After 14 years, GameSpy closes down - <AUTHOR> http://au.pc.gamespy.com/articles/122/1227460p1.html <comment><USER2> A bit of background. Ziff Davis (parent company J2 global, Nasdaq JCOM) purchased IGN[0] from News Corp. Of the major properties in the IGN group: IGN.com, AskMen, UGO.com, 1up.com etc. they are shutting down GameSpot, 1UP and UGO[1] and laying off a bunch of people in the remainder of the business.

In the media world most people associate 'online' with efficient, and this demonstrates that it isn't necessarily true. There is still a lot of competitive pressure if all you are doing is running a fat organization and replacing paper with a web server.

Ziff apparently only paid $100M for the business[2] (News paid $600M+ only years ago) and IGN has 53 million unique visitors (in a high yield demographic - young males) across their properties, yet they couldn't make the business model work. Demonstrates just how 'thin' the new media businesses have to become in order to survive and the challenge that old media companies are facing.

[0] [http://investor.j2global.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=737...](http://investor.j2global.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=737575)

[1] [http://kotaku.com/5986027/ziff-davis-shuts-1up-gamespy- and-u...](http://kotaku.com/5986027/ziff-davis-shuts-1up-gamespy-and-ugo)

[2] [http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/01/sources-ziff-davis-is- close...](http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/01/sources-ziff-davis-is-close-to- buying-ign/)

<comment><USER3> GameSpy and Gamespot are the only gaming sites I knew. Where does one look for information on games now?

Edit: thanks for the suggestions so far! They all seem to be in blog style, with the typical horrible navigation (basically, you are limited to the most recent posts). I miss the huge repositories of game reviews from sites like GameSpy - being able to look up reviews of old games?

<comment><USER4> The Verge spawned a gaming-only sister site: <http://www.polygon.com/> I'd also highly recommend <http://www.escapistmagazine.com/> and if you have any interest in the development behind the games then <http://www.gamasutra.com/> is great

<comment><USER5> Polygon has a great editorial staff. I just wish their site had more information density. As it stands, I can only view three news entries without having to scroll down on my laptop's 13.3" monitor. I wish they had a more dense viewing layout. Their mobile site is very usable, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> RIP GameSpy. I owe a lot of my interest in programming languages to an essay I read in 2000 on GameSpy back when they were much cooler and had a "dev week;" the author was some guest writer named Tim Sweeney, illustrated by some outfit called "penny arcade;" alas its not hosted by GameSpy anymore but, thank gosh for time machines:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20000302031550/http://www.gamespy...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000302031550/http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.shtm)

</comment><comment><USER7> My experience of gamespy is a little different to what Im reading here. For me it is or was some bit of software that got installed that I never ever asked for or wanted. To me it was some sort of evil spyware I never asked for, a bit like being forced to install a tool bar in my browser. I'd get rid of it only for another game to replace it. When I first saw it, I looked it up and realised it was not dangerous or evil, so in the end I ignored it as an irritant not worth worrying about. Its still there in my start menu now.

First thing I thought when I saw the headline was, good. So, Im finding it fascinating that today I see a thread full of people who use(d) and love(d) it. I really never knew it had value to any one, let alone some fondness.

<comment><USER8> Way back when everyone played Quake, there was no central server list, and GameSpy was how you found new servers. I installed it and kept it upgraded a number of years, until I no longer needed it.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it didn't start out evil at all, it started out awesome, Gamespy was how you found servers to play on for games 10 years ago before games had their own match making. It became awful when it tried to be both.

It just morphed over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FYI, there's 2 parts to the GameSpy brand. IGN sold the technology group, behind in-game online middleware used by over 1,000 games (including BF 1942 e.g.) to GLU Mobile last year:

[http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120802006354/en/Glu-...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120802006354/en/Glu- Acquires-GameSpy-Technology-Expand-Connected-Cross-Platform)

What's being shut down here is the editorial GameSpy.com site.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, thanks. I didn't realize they were two separate entities.

I remember Gamespy as being one of the first software options to easily facilitate multiplayer gaming back before it was baked in to most games.

<comment><USER10> GameSpy, the standalone server browsing client of the early 2000s which evolved from the Quake specific QuakeSpy was originally a third party developed app by 3 programmers and brought in-house by company behind the 'Planet' brand of community web sites. Eventually, the newly renamed GameSpy Industries created in-game solutions to provide server browsing and more as middleware and hosted the backend services used by these games.

GLU Mobile inherited that backend for legacy games still using it, and now need to figure out how to license it out (or collect pending licensing fees from games that have been out for 5-8 years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would be more sympathetic if I hadn't had several magazines gutted in exactly this same way by Ziff Davis. Buy the competition, kill it off, more for your 'main' brand. I still miss Modern Electronics and Radio Electronics.

Same story to "Sure its making a profit, it just isn't profitable enough." Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER13> Captures the entire problem with the news industry right now: "Why is this closure happening, then? It's a business thing, and like most business things it's not easy to explain or understand unless you spend all day crunching numbers and paying bills. Which I don't."

</comment><comment><USER14> My reaction: Thank god.

GameSpy has been a plague to the gaming experience since its inception.

<comment><USER15> haha, I actually exclaimed "Thank God" when I read the title.

Though reading the article it just sounds like their news site/blog is shutting down?

<comment><USER16> GameSpy Arcade and GameSpy are different creatures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really sad to see the gamespy brand come to an end, 12 years ago the GameSpy desktop application was revolutionary for connecting with friends on servers and finding the best gaming opportunities.

RIP

</comment><comment><USER18> I still remember QSpy, and its text-mode linux version. I wasted so many happy days in QuakeWorld because of that little program.

Happy days.

/old

</comment><comment><USER19> Is the games industry doing a lot worse? I read this article: [http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/22/ign-layoffs-and- sayin...](http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/22/ign-layoffs-and-saying- goodbye-to-1up-and-gamespy)

Although they don't say it outright, it strongly implies that the game industry is not as profitable as it once was.

I haven't been a gamer for years, so it's shocking that these sites/publications are shutting down.

Can someone enlighten me as far as what's going on in the gaming industry?

<comment><USER20> The money has shifted from one area to the next.

Steam made little money at the start, but the market shifted and now theyre a big player.

I remember buying gaming magazines and using BBS's back in the day but the market shifted.

Same with consoles vs PC due to pirating.

<comment><USER19> Why has this affected the magazines and online publications?

<comment><USER20> By reading the article, seems they have a few games websites and so are consolidating them. I would say there are less advertising dollars going to these kinds of sites compared to paying to get on the front page of Steam for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So how am I going to find Quake servers to connect to now?

<comment><USER22> Is Quake still alive?

<comment><USER23> Barely. Check out <http://www.quakeservers.net/> for server lists.

Seeing this thread actually inspired me to get Quake running on my Mac. Just left a free-for-all deathmatch that I won handily using a trackpad. Still got it :).

<comment><USER24> There's also Quake Live (<http://www.quakelive.com>) if you're looking for some Q3 action

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awww. I grew up on GameSpy. Best of luck to the staff in their future endeavors.

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember GameSpy fondly for having those really awesome and funny short stories that I think were actually done by the Penny Arcade guys. The Divine Systems Administrator and the guy who overclocked everything, and the guy who plays an FPS quicksaving every 3 steps and never using rocket ammo. I want to recover those as I remember them being some of the funniest stuff I ever read back in the day, and they even had crossovers!

Their app was annoying at times, but it did server a purpose that was really cool and ahead of it's time I think.

<comment><USER27> The stories were written by Dave "Fargo" Kosak (he's currently lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, btw).

You aren't wrong in remembering the Penny Arcade connection, though. About half of the stories had accompanying illustrations drawn by PA's Gabe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I old icon of the industry, but it feels like they shoot themselves in the foot when they took down daily victim from their site years ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a bug with how their page is served. If you go through and see this:

        //

Just refresh and you'll see the story.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is pretty sad. I used to spend tons of time on GameSpy Arcade and MPlayer.com before GameSpy took it over.

I have fond memories of playing AvP and Command & Conquer through these services as a kid. I always enjoyed the chat sessions while games were being arranged.

I also spent a ton of time reading GameSpy.com reviews. For a while the site was my go-to-place for reviews.

</comment><comment><USER30> Happy Puppy -> GameSpy -> ???

Guess time to check out IGN unless anyone have other suggestions.

<comment><USER31> Eurogamer and Edge are reliably good. Polygon is very new but excellent. TIGSource covers just about any indie game that gets released, although it's better as a source of information about what's out there than as a reliable review site — the indie community is pretty small, and the reviewers are often friends with the developers. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has some of the best coverage of anything that runs on a computer, including independent games, but it doesn't cover consoles. Venus Patrol focuses on a more artsy niche, although its coverage can be pretty spotty and it's quite new too.

Hope that helps!

<comment> shawn-butler <http://www.rockpapershotgun.com> is indeed pretty good.

<http://www.gameinformer.com> went from being pretty good to being utter garbage in such a short period of time that maybe it's just a local minimum, but I have my doubts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What does make me sad is that there's a huge amount of content that they've put out, lots of retrogaming folks research using these long lasting sites like this, and now it's all gone.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is this just GameSpy the gaming website (eugh) or GameSpy's server browser (also eugh, but it serves a purpose in life)? BF1942 and Quake and a couple other older games used it.

