Netflix Isn't Doomed - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653182551430322.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

<comment><USER2> The fact that media companies are unwilling to let any one company have a full listing of all movies is one of the major failings of the industry. The videogame industry has the same fundamental problem but the near monopoly of the Steam service actually does them some good in my opinion.

The problem I think is rooted in piracy, at least as it is practiced in first- world countries where convenience is worth more than price. Piracy has several built-in practical issues, because it is frankly inconvenient to be conducting illegal business, and DRM provides another inconvenience. But despite these endemic problems with piracy, it does offer a huge convenience: universality. The legal movie market is fragmented and therefore a pain to deal with, where the black market is very universal, with mirrors of content on all the major distribution channels (torrents, rapidshare/HTTP sites, and USENET are the big three).

The interesting thing to me is that all three of these distribution channels have successful paid services springing up around them. There are private VPN services you can pay for to torrent from a foreign IP. Almost every HTTP distribution site such as rapidshare has a premium service you can pay for to get more volume. And USENET has several news servers that retain data for years and offer direct encrypted downloads. So it is clear to me that people are willing to pay for the benefits these services offer.

If you line up the pros and cons, I would say that legal services win out on almost every count except two: price and universality. The success of grey market services and nearly-universal services in other industries (iTunes, Steam) tells me that price is not the real blocker, if only movie studios would get their act together and let distributors license everything in the world.

I would love to see a world where cable TV providers, digital streaming services and physical retail services all had access to the entire catalog of movies and competed on price and convenience. The current world where services compete with content catalogs and exclusivity just seems unsustainable because it is worse for consumers in the long run.

<comment><USER3> _The problem I think is rooted in piracy, at least as it is practiced in first-world countries where convenience is worth more than price. Piracy has several built-in practical issues, because it is frankly inconvenient to be conducting illegal business, and DRM provides another inconvenience. But despite these endemic problems with piracy, it does offer a huge convenience: universality. The legal movie market is fragmented and therefore a pain to deal with, where the black market is very universal, with mirrors of content on all the major distribution channels (torrents, rapidshare/HTTP sites, and USENET are the big three)._

I think you're overestimating the effect of piracy, because you tend to hang out with young, tech-savvy folks. The average Netflix customer would have no idea how or where to pirate a movie even if they _did_ want to (not to mention there are _some_ people in the world who aren't completely amoral and as such wouldn't).

<comment><USER4> >(not to mention there are some people in the world who aren't completely amoral and as such wouldn't)

You're implying that everyone follows the same code of ethics. You might not agree with it but for some people it's not in the slightest bit amoral to pirate a movie.

<comment><USER5> This is the long term problem for content creators. The current generation of sub-30 year olds have grown up/will grow up in a culture of free things. That idea is flourishing and is what really should scare content creators.

<comment><USER4> >That idea is flourishing and is what really should scare content creators.

The only one scared by this is the content industry, aka the publishers, and the unfortunate people who believe their propaganda and lies. Free culture is a good thing. The internet, for the first time in human history, has made the dream of unlimited sharing possible. Creators will not die out because the industry that imposed copyright on them in the first place is no longer needed.

<comment><USER5> Thanks yes true creators well be fine. Its the content publishers and packagers that will feel the pressure as consumers find ways around them to the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, Amazon may have the best streaming solution right now.

I have a Roku box that gets both, though I usually stick to Netflix. I got an episode that glitched the other day, so I flipped over to Amazon Prime, which turned out to have it, so I watched it there. I then flipped around a little bit to see what was new.

The great thing about Amazon is that their streaming library is way, way more comprehensive. Want something that isn't a part of a Prime subscription? Just pay a rental or purchase fee and watch it right away, without waiting for a disk, running down to Redbox, or whatever. Don't have a Prime subscription at all? Try it for cash for a few times and see whether the subscription fee is worth paying. And since it's Amazon, they probably already have your credit card on file, so there's not much to fiddle with.

If they can get the Kindle Fire in a lot of people's hands (and apparently they can, if the rumors are true), this could be a huge opportunity for them to leapfrog Netflix and Apple.

<comment><USER7> Another good thing about Amazon is that, via Prime, you also get awesome shipping. So for the cost, it is hard to beat.

But, UX-wise, Amazon has a lot of issues.

With their streaming movies, if you leave a program half-way and come back later, you have to search for it all over again to find it and resume the program. There isn't a "recently viewed" section or any of that.

The site is also very static (pretty lame content discovery). Not nearly as compelling as the actual Amazon stores, oddly. It's as if it isn't hooked into your search history or viewing preferences. At. All. The experience is painfully mimicking the store experience, but without the typical Amazon recommendations. It's disappointing, to say the least.

<comment><USER8> I couldn't agree more. The current experience of watching movies on Amazon is _horrible_. They basically bolted a substandard YouTube like player onto the existing Amazon storefront UI. It's a horrible combination for watching movies and I tend to avoid it when possible. I'll check Netflix and see if they have what I want before I ever go to Amazon.

<comment><USER9> I just became a paying Prime member, so I got the streaming included now. I agree, it doesn't feel like a "premium" service. Your description of bolting a crappy player to the storefront is dead on. If it wasn't included with my Prime membership, I don't know if I'd pay for access at any level. Hopefully that experience gets better, having more players in this field sure wouldn't hurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He may be right that no company will get all the movies/series/etc and the market will continue to be fragmented.

But if that happens then piracy will kill the industry and nothing will be able to save them. This doesn't mean that they can survive only if there is a single company you can buy from -- I believe there is space for a number of different companies much like there is Spotify, Last.fm, iTunes store, etc each with a different model for how to provide value to customers -- but that each company must have all, or substantially all, the movies people want.

Because as long as it is easier for people to find what they want on a torrent site or on rapidshare or on usenet they will do that. The movie industry is in competition with the pirates and have no way to beat them on price so they will have to fight on the basis of convenience (which is a battle they can will, as illustrated by iTunes).

If they don't, they are doomed.

And if anybody out there is looking for a new startup, may I suggest that you make a recommendation engine like netflix has but for tv series. The channels (and especially the bundles of channels) belong to the past. But there is good value in recommending good quality tv shows to people who may be interested in them. If Netflix had focused _massively_ on that, they would be in much stronger position against the rights holders.

</comment><comment><USER11> A bit OT, but what about the concept of "movies" in general going away? This is something that we've only had for around 100 years - as part of mainstream society's expectations, it's only a few generations old.

Might we see a major transformation of what we consider 'movies' (both in form and in content) due to delivery constraints, IP issues and such?

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not long on Netflix, and here's why:

1\. Netflix is at the mercy of media companies that control the content. Media companies can basically charge whatever they want for their content on Netflix. If Netflix can't afford it, they'll let their contracts expire and people will no longer get to see the movies and shows they want to watch. Unfortunately, the pricing hikes made consumers realize that it was extremely expensive to spend $16 a month to rent 1 DVD a week with streaming, whereas before at $10 they could justify the cost.

2\. Netflix is in a crowded market with Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Google, and the media companies themselves. Sooner or later Starz, HBO, Warner Bros, and all these other media companies may decide to start their own version of "Netflix" and cancel all their existing contracts entirely. This would be more profitable for them, and would essentially kill Netflix.

3\. Poor customer relations. The Qwikster snafu significantly hurt their brand, and a lot of customers (800k so far) have already left their service. Not only are they going to have to convince their existing customer base to stay, they need to convince more customers to join, as to drive revenue growth.

4\. Netflix is predicting that its combined loss of customers and European launch will push it into the red next year where it may stay for all of 2012, according to a letter to its shareholders. <http://goo.gl/3VdED>

<comment><USER13> I doubt that anybody 'doubled up' and now pays for both the DVD and streaming option. The reason for the DVD service to exist at all is to do with Hollywood accounting and the way the licenses are counted - the idiocy of this has been discussed here before.

The studios can't start their own streaming service simply because they do not have the branding they think they have. This isn't the 1950s, nobody thinks "I must sign up for MGM's service they have all the best action movies". HBO and BBC might manage to make separate pay-for services but are more likely to simply agree an extra cost deal with Netflix in the same way they sell an extra cost package to cable. Does HBO really want to get into the writing and supporting software player business?

Then the studios have a problem that they are in direct competition to their main customers - the cable companies that would be delivering these shows over IP. Can we say serious throttling?

Sooner or later somebody in Hollywood is going to manage to get the childproof top off their Lithium tablets and realize that iTunes hasn't quite destroyed the music industry.

<comment><USER14> Isn't HBO already in the "writing and supporting software player" business with its HBO Go apps? It's already circumventing business like Netflix today.

