Concealing the Calculus of Higher Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/your-money/concealing-the-calculus-of-higher-education.html?mabReward=CTM&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine <comment><USER2> This isn't mysterious. The easier it is to compare prices between colleges, the larger a factor those prices will be in prospective students' decisions. That creates downward pressure on tuition, which means the schools will get less money. So they oppose the creation of tools that make price comparison easier, using any excuses available.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not sure I agree with the title. The institutions alluded to in the article are not "hiding" their data. They simply are declining to provide access to it to an aggregator which would allow potential students to more easily compare the costs across multiple institutions. They can still get that data by going directly to the institutions site.

Also the comparisons to airlines in the article, in my opinion, is flawed. I compare airline tickets based on cost, schedule, number of connections, and frequent flier affiliation. Plane tickets are reasonably interchangeable based upon any of the above factors. Yet going to a college is a far bigger decision and the decision points are not quite as easily parsed and quantified as purchasing an airline ticket. The consequences of the decisions are not of equal magnitude.

<comment><USER4> A big reason is many college's cost DEPENDS on your family's income. So if you look at Stanford it cost $65,000, but if your family makes less then $125,000 it is actually free.

[http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/04/02/3642085/stanfo...](http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/04/02/3642085/stanford- free-tuition/)

If the family makes less then $65,000 you don't even need to get any sort of financial aid.

<comment><USER3> That still, to me, seems like a thing that could be accounted for by an aggregator. They stated they were willing to work with the institutions I don't see why they can't have specific rules per institution that aligned with their policies.

<comment><USER4> I quit my job as a librarian at a small liberal arts college because I felt that the age of private colleges was going away. In the 8 years I have been gone the school has lost almost 50% of the student body and Community Colleges have multiplied.

Colleges are scared they won't survive the next next 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ivy league schools and their kindred also seem to be aware that they are inherently in the race to the bottom that "higher education" has become and feel threatened, if they didn't, they wouldn't feel the need to go to such lengths. I wouldn't consider obfuscation in the interest of propagating information for those schools that supposedly want to help students make educated decisions in a reasonable/technically possible manor, unless they need "higher education" before they can decide such things from such basis.

Also, ECMC Group keeping the lights on for College Abacus is like putting a band-aid over stab wound. Although, as long as young kids keep buying into the racket because they are told by their elders who paid an order of magnitude less for their "education" or for their "so much more than that" and reinforced by those around them that they need $x for $y (whether academia can only provide $x and if $x is the only way to do $y or not is irrelevant), the show will go on.

<comment><USER6> And those who DID end up paying that order of magnitude more for their education will always enforce that others had to also. Those with more formal education nearly always prefer more educated colleagues regardless of whether its necessary or even helpful for the job at hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another possible reason is that the college's calculators, while required by the federal government, are not terribly accurate. In fact, they are pretty much useless. A comparison would only show which calculators were out of whack the most, which is not really helpful for students looking for cheaper colleges.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rising cost is fueled by student loans. Problem could be easily avoided, if there would be upper limit on state guaranteed loans, perhaps $50,000?

<comment><USER9> So now poor students cannot attend top end schools, or expensive courses (law, medicine, engineering, etc), but richer ones can.

I completely agree that something has to be done to limit the rise in tuition costs; I personally think greater transparency requirements (e.g. the student has to know how much study will cost before they can be accepted, a system that compares all US colleges for a specific course, etc).

I don't honestly think students REALLY grasp how much college is going to be costing them and what the payback period. How can someone spending $40K on an English Lit major really think it is going to pay for itself? They must not have looked at the specifics or figured out the repay period.</comment></comment>


Canada extends financial aid for millions for two more months - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cerb-extended-trudeau-1.5613782 <comment><USER2> As a Canadian business owner, we're super lucky to be in Canada right now, and for the supports that have been put into place for people and businesses alike.

Our company was luckily not hit badly enough to qualify for the 75% support on salaries (we did get a line of credit!), but I know several others who needed it and got the support they needed which is great!

It's not perfect - rent supports for storefronts, restaurants, bars, etc. could be better, for example - and it won't save everyone or every business, but it's made a difference in many lives and helped us stay home and quarantine more effectively without so much worry about making ends meet.

I just hope more Canadians remember it was the NDP fighting for a lot of these supports come election time :)

<comment><USER3> In the short term, it's great.

It really doesn't take much to tell banks to add numbers to people's bank accounts.