</comment><comment><USER34> No! I remember using GameSpy to tee-up games with my friends. It was a great program. I also loved The All-Seeing Eye, was also brilliant but had less features. Such a shame.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'll never forget playing AQ2 on Pearlmankey servers. Thank you for all the great connections GameSpy!

</comment><comment><USER36> There goes Flintlocke and Flintlocke vs Horde ... sad for site and the team :(

</comment><comment><USER37> or the short version "u no make enough money byebye" ;-)</comment>


A story about Vienna. (an interactive narrative infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/a-story-about-vienna/#apps4austria=1/ <comment><USER2> People born in any developed country have absolutely NO IDEA how lucky they are to be born there. A Hardworking, Highly Educated and Professional born and living in developing country can't imagine having the quality of life that - even a college student enjoys in better part of the world.

With that said there are Tons of positive stuff happening all around .

And almost all of Europe is Amazingly beautiful

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm originally from Vienna (now living in SF) and I wouldn't really recommend to live there. The Viennese people all praise how well there city works, but if you've lived in another place for a while you quickly notice all the things going terribly wrong there.

To bring a few counter-points to the praises listed on the web site:

You want to work at a startup? Great! But don't go to Vienna then. There are a few startups, but most of them finance themselves via part-time consulting work, as the chances of getting "real" investments are quite low. And almost all of the successful ones that I know move to places like London or Berlin as soon as possible.

Salaries are low. And I mean low. If you're used to salaries at places like SF you're probably paying more for your apartment in those places than what you're net income in Vienna would be. And forget about stock options, even at the so called "startups" there they are quite rare.

It feels like almost everyone smokes in Vienna. If you're ever going to a restaurant or a bar, even if it's only a brief visit, be prepared to wash all of your clothing afterwards. There are practically no laws protecting non- smokers, although those are nowadays standard in most other modern cities.

It rains almost all the time. There are something like 2 months of summer and 2 months of winter. The remainder of the time is cloudy rainy weather. So yes, there would be a few nice places where you could do stuff outside, but only during the short summer time. And don't expect any clean parks where you just can lie down and enjoy the sun (like in SF). Most of the city parks are dirty. And most people don't clean up after their dogs, so you wouldn't want to lie down in those parks anyway.

<comment><USER4> Salaries aren't that low... the standard entry level right now is about $42K USD, keep in mind that includes the mandatory Austria 5 weeks of paid vacation. Also when calculating an offer it's important to note that you're usually quoted a monthly amount which is paid 14 times per year. (Two months you receive a double payment, before the summer for vacation spending and before Christmas for christmas spending)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lagging a lot on a i7 Macbook Pro Retina with 16 Gbs of RAM in Chrome. It is a bit better in Safari, but still not smooth.

<comment><USER6> Wow. When I ran OS X Leopard on this 17" MacBook Pro w/4GB RAM, all the fancy pages posted on HN used to peg my cores at 100% and made the fans roar like jet engines. Now I'm running Slackware Linux (64 bit) on it, and this page is running as smooth as butter in Firefox 19.0.2. It's nice to be at the other end of the spectrum, for once. It runs almost as smoothly in Chrome, but with a little more jitter during the transitions and a bit more CPU usage. Not so nice in Opera, which is struggling to get all the pieces working and kind of ruins the experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've heard good things from other Australians about Vienna of late, and you've probably convinced me to drop by before or after OHM2013 in August. Few tips for internationalisation purposes...

Germanisms: _city_ bike, _public_ barbecuing.

Style: US would typically (over)use exclamations! Like, _There's loads to do in Vienna!_ (and _BBQ_ ) AU would be _Mate, there's shit-loads to do in Vienna!_ (and _have a barbie_ or _BBQ_ ) NZ would be _Vienna's wicked chur bro!_ (or _BBQ_ ). OK well, those last two might be taking it a bit far. But you can de-formalize(/Germanify) a little ;)

Best wishes from China... AU/DE/NZ guy of partly-German/Prussian descent.

<comment><USER8> We are austrians, not australians btw..

<comment><USER9> He's saying that he's Australian, and he's heard from other of his countrymen that Vienna is kind of alright. :)

(Don't we, we get equally worried when people mix it up.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> i've visited vienna twice now. once in november, once in june. vienna is a vibrant, gorgeous and exciting city. the arts, culture, everything is fantastic, and the people are friendly and charming. one of my favorite museums - the belvedere - is there, and the gardens near that are also gorgeous.

i can't wait to go back to visit. i would say go in the summer, the winter (at least the week i was there) was dreary. i also love the cold war history of vienna, so that was exciting.

thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER11> >and the people are friendly and charming.

hmmm, must be another city

<comment><AUTHOR> haha that's true. viennese people love to be grumpy :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice city, but with 114% of the population being smokers...

I love Europe, but for being so developed, it's amazing how many places there people still think smoking is 'cool,' and 'a symbol of freedom.'

I do like Vienna, but I think I'd choose Hamburg if I had to choose a city in the German-speaking world. Or Berlin - only slightly less cosmopolitan, but the tech start-up scene is kind of happening, and the cost of living is cheaper.

<comment><USER13> Depends on the country: they banned smoking indoors in Italy a while back, and at least in the part of the country I live in, people have always respected that ban (I was a bit surprised). In Austria, when we left, they still let people smoke anywhere and everywhere, pretty much - the only places where it was banned in Innsbruck, where we lived, were McDonalds and Ikea. My wife went out with our baby daughter for cake and coffee with a friend one afternoon, to a pastry shop, and came back reeking of smoke, because some other patrons sat down and started chain smoking. It made my blood boil.

That said, Vienna struck me as a very nice city - very livable for its size, although the climate leaves a lot to be desired.

<comment><USER4> That's a huge problem in Austria, coming here from Canada I was shocked that you could still smoke everywhere here. I rarely go out to bars or cafes here due to the fact that I then have to change clothes and shower in order to get rid of the smell of smoke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> worth mentioning hackerspaces / tech-coworking in vienna:

<https://metalab.at/> <http://www.sektor5.at/> <http://vienna.the-hub.net/>

<comment><USER15> The metalab people are very cool. They hooked me up with some LEDs when I needed them on short notice. When I visited they were printing a new battery cover for an old hand-held gaming device with their 3D printer (and this was a few years back).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Small nitpick: I doubt Vienna's got 20+ universities as the infographic would suggest. It's far more likely what you meant is "faculty buildings" or something to that extent.

I would also venture a guess that most of those belong to a single University of Vienna.

<comment><USER17> I assume the citation from the 20 is this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_Austria...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_Austria#Vienna)

<comment><USER16> There still seem to be a lot more listed on the map. <http://i.imgur.com/T9GxbPV.jpg>

Even for a city as cool as Vienna, that many _universities_ looks unrealistic.

<comment><USER17> I assumed that it was just British English ... British seems to just use "university" for any higher learning degree program, whereas Americans use "university" only for schools with grad programs as well as undergrad.

<http://grammarist.com/usage/college-university/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Neat, but honestly I had hoped for some more than just a story; i.e. history. Vienna's history is incredibly rich! How can that simply be ignored. People don't talk about the Holy Roman Empire anymore!

Perhaps Austrians are still coping with 1866.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> in case anyone has issues with displaying it, here are some screens about how it should look like: <http://www.data.gv.at/anwendungen/a-story-about-vienna/>

the project is also hosted on github, if anyone is interested in looking at the code: <https://github.com/pa7/a-story-about-vienna/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Vienna is a very nice city to live in. Yet, it is not exactly a technology hub, so probably not a destination of preference for the HN crowd.

<comment><USER11> i and a lot of other people are actively working on the technology part, i.e.: <http://www.viennajs.org/> meetup, <https://www.facebook.com/RailsGirlsVienna>, <http://events.jquery.org/2013/eu/> (happened a few weeks ago, but will happen again next year), <https://metalab.at/>, <http://www.gdg-vienna.at/>, ....

said that, if you want to live in vienna and are an experienced dev. send me a tweet, we will hook you up with a job in no time

<comment><USER4> What would you suggest for a general developer meetup? I'm in Linz and was thinking about coming up and seeing Metalab and going to a developer meetup. Any good events coming up you would recommend?

<comment><USER11> well, i organize viennajs.org, but well you should be into JS (or we will convince you, last wednesday of every month), there is the web performance meetup <http://web-performance.meetup.com/members/at/vienna/> it's about pretty much any language & performance, there is <http://www.meetup.com/Vienna-Perl-Mongers/> well perl. gdg <http://www.gdg- vienna.at/> has some new organizes, so i don't know what they have in mind, also python, symphony and ux are meeting at meetalab <https://metalab.at/calendar/>

from your blog i see you are into php and flash, well, come by to the viennajs meetup and lets talk about html5.

<comment><USER4> Heh, php and flash is what I use for my hobby gamedev. I'm a Java developer. (Hides from the Java and Flash hate). I've worked with js before, html5 is definitely interesting, I'll have to come to a meetup and let you lure me to the cool side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The parallax effect on the final page was a nice touch.