<comment><USER15> Kinda. In order to get HBO Go you need to be a subscriber, through your cable company. And not ever cable network is providing access to HBO Go, though I hear Time Warner Cable, is close to doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doomed? No.

Doomed to be TBS/FX instead of the cable giants that they were initially pitted against? Quite possibly.

</comment><comment><USER17> If I can't find the movie I want on Netflix, I torrent it. So yeah, I don't think Netflix is doomed either.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to see a live comparison of content available on Amazon Prime (free streaming) versus Netflix, Hulu and any other subscription services. Has anyone built such an interface? Am I just describing something that Boxee/XBMC arleady does?

<comment><USER19> It's not exactly what you're looking for, but Clicker.com is probably the closest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Netflix's biggest issue in my mind is it's content licensing costs. They have gone from under $200M to nearly $2B in just a year. These costs will become a greater proportion of their overall cost structure, especially as competitors vie for the same digital content. The real winners here are the Sony's and Warner's of the world.

Distribution eventually gets commoditized, content is king.

</comment><comment><USER21> Despite the recent downward spiral of NFLX, I'd agree that Netflix isn't doomed - it just has to seriously re-evaluate its branding and messaging. Their success as a company will hinge on their success in shifting the meaning of the Netflix brand (Qwickster was clearly one attempt at that).

Netflix is down, but not out, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it bounce back (maybe not to quite the same peak, but still much higher than it is now).</comment>


If You Love (Or Want To Love) Sales, Watch This - with Fred Bliss - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/fred-bliss-rv-industry-interview/ <comment><USER2> This is the story of a developer who happend to sell RVs for a few months and what he learned. Some interesting points:

1) One of the three options they showed customers was always a bad fit. They showed it to make the option they really wanted the customer buy look esp good because of the contrast.

2) They sold by painting a picture in the customer's mind. They'd tell the customer a story about how she'd drive the RV for a getaway, and help the customer imagine how her life would be different.

3) When they negotiated, they found that it was most effective to go "ask the manager" 3 times with 3 different offers before he'd accept the deal, because, if the manager accepted on the first try, the customer felt like it was too easy and that he didn't bargain enough.

I wonder how these (and the rest of the ideas in the interview) can be used online.</comment>


Show HN: Released – Automate the release process for your software - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/released <comment><USER2> Great product, very streamlined process. Video intro was informative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Google has added "unsupported browser" warnings for Edge Chromium on Google Docs - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1123066219165245440 <comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I think this could just be chalked up to UA string parsing issues. Not worth the trouble for Google to kick up a storm over a marginal market share browser.

<comment><USER2> But the bigger point is why are they even sniffing UA strings?

Google, who advocates for everybody else that you should use standards and proper feature detection, still relies on UA whitelists for their own products.

Then look at google.com homepage itself... not responsive, not in any way modern... many of their own sites perform terribly by their own guidance to other devs.

Google's hypocrisy is sickening and I'm tired of their "we own the web, do what we say" attitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why of course they do this. This is meant to boost market share and scare the tech-illiterate into using Chrome. And it works.

Unsupported browser is a bit of a joke anyways in times of modern web standards...

</comment><comment><USER4> But how do you support a browser that hasn't been released yet? Give them some time.

<comment><USER5> That's... not how the web is supposed to work.

<comment><USER6> Until the day 100% of browsers support 100% of features with 100% correct implementations, or we have only one browser, it will keep working like this.

<comment> maracuja-juice They could just use feature detection instead and will see that the browser actually supports all the features they're using!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why are people assuming that they don't use feature detection just because they have a warning based on UA-sniffing?

Saying that an unknown browser is "unsupported browser" is not the same as saying that "it will break. we will deliberately disable the feature". All it means is "We don't know what this browser is. We have never tested on it. we will not pay as much attention is this unknown browser break".

Just because a browser passes features detection doesn't mean they don't have bugs or weird behaviors.

Why do people assume that Google doesn't both, using feature detection to enable features and also display warning if the user is user some browser they don't know and can't guarantee that they ever test on it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Firefox mobile already pretends to be Chrome for several Google websites.

Edge Chromium explicitly uses a new User-Agent string so websites see it as Chromium, not as Edge (it does not even contain "Edge", only "Edg").

And yet, Google intentionally works against any browser except their own.

<comment><USER9> This sounds like a new chapter in [https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string- history/](https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This came up a few days ago and it turns out Microsoft changed Edge's user agent in the latest update which triggered the message in Google's apps. This is likely a non-issue and will be corrected soon. Keep in mind that Edge is in beta so mistakes will happen.

<comment><USER11> Still, why is Google of all companies sniffing User Agents instead of using feature detection, like they preach?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, I was using google docs with no warning, then I noticed Edge needed an update, and after the update I got the warning.

Not sure if it was MS changing something or Google changing something?

</comment><comment><USER13> Microsoft also made a new version of Skype web app that only supports Chrome and Edge. The browser wars are back.

</comment><comment><USER14> waiting for plugin to edge chrome making google docs to be ms office or look like</comment>


GDPR Hasn't Shown Its Teeth, Frustrating Advocates - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/technology/GDPR-privacy-law-europe.html <comment><USER2> You know.... I'm still waiting for Adtech companies to request realtime log shipping on the backend. You'd set up each server type (Apache, HAProxy, Nginx, IIS, etc) as a log ingester type. And from there, you ask the server admin to install a telegraf like tool that securely sends data to endpoint.

Doing this would allow websites to remove all appearances of tracking code. It just wouldn't be there. Sure makes for some strong plausible deniability.

<comment><USER3> Please don't give them ideas.

<comment><USER2> I'm sure the people working in Adtech (primarily google) have already thought of this long ago. It's only stopped by the fact that many websites are just frontends and have no backend access.

<comment><USER4> The real obstacle is that solution involves trusting the publisher. The biggest reason ads are so bloated these days is all the companies that advertisers, publishers and ad networks tack in to try catch anyone cheating anyone else (in terms of JS at least, obviously higher res video content also contributes, but at least nominally most ad companies try pick something appropriate for the connection as starting playback quickly is in their interest too)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Getting the strong impression many commenters here are reading the headline and not the article (and tbh it kind of buries the lede), so TL;DR:

> _At the center of the dispute is Ireland, which has outsize influence over > the law's enforcement because Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter > are all based there. The country is responsible for leading more > investigations, 127, than any other country in Europe, according to Brave._

> _[...]_

> _Last year, Ireland's data protection regulator sought a budget increase of > €5.9 million. It got a third of that amount._

> _Helen Dixon, the chair of Ireland's data protection agency, said she was > frustrated by the budget restrictions but defended the work of her office._

> _She graded Ireland's performance an "A for effort" but a "C-plus /B-minus > in terms of output."_

Basically, the current Irish government administration, responsible for funding the DPC, is not a fan of GDPR.

For anyone interested in reading more about the Irish DPC's frustrations, Cianan Brennan[0][1] of the Irish Examiner is pretty dogged in his coverage of all things Helen Dixon & DPC (he's basically the main journalist covering GDPR in the main country tasked with enforcing GDPR), including her various[2][3][4] battles with the Irish government on their own GDPR- compliance.

[0] [https://twitter.com/ciananbrennan](https://twitter.com/ciananbrennan)

[1] [https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/authors/cianan- br...](https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/authors/cianan-brennan/)

[2] [https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/over-6700...](https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/over-6700-data- breaches-reported-to-data-protection-commissioner-976403.html)

[3] [https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/ci...](https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/cianan- brennan-dixon-determined-to-face-all-challenges-982811.html)

[4] [https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/psc- data-...](https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/psc-data- protection-policy-updated-after-doherty-loses-seat-981078.html)

<comment><USER6> sorry, but the Irish DPA is bought. Even with a low budget she could have at least start investigations, instead nothing. The GDPR will be revised this year (I believe), the corrupted Irish DPA and the OneStopShop approach is the main issue. Other DPA's are furious btw.

<comment><USER5> > _she could have at least start investigations, instead nothing_

She's started plenty* of investigations but:

(a) for large cases, the legal resources of the defendant have to be considered and a case has to be viable. Building these cases takes time

(b) even for smaller cases, actual court procedures take (too much) time, so the cases she has taken are largely still in train

* A good portion of those cases appear to be directly against the Irish state, rather than any private corporation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of this gets into whether you think punishment is the desired outcome or behavioral changes.

There has been a real and definite shift in the industry post GDPR away from "we might need this data someday" to "please delete it at the first opportunity".

