Chromatron Wi-Fi Pixel Controller - <AUTHOR> http://chromatron.io/ <comment><USER4> This seems like way overcomplicated design - why do they need two CPUs? They claim "real time control", but this doesn't check out: their main CPU, esp8266, has a DMA that can emit stable protocol timings. And the higher level effects don't care about millisecond or ten of jitter.

I am running two such simple strips right now, and it works very well.

<comment><USER5> ESP8266s aren't very pleasant to work with, and in my experience it can be hard to accomplish much in program logic while keeping the WiFi stable.

But the cottage industry around these addressable LED driver boards is getting pretty ridiculous. The PixelBlaze already does a great job of controlling them from an ESP8266. And the LEDs aren't that hard to use with generic hardware like Arduinos, even for people with zero prior experience.

There's no doubt about it, this world caters to the hucksters and the unrealistically optimistic.

<comment><USER6> Regarding "in my experience it can be hard to accomplish much in program logic while keeping the WiFi stable".

I've had the same; sorting a big list of numbers or doing any action that takes a few seconds can make the WiFi unstable, disconnect, or not respond.

I'm curious though, there are some dual-core designs with ESP8266 compatibility out there, would that help?

<comment><USER7> I have no problem using coroutines to keep Wifi working fluidly on ESP8266. This just requires attention, its not too difficult to keep the ESP8266 pumping data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone looking into this (seems you can't get your hands on the hardware just now, skimming the comments?) may want to look int WLED...

All you need is a NanoMCU / ESP8266, a power source and LED-strips of you choice... There even are iOS (and i think Android) apps to control the strips via Wifi, options to sync N strips etc. etc...

[https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED](https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED)

<comment><USER9> +1 for WLED. They have an Android app that works quite nicely. Apparently WLED also implements ways to sync to systems like Philips Hue and offers alternative interfaces like MQTT. The community is also great and will help you out where they can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very awesome demo. I want to do more DIY LED lighting in my office (because it makes for a great video conference backdrop) and I am perfectly capable of buying and programming ESP8266's or ESP32's.... But it's a PITA. Doing it totally DIY is a lot of tinkering with a lot of different things (power, the vagueries of LED strips you get from Aliexpress, etc).

I'd totally be down for buying like 5 of these units to test with, provided they weren't unreasonably more expensive than what I'd expect to pay for an ESP8266 and related gear.

<comment><USER11> I've heard good things about those (but no firsthand experience myself!): [https://www.tindie.com/products/electromage/electromage- pixe...](https://www.tindie.com/products/electromage/electromage- pixelblaze-v2-wifi-led-controller/)

<comment><USER12> I've played with the Pixelblaze and it's pretty sweet. As far as going from nothing to being able to control a string of LED lights with a series of pre- programmed effects, it is really easy.

That said, I ended up abandoning the project I was going to use them for: permanently installed Christmas lights that doubled as just normal outside lighting when it wasn't a holiday. I ended up, just this weekend in fact, installing just a white LED strip light for that. Which I just did on a whim yesterday afternoon, after someone was prowling up the street looking for open cars that morning.

<comment><USER13> What pain point(s) made you abandon the project? I like the idea!

<comment><USER12> Things kind of just spiraled out of control...

\- Wasn't clear if Pixelblaze with it's add on board could drive multiple strips at high refresh rates, or I needed multiple pixelblaze. Then there are synchronization issues.

\- If I'm gonna do that, I might as well go with one of those Falcon LED controllers that can do shows, for $200.

\- I have power in the garage at one end of the house, but need to branch off the middle of the house. But to get acceptable voltage drop, I'd probably need to run 12/2, but I need to figure out DC code, or I need to find a place to stow the power supply.

\- I'd like to use some or all of them as a "porch light", but just switching off/on had some issue. I don't recall, it either took a long time to get to the point where the lights were on, or required also poking the control port or something.

\- And it was maybe 6 weeks from Christmas with a lot of building to do to get there.

If I end up deciding to do it, I might install a dual track with white non- addressable strip AND the color addressable AND go with the Falcon controller. Maybe running conduit from the center of the house into the closet, where I put the power supply and Falcon. I recently ran a receptacle into it to drive the LED light strip that is in there, because that closet was a dark pit that you couldn't find anything in, so that makes it a bit easier than it was last holidays.

<comment><USER13> Wow, well thought out post! Thank you for the tips, future me will benefit greatly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> seems like this may no longer be in production. [https://kickstarter.com/projects/1286098094/chromatron- wifi-...](https://kickstarter.com/projects/1286098094/chromatron-wifi-pixel- controller) [https://www.tindie.com/products/readmodifywrite/chromatron-w...](https://www.tindie.com/products/readmodifywrite/chromatron- wifi-led-pixel-controller/)

<comment><USER10> Awww, that's very unfortunate. Found the repo ( [https://github.com/sapphireos/chromatron](https://github.com/sapphireos/chromatron) ) since it's open source and there are no commits in the last 2 years.

<comment><USER15> Hi! I'm the project creator. While it's true the Kickstarter boards have all sold out, the project is still alive and well. Check out the dev and esp8266 branches, there's commits as of today ;-)

My long term goal for this year is to get a port running on some stock ESP8266 boards (such as NodeMCU and the Adafruit Feather Huzzah). My original hardware design was too complex to build in a cost effective way, but I'd really like to get the software in the hands of those who are interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did I just miss it, or is there no information about price, where to get it, whether it's available now, etc?

It looks interesting, and if it were the right price I might actually want one.

As far as I can tell there's only the signup for more info (no, thanks) - <USER2> some links to github and some social media.

<comment><USER15> Hi, project creator here. Sadly, the poster was a little behind on catching this... The Kickstarter boards shipped over 2 years ago, and as the hardware didn't really sell well after that, it's mostly just a personal project that this point.

That being said, I am actively working on a port for some stock ESP8266 boards (Adafruit Feather, NodeMCU, etc). I don't really want to sell hardware, but I'd love to see someone else using the software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A custom virtual machine and wifi. As a user, I'd much more appreciate exercises of modularity than featurefullness. Not that I don't sympathize with the maker. Over-engineering can be fun.

<comment><USER15> Over-engineering is indeed fun - that was part of the point of the project, it was (and remains) a labor of love.

Modularity was actually a design consideration I really struggled with, but at the end of the day, I realized I didn't want to do just another Arduino clone where you put the whole thing together yourself. I designed Chromatron under the assumption that you'd eventually end up with a lot of them, in which case the Wifi and live coding are really useful features - I wanted and all-in-one solution. But for most people who only need 1 or 2 projects, it's overkill. I think that's part of the reason it didn't sell that well.

<comment><USER17> Easy modularity can be hard, so can't blame you for going for an AIO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have two of these. Way faster than an Arduino if you just want to set up some dynamic lighting, and still plenty of room for tinkering.

<comment><USER19> where did you buy it ?

<comment><USER18> The Kickstarter. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1286098094/chromatron-w...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1286098094/chromatron- wifi-pixel-controller)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love that it has a terminal block. Secure connection and no soldering.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why is there a 300 LED limit?

<comment><USER15> Memory and the available CPU time to run the virtual machine. There's also a fader engine to do timed fades per pixel, that eats a fair amount of RAM as well (but it's a nice to have).

It was designed for smaller, but highly dynamic, projects. I figured large scale installations were already well served in the DMX/pixel mapping space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This one needs some love www.heroicrobotics.com PixelPusher

</comment><comment><USER7> I worked with Wizard23 to produce something similar, called the MagicShifter:

[http://magicshifter.net/](http://magicshifter.net/)

Its an open source, portable battery powered pocketable light synthesiser with multiple built-in programs for doing a variety of different things - <USER3> Persistence of Vision effects (very popular), to accelerometer-based level meters, vibration visualisers, and disco/strobe effects.

I added MIDI to it - meaning the whole thing can be sync'ed over rtpMIDI (MIDI over Wifi is awesome and supported out of the box by most operating systems), and I also built an Arpeggiator for it too - meaning you can have your dancers wired up with shifters on their bodies, an Arpeggiator on stage with you on your synth stacks, and MagicShifters all over the place synchronised to your drum machine. ;)

We (Phillip, the hardware inventor, and myself the software guy) also designed the latest-gen MS3000 PCB to be easily useful for longer LED strip experiments, and included both 5v and 3.3v onboard, with a UART breakout, for extra hacking purposes - wire it up to a console and use it as a build indicator, or just use plain old Wifi too. We have a light strip with 200 LED's wired up to a single MagicShifter and used it to create a wall clock. Pins for wiring up longer strips are exposed on one end of the board, and you can solder the strips directly without requiring further driver hardware - just change the constants in the MS3KOS to tell it how many LED's you're driving ..

