Zynga's Going Down. - <AUTHOR> http://silencedgood.tumblr.com/post/22547672461/zyngas-going-down <comment><USER2> Tech stocks (in aggregate) have declined about 32% in the same time period. What this article fails to mention is that Zynga's stock price was at an all- time high when Zynga acquired OMGPOP. The stock has since floated around it's post-IPO price. OMGPOP is most likely unrelated to these fluctuations.

What is relevant is Facebook. Zynga's stock grew rapidly once Facebook's S-1 filings revealed that Facebook derives 12% of it's revenue from Zynga. This news cause a flurry of interest in Zynga, but the excitement has since waned, and both Facebook and Zynga have been scrutinized heavily since. This is to be expected, but I also expect that both company's stocks will perform well after May 18 and into next quarter.

Last, and possibly most important, is the misconception about how easy it is to launch a profitable mobile app to millions of users. Zynga now hosts about 80% of their games on their private cloud (the zCloud). This infrastructure separates Zynga from a group of 15 hackers who want to make the next Angry Birds. Zynga releases games in dozens of foreign languages; they have games on every social network and in dozens of countries, as well as in many emerging markets. The point is, it's easy to take pot-shots at Zynga's business model and claim it's a house of cards, but I think the reality is that Zynga is a well established company, with far vaster resources than many of their competitors. Mobile and social games are a clear-cut example of economies of scale.

<comment><USER3> > Last, and possibly most important, is the misconception about how easy it is > to launch a profitable mobile app to millions of users. Zynga now hosts > about 80% of their games on their private cloud (the zCloud). This > infrastructure separates Zynga from a group of 15 hackers who want to make > the next Angry Birds.

Sorry, I don't buy it. You don't need to host your own infrastructure to schlep virtual cows around. Zynga probably saves some money in self-hosting but that isn't going to make or break a title.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, zCloud only came into fruition late last year. Before that they were using AWS, and handling the same scale they do now. Private cloud is saving them money, but some other company could use AWS just as Zynga did before and handle millions of users absolutely fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "It takes nothing to produce a hot game. You merely need somebody with a computer, a good idea, and the ability to make a game. Making a game is not rocket science. Making matters worse for Zynga is that it does not and never will control the distribution channels."

Yes, that's why everyone with a CS degree has made millions of dollars. This is offensive to everyone that makes games.

<comment><USER6> His point isn't that everyone can do it, obviously that's not true, but that there is nothing about it that requires a multi-billion dollar company. To wit, the barrier to entry is low.

>You merely need somebody with a computer, a _good idea_ , and the _ability to make a game_

<comment><USER7> The barrier to entry is low from the perspective of sunken costs other than development time, being a purely creative endeavor that you can work on with mostly free software tools.

However, the talent required to pull off a quality game and the time it takes are huge and only grow exponentially. That in recent years we've got a couple of indie games that were successful, that's only because on mobile devices the expectations for CGI quality are for the moment low. Plus, with these app stores, the budget required for marketing has decreased, if you're lucky enough to have your app featured.

And while you can create indie games for the desktop and be successful, as Minecraft shows, the expectations for quality CGI are much higher and so it takes an insane amount of creativity to fill the blanks.

Now, of course, Zynga games are not really on the same level as what id Software or Blizzard are releasing and you can certainly picture yourself pulling off games of the same quality, as Zynga games are nothing special, except for the social-network effects.

However you shouldn't underestimate the effort required to build a game from scratch. I consider it to be by far one of the most challenging fields in software development, as not only it requires great feats of engineering, but it also requires creativity and design. E.g. developers by themselves can barely pull it off without the help of a good artist that can draw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This story (Draw Something losing ~5M customers/month) annoys me. It's an example of not knowing the difference between causation, correlation and coincidence. In at least some cases people are making that "mistake" for link- bait reasons and to push an agenda (eg they hate Zynga).

The idea that 5M/month Draw Something care about the Zynga purchase is ludicrous. It seems Zynga has made some annoying changes to the game, at least for those that use Facebook to login, but even so.

I think the only story here is that Zynga overpaid for something that was peaking. They may purchased OMGPOP just in case it turned into something huge. There's plenty of that going on ( _cough_ Instragram _cough_ ).

I've tried Draw Something. It's amusing and I can see the appeal but from all usage patterns I've seen the game has a pretty short shelf life. A game with a short shelf life is going to lose lots of customers once it peaks. It's inevitable.

As for how easy it is to make a game, that's actually hard. I believe you should also separate "normal" games from "social" games here as both are radically different.

Normal games are like blockbuster movies. You want people to buy up big. You deliberately build up the hype. There is very little in the way of long tail in revenue in most cases (other than sequels). I consider this a fairly "honest" or ethical practice because you pay the sticker price and you have your fun.

Social games are more like TV shows. You're trying to build a persistent audience and you're all about the long tail. The part that bothers me is the psychological trickery that goes into this. Social games are really about manipulating the psychological triggers for addiction and I don't really see a distinction between this and, say, gambling addiction.

Some people spend an awful lot on these games (I believe Zynga calls people who spend over $10k "whales" [1]). Zynga and similar companies like to whitewash this with "maybe they're just rich". I believe they know better. They are (IMHO) preying on the weak and those arguably with mental health problems ("it's not unethical, it's funethical!").

Successful social games are all about Big Data. Figuring out what works, what doesn't, analyzing your customer usage and adjusting to maximize revenue and retention.

They're not even "games" really. They're just exercises in repetition.

Anyway, rant aside, I don't like Zynga either but please don't confuse the OMGPOP purchase with a short shelf-life peaking purchase.

[1]: [http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/zyngas-quest-for- bigspe...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/zyngas-quest-for-bigspending- whales-07072011.html)

<comment><USER9> _The part that bothers me is the psychological trickery that goes into this. Social games are really about manipulating the psychological triggers for addiction and I don't really see a distinction between this and, say, gambling addiction._

Calling the reward systems in games psychological trickery is a bit much. Gameplay have long been based on the psychologically rewarding system of 'do something good, get positive feedback; do something bad, get negative feedback.'

The first arcade games had theses reward systems - do well and put your initials on the leaderboard; do poorly, pay another quarter to keep playing. The fact that it's psychologically enjoyable to play these games isn't trickery - it's basic human-environment interaction. That _some_ people have addictive responses to these mechanisms doesn't mean it's insidious trickery, it just means some people are more likely to become dependent on the rewards these games offer.

<comment><USER10> You misunderstand the experience.

Go to Vegas sometime. Watch the people who are playing the slots for hours at a time. They are not enjoying anything. What you're seeing is compulsion and addiction, not fun. That those people are there is not some wacky accident. It's the point.

I believe that Zynga is pursuing exactly that cycle of addiction. They're a metrics and viral marketing company, not a games company.

<comment><USER11> Many people actually really enjoy playing slots. It's fun to win money, and it's fun to enjoy the dramatic moment before you know if you've won money. Some people get addicted to it, just like some people have gotten addicted to immersive PC games or really anything enjoyable. The distinction you're trying to draw is basically non-existent, except perhaps that social games and slots are simpler and revolve entirely around the unknown-reward mechanic.

<comment><USER10> That you can't perceive a distinction does not mean that it doesn't exist. People don't get addicted to everything fun in equal measure; some things are more compelling than others.

And seriously, go to Vegas and spend a couple of hours watching people play slots. Craps players are visibly having fun. The people who spend hours at the slot machines visibly aren't.

<comment><USER12> Craps, and to a lesser extent Blackjack, have some shared experiences between the players. In craps, many of the players will be betting the same, or at least very similar, way. Since there is only one dice roll for the entire table, there is a lot of shared excitement. With Blackjack, say the dealer is showing a 6, it's most likely that nobody on the table will bust, so if the dealer busts, everyone is excited. A slot machine, on the other hand, is an entirely solo experience.