<comment><USER8> Punishment is always the desired outcome in the journalist world. If something dramatic does not happen, then from the perspective of NY Times nothing has happened at all. There is no story, no people to smear that were the villains, no heroes to glorify that fought for GDPR. The reality is, that the mundane often impacts our lives much more than the exciting. Small incremental changes that we do not notice shape our reality. The same way that NY Times slowly became a parody of itself, the GDPR slowly changes the web. I still think that we need more time to put this into perspecive and we need more initiatives that build on top of GDPR really stands for.

<comment><USER9> Underrated comment.

Perhaps because it's laying out a mundane case, rather than making bombastic claims...

<comment><USER8> The point is that we often overlook the things that really shape our reality. What every ideological and/or political movement knows is that no one will fight the ideology if it's fed in very small increments. We will simply overlook it as insignificant. If you try to nitpick on small things then you're sure to become the laughing stock. It's the same mechanism, but for once it works in our favor.

I was a bit sad when I saw the initial downvotes, since this account was already 4 times below zero points in total and I don't think there was anything that broke the rules in that comment. I guess I was looking down on NYT, but at this point the collapse of journalism is not an opinion, but a measurable truth. You can just measure it by average salary in the domain. I don't think there are any sources lately that you can trust 100%.

<comment><USER10> You've been paying a man to warn you if there are tigers on the main street. Every day for the last 10 years he's been telling you there are no tigers on the main street and you've taken the main street or he's told you there are tigers there and you've taken the side street. Today he said that there was a tiger on the main street but you took it anyway and didn't see the tiger. Has his trustworthiness collapsed or was he always scamming you?

<comment><USER9> _> and [you] didn't see the tiger_

Of course; a tiger keeps hidden and attacks humans from behind.

Jokes aside, your fable is excellent and I hope to use it in the future.

Other than that, I have no useful answer beyond re-iterating my earlier assertion: the media was always bad. Now we can see it better than before.

Perhaps _the tiger_ was a red herring all along. There just might be a _fat cat_ getting fatter in the city hall that we were too distracted to pay attention to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> GDPR has caused significant behavioral change for many companies. There hasn't been much high-profile enforcement yet, granted, but I'm not sure that that's actually that unusual for an (in EU terms) shiny new regulation.

<comment><USER12> People keep saying this, and to some extent it's very true, I've witnessed it myself in companies. But I mean, the aim of GDPR was never to make resonable data collection that is done in a safe way by "the good guys" hard.

The question is rather how many companies that pre-GDPR stored my data in ways I (as a technical person) would consider unsafe, or used it in ways I would consider "bad", that have changed their ways.

My local bowling alley still stores my password in plaintext and use an outdated Wordpress-plugin for bookings, and Google stills knows as much about my behaviour online and IRL.

<comment><USER13> Isn't the whole point that you can stop them from collecting your data and also get them to delete your data if you want? Presumably you could get Google to delete all of your data. Is this not the case?

<comment><USER12> I don't actually know, honestly, what the point was/is exactly. Partly to affect long-term change in how personal data is viewed (less "gold mine, let's collect it all" and more "potentially toxic asset, let's collect as little as possible").

But also partly deletion and opt-out also of course, and that probably works well, for those who use it. But with the huge implementation cost (cited by PwC as upwards of 150 billion USD in the U.S alone [0]), I wonder what the price per delete request or opt-out is.

[0]: [https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/24/gdpr-after-one- year-...](https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/24/gdpr-after-one-year-costs- and-unintended-consequences/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know, this article maybe makes sense through an american lens, i'm open to that idea.

From my view, GDPR has had a few impacting benefits to me personally already.

I've been notified of security breaches 3 times now that i'm confident either wouldn't have been reported or would but 18 months later. I've been able to move my ISP as a result. Getting closer to that idea that customers will punish you if you mess up - in this case i was able to learn about their mistake thanks to GDPR.

<comment><USER15> I agree. Additionally the added ability to get my data back via take-out features from most services has been a general boon for me, and a major upside to the law. A far more important feature of the GDPR in my eyes than vindictive punishments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hasn't shown its teeth... in America. For anyone working with even remotely liable user data in the EU, GDPR has been a massive change.

<comment><USER17> "shown its teeth" specifically means penalties or similar remedies when talking about laws. It doesn't mean that it hasn't had an effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes and no. I can't lie, I was really hoping for a significant company to be put up against a wall and shot, maybe a major retailer that won't let you check out online without giving a phone number or whatever. The notion of data being a toxic asset[1] still hasn't really sunk into the higher ranks of most large orgs.

However, I've found GDPR deletion requests to be a pretty strong cudgel. For the last 10 years or so I've been sending deletion requests for accounts when I no longer need them. Prior to GDPR, about 50% of responses would be along the lines of "in the nicest possible way, we don't care about you enough to do that so please fuck off". Reading between the lines, I assumed that about 50% of websites were implemented poorly and didn't properly support deletion.

Post GDPR, all but one request have been given a polite "we have done as you have requested, we hope to see you as a customer again". GDPR has both legitimized the process of requesting that your data has been deleted after you're finished using a service, and has legitimized the concerns of all those developers who were never able to get engineering time to properly support account deletion.

So it's been a success, it could be succeeding more but I'm not unhappy. I would still like to see at least one company get ICBM'd in order to remind larger entities that they've got responsibilities to society too, not just their shareholders.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic.html)

<comment><USER19> Can you call it "your data" if it is not being stored on your hard drive?

<comment><USER20> If I write your birthday on a piece of paper is it "your" birthday?

<comment><USER21> It's his birthday, but he definitely doesn't own your piece of paper now.

<comment><USER18> Nor do I own the banks hard drives, but I do own the money stored on them.

Much like how if I leave my phone in a taxi, either deliberately or accidentally, I don't own the taxi, but I do still own the phone.

<comment><USER21> I think the analogy falls apart when you consider the movement/creation of singular objects (like your phone or your money) versus new/copied objects (a copy of his birthday on your singular piece of paper).

If you create a replica of a taxi you rode in, you own that copy.

If you take a photo of someone, you own that photo.

If you write that person's birthday down on a piece of paper, you don't own their birthday now. You own the piece of paper with their birthday written on it, and they have no claim to that paper or what's written on it.

<comment><USER18> If you go through someones wallet and write down all the details required to open a bank account in their name, you do not suddenly own all those details, and you may not do with them whatever you wish as if you did.

Opening a bank account using those details is identity theft, because they are not /your/ details. No one cares if you owned the paper you wrote them down on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I really learned from GDPR and its rollout and its subsequent lack of enforcement is that laws written with regulators being the only ones able to enforce it are just political light shows, they achieve little of value. It is easy for a government to effectively sidestep not implementing the law by defunding the organisation that would do the enforcement or putting a person in charge who doesn't pursue the big breakers.

Since individuals can't bring GDPR lawsuits themselves for breaches and fines charged and governments have largely stopped effective enforcement it has become a pointless law. Any company complying now has missed just how little regulators care and are hampering their business for no good reason, it is still open season on customer data. It has the potential to charge in the future, a government change and some adjustments in the commissioner's office in a country could suddenly make the law come into effect but right now it's looking like companies have another half-decade of ignoring this law at least.

It could have been useful, in practice it just made websites more annoying to use and those complying fully are exceptionally rare.

<comment><USER23> >Since individuals can't bring GDPR lawsuits themselves

They absolutely can:

Article 79

Right to an effective judicial remedy against a controller or processor

1\. Without prejudice to any available administrative or non-judicial remedy, including the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority pursuant to Article 77, each data subject shall have the right to an effective judicial remedy where he or she considers that his or her rights under this Regulation have been infringed as a result of the processing of his or her personal data in non-compliance with this Regulation.

2\. Proceedings against a controller or a processor shall be brought before the courts of the Member State where the controller or processor has an establishment. Alternatively, such proceedings may be brought before the courts of the Member State where the data subject has his or her habitual residence, unless the controller or processor is a public authority of a Member State acting in the exercise of its public powers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> We are moving into a world where every thing we do will leave a data history behind. To take a single example of a single act of buying a milk at the store: The store want a record in order to manage inventory, sale history and sale predictions. They also want location path data in order to determine effectiveness of product placements. Your bank want a record in order to facilitating money exchange and manage money laundering laws. The recipient bank want a record too to do the same for the store owner, but also to keep track of the market which the store is under. The government want a record in order to know how much money has changed hand and for what product in order to determine taxes for the seller and buyer. The mall want a record for the location of the store you bought the milk and how you traversed the mall to reach it in order to evaluate property values and advertise placements. Other milk producers and milk alternatives want a record in order to make a better case arguing for their competing product. The secret police want a secret record in order to verify that you did not buy something that could be made into a threat. The regular police want a copy of the record and a video record in case a crime happened while buying the milk. The local government want a location record in order to manage traffic of people who travel around in order to buy milk. The health department want a record to help researcher determine the potential benefit of milk drinkers.

