The fall of Quibi: how did a starry $1.75B Netflix rival crash so fast? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/28/quibi-netflix-jeffrey-katzenberg-crash <comment><USER3> I see lot of comments along the lines of "silicon valley hubris", but how much of Quibi's $1.75B actually came from silicon valley?

> _In 2018, the startup (then called "New TV") announced that it had raised $1 > billion in funding. Among the initial investors were a who's who of > Hollywood studios: Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, > Viacom, AT &T's WarnerMedia, Lionsgate, MGM, ITV and Entertainment One (now > part of Hasbro). Tech investors include China's Alibaba Group. That funding > round was led by VC firm Madrone Capital Partners; other investors were > Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and John Malone's Liberty Global. The Katzenberg- > founded WndrCo investment vehicle also is a Quibi investor._

It sounds like a bunch of old-school media companies and Hollywood studios trying to play Silicon Valley, and thinking they can build a Decacorn by spending lots of money and hiring famous celebrities, instead of doing small- scale MVPs and market-validation.

There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea".

<comment><USER4> I've been a tech consultant in LA for more or less 15 years at this point.

A very large portion of well funded, early stage startups that crash and burn in LA are typically because media people have a hard time conceptualizing lean startup, and rapid iteration etc. Over the years I've accepted it's not so much hubris as it is entertainment is just a different industry with a different way of doing business and people who found success in entertainment think that method they achieved translates to tech startups, when it unfortunately doesn't.

In Hollywood you put all this time and money into one big event like a film, or an album or a pilot and people scoop it up due to marketing. They consume it, then they are done. If they like it they ask for more. So if you have the money you spend all of the money at once to make the best thing possible, put as much marketing and PR against it as possible and people will consume it anyway. Usually you make some of your money back. If consumers ask for more, that's a bonus. Then you go out and raise more for the sequel or the next album or whatever.

Of course tech is different - you can't put all that money into the first iteration and expect it to pay off. You need to stretch it out over many experiments and control burn over years. It's just a totally different financial model and business plan. There are so so many Quibis out there that never got past private alpha / beta. The execs spend YEARS crafting that perfect alpha, open it up privately to friends and family, it flops and then they throw in the towel just like that. I've seen it more times than I can count now

<comment><USER5> Your comment makes me wonder if the tech agile model would work in movies or TV. Imagine if you got bites of a show every week and based on your feedback, the show evolved it's direction. Sounds interesting and strange.

<comment><USER6> This is more or less how TV series work. You put out a season, you get feedback, then you develop the next season.

I doubt it's practical for individual episodes yet. You would likely need a month between episodes to do this, and people would just forget about your show in that time.

<comment><USER7> Aren't TV pilots individual episodes?

<comment><USER8> They are, but there's a lot of lead time that goes in to shooting the pilot, and then even more in planning the rest of the season if it gets picked back up. They end up released at the same time, but that doesn't mean that a year hasn't passed since they started pre production on the pilot.

It's simply infeasible to adjust a show to fan feedback on a weekly basis I think. You'd need either a really small show, or one where most of the elements (sets, lighting, wardrobe, etc.) stay pretty consistent between episodes, then the work would just be a matter of tweaking the story, rather than figuring out how to get the whole crew out to all the locations required to make a traditional tv show.

<comment><USER9> From listing to some of the director/producers commentary on episodic tv there is a lot of prep work that goes into a show and then you have 7 days to shoot the episode.

So you cant really change that much week to week.

<comment><USER8> Yup, exactly. I work in production, and you need so much time to prep all of the aspects of a single day of production, and then working each day in to a rational schedule to get everything you need. You can't just change everything on a whim. (not without lots of time and money)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They lost me at $4.99/ month with advertising and $6.99/ month without. Since I can't stand video advertising, this costs just as much as Disney+ for an absolutely unknown content library. Comparing them to Disney+ isn't remotely fair though because Disney+ contains a huge library of content and people know exactly what they are getting. Which leave's me scratching my head.

So lets look at another company trying to get into the media game at the ground floor. The Apple TV+ launch was similarly a bit starved for known media properties and went with a fairly similar _buy the celebrity_ sort of route into the business. That's why they have Oprah and Steven Spielberg titles featured prominently. It's why they have Foundation coming on Apple TV+.

And Apple TV+ is $4.99/ month commercial free and (for many), a full year of free content. Even with comparable talent at launch, lower pricing and more generous terms, Apple's offering isn't exactly blowing the doors off the market either. (I kind of think it's doing Ok, just not making Netflix or DIS sweat too much).

If you want to get into media streaming right now, you need to either have a strong existing brand, or you need to be willing to lose a lot of money for a long time building up a catalog of trusted franchises.

</comment><comment><USER11> It started in april 2020, ie 3 months ago. I think it's presumptuous to say that it "failed" already. It's just below its own target.

Lot ot things can still happen. They can release a show that'll become viral and bring them million of subscribers.

But of course there are some very strange decisions:

\- Mobile-only is weird. Why not make mobile a priority, but people are used to watch shows on their TV or PC. And you cannot watch things with multiple other people. Even with one person, it's not really practical.

\- Did not allow screenshot: for a mobile only, it's strange, they failed to understand something about the internet. Heck, they could have made a button to annotate and share a screenshot on social media in-app since they're in mobile-only. That would have been something people are used to. But at least allow people to share the content they like. You're just forbidding free advertisment.

<comment><USER12> They at least seem to be rethinking the "only on mobile" thing. You can now play on a TV using a Chromecast or AirPlay. Still no dedicated smart TV or streaming stick apps, though.

[https://help.quibi.com/hc/en- us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-...](https://help.quibi.com/hc/en- us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-use-Chromecast-or-Apple-AirPlay-with-my-Quibi- app-)

<comment><USER13> Compared to web pages, video storage and bandwidth is a meaningful portion of video CPM or video subscription, so 720p (or, say, 360p for iOS 14 PIP mode) yields significantly different cost basis.

The only on mobile thing may have been necessary for the business model.

<comment><USER14> > video storage and bandwidth is a meaningful portion of video CPM or video > subscription

Maybe "compared to web pages". But very skeptical it's a meaningful cost compared to production or subscription prices. Even going with a third party CDN you're probably not paying more than ¢1/GB of transfer. For 720P h.264 that's about about 2GB, or 2¢, per hour of content transferred. How many pennies per month do you need before it's a meaningful portion of the $7 subscription price?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm (in theory) the target demographics for this app. I love short content (YouTube, podcast, web-comics, etc...) and always on the go.

The main problem (for me) was the lack of content, for some reason they didn't tap in the YouTube ecosystem where there is plentiful of talent that specialize in the short (10 minute or less) format, Minutephysics is the first example that come to mind. Instead they went for the big-star tactics that really doesn't work.

I watched all the show and, while some of them are good, the vast majority is only "meh". This plus the low number of show and episode, doesn't allow me to justify speeding the money of the subscription.

It seem they tried to do Netflix "but short", instead of specializing in on- the-go entertainment. They don't even have podcast!

However i really want a service with curated short content, but i want more than video! I'm also interested in podcast, articles (side note: can someone recommend summary "this-week-in-[argument]" site or channel?). I currently use YouTube, but a more curated multi-media platform (without ads) would be awesome and i would pay for it.

<comment><USER16> Was this service promoted outside the USA (other way put, should I have heard about this in EU?)?

You at least heard of it, and used it.

<comment><USER17> I'm in the USA and I've heard the name once or twice ('some viral video series coming soon!' type ads), but didn't even realize it launched. Maybe I'm not the target demographic.

<comment><USER12> They also launched April 6, 2020, which was right smack in the middle of pandemic lockdowns.

Not great timing to get eyes on your ads. Not the right mood for "here's light and quick content for your commute!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't mean to sound negative, but I thought from the original announcement that this model was absurd.

Yes, people like watching content on their phones, but the novelty of that (for me) was the freedom that came from being locked in to my TV or PC. Freedom was the thing that made me welcome YouTube to my phone.

When I read that Quibi was going to lock customers into a single format I literally laughed out loud. It seemed to me that maybe the founders consulted a handful of teenagers and got pranked in the process.

I installed Quibi a while back, got the 90 day trial, and uninstalled it in under an hour after realizing I couldn't cast it to my FireStick.

> _...the company is in talks with Amazon Fire and Roku to bring the app to > TV._

This is even funnier. If they had done this much, much earlier they would probably be in much better shape. The fact that they're doing it now indicates that this is the case.

Again, I cannot stress how funny it is that at some point in some meeting, somebody pitched something akin to "You know what people don't care about/hate? Choice." and that flew. It's like something from a Christopher Guest movie.

<comment><USER19> Quibi has all the hallmarks of _corporate_ groupthink. "You know what the kids like? They like phones and Joe Jonas, my daughter won't stop talking about him."

