Bill Belichick Throws in the Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/sports/football/bill-belichick-patriots-might-be-a-mac-guy.html <comment><USER2> Surface is getting all the heat in the article, but in the linked interview [1] he blames pretty much every part of the infrastructure other than the interface:

> The other communication systems involve the press box to the coaches on the > field, and then the coach on the field, the signal caller, or the coach-to- > quarterback, coach-to-signal caller system. Those fail on a regular basis.

> And again, there's a lot of equipment involved, too. There are headsets in > the helmets, there's the belt pack, that communication, there's a hookup or > connection to internet service or that process and so forth with the coaches > and the press box. So, there are a number of pieces of equipment, there is a > number of connections that are on different frequencies.

> And then during the game sometimes something happens and it has to be fixed, > and first of all, you have to figure out what the problem is. Is it a > battery? Is it the helmet? Is it the coaches' pack? Is it the battery on the > coaches' pack? I mean you know, again, it could be one of 15 different > things.

[1] [http://www.patriots.com/news/2016/10/18/bill-belichick- confe...](http://www.patriots.com/news/2016/10/18/bill-belichick-conference- call-transcript-1018)

<comment><USER3> The NY Times didn't include this gif I saw on Deadspin[1]:

[https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s-- unnNrpz...](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s-- unnNrpzl--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/kr0ogkrmpjqlxupcbs17.gif)

I think it paints a clearer picture as to why the Surface was singled out among the equipment.

[1] [http://deadspin.com/bill-belichick-is-sick-of-those- stupid-m...](http://deadspin.com/bill-belichick-is-sick-of-those-stupid- microsoft-tablet-1787931452)

<comment><USER4> If Belichick threw his paper notebook^1, would you assume it's because of the notebook? Or because his team just threw an interception, missed a field goal, or lost the game? I don't think we have any context as to what happened in that gif.

[1] For example: [http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/Fuck....](http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/Fuck.gif)

<comment><USER5> He threw the tablet because it wasn't working for him, per Belichick:

> As you probably noticed, I'm done with the tablets. I've given them as much > time as I can give them. They're just too undependable for me. I'm going to > stick with pictures as several of our other coaches do as well because there > just isn't enough consistency in the performance of the tablets, so I just > can't take it anymore.

<comment><USER4> I see no called-out connection between anything in the article and the gif at the top of it. It's a good gif to go along with the article, but I don't think we can say "he threw the tablet in this image because he was angry with it".

Edit: this comment is at -2 at the moment. If I'm wrong, please make the connection. I earlier pointed out that coaches are often emotional^1, and we have no idea if him throwing the tablet is related to him being angry at it, or even if it's a recent image.

[1] [http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/Fuck....](http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/Fuck.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm guessing it has far more to do with network connectivity than the tablet itself. The problems he describes to me sound like exactly what I would expect in a stadium filled with 100,000 cellphones emitting wifi and cellular interference.

I'm guessing the NFL didn't get clearance from the FCC to use a dedicated wavelength within the stadium to isolate their systems from noise.

<comment><USER7> There is actually an immense amount of coordination that goes into an NFL game, even more so for the Super Bowl:

* [http://blog.rfvenue.com/karl-voss/](http://blog.rfvenue.com/karl-voss/)

"... at the Super Bowl we manage ... basically anything D/C to light that is allowed inside the NFL venues.

<comment><USER8> Yep. I had a friend who worked the Super Bowl, his only job was to detect and locate (and handle) rogue sources of RF energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now, I have to preface this by saying that I don't know much about football and even less about coaching it, but I wonder how much of this speaks to a lack of a real need for a technology solution for coaches. If it were providing a lot of value to them, I imagine they'd have a harder giving it up.

This NFL suggests that there is such a need: "Since Microsoft has been a partner of the N.F.L. and implemented their technology on our sidelines, the efficiency and speed of communication between coaches has greatly increased."

But of course, that is the NFL speaking about a partner's product, so I can't imagine them saying anything else.

<comment><USER10> Belichick is considered the best coach in football of the last twenty odd years, so he has probably his process with pen and paper nailed down. And the thing is, new technology requires a learning curve both individually and also on a larger scale culturally, so I would guess that tablets after a year or so of use would provide a lot of value, however they do not do so now.

<comment><USER11> Reminds me of a story I heard during a project management class many years ago. The PM was working on a govt contract for the US Army in the late 90s to build a mobile mapping system for use in the field on the Humvees. He got all the specs from the generals to build this marvel of a technology system with screens and scrolling maps (90s remember) and decided to talk to the soldiers in the field to ask them what they wanted out of the project.

The soldiers told him what they really wanted was a piece of plywood that they could fold out and lay their paper maps on. They didn't want screens or electronics, because those don't work with bullet holes in them, but the paper maps work fine even if they get shot.

<comment><USER12> This kind of stuff still happens all the time today. A few years ago I worked for a small government contractor which did a lot of phase 1 and 2 projects for the DoD. Most of the contracts we got were for developing experimental technologies to make soldiers more effective, which involved a lot of guessing what the soldiers actually wanted. After making a shiny demo (usually held together with duct tape, ugly perl scripts, and prayers) which the government PM would fall in love with, we would do field testing which would inevitably end with the soldiers reporting that it was a cool piece of technology, but almost completely useless to them. Anyway, it was lots of fun to work on those projects :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Microsoft entered into a long-term sponsorship partnership with the league > in 2013. At the time, the N.F.L. had a list of demands for the equipment, > including ruggedness, ease of use, size, effectiveness in extreme > temperature and glare resistance.

> In 2014, Belichick noted that the system had crashed, but seemed mostly cool > with it. "I'd say that's all kind of part of the game," he said.

> "I just can't take it anymore," he said at a news conference Tuesday.

This is an under-reported challenge of the increasing automation narrative: we need more robust systems.

<comment><USER14> Robust systems are achievable already. We need managers that understand quality takes proper planning, time, and deep, concentrated, uninterrupted work.

<comment><USER15> And money. Don't forget about lots and lots of money.

I'm going through this headache right now.

<comment><USER16> This is a huge challenge for quality software. As others have noted there is a disconnect between users, developers, managers, and quality/reliability engineering such that nobody seems to have enough of the picture to make the best decisions.

Sales wants more features to be competitive.

Management wants to ship it because it will generate revenue.

QRE/Manufacturing wants more time to test all of the features and their interactions.

And everywhere money gets squeezed out, sales wants to offer a discount to "win the deal", management wants to improve the margins by lowering the cost to develop, and the factory wants to ship product faster and spend less time qualifying it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This speaks to a higher level perception about software. Bugs and crashes, however inconsistent, irreparably damage the sentiment about using a technology. Younger folks grew up in an age with these inconsistencies and are less perturbed by them. To older folks though, manual systems rarely "fail" during use. The bar of acceptance is a great deal higher when your reliability and availability are compared to pencil and paper.

Long story short: quality is always important. as the median age of user rises, quality requirements increase dramatically.

<comment><USER18> Younger folks...

My TWC cable net connection has been dropping on a daily basis for the last two months. Resetting the modem solves it until the next outage. (TWC has since replaced a shit ton of stuff to fix this).

So everyday, my two special snowflakes would get pissed when the Wifi would go nowhere. They would text me expecting me to fix it even when I'm in the office. They would text me when I was watching football (my only sacrosanct timeslot). They would text me when taking a dump. I could feel my blood pressure rise everytime I heard the phrase "The WiFi is down!"

So no, I think you're completely wrong about youngsters being less perturbed. When I was their age, my motto was "I want my MTV..." Their motto is "I want my WiFi..."

<comment><USER19> If you're talking about the built-in wifi on the TWC given box then I would try using a third party access point. I was having the same problems as you and that solved it for me.

<comment><USER18> No, I'm using an Airport. The entire connection was down, but it was more annoying since the kids could connect to wifi, but it wasn't able to get outbound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mostly what stands out to me from this is that they only get the tablets just a few hours before the game.

That's ridiculous, unless the NFL is also providing all the technical support (which Bill's actual rant doesn't imply they do.) Having just a short time to use, test and get them ready for the game is incredibly lousy, and certainly won't give the team's IT people any chance to seriously troubleshoot and improve the situation.

It doesn't matter who makes the tech, or how solid it is. You can't just throw tech at a problem and expect it to solve it.

<comment><USER11> Since the tablets are operating wirelessly it becomes very hard to test since the conditions before the game aren't the same as what occurs during the game. All the fans with their smartphones aren't there yet polluting the airwaves until the game starts (some don't make it in until after the game has already started).