EDIT: Have a look at the PCB here:

[https://magicshifter.github.io/magicshifter.net/img/new/ms30...](https://magicshifter.github.io/magicshifter.net/img/new/ms3000-pcb- and-assembled.jpg)

You can see the UART breakout as well as the 4 contact points for longer LED strips...

It includes a REST-based interface for changing the LED effects modes, as well as presenting a web-based Pixel Editor to create your own POV images.

Sources here (100% open source) for anyone who might glean some use out of our project:

[https://github.com/magicshifter](https://github.com/magicshifter)

Some other nice demo videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xoYjA06XkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xoYjA06XkQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syP8_lccIQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syP8_lccIQA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shac_DN2ZrU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shac_DN2ZrU)

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

EDIT: you can get an MS3000 from [http://hackerspaceshop.com](http://hackerspaceshop.com) ..</comment>


Thomson Reuters Delivers Microsecond Access to News in London and Chicago - <AUTHOR> http://thomsonreuters.com/content/press_room/tf/tf_gen_business/2010_01_25_microsecond_news

<comment><USER2> Would love to have a feed like that and do some machine learning on it. Would be fascinating to see what results are possible, but I guess I'd need a very, very fast trading connection to be able to compete.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Coveralls need to write to my repo? - <AUTHOR>

I'm familiar with how Travis (and presumably other CIs) write to a repo's "status" to indicate broken builds. This morning, coveralls.io asked for perms to do the same thing, which seemed cool. After I approved that, it then asked for "read and write all public and private repo data". Github says that perm includes writing the following:

  Code
  Issues
  Pull requests
  Wikis
  Settings
  Webhooks and services
  Deploy keys
 And also Coveralls has set up a redirect loop so that if I don't submit to this indignity, I can't use that site at all. Anyone have any ideas about this? <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure it's because of Github's limited scope levels.

Slack has a similar thing, but they call it out in support docs - see here: [https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/201824286-Settin...](https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/201824286-Setting-up-the-GitHub-integration)

Actually, I just had a dig through their FAQ and Coveralls answers this: [https://coveralls.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/201344219-Wh...](https://coveralls.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/201344219-Why-do-you-require-write-access-for-private-repos-)

So basically it's a limitation on Github's side, by not providing a read-only scope for repos.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any private repos on Github. And besides it's asking for write on both public _and_ private. Thanks for the Slack link though, the "no auth" page linked from there indicates that they just need some webhooks installed, and users can do that themselves.

Besides, I was perfectly happy with Coveralls' service yesterday. They could make at least a token effort toward explaining what more they can do with God access.

<comment><USER2> It's because the Github 'repo' scope is for access to public and private repos, in both read and write modes.

The Github scopes are not finely grained enough for applications using them to ask for only the minimal permissions they need.

I do agree that Coveralls should explain this better, either before they ask for the permissions, or at least in their FAQs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good question, thanks for posting. May be stackoverflow.com is better place to ask this though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe? At this point I don't care enough to wade into that. A _worse_ place, however, would be the Coveralls "Community" section. Of the five actual questions posted there, zero have been answered over a period of four months. (I had to use incognito mode to see this, due to the redirect loop noted above.)

Whatever, it's free. I'll stop bitching.

<comment><USER3> I am planning to use them, besides this issue do you like the service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Presumably, if one were comfortable with the perms they're now requiring, one would be happy with the service. I haven't given them the perms, so since they changed the service to require them I can't update my config in any way, or add new repos. I guess eventually I'll either figure out a new coverage service to use or I'll just handle my own coverage icons. It seems that an npm script could generate an svg icon based on the output of the coverage tool, and the readme could just point at that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wealthcare: Any Rand's Impact on Modern Elite - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No link included. One of these?

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Wealthcare%3A+Any+Rand%27s+Impact+...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Wealthcare%3A+Any+Rand%27s+Impact+on+Modern+Elite)</comment>


Don't be evil - Google pays £6m UK tax on £395m turnover - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3375231/google-pays-6m-uk-tax-on-395m-turnover/

<comment><USER2> Last time I checked corporation tax was payable on profits, not turnover.

<http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ct/getting-started/intro.htm>

<comment><USER3> Profit is whatever your accountant wants it to be. Revenue is much more objective.

<comment><USER4> Profits for the books are somewhat malleable by an accountant. There are still limitations to what you can do. For tax, rules are tighter. Even revenue is often not objective. For example, I sell someone a subscription to a service for a year. Do I record the revenue now (not a good idea), spread it out over 12 months (practical) or every time a user uses the service (not so practical, more realistic?).

Corporate tax is on profit. VAT like taxes are closer to revenue (or more accurately, closer to when you get paid by customers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a British taxpayer, but let's put this into perspective: _turnover of £395 million_ ... _The search giant reported overall losses of £24.1 million in the UK_

If my business made a loss, it wouldn't pay much tax either (beyond the VAT I have to collect, employer NICs, not to mention the income tax my employees pay, etc.)

If there's anything fishy here, it's why Google is making a loss on such healthy revenues in the UK when it's so profitable in the US.. but the tax itself is not surprising given the lack of profit.

</comment><comment><USER6> It would help if we knew what UK Google's real profit was (as opposed to the accounting profit (loss) it (doesn't) pay tax on).

e.g. I expect UK Google pays a lot to license various Google trademarks from an offshore Google subsidiary. How much?

</comment><comment><USER7> In my country companies pay no income tax if there is no profit (they do pay other taxes for each employee). I think this is pretty common in Europe, as taxes are usually taken from profit no revenue.</comment>


If I were a rock star I wouldn't be applying for a temp programing job - <AUTHOR> http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/10555/ios-iphone-mobile-engineer-1-contract-1-fte-stealth-funded-london-startup?campaign=LargeGeocoded

<comment><USER2> This job listing maybe isn't the best example, but presume you have some highly sought after skill set.

Why not take temp programming gigs where you can sell that skill for some multiple of the pay you could get as a FTE?

</comment><comment><USER3> If I were a rock star I would be too busy doing drugs and getting laid.</comment>


Perseverance Won't Make You Successful (But without It You Won't Get Anywhere) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ezeep.com/blog/perseverance/

<comment><USER2> I've always thought that perseverance alone wasn't enough. Perseverance is simply something that's often missing from the equation. That is, someone figured out a winning formula, but didn't stick to implementing it long enough for it to pay off. If you don't have the winning formula, and do nothing other than persevere, then you are hoping to get lucky, not guaranteeing yourself success.</comment>


Data Visualization Catalog - <AUTHOR> https://datavizcatalogue.com/index.html <comment><USER2> So some brief advice from spending about 5 years as a visualization engineer/designer/data scientist:

1\. Get an intuitive understanding of the data

2\. (via Alberto Cairo) Aim to allow the user to correlate, organize and compare this data

3\. Come up with a few visual means to do no. 2, and get feedback and iterate.

4\. Go to the catalogs and see what work has already been done on your version of 3, and then implement.

It is amazing how many "original" charts I have created which have already been named and studied from a perceptual science point of view. But it is still important to come to a clear understanding from your own point of view of how the data fits that representation.

<comment><USER3> >> "original" charts I have created which have already been named and studied

thank you! I am slightly embarrassed to say, I thought I had personally invented a certain version of the BoxPlot, and after vacation presented it our Department Head, whose wife has a Masters Degree in Statistics! I told a story about what I wanted to solve, and how I intended to solve it, and the BoxPlot part was buried in there.. so it wasnt that bad. Only I (and now you, the reader) noticed my internal error.

<comment><USER4> Just to chime in as somebody who's taught data viz for years: I didn't hear anything in your story for you to be embarrassed about! Accidentally re- inventing the box plot just means that you're thinking at the same level as Mary Eleanor Spear and John Tukey, and in my book that's something to feel pretty good about. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also: Chartmaker Directory- [http://chartmaker.visualisingdata.com/](http://chartmaker.visualisingdata.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I had so much trouble building a catalog for my data visualisation.

As data scientists and software engineers, Tristan Mayer, Daniel Velasquez, and I have spent hours trying to find the most relevant datasets to do our analysis. Once we found the right one, we couldn't understand how to use it, or if we could trust it. This is painful but unfortunately too common.

We interviewed 150 companies at the end of our studies to search for solutions. Every one of them faced the problem. We worked hard for 6 months to build a solution and released the first version of our product.

Go check it out www.castordoc.com and give us feedback!

