Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle - <AUTHOR> https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/ <comment><USER2> > _If we look at major commercial databases today, two out of the three big > names in commericial databases forbid publishing benchmarks._

I see many people bashing Oracle/Ellison, but they are not alone in this. MS does the same thing as well. The really worrying thing is that such practices are deemed to be legal. The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for.

The fact that there are no government regulations against such behavior, is precisely what leads people to think that we are living in a Corporatocracy, and not a Free Market.

<comment><USER3> > The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having > accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing > agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of > product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free- > Markets stand for.

I agree with where you are going but I entirely disagree with your description of Free Markets and Capitalism.

free market - _an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses_

There's _nothing_ in there about _consumers having accurate information_. If anything, _caveat emptor_. Moreover, if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. Those are costs of doing business, to be avoided if possible. Naturally, Larry is only trying to avoid them.

That's why we have regulation. That's why civilization has evolved to have government. That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. That's why _The Fountainhead_ is such a misguided fantasy where entrepreneurs can do anything and it's always better and governments can do nothing and it's always worse.

Free Markets and Capitalism don't _stand_ for anything. That's not even a criticism of them either. Civilization might stand for something although that something is a provisional something at best but then that provisional something is better than nothing.

The requirement for _consumers having accurate information_ is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement.

<comment><USER4> > There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information.

Yes, but practice has taught us that it is an important part of any functioning market.

> the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness > to your consumer.

I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. An unfair market is a fickle and unreliable one. That's not good for anyone.

Further, if my consumer walks away from the deal feeling that it was unfair then I've really done myself a disservice in the long term. It's a reason why "Goodwill and Brand Awareness" are line items in the world of corporate accounting.

> Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything.

They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal.

<comment><USER5> >> the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer.

> I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my > competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair.

Thank you for that. I really dislike the common model of capitalism where the entrepreneur is viewed as a robot whose only goal is to maximize profit with the law being the only boundary.

In my social bubble the landlords that I know care about their renters' wellbeing even if it costs them a bit. I only know a handful of entrepreneurs personally but for all of them fairness and dignity have greater value than profit. Also the millions of small shops in cities around the world that are content just selling enough every month to make a comfortable living with no goal of maximizing anything.

Yes, huge cooperations are different than the guy selling Kebab at the corner. But still I would appreciate if people would see entrepreneurship and businesses not so statically as money-maximizers.

<comment><USER6> > I really dislike the common model of capitalism where the entrepreneur is > viewed as a robot whose only goal is to maximize profit with the law being > the only boundary.

It's something you can do if you want to. Nobody will stop you as long as it's legal, so there will be a non-trivial amount of companies doing just that. It doesn't matter that the guy on the cornerr is trying to be fair. At some point he'll be screwed by a kebab chain which pays the minimum wage and can use the economy of scale in deliveries.

And that's even before we talk about companies that go for risk*penalty<gain situations where they can ignore the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I took a databases course under Professor DeWitt - it was one of the most rewarding and memorable classes that I took at UW Madison. Many years later I heard Larry warmly refer to David DeWitt. I forget whether that was at an all- hands meeting or a conference keynote.

On an unrelated topic, I was taking the course while US v. Microsoft was proceeding. DeWitt kept getting called as an expert witness. At one point he noticed someone wearing a suit in the classroom. He interrupted the class and asked the guy to hand over the subpoena so that he could continue on without being distracted. It turns out that the overdressed student was just prepared for an interview that was happening after the class.

</comment><comment><USER8> DeWitt clauses have spread outside of databases too, unfortunately. John Regehr got a nastygram from Coverity/Synopsys when he tried to post static analyzer benchmarks (not even his own; the benchmarks were done by researchers at the Toyota InfoTechnology Center):

[https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1217](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1217)

This has effectively dissuaded me from trying to perform benchmarks of Coverity and other commercial tools using LAVA [1], so I can attest to its chilling effect.

[1] [https://seclab.ccs.neu.edu/static/publications/sp2016lava.pd...](https://seclab.ccs.neu.edu/static/publications/sp2016lava.pdf)

<comment><USER9> That sounds like something SciHub would be very useful for --- "the benchmarks they don't want you to know."

<comment><USER8> Sure, someone could post a paper like this anonymously. But anonymous papers don't benefit from all the incentives of the standard academic publishing system.

As a fun aside, here's an example of one of the few fully anonymous papers I know of:

[http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html](http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did not know that there is a clause in the license agreement about not being allowed to disclose benchmarks of databases.

Recently I came into discussion regarding why someone chose to use Oracle instead of Postgres; the argument that someone brought up was that they did not know how Postgres scaled. After pointing out that the data that will be stored will be most likely be a few hundred GB (in an exaggerated worst case scenario) and that Postgres is said to handle 100's of TB of data, they capitulated and said that customers trust Oracle (even though they never see or touch the database).

Personally I would be very interested in seeing comparisons between PG, Oracle and MSSQL as well for different data-sets/use-case scenarios. This would really help as a reference in the future when someone else is making critical decisions which might not appear to make sense.

EDIT: This sounds like a very shady clause; anyone with law insights know whether this would be enforceable in the EU?

<comment><USER11> Postgre doesn't handle hundreds of TB of data.

<comment><USER12> 10 years ago it could handle 2PB. [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2535825/business- intel...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2535825/business- intelligence/size-matters--yahoo-claims-2-petabyte-database-is-world-s-biggest --busiest.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Law professor here again.

For those who are interested in the legal and policy aspects of this, I highly recommend a book called Boilerplate by Margaret Radin. This is just one of many examples of comically abusive and bizarre contract terms that companies impose by imaginary consent.

<comment><USER14> How are clauses like this even legal? One could argue they limit people's personal freedom and is essentially an anti-competition clause without an upside. Legitimate question, as I am finding it hard that a court would allow this.

<comment><USER15> whenever I encounter a deep gray area contract like this my first thought is that its a play on cost of discovery. so long as it is ambiguous enough it just boils down to who can afford how much legal expense. when comparing deep pockets like oracle and some random reviewer/blogger its a done deal.

<comment><USER13> Yes. This is often true of all kinds of legally shady behavior, not just contracts. This is why things like class action litigation can be important, and other aggregation mechanisms. (There might be something to crowdfunding challenges in cases like this)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This isn't limited to commercial software. Until its recent relicensing, GPL FreeRTOS had this turd:

Clause 2:

FreeRTOS may not be used for any competitive or comparative purpose, including the publication of any form of run time or compile time metric, without the express permission of Real Time Engineers Ltd. (this is the norm within the industry and is intended to ensure information accuracy).

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't a major usage restriction that make it incompatable with other GPL software (and possibly make it tagged as non-free by FSF and OSI)?

<comment><USER18> I suspect this makes it incompatible with FreeRTOS itself too, as the GPL allows redistribution only if no additional restrictions are stipulated. So there was legal way to redistribute it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somebody who apparently had to deal with the company once told me that Oracle is really an acronym for "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised these clauses manage to prevent benchmarks. Surely someone with no Oracle contract can still publish them? Leak a benchmark, benchmark on someone else's system, whatever. It shouldn't be too hard to publish a benchmark for which this clause can't be enforced.

<comment><USER21> How would they get the software legally?

Oracle would probably sue them for piracy or something. If you bought it, they would probably say you violated the agreement and no longer have a valid license.

Not saying it's right, but since it's commercial software, they can probably play some tricks. It's one of among many reasons to use commerical software where possible.

<comment><USER9> You can legally get Oracle DB completely free, for "development":

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/downloads/index.ht...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/downloads/index.html)

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard- license-...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard- license-152015.html)

Of course there's the anti-benchmarking clause, but other than that, they offer the downloads free (as in beer).

<comment><USER22> But you have to register.

If you publish the benchmark, Oracle will sue you for obtaining the software illegitimately or sue you for not conforming to the license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone explain how this agreement can be binding? For instance, if I buy their DB, then publish benchmarks, at best they can deactivate my license or something right? So if I am willing to forego the cost of the license, I can do whatever benchmarking I want, publish it, and say goodbye to the DB?

<comment><USER11> If you publish a benchmark, you risk a lawsuit. That will be time consuming and expensive. It may result in fines and having to take off the benchmark from the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This has often been abused by these companies to attack open source software that allows benchmarking (because what kind of open source license would ban that?). The company can perform a "benchmark" of their product and the open source product. They'll then release the results as a whitepaper. Even if they perform the benchmark correctly, they can always choose which results to actually publish.

But since the proprietary software has a "no benchmarking" clause, open source projects cannot respond to the whitepaper by performing their own benchmarking. They would need the permission of the proprietary vendor!

For example, here is an IBM blog post comparing the performance of IBM MQ and Apache ActiveMQ ([https://webspherecompetition.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/ibm- mq...](https://webspherecompetition.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/ibm-mq-vs-apache- activemq-performance-comparison-update/)). I've tried to find a copy of the IBM MQ EULA to link, but cannot find one anywhere. But last time I reviewed it (several years ago) I believe it also had a "no benchmark" clause.