These things are made by executives and leaders that are so type-A they don't actually look at their phones because they're barking out orders to format a PowerPoint slide, and then instead of just asking their kid if they'd do something (sit down for ten minutes to watch Sophie Turner) they get a big panel of people (who sign up to do panel studies) and ask them.

When big media companies make apps, it's like when developers go to the edge of a town and build an urban hellscape edge city. When will media executives realize they can't Robert Moses their way into the FAANG?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _"With Katzenberg singularly blaming the pandemic"..._

If this wasn't the best time to launch an online entertainment platform - <USER2> don't know what would. With everyone unable to travel and consuming so much media the pandemic should have been a boost to their launch in my opinion.

<comment><USER21> Which is probably why he should be singularly blaming the product. I'm sat at home. I don't want to watch video on my phone while sitting on the couch with my 60 inch television right there.

(To be honest this is just one of the pile of problems of the product/service)

<comment><USER22> ^This^ is the reason that I have watched a grand total of less than a dozen movies on a computer or phone, ever. The experience just flat sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a reason that the phrase, "Content is King" is so prevalent: it's a fact.

Like many, I saw dozens of ads for Quibi (many of them on YouTube) and the entire campaign was centered around selling me on the concept of short-form content—-something I found hilarious on YouTube since anyone who frequents YouTube is probably already pretty sold on that concept. At no point was I given any indication of what I could watch. Every ad left me totally disengaged because I was either left to guess at what they might have or to assume that their library must be pretty shit if they aren't going to talk about it.

I worked at Netflix when the company began the idea of a "Netflix Original." Everyone points to House of Cards as the first (and, in terms of Netflix- produced content, it was) but there was a lesser known first original called "Lillyhammer." You didn't hear about it because it was literally dipping the toes into the water of what it meant to "own" content rather that just license it. It wasn't a signature piece of content we could build a brand around.

House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were the big ones and they came 6 and 9 months later respectively. They were "signature" shows that set the tone of what Netflix originals were all about. I remember the lead Product Manager and I sitting together and discussing whether we should include a promotional photo of one of the characters from House of Cards giving the camera the middle finger in our main experience. We knew that parents and conservative groups might be upset by it being right there in our UI; but, we also knew the tone we wanted to set for our content. We put it in. The content drove our marketing.

It was important that people get on board with the idea of "Netflix Originals." But it was more important that the content spoke for itself. In Quibi's case, they need content they can showcase that speak for itself and gets people on the platform. No one will care if it's "short form" or "long form" as long as it's GOOD.

<comment><USER24> This a thousand times over! WTH is a Quibi and why should I care? That's the question I always asked after one of those commercials. It was like watching someone trying to sell a blank notebook with a fancy cover that wouldn't take ink ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some things work, other things don't work.

You find out by trying.

The thing is not to use $1bn to try.

<comment><USER26> Or pay $6M for a single minimal content.

<comment><USER27> $6M buys you a lot of David Attenborough for VO work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dawg- It's been discussed a lot, but i think the name is such a big part of it. Quibi is an impressively terrible name.

<comment><USER28> I'm going to assume I wasn't part of their target audience, given what I'm about to say, but the whole thing looks like a bunch of amateurs with a ton of money.

First off you're spot on with the name — what a terrible decision. Secondly because the name doesn't tell you anything about who they are or what they do they needed to have advertising spots that got that across quickly. Except for some completely inexplicable reason they ran ads from a show about a mobile app, requiring you to watch for over a minute (!) before realizing the spot was for a show, not for some new app named Quibi. I literally saw their ads dozens and dozens of times before accidentally letting it run long enough to figure out what the hell it was. Did they recruit marketers from Microsoft or something? They're the only other people I've seen capable of causing that degree of product confusion in marketing decisions.

Next, where the hell did the focus on short form content come from? If anything the trend has been for longer and longer form content as seen by the success of HBO, where a shorter medium (cinema) has moved into a longer form medium (television) in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Given the focus on celebrities I'm sure I wasn't their target audience, but what mobile-first audience WAS the target anyway? Why wasn't YouTube serving their needs? Why weren't there production companies making and promoting this form on YouTube and other platforms already? The mind boggles. The whole thing reads like a bunch of amateurs with too much money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Their USP is anything but unique. There's nothing at all to stop Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc putting out ten minute chunks of content. They seem to have mistaken content production for content distribution. If short videos are what people want, then act as a production studio and sell your content to one of the streaming services.

<comment><USER30> > If short videos are what people want, then act as a production studio

Yup, the kind of content (TV level series) they were attempting to put out there hasn't been perfected for short-form yet. They should've focused on that instead of leaving that problem to the content creators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The thought that buying short content from celebrities I think fails to realize that content is not desired if from people who have status, but content that is interesting in and of itself. The fact that the two spearheads are in Hollywood shows this as a viable hypothesis why other avenues were not considered.

This is just another overly hyped "business" that wasn't meant to pan out.

<comment><USER32> I think hits the nail on the head, the shows were just boring.

It also plays into my hypothesis that writers in Hollywood are very underappreciated, because I don't know how else we get so much poorly written garbage, given the budgets involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _Quibi's signature "Turnstyle" technology, which allowed content to flow > from portrait view to landscape and back again seamlessly on your phone, is > tied up in a patent lawsuit with a deep-pocketed hedge fund._

Seems like this minimizes the seriousness a bit. The deep pocketed hedge fund is Elliott Management and they are basically gunning for the whole company. They're working with the original patent holder and bankrolling the law suit process.

Elliott (Paul Singer) are not stupid and they don't play nice. If they are stepping into bankroll this lawsuit then they obviously see something and the lawsuit should be considered an existential threat to Quibi. Singer strikes fear into sovereign nations so a couple media execs are going to be small potatoes.

<comment><USER34> Wait... they did what? I didn't realize they had such a terrible idea at the core of their business....

> Every show (and ad) is filmed and edited in both portrait and landscape. > Creators upload two video files and a separate audio file, which are then > synced and streamed simultaneously to your phone, so the video instantly > switches when you rotate the device.

I already dread getting the sides chopped off my movies due to aspect ratio confusion, are they seriously offering a platform where I'm always missing out on one half of the footage? Maybe it's the ol' OCD kicking in, but I imagine constantly switching back and forth to try to figure out the 'right' angle to look at a scene from. It seems deeply unpleasant.

<comment><USER35> I have a friend who is an editor on a topical semi-daily current-affairs show on Quibi. It's all done manually and they now have a semi-established style now, however a lot of it is cropping or shrink-to-fit with a background.

The fictional series, however, are shot with an almost 1:1 ratio since the safe-zone is ridiculously small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's easy: All of the hype was manufactured. No one was actually excited for it, there were just a ton of articles that made you think you others were.

<comment><USER37> > No one was actually excited for it, there were just a ton of articles that > made you think you others were.

My impression every time I heard about it was people weren't even buying into the "other people were excited" part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It seems like quibi raised the equivalent of the entire GDP of Belize without first verifying if literally anyone was interested in their offering.

Classic silicon valley-style hubris.

<comment><USER39> Classic _hollywood_ hubris, figuring enough spent on marketing and celebs will sell anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have another question: how did anyone buy into Quibi?

Extremely short film only works for the spontaneity of people's individual creativity and not as a corporately produced product. See: vine, tiktok, etc. When it's a corporate production it isn't cool anymore.

<comment><USER30> Meh, Youtube is making bank on short videos (often <10min, like Quibi's cap) and many of those aren't spontaneous bursts of creativity anymore, but highly produced products.

<comment><USER41> And many if not most of those YouTube creators are increasingly dissatisfied with Googles management and are looking for an alternative platform. It seems like such an obvious missed opportunity.

<comment><USER42> I hate to play arm-chair executive, but I have this nagging feeling you're right. Many (most?) YouTube content creators are making a pittance that's growing ever smaller by the day - $1.75bn can buy a huge amount of organic content.

The obvious mistake was going all-in on the first (unproven) concept and leaving no time/budget to experiment with the latter. Smacks very much of the hubris of a entrenched, well-capitalized industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I knew as soon as I heard about Quibi that it would fail. A few reasons:

\- Mobile first short content has already been tried multiple times by the big players and failed to find a market fit. The only one who has succeeded is YouTube, and they're free.

\- Original content only. You can't start a streaming service with just original content. You need a library of content, which means licensing existing content, or having a library already (HBOMax, CBS All Access, Peacock, etc. all have back catalogs from their parent companies).

\- Meg Whitman. I worked for Meg at eBay/PayPal. She was brilliant. But her expertise is growing a successful enterprise, not coming from behind. Look at her two main gigs -- eBay/PayPal, where she came into an already profitable enterprise and made it explode, and HPE, where she came into a failing enterprise and made it worse.

</comment><comment><USER44> There are a lot of startups which make you question your sanity, but they end up working out because your initial assumptions or understanding of the market are completely wrong. I've been caught enough times over the years to give the benefit of the doubt to new companies.