This makes me want to visit Austria (and Vienna in particular) sometime soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> Whoa, the performance os that site is TERRIBLE, specially the parallax effect.

It almost asploded the Mac! Poor thing.

<comment><USER22> It did crash my chrome tab..

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This thing needs some max-width action. It looks completely broken on my 27" iMac.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very slow and laggy..couldn't even read the text content properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you mean with couldn't even read the text content properly? did you try to read it while scrolling?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Public Transport was just a city map for me?

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry that's a known issue (sometimes when the page takes too long to load, the pins get positioned wrongly. that's because the data is from an Open Government Data plattform and they use another projection to save the data). but this is how it should look like: [http://www.data.gv.at/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/storyvienna...](http://www.data.gv.at/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/storyvienna3.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Facebook sharing function seems broken...

<comment><AUTHOR> what happened?

<comment><USER26> nothing... just loading...</comment></comment></comment>


When Nixon Threatened to Nuke Vietnam - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/war-is-boring/when-nixon-threatened-to-nuke-vietnam-26c43a3f59d6

<comment><USER2> The Vietnam War could have been prevented, had the Versailles Treaty granted Vietnam its independence, as Ho Chi Minh requested when he attended the Hall of Mirrors conference.

My father was an anti-aircraft missile fire control officer aboard the USS Providence. While he never told me, it was later declassified that the talos missiles he fired, could be fitted with nuclear warheads.

I'm not real sure about the rationale but I figure nuclear antiaircraft missiles would be used if the enemy was swarming.

After many years of quiet contemplation, Dad told me one day "We should not have been in Vietnam".

65,000 americans died during the war, 250,000 vietnam vets committed suicide. At least a million vietnamese perished.

But Vietnam did get its independence, and the US and vietnam are the best of friends.

<comment><USER3> Also, if the corrupt south had carried out the suggestions (like land re- distribution to the delta farmers, etc.) that they address the terrible inequities which fostered the insurgency, the south would have had a better chance at viability.

Years earlier, South Korea and Taiwan undertook some of the US suggestions, and had a much better outcome.

SVN, was too corrupt to entertain the idea (and yes, some US advisers in that area, had lost some of the ear, they had in that regard)

<comment><USER2> I'm planning to read the Pentagon Papers sometime soon.

When I took high school American History, I thought it odd that we did not discuss vietnam in any way, despite that our textbook had good coverage of it.

I figured the reason was that most of our parents were vietnam vets - Fairfield, California is a military town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"We should try to induce them to get out of the war without having their country destroyed and to realize that if they do not get out, their country will be destroyed,"_ \-- McNamara

Totally false premise.

The Vietnamese fought the French from '46 to '54 [0] and defeated them. In '54, six parachute battalions dropped using US aircraft, artillery, and US tanks were deployed in _Dien Bien Phu_ , NE Vietnam. Over a month later the Vietnamese overran the entire French force, effectively ending the war. This was known by the US and I'm not sure they learned these lessons.

I didn't realise why the French might be interested in Vietnam until I found Michelin had interests in rubber plantations. [1]

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

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

<comment><USER5> So your saying that socialist france went to war in the interest of a company? Why do I find that hard to believe?

<comment><USER6> Probably because your image of France as cute and socialist is overshadowing the less cute reality of France as the world's second-largest colonial power in the 19th and 20th centuries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tangentially related:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668)

Nixon undermined the peace process for his own ends (assuming the article is true)

<comment><USER8> Why Nixon and his aidee were involved in those talks? nor the article nor the wikipedia article about the paris peace acords mention the reason, only the effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> and they say Hitler and Stalin were madmen.

my country won the war but it was so thoroughly broken, it hasn't recovered properly to start to do anything sensible yet.

edit: -> Hitler and Stalin were the poster-boy of madmen, according to the West.

</comment><comment><USER10> What the article doesn't mention is that South Vietnam was bombed 3 times more heavily than North Vietnam. The bulk of the war effort was in the South.

</comment><comment><USER11> But Iran is part of the axis of evil. Why, if they get nukes, they might do what we do!</comment>


Do you think the new Dell XPS (2020) could be a MacBook Pro killer? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ <comment><USER2> Did they fix the audio amplifiers? It's impossible to hold a video call without headphones on the 2019 models, max volume is just too low.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been wanting to give one a spin with PopOS. It is coming close to MacOS for my needs, which mostly involve getting out of the way and letting me get stuff done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been looking for a good laptop to get out of the hands of Apple. Macbook's experience has been slowly degrading along the years.

If these new Dell XPS laptops happen to have good Linux support, that could definitely be my next machine. It seems on par with newest Macbook Pros.

<comment><USER4> I have an XPS 13 and an XPS 15. I have linux on 13 and windows on 15. I've been pretty happy with both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't shock me. It had a janky touchpad but loved my Inspiron 3452 with an i3 that I'll be replacing the dvd drive with an SSD caddy after upgrading the RAM and replacing the battery soon-ish.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, but any and all of the Lenovo x1 carbons are. Try them with the latest fedora live media.</comment>


The Birth of Standard Error - <AUTHOR> http://spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/

<comment><USER2> Did anyone else think this was going to be about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error) from statistics? I just think of the computing term as 'stderr'.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. I did. It made sense when I saw the article, but I was confused for a second.

<comment><USER4> Being an avid "nixer" I immediately thought of the following:

[http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r12/index.jsp?topic=...](http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r12/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.zos.r12.bpxa400%2Fstd.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, did stderr outlive its purpose?

<comment><USER6> A disadvantage of separate stdout and stderr streams is matching of errors to the corresponding resulting output.

<comment><USER7> When this is important, you can make it so that stdout and stderr are the same stream, via a variety of methods. With bash this is done with 2>&1, as in:

command 2>&1

<comment><USER8> While that makes them the same stream, it doesn't actually solve the problem. Many systems will write to stdout buffered, but stderr unbuffered, so that writes are visible when the program crashes. Redirecting streams at the shell level doesn't stop application level buffering ruining your day.

Having said that, GP's request is pretty niche, it's only useful when the program uses stdout (not a gui, web etc) and is doing work that might write to stderr while it's writing to stdout (so no summary report generators, long running physics simulations etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why snprintf did not make it into C89 given the Morris worm.</comment>


New Linux patch could circumvent Microsoft's FAT patents - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/vfat-linux-patch-could-circumvent-microsofts-patent-claims.ars <comment><USER2> On the one hand, this seems like a clever bit of lateral thinking with tangible benefits, so it makes me happy. On the other hand, a lateral move had to be found to ditch a...wait for it... _patent absurdity_ , so I'm a little miffed that the need even existed.

Maybe someone should create a lateral-thinking patent evasion group. If they did, would we primarily be smugly satisfied with ourselves for having done so, or would we be overcome with angst over the fact that such a group might be needed?

<comment><USER3> Actually, if someone created a lateral-thinking patent evasion group, as proposed, they would probably violate a patent filed by someone who thought of it in the first place but couldn't be buggered to implement it in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> USPTO Patent #7075962 (Tridgell et al): Method for circumventing USPTO Patent #5579517.

</comment><comment><USER5> ESR on Microsoft vs TomTom case: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=819></comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on Cloudflare? - <AUTHOR> I use the free plan of Cloudflare for a personal site and find it useful for the CDN, analytics, SSL and DNS.
One thing that bothers me is the cost of these benefits: all traffic is decrypted at their servers. Is it something to be worried about for the average user? (Data stolen while passing through their servers)
Maybe I am paranoid, but is it a good option for sites that deal with payment data? <comment><USER2> I've always seen cloudflare as a panacea for horribly written websites that need to handle high traffic. A good framework can crank out like 200k requests per second on normal hardware. If you're using something like PHP for a high load site you're asking for trouble and cloudflare might save you from a rewrite.

Their core service is DDoS protection, but the reality is that these attacks are rare and usually small. Most people using cloudflare could save money by just running their own Nginx/varnish reverse proxy. Cloudflare for the most part is just an http reverse proxy, and I've heard they just use nginx internally to do it.

I worked at a software/IT consultancy and some of our clients ran controversial political sites. Lots of them. They were surprising never "attacked" with more than a few hundred requests per second. In fact, none of the few hundred sites we ran was ever attacked while I was there. The only ones that went down a lot were wordpress based sites that could only handle like 7 requests per second past the cache. We ran cloudflare on some of these, but only so it wasn't our fault when they inevitable crashed from xmlrpc bots and other primitive garbage.

<comment><USER3> Hi; I work for Cloudflare so I just wanted to address some of these points.

We have sites of all platforms and types which are in need of caching services for a variety of reasons. We have e-commerce sites wanting to cache anonymous page views to improve conversion rates through improved speeds, through to services wanting to accelerate dynamic content using our Railgun optimiser.

As a reverse proxy, we do offer an incredibly powerful DDOS mitigation service. Over the past few months we have seen a dramatic increase in DDOS attacks - including multiple DDOS attacks which are greater than 400Gbps. Whilst not all sites will face such attacks, we do offer a service for those who are in need of protection (either as a precaution or to mitigate an active attack).