<comment><USER25> The blog post says in the end that IBM does allow benchmarks.

<comment><USER24> I don't see that. It has tools for running the benchmarks yourself, but that doesn't give you permission to publish benchmark results. And even if it did, a blog post from an employee cannot give you permission to do something that the EULA takes away.

<comment><USER26> From the OP:

> IBM is notable for actually allowing benchmarks: > Licensee may disclose the > results of any benchmark test of the Program or its subcomponents to any > third party provided that …

<comment><USER24> Oh geez, thanks both for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> (edit: congress forbid review gag clauses last year)

I've pointed this:

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/congress- passes-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/congress-passes-law- protecting-right-to-post-negative-online-reviews/)

out to my employer's lawyers, who responded with "well, yes, but we'd still get sued, by Oracle, so... no."

<comment><USER28> These evil clauses are called Dewitt Clauses, since the original purpose was to attack DeWitt.

Unfortunately, the law that protects reviewers does not protect people who publish benchmarks in software. These DeWitt clauses should be illegal in the United States on First Amendment grounds, but the problem is that to get software at all you have to agree to the license, and the licenses often have these nasty things. I think these Clauses should be straight up illegal, but very few people have enough money to pursue this in court.

<comment><USER29> > Unfortunately, the law that protects reviewers does not protect people who > publish benchmarks in software.

I'm not convinced that's generally true. The form contracts language [1] clearly talks about individuals, but at least one of the DB vendor license agreements allows for individuals. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888236)

If an individual were to decide to do such a benchmark, I don't immediately see how the DeWitt clause would be still valid. Not many people are going to risk that obviously.

> hese DeWitt clauses should be illegal in the United States on First > Amendment ground

I agree that they shouldn't be allowed, I however fail to see how 1A applies. You willingly enter into a contract with a private entity. That contract has rules, and there are some consequences for breaking them.

I think the government has an important, and imo somewhat neglected, role in providing rules around valid contracts, but that's not 1A.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can Oracle/Microsoft actually enforce "no benchmark clauses," as in could they take you to court and win?

<comment><USER31> I suspect not, you should be covered by the first amendment. However, I don't think most people have the money to find out. The ones that do seem keen on following Ellison's example.

<comment><USER32> The first amendment doesn't apply to contracts between private entities. The government cannot forbid you to publish benchmarks. However, it can also not prevent you from signing away your first amendment rights in most circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The one time such a clause was challenged in court it was struck down, but on narrower grounds related to the specifics of the particular case. The actual issue of whether such a clause is enforceable was not answered by the court. [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/28511/has- the-d...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/28511/has-the-dewitt- clause-which-prevents-researchers-for-publishing-db-benchmarks-e)

</comment><comment><USER34> Standard "enterprise software" company operating procedure. I think VMware is equally jealous of their benchmarks.

It could be worse though. Cisco pressed _criminal_ charges against this guy[0] for wanting to 3rd-party-service their equipment.

Happy 2017, peasants!

[0-0] [http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Cisco+deceived+Canadian+cou...](http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Cisco+deceived+Canadian+courts+audacious+ploy+jail+executive+judge+finds/4884794/story.html)

[0-1] [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2507735/cybercrime- hac...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2507735/cybercrime- hacking/former-engineer-who-sued-cisco-now-faces-criminal-charges.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> For a time I really idolised Larry Ellison. Then I saw a documentary on Oracle early years and someone said - "There was no Oralce v1, as Ellison, "knew no one would want to buy version 1". This sounded both stupid and an urban legend. Till I checked the Wikipedia entry:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database#Releases_and...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database#Releases_and_versions)

It not only changed my perspective of the man but also the company. One can know a lot about a company's practices from the way it was founded. Now there is nothing about Oracle which surprises me any more.

<comment><USER36> _> There was no Oralce v1, as Ellison, "knew no one would want to buy version 1"_

Of the "bad Larry Ellison" anecdotes ITT, most of which do paint him in a very bad light, this one doesn't offend me at all; more like smart marketing advice you can use.

<comment><USER37> That's a very bad marketing advice. In case someone finds out what you've done, it's a red cross mark on your brand.

<comment><USER36> It's no different from pricing your product at $9.99/month instead of $10/month, or $9.99/month instead of $119.88/year. Or more pertinent, marketing Java 1.8 as Java 8, selling products with random alphanumeric names like "A-Series 7340X", retroactively renumbering previous software versions, or going straight from Windows 8 to Windows 10.

Software version schemes are often started at 0, or other times 1, so why not any other integer? I don't expect software version numbers to mean anything except that higher is (probably) chronologically later. That said I would probably still start numbering internal/beta versions at 1 or 0 and use 2 for the first release.

It's not even in the same league of dishonesty as ubiquitous practices by blue-chip tech companies such as using trial pricing in advertisements, selling "new versions" of software with only trivial changes, selling "extended warranties" on hardware that don't cover the most common causes of breakage, or claiming customers have access to "expertise" developing intelligent zero-downtime SaaS solutions on the blockchain with the deep learning algorithms powering our global AR/VR-enabled IoT cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm more interested in which cloud provider doesn't allow benchmarks.

<comment><USER39> Given his employment history, I'm guessing MS: [https://twitter.com/danluu](https://twitter.com/danluu)

<comment><USER40> Not sure that's true, given easy-to-find examples of Azure benchmarks (and it doesn't even do well in this one):

[http://www.acmebenchmarking.com/2015/11/benchmarking- cloud-p...](http://www.acmebenchmarking.com/2015/11/benchmarking-cloud- provider-performance.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Eulas are toiled paper in EU, so just benchmark here. You can even buy the software second hand and avoid touching EULA completely. Oracle learned this the hard way, losing the lawsuit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UsedSoft#ECJ_ruling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UsedSoft#ECJ_ruling)

</comment><comment><USER42> Larry Ellison long ago was an engineer, he turned to the dark side a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

There are reasons for companies not wanting benchmarks public i.e. unequal or fixed results. But ultimately one can no longer be an engineer if you are excluding metrics from software for business/legal reasons.

I have had to run many systems on Oracle and the developer is not their customer, it is a painful experience in Oracle enterprise. The extent of it is they have Ask Tom fill in the gaps. Luckily most of the Oracle work was moving systems from massive Oracle setups to swifter (and hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper) architecture on MSSQL, PostgreSQL and MySQL (until Oracle bought them) now MariaDB.

I like platforms that put the developer and their workflow as a top priority, not how many rounds of golf you play with the C level execs. Oracle would be the latter type of "enterprise" company.

</comment><comment><USER43> Alright, this isn't news. It's pretty well known you can benchmark Oracle, it's just always referred to as Database X in the literature (Sometimes MSSQL gets this treatment too)

<comment><USER6> Got any examples? Googling for benchmark enterprise database X doesn't give anything useful.

<comment><USER43> [http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.pdf](http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.pdf)

Sorry, it's actually "DBMS-X"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why would you have that clause? If you believe in your product you _want_ me to benchmark it, and if you don't believe in your own product, why should I?

<comment><USER45> They don't want MS to pay an "independent" 3rd party to poorly configure their database then publish benchmarks that show them in a negative light. Therefor if you want to publish benchmarks you have to (pay to) keep Oracle in the loop so that they make sure you don't screw it up.

You see this all the time with Mysql and Postgresql benchmarks. Typically when I see the two compared it is by someone with a decade of experience with one of the systems, and none with the other one. They use a workload that is optimized for their usual system. They also don't have a clue how to create a high performance version for the competitor, nor do they know how to configure it.

<comment><USER11> Most of the benchmarks are done by competing companies with competing products, not by a random engineer. They make sure the benchmark put their own products in a good light.

It's also true that the testers usually don't configure all the products equivalently. It's usually not (only) incompetence, they are pushing an agenda for their product or consulting services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Buried quite a ways down in the article is an interesting concept of using semi anonymous markets to distribute and pay for benchmarking.

</comment><comment><USER47> Why don't the competing proprietary databases go right at Oracle in their ads to business class at airports.

"Oracle won't let you read or publish benchmarks, maybe too many of their customers would get fired if they did...?" Or variants on the "why do they need to hide?"

Haven't seen a case where going with postgres up front on pure prejudice has backfired. Maybe there are times, it would be interesting to know what and when.

</comment><comment><USER48> Does anyone here have direct experience with being sued for releasing a benchmark online? I'm interested in seeing how common (and enforceable) it really is.

<comment><USER49> As far as I know, it is very easily enforceable and quite common for enterprise software.

In certain countries that is even illegal to publish "benchmarks" like this one. I remember that there was a law like that in Germany - not sure whether it has changed with EU.

