The effort to make war less inhumane dates back centuries - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/is-war-becoming-more-humane-1735636987 <comment><USER2> Discussion here is getting derailed by the provocative title, so we've replaced that with more neutral language from the article. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) one, we can change it again.

Obviously there's no question of war being humane, but it isn't interesting to just repeat the universal reflexive objection, which the article itself includes: "The idea that we might be able to make war more humane at all seems oxymoronic; war is, by definition, inhumane."

What we want is discussion that engages with the specific content of this article, not generic dismissals. If it's wrong, great, but say how and where. Long experience with HN has shown that generic dismissals lead to boilerplate threads (edit: which usually then turn angry—perhaps because they're so boring), but specific engagement gets interesting.

<comment><USER3> I propose "Jus in Bello". There are 2 terms in the _Laws of War_ , one for the laws that govern the legal right to engage in war/use of force itself ("Jus Ad Bellum") and the laws that govern the conduct while engaged in war/use of force ("Jus In Bello").

As an introduction to the subject of jus in bello this particular article is a fire starter, for example, the thread would be much different if the article introduced Jody Williams[1] being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in banning landmines. Wars will still be brutal and gory but it is also good to know that 50 years after present wars are over kids won't be playing in a field somewhere having their legs blown off by unexploded landmines; whereas, 10 years ago there were 15,000-20,000 deaths/year (mostly children) and in 2012 there were 3,000-4,000 (mostly children).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The US gov (at least under the current president and under at least 90% of the current candidates) does not care about non-lethal weapons. It prefers killing them, even over blinding them instead (as the article says), or capturing them [1].

As for automated killing robots, is anyone naive enough to think they will wait until they can "perfectly identify an enemy combatant"?

First off, the definition of enemy combatant is _already_ waaay too vague, to include just about any male in the Middle East.

Second, the gov is making _even now_ , in 2015, plenty of "mistakes" with drone strikes (see the hospital strike, the killing of the mother of the guy who they were supposed to kill, but had switched phones) - and they've been using them for more than a decade.

After all of these facts, there's nothing that can convince me that the robots will only kill the "right people" when they start launching them on the battlefield.

[1] [https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small- footprint...](https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint- operations-5-13)

</comment><comment><USER5> From Star Trek, season 1, episode 23, "A Taste of Armageddon":

ANAN: It's a vicious attack, extremely destructive. Fortunately, our defences are firming, but our casualties are high. Very high.

KIRK: Sir, I have been in contact with my ship, which has had this entire planet under surveillance. All during this so-called attack of yours, we have been monitoring you. There's been no attack, no explosions, no radiations, no disturbances whatsoever. If this is some sort of game you're playing...

ANAN: This is no game, Captain. Half a million people have just been killed. Activate the attack units, Sar.

SAR: Yes, Councilman.

ANAN: Launch immediate counter attack.

SPOCK: Computers, Captain. They fight their war with computers. Totally.

ANAN: Yes, of course.

KIRK: Computer don't kill a half million people.

ANAN: Deaths have been registered. Of course they have twenty four hours to report.

KIRK: To report?

ANAN: To our disintegration machines. You must understand, Captain, we have been at war for five hundred years. Under ordinary conditions, no civilisation could withstand that. But we have reached a solution.

SPOCK: Then the attack by Vendikar was theoretical.

ANAN: Oh, no, quite real. An attack is mathematically launched. I lost my wife in the last attack. Our civilisation lives. The people die, but our culture goes on.

KIRK: You mean to tell me your people just walk into a disintegration machine when they're told to?

ANAN: We have a high consciousness of duty, Captain.

SPOCK: There is a certain scientific logic about it.

ANAN: I'm glad you approve.

SPOCK: I do not approve. I understand.

ANAN: Good. Then you will recall I warned you not to come here. You chose to ignore my warning. I'm sorry, but it's happened.

KIRK: What has happened?

ANAN: Once your ship was in orbit about our planet, it became a legitimate target. It has been classified destroyed by a tricobalt satellite explosion. All persons aboard your ship have twenty four hours to report to our disintegration machines. In order to ensure their co-operation, I have ordered you, Captain, and your party held in custody until they surrender. If possible, we shall spare your ship, Captain, but its passengers and crew are already dead.

</comment><comment><USER6> The blinding laser made an interesting point. My wife had surgery last year where she told the surgeons to spare the use of her face rather than her vision should they run into a situation requiring a choice. She also knew going in that she would lose balance and hearing on one side. Different people (and cultures) value different things. She would much rather be deaf and blind than disfigured in any way. The point about potentially increasing casualties though is valid.

Another point is regarding the targeting. When a missile strikes, assuming it strikes the intended target and meets the objective, there tend to be other losses as well. It's very disconcerting that it's people (even the objective) doing day to day things during that time. What is worse is that US considers 16-49 year old males as enemy combatants in that case and does not report that as civilian casualties. It's true it would be very hard and when it's at a training camp or the like it's more likely, but it's not always the case.

Finally some of my family lived through WWII and some are still alive. The stories they told before passing and those still here tell are chilling. War is insane and inhumane. Unless you have this sort of account it's nearly impossible to comprehend how callous and capricious the events can be. Take the recent hospital strike. Of course the US military will do all they can to fight hard in the rules of engagement. They will call in airstrikes when ever they can and then you have civilian casualties. To war you have to live with that.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll just drop this here:

The Strange Tale of the Norden Bombsight [https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell](https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell)

<comment><USER8> For a sense of the problem, watch this Norden bombsight training film.[1] This shows a training mission; the geometry of dropping a bomb with the sight is covered in [2]. Three's lots of looking at crosshairs while making fine adjustments to knobs. It's not enough to get the crosshairs on target; approach and drift speeds have to be set so that the crosshairs stay on target as the plane moves. This is a four-knob job; basically X, Y, dX, and dY. All this has to be done in an airplane, often while people are shooting at you from the ground or attacking the bomber with fighters. The aircraft had to be flown straight and level for a minute or so approaching the target while the bombardier adjusted all the knobs. That seldom happened in combat against any defended target.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlW- JCqGkYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlW-JCqGkYo) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh3hknntD10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh3hknntD10)

<comment><USER6> Also Norden did not want to work with Sperry which had some better gyroscopes and less production issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Curious how much of this is actually about making things 'humane' and how much is for recruiting purposes.

If you're running a war against a worthy opponent, _everyone_ needs to get behind it if you have a chance at succeeding.

It's also a pretty despicable thing to have to get behind, and not everyone is going to want to on purely moral grounds.

If you can somehow soften the edges, at least in theory, you might be able to convince otherwise inconvincible segments of your own society to at least tacitly support the effort.

</comment><comment><USER10> Of course there is some twisted logic in actually killing people in war as it removes the possibility of an enemy fighting again. If everyone just surrenders at the first sign of a drone, or else is intent on suicide it just becomes a form of policing rather than war.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder who commissioned this article.

</comment><comment><USER12> Really gizmodo? Your adherence to the Betteridge rule made me gag a little. The question in the headline is abhorrent, even if the body of the article is somewhat sensible.

It's honestly the worst line of investigation I could think of. Instead of this question, I think the best premise is to ask how we got the point where the image of constantly belligerent western militaries is distorted into a picture of humanity and outright magnanimous consideration for human life?

<comment><USER13> > It's honestly the worst line of investigation I could think of.

Really? You don't think investigating whether technological progress has (or hasn't) improved the damages caused by war is worthwhile?

The issue that we somehow can't manage to stop going to war is a distinct one. Just because it would be preferable to not start wars in the first place asking followup questions about the effectiveness of attempts to reduce collateral damage and indiscriminate slaughter when we do seems reasonable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> According to Betteridge's law* a title in the form a question can be answered with a "No".

That said, this article does explore developments in precision tech resulting in "less killing" or "more targeted killing".

When will the global community work on growing past the age of war? Perhaps toward an age of military competition without death.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER14> Sorry, but what world are you living in?

Yes, now that its not fashionable to report how many of the "enemy" are killed or injured at the end of each day, it doesn't mean that they are not killed.

The sheer colossal waste of life for the last three big wars, is overwhelming. In iraq we(the west) killed the best part of at least 100,000 people. Then with the sheer ineptitude of occupation set the seeds for a bloody civil war that is still raging (ISIS et al is just a direct consequence) claiming god knows how many people through active fighting a week, and a magnitude more because of the breakdown of the fabric of society.

