Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36879831 <comment><USER4> I did a little work as a developer for Verizon's ecosystem back in 2007. Let me just say, from what I could see, they were a huge, bureaucratic company without a single redeeming cultural trait. The managers seemed like a bunch of frat boys who had been raised up into positions of authority through some inscrutable lottery, and none of them seemed to possess an iota of analytical capability or human management talent.

I left that position and later worked for a bunch of tech startups and larger companies that, while not perfect, at least had enough good people in them to redeem my view on the human race.

I cannot imagine why anyone would actually work as a mid-level worker in Verizon unless you had absolutely no other options in life.

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, which Verizon did you work for? The former MCI/Worldcom unit ("VZ Business"), the GTE/Bell Atlantic one (Landline, FiOS, etc.), or Verizon Wireless? As far as I know, that company has remained fairly fractured, and operated as if they were three different companies.

<comment><USER6> vzw actually is a different company, which is partly owned by vz. Fba/fgte are practically separate companies too. I worked for fba (former bell Atlantic) for years and can attest, it's no place for capable doers. It's unbelievable how many layers of dysfunctional middle management are in there, supported only by the fact that vz owns so much legacy infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> Who owns the rest of it? I know Vodafone used to, but VZ bought their share out a couple years ago.

Totally agreed on BA/GTE. I used to contract on the GTE side of the house, and I saw how little it mattered whether you were good or bad at your job. All reports I hear from the new Frontier sound like it's even worse now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Verizon shouldn't be allowed to own any web properties. They inject a unique subscriber identifier into your HTTP requests unless you turn it off.

[http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier- hea...](http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-header-faqs/)

<comment><USER8> No company that sells Internet access should be allowed to also be in the content business.

<comment><USER9> Should Google be allowed to sell fiber?

I think the suggestion that carriers shouldn't do this is wrong and naive and here is why:

User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts. It inescapably results in fundamentally unethical business practices where users are exploited.

That is google's business model and they stand uncontested today.

Carriers that end up doing any amount of content monetization will never disrupt Google, but they can create pressure that drives the cost of ads down, making google's life harder. I think this is so important that I am happily willing to endure the judgement of everyone here. I know this is downvote bait, but I keep thinking at some point everyone here will see the net positive on all possible angles.

<comment><USER10> > User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts.

This makes no sense.

This is the backbone of the entire internet. Ethics and the value that users get from a company/service are all subjective, there's no hard rule that you can lay down like this.

<comment><USER9> It makes plenty of sense. I am annoyed that you cast me as illogical simply because you disagree. Something has changed in modern discourse and your reaction has become distressingly common.

Here is an article from 2012, enumerating the same point: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/03/05/if- youre-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/03/05/if-youre-not- paying-for-it-you-become-the-product/#4b997d71b445)

Here is another from 2010: [http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying- for-it-you...](http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre- the-product)

If this is a new idea to you, you might want to consider broadening your debate network.

<comment><USER10> This isn't a new idea or theory, it's older than the internet itself. So what?

This is a tired argument that doesn't really make a point. People being "the product" isn't some inherently bad thing. These platforms have so many engaged users because they do actually deliver value to those users, whether you think so or not.

Maybe you want to pay for a social network but others want it free and are fine with the trade-off. Both perspectives are fine and what's important is that you have a choice, but saying that " _user counts should never be exponential of customer counts_ " still makes no sense as it not up to you to decide everyone else's fate. Does that really seem logical to you?

<comment><USER9> Strawman.

>>it not up to you to decide everyone else's fate

I'm not asking anyone to live to my values. Many others share them.

I think the point that users should not exceed customers is easy to understand. Many people agree with me. Many others dont.

I have turned down an offer at Google because I couldn't reconcile the bad stuff. I wish more people agreed with me, but I don't say that those who don't are illogical. They simply have different values. That is OK if you value diversity.

<comment><USER10> > User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts.

This is what you wrote. Why make this proclamation? Why should free users be limited regardless of whether they derive value from the service and are ok with being "the product"? The ethics of a company and the value they provide to a user are all subjective and thus you cannot state that the company is unethical or the users are being exploited as a rule. This is why your statement does not make sense.

> Strawman ... I have turned down an offer at Google because I couldn't > reconcile the bad stuff. I wish more people agreed with me, but I don't say > that those who don't are illogical. They simply have different values. That > is OK if you value diversity.

This is actually a good example of a strawman argument - and completely irrelevant to the discussion. I'm not calling you illogical and I don't see how diversity has anything to do with this. You've made a statement and I explained why it doesn't make sense (see above). You're still free to say it and I'm still glad you did as it led to this discussion.

Please focus on the arguments instead of being so defensive and using these passive accusations.

<comment><USER9> >>The ethics of a company and the value they provide to a user are all subjective and thus you cannot state that the company is unethical or the users are being exploited as a rule.

This seems to me to be the crux of our disagreement. You believe ethics are so subjective that ethical stances should not be expressed.

I reject that whole heartedly.

Businesses with user counts that dwarf customer counts generally are exploitative and bad for the consumer.

They are incented to harvest information that results in privacy violations.

<comment><USER10> > ethical stances should not be expressed

Who is stopping you from saying anything? You expressed it and I said I'm glad you did. Again, please stop being so defensive for no reason, it's not conducive to any discussion.

> Businesses with user counts that dwarf customer counts generally are > exploitative and bad for the consumer. They are incented to harvest > information that results in privacy violations.

Not really, again you say "exploitative and bad" but this is according to you. It's up to the actual consumer to consider this for themselves, which is why there's no valid way to make a statement as how to how this generally works or that users should always be fewer than customers. You can look at open-source companies that produce software used by thousands but sponsored by a few customers as just 1 of many counter examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yahoo got all cash, which is nice as it gives them more flexibility, the last thing they'd want after the Alibaba spin off fiasco is to have to try and sell 4.83 Billion in Verizon stock.

Bloomberg just put up a head line saying that Yahoo will return all the cash, minus Operating Costs to the share holders. If anyone has any guess as to how much "operating costs" will be, please email:)

So I guess queue Alibaba and SoftBank now to come in and divvy up the rest of the company?

From Matt Levine:

> "Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's chief executive, is not expected to join Verizon, > but she is due to receive a severance payout worth about $57 million," > bringing her total compensation for about four years of work at Yahoo to > $218 million.

Wow! So I guess the now decade old valley trick off spending a "few" years at google to start your career and leveraging the google name to get another job really is the way to go:)

<comment><USER12> There has been a lot of debate as to whether she succeeded or failed at her job, but at the end of the day all I can say: I really chose the wrong career path, as I can't imagine a scenario where a dev's comparative performance results in a 218m$ payout. (In more direct terms, I would gladly take the internet-hate-firehose in the face if it means making even single digit millions.)

To make some more reasonable statement to try and add value to this non- comment, more than anything of yahoo's fall, every time it gets brought it it just makes me shake my head at the current state of compensation. For the same reason I can't comprehend what freedom and power $10m+ buys you, I can't comprehend how we change the system such that more of us get more of that.

<comment><USER13> Soon-to-be a freshman in college. If you don't mind me asking, what career path do you wish you took?

<comment><USER14> I believe he was being a being slightly tongue in cheek. In reply to your question though - never follow the money, follow the path where your interests lie and where your strengths lie. Biggest career mistake I ever made was to move from a job I really enjoyed to another because they offered to more than double my salary.

<comment><USER15> But you still get to eat right? I followed my interests, and now can't afford food, literally. I should have went for a job a hate but that paid well.

<comment><USER16> This. I hate my job but tell me some other way I can make $300k (I'm basically doing management consulting). I'm 38 with 3 kids and my wife doesn't earn an income (she homeschools the kids). I suck it up so they're well provided for.

<comment><USER17> 300k is nearly 6 times the median US income, and even the median US income is double that of high-quality-of-life places like Germany. Literally most of the planet has happy families with significantly less money than that.