Also worth noting that some of the reporters were complaining at last week's game that the WiFi was down in the press box at Gillette Stadium at the start of the game. There could have been a bigger networking issue going on there.

The Pats use Extreme Networks WiFi gear in the stadium.

<comment><USER21> > Since the tablets are operating wirelessly it becomes very hard to test > since the conditions before the game aren't the same as what occurs during > the game. All the fans with their smartphones aren't there yet polluting the > airwaves until the game starts (some don't make it in until after the game > has already started).

By now, the IT team should know the gametime environment very well. It should no longer be a surprise to them.

<comment><USER22> Knowing roughly what conditions to expect is not the same as actually testing equipment under those conditions. The team staff aren't trying to simulate or predict anything, they're trying to test the performance of the specific tablets they get, under game conditions.

On gameday there are thousands of different rf sources - deliberate and otherwise - in the stadium. You can't simulate that in as much detail as needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not just capabilities, but _reliability_ that matters.

If I've got a system that takes a bit of consistent prodding to happen, or can do A & B reliably but not C, _and it is consistent about that_ , it's almost _always_ far more acceptable than a system which works _most of the time_ without prodding _but then falls down copletely_ , or a system that does A, B, & C, _but fails to work right 10% of the time_.

That little bit of uncertainty pokes an sticks at you. It's always at the back of your consciousness. A football coach's job _is to coach the game_. It's _not_ to to try to figure out what's wrong with his comms equipment _or even if it 's working correctly or incorrectly_.

Closely related: the paradox of automation.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash- how...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how- computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster)

</comment><comment><USER24> Also must be quite depressing for Microsoft when the announcers refer to the Surface tablets as iPads during the game.

</comment><comment><USER25> He also noted that the comms system fails regularly.

Seems NFL sets them up a few hours before kickoff.

Perhaps it is time for NFL to improve their tech support in all areas. There might be a relationship between the tablet issues and the problems with the comms system.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if there is an actual product here or if there is just a product placement. And by that I mean has anyone sat down with coaches and said "Given what you do in a game on the sidelines, the choices you are making, the questions you are asking, and options you are trying to weigh; Is there a way to improve the tools you've already been using with some automation?"

Anyone know?

<comment><USER26> I don't, but why would a coach give up his expert knowledge to all other coaches he is potentially competing against?

The incentives for all parties involved in this situation is less than ideal.

<comment><USER27> I'm sure there are plenty of retired NFL coaches out there who would be willing to advise.

<comment><USER28> That assumes that the needs of retired coaches are the same as the needs of coaches today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Network issues are most likely the problem, especially if the devices are issued by the NFL prior to gametime.

A coach needs a few things to really make this valuable. First they need a play chart for selecting the appropriate play call for the corresponding down and distance. This can be a canned application that doesn't require network connectivity after it's been loaded, but networking would allow an assistant to update the player personnel availability in real time so that you don't call a play with improper personnel.

The other thing the tablets replaced was the physical photos the teams used to use to review plays. The NFL previously made the teams use B&W photos sent down to the sidelines. They don't want the teams to use live replays for some reason, though the monstrous displays in most stadiums make this dumb.

So if you take out the network connection, these lose a lot of their value. I can't imagine a more hostile environment for Wifi than a stadium packed with a bazillion cellphones, plus goofy atmospherics due to design.

</comment><comment><USER29> What a terrible URL: [http://.../football/bill-belichick-patriots-might-be-a- mac-g...](http://.../football/bill-belichick-patriots-might-be-a-mac-guy.html)

I think there is a lot to be said about the fact that any event that has as much tech as an NFL broadcast and that it is never setup permanently will always run into some issue. The base complaint seems to be just that the league gives him the stuff too late to work out any unforeseen issues, and so it just is a sprint to troubleshoot week after week where he could just show up with briefcase full of printed plays and this just not be a problem. It's not like he has a shortage of bodies for manual labour on the sidelines.

<comment><USER20> your URL got shortened in the most bizarre way (I swear I'm seeing this happen more and more often on HN)

<comment><USER30> He intentionally removed the domain name to highlight the rest of the permalink. It's the same URL as linked in the title, but he's highlighting the "bill-might-be-a-mac-guy" part of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a feeling that the NFL doesn't really need tablets on the sideline, but Paul Allen (MS Founder, Owner of the Seahawks) had something to do with it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not sure if wifi is actually the problem here as many are claiming, this is a good read about sports frequency coordination: [http://www.radioworld.com/article/photo-holding- page/279450](http://www.radioworld.com/article/photo-holding-page/279450)

Frequency management in a stadium is very hard. It's mostly done by volunteer ham radio people.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is what inevitably happens when you have a solution looking for a problem.

I have 2 "systems" at work...

One includes email and a white board with index cards taped to the wall next to it.

The other includes Jira, Confluence, Infor, Sharepoint, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe Illustrator, GIMP, Skype, Webex, Success Factors, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

If I don't need all this horrible shit to build software, why would anyone need any of it to play football?

</comment><comment><USER34> Hahahahaha, Microsoft really screwed itself on this.

Ipads are more reliable and have a better gui, so why is the NFL using surface tablets? It's because Apple didn't need to push the ipad, but surface was really new and Microsoft really needed to promote it anyway possible, so it made a huge marketing push on the NFL, no doubt making it financially very attractive and promising all sorts of help.

What Microsoft seems to have not thought out is it would work out well for the coaches only if the entire network system worked flawlessly, or surface would get rejected by association, and so they should have given extensive help to make sure that happened. But they apparently didn't do that, the network screwed up endlessly, and sure enough, surface is being painted as no good.

</comment><comment><USER35> I own two computers and have a work laptop (all PCs):

Computer 1: Dell - Works as expected

Computer 2: Lenovo Thinkpad (work) - Old, works amazing

Computer 3: Surface pro - Randomly unresponsive, often times the keyboard has to be disconnected and reconnected. Often times it just freaks out and starts clicking where I am not clicking.

I followed all troubleshooting steps. It is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER36> Technology seems to be a huge issue at the Patriots home stadium. Pretty much every visiting team coach that's been there complains about headset failures / communication issues between coaches/on-field captains. Mike Tomlin said "It's always the case" when speaking about them failing. Like countless other people are saying in other comments - this is likely just a huge radio frequency collision issue for all of the wireless operations of any stadium.

<comment><USER21> From TFA:

 _Belichick was also unhappy with the other communications systems at the game, like the ones between the press box and the sideline and between the coach and the quarterback. "Those fail on a regular basis," he said.

He noted that the league does not supply the equipment to the teams until a few hours before the game, making troubleshooting difficult.

"So I would just say there are problems in every game," he said. "There were problems last week, but there were problems the week before that, too. Some are worse than others. Sometimes both teams have them, sometimes one team has them and the other team doesn't have them."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Did you know that 30 years ago, Polaroids were the new hotness? The difference between those and today's tablets is that the Polaroids were utterly reliable. Both provide additional value from what was there before.

The interesting question is why the new tablet/network is unreliable. My contention is that many physical processes are not vulnerable to single points of failure but that software is.

</comment><comment><USER38> Has anybody ever used a tablet or laptop outside? They're unreadable. This isn't a problem with surface, it's a problem with most electronic devices in the sunlight. There probably are other glitches but low tech film isn't going away anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've seen this time and time again in multiple different industries.

Electronics technology & software are truly great and wonderful, but they are still too immature (the latter more so) to be truly reliable. I'm confident that someday they will actually be superior to physical technology like pads of paper, but they're just not there yet. Honestly, I don't really expect them to get where they need to be within my lifetime.

For that matter, high-tech stuff isn't as reliable as low-tech stuff. I know that when I pick up my landline wired headset that I will have crystal-clear calling, every single time; I don't know that with my cordless phone; I don't know that with my cellphone. I know that when I pick up a pen & paper, that I will be able to quickly write and draw whatever I want; I don't know that with my laptop, nor with my tablet, nor with my phone.

</comment><comment><USER40> > Zack Cox of New England Sports Network timed Belichick's denunciation of NFL > technology at 5 minutes 25 seconds

</comment><comment><USER41> How much values does Microsoft derive from paying 80 million/year to use these tablets.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not sure this really says anything bad about Microsoft. Is it really hard to imagine an NFL coach losing his temper with something let alone a computer?

<comment><USER43> Have you watched a Pats game? Belichick is about as wordy as a granite counter-top in game and is like a cemetery in front of journalists. That he bothered to complain, let alone did some much to reporters, indicates that there are VERY big problems with them.