Our WAF can help protect against other such attacks from SQL Injection to XSS and beyond, for example; we have a rule to protect against XML-RPC attacks. We're constantly improving our feature set and adding more; one such product we're particularly excited to reveal is our Traffic Control solution which can help add extra layers of security to APIs and websites.</comment></comment>


The Valve Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

<comment><USER2> After some time working in "start-ups" this is one thing I agree with more than anything.

"Hours While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it's a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you're looking around wondering why people aren't in "crunch mode," the answer's pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life."

<comment><USER3> You know what's funny though. I know some folks at Valve, they all say that the work-life balance isn't great (not terrible, but not great). Valve does peer stack ranking in order to set compensation. From what I hear this means that, yes, you can technically 9-to-5 it, but good luck getting anywhere in the company if you do.

I've also heard that the everything-is-flat model isn't all that great either. Yes you get to work on what you want, but, going back to the stack-ranking, it can be quite the political place if you want to get on the right projects, etc.

I'm not trying to say that Valve isn't a great place to work, but I think people romanticize it a little too much when this handbook gets trotted out on HN every other month.

<comment><USER4> _I know some folks at Valve, they all say that the work-life balance isn 't great (not terrible, but not great)._

context matters: the work-life norm for video games is horrendously awful.

I'm not saying this is how Valve thinks, but if you were recruiting for a video game company, you could totally tell people "work-life balance matters here, so you'll often be able to go home on weekends," or "work-life balance matters here, so we rarely work more than ten hours a day."

<comment><USER3> That's a fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All right, since everybody seems to have read the handbook, here's something fresh: Gabe Newell's email [0], taken from today's r/Steam, where he shares his thoughts behind the flat company structure which Valve is so famous for.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2zxcyy/gabe_newell_re...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2zxcyy/gabe_newell_responds_to_email_asking_about/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This has been discussed here before in 2012 and the linked version is not different from the one before.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463)

<comment><USER7> It was discussed before, it will be discussed again. We've presumably got new users and new insights in the last 3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title should be updated to include (2012) when this was originally released to the public, following a pervious leak.

</comment><comment><USER4> adding my voice to the chorus: please put 2012 in the title.

edit: looked on github for hacker news source, to see if I could automate this. is it not open-sourced? all I found was docs for the API.</comment>


Show HN: I made a Font using Code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aswinmohanme/Plexta-FreeFont <comment><USER2> I'd be very interested to see the code for this. You should put it in that repo as well ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Where is the code you used to generate this SVGs?

</comment><comment><USER4> You could make an exporter to ttf!</comment>


Why do MIS/CIS graduates start making more than CS/SE graduates? - <AUTHOR>

The rigor of the MIS/CIS education is ridiculously week.  Though I have seen many websites as well as bls.gov which show that MIS degree holders do in fact make more than CS degree holders even if it's the same job.<p>What's up with this? <comment><USER2> If you're working somewhere good, this won't be true, or at worst it won't be true after the first year when new employees prove their value. If you're working somewhere bad, then you might see this, but the real problem then is that you work somewhere bad.

Do good work, and work somewhere good, and don't worry about whether the average for MIS is better or worse than CS. Don't worry about averages or what degrees your peers have. Worry about what you make, and what your peers make, and how much value you add vs your peers. I'd take an English major who does builds awesome software oven a mediocre CS major any day, and anyone who wouldn't is an idiot.

</comment><comment><USER3> One perspective might be that MIS/CIS degree holders move faster into management roles. Might be based on the misconception that the MIS/CIS degree sounds more like coming from a systemic or wholistic perspective while the CS/SE could be more associated with a specialist position. Just guessing...

</comment><comment><USER4> _weak_</comment>


Dalio Says Capitalism Must Be Reformed, Not Abandoned - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-15/ray-dalio-says-capitalism-must-be-reformed-not-abandoned <comment><USER2> Maybe someone should ask Dalio if he's being manipulative by making a false- choice statement. Who said anything about abandoning Capitalism?</comment>


Transcend violates GPL - <AUTHOR> http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=15.%20Transcend%20WiFiSD#GPL

<comment><USER2> This seems a clear GPL violation to me and Transcend deserve an expensive legal education.

"GPL also makes anything linked with a GPL sourced component a derivative work - requiring it too to be licenced under GPL."

This isn't correct. The result of linking a GPL work with another work is itself a derived work. To distribute that derived work you are required to make the all sources available under the GPL [or strictly more permissive license - read the GPL yourself if it matters] so you have a choice between:

1 not distributing the derived work (the binary) OR

2 ensuring appropriate release of source code OR

3 coming to a private arrangement to receive a (non-GPL) license from the copyright holders of the GPLed work (not practical or possible with Linux) OR

4 (not recommended) committing copyright infringement by distributing the binary without permission.

The GPL is not viral and does not automatically cause licenses to be granted to linked work. It sounds as if Transcend have gone for option 4 which would make them commercial copyright infringers and liable for penalties in most countries of the world (Berne Convention etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> none of 1...3 applies here, though.

just #4

<comment><USER2> Agreed (as I say at the beginning and end of my post) and that is why I hope this company receives an expensive legal education

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's too bad, because those little Wifi SD cards are actually pretty awesome for microcontroller projects, since you can talk to them over a standard SPI bus, and they're fairly inexpensive for what they do. Hopefully Transcend opens the source. If they did, then there would be more reason to actually buy these cards as embedded Linux systems, meaning more sales for them.

EDIT: I wonder why hardware manufacturers are so insistent on keeping the source closed for products such as this. From what I've heard, the software onboard the card is quite buggy and contains numerous exploits. If they just let the community help improve it, I'm sure we would be seeing better alternative distributions for this card (kind of like Cyanogenmod with Android)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I did get the card to fully work using my own kernel and ramdisk and filesystem, even bringing up ubuntu. Just had to do some dirty things to the kernel. If you're curious, the linked article described how to do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this true, that kernel modules that are independently compiled are also "infected" by the GPL?

I do not think this is the case, and the recent Oracle v. Google case seems to suggest that APIs themselves are not copyrightable. So the kernel module API used by a non-OSS licensed module doesn't seem like it should infect the entire module. That is, importing kernel headers in a binary doesn't constitute a derivative work.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: I am not a lawyer. I wasn't a lawyer when I started writing this comment and, alas, I will not be when I have finished it.

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by "modules that are independently compiled"?

If I were to write a kernel module, which I only distribute in source form, there is nothing that would require me to make my module GPL unless I have copied into my module source copyrightable elements from Linux (or some other GPL-licensed code). Let's assume I use a license for my module source that is not compatible with GPLv2.

If you take my module, and compile it into a Linux kernel, and want to distribute the resulting binary, then YOU have a problem in that the resulting binary that includes the kernel and my module is probably a derivative work of the Linux kernel, and the license of the kernel doesn't let you distribute derivative works of the kernel unless they are licensed under GPLv2. (You might try to argue that my module and the kernel together are a compilation, not a derivative work, but I don't think that would work).

I've seen it argued that since my module is intended to be built into kernels and doesn't have much use if not built into kernels, than I am effectively building it into kernels and distributing it even though others do the actual building, and so I do have to license my code under GPL.

Copyright law (at least in the US) does actually recognize a couple of circumstances under which I could be liable for someone else's infringement. There is "contributory infringement" and "induced infringement". If either of these could be applied, I could be held responsible for the infringement that occurs when others build infringing kernels using my module source. For induced infringement, the person actually doing the infringement basically has to be an agent of mine, so that would not apply. For contributory infringement, I just have to be doing something that enables their infringement.

Alas for those who want to hold me liable, there is a major problem with the contributory infringement approach. There CANNOT be contributory infringement without there being a direct infringement for me to have been contributory toward, and there must no substantial non-infringing use for my work. As even Stallman concedes, the GPL allows a person to take GPL source code and combine it with code that is licensed incompatibly with GPL and build binaries for their own private use. These people are not infringing, and so do not provide a foundation for contributory infringement, and they provide an example of a substantial non-infringing use for my work.

The above hypothetical (module distributed in source form only) is what I think of when I hear the phrase "independently compiled".

One thing often overlooked when these discussions come up is that the Linux kernel is not the first program that outsiders have wanted to write code for without following the rules set forth by the program's owners. People have been figuring out non-public internal interfaces and data structures of word processors, spreadsheets, video games, embedded systems, proprietary operating systems, and so on, and then releasing things that patch in and do unauthorized things long before Linux came along. All that's different with Linux is that (1) they can look at the Linux code so it is a lot easier to figure out non-public internal interfaces and data structures, and (2) GPL saves them from contributory infringement (with unauthorized modifications to proprietary programs, the end user might be violating a EULA if they use your work, which puts you on less firm ground).

<comment><USER4> > If you take my module, and compile it into a Linux kernel, and want to > distribute the resulting binary

Binaries. Separate. That is, a kernel module containing or as an independently compiled binary component from the kernel. Does that get infected by the GPL by virtue of its ultimate use, even though it can be distributed separately?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is important to cut these evil companies to size by boycotting them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonder if FSF will care about this? Or if they can help.

<comment><USER7> They don't hold rights for the kernel, so they can't.

Linux Foundation can, as do anyone who contributed to the kernel they are using.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it would be worthwhile to try? I really would love to see the proper and complete source released for this card - it is a cute and capable device, and having to hack module.c to make use of it seems wrong.