</comment><comment><USER7> The design bureau ferdio has made a much prettier version: [https://datavizproject.com/](https://datavizproject.com/)

<comment><USER8> But it doesn't link to any implementations as far as I can tell. It just asks you to hire Ferdio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've referred to this resource in a couple of talks I've given on data vis. My advice is always to learn about different kinds of standard charts that are out there, then when visualizing a dataset use the best combination of words, numbers, and pictures to convey your idea. This may Or may not fit into a standard chart type.

Edward Tufte's books have a lot of great examples for static visualizations and Bret Victor has some great examples applying these concepts to software ([http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/))

</comment><comment><USER10> I've just moved to a data scientist job where most of the work is done through Scala. I've loved working with Scala for all the type safety and compiler helpers, but the lack of a data visualisation library makes me feel like I've lost a limb whenever I'm doing exploratory data analysis. I wonder why one hasn't been developed when it seems like there's twenty different libraries for python!

<comment><USER2> I use Vegas and am very happy with it for all but the most complex visualizations.

[https://github.com/vegas-viz/Vegas](https://github.com/vegas-viz/Vegas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm researching graphs used to communicate I/O error. I'm using histograms and scatterplots.

I suspect there was no small amount of work to develop the top-down, ontological framework for this catalog.

I wish there was a search feature for use cases to access the catalog from the bottom up. I would like the chance to discover additional visualizations using terms specific to my use case.

</comment><comment><USER12> These are all great to use for data exploration. But if you're going to show data to a non-analyst audience, stick to bar charts (not histograms), trend lines, pie charts, and choropleth maps.

I'm not trying to condescend. I've tried for years to introduce more chart types, bit always received pushback on how hard they were to read.

<comment><USER13> I worked for a company that made data visualization software a couple years back (basically a Tableau type thing, but specific to one industry).

Even though our end-users were analysts, we still had "trainers" who we paid to show up in-person, on-site, to teach the end-users how to read all the types of visualizations that our software could generate. The visualizations weren't tremendously complex, but when most real-world analysts still spend most of their time in Excel, a brief explanation is still required for the end-users to actually buy-in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is D3 stil the best JS library for visualization? I used to make D3 components full time and it was pretty great. [https://d3js.org/](https://d3js.org/)

<comment><USER9> I used to use d3 for all parts of data visualizations, but lately I find myself using d3 utilities just to manipulate data to prepare for visualization, but then using a front end framework like react to render to the dom. This feels a lot cleaner than using d3 for dom manipulation.

<comment><USER14> well yeah of course d3 is not a general purpose dom manipulation tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No love for the corporate stalwart waterfall chart. I'm not sure why, but it is often ignored or despised by people who geek out on data viz.

<comment><USER16> In my experience, this is the go-to chart for understanding financial drivers at the senior leader/board level.

Even the popular plotting libraries in python don't seem to have an easily configurable version. Recently tried plotly and found it plotting the categories in reverse order from the intuitive way you'd expect to see.

I've been meaning to script my own custom plot since Excel's waterfalls are tedious to create and you don't get enough control over the labeling.

<comment><USER17> I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Plotly... I'd be curious to hear more if you're willing to share! Were you working in Python or Javascript or within our GUI?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's the first time I see a chord diagram. I understand the concept, but I think it's very hard to apprehend

<comment><USER19> Plotting directed acyclic graphs while displaying the edge weights and node sizes is a bit of an unsolved problem. I agree that in most cases chord diagrams are more confusing than illuminating, but so are the alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See also [http://visualizationuniverse.com/charts/](http://visualizationuniverse.com/charts/) made by Adioma - with search interest and data from Google Trends.

</comment><comment><USER21> paid components only ?

for instance, treemap: [https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/treemap.html](https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/treemap.html)

I don't see echarts treemaps.</comment>


The Gracie jiu-jitsu story - <AUTHOR> http://grantland.com/one-hundred-years-arm-bars-gracie-jiu-jitsu-mma/?ex_cid=GrantlandTW <comment><USER2> Fascinating history. It's strange to see what the various jujitsu-descended arts choose as their comfort level with injury. The traditional jujitsu ryu had lots of maming / killing techniques, which have been taken out and readded depending on the art:

Judo focused on making a very safe art that could be applied full-intensity in a sporting context. Aikido focussed on making a purely defensive art.

Then Gracie jujitsu decided to re-brutalize judo. And now we have MMA that is a sport that tolerates fairly severe injury of combatants. I can't say I like the direction MMA has gone here. Every time I see it, I kind of get a sick feeling like I'm watching some kind of Roman spectacle.

I trained for a while in a style that taught techniques designed to kill. And, as a pacifist, I was okay with that because they were taught as forms, and the art is not practiced in competition. Clearly MMA had to decide on a tolerable level of violence between "no competition" and "fight to the death." I just wonder how that point of acceptable violence came to be what it is--from the article, broken eye sockets and arms aren't enough to call a fight. I think I know the answer: maximum injury that won't result in death / legal problems. And I find that a bit troubling.

<comment><USER3> I will be the sole responder who agrees with you that promotions like the UFC cross the line in terms of acceptable injury to fighters.

Most professional MMA fighters with a few years in have severe debilitating injuries. I am not talking about a bad knee of slipped disc, I am talking about severe chronic pain and brain damage, something that is the inevitable result of the kind of punishment they deal with. Just look at someone like George Saint-Pierre who suddenly forgets what he has been doing for the last six hours.

It doesn't matter if fighters participate of their own free will, I could probably go into the slums right now and get two people to fight to the death over a $50 bill. There's a reason we have laws to prevent exploitation and don't just leave it to people's "free will".

I very much like MMA as a sport, but I wish there was a way to protect the fighters better. Headgear? Who can honestly say that they enjoy a fight where the fighters are bathed in each other's blood, not to mention the health implications (even the ref wears gloves).

<comment><USER4> Can you link the info about GSP forgetting the last 6 months, didn't hear that one.

<comment><USER5> [http://fightland.vice.com/blog/joe-rogan-gsps-alien- abductio...](http://fightland.vice.com/blog/joe-rogan-gsps-alien-abduction- and-forced-retirement)

he mentioned it here originally: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmFsUV5ICKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmFsUV5ICKk)

his theory is that he was abducted by aliens, but it sounds like brain damage...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For some reason, these stories always leave out that UFC 1 was organized by a Gracie with pretty much the goal of showcasing Gracie JJ. UFC 2 (I think? or was it 1 already?) even had a half-time 'ceremony' where Rickson gave Helio a 'lifetime award' of some sort - while booed by the audience; and rightfully - that was clear self-promotion and put a shadow over the objectiveness of the whole event. In that light, the line-up for the first couple of UFC's is rather suspect. Kevin Rosier? Who came back from retirement especially for it? All of them except Ken Shamrock being strikers? Objectively speaking, inviting some Pancrase people (again, besides Ken Shamrock) would have made more sense. Of course it was framed as 'style vs style', but still...

Of course Gracie JJ is very effective, but the truth is that early-days UFC was a marketing scheme for the Gracies to export their JJ. It took very little time for what was promoted as 'the perfected style, honed over 60 years' to become just one aspect of a well-rounded fighter's skills. Look at the training DVD's Carlos and Rickson made in the mid-1990's - they were laughable just 5 years later.

Not sure I'm working towards one overarching point here; maybe it's that the Gracie's real legacy is just as much in marketing as it is fighting.

<comment><USER3> > For some reason, these stories always leave out that UFC 1 was organized by > a Gracie with pretty much the goal of showcasing Gracie JJ

Second paragraph:

 _In 1993, Rórion Gracie founded the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a way to spread Gracie jiu-jitsu to North America, inspiring the rise of mixed martial arts._

<comment><USER6> Fair enough, I did overlook that :) And indeed overall the OP is more nuanced than many stories like it are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is less about the show and more about a philosophy of life.

Being trained in the arts many years ago, things like "a body is as strong as its weakest link", have served me well in life and business.

I don't know of any other martial art where your formative years are spent being kicked up in the ass. You learn how to survive under very harsh conditions and how to be resilient.

You don't need to be the strongest, the faster... You just need to stay alive and be aware. And you learn how to respect human life, because you come to understand how fragile it is.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has been responsible for taking many people out of the streets, giving them something to abide for. This will be the greatest legacy of the Gracies.

<comment><USER8> _> I don't know of any other martial art where_

I don't know any other martial art where so many practitioners claim that their MA is, literally, the best.

From Gracie Academy website, which is the first one coming up in Google: "[...]Gracie or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the most effective martial art on the planet[...]".

A little bit of modesty and camaraderie would go a long way here. A lot of martial arts have formative/spiritual components that help people out in life. Pretty much any real TMA which has proper training, beyond aggression and handing out belts.