<comment><USER50> > In certain countries that is even illegal to publish "benchmarks" like this > one.

My understanding is that in some places it's illegal for companies to publish benchmarks "proving" that their software is better than their competitors', the idea being that you're unlikely to show a fair comparison. I've not heard of it being illegal for a third party to post such a thing, though. Do you have a link? (I'm genuinely curious.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> We don't do benchmarks. Our network security team verifies VPN transaction performance and ensures packet security using general purpose scripts that, strangely, look like they're doing basic db operations on different servers and systems. The unfortunate side effect are numbers related to network latency and, I suppose, system performance. But of course we don't care about that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Meanwhile, Aurora on AWS has an explicit performance assessment guide

[https://d0.awsstatic.com/product- marketing/Aurora/RDS_Aurora...](https://d0.awsstatic.com/product- marketing/Aurora/RDS_Aurora_Performance_Assessment_Benchmarking_v1-2.pdf)

With Oracle going all in on cloud, this mindset of Larry surely doesn't bode well?

</comment><comment><USER53> Wouldn't it be relatively trivial to create a set of data and code, plus a deployment script to spin up some DBs on a cloud service and compare the results? If you're doing it in house without publishing the results so that you can determine the best db for your needs, would it run foul of the TOC? Would the vendors even know you're doing it?

</comment><comment><USER54> I guess I have never read the EULA, as I have benchmarked the speed vs accuracy of EM simulators and published the results online.

</comment><comment><USER55> So how good does Oracle perform im comparison to mssql and postgres? For example with just INSERTs and SELECTs?

</comment><comment><USER56> I hadn't a chance to read Oracle's or SQL Server's license, but one thing is not clear to me: is the used forbidden from _performing_ benchmarks or from _publishing_ them?

</comment><comment><USER57> Maybe it's time to start shorting Oracle stock. In the age of AWS and Azure, I don't see their 10 year prospects as being very good.

<comment><USER58> Oracle Cloud!

It's not in the Azure/GCP tier, but they're investing a ton in it (seven figure offers) to pull in engineering talent from AWS/Azure/GCP. And Oracle does have some definite ... "structural" advantages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Everyone knows that Oracle products are poor quality. They were never about the product... Always about sales and litigation.

Oracle has firmly established its reputation and I'm confident that someday they'll pay for it.

<comment><USER60> > someday they'll pay for it

I'm not holding my breath though. Maybe my grandchildren will live to see Oracle bought as a Kickstarter project started by Postgres devs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Are there really no anonymous benchmarks in the wild?

<comment><USER62> Probably, but non-trivial comparative benchmarks of many types of commercial software, performed using well thought out methodologies, are neither easy nor cheap to run.

Furthermore, an anonymous benchmark (like many other anonymous product comparisons) is going to make many people suspect that it's a fraudulent result. Imagine there's an anonymous benchmark that isn't simple to replicate because of software and/or hardware costs that shows some proprietary software whipping an open source project on some dimensions or other. How many people here are going to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's the proprietary vendor planting false information?

<comment><USER11> Anonymous benchmarks are usually affiliated to at least one of the products being benchmarked. It's usually not hard to figure out which one.

Either way I wouldn't expect a real world benchmark to be reproducible, it's too hard to reproduce and takes too much resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This should be marked (2014).

</comment><comment><USER64> And remember,

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to > think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't > anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick > your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the > lawnmower hates me' \-- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower > can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that > trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill > ([https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s](https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s))

And

> I actually think that it does a dis-service to _not_ go to Nazi allegory > because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some > critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have > said before I emphatically believe that if you _have_ to explain the Nazis > to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer > there's a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle > allegory. — also Brian Cantrill > ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m))

<comment><USER9> The other memorable quote I've heard is "Oracle is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".

<comment><USER65> "Oregon Ripped-off, America's Cup, Larry Ellison."

<comment><USER66> It probably worked better when Oracle was the race winner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> How can database vendors make benchmarking illegal? Saying "we don't allow benchmarking" in their EULA don't make it illegal if the clause is abusive. Maybe it can work in some juridictions but I don't think it is enforceable worldwide.

<comment><USER68> I'm not a lawyer so I don't really have any clue :). But I suspect the defense would be that it's an agreement between two parties: you want to use their shit you agree to use it by their terms. The debate around these things has always been more or less centered on what it meant to agree, i.e. did I agree when I opened the shrinkwrap on a box? But with Oracle licenses there is not much doubt about what it means to agree, there being reams of paper evidence that you agreed, and large checks written to make that agreement concrete.

<comment><USER69> I suppose you could also go at it from the angle that it's an anti-competitive practice and no license should be able to restrict you from publishing truthful benchmarks.

<comment><USER70> You could knowingly publish incorrect, fictional, or fabricated results. When they sue, you won't have violated any license. But at least oracle will look terrible.

<comment><USER71> This sounds like a terrible idea. Maybe if one is a 15 year old kid, sure, for shits and giggles. Why would a researcher do this, damaging their reputation in the process? And what good does it serve anyone?

<comment><USER70> Mostly because it's a better world than one where Oracle can control the image of their shitty db.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I was under impression that "no benchmark clauses" is many ToS and license terms. Are there any enterprise software which allows that?

</comment><comment><USER72> Could it be that these provisions are there mainly to prevent other companies from publishing misleading benchmarks? Instead of fighting in the court if the benchmarks are done properly and give correct picture, maybe it is just easier to outright ban them.</comment>


Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130603/zynga-to-lay-off-520-employees-18-percent-of-staff-and-shutter-new-york-and-la-offices/ <comment><USER2> Good thing Pincus sold off a bunch of stock [1] -- $190mm worth [2]. Even better, he sold it before the employee lockup expired [3]. Living like a boss == fuck you money in the bank, instead of locked up in a company like suckers (employees and investors). From the stock charts [4], it looks like it closed opening day at $9.50, Pincus and insiders dumped at $12, and if you're a regular employee w/ a 6mo lockup that presumably expired 16 Jun since the company opened 16 Dec 11, you've never seen a price higher than $6.

ps -- dear employees and investors: your ceo dumping big blocks of stock is probably a negative signal

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230472440457729...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577299372042231462.html)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/10/05/zynga- kee...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/10/05/zynga-keeps- crashing-but-mark-pincus-is-having-a-great-year/)

[3] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/zynga-insider- tradi...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/zynga-insider-trading- lawsuit_n_1724410.html)

[4] <http://www.google.com/finance?cid=481720736332929>

updated to include pricing. Again, selling at 2x your employees == living like a fucking boss.

<comment><USER3> While I feel bad for the employees, some investors should have known better. It was over priced at $12.

<comment><USER4> It was over-priced at $.01, apparently

<comment><USER5> should have bought some puts

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know what the problem here is? There is no material difference between a 10 person game studio and a 3000 person game studio. Zynga likes to pretend that their Z-Cloud gives them an advantage over their competitors. Maybe it does in terms of operations, but games isn't an operations business, it's a hits business. All of the optimization in the world doesn't help if you can't keep making wins and Zynga can't make wins because they're too cluttered with layers of middle management FUD.

520 employees is a lot of people out of work, but I have to think they saw it coming. My advice to people in similar positions all throughout tech is this: there are three signs that indicate an impending downsizing.

* Depressed Stock Value over long periods of time

* An Acceleration of secrecy and fiefdom claiming within the culture

* You look around and no one wants to come to work anymore

If you find yourself in this situation, leave. Find another job. Being caught in a downsizing sucks, but if you pay attention you can avoid them. It's important to make friends and to be able to tell the temperature of your local environment to avoid such devastation.

 _Edit_ : This can best be summarized as the well known phenomenon: "There's no such thing as a Free Lunch".

<comment><USER7> _Being caught in a downsizing sucks_

Or it can be a great. Severance packages can be quite lucrative.

The better advice I give people is "always be looking for job opportunities". The best job opportunities come when you least expect them, and the worst jobs are taken when you're desperate.

<comment><USER8> _the worst jobs are taken when you're desperate_

If I could suggest one thing for a young programmer to tattoo onto their inner arm, it would be that sentence right there.

<comment><USER9> Problem is they usually are actually desperate...

<comment><USER8> Being aware of being desperate and what that means will at least allow people to make more informed desperate choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel bad for those who put their blood, sweat and tears into building Zynga.

I feel bad for those who have just lost their jobs.

I feel bad for those who remain under a cloud with the only comment they get is self-deflecting language from their CEO like "brothers and sisters".

Who I don't feel bad for is Mark Pincus. The collapse of Zynga couldn't happen to a more deserving person. Just 18 months ago when Zynga was on top of the world, Pincus made a name for himself by bullying staff to give back stock options [1] for no other reason than he thought they didn't deserve such a huge windfall.

Well those chickens have come home to roost. Those same employers will be the first to take flight having no further loyalty to the company.