<comment><USER30> And the fact that he previously said there were issues but he was trying to work through them, then years later decided he couldn't deal with it anymore speaks volumes. He actually did give it a shot, for years, and it never got better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> On the one hand, it's a reasoned, eloquent, logical gripe about technology not functioning as intended for its target audience, an NFL head coach.

On the other hand, this is Bill Belichick doing the talking, so I take the bulk of his complaints about the communications equipment with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you're not familiar with Mr. Belichick, he's earned the reputation of being worthy of suspicion when it comes to either exploiting a loophole in the rules or potentially breaking them outright and trying to explain them away[1]. A quick search[2] dredges up numerous cases of NFL teams visiting Gillette Stadium and experiencing significant communications system difficulties.

So, the cynic in me would like to pose a tentative solution to Bill: If his team would shut off whatever jammers and bullshit disruption devices they're using on the visiting opponents, maybe his equipment wouldn't fuck up as much either.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_England_Patriots_vide...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_England_Patriots_videotaping_controversy)

[2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=radio+trouble+gillette+stadi...](https://www.google.com/search?q=radio+trouble+gillette+stadium+nfl&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying it's impossible (given the history with on field equipment – aka deflategate), but it's seems highly unlikely given that the NFL hires RF specialists with spectrum analyzers and direction finding equipment just to hunt down unauthorized transmissions at games.

<comment><USER45> The broad scientific consensus is that the deflation of the balls occurred naturally and there was no foul-play involved.

[0][http://www.si.com/nfl/2016/10/04/tom-brady-deflategate- ideal...](http://www.si.com/nfl/2016/10/04/tom-brady-deflategate-ideal-gas- law)

[1][http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2016/03/12/deflate-gate- scienc...](http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2016/03/12/deflate-gate-science- goodell)

[2][https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/culture- beaker/deflategate-...](https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/culture- beaker/deflategate-favored-foul-play-over-science)

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

[4][http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2016/05/27/scientists- file-a...](http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2016/05/27/scientists-file-amicus- brief-tom-brady/)</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Network Capacity Analysis – Part 2: Macro Transaction Trends - <AUTHOR> https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-2-macro-transaction-trends

<comment><USER2> Very accessible writeup from the standpoint of a casual observer. Is there a strong counterargument for increasing max blocksize?

<comment><USER3> The strongest arguments for and against raising the blocksize are all about decentralization.

For the raise: As the number of transactions organically grows, if the blocks fill up, users will be pushed to "off-chain" services such as CoinBase or ChangeTip. This will hurt decentralization, because these services are basically banks.

Against the raise: As the size of blocks have grown, the number of full nodes has fallen. Further increases in block size will only make the number of full nodes decrease further (because of increased requirements for bandwidth, memory, and disk space), which will hurt decentralization.

<comment><USER2> Makes sense. Interesting balancing act. Thanks for your insight.</comment></comment></comment>


Why did world forget Boson's father? - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/God-Why-did-world-forget-Bosons-father/articleshow/14683835.cms No one now remembers Bose, on whose name the subatomic particle is named. <comment><USER2> There is no need to get worked up on this - no one is calling into question the great work done on by SN Bose. The immediate discovery is of Higgs Boson - which is why Higgs is getting a lot more mentions. Every time a subatomic particle is discovered do we go all the way back to Rutherford,Bohr or Einstein?

</comment><comment><USER3> who is this fucktard that wrote this? it's higgs boson particle. not higgs particle.

> "I believe it is a deliberate omission," says P M Bhargava, founder director > of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology

biology center's director? seriously to comment on physics. I agree he might be a scientist, but this is retarted.

 _flag_ (everyone flag it too)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wikipedia on S N Bose : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose>

</comment><comment><USER5> Why to just blow a trumpet which an irresponsible media house has created !! No one is stealing a thinder or anything !!

</comment><comment><USER6> Really? They admit very early on that bosons are named after Bose. If that's not honoring Bose, I don't know what is.

"I believe it's a deliberate omission."

It's named a freaking BOSON, as in "BOSE-ON". Get over yourselves.</comment>


Twitterfeed will be shutting its doors on October 31st, 2016 - <AUTHOR> Not me:
Howdy, Twitterfeeders!
We're writing to let you know that Twitterfeed will be shutting its doors on October 31st, 2016. It's been one heck of a run and we can't thank you enough for your loyal usage and support over the years.
If you're looking for a service similar to Twitterfeed to continue using in our absence, we recommend checking out the good folks at Buffer (https://buffer.com) or Dlvr.it (https://dlvr.it)
Thanks again for all the feeds!
- Mario Founder, Twitterfeed https://twitterfeed.com/ 139 5th Ave. New York, NY 10010 <comment><USER2> Why not open source it so we can run it on our own hardware?

Why does something useful have to go away because a business couldn't be made of it?

<comment><USER3> Often open sourcing a project requires a lot of work. If it uses licensed technology it may require some money too. And sometimes the engineering is uniquely tuned to the context in which the project was developed to the point that it makes no sense, for example the code contains dependencies on specific service providers like hosting companies or CDN's or expects unique hardware configurations.

<comment><USER4> Surely there is value in code that can't be run. If I write a nodejs app that only runs on Google app engine, it still might be useful to someone else.

<comment><USER5> I think you underestimate the difficulty of open sourcing some projects.

At the last company I worked at, we really wanted to open source some of the stuff we were doing, but we literally couldn't because we depended on some private APIs and were under NDA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the linked website: "© 2007-2015 Bitly, Inc" \- was this a subsidiary of bitly from jump, or an acquihire?

<comment><USER7> Acquihire in mid-2011 [http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/bitly-acquires- twitterfeed...](http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/bitly-acquires- twitterfeed/453946)

Mario continued to work mostly independently on Twitterfeed for many years, maybe up until now.

Legend has it that one of the motivations for the acquisition was to help with a work visa situation for another employee from the UK, Mike Dewar. He was a graduate student in NYC who did an internship (or similar) at Bitly, but had to move back to the UK when he finished/discontinued his studies. So they had Twitterfeed hire him, then acquired Twitterfeed, then he was able to move back to the US office. Just hear-say from long ago, I don't recall any details :)

<comment><USER8> why would you make this kind of info public?

<comment><USER9> Legend has it that ploxiln from NYC that worked on Bitly is a disgruntled employee that had a problem with the company and/or the engineer he mentioned. Just hear-say from long ago, I don't recall any details :)

<comment><USER7> I don't see how what I said carries any negative connotations about anyone. Jeez.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was using this service back when many people were using RSS and Twitter was somewhat of a sane platform for interaction and information. It isn't as much as the lack of RSS use (I still use RSS) but more so of the lack of use of Twitter itself, which made me abandon this service. Twitter eventually became somewhat reasonable to follow via Lists. They don't want you to use RSS anyways, so ... we move on. Twitterfeed was a good and reasonable service.

</comment><comment><USER11> Submit to Our Incredible Journey?

</comment><comment><USER12> We lost the best free RSSfeeder on internet. Thank you guys for your services and good luck in your futures projects.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hi, someone knows if it's possible to export the rss list… some of my twitterfeed account are more than 100 items. so… tks a lot

</comment><comment><USER14> did the Fifth Avenue address play any role in the winding down of this business

<comment><USER15> That address is bit.ly's corporate headquarters: [https://bitly.com/pages/contact](https://bitly.com/pages/contact)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is sad, I use it

</comment><comment><USER16> Time to move on to products that aren't tethered to a sinking ship.</comment>


Open Sourcing Zulip – A Dropbox Hack Week Project - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant. Zulip has been a life-changing tool for us: it's the key technology supporting a change in social environment that lets us employ remote staff and collaborate effectively.</comment>


Scrap your MapReduce – Introduction to Apache Spark - <AUTHOR> http://rahulkavale.github.io/blog/2014/11/16/scrap-your-map-reduce/

<comment><USER2> Good introduction. Spark is really a project to watch in the data analysis field on distributed architecture. We had performed several benchmarks and Spark keeps its promisses. 2.5x faster comparing to Pig for the same algorithm on the same cluster.

For iterative algorithm with the in-memory possibilities, performances are really good comparing to Hadoop.

The project is still young with several bugs but the documentation is really good and the code is well commented and robust.

<comment><USER3> As part of our work we have done extensive comparisons of Spark on various workloads, clusters and cluster sizes comparing with Hadoop Map Reduce, Naiad and several other frameworks. We've found Spark to be temperamental, hard to configure, and with wildly varying performance, suited only to a small set of computations for which in-memory state reuse is beneficial (mostly it isn't).

In nearly every test Naiad has beaten Spark.