<comment><USER9> > I don't know any other martial art where so many practitioners claim that > their MA is, literally, the best.

Eh. I'd say Aikido is the most proselytizing martial art out there. But they, like most martial arts, don't have any actual sparring. BJJ gets away with it because you can spar without much, if any, risk of injury.

I think this is where a lot of the mentality comes from--being one of the few MA's where theory and technique get tested regularly. If you've done any form of striking, you'd know how much different it is to practice against a bag than it is another human. Same goes for grappling.

> A little bit of modesty and camaraderie would go a long way here.

I think you'd see a lot of modesty and camaraderie if you went to a BJJ gym.

You have to remember that martial arts has a history of "who's better than who", which is what MMA grew out of. So of course there will be competition between various martial arts, as it simply comes down to marketing.

But a ton of BJJ folks train multiple martial arts. It's incredibly common to see Muay Thai taught in the same gym, and these places don't even market themselves as MMA.

(But yes, I agree--the chest puffing marketing doesn't appeal to me either.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
        > Rickson ... Tokyo Dome on May 26, 2000 ... Funaki

If you've ever wondered what 12 minutes of sweaty men hugging each other, standing up, and not moving much except to occasionally knee each other in the crotch, followed by 3 minutes of violence looks like, this is the fight for you.

</comment><comment><USER11> How can one write a story about Gracie jiu-jitsu without mentioning Kazushi Sakuraba?

</comment><comment> V-2 I wonder if there are any HN-ers actually practicing bjj? Purple belt here

<comment> atom-morgan I did for about 6 months. By far one of the most humbling experiences I'd ever had. I just wasn't a fan of the people at that gym.

<comment><USER12> A lot of practitioners really make the sport as a whole look bad. I'm not a fan of some of the MMA culture that bleeds over into BJJ.

<comment><USER13> Which is fair, but I give some credit to the MMA training I did for having a "just deal with what's going on, keep moving forward" attitude in my jiu jitsu. In work and life, even.

(I never had an MMA fight, but many of the guys I trained with did, and I helped them prepare.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> reinventing long-form journalism in a tolerable format. three cheers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Was able to find a video of the fight discussed in the article:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgE2SZBaUE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgE2SZBaUE)

</comment><comment><USER16> What a fantastically designed and executed site! I love the attention to detail all the way across the responsive sizes. Great work.

<comment><USER17> except if you are half way and resize the window, then maximize - it fails (chrome on windows 10)

<comment><USER18> I couldn't read the article at all -- there was a big blue "title page" that I couldn't get to go away by scrolling down or clicking anywhere.

It got better when I resized the page, though only somewhat -- some page widths did "nice" things (like having a simple header at the top), but others gave the awful expanding blue header thing. With that header I'd scroll down to get to the content, then I'd have to scroll back up again to get to the content that I'd scrolled past :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That is a really nicely designed article!

I don't think I've ever seen that scroll down action before.</comment>


Facebook Sells Your Friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_40/b4197064860826.htm

<comment><USER2> From the article: "'I can target my exact audience, rather than trying to come up with a proxy for it,' like looking at search terms or which websites people visit, says Belden, who was spending about $4,000 a month on Facebook earlier in the year before he was forced to rein in his marketing expenses because of budget issues."

Maybe I am misreading this, but in context this seems to say that the guy thinks Facebook offers better value than any other advertising platform, but STILL doesn't make him enough money that he can afford to keep using it. Doesn't Facebook have to help people make money for it to continue to gain advertising revenue?

<comment><USER3> This guy is assuming he's doing a better job of finding people who would be interested in his product on Facebook than he could via Google. He's probably wrong. Search queries are a better metric for determining intent than demographics are.

<comment><USER4> Demand generation vs demand fulfillment. Once people are looking to buy something search ads are a great way to connect with them, but it's hard to reach them if they aren't yet searching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Duh?

How many times have there been articles and posts about how its users are not Facebook's customers. Facebook is monetized on advertising, selling their users' personal data.

<comment><USER6> And yet it's completely false. Facebook does not sell personal data. Advertisers pay to display ads -- they don't get info about you.

<comment><USER7> Come on, Paul. Do you really believe that Facebook is building this vast social graph and treasure trove of personal information, and they'll not try to exploit it in every way they can for huge profits? That's really what we're talking about here.

Facebook can spin it any way they like, but in the end they will have to invade everyone's privacy in order to make money. There's just no other value on that site. There are lots of brilliant engineers at Facebook, but it seems they are kept so preoccupied with "hacking" that they don't recognize the evil empire they're helping to build.

<comment><USER8> This is pure speculation on your part. You could replace Facebook with Google and make the exact same argument.

Let's keep outrage for when outrageous things happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might be naive, but a monthly subscription model might work for facebook. Then you'd have no more ads, no more privacy snafus--the goals of the company would be aligned with the goals of the users because the users would be customers. It's simple. Would it tick off some users? Sure, but that hasn't stopped facebook in the past.

I'd pay $10/month for a facebook that cares about me as a customer. Right now I don't use it because facebook's goals aren't aligned with mine, even though it's a valuable service.

But $10/month per user probably wouldn't be enough revenue to match facebook's high valuation.

<comment><USER10> > But $10/month per user probably wouldn't be enough revenue to match > facebook's high valuation.

What, five billion a month would not be enough? Of course, no one is going to pay for Facebook, mostly because some people aren't going to pay for Facebook and when some people aren't there, no one is.

<comment><USER9> Great point. It gives me an idea: you could turn it on its head and make the subscription price the _main feature_. $200/month allows you access to the super-exclusive social network. ;)

<comment><USER10> Haven't you heard of executive dating services? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worth reading fully. The last sentence speaks volumes...

"And it's not yet clear how those hundreds of millions of people will feel when they realize they've been permanently joined on the site by advertisers who are not all that interested in friendship."

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm looking at my facebook page.

The ads are for: two online degrees which I don't need, (having an advanced degree that FB should know about) and one cheap TV offer, which I don't want since I don't watch TV.

I can see zero evidence of ads being targeted to me, even though I in the past I clicked "like" and "dislike" on ads in the vein hope they'd become more relevant or at least less offensive.

My friends posted complaints on my page concerning my "liking" of said ads since they _hated_ Facebook using my name as a reference.

 _But main thing is, if FB is so great, why do they have same scam- ish/opportunist ads that Yahoo has?_

(refreshing, I get the same sort of thing - one targeted to my geographical location - mass market products, FB stuff, NOTHING SPECIFIC TO WHAT I WANT).

FB, a billion dollar company that still has only "potential"...

<comment><USER13> _I can see zero evidence of ads being targeted to me,_

try changing your status to engaged...

<comment><USER14> Hah! I encountered the same majorly-mismatched... then got engaged -> married. When I left, I was _still_ getting _tons_ of "ENGAGMENT RING HEER"-level ads, despite being married.</comment></comment></comment>


Is SE-Over? - <AUTHOR> http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1868121/se

<comment> mike-cardwell I stopped reading when I hit this gem in the second paragraph:

"The algorithm is truly an amazing thing and, to me, the closest thing we have ever come to something like artificial intelligence"</comment>


Losethos is now SparrowOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparrowos.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> And sadly, he's still hellbanned, now with a different name: <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS></comment>


Neil deGrasse Tyson AMA #2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degrasse_tyson_ama/

<comment><USER2> I found his AMAs to be the two most interesting things I've ever read on reddit, I think. It's as if the whole community collectively attempts to behave just so they don't fuck it up. The memes are kept to a minimum, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> For an incredibly candid interview done by out-of-character Stephen Colbert, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXh9RQCvxmg>

It's extremely worth it and mentions a lot of the same points he makes in the two AMAs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reddit is really a horrible medium to do an AMA. Just trying to read through that thread is incredibly inefficient and annoying. I wish better alternatives like AnyAsq would catch on.

<comment><USER2> Do you have any better ideas? No other popular venue has the same kind of community upvote/downvote system to automatically filter out the "best" questions.

I mean it could be HN, but the system and UI have similar usability, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degras...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degrasse_tyson_ama/c38v8xs)

Impact of finding Higgs at LHC NDG: _To discover something you expect to be there does almost nothing to advance physics._

This is exactly what I have been saying: finding something that we know is there and likely to fill in the last missing piece does almost nothing to advance physics. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3343661>

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's wrong to encourage students to major in science.

People should think for themselves and pursue whatever career interests them most.

<comment><USER7> The word 'encourage' is key here. They're still free to go into retail, office or plumbing (and those fields are fine) but if they're not exposed to science and its way of thinking they won't be inclined to take it up.