GDPR is really just a small stop gap to manage a fraction of all the records we leave behind. It is unlikely to be the last one trying to create the laws needed to handle the fact that everyone a record of everything everyone does, but that we also likely going to end up where everyone has a record of everything everyone does because it saves money, makes strategies more efficient and reduces the need for manual labor. Unrestricted data records has a history full of recorded abuse, and a lot of current use today is explicitly designed to harm people by manipulation and predatory strategies. GDPR is a small step forward, but it is mostly just testing the water for the real legal work needed to make the behavior of all those data collectors safe enough that a person can do something as simple as buying milk at the store without exposing themselves to harm.

<comment><USER25> You completely missed the point: GDPR is not a "small step" in the right direction, but counter-productive and detrimental for future efforts. Big companies will manage to comply with the legal requirements but ignore the spirit and intention of the GDPR, small companies will have more stumbling stones in competing with big corporations.

<comment><USER23> The GDPR _is_ a small step.

It's an evolution of data protection rather than a revolution.

All of the fundamentals included in the GDPR were in the Data Protection Directive from 1995!

Of course, the extraterritoriality is new, the level of administrative fines is much higher, but it's not like this popped out of nowhere.

<comment><USER25> > _The GDPR is a small step._

Some people wish it to be, but it isn't just because they do.

In order to be a small step forward rather than backwards, it would have to show actual positive results. It doesn't, all major data leeches claim to comply with it while retaining more data than ever before, all small companies struggle with it without bad intentions. Don't be deluded by idealism, look at the facts. It's about as effective at keeping your data safe as cookie banners are in preventing cookies, while having similar adverse effects on everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> IMO the only way GDPR would have worked the way its advocates hoped is if the enacting statutes created a private right of action. (I don't even know if private rights of action is a thing in the EU.)

In the US some (though not enough) consumer protection or civil right laws expressly grant plaintiffs the right to bring their own lawsuit in court. There are edge conditions depending on the laws or jurisdictions involved. For example, some laws provide a private right of action only if the state agents decline to pursue the case. While other laws may require the plaintiff to give notice to some agencies first.

Otherwise, laws that may look bold on paper become toothless based on inaction by the state agents that must enforce them. In contrast, if a law includes a private right of action and reasonable fee shifting provisions, private attorneys will pick up the slack and then some.

For example, in the US, the medical privacy regime, HIPAA, is considerably weakened by its absence (as far as I know) of a private right of action. For example, if your medical privacy is violated by your HR department or your doctor, you cannot sue under US Federal HIPAA laws, you need to sue under some other law and prove real damages. Note, there may be other laws that cover the same facts, such as, state privacy laws, or the like. And, in some circumstance, proven HIPAA violations may be used as evidence of negligence, or the like, to meet the requirements of the other laws.

<comment><USER23> >IMO the only way GDPR would have worked the way its advocates hoped is if the enacting statutes created a private right of action.

Article 79

Right to an effective judicial remedy against a controller or processor

1\. Without prejudice to any available administrative or non-judicial remedy, including the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority pursuant to Article 77, each data subject shall have the right to an effective judicial remedy where he or she considers that his or her rights under this Regulation have been infringed as a result of the processing of his or her personal data in non-compliance with this Regulation.

2\. Proceedings against a controller or a processor shall be brought before the courts of the Member State where the controller or processor has an establishment. Alternatively, such proceedings may be brought before the courts of the Member State where the data subject has his or her habitual residence, unless the controller or processor is a public authority of a Member State acting in the exercise of its public powers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What hasn't worked: Expensive bureaucracy that big incumbents can easily afford to navigate but new entrants would be easily crippled by?

Shocked. /s

<comment><USER28> It's damn near impossible for very small organizations to follow the GDPR in good faith, especially without a lawyer. The intent is good, but not the execution.

<comment><USER29> What bs. There's plenty arguments against it but people act like it's some arcane thick book with legalese written in runes. That's very far from the truth and a quick read-trough the law to identify where it applies to you won't leave many with much if any questions

<comment><USER30> A quick read through doesn't necessarily make it easy to follow. For example, Sarbanes Oxley compliance is a huge business, that is fairly expensive for a company to implement correctly. And the compliance requirements of it stems from essentially one paragraph of law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's a handy website to keep track of GDPR enforcement and fines:

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

</comment><comment><USER32> Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

GDPR did a lot to shift the window back and put the behaviour of the big adtech companies in the sunlight for a while.

The enforcement side is definitely lacking, and black mirror might still have done more to shift opinion, but it's not all bad.

Consumers all over the world now have the ability to request data takeouts and deletions, etc. And anecdotally I've noticed more and more sites honouring the opt in requirement for 3rd party tracking scripts.

It's a solid improvement over the status quo of 2017.

<comment><USER33> Sadly it mostly still is opt out options.

Not later than this morning I wanted to access a forum post. So I go to the privacy page (as a popup proposed me) and then arrived to a page with the list of all the « partners » with access authorized by default.

Around 50 of them. No button to refuse all and had to do it one by one. And I visit sites like that every day.

I agree that there have been a lot of progress but we are still far from completion.

<comment><USER34> I'm an American, so forgive my ignorance, but I thought GDPR required explicit opt-in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> All the GDPR did was make it harder for the smaller players. It was a massive win for Facebook and Google.

<comment><USER36> That's how regulation works mostly. Even if the intentions are noble, this has happened so many times that politicians should know better.

<comment><USER37> Come on. Intentions are never noble. All politicians have their respective owners. Be it officially through lobby groups or unofficially by local oligarchs without middle men.

<comment><USER38> > _All politicians have their respective owners._

Who owns you, or do you consider yourself immune?

<comment><USER37> Am I a career politician? But actually you might be right - just noticed Massie[0]. If he was to act like a typical politician he would let the food shortage strike and only then go solving it to gather extra points. Rand Paul also seems to have something like a conscience. Guess when such people would have any say on real matters though. Never. And with nation states still being the main actor, there is no such person in Brussels, unless we count the hell- raising clowns like Korwin-Mikke and Farage who raise hell for the sake of raising hell.

0\. [https://noqreport.com/2020/04/26/rep-thomas-massie-has-a- pla...](https://noqreport.com/2020/04/26/rep-thomas-massie-has-a-plan-to- prevent-the-coming-food-shortage/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> GDPR was meant to spite google, it ended up killing all their competition. Who knows, maybe that was the plan?

<comment><USER40> Main Problem with the Big Companies is that these are located in Ireland.

The Commissioner there has no resources [0] to pursue these cases but he can't be bypassed when it comes to fees (at least convention of the other Commissioners if not by the GDPR itself).

The other Commissioners are becoming more and more upset with this and planing to institute a board to overrule Ireland's Commissioner. But all of this is very slow...

You can't imagen the frustration over this on part of the other Comissioners

[0] [https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double- wo...](https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double-workforce- new-dublin-office/)

<comment><USER41> > [0] [https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double- > wo...](https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double-workforce- > new-dublin-office/)

/r/nottheonion

> The other Commissioners are becoming more and more upset with this and > planing to institute a board to overrule Ireland's Commissioner. But all of > this is very slow...

Interesting, do you know of a news article or something similar about this?

<comment><USER40> Alvar Freude (Employee at a DPO in Germany) talked about it in "Auslegungssache"[0] Episode 9. The whole talk is in German, though.

[0][https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Auslegungssache-Der- Datensch...](https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Auslegungssache-Der-Datenschutz- Podcast-des-c-t-Magazins-4571821.html)

<comment><USER41> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What I don't like about the GDPR is how it handled cookies. We could have much tighter control and explicit consent at the browser level, which makes sense because it's a browser feature.

Instead of something useful like that, we have annoying popups on millions of websites.

<comment><USER43> The cookie thing is a myth most likely perpetuated by the cancerous advertising/marketing industry in an attempt to make the regulation look more annoying than it is.

Cookies for strictly necessary technical reasons (like a session cookie set when you log in) or those that contain non-identifying information like language or font size do not require disclosure or consent.

Oh the other hand, _any_ tracking technology that collects personal information (whether cookies, local storage, server logs or browser fingerprinting) for non strictly necessary purposes (like analytics, A/B testing or conversion tracking) needs explicit, opt-in consent, and as far as I know personal information includes IP addresses or anything that can be used to identify someone uniquely with reasonable accuracy (so browser fingerprints fall in this category too).

When consent is requested, it should _freely given_ , so if saying yes is easier than saying no (which often requires unticking hundreds of checkboxes one by one or waiting 30 seconds for a fake "we are applying your ad preferences") then that consent is considered invalid and you may as well just not ask for it in the first place because you're in breach of the regulation anyway, but at least you wouldn't be annoying your users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In France, for example, the GDPR law haven't still been transcribed in French law.