Yes, we have precision bombs. Yes we have drones. but that just means that we, the west don't directly get hurt. Not the "enemy", or the poor fuckers that happen to be in the way.

Do you know why the current calibre for most nato guns is 5.56mm? yes partly because its smaller, partly because there is less kick, but also because its less lethal.

An injured enemy requires more resources to rescue, causes a distraction, and mental anguish.

As described by many, more gifted people, war is hell.

And right now, futile.

<comment><USER15> > but also because its less lethal

Source? The reason I've always gotten is that it causes the bullet to "tumble"[0] once it enters the body which causes even greater damage to the body than simply passing through, which results in a greater lethality.

[0] - [http://www.futurefirepower.com/myths-about-the- nato-556-cart...](http://www.futurefirepower.com/myths-about-the- nato-556-cartridge)

<comment><USER16> _All_ bullets will tumble when they change media like that, they do a 180 and if in the body long enough will exit rearwards.

There's enough bullshit in the link you reference that it should be entirely ignored, the twist rate pertains to getting the bullet to spin fast enough to be stabilized in the air, it's not going to significantly affect the stability once it changes media. It's been decreased, bullets are spun faster, because we've adopted a heavier and disproportionately longer round (has a soft steel penetrating capsule), and the particularly long tracer version requires a 1:7 twist rate.

Cavitation, which causes the effect called temporary stretch cavity, is if you believe Dr. Martin Fackler, not a major wounding mechanism, most tissue will snap back without major effects. Permanent crush cavity is what counts.

This is not the general understanding when the round was adopted, it's what Facker found out after a lot of surgery in Vietnam lead to a career in wound ballistics and shooting a lot of blocks of _calibrated_ gelatin etc. to figure out what actually happens.

<comment><USER15> Source?

<comment><USER16> In particular Fackler's works that are available on the net, but I'm under the impression that's general knowledge, plus the basic physics.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure what the official story is with expanding bullets, which are not under discussion here, but I can't see how adding drag to the lighter end of the bullet will change this. And of course it'll depend on profile, I'm talking about spitzer rifle bullets, a putative fully jacketed wadcutter, a simple cylinder, wouldn't have any reason to swap ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No. War is categorically inhumane. There are no gray areas.

You can add layers of abstraction on top of the violence – much like Tesla owners are abstracted away from the pollution that powers their vehicles – but at the end of the day, someone is on the receiving end of a weapon designed to kill, and you can't sugar-coat that.

<comment><USER18> As opposed to area bombing ww2 style - modern war takes far more care to avoid collateral damage.

<comment><USER19> You're kidding, right?

The operation in the Iraq War (2003) was a shit show -- we steamrolled Iraq's entire public infrastructure, funneled untold millions/billions into Islamist and Western militias, and killed/wounded tens of thousands of Americans, Iraqis, or otherwise.

In Yemen and Afghanistan we send drones over with abandon, not taking care to avoid civilians or that we're hitting the right target.

And after all that, hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown away. Not only is collateral damage there but it's here too -- we are wasting money on dubious programs that have no measurable indicator of success and no end in sight.

War is every bit as ugly as it was a century ago.

<comment><USER18> No I am not - you can't compare Iraq to fire bombing Dresden or Tokyo with a single air raid killing 50k plus in a single night.

Let alone what happened on the ground in ww2 read Bevors Stalingrad or Berlin.

IRAQ was a CF but its relatively more humane than ww2</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ReadAndSearch.com – Daily dose of knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://www.readandsearch.com <comment><AUTHOR> ReadandSearch.com is a place for "thought proccess". You can write an article about anything and other people can comment or change your statements. At the end, we will have a collective work of people on some cases, which is pretty important we think.

Or you can share the story you've written, you can share one page of a book everyday, we accept anything related with knowledge.</comment>


Volkswagen uses quantum computing for traffic flow optimization - <AUTHOR> http://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/03/20170314-volkswagen.html <comment><AUTHOR> This was presented at CeBIT. But there seemed to be zero information elsewhere about this project. Are they using it for just a tiny part of the project or for the whole algorithm? Does anyone know more about this?

update: Here is the original press info (overlooked in the first read)

[https://www.volkswagen-media- services.com/en/detailpage/-/de...](https://www.volkswagen-media- services.com/en/detailpage/-/detail/Digital-pioneering-work-Volkswagen-uses- quantum- computers/view/4708404/7a5bbec13158edd433c6630f5ac445da?p_p_auth=0e8AdGtH)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192)</comment></comment>


One of the Basic Math Rules You Learned In School Is Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/one-of-the-basic-math-rules-you-learned-in-school-is-wr-508550603 <comment><USER2> I may be the only one who learned it this way, but here goes:

Square Brace (BPEMDAS with a silent B)

Parenthesis

Exponent

Multiply & Divide

Addition & Subtraction

When I learned PEMDAS (a long time ago) this was hammered into my head so well that I know the nuances to this day. In fact from what I recall there was 1 PEMDAS unit per year for a couple years in a row. Also, I hate sensationalism.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is to prioritise addition over subtraction and multiplication over division rather than assigning them equal priorities and evaluating the expression left-to-right. In German, there is no 'PEMDAS' but only 'Punkt vor Strich' ('Dots before dashes'?), i.e. multiplication/division (·,:) before addition/subtraction (+,-). Parentheses obviously still take precedence.

</comment><comment><USER4> I must be lucky then or my teacher was a real good one. I even didn't learn something like PEMDAS.</comment>


Microsoft's shares sink by more than 10% - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT <comment><USER2> Ballmer has been a terrible CEO. Time and again he has displayed poor judgement that has cost shareholders billions of dollars.

Here's something to ponder: When Bill Gates retired as CEO in 2000, imagine that the board of directors hadn't chosen Steve Ballmer to replace him. Instead, they chose a CEO who stuck a sign on his desk saying "Windows and Office Development - nothing else" and then went to sip cocktails on a beach in the Bahamas for the next 13 years.

How much more would Microsoft be worth now?

I think Ballmer's alpha-male personality has blinded him to the 'do nothing' option. He loves the thrill and prestige of investing billions of dollars in new projects and is therefore biased against doing nothing and letting the shareholders keep their money.

And when he does 'do something' his execution is often flawed. Here he is in 2007 talking about the new iPhone: "Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." [1]

[1] [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/20...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-04-29-ballmer- ceo-forum-usat_N.htm)

<comment><USER3> People who say Ballmer is a bad CEO based on the stock price really aren't paying attention. He took over at the height of the tech bubble. Microsoft's PE (and everything else) was a joke. Since he took over revenue and profits have increased by an impressive amount. The only reason the stock has been flat is that it was extremely over inflated when he took over.

(Certainly he has made mistakes, but frankly I think he's done just fine. Windows phone 7-8 have been pretty good, just slightly late. Xbox has been pretty successful. Azure has been fine. Bing has been the only real failure/money loser, but at least it might be holding back Google to some extent. That was the whole purpose anyways.)

<comment><USER4> I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.

<comment><USER5> "Stack ranking employee evaluations"

I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.

<comment><USER6> Go through a stack ranking where you get a bad review simply because "there are too many good developers on the team" before you say that it is a nonsensical criticism.

Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.

<comment><USER7> Anecdotal, but, I know a bunch of good developers at Microsoft, and I've never heard any one of them complain about that before. They complain about a bunch of things, many of them related to upper management, but that "lost decade" article was the first I heard anyone complaining about stack ranking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With many of their new products, Microsoft seems to finally have viable offerings. The dangerous thing for Microsoft's competition is that previous iterations of Microsoft products stunk so you had to go to the competition by default. That is not the case anymore so expect to see much thinner margins for Apple, Google and others in the future.

Azure including their Virtual Machines are a great competitor to Amazon AWS and EC2. I've used both.

Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are a great competitor to Google Apps. I've used both.

Windows Phone 8 is a great competitor to iPhone. I had iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s and now a Nokia Lumia 928.

Windows Surface Pro (i.e. not RT) is a great competitor to iPad. It really is a desktop/laptop replacement unlike the iPad and again, I've owned both.

Windows 8 had several issues out of the gate. I use it every day and spent the 10 minutes necessary to learn the new interface to get used to it. Many people aren't willing to do that. Vista had even more problems, and Microsoft still came roaring back with a very successful Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping Windows 8.1 does the same thing for Windows 8.

In all of this, the customers win. Expect cheaper prices with increased competition - example being how Amazon just lowered their EC2 pricing by as much as 80%.