It's facile of me to diagnose your life over the internet but I often think of the deathbed quote:

"I wish I had earned more money and spent less time with my family" \-- no one ever

<comment><USER18> I think that deathbed quote is more about people who had reasonably successful life and had family. I doubt that 100s of millions in 3rd world dying in penury with no family to talk of would make similar statements. Perhaps their statements would be so pedestrian as not to be noted down.

<comment><USER16> I dated a Columbian girl (an illegal actually) before I met my wife. I remember one day she slapped me across the face and with tears of anger made it clear how stupid I was. My mistake? Uttering the bullshit platitude: "better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable". She said, "you don't know what poor is, we couldn't even afford a toothbrush. We weren't happy we were miserable. How dare you."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: [http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/](http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/)

Times -- and fortunes -- change.

<comment><USER20> Had to look it up, for curiosity:

        In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion
        (or over $10,000 per user) in stock. [...] The company had 570,000 users.
        -- Wikipedia

These 570k users only listened to audio, seems like the biggest waste ever. Cuban got a bunch of (undeserved?) money and Yahoo lost the same amount. Feels like a pointless transaction.

<comment> tuna-piano I'm not so sure. Here's my reasoning, but I'm just using logic, I'm really not super in-tune to this stuff.

If the company knew thought its stock was 10x overvalued (Yahoo's stock did drop 90% a year or so later) then they really only sold it for $570 million. That is, if Yahoo knew its stock would be worth 1/10 of its current value in a year, buying a company with $5.7B in stock will add value to Yahoo so long as The acquired company ends up being worth >$570M.

That being said, if they knew their stock was overvalued, it would be best to issue additonal shares, as $1 is worth $1 regardless. Similiar to how undervalued companies should buy back their stock.

<comment><USER21> I think back in those insane dotcom bubble days valuation and stock prices did not play well together. The acquisition moved forward because it was sound business (Yahoo's planned to become a media corp) and increased shareholder value, as the best way to profit from an overheated market was to hoard investors attention relentlessly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers - which is tied to their handsets - with the tracking information already gathered by AOL's sites._

I was talking to a friend who is in the Telecom industry in Japan, and apparently this sort of arrangement is not legal there. EU is generally wary of such arrangements as well. So this is a merger whose product synergies would not have been possible in other jurisdictions.

In recent years I recall advertisers being skeptical about the quality of eyeballs on Yahoo!'s platform. The pitch to the same advertisers already seems more compelling, though the premise does make me feel uneasy.

And I imagine Mayer will be getting her full 9 figure severance package. So much for rewarding success and having interests aligned.

<comment><USER23> The problem with yahoo was never quality of the traffic. They have the most coveted audiences cornered. Their problem is the lack of good ad units. They have banners... That's unacceptable in 2016.

<comment><USER24> Not familiar with ad tech... what _is_ the standard for acceptable, in 2016?

<comment><USER25> I think it is square patches between textual content. They are everywhere on newssites. Also, 'sponsored content' as on twitter and facebook.

<comment><USER26> Called "native ads" in the mobile space, which are all over Yahoo!'s mobile apps (see Yahoo! Weather for a simple, relevant example), and offered to other publishers through their Yahoo! Gemini platform.

So not only does Yahoo! run the currently "hot" ad unit (they also do rewarded video), they own it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So this means Mozilla's insanely bad clause (for Yahoo) [1] kicks in?

1\. [http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer- deal-m...](http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-mozilla- yahoo-payment)

<comment><USER28> I'd bet that Mozilla continues to work with Yahoo/Verizon.

<comment><USER29> Or they could switch back to google or bing and grab nearly an extra billion dollars between now and 2019.

Seems like a no brainier to Mozilla.

<comment><USER30> Would be funny if they switched to Bing since that is what Yahoo search is now any way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why isn't this mentioned/discussed anywhere. In 2008 Microsoft offered $45 Billion to acquire Yahoo. Then Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang rejected the offer, saying that the bid "substantially undervalues Yahoo." Microsoft raised the bid to 50 Billion, and it was yet again rejected. After that MS withdrew its bid. 8 years later, at 10% the original offer!

<comment><USER32> Well, YHOO's total market cap is now about $37.36B, so it's not a complete travesty. (MSFT would have gotten the Alibaba investment with the $45B offer)

<comment><USER33> Eh, it's a pretty complete travesty. 8 years later the stock is still almost 20% below the $45B offer price, which was by the way a 60% premium over the market cap at the time.

I still have trouble wrapping my head around why Microsoft even made the offer, but I have even more trouble understanding why Yahoo rejected it.

<comment><USER34> In those intervening 8 years, Yahoo sold a big chunk of its BABA stock back to the company. If they kept the number of shares they had at the time Microsoft made the offer, that asset alone would be worth $48B today. If you add in the Yahoo! Japan holdings, the company would be worth at least $56B, even if the core Yahoo! business were worth nothing. It wouldn't have been a bad buy for Microsoft.

<comment><USER35> BABA wasn't public back then, though. It was inherently hard to value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> To the guys on this thread who talk like they're some mini-pundits who know it all saying this is what Yahoo gets for walking away from larger valuation offers from a decade ago: No one thinks you're intelligent for pointing out something years after the fact. Tech companies come and go, and I would bet that a lot of the hottest tech companies right now will meet the end just like Yahoo did in a decade (or less).

Imagine if Google becomes irrelevant in 10 years, and end up selling itself to whichever hottest tech company that will be around then. Will you say "Told ya! Google should have sold to Yahoo when Yahoo was going to acquire them for $3 billion!"

<comment><USER37> Are you seriously suggesting that when Microsoft made its final offer in 2008, Yahoo was one of "the hottest tech companies"?

<comment><USER38> Not the OP, but I remember that from a developer's perspective (mine) Yahoo was pretty hot back in 2006-2007. Their dev center and API's were on par with Google's, if not better, while Yahoo Pipes was a very cool and interesting thing which has not been successfully replicated until now. Companies like FB were cool only because they had an exponential user growth and because of the rumors of them poaching engineers from Google or Yahoo for insane financial packages. That started to change around 2010 I'd say, when the FB devs started to open themselves up more to the world.

<comment><USER39> who is replicating pipes?

<comment><USER38> I remember reading somth about a proof-of-concept replica of Pipes here on HN, I might be wrong, though, can't remember the source.

<comment><USER39> part of pipes was the community of work that you could clone and contribute to. just recreating the technology isnt the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I remember being shocked when Yahoo spurned MSFT's $44+ billion offer in 2008. Goes to show, when someone offers you 11 figures for a failing company, sell because the offers aren't going to get better.

<comment><USER41> People were also shocked when Zuckerberg turned down $1+ billion offers. Hindsight is 20/20.

<comment><USER42> I don't know about other people, but there's a number past which I _do not care_. N > 10^7 in my pocket after tax, I'm out, regardless of circumstances, regardless of ability to earn more. No ragrets.

<comment><USER43> I suspect it's not about money at a certain point.

<comment><USER44> It is always about the money. The more money you have the more money you need to manage the money you already have. So it is always about the money. The Zuck was confident his website was worth way more than a billion. that's why he didn't sell.

<comment><USER45> If it was about money, he wouldn't be giving away most of his company while trying to retain a controlling stake. The fact that he is giving away his money suggests that he's more interested in being a successful business mogul than he is about being "FU rich."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Keep your eye on [http://tracker.archiveteam.org/](http://tracker.archiveteam.org/) to contribute to archiving certain Yahoo assets for future generations in the Internet Archive.

</comment><comment><USER47> "The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook."

Can someone explain how combining two "past their prime" entities like Yahoo and AOL, with the Verizon telecom bureaucracy is going to produce anything "capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook"?

Telecom companies have a pretty horrible culture. It is not one of innovation or agility. They are bloated bureaucracies based on tenure and not merit. I speak from experience. To give one small example I have have been on conference bridges where Verizon project managers fell asleep and began snoring. I have many more of such anecdotes with these folks. All similarly illustrative of the culture.

<comment><USER48> Note that Verizon has a division - Product Innovation and New Business - <USER2> is run separate from the telco business that you are mentioning.