I also know that I wouldn't work for Pincus. He's shown his true character with this petty greed (how much difference did this make to him personally really?).

Frankly I'd hesitate in working for any company backed by the same VCs that let this happen. To allow this erosion of what I'd call the "startup bargain" (trading salary for equity) by greatly reducing the upside is shortsighted and undermines the very conditions that makes the startup scene thrive and succeed.

As much as I viewed Groupon as a scam (a Ponzi scheme essentially), Andrew Mason's parting words [2] after getting fired gained him a lot of respect (from me at least) as they were authentic and didn't seek to cast blame elsewhere. In fact he went so far as to make a joke of "spending more time with my family" (which we all know is a euphemism for getting fired).

What entrepreneurs and VCs need to realize is these bullying tactics (and I include the underhanded clawback agreements to Skype employees in this) undermine the entire ecosystem and we need to send a powerful message that they can't and won't be tolerated.

[1]: [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-11-10/zy...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-11-10/zynga- ipo-stock/51158068/1)

[2]: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/28/andrew-mason- groupo...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/28/andrew-mason-groupoin/)

<comment><USER11> "Frankly I'd hesitate in working for any company backed by the same VCs that let this happen."

I see some pretty big names in the list of Zynga investors. Namely Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. The set of startups these VCs have invested in will cover a huge portion of the "good" startups to work for.

I don't know if refusing to work for a company backed by one of them is a viable option.

<comment><USER12> Google invested on Zynga, and Cletus work for Google. Sorry for being cynic, it's not my style.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why do you assume Google is so good? Or so unavoidable?

Recently Google bought Quickoffice and booted two offices of android devs + QA in Ukraine without even paying them 2-month equivalent of salary for the inconvenience. Not sure if they are going to sue.

You can argue it was not "The Google" but some of their proxies, but it doesn't matter: as a company they're cool with that, saving some dimes by ripping out employees they aren't going to use, when they can get away with that.

<comment><USER12> See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5817073>

<comment> guard-of-terra So what? I didn't doubt Google invested; I just claim it's not as important because Google isn't actually good when it comes to treating 3rd party employees.

<comment><USER12> You didn't read the whole thread. The thread was initiated by someone who works at Google, and says ""Frankly I'd hesitate in working for any company backed by the same VCs that let this happen.".

<comment> guard-of-terra It wasn't obvious from the context that he works for Google.

And it seems he actually works for Twilio: <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stanleydrew>

But I would say "core Google" is safe, it's just that Google investements/acquirement doesn't really mean any safety per se.

<comment><USER12> Again you are not reading what I say. The user is <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cletus>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A good reminder to not get stuck in local fad maximums.

Remember when the future of every single company was gamification or bust? Remember when the seemingly only viable business model was skinner boxing rube middle america housewives with no self control (oddly, middle eastern princes also would spend tens of thousands a month on those silly in app purchase games, except they can afford it and don't have their lives ruined with addict-induced credit card debt)?

I don't have a point. Just notice how the "tech press" and fads and media sweeps through in its ever-shortening attention span to the point where they aren't good signals for anything anymore.

<comment><USER14> Empty, derivative Facebook games are not any more "skinner box" than anything else we either enjoy or do out of necessity. Almost any game ever created could be described as a "skinner box." Completing work units for a salary could be described as a "skinner box." If there is something especially bad or manipulative about Facebook games, it isn't that they are a "skinner box."

<comment><USER15> Perhaps you're unaware that Zynga explicitly treats games like skinner boxes? Their whole deal was using metrics to manipulate the feedback loop to maximize profit.

Even the most mainstream traditional games were designed to be fun -- they might aim for the lowest common denominator, they may artificially inflate the game length, but the goal was still entertainment. Because all they wanted you to do was buy the game.

That's not the case with the microtransaction free-to-play model -- they need you to not just play the game, but to feel a _need_ to play the game. That means their goal is getting you addicted to the skinner box. The mechanics of such a game are all built to reinforce this goal. Zynga took this to its logical conclusion by A/B testing the various game parameters.

As Tim Rogers said, such games are "a love letter from a computer virus."

<http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=1076>

(Warning: long but insightful article (But if you recognize the author's name you'd already know that.))

<comment><USER16> >That's not the case with the microtransaction free-to-play model -- they need you to play the game, to feel a need to play the game.

Zynga focuses on mechanics that promote habits, but to say that's the only approach incentivized by F2P is a pretty myopic view of the market.

The F2P model incentivizes addictive gameplay more than other genres, but it's not like building an addicted game was a bad thing pre-F2P. Valve's DOTA 2, for instance, has largely identical gameplay to its 100% free Warcraft 3-based ancestor (tangentially, Team Fortress 2 isn't much of a skinner box either).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have only passively been paying attention to Zynga. I do feel bad for people who are now out of work. However, the staggering thing about this article to me was that 520 people only represents _18 percent_ of their employees. That means that after this, there's an astonishing 2300+ people _still_ working on Farmville and friends. Coming from a nonprofit biomedical research group where I struggle to get single digit numbers of developers, that is mind-bending.

<comment><USER18> your nonprof biomedical group didnt have kleiner perkins pushing it towards an ipo ;)

<comment><USER19> Ah, but the IPO already happened so it's time to lay them off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _"The reason? Mobile"_

I don't buy this at all, nor do I believe that this is a

It seems like everyone blames everything on either the economy or a shift to mobile these days. Intel, Microsoft, EA, and now Zynga. All of this despite the fact that dekstop traffic has remained steady or grown, even in the last two years. Yes, more people are accessing the web via mobile, but it's still only 15%. [1]

Do you see Activision-Blizzard and Steam talking about how mobile is stealing their lunch? Nah, they're too busy eating Zynga and EA's lunches.

I have yet to see any data showing that EA or Zynga are shrinking based on forces beyond their control. I bet the guys on /r/gaming - annoying though they can be - could give you a better idea than journalists who buy the PR lines. This isn't some totally-unforeseen and cataclysmic surge to mobile.

We're talking about a company with a reputation for churning out unoriginal copies of smaller/indie games. THAT is their problem. If Zynga wants to grown, they must focus on original and high-quality games. Costs and risks are much higher, but _that's what people are willing to pay real money for._

[1] [http://searchengineland.com/report-mobile-traffic-to- local-s...](http://searchengineland.com/report-mobile-traffic-to-local-sites- growing-faster-than-total-internet-now-at-27-percent-158139)

<comment><USER21> It's really casual gaming that's suffering from this: folks are switching from playing those types of games on Facebook to playing them on their phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Boy does this suck for Zynga employees. I really feel for the former OMGPOP employees as well- looks like Zynga has taken them down with them. I know that OMGPOP were desperately short of cash themselves, but at least they were the masters of their own destinies.

EDIT: and I wouldn't be too smug about their downfall if I were you. There could be repercussions across the tech sector if Zynga totally fails.

<comment><USER23> Why? I felt bad for Zynga employees who got screwed earlier since that was the first breach of trust by their CEO and it was still unclear if Zynga was something other than a game-copying exploiter of economically disadvantaged people through game mechanic trickery. But now, after all the dirty laundry has been aired?

edit: Any repercussions for the tech sector if Zynga fails will fall in the "healthy correction" column in my book.

<comment><USER24> I would assume that he is referring to the possibility of a confidence crash in tech companies that would affect public markets. Personally, I don't think Zynga is widely held enough for it to have much of an impact, and as you mentioned, the dirty laundry has already been aired.

<comment><USER25> I agree. If somehow Facebook plummeted and bankrupted it would absolutely raise doubts about the tech sector. 1/7 of the world can't use a service it trusts any more is a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The gaming industry is so fucked. On one hand, you've got huge conglomerates like EA that release shitty game after shitty game with invasive DRM that would make Orwell cringe, and on the other you've got 2300+ people working on Farmville. I just feel bad for indie developers that release progressive and inventive games competition after competition with tiny teams of 1-2 and live on shoestring/student budgets.

Steam Greenlight ended up being more of a failure than a success, next-gen consoles won't even give a shit about indies, and we wonder why this industry is so screwed up. Don't even get me started on the lack of proper infrastructure for competitive games, etc (at least in the West). The whole thing is just depressing.

<comment><USER27> There's never been a better time to be an indie developer, particularly on the PC. Marketing remains difficult, but now there are virtually no barriers. Digital distribution and engines like Unity have changed everything.

Steam has its problems, and I wish they'd just shift to an Apple-style app store model with a curated storefront. But in general, they've been a huge boon to independent developers.

<comment><USER28> >I wish they'd just shift to an Apple-style app store model

If they lowered the minimum prices too, I wouldn't mind. But right now Steam has a lot of third-rate "side-project" games that are lower quality than free flash games online charging the price of a very good iOS/Android game and it's getting annoying.