I rarely play any floor games, but one time I was waiting for some friends to wake up and I wandered down to the casino to play some video poker. I ended up winning $1500 on a royal flush at a nickel machine. What am I supposed to do, start running around the casino in excitement? It was around 8:30 in the morning and the places was pretty quite. Had my friends been there, I'm sure we would have had some hi-fives or something like that, but if I'm just sitting there playing by myself, I'm not going to have any sort of substantial showcase of emotion.

I think you're correct in that a lot of people sit at the slot machines for hours, losing their paychecks in the process, and it's destructive for them. They may be looking miserable at the machines. The people playing craps who are in the process of losing their paychecks are equally as miserable, they're just showing different outward emotions. The addiction isn't any healthier because the person appears to be having fun.

<comment><USER10> I agree with this, but I'm not sure what your point is relative to the rest of the discussion. I'm pointing out that "fun" and "compelling" are distinct. You can engineer for either, or both. If you watch people playing slots, it's pretty obvious that most people who play slots for a long time are not having fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "It takes nothing to produce a hot game. You merely need somebody with a computer, a good idea, and the ability to make a game. Making a game is not rocket science."

Actually. Making a game that makes money IS rocket science (or at least as close as it can get to it).

<comment><USER14> Making a game is sort of like making music. It's so much fun, people do it for free. It's not a big deal if you have a few dozen programmers making some roguelike. If you have 10k college sophomores making games, chances are pretty good one of them will be pretty fun, and take off. The key here is, they would do it anyway. there is not free carwashing service because someone likes washing cars. there are however tons of free games, because making games is fun.

<comment><USER15> That statement couldn't possibly be more wrong.

The majority of games are created by large teams of highly talented and well paid individuals. There are certain types of games that could be created by a single college sophomore or a teeny tiny team. Most games can not. A team size of 20 is considered quite small.

Both your statement and the link's author's is incredibly wrong and incredibly insulting.

<comment><USER16> There's a difference between the triple-A mass-market games you see at Gamestop, and the social games you see on Facebook.

Pointing out that AAA-games are expensive to develop in a discussion about social games is missing the point a little, I think.

<comment><USER17> I think forrestthewoods is pointing out that making games, even social games, is hard.

Sure it's possible for one person to develop a successful social game. But how many of those people can develop two successful social games? 5? 10+? The only name that comes to my mind is Zynga.

<comment><USER18> It's only a problem if Zynga chooses to purchase other people's winning games at huge rates. You can't throw half a billion at every kid who writes a successful game and expect in-app cash upgrades to offset it. Making a successful game is hard, but at the scale of the market, there will always be another kid next month with an unexpected hit on his hands.

Zynga can make it work either by continuing to develop successful games on their own, or by backing down from Instagram silly money on their buyout offers. But they can't make it work by pretending to be the gateway middleman for a distribution network they simply don't own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd say Zynga's problem is that they are a big fish competing in an environment that is much better suited to lots of nimble little fish. With fickle customers and increasing offerings in their segment, its going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to produce sure fire hits. The alternative is to acquire the small fish when they have a hit but that can be an equally dangerous game as proven by the OMGPOP acquisition. I just don't think being in the app/casual game business is a great spot for large public companies - there is not a lot you can leverage or ability to lock down revenue streams in any long term manner by being big. I'd be much more positive on Zynga if they had a core product that the whole company was iterating on but from what I can see that is not their model.

<comment><USER20> I'd venture that Zynga's problems are more critical than that - and not unique to Zynga. IMO social gaming (in its current format and incarnation) is a space that exists only temporarily while consumers figure things out.

Notice the explosion of FarmVille when it first came out, how _everyone_ was playing it, and its subsequent death. It exploded into the mainstream very suddenly, and faded into niche obscurity just as quickly.

The "glorified slot machine" format of social gaming (which IMO is a perversion of the word, there's nothing social about this sort of gaming) does not have a permanent, mass-market future. It will fade and become a niche (profitable, perhaps), but it will not justify the market cap that investors have saw fit to pour into Zynga et al.

If anything, the industry in which Zynga plays has more in common with the Tamagotchi than it does with WoW.

<comment><USER21> Farmville is the number 7 game on facebook in May with 5 million daily users.You can buy Farmville yhemed cups in 7/11. A level of obscurity to dream of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The author gives the game away at the end of his post. That is he's been predicting the demise of Zynga for years. So really the fact that the stock price has dropped gives the author some belief that they were correct.

Id imagine the drop in price is linked to the FB IPO. Not sure if anyone remembered when FB announced their plans, anything in that space increased.

</comment><comment><USER23> I actually do think it's a coincidence that the stock price is down 38% since purchasing OMGPOP. It had a nice run up based on positive news related to the Facebook IPO, so when the market began to contract in late March/April, people took their profits. There hasn't been much positive news since then, so it hasn't rebounded. In fact, the whole technology sector is down about 32% since late March (it was +20% on the year, now its only +13.9%)[1]. Basically, I don't think the OMGPOP acquisition has had much of an effect on the stock price.

[1] <http://www.google.com/finance?catid=66529330>

</comment><comment><USER24> "I have been predicting Zynga's descent for a couple of years"

Oh, I know this trick. I also can predict descent of any company, but just not the timeframe. Eventually I will be right.

<comment> steve-howard How does that saying go? "Anyone can predict rain, but the real prophet builds an ark."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The story is too easy to write about and I'm going to have to disagree here. I think it was pretty obvious that Draw Something wasn't going to last forever. And Zynga, with extremely similar games like Words With Friends, Hanging With Friends, and Scramble, knew that Draw Something was going to have the same fate.

Yes, the purchase was a little steep, but it had to happen. It had to happen because the game was formatted and structured EXACTLY like Zynga's games. With its popularity, Zynga did not want Draw Something to threaten the Zynga brand of social mobile games.

So here we are and Draw Something lost 5M users. You think Zynga didn't see that coming? Is someone really surprised? It makes sense that the drop in stock reflects the loss. I wouldn't say it's fact but it's highly probable. But, they're not dumb. The way the company works, I expect another amusing addicting social mobile game to be released in the near future to silence these stories and like other stocks it'll go where it goes, but not rock bottom.

<comment><USER26> Surprised no one has figured out why they paid so much. 20m dau at the time of acquisition means they had 20m+ user accounts (likely 3x that). All of these people are "socially obligated" to stay connected for some amount of time. How much would your company pay to acquire ~60m customers? That's not including the revenue they were bringing in. I don't dispute they paid too much, but apparently it was worth it to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > And yes, it is completely ridiculous for a company that is losing close to a > billion dollars a year to occupy a multimillion dollar office building that > looks like a children's museum.

Where does a billion dollars a year come from? They lost 86 million last quarter. Is he equating operating costs or reduced market capital with loses?

<comment><USER19> He gets it probably from extrapolating the average of this past quarter and and the quarter before. In the quarter before the last, net income was around -435 million although I doubt their annual net will be -1B

<comment><USER27> That makes sense. You can't extrapolate from two data points though. I could just as easily claim that their profit is gaining 350 million a quarter an they'll end up with half a billion in profit for the year.

<comment><USER19> I agree thats its not sound and their is unfortunately a tendency to cherry pick data to support one's story. I'm not bullish on Zynga but I'd agree that using 2 quarters of data (if thats what is being used by the author) is unfair especially for a relatively new company like Zynga.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I think of Zynga, I think of two words: options clawback.

Gordon Pincus is obviously very smart or he wouldn't have taken Zynga as far as it has come, but I can't see myself ever working for a company willing to confiscate options from at-will employees.

As for Zynga going down: maybe, but not anytime soon. Their business model is easy to replicate on the surface, but underneath is an awful lot of solid engineering to keep it from collapsing in on itself.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sometimes I suspect many hackers of being anarchists. It's not always that a big company is going down, or that a certain industry needs to be disrupted from behind. It's like some of you secretly want to see the world as we know it, burning down in flames around you!

</comment><comment><USER30> Not to defend Zynga much but please take into account the broader market when doing any kind of stock analysis, all stocks have been shaky since late March/April. Also it is typical for stocks to lose value after large acquisitions. Zynga could have even timed this more or known that the market would be going on a typical late spring/summer correction (from lower volume) and bought during that (Facebook launching in a low volume window is strange but that is another story).