That said, this is _not_ one of those times.

Quibi's business model as it stands now is batshit insane. The fact that it hasn't taken off has given me a deep sense of relief that the guy in the mirror is not the one who is barking mad.

Personally, my guess is that it's some sort of Russian oligarch money laundering scheme. Or something akin to a modern day equivalent of The Producers where they make money from total failure.

</comment><comment><USER45> The name sounds like some chinese app that I see spammed on YouTube ads all the timed and a paid subscription at this time for a vine-like TV streaming service? HULU was free for ages. Disney+ just came out. Fail.

</comment><comment><USER46> Flagged, as this is clickbait. Quibi has not failed or "crashed", it has simply not met early (and very ambitious) targets.

<comment><USER47> From the article:

> while it's too soon to declare the end of Quibi, it's still worth asking: is > the promise of the quick bite already over? And what went so wrong?

it doesn't say "it failed" it says their adoption has collapsed. "it has simply not met early (and very ambitious) targets" is just another way of saying their numbers are bad, which is ... all the article is saying. Doesn't seem even remotely close to warranting a flag.

<comment><USER48> The title says it crashed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Their The Most Dangerous game had a lot of potential, but I want to watch it on my 70" TV, not my 5" phone screen.

I know they recently enabled AirPlay, but seriously, if they would've just launched with a smart TV app they might've been better off

</comment><comment><USER50> Instagram Stories and Snapchat both prove that there absolutely is a huge demand for mobile-only portrait short-form video content.

Maybe not "produced TV shows" in that format, as Quibi seemed to be pushing.

But I'd much prefer watching vloggers/YouTubers/Twitch/etc. in that format rather than in a landscape video on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER51> Jeferry Katzenberg is way way overrated.

I believed the shtick about him being behind Disney's animation success. I held Dreamworks Animation, admittedly the buyout was a fair price, but he got paid a ton of money for fairly mixed performance. Shrek, Kung Fu Panda definitely decent franchises but he piled the profit from these films into a ton of shit that didn't work (and his own pocket, somehow he is a billionaire).

But yeah, this had failure written all over it. I think the concept is basically fine...you don't know until you try it. But pouring a billion dollars into this was fucking lunacy (and the fact that Katzenberg invested too, shows that he is genuinely just not very good at his job). Like you prove the concept with far lower levels of capital...the issue was that the product was dogshit, not that you needed a billion dollars to make it work.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's increasingly looking like an unpopular opinion, but Quibi to me seems like an obviously sound business strategy. It's seemingly skating where the puck is going through numerous media consumption trends. At worst, this short- term failure seems like the failure of Google Wave, namely that it failed by being too far ahead of its time (and it's ideas will be cannibalized into however many yet-to-be-invented media products).

This doesn't detract from the pleasure I have at seeing it fail, mainly because of the way they wantonly plagiarized Everything Is Terrible with "Memory Hole".

But, to generalize, I think a lot of people have lots of different reasons to feel animosity towards Quibi, and we're all collectively misconstruing that animosity as identification of a weak business model (which I don't believe it is).

<comment><USER53> I agree. It's a good model but without killer content it won't gain much traction. Finding that killer content will be hard because it's new. It's not going to be the same killer content that Netflix has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Making it mobile only in the beginning was a big mistake, I think they overestimated how many younger people would want to watch on their phones with no option to watch on their TV.

It tries to be tiktok and netflix at the same time, without being good at either vertical.

</comment><comment><USER55> I am actually interested in trialing and maybe subscribing to Quibi—I could use a set of well-produced shows optimized for mobile viewing when I'm out and about. For context, I don't subscribe to anything other video service, including Netflix—I prefer buying shows on iTunes without a subscription, even if I end up paying a bit more overall.

But, I have _zero_ interest in Quibi while I'm stuck at home due to COVID. Why would I watch a video on my phone when I have a 100 ft projector a button tap away?

I just hope the service is still around when the world opens back up.

<comment><USER56> I believe they have added Chromecast support

<comment><USER55> Thanks, but that defeats the point. If I'm at home, I'd rather watch a proper 30-60 minute show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Quibi claimed to be competing with free and i think thats where they made their mistake. People on Youtube can leave a 10 minute vlog half way and still feel satisfied that they got their fill of quick stimulation. Quibi forces high effort engagement into a snippet of time where that's the last thing you want to be doing. Of course if they aren't competing with free, then they're competing with Netflix and honestly there is no USP on that side either. Its clear that they were exposed on both sides from the get go.

</comment><comment><USER58> Wrong question. Why did anyone think it would succeed? There was zero organic demand for this and it just seemed like some ill-conceived VC backed company that was trying to be the next TikTok. How did it crash so fast? Because it tried to solve something that no one cared about and didn't offer any real meaningful value--their launched 'shows' were garbage quality. Also, Meg Whitman... she ran Ebay and HP into the ground. Why pick her to lead a startup or all people? This was doomed from inception.

</comment><comment><USER59> Quibi seems like a neat idea but is being run very strangely for what it is: its being run like old media when the point is that it's new media.

-where is the trial option for a new media format?

-where are the samples of series on YouTube?

-where are my targeted ads on YouTube that point me to those samples?

I saw enough stuff about Quibi on websites where I get my TV and movie discussions to be interested, but nothing in places where I make decisions about what web content i consume to even consider dealing with the friction of a new app and a new subscription.

<comment><USER60> There were a ton of Quibi ads on Tik Tok. But it doesn't have the virality and originality, and honestly I don't think it ever will. Big production budgets and incredible story lines are something that Hollywood does a really good job of (and we've seen that come to TV over the past 10 years). But the sort of Tik Toks and Youtube videos that I like are pretty basic, and would be laughed out of the room as boring. It's like comparing a newspaper article with a novel. They're different products that do different jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is a really funny video take on the whole situation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc)

<comment><USER62> Thanks! That's a great overview! (and I say that as someone that generally doesn't like getting journalism through videos.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Some thoughts:

1) The name is awful. Nothing about "quibi" tells me that it is a streaming platform. "you tube" "net flix" "vimeo" etc. These are all obviously video platforms, and the name indicates that. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but the name definitely is not helping.

2) There is no way I am going to watch anything longer than 30 seconds on my phone unless I absolutely _have_ to. Mobile data overages are expensive. I'm not going to risk my wifi cutting out, and eating through my monthly data to watch reno 911.

How I would fix this:

1) Change the name. "Mob-ix" is a portmanteau of "mobile and flix". Change the name to mobix.

2) Create a website where I can watch this content.

3) Post some of the content on youtube, twitter, instagram, etc. That's where you supposed users are. Go to them.

4) Make this content available on amazon video, itunes, etc. as well. I'll pay you for reno 911.

It seems like they're trying to make a new genre of video, that's cool, and maybe this will stick, but you need to convince people that this is valuable and that they should not only pay a new service, but invest into a new paradigm. I think that by posting some of this on the existing places where people are watching short-form video is how you do that.

</comment><comment><USER64> I have used most streaming networks at some point and have never heard of Quibi before today. It's possible I've seen the name and assumed it was another Chinese social network, but I really wasn't aware that a service with this video format existed.

I live in the UK, maybe they aren't advertising in the UK? I do follow a lot of people in the US though and not heard any of them talking about it.

<comment><USER65> UK too. The BBC News site ran an article[0] back in April about this and that's how I picked up on it. Other US creators have mentioned in passing, but normally not very positively.

This article actually incorrectly suggests Quibi is only accessible in US and Canada...

> (Quibi is only available in the US and Canada)

...and no one I've spoken to has ever heard of it.

[0] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52193311](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52193311)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Most companies are destined to fail. If you invest $1.75 billion logically, you invest $1m in 10 companies, then after a year take the best-performing of those and invest another $5m in each, take the next three and invest $1m more to give them another year, and let the bottom three fail. A year later you see if any of the middle three have done well, put $5m into those, and $50m into the top performers of the A-list batch. In doing so you will find yourself investing more money in the stronger-performing companies and overall you are unlikely to lose massive amounts of money (you will only be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that are already very successful, so even if they don't achieve what you wanted them to, you will at least be able to recover some of your investment).

Or, you can just go and bet $1.75b on rolling a six and sit there scratching your head when it doesn't work out.

</comment><comment><USER67> The fact that I've never heard of it until now makes me highly suspicious they failed to market the service correctly.

<comment><USER68> I must have seen their (annoying, to me) ads over a 100 times already.

<comment><USER69> Where? I've only managed to read about it in the media. Zero ads.

<comment><USER68> Either sling or hulu, forget...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is a good time for a reminder about the startup journey. Quibi is in the "Trough of Sorrow" which is NORMAL.