What it's really doing is subsidizing everybody that works in or is tied to non-essential face-to-face service industry, by everyone else.

It's really not even that interesting, other than seeing how easily frazzled people are by the slightest calamity - why is non-essential services taking a vacation for a few months at the expense of everyone else supposed to be a major event with long-lasting consequences?

Imagine you have a family and you lose your job. If you have savings for a couple of years, you can take it easy for a while and then go look for a job and find one 6 months later. Was anything other than your ego bruised by the loss of the job? No, not really.

Why doesn't this analogy translate to what's happening with covid? I'm guessing because not only have you lost your job, but you owe tens of millions in gambling debts and spent half your waking hours convincing various factions to give you some extra time to come up with the money.

That's what the economy looks like to me and I find it difficult to be sympathetic - people need a reality check and get back to living a simpler life with less shit being bought and sold all the time. It is within my lifetime that I've gone from owning 2 t-shirts to 20 and I have no idea why. I can go back to wearing 2 and my life will be the same - I just hope others can see the silver lining in all this and not go back to living frivolously.

<comment><USER4> It's reasonable for individuals to aim for a few months of emergency funds. It's not reasonable to expect main street businesses to have cash on hand to cover many months of near zero revenue. Most small businesses just don't have the margins for that to be viable. If you expect every individual restaurant to be able to weather a period of months when no one goes to restaurants without any kind of assistance, the only restaurants you'll get will be large chains.

Much like running government 'like a business', the analogy of running a business 'like a household' only takes you so far. They're fundamentally different things.

<comment><USER3> How did you arrive at your assessment of what is reasonable?

Mine happens to be different from yours. Does that make me unreasonable? I mean, are there more shades to the world than reasonable/unreasonable, black and white?

I think so and I hope we can discuss the various shades of grey.

I think being responsible and saving for a rainy day applies across all spheres of life - be it government, business or a household. What do you think is fundamentally wrong with such a view, other than that it isn't the way things currently are?

<comment><USER5> You made a bunch of normative statements about what people "need" to do, so I don't think it's out of bounds to make a normative comment about the reasonableness of your demands.

>What do you think is fundamentally wrong with such a view, other than that it isn't the way things currently are?

For one, it dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business. Such capital is likely not going to be available to new restaurants or other service oriented small businesses with no real collateral. Or it would come at such a high cost that it would be unprofitable to run the restaurant. All to optimize for a once in a century event.

I think the world where the government backstops these businesses is just a better world than the one that would arise from what you envision. It has more of what I want and less of what I don't.

<comment><USER3> > You made a bunch of normative statements about what people "need" to do, so > I don't think it's out of bounds to make a normative comment about the > reasonableness of your demands.

Did I? There is a single sentence with the word 'need' in it in my entire post. My last sentence expresses my hope for others' behaviour. That's two 'normative' statements that really express the same point - we are living in a consumerist culture. I don't think that's at all a controversial position, it is almost a cliche at this point.

I also haven't made a single demand upon anyone.

I'm not sure what motivates you to misrepresent my position in such crude fashion and I wish you'd refrain from replying to me in this manner in the future.

> it dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new > business.

Help me understand - you think the approach of being responsible and saving for a rainy day, dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business? How?

How does saving profits relate to upstart requirements? As far as I can tell - the two are unrelated.

<comment><USER4> OK, so you're saying you don't need to have rainy day funds at the start of a new business, but should build them up over time, right? So, that leads to two potential situations. Let's use the restaurant example.

First possibility is the one most restaurants face. If they're lucky and the business is actually viable, they will have a profit margin of 3-5%. For a single location restaurant, that profit will be enough for the proprietor to make a decent living hopefully, but not a whole lot more. Should be enough for them to save up a few months of personal expenses sure. But saving up enough cash to pay rent, suppliers, and staff, for months, with no income... would take forever with those margins. It's just not possible for most businesses of that sort.

But let's also look at the other possibility. Say you've got a real hit restaurant (or another type of business with larger margins) and your margins aren't 3-5, but 15-20%. Now you're saving real money. So yes, you could sock it away under the proverbial mattress. But if you're that successful, it means people really value the product you're providing. Instead of hoarding your profits in case of a pandemic, you could instead invest those profits into opening a second location, allowing twice as many people to benefit from the service you're providing. In the 99% of years when there isn't a black swan event, that option is better not only for the business owner, but for society as a whole. So even for very successful businesses that could afford to keep a large amount of cash around, we're usually better off if they spend that money to do more of what's making them successful in the first place.