OMGPOP wasn't just Draw Something. They have actually been around for a while since 2008 at least. They have had decently successful web games before and probably have a fair amount of assets that Zynga could use with Draw Something being the big icing.

Take a gander at OMGPOP.com and see what they have. They used to be called 'iminlikewithyou' <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/omgpop> This wasn't really a one hit wonder, it was a one BIG hit wonder but a pretty solid gaming community before and the people and tech created Draw Something. So there was something there... It is hard enough finding good developers, then there harder to find good teams, then harder to find good teams that can make hits, when you find one or the systems used to build it then it is valuable.

Let's face it there were plenty of pictionary like games available before (isketch.net comes to mind, or Doodle or Flipbook at Benetton Play have been around for ages: <http://www.benettonplay.com/toybox.php>), but they got the right juice. That might be what they bought.

<comment><USER31> The NASDAQ is down 4%, the past month. Zynga is down 30%.

The social gaming space has plateaued. It got incredibly big incredibly fast, but those days of growth are over. Zynga has built a dominant position, but isn't making money yet. I'm not sure what that means, but it isn't good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> _I reasoned that there is no greater strategy at play by the Zynga geniuses in the war room of their ridiculous company headquarters._

Whenever I find myself thinking this way, the klaxons start going off. I'm basically saying "My mental model of a clearly smart person, surrounded by clearly smart people, who has made more money than I have and raised money from other smart people who have _also_ made more money than I have--is that he's an idiot."

And then we get to:

 _So here Zynga finds itself, sitting atop a group of popular games and bracing itself for the next Draw Something to come onto the market so it can swallow it up...So the matchup is Zynga against the field, the field being every person in the world who knows how to, and has the will to create a social game._

Another way of looking at this is that Zynga is building a competitive advantage in social game monetization: if you have a given audience, Zynga can do more with it than you can. Meanwhile, giant deals like OMGPOP create a tournament dynamic, where everyone wants to build the next Draw Something. If Zynga is making their raw material cheap while putting their competitive advantage at a relative premium, that's great for their future.

It's also a more solid theory than just assuming that Pincus doesn't know what he's doing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Zynga's fine. They correctly figured out that once you're the biggest on Facebook, it's very easy to stay there. It'd take a competitor insane money to buy up the advertising necessary to introduce a game, whereas it takes Zynga an intro to their 'try these games' bar. When a smaller competitor happens to beat the odds and get to the top for one game, Zynga must make a copy-or-buy decision. Copy if you think the competitor can't leverage (or be used as leverage by a bigger competitor) the game's temporary eyeballs, or buy if you can make good use of those temporary eyeballs to cross-sell your other games.

Draw something is a fad on fire. So rather than build (and cross-sell existing Zynga users who you 'own' already), buy the fad, cross-sell hopefully new users, cut off anybody who could have done the same. Extra points if those new users are a different type of user who wouldn't normally be caught playing X-ville junk.

 _Now if in six months Zynga is raking in tens of millions of dollars a month on Draw Something I will eat crow. I have a feeling that isn't going to happen._

Zynga don't have to. Zynga doesn't care which if their games you play once you're in the system. They care about the total customer lifetime value of each user, not the 1-game value.

</comment><comment><USER34> Which companies will be the most spectacular flameouts of internet boom, 2.0? I don't think it's much of a stretch to predict Zynga has a good chance of making the list.

<comment><USER35> Groupon

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I view Zynga's economics like a tv network. Their primary asset is their audience, and acquisition is a way for them to increase that. There are two different kinds of acquisitions they can do: shows that already have a following (low risk, low payoff, high cost) and promising small shows, which have opposite characteristics. The stuff they produce in-house tends to be highly targeted, less innovative stuff.

</comment><comment><USER37> Zynga's decline has nothing to do with purchases they made and everything with Facebook killing viral channels - a year and a half ago!

</comment><comment><USER38> Find it priceless this guy talks about knowing that the company was going down in flames but didn't sell short at all on the stock.

<comment><USER39> Exactly. Put your money where you mouth is. Especially if you'd make a lot of profit out of it. But of course, he didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook snaps up Zynga eventually. But Zynga is definately heading in the wrong direction.. But basing this off Draw Something is silly. It's one game, and people could of seen this coming a mile away. People get bored of games eventually.

</comment><comment><USER41> Good indication that the social media bubble won't last forener. Maybe a .com bubble 2.0?

</comment><comment><USER42> Don't want to get into Zynga's business model but it's one sided to reference this "failed" acquisition without referencing the "with friends" franchise which has been a pretty incredible acquisition for them.

</comment><comment><USER43> Zynga is making a gaming platform. I'm pretty sure Pincus is aware simply churning out social games isn't a good long term vision.

</comment><comment><USER44> Once they convert Zynga Poker into an actual online paid poker site they will make an absolutely phenomenal amount of money.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Videogame development is not rocket science." These people obviously have no idea what it takes to make a game.

<comment><USER46> Let's be fair though, there are _far_ more organizations capable of building games than can build rockets. Teenagers in basements can and do kick-start game companies but so far it seems as though rocket building is still in the domain of governments and dot-com millionaires. _That_ is the difference that is relevant; barrier to entry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> _Buying up games as they become hot is not a sustainable strategy. It takes nothing to produce a hot game._

I'm no fan of Zynga, maybe, but this statement is false. It's typical for large companies to begin doing corporate buyouts as a strategy as they transition out of the growth-company phase. (Think Oracle.)

If it took "nothing" to produce a hot game, then we'd be flooded with new gaming millionaires. Certainly there are a few, but how many social games that your aunt plays are coming from tiny shops? And, if they're actually making money, how many of those shops would turn down a big buy-out offer from Zynga?

</comment><comment><USER48> It's hard to bet against Zynga with Marc Pincus still in charge. Pincus is a smart cookie. :)</comment>


Inside the Culture of Sexism at Riot Games - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-games-1828165483 <comment><USER2> They tried to hire me once (I'm a guy). They turned me off when they said they were looking for gamers. I'm not a gamer, but I'm really interested in problems like distributed consensus between untrusted clients and things like that.

Oh well... Monoculture is a big problem.

<comment><USER3> I mean that's not at all surprising in the games industry. Would you hire an engineer for a web-company who doesn't go to any websites?

<comment><USER4> No, but I wouldn't care if someone in HR or Finance or Legal didn't go to websites. I would be hiring them for their skill in HR/Finance/Legal/whatever.

If they happened to also visit websites, that would be a plus that could be the deciding factor against an otherwise equally matched candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I had to keep checking the url to make sure it wasn't the onion.

That's an extremely toxic company culture.</comment>


Verizon buys AOL for $4.4B – May. 12, 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/12/investing/verizon-buys-aol/ <comment><AUTHOR> This blew my mind at first until I thought about all of the media properties that AOL has. Verizon probably already has large Ad spend on sites similar to these this just makes it more cost effective.</comment>


Ask HN: Do the companies hire recent grads with only BS degree who need visa? - <AUTHOR> My school is not in the U.S. and I'm not a U.S. citizen. I'll have my BS degree in Computer Science at June 2018. How possible is it to get hired by a U.S. company for me, set aside GPA and other stuff? Technically I can be hired with only BS degree but some say you actually need at least an MS degree from a U.S. university because even if it's not requirement companies don't want to sponsor you if you at least don't have an MS degree. <comment><USER2> What are "the companies" ...</comment>


Can moons have moons? - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03304 <comment><USER2> Earth's moon has unstable orbits:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effects)

Gravitational anomalies slightly distorting the orbits of some Lunar Orbiters led to the discovery of mass concentrations (dubbed mascons) beneath the lunar surface caused by large impacting bodies at some remote time in the past. These anomalies are significant enough to cause a lunar orbit to change significantly over the course of several days.