<comment><USER8> Find anyone who has a.) contributed code to the kernel (and, thus, holds copyright on it) and b.) wants to pursue a claim of copyright infringement. _Any_ kernel contributor should have standing, AIUI.

 _(standard "IANAL" and "I speak only for myself" disclaimers apply)_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Linux modules have _always_ been exempt from the GPL.

[http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/ch01.html#t6](http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/ch01.html#t6)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not quite. any part that links with kernel must be GPL. other parts may not be. See how NVIDIA/ATI do it for examples</comment></comment>


E-Commerce Is A Bear - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/d233f02d52a5?attempt=2 <comment><USER2> >>In two decades of e-commerce in the US, we have produced only two standalone e-commerce companies of meaningful enterprise value: Amazon and eBay. One went public in 1997, the other in 1998. We haven't had an IPO of an e-commerce company that has gotten to a two billion of market cap in fifteen years, let alone double digit billions.

That's the bad news. The good news: if you wanted to become a millionaire on the web with reasonable but not outsized risk, ecommerce has pretty much been your best bet for the last 15 years or so. Getting an ecommerce businesses to the $1m-$50m revenue range has been done by many folks during that time. They may not be IPOing, but I think they're happy.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention - there are literally ten thousand businesses making over $1,000,000 a year selling their products on Amazon alone. (Over 50% of total Amazon sales are 3rd party sellers, I've worked for 5 of them doing over $1,000,000))

<comment><USER4> Very true. At $DAY_JOB, I maintain the MWS integration and we do high 7 figures a year.

The problem is if your niche is profitable enough Amazon has a habit of moving in and knocking you off their site. So we only sell stuff we control the manufacturing for via Amazon because they've gone after our suppliers for anything else and then undercut us by $0.01.

<comment><USER3> Exactly that. I worked with the manufacturers themselves in jewelry, furniture, and apparel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are other companies that have done well online in ecommerce. Niche focused companies like Newegg come to mind as a great example of how to compete and succeed. Monoprice is another.

Also, companies like Hayneedle have grown large on the model o focused niche e-commerce stores in lots of different verticals.

I don't think any store is going to come along and "destroy" amazon anytime soon. However, one area where other e-commerce retailers will exist is as sellers on the Amazon Marketplace. In some ways, Amazon becomes a large sales channel for online retailers in the same way that Facebook and AdWords are.

Fundamentally, I don't think Amazon cares who is selling what as long as they are making money and their customers are happy. Amazon, like eBay really gets that they are a platform that other sellers add a lot of value to.

<comment><USER6> Note that many of the successes were not venture funded. The extreme margins are just not there for these kinds of businesses to generate the returns needed for investors. The only hope is selling into a frothy market which is willing to ignore the financials and pay for the stock at a silly p/e.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot a good insights in this article. Some random thoughts:

We have a company here in SLO with a network of niche ecommerce sites ([http://www.tennis-warehouse.com/](http://www.tennis-warehouse.com/) and similar). It was founded before Amazon and they're making _a ton_ of money. You just don't hear about it in startupland.

Obviously the author is a little biased about the proprietary merch. angle. Personally, I think NastyGal and ModCloth (and similar like Ruche) are going to be big winners (i.e. IPO). They have huge loyalty and are already moving into the proprietary merchandise angle where the author puts Bonobos (NastyGal has their own line of clothes now).

I love Warby Parker but they will need to move beyond just glasses at some point.

One sector I've never understood is the flash sale sites. To me, they seem nothing more than an ecommerce version of Ross/TJ Maxx/Marhalls/outlet stores with some pretty CSS. Granted, TJX and Ross are both public companies with double-digit billion market caps, so there's something. I just never found them intriguing personally.

EBay seems like the one that really needs to get up-ended. I know a lot of startups are trying to do it via mobile–but is that the best route? I bet most of these other up-and-coming players still do the bulk of their business via desktop browsers vs smartphone (would LOVE any metrics anyone has on this).

<comment><USER8> I hate ebay and I still use it. Ebay has a very _strong_ moat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Considering flash sale sites are emphasized in the article, I don't see how Groupon doesn't break the claim that there are no public ecommerce companies worth over 2B (Groupon market cap is around $4B)

<comment><USER10> Zulily's market cap is around $4.5B right now as well. I believe the criteria for that claim was that there are no other _full-priced_ ecommerce companies breaking the $2B mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started working in the "internet economy" around 2004, when the web was coming back. I worked on several small eccommerce projects and I read a lot of commentary. I really thought ecommerce imminent industrial revolution scale.

      - Affiliate marketing was a buzzword.
      Adwords ads placed by affiliates were common.
      - Dropshipping was a buzzword.
      It seemed like a matter of time before all factories would be dropshippers.
      - Google had just made online advertising make sense
      - Amazon had survived the bust
      - Hosted carts were getting good.

_Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything._ \- I was one of these believers.

But, I didn't believe that there were long term businesses to be had gluing together all these things. If all the eccommerce "site" was going to be doing was paying affiliates and forwarding orders to dropshipping suppliers, that could be all automated. If all affiliate marketers were doing was pointing links to products, they could be 'eaten" by a product search engine like (the promising new Google Products).

Eventually what we would have is factories, postmen & search engines. All the intermediaries wouldn't be necessary.

What I thought I was seeing was the etherialization of the entire retail-to- manufacturing chain. When a product starts getting produced, it puts itself on the ether. People buy it. It gets shipped factory-to-consumer. The efficiencies are mind boggling.

It turned out that all the details I thought would be solved, turned out to be bigger barriers than expected. Even a small-medium retailer that wants to buy direct from factories, will have a hard time, never mind the consumer. Online transactions still suck. Shipping still sucks (in many places). The experience is still "of.f"

That kind of "etheriazation" didn't even happen for digital products.

But, I think that we are still moving in that direction. The Alibaba group IPO is a hint at steps in that direction. They are working closer to the manufacturer end of the manufacturer-consumer chain.

"Modern supply chains" is a big and hard to understand part of the transition too: H&M, Zara, Dell, Tesla. These are all examples.

I'm not sure how to wrap it all up. I think that retail is being eaten by software, but it isn't happening on the 5-10 schedule we expect from "eaten by software" revolutions.

<comment><USER12> > Eventually what we would have is factories, postmen & search engines.

Agreed. And Amazon is a search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I disagree that it is futile to compete with Amazon without a "proprietary X" strategy. Their competitive strategy is well known, and there are some major weaknesses to it...most notably, that it becomes a bigger and more obvious bluff as they stick their hands into more pies. They actually have a very delicate balancing act to perform: maintaining enough profit to convey to shareholders that they arent a sinking ship, but aggressivly expanding and investing in areas that require significant acquisition of expertise. They have the cash flow to survive a long protracted battle, but they would definitely take the hit in their share price...and considering they now have an army of employees that are paid a significant share of their compensation in the form of stock, there is significant cultural resistance to agressively losing money as a form of compeitition.

</comment><comment><USER14> Personal pet peeve, publishers not putting dates on the articles anymore. This article popped up here on HN over a year ago. Great piece, but I'd love to see dates so I know if stuff is still relevant or fresh. /rant

</comment><comment><USER15> Very strange to not mention Shopify in an article like this. They will almost certainly clear a $2B valuation when they IPO.

<comment><USER7> Shopify isn't an ecommerce store–it's an ecommerce infrastructure provider.

My only beef with shopify is that I don't see any of these fast growing etailers using them. I know why (makes no sense to give up that kind of % when you're at huge scale) and I wonder if it will hurt them in the long run. They seem to just help people with the MVP of their store.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's surprising at all. Shopify is software, off the shelf. Most retailers that fit into their model will probably get as good or better a result with shopify as they would on a sub $100k budget with custom software.

Beyond a certain scale, (a) the benefits from controlling the software get bigger and (you don't have to do shipping, promotions, inventory, UI etc in a way that is supported by shopify) (b) the cost of doing your own software is less of a barrier.

Benefits like accessibility to non technical people don't mean anything once you hire specialists to be in charge of things. T

Off the shelf software that a non specialist can use makes sense for SMBs. That's shopify's target market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> artumi-richard I don't believe there is going to be a time when amazon can suddenly flip a switch and start bringing in mountains of profit, and then maintain that for a prolonged period, in it's retail business.

It will be too easy to compete in some areas, indeed it's fairly easy to compete (with amazon) in some areas already.

My customer sells pushchairs (strollers) and prams and cots and so on. There is a thriving independent e-commerce environment in the UK with baby goods.

Amazon is supposed to be this cost-cutting behemoth that through market forces and a willingness to operate on razor slim margins will wipe out any and all competition.

Online4Baby can sell a sleigh cot bed with a drawer at £150 and Amazon's closest is at £179, even with it's 3rd party sellers.

That's just one product, but the continued existence and growth of the independent baby e-commerce operators in the UK is proof that there are areas where you can compete today. And when amazon flip the switch there will be more areas where you can compete.

What I've seen is that it's when the UK supermarkets entered the market, after one of them bought a competitor, that has had the greatest impact over the last 5 years or so.