[https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in- the-...](https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-trough- of-sorrow/)

<comment><USER10> Suggesting they are in a trough implies that there was an initial bump of enthusiasm which seems completely absent. There was a bit of advertising driven early uptake, but it didn't stick at all. I'm not even sure I'd consider a celebrity backed company that was backed by nearly $2B out of the gate a startup in the normal sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> It's quite simple why Quibi failed. They couldn't retain users during when the lockdown measures were in place in April, which they betted heavily on. If they couldn't gain those users at that time, then they would be finished as soon as the lockdown was being eased.

I guess that a mobile only, 10 minute video platform wasn't appealing to those users who bought into the original hype of purchasing this service and later switched back to the good old Netflix, Apple TV+ and Disney+. It had no chance and was dead before it was even born. The fact that all of Hollywood was backing this and throwing $1.7 billion is at most the top charts of product failures and part of the greatest hits of VC hype trains I've seen so far.

As the comments here already have mentioned, this can be best described as a high speed expensive train crash for investors.

<comment><USER72> Mobile only - and it reportedly didn't support sharing, which would explain why I never saw _anyone_ talking about it. Installing an app is a barrier to adoption and they intentionally blocked the most common way to get over that by letting people on social media convince their friends there's something worth watching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> They spent 1.75$bn in 3 months??? If they spent that kind of money on original series on a worldwide CC license, spammed the shit out of it on social media and provided integrations with every video platform in existence, they would've achieved much more than whatever it is they were trying to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER74> The new Reno 911 was really good. In that it is exactly what I wanted (more Reno 912), but i had to watch it on my phone so whatever. There were some moments where you could rotate the phone to watch a different angle but it wasn't essential. Maybe they should try putting up more Reno 911, couldn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER75> A thing I don't think enough people are talking about is that this launched in the era of stay-at-home but it was designed for the on-the-go person. The folks that want to watch super short-form content optimized for a smart phone are the folks on the subway or on a lunch break but now most of the world is at home surrounded by large screens and high-quality, well known content so Quibi has nearly no appeal. Give it a year ( if they can make it that long ) and I think you'll see them align with a larger on-the-go audience but at the current price point with all new, smartphone-optimized content they just don't fit into a market where people have access all day to TVs and are craving comforting, familiar favorites in juxtaposition to a world that is full of change and generally full of anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER76> I could not believe they wanted $5/month WITH ads!

</comment><comment><USER77> To me Quibi was immediately a sort of joke. I saw the video ads about a pilot watching Quibi or something and kind of ignored it. I knew what the platform was sort of but I never checked it out. It's kind of like the reality of any app-store platform, you have to have a killer app. In this case it would be a video series that can't be found anywhere other than Quibi that makes them have to check it out. Maybe there was one that I don't know about, but I feel like their ads should have been telling me where to find what I already wanted instead of just trying to entice me to check it out because they paid someone to pretend to be a pilot who is checking it out.

</comment><comment><USER78> I tried Quibi and I did not even finish the free trial. The reason being, is that it doesn't know what it is. Quibi was great for short shows that are made in short format... but it wanted me to watch a long show in a short format - which it just means that now instead of watching one episode for 30 mins I need to watch 6 episodes for 5 mins.

I also think their timing was an issue.. because with this pandemic people have more time to watch shows, long shows, movies, and I honestly don't think many people would pick Quibi when there are so many more options with so much more content.

</comment><comment><USER79> Never name your company something that your customers can't pronounce. :-)

</comment><comment><USER80> It should be free with ad support. Five minutes of laughs followed by a commercial interlude sort of gets you in the standard sitcom world anyway. Then maybe add a premium payment option.

</comment><comment><USER81> This is startup hubris because:

1) they are trying to innovate along a few vectors at the same time, choose one.

2) Political leaders not highly engaged with the details of the experience. Whitman scaled EBay she did not start it.

3) You have a pile of cash, and tons of people looking to cash in huge by grabbing some of the pie for easy money. That one of the content buyers gave his $6M for voice overs is definitely a scandal - this could only happen in a hyper politicised world.

</comment><comment><USER82> When I think of Quibi I think of the companies that I used to see set up "activations" in this one space on Abbot Kinney in Venice (LA). They were always new social apps or other things that received funding from outside the tech sphere and figured their best bet was to setup a thing on a shopping street.

Money != product even if you have nearly $2B dollars.

</comment><comment><USER83> T-Mobile offers it free with cell phone service. I'm still not interested enough to bother with it. Apparently there's a celebrity fan-made remake of The Princess Bride that's going up on the service. I'm a little curious to see it, but it's still not enough to bother with downloading an app to use a service I get for free.

</comment><comment><USER84> From my point of view, the idea never got validated by actual users, but instead been pushed by investors and the founder(s) itself, thinking this would be a hit.

Of course, due to a lot of marketing, they got a lot of users. Probably just to find out, that this is not what people expected or liked.

</comment><comment><USER85> It's interesting because I saw a lot of ads for Quibi on Youtube and immediately assumed it was shovelware because that's pretty much the only thing that gets advertised on Youtube. I'm surprised that it was actually something that had a lot ofn investment behind it.

<comment><USER86> I really didn't like the ads b/c it gave me a sense that they were leveraging celebrity brands to expand their own, didn't feel organic or something new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> People won't pay a subscription for short-form content. Back in the day cartoons came at the beginning of movies because nobody would go to a theater for a fifteen minute show. Today short-form content is supported by advertising, be it on YouTube or Facebook or TikTok.

<comment><USER66> Spotify?

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Netflix rival ??!!

Only in the wild imaginings and ramblings of its founders.

A stupid concept endlessly hyped by billionaire founder and vapid celebs, anti-consumer and useless, and having the nerve to blame Covid-19 for the failure of your idea - the hubris and arrogance is truly breathtaking.

</comment><comment><USER89> I tried Quibi for a few days when it was released (90 day free trial) but found the content to be pretty boring.

Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it, but I tried a few different shows and nothing really kept me engaged like shows on Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER90> Dang didn't this just come out. I just learned about this app. I thought it was just really small, iterating its business, and just blew up. I didn't even know they made startups like this anymore.

</comment><comment><USER91> Quibi saddled a weird new idea for media to a traditional paywall streaming service business model. Irrespective of anything else, that's a bad start.

Traditional media subscriptions work because you know what you're getting - sit down, watch a show that they offer. There's no ambiguity about whether you'll like the sitting down and watching part, it's only down to whether you'll like the particular show. For a consumer its very low risk.

Quibi's medium is new and exploratory, and you don't really know what you're getting both in viewing experience and the content itself as they leveraged no existing IP. If you don't know what you're getting, and nobody else knows because its new, paywalling is a terrible idea.

I'm sure there's a way to make bite-sized media pay for itself, but the path for that is probably as an offshoot of a social app like TikTok or a niche community play that slowly expands out, not some big Hollywood standalone spectacle.

</comment><comment><USER92> It had no strong differentiator and it had a stupid name. As a consumer I just dismissed it as soon as I first heard it mentioned. It seems I wasn't the only one!

</comment><comment><USER93> Success is almost inversely proportional to money raised pre-launch.... Magic Leap is another example. Theranos.

Top 10 ICOs all failures with no users despite $100m+ each.

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm sure there are counter-examples, and this is totally gut feeling, but it never seems like things that start with Q work out! Never invest in Q.

</comment><comment><USER95> I am not the market for this. I live less than a mile from work (when I am going into work...). However, some of the reviews I have seen have argued that some of the shows didn't even use the format well and seemed to have been reedited from traditional shows. That makes it less appealing for me.

Then there are also rumors that because the "episodes" are so short that they can be filmed using largely non-union crew which, if true, is pretty shitty. I have looked but I haven't found anything more than tweets claiming this though.

</comment><comment><USER96> honestly, the minute i saw "mobile only" i pretty much lost interest in quibi, and in fact i had entirely forgotten that they existed. i'm glad the guardian called that out as one of the factors contributing to their demise, and would love to see the entire trend of mobile-only apps and services go the way of the dodo.

</comment><comment><USER97> no boots on the ground is why it failed. saw many ads on mobile reddit, about quibi. and even was a massive turn off. they made the same mistake, netflix is doing now: not investing in good content creators i.e writers, producers etc. have a home run of a show, then people will migrate to your platform. same playbook, disney+ used.

</comment><comment><USER98> Maybe because they bought a lot of stupid and annoying commercials that made no sense to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER93> Whatifi is way better.... interactive movie games that you watch with your friends.

</comment><comment><USER99> As always with failures like this, it was the answer to a question no one asked.

</comment><comment><USER100> I had literally never even heard of Quibi before I saw this headline

</comment><comment><USER101> Because the terrible name?

</comment><comment><USER102> Insane that Quibi spent $470 million on marketing in the first year and ranked outside the top 100 of free apps in the Apple store. Gone in 60 quibis...

[https://notboring.substack.com/p/gone- in-60-quibis](https://notboring.substack.com/p/gone-in-60-quibis)

</comment><comment><USER103> > Quibi

Who?