See also:

[https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2006/0...](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2006/06nov_loworbit/)

Joining an earlier subsatellite PFS-1, released by Apollo 15 astronauts eight months earlier, PFS-2 was to measure charged particles and magnetic fields all around the Moon as the Moon orbited Earth. The orbit of PFS-2 rapidly changed shape and distance from the Moon. In 2-1/2 weeks the satellite was swooping to within a hair-raising 6 miles (10 km) of the lunar surface at closest approach. As the orbit kept changing, PFS-2 backed off again, until it seemed to be a safe 30 miles away. But not for long: inexorably, the subsatellite's orbit carried it back toward the Moon. And on May 29, 1972—only 35 days and 425 orbits after its release—PFS-2 crashed.

Be careful of the orbit chosen for a low-orbiting lunar satellite. "What counts is an orbit's inclination," that is, the tilt of its plane to the Moon's equatorial plane. "There are actually a number of 'frozen orbits' where a spacecraft can stay in a low lunar orbit indefinitely. They occur at four inclinations: 27º, 50º, 76º, and 86º"—the last one being nearly over the lunar poles. The orbit of the relatively long-lived Apollo 15 subsatellite PFS-1 had an inclination of 28º, which turned out to be close to the inclination of one of the frozen orbits—but poor PFS-2 was cursed with an inclination of only 11º.

edit: added additional information about frozen orbits.

<comment><USER3> Our moon, and those of mars, are special cases. They are most likely the result of collisions involving the host planet and some other very large object. They are bigger and closer than any 'natural' moon formed during the formation of the solar system. So it is expected that they are unsymmetrical both in shape and orbit, resulting in them having few stable orbits for sub- moons. Collisions are certainly part of the equation, but there again many of those collisions were associated with debris from the initial impact that created the moon.

A 'natural' moon formed early in the life of a solar system could be much further from its host, with much more symmetrical gravity and many stable orbits ready to host sub-moons. A moon is also in a much better place from which to capture a passing body.

<comment><USER4> Mars' moons are indeed much too close but our Moon is one of those listed in this paper as being capable of having a moon of its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also got interested in this question a few years back and while browsing for candidates I learned about Neso, the outermost (known) moon of Neptune. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neso_(moon)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neso_\(moon\))

It is on average further away from Neptune than Mercury is from the Sun! It takes more than 26 years to orbit Neptune, it still hasn't completed a full orbit since we have discovered it.

Also, I think there could be "binary-moons", if a binary asteroid gets captured as an irregular moon.

Asteroids with natural satellites exist and have been found.

There could also be very big trojans moons/planets in other star systems.

</comment><comment><USER6> To the Sun, a moon is like a submoon to the planet, so what would be the difference? With enough distance in between it should be possible. Not probable but possible.

Submoons will probably clump together much easier in the formation phase of any system and a moon will never capture an asteroid before it's planet does.

As the author pointed out, the question remains how stable it is. The almost nonexistent cases (at least in our Solar System) shows how rare it is. Maybe only distance is a factor. Huge Solar Systems with twice the distance between objects will also have more submoons.

<comment><USER7> Well the moon has had artificial satellites in the past. I imagine it might not be terribly common, but not impossible either.

>The almost nonexistent cases (at least in our Solar System) shows how rare it is.

It might not exist in our solar system, our solar system isn't a model from which all others operate from. Submoons may be rare, but not because they don't exist in our solar system.

<comment><USER8> > _Submoons may be rare, but not because they don 't exist in our solar > system_

Sure, "submoons are rare because they're rare in our solar system" isn't a proof. (It's a hypothesis.) But the observation _is_ evidence. In the absence of other evidence, it defines the _status quo_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > which we call submoons

I believe the publicly accepted term for these is "moonmoon".

<comment><USER10> No, a "moonmoon" would be the big moon into whose orbit you park the smaller moon. Reference: [https://xkcd.com/2043/](https://xkcd.com/2043/)

<comment><USER11> That actually doesn't match the meanings of househouse and boatboat in the chart. The hovertext specifies that you can refer to the contained object by flipping the order, so a moonmoon can also refer to the smaller moon orbiting around a larger one:

> The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, > the stuff you buy is truck food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought the correct term for anything other than Earths Moon was "natural satelite".

<comment><USER13> Not at all. The noun 'moon' can refer to any, well, moon (like Deimos or Europa). To distinguish between those and our moon, you can use the proper name 'Moon' (capitalised) or Luna if you are so inclined.

The same goes for the Sun. Our sun is either proper name 'Sun', or if your prefer Luna above, Sol. Any other star with stuff orbiting around it is just another sun (noun).

<comment><USER14> I thought there's only one sun regarding of whether you capitalize it or not, but that moon was generic.

<comment><USER15> "sun" is generic but rarely used as such instead of the proper noun "Sun" outside of interstellar fiction, because "star" is available and denotatively equivalent. ("sun" has a stronger connotation that the object's importance is relative to one or more planets, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of course this is just within the arbitrary distinctions of what constitutes a moon and a planet. A particle of sand in the Sahara desert orbits the earth's core albeit with a lot of collisions with other sand moons.

</comment><comment><USER17> Technically, aren't planets moons of their star? So if a 'planet' has a moon, wouldn't that be a submoon?

<comment><USER8> > _aren 't planets moons of their star?_

No. The difference between "star" and "not star," within the context of a solar system, is well defined. (Brown dwarfs muddy the line in general.)

The difference between "planet" and "not planet" is a little more arbitrary, with the line between "moon" and "non-moon satellite" being more arbitrary still.

The all-encompassing term you're looking for is "satellite."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sub-question. Are there any extant man-made objects in orbit around our moon right now? Around any of the planets?

<comment><USER5> Currently active: 1 around Venus, 4 around the Moon, 6 around Mars, 1 around Ceres, 1 around Jupiter.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extraterrestrial_orbit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extraterrestrial_orbiters)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> TIL: They have detected exo-moons around exo-planets outside our solar system.

</comment><comment><USER20> May someone tell me where this article was published (magazine, congress, etc), please?

<comment><USER21> Proper link to abstract on arXiv:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03304](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03304)

arXiv is an archive of preprints. This is a preprint. It hasn't been published (yet). In some scientific fields, it's customary to share preprints publicly before they are published. Sometimes they aren't published (i.e. by a peer- review journal) at all.

<comment><USER20> Interesting. Thank you aargh_aargh for the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is an exception to Betteridge's law, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER23> Most importantly: can moons have morons?

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes.

<comment><USER25> Your username is well suited to comment this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> DOUBLEMOON

</comment><comment><USER27> so what is the human behavior denoted by 'moonmoon-ing' someone?

</comment><comment><USER28> As programmers, the answer is "of course". Of course a function can call a function. But nature isn't a stack. Can submoons have subsubmoons.</comment>


Effectful Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://slpopejoy.github.io/posts/Effectful02.html <comment><AUTHOR> this is a very (very) good tutorial. that it's literate source is very useful for experimenting.</comment>


Faradaic electro-swing reactive adsorption for CO2 capture - <AUTHOR> https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/ee/c9ee02412c#!divAbstract <comment><USER2> Thank you for posting, but this there is a radically superior technology: a cow.

Please see this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675997)</comment>


How We Made Joins Faster, Part Three - <AUTHOR> https://crate.io/a/lab-notes-how-we-made-joins-23-thousand-times-faster-part-three/ <comment><USER2> Anybody here with experience using Crate? Why would I pick it over TimescaleDB for IOT data ingestion?

<comment><USER3> It's elasticsearch with joins/subqueries on top. Many features missing from rbdms/elasticsearch, and features that neither of them have.</comment></comment>


I've been programming for a solid 5 minutes now, so how do I make an MMORPG? - <AUTHOR> http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/7184/need-advice-on-how-to-make-a-3d-mmorpg

<comment><USER2> This is the game developer's version of "Okay, I wrote a contact form in PHP, time to write the next Facebook".

Sadly, this is far more prevalent than it should be.