[0] [http://www.online4baby.com/4baby-sleigh-cot-with-drawer- whit...](http://www.online4baby.com/4baby-sleigh-cot-with-drawer-white)

[1] [http://amzn.to/1mcLcZC](http://amzn.to/1mcLcZC)

<comment><USER16> Outside of the USA, Amazon stinks at selling everything but their core media goods - DVDs, books, CDs, etc.

I shop for just about _anything_ on Amazon outside of those core products here in Canada, and the prices are mediocre-to-terrible. I think a big component is that merchants get their semi-official status with Amazon (whatever that's called) and then see the opportunity to fill out every possible gap in Amazon's product catalogue with a tidy mark-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fantastic article. I love when somebody who has been working on a particular business area writes a casual post like this with lots of hard-earned wisdom in it.

For example, like Marc Andreessen I've been believing that e-commerce will eat a big part of retail sooner than people realise and it will have huge impact on employment and how cities work. But I hadn't understand how tough the entry is for new players, because of Amazon's dominance and low margins.

</comment><comment><USER18> > and if their everyday low prices are available to the entire country via a > mechanical turk algorithm which is guaranteed to beat you, how do you > compete?

...i think this is an incorrect usage of "mechanical turk". this would imply a person behind the 'algorithm' making it go, and, chuckling to myself as i write this, the answer to the question on how to compete might be to make an algorithm that does not i fact work like a mechanical turk!

</comment><comment><USER19> I think there's more of an overlap between eBay and Amazon than mentioned in the article. I sometimes go to eBay if I want something for a lower price than on Amazon (often direct from China) and don't mind waiting for slower delivery times.

He also doesn't mention the new style specialist market sites like tindie and etsy which I think is a new category of retailer. They allow specialist suppliers come together and sell to a captive audience.

</comment><comment><USER20> E-commerce is pretty big if you consider all of those normal retailers that have customers checking things online before they get to the store. If you sell specialist goods or expensive home electricals then those people coming through the door have invariably checked you out online first. However, those sales are recorded as High Street sales, from walk-ins, not 'e-commerce sales'. It is the bricks and mortar stores that dominate e-commerce with the exception of online-only Amazon.

A lot of suppliers don't want to deal with online only stores. To do so upsets their other retailers so you have to be bricks and mortar to get the suppliers. Plus you have to sell at their prices. There are exceptions, the out of date, end of line overstock items can go to 'flash sales' sites but not the new model year stuff.

</comment><comment><USER21> Dunn is correct in his thesis, though it's nothing new with respect to the fact it's been happening in offline retail since forever. It's a given that companies who sell their own stuff will have better gross margin than those who sell other people's stuff.

A relevant comparison right now would be between private label and mass merchandising i.e luxury brands and discounters. Both are selling in essence commodity goods and both are doing very well right now but adopt a completely different approach to retailing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Alibaba is also a huge player in e-commerce, who just filed for a nominal $1 billion market cap IPO, though it's estimated to be in the $200 billion range. [1]

However, Alibaba was founded in 1999, so it was founded around the same time as ebay and amazon, so this might actually further support the author's point.

[1]: [http://www.cnbc.com/id/101598851](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101598851)

</comment><comment><USER23> fta, what does this mean? Bonobos is going to sell in-store or on someone else's site?

       We're on the record as saying that we've raised the last capital we need to
       get to profitability.

       The irony is a big part of how we're getting there is by exiting standalone
       e-commerce.

</comment><comment><USER24> No mention of Etsy?

<comment><USER25> Nope, no mention of Etsy in that article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think there is a message lying on the closing story: The only chance of success for an e-commerce company is not to be pursued by Amazon.

<comment><USER24> Or just get big enough to get bought out by Amazon. I guess it depends what kind of "success" you're aiming at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wait another ten minutes till the Alibaba IPO?

</comment><comment><USER28> _I'm not a stock picker, but I'm long Amazon, very long_

 _I'm extremely long this business model_

What does "long" mean here?

<comment><USER29> He expects Amazon and its business model to rise in value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about anti-monopoly legislation? I didn't see that mentioned in the article, did I miss it?

<comment><USER31> I guess this covers what he thinks of government involvement? "Hell no, this is America. We're capitalists and we're fighters, and today's David is tomorrow's Goliath."

<comment><USER30> US has had good anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement of it in the past including Standard Oil, Telecoms, and Microsoft and even Intel. It seems odd not to mention that possibility with Amazon, if they are a monopoly.

<comment><USER4> Amazon will never have more of the ecommerce market than Google does and Google isn't going to be broken up either.

The Internet creates the illusion of choice and non-technical people don't understand the gravity of the network effects involved. If Amazon had 67% of the ecommerce market, they'd be virtually impossible to dislodge as they'd just squeeze their suppliers like Walmart does, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> E-commerce _is_ the catalog business. It is confusing to call it 'e-commerce' because you will conceptually lose the smooth progression from the printed catalogs to the web.

The Sears stores were, in fact, add-ons that appeared after the catalogs became ubiquitous.

This assertion:

>Said differently, if your business is standalone e-commerce selling third- party brands, good luck. You can't generate enough operating profit to scale beyond getting noticed, counter-attacked, and at best acquired. You are forced into stay right where you are.

...is basically correct for most categories. It's really hard for businesses like Macy's and JC Penny and the rest which are primarily retail businesses to compete in the catalog business. Amazon in particular is moving into apparel and is doing a capable job of it for brands that their customers are already familiar with.

Is this true for the venture funded web catalog business? Yeah, but venture economics are usually terrible for web catalogs, and there are many venture corpses built upon dumb assumptions about 'branding' to attest to this.

The linked puff piece in this article praises NastyGal, which is, again, a venture funded catalog. It is a nice catalog with excellent photography, fast load speeds, and OK copywriting. The selection is also solid with an oft- changing inventory, but I would worry about the bad demographics and limited spending power of the target market. It wasn't so long ago that a similar brand with a similar style (American Apparel) was the new hotness. AA collapsed because of the reversal in commercial real estate and the prolapse in the spending power of its target market. Escalating advertising costs, high shipping costs, and bad market demographics threaten the venture funded nuCatalog model. Why do today's young women buy stuff from Forever 21 etc.? It's because they have no money.

"I'm starting a pants catalog and putting it on the web" sounds a lot less ~web 3.6 future internets~ than something about butt algorithms and personalization. What it still amounts to is selling pants through the mail. Catalogs on the web are a fantastic opportunity for everyone except for venture capitalists, in my view, just because the economics are not venture economics, and VCs are just killing each other pointlessly by bidding up advertising and labor costs for everyone. The opportunity is there, but these are not opportunities that venture investors are really well suited to navigate.

"We sell $80 khakis that fit" is not a great USP because Banana Republic does this also.

The big problem with selling fitted clothes via catalog is that unless the customers are familiar with your fits, they will tend to shy away from fitted clothes, and will instead stick to accessories or items with well-standardized fits like shoes. They bring up all these brands that do well selling via internet catalog that do so because they have elastic waistbands. Lululemons have some wiggle on the fit in the way that men's khakis do not.

Fitted clothes now have a nightmarish sizing problem due to retailers attempting to make fat people feel better about their hyperfattitude by making the sizes on everything totally nonstandard. This has some unfortunate spillover effects online as everyone has to modify their fits.

</comment><comment><USER32> Andy's article mentioned Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara. Are there any books about their story building Diapers.com? I'd settle for a well-written longform article.

<comment><USER33> There's a good profile at Business Week

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_42/b41990627...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_42/b4199062749187.htm)</comment></comment>


Initial Thoughts on Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://acooke.org/cute/InitialTho0.html

<comment><USER3> A very even-handed, honest and accurate evaluation of Clojure, at least from my somewhat limited perspective. I've written a couple of small/trivial programs in Clojure and read a couple of the books ("Joy of" and "Practical"), so I'm far from an expert.

I will say that the online documentation IS atrocious and basically impenetrable, and usable code samples are quite difficult to come by. That being said, it's a very young language, with a very active, helpful and -- dare I say -- friendly IRC channel. (And by the way, a couple of top-notch eval bots)

The documentation piece is easily overcome by spending $20 on an ebook. Joy of Clj and Practical Clj are both very readable & accessible. The code samples are clear and concise, and the explanatory prose is excellent.

IDE support... well, I use emacs. It's widely recommended people use emacs for Clojure simply because it is so well integrated with it. REPL and line evaluation are fantastic in emacs. People who don't like/want emacs tend to use vim's Clojure mode, at least according to IRC.

I will say that the main pain point I had in getting started with Clojure was building the environment. The "best practices" for a Clojure environment has shifted wildly, as far as I can tell, over the past few years, so most/many of the blog posts that describe how to get it set up are wrong, or very dated and unsupported by current software (e.g. Leiningen).

All in all if you are interested in learning Clojure, you are doing yourself an enormous disservice by not joining #clojure and asking your questions there.

<comment><USER4> Your comments about the build system do bring up a good point. Perhaps leiningen or cake should be adopted as a default build tool and integrated into the main code base and website.

I admit that the complaints about the lack of examples in the documentation does confuse me a bit. The documentation sites for C and C++ don't seem to include examples either. For me, tutorials and books were always the go to places for examples. I will agree whole heartedly that some of the 3rd party libraries like ring/compojure need some serious documentation improvement, in particular since the architecture of these libraries is fairly complicated.