Even more, the IT privacy agency (CNIL) gave time to adv. parties to comply, as in « you can continue to do as usual for now » Big shame.

<comment><USER44> Regulations, unlike directives, don't have to be transformed to national law to be applicable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Frankly, I think advocates are just wrong about what GDPR means. A lot of people expected every tech company to face huge fines, because they got it in their heads that the regulation grants you a right to opt out of targeted ads, and as far as I can tell that's just not true.

The obvious explanation for why "no major fines or penalties have been announced against Facebook, Amazon or Twitter" is that those companies don't have any major violations.

</comment><comment><USER12> IMHO GDPR has been (as of yet at least) a net loss to society. It hasn't, and probably never will, change the status quo of the biggest data hoggers (Facebook, Google et.al). It have increased my annoyance on the web with even more crap interruptions about cookies etc. It has increased administration in so many places in our society where data is collected in totally non-harmful ways with no real functioning opt-out, like phone numbers in kids football associations or contact info for parents in schools etc. Remember that even data stored on papers are covered by GDPR.

I think my gripe is that organisations becoming "GDPR compliant" mainly has created systems for collecting consent or focusing on which cloud platform to not use, rather than creating any real change by e.g not using systems with piss poor security to begin with.

Almost like if we created regulation around banning bad roads, and all that happened was that people had to start signing papers saying they accepted the risk of bad roads.

But I guess it will take some time to see real change, hopefully it will come someday.

<comment><USER46> >Almost like if we created regulation around banning bad roads, and all that happened was that people had to start signing papers saying they accepted the risk of bad roads.

Really?, did you not see the popups with the giant list of "partners" that have access to your data, you need to click on the show details button but now you can see the shit, where in your road example people would not see the wholes in the road.

I am fine with even more transparency.

<comment><USER12> I mean it's nice that it's transparent and even opt-out. But would be interesting to see the stats of how many people click the details-link on pages like [https://www.elle.com](https://www.elle.com) or even [http://techcrunch.com](http://techcrunch.com).

My hunch is that its way less than 0.01%.

Imho it would been as effective, and much nicer, if they could just assume consent and have a setting accessible via the footer. The small small percentage of people caring about it enough to be bothered would find it as easily, and the rest could just go about their day as before.

<comment><USER46> You only click Accept once and you never see that popup again on that website. Do you also dislike that all emails have now one paragraph on how to unsubscribe and should be a small link hidden somewhere in the footer?

<comment><USER47> I would argue that those buttons train consumers for worse in the future. Next time it will be a button that says we retain access to your mind while you are using this service and all the consumers will just agree like they did before.

It's as flawed as false sense of security or all tos are legally enforceable click check mark buttons. They aren't. Stop trying to pretend they are and cause a chilling effect in people. It's social_manipulation!

So yeah I absolutely hate that banner. it's terrible.

<comment><USER46> >Next time it will be a button that says we retain access to your mind while you are using this service and all the consumers will just agree like they did before.

This is not true for all users, some users will always click on the big blue button and the problem is not GRPR but shit designers, like PayPal is pushing me into some new thing with a page with a giant blue button and a super small "No now" link, shit companies will always be shit , they will always screw you but this time GRPR forces them to be transparent on how bad are they screwing you.

The popups are annying but you know what, some users are deciding to click NO, and go to a different web page. So if news website A has annoying popups and shit design with tons of ads users will find eventually the website with less ads and popups or will install an extension that block all the tracking and ads. So if the GDPR popup will convince some people to install ad blocking to block the popup and the tracking then is great.

Power users like myself are running with JS off and white-listing good websites to allow JS. If some link shared here is not opening then I just read something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Requiring everyone to post those stupid cookie popups is not going to win you any advocates.</comment>


Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls <comment><USER2> Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day.

So not being able to rely on search, people have to memorize companies' urls, to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string. Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more important in China than elsewhere.

Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

<comment><USER3> > Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

I'd rather them wait until they are no longer required to censor their results and track their users on behalf of the state security apparatus.

<comment><USER4> Most people would rather want this because you don't have to bear the consequences. To simulate the experience, I suggest you start using a censored Bing exclusively while dialing down its search relevancy 30-40% for a start. Make sure you also realize the political reality that your rulers would rather go North Korea than giving up censorship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated > their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and > 10010.cn, respectively.

[https://9292.nl](https://9292.nl) is an example of this outside China, taking its name from 0900-9292 (a phone number you can call to get public transport travel directions, now largely replaced by the website/app).

<comment><USER6> Or [https://www.1177.se](https://www.1177.se) for Sweden, the health care number/website. The NHS in the UK has [https://111.nhs.uk](https://111.nhs.uk) as the URL for their new online emergency service.

<comment><USER7> Nitpick: 111 is the urgent but non-emergency service. The first page asks you to "Check it's not an emergency" (signs of a heart attack/signs of a stroke/severe difficulty breathing/heavy bleeding/severe injuries/seizure), and to call 999 if it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888.

It certainly added wealth to the phone number holder/assigner.

<comment><USER9> I always wonder how much lawyers in the US pay for their phone numbers... 444-4444 or 888-8888 and so on. I would guess it's even more?

<comment><USER10> I see bus ads for an accident lawyer in California with the phone number (800) 800-0000. I wonder if that phone number is more valuable than 888-8888.

<comment><USER11> Probably pretty similar in California advertising to non-Chinese. To Chinese, 8 is a lucky number, so more 8s would be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember going to 4399 for games when I was an elementary student.

Part of the reason why numbers are so pervasive, in the 51job.com sense, is that if you were to type out the pinyin for "i want a job" in Chinese... the url would be insanely long and unwieldy. 51job.com is easy to type and remember (also they have a billion ads everywhere). This means if you dont have numbers, you will try to use the initials for all the pinyins in your name. Jing Dong becomes jd.com

4008-517-517.com for McDonald's delivery is from their delivery phone number, which they had years before the URL. You would hear 4008 517 517 with a jingle on the radio all the time. The last time I heard it was probably 10 years ago but funny how the tune of these oft-heard ad jingles never fully leave your consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if this will ever evolve in emoji in URLs. I watched a short video about a guy who is squatting on most of the emoji domains

<comment><USER14> I now have the image of a man squatting over the pile of poo emoji. I accept I will never grow up.

<comment><USER15> I guess this site is relevant here: [https://xn--ls8h.la/](https://xn-- ls8h.la/) (<pile of poop emoji>.la)

But apparently most TLDs don't support emoji URLs yet.

<comment><USER16> the biggest barrier, in my opinion, is the ugly punycode links. most browsers still do not render them properly, and if they did, it would have false positives. (i.e. there is no way to tell if a string is intended to be punycode or not)

<comment><USER17> It's not as much a matter of "still not rendering them properly", but more that they are doing it on purpose to avoid homoglyph attacks. Earlier browsers more OFTEN used to render them "properly", I believe.

<comment><USER18> Of course, this only helps against _foreign_ letters, you still have people squatting or putting phishing on common typos of pure asci urls with basically the same result.

Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their native language :(

<comment><USER19> > Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their > native language :(

Why not?

For example, [http://xn--h1alffa9f.xn--p1ai/](http://россия.рф/) renders the URL in Russian for me in the URL bar in all of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (though Chrome converts to punycode if I copy the URL from the URL bar, unfortunately). [Edit: Also, it looks like HN's linkifier converts to punycode; what I wrote there is "россия.рф" and that's what HN has stored if I edit this comment.]

In more detail, for Firefox (where I can find this sort of thing quickly in the code), there are the following things affecting the display:

1) The "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference. This defaults to false, so punycode is not forced across the board.

2) There is a bunch of preferences for what toplevel domains are "safe" for use with non-ASCII chars by default no matter what. That option currently defaults to "false" as far as I can tell.

3) URLs the fit in the Highly Restrictive profile defined at [https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/#Restriction_Level_Dete...](https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/#Restriction_Level_Detection) are shown as non-punycode as far as I can tell.

4) There's some heuristic detection for URLs using multiple scripts at once and blocking that.

There are also preferences to force-allow or force-deny use of IDN with certain characters; those sets are empty by default.

In any case, the default behavior looks to me like a single-script URL in any language would be shown in IDN. Do you have a counter-example?