<comment><USER3> Is that really that far off from what Zuckerberg did?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In one of the comments, OP says he is 14, so at least he's found a good resource and has plenty of time to learn...</comment>


How are cold-calling ceasefires illegal? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.navarr.me/how-are-coldcalling-ceasefires-illegal <comment><USER3> Read the Department of Justice press release about the case:

[http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262648...](http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262648.htm)

> The department said that the agreements eliminated a significant form of > competition to attract highly skilled employees, and overall diminished > competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived > of competitively important information and access to better job > opportunities.

Now, you may not _agree_ that it should be illegal, but the explanation is right there in the document.

<comment><USER4> If that's the actual legal precedent set by these cases, then that's rather a big deal, no? California's limitations on noncompete clauses are quite strict, to the point of making noncompetes mostly worthless, but this is extending that to nonsolicits, and extending it to all 50 states.

Regardless of what you feel about the case I think that's a huge change to the current ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> Non-competes are between an employee/employer. Non-solicits would be between companies, in this case competitors. At least they are competing over the same pool of employees. As such, it's likely viewed as collusion.

This isn't a big of a change to the legal precedents. This type of behavior has been illegal for a long time. This is just the first time that I know of where it's been this _public_ involving media-friendly companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >"if your employees reach out to us or vice-versa they're fair game."

Not quite....

> "Not to pursue manager level and above candidates for Product, Sales, or G&A > roles — even if they have applied to Google;"

[http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles- wage-...](http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing- cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/)

<comment><USER7> > While the later is certainly much more questionable on the legality > standpoint

The author of this post seems to have acknowledged that part was suspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Collusion with competitors to fix or restrict a price of a good in a market is one of the easier antitrust cases to pursue, especially if it's nicely documented in email.

Engineering salaries were likely depressed due to this non–compete cartel.

OPEC can do this with oil since it's not under US jurisdiction. US airlines, for example, cannot phone each other up and say "Let's agree to price JFK-SFO at $500 each way." They _can_ observe what each other charges for a given ticket and make a decision to price their own fare accordingly, but they cannot act in concert.

<comment><USER9> Pointing out the obvious: engineers are not "goods" that Google or Apple produces.

Even if consider employees salary to fall under that dubious categorization, good luck proving the salaries were "likely depressed" when during that period the salaries went up. A lot.

It seems that it only affected lazy and apathetic engineers i.e. those who couldn't be bother to send out a resume.

<comment><USER10> Uh, goods are not just things companies produce, but also things they consume. Therefore it could also include employees.

Also, if you have a look at the class action filing, the mechanism of action is quite clear.

To lay it out, the way that salaries are set is for any given title (eg: Software Engineer I), there is a pay range. Hiring managers do not have the general permission to go outside the pay band. Under the interests of fairness, these pay bands are adhered to fairly strictly.

So depressing the wages of even a sub-section of the employee pool helps keep the pay band down.

While you may deem this a mere 'theory', there is evidence of it's affects. Specifically that Google was forced to give 10% raises to their entire employee when Facebook would not accede to a cold-call prohibition.

Your final sentence is not very complementary to your fellow engineers - <USER2> times engineers are focused on the problem and unaware of their place in the market. To call them lazy and apathetic is pretty mean spirited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > And I can't even figure out how it's illegal?

Are you a lawyer? If not, have you asked one? What research have you done to try to figure out how it might be illegal? Have you read any laws or legal articles about the subject matter?

</comment><comment><USER12> Salaries, perks, and descriptions of interesting projects you might work on are rarely public information. Quite often the only way I'd find out that I could get a better deal and more interesting work at Company X is if they reach out to me and tell me so. If my current company is blocking this, then I'm being deprived of a very important source of information and opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's pretty simple. It's illegal for corporations to get together and decide the price of things. This destroys the free market's ability to choose the best product at the best price since all the products, despite their quality, have the same price. This is the part of economics that says a free market only works as long as everyone involved has equal information.

And remember, a free market means the _consumer_ has a right to choose, not the _corporation_ has a right to trick consumers into buying at fixed prices.

In addition to price fixing products, companies also can't wage fix. If corporations were allowed to get together and decide the max they'll all pay certain employees then they can do...well exactly this. Also remember that these companies _also_ refused to hire people who came to them, and _also_ ratted out those employees to their original employer. That goes beyond basic wage fixing and into the realm of heinous employee rights violations.

The main reason all of this is illegal though is because the consumers and the employees are not given all the information they need to decide. The key to this important detail is in how all these sleazy assholes went around telling each other to be quiet. If this action were something that was morally correct they wouldn't need to hide it. However they knew that if the employees knew they'd leave the company and it'd cost more to keep them. That's why the companies kept the information from the employees.

More importantly though, if the consumers know about price fixing, they revolt and entire industries collapse in huge meltdowns and the consumers stop trusting the market. Politicians then react and pass laws against it so that there isn't a huge economic revolt, or worse, a political bloody one.

Then again, programmers seem to worship corporations these days so I got no idea how this will play out. Personally I hope we all boycott the shit out of every company on this list, but that'll never happen as long as coders have their heads firmly planted up Ayn Rand's ass.

The one thing that I'm enjoying coming out is how this is proving to programmers that they are valuable. I think before this coders just kind of thought of their value as just a typical cube farming wage slave. Now they see that they're so valuable that corporations will go to very great lengths to keep them from leaving and from paying them what they're worth.

That is definitely going to be interesting to watch play out.

<comment><USER14> >>It's pretty simple. It's illegal for corporations to get together and decide the price of things. <<

Is this not how LIBOR or the Fed rate is determined?

<comment><USER8> The L in LIBOR stands for London. Which is not in the US. And the theoretical basis for LIBOR was that the BBA called various banks to see what they'd offer. What we've since learned is that the various banks would chat with each other to see what they needed LIBOR to be and then conspired to set LIBOR. Which is why there's various prosecutions underway.

The Fed rate is determined by the Fed. Which is a US Government entity. And is its responsibility. So not even remotely close to the same thing

<comment><USER14> Digressing a little, but since you are talking about jurisdiction then yes it's a fair point albeit splitting hairs. But from a morality point of view isn't it incompatible with the parent's view that certain values should be universal?

The Fed is not a US Government entity. It operates within rules created by Congress but is not beholden to Congress or any branch of the US Government. The board holds meetings and the Chairman reports to Congress once in a while but they have more or less a free hand in running things.

"As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve derives its authority from the Congress of the United States. It is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."

[http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm](http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Misrepresenting what happened in order to strawman it, and then self-posting it to HN.

Fantastic way to get hits, I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> No need for hits. It's a tiny blog.

Relevant xkcd though: [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there's two aspects to this discussion that keep getting muddled together.

1\. Were the individuals at the companies in question knowingly acting outside their own ethics or the ethics they portray themselves as having? Was there something "sinister" about this?

2\. What harm did these actions cause and do we need to do something to prevent such kinds of harm in the future?

A lot of #1 sounds like execs trying to manage the relationships with the companies they worked with. It doesn't sound like there was a big taboo around these types of do-not-solicit agreements at that time, and with all the players aggressively trying to hire and hold onto experienced employees I can see how finding out that a partner company was targeting the employees you were trying to keep around could be interpreted as a hostile/unfriendly business move. The most damning thing I've come across regarding #1 was the email about taking the conversation offline to avoid a paper trail. Would love to read more about the context of that.

I wasn't sure about #2 at first, but after all the discussion I've been strongly persuaded that this is a net negative for the software industry. The lawsuits and public outcry will hopefully create a strong taboo against this sort of behavior in the future, in addition to clarifying the legal ramifications. Is there anything more that needs to be done here?

</comment><comment><USER16> Wait so it's illegal to agree not to cold call each other's employees and let them apply for a job if they want?

If that's all they did, what would be illegal? How is that price fixing?

That's like saying stores agreeing not to advertise inside each other's premises are a cartel. Those companies can still advertise their openings just not actively poaching each other's employees.

<comment><USER17> Essentially, think of the reason for Google to want this. They essentially want to keep their engineers with them for a lower price while preventing other companies from offering more attractive positions/salaries which would mean either Google would have to match the salary, or they'd lose the engineer.