Could someone link examples of good documentation they like from other languages to help clarify?

<comment><USER3> C and C++? Dude, there's a whole generation of programmers -- paid, successful, professional, prolific programmers -- who have never even looked at C or C++. Or, if they did, it was for a couple of classes and haven't touched it since.

Making C/C++ documentation the standard for documentation is like making a Chevy Nova the standard for features in modern automobiles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Clojure for maybe 3 months now.

> The documentation is bad.

Mostly true. Initially, I got The Joy of Clojure, which is really good and helped me bootstrap my learning process. Now, if I need to know something, I look up the source. This process seems to work well.

The only problem with this strategy is that sometimes I'll not know of a better way to solve a problem (for example, I only discovered update-in a few days ago. Don't ask what I've been doing before that.)

The best way to solve this problem is by pair programming with someone else who knows Clojure. Failing that, you can hop on IRC; people there are super helpful and willing to write big code samples just to make sure you get it. And be sure to read a lot of source code to pick up common idioms, etc.

> Error messages are unhelpful.

This is true, but here's a quick tip: if you just look for errors that come from your-namespace.core (or whatever) then you can rapidly ignore about 99% of the extraneous junk that pops up.

Unfortunately, there's always that 1/10 chance that your error has no line number. Not much you can do about that, except guess where the reported error is coming frm, and hope for more progress in clojure in clojure :/

> IDE support

Use emacs with swank clojure. Just do it. It's amazing, and you won't look back. I'm saying this as a hardcore vim user with visual mode tattooed on his back. (I have to use viper-mode and vimpulse - which makes emacs pretty much just the same as vim.)

> It suffers from using the JVM

I really don't understand this point. I believe JVM integration is a win all around. It allows for speed without much effort, and it gives access to a huge wealth of libraries without need for a community to build them.

Some closing remarks:

You've got to remember that Clojure is only 3 or 4 years old. If you're (subconsciously or not) comparing it to languages with 10 or 20 years of history, the older languages will always dominate in terms of documentation, support, etc. This is unfortunate for new languages, but also exciting, because it means that even beginners like me and you can pick off low hanging fruit and make important contributions.

</comment><comment><USER6> The second part of the article, titled "Why I tried Clojure then stopped" shows a very shallow understanding of the language. His point is that Clojure heavily uses vectors which aren't efficient when the collection changes size frequently. Clojure does in fact heavily use vector literals in code, but those aren't large enough for their performance characteristics to matter under most circumstances. The use of vectors over lists is to differentiate things that get executed from things that don't; lists are code and vectors are data.

I ran some tests with a function that did nothing but recur/drop on a sequence. There was no speed difference between a vector, a LazySeq (previously evaluated), a PersistentVector and a PersistentList with a million elements. I tried it with ten million and it was 400 times slower with both a LazySeq and a PersistentVector. Attempting to make a PersistentList from the 10M element LazySeq with 'into' resulted in running out of heap space. I did not try again with more heap space allocated.

</comment><comment><USER7> I disagree with the author about how it suffers from being on the JVM. In fact, I'm not quite sure the author even knows what the full scope of that sentiment means. I believe it is quite the contrary. With respect to the JVM not getting any better, it just did. "invokedynamic" was introduced with the latest release of JDK7 and is directly related to the support of dynamic language such as Clojure and JRuby. Using the JVM opens a bunch of doors for a burgeoning language that normally it would have to re-invent. In this case, because it is on the JVM it doesn't have to re-invent the wheel it can re-use existing and proven libraries, performance and monitoring tools, etc. I will conceded that documentation can be spotty, but it isn't any worse than most new languages, and it is continually getting better. Furthermore, if you really want to give issue such strong opinions about a language you ought to spend mor time with it than just a day or 2. IMHO your writeup is shallow and not well conceived.

<comment><AUTHOR> given how stalled the JCP seems to be (the disappointment with 7 and the general sentiment against oracle) i can't see TCO ever being fixed and i wonder how much tolerance there will be for third party expansion (without lawsuits or licencing). i agree that invokedynamic is going to help, but even there you can argue that it took a long time in coming (when did davinci appear? 2008? three long years....)

but i agree it's not a "deep" analysis. did you miss the part where i said i had only used the language for a day? or the word "initial" in the title?

[edit:] actually, there is one more thing i want to say. one thing that has discouraged me from looking at clojure earlier is the agressiveness i've seen from the language's fanboys. fwiw.

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that Clojure runs on the .NET/Mono CLR as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm looking at both Scala and Clojure right now. I'm a .Net guy these days, looked hard at (and fell partially in love with) F#, but - I need to broaden my field.

And - I'd like to see if I can (ab)use those languages to improve my experiences with Android.

So far I'm heavily leaning towards Scala. The documentation seems to make more sense to me. It seems powerful to ~no end~. This post now, while being not totally impressed about all things Clojure, ends with an unqualified 'still more usable than Scala', which threw me off.

More data points, please? If the writer is true and makes sense: What's the reason for this comment? Convert me. :)

<comment><USER10> The difference between Scala and Clojure, in my opinion, is primarily one of philosophy.

* Clojure is strongly and dynamically typed. Scala has a complex type system, which from what I understand many Scala developers don't fully understand or utilize it. Clojure doesn't suffer much in performance, however, because you can sprinkle in type hints for performance after the fact wherever it turns out to be necessary.

* Clojure is a Lisp. The benefits of that are a whole other discussion, but homoiconicity and macros are undoubtedly pretty cool.

* Scala is multi-paradigm, Clojure is unabashedly single-paradigm.

* Scala includes the kitchen sink, Clojure is highly opinionated about what it provides. As Brian Hurt says, "It's not what a programming language makes possible, it's what it makes easy." For one example, you _can_ do immutability in Scala, but you're also free to go in and make a hairball of state if you want. Clojure has decided immutability is good, and _forces_ you to manage state in a controlled way.

* Clojure is less complex (in the sense Stu Halloway uses the word in his talk on Simplicity, [http://blip.tv/clojure/stuart-halloway-simplicity-ain-t-easy...](http://blip.tv/clojure/stuart-halloway-simplicity-ain-t-easy-4842694))

 _Full disclosure: I'm a huge Clojure fan and author of Practical Clojure, and haven't used Scala on any nontrivial projects, so I'm probably somewhat biased._

<comment><USER11> > Scala has a complex type system, which from what I understand many Scala > developers don't fully understand or utilize it.

"When we say that a language is expressive, we mean that it is easy to use. When we say that a type system is expressive, we mean that it isn't."

\- Gilad Bracha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good post. I haven't used clojure yet, or any purely functional or lispy languages, but I'm keen to try. I'm especially interested in macros and dsls, as I feel like I'm always trying to bend ruby and python into structures that seem, from the little I know of lisp, like they really want to use lisp macros, and the more experience I get, the more I feel like that sort of metaprogramming is where the real power is. That said, I'm also wary of trading the comfy, curated library ecosystems of rb/py land for what looks from the outside like the overgrown jungle of Java.

I think I've narrowed my next learning project down to either clojure or node. Node seems perhaps more immediately useful and easier to grok, while clojure may offer more for my overall development as a programmer. I'm not the type to build a throwaway educational app--I have to feel like whatever I'm working on could turn into something real, even if it's unlikely, so if I were to go with clojure, I'd want it to be for its potential to really offer more power and productivity in making something cool and getting it launched, not just as an academic exercise. I have a couple busy months of contract work to go before I'll be able to dive into anything, so it's great to read reports like this while the decision stews.

<comment><USER13> If you're looking for Lisp-like meta-programming, I'm pretty sure you don't want Node. It may be easier to grok, but that's because it's much closer to Ruby and Python than it is to lisp. The interesting thing about Node is its event-driven structure.

For that matter, you might not want Clojure to be your first lisp experience. Have you considered Racket, the scheme dialect? It seems to have lots of useful libraries, in addition to being, I don't know if "cleaner" is the right word, but something like that. A bit more traditional, maybe simpler.

I don't have that much experience with lisp or Node. If someone with more experience can correct my impressions, I would be grateful.

<comment><USER14> As someone who's used Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure; out of that bunch I would highly recommend Clojure for a beginner.

Pros: 1\. Easier to setup (with a single script from <https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen>) 2\. Benefits of a lisp-1, with nicer syntax (fewer confusing parens) 3\. Easier to get started with Emacs + swank-clojure + lein 4\. Wealth of Java libraries 5\. Functional

Cons: 1\. Can't think of any, unless you want Interface Builder and similar, or are desperate to program using call/cc or are in any of the above ways a non-beginner. drscheme is a nice counterpoint though, in that the learning enviroment could include a bit more hand-holding.

IMHO for those coming from ruby/python etc. Clojure is a huge win. With square brackets for function-args, if you turn off or dim parens (emacs has several options such as rainbow-parens) the source looks very much like python.

And with M-q and friends and sexp editing, it behaves better.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. Thanks. Maybe I'll start there, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Please forgive my bluntness: this is not a method of evaluating anything.

The entries have been made every few hours. The author started to have some hopes about Clojure, then _in the same day_ (heck! in three hours) he resigned.

Even geniuses need some time to digest information. The best way to do it is to think hard during a day, relax and let the brain work on it during sleep. You're lucky if some insight comes just another day. But it will come eventually.