Now, I'm not one to think saturation with lower quality/more indie stuff is always bad (especially with music, for example) but it seems with the ubiquity of PC game development as a hobby, a decent amount of crap is a byproduct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming > company . . ._

Zynga is a gaming company? That's news to me -- I thought they were still in the business of tricking people into paying for the privilege to click things faster.

Is it any surprise that wasn't enough to sustain a company?

</comment><comment><USER30> It's unfortunate such an ethical CEO as Mark Pincus has to go through troubles such as this.

This is also a reminder that only very few companies caught up in the bubble have real business models that will last when the bubble pops.

<comment><USER30> Yes, I was being sarcastic. Sorry, I thought everyone knew what a douche Pincus was: (and this is just ONE example):

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social- gaming...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming- ecosystem-of-hell/)

Sidenote: Does HN stop editing after a certain timeframe? I can't find a link to edit my original comment to add this.

<comment><USER31> > Sidenote: Does HN stop editing after a certain timeframe? I can't find a > link to edit my original comment to add this.

Yup. The time frame is ~15 minutes, AFAICT. Same with deleting, though I _think_ that's about an hour. Don't quote me on those numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The takeaway here, for me at least, is that Zynga got a lot of early success via a couple smart exploits-- early social network virality (since shut down by Facebook et al. because spammy Farmville requests hurt user experience) and freemium gaming (which has been embraced by the rest of the competition and no longer serves as a competitive advantage). So Zynga now has to be just another gaming company, and gaming, as an industry, is high-overhead and high-risk, with a lot of very serious competition. There's no hockey stick in running a big gaming conglomerate; it's just a media business. If you have a hit, you make money for a while, if you don't, you lose. Just like running a record label or a movie studio.

</comment><comment><USER33> > restructure its troubled business toward mobile

How can you found a company in 2007, go public in 2011, and not be prepared for mobile in 2013? You take all that cash from public markets but fail to have a mobile strategy while hiring 3000 people? That's a colossal management failure. The board should rid the shareholders of him. Also, where the eff _was_ the board? You'd think someone would have just held up their iphone in a meeting and it would have been enough.

<comment><USER34> Because no one is really prepared for mobile, even now. The problem isn't that no one saw the rise of mobile coming, but rather that no one really knows what to do about it in response. Most people _still_ don't.

This is particularly true for advertising-based companies. Mobile users are less engaged to your ads, have less intent, and are more loathe to tap on ads, so even if you can maintain the dominance of your product into the mobile space you're still looking at a bad revenue situation.

Mobile is _here_ now, in full force, but revenue on mobile platforms is still largely an unanswered question. We started out selling apps, then we started down microtransactions, and ads, but none of these are particularly great.

<comment><USER33> So I guess what you're saying is that zynga staffed as if mobile was going to be as profitable as online but it turned out that it was an entirely different beast. They scrambled to adjust, but nothing worked. Too many people; time for tough love. Fair enough. The overstaffing may still be excessive -- the reaction delayed, hard to tell -- but I can easily imagine swinging for a land grab and ending up surprised in the dirt. Thanks for explaining. I guess I'd make a crappy board member :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> With respect to employees that have lost their jobs. Good, fuck Zynga.

</comment><comment><USER36> The public announcement: <http://blog.zynga.com/2013/06/03/ceo-update-4/>

        "Our Founder and CEO Mark Pincus today sent a note to employees
         outlining structural changes..."

It might seem like a small thing to some, but I can't believe the casual language on the blog post introduction. The CEO "sent a note" to his company?

I'm sure that softened the blow to those 520 people. It was just a note, after all.

I don't care what your culture is like or that you want to be a "cool" company. Notes are for reminding people to clear their old food from the fridge, or seeing if anyone wants to get together after work to welcome the new guy. This is serious shit to (hopefully) every one of your employees, and especially so to 18% of them. There are times to be formal.

The letter itself is much better, but the blog intro is part of the official announcement. It counts.

<comment><USER37> In this case, what is likely the material difference between that "note" and a "letter"? I can't imagine this note was scrawled with sharpie onto a notepad sized piece of paper with adhesive backing and faint images of fruits or snowmen printed on it.

<comment><USER36> A note is by definition brief and informal. I think the employees deserve that any official communication in this kind of situation be neither.

Edit: And I'm sure I've put more weight on that one phrase than almost anyone else, but I've worked at startups for years now and been through rounds of layoffs at a couple. It's appropriate to err in the other direction.

<comment><USER38> You expect better from Zynga? Isn't this the same company that fired people immediately before the IPO so that founders could take back their stock options? "Being a meritocracy is one of their core values."

[http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&i...](http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&id=8426597)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Well, considering that their industry didn't exist very long ago, 2000+ employees is still commendable [ie if they had gotten there with no layoffs we'd be saying how great they are doing].

Its a young company, who knows what form it survives in but that it go so far so fast is pretty impressive!

</comment><comment><USER40> Why does Zynga have such a huge payroll?

Blizzard have in thousands mostly because of the Game Masters they need to provide for WoW.

</comment><comment><USER41> To anyone at Zynga looking for an interesting meaningful challenge that also pays well: Transportation is changing, and InstantCab is on the forefront. We are hiring smart people to join our team of a excellent hackers who are also good people. We are hiring for almost every technical role you can think of.

We have been growing at double digit % every month for several months. Helping people get from A to B seems like a simple problem that anyone can solve, but the real world complexity required to scale such a company demands pretty ingenious solutions and behind the curtain, we are building just such solutions.

Email me: email@example.com so I can give you more details in a private conversation.

</comment><comment><USER42> Based on the article, assuming the $80 mil in savings was over 1 year, that means the average Zynga employee costs $153k per year.

<comment><USER43> Initially that seems a bit high, but after thinking about it a bit, it doesn't seem unreasonable.

LA and NYC are expensive places to live, so the salaries will be bumped up to account for the cost of living.

And the $80 million figure takes into account all of the taxes, social security, unemployment insurance, and benefit costs associated with the employees. An employee making $80k a year can easily cost $100k- $120k a year depending on benefits and taxes.

And its trendy for big name "startup" companies to offer high salaries and costly fringe benefits to attract "rock star" programmers.

<comment><USER44> 80k is definitely too low, practically all big companies in the Bay offer more than that to fresh out of school kids these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Whatever happens - Pincus will do alright for himself.

<comment><USER46> He's already done alright for himself, because he was wise enough to take money off the table when he had the opportunity to do so.

What I don't understand is why he's still at it. This must be an enormously stressful time. Why wouldn't he take the rather impressive amount of money he's already made and just go enjoy his life?

Evidence, I suppose, that some of us are just wired differently.

<comment><USER47> > _"This must be an enormously stressful time."_

If he's already taken (a lot of) money off the table, what's there (for him) to be stressed about?

<comment><USER46> You might be different, but I've always found firing employees and/or not meeting expectations pretty stressful, no matter what my personal financial situation.

<comment><USER47> Well, _I'd_ have had a hard time building an empire off copy/paste game development, spammy-to-fraudulent marketing schemes, encouraged social pressure/spam, an 'arcade' currency, and a pretty shameless twisting of game designs to really squeeze profit from that situation.

So I'm pretty sure the stress _I'd_ personally feel isn't worth talking about.

Which is why I not-so-subtly reframed the assertion in terms of the person who _is_ in that situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I had visited the Zynga office a few years back, and was super impressed. Free food/drinks everywhere, and the office looked really nice. They even had Zynga branded water. I had not played any Zynga games until then, but came back thinking these guys must be on to something.

That evening I went back and signed up for Mafia wars. After a few minutes of repeatedly clicking buttons to watch an 'experience meter' rise, I knew this couldn't last. There is of course more to it than just that, but it just wasn't fun or engaging to play. I read a lot about how their analytics gives them an advantage, but I just didn't see the appeal of that game. That bubble had to burst.

</comment><comment><USER49> Here's the problem:

Virtual Farmville Tractors at Zynga require about (520 this layoff)/(represents 0.18 of workforce) around 3000 people to produce.

Real world tractors at Caterpillar Inc require about (125000 people worldwide)/(about 110 plants) = about 1000 people to produce.

Something wrong when a fake tractor requires more people to produce than a real tractor (yes yes I know that Zynga makes more than Skinner box farm games on the FB platform, but I still found the comparison stunning)

<comment><USER50> The comparison falls even more short since Zynga develops all aspects of a farm, including animals and crops. And I woukd have to think there are many more virtual farms than real ones.

You are also for some reason comparing all of Zynga with just one Caterpillar plant.

<comment><USER49> That is true that I compared to only one plant, however caterpillar is a holding company of multiple heavy equipment mfgrs, so it seemed unfair to compare the EMD locomotive factory AND the bulldozer factory vs merely farmville.

On the other hand, there are many more types of caterpillar tractors than farmville tractors, which does even it up a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see a WARN act filing by Zynga with the state of California for 2012 or 2013. [http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN...](http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN.htm)

My understanding is that WARN Act notices are required to be filed in CA for layoffs of more than 50 people by larger companies. (Perhaps the LA office has fewer than 50 people?)