A lot of hires and promotions are made through these sorts of offers. Steve Jobs famously courted John Sculley from Pepsi. Do you think Marissa Mayer applied for her role at Yahoo?

These sort of agreements restrict the market and are unfair to engineers.

<comment><USER16> Ok I guess if the market gets out of control with everyone poaching each other's customers blatantly, then any agreement to scale back is considered an illegal cartel?

So if for example stores advertise massive discounts in front of each other's premises specifically for the customers about to make a purchase at the competing store, then two stores agreeing to stop and go back to simply letting shoppers DO THEIR OWN RESEARCH is a cartel?

<comment><USER18> Yes?

I get the feeling you're being rhetorical, but if I remove the tone in my head then: yes, clearly.

> out of control with everyone poaching each other's customers blatantly

Corporations shouldn't own customers... Like, the way you poach one is by offering a better deal (more features, better price, better service, etc). I think the way an economist would see the situation you are describing there is a "functioning market" \-- the way that an economy improves customers life.

If AMD releases a new processor and "steals" a ton of Intel customers that's a good thing. The customers get better processors which they use in their own economic contributions. If Intel steals them back by releasing an even better processor, that's also fantastic. If that process repeats it's not "out of control" \-- it's the world becoming better.

This dynamic (competition) is the reason why capitalistic societies have done so well in the last two centuries. It's the reason why the quality of the goods you use continues to increase while the price drops.

When corporations make an agreement to stop competing on any dimension, that dimension suffers. Maybe you're saying you don't care about this particular dimension. If that was true in general (ie no consumers care about the dimension), then the _agreement wouldn 't be necessary_ since competing on that basis would have no effect.

<comment><USER16> I guess our disagreement is in the word "offering".

I can advertise an offer in many places, but just because I agree not to advertise an offer in a particular place (eg right outside a rival movie theater, and vice versa) doesn't mean I don't OFFER something. It may mean that we agree not to degrade the experience for one another's customers.

Are you saying that a world where people are hit with AMD ads as soon as they exit the Intel store is a better world? Well why don't companies go the other way then -- agree to tell each other every time you purchase something and share your purchase data without your consent. I hope you like to receive spam mail every time you buy something, from competitors.

Please explain why men seducing each other's wives at every opportunity would lead to better deals for wives.

<comment><USER18> > Are you saying that a world where people are hit with AMD ads as soon as > they exit the Intel store is a better world?

Assuming the ad runs profitably, yep. Customers are changing their buying patterns for a reason.

> Well why don't companies go the other way then -- agree to tell each other > every time you purchase something and share your purchase data without your > consent.

You answered your own question by including "without your consent". The with consent version does happen though -- it's not unheard of for a knowledgable salesperson to recommend a different product than the one they are selling.

> I hope you like to receive spam mail every time you buy something, from > competitors.

This is quite a leap from your previous example. Did you grow tired of it?

> Please explain why men seducing each other's wives at every opportunity > would lead to better deals for wives.

Please explain why women get remarried.

<comment><USER16> >> Please explain why men seducing each other's wives at every opportunity would lead to better deals for wives.

>Please explain why women get remarried.

Answering a question with a question? This is a non-sequitur. While there are many reasons for women to get remarried, to make your point you have to show that it's better for women when men actively try to seduce each other's wives at every opportunity. After all, women are perfectly capable of discovering other men themselves, especially if the men advertise their availability and offers in various well-known places. The men don't need to cold-call other men's wives specifically trying to poach them. There's a big difference.

Illustrate to me economically why the world where men are specifically cold- calling other men's wives is a better world due to the increased "competition" by men.

If we take this logic even further, perhaps ever-more-clever ways of men sabotaging the others' relationships with their wives would have even BETTER results for the wives, because they are more "competitive"? Doesn't this have diminishing returns?

<comment><USER18> > to make your point you have to show that it's better for women when men > actively try to seduce each other's wives at every opportunity

Not really. The point actually should read "men making an agreement not to flirt with married women would be worse for married women as a whole".

Note this differs from your version in two important ways:

A1. The group that is benefited is _not_ women, but married women

A2. "Every opportunity" is replaced with "where the man in question believes it is a good idea"

And the version with those modifications is clearly true.

High level argument:

B1. the cost to happily married women isn't particularly high (they stay in their relationship, feel flattered, have a fun conversation, etc)

B2. the cost to unhappily married women would be particularly high (since they have less knowledge about potential alternatives / may stay in a bad situation longer due to lack of information)

I'm not sure what the exact population sizes are for those two groups, but by using the divorce rate as a quick proxy we can see it's a high enough ratio to be net positive. Hence it would be better.

(If you are thinking about talking about obnoxious flirting, I will point you to A2 above)

FWIW "Please explain why women get remarried" is just a shorter version of the above argument -- the reason men not flirting with married women is bad for married women as a whole is because some would get remarried.

> If we take this logic even further, perhaps ever-more-clever ways of men > sabotaging the others' relationships with their wives would have even BETTER > results for the wives, because they are more "competitive"? Doesn't this > have diminishing returns?

You talk about straw men in other threads. Do you really not see the straw man in your last two replies to me? No one is arguing that Apple should seek to harm the way that Google's employees feel about Google except in true ways ("Google is paying you 20% less than market" is good if true in much the same way as "Greg is cheating on you" is good if true. Both are of course bad if false)

<comment><USER16> Well let's take this context of married women for example. The reality is that there are many men who do not have any qualms about "trying to seduce" a married woman.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKfMqwSMI4U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKfMqwSMI4U) (I just had to link this :-)

These men do not "respect" the institution of marriage or the religious views on adultery etc.

There are entire forums on the internet devoted to "how to get a girl in a relationship" with "boyfriend destroyer routines" or whatever.

The idea is that an institution employing experts with lots of experience in poaching employees, is going to have an unequal advantage over the employee, and is likely to entice them either through souring their relationship with their current employer (maybe telling an employee about how Apple's workers are treated in China, for example) as well as using psychological tricks to lure them away.

Flirting is one thing. Blatantly propositioning in front of the husband when he's ware of it is something else. Most people draw a line not because they want to flaunt some antitrust law, but because of biological / economic emergent actions.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3798](http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3798)

<comment><USER18> So you're saying in your mind accepting a job is like committing to a marriage? "Till death do us part" and all that?

You can moonlight as an employee, so at the very least you have to agree it's like a swinger/open marriage. I don't know the protocol there, but I'm guessing blatantly propositioning someone in an open marriage falls in to a different category than a closed one. It's much closer to talking to someone who's single.

re: unequal recruiting skill level vs the employee. Are you now taking the position that recruiting is immoral in and of itself?

<comment><USER16> Recruiting involves many things and what is considered moral is relative. An HR dept will pay recruiters to advertise in APPROPRIATE places and screen candidates, do background checks, set up a pipeline etc.

If the recruiter is instructed not to advertise the company's openings in strip clubs or porn sites, that isn't illegal or immoral. This is how I view instructing the recruiters not to advertise on their competitor's website or target other company's employees. Perhaps they think the cost of bad reputation or reprisals from those companies was too high. It doesn't have to be a "conspiracy". As I posted, an arxiv article shows that cartels are a natural emergent phenomenon of markets.

As far as marriage - there was a time when people worked decades for a company and earned a pension. These days esp in the tech industry those days are long gone. Poaching is an additional cost of hiring employees. You want to increase this cost - fine, and it will be passed on to the employees and depress their salaries. Your argument that the correlation is the other way is sofar without basis. I am not arguing that it is not illegal - the courts should decide that. I am saying this enforcement goes contrary to the purpse of the law and no one wins.

<comment><USER17> So you're saying other companies offering tech workers high salaries will lower their salaries? I think you're missing the point.

<comment><USER16> Yes if we're still talking about poaching, it creates downward pressure on the salaries of everyone else.