<comment><USER9> I get that you're a Windows Dev and obviously try to put in the effort to find the good things in Microsoft's current product line - but you also need to see the reality here. Microsoft definitely does not have viable offerings.

Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

The new xbox is probably the most panned product announcement I've ever seen.

Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.

Windows Phone has been a dismal failure in terms of actual customer traction - especially outside USA. Numerous product placements are making this more of a joke than anything - (everyone laughs when a hacker in Burn Notice pulls out a Windows Phone).

Surface Pro is not even in the same market segment as an iPad - Surface Pro competes with laptops and the Mac Air, not with the iPad. You can't use them for the same tasks.

Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.

I get that you've used the Windows stuff and the competition and find the Windows stuff better for you - that's likely because of how familiar you are with the Windows environment and Windows announcements. However, most people off the street are completely confused by it. You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving and all your customers are hopping ship.

<comment><USER10> I second all of these conclusions and have a few anecdotes of my own to add.

WinXP is still the dominant Enterprise Operating system (crazy I know).

Exchange email is seen as a relic of a time gone by for new companies and something that admins usually hate in large companies. Outsource it (and I'll note that the largest reseller of Exchange, Intermedia, doesn't sell Office365).

The first windows phone I had was Windows Mobile 4.0. The flipphone handsets that came out during 6.0 were good, but every one of their gigantic, flagship, Halo devices, was terrible. HTC had some of the most badass, feature-packed phones ever, and the Operating system killed them. It's just a pile of bloat, the same way WinPhone7 and WinPhone8 appear to be. Look at the work they've done with Nokia where they basically paid Nokia billions of dollars in marketing money to attempt to promote WinPho8 and ended up hemmoraging marketshare in the transition from Symbian (Elop's "Burning Platform" memo should go down as the worst corporate writing ever, and it's not lost on me that he came from $MSFT).

I won't even dignify the surface with commentary. It was an unmitigated disaster that everyone saw coming.

Azure is only large because of promo usage. It's not competitive even with Digital Ocean in terms of scale (my personal opinion, I have no facts to back this up except anecdotes I can't publish). There's a lot of empty instances in Azure land.

Microsoft is making a lot of obvious errors. They continue to be unable to remove FUD and the Cruft of age. If they go down this path, the inertia will eventually kill them; it might take 20 years, but Microsoft is already becoming a place that finds it hard to recruit. I would argue that without their ridiculous abuse of the H1B program they would not be able to remain competitive.

In short, there's a lot of stuff to fix. The bright spot for Microsoft, as always, is licensing, but that's an ugly, ugly business.

My $.02.

<comment><USER8> _WinXP is still the dominant Enterprise Operating system (crazy I know)._

Source? Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.

 _HTC had some of the most badass, feature-packed phones ever, and the Operating system killed them. It 's just a pile of bloat, the same way WinPhone7 and WinPhone8 appear to be._

This is just silly. You bring up Windows Mobile 4.0, then 6.0. Then you lump Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 in with them. Tell me - which WP8 phone have you owned? Because you're replying to a thread I started in which I said everything before WP8 stunk. So if you haven't used WP8, there isn't much point to your comment.

 _I won 't even dignify the surface with commentary. It was an unmitigated disaster that everyone saw coming._

Surface Pro is doing well. Surface RT is what is not doing well - as you said, it's a solution looking for a problem.

 _There 's a lot of empty instances in Azure land._

Where do you get these stats?

 _and it 's not lost on me that he came from $MSFT_

And it's not lost on me that you use a 90s-era style anti-Microsoft inclusion of a $ when mentioning them. Do you at least realize how biased you are or do you lack introspection?

<comment><USER10> You think Windows is great. I don't.

You think you can tell me my comment is worthless despite the many years I've spent deeply entrenched in Microsoft culture. The past has relevance.

Well is relative with respect to the Surface Pro, but I won't waste my keystrokes attacking its sales figures.

As I mentioned in another comment I've got a lot of folks who run big stuff on Azure and I can tell you that almost all of their instance time is comped. Take that for what it's worth, I don't run in Azure and don't plan to run in Azure, but I can appreciate your comments here.

The $MSFT comes from StockTweets. I'm not biased, I am a student of the industry. If you ask me to critique Apple, I'd have a number of things to say. Microsoft isn't all negative, they still make a ton of money, but calling the Kettle black isn't a crime. WP8 is not a dominant operating system. Azure is not a dominant cloud infrastructure. Surface is not a dominant tablet.

We can debate semantics, but we can both agree that Microsoft has a lot of work to do. I believe it's in the product, and, if I understand you correctly, you believe it's in the branding/marketing. Chances are we're both partially correct.

Does that make sense?

<comment><USER11> > WP8 is not a dominant operating system. Azure is not a dominant cloud > infrastructure. Surface is not a dominant tablet.

The closest claim that was made to any of these was that WP8, Azure, and Surface Pro are "viable offerings" in their markets. Not that they're dominant. You even give an example of "folks who run big stuff on Azure" \-- how is that not proof that Azure at least provides competition in the cloud services market?

<comment><USER10> It's a monopoly game with a power-law distribution. If you're not playing for first place, eventually Amazon's Zero margin business will subsume all of the smaller players.

I articulated this point in a blog post for our site[0] in which I describe a phenomenon I call Bezos' Law. Essentially, the cost of cloud computing in general (currently driven by AWS) is cut in half roughly every 18 months. This is like Moore's law, except it's driven by market conditions instead of technical innovation. The endgame of Bezos' Law is 0, but everyone else will get out well before then (once it ceases being a profitable business). Since AWS will be the largest player in cloud infrastructure, it will eventually shift from being a profit center for other organizations and will become a cost center. After that it becomes a matter of time.

IMHO, this is also the plan for Amazon's Commerce business long-term and is why the market provides them with such a ridiculous P/E ratio.

So does Azure provide competition? Maybe. I think most of the people on Azure are on there because Microsoft is comping the time (pure conjecture based on the kinds of numbers they put forward). The endgame, from my perspective, is that everyone gets choked out by Amazon with time unless someone upends them, and that's why I think the position of "providing competition" isn't going to materially move the needle for a company like Microsoft. Not now and not long term. They've called Azure a billion dollar business, but only when counting comped hours.

Lots of conjecture, I definitely put myself out there for some flaming, _but_ that's how you learn whether your positions can stand on their own merits. Let me know what your thoughts are :).

To be clear, in spite of everything I've said today, I am long-term bullish on Microsoft. I just think Ballmer isn't making smart decisions right now.

[0][http://blog.2600hz.com/post/55614383443/bezos- law](http://blog.2600hz.com/post/55614383443/bezos-law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> SurfaceRT is a $900-million mistake right now.

There are so many ways to make SurfaceRT a compelling product. _If_ it supported Win32 API, _IF_ it had domain-joining support, _if_ it wasn't completely locked down to the Windows Store... maybe it'd be a compelling buy. But as it is, it has all of the disadvantages of tablets (locked down, proprietary API), with few of the advantages of Windows.

Then you've got XBox One mistake. So much wasted potential there...

Windows 8 has to happen though, the computing industry is evolving towards touch controls, and as primitive as Windows8 is with touch... its a step in the right direction for Microsoft. But they need to be more sensitive to their business partners.

<comment><USER13> RT is a joke but what's wrong with XBox One?

<comment><USER12> Compared to the PS4, the XBox One hardware has 30% less shaders on the GPU, is using DDR3 RAM instead of faster GDDR5 RAM, and is using the same CPU as the PS4. All the while, it costs $100 more than the PS4.

So for the first time in XBox's history, the XBox is launching with _strictly weaker_ hardware than its closest competitor. (XBox 360 at least had a GPU that was 2x stronger than the PS3 GPU, and the XBox 360 also had faster RAM. PS3 won on CPU power... but lost out on everything else.)

There is terrible, terrible press across the whole internet about the XBox One-Eighty. Video Gamers overall have a negative impression on it.

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/12](http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2013/06/12) [http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2013/06/21](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/21)

<comment><USER14> >XBox 360 at least had a GPU that was 2x stronger than the PS3 GPU [et al]

And did it matter at all? From what I remember of this current generation's history, if games looked any different on the PS3 than the 360, the developers blamed it on the tools and how difficult the PS3 was to program for, not on the weaker hardware. Developers made cross-platform titles for the Xbox first and ported to the PS3 because Xbox was easier.