In recent years Verizon has acquired technology companies EdgeCast Networks (CDN) and upLynk (Video Streaming) which form the core of Verizon's Digital Media Services [1].

Combining these assets with AOL (AdTech) and Yahoo (if the deal happens) gives Verizon an end-to-end platform for the creation, delivery and monetization of content (with focus on video) in the Internet.

Disclosure: I work at EdgeCast and we operate as a technology company, hate bureaucracy and try very hard to innovate and stay agile.

[1] [https://www.verizondigitalmedia.com/about/](https://www.verizondigitalmedia.com/about/)

<comment><USER49> Does any of that give it customers?

<comment><USER48> Hi, can you elaborate more on what you are asking?

<comment><USER49> I was being snarky. The fact that they have an end-to-end platform is great and all, but that doesn't mean peopl will use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yeah, they have billions to spend on buying companies like Yahoo, but they can't upgrade all their rotting copper to fiber optics. That's Verizon for you.

<comment><USER51> Any place that doesn't already have fiber within Verizon's footprint probably can't accommodate it profitably. The margins on the places that _do_ already have fiber are already thin. _No_ business wants to invest in new infrastructure that isn't going to make it any money. It's not like anybody else is chomping at the bit to build fiber in those places.

<comment><USER50> It can accommodate it profitably. But any such undertaking is a long term investment, and Verizon doesn't operate in such categories. They want to rip profits faster.

Also, they have internal conflict of interests. I.e. their execs are all about wireless, and simply don't care about landline business. Splitting it in two could actually help, since then they'll care about improving.

 _> It's not like anybody else is chomping at the bit to build fiber in those places._

Verizon stopped building out fiber everywhere. Only when they have a contract, they do it (very reluctantly). Some areas are indeed less profitable because of population density and other such factors. But others are not.

<comment><USER51> Verizon's wireline unit is making low single digit operating profit margins with its existing footprint. I'm pretty sure expansion into less favorable markets would push that into the red. There is a reason Google only enters carefully-vetted markets that waive the usual roadblocks to fiber buildout-- it's the only way to make money in the industry.

And Verizon is a public company. Investors are pushing it to ditch wireline entirely. If the wireline unit was spun off, would those same investors suddenly be eager to give the divested company billions to build a bunch of marginally profitable infrastructure?

<comment><USER50> _> Verizon's wireline unit is making low single digit operating profit margins with its existing footprint._

Because they never cared about improving its efficiency. They actually noted, that when they upgrade to fiber, their expenses drop. A huge drain on their landline profits is their copper network which is falling apart. Their fiber is profitable.

Investors want them to focus on wireless. As I said, if it would have been split off, investors would have cared about how to improve their landline profits.

<comment><USER51> When Verizon replaces copper with fiber, the investment gets booked as a capital asset, which doesn't count against profits. But any operational savings achieved by that will goose short term profits. So if Verizon is focused only on goosing short term profits, as you claim, they'd replace all the copper with fiber!

More generally, Verizon is legally required to keep serving the places it already served with copper. If it could save money by switching that with fiber, they'd do it. You're accusing a money-grubbing big corporation of leaving billions of dollars on the table each year.

<comment><USER50> They would. Except they can get even more profit by investing in wireless. So again, typical conflict of interests. Removing it could help.

Their execs indeed have no clue how to mange landline business or they simply don't care about it. Their whole background is wireless and they are trying to get rid of landline (selling it off).

Seidenberg was landline man through and through. He cared about improving it and moving it forward. McAdam has no clue about it and doesn't care.

<comment><USER51> So Verizon is too incompetent to make money on wireline so it's looking to sell it. And Google isn't chomping at the bit to buy it because?

<comment><USER50> _> So Verizon is too incompetent to make money on wireline so it's looking to sell it._

Yes, or rather they aren't interested in getting that competence, because they are too focused on wireless.

 _> And Google isn't chomping at the bit to buy it because?_

Google might at some point. They can have different reasons to wait. For instance Verizon are still obligated to build out in some areas. Or Google want to avoid dealing with unions and such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What the hell has Marissa Mayer been paid for?

Everything about this smells like Yahoo! is being run by idiot MBAs with some spreadsheets somewhere totally misunderstanding that technology can empower people to do fantastic things including those working within Yahoo! - <USER3> it's been hamstrung by each property not being held accountable to it's competitors effectively.

I would have started competitors (startups) internally for all of Yahoo!'s key products (buy Y.com and test them under that) and told the current product owners if their products were not better faster than these startups could build them they'd be replaced.

The decision to sell search because they were not able to match the investment Google and Microsoft were putting in is another example; if you can't beat someone financially you need to be better than them. To have just given up based on "only" having a few billion to invest is absurd.

<comment><USER53> I don't think you can put this all on Mayer. It's basically a tug of war between two different groups of key investors, with the concerns about the IRS also playing a role.

One group thought that Y! had a shot at a viable business. The other group wanted out, but didn't want to sell until they got their cut from the Alibaba/Y!JP investments (which also propped up the stock price for the whole thing). Mayer was hired by the first group to try and turn the tide. The second group agreed in the hope that it would also bring the stock price up a bit and make the non-Alibaba part of the company more valuable.

The IRS finally ruled that Yahoo can't just divest Alibaba &co. without paying a huge bill, and Mayer hasn't been able to do anything about the rest of the company. Which means the second group of investors is basically winning out and spinning off all the assets so they can close out their price at the value of the Alibaba stake and make their profit.

It's difficult to say that Mayer is 100% responsible since a good chunk of the board/investors didn't care or were actively against her from day one. Also, she didn't have all the tools that a turnaround CEO has at other companies because she had to protect the share price around the value of the Alibaba investments or that second group would simply fire her. It was always a longshot IMO.

<comment><USER54> She lost support of the investors when it became clear that the turnaround plan was a complete failure. Initially she was given a lot of latitude to make whatever moves she deemed necessary including blowing a lot of money on failed acquisitions and key hires that didn't work out. Now maybe Yahoo was beyond saving, and it was going to fail anyway, but Mayer's execution didn't seem to help it at all.

This reminds me of JC Penney, where investors also brought in an exec from abother successful company in the hope that they could replicate that success. In that case it was Ron Johnson from Apple, who tried to replicate Apple's retail strategy at JC Penney with devastating results, and certainly not for lack of being given the latitude to implement whatever changes he asked for.

The situation at Yahoo is pretty similar. I wouldn't blame the board and investors for finally trying to cut their losses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 2 guys who spent 20 years at Yahoo, started WhatsApp and sold itself to Facebook for $19B. and this huge company sold for 1/4th of that price. Management vs. Product Visionaries.

<comment><USER56> How much revenue/profit does Yahoo generate? How much does WhatsApp? Facebook paid handsomely for a lot of hype and to gamble at poaching users.

The Yahoo deal seems way more down to Earth, compared to an astronomical offer by a company with cash to burn and a desperate desire to keep growth going up.

<comment><USER57> Facebook buying WhatsApp could also be seen as a defensive purchase (i.e. prevent Google or MS from buying up the users).

<comment><USER45> Facebook realizes that it's smarter to be a communication company rather than a communication platform. Brand management is a key to P&G's success, and Facebook is smart to emulate this in the tech. sector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I hope yahoo mail sticks around. I've been using it since forever, and would hate to change to gmail. Yahoo mail is kind of slow, but gets the job done, gmail is too chaotic for me. Maybe I'm old school about that, but I'm all in on yahoo mail.

<comment><USER59> I didn't believe you that Gmail was more chaotic than Yahoo, so I signed into my never-used yahoo account.

The Yahoo Mail interface is much cleaner than I remember, though I don't enjoy the purple theme, the loading times, and the persistent "Try Firefox" banner in the top right.

Plus my mailbox is full of spam from Yahoo itself, like weekly emails from Yahoo Movies.