Ex-Zynga employee who feels like returning the favor? Make friends with a plaintiff's side employment lawyer. Here's one: <http://www.girardgibbs.com/california-warn-act/> (I'm guessing they make waiving the right to such suits a condition of the severance, though.)

Note: I am not a lawyer and I have no idea whether Zynga violated the law. I have no affiliation with the firm linked above. I do not necessarily believe that filing a lawsuit will deliver either emotional or financial vindication, and I have no idea whether or how it might affect one's future employment prospects. But I do believe that all companies should be required to follow the law as written.

</comment><comment><USER52> I feel really bad for the employees getting laid off, but this feels a lot like a company that assumed growth would be forever up and to the right without leveling off or declining. Maybe when you go from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue it's easy to feel that way, but I don't see a place where Zynga is going to ever grow very rapidly again like in the "good old days"

<comment><USER53> as a former Zynga employee, i'm pretty sure the entire management team knows what they are doing, and have expected this for quite some time.

<comment><USER54> What would you predict Zynga will look like in a year? In five years? Do you think these layoffs are a good or bad thing for the future of the company?

<comment><USER53> I truly hope this is a "cut once, cut deep" action. There are still a ton of extremely smart people at the company, I just hope they stop overreaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's so weird, Zynga started auspiciously with a core team of some amazingly season develepors and rather than building up an amazing portfolio suddenly ended up doing...well, nothing good.

The writing has been on the wall for a while, if we even see Zynga make it through this year I'd be surprised. You can't assume you're going to win by just thinking 'this will appeal to the masses', you need a hook to engage them. FarmVille worked because people enjoyed it, not the concept, you can't try and shovel the same shit twice.

Plus, Draw Something was a dumb purchase. A great game with low revenues destroyed by high ads and shitty backed service. It was doomed to failure and a massive waste of money that they were too young to afford to risk.

</comment><comment><USER56> I thought the whole deal with Zynga was that it was circling the drain (yet profitable) while waiting for "real money gaming" to be legal and possible. These cost cutting measures in their legacy business would seem to be a good thing in that light.

</comment><comment><USER57> I do not know what these 2900 employees do, but not to long ago I played one of their games for a while. Some really big constant problems in their games. Once one thing breaks its takes a long time to get fixed, then it gets fixed but breaks another thing. I remember Thursday before thanksgiving weekend their game gave errors and was unplayable. It took 6 days for they to get it to work.

That really shows devotion to the entertainment sector right? (Maybe it was a bad steak maybe I was the only one seeing these problems, who knows? Ask the company thats cutting 500 employees)

</comment><comment><USER58> 3000 people were making those Zynga games? Doing what exactly? Pls I'm genuinely curious.

These social games seems so lame to me that I can't think of any reason why someone will even think of building a public company on top of it. You simply cannot meet investors' quartely demand when your success is built on being "flavor of the month" business model.

I don't have anything wrong against Zynga or its founder and so I don't wish them failure but this should have come as a common sense that they should have stayed private and stayed lean (both in taking VC funding and the number of employees)

</comment><comment><USER59> I might be nitpicking here, but the very first sentence reeks of bullshit & PR spin.

"...saying goodbye to 18% of our Zynga brothers & sisters..."

Who says that in real life? "I'm sad, because yesterday 25% of my family had flu"

</comment><comment><USER60> Stock trading halted after this was published? Did this article beat a planned press release to the punch? If you traded this news you might have had a good day.

</comment><comment><USER61> So much for Tony Robbins and the "internet treasure"?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEojTYYyGA0>

</comment><comment><USER62> Looks like an attempt to re-establishing connection with reality: Flash-games cannot be valued in billions even in a delirium.)

</comment><comment><USER63> Anyone out there dare to claim there is any "light at the end of the tunnel"?

Perhaps ZNGA is a good stock to buy now that it's over 10% off?

</comment><comment><USER64> <http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/znga/real-time>

</comment><comment><USER65> I would love to see a breakdown on this. Specifically, the ratio between developers, marketers, management, etc.

</comment><comment><USER66> Bad news for the educational game accelerator they just launched.

</comment><comment><USER67> seriously, what did zunga do/make ?

</comment><comment><USER68> Stock halted. Bracing for a crash.

This will be bad.

<comment><USER69> This is the first I've seen a stock's trading being halted. Does anyone know more about the mechanics of how this works? What the advantages/disadvantages are?

<comment><USER70> It often happens after huge news, and it's meant to give investors time to digest it.

I believe the last notable instance was after Jobs died, AAPL was halted.

<comment><USER71> > I believe the last notable instance was after Jobs died, AAPL was halted.

That depends on your definition of notable. You could always use the "no true Scotsman" logic to say that Steve Jobs death was the last "notable" halt but they happen all the time.

here is the Nasdaq list of halts. Notice that there have been 3 halts already today.

<http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=Tradehalts>

Here is a list of IROC halts( Canadian)

<http://micro.newswire.ca/70886-0.html>

Note that there have been 4 halts today for Canadian stocks.

<comment><USER72> In fact, Zynga's stock was halted multiple times a little over a year ago when Facebook IPO'd.

Also, the halt for Jobs death was after hours so it had a smaller impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I look at this a little differently, Im not going to opine on the character of the CEO or his employees.

Besides raw economic factors and the trend-happy game industry, I think its worth it to ask:

What on earth are we building? And why are we building it?

Its OK to build games we all need entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. But Zynga games were obsessive click factories which were as far as anyone can tell designed to be addictive.

As an engineer, I have worked at places that had so called "projects" designed to "get more clicks".

That may include a lot of web shops. Usually for ad revenue. But if you think about that from an engineering perspective, what a woeful, sad day it is to have your boss come to you with that mission.

Its the day you realize that what you built has no real value to the user, and is a self serving mechanism to get meaningless clicks out of your robot users.

In the old days we made software that people wanted to use and we didnt care how many times they clicked on a cow.

Or on an ad.

</comment><comment><USER74> I know how it feels to be in that situation. Best of luck to all the people who got the lay off. Make sure you hit the job search running and be sure to network as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER75> no problem, they are pivoting.Why do people hate Zynga so much?</comment>


How to make your own hand sanitizer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21161346/hand-sanitizer-diy-how-to-hand-wash-cdc-alcohol-virus-illness <comment><USER2> Nothing beats water and detergent. That gives a physical removal of bugs from the skin. Let your hands air-dry. Do surgeons scrub before an operation, or do they just spray on some sanitizer?

Sanitizers rely on _killing_ the bugs. They aren't perfect. I know all the ads say 99.9% and it sounds wonderful. In reality that leaves one bug in a thousand as fully active. Start with a load of 100 million bugs and you end up with 100,000 survivors, plenty enough to do you some damage.</comment>


PayTango – simple invoicing + $50k free credit card processing - <AUTHOR> https://www.paytango.com

<comment><USER2> Note that this is the relaunch/pivot of a YC W13 startup.

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8150386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8150386)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. If Paypal Here did this 2 years ago when they started giving away free stuff, their market share would completely go the other way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh nice! This looks sick!</comment>


US issues hacking security alert for small planes - <AUTHOR> https://www.apnews.com/6219f26c3ea145b6b29b5e69115504a9 <comment><USER2> This shouldn't be news. It's game over once physical access is compromised. If you're injecting frames remotely that's another story...

Lest someone patent it let me state clearly that injecting false data on a small airplane's canbus is a patently (!) obvious technique for create a training environment to help pilots in simulated IMC recognize instrument failures.</comment>


Imagine if your house had Windows - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/imagine-if-your-house-had-windows

<comment><USER2> But those poor guys in the Apple Orchard...

They don't have bathrooms, because the designer said that it would interrupt the flow of the house, and that no one uses them anymore. "But we need them", the home owners said. "No you don't," the developers replied. The residents have grown accustomed to it and use buckets and sinks instead.

The house has no Windows, so you can't see the Real World. After spending years saying "You don't need to do that," the Developer finally responds that you can hang pictures on the wall of what the idealized Real World looks like. They offer to also sell you a second home over in the Windows development area, but you're either squatting or paying full price for it.

Recently, the Developer replaced nearly every front door in the community with a garage door. "It gives you faster access to everything!" he explains. It opens seemingly at random, and looks nothing like the rest of the house. It's uncharacteristically gaudy. Most of the residents hide it or pretend it isn't there.

Every street in the development is named after cats, but there's no sequential logic to it. When the ISP explains "You need to live north of Tiger to get high speed internet" in their ads, most people have to pull out a map to figure out if they can. People have taken to numbering the streets, but those numbers aren't written on the street signs. Fortunately, it's relatively easy and cheap to move to another street, but in most cases nothing changes. The residents claim they know the order, but when anyone comes to visit from out of town, they are confused and quickly lost, since most of the streets look the same anyway.