When I was 16 years old I argued console hardware specs. These days I don't hear many experience gamers mention it at all, because when it comes down to it, minor differences in specs doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER12> Why was the PS3 harder to program for? Because its GPU was out of date, its RAM was split, and its architecture sucked. Programming the PS3 "incorrectly" leads to extremely poor performance.

Certain memory transfers on the PS3 are just straight up broken: [http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1007286/ps3-hardwar...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1007286/ps3-hardware- slow-broken)

The XBox was "easier" to program for because it was a more balanced system. Overall, the XBox360 was both simpler and more powerful.

By making XBox360 more powerful, previous soft-exclusives like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid made their way to the XBox360. Sony lost a lot of publishers because of the boneheaded hardware they shoved into developer's faces.

It is Microsoft that has made this mistake in this generation. Not only from a policy stand point against indie gamers (ie: Oddworld moving to PS4 exclusive title. As well as SuperGiant Games making Transistor PS4 exclusive), but also by launching with weaker (yet paradoxically more expensive) hardware.

The PS4 will be easier to program for, it has a simpler more unified architecture, and Sony's policies are more friendly towards developers.

While it barely matters for the end consumer, it is easy to see which systems producers will prefer in the coming generation.

<comment><USER15> _" The PS4 will be easier to program for, it has a simpler more unified architecture, and Sony's policies are more friendly towards developers."_

The architectures seem near identical--the only big difference would seem to be that the XBO will have dedicated framebuffer memory, probably hidden behind a system call anyways.

As for being more friendly to developers, Microsoft has always had the best tools and documentation for developers (long live SGI, poor bastards).

I don't really see where you're getting this from.

<comment><USER12> Count the number of indie-developers on XBox One. Now count the 140 currently announced titles on the PS4 (most of them indie games). The current joke: PS4 has more _exclusives_ than XBox One has launch titles. (slight hyperbole, but the number of PS4 exclusives almost gets there. 30 titles from Sony themselves, ~10 exclusive indie titles announced at E3, and all of a sudden the game environment for PS4 looks mighty tasty)

It is dead obvious which console has won the support of indie developers.

Microsoft may have superior documentation... but when you _require_ indie gamers to find a publisher before they're allowed to make an XBox one game, the number of titles on your system will suffer significantly.

A number of PS4 indie developers want to program for the XBox One, but they can't due to Microsoft's boneheaded policy. It doesn't matter how good the XBox One development kit is, if Microsoft fails to hand it off to innovative developers.

Again, XBox One _POLICY_ is bad for indie developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is interesting is that over the last ten years microsoft has been unable to win markets with its time tested strategy: keeping at it until it conquers the market. It's because some very competent competitors have arisen that move faster and better than microsoft. consequently its late-to-market-but- persistent strategy fails.

Seemingly the only way a company can retain its leadership is by innovating and then leading the market. Microsoft hasn't been that good at genuine market innovation (we're talking revolutions), so unless it can use its strong stance in markets it leads currently, the future isn't looking all that rosy for microsoft..

<comment><USER17> This isn't entirely fair. Ten years ago Microsoft was just getting into the video game business, now they essentially own it (though they definitely fumbled the XBox One rollout). Ten years ago Azure didn't exist, now it's a $1bn/year business and a credible threat to AWS. In both these cases Microsoft started out with weak initial offerings and refined them into something people found compelling. There are other markets where this approach has not yet yielded fruit for them (mobile, tablet, search), but it's not really true that it just never works.

 _> Microsoft hasn't been that good at genuine market innovation (we're talking revolutions)_

Microsoft has never been about revolutionary innovation. MS-DOS was just a rebadged version of Tim Paterson's QDOS. MacOS was the first OS to bring GUIs to the mass market, not Windows. IE came after Netscape. Etc.

Since the beginning of the business their approach has been to be a "fast follower" \-- to let other companies take the huge risks of pioneering a new market, and then, if that market proves out, swoop in with a product of their own. Generally speaking this has worked out really, really well for them. Letting someone else do the pioneering isn't particularly heroic, but then, as the saying goes, you can always tell the pioneers because they're the ones with the arrows in their back.

<comment><USER18> And it's almost funny--they've been hamstrung by being too far ahead of the pack in some ways. Look at all the trouble they had when they built Windows on top of the IE engine. In a way, that's one of the first steps towards a real use for the "cloud"\--what should be different about browsing for a file on your computer and browsing the internet? And that ended up causing them some serious money.

They flubbed their early efforts at mobile OS development also. They had a real chance to corner the market before Apple was even making iPods, I believe. But they got too focused on beating Blackberry and didn't really look past them (in my opinion--I'm no expert).

Then the tablet: Microsoft was one of the first to really push tablet computers. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't there to support the idea. So they shelved it for awhile, then Apple came along ~10 years later and did it "right". And now Microsoft is trying to play catch up to a field where they did a decent amount of the early work.

<comment><USER19> That's not how any of these things went.

> Look at all the trouble they had when they built Windows on top of the IE > engine.

They didn't build windows on top of IE. They showhorned IE in as a technical solution to a legal problem (How to abuse their monopoly without it being patently obvious to everyone). Just to be clear - At the time, IE4 was way better than Netscape4 - but it only became popular when it was available by default. And it was a successful solution, on all accounts - they killed netscape, they won the web (for a while), and they paid very little in damages eventually.

> Then the tablet: Microsoft was one of the first to really push tablet > computers. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't there to support the idea.

The technology WAS there, but Microsoft's UI wasn't - they continuously tried (and failed) to make a desktop-OS touch-usable. I've never used one myself, but everyone I know who had a Newton said it was "just right". And the palm pilot worked very well too.

People underestimate what apple have done with the iphone and tablets - they've figured out the UI/UX. Hardware is an important, but lesser part of this equation. Microsoft, for 10 years, couldn't figure out that there even was a UI/UX problem.

<comment><USER20> > I've never used one myself, but everyone I know who had a Newton said it was > "just right".

Interestingly, a big part of the Newton's failure (along with the terrible v1 handwriting recognition, which was largely fixed later, and Apple's strained finances) was that they went for a complete break with the past; there was basically no developer familiarity. iOS was probably a sweet spot; new, purpose-designed interface bearing very little resemblance to MacOS beyond font choices, but almost the same under the hood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the surface, Microsoft seem to have tons of problems in management structure, product design, public relations, etc etc. However, at least in my view, all of this isn't really a big issue and companies can easily survive on this stuff. The key problem is a very simple one: Microsoft has forgotten why they even exist. The goal of a company is to sell products to customers by giving customers what they want.

Microsoft of 15-20 years back did they wonderfully - easier to use OS, better features in Office, fast adoption of new hardware standards, etc. Microsoft of today is actively trying to sell customers what they don't want. Metro. Kinect. Office Ribbon. Bing. ARM Surface. The list goes on to almost every product MS offers.

Microsoft needs to stop pushing products for the benefit of Microsoft. I'd recommend the following: put up a poll and let the general public decide on issues like Metro - and then follow those results, even if it means throwing Metro out of the desktop. Microsoft needs to listen to customers simply because other businesses are listening to Microsoft's customers, and those customers are leaving.

Business 101 - it still applies even when you're not a startup anymore.

<comment><USER21> While overall I agree that Microsoft is really missing the mark when it comes to creating products people want, I disagree on the premise.

The goal of a company is to profit from products _that sell_. It doesn't necessarily mean they're building for what customers currently demand, but knowing what customers _will_ demand.

The canonical example is Apple. If you listen to tech reviewers, Apple never makes the product that people "want". Yet they continue to lead profits in almost every product category they market.

<comment><USER9> What? Some kind of cognitive dissonance here, maybe. People do not queue up around the block waiting for hours on launch day for something they do not want. People very much want exactly what Apple is making. They build exactly what people want.

If you want an example of something that people do not want, would never queue up for, and should not have been made? Metro.

In regards to the comment above on Metro fitting well on Xbox? Not a chance - Metro is terrible and confusing to use on Xbox, and the adverts make it even worse. If the xbox had launched with Metro as standard, it would have gotten very negative launch reviews.

<comment><USER22> I think the point he was trying to make was that if Apple had issued a poll before launching the iPad, people would most likely said "it has to run my current OSX Apps and offer a way to switch back to OSX" because they would consider the iPad a computer. Re the loud complaints about lacking USB ports etc. when the iPad launched.