Of course occasionally there will indeed be a pandemic, at which point government can help out to prevent both types of businesses from failing, so that when the event passes they can go back to generating value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pertinent satire:

[https://youtu.be/wz-PtEJEaqY](https://youtu.be/wz-PtEJEaqY)

You are subsidizing landlords by giving this stimulus. It's not that bottom up.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. When it happened, a few Canadian friends of mine were impressed with Trudeau but when we walked through the amount and where it would likely go, we realized it was purely to hold up the housing market. Without this, the housing market would have collapsed FEROCIOUSLY. So this was a gift (yet again) to Canadian landlords and homeowners at the expense of the younger generation.

<comment><USER8> >So this was a gift (yet again) to Canadian landlords and homeowners at the expense of the younger generation.

What about the people who would have been made homeless, perhaps permanently, by the housing market collapsing ferociously as you pointed you?

<comment><USER9> How do you become homeless by the 'housing market collapsing'? If the price of housing goes down rapidly (which I guess it what's meant by 'collapse'), that makes it _more_ affordable, not less.

<comment><USER8> What do you think happens the tenants when the landlord's properties go into foreclosure?

What do you think happens mortgage lending in such a scenario?

What percentage of current renters have a 20% downpayment ready for even something as large as a 50% drop in home values? In Toronto, last I checked it as 1.1m for the average house and about 800k for a reasonable condo. How many current renters do you honestly think have $110k/$80 ready for a downpayment?

A housing market collapse only benefits those with great sums of capital on the sidelines waiting to deploy.

<comment><USER10> Granted, there is a problem of someone doing an "Amazon", but these dangers can all be accounted for and cheap homes would vastly benefit the younger generation. Granted, maybe progressive taxes on property are needed, but I don't see problems.

So 1.1m for a house is probably a problem. What is the alternative to fixing that?

<comment><USER8> >cheap homes would vastly benefit the younger generation

The USA, Ireland and others have already been through housing busts in the last 10-15 years and it had no effect on home ownership.

>So 1.1m for a house is probably a problem. What is the alternative to fixing that?

Keep in mind we're talking about prices in some of the most attractive places to live in, in North America. Places that are also the target of skilled immigration and migrants with money also.

As you probably know, it might be $1m for a starter condo in NYC, but you can pick up a detached house in a decent area elsewhere for a quarter of that.

The unaffordability of the cities is a function of supply vs demand. If you want to bring down city property prices, simply reduce the need for cities.

<comment><USER11> There are plenty of megalopolises all over the world where housing values are not nearly as extreme as they are in North America. In ten minutes of searching, I found a 3 bedroom condo in Tokyo marketed to expats for $350,000. With a parking spot. And a balcony.

<comment><USER12> Is that a function of keeping up with supply by building? And if so, what does Tokyo do structurally that NA cities can't seem to get their act together to manage it? My understanding is that in Japan generally, there is more of a culture of destroying housing stock and rebuilding. I presume that leads to building with greater density if there is more turnover. And presumably, this also helps with keeping up the infrastructure expansion to support density (transit and utilities). Just a hunch, is it true?

<comment><USER11> It's a good hunch. I think the biggest thing they do is that planning and zoning isn't done at a local level, it's done at a national level. So you can't get your neighbors together to vote out your representative or throw massive amounts of effort at stymieing development. I think some of it is cultural, too. The Japanese are still dealing with the fallout of the real estate crash in 1992, the Nikkei 225 has still yet to reach the peak value from that time, and they just don't look at real estate as an asset that will always go up in value indefinitely like we do here in the West, so there's no political will to maintain that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Being in Canada, I think that helped a lot of my friends who had expensive rent to pay in Downtown Toronto. But, it's not clear how the financial aid will help the small businesses; I can see that a lot of the restaurant in Downtown are not going to recover and those people who eventually weaned off from the government support, won't have a job to go back. Expecting that some other business will fill those gaps won't happen suddenly.

<comment><USER14> What about the support available for businesses (ie. [https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/economic- respons...](https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/economic-response- plan.html#businesses))?

<comment><USER13> There are support for business to pay up to 75% and for small businesses a $40K loan with $10K forgivable. At least in Downtown Toronto, those support won't do much specially because the rent is super expensive. Expensive in the range of $5000 and up for a small restaurant in downtown area. You can also find news from BC, where the rent relief for landlords are not being adopted because landlords are not willing to register for the support and the business tenants are not getting support because of that. News don't say why that is happening but it's something interesting to think about.