One of his main points in his two AMAs is that children are born curious but if they don't get taught how to be scientifically literate they won't pursue science and waste their potential. Thus we should encourage students to pursue science from an early age so that we have more and more people who didn't get put off of all the memorization and boring math.

<comment><USER6> Are students receiving equal encouragement to become game designers?

Game design is a lot more rewarding than scientific research.

<comment><USER8> >Game design is a lot more rewarding than scientific research.

Doesn't this directly contradict you first comment?

>People should think for themselves and pursue whatever career interests them most.

<comment><USER6> Not really.

Ideally, people should think for themselves without enouragement.

But if you are going to allow encouragement in science, then should also allow equal encouragement in other fields.

<comment><USER9> There are certain skills that are considered to be necessary over others. Literacy is a good example. Math is another.

There are other skills that might have less of an impact than literacy, but have a direct impact on society and the quality of life for everyone. History and science are good examples here. History because being knowledgeable about the politics of yesterday helps in framing political decisions today. Science because our lives have been affected by (and improved by) science for the past few hundred years.

Having a populous that's informed about the benefits of science and technology and how they affect all of our lives should help everyone make better decisions regarding the two -- from a mom who mixes ammonia and bleach to clean her floor to the congressman who brushed off Vint Cerf's testimony during the SOPA hearing with a comment about nerds.

So, while we should encourage people to follow their passions and explore interesting topics, I'm comfortable saying that we should encourage certain things like math, reading, science, and history over game design, running a business, or basket weaving.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 years after Love Parade disaster - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster

<comment><AUTHOR> It's 10 years today 21 people wanting to party found death, many got injured and traumatised.

To everyone planning events: Never underestimate security!</comment>


Google to restrict political adverts worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50498166 <comment><USER2> Restricting the categories for political advertising is certainly a move in the right direction. It will reduce the power of digital advertising to that of traditional media. It may not be a welcome move by some political parties but overall it could allow for good ideas from rival parties to have a wider reach rather than 'preaching to the choir' as it were. The dissemination of good ideas might become more democratic.

However, the idea of removing ads because of 'false claims' can only lead to censorship in the future. The list of what's considered false will inevitably grow over time and put a lot of power in the hands of whoever is deciding the 'truthiness' of claims. It isn't difficult to imagine this being applied inconsistently in countries further away from Western politcal norms. This does give Google a lot of power in shaping political discourse and influence outside of US and EU territories.

We know from how they've handled disputes on YouTube, disabled Gmail and developer accounts that this process unlikely have any better transparency than we've seen to date.

I'd argue that political advertising would require greater transparency and I'm not convinced that Google has the capability or the motivation to provide it.

<comment><USER3> >However, the idea of removing ads because of 'false claims' can only lead to censorship in the future

you might be right, but the reality is that the world has a large problem with disinformation and false claims _right now_ that's causing real negative consequences for real people. Stopping the spread of false information is a good thing that should be done.

Letting blatant lies control our political processes now just to prevent future potential censorship in the future is not a good compromise.

<comment><USER4> Personally, I'm conflicted. Your argument rests upon the idea that people's minds can be "poisoned" with false information. And I understand that. But at some point you have to hold people responsible for believing stuff that is blatantly false. There was a time that, if you believed in Bat Boy [1], most people rightly thought you were a bozo.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_(character)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_\(character\))

<comment><USER5> I too want to believe in individual people having the ability to determine fact from fiction. The problem I see, however, is the power dynamic nowadays. What chance does the average person have in rooting out disinformation when it's being spread by interests using million dollar marketing campaigns and rooms filled with PhDs? The average person can't really invest the time in becoming an expert in all of the problems that affect us even if they want to and you need to rely on other people at some point.

<comment><USER6> These hordes of extremely naive people that are so easily fooled: if they exist, why should they be allowed to vote at all in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just ban them completely or don't bother, I don't want Google to be the judge of the validity of claims as it's perfectly possible to make an add which is 100% made up of technically correct statements but presents a misleading narrative.

Then it comes to the question is there is such thing as a true narrative to begin with as narratives are subjective in nature, this is a can of worms that Google shouldn't open.

So yeah a full ban sure but not this, if they want some sort of a partial ban they should probably have an interface that allows local electoral commissions to vet advertisement and the most important thing I think Google must do is to disable targeted political ads if they continue to allow them in any shape or form.

<comment><USER8> Banning them would just further extend the isolation/echo chambers created by social media.

If you have a political message, it makes sense to force you to tailor that message on very broad terms. Hearing something you might disagree with is part of life and very important to critical thinking.

This is not intended to be an opinion on false statements in political advertising.

<comment><USER9> Paid adverting artificiality maintains and promotes ideas backed by money rather than having ideas become widespread solely based on validity.

If we believe in the "market place of ideas" where validity and accuracy are the sole determiners of success then none should have artificial support. So all ads should be banned. If an idea fails in this market place, then it is reasonable to assume it is a bad idea. Leveraging it is just as bad when done by Soviet approved posters or Exxon paid for ads.

The echo chamber is an example where paid ads will actually _worsen_ the situation: Ads are aimed at target audiences driving them into more extremes by seeing exaggerated or false statement they would not have seen if there were no ads. Also, those echo chambers backed by moneyed interests will thrive and expand while those not money backed will fade. So instead of at least having some hope of uneasy balance between two extremes, you get head long plunge into just one of them.

<comment><USER10> > If we believe in the "market place of ideas" where validity and accuracy are > the sole determiners of success then none should have artificial support.

The "market place of ideas" makes no mention of the speed, likelihood of transmission, or intended audience. The best candidate with the best message still needs to get the message out in a timely fashion (before the election and to the core constituency!). The best product at the best price doesn't matter if the business runs out of money before it can drum up sales... not to mention, real world concerns like collective action problems.

I'd argue the market place of ideas is only the best idea in comparison to the rest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's be clear, this isn't an outright ban but just a restriction.

> It said political groups would soon only be able to target ads based on > "general categories" such as age, gender and rough location.

This just means that the moneyed few with deep pockets and illicit agendas will simply have to spend more to get their message out since they won't have the benefit of niche targeting.

<comment><USER12> Oooo! So they make even more money since the advertisers can't target the ads and have to use more but less effective ads!!! That's a nice side effect for business while pretending you're being noble. Ah, the joy of signaling.

<comment><USER13> ...or the relative value of Google's ads is decreased and advertisers take their money elsewhere

<comment><USER14> Seriously... My "favorite" part of posts about Google on HN is the posts that combine blind ignorance about the ads business, blind hatred of Google and pat-yourself-on-the-back cynicism. It gets _so_ tiresome.

<comment><USER15> I _love_ the meta debate about HN. I frequently click out of a thread after reading the first half of the first comment, it's always the same thing over and over. HN is a great as an aggregator of interesting article, but the discussion is frequently lacking substance.

<comment><USER14> I'd slightly disagree; the reason I complain about it so much is because there are so many people here who are clearly intelligent and thoughtful and have interesting perspectives. I go back and forth on whether picking gems out of the piles of manure is worth it.

In part, I've been badly spoiled by another forum I participate in that heavily moderates tone (and tries to separate it from content). I wouldn't have guessed it, but it turns out that low-effort intellectual dishonesty and rank stupidity of the sort that annoy me here correlate pretty well with emotional incontinence, which means that the occasional low-quality commenter that pops up on that forum gets washed out pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish ad and social media companies would just tag ads (and ideally more popular articles) similar to how reddit mods can tag submissions. "Misleading", "Information cannot be verified", "Factually incorrect", "Paid for by XYZ", "Satire" etc. I would say they can probably do this with machine learning or some sort of crowdsourced system, but I feel like that is wide open to well poisoning attacks. Might be easiest and most accurate to send ads that get enough reports to a human to do tagging (or not if they don't think it is appropriate). Have several employees do tagging and if enough give the same tag, apply it. Warn all advertisers their articles can be tagged if they don't make an honest effort to accurately represent whatever it is they're advertising. It isn't perfect system, but I think it could work.

<comment><USER17> Imagine the outcry if Google were to label an ad for Fox/Breitbart/Daily Caller/Trump as "misleading" or "factually incorrect". (Indeed I might get called out even here on HN for my "bias" given that I highlighted right-wing publications and politicians.)

That is a dragon you don't want to tickle.

<comment><USER18> No media outlet is immune to posting what may be considered factually incorrect information, for example, earlier this year as highlighted in [1].

Deciding what is "true" or not these days is incredibly difficult if not impossible when we have a POTUS who wants to control the narrative and calls what could be considered factually correct as "fake news".