</comment><comment><USER104> An article about one of their shows ('Murder House') told me all I needed to know about Quibi. Our culture does not need to trivialize murder or revictimize victims of crime more than we already do, thank you.

No amount of quality content could overcome my revulsion to use a service which features this:

"There's a new television show in the works that combines all your favorite things: home renovation projects and true crime stories [...] all about renovation houses where murders took place."[1]

[1] [https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show- called...](https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show-called- murder-house-flip-will-be-your-new-obsession/)

<comment><USER105> I take it you've never watched Investigation Discovery, aka, The Murder Channel?

[https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/](https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/)

One of my favorite channels, BTW :-)

<comment><USER104> No, I haven't.

And rather than try to infer your implication(s) about Investigation Discovery I will ask directly:

\- Do they treat murder as a venue for entertainment? \- Are they seemingly indifferent to the impact on victims?

Because, if it was not clear, those were the points I was trying to convey about the unhealthy aspects of Quibi's show.

<comment><USER105> Well, they're definitely not indifferent to the victims. ID has a bunch of different shows, but a lot of them involve interviews with victims interspersed with the story but they certainly seem sympathetic to their situation.

As far as it being a "venue for entertainment," well, the basis of the channel is crime stories, primarily murders and it would be a stretch to say that it's for educational purposes, so...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alien Space Rock 'Oumuamua Just Keeps Getting Weirder - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2018/11/08/oumuamua-alien-asteroid-comet/ <comment><USER2> From the article: _It came into the solar system, inside 1,000 AU, around 1837._ _It wasn't spotted until last year because it was too far from the Sun to reflect enough light for astronomers to pick it up._ _It 's expected to reach the Kuiper belt in about 2024, and pass the edge of the Kuiper belt in late 2025. It will pass the most distant location the Voyagers have reached in about 2038. By 2196, it will again be 1,000 AU from the Sun._ _2,600 feet (800 meters) long and about 260 feet (80 m) wide._ _It showed a really strong non- gravitational acceleration...which means its motion indicated that gravity was not the only thing dictating its path._

Did any other celestial bodies experience anomalous movement at the same time? What if a larger (undetected) object was in its vicinity?

It looks like it would be possible to reach it with current technology [1] (It's traveling at only 26.33 km/s (94,800 km/h))

I'd like to see people's guess at the probability it's "just a rock" vs their assessment of how risky it would be to make physical contact with it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Hypothetical_sp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Hypothetical_space_missions)</comment>


A World Where WomenInTech Rules - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/bhavaniravi/a-world-where-womenintech-rules-1g2g <comment><USER2> Our blind spots in gender matters are still gaping. It's pretty wild and sad. Please, try to make an effort to be more considerate at every step.</comment>


The Alibaba phenomenon: e-commerce firm on track to reach 1 trillion USD/year - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21573981-chinas-e-commerce-giant-could-generate-enormous-wealthprovided-countrys-rulers-leave-it

<comment><AUTHOR> Being in Beijing it is amazing how many customer focused e-commerce companies there are and the amount of delivery vehicles from them going around everyday.

Amazon.cn, Taobao, 360buy (now JD.com)... just to name 3 of the biggest.

And the feature I like the most, pay by cash on delivery! :)</comment>


Show HN: keyzen - my touch typing trainer geared towards programmers. - <AUTHOR> http://wwwtyro.github.com/keyzen/ <comment><USER2> Excellent - I'm planning to use this with Z-Type (<http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/>) to learn Colemak. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow - that's a lot of fun!

<comment><USER2> Update: forked keyzen to make a Colemak version - <https://github.com/eurekaoverdrive/keyzen-colemak>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Spacebar doesn't work in chrome/win7... unless I'm in incognito mode. I'm not sure why.

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't one learn faster by typing words instead of random letters?

<comment><USER5> I think this approach helps to avoid simply building up muscle memory for certain words.

<comment><USER6> The touchtyping keyboard layouts are based on n-grams in real words

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Finally, a reason to force myself to touch-type numbers.</comment>


Palm Is Developing a New Smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/08/09/exclusive-palms-new-android-phone-tiny-3-3-screen-800mah-battery/ <comment><USER2> Not Palm, TCL.

A company that keeps burning through their brands non-stop.

</comment><comment><USER3> credit card sized? want!</comment>


Seattle area's topsy-turvy home market ends 2018 with Eastside prices falling - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-home-prices-down-nearly-100000-in-seven-months-eastside-market-falls-too <comment><AUTHOR> Seattle builds lots of new housing units; prices moderate or fall: [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid- build...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-building- boom-1-in-10-seattle-apartments-are-empty-and-rents-are-dropping/).

SF builds very few new housing units; prices remain steady or go up.</comment>


Reverse engineering a Gameboy ROM with radare2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.megabeets.net/reverse-engineering-a-gameboy-rom-with-radare2/ <comment><USER2> I'm always impressed by GameBoy ROM disassembling efforts.

The complete disassembly of Pokemon Red/Blue [1] is an outstanding piece of work. All the source code and data of the ROM have been figured out and commented.

For the Zelda DX disassembly I'm currently working on [2], devdri wrote a custom GameBoy disassembler named "awake" [3]. It produces a nice pseudo-code view with C-style statements, and also do some static codeflow analysis with variables propagation to know which memory banks are being switched in and out. Quite impressive IMO.

But damn, even with these tools disassembling is still a lengthy work…

[1] [https://github.com/pret/pokered](https://github.com/pret/pokered)

[2] [https://github.com/mojobojo/LADX- Disassembly](https://github.com/mojobojo/LADX-Disassembly)

[3] [https://github.com/kemenaran/awake](https://github.com/kemenaran/awake)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to try with a real debugger next time, bgb[1] offers one that's excellent. The emulator is unfortunately closed source, but it's well supported under Wine.

[1] [http://bgb.bircd.org/](http://bgb.bircd.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> There was another challenge just like this in the Square CTF at the Grace Hopper Celebration. Unfortunately that CTF is still going on until Friday, but it was a fun challenge; worth looking at if you get a chance. Otherwise, there will undoubtedly be writeups coming after the CTF ends.

</comment><comment><USER5> The site seems down to me, but this archive link works: [http://archive.is/fRhT5](http://archive.is/fRhT5)</comment>


Oregon sues Oracle, claiming fraud over failed Obamacare website - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/oregon-sues-oracle-claiming-fraud-over-failed-obamacare-213323763--finance.html <comment><USER2> "...is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." Wait, for $240 million, isn't Oracle supposed to be managing the "complex IT project."

So sad that Oregon couldn't find something other than a soul sucking corporate behemoth.

<comment><USER3> Oracle -- the typical golf-ware. Some salesperson from Oracle played golf with the person in charge of the check book. Nobody really looked at requirements. A decision was made from above and code monkeys below in the chain got a heaping pile of shit on their lap -- "Here, use this crap, build a website that kinda does this. You have to use these tools."

They are both to blame. Well Oracle made a pretty penny, so financially they know how to do this.

I once knew an Oracle salesperson. Asked them what they thought of PostgreSQL, including the companies providing paid support for it. And the response was nobody can tough us, because we know how to sell and market our stuff to the top brass. Those at the top listen more to the salesmen like that than to their own employees. Then obviously there is kickbacks and all kinds of incentives.

<comment><USER4> While I'm sure people will have many excuses, I think you are right. $200M+ for a health insurance portal that includes zero novel technologies, algorithms, or other sources of fundamental technology uncertainty, never mind actual risk, has room for multiple crimes of fraud, bribery, and other malfeasance. There are multiple comparable projects against which to measure this one and find the outlier events.

All that said, a successful lawsuit and even criminal prosecutions won't make a significant sent in similar future cases. Governments have got to start acting like a large, collaborative, transparent monopsony, and to demand that vendors draw on and contribute to a pool of open source software, and to form consortia to audit and maintain that pool. That would be a huge benefit to the technology industry, and to taxpayers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If someone paid your company $240M, even with shoddy oversight, knowing that the health of millions of people depends on reasonable engineering (one website), you'd deliver a decent website.

This is appalling. The fact that so many here are jaded - I'm jaded too - doesn't change the fact that if you take $240M of a customer's money, you'd deliver a website.

<comment><USER6> I agree. To companies it's just business, but I will forever view HP as a degenerate company that deserves to go bankrupt for the rapacious deal it carved out from the U.S. Navy for NMCI.[1] It's not just business for the people in government, especially those putting their lives on the line.

If Oracle can't build a website for $240M it should go bankrupt too. Who cares about people getting healthcare when we can rack up costs. Go Sales!

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network- hostage/](http://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is exactly why big companies are hired right? So you have someone to sue when the shit hits the fan.

<comment><USER8> Blame Driven Development. It's trending.