What Microsoft needs is someone in upper management with a vision about what products they want to make and the persistence to make them happen. That's a bit difficult to accomplish when there is a management shuffle with some top executive deciding to spend more time with their family roughly every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands Over the past five years, their stock is up over $5/share or around 21%. Not bad for a company people keep expecting to fail.

Full disclosure: I always take the long view with tech companies, especially the big ones. Start ups can have the wheels fall off over a 10% drop. Big companies like MS, this is virtually nothing. I mean, look at Best Buy. Their profits were down over 80% last year and they're still out there hammering away.

Here's that BBY article I was alluding to: [http://www.webpronews.com/best- buy-earnings-net-income-down-...](http://www.webpronews.com/best-buy-earnings- net-income-down-90-2012-08)

"Hubert Joly is the CEO now, coming in as the company reports a 90% profit drop thanks to less-than-stellar sales, and restructuring expenses."

<comment><USER23> > Over the past five years, their stock is up over $5/share or around 21%.

How much as the economy grown in the last year, or how much has the dollar inflated in the last 5 years. I'm sure there is some stock growth there, and it definitely isn't tanking. But for someone who bought 5 years ago, was it a good investment with respect to the market average for this sector?

<comment> at-fates-hands >>> But for someone who bought 5 years ago, was it a good investment with respect to the market average for this sector?

Yes, and here's why. . .

[http://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T052-C017-S001-wh...](http://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T052-C017-S001-why- microsoft-is-a-smarter-investment-than-apple-t.html)

MS tends to be in the sweet spot for investors. It's not grossly over priced, they hit their numbers on a regular basis, and no expects them to be successful. Therefore, if one of their products hits big, investors are happy, if they have a flop, no biggie, the shares are only $23.

Compare that to Apple. Their shares are in the $500 range and they are the homecoming queen in the tech sector. If they have a flop, and you have a sizable investment, you're hosed. If they hit their numbers, your large investment stays put. It's a lot more riskier.

<comment><USER24> Actually I have to agree with this. I own a number of tech stocks and MSFT has a pretty stable price, but pays good dividends. Google and Apple on the other hand yo-yo like crazy on the stock price. If you are interested in short term bets on stock prices then GOOG and APPL are of course more interesting, but I'm currently happy to see the dividends rolling in from MSFT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I used to work at Microsoft from 1996 to 2006. Here is a pattern that I've seen, which explains so much of the problem with Balmer.

The strategy in 1990's was that software was sold in stored (EggHead). People would compare the BULLETs or CHECKMARKS on two competing packages. Microsoft's goal was to always have more and better checkmarks. That sold more software in the 1990's.

Notice their newest re-org. They are making two big pushes DEVICES and SERVICES. The entire company is becoming "functional" (devs vs testers vs program managers, etc.). They all report to Balmer. Balmer is trying to be like Steve Jobs.

Balmer talked about having "efforts" selected by him and execs in his office. Those would be the major efforts of products. This is the same as picking FEATURE BULLETS for the back of packaged software.

Microsoft does NOT have a strategy. They focus on packing feature bullets, like it is a box of software. Watch them do that with XBox ONE, Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc. Until they pick a strategy, they won't find a way to use leverage to pull ahead.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Just zoom out to the ten-year chart:

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT)

<comment><USER27> That is scary for a different reason - you can see then that MSFT has actually barely grown at all in 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think it's a good time to buy -- the re-org underway will be intriguing, and I'm very bullish on Windows (especially after 8.1)

I think they don't get enough credit for what they do really well (Windows Phone is phenomenal; Office is still the gold standard; Skydrive works just as well as Dropbox; SQL Server is key in many orgs; the offerings with the new Xbox to be the media centerpiece of the home will be very interesting)

Have they missed the mark for being so late with tablets and underestimating how much people would have shock at the new Windows 8 change? Sure -- but they have too many smart people to let the stock drop and for them to 'fail'...keep in mind that Apple was not far from here just a decade or so ago =)

</comment><comment><USER29> One of Microsofts flagship products is Microsoft Office. It's a great suite of software, it's ubiquitous, people are familiar with it, etc.

But the selling point of it is that it's _familiar_. When we recently starting transitioning to google apps at my office, people damn near rioted.

It wasn't that MS Office offered something that GA didn't, it was that they were scared that they wouldn't know how to work the new interface.

So...think about that, Microsoft. People aren't holding on to your product because it is the _best_ , people are hanging on to your product because it is the _most familiar_.

I think that time will erode that.

<comment><USER30> Excel offers far more than familiarity. Anyone that thinks the competitors are on-par probably doesn't use Excel much.

<comment><USER31> A lot of people use Excel for making lists and doing very simple calculations. You can do that just fine in Google Apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looking up MSFT at finance.yahoo.com, their stock is at the same level it was ~15 years ago. (I'm not quoting the bubble peak, but 2 years before it) This sounds more like a sloppy 15 years rather than a sloppy quarter.

<comment><USER33> Adjusting that for inflation, it's worth approximately 70% of that (based on 43% cumulative inflation 1998-2013).

<comment><USER34> Does this take 3 stock splits in to account as well?

<comment><USER32> The charts on Yahoo Finance (very good website, btw - I'm unaffiliated) adjust for splits. This is why you don't see any discontinuity on split dates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Part of the demise of MSFT has nothing to do with MSFT, the landscape in which they operate is just changing. I haven't used Windows in years, yet I used to develop on the Win32 API, I gave up with it when they released all that OLE nonsense. Now that world is largely one big IUnknown interface. The web has democratized the consumer interface to technology, Apple has risen up from the days when MSFT loaned them $100M to keep going. The world is nolonger a Windows and Intel one. In the consumer world things have shifted, while in the backend world, any IT person that's using Windows over a Unix variant is laughed at. I remember the early days of IIS and even though NT had I/O completion ports, it still couldn't keep up with the Unix offerings. Today there are some viable server side offerings, Share Point is a decent product (especially when compared to Lotus Notes) but Linux has eaten the server side market, and Apple and Samsung have eaten the consumer side. I know nothing about gaming, so maybe the xbox is the best product ever, who knows...

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not surprised. Their time-tested strategy of blatant vendor lock-in is being disrupted by competitors providing the same kind of software for free - google docs, firefox/chrome, linux.

After the upcoming "adjustments," they should be able to survive at a somewhat healthy level, but they will have to accept lower revenue and margin as a persistent reality.

<comment><USER37> Revenue was up this quarter. The surface fiasco dinged profit a bit, but financially they're still in great shape. Microsoft is not really fundamentally about Windows anymore, they've now got a diverse portfolio of businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Funny linking to a blog that's now down. Stock prices are public info.

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT)

</comment><comment><USER39> That plot looks much less scary if you see the current data in a longer time- frame: [https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1374273154280&chddm=1169552&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=B73pUZjKOMzCwAOOag)

</comment><comment><USER40> I know a few people with Windows phones, and they all love them. Apparently it's actually a very nice phone. But every one of them laments the lack of apps, and considers it a reason to move.

The trouble is that "Microsoft" and "Windows" sounds to the consumer like "Monday 9am at the office". For the consumer market, they're tainted brands.

</comment><comment><USER41> Windows 8 Home Premium (upgrade) started to sell at $29.99 during introductory period last year. It was a time when I finally got licenses for all my PCs. And many other people around me in my country did as well. Even if we cheated a bit to install upgrade version on a clean home-made hardware. Previous pricing was too high for developing world. ~$200 for an OS? I do not even know for sure what was that price, it was too high to even care about it. What I am really interested in, is what they will do with the pricing of 8.1. I hope they do special upgrade pricing again for a couple of months. That's one way to hide the fact that new Windows price is much less now than it was 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER42> Microsoft needs to pull out of mobile and tighten their grip on the desktop market. I can say anecdotally that the only reason many people stay with Windows is for games.

I'd like to see Windows rebranded as "The Gaming OS which does much more than just games". They need to keep the value of Windows tied to the value of Steam. This means bending over backwards to the needs of game developers and cementing the expectation that you need Windows if you want games before that expectation goes away.

This may even mean marketing themselves to Mac and Linux users as the OS you should dual boot if you want to play games. What a crazy thought.

<comment><USER43> Pull out of mobile? Meanwhile the entire world is pushing mobile market making a lot bigger than the desktop pc market? Not a really good idea. It would be a suicide and they know it, that's why they are putting billions of money in windows phone and nokia, they NEED at least a minimum marketshare (10%) in the mobile market

<comment><USER44> There are also lot of people making a lot of money in the energy industry. Is it time for Microsoft to start drilling for oil, too?