Even reporting the "facts" has become incredibly difficult, especially when digital data is so easily manipulated (for example, how can we verify the integrity of a 'tweet' as it was published at a particular second in history? Is there a hash that should be provided? Screenshots can be easily manipulated, as some articles embed the tweet itself and can be later modified, even Spez on Reddit admitted to editing the database).

[1]: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-46935701](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46935701)

<comment><USER19> Everyone wants to control the narrative; this is simply the first time you've been faced with a right-wing POTUS that is capable to some extent of doing so, and it's helped you forget that all political parties are putting forward a narrative, because partisanship is a hefty drug. This is nothing new, which is both good and bad; it's not a novel crisis, but it's also something we can't get rid of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do believe this will strengthen propaganda to be honest. I don't think I ever noticed a political ad from Google (not US based), but I am pretty certain that Google will ban those advertisements that are not in their interest. Google has close contaxts to many political circles.

<comment><USER21> I posted this link on HN before and was downvoted. Here it is again.

[https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it- seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)

<comment><USER22> I really don't like Hillary and I refuse to use google.

I do enjoy reading DARPA funded research on occasion.

Smear starts here:

" Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt's tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation."

This is actually a systemic problem and seems more like a passive criticism of the US overall. The interesting tactic here is the Hillary+Obama+LiberalGoogle to get those divisive flames going.

Then it paints DARPA research as bad by trying to connect it directly to intelligence. WHAT defending your country is bad now?! Look at what you're implicitly agreeing to if you accept this. Say NSA is bad or oversteps bounds or hacks to much or whatever those are separate arguments.

DARPA research is good stuff and supporting defense technology is too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The firm said it would also clarify under what circumstances it would remove > political ads for making "false claims".

Oh great, this means they will apply the same rules to regular ads, right?

<comment><USER24> >> The firm said it would also clarify under what circumstances it would remove political ads for making "false claims".

>Oh great, this means they will apply the same rules to regular ads, right?

So ban all ads altogether :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Exactly how would Google determine whether an advertisement is political in nature?

<comment><USER26> I can see this hitting legal businesses, like gun stores and abortion providers. Advertisements for those are equally political, but I really doubt that Google would judge it that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google should create a department of truth, so everyone has a single source of objective truth. That should help put everyone at ease and make it easier to create a department of peace and love.

</comment><comment><USER28> Google will be totally neutral fellas despite:

1\. Some 95% of employees being registered Democrats

2\. 100% of senior leadership being Democrat. Heck, they even wept publicly after the 2016 elections.

3\. They've never refuted contents of leaked tapes exposing bias - just keep denying that the said bias is company policy. [1][2][3][4]

[1]: [https://youtu.be/CX6LlEcJ4nw](https://youtu.be/CX6LlEcJ4nw)

[2]: [https://youtu.be/IzF7nBmwPso](https://youtu.be/IzF7nBmwPso)

[3]: [https://youtu.be/SY82j7NUtCQ](https://youtu.be/SY82j7NUtCQ)

[4]: [https://youtu.be/ik_kzn3etsE](https://youtu.be/ik_kzn3etsE)

<comment><USER29> 95% political affiliation already off the bat is suspicious. Who measured? How did they measure? Google certainly wouldn't, as asking your employees political affiliation would be illegal.

And not just affiliation, but registration? What about employees in non-US countries? They are registered with a US political party?

If you're going to just make stuff up, why not say 100% at that point?

<comment><USER28> I was referring to Google USA, as the timing of this announcement right before peak political US ad-spend is quite clearly a stab at US politics.

As for political affiliation, in your estimate, what is Google-USA's make up? Also, if non-US employees are making political censorship decisions on behalf of Google, isn;t the foreign interference? All that intersectional talk from Googlers that has made it into _unbiased_ AI truths(??) in their search autocomplete, like "men can have [periods, babies, ...]" really points to overwhelming Republican bent at Google. Right?

<comment><USER29> I guess you missed the point: you are guessing at the distribution of political leanings of thousands of people, and then using your guess as "proof" of bias.

Me guessing a different number doesn't change the fact that it would be a guess. It's not evidence of bias, and trying to prove that your guess is true is at best circular logic (they are biased so there must be more Democrats, which in turn... Proves that they are biased??). I reject this idea on the simple truth of making logical arguments based on facts. Guesses are not evidence.

As for the rest of your post, you seem to be confusing search autocomplete with double click ads, which shows a gross misunderstanding of what is even being discussed.

<comment><USER28> > As for the rest of your post, you seem to be confusing search autocomplete > with double click ads, which shows a gross misunderstanding of what is even > being discussed

As for this nugget, if shows a gross misunderstanding of what we're debating: whether Google is biased towards one party.

But processing your full response - nitpicking on the exact % of Democrats is a masterful tangent from the crux - that Google is likely not going to censor fairly. And the only reason I can think of for this bike shedding [1] is likely because you know it's true.

[1]: [https://bit.ly/2XA2wAx](https://bit.ly/2XA2wAx)

<comment><USER29> It's not really kosher to throw out claims with no basis in fact, and then say it's bike shedding if someone calls you on it. If you want to have an intellectual discussion about serious issues, you shouldn't open with making things up that you think make your options look more authoritative.

If we want to have a discussion, we need to start by being intellectually honest. Part of that is not making claims of facts that don't exist.

On a very real level, are you saying nonsense. Do you think that a human is reading what you type into Google and saying "haha, time to auto complete this with my liberal bias!!". How exactly do you think this technology works? And why do you think it had anything to do with this announcement about political ads? There is so much illiteracy to unpack in a short space.

<comment><USER28> Ignoring the ad hominem suggestions of illiteracy and stupidity _only_ because you are willing to listen.

1\. Google is majority Democratic, at least by a spread of 40% (D:R) if you simply assume the employee pool to mirror Democrat:Republican ratios of the counties Google HQ and branches are located in the bay area. [1]. Further, this is only the lower bound, as Google's employee pool tends to be college educated with postgraduate degrees (M.S, PhD, ...), which leans 63% democratic [2]. Further, Google is legendary for it's recruitment of the activist left, and minorities, with an even greater proclivity towards the Democratic party. So yes - you are bike-shedding when you make a mountain of the 95% claim, because the spread between Democrats and Republicans is large, nay mammoth enough for it to be irrelevant. And I bet you knew all of this, but wanted to engage in trivialities anyways.

2\. Google search suggestions show falsehoods on certain terms like "men can " precisely because of manually inserted political bias into training models that the AI is based on. Google has a whole ethics committee whose entire job is precisely this - play "judge" on what AI models are "ethical and fair", manually intervene with oodles of their own corrections & interpretations - never mind the facts behind the issue. Here is the AI ethics committee explaining manual interventions [3], and here [4] is the explanation on why Google search suggestions show what they do, with the AI engineer confirming it 6],despite having ZERO correlation on Google search trends for those terms (tsk tsk manually inserted political bias) . Also note that the contents of this video were the subject of a congressional hearing [5], in which Google confirmed it's veracity, but still maintained political neutrality blaming any appearance of bias on individual employees.

3\. "why do you think it had anything to do with this announcement about political ads". It has __everything __to do with political ads, because Google has been repeatedly caught red-handed in acts of bias against conservatives on YouTube, search results, political ad-spend, ..... (my GGM comment cites some instances). They 've confirmed that their news app has an editorial agenda (hint: left leaning), and senior employees have been caught on record stating they'll do whatever it takes to skew the system against a Trump re-election. So yes - in aggregate, Google has a __massive __leftist basis, and every iota of their business decision making imbibes these biases. My prediction is that they __will not __censor leftist political ads, but will put any right leaning ads through hell before letting them see light of day.

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

[2]: [https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party- af...](https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation- among-demographic-groups/2_6-10/)

[3]: [https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0?t=259](https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0?t=259)

[4]: [https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0?t=429](https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0?t=429)

[5]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX6LlEcJ4nw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX6LlEcJ4nw)

[6]: [https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0?t=536](https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0?t=536)

PS: The hubris in this statement!! -

> "haha, time to auto complete this with my liberal bias!!". How exactly do > you think this technology works? And why do you think it had anything to do > with this announcement about political ads? There is so much illiteracy to > unpack in a short space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also give us access to all the ads being run. Part of the insidious nature of microtargeting ads is they get seen by few people outside the community so you have no idea what's being said to respond, rebut or correct.

<comment><USER31> [https://transparencyreport.google.com/political- ads/home](https://transparencyreport.google.com/political-ads/home)

<comment><USER32> Thanks for posting this, I was also unaware.

Slightly off-topic, but Facebook offers a similar thing: [https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/)

I like these additions to ad serving entities, this is an important development. I'm really surprised I was not informed about these ad transparency portals, and that nobody seems to be paying attention to these. I would have wagered there would be various activists using this tool already. None of my news channels have this on their radar.