There are certain costs associated with hiring someone. Such as:

1) Recruiting 2) Interviewing 3) Onboarding and introducing to team 4) Provisioning equipment, office, etc. 5) Ramping up and getting integrated

Now, if these costs are paid per employee, then the longer this employee works with us, the more valuable they become and the more money they can make.

BUT

Those employees that get poached, or "fail upwards" into other companies, or whatever, actually make that position cost more. Way more. And I am not just talking about the fact that they might leave mid-project or have a moral hazard of screwing up a project knowing they'll have their next job to fail upwards into. But something even more basic.

For example if I have to pay the cost of 1-5 once every 3 years, that's 3 times less than if I have to pay it every year. So will I bear the full cost of 1-5 every time or pass it on to the employees I hire into that position? Of course I would pass it on, and moreover I can justify it by saying that they don't have "seniority within the organization" or that we are a meritocracy.

So you are completely neglecting this side of the phenomena, and blindly claiming that salaries will go up because poaching increases. It's not at all obvious that they would!

<comment><USER17> You're neglecting the fact that not every "poaching" attempt is successful and the fact that companies like Google have an incentive to keep salaries high in order to prevent poaching.

<comment><USER16> I didn't neglect that. How do these facts rule out that successful poaching imposes an additional cost per employee on companies? Paying employees a larger salary doesn't prevent poaching if your opponent can do the same. People are more likely to fail upwards and projects are more likely to cost more and be finished later because of successful poaching. Who bears this cost and how?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Because those employees deserve to earn more money from a company that is willing to offer it to them.

<comment><USER20> But they weren't willing to offer it to them. They _might_ have been, if it didn't mean competitors might start poaching, but it did mean that.

<comment><USER21> If you don't work there anymore its not poaching. It applied to former employees as well.

<comment><USER20> s/poaching/poaching or hiring former employees, if that's the case

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's illegal if a court says it's illegal. Whether a particular person can think of a good reason for something to be illegal doesn't factor into the picture.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wrong. 1) It also applies to former employees. 2) Like monopolies, corruption and price-fixing its bad for the free market.

Steve Jobs knew it was illegal and wrong.

</comment><comment><USER23> As in "You stop cold-calling me, I cease firing on you"?

Not sure why that would be illegal.

</comment><comment><USER24> This marks the decline of hn. Experiment over I guess. Now where do I go for news?

</comment><comment><USER25> It doesn't have to be illegal to be unethical.

<comment><USER20> It also doesn't need to be unethical to be illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> First of all, even if it weren't illegal, it would still be extremely sleazy.

Second, many people who do objectively illegal things (a) are subtle enough about it to leave doubt and (b) rarely will be caught on the totality of evidence that would convict them. If they leave enough of a trail to prove them guilty on the small things they don't care much about, what are they up to that's hidden from view?

Let's take extortion. Real-world extortionists don't say, "give me money or I'll shoot up your storefront." Making it that obvious will put them in jail. Accidents and annoyances occur, with escalation over time. Rumors are spread, often by the extortionist, that the extortionist is taking interest in the business and will demand payment. Someone goes in, hits his head on the side of the door and demands recompense. Or the extorted party is asked to purchase "protection" services. White-collar extortion tends to focus on reputation rather than physical violence, and the services are dressed as some kind of consulting, but it's a similar game. It's hard to convict because most criminals can stay just on the right side of the line, at least in terms of where they leave a record.

Is this a price-fixing cartel? No, not quite (at least, not from what we know). However, if people are being instructed to follow no-poach agreements and terminated when they break them, it's quite likely that these networks of collusion are being used for worse things, like blacklisting. A no-poach agreement denies career opportunities to people who would otherwise have them. without their knowing why the opportunities are not there or even that it is occurring. That's a big deal. It makes it not unlikely that these companies are also blacklisting, say, people who might support collective bargaining for engineers or who otherwise fight for themselves. Shit, I might be on a PITA list somewhere.

Those sorts of probably illegal collusive arrangements exist all over the Valley, especially among venture capitalists who compare notes on prospects instead of competing on a fair market. Indeed, most of what VCs do would be highly illegal (insider trading, market manipulation, pump-and-dump, use of negative rumor to punish and intimidate) if it pertained to publicly traded stock rather than private equity.

This is a major issue. Even if not illegal, it's still sleazy and shameful.</comment>


Top Ten Worst Uses for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29644?ts

<comment><USER2> Oh, please, no. No "Top Ten" anything here. That's what Digg is for.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is windows that bad on memory leaks? The author seem to think so. I'm pretty sure a windows 2000 (haven't had an xp or vista box) box can stay up for a long time without need for a reboot if no experimental software/driver is running on it. I remember windows 95 used to crash after like 30 days (if I recall correctly, can't remember where I read that).

<comment><USER4> All windows before 98SE had memory leaks every time a new thread was spawned. Memory leaks in newer versions of windows are due to sloppy user programs (mainly handles that aren't released properly but a precise programming can reduce those to zero) and rarely bad drivers but the core itself is stable.

<comment><USER5> sshhh, you're not supposed to say things like that out loud. Windows = bad and it's all Microsoft's fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe that Windows for Warships didn't make the list.

(I wish I was kidding, but I'm not - [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/26/windows_boxes_at_sea...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/26/windows_boxes_at_sea/) \- this would be bad for an American warship, but this project is British, an excellent decision to use offshore closed source technolgy!)

Mind you that isn't as bad as the fact that the new British carriers will use an ammunition handling system based on the baggage system in use at Terminal 5 :(

</comment><comment><USER7> And I thought that cards that sing when you open them running Windows was ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER8> They forgot robots. Microsoft is actually marketing a robotics suite! Its almost too cliche to even mention windows running robots going beserk etc....

</comment><comment><USER9> Scheduled downtime isn't used in calculating 5 nines? Surely it should if it's that bad...

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh god, I already trust Microsoft to slow down everything I do at home, but if my breathing apparatus in my hospital responsible for saving my life hits the BSOD, I am going to rise from the dead and eat some MS brains.</comment>


Will Speech Syntax Markup Language (SSML) Become the New HTML? - <AUTHOR> Was playing around with Amazon Echo and was struck by Amazon's documentation for Speech Synthesis Markup Language.<p>As I read these incredibly clear API docs for creating and contextualizing how to read out nuanced pronunciation... I have become convinced that syntax like this is the future.   https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html <comment><USER2> It's Speech _Synthesis_ Markup Language, and, no, it won't be the next HTML; it's got a narrower niche, and most of the semantic and presentational support it provides for rendering speech is already provided between HTML and the CSS Speech Module.

SSML and related technologies (VoiceXML, for instance) are great for dedicated speech applications, but they aren't positioned to replace HTML.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it really that different from, say, VoiceXML, which has been around since the 90's?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML)

<comment><USER4> VoiceXML uses SSML to mark up text to be spoken to the user, and in fact the two standards were developed in parallel by the W3C's Voice Browser Working Group.

<comment><USER5> Hopefully, with an AWS offering, this could give an impetus to widespread adoption. A lot of great ideas are simply left dormant because of network effects.

<comment><USER2> SSML is fairly widely supported now in it's domain (and, unless I'm mistaken, the generally similar features in CSS Speech were modelled on it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, an XML-like language is the future of XML-like HTML?</comment>


Don't Let Fear Keep You From Moving - <AUTHOR> http://andysparks.co/post/50029141054/dont-let-fear-keep-you-from-moving

<comment><USER2> I faced a similar dilema just over a year ago and made a similar decision. I've not regretted it one bit. It's amazing how much of the fear melts away instantly when you commit to something and realize that most of your limits are self imposed.

Great post, thanks.</comment>


What is and how to start with Decentralized Finance (DeFi) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coinmonks/what-is-and-how-to-start-with-decentralized-finance-defi-67ea5ea0eca2 <comment><USER2> I've been earning interest on my DAI quite nicely. The only thing that concerns me since the bZx fiasco is... how attack-proof are all these smart contracts? At times it feels like putting your money in a house of cards.