<comment><USER15> The small business support also maxes out at $2000/mo, so if you make more than $17/hr then your employer is getting <75%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Landlord here. Someone else said it best. We have mortgages to pay too. The province also shut down the possibility to evict in order to pay it (for now). CERB nullifies what would have been an explosive, shitty situation for everyone.

<comment><USER17> From time to time landlords have to go bankrupt after taking too much leverage.

If landlord's mortgage is risk-free, it means that the landlord is leveraged at the expense of people who don't have home — which is rather unfair economically, and leads to more inequality. Wealthy risk-free landlords get passive income and re-invest it into more leveraged assets, poor people pay taxes to bail-out their landlords.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure where you are going with this. Are you saying CERB shouldn't exist? For the inequality issue you mention, what solution would you propose? A socialist state?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> UBI somehow is realized after a disaster. Interesting to see what economic impact will be in one or two years.

<comment><USER19> The CERB is all the downsides and expenses of UBI without any of the benefits ---no incentive to find work, bureaucracy hell, Canada has to worry about and invesigate fraud, doesn't help poor workers working minimum wage jobs (which are almost all essential)

<comment><USER20> >bureaucracy hell

Not sure how you figure this. It's a pretty painless application process and everybody is getting approved.

<comment><USER21> Yes, they've made it highly abusable and pretended this was a "feature", then backloaded all the bureaucracy into the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) who will have to determine how many _millions_ of people received aid when they didn't qualify.

It would honestly be better if they just said "free money for everyone, just click here" because the CRA will now have to spend the next decade trying to collect fraudulent benefits. The cost of the entire program would probably be 25% higher if you factor in what this will cost to audit and attempt to collect from fraudulent claimants in the future, plus the lawsuits from tax payers because Canadian leaders literally instructed people to just claim it even if they didn't qualify.

<comment><USER22> No Canadian political leaders instructed people to claim it when they don't qualify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who works at a university in Alberta who is on furlough, this worry's me because they will delay recalling us even longer. Since our provincial government is hell bent on destroying any form of non Christian learning institutions. Post secondaries have the covid front and the government cut front. Multiple people have volunteered for buyouts but the schools can't afford the union mandated abolishment terms, being in education in Alberta right now is a career death sentence. Anyone worried about the debt from this needs to relax the majority of this money goes right back into the economy for food, clothing and shelter, and They're clearly not relying on it for their families survival, it's a tough nut to casually pivot elsewhere right now.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's not helping. I still have millennial kids in my home.

"But dad if I moved back to my place I'd have to buy my own groceries."

 _sigh_

<comment> blaser-waffle If they're residents you have to evict them... but no one said you have to feed them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A little more context: What's not mentioned in this article is that the Liberal party, currently in power, has a minority government, and therefore needs the support of either the NDP (left of the Liberal Party) or the Conservatives (right of Liberal Party) to get things done. NDP was pushing for extending the financial aid, which is likely a significant political reason why the liberals chose to extend CERB (in addition to not wanting a massive number of evictions to occur all at once...). Here is some more info on the give-and-take going on: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cerb-bill- impasse-1.5605937](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cerb-bill- impasse-1.5605937)

<comment><USER26> > needs the support of either the NDP (left of the Liberal Party) or the > Conservatives (right of Liberal Party) to get things done

That's simply not true. They can do anything they want without the agreement of any of them. Check the seats, you missed some.

<comment><USER27> How do you figure? The liberals currently have 157 seats out of 338, they need the support of at least one other party on confidence motions (that party could be the Bloc as well)

<comment><USER28> He seems to have missed the difference between a majority and a plurality.

<comment><USER26> How did I miss anything ? I'm saying they can get majority without the NDP and PCC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The only thing that gets me is that unlike EI, CERB is not taxed up front, so many low-income Canadians claiming it are going to owe taxes on it next year. I would rather it be taxed up front or tax-free for the recipients. People are really going to struggle when it comes back on them.

About the original 4-month term (with 2 additional months at 0.15% tax, $12000 works out to $1800 to pay back):

"A recipient who earns the maximum benefit of $8,000 will have to repay $1,200 at tax time."

[https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/don-t-spend-it- all...](https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/don-t-spend-it-all-cerb- recipients-will-owe-income-tax-on-it-next-year-1.4908256)

<comment><USER30> I think it's better to have more cashflow during the pandemic and pay the taxes later. Taxes can also be payed in installments. Obviously, all this doesn't matter if someone is not good at managing cashflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The regional variance in covid infection rates in Canada is high. Covid has always been at a relatively low level in BC, but severe in Quebec. (15x the death rate).