<comment><USER60> >the persistent "Try Firefox" banner in the top right

We, non-Chrome users, hate persistent "try Google Chrome" banners on every Google property too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm curious how this will play out for AT&T internet customers, given that their email is currently hosted by Yahoo. Is Verizon going to host their competitor's customers' email?

<comment><USER62> if att has a contract with yahoo and yahoo doesn't file for bankruptcy, it will have to continue to provide support or pay the contract cancellation.

... or, now it being Verizon, they will just drip one email per day into the inbox and say that they only advertised up to 100% of email, but that the contract only really guarantees 0.01% of the advertised speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Can someone change the title to include the fact that this purchase is for the search and advertising operations part of Yahoo? Everyone here thinks it's for the entirety of Yahoo. It's like they didn't bother to read the article.

<comment><USER64> Maybe someone could remove those 'distracting, unnecessary quotation marks' as well.

I think the BBC somehow thinks they're being ultraprecise by putting quotation marks around certain words, but it's just obnoxious.

<comment><USER65> It's just to indicate reported speech: "this isn't confirmed fact, it's something we've been told". Absolutely standard journalistic practice.

<comment><USER64> At one point, the headline was changed to read "Syrian migrant 'behind German blast'". But at that point, the fact that there was a German blast was widely known; the unconfirmed portion was that a Syrian migrant was behind it.

So if anything, the headline should have been written "'Syrian migrant' behind German blast". But the BBC didn't do that, because all indications are that BBC journalists pepper their headlines randomly with quotation marks.

Randomly peppering headlines with quotation marks absolutely is not standard practice. Most American newspapers don't do it.

<comment><USER65> Ok, absolutely standard British journalistic practice then, where the BBC (and I) come from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I wonder if Verizon worked out a deal with the mozilla foundation over the search bar exit clause? That's basically a billion dollar pay out over 3 years if Mozilla decides to trigger it.

</comment><comment><USER60> That seems incredibly cheap, when stuff like LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter and so on having bigger valuations, despite being just as unprofitable.

<comment><USER67> One of the keys to having a valuation that's higher than your discounted cash flow is whether or not people think you can grow. Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat are all growth-stage companies so there is less relation between their valuation and the sum of their assets. Yahoo! is much closer to a mature company so their valuation is better determined by a sum of assets minus liabilities.

With LinkedIn you had an obvious path to continue growing as well as a pretty obvious path to profitability whenever they decided to stop growing.

Snapchat actually has pretty big growth prospects and has shown that they can monetize very well, so they can command a much higher multiple of their current earnings.

Twitter's market cap is just over 2x what Yahoo! sold for, so it's not like people think they are THAT much more valuable, and their stock has taken quite a beating over the last year because they're showing that they don't have a path to growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Here is math for people wondering about price of Yahoo:

Y! market cap is $36.38b. Have in mind that Y! is selling only its core biz so we would have to subtract values of Y! shares in Alibaba and Y!Japan, which are worth $33.74b and $8.56b respectively. However thats pre-tax and Y! could not get that money for them. There for adjusted values (-38% tax)are $21b and $5.4b again respectively. There are also cash & marketable securities worth $6.8b and convertible debt of $1.4b.

So final math looks like this: $36.38b-$21b-$5.4b-$6.38b-(-$1.4b)=$5b

<comment><USER69> why do people keep bringing up the alibaba and other assets when discussing the market cap?

this is like buying someone body shop, looking at the body shop revenue, and then subtracting the price of the current owner paid-for porsche.

<comment><USER45> Because Yahoo owns $30B+ worth of Alibaba stock.

To use your analogy, it's like buying a body shop, but subtracting the $10,000,000 in real estate they own because it's not included in the sale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> "US telecoms giant Verizon Communications is to buy Yahoo's search and advertising operations"

First, I was surprised to see search operations mentioned, since they farmer that out to Microsoft. Second, if this is only search and advertising, I wonder what will happen to things like Flickr and Tumblr.

It should be interesting to see what is actually in the announcement.

</comment><comment><USER71> It used to be said that Yahoo is where startups go to die. With AOL and Yahoo, is Verizon now where IT companies go to die?

</comment><comment><USER72> YHOO used to be valued at $112B at its peak.

<comment><USER73> It's turns out valuations are imaginary numbers that mean nothing?

I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that:

100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion.

Nice! Anybody interested in investing please get in touch I'm raising a series A.

<comment><USER74> > _I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let 's back-of-the envelope that: > 100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a > profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means > my beer business is valued at $5 billion._

And if you've convinced enough people that this is the case, so you get at least a few million dollars in investment, that would mean your company indeed has some value.

But selling $1 of beer of $2 to a friend once never got anybody anywhere.

You seem to conflate what happens in micro-micro-scale with what should be shown to be able to happen in the macro-world, for a valuation like $5 billion to start involving people investing lots of real money.

In other words, sure, valuations are based on extrapolation, but it's BS to think they're the same as (or based on) any small-scale extrapolation of an statistically insignificant transation (selling $2 worth of beer).

When the volume/sales/eyeballs/etc get so many that people start actually investing big money according to a large-sh valuation, the company has already passed a lot of basic tests...

<comment><USER73> I was being facetious. My point was to deminstrate a business that is clearly not worth 5b, but calculate myself a $5b valuation. Most real workd examples are more grounded than mine but still these are imaginary numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> While Flickr has decent export tools (you just get your photos without tags, descriptions - literally anything else), Tumblr's have always been non- existent aside from an unofficial, macOS-only tool by Marco whose download link ([https://marco.org/2009/12/10/the-tumblr-backup-app-is- ready-...](https://marco.org/2009/12/10/the-tumblr-backup-app-is-ready-for- its-first-beta)) no longer works.

Anyone recommend a Tumblr export tool? The best, as far as I can tell, is jekyll-import ([http://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/](http://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/)), but I'm running into errors and getting weird results.

<comment><USER76> Wordpress's Tumblr importer reputedly works pretty well. YMMV and test first, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Off-the-cuff sentiment:

Axis of... something.

As a Verizon (now, specifically Wireless) customer, I've watched things go from "worth the price" to "what am I paying for?".

And Yahoo. Once proud, pioneering Yahoo.

And the remains of AOL are in the mix, as well?

I mostly feel this is somehow primarily going to shovel more crap at me.

</comment><comment><USER78> A fair amount of FreeBSD's infrastructure in hosted in Yahoo!'s datacenter in Santa Clara.

I'm curious how this will affect that relationship, if at all. It's not like Yahoo! is going to stop using FreeBSD overnight or anything but Verizon may decide they don't want third-party infrastructure in "their" datacenter.

</comment><comment><USER79> Every time I hear about Yahoo these days, I am reminded of the movie Frequency. At the end of the movie, the protagonist is driving a fancy mercedes with "YAHOO" as the license plate, implying investments in Yahoo made him rich. How ironic that since the movie came out, Yahoo started its decline.

[http://www.rexblog.com/2012/05/13/47671](http://www.rexblog.com/2012/05/13/47671)

</comment><comment><USER80> Basically everything Yahoo tried to do basically failed to earn income, and Google came along and did those things better.

Verizon can get more users from Yahoo and merge them with their AOL users. No doubt this bigger user base can be sold advertising to earn more money.

Firefox stopped supporting Google searches and switched me to Yahoo, will this Yahoo change no longer support Mozilla and be taken off the list?

<comment><USER47> Who are the AOL users? Are these folks in rural areas out of the reach of broadband? I've heard that there are still dial up users. This however would be odd with Verizon business plans as they have been divesting themselves of copper plant.

<comment><USER81> I know two people who are now on Verizon Fios and still start up their internet by going to AOL.com... They are about as far from a technical user as you can get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale What is likely to happen to shareholders of YHOO?

<comment><USER82> They will receive about $5.27[1] per share of YHOO stock they hold (or perhaps an equivalent amount of verizon stock if they do the deal that way) in exchange for the portion of the business being sold. Perhaps a bit less than this if there are transaction fees or taxes that must be paid.

They will then continue to hold their Yahoo shares which will represent their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan as well as Yahoo's patent portfolio.