People spend so much energy covering their asses none is left to actually build anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mostly unrelated, but I just met a guy last night who's working in state govt (NC). Is working in a dept and is being told he only has access to Windows servers, and is required to use IIS and SQL Server. They're already bought/paid/licensed, and he has no option. But... there's no budget to get him a licensed copy of Visual Studio. So he's been writing PHP with some free editor and cobbling it together on Windows/MSSQL.

He seemed to be unaware of Visual Studio Express options, so that's a little bit his fault (or more likely, the fault of whoever is overseeing his group).

Again, yes, unrelated to the Oracle thing, except yet one more anecdotal illustration of just how poorly run govt programs can be. I know private enterprise can be as well, but we're not having to fund those directly, and in many cases the market eventually sorts them out.

<comment><USER10> and that is exactly why we don't pay attention to anecdotes for this kinda thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is what things like the US Digital Service and UK GRS are trying to prevent. And I hope (with respect to State residents) that Oregon loses it's shirt over this and several key administrators.

At some point we have to accept that software is an intimate part of what we do and will be - that there is no "external supplier" for our own core identity.

Either a system and process is totally outsourced and barely even a government function (power generation) or it's intimately connected to what we want from government (and yes Americans, that means healthcare)

So buck up - delivering software at scale is what life is going to be about for the next fifty years - learn that lesson now - don't blame the wolf for eating your chickens.

That's probably an Oregonian saying.

<comment><USER12> _what we want from government (and yes Americans, that means healthcare)_

Who appointed you to speak for Americans? I don't want the government involved in or paying for or deciding who provides my healthcare. One of the reasons is I don't want it managed by the incompetence illustrated in this story.

<comment><USER13> The majority of Americans have spoken, and want affordable healthcare. You are not in the majority.

<comment><USER14> >The majority of Americans have spoken, and want affordable healthcare.

Well obviously. I want affordable everything.

Do most Americans want government-run healthcare?

<comment><USER13> "Medicare Beats Private Plans for Patient Satisfaction: Survey

People with individual or employer health plans paid more out of pocket, had worse access to care"

"Meanwhile, those with employer-sponsored health plans and those who bought their own insurance were nearly twice as likely to report problems with their medical bills than people with Medicare, the study found."

[http://health.usnews.com/health- news/news/articles/2012/07/1...](http://health.usnews.com/health- news/news/articles/2012/07/19/medicare-beats-private-plans-for-patient- satisfaction-survey)

Apparently so.

<comment><USER15> Medicare is not Obamacare.

<comment><USER13> Medicare is funded directly by payroll deductions from the working population. Obamacare requires all citizens to purchase health insurance, regardless if they deem it as necessary.

Obamacare requires health insurance companies disburse at least 80 percent of the premiums they bring in to medical service providers for their members. This effectively turns health insurance companies into quasi-non-profit entities, very similar to Medicare (which has no profit motive).

I don't mind living in a world where you can get better healthcare if you can afford it. I do have a problem living in a world that doesn't have a minimum level of care for everyone.

Difference?

<comment><USER15> You mean other than the fact that Obamacare funnels money directly in to the pockets of insurance companies that, despite your characterization of them as " quasi-non-profit entities" were, and remain, very-much-for-profit entities? That's one. There are many others.

What's your theory for why the insurance companies "volunteered" for this? Altruism?

And you're still trying to change the subject.

<comment><USER16> looking at this whole thread starting with lifeisstillgood's comment ("[...] what we want from government (and yes Americans, that means healthcare)") at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214708) it would appear that _you_ are the one trying to change the subject from affordable health care to "obamacare".

toomuchtodo said "The majority of Americans have spoken, and want affordable healthcare.", at which point you started talking about "Obamacare".

btw your attempt to incite a quarrel is funny since your statements agree with lifeisstillgood's and toomuchtodo's statements.

<comment><USER15> Dude, the entire subject of this post is Obamacare. The majority of Americans do not favor Obamacare, nor have they ever.

He's the one that's trying to equate it with some magical, mythical "affordable healthcare" system that does not exist in real life.

Nice try, though.

<comment><USER13> > He's the one that's trying to equate it with some magical, mythical > "affordable healthcare" system that does not exist in real life.

Let's not lie now, shall we?

"The U.S. stands almost entirely alone among developed nations that lack universal health care."

"That brings us to another way that America is a big outlier on health care. The grey countries on this map tend to spend significantly less per capita on health care than do the green countries -- except for the U.S., where the government spends way more on health care per person than do most countries with free, universal health care. This is also true of health care costs as a share of national GDP -- in other words, how much of a country's money goes into health care."

[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/her...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/heres- a-map-of-the-countries-that-provide-universal-health-care-americas-still-not- on-it/259153/)

Not only do we spend the most per capita on healthcare, we consistently deliver _lower quality care_ than other first world countries with universal healthcare spending less than us.

I really don't care to argue with you. Obamacare/ACA is well on its way to pushing the US to universal healthcare, as it should.

<comment><USER15> You are arguing in a fundamentally dishonest way.

Everyone is in favor of "affordable healthcare" for the same reason that everyone is in favor of good weather and world peace.

You are attempting to make "affordable healthcare" synonymous with Obamacare, which it isn't, and suggest that anyone who thinks that Obamacare is a horrible implementation must be opposed to "affordable healthcare".

It is the exact same dishonest argument that's used to shout down someone who (e.g.) thinks that the Patriot Act was a bad idea by implying that the person is in favor of terrorism.

I posted a link that showed that majority of Americans are opposed to Obamacare and always have been (multiple polls).

It got modded down. Which, of course, is even more dishonest.

But, you know, modding people down isn't _actually_ going to make the problem go away.

>Not only do we spend the most per capita on healthcare, we consistently deliver lower quality care than other first world countries with universal healthcare spending less than us.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Obamacare is the best solution for the problem. It isn't. It combines the worst aspects of private health insurance with the worst aspects of socialized medicine, combined with massive payouts to insurance companies at taxpayer expense.

>Obamacare/ACA is well on its way to pushing the US to universal healthcare, as it should.

Obamacare is going to kill real healthcare reform in the U.S. for at least a generation. Maybe longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Failure?

No, it's a _success_ \-- at putting money into campaign contributor pockets, and proving that "government doesn't work".

Now take something like the California death registration system ([https://ca.edrs.us/edrs/secureLogin](https://ca.edrs.us/edrs/secureLogin)), which, since it was developed by a mere handful of state employees (on-shore, of course) on a modest budget and runs on a single Linux server, completely _failed_ to accomplish those financial and propaganda goals for the corporate 1%-ers. :-)

If stupid, greedy, people run with the project, it's doomed whether you slap "public" or "private" on the work.

</comment><comment><USER18> chromatic wrote up a great post on this kerfluffle - "why do govt IT projects fail":

[http://outspeaking.com/words-of-technology/why-do- government...](http://outspeaking.com/words-of-technology/why-do-government- it-and-software-projects-fail.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious about more information regarding this, since I'm an Oregonian. Dealing with the state for software, I can understand lack of clarity on requirements and "flip-flopping" on a weekly basis. However, based on what I've read in the past, Oracle doesn't strike me as the most benevolent of companies, nor as one which has good people in charge of software (just look at how far behind Java is to C# or other languages).

</comment><comment><USER20> Optimistically, this would lead to reform of software partner selection within the government.

However, I expect it will introduce more red tape and ensure the same result. More work for companies like Oracle and more failed projects and waste.

<comment><USER21> I hold out no hope. The RFP process is inherently broken and seems to revolve ONLY around preventing nepotism and with a pervasive attitude of one-size- fits-all in State government, I don't see this changing anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

</comment><comment><USER23> I personally met some of the PMs on this towards the end -- Oracle was hiring anyone with a BS and a pulse on the East Coast to be a PM, flying them over for five nights a week and often flying them back to wherever they lived on the weekends. Technical knowledge was apparently not a criterion.

</comment><comment><USER24> As an Oregonian I really, really want to see the code.

<comment><USER25> I actually saw some of it because someone forgot to disable stack traces on the production server (and their sign up form was broken when I submitted it). It was written using some PHP framework. You'd think it would be written in Java...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's (re)election season, following a scandalous boondoggle ... politics and posturing, end of story.

</comment><comment><USER27> From the lawsuit:

"one formal Oracle employee said the solution "literally garbage" that was seemingly configured by "a kindergartner.""</comment>


Apple is killing the headphone jack - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apple-killing-headphone-jack-affects-headphones-iphone-7-2016-7 <comment><USER2> This is all still just rumor. The race to have products out the door on day 1 of a new iPhone launch means manufacturers actually chase these rumors and in some cases begin production of products before knowing if they'll even work!

The iPod touch is thinner than the 6/6S and it still has a headphone jack. Maybe Apple will remove it someday but there is no evidence that it will happen with the iPhone 7.