Every 18 months or so, many of the residents bulldoze their entire home and replace it. They look down on those who don't. If someone hasn't bought a house recently enough, the developer won't even bring over new furniture, and the street cleaner begins skipping their house.

All the cars a elegant and beautiful works of glass, wrapped in large, often gaudy rubber bumpers. Some people even cover their entire car in a bumper (except the windshield, which gets a gummy sticker). Early buyers of the glass car need the bumpers to cover a hole where fuel leaks out, but for most, it's because the glass cars might shatter.

But all the residents of the Orchard are happy. They're a bit stuck up about how much their homes cost, despite that most people living in the "other" complex could easily afford it. They write long missives in their local paper about how bad it is to live in the other community, how they "just don't get it". They believe the home that suited them is clearly the best choice for everyone, even businesses. The talk with pride about how much money their Developer makes, even bragging that he has the highest margins in the industry, and wear their credit card debt as a badge of pride. To everyone else, they're an odd but mostly harmless group. But in their echo chamber, they're the smartest, most progressive, most intelligent and affluent people in the world, for whom the defining characteristic of their life is who they bought their house from.

And somewhere, off in the hills, the Unix monastery (which designed and constructed much of the infrastructure for the Orchard, free of charge, for the betterment of everyone) lives in hand-built homes, constantly adjusted and tailored to their needs and whims, and occasionally stripped down to the foundation and rebuilt just for fun.

<comment><USER3> Although I am _quite_ happy in the Unix monastery, I will note that it does have a few drawbacks. Of course one is that we don't seem to be quite as good as the Redwood Forest or the Apple Orchard builder at foundations... every time you try to build a home on a new tract of land, you find something not- quite-perfect about the way the home interacts with that land (this is especially true of mobile pieces of land, known as "icebergs").

Another is that while I'm all for life-long-learning, it's exhausting the amount of seminars you have to attend to really keep up with modern building techniques (e.g. composite materials made of beryl, or e.g. quantum chromodynamic xorgs), which is necessary unless you're willing to live in somewhat out-of-date cast-offs from elder members of the sect, at their leisure (they're generous enough to make those donations to novice members like myself on their own schedule, but they get pretty grouchy pretty fast if you ask them to customize your house FOR you).

That, and of course as we all know there are a few pieces of furniture that one just can't fit in through the front door of one's monastic house. For this purpose I choose to rent a cottage over in the Redwood territory to hold some of this esoteric furniture. My favourite is this Steam-powered monstrosity full of Valves, but your aesthetic tastes in furniture may vary.

Ah well. One of the reasons I (mostly) live over here in the monastery is my irrational faith that work (or at least preemptive laziness) shall set me free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most maddening part is the control panel. There is absolutely no reason I can come up with for the seemingly random re-shuffling of names and functions that comes with each windows upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you and your neighbors stopped calling the build ten times a day asking him to do stuff like move the wall over three inches this wouldn't happen any more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this specifically about Windows? or about software in general?

I think Microsoft would take it as a compliment that they release too often. I also think Windows is one of the most backward-compatible systems out there.

<comment><USER7> It does seem pretty grumpy. It reminds me of how different people's mindsets can be regarding software updates. My wife, for example, reacts: "Oh no, an update." She hates updates and waits as long as possible to do them. I guess because updates are almost always available at inconvenient times and often break things.

I, OTOH, usually go: "Ooh, an update!"

And as a Windows user, I've been pretty happy with almost all the improvements in Win7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, if you want to apply the inverse of the analogy literally, everyone would still be using the command line, or, at best, ncurses-style applications.

<comment><USER9> If _I_ were to apply the analogy literally, I would suggest most people would upgrade happily for the first few years after first using an OS, then their tolerance for change would decline, just as it often does with houses.

They won't embrace a major change unless their own circumstances undergo a similar change, such as having their children leave for college. Or in computers, such as buying a tablet where before they only used a laptop.

<comment><USER10> Of course you are correct. I love change and "new stuff" because I'm a geek and that's what I do.

My parents (or - even my younger brother who just wants things to work) not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the late 90s and early 2000s operating systems were compared with airlines, in a humorous manner: [http://www.webaugur.com/bazaar/53-what-if-operating- systems-...](http://www.webaugur.com/bazaar/53-what-if-operating-systems-were- airlines.html). Now it seems that the comparisons have become more serious than that. I'm using Unix/Linux every day, and I don't feel like I'm living in a monastery.

</comment><comment><USER12> How about living in a chrome house? The Developer would just sneak in while I sleep and update everything without asking. The downside is it would consist of just one living area. If I were need any specialized rooms like a bathroom or kitchen they just attach one temporarily and charge me by the hour!

</comment><comment><USER13> This theme has been done so many times, it is not even funny any more. Buggered if I'm going back to House XP, because House 7 shits all over it. Stop being a Luddite and resisting progress, get used to things changing, it is inevitable. Windows rocks.</comment>


Open Dylan 2013.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://opendylan.org/news/2013/07/11/new-release.html

<comment><USER2> I've been seeing OpenDylan pass by on /r/lisp and HN the past few months. I've installed it, and it looks nice, but it could use some maturing and I'm not sure what the advantage over other LISPs is. Can someone explain it to me?

<comment><AUTHOR> This can be a difficult thing to answer, as choice in programming language can be something very personal in that different things resonate in different ways with each of us.

For me, some of the important things are:

* The language is much smaller and cleaner than Common Lisp (and designed by some of the same people that participated in the CL standardization).

* Because it has a smaller community and installed base at this point in time, it has the freedom to evolve in new directions whereas an existing Lisp is already defined and tied down to what it is (for the most part). (Coroutines would be a nice addition for example.)

* You can produce executables from it and don't have to have a running image.

* The integration of the type system is, for the most part, nice. It is nice to have the ability to have a mix of dynamic and more static typing. (The type system could be better, and that too is an interesting possible future direction.)

* Always using multi-methods and everything being an object and the more powerful dispatch capabilities are quite handy.

* It has a condition system like Common Lisp rather than exceptions.

* The macro system is okay.

* It is nice having multiple return values, #rest parameters and keyword parameters, all cleanly integrated.

* The C-FFI is good.

* Some people like the syntax. I enjoy how readable the code is to me.

* I'm not tied into using the JVM.

Some Lisps have some of the above, some don't. Not everyone might like all of the above, but for me, it is a comfortable fit.

<comment><USER2> Point 1 & 3 are nice enough to convince me to try it out, but I kind of miss the bracey syntax.

Is the backend of the compiler outputting C or native assembly? Is there a way to use Dylan on ARM/Linux?

<comment><AUTHOR> The compiler has multiple backends.

The "HARP" backend outputs native code for x86-linux, x86-freebsd and x86-windows.

The C backend outputs C and works on x86_64-linux, x86_64-freebsd and Mac OS X.

We have an in-progress LLVM backend that will support all of the above platforms and more.

As for ARM/Linux, we have a port in progress for the C backend. In theory, it should work after a cross-compile or using cross-compilation tools, but we haven't quite tried it out yet ourselves (the person doing the port is getting married this weekend and going away for a couple of weeks).

If you would like to help out with Dylan on ARM/Linux, drop by #dylan on FreeNode IRC and I'll work with you. (The hack-a-thon this weekend is a great time for that.)

Otherwise, we plan to have this in the 2013.2 release (whenever that is).

<comment><USER2> I would love to help, and I'm really interested in compiler development etc, but I have the habit of promising to help out and concluding that I don't have the time to follow through.

I might have a few weeks between projects in August, and if so, I'll try to see if I can help out (but no promises! ;)) I'll definitely join #dylan tomorrow though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're also having our hack-a-thon this weekend (July 13-14). We're expecting around 15 people to participate on IRC and perhaps a Google hangout.

Hopefully we'll be making some good headway on things for our next release (which will include ARM Linux support among other things).

<comment><USER3> Here's the task list for this hackaton. [https://github.com/dylan- lang/opendylan/wiki](https://github.com/dylan-lang/opendylan/wiki)

Things that stand out to me are the LLVM back end, Coroutines support, Postgres library, and uWSGI binding.

<comment><AUTHOR> The LLVM backend and Coroutines support are a bit more than would fit into a hack-a-thon. The LLVM backend is actually making good progress with someone who has been working on it for a long time (with some breaks).

The postgres client library and uWSGI bindings are probably doable within a weekend. Feel like dropping by? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, is there a reason for allowing operators in variable names? I've just glanced over the introduction, so if I got something wrong here, sorry. But it seems like this would work?

      let shoe = 5;
      let size = 3;
      let shoe-size = 10;
      shoe-size := shoe-size;

Now what? Is shoe-size 10 or 2?