1\. $5B / 948.25M outstanding shares ~= $5.27 per share.

<comment><USER73> Wait?! is that really how this works? What if people want to keep owning the online part of the business? Are they hooped? Seems like you could really royally screw shareholders like that (i.e. sell all the good parts and leave shareholders holding the bad parts).

Their share price is about 39 USD right now, that means they sold off a huge chunk of the biz for 13% (5.27/39.38 = 0.1338) of the stock's current valuation, right?

Forgive my incredulity, I genuinely didn't know how this kind of thing worked.

<comment><USER83> Deals like this are made by the board of directors, who represent the shareholders and have a fiduciary duty to them, as well as being shareholders themselves. So that's your guarantee of it not being a crap deal.

If you do a sum-of-the-parts valuation of Yahoo, you can end up seeing that the core business has a negative value. So holders of YHOO will trade something worth -1$bn for $5bn in cash, that's a pretty good deal.

<comment><USER84> Sum of parts for yahoo is a terrible way to calculate it's actual value. If you look at the balance sheet you'll see billions in deferred taxes. That relates directly towards selling alibaba and yahoo Japan in the open market. The play on yahoo now will be is if yahoo board members can save money on those taxes. If you think they can, you win. If not, stock is trading roughly around the fair price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Yahoo retains a market cap of $36 billion. The reason Verizon paid only $5 billion is that Yahoo Japan and Alibaba are not part of the deal.

> Yahoo owns about 35 percent of Yahoo Japan and 15 percent of Alibaba, two > overseas companies that have long dwarfed Yahoo in size.

</comment><comment><USER86> So less than 1/5 of a linkedin. Is Yahoo's core business really that bad?

<comment><USER87> What is Yahoo's core business these days?

<comment><USER88> Sounds like the core business is actually "Owner of Alibaba stock".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> The oil trader folks are going to be miffed, did Yahoo! Chat get axed in the deal?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826186)

</comment><comment><USER90> S __T — that is so going to mess up my AT &T email with Yahoo. Both my AT&T account and Yahoo email are intertwined.

<comment><USER80> Me too and my entire family has SBC/ATT email accounts.

Will it stay like the Rocketmail accounts did, or will they turn off service for legacy email to save money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Shouldn't it be banned? Like car factory owning dealerships? Or Movie Theaters owning Hollywood Studios??

<comment><USER92> > Or Movie Theaters owning Hollywood Studios??

Wanda Group, majority owner of AMC Theatres, also owns Legendary Entertainment. And AMC Theatres and Regal Entertainment Group co-own Open Road Films.

Stepping back in time, infamous low-budget studio Cannon Films owned hundreds of theaters.

> Like car factory owning dealerships?

Plenty of folks think that would be a good thing, e.g., [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.justice.gov/atr/economic-effects-state-bans- dire...](https://www.justice.gov/atr/economic-effects-state-bans-direct- manufacturer-sales-car-buyers)

[2] [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/competition- matters/20...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/competition- matters/2015/05/direct-consumer-auto-sales-its-not-just-about-tesla)

<comment><USER93> In my country, Car makers own dealerships, well actually only a small number of them, most Dealerships are franchises, so we have a mixed model that works pretty great for all involved. New makers that arrive to my country expand with their own dealerships, and after they gain traction they start to sell franchises, when well stablished car makers want to expand to new markets they usually do it with their own dealerships too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> How does this effect DuckDuckGo who just partnered with Yahoo??

Does Verizon share the same values as duckduckgo?

</comment><comment><USER95> If you're a current $YHOO shareholder, what does this deal mean for you?

</comment><comment><USER96> can someone explain why yahoo is worth a penny?

<comment><USER97> Trailing-edge users.

Trailing-edge users are those people we might otherwise make fun of, but they don't run adblockers and they don't constantly question the services they use. These people have used Yahoo Mail for a decade and will continue to for the rest of their lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Note: this acquisition does not include their $30+ Billion USD worth of shares in Alibaba and their stake in Yahoo Japan which is about $12 Billion USD.

<comment><USER99> What's the deal with that? How is Yahoo Japan worse $7B more than Yahoo Rest- of-World?

<comment><USER100> Yahoo Japan is an entirely separate company. It's actually an e-commerce platform closer to Amazon than Yahoo proper. Yahoo just has an investment and a cobranding agreement. Otherwise it's entirely separate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> This sounds a lot like News Corp's purchase of MySpace back in 2005.

</comment><comment><USER102> 5 billion dollars down the drain! Yahoo has excellent negotiators I must say!

</comment><comment><USER103> I misread that on my phone's tiny screen as a "$4,88" deal. Even then I thought it was a lot to pay for... er... whatever it is that Yahoo does these days.

</comment><comment><USER104> Mods: What was with all the other submissions being marked DUP?

<comment><USER105> They're ... duplicates...?

<comment><USER104> They weren't at the time, someone was marking all the early submissions then putting a link to a two day old thread. It looked like someone was picking what source would make the front page.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Internship ideas for a PHP developer in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Just left my job. I'm turning 19 in two weeks and really want to pick up some programming knowledge, including learning Python and C++. Right now all I know are Java, PHP, and CakePHP.<p>I am going to college and would love to intern for around 15 - 20 hours a week anywhere where I can program. I'm looking for something that pays around $250+ a week just to cover my expenses. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> We hire interns interested in learning Python and other technologies and they've learned a lot. Send me an email</comment>


Understanding Node.js Event-Driven Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/understanding-node-js-event-driven-architecture-223292fcbc2d <comment><USER2> I know I'm in the minority about this, but I still prefer callbacks. In one common case, you're only doing one or two async things in a given area of the code, and in that case the async primitive you choose doesn't really matter. In another common case, you're doing a lot of async things that depend on each other's outcomes. In that case, I find that it's easier to build a reusable pattern for handling the specific type of async interaction you have using callback-based functions, whereas with promises and async/await, you tend to try to write straight line code that can't be reused and hides the asynchrony in a way that makes it difficult to debug.

<comment><USER3> I'm just too hooked on the async.auto() pattern to give up callbacks. The ability to break a large flow down into functions and then use a dependency based structure to automatically execute the flow with the most optimal concurrency is incredible. And the resulting code is very clean, with each functional step in the flow living on the same indent level. Refactoring and adding new steps is very easy as you can just add a new dependency to one of the existing functions or add a new function that depends on one of the other functions.

[https://caolan.github.io/async/docs.html#auto](https://caolan.github.io/async/docs.html#auto)

<comment><USER4> That looks interesting - as long as you stay in JS land. Once you move into typescript this kind of system will be impossible to typecheck. Promises and their compositions will typecheck just naturally compared to that.

<comment><USER3> Yep, there is the autoInject which injects previous dependent functions return values as parameters instead of as properties of a context object, so that may help some, but it still breaks typechecks.

I wish that promises had a concept similar to this. It's simply too annoying for me to manually refactor a bunch of Promise.all() calls to manually adjust the concurrency of the logic flow compared to using the dependency pattern of async.auto().

And based on what I've seen this is a common problem in both async functions, generators, and promises. Since it is difficult to properly execute a tree of functional steps with the maximal concurrency I see code all the time which just runs async functions or promises in a series instead of taking advantage of the ability to concurrently execute two branches of the tree at the same time.

<comment><USER5> Have you looked at [http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/api/promise.map.html](http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/api/promise.map.html) \- which allows you to control the concurrency of Promises easily?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can you understand the node event driven architecture without mentioning the node event loop? You can't.

The event loop is not something you can be abstracted from, it is a core component of node that you need to be aware of all the time.

If you have long lived code within an event loop tick you will starve the I/O and everything will start timing out.

Then, freecodecamp (and every other coding camp) do an incredible disservice to society by telling everyone that ever touched a computer for 5 minutes that they're "full-stack engineers", a denomination that is in itself very questionable too.

It's like calling myself a veterinarian because I walked my dog, or calling myself a chef because I fried an egg. These camps promote a very oversimplified vision of what it means to be a software engineer.