One wonders if you'll consequently see very difficult economic recoveries in different provinces.

<comment><USER32> > Covid has always been at a relatively low level in BC

BC was actually the hardest hit early on, but they were quick on their feet and the first to see a real response to curve-flattening changes.

<comment><USER33> BC is also much younger and healthier than QC; in addition, Western regions of North America are generally doing much better than the Eastern for some reason. It's really difficult to be sure what's going on right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is the right move. This is how you do a V-shaped recovery.

<comment><USER35> They are also starting to threaten jail time for people who collect but who aren't supposed to. They should really just do helicopter money

<comment><USER36> How do you think they will force many thousands of poor people to repay money that they don't have, neither in savings nor in income, while holding on to a minority position in government?

They're just lying about being strict on TV to make everyone feel better about it. They don't have the capacity or political willpower to follow through. It's been months, it isn't urgent anymore, if they wanted to devise any sort of eligibility checks they would have done it already. But the only real eligibility requirement is being ballsy / desperate / yolo enough to claim it.

<comment><USER37> I always had the impression that with these programs that repayment isn't the goal. Yes, the government wants its money back but if say only 10% of the money was "wasted" then you can just consider that money a form of economic stimulus.

<comment><USER36> If it was a universal stimulus that's be great, but that 10% is a hundred- million-dollar subsidy to dishonest people and outright fraudsters. Such incentives affect people's behaviour and over long term this might even accumulate to a pretty damaging change in culture that will be very hard to fix.

Some people like to complain about regular welfare programs being abused, but at least those have _some_ controls, they're not just a web form with your bank details. Abuse rates will surely be much much higher for CERB, and that was largely preventable.

<comment><USER38> I'm ok with it - it allowed many of my friends to survive the pandemic with out too much fuss and any controls put it to prevent abuse would have delayed much needed help

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Happy to pay for extended vacations for so many... I personally know several people who refuse to go back to work under the guise of "we don't feel safe" so that they continue to get this free vacation. The debt hole that's being dug on this fraud is incredible...

<comment><USER40> So what? Those people aren't hoarding the money, they're circulating it through consumer spending, and they're far, far from a significant minority, let alone a majority of people.

Every system has freeloaders. Keeping freeloaders in business during this crisis has more than enough downstream benefits that we really shouldn't care if some lazy assholes get to be moreso for a few months.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Packamatic – on demand packaging with logo for your products - <AUTHOR> http://packamatic.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept, and the idea is conveyed quite well. A couple minor suggestions, hopefully useful:

> All boxes come with your logo on it.

In this sentence, "it" is intended to be coreferential with "all boxes", and thus should agree in grammatical number. You should change the sentence to, "All boxes come with your logo on them", or, "Every box comes with your logo on it."

Second, as a B2B customer, I would like to know more about your company before contacting you; at a minimum, where you are domiciled. I currently have to guess from the "Ltd" and use of centimeters that you are in Europe somewhere.</comment>


Show HN: The Cat API - <AUTHOR> http://thecatapi.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled on this looking for a cat api, the only downside is that it doesnt support CORS or jsonp, so I wrote a little wrapper that returns a single random cat:

[https://exhibitionnest.com/cat](https://exhibitionnest.com/cat)</comment>


First official release of 3DNES is available - <AUTHOR> http://helpmebro.com/posts/wbcyQqFeqa <comment><USER2> As it wasn't too obvious to me from that page:

The 3DNes emulator doesn't just automagically convert 2D games into 3D. It's got some algorithms behind it that attempt to partition a given scene into regions, then assign the region to a layer (front/back) and extrusion method (box, horizontal/vertical cylinder, character). Someone then needs to play through the game, and if they see anything that the algorithm has guessed wrong, they can pull up an editor window, click on the region in the emulator, and edit layer/extrusion/etc on the fly. Once that's all done, the collected data can be uploaded so that other people playing the same game can play it with everything looking correct.

I'm not entirely clear on whether the partitioning/assignment/settings memorization works by detecting the actual sprites or graphics tiles that the emulated NES is drawing to the screen, or whether it's just calculating some sort of signature for that clump of pixels and looking it up in a table. My guess is the latter.

It's a very nifty piece of tech :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't this link to [https://geod.itch.io/3dnes](https://geod.itch.io/3dnes) instead of this blog?