"Mobile" has little overlap with the markets that MS has built 30 years of competitive advantage in. Phones and tablets are _not_ general substitutes for PCS.

Microsoft's venture into the "mobile" market has resulted in them slapping the Windows name on products that are almost - but not quite - entirely unlike Windows, and this has brought a good deal of frustration to many people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Articles like this make me wonder if one of the reasons Steam opted to open up Linux support was in the event that Microsoft imploded and Windows no longer was a viable gaming platform they would still have a decent target. Seems far fetched, but you never know these days. People sure do complain about Windows 8 a lot. I don't mind it, but I'm just one guy.

I don't immediately see how this would all happen in the short term, but stuff like this tends to catch a lot of folks off guard.

</comment><comment><USER46> Innovation vs the world's worst CEO.

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1374269216984&chddm=296611&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:TSLA&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=_q7pUdiON- iqiQKq0wE)

<comment><USER47> This comparaison is worthless. Here is an example of an extremly innovative company vs Microsoft.

Innovation vs worlds worst CEO part 2:

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1374269216984&chddm=296611&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:BBRY&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=_q7pUdiON- iqiQKq0wE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> They have the wrong Steve.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it weird that, given the surface, Windows 8, and the new xbox that I still think Microsoft is overvalued after the drop?

<comment><USER12> I dunno. Given the ability for Microsoft to just up their CAL licenses for their business buyers and pull revenue literally out of their ass... all the while shoving Windows 8 down their partners thoats??

Microsoft is still big. As a business, they remain profitable. They have plenty of time to turn the ship around.

Their business decisions may have been terrible these past years, but they're still profitable, still making money nonetheless.

<comment><USER43> The problem is the long term run. At the moment they are really profitable, but with the switching of the market from pc-leadership to tablet-smartphone- smartdevices leadershipt they are in big risks.

<comment><USER50> They could always do the IBM. Retrench, sell to corporate, cut costs. Apparently very profitable.

<comment><USER23> Kill your R&D and seed corn for short term gains? Very profitable today...but what about tomorrow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Technology companies today have to be sexy. There has be an innate desire for the products.

Just look at the resurgence of Samsung, that's sexy.

Microsoft? Some of their dev products might be okay, but Windows 8 and the new Xbox are downright awful. Horrible campaigns behind both.

<comment><USER52> That's just confirmation bias. The number of very much unsexy tech companies that consistently make billions of dollars hand over fist vastly outnumbers that of the tiny handful of "sexy" tech companies. Is Foxconn sexy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Also: Corporate customers don't like backdoors in their software. Expect more sinking.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm pretty inexperienced with stock prices, but I zoomed out a bunch and this drop doesn't look very noteworthy.

</comment><comment><USER55> ... And S&P closes at all time high.

</comment><comment><USER56> Make Windows 8 more like Windows XP.

</comment><comment><USER57> I said this would happen. Unfortunately I said it would happen four years ago which doesn't gain me any street cred.

</comment><comment><USER58> edit: bah. im not here to educate you.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't understand how Ycombinator News works sometime. We have written this article [http://wind8apps.com/microsoft-stock- down-11-percent/](http://wind8apps.com/microsoft-stock-down-11-percent/) and it was the FIRST here, it got on the front page, it got REMOVED and then somebody submitted a simple link to the stock page.

I mean, don't we deserve a little credit for being quick enough? Or we ALWAYS have to be the primary source of something. In this case, the google stock page is only a tool.

Please explain on how this works because I have previously submitted stories that I discovered and further developed.

I just need to understand how this community works to make the most of it.

thank you!

<comment><USER60> The guidelines and culture encourage submitting original sources: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." In this case, raw stock market information from Google or another source would be the "original".

Also, the last time I saw one of your articles, a lot of people suggested running a basic spell check over your articles. I can tell that still isn't being done. More than "being first", your articles need to add meaningful insight and information. That isn't conveyed if you text hasn't been well- edited.

<comment><USER59> Thank you for replying!

I will make sure to add meaningful insight and information!

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


Ambien maker responds to Roseanne: Racism is 'not a known side effect' - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ambien-maker-responds-to-roseanne-racism-is-not-a-known-side-effect-2018-05-30 <comment><USER2> Random (re thinking) is a side effect of very large numbers of pharmaceuticals.

Disinhibition is a side effect of many pharmaceuticals; thinking that whatever you're doing right now is cool, regardless (antidepressants in particular.)

Despite of Sanofi's snide, society is coping with widespread behavioral effects of medication, which can include making murder and suicide much more likely, and overdoses on some second medication more likely. The costs aren't small.

Behavior is multifactorial; there's no one cause. So yes, whatever you think of the Rosanne debacle there's plenty of suffering in aggregate from behavioral side effects of prescription medicine.

Long ago I was the roommate of a professor who was being twisted around by his sleep meds, which he'd been taking for decades by then. By no coincidence I've never taken a prescription sleep medication. Regular periods of total darkness (red light is okay) are very effective (after about 3 weeks.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nonsense. Bizarre behavior is a known side-effect. Ambien is dangerous. Ambien + alcohol is even more dangerous. Google "Ambien Zombies." "Ambien Murder" "Sleep Eating" or "Sleep Driving"; or the Tom Tuduj case in Chicago. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of these cases.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's absolutely appalling that a corporation whose scientific professionalism is relied upon by so many would jump in for a cheap shot on this. (It's even more appalling that they're simply wrong on the science, as others have noted.)</comment>


McDonalds promoted mass employment. Very few locations actually hired. - <AUTHOR> http://theloop21.com/money/supersize-economy

<comment><USER2> One thing that I've noticed about McDonald's is the sort of people who work there in cities versus the country. I grew up in the country and McDonald's was a place for kids to work. In the city it's a place where adults work. I suppose given the choice I'd rather hire adults but I'm not sure how an adult supports themselves in a city like Boston on what they pay.

<comment><USER3> Could be they work at MacDonalds to supplement their major source of income (pension, working partner etc).

<comment><USER2> From my limited observation it seems like that might be possible. Many of their workers seem to be Haitian or Chinese immigrants. I don't really go there for anything but the occasional strawberry shake so my sample size is pretty small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 50,000 jobs sounds like a lot until you realize there are over 13,000 McDonalds in the U.S. And he had a sample size of four?

<comment><USER5> 4 per location is still a lot of hirings. Not to mention if each of the 50,000 cost $10,000 yearly in salary, the cost to McDonalds is 500 mil.

<comment><USER4> You are assuming they are all new positions, when we know that fast food has extremely high turnover. Just putting in a two-week hiring freeze in advance of the date would probably generate a huge number of open jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While it read very negative the end sums it up in a much better light:

"In some cases, McDonald's franchises may have taken the opportunity to truly hire new employees. But, for the most part it was for show. Even the second largest commercial employer in America can't solve our recessionary woes, but it's nice to know that at least somewhere along the line they made an attempt."

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the author that the stigma is that you only work at McDonalds if you are a loser. At least in major cities. I grew up in the country as well and perhaps the teachings are a tad different there. I was taught that any income is better than no income. And McDonalds is some income. Now all you see are a bunch of people attempting to become the next Facebook, google or Color. Too many people think that if they work at McDonalds or any other fast food joint that they are stuck there instead of realizing that they are actually contributing more than just slaving away.

</comment><comment><USER8> Americans really, really don't understand what poverty is, why it exists, and how it works. Nor do they comprehend why it must be fought and how hard it is to fight. This is because most Americans haven't been face-to-face with actual poverty in 50 years and now that it's creeping up on them in the less fortunate reaches of the country, they don't know what is going on.

The stores in these towns are dying because people don't have money to spend in them, and because the stores are dying, people have even less money and more stores have to close. It's a self-accelerating process. Even McDonald's is not immune: it's still unaffordable for the truly poor, so as people slide, its revenues are going to decline like everything else. Conservatives believe poverty is a "moral medicine" that toughens up the good and kills off the weak. Wrong. It's a cancer.