<comment><USER7> That's why Python does the contrary and let you use the event loop explicitly. But then the problem is that you have to deal with it even for simple things.

I think the balance is missing here.

<comment><USER8> I think the balance is node, which allows an implicit event loop (via async/await), or an explicit event loop (via using coroutines as standins for async functions and manually yielding them).

<comment><USER6> There is "the" event loop in node. [http://docs.libuv.org/en/v1.x/loop.html](http://docs.libuv.org/en/v1.x/loop.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last time I checked (~ a year ago admittedly), the node.js api itself (e.g. fs) was still mostly callback-based and had little built-in support for promises. You either had to resort to 3rd-party wrapper modules or wrap the calls yourself, resulting in a lot of clutter in your code.

Does anyone know if the situation has changed by now and you can obtain promises from core functions directly?

<comment><USER10> The situation is still that callbacks are king in the node core libraries. But there is some talk about how to move forward[0], however I don't think there has been much headway as of the last time I really looked into it about 6-months ago.

That being said, there are some fantastic libraries which you can use as a drop-in replacement for the core libraries provide a promise based API, but nothing in core directly.

[0] [https://github.com/nodejs/NG/issues/25](https://github.com/nodejs/NG/issues/25)

<comment><USER11> Can you recommend please some of these non CB based libraries?

<comment><USER12> supertest-as-promised is pretty great for testing purposes.

<comment><USER13> Regular supertest supports promises.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bidinfinity – Free eBay research and auction analytics platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.bidinfinity.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> My brother and I started working on this project at the start of this year. Originally we wanted this to be a private service that only we would use. In short, we would automate scraping online auctions, and have discounted listings sent to us in a text message, where we could then bid on the item to sell it for profit. However, things didn't go exactly as planned, as we were very new to using API's ( and coding in general ) and ran into a lot of bugs. The code lay dormant for a couple of months, until we had an idea that we could re-create it into a service that provides analytics for online auctions. There are not really any other websites, that we are aware of, that offer everything that we offer, such as sales volume and market share etc. We are planning to keep developing the website until it is at a place where we are happy with it. I would really appreciate any feedback and any comments. Thanks</comment>


WWDC16: HLS Supports Fragmented MP4 – And Gets MPEG-DASH Compatible - <AUTHOR> https://bitmovin.com/hls-news-wwdc-2016/ <comment><USER2> This is great news! It will allow to hugely simplify the encoding and distributing workflows, with the same fMP4 segments for HLS, DASH, Smooth...</comment>


The Movie You Should See Instead of "Interstellar" - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/sunshine-vs-interstellar

<comment><USER2> The author makes the case that the 2007 film Sunshine is a better alternative to the recent release Interstellar. Personally, I couldn't get past the implausible premise of humans attempting to reignite the sun with a giant bomb that's also a ship.

<comment><USER3> Iirc the idea was that there was a quantum black hole in the sun and the bomb needed to knock it out of the sun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoyed Interstellar. In fact, I'm going to go see it again. The author sounds to me like a movie hipster.

You should go see it.</comment>


Cleverer Automata Exist - <AUTHOR> https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/cleverer-automata-exist/ <comment><USER2> Is this refuting or extending Church-Turing? Or something else?</comment>


Magnetic tape to the rescue - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590758-information-storage-60-year-old-technology-offers-solution-modern

<comment><USER2> "Of the 50 petabytes of data held on hard disk, however, it loses a few hundred terabytes in the same period."

Wha? Loses?</comment>


Our Skulls Didn't Evolve to be Punched - <AUTHOR> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/10/our-skulls-didnt-evolve-to-be-punched/ <comment><USER2> There's a point-by-point reply from one of the authors, David Carrier, in the comments:

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/10/our- skull...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/10/our-skulls-didnt- evolve-to-be-punched/#comment-96986)

<comment><USER3> Carrier's hypothesis is interesting and well argued, but only time will tell if it stands up to further scrutiny. This is the scientific process. Yong, on the other hand, is just defending his own preconceptions. While I agree with him that the established theory of changing diet/changing dentition is very well supported, Carrier's theory doesn't necessarily contradict it. Both of these theories could have shaped the faces of our ancestors and, eventually, us.

I would love to see models testing how well the skulls of different human ancestors and humans themselves stand up to blunt blows, both head-on and oblique ones. It's possible that the skulls of modern humans, despite being more gracile, might perform surprisingly well thanks to the force-spreading properties of our parabolic dental arcades. i.e. If you hit a human in the side of the jaw you're hitting a self-buttressing arc of bone and teeth. If you hit the U-shaped jaw of an australopithecine on the side, you're hitting a straight wall.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Yong, on the other hand, is just defending his own preconceptions._

When I take into account that the author of the submitted article is science writer on evolution topics Brian Switek and not general science writer Ed Yong, I wonder what defending of preconceptions is going on in your comment.

AFTER EDIT: After I first posted this, I looked up how the first attested use of stone tools by early hominins compares in time with the hypothesized change in facial features discussed in the article, and I see there is some dispute about the very earliest regular use of stone tools, but that definitely precedes the emergence of _Homo sapiens_ by far, and may go back to the time of some of the later australopithecines. Using stone tools as weapons (even just picking up and throwing rocks) was surely a game-changer in fights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As human ancestors became more adept at tool usage, one would expect any evolved skull defenses to crumble.

No amount of skull reinforcement will stand up to a solid strike from a club. And even if it did, it wouldn't matter - our huge brains concuss easily, meaning that even if the bone structure itself remained intact following a club blow, the brain it protects would be quite damaged.

Human weapon use has been discussed as one reason why humans are less sexually dominant than many other primate relatives. Beta chimps don't have the ability to easily murder the reigning alpha chimp in his sleep. Humans do.

<comment><USER5> This, along with the fragility of the bones in the human hand and the hardness of the skull, make it pretty clear that we aren't evolved for punching or being punched. Boxing was developed specifically to _get around_ the many problems with punching: protecting the hands from being broken, and developing defensive strategies to avoid blows from even _padded_ fists. Barehanded boxing is worse. If you want to hurt someone with impunity and ensure you win, grab a stick.

If anything, the evolution of humans as bipedal creatures should have made the _legs_ into the weapons of choice, since they are not only stronger and larger but can be wielded with momentum for increased force. But the legs make for poor weapons because all the vulnerable targets are up high. While the most direct way to hurt someone is actually a straight movement towards someone, our limbs are designed to swing and swivel, not shoot out forward.

If hands were for punching, then the tissues attaching our arms to our bodies would have been designed to issue strikes faster and more powerfully. Currently it's very difficult for humans to issue incredibly rapid strikes with power; we have to use our lats, core, legs, and hips to rotate our bodies to increase momentum in a punch and line up the shoulder with the target, lest you deliver with reduced power. In contrast, kicks can be issued just as fast and with greater power, so one would think that naturally humans would have gravitated to kicking each other rather than punching, but the opposite seems to be the case.

IMHO, the most ideal strike a human can give without injuring themselves would be from the shin or heel. If you look at animals that don't have sharp teeth or claws, often they'll use their hind legs in a kicking motion to provide the most powerful hit, while moving their sensitive head/neck/chest away from the target. A few human groups developed fighting styles this way, but for millenia we've still been fighting standing up. I can only assume this is because we got so used to being bipedal that we adapted our fighting to it. I think our evolution probably prompted us to develop new ways of fighting that were comfortable to our bodies, rather than vice versa.

<comment><USER6> _> "IMHO, the most ideal strike a human can give without injuring themselves would be from the shin or heel. If you look at animals that don't have sharp teeth or claws, often they'll use their hind legs in a kicking motion to provide the most powerful hit, while moving their sensitive head/neck/chest away from the target. A few human groups developed fighting styles this way, but for millenia we've still been fighting standing up. I can only assume this is because we got so used to being bipedal that we adapted our fighting to it."_

Most fights between people end up on the ground very quickly. Optimizing for full-stroke punches and kicks effectively forces your strategy to be "debilitate the other guy before he can get inside and close". The difference between humans and the non-toothed/clawed animals you mention is that humans have arms and hands that can defend against the slower knockout blows you mention.