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this an offshoot of this previous work, or a separate project?: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11411054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11411054)

<comment><USER5> That's a completely separate project, released at nearly the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why does the windows version start at 0$ but the linux version start at 4.99$

<comment><USER7> Linux users tend to pay money for ports. The author even started accepting bitcoin due to linux user requests.

If you'll notice, there's a windows version for the same price. The free release appears to be a 1.2.x release, while you pay for the 1.3.x releases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! I love applications of emulation like this. I remember EmuDX many moons ago having similar goals of making retro games look more modern.</comment>


TeraCrafts - Time Tracking for Africa Businesses and Individuals - <AUTHOR> https://www.teracrafts.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Means business owners can track how their employees spend their time in the workspace</comment>


Cliqz is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-learned-cliqz-victoria-gassmann/ <comment><USER2> Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google.

Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch.

Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product.

That's why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy- awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy.

Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all.

Other than that, you can't compare Cliqz with Brave, and here's the reason why Brave will not fail:

\- First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years \- In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads \- An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand. \- user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision.

As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.

<comment><USER3> Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-)

"The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where their mouth was. Kudos for that.

Privacy was never Cliqz primary product. Privacy was a strict design requirement of Cliqz, which can be marketed more or less. Data collection and browsers alike, we wanted them to be private, because that's the right thing to do, even if it was more difficult to implement. The whole data vs. privacy argument is fallacious. One of the reasons why privacy was so important to us is precisely now, whoever ends up owning the data cannot learn anything about any of the users. Imagine the government getting Google's data if they go belly up or upon "legal" request (change Google by any other company). The data of Cliqz poses no risk to any user, including myself.

The primary product of Cliqz was search, either as the typical result page or instant search integrated on the browser. That's very difficult to build, and expensive, something that DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, etc. do not have to pay because they rely on the backend of others (not 100%, but mostly). If we were repackaging Bing/Google/Yandex with a different ranking twists, our quality would have been better from the beginning, of course. But that's not building an alternative to Google, which is what we wanted. Still, that's not a pun to DDG and others, what they provide has value to the users, of course. But they are not real alternative, kind of an electric car that gets its electricity from burning coal.

Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. For Brave it's Chrome, for Cliqz was both Chrome and Search. Too much to chew? Yes, but we had plenty of fun. The only thing I regret after +6 years working there is the loss of such a great team.

<comment><USER4> Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be?

I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on each page I visit).

<comment><USER3> Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them.

Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said, perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was totally off.

In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an independent index (let's hope).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. From that team photo alone it looks like they had ~100 employees.

I've never even heard of this company, and I'm still sorta tuned into the browser business, and based in Europe.

Where did they get the money to hire ~100 people?

Edit: Ah. They got their money from a german media group struggling to stay relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media)

<comment><USER6> Some of their posts were quite popular on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG now.

The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages.

All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet very few people would stick to such a search engine.

> Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing > drive from business development

I don't know about Cliqz but this is generally true. We developers do a great job building (oh well) but if somebody doesn't do an even greater job at selling the outcome won't be good. The importance of selling vs building is 80-20 IMHO.

<comment><USER8> If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant ([https://www.qwant.com](https://www.qwant.com), best one regarding privacy I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or Startpage ([https://startpage.com](https://startpage.com), they actually show you google results) a try as well.

<comment><USER9> Startpage was acquired by an ad company: [https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage- buyout-ad-tech-company/](https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech- company/).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your company name out loud.

A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and they succeeded!" Well, I was there when those companies first came on the scene, and I didn't find their names embarrassing, so there's a difference between silly and embarrassing, I believe.

<comment><USER11> Cliqz sounds like a name of a toy marketed to girls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sorry to see this, I was looking forward to their Android web browser that intended to support the Dat protocol:

\- [https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept- browser](https://github.com/cliqz/cliqz-concept-browser)

\- [https://github.com/cliqz/daisy](https://github.com/cliqz/daisy)

I love Beaker Browser and its vision for a P2P web, but it hasn't had a major release in a while (despite seemingly having active development) and it appears it will be desktop-only for the foreseeable future. I don't think Dat will have much uptake until there is a solid browser on both desktop and mobile.