Does anybody know of other ad transparency portals, or of any projects working with these portals? Whats the likelyhood that these portals vanish into nothing, or behind a paywall or whatever? Are there APIs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The Conservative Party are currently flouting this "restriction" in the UK general elections: [https://twitter.com/rowlsmanthorpe/status/119746934421060403...](https://twitter.com/rowlsmanthorpe/status/1197469344210604037)

</comment><comment><USER34> I dont understand this argument that political advertising should be broad target only.

TV is often used as an example, but you can target cable to the individual/house, just like online ads.

A huge percent of political speech is individually targeted (phone calls, door knocks, mail, digital, addressable tv). Campaigns and bad actors have been doing deceptive or flat out lying campaigns forever (before the internet). Google 'McCain Bush child robocall' or 'push poll' as simple examples.

Edit: For reference I work in digital politics, my agency buys & creates digital advertising.

</comment><comment><USER35> Amazing HN feedback, its like people are not aware of whats going on, Mark Zuckerberg wasnt being grilled by Congress for funsies after all. Its about stealing elections, and Google/Fb waking up to the possibility of heavy legal backlash.

At least watch Computer History Museum" CHM Live | The Great Hack" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y26NQdTLtaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y26NQdTLtaw)

</comment><comment><USER36> All these companies trying to look cool by restricting "political" adverts while retaining full power to corporate advertising which is 10000% political.

</comment><comment><USER37> We've moved on from hyper targeted ideologies and pre- and post-truth storytelling to ageism and money/time/quantity as political symbols. Ok boomer. This 'restriction' is simply Google keeping up with the times. Google wants to move from being the narrative controlling, ai job-taking strong man to the biggest fish in the sea that you have to pay to be on.

In a few years it will refine the rules again.

</comment><comment><USER38> Not really sure if Google is the right gatekeeper for this kind of thing. Google as a company has often take clear political stances.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why not just ban the mentioning of a competing party in paid adverts?

This works pretty well for above the line advertising restrictions in some contries where brands cannot mention competitors in their ads.

It encourages advertisers to focus on promoting their own merits instead of misinformation about competitors.

<comment><USER40> But it doesn't stop "concerned citizens" or "non-governmental organisations" from spreading misinformation about others.

<comment><USER39> Just limit it so that only verified parties can mention their own brands.

<comment><USER41> That does nothing to stop a "swift boat" style smear campaign that simply doesn't mention anything about the alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589711)

</comment><comment><USER42> Yesterday we had a story about google's anti-union activities and hn was saying how evil and untrustworthy they were. Now hn is praising Google for censoring and being arbiters of truth just because they think Google is going to censor "correctly" or in line with their political leaning. One day google can't be trusted. The next day google should determine the political discourse of countries.

</comment><comment><USER43> They should ban ads for prescription drugs that cannot show through double- blind testing that they are more effective than cheaper branded or generic drugs.

</comment><comment><USER44> Cool. When will they stop aggregating all of everyone's data ever?

</comment><comment><USER45> Or, we could ban ads altogether and really improve society.

<comment><USER46> So you're willing to pay a subscription fee to use Google Search, Google Docs, Google Maps, Youtube, etc?

<comment><USER45> Sure, but not everyone can. Realistically Search and Maps should be public utilities.

And quite honestly, Google is completely scamming anyone who pays for my views. They know damn well I don't see ads, let alone click on them (except through automated means a la ad nauseam).

<comment><USER46> > Realistically Search and Maps should be public utilities.

That's the most comical thing I've read today. The government controlling search and maps is the last thing anyone should ever want. Not to mention they'll innovate as quickly as they innovate the DMV; no incentive therefore no innovation. Public utilities such as water, gas, and electricity are natural monopolies and priced on a per usage basis, so you'll be paying per search query and map lookup making it a more expensive and worse experience.

<comment><USER45> > The government controlling search and maps is the last thing anyone should > ever want.

Why is this any worse than Google? There are obvious perverse incentives against providing a decent search tool on every page by design.

<comment><USER46> > Why is this any worse than Google?

\- Easier surveillance of citizens

\- Easier to censor anti-government speech

\- Easier to alter search results for more government propaganda

\- Easier to make correlations between search history and crimes for when it's convenient to prosecutors

\- Lower quality of service because the government does not have consumer's best-interest in mind

I don't know about you but I prefer to not live in George Orwell's 1984 dystopian world</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter works just fine – but for investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/30/twitter-works-just-fine-but-for-investors-anything-except-total-market-domination-is-a-disaster

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10144549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10144549)</comment>


Ask HN: Open source intent detection - <AUTHOR> I am trying to learn building a Q&A and chatbots. Appreciate pointers towards tools (preferable open sourced tools0  that you know or have used. Looking to be able to do intent detection, train with my own data. <comment><USER2> Check out Rasa NLU

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Thanks</comment></comment>


Gear Up for Remote Work on a Budget - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/mrassili/gear-up-for-remote-work-on-a-budget-2je6 <comment><USER2> $1500 MBP Pro (2015) is budget, GTFO with that bullshit

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the nice words.

I think that's the upper limit, you can find it for less. Given the specs, it's a great laptop compared to the new models.</comment></comment>


Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire? - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a7341/rome-sweet-rome-could-a-single-marine-unit-destroy-the-roman-empire/ <comment><USER2> _" So, as soon as the Marines ran out of gas, their tanks would become little more than hunks of metal."_

That may be optimistic. According to [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Sparrow2/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Sparrow2/publication/224624994_Improving_Reliability_and_Operational_Availability_of_Military_Systems/links/55243a080cf2b123c5173845.pdf), _" The M1A2 Abrams main battle tank has an MTBF of 27 hours"_, so if they have fuel for a week, chances are that tank will break down before they run out of fuel, even if they bring spare parts for doing minor repairs.

Modern war needs insane efforts in logistics.

<comment><USER3> > "The M1A2 Abrams main battle tank has an MTBF of 27 hours"

There's logistics and there's this. How is this at all acceptable? In a real war with the likes of Russia it's entirely possible that supply lines could be cut off for extended periods.

<comment><USER4> > _the likes of Russia_

May I point out that there are no "likes of Russia", Russia is unique in all respects that matter. A war with China, for instance, would have little in common with a war with Russia. (I guess, China is unique in its own way.)

<comment><USER3> In this case "the likes of russia" is anyone that can disrupt supply lines during a land war, which would easily include China. Just look at all the trouble cause by a guerrilla war in a small country like Iraq.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are sent back in time? Why the hell would you even attempt to start a war. If anything you would want to make friends with the Romans and become generals in the Romans legions and establish your position in the Empire. You would be a complete fool to start any sort of conflict in a place like that. Having all your future knowledge could help quite a bit with doing something like this and get your men fed and kept alive until they are old and dead.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, interesting concept for reddit thread, but would make for a bad plot for a movie in my opinion

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing to keep in mind is that soldiers back in the day had to be exceptionally strong, if they were to survive a single battle. That, and the fact that "natural" selection was much more effective than it is today.

</comment><comment><USER7> If they were to land close to Rome, they would probably capture it before any legions could respond.

If they failed to capture Rome before running out of ammo, they would probably lose.

That said, they would certainly have huge advantages, including psychological ones (superstitious Romans might mistake Marines for armies of an angry Jove).

If they succeed, and set themselves up as Praetoria Novae, some of the smarter Marines might be able to accelerate Rome's military technology a few hundred years by introducing gunpowder and bronze cannons.</comment>


How Steve Jobs Became a Billionaire - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/steve-jobs-pixar-apple-lawrence-levy/ <comment><USER3> He won the sociopath lottery; he was able to take enormous risks because they didn't particularly faze him. Most people who do that fail horribly, but if you work backwards from a list of highly successful people, you may find that pattern of behavior occasionally bears fruit. The same is true of playing the lottery, but it would be wrong to assume that the secret to success is to play it.

Truly, for a bunch of very smart people, you'd think the tech community would be more aware of the dangers of working backwards from a pool of successful people, hoping to find a magic ingredient. Work from the broad population forward, not from the narrow population, back.

<comment><USER4> Almost every business book and online article about how $BUSINESS or $ENTREPRENEUR became successful does this. It's infuriating. "Let's wait to see which of the 7 billion people on the planet become billionaires, and then look back and see what they did, ignoring all those who did similar things and did not become billionaires." Totally flawed, yet the public eats it up like candy.

Go read Good To Great and prepare to barf. Business schools adore this book. Look at the description on Jim Collins's web site [1]: "Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. Now here's how you can do it too." That's literally Survivorship Bias.