Wrestling is a more accurate sports approximation for how humans "naturally" fight (assuming 1-on-1).

<comment><USER4> >>Wrestling is a more accurate sports approximation for how humans "naturally" fight (assuming 1-on-1).

Disagree: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_warfare](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_warfare)

<comment><USER6> The context of the parent was violence in the absence of weaponry.

<comment><USER7> How is that context relevant? There are rocks and sticks on the savanna. Humans are tool-users, so their most natural fighting techniques use tools.

<comment><USER8> Depends. Two guys who just want to fight are probably going to have a shoving match which will end when one gets pinned and the other guy gets pulled off.

Two groups of guys who have some need to fight over are more likely to use tools.

<comment><USER9> If two people are having a shoving match, they don't really want to fight. A fight implies you want to hurt the other person, not escalate the situation until one of you gathers the courage to strike the other.

<comment><USER8> True. It only takes one person to turn a fist fight into a shoving match. Grab on, and keep moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked at an oral surgeons office for a few years. Everytime we performed jaw surgery on someone who was in a fight, 9/10 times they also had a broken hand.

The hand wasn't designed for punching either.

<comment><USER11> I've studied Martial Arts for about 12 years. You're totally right. It takes years of training to learn how to properly throw a punch such that you harm your opponent and do not break your own hand.

<comment><USER12> And part of that is not attacking targets where you're likely to significantly injure yourself as well as your opponent. There's a lot to be said for not punching someone in the jaw.

<comment><USER8> and that part about the right way to hit different parts of the body.

a slap is almost as hard, and won't hurt the slapper.

<comment><USER13> A slap is no where near as hard. Surface area of an open hand vs surface area of 2-3 knuckles. Think hammer vs fly-swat.

<comment><USER14> It is still possible to knock someone out with a slap. Some bouncers in the UK recommend it as a) it doesn't hurt your hand so much and b) telling the police you just slapped someone doesn't sound so bad. Plenty of videos on youtube of people being knocked out with a slap.

<comment><USER13> being knocked out is related to the brain hitting the walls of the skull, it has very little to do with what caused that. Slap, Fist, head-butt, concrete, car crash etc.

But I was responding to the claim slapping is equivalent to punching.

<comment><USER8> Depends on the goal. You're right about it being less likely to break a bone (on the target) or cause bleeding (again, on the target), but a solid slap will cause similar secondary impacts (brain hitting the skull)

I'll take a KO after some body shots and two working hands over a bloodied up opponent and a broken hand. There are much better tools to use against a skull, like elbows (less delicate than hands), but you need to account for range and movement.

<comment><USER13> You are arguing hypothetical outcomes, I'm arguing applied force.

We are kind of talking past each other.

<comment><USER8> Just so we're talking about the same kind of slap. If I had to guess, and I can only guess at this point, you're thinking... like... a slap, a swing with an arm.

I'm talking more like an open handed punch, complete with torso rotation and a pivot. Like a hook, just no fist.

oh, oh, got another one.

Look into the impulse of the strike, and the pressure area. Here, you're going to see a big difference, in favor of your position.

You'll have the same amount of force, probably with a significant increase in the speed that force transmits into the struck area. You're right. Past a certain point, though, someone doesn't get /more/ unconscious.

And, to anticipate your possible response, yes, they can end up /more/ unconscious to the point of death, but, cement does a much better job of that than any human body part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's silly to me about the original argument is that the authors think that our ancestors fought in a kind of "put your dukes up" kind of fighting where only punches are thrown. While not an expert in the subject, I feel it's safe to assume that fights for mates and territory where the loser dies would not be fist fights but rather full-on fights to the death using every biological weapon available, including feet and teeth.

<comment><USER16> Such duels are often heavily ritualized, they aren't necessarily lacking in rules. The victor doesn't want to kill the opponent, they want to prove their social standing. For example wolves have a submissive signal they can show, that stops a fight in the middle, avoiding serious injury or death. If every such duel ended in a death, the population would quickly shrink.

<comment><USER17> I think that winning is what is important in an on-going war that is fought on a daily basis, the prize being females/territory.

I base my opinion on the antics of the foxes fighting outside my window right now. I am fairly sure I won't find a dead fox on my doorstep in the morning and I am fairly sure tomorrow will be another chapter in the on-going duel. Their fighting is truly no-holds barred however killing is not necessary to win females/territory. A given territory only supports a given quantity of a given species, a given territory can only be defended up to a certain area, so there is no concern needed to only fight so far lest the population/gene pool be diminished.

As for us humans and how we fight, we are pack animals that can augment our fights with words. This applies okay in pub brawl situations, however, we have no hesitation at all when it comes to wiping out rival tribes. This has applied historically, I think that Hitler bloke was quite keen on wiping out the Jewish tribe and, although worded differently, Bush and Blair had no qualms when it came to wiping out tribes of people in more recent times. We also have class hierarchy so the rich have no problems sending millions of their own off to certain death, e.g. WW1, because they are a different tribe within a tribe. Concern for population depletion really matters not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I do not want to contradict the research by this, but our heads certainly aren't all too well adapted to punching. The brain is to a large extent floating quite freely in the cerebrospinal fluid in the skull, and when the head is punched it experiences an effect similar to a passenger in a suddenly breaking car - it is smashed against the skull as a result of inertia, often resulting in permanent brain trauma:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_pugilistica](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_pugilistica)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopath...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy)

In fact, many people die from just a single punch to the head. They become unconscious and fall on the concrete, for example:

[http://www.smh.com.au/national/90-killed-in-singlepunch- assa...](http://www.smh.com.au/national/90-killed-in-singlepunch-assaults- since-2000-20131201-2yjtr.html)

<comment><USER19> It's worth noting that both Dementia Pugilistica and CTE seem to take a decade or longer to appear in affected individuals, which means it is unlikely that they would have a significant impact on an individual's ability to reproduce (especially if winning a fist fight led to immediate opportunities to mate).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. I would think that pre-modern humans would be unlikely to strike each other with very much force, simply because they were so strong that one or two blows would debilitate if not kill the opponent.

The Neanderthals are thought to be many times stronger than modern humans, judging by the thickness of their bones and the size of the muscle attachment sites, as well as their likely lifestyles in the brutal Pleistocene era.

If one male were to strike another with full force, it would more than likely cause concussion if not death. In those days, you couldn't afford to lose a healthy male from the tribe, even one you're pissed off at for wanting to mate with your woman.

Probably ditto for other ancestral variants such as homo erectus. They weren't exactly sophisticated, but you have to logically assume that a population that tolerated high levels of violence would be more likely to die out. A population that tended to resort to symbolic confrontations like shouting and gesturing and jumping would be more successful.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't their increased strength and size also offset the increased force of the blows to make it about the same as the current situation?

In my head I'm comparing it to something like: If a 250 lb NFL linebacker tackled me at full speed I am pretty sure I would break multiple bones. But NFL running backs take that kind of beating 40-50 times a game, 20 games a year.

<comment><USER22> Not everything scales the same. I suspect that heavyweight boxers, for example, can hurt each other a lot more than featherweight boxers.

<comment><USER23> This is actually why I much prefer watching lower weight MMA fights to the bigger guys. The fights tend to go on longer and are more dynamic. With the bigger guys, one solid punch to the head and it's often game over.

[http://fightnomics.com/blog/ufc-finishes-by-weight- class-201...](http://fightnomics.com/blog/ufc-finishes-by-weight-class-2013/)

<comment><USER12> Interesting stats. I'm not sure it completely explains the higher weight divisions though, since if you look at the rate at which the heavier fighters get tired and start lowering their guard, it's much higher than in the lower weight divisions, leaving them more susceptible to the KO/TKO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is dumb. If a single human survived a punch that otherwise would have killed them before breeding age than Yes, we did "evolve" to handle punches.

Evolution is not driven, it is all the little things that worked over a long period of time. The sum of all factors.