(There was also the Bunsen browser trying to support Dat on Android, but it seems to be abandonware and I was never able to get it working anyway: [https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/](https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/) )

<comment><USER13> Beaker's going to finally release a new version in ~2 weeks. No solution to the mobile browser yet, but I hope somebody will pick up the mantle from Cliqz and Busnen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I spent a good amount of time using Cliqz. For creating their own search index, it was pretty good. But it was nowhere near as good as Google or Bing, and to the average end-user that's all that matters. Most people don't really care about the engineering behind a tool, they just want the tool to work.

The company name never bothered me, but from the comments it looks like I'm in the minority there. Is it any worse than DuckDuckGo?

If you are looking for another search engine with their own search index, also check out Mojeek. [https://www.mojeek.com/](https://www.mojeek.com/)

<comment><USER15> The search really wasn't bad. I made some test searches and wrote a small article about it, comparing the results. Cliqz did really well in it. Not everything was perfect, but neither was Google. I was impressed enough to use them as my own search engine and that worked just fine. Sure, sometimes necessary to switch over, but that's the same with ddg. I would have loved to see how they'd perform in a few years.

And while I don't like some political positions of the backing publisher they had: It is true that Europe and Germany needs enterprises like that, companies that can be alternatives to the US tech giants. Not sure they should be publicly funded, but should they get support? Of course.

Thanks for the link to Mojeek, seems worth a look.

Btw, [https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from- cliqz](https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz) is maybe a more fitting link target for the submission with the current title (dang?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox)

<comment><USER17> Wow, I came in to joke we know DuckDuckGo must be doing well if it's killing competitors but _sheesh_.

It amazes me so many companies (not just privacy oriented) don't think the ground truth of having a useful product which treats users with respect is necessary in order to be successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Some of the back-burner [marketing] ideas were: Changing the Cliqz name, > turning the browser colors to pick for Valentine's day, advertising on porn > websites (okay, that one made it).

This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search engine.

To me this product sounds like one of those toolbars in web browsers years ago.

<comment><USER19> It makes total sense for a privacy-oriented to advertise there. It's the same reason VPNs advertise on pirate bay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For what it's worth, their engineering blog about how to build a large-scale search engine more or less from scratch was really interesting: [https://0x65.dev/](https://0x65.dev/)

<comment><USER21> Weren't there a bunch of posts on HN by them?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I believe in December they did a post a day. A lot of the posts made it to the front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ok, so it's kind of difficult to compete with Google. I get that. How about building decentralized search engines? Basically ActivityPub, but for search engines.

Any known efforts in this direction?

<comment><USER23> There is YaCy which has pretty terrible results but is P2P. There used to be a P2P search engine called FAROO that was better but seems to have been shutdown.

I wrote a blog post comparing search results quality earlier this year. YaCy came in last, even behind Cliqz.

[https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine- has...](https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best- results/)

<comment><USER22> I remember YaCy, yes... I tried it once, and wasn't convinced.

I mean, obviously, there is more to building a "search engine" than just a big fat searchable index. I think where Google shines is to understand what you mean, not what you wrote. This is a pretty complex task, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Remember the time Mozilla sent the full URL history of some users to Cliqz: [https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing- cliqz-i...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in- firefox/)

Farewell, au revoir.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can we please just get the old AltaVista graphical clustering back in a search engine? Please?

Presumably the problem is monetizing it. I don't have good answers for that.

Ads are obvious. However, that introduces the perverse incentives that everybody complains about.

</comment><comment><USER26> I tried Cliqz for a day and didn't find the results useful (so I went back to DDG.)

</comment><comment><USER27> It is shutting down and this is the first time I even hear about it.

</comment><comment><USER28> More discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043785)

</comment><comment><USER29> > Cliqz lost the fight against Google. There's no way to sugarcoat this.

> A cynic might say that Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for > technology and a missing drive from business development.

A cynic might also say that you were dishonest and masqueraded as something different than what your business model represented, so people had no compelling reason to switch over from Google, which does a much better job at offering quality products and deceiving its users.

I hope Brave Browser is next. Brave is the kind of company that exploits people's desire for privacy to become a rent seeker for creators and publishers, sprinkled with some crypto tokens as bait.

<comment><USER3> Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did.

Cliqz search was never on par with Google -- I build parts of it -- but was getting there little by little. To be more precise, it was getting good enough, to not be a factor. That has some merit given the totally independent index (not relying on Bing under the hood).

Brave the same as Cliqz are trying their best to offer an alternative. If you think you can do better, please do so. Believe, I'll root for you regardless of my opinion about you (we crossed path in the past). Why would I support you, even though that does not mean I use what you build? Because we are in need of having plurality on the Web, the more the better. Unlike you, I do not see the point of speaking bullshit, not sure if out of ignorance or ill-will, don't know, don't care.