More info on Naiad: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/naiad/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/naiad/)

<comment><USER4> MSFT killed Naiad's predecessor Dryad in favor of Hadoop some time ago, because Hadoop was becoming popular. The primary author linked in the page works at "Microsoft Silicon Valley"which was just shut down and in fact now lists himself on LinkedIn as "Researcher At Large, previously at Microsoft"

So, how do we know Naiad has much future? . Technologically, it may be better/more reliable/faster, but if it's a niche product that gets desupported just because it never took off... it doesn't really matter.

Spark on the other hand has a great deal of momentum and in my experience, momentum and adoption trump technical elegance in the short run...

(don't get me wrong: I thought Dryad was awesome. Google's Flume is very similar in some ways. MapReduce's days are numbered except for a small number of problems which can't be easily ported).

<comment><USER3> All good points. I can't say what the future of Naiad is. What they have done to Microsoft Research Silicon Valley is disgusting (I worked there too for a short time).

In our experiences the performance claims with Spark have been more hype than substance. Naiad on the other hand has been hard to find a corner case for.

Naiad is open source licensed under an Apache License so one can only hope...

<comment><USER3> FYI: Link to Naiad github repo: [https://github.com/MicrosoftResearch/Naiad](https://github.com/MicrosoftResearch/Naiad)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, but: this is a dead project.

Also, it appears to be tied to Windows (it's delivered as a VS solution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are interested in this, you might be interested in my (warning: shameless plug) 5 part blog series located at [http://blog.caseystella.com/pyspark-openpayments- analysis.ht...](http://blog.caseystella.com/pyspark-openpayments- analysis.html). I'm using the python bindings for Spark to illustrate doing data analysis on healthcare financial data on Hadoop.

</comment><comment><USER6> Spark is nice, but its memory model almost requires a full cluster overhaul. We looked at it at my last project. Our cluster nodes only had 64 GB of RAM. That was carved into 4 GB workers. In order to use Spark we'd have to halve our number of workers because of the memory requirements.

Neat project. Has its place. Requires a different cluster configuration which might limit its utility.

<comment><USER7> You need to deploy your MapReduce cluster with Mesos, allowing both Spark and MR to use the cluster at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've just start using this at work. It's far easier to jump into than MapReduce; orders a magnitude easier. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute back to the project at some point.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good work. Love the title for your blog too :)</comment>


Project Capillary: End-to-end encryption for push messaging, simplified - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/06/project-capillary-end-to-end-encryption.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> As a crypto design, this seems like the worst of all possible worlds. Due to what appears to be a platform limitation, public key encryption for push messages apparently has to use RSA --- modern cryptosystems avoid RSA as an egregious source of foot-cannons --- and for some reason the designers have opted to layer ECDSA --- elliptic curve's biggest source of foot-cannons! --- on top of it.

Since Google has excellent crypto people on staff I'm sort of left wondering what I'm missing.

At least it's using Tink, under the hood. If you're unfamiliar with all this stuff, a better starting place might be Google's Tink project.

<comment><USER3> Okay I Googled "foot-cannon" but didn't find any relevant looking results. Can you explain to me what it is?

<comment><USER4> A foot cannon is a joke term for something which makes it easy to "shoot yourself in the foot". In other words a tool which is easy to use incorrectly.

<comment><USER5> Why is this term so familiar to people on HN but like OP I cannot find a single reference to it on Google...

<comment><USER6> I think people are very familiar with "foot gun" which is quite common, and are inferring that since a cannon is a really big gun, a foot cannon is a really big foot gun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > (at last, the Google privacy team has its own messaging app!)

A nice jab at themselves. Glad they have a sense of humor.

<comment><USER8> Google actually has an internal social network and the main purpose is basically to make fun of google's messaging apps.

<comment><USER9> It's not just for that. They also post screenshots of other social networks referencing its meta-memes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> End-to-end encryption but "not designed to support peer-to-peer messaging and key exchange"? This sounded like such a good idea, but after reading just realistically looks like vendor lock-in and trying to capture "E2EE" hype.

For those looking for an actual solution, we've built tools (already running in production) that make this very easy:

[http://gun.js.org/docs/SEA](http://gun.js.org/docs/SEA)

\- Cross-device, cross-platform.

\- Fully P2P/decentralized.

\- `user()` provides key management, multi-device login.

\- ECDSA

\- Diffie-Hellman

\- Can do RSA-like DH-based 1-way messages.

\- PBKDF2

\- AES

\- SHA256

<comment><USER11> After looking at this it appears that you are just using this thread to promote a library that doesn't really fill the same problem space but does have a couple of buzzwords in common.

<comment><USER10> It has, MIT/ZLIB/Apache2 licensed, a library for syncing data, including a relay server if needed, and tooling to a abstract the encryption and key management, plus it is designed from ground up to handle P2P uses. Have you checked the rest of the docs and the repo? What is it missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I missing something? End 2 end implies client to client, no server access to keys...doing server to client with full key access isn't even a particularly hard problem, the tough part of most e2e systems is the ECDHE exchange, that's where I thought this was going.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks like e2e push notifications but has warnings against p2p use, so I'm not fully sure what the use case is for this. Apologies for my ignorance - maybe someone can explain this relative to GCM, FireChat, XMPP, or Signal?

<comment><USER14> By default, both Google and Apple can read the content of messages over their respective push services.

This allows a service to send push messages to its users without Google being privvy to the content of the messages. I guess it's not ready for P2P use yet (aka encrypting the messages with a key unknown to $Service) but could still be useful for telling a user that "Jane sent you a message" without leaking the fact that John is communicating with Jane.

<comment><USER15> So if I have signal on iOS configured to use notifications (which include the body of the message), those notifications are sent unencrypted over apple's push notification system?

Some quick googling let me to this SO answer [0] suggesting that as of 2016 devs can configure APNS as an encrypted channel where the client decrypts notification payloads locally.

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32719476/how-secure- are-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32719476/how-secure-are-apple- apns-push-notifications)

<comment><USER14> Your link is correct -- Apple recently added the ability to programmatically modify the contents of push notifications which would allow one to build E2E on top of APNS. Android has always processed notifications through intents, so it's always had this capability. Google is just providing a pre built solution that works for some use cases but this method was technically possible before.

Not sure what Signal does here particularly, but their FAQ claims it's not a problem. [https://support.signal.org/hc/en- us/articles/217524107-Can-G...](https://support.signal.org/hc/en- us/articles/217524107-Can-Google-read-my-messages-Can-Apple-read-my-messages-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read from the Signal team before (no reference links on hand, sorry) that Signal servers send an empty push notification to your device to wake it up, at which point the Signal app fetches your notifications/messages from Signal's servers.

At least, that's what I read for Android/GCM, I'm not sure if that applies to Apple.

<comment><USER16> I believe they're referred as "Silent notifications" on iOS. It's very convenient to update state in the app without having to wait for the user to perform the action manually.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blodwen: A prototype successor to Idris - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/edwinb/Blodwen <comment><AUTHOR> Last week on the Idris mailing list Marimuthu posted a message announcing he has succeeded in compiling a new JVM backend, which means that Blowden (Idris 2) can now run on the JVM. The new code is now on GitHub...

[https://github.com/mmhelloworld/Blodwen/releases](https://github.com/mmhelloworld/Blodwen/releases)</comment>


Introduction to Classical Physics -Video Lectures from IIT - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Gw08pwhws

<comment><AUTHOR> Although not related to computer science, these are a set of excellent video lectures that provide a nice introduction to classical Physics. The only reason I'm sharing it is because I've really enjoyed this series, and hope others may too. (Hint: Its not like any other physics course; watch the first lecture!)</comment>


ShipBuilder - <AUTHOR> http://shipbuilder.io/ <comment><USER2> From reading this, I don't really know what ShipBuilder does. It's some kind of tool to help me deploy. Is it self-hosted or PaaS? Why is it better than what I'm doing now? Is the system diagram what my infrastructure will look like?

It sounds kind of interesting, but I really don't know what it is yet.

<comment><USER3> I have looked at the website and i cant figure out anything. This is something that i might be interested, but i have no way to know. The whole site looks amateur. You might want to fix that up to provide more information on everything</comment></comment>


How much is a Facebook app worth? Facebook Application Logbook goes on eBay for $2,550 - <AUTHOR> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160159594256 <comment><USER2> This isn't a great data point because there were no users for this app.</comment>


In South Africa, Ranchers Are Breeding Animals to Be Hunted - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-hunting-mutant-big-game-in-south-africa/

<comment><USER2> I have a great uncle who runs an elk farm. He's often said he wants to breed albino elk because hunters will pay a fortune to bag one, but he has yet to get even one. Fortunately, regular elk will do for most. Hunters pay to come onto his land and shoot elk. He leads them out in a pickup and, depending on how trustworthy the hunter is, has his sons split off the animal he wants shot (a hunter with poor aim might unwittingly take out a mating bull or pregnant cow, thereby multiplying the cost by a factor of two or _much_ more). "Hunters" tend to get upset if they're suddenly on the hook for a much larger bill than initially agreed upon.