[https://searchfox.org/mozilla- central/rev/75294521381b331f82...](https://searchfox.org/mozilla- central/rev/75294521381b331f821aad3d6b60636844080ee2/modules/libpref/init/all.js#2043-2189) has the relevant preferences with their default values as of today.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, and have been involved peripherally in some of the IDN work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is also an interesting way to go about dealing with the scarcity of domain names

</comment><comment><USER21> >though the U.S. recently agreed to hand it over to a "global multi- stakeholder community" in 2015

Hmm, it seems like the title should have a year after it.

</comment><comment><USER22> The last sentence is odd:

> You can't blame other countries for wanting to tell the American 250s to > 0748.

250 = idiot

0748 = go die

Which translates:

> You can't blame other countries for wanting to tell the American idiots to > go die.

I'm not sure why the author felt the need to include that.

(Edit: Am I wrong for questioning the article?)

<comment><USER23> It doesn't seem odd given the context of the full paragraph, which starts:

> Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet's built-in > bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it's still a fundamentally > American system.

It describes how URLs are frustrating and difficult to use for non-English speakers. Given that, it makes a joke about that frustration using the URL- hacks that are often used in China, which is what the whole prior article covers.

<comment><USER24> I get that the author wanted to express frustration and be clever, and he had limited examples of "number-based slang" to do so with, but I agree with the parent comment that calling Americans "idiots" and telling them to "go die" seems excessively hostile.

Though I also can't imagine "go die" has the same force in Chinese that it would have in English if it's a common slang.

<comment><USER22> That's my thought too. Apparently HN does not agree which I think is sad. It's interesting information in the article, but being hostile just because the Internet was pioneered in the U.S. and thus a lot of U.S. customs are baked in seems excesive. I like anime, but I'm not hostile to the Japanese because the shows I like are spoken in Japanese with only English subtitles.

<comment><USER25> Anime isn't deeply embedded in society the way the internet is now. Imagine if you had to learn some Japanese just to access your bank account or buy plane tickets.

<comment><USER22> I have (Japanese, Spanish, and Korean). I didn't hate the host cultures because of it.

<comment><USER25> I don't mean imagine if you had to do that in order to live in those countries. I mean, imagine if you had to do that in the US, to access your American bank down the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 420.com certainly works!

</comment><comment><USER9> Mods, this is from 2014, maybe add that to the title?

</comment><comment><USER27> This article has been discussed 5 years ago (at its release). [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076)

</comment><comment><USER28> please put the year [2014] after this title. Ancient as the Chinese culture it's about heh

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076)</comment>


How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@aayushu/how-i-make-400-a-month-in-passive-income-by-self-publishing-68fa948edff5 <comment><USER2> 1\. Active, not passive: This is income made by actively promoting the book upon its release as stated in the post.

2\. Past, not future: This is historical revenue based on active marketing. It is unlikely that it will bring the same income in the future without marketing.

3\. Revenue, not profit: The nice cover design is something others would need to pay for if this is to serve as reference, but this cost isn't taken into account.

TLDR: He isn't making $400 ($360) in passive monthly income and it is unlikely he will in the future.

<comment><USER3> People are constantly misusing the term "passive" when they mean "residual."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mark my words this won't last.

It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the fundamental problem of user generated content.

At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book. Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a given creative person will go to zero.

The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks.

Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.

<comment><USER5> There's also hundreds if not thousands of blog posts on certain topics that have dozens if not hundreds of books/video courses made for it.

People tend to buy paid learning material not only for the learning experience, but how it's written which is very unique to the individual who is publishing.

It doesn't matter if 5,000 other people have books on the same subject. Once I get to know an author, if his style clicks with me then I'm going to buy his book. If his style resonates with a lot of people he'll quickly rise to the top for that subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was the editor and publisher of this tome of a shitpost:

[https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X](https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X)

[http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/pro...](http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/product-22517627.html)

The 4chan /lit/ board wrote Hypersphere as a collaborative writing project but someone needed to actually publish it, something I undertook as a project, I must have spent something like 20 hours editing it (plus way more helping to write it). It has so far sold 650 copies, most of which I sold with a profit of less than a dollar in profit per book since it didn't feel right selling it for a profit to the people that helped write it.

I've since bumped the price and I'm getting something like ~$2.5 a book, and it's currently selling 5-10 copies a month. The Amazon price is far higher than the Lulu one (which was the publishing platform of choice) since they obviously want a cut.

The biggest pro of the project was that it helped me understand how to self- publish: I've given my partner two physical poetry collections about her since: something that was pretty appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER7> Self-publishing over publishing, sure, but this is very based on the content of the book. As someone who actually interacts with College Confidential and the like, an educated book on the subject making money doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it takes knowledge and time to write. You can't just write whatever you want - the author was lucky enough to know about a subject in a favorable market - parents and kids who are Ivy-obsessed will easily pay for a book on the subject given how many small in's and out's there are in the process.

Edit Note: More info on why the market is favorable for the subject

</comment><comment><USER8> Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. For example I wrote a book about Decoding CAPTCHA's. I have the top ranking post on most search engines for this which is the only marketing channel.

I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me.

Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book was to deflect all the emails I used to get about the subject. Not only did it achieve this aim it supplies beer money for me every month.

<comment><USER9> I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours) Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several thousand dollars a year.

<comment><USER10> A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis, dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience. For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.

<comment><USER11> As someone who actually likes books, this makes me sad. Leanpub and Gumrroad are already full of quite mediocre content, to the point that I avoid them altogether--which is a shame, since there are some serious self-published authors that would benefit from a good platform. These cheap ebooks (e-brochures?) also made their way into Amazon, which really annoys me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A little off-topic, but I found this interesting:

> "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often > times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid."

It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to somebody, but still seem like it should cost less. Personally, I'll gladly pay an extra dollar to get an e-book version for anything I'm only expecting to read once or twice.

<comment><USER13> > _It 's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, > easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to > somebody, but still seem like it should cost less._

That's a bizarro reasoning.

Obviously it's not about the value added because of extra functionality, it's about the new technology having lower marginal costs (and all that functionality comes basically for free), and publishers still charging as if they still incur the full physical production and distribution costs.

When commercial music records first came out in the late 19th century, they cost quite a lot -- but that was justifiable because it was a new technology, with big costs to manufacture, carry, etc.

Would you justify paying the same amount for an mp3 today, just because it's more convenient and it sounds way better than those disks?

<comment><USER14> > Obviously it's not about the value added because of extra functionality, > it's about the new technology having lower marginal costs

Is that really how supply and demand works though? If people are willing to pay more for the extra functionality, why would you not sell it at that higher price?

<comment><USER15> Most people aren't paying for the extra functionality of ebooks though. Most people are still buying physical books: [http://authorearnings.com/report/print-vs-digital- report/](http://authorearnings.com/report/print-vs-digital-report/)

Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated to supply vs. demand. What you are talking about is a pricing strategy. There is a near unlimited supply of an ebook, so it's not supply vs. demand, it's a pricing strategy that's setting the price. A pricing strategy could also be used to sell the ebook at a cost below production costs to drive sales. Again, the ebook supply remains constant.

<comment><USER14> > Most people aren't paying for the extra functionality of ebooks though. Most > people are still buying physical books

That's not what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about this: if you set the price of ebooks at some small margin above the price to produce plus the price to license the content, you sell at price $X. If you set the price where people are willing to buy it due to increased convenience for them, you sell at price $Y. If $Y > $X, why not sell at $Y?

Of course, this isn't a direct relationship, since different people have different $Y prices, but there's a price curve there, and one ought to sell their ebooks on the curve to maximize the (number of sales) * $Y.

> Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated > to supply vs. demand.

Maybe supply vs demand was the wrong choice of words, but that shouldn't detract from the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >But 1-on-1 advising doesn't scale.

In the right market, it doesn't have to scale. I know some wealthy people (in NYC) who have dropped a lot of money to get their kids into Ivy League schools. It is a must for those people and I've seen them drop high dollar for application advice and prep. With any kind of success, the same people get referred over and over again in the same circles.

As an aside, I loosely know someone who went to prison for a white collar crime. He too hired a high dollar consultant (former prison officer, IIRC) to advise him on how to prepare for, adjust to and survive in prison.

Of course consulting to wealthy people isn't passive, but the return on effort is hard to beat, once you're in the right referral circle.

</comment><comment><USER17> I always enjoy seeing stuff like this. While it may not make a ton of economic sense for a guy working at Google, I'm happy to see people fill niche knowledge spaces because they can.

It's interesting that the paperback copies sold the best -- I would guess it's because these books are given as gifts (and bought by parents). If anyone has data on this behavior for fiction I'd be interested to hear it (I publish an online science fiction magazine, compellingsciencefiction.com).