<comment><AUTHOR> White space is required around operators. This allows the names of bindings (variables, methods or whatever) to be very flexible. Things that represent a boolean can end in '?'. Operations that mutate can end in '!'. In the Objective C bridge that I'm working on, I make use of '/' like: 'objc/class- responds-to-selector'.

Type names are typically enclosed in '<...>' like '<integer>' (but that's just a convention used everywhere).

<comment><USER4> Ah, ok, I had not seen the part about the mandatory whitespaces. I still think it has the potential to confuse, so if I were to write in languages that allow dashes, I'd probably still avoid them where possible (can't see the advantage over using underscores instead). Anyway, thanks for the info.

<comment><USER5> Having plenty of experience both with languages that do and do not allow "operators" in variable names, it's not actually confusing in practice. You quickly learn that whitespace is very significant in those languages, and then you read them differently. This isn't any different than indentation in Python, line breaks in Ruby, or sigils in C++.

<comment><USER6> I haven't really programmed in Lisp or Dylan, but the code I read certainly seemed the better because of the punctuation in function names. It gets denser, but stays readable. A question mark signals 'returns boolean' just as strong as a "Is" or "Has" prefix, and there AFAIK is nothing in other languages that signals "modifies its arguments" as strong as a ! suffix.

I also find that Dylan's convention of using brackets in class names rapidly grows on you. But maybe that requires working in Forth as a warming up.

And of course, hyphens not only look better than underscores, they are easier to type, too :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations! I'm downloading my copy now. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations Bruce!

</comment><comment><USER9> No hot fire? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9lg6HqJeY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9lg6HqJeY0)</comment>


Custard Antenna - <AUTHOR> https://michaelcullen.name/2019/04/custard-antenna/ <comment><USER2> If you're willing to experiment, you'll find out that you can tune pretty much anything from a random spool of wire to an iron frame bed, and in this case custard. I've found that an inductively coupled sausage is a nice match on the VHF air band with a proper number of turns.

However, getting a nice 1:1 voltage standing wave ratio only means that the transmitter sees a proper 50 Ω load that does not reflect anything back. Most of the radiation probably happens in the feedline and the rest is absorbed as resistive losses. The whole setup only works because at lower "high" frequencies signal levels are relatively strong and receiver sensitivity is rarely a problem. Most HF transceivers actually have front panel knobs for attenuation and gain reduction.

Also, FT8 is a relatively new digital modulation that works at low SNR and is not feasible for transmitting any information apart from the callsigns of the communicating parties.

<comment><USER3> Exactly this. A dummy load (a 50-ohm resistor) will give you a perfect 1:1 SWR, but makes a rubbish antenna... an SWR match just means it's less likely to fry the transceiver's power stage.

You could transmit data over FT8, but you're right -- with identification requirements you'd be limited to maybe half a dozen characters per 15-second cycle. Slow as molasses but it'll be receivable even if the signal is down in the noise floor.

<comment><USER4> > Slow as molasses

Slow as custard, surely.

<comment><USER3> Depends how thick the custard is. Is it thick enough to classify as a non- Newtonian fluid?

<comment><USER5> That isn't a label for particularly viscous fluids but for fluids where the viscosity is dependent on applied force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> W6LG made a lightbulb dipole and got 750 miles with FT8:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSy271C07b4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSy271C07b4)

FT8 is really something. I built a cobweb antenna and got Japan from Massachusetts on my new IC-7300:

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/ciefcobDkiTrawsB9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/ciefcobDkiTrawsB9)

So here's a funny thing: FT8 was written by a Nobel laureate in Fortran!

<comment><USER7> Can anyone simulate this light bulb setup in HFSS or another antenna simulation software? I'm always on the lookout for comparisons on weird cases like this for the simulation code I've written. If I can find material property data on custard as easily as for tungsten (watch the temperature dependence!) I might give that a shot next.

<comment><USER8> You really don't need to simulate it. It will just be a electrically small magnetic loop with a large real resistance. Any antenna text book should have it, with gain proportional to frequency.

Of course the nonlinearity of the filament will change things slightly, but it will converge down to a fixed impedance.

<comment><USER7> I suppose a bit more context would be explanatory. My real interest is not the free-space performance of the antenna, but the eventual installed performance. In the video describing the setup he says "I talked with a couple of engineers, and some other guys, and we've come to the conclusion that if I put 100 watts into it, it might radiate a milliwatt. And not all that well." I'm not sure if they were thinking of it as a magnetic loop antenna the way you described or coming up with the numbers some other way. But then at the end mentions, "I'm gonna set it on the top part of that air conditioner and put it right in the window." How much of his success is a result of sticking the antenna on what may be effectively a (admittedly electrically small compared to 20m) metal box? That's what I think is interesting to simulate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You think that's cool, check out this antenna made from a jet of seawater: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tIZUhu21sQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tIZUhu21sQ)

<comment><USER10> This is much cooler because it's actually an antenna that works.

<comment><USER11> I plan to make a working custard antenna. This was explicitly attempting to tune a bowl of custard, not so much radiate

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've initially thought it was some sort of April fool's article. But I'm skeptical.

He didn't detail, but probably used a proper, non-irradiating cable, or no cable at all, when he experimented with the dummy load. If that was the case, he can't say he just swapped the dessert with the dummy load and, then, can't attribute the change in the results to that. So my guess is that the wires were in fact playing the role of an antenna there.

Besides, impedance matching doesn't mean much per se. As they say, even a dummy load can be tunned. The effectively irradiated power and the irradiation patterns are even more important than tunning in many situations.

<comment><USER11> In this configuration, yes, the wires are most likely doing quite a bit of the pickup.

The custard is more or less a dummy load - I didn't intend it to radiate or really work as an antenna - I just wanted to try it to see what would happen.

I do want to see if I can make custard radiate though. It'll probably be quite lossy but it'll be fun to try!

<comment><USER12> Perhaps the custard is working as a resistive load of a kind of beverage antenna.

It's a valid experiment. I only think that is a bit misleading for those who read about it. People get impressed thinking that the custard was tunned to operate as an exotic antenna.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great post, I would have liked a bit more deep diving into the custard.

For example, what are the merits of using a fresh, organic or powdered custard. Would Madigascan vanilla increase reception?

</comment><comment><USER14> Without knowing anything about this, how much of it is the custard vs. the wires leading _to_ the custard? Like, could you pull them out, and have them hanging in the air a few inches apart and get the same result? Or, I suppose, insert a resistance equivalent to the custard?

<comment> brian-armstrong The post mentions that he tried that and was not able to receive anything using a dummy resistive load.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. But he didn't mention how he connected the dummy load to the radio. Dummy loads have usually a standard antenna connector and are meant to be attached directly to the radio or through an non-irradiating cable. So, my guess is that, by using the dummy load, he disconnected the actual antenna: the "dipole" made by the wires between the radio and the dessert

<comment><USER2> The custard probably mostly acts as a resistive load and mechanical support. Actual radiation happens in the wires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it possible to convince most antenna tuners to effectively match "into themself", and dissipate most of the power internally? I accidentally did that with a matching network I was trying to use to tune a weird inductively- coupled plasma setup.

Sounds like he made a weird partially-shorted dipole antenna, and needs a good VNA to answer the rest of his questions.

<comment><USER16> It is. In this case however I suppose the resistive component of the custard plays a significant role in the match and therefore power dissipation (but not radiation). The main components acting as an antenna here are indeed the wires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is he actually 'tuning'?

I mean i don't understand it. He puts some wire into custard and then a device is 'tuning' and then the reception is better after?

<comment><USER10> There's nothing surprising here.

The custard will present a certain impedance (resistance and reactance, normally represented as a complex number) at a frequency. A radio transceiver normally expects 50ohms (real) at the antenna port for maximum energy transfer (and smallest standing wave voltage ratio). Using a network of capacitors and inductors (the tuner) the custard's impedance can be transformed to 50 ohms. But it's still not an efficient antenna, in the sense that it won't radiate more.

<comment><USER18> You are using the ubiquitous jargon of radio engineering. But for those on this site who are not radio engineers: of course the impedance of the custard does not change. The impedance of the system including the custard and the antenna tuner is different – and better for the radio to work with — than the custard alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Because I can" has produced some odd results over the years. This however is among the oddest.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not directly related to the post, but I remember back in the day we had a black-and-white TV which could receive only 3 basic channels in the country. I connected a co-ax cable to the output of a receiver and connected it to a dipole antenna. Now, after tuning the TV on the exact frequency of the antenna, I could play anything on the TV. It was a simple in-house broadcasting station. Of course, had to disassemble it due to concerns with electromagnetic waves.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can it tune fish fingers, too?

<comment><USER22> You can tune a piano but you can't tune a fish (finger). Allegedly.

<comment><USER23> But everyone knows you can tuna fish. (In either oil or water, according to taste.)

<comment><USER21> Just my kind of humor!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ok but can he tune a fish?

</comment><comment><USER25> Looney tune</comment>