Some of the customers paying to shoot elk are just frustrated hunters. They've been out hunting and simply had no luck, but didn't want to go home empty handed. For them, my uncle's farm is the backup plan. Some customers like the taste of elk and want it out of season (wild elk can be legally hunted for only a few months per year). However, there are also those who just want to shoot a big game animal but entirely lack the expertise to hunt.

Meat and velvet (antlers) are still bigger sources of income, but hunters make an impressive contribution to my uncle's revenues. My uncle started his farm in the eighties when farming elk was virtually unheard of but, even today, when Elk farms are much more common and Elk meat is on a lot of restaurant menus, Elk are still viewed as wild animals. This is not entirely inaccurate. Even the "tame" elk on my uncle's farm are quite vicious to anything shorter than them. Short hunters are advised to stay in the truck at all times!

If you want to spot an elk farm, the give-away is the 8-foot (minimum) and sturdily built fence that surrounds them. Elk are excellent jumpers and bulls have the mass of a bovine cow. Imagine a cow that can clear a six foot fence, and you have an idea of what elk are like.

<comment><USER3> Interesting story, I get Elk antlers for my dogs to chew on and they are pretty expensive for even a small piece. It has always made me wonder how profitable it is for people who sell Elk antlers and other types of animal antlers. Although I doubt you can really scale up antler production very easily.

<comment><USER4> You're probably buying cut and sanded sheds - which are found in heavy elk populated areas in the spring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it all comes down to this:

> Hunting ranches have been widely credited with saving the rhinoceros from > extinction in the 1960s, when there were just an estimated 575,000 large > wild animals in the country.

Megafauna compete human beings: they eat us, or they eat our food, or they displace our food. We're really, _really_ good at competing.

Fortunately, private property rights give an incentive for people to protect & foster animals they would otherwise have an incentive to kill. No sane person would want to live within range of a lion—unless he derived some benefit from it. That's precisely what these operations do: they have every reason to preserve the species they are each interested in (yes, even the non-mutants, because they provide breeding stock).

Now, I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in the pursuit, in trying to match the animals' advantages with our own. I could see paying for a white tiger skin rug (it'd be pretty), but I can't imagine tromping out some ranch, riding out in a truck and shooting it myself. What'd be the point? I don't go to a cattle ranch and shoot steers; I don't go to a potato farm and pull potatoes.

<comment><USER6> > I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less > captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in > the pursuit

If the land area was large enough you could have the best of both.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but the animal wouldn't really be wild, so it wouldn't really be the same experience. Everybody's different, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This happens in lots of places. Around the Rocky Mountains there are elk breeders and huge ranches for the same purpose. Depending on the size of the bull (or specifically his rack) the price can reach tens of thousands of dollars.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is excellent!

If they can switch everyone to this instead of poaching it would be huge positive for those animals.

<comment><USER8> It would help if social media didn't erupt into massive storms of outrage every time someone took a photo of themselves with a dead lion that they shot on a safari ranch.

<comment><USER6> They need to give it a PR spin like "sustainably shot" or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hunting mutant animals bred for the purpose over generations sounds a lot like most commercial pheasant shooting.

[http://www.heartofenglandfarms.com/gamestock/breeds/](http://www.heartofenglandfarms.com/gamestock/breeds/)

</comment><comment><USER10> > mutant animals

How about we de-sensationalize this to _selective breeding_.

<comment><USER11> Ok, we took out "mutant".</comment></comment>


Trump starts a feud with an algorithm after Googling his own name - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbjabj/trump-news-fake-google-twitter-search <comment><USER2> The title of this article is loaded clickbait.</comment>


Do Certain Countries Produce Only Positive Results? Systematic Review of RCTs - <AUTHOR> http://www.dcscience.net/Vickers_1998_Controlled-Clinical-Trials.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Excerpts of Vickers et al 1998: [https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/9JaywVjg...](https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/9JaywVjgQ5S)</comment>


An Optometrist Billionaire Investor - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/02/19/the-greatest-investor-youve-never-heard-of-an-optometrist-who-beat-the-odds-to-become-a-billionaire/ <comment><USER2> This article does its subject something of a disservice in the fourth paragraph: "His fortune comes not from some flash of entrepreneurial brilliance or dogged devotion to career, but from a lifetime of prudent do-it- yourself buy-and-hold investing."

We learn later in the story that Wertheim did in fact demonstrate enterpreneurial brilliance _and_ dogged devotion to his career _and_ was an unimaginably successful buy-and-hold investor. The company he founded, BPI, threw off up to $10M / year in cash that funded his investment portfolio.

That he he was successful not just as an investor, but also as an inventor and entrepreneur, is what's truly amazing.

<comment><USER3> Actually, from the article it's unclear if he's beaten the S&P500 as an investor. It doesn't mention much about what he invested in before 1980, but it does say he lost about $50 million dollars in a margin call in 1982 so he was already quite wealthy either from BPI (the company started in ~1971) or from investing in the 60's/70's.

If his total investments at that time was $100 million, which seems somewhat reasonable given how much he lost in the margin call, investing that in the S&P500 would be worth $4 billion today, which is quite a bit more than the $2.3 billion he's actually worth.

That's also ignoring his currently $10 million a year income from BPI, so he could have spent 100% of that money.

<comment><USER4> I wonder why internet commentators who haven't made billions always bring up this index fund stuff, when no one who actually has made billions did it by piling their money into the S&P 500.

<comment><USER5> Because it has been very well demonstrated that almost all active investors, fund managers etc... virtually never beat the market cumulatively over decades. There are some exceptions, but not more than you would expect from random chance due to large sample size (a lot of people playing). So given that information why should most of us spend the effort trying to beat the market especially considering the low expense ratio on some really solid ETFs. Generally speaking if you expect the economy to continue to grow for the next few decades than index funds are a pretty good option.

<comment> barry-cotter The weak form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true but the strong form, which you're expounding, is a crock. Warren Buffet has beaten the market for longer than I have been alive at what the stock market is optimised to do. George Soros made multiple fortunes as a trader and Julian Simons' Renaissance hedge fund mints money and has for decades. The only one of those you can invest in is Buffett because it pleases him to run Berkshire Hathaway his way instead of maximising his personal returns like the founders of the best hedge funds. After fees the investors in them don't beat the market but the principles make giant piles of money for long periods of time.

Investing skill exists, is rare and often captures _all_ of the gains accruing to it because wannabe investors bid for access to it and due to the winner's curse often overpay.

George Soros is like Steve Jobs. Making a giant fortune once could be luck but if you can repeat it again and again the chances it was ever luck just go down and down.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham- and-Doddsville)

> The speech and article challenged the idea that equity markets are efficient > through a study of nine successful investment funds generating long-term > returns above the market index. All these funds were managed by Benjamin > Graham's alumni, pursuing different investment tactics but following the > same "Graham-and-Doddsville" value investing strategy.

All that said. The weak form of the EMH is true. You personally are very unlikely to beat the market over the long run.

<comment><USER6> Book value vs market cap is the liquidator paradigm which is the advice that Buffet professes. But really he buys distressed assets. Structural buy ins such as American Express, GEICO, Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, USG, Harley-Davidson and Bank of America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He got his first pot of gold from a very decent business, then brought into 2 of the best historic stocks of all times (AAPL and MSFT) at its lowest and held to it longer than most.

<comment><USER8> nothing to see be here other than survivorship bias cargo cult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I realize that this guy fits the profile of someone from the future who is thrown back in time and left stranded :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> > "My thing is I wanted to be able to have free time. To me, having time is > the most precious thing."

Interestingly it's a backward model when compared to people that use time as a resource towards money/success/<your_goal>...

I guess actual freedom indeed requires both free time and available resources (money/skills/knowledge/etc.).

I see many people always filling up their schedules months in advance while I always feel better without the constraint to follow past decisions. Maybe linked to control seeking & risk aversion vs. interest for unexpected opportunities...

</comment><comment><USER11> Apple and Microsoft?

How could this guy miss out on RED HAT?