For a more ground-level analysis of this, what actually happens during corporate-chain hiring drives is that the individual stores have tight seatbelts and the budgets often don't increase. The corporate office may decide to have a "hiring drive" but it doesn't increase the stores' budgets. The goal of the "hiring drive" is not to increase staffing but to take in new people and fire some, or to ensure that workers who are currently getting overtime no longer do. (Workers in low-paid hourly positions often love overtime, but managers don't like having to pay it out.) Thus, hiring new people means that those are there have to take hours cuts or get laid off. Generally, managers would rather keep the people they have than hire someone new and have to cut other peoples' hours, hurting morale across the board. So the incentive structure in such hiring drives is such that very little actual hiring will take place. Serious hiring only happens if (a) the budget increases, or (b) people are working overtime and corporate comes down on the store manager for paying out too much time-and-a-half.

<comment><USER2> Well it's likely that Americans will experience such poverty again given the course things seem to be heading on.

<comment><USER8> It's possible. A lot of bad ideas that seemed to die in the mid-20th century and were supposed to turn to ash by 2000 instead came back with a vengeance in 1973-Present in forms such as "trickle down economics" and neoconservatism.

The Reaganites were incredibly naive and short-sighted, being too young to remember the Great Depression. So they thought the egalitarian and regulatory seatbelts of the 1940-1975 era were horrible encumbrances. They had no idea, in the 1980s, what they would set in motion. The smarter ones left the conservative bandwagon before the disastrous presidency of Bush II, but by this point the Juggernaut (5/3, cannot be blocked by walls) was in motion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IN the US we have something called the FTC truth-in-advertising act I wonder how fast some Lawyer volunteers to do a class action suit against McDonalds for false advertising?

<comment><USER2> There can be any number of reasons why people didn't get jobs. Not sure you can sue them for failing to hire a large group of people.</comment></comment>


The New York Times sells premium ads based on how an article makes you feel - <AUTHOR> https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/the-new-york-times-sells-premium-ads-based-on-how-an-article-makes-you-feel/ <comment><USER2> Below is the list of feelings, which, according to the article, the NYT is now predicting with ML models trained on a proprietary dataset collected internally from a sample of articles shown to a sample of readers. I've marked positive feelings with `(+)`, negative feelings with `(-)`, and feelings which could be viewed one way or another, depending on context, with `( )`.

Remarkably, a majority of these feelings are positive, so this advertising initiative, which has been successful at increasing per-ad revenues by as much as 80%, is creating a financial incentive for the NYT to produce content that generates positive feelings in readers!

On its face, this is _shocking_ to me. I would have _never, ever_ expected positive content to be more profitable than negative content! In hindsight, however, after thinking about it a bit, it kind of makes sense. I'm now wondering, could advertising perhaps become (gasp) a force for good, at least in certain settings?

      NYT PREDICTED FEELINGS
      Optimistic             (+)
      Inspired               (+)
      Self-Confident         (+)
      Amused                 (+)
      Adventurous            (+)
      In the mood to spend   ( )
      Love                   (+)
      Sadness                (-)
      Boredom                ( )
      Interest               (+)
      Fear                   (-)
      Hate                   (-)
      Hope                   (+)
      Happiness              (+)
      Nostalgic              ( )
      Indulgent              ( )
      Competitive            (+)
      Informed               (+)

<comment><USER3> The predicted emotions are actually contained in the HTML source of each article. E.g. for an article I randomly grabbed off the front page:

      curl 'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/sports/tiger-woods-wins-masters.html' | perl -n -e'/"emotions":"([^"]*)"/ && print $1'

inspired,boredom,happiness,optimistic,not_interest,not_hate,not_amused,not_inthemoodtospend,not_informed,not_love,not_sadness,not_fear,not_hope

<comment><USER4> > not_hope

This one is a little surprising. Does the NYT think this article dashes any hopes readers might have of winning the Masters?

<comment><USER5> It's not hopelessness, just not hope. As in, reading this article does not elicit feelings of Hope in the reader.

<comment><USER6> Isn't it a huge comeback story, Wood who has not won any major in 12 years?

<comment><USER7> I would assume most people do not place themselves in Tiger Woods' shoes

<comment><USER5> Yup. In fact, I venture a lot of stories like this border on eliciting emotions of despair or reduced self-worth for a subset of the readers, something along the lines of "so and so did x/y/z and they're n years (younger|older) than me, what have I done that's worth anything in my life?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would seem that such ad placement, based only on content and not the reader, is exactly what privacy advocates have been clamoring for.

I know the mention of emotions creeps people out. But it's probably the only salient connection a general interest publisher such as the Times can offer advertisers. Very few of their articles mention any product, product category, or really any factual nexus to anything somebody might want to sell.

<comment><USER9> This sets up a horrifying set of perverse incentives for journalists. This is not to say that the set of incentives facing journalism today isn't already pretty bad, but this forces entities like the NYT further onto a path of convergent evolution with the National Enquirer.

<comment><USER10> The journalists I know describe something they call a "firewall". Supposedly the business staff and the journalists simply do not communicate except for very formalized channels. At some places they are not permitted to walk in on each other's floors/buildings. From personal observations, it seems they usually adhere to the firewall.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I've worked closely with media, and this is something I've witnessed as well.

Where many people like to propose that journalists and editors are steered by the business and sales staff-my own experience couldn't be further from the truth.

I can't speak for less reputable outlets. The journalistic outlets I've worked with have been very dedicated to their own voice—and passionately so.

<comment><USER11> This works for obvious direct pressure, but there is still pressure in that they work for the same entity. A nytimes journalist wants the paper to do well and as long as that journalist knows how the paper makes money, there will be pressure mentally to support that.

<comment> 52-6F-62 In my experience, most writers are much more detached from the business than that.

They admire working for a publication because of its journalistic reputation, are sometimes unionized [not always], and often stand opposed to business imposing its own desires ranging from editorial changes to working conditions.

So I know it's only anecdotal, but my experience leads me to believe your presumptions are largely unfounded.

Many journalists have about as much attachment to their publications as a GM factory line worker has to GM stock prices. The pride is in the quality of output. They never expect to become rich off of that work. For journalists, the money comes in publishing best-selling books—not selling 5% more subscriptions one year, or 10x ad-impressions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like a great conflict of interest. Emotional manipulation will become a metric to optimize. Depending on what the content manipulates you into feeling, you may sell more ads. This leads to more manipulative content since it's what sells more ads.

As an alternative to current targeted advertising, this seems much worse. At least I can block ads and trackers. I can't block content that's been engineered to manipulate.

<comment><USER13> doesnt bloomberg already reward articles that shake the markets? (at least thats a rumour)

<comment><USER8> No

<comment><USER13> This suggests otherwise [https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters- compensa...](https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters- compensation-2013-12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The offering also includes "neutrality targeting": that is, isolating upsetting stories that could decrease receptivity to ad messages — placements to be avoided."

In a news environment driven by ad revenues, expect the news to avoid hard hitting stories that make you feel bad. Shame and anger are emotions that cause change -- they don't sell consumer products well. Chipper stories are the order of the day, never mind the complete capture of the information system by corporations, government elites, and the rich generally.

<comment><USER8> You should maybe coordinate with the other popular conspiracy theory, namely that "the media" is driving outrage because it sells so well.

<comment><USER15> Or the naive, starry eyed, theory (only upper middle class Americans could ever be sold) that there are no conspiracies.

In other words, that whenever big private interests have a chance to make more profit by collusion, alignment, and covert action, they never do...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how much they're hacking the "Popular" section in the app to increase ad revenue. I notice that absolutely 0 of their top stories are ever at the top popular article list - usually travel, opinion and health, which presumably has more high traffic ads.

They're also messing with the scroller - it will stop scrolling on an ad to make sure it loads.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a video from one of the data scientists who worked on the project explaining the science behind it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVzZmNxmWko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVzZmNxmWko)

</comment><comment><USER18> Good! I can't wait till I have a browser plugin that will tell me what my mood will be after reading a news article. You could make it an add-on to RescueTime. One could limit depressing or enraging news articles to 10 minutes a week.

</comment><comment><USER19> NYTimes is the main reason I've been on the search for some kind of feature for HN (addon? greasemonkey script? ANYTHING) to auto-hide articles based on domain or title matches. Does anyone have a solution?

<comment><USER10> It is difficult for me to see this as not being naive. Yes, the editorial staff of any newspaper would have opinions, and even worse, implicit biases. 1: that does not mean that the firewall between journalists and editorial is being broken casually; 2: you correct for bias by using diverse journalistic sources (and removing only the worse offenders like say Breitbart or Infowars), not by completely disregarding information from imperfect sources.