</comment><comment><USER18> your adjusted rating on amazon is 4.5. It is still very good. [http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension...](http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension&utm_content=firefox_v2.2)

</comment><comment><USER19> I have written and self-published a couple of books [1] - one which is effectively a practical textbook for the course I teach (A level music technology in the UK, for 16-18 year olds), and one which sprung out of a course I taught locally for a number of schools, using Sibelius 7, where the user interface changed in a similar way to the change to Word 2007's "ribbon" interface.

The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the heads of music at schools that teach music technology).

I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots, workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate.

It was only the chance connection with the education department of the software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter), which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books. This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info).

While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in the high hundreds to achieve this.

By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon (particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a moment's thought to until I completed the book.

[1] - [http://musictechtuition.com/books/](http://musictechtuition.com/books/)

<comment><USER20> It makes sense that you sell more through Lulu: I'd never heard of Lulu until I read this self-publishing thread here on HN

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disappointed the link is not satire. $400/month is less than unemployment

</comment><comment><USER22> I couldn't find any numbers, but I get the distinct impression that so far, the authors job at google probably pays better than the book. Sure, most of the work is done now and if continues for another two years or so things change. But it's hard to predict how non-fiction books age.

<comment><USER23> It doesn't matter how much a book ages, as long as it was written in the off time (I.e., evenings or weekends). The sales made from that book is a net productivity gain.

<comment><USER24> You could freelance $400 in a few hours at most. Probably less. You have to consider opportunity cost, for which books are poor.

<comment><USER25> You also have to consider personal cost. Do you enjoy writing, and do you have a strong interest in a field worth writing about? Then great, this could be a productive use of time for you both personally and financially. There's nothing wrong with doing things that make your life worth living.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


EFF 'Teaching Copyright' to Correct Entertainment Industry Misinformation  - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/05/27 <comment><USER2> What happened to the EFF's website??</comment>


US Senate Warns Israel over Deepening Ties with China, Serious Security Concerns - <AUTHOR> https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-u-s-senate-condemns-deepening-israel-china-ties-cites-serious-security-concerns-1.7368680 <comment><AUTHOR> We're in a trade war with China, and yet "our greatest ally" has been cozying up with China for years. Technology acceleration programs, microchip fabrications (while Israel designs hardware backdoors into x86 chips; the DEC, or "Deeply Embedded Core"). Google "In Beijing, Netanyahu looks to 'marry Israel's technology with China's capacity'", "Netanyahu Xi", "Israel China trade" etc. How does no one else see this? And why are we still sharing our technology with Israel?</comment>


How Browsers Work: Behind the scenes of modern web browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/?&&

<comment><USER2> The article is lengthy, but considering the scope of the topic I thought this was a great read on browser internals. It gives some straightforward insight into the general process and algorithms used behind parsing HTML/CSS and how browsers render/layout/paint pages.</comment>


34,000 people have applied for student loan forgiveness. 26 have been approved - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/29/this-public-service-loan-forgiveness-remedy-isnt-reaching-many-people.html <comment><USER2> Jesus. The loan forgiveness program cost $350M. If they had simply approved all applications, it should have cost less than that!</comment>


Actually Fly the M400X Skycar Into History - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/actually-fly-the-m400x-skycar-into-history

<comment><USER2> Read the wikipedia article before donating: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar)</comment>


What it's like to intern at Facebook in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://mukulrathi.com/facebook-internship-experience-2019/ <comment><USER2> > Facebook came to my university...

I stopped reading from that sentence and realised the source of skills and the so called 'tech talent' that Facebook is really looking for. It is the same old elite Oxbridge + London universities in the 'golden triangle' that get all the opportunities running to them and no where else. Even after the internship ends, you are networked with the employees and already have an instant offer to work there.

It is no wonder in 2019, Facebook would more likely go to those universities in person and give you a referral + internship than else where else and that is the true reality for direct applicants.

Thank you for sharing your internship story, however, students from non Ivy League and non Russell Group universities need not apply.

<comment><AUTHOR> In response to your comment, Facebook merely gave a talk, they did not refer anyone - I applied online without a referral.

This post is about what the internship itself was like, not how to apply - there are plenty of other posts about that online.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's coming round to internship interviewing season again, so for those considering interning at Facebook, here's a post that will hopefully give you a better insight of what it is like to intern at Facebook! I thoroughly enjoyed my internship this summer and would strongly recommend interning here - in fact I'll be returning next summer for another internship!</comment>


Who wants to learn R? Sharing DataCamp's user stats and insights - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datacamp.com/who-wants-to-learn-r-sharing-datacamps-user-stats-and-insights/

<comment><USER2> For a camp that teaches people how to practice good statistics with R, the data presentation is very inefficient and _extremely_ confusing.

You can't have one chart or visualization take up an entire slide without any titles or axis labels.</comment>


Homemade Electric Motorcycle Stopped on M25 in Hertfordshire - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-49393998 <comment><USER3> IMHO the future of personal transportation is vehicles like that. We don't have the space in cities to support 2-3 tons of steel per traveler, and plain bicycles are uncomfortable in bad weather, or when you are physically impaired. But small (electric?) velomobiles with three or four wheels are perfect for city commutes when cycling is not an option. They also don't need 15-20kWh/100km like an electric car would.

<comment><USER4> I've expressed the same sentiment before. The problem is that even talking about electric cars gets people's knickers in a twist; they need to be able to drive for 1000 miles straight while towing an apartment on wheels behind them and any vehicle which can't do that just isn't good enough. They'd rather be dead than have to drive one of these.

<comment><USER5> > The problem is that even talking about electric cars gets people's knickers > in a twist; they need to be able to drive for 1000 miles straight while > towing an apartment on wheels behind them and any vehicle which can't do > that just isn't good enough.

I mean that's understandable, if the car you buy can only handle small commuting that means at the very least the _additional cost_ of using other transport methods or renting a car or having a second car (all of which may be problematic or impossible) when you need to see friends, your family, or go on holidays. And that's not "par" money as the EV is not going to be significantly cheaper than an equivalent ICE.

A _small and cheap_ comfy-ish EV might actually be a good option there, as it lets you have a regular car when you need to e.g. go to Ikea (which might be out of range of an EV depending where you live) or drive to the next country or go see your sister a few hundred miles away without significant additional costs, but it needs to be small (so it's not an issue e.g. for people living in cities who may not have access to a garage at all let alone a multi-car one) and cheap (so it's not a drain on resources, or at least not a big one, compared to just using the one car all the time).

Incentives are a thing, and currently EVs mostly incentivise using something else if you don't have fuck you money and more surface than you can use. As- is, plug-in hybrids are probably a better option for single people or single- car households.

<comment><USER4> I agree with what you are saying. The tradeoffs are complex between an electric car and something else. In many cases the only reasonable solution is to have both and use the appropriate vehicle for the appropriate trip. The downsides of that are many unless you already need two vehicles.

However, you seem to have illustrated exactly my point. An electric car has some limitations compared to a conventional car. But the gap from an electric car to an electric velomobile is probably even greater.

<comment><USER5> > However, you seem to have illustrated exactly my point. An electric car has > some limitations compared to a conventional car. But the gap from an > electric car to an electric velomobile is probably even greater.

The difference and point (as noted in the second paragraph) is that it is much more feasible to have a car and a velomobile than to have two cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From Twitter [1] It's Cedric Lynch's car. There is a YouTube video [2] of him showing it off and saying it goes 55mph and gets 150-200 miles on a charge of its Lithium batteries. And another picture of him with it (and also barefoot) [3]

1\. [https://twitter.com/mikel01/status/1163709573984899072?s=21](https://twitter.com/mikel01/status/1163709573984899072?s=21)

2\. [https://youtu.be/KnqoH0YaCsE](https://youtu.be/KnqoH0YaCsE)

3\. [http://www.bikeweb.com/node/2601](http://www.bikeweb.com/node/2601)

<comment><USER7> This is truly amazing, thank you for the links!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, no mentioning of his dog Gromit. I hope he is doing well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Driver of the vehicle also invented and built the motor which powers it - <USER2> Lynch Motor - an axial-flux permanent magnet electric motor. See

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

Video of Cedric talking about the 'thingymobile'

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnqoH0YaCsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnqoH0YaCsE)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a velomobile. They're somewhat unusual but surely not so unusual that they're worthy of a newspaper article? There are quite a few manufacturers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile#Velomobile_manufact...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile#Velomobile_manufacturers)

<comment><USER11> I think the news story is also that it was spotted on the M25 which is the orbital motorway round London that is quite busy and that it is, in fact, perfectly legal.