<comment><USER12> Yes. I saw the photos and this was my first question. Mind you the free red fedora they gave away around the time of the public share offering was truly trashy-bad. I suspect anyone with a real fur fedora saw warning signs there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1/3 of his net worth comes from a single good (almost lucky) investment in his friend's company, which he was an advisor for. That's sort of on the line between investor and entrepreneur.

He's done really well, but it's a bit disingenuous to say that he did all through investing. He started a business that gives him 10 million a year to invest with! Yes, he appears to have taken that and increased it many times over, but it helps to start at a high base level.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure they made a mistake with the "World Yacht". They linked to a small boat in New York [1] that is used for weddings and other events, which is pretty funny.

I'm almost 100% sure that they were talking about "The World" yacht [2]. I found out about this last year, and I'd be tempted to buy an apartment if I could ever afford it (you need at least $10 million.) The expeditions are amazing [3], as well as the regular lectures and workshops [4].

It's also pretentious, dystopian, and a bit embarrassing. I don't know if those are the sort of people I'd want to spend all my time with, but maybe many of them are just ordinary people who happen to have a lot of money. It would certainly be an interesting place to live.

[1] [https://worldyacht.com](https://worldyacht.com)

[2] [https://aboardtheworld.com](https://aboardtheworld.com)

[3] [https://aboardtheworld.com/rare- expeditions/](https://aboardtheworld.com/rare-expeditions/)

[4] [https://aboardtheworld.com/experience/enrichment/](https://aboardtheworld.com/experience/enrichment/)

</comment><comment><USER11> "My goal is to buy and almost never sell"

Therein lies one of the great secrets to wealth.

Buffett, Bogle, etc. all espouse it. For those who are looking for ways to level the economic field (at least personally), take note.

<comment><USER15> Unless you bought Kodak, Enron or Pets.com. You still have to pick the right stocks. For most it's probably better to buy an index fund. I bought Cisco in 1999 and I think it's barely back to that level right now and it will probably go down once this bull market ends.

<comment><USER16> "Almost never sell" doesnt mean he never sells. Most people read this quite literally. Giving it more weight than the actual investor. This guy by his own admission sells off when is loss 25% or more. So those positions that you mentioned would have been sold off for tax harvesting reasons. He might have acquired a new position in the same stock if he believed in the company and his investment thesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's all just take a moment to acknowledge the awesomeness of naming your company Brain Power Inc.

</comment><comment><USER18> What would be some reasonably priced stocks you could buy today and hold onto for the next 15-20 years? I'm thinking TSLA or may be AMZN too

<comment><USER19> In general, here's what I think a good long-term stock selection strategy is: Look at all companies that will benefit from technology disruption and the future and discount the companies that will be hurt.

An example of company that would be helped by future disruption would maybe be Amazon or Tesla. Examples of companies that might be hurt by the future would be Exxon or Phillip Morris or Safeway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The secret: he can see all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains</comment>


The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill-open-access-and-creative-commons-news <comment><USER2> I also love how most mainstream media does not report this or cover it at all. Yeah they might have the odd article but nothing else. I personally would be extremely happy, if this pile of shit passes, to see FB and google block all EU news outlets and drive them to the ground. I mean that should be the price to pay when meddling with the freedom of information.

Having your revenue down by 50-60% (hopefully) because you're dumb enough to think that your lobbying is the smartest idea sound like justice.

I just can't believe that the EU is actually doing this. It puts a really bad taste in my mouth that it tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because of large lobbyist corporations.

<comment><USER3> I think the EU understands perfectly fine. It is the Internet that doesn't understand how copyright works. Most countries don't have comprehensive fair use. Copyright rules and e.g. quotation rights are fairly 'weak' exceptions. Various people and organization, like Lawrence Lessig and the Pirate Party, have advocated for reform. Companies like Google and Facebook have instead basically made it their business to abuse copyright, which especially online most people seem happy with. Unfortunately reality tends to catch up with you and 2018 is turning out to be the year when grace period on how to operate the Internet is running out.

<comment><USER4> I downvoted you because linking and showing a few sentences does not mean a company's business is to "abuse copyright."

<comment><USER5> Google shows a lot more than a link and increasingly is tailored to answer your question and prevent you from going to the site that provided the information in the first place.

<comment><USER6> > is tailored to answer your question

In the US, factual information can not be copyrighted.

I believe it can in the EU, although I might be misrepresenting their official stance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that the EU allows you to copyright databases. I'm sure EU residents can correct me if I'm missing some kind of subtlety.

At least in the US though, there is nothing remotely illegal about looking up a fact on a website and then giving it to someone else directly, even if that diverts traffic away from the original site. Copyright was never intended to cover stuff like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I support lots of initiatives from the EU resulting from the tech world being unable to self-regulate.

This link-tax however is so extremely flawed, so obviously lobbied by special interest and just fundamentally backwards wrt how the www works...

I can't see how they think they're going to win the public opinion to support or respect it.

<comment><USER8> Well, that is the double edged sword. For two decades or more we enjoyed an internet that was more or less free from regulation because the politicians of the era didn't really use it or understand it. Now the politicians do use it (I doubt they understand it) and are happy to regulate it, I imagine we can expect much more like this from the EU.

<comment><USER9> Double edged sword indeed. Without regulation the internet turned into shit and we have companies like Google and Facebook running the show.

<comment><USER10> > Google and Facebook running the show.

It only runs the show if you let them. You can still live outside of the Google/Facebook world happily.

<comment><USER11> No, you can't. Not unless you stop living in Europe or the US or any other place that has internet. I don't have a Facebook account, but I'm certain Facebook knows all it needs to know from friends who shared pictures and tagged me, from people who uploaded their address book which included my phone number, from companies that uploaded my data as part of a targeted audience list. You cannot opt out of this part of the data collection. And all the policies that Facebook promotes, all the social dialogue it shapes, this affects me, too. I cannot possibly opt out of that either.

<comment><USER12> Facebook under GDPR isn't allowed to create a shadow profile of EU citizens: all consent has to be opt-in. OK, so they could have some legitimate interest argument, but I find it hard to believe that'd fly in an EU court. They're also not allowed to use the consent of your associates to process your personal information without your own opt-in consent. So it's going to be interesting when the first court case with Facebook as a defendant against the GDPR happens.

<comment><USER11> Let's see if that happens, but that's tangential to the point. The GP was asserting that you can just ignore Facebook/Google and that act alone will remove all (ill) effect it might have on your life. I'm asserting this is false. If that effect is reduced by regulation, then this is the opposite of ignorance, it's actively shaping what these actors can and cannot do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm with EFF on many things, but "link tax" is a non-starter for any serious discussion. There is no "tax" at all here, and the copyright reform isn't about "links". It's about clarifying the legal situation of search engines and news aggregators previewing large parts of other site's content, which has always been copyright infringement. "Link tax" FUD doesn't contribute.

<comment><USER2> I mean they put up the definition from article 11 right there. Seems like a legit link tax to me.

<comment><USER14> I'm lost on their first excerpt (recital 32) and their interpretation about compulsory commercial license and how it kills Creative Commons. Maybe I'm slow but that quoted text implies no such things, so the EFF makes claims without backing them up (without properly doing the work of explain the steps of how they derived those consequences).

<comment><USER2> Well this text states exactly that:

>> Such protection should be effectively guaranteed through the introduction, in Union law, of rights related to copyright for the reproduction and making available to the public of press publications in respect of digital uses in order to obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses.

Which makes some sense. If you have a digital version that needs to still give you money but them:

>> In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration.

Says you will have to pay in a different from just driving traffic to those ppl.

Now if I'm a Creative Commons news outlet there is no way for me to waive that extra payment. The law states that just listing me somewhere is not enough and I need to be paid in a different way. I may not want that but the law INSISTS that I get paid in a different way.

Does this make it more clear?

<comment><USER15> And a fair and proportionate amount for Creative Commons article is presumably zero?

<comment><USER2> True but with an explicit arrangement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If Google creates their own journalism arm, or some variant (e.g. YouTube for News), does that bypass this?

Is the endgame of these EU laws full vertical integration, so you have one company paying itself, no 'third party cookie' because there's only a first party, etc?

</comment><comment><USER17> This is so wrong that you almost start to think that the eff is somehow exaggerating this; they're probably not.

The secrecy is the worst part. Democracies should be about openness. EU is arguably democratic and hardly open.

<comment><USER18> The EU is usually open -- see the TTIP negotiations.

The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. If populists like Farage are in the parliament, that's only because people vote for them. Hardly undemocratic.

The EU Council comprises the elected head of government of each member state. Hardly undemocratic.

The EU Commission comprises a president, who is selected by the EU Council and approved or denied by the EU Parliament. The Council also appoints the members of the commission, each country appoints 1 person. In the UK this is no different to the PM appointing ministers.