<comment><USER20> The commenter stated they wanted to skip seeing NYT, which seems like a personal preference. Why not skip breitbart and NYT? If you're trying to avoid exposure to a certain bias for personal reasons it seems reasonable that any news source could be avoided.

For example, it sounds like you might identify as center left. Some people on the left are so disillusioned with the establishment that they would rather avoid it entirely. For example one could replace NYT with Democracy Now and get an informed global perspective like the NYT without getting so much centrist exposure.

<comment><USER10> I concur with the sibling comment. I am not suggesting filtering based on political ideology. I am suggesting filtering based on journalistsic quality and honesty (e.g. WaPo on the left, and __some __parts of Fox on the right can be somewhat biased, but they are worthwhile) versus naked editorial decisions that do not care about facts (e.g. Infowars or __some __ "antifa" outlets).

And yes, the OP can certainly be happy if they do not consume any news or if they consume only media taylored to their emotional pleasure[1]. However, it is in my interest for my fellow humans to be well informed, with a diversity of legitimate sources, so that when we make collective decisions we decided not-horribly.

1: Although specifically singling out NYT is very strange in that context, as they are by far a more moderate and truthful albeit imperfect source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On one hand, I like this because it might skew "news" production toward positive news stories. On the other hand, I dislike it because the news should just be the news and the business of the news should not skew the content of the news. But, that's probably too much to ask these days.

</comment><comment><USER22> Bet the Financial Times doesn't do this.

(See [https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant- stand-t...](https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-the- new-york-times.php) \-- whatever your politics she makes a fair point)

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this one of those instances where regulatory laws would help? Something like requiring publishers to place a notice saying, "This article typically invokes hope. The ads shown on this page utilize this tendency".

These premium ads look like the logical progression of content-based advertising. The only slimy thing is them pretending to be randomly placed.

<comment><USER24> Most respectable brands conform to AdChoices policies. If you click the little blue triangle on an ad it will usually tell you how an ad was targeted to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If there was any question that the NYT is not a newspaper, at least in the pre-internet sense of the word, this should put it to rest. The same kind of shenanigans are at play in every news outlet I can think off. How does one make sense of such a vast world when telling the truth is not profitable?

<comment><USER24> > telling the truth is not profitable?

Where'd you get that idea? Plenty of newspapers tell the truth and still make money. They do make a lot less than previously though.

<comment><USER25> Which ones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why is the advertisement industry so sleezy and disgusting? Aren't there any sensible ways of putting your product or service out there without insane advertisement strategies that invade privacy, cross ethical boundaries and sometimes, literally illegal?

Advertisement is why we have privacy issues (the other being governments spying on their people) and giant corporations based on targeted advertisement business model. It's sickening and people working in this profession should be ashamed of themselves. Not to mention all the psychological tricks that go into the "smell" of the store, deluding people into buying and then underdelivering, buy one get one free, sales!!! sales!!! sales!!!, 20% off if you sign up for a store credit card, etc. what happened to ethics and honesty in doing business?

There has to be a more sensible way? Word of mouth, magazines, banners, trade shows, demos, putting product on the shelf, etc aren't good enough? I am not a sales man but boy I despise that whole industry.

<comment><USER27> One of the dead comments in this thread calls for "criminalizing advertising". I am quite positive to this idea myself. Does advertising really do anything positive to the economy and the world? Doesn't the paradox of advertising already prove that it is at best unnecessary?

Recently however I read about the time in the middle ages when guilts had forbidden advertisement. They took this to such a degree, that if a merchant would cough while a potential customer was walking nearby, the other merchants would accuse him/her of trying to catch the attention of the passer-by.

Perhaps the reason we allow advertisement is just that we don't know how to get rid of it. However, then we should certainly try to regulate it as much as possible; make rules limiting it to the tolerable and perhaps undamaging.

Unfortunately, it may be that so many industries now depend on selling adverts, that limiting it in any meaningful degree would be very hard politically.

<comment><USER28> Banning advertisement is fundamentally impossible in a free society because advertising is speech. You can't stop people from persuading other people. You can't realistically ban paid advertisement either, that just pushes it underground because it's so valuable that people will find a way to pay for it anyway. What you're asking for is a society free of financially-motivated influence, and I don't think that has/can/will ever exist.

Even if you could get rid of advertising, that just cedes control of advertising to random natural factors like geography or chance. It's not clear to me how that's a better state of affairs.

<comment><USER27> The alternative wouldn't be chance. In the ideal world we would have unbiased reviews to guide us.

I very much agree with you however. We can't ban it. It just practically isn't possible. We should be able to regulate it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is not particular to NYT but when your news sources are A/B testing and have information on your feelings, they will happily make up the news to reinforce your confirmation bias.

The Royal Society's motto "nulius in verba" is becoming more true by day.

<comment><USER24> > they will happily make up the news

How are you possibly making that claim? There is nothing to support that.</comment></comment>


DNSound: What does your domain sound like? - <AUTHOR> https://dnsimple.com/dnsound <comment><AUTHOR> Unexpected to find that in my dnsimple DNS control panel -- but oh so fun! Party paws! :D</comment>


George Hotz's Startup Gives Away Semiautonomous-Driving Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/george-hotzs-startup-gives-away-semiautonomous-driving-software-1480548039 <comment><AUTHOR> "If [auto makers] don't accept software companies writing the code for their cars, they're going to end up like the phone companies that didn't accept Android," Mr. Hotz said.

An interesting comparison, but I'm not buying it.</comment>


Ask HN: Stemmers in ruby, any good? or should I just go ahead and write my own? - <AUTHOR>

The most popular option seems to be https://github.com/aurelian/ruby-stemmer. But its kinda outdated and gives poor-ish results. "why" becomes "whi", "people" becomes "peopl" and a lot lot many incorrect ones.
Something like Solr's reduction to stems is what I was hoping for to be able to use it in my project.
Thinking of going for a full port of Porter's stemming. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Thanks for asking this, I'd also be interested in knowing...

Did you try the uea-stemmer? Also pretty old: [https://github.com/ealdent/uea- stemmer](https://github.com/ealdent/uea-stemmer)

Also, there's the treat gem, which is an all-in-one package...it uses both the stemmer you mentioned and the uea one...so maybe that's it for Rubyists.

[https://github.com/louismullie/treat](https://github.com/louismullie/treat)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/raypereda/stemmify](https://github.com/raypereda/stemmify)

Not a Ruby guy so no idea if its any good, but it is the implementation linked from here [http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/](http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/)</comment>


Chinese database is tracking cellphone usage, car location and more - <AUTHOR> https://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Chinese-database-is-tracking-cellphone-usage-car-13812775.php <comment><USER2> We can't say we didn't know... Still, human forgetfulness is probably even more enshrined in society than it was 80 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> In other news, every (developed) country is tracking cellphone usage, car location, and electricity usage in _every_ city.

<comment><USER4> From the article:

> The IJOP system, which keeps track of practically the entire Xinjiang > population, alerts authorities when a person unexpectedly crosses virtual > "fences" by driving past a certain checkpoint or checking into a hotel

Is there a western country where the government gets push notifications each time a citizen travels too far from home?

Pointing out similar privacy problems of other modern governments is fine, but trying to excuse the worst of the worst (China) by claiming it happens everywhere is a false equivalency.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't trying to excuse anything! I was pointing out that the problem is much broader than China.

But you're right that I only read the headline, and the article does make it sound worse than the headline did :).

<comment><USER5> > I wasn't trying to excuse anything! I was pointing out that the problem is > much broader than China.

> But you're right that I only read the headline...

Please don't do that. Your hot take based on the headline was identical in form if not intent to a propaganda technique called whataboutism, which is meant to _distract_ attention away from _particular_ abuses.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Get Incredible Summer Interns for your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.udemy.com/blog/2011/05/17/startup-interns/

<comment><USER2> Nice post! If a paid position, how much have you typically paid interns? Is it hourly or project based?

<comment><AUTHOR> We pay a stipend for the whole summer ($2K). I've heard everything from unpaid to $4K for the summer. More than that for a business intern, in my opinion, is unnecessary and doesn't get you kids who are there for the right reasons.

<comment><USER3> In most states (perhaps all), you must pay interns at least minimum wage unless they get college credit and you get no benefit to your business from the internship.

<comment><USER4> You'd be surprised what people do, sometimes they just ignore that. Or they make them a contractor with a 1099, which is also illegal (or borderline).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome post. Working on our efforts right now. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER6> Perfect timing! Thanks Gagan, very well written blog.</comment>