<comment><USER30> > Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other > ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox): "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."

Yep, real "client-side", eh?

Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so- locally-stored anymore.

<comment><USER3> This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."

Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue.

UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which is not the data being described in the paragraph: queries, scrolling, amount time spend, urls, etc. For this kind of user data (HumanWeb) there is no uuid, neither implicit or explicit.

There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open- source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable, we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.

<comment><USER31> > we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or > not.

This is accurate. They partnered with us at FoxyProxy to prevent browser telemetry from revealing users' IP addresses and other metadata.

These guys are above board and even if there may have been a problem in 2017 with Firefox, that was no longer the case in 2018, 2019, and 2020. They bent over backwards and jumped through many hoops to hide their users' identity. They were very interested in the solving the engineering problem around anonymization. I know this from first-hand experience.

This is a loss larger than many people realize. There are so few companies with such integrity and who put their users first, above profits or shareholders.

<comment><USER3> There were no problems in 2017 or before, we were doing the same exactly the same during Firefox times (we went through security and privacy audits). Data collection is and always was safe wrt to privacy.

Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work. The press release that FF -- written by one of these people with a lot of biases and published without review -- did not help as it was misleading.

We did a big mistake back then. Instead of rebutting it, we chose to ignore the FUD assuming that facts would prevail. They did not.

Sadly the community is "scared", we have been congratulated and lauded by anyone who checked our systems. But never endorsed in public, there is little to gain and a lot to lose (you are getting a sneak preview right now).

Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.

<comment><USER30> > Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is > compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's > impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, > data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their > belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work.

If my eyes rolled any harder I'd likely pull a muscle.

Let's dissect this a bit:

> Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period.

It ain't about it being _sent_ (though that's bad, too). It's about it being collected _at all_. Cliqz collects and aggregates my data _somewhere_ , and that is therefore a violation of my privacy, even if (for now) it's on my local machine (I could certainly routinely delete that collected data, much like I do with cache and cookies, but then what's the point of using Cliqz in the first place?).

> Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be > inspected, documentation, etc.)

I _have_ checked the claims for myself (to the best of my ability). None of them address the very real concern of the aggregated data being, you know, aggregated. Just because it's on my local machine doesn't mean it's guaranteed to stay that way; every second it's on my machine is a liability that anyone who's privacy-conscious would want to eliminate (and anyone who's _not_ privacy-conscious doesn't care about).

Like, there's no argument that Cliqz's HumanWeb is at least _less_ evil than traditional tracking systems, but it still relies on aggregation of data, and that is still a massive privacy hazard. Not to mention that the data that _is_ sent¹ is still rich with datapoints that could be used for fingerprinting (the papers seem to suggest there are "heuristics" to detect and anonymize this, but said papers are pretty light on detail, and source code is meaningless since we don't know if it's what's actually running server-side). And also not to mention the rather sketchy distribution methods, like piggybacking on .NET downloads via chip.de in a manner that's been a hallmark of spyware since Y2K.

> they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and > does not imply hard work.

"Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong."

\----

> Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.

Not with that attitude. The search engine technology y'all developed is pretty interesting from a technical standpoint, and could be put to use (I'm sure DDG would be interested in adding it to their mix, or perhaps Ecosia could use it to diversify their Bing/Yahoo results the way DDG does with their in-house crawler). Same with Ghostery's more efficient network request blocking engine² (though it seems like Ghostery's development is still ongoing, no?), which could be useful in other ad and tracker blockers. Neither of these are much in the way of money-makers (well, maybe the search one is, if y'all license it), but it'll at least help make the best of a lousy situation.

I get that it sucks - I've similarly felt the pain of a product into which I've put my blood, sweat, and tears ultimately failing. It's easy to write off the detractors and critics as simply uninformed masses who just "didn't understand how great of a product we have". It's harder to admit that the product wasn't great, or the name was terrible, or the market wasn't as big as anticipated, or what have you.

I'm confident that being the bright and enthusiastic people y'all are, you'll find your footing again. Just, um, try to come up a name that doesn't scream "adware" like "Cliqz MyOffrz" next time, lol. And maybe instead of writing off your criticisms as "FUD", actually examine why those criticisms persist and what you can do to better address them.

\----

¹: [https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/transparency](https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/transparency)

²: [https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html](https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>