For this law to pass, not only does the parliament of elected MEPs have to pass it, but so does a majority of the Council, elected leaders.

While it suits heads of various EU governemnts to blame 'the EU', it's entirely in their control to approve or reject the directive, and it's entirely in your MEP's control to approve or reject it.

<comment><USER19> > The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote.

Depending from which country you are from your vote may weight differently up to a factor of 11 (Luxembourg vs Spain) [1], hardly democratic.

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

<comment><USER20> the same thing is happening in the US, right? big states like california vs smaller states like delaware.

I think there is value into rules like these because otherwise smaller states will be always trumped.

<comment><USER19> This is not true for the Congress which is the comparable institution to the European Parliament.

      Each state is apportioned a number of seats which
      approximately corresponds to its share of the aggregate
      population of the 50 states.
      ... The method of equal proportions minimizes the
      percentage differences in the populations of the
      congressional districts. [1]

Some outliers exist, because states are guaranteed at least one seat (compare that with 6 for Luxembourg)

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

<comment><USER20> I don't get your point. you say it is not true and then you agree that some outliers exist. this is exactly the point, that there are outliers like this in US Congress, just like there are in the EU parliament. Probably the value is higher in the EU, but I think that's fair to protect the smaller states.

<comment><USER18> His argument is that the 11:1 ratio of MEPs is not democratic, but the 2:1 ratio of Congress is democratic.

The UK has a system, widely known as democratic, where the government of the day (with the exception of 2010), does not have the support of the voting population. In 2015 David Cameron and his Tory party got 100% of power in Parliament, and thus 100% of power in the executive, based on 36.9% of the voting public.

The U.S presidential elections are also classed as democratic, despite that twice in the last 20 years more people have voted for a different candidate than the one who became president.

(It's actually worse than 11:1 ratio -- Podlaskie and Warmian-Masurian has 1.3m voters per MEP, Malta has 70,000, that's a 19:1 ratio)

However I've never heard people complain that Malta, Luxemboug, Slovenia, Cyprus etc hold the cards, people always complain it's Germany and the UK that call the shots.

<comment><USER20> also each vote cast in Wyoming is worth 3.6 as much as the same vote cast in California. still less than in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are two possible outcomes from Article 11. Either it will backfire and large Internet networks like Google or Facebook will start removing links to news sites which will have the opposite result from what the latter where hopping when they were lobbying for a new copyright law, or it will kill the web as we know it at least in Europe. I'd put my money on the first scenario.

<comment><USER22> Worst case is adding a little more bureaucracy. Google will stop listing news sites, or at least summaries. The number of visitors will crash and the news sites will be forced to give Google (and others) a free license to link to their content.

It not going to be an issue, some newspapers already allow to access to articles for free is you come directly from a search engine.

The part I find troubling is filtering user uploaded content, that's simply not going to work.

<comment><USER23> We had the exact same situation in Germany already:

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

In the end Google said "ok, then we'll stop listing you" and suddenly the publishers that wanted this law gave Google permission to link to them without cost. Sounds okay in theory, but every minor search engine or news aggregator which doesn't have the defacto monopoly of Google still suffers from it.

<comment><USER24> which then had the interesting effect of actually being great for Google, it will effectively prevent any competition of google news forever. Politicians are all corrupt/payed for, they have absolutely no concept of what they are doing and could not care less about its collateral damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most bothering part is not the objective, or the nature of the law. That we can argue.

But it's the absurdity of the fact that the EU can pass a law which has such massive and widespread implications - where the wording is unclear, bizarre, makes little sense, and can hardly be applied.

Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots.

Whatever it is, it has to be clean, simple, effective, spelled out ... or else there just shouldn't be a law.

<comment><USER26> They are not idiots: they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions) that is beneficial for them by presenting their political opponents in a bad way. How poor the law is is not their concern.

<comment><USER27> > they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public > subventions)

In my home country you could trace most news outlets back to a few big players and those tend to be in the top 100 rich people of the country. If they are getting public subventions I would see it more as a way for politicians to keep the coverage positive.

<comment><USER25> This is a great point.

I think there is an earnest attempt to save journalism overall ... but also consider that European industries are static, and especially the press are owned by old, rich families who have considerable influence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This thread has gone way off topic. It had descended into general EU bashing and yet another GDPR debate.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why cannot we see how MEPs voted? Smearing them in local media for their votes would quickly put a stop to this and other nonsense being passed in EP. Without electronic vote tracking, MEPs are free to vote for lobbyists while sweet-talking the public.

<comment><USER29> You can:

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bPV%2b20180912%2bRES- RCV%2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN)

A8-0245

<comment><USER28> I see no vote data on amendments 89 and 90 that proposed removal of articles 11 and 13 respectively.

Even this vote on the whole law is hard to find. Personally, I couldn't find it if you didn't post it here.

<comment><USER30> Did you not see them in the ToC? Data for amendment 89 is on page 22 and amendment 90 is on page 26.

<comment><USER28> I see them now. Thanks. I wish there was a clean website where this information could be easily found by picking legislation on one side and MEPs on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ads killed the web anyway, now we're just fighting over the corpse.

</comment><comment><USER32> The EU has already destroyed the web surfing experience for everyone, with their cookie laws. Now most sites require users to click on some banners that cover half of the screen on mobile, just to get to the content, on some random site they might only visit once. Argh!

I wonder what they'll do next. At some point in the future we're going to need a "new internet".

<comment><USER33> The ad industry destroyed web surfing. The EU just drew attention to that.

Sites without tracking cookies don't need to show a cookie banner.

<comment><USER34> Ads were never as intrusive as that damn cookie/gdpr banner.

In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.

<comment><USER35> > Ads were never as intrusive as that damn cookie/gdpr banner.

The poison slipped into your morning coffee is also less intrusive than the antidote shot into your arm with a syringe.

> In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.

And thanks to the GDPR, they might make a comeback now.

<comment><USER34> I'm afraid in this case the antidote was worse than the disease.

GDPR is here already and the solution chosen by websites is either the obnoxious banner or blocking Europe. No cookie-less I am afraid...

<comment><USER36> So ban the EU then. The market will find another venue if the service is useful enough.

If a website is obnoxious about its GDPR compliancy, I just close it. Coincidentally, it has never happened on something I really needed (technical documentation, scientific journals, etc.)

I don't necessarily agree with how the GDPR was created, or maybe even why, but to say it's worse than the information tyranny being built in the world today? Pft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Isn't this against freedom of speech and thus against constitution in most member states? Nobody can stop me from disseminating my ideas free of charge, right?

</comment><comment><USER28> Trampling of open content is a part of wider tendency of governments everywhere in the world to suppress and reverse automation by passing labor- intensive laws and subsidizing labor-intensive businesses. Every time we make progress with automation, they invent more work for us to do.

Open content is up to 100 times more popular. It therefore requires up to 100 times less work to satisfy demand. They just cannot let this happen.

This follows from the strange ethic of valuing hard work over efficiency. Labor is sacred. Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Economic output is supposed to be split according to the amount of work done, at least in theory. Any other alternative is considered communist. In order to maintain this moral system, people must be made to work even if the work is useless or subversive.

<comment><USER37> > Avoidance of work is considered amoral.

Did you mean immoral? Amoral means morals being not applicable, immoral means one who flouts morals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The politicians pushing that legislation really should face life in prison as the penalty. Absolutely atrocious.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder whether this will make blogs much more popular after search engines drop links to news sites.

</comment><comment><USER39> the fact that individual news organisations can't even waive this right, really makes this look lobbied, because the lobbyist corporations will definitely look bad if the others choose to not charge this tax

<comment><USER40> Can't waive it, but they could charge €1 per year. I don't see why they couldn't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> While this "link tax" is indeed rather stupid, the EFF is to a certain degree overstating their case.

If you check the current proposals ([http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-I...](http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-INIT/EN/pdf)) you will find (page 93) that the Council inserted a specific exemption for wikipedia and open source code. That's in addition to a few passages that had already been included previously, and that pretty clearly show that any requirement to collect from people linking to you only applies to large, commercial publishers.

Many people attack this proposal with rather wild interpretations, often of the sort of hair-splitting non-lawyers consider very smart. Those usually just get a tired rolling of the eyes from judges.

Real life is nothing but nuances, yet laws need to be abstract, and provide enough guidance to adequately capture future situations. Since it's impossible to make laws for every individual case (and actually illegal in many jurisdiction), there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes.