I'm telling this not in the defense of Closure, but in the defense of a _proper method of examining the world around_.

And if you like modern Lisps, you can always check Racket. (But slowly :)

</comment><comment><USER16> _IDE support is poor, at least in IntlliJ_

Intellij's La Clojure does a little more than syntax highlight: minimal refactoring support, rainbow parenthesis, smart parenthesis, syntax highlighted repl, great autocomplete support, awesome code navigation, autocomplete for java classes and live templates.

Not to mention that slurp forwards (Edit->Clojure->Slurp Forwards) is really nice. Example. Place your carret on |

      (println|) (reduce + [1 2 3])

Slurp forwards will turn it into

      (println (reduce + [1 2 3]))

</comment><comment><USER17> Several thoughts:

1\. While the complaints about error stack traces and documentation are valid, I would personally use a language for a month or two before publicly publicly criticizing it.

2\. If you want to learn Clojure and/or Scala, I think that it is worth taking an initial detour and learn a little Haskell. Every time I spend a few evenings studying Haskell I feel like I understand Clojure and Scala a bit better.

3\. I think that tool support is very good. I must admit mostly using IntelliJ with the Clojure plugin, but I also use Emacs+Slime for several hours a week.

4\. There are _many_ awesome projects and frameworks written in Clojure - <USER2> me this is the clearest indication that Clojure is an important language and deserves careful consideration for new projects.

</comment><comment><USER18> I used Clojure for 2.5 years. Here are my thoughts.

TL;DR: it's an excellent language, but it's dynamically-typed and that can be a pain.

The language itself is pretty simple. The default collection type is a lazy seq, and that takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's actually a great thing. It allows you to compose filters, maps, et al without taking a hit to performance on account of needless copying.

The language's documentation is mediocre, true, but that doesn't matter _that_ much given that learning a new language is a 6-month (at least) investment. Trust me: if you've never used a functional programming language before, it's more than worth your time.

Some of the error messages are useless, mainly because of Java hangover. Clojure is a very pretty and powerful language built on top of an incredibly ugly one. Impedance mismatches are hardly surprising. Again, this is something that takes a few months to get a hang of, but once you've got a handle on it, it isn't so bad. Clojure is amenable to tracing/printf style debugging, which isn't so bad if you structure your code in an intelligent way. Since the language is mostly functional, the path of least resistance usually _is_ intelligent structuring.

Clojure is a great choice if you're disciplined and willing to do, if not full-on TDD, development with a lot of testing involved. You have to unit test; fast-and-sloppy development will cripple you. It's dynamically typed, and I'll probably always prefer static, but if we accept that the static- vs.-dynamic debate remains unresolved (a lot of smart people with great arguments on both sides) I'd have to give it very high marks within the dynamic category. My ideal language would still be a statically-typed one, but Clojure is more than good enough in practice.

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems to be increasingly popular to denote some notes with trivial contents as a 'paper'. A paper is something that is published in a peer-reviewed journal.

It would, by the way, be nice to get rid of some of all those self-promoting posts. New rule: You can not link to your own shit. Thank you, Sir.

<comment><AUTHOR> i thought self-linking was encouraged? isn't there some guideline that says instead of making a direct post (askhn etc) you should link to your blog?

also, a new account just to takes shots at me? did i shoot your dog or something?

<comment><USER20> It's generally held that linking to your own posts is ok as long as it's relevant to HN (and I don't see any argument that this isn't). I mean, who cares who submitted it if it's relevant?</comment></comment></comment>


Apple reportedly in talks to acquire German HDTV maker Loewe  - <AUTHOR> http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/12/05/12/apple_reportedly_in_talks_to_acquire_german_hdtv_maker_loewe.html

<comment><USER2> For some reason the submitter used the mobile website link, which if you're on a desktop redirects to the homepage. Here is a link that should actually work:

[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/05/12/apple_reported...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/05/12/apple_reportedly_in_talks_to_acquire_german_hdtv_maker_loewe.html)

Blame Apple Insider for breaking one of the basic rules of making a mobile version of your site: if you share the links they should work on _any_ platform.

<comment><USER3> > For some reason the submitter used the mobile website link, which if you're > on a desktop redirects to the homepage.

A little off-topic, but is anyone else irritated by the fact that many websites redirect you to their homepage when you access the desktop version of the site from a mobile device, and vice versa? I don't understand why you would ever implement this sort of behavior.

<comment><USER4> Pageviews, Pageviews, Pageviews.

If I were to put my "suit-hat" on, I'd think like this:

"Most of the population that encounter this inconvenience will think _'oh, I navigated to the wrong version of the page, my mistake. Now, time to find the proper page'._ They aren't going to realize that we could have implemented the logic to properly route the reader to the corresponding page on the other version, mobile or desktop. Furthermore, while I can't quantify how many people get pissed off and become resentful of the site for implementing this kind of behavior, _I can_ quantify how many more pageviews we get from putting up this inconvenience (via logs). I can translate this increased pageview to increased ad revenue (simple multiplication). That means increased (at least superficial) profits! _I better get a promotion next quarter!_ "

(I admit to employing excessive hyperbole, but I wouldn't be surprised if people actually thought like this)

<comment><USER5> There's an old saying... never ascribe to malice what can be perfectly well explained by incompetence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I grew up with a Loewe TV in our household. Loewe products are of a very high quality and easy on the eyes. exactly what Apple would look for, to get started with their TV business.

Side note: Apple has always had a love for German companies. Frog Design made the hardware cases back in the 80s and some of the iPhone parts are from a company in Germany.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget the many design examples Braun has set for apple four decades before their hardware became design pieces.

[http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the- secr...](http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to- apples-future)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is interesting, because it probably means an "iTV" is further away than previously speculated (this summer, end of 2012). Unless Apple decides to rush it, which usually results in a bad product, transforming an acquired company's product into your own takes a while.

<comment><USER9> Very possible. I don't think there's any huge rush to get the iTV out the door. It could also be they plan to get started with 'off-the-shelf' components but hope to do some custom parts for later models or perhaps they've been working with Apple the entire time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What would be nice is if Apple pushed the boundaries of HDTV. One thing that's hard to deny, Apple has always been willing to push old technologies out the window without an apology. With the new iPad screen pushing beyond 1080p HD even on a 10" screen, it'd be nice to see a massive screen with a massive resolution to match. An 85" 4K TV screen with the content and delivery system Apple would be able to force might just make me buy whatever Apple required me to have.

<comment><USER4> But we should keep in mind that while Apple products _are_ on the pricey side, they are firmly within the reach of the common man. Apple products seem to be deliberately positioned below the utmost premium of the price scale for each of their products (ex: you can find laptops with higher performance and a higher sticker price). Their strategy is definitely not "bigger, better, pricier, is better".

If we believe in the "common man stretching his arms" ethos, then the 85" TV screen is definitely out of the question. How many people can even fit a 85" TV into their living rooms? (count me in as one of them)

<comment><USER11> Apple sells premium products, they just have the sales volume and operational chops to sell them at reasonable prices.

<comment><USER12> I think you missed the point. Look at Apple's MacBook line, for example. While it's true Apple makes great products, there are plenty of laptops out there with higher resolution displays, better processors, more RAM, and better video cards.

Like someone else said - Apple makes the BMW of products, not the Bugatti Veyron.

<comment><USER11> It's obvious that Apple doesn't compete on specs. Features like the iPad retina display though, or the laser-drilled sleep indicator on the MacBook Pro, or the unibody enclosures would be dramatically more expensive if they were even available, were it not for Apple's ability to secure them at large scale. There's no massive advantage or design taste in having marginally more RAM, so that's not where Apple's attention is spent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> or the they simply need loewe's patents.

<comment><USER13> Any idea what type of patents are in Loewe's portfolio?

<comment><AUTHOR> tried to research but found only tube related stuff, they had some key patents on how tubes where made.</comment></comment></comment>


BromBone: A Headless Browser as a Service - build on PhantomJS - <AUTHOR> http://www.BromBone.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys. I made BromeBone. I think PhantomJS is a great tool, but it can be a pain to install it, write scripts, and get it performing fast. I hope BromBone can make it easy for anyone to use PhantomJS.

I'd love to hear any feedback about service or the landing page.</comment>


Phase-Separating Proteins May Protect and Regulate Cells - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/phase-separating-proteins-may-protect-and-regulate-cells-20181126/ <comment><USER2> Gilbert Ling's work ([http://gilbertling.org](http://gilbertling.org)) on structured cellular water sounds similar in the sense of involving protein and phase as well as passivity (or lack) of membrane. Does anyone know if there's a generalization of these concepts into something like "statistical molecular mechanics"?

<comment><USER3> Biophysics and biochemistry would both fit the bill.

I would not take the site you linked seriously - it's the ramblings of a crackpot. If you happen to have a biology background and would like to debate this, I'd be happy to elaborate.

<comment><USER2> No need to debate, I have no idea what I'm talking about! But here's another recent study that (to my lay mind) also seems to be in this space: [https://phys.org/news/2018-11-conventional-wisdom-cell- membr...](https://phys.org/news/2018-11-conventional-wisdom-cell- membranes.html).</comment></comment></comment>