1: [http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to- gr...](http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html)

<comment><USER3> Everyone wants to be successful, and no one wants to believe that it's not something they could control if they just knew the "secret". Add that to the fact that no one ever sold a self-help book entitled, "Getting Lucky", and it starts to make sense how we've arrived at this point.

Great link by the way.

<comment><USER4> We've all done that exercise in school where the professor tells everyone ahead of time to bring a coin to class. Then he has everyone stand up and flip a coin. Everyone who flips tails sits down. Those remaining standing flip it again, those flipping tails sit down, repeat until there is one person standing.

Then interview that last person and ask her what her technique was, how could she possibly flip heads 6 times in a row? What hard work and practice did she do ahead of time to make her such a good coin flipper? What daily habits produced this proficiency? This is essentially what we do when we try to be successful simply by asking successful people what they did.

<comment><USER5> Of course the person who chose to not flip their coin at all...didn't end up being the person to flip the most heads in a row.

So the truth lies somewhere between "it's entirely chance" and "it's entirely hard work/intelligence/participation".

<comment><USER6> Or, in my case in that school exercise: "I cheated." And so did the other finalist. But he was a known scoundrel, and I was the 'nice kid.' The last coin flip was the only one that was monitored. I won, and it was hailed and a just result. So, it's not all luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jobs didn't do Pixar. Ed Catmull did Pixar. Jobs was the investor.

The real payoff for Jobs with Pixar was that it made the iPod possible. Others had done MP3 players, but nobody had a good deal with the music industry. Jobs was able to do that for a Hollywood reason - as a studio owner, he outranked the music execs, and they had to take his calls. Hollywood is very hierarchical like that.[1] At the time, Apple was a nobody in the music industry, had no consumer electronics products, and was not doing all that well in desktop computers. It was heading Pixar that got him in the door at Warner, Sony, and Universal.

[1] [http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/itunes-10th- anniversa...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/itunes-10th-anniversary- how-steve-jobs-turned-the-industry-upside-down-20130426)

<comment><USER8> He was more than an investor. He believed in the computer graphics work that they were doing and became the sole owner of Pixar when they were on the brink of disbanding. He bought the company outright and moved them from the eastcoast to the westcoast. That's huge. Nobody does that as an investor. You have to really believe in that on a core, personal level to do that.

<comment><USER9> > Nobody does that as an investor.

Private equity investors that specialize in turnarounds and restructurings do that on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I think Steve Jobs was a huge dick and doesn't deserve all the praise he gets, I do think that his one quality was to be harsh about things in an honest way.

When an engineer spent a week overworking to be able to boot a system, he is the one guy that will say it is not enough and needs to go faster. That he had no respect for others, and considered his will the only important things probably helped quite a bit in enforcing his vision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't this be said about most founders of most failed startups?

In revisionist history, if the founder was persistent and the product achieved a product-market fit, it was a vision. If the founder was persistent, and the product did not achieve product-market fit, it was a delusion and toxic work environment.

<comment><USER11> I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy there. Some engineers are willing to work in a harsh, toxic environment if they think the founder _isn 't_ delusional and is actually onto something. I presume that's how Apple employees felt.

People are willing to put up with authoritarian assholes if they think their vision is worth implementing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Far down in this article, Apple co-founder Rod Holt explains what he thought it was about Steve Jobs that put him into the vanguard.

[http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve- jobs](http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-jobs)

Particularly the part where he talks about commodities and products, and the process and relations of production at early Apple.

I think what much of what Holt says will go over the heads of people not in the milieu of Holt, Proyect etc. Not all of it will though.

One reason I find the Holt piece interesting is everyone else seems to come at the question from the same angle. Holt does not, but more importantly Jobs did not. Also Holt was there when Apple was incorporated, and had a very thoughtful sociological Weltanschauung back then.

You can tell everyone comes at it from the same angle by the OP title. How Steve Jobs became a billionaire. People who start from that point, a desire to get insanely rich and spend money and be admired, will probably never get to be be billionaire. I don't think that they'll get it either.

Most people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page etc. don't seem to be focused on wealth. Even someone like Larry Ellison who seems to be focused on wealth gets more stirred up talking about engineering one of the first usable relational databases than he does about his billions.

The US is in such a homogeneous ideological fog that it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. Holt was around when Apple started, but was not a participant in what C. Wright Mills called the great American celebration, so I find his viewpoint interesting, and in my opinion, more insightful than any other I've heard.

</comment><comment><USER13> Luck = more successful than me

Lazy = less successful than me

Not useful words, regardless of if it is true or not. There is no formula despite our brain desparately seeking one. My experiences with surfing the internet, sugar and other things suggest that seeking != the right metric for utility to you now or in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ed Catmull talks about the Pixar IPO in the book (below)

Before Toy Story came out, when Ed was not even sure they would even get a film out the door, Jobs started planning the IPO. Catmull disagreed, but Jobs pushed it through, and Pixar IPO'd a month or two after the barn-stomrning success of Pixar. The IPO made Jobs a billionaire, and put pIxar on the finanical footing to its current success.

Jobs knew how to, and took risks that even a fantastic business-builder like Catmull was afraid too.

Its a skill, and a personality that is rare and it built the foundation for two world class businesses on the same IPO. Don't knock him ... too much.

<comment><USER15> I think with n=1 it's pretty hard to call it a skill. He made a call and was lucky. And it wasn't a hard call for him to make - if Toy Story had flopped, at least he wouldn't be out of pocket for the ongoing expenses of the studio. He took a punt on win-big-or-quit when he was planning on quitting anyway. The only downside to the call was for the people working for him, and his track record on that front speaks for itself.

<comment><USER16> Every time someone succeeds, people call it out for good luck.

In the case of Steve Jobs, that takes a lot of good luck. Good luck repeated reliably over the course of his life.

It's funny how good luck falls more on people often who work hard...

<comment><USER4> Attributing a causal relationship between hard work and success ignores the millions who work hard and are not successful.

<comment><USER17> Hard work in itself doesn't matter. You also have to work in a smart way. Most people work hard, but not smart.

<comment><USER18> The wealthy boss will always sell you on hard work being responsible for being where he is today. But who gains most from a hard working employee - <USER2> employee or the boss?

<comment><USER17> The boss, obviously. Most wealthy people I know with net worths over $100m (maybe some tech founders excluding) aren't really hard working.. they're strategic thinkers and deal makers, and they know how to get stuff done, but I would not consider them hard working. They tend to live relatively relaxed lifestyles but are smart about how to achieve results when required. And when required, that might mean once a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> there is a book called "creativity inc." by ed-catmull which also is pretty good. it is more of an exposition of management style at pixar than anything else though. might not suit everyone's fancy :)

edit: but if you like that kind of thing, then it's the kind of thing that you would like.

<comment><USER20> Jason Calacanis interviewed Ed Catmull on this week in startups:

Part 1: [http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney- pt1/](http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney-pt1/)

Part 2: [http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney- pt2/](http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney-pt2/)

<comment><USER19> > Jason Calacanis interviewed Ed Catmull on this week in startups

this is very cool ! thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author built up huge empathy for the employees in the article, but then decided not to let us know how they came out. Too bad. Still, great article.

<comment><USER22> >Excerpted from "To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey With Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History,"

He likely covers it in the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> These comments are so focused on the negative side of Jobs, I have to think there's at least a bit of envy there... A bit of the thought "oh, he was more successful than me, so he must have been worse in other ways"

<comment><USER24> I might be envious of his success, but I don't think that's the source of the negativity. There's quite a bit of documentation of him behaving in ways that I don't think are acceptable (your opinion may vary). Here's an article from a quick google search. [http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs- jerk-2011-10](http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10)

<comment><USER25> It looks like this article came out a week after his death. Sometimes it amazes me how tasteless and low these writers can be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No follow up on the employee share issue? Did they feel compensated fairly? Kind of a sloppy article.

<comment><USER27> Yes I read to the end to find the answer to that. I guess you have to buy the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Luck. Mostly.

</comment><comment><USER29> He made billions because he had millions to gamble with.

<comment><USER30> He had millions to gamble with because he started out soldering computers in a garage and selling them to people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Stealing Alan Kay.

</comment><comment><USER32> Spoiler: Pixar.

</comment><comment><USER33> Steve Jobs, aka the visionary genius, everyone.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think what the article missed is that content creation is the most profitable business model. Jobs' first billion was due to a creative invention whose equity did not end on opening night, foreign distribution and DVD sales but rather through trademarks, copyrights and of course the conquest of different markets such as toys, books and clothing.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've often thought about what it says that it took a pretty horrible person like Steve Jobs to recognize and motivate talent to create great products.</comment>