We need better insurance in the crypto space. Nexus is fine but it doesn't cover everything and you could still be denied as it's not trust-less.</comment>


Amazon prefaces its recruiting emails to women engineers with "Diversity HIRE" - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/MzTV9 <comment><USER2> OP, can you offer more thoughts on why this is newsworthy? I intend no criticism, I just want to understand what this means to you and why you linked it. (If you'd rather not, I can safely assume a partial understanding from it, so no worries.)

<comment><USER3> I think it's honestly offensive to tell a candidate "we are interested in you not (only) because of your engineering skills but also because you are diverse."

It's good that Amazon is trying to become more diverse, but an email like this makes a candidate feel like they are being recruited for the wrong reason.

<comment><USER2> I agree. Thank you for taking the time to write this. I would likely have agreed with OP too, if I could be sure what they thought :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Definitions are important, it's probably not the Diversity Hire you're thinking of > [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=diversity%20h...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=diversity%20hire)

In Corporate Speak this means someone else qualified besides white males. Every major tech employer is facing this issue > [https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/08/02/faceboo...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/08/02/facebooks- diversity-report-shows-gains-for-women-but-workforce-remains-very- white/#655f78414375)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's better than not hiring women I guess....

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish they wouldn't have blocked out the email information. There's very little to verify this is legit.

<comment><USER3> This is my very good friend and I promise this is legit

<comment><USER7> This is your first comment in 1.75 yrs and we have no reason to trust you; your testimonial is unconvincing, unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> Fair, I added some more identifying information to my profile so you know that I'm a real person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> uggh.. "This site can't be reached"

<comment><USER9> Here's a non album link: [https://i.imgur.com/ZeReXLm.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZeReXLm.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> LOL this is incredible</comment>


NudgePad: an IDE in Your Browser - <AUTHOR> https://angel.co/nudgepad

<comment><USER2> I've been watching nudge evolve for a while and must say I'm really impressed by the overall design, performance and ease of use. There are plenty of tools for rapid prototyping these days, but nudge just gets out of your way and exposes an incredible time-to-value proposition. Considering the approach to modular add-ons, I can envision this simple tool turning into a powerhouse in the near future.

TL;DR: spend at least 15 minutes playing with it and imagine the possibilities

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems objectively neat, but I'm curious what the target use-case is. I would image most web developers want more powerful tools (a real console, their editor of choice, their commandline tools, etc). And it has too much power for non-technical users to break stuff.

Maybe it's a tool for neophyte devs, somewhere between random-free-hosting.biz and using aws?

Who is this aimed at?

<comment><USER4> Target user at the moment is entry level devs on up who want to start developing in seconds.

Medium term the target is small multirole teams (developer, designer, copywriter), who want to work more collaboratively using specific tools for the types of things each is most qualified to edit (code/schemas, mockups/styles/images, copy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Sorry, we are currently experiencing heavy load. Please check back later."

Thanks, but I prefer my IDE to be available anytime I want it. Even if this IDE-in-a-browser isn't tied to their website, it doesn't inspire confidence that they can't handle a surge in web traffic.

<comment><USER4> Sorry about that, we temporarily turned off new sites on the main server so our current users on that server have uninterrupted access to their sites. Most production sites are not running on nudgepad.com, but on other servers running NP. NudgePad.com is more of a demonstration server. We haven't tested it with more than 10,000 projects on a single machine and didn't expect this big a response tonight. It will be very easy to scale--just need to shard new projects across servers--just haven't gotten to that yet.

Happy to send a direct link to anyone who wants to try email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like a cheap attempt to get people to look at their angellist page.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Nudge uses Space, a new lightweight object-oriented programming language"

Is this a joke? Space seems to be just a lightweight JSON replacement [http://spaceful.org/](http://spaceful.org/)

<comment><USER4> Edited. Should have said "encoding language".

Here are some examples of space in action:

\- [http://sender.nudgepad.com/demo.html](http://sender.nudgepad.com/demo.html)

\- [http://nudgepress.com/](http://nudgepress.com/)

It is very useful. Happy to answer questions about it.

<comment><USER8> Its list handling seems broken? tojson(fromjson(x)) !== x.

Paste { "name": "John", "age": "29", "foo": [1,2,3] } into the JSON side, and click in the left and move the cursor to force it to update and see what happens (I see it drop the first two list items).

<comment><USER4> Correct. We can turn all JSON to Space easily, but there's no canonical way to turn all Space into JSON (although you can do it easily for a particular use case).

Unlike JSON, in Space order is important and you can have duplicate properties. So in JSON you can't do this:

``` { 'h1' : 'hello world', 'h1' : 'this is a test', } ```

But you can do that in Space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is very cool. This could really lower the bar for entry level developers who don't want to deal with running a web server. It reminds me of github pages, but even further along.

</comment><comment><USER10> For downloadable browser IDE check us out (www.crudzilla.com), plus you can use a bunch of languages and the whole setup is ready to deploy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool but it's really silly to claim that no existing projects make it easier to develop apps. There are Koding, Cloud9 for years

</comment><comment><USER12> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://nudgepad.com/)</comment>


Linux Performance Analysis and Tools - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2013/06/08/linux-performance-analysis-and-tools/

<comment><USER2> Awesome talk, though the SystemTap coverage was oddly weak.

Saying 'SystemTap was was created when there weren't Solaris for Linux ports' is a little disingenuous. Linux had live kernel instrumentation with kprobes way before Sun debuted DTrace, and DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel.

If you want to see some actual useful production taps you can use right now on your Red Hat / CentOS box, check out [http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WarStories](http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WarStories)

<comment><USER3> _DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel._

This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507)

[2]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

[3]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI)

<comment><USER4> I want to point out a comment [1] apparently by the former chief open source evangelist, Danese Cooper [2], on the "Fork Yeah!" video contradicting Bryan Cantrill on this point. Here it is reproduced:

Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither _because_ that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&lc=UEj5uH4rMafUnX...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&lc=UEj5uH4rMafUnXNekr8VLEFBfO2UpbRVyNaLbGRcDzs) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper)

<comment><USER5> I fully trust in Danese's description of the events in this case.

Not only because she (Danese) was the person who actually created the licence (and thus is the best authority on the prerequisites set by the Sun management), but also because it makes perfect sense.

Sun, a company whose Solaris product was suffering greatly under competition from Linux, would NOT want to offer up their systems technical advantages under a open source licence which would allow Linux to use said technical advantages. It seems purely logical to me.

Listening further to Danese, she describes the Sun management as wanting a copyleft style licence for the code, and that they were eyeing GPLv3, but not GPLv2 which was already available (again, GPLv3 code would not be compatible with the Linux kernel, while GPLv2 obviously would), however GPLv3 was taking to long to be finalized so they set her (Danese) on the task of creating a new licence.

<comment><USER6> I've recently been using DTrace on Ubuntu. I filed two bugs on the project page ([https://github.com/dtrace4linux/linux](https://github.com/dtrace4linux/linux)), and Paul Fox fixed them quickly. I have more bugs to file, but I'm doing my part in making DTrace on Linux a reality.

It's very tempting to join these licensing discussions (I was at Sun, too, and many of us DID want to see DTrace on Linux), but I think that's a distraction from what's happening right now.

There are two projects porting DTrace to Linux, which is really exciting. I'm helping out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently dove into this area in an attempt to find something like strace that didn't cost as much (as the slides mention, it's hundreds of times slower to run something under strace). It seems like dtrace can likely do what I want, but it doesn't sound reliable under linux yet. Does anyone know if the native linux profiling tools can be used to answer questions like "which files is my process accessing"?

As far as I found, various tools can trace syscalls and count them, but the critical thing strace adds is that it decodes the pointer parameters to syscalls into strings, something that e.g. "perf trace" doesn't seem to do.

<comment><USER8> Try lsof for files accessed by process.

<comment><USER9> Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe lsof can only display files held open at a given point in time (when you run lsof), no? So if a process opens a file, does something with it, and then immediately closes it, you're unlikely to be able to catch that with lsof unless you happen to run it at _exactly_ the right time.</comment></comment></comment>