<comment><USER3> The iPod nano (5.4mm) is even thinner than the iPod touch (6.1mm). It still has a headphone jack.

And 5mm is the absolute minimum thickness for a 5-inch device; you really don't want a slab-shaped phone that is any thinner, otherwise the structural stress on it will genuinely make it warp/bend/crack in people's pockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The beauty of the current style of headphone is that I don't have to remember to charge them.

I haven't had great luck with Bluetooth devices connecting reliably, every time, and at any rate, with the shitty batteries that device manufacturers use, I expect that I will be bricking more than one set of headphones very quickly, if I even bother buying them.

<comment><USER5> Except you'd still be able to use the lightning cable for audio, bluetooth won't be the sole method of audio output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So now I'll have to pay $100 for a headphone with the quality of a $7 one while getting zero benefits and tons of incompatibility issues. That's "progress" all right. Progress for Apple's bottom line at the expense of every consumer who buys the new devices and headphones. It's just too bad consumers are too stupid to see how they're being fucked over.

<comment><USER7> ...or maybe $8, for a superior experience? As long as we're making up scenarios.

<comment><USER8> A halfway decent DAC will cost closer to $50 than $1. Given the current market for marked-up mediocre headphones, I can much more easily see the parent's scenario than yours.

<comment><USER9> How much does the DAC that's currently in the iPhone cost, I wonder?

<comment><USER8> It's likely integrated with another chipset, but I don't imagine it's more than $10-20. However, to be standalone, there has to be a dedicated DAC, Amp, and power supply chipset, as well as the associated resistors and capacitors; which when not integrated into another package (like a phone motherboard) is not as cheap.

The least expensive USB set I've found in the past has run around $30, and you get what you pay for. Good enough for highly compressed voice communication, but terrible at rendering music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They can't save much money on the DAC in the phone unless they also plan to drop the phone's speakers.

It's strange to me that some of the rumors try to spin this as a "cost savings" on the hardware in the phone. Removing the headphone jack wouldn't let them drop the DAC nor the set of amplifier circuits the speakers use because in order to be a "phone" it's presumed that it will still need speakers on the "phone".

Presuming that Apple continues to bundle in some form of earbuds with the iPhone after dropping the headphones jack it's essentially a net increase in DACs in the package (as I assume the speakers and headphone jack share a DAC currently; but I've not double checked an actual hardware breakdown). Quite the backwards direction for something rumors seem to be trying to spin as a "cost saving" measure.

Maybe it's all a conspiracy by Big DAC? ;)

[Bonus punchline: Big DAC is the name of the old school hip hop cover band I sponsor.]

</comment><comment><USER11> This article covers that there is going to be an increase in cost for the consumer as we're conditioned on the reality of Apple offloading the DAC to the headphone companies.

The article also talks about how, but doing this Apple opens the door for more cost to own an apple by buying accessories to continue to use your existing headphones.

This article doesn't go into DRM when there is no digital to analog conversion. The killing of the headphone jack seems to open the door for the phone to decide whether its going to play the music returning to the original ipod problem of whether it was bought with Itunes or not.

<comment><USER9> > This article doesn't go into DRM when there is no digital to analog > conversion.

There is always digital to analog conversion, it'll just happen upstream from the phone. There will always be iPhone -> headphone jack adapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is USB-C like?

My experience with USB in general is it's a PITA if you need to insert / remove on regular basis. The sharp edges scratch at the plastic, and you typically always try to insert it at the wrong angle first try, and so need to play the USB dance of switching back and forth until it finds its way in. Its impossible to do while in your pocket, which is where the jack really comes into its own.

<comment><USER13> USB-C is reversible.

<comment><USER8> This won't help with the connector wearing out, and when there's only one connector for charging and headphones (and everything else), it will wear out more quickly. The USB and Thunderbolt ports on my laptop are already getting flaky, and it has been a mere 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yc-kraln they can take it from my cold dead hands

<comment><USER14> I feel the same way. How does this change benefit the consumer? Has Apple finally jumped the shark?

<comment><USER15> Nah, they have often had this sort of user-hostile-in-the-name-of-cutting-edge attitude for a long time. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. IMO this is a case where it doesn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Android phone: all specs and apps revealed - <AUTHOR> http://tmonews.com/2008/09/info-leaks/

<comment> patrickg-zill Underwhelmed. It has a keyboard, which is nice, however, $35 a month for a data plan? Why is this a better thing than the $20 a month TMo charges when you buy a SideKick?

All Apple has to do to shoot this thing in the head, is to release a Bluetooth keyboard capability for the iPhone. Then it will be DOA.

<comment><USER2> I have a hard time believing that Apple will ever put their name on a clunky external keyboard for a phone. The whole idea just screams "ugly" to my sense of aesthetics. Keep an extra gadget in your pocket just so you can type on your phone? (even worse: it'd have to clip on to the phone or something for access to the display). Ick.

<comment><USER3> All it has to be is a silent driver update. Then it would be an undocumented hack for someone with Google and a Bluetooth keyboard.

<comment><USER2> An undocumented hack is going to shoot the G1 in the head and make it DOA? I wasn't saying that this couldn't be done. I was saying that Apple would never do it, because it's an aesthetic disaster.

<comment><USER3> I won't comment on whether or not it's a disaster (MobileMe, anyone), but it's really just not that useful. There is not that much to do on your phone that would require a real keyboard. If you want a real keyboard, get an Eeepc instead of an iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The G1 seems like a mixed bag. It doesn't appear to excel in any capacity, and it has some big drawbacks - no headphone jack, slow browser, basic media player, etc. Adding to that the fact that it's only available through T-Mobile's sketchy network, and it doesn't seem like the kind of product that will set the world on fire. It's good that Google was able to get a phone out for the holiday season, but I'm thinking that Android's story will play out more in 2009 than this year.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Gmail account required to sign in and use, no corporate access email available."

I'm sure this is Microsoft's fault - it's not like they are going to offer up a portable mobile outlook or owa integrator.

But I wonder who this hurts in the end, device sales, or Exchange use by SMB's ? - I'm guessing a little bit of both, mostly the latter.

<comment><USER2> There are free software exchange clients, and it's an open platform. Do the math. :)

The truth is that the baked-in software stack is never going to be what sells this phone. If what the user wants is an expensive, high end, pocket-sized browser appliance, then the iPhone has already cornered that market. Android is trying to be a platform. The extent to which it succeeds is _precicely_ that to which criticisms like yours miss the point. If there are important things that it can't do that aren't addressed by the developer base, then it will fail. If not, then it wins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How much?

<comment><USER7> $179 on a 2 year contract, no idea about pricing outside about the US

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> doesn't look like a winner</comment>


As a non-technical founder, should I enroll in a coding bootcamp? - <AUTHOR> For example, Hack Reactor. Was thinking the purpose is to get basic understanding of programming and being able to speak the same language as the technical folks. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> A bootcamp is going to focus more on the day-to-day of how to code, and practicing coding. That isn't really what you need. You need to understand what coders do, but you don't need to get into algorithms or the syntax of any particular language or framework.

What you do need to know is how to prioritize. You need to understand that while everyone shares the goal of getting features out the door, some take longer than others. Some build upon others. Some block others. Coding Feature A today might be a 4 month effort, but coding smaller features X, Y, and Z, might build the foundation work the A needed... so you could get all 4 features out the door in 5 months by doing A last, and being ahead of the game in the long run even though you deferred the feature most important to you by the same amount of time it would have taken to just code it.

Making such decisions is less about knowing how to code, and more about understanding the different layers of technical architecture, how they integrate, and how they can both enable some components, while blocking and restricting others.

It is also about knowing your team. You don't need to be able to figure out all the answers yourself, but you do need to be able to communicate well with the senior devs who can give you those answers. And you need to figure out which devs are good at figuring out such things. We do not all share the same skills, and don't all look at software the same way. Get to know your team, and who has which strengths. Your decisions will be empowered far more by knowing the team, getting their input, and looking at the big picture of planning how to move a product forward than they would be by knowing how to code.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, I kinda did this - I needed a developer for my startup but couldn't afford to pay one. So I learned myself, though I didn't use a bootcamp, just tried to build what I could and learn more from MOOC's like udemy or youtube channel or discord servers. As my startup grows my first hire is going to be a lead developer. (Whom I will probably have to give some equity when he sees how much of my code he is going to have to fix)

It's a tremendous advantage if you ask me, that I can speak in his language. Ideas are a lot easier to plan out and conceptualize.

If your product is purely software, yeah, learn to code some, but remember you are doing it as a means to an end. The moment you get a professional, hand the reins over, because that's not your main strength.

I think you are doing the right thing by browsing on HN. Read what developers are talking about, there's a fair amount of time I won't even understand what the title is talking about but every time I read it, it gives me an idea about what developers struggle with.

There's no checkbox for "is now a good communicator". It's a spectrum, you just have to keep learning.