It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%, with the disappearance not just of readers, but classifieds and advertisers at the same time. Both in Europe and the US, local newspapers will be gone from vast swaths of the country. Those that remain are but shells of what they once were.

Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics. Yet if you don't know what is happening, it's is impossible to make decisions in the voting booth. Without this essential loopback, politicians' career prospects become entirely divorced from their actions, rendering democracy meaningless.

This current proposal seems to be far too convoluted, and enough of the fears are credible to make it look like a bad idea to me.

But instead of spinning conspiracy theories of who paid whom, it would (have been) far more effective to try to find some other mechanism to ensure the survival of at least some journalism.

One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous. I am quite sure that there's a balance that reduces annoyances by 80% while having far less of an impact on revenue.

If something like this had succeeded in easing some of the economic pressure, it would be far less likely that politicians feel the need to devote their time to such hard-handed measures such as link taxes.

<comment><USER42> > professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session

The promise of the internet was that we wouldn't need this person because we have direct access to the city council session, and it has largely delivered. The tech is there for the city council to make its sessions public. It is transparency that killed the journalist, not google.

<comment><USER43> That was my thought (the city council session should be on the web) at first, but I believe a person is still needed to make a summary, to explain certain things (sometimes people use lingo or refer to things you might not know), verify claims, etc.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me I have just described the job of a journalist.

<comment><USER42> Or of a reddit commenter. Or of an HN commenter. Or a peer reviewer. Or a blog poster. There is a wide selection nowadays. No need to channel everything through a handful of individuals.

<comment><USER44> Or a facebook post. Or a russian twitter bot. None of them you can trust. All of those selected for you to see by algorithms.

And you really want to tell me this is no different or definitively better than the last century's news systems? Or even that we understand what impacts the switch to social media will have?

<comment><USER45> Certainly it's no worse than this century's news system, which produces, as far as I can tell, journalists that do exactly the same thing.

Find a source you know (through research and watching over time) you can trust and read them, whether they publish in Reddit or USAToday. That's something you can do today that wasn't really possible before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> And people wonder why the brits voted Brexit.

<comment><USER47> While this might be a benefit of Brexit, I doubt this was at the top of the list of reasons for Brexit.

<comment><USER48> People didn't vote for brexit because of this specific issue, but because the EU does crazy stuff like this costantly, in all industries.

<comment><USER49> Honestly, having read many EU standards, they are usually some of the most sensible, reasonable legislation you could ask, on both the consumer and producer side. Most silliness that gets blamed on them is either willfull misinterpretation of the rules ('EU says banana must be straight!'. No, EU says bananas must not be misshapen (by, for example, having a 90 degree bend in the middle of an otherwise normally shaped banana) if they are to be classed above a certain grade), or excessive risk aversion on the part of companies (usually driven by lawyers).

<comment><USER45> Like GDPR, where they claim like lunatics that their laws apply to every business in the world?

I don't care how well-meaning or reasonable sounding their laws generally are. They clearly don't have a clue.

<comment><USER49> They claim their law applies to their citizens. Especially on the internet, where a company can be 'based' wherever will regulate them the least, this is a reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER45> Wrong. A law that applies to their citizens would be a law forbidding their citizens from doing business with companies with crappy privacy policies.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Tries to Patch Its Talent Leak - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/google-tries-to-patch-its-talent-leak.html <comment><USER2> _Having a company full of alpha dog, intellectual talent can present unique situations. Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to foster that young company feel as the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."_

I believe _alpha dogs_ leaving to do their own thing is quite normal and should be expected. Accepting that some of your brightest talent will leave the nest to pursue their passions should be an embraced value. No hard feelings, okay?

I think Eric misses the point in saying "being _part_ of a startup within Google". How do you stop a monoculture from creeping in and taking over your organization? Big companies have this problem and Google, I would guess, is no exception.

Maybe foster an environment where new ideas (coming from the outside) are brought into the fold (in the form of more startup acquisitions)? I'm sure this causes it's own problems where founders must now deal with the internal workings of a giant acquirer.

I would call this "organizational drag". Too many people with too many inputs into too few decisions. This provides just the right amount of friction to squeeze out anyone who truly wants to scratch their itch. Put another way, if you put up enough barriers, some will attempt to navigate your organizational obstacle course but others will simply see your barriers, and the organization itself, as _the_ problem to solve.

I don't know if funding actual startups would be something Google should look into but I don't think Google could ever bring back that small startup feeling; that's just wishful thinking.

<comment><USER3> I worked for a famous consultancy that started doing this. They had startups within the company - them acting like a VC and the inventors owning equity.

Then times got tough at the parent so they introduced a 3month notice period, during which they charged you to the startup at full consultant rates - so all their 'investment' immediately went back to them as billable hours. Then they introduced a 'recruitment fee' where for each person leaving to go to the startup the startup was billed 1 years salary to cover the costs of replacing the person. The VC arm of the parent also managed other funds and these were invested in the startup - and immediately billed back to the parent in some way. Eventually the parent went bust before the SEC could investigate all this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Whenever you see the word 'force' used to describe a technique it looks like > some of the fun may be leaving Google along with its talent. Once again, is > this kind of thing avoidable when a company becomes the size, scope and > influence of Google? Few have enough experience to even know this especially > in a company that has gone from 0 to world leader in such a short amount of > time.

Well, they used force in the sense, "Hey, let's force management to pay attention to all the crazy ideas engineering is coming up with," not, "Hey, let's force engineering to pay attention to all the crazy ideas management has."

Doesn't actually seem like there's a talent leak, but rather a talent utilization leak. See: Dodgeball.</comment>


'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565& <comment><USER2> Discussed 6 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21416115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21416115)

(The cutoff for reposts is a year or so: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))

Also, a thread from 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899784)

and from 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957864)

</comment><comment><USER3> The quip "if you've got nothing to hide, then why don't you write all your letters on postcards?" got people thinking about privacy back in the day. Unfortunately, people don't use regular mail anymore. And what's even sadder is that we ultimately ended up writing all of our letters on postcards with email.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like there should be some middle ground. Everyone agrees that people should be entitled to _some_ privacy under certain circumstances. But the camp advocating absolute privacy by-default 24/7/365 is too extreme, imo.

There are many societal illnesses that both emerge and are difficult to solve when everyone is untracably anonymous. Lack of privacy provides a feedback mechanism by which corrective action can be taken.

<comment><USER5> What a magnificent piece of misdirection and mind manipulation. You should not try to pull a fast one with cheap propaganda tricks on HN readers, that won't work most of the time.

> there should be some middle ground

argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy

> the camp advocating absolute privacy by-default 24/7/365 is too extreme

People who speak in favour of exercising a basic human rights are labelled extremists.

> everyone is untracably anonymous

Shifting of the goal-post: privacy is not the same as anonymity.

<comment><USER6> > People who speak in favour of exercising a basic human rights are labelled > extremists.

No, not extremists, more like the Patriot Act has been in place since 2001 and other things like Facebook running most people's lives (maybe not you, but 1+ billion other people) are a fact of life now, and has been for decades. If someone says we must have privacy, I'd say sure, but that's not how it's been for decades now, and there is no realistic solution in sight, only keeps getting worse. Hence the calls for some middle ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> apple just posted data showing phone location activity in the context of "shelter in place" breaking up.

google maps shows me live traffic based on phone locations.

IE the war on "personal privacy" has already been lost.

I installed the Australian govt covid tracing app this weekend, since the ability to trace and track new outbreaks is critical to easing lockdown.

Google and apple already know where my phone is. Might as well admit that and use it as a public health tool.

<comment><USER8> Honestly I'm somewhat okay with companies collecting user data. They should just make it easy to opt-out of data collection and to delete all my data (i.e., "right to be forgotten").

<comment><USER9> And also not connect useful features to this opt out. For example Google Maps allows you to store locations only if you have location history enabled. I can't think of any reason for this besides an attempt to bully people into allow location history.

<comment><USER10> It seems plausible to me that it's just a consequence of some contingent aspect of the design of the location system, and there's not a compelling reason to refactor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think an important consideration about the I've got nothing to hide camp is that they don't need absolute privacy.

The argument about handing over passwords or writing letters on postcards falls flat because the person who's "losing" privacy can agree that a medium isn't private and respond according.

Not everyone needs 100% privacy all the time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always felt that anyone who says "I don't care, I have nothing to hide," was committing to the position that privacy is not intrinsically valuable in itself, and thus should have no problem agreeing to install a webcam in front of their toilet.

<comment><USER13> Also, I think the set of people who proclaim that has a strong overlap with people who believe that transgender people going into the bathrooms of their choice is extremely alarming due to privacy concerns.</comment></comment>