Edit: Also it is the BBC which has a track record of regarding unusual vehicles as entertaining:

[https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/top-gear-technology- cent...](https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/top-gear-technology-centre/p45)

From the 'review': "Against: The crash protection is a bit fleshy"

<comment><USER12> Also it's mildy amusing that the police stopped it because OBVIOUSLY that's not road legal, but it turns out that actually there was nothing they could cite it for - unlike a good number of cars on the road.

<comment><USER13> To be fair to the police in this situation: most velomobiles would be more like electric bikes and therefore not be legal on motor highways, wouldn't they?

It probably wouldn't be the first time someone eccentric created something cool in their garage and not go through the motions of getting it properly registered.

<comment><USER11> Yeah - it seems pretty sensible to me that the police stop and check that vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also odd, the driver is barefoot while he is stood on the motorway hard shoulder.

<comment><USER15> is it legal in the uk to drive barefoot?

<comment><USER16> Yep - [https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/road-safety/driving- witho...](https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/road-safety/driving-without- shoes-is-it-illegal/)

<comment><USER17> It's also legal in New Zealand to drive barefoot (or even ride a motorbike barefoot): [https://i.stuff.co.nz/motoring/99992891/silly- question-24-ca...](https://i.stuff.co.nz/motoring/99992891/silly- question-24-can-we-drive-in-jandals-or-barefoot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of the Czechoslovakian Velorex, which had three wheels, a motorcycle engine and a leather body[0].

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

<comment><USER19> Or soviet "invalidka": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMZ_cyclecar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMZ_cyclecar). (4 wheels though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Far from the shonkiest vehicle I have ever seen on the M25.

</comment><comment><USER21> As reported on Twitter, this is Cedric Lynch's vehicle:

[https://greentransportation.info/videos/history/cedric- lynch...](https://greentransportation.info/videos/history/cedric- lynch/evmotorcycle-interview.html)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/isleofman/content/articles/2009/06/15/e...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/isleofman/content/articles/2009/06/15/electric_motor_feature.shtml)

He is something of an electric vehicle innovator, inventing the Lynch motor in the 1970s/80s:

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

</comment><comment><USER22> Afaik most microcars are pretty much bikes or electric mobility scooters with bodies. Plenty of fun can be had by googling for 'microcar.'

Even some beefier things like KTM X-Bow or Polaris Slingshot, which are racing cars for all practical purposes, are registered as bikes due to having no safety features.

<comment> m-i-l One of the "selling points" of the Sinclair C5 was that its electric motor was built by Hoover and would be serviced at the existing network of vacuum cleaner service centres[0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the UK can traffic police stop motorists for no reason? No probable cause required?

<comment><USER24> Yup. In the UK police can also stop and search you at their liberty.

Airstrip One.

<comment><USER25> They have to have probable cause, but like in most other countries they'll just make something up like they smell drugs or whatever

<comment><USER16> In the UK they don't have to have probable cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd love to build my own custom vehicle, I wonder what it would involve in terms of making it road legal

</comment><comment><USER27> it rear side resembles like a small boat</comment>


An MNIST-like fashion product dataset - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this seems to be getting so much attention. There are plenty of small image datasets around, and wide recognition of the issues with MNIST.

I see no evidence at all that this particular dataset is better than MNIST. None of the issues they themselves list with MNIST are discussed with relation to their proposed replacement.

The benchmarks they provide are entirely useless - sklearn does not claim to be a platform for computer vision models. A quick WRN model gets 96% of this dataset (h/t @ajmooch on Twitter), suggesting that it doesn't deal with the "too easy" issue.

The images clearly don't deal with the problem of lack of translation invariance.

On the downside, they don't have the same ease of understanding of hand-drawn digits, which is extremely helpful for teaching, debugging, and visualizing.

<comment><USER3> > sklearn does not claim to be a platform for computer vision models.

There are more than a dozen image classification and segmentation examples on the scikit-learn gallery:

[http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/index.html](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/auto_examples/index.html)

<comment><USER2> Yes but at this stage they're really toy examples. IIRC the best sklearn result they showed on this benchmark had 20% error, whereas the little WRN network was 4%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How would you go about generating such dataset?

1\. Scrape images and store as png

2\. Downscale to 28px

3\. Convert each image to grayscale

4\. Convert to matrices and add label (additional row?)

5\. Normalize to have matrices of 1 and 0 for faster computation

6\. Vectorize said matrices

7\. Concatenate into one big vector

Did I miss something / Am I fooling myself?

I plan on working on my first ML side project and I would love to gain some insights from HN.

<comment><USER5> That's the right idea overall, with a few caveats.

1\. Yes but you need to manually inspect and verify that the images are of the right class

5\. Images are grayscale, not only black and white.

Additionally, MNIST and fashion-MNIST have all their objects centered and of similar scale. This is a large part of what makes them a popular first test for any image model: they are very simple to solve as the model need not be very robust to fit the dataset.

<comment><USER3> > Additionally, MNIST and fashion-MNIST have all their objects centered and of > similar scale. This is a large part of what makes them a popular first test > for any image model: they are very simple to solve as the model need not be > very robust to fit the dataset.

Yeah, this is crucial. Especially when trying to generalize models. It's easy to verify the usefulness of data augmentation when you can make basic assumptions about the data (e.g. it's centered).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like this was sourced from in-house at some German online retailer: zalando.de. There is a similar data set from from amazon sourced by UCSD: [http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/](http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/)

And our research on recommenders using it: [http://sharknado.eggie5.com](http://sharknado.eggie5.com)

Particularly, the 2D scatter of the CNN features: [http://sharknado.eggie5.com/tsne](http://sharknado.eggie5.com/tsne)

<comment><USER7> It says in the README, that it's from them (Zalando). Via a Google search, they're an e-commerce site from Berlin funded by the Rocket Internet folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to play around with this dataset! It certainly seems richer than MNIST, and would most likely force the network to extract more features.

But just like MNIST, it seems to lack variety in the positioning of the important elements, they are all centered which means that they don't train the network in being translation invariant. I presume this issue can be tackled with data augmentation techniques like applying affine transformations.

<comment><USER9> You could potentially add translations to the dataset automatically (and generate mosaics with multiple images). Since you've done the transforms you have perfect knowledge of the new images and they're ready to train on

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a MNIST-like dataset, I often use not-MNIST ([http://yaroslavvb.blogspot.com/2011/09/notmnist- dataset.html](http://yaroslavvb.blogspot.com/2011/09/notmnist-dataset.html)), which is more difficult than the original one (see examples of misclassified digits here: [https://docs.neptune.ml/get-started/character- recognition/](https://docs.neptune.ml/get-started/character-recognition/)).

However, I am not sure if we need more MNIST-like datasets. With small size many things make much less sense (data augmentation, even convnets as images are centered anyway) plus using many channels is a typical things (IRL I rarely work with grayscale images). So I am curious, in which way this dataset is better than CIFAR-10?

See my note on datasets in Learning Deep Learning, [http://p.migdal.pl/2017/04/30/teaching-deep- learning.html#da...](http://p.migdal.pl/2017/04/30/teaching-deep- learning.html#datasets).

</comment><comment><USER11> If I am understanding the side-by-side comparison correctly, then the performance is highly correlated with MNIST (at least for high accuracy methods).

[https://i.imgur.com/viV7gFB.png](https://i.imgur.com/viV7gFB.png) (x-axis: Fashion, y-axis: MNIST)

<comment><USER3> They should be correlated. It's difficult (or near impossible) to interpret the underlying convolutional features, but one can assume they are recognizing basic image descriptors like intensities and shapes. They are rescaled to a size that would deemphasize complex descriptors like texture. Likewise, they are single-channel so that would deemphasize color features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the reasons people have shifted away from MNIST is that it's simply too easy. Single channel, small image size, few classes, etc. Unfortunately, this does not address any of these concerns.

</comment><comment><USER13> How is this 'better' then cifar10 / cifar100?

<comment><USER3> From looking at the examples, zeroed out backgrounds are one advantage to CIFAR (depending on your task).</comment></comment>


Anthropologists Uncover Art by (Really) Old Masters–38,000 Year-Old Engravings - <AUTHOR> http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/january/anthropologists-uncover-art-by--really--old-masters38-000-year-o.html <comment><USER2> Prehistory studies changed my life. To think that humanity is here for 200000+ years really gives you a new perspective of society and of our own minds.

<comment><USER3> Agreed and although it should be obvious the other thing that blows my mind is that the intelligence is exactly the same only the base knowledge starting point differs.

<comment><USER4> This is up for debate. It is very well possible that you share very little with then. You should read: the breakdown of the bikameral mind and the creation of consciousness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice. But not seeing the cow.

<comment><USER6> Ignore the indentations and look at the horizontal line. It's a cow's back. The cow is looking right and its horns are visible.</comment></comment>