</comment><comment><USER4> Only if you find it interesting or if its causing issues, otherwise its a waste of time. Be clear about what strengths you bring to the table and work on those. If you have a sales background for example hone that craft. Let the techies do the tech, the same way you let the lawyers do the legal stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you can afford a bootcamp, you're better off hiring a senior developer and learning from immersion by seeing how they work. If you're lucky you'll find someone who is patient, and a good communicator who can spend an hour a day on screenshares with you explaining how things work.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a non-technical founder of a technical start-up you need to learn about technology. Coding bootcamp programs teach how to program. Being able to code (program) does not translate into an understanding of technology. I know of no bootcamp or academic program that teaches the theory and technology rather than the nuts and bolts of coding. Problem is deep understanding is hard while programming is relatively easy.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can probably learn enough online and on your own and avoid the tuition, but still have some ability to communicate with developers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Definitelly. To be able to respect developers in thier hard work ;-)</comment>


'Free Culture' Advocate May Pay High Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/aaron-swartzs-web-activism-may-cost-him-dearly.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> 35 years for copying some academic research papers that should be available to everyone for free in the first place. In the mean time the bankers that have collapsed the economy of the whole globe run free.</comment>


The relationship between money and happiness - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/money-happiness-large.html <comment><USER2> This was a great example of design hindering interpretation. The graph's diagonal/diamond shape made legibility much harder. A traditionally oriented graph would have been trivial to read and correlation more obvious.

<comment><USER3> I think they were trying to show something meaningful with the orientation by having their "Trend Line" be the one horizontal metric.

I didn't really understand how they came up with that as a trend line.

I agree that they made an obvious decision to give design preference over legibility. My first glance at the page was "this is neat", but as I tried to wrap my brain around the data, my thoughts changed to "what an unnecessary mess".

<comment><USER4> I was physically turning my head 45 degrees to the right to figure out what was going on in the graph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, in the attempt to make a snazzy graph the designer has actually obscured what the data show. People are used to the most desirable point being at a corner on this kind of thing, not in the middle of the side.

Regarding what it's showing I have some real reservations about the satisfaction score. It's pretty subjective how happy a person is, and it's not actually that easy to translate the question into foreign languages. Just consider in English:

\- Are you happy?

\- Are you generally happy?

\- Are you satisfied with life?

\- Are you overjoyed?

All these things mean something similar but cannot easily be translated to all other languages in the study.

Plus there's a question of how people really think about the question. If I'm living in Scandinavia I will constantly be bombed with the results of this exact type of study. Maybe I won't think so hard when I consider what the answer should be. Because I know it, I read it in the paper.

On the income side, you could argue that the score should be the median income, not the average. There's a number of small, rich countries where a few people are insanely rich. I think Equatorial Guinea showed up on one of those GDP/C lists last time I looked.

<comment><USER6> I happened to study this in my History degree back in 1995 (I took 'quantification in history' because I liked math, then utterly sucked at it. But I digress).

Happiness is an extremely tricky subject, and the Latin America thing brought back memories of discussions about whether LA countries and cultures simply self-identified as happy, or whether they really were happier. I always thought just asking people if they were happy was a really dumb way of comparing levels of happiness, and that more objective measures of populations, like number of suicides (however problematic in itself, eg a reluctance in some cultures to identify death as suicide) was more reliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What this chart shows to me is that GDP is not a good measure of people's wealth. For example Luxembourg is shown as an outlier because it has a very high GDP but not a similarly high satisfaction score. And I think that is because the economy of Luxembourg is largely banking, where the money will just belong to a rich few, not to the average people.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how happiness correlates to distribution of GDP rather than size of GDP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would like to see this measured with either gdp per capita ppp, or better median wages, preferably adjusted for local purchasing power.

Gdp per capita doesn't take into account different purchasing powers locally. Nor does it take into account income inequality. i.e., the influence of a few people on the happiness measure is negligible compared to their influence on the income statistic.

<comment><USER9> Singapore having $80k as the baseline is laughable. The median is $30k.

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

It drops from 3rd to 18th, Qatar drops from second to 23rd.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, low overall satisfaction isn't that surprising in a 'rich' country if the reality is a crazy-rich aristocracy while the majority live like serfs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A potentially interesting additional axis would be income inequality. One very wealthy person among the poor can skew the average GDP considerably, but happiness is relative to a fixed maximum and doesn't distribute the same way over the population. Qatar might be an example of this.

</comment><comment><USER12> How did they measure happiness? If they just asked people, I think this only shows the different answer-cultures in each country.

<comment><USER13> Considering Brazil and Mexico make up cities that cover the top ten in murder but appear to show positively in this graph, I'm skeptical.

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

<comment><USER14> I've spent significant time in South America and I can categorically say that people are happier and friendlier that the northern americans. Being in a high-crime area doesn't mean you don't have life satisfaction, with your extended family living nearby and your basic needs met, and the fine weather and food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of the worst data visualization graphs I've seen in my entire life. I had to rotate my monitor 45 degrees to have any idea what was going on.

</comment><comment><USER16> Iran is on the graph twice..

</comment><comment><USER17> The graph looks good. Any idea, what did they use to construct it?</comment>


From Switch Statement Down to Machine Code (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://741mhz.com/switch/

<comment><USER2> >A programmer should not even try to optimize the code that is not proven to be a bottleneck by carefully profiling the whole program

All who haven't taken note, please do!

<comment><USER3> It's a cost/benefit thing. You should try to design your program sensibly when it comes to performance, because the cost of a failed architectural decision is high. What you shouldn't do is micro-optimizations which make the code longer and harder to read.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure a 'readable' preemptive micro optimization is any more sensible. I think we should limit 'sensible' to preemptive macro and architectural optimization. A programmer should examine what their compiler is spitting out before they decide they can do better.

<comment><USER3> What is a "micro-optimization" is debatable, but if you have two ways of doing the same thing, and you can do the fastest one without impact safety or readability, it's not wrong to pick the fastest one (for instance, no point in building list A in order to append A to list B when you can directly add stuff in list B, like the code I refactored away one hour ago).

As for architectural optimization, I disagree. There are things you're really going to have a hard time adding post facto. If you know you're going to need performance, it's important to know what kind of program you're going to build (this may include benchmarking prototypes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _this feature [label address-of operator] is implemented as a nonstandard extension by most production grade C and C++ compilers_

This feature is entirely a GCC extension, and is only implemented by "production grade" compilers to the extent that they try to be compatible with source that compiles with GCC.

Many - I'd guess, probably a majority of - C compilers that people consider "production grade" do not in fact understand this construct.

</comment><comment><USER5> _C programming language is very high-level..._

This made me chuckle. The author has a very different perspective from most software developers I know.

 _...and it might seem that in many cases it should not matter how the control flow is described and the same optimization might be applied as long as a resulting program is functionally the same. This raises a question of whether compiler will do the same optimizations if programmer is using if-then-else. In theory, it might be the same, or might be different. But instead of guessing, let's find out._

I love the author's attitude towards experimentation. It reminds me of John Carmack: _" If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."_

Obligatory XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/1445/](http://xkcd.com/1445/)

<comment><USER6> Back in the 90s, C was indeed considered high level. Most people had a background of assembly+something else (like Pascal or even Basic). The typical C+libs approach was rather high level in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why disassemble when the source code is available?

Why not instruct the compiler to stop after code generating assembly from C?

Sorry for the stupid questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Why disassemble when the source code is available?_

Because there isn't a one-to-one relationship between the original source and the compiled code. Optimizing C compilers (meaning all modern C compilers) frequently go so far as to substitute completely different algorithms for code sequences that they recognize. The source code tells you the intended behavior, the assembly tells you what's actually happening.

 _Why not instruct the compiler to stop after code generating assembly from C?_

You are right that you could get the most of the same information by looking at the generated assembly (-S with gcc/icc/clang). There usually isn't a lot of savings in time, though, as assembling is a fast operation.

Also, the compiler generated assembly is often messy, and cluttered with machine generated comments. Disassembled code is in a standard format, and can be easier to read. The disassembly also tells you alignment and instruction length, which can occasionally be essential.

<comment><USER7> What about using inline assembly for the switch?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fascinating read. It never fails to amaze me how far compilers have come over the past two decades.</comment>


AndroidHome: Google Gets Serious About the Smart Home - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/androidathome_google_gets_serious_about_the_smart_home.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4dca4d1952af55c8%2C0 <comment><USER2> I am not surprised at all that Google has done this. There intentions for the Android platform have been pretty clear, and this was the next logical step. I am very excited to see the kinds of things that come out of this.</comment>


DreamHost Hacked; Change Your Passwords Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/01/dreamhost-hacked-change-your-passwords-now/ <comment><AUTHOR> More information [http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2012/01/20/changing- ftpshell-...](http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2012/01/20/changing-ftpshell- passwords-due-to-security-issue/)</comment>