There will be no smoking gun that says we did this or that for this or that, only our modern form that says "this worked".

<comment><USER25> Did our feet evolve to avoid slipping on banana peels?

<comment><USER26> If any person has ever been saved from dying from slipping on a banana peel by the shape of their foot, then the answer is yes.

<comment><USER27> How would you determine whether the cause of them not dying was 'the shape of their foot', and not any of thousands of other features you could arbitrarily pick, such as 'the balance of their skeleton', or 'their gait', or 'the thickness of their skull' or 'the responsiveness of their reflexes'?

<comment><USER28> You don't and neither does evolution.

All that the DNA knows is that it got into the next generation and it will keep doing whatever it was doing before plus or minus a few small random mutations.

<comment><USER27> Exactly, so these just so stories are just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Honestly, this article just feels like an overreaction / rant the other direction. That there is No way that fist combat could have affected skull morphology. Like alot of evolution, it mostly comes down to a) does a trait make you more likely to have sex / better or more effective sex? b) does a trait make it more likely you'll survive to have sex? I find it hard with this amount of evidence to say that fistfights could be a driving trait, that would single-handedly shape survival / mating statistics, but I could see it being a contributor, something that helps other factors dominate survival / mating statistics. Perhaps our skull features are mostly for effective eating, but have an ancillary benefit to survival / mating when it comes to fights.

<comment><USER21> I don't know, to me he presents at least one pretty compelling point indicating that point. The species which exhibit the exaggerated facial features could not even form a fist with which to fight.

<comment><USER30> He said that punches driving facial evolution was fine as a hypothesis, it just needs evidence and he hasn't seen any.

His characterization of this as a just-so story, glib and light on evidence, doesn't just accurately describe this one specific claim; there are dozens or hundreds more just like it. On any given day, you can probably find an equally vacuous story about evolutionary psychology in some newspaper. It's a lame excuse for science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _" Given the very few fossils of the australopith face, I am not optimistic that evidence of…"_

That is the primary reason you shouldn't put much faith in anything you read about most early humanoids, especially not the parts that reach general audiences. We simply cannot know much from the samples we have. Yet, scientists feel the pressure of having to publish, and cannot just publish new measurements, so they hypothise away.

This, like many in the field, mostly is a "we cannot rule out that" paper; all evidence is circumstantial. It may be truly insightful or it may not be, but we simply cannot know at the moment.

Can we blame the scientists? No, but I wished we educated fewer in this field and/or told those working in the field "feel free to think, study and experiment for a few decades and publish something when you are certain you have a convincing argument"

On the other hand, it is intriguing to read about the latest ideas in the field, just like it is to read about our new thinking about dinosaurs, even if experience tells us our ideas about both will swing heavily (in a few decades, what color will dinosaurs be? Will they be warm-blooded? Will all of them have feathers?)

<comment><USER32> There's nothing wrong with publishing new theoretically plausible ideas. They just need to be properly qualified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I recently dismantled a human skull, cutting the entire mass into 2mm squares. The face is definitely one of the more delicate bits.

I suppose the argument could be made that it is a crumple zone designed to absorb shocks that might otherwise damage the brain. However, it seems far more likely that like the rest of the skull the face evolved to facilitate the birth of a bipedal creature with a ginormous brain.

Most studies of rapid human encephalization and obstetrics also seem to lean towards this conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER34> My dad often said, "Fits like a fist in an eye". So he was right or wrong depending on your point of view.

</comment><comment><USER35> I honestly can't even read the article because that GIF is so annoying.

I have _two_ different GIF-stopping extensions and neither of them works because of the way the elements are nested (I guess).

I'm actually so irritated that I'm binding giphy to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file.

/rant

<comment><USER36> Clearly ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearly/iooicodkii...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearly/iooicodkiihhpojmmeghjclgihfjdjhj?hl=en)) is pretty effective for a wide range of internet reading irritations. It even kind of works on G+

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In Demonic Males ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males)) there is a section that highlights punching as a particularly chimpanzee (and human) activity.

</comment><comment><USER37> What te hell?

Evolution doesn't work to achieve a goal. It isn't a goal-seaking mechanism.

Are these people getting grant money to pretend they are doing science?

Unbelievable.

Somebody send them copies of "The Blind Watchmaker".

</comment><comment><USER38> Having lived up north in t'UK, I would say some peoples bodies have evolved in interesting ways. Drunken fights seem common here, and seems evolution has provided enough protection.

Also, evolution seems to have made them quite supple, evidenced with the "T'Northern Yoga", which is basically the awkward body poses they pull off when passed out drunk in the Town Square.

</comment><comment><USER39> Or the aliens didnt allow it to evolve so that they can come one day and crush it ... x( ...

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting article, but better for reddit than hackernews

<comment><USER41> The same content is always on both sites. Why are you making a distinction?

<comment><USER40> I know you're probably joking, but on hacker news I usually don't have to sort though a bunch of "interesting" articles to find relevant news. Another distinction is that I read hackernews on the clock, but not reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Uh yea, that's why we punch people in the head. It's exploiting a weakness.

</comment><comment><USER43> Article is dumb.

Early humans had rocks, they did not need fists.

And reinforced skull is good in any case, when living in wilderness.</comment>


GoPro finally debuts its portable Karma drone - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/gopro-karma/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER2> For that price you can get a DJI p3p which has lightbridge, a proven gimbal, longer battery life etc. The main advantage this has it has it is a little more portable. I think they should have sold it for 500 bucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Plus, the range is worse by approximately 80% (depending on the DJI model), the battery life and maximum speed are lower by approximately 20%. With the camera included, it is 50% more expensive than a Phantom 3 Advanced.

On top of that the field of view of a GoPro camera is too wide for a drone, DJI have a much more adequate setup. GoPro should have at least supplied a small lens that would fix this problem.

As for portability, assuming that one would be using each brand's backpack to transport each drone, they are actually very similar in size:

GoPro: 540 x 320 x 150 mm DJI: 447 x 318 x 229

GoPro would have a much better chance if they had entered the market at the right price (~500 USD) and emphasised the qualities they are known for - durability and reliability.

<comment><USER3> > _As for portability, assuming that one would be using each brand 's backpack > to transport each drone, they are actually very similar in size: GoPro: 540 > x 320 x 150 mm DJI: 447 x 318 x 229_

That's when the GoPro is folded in the bag?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's a comparison of the dimensions of the two backpacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something that bothers me about these drone cameras is that when people are using them in remote spots (i.e. the top of a hill or a lake at the base of a mountain in a national park) they generate a TON of noise. I went backpacking at Jefferson Park this summer and was woken up to the serene sounds of a quad- copter flying over our little lakeside spot. Lovely. Hopefully it doesn't scare off wildlife.

<comment><USER5> Report it to the park's ranger. UAV operations are not allowed within U.S. National Parks.

<comment><USER6> Technically, I believe it is legal to fly a drone into a National Park, as long as you are not inside of the park while operating.

From the NPS website, "Launching, landing, or operating an unmanned aircraft from or on lands and waters administered by the National Park Service within the boundaries of [insert name of park] is prohibited except as approved in writing by the superintendent."

Because the FAA controls jurisdiction over the airspace, the NPS can't prevent UAV flights, but, they can regulate the operators.

<comment><USER7> Then what is the meaning of the distinction "from or on" in the quote you provided?

<comment><USER8> "from or on" means exactly that.

"in the airspace above" is a separate distinction, and one they do not have control over.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. I had never considered donating and helping the NPS setup flight restrictions in their airspace until this moment.

<comment><USER8> To the best of my understanding, the FAA maintains exclusive control over all airspace, so you'd want to donate specifically to get some collaboration going.

<comment><USER9> Right, exactly! The NPS would have to request permanent TFR status from the FAA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The actual gopro site for it at [https://shop.gopro.com/karma](https://shop.gopro.com/karma)

</comment><comment><USER6> The problem with the go pro in a drone is that you lose either 1) the durability/waterproofness of a go pro case (the key selling point for me), or 2) the ability to live view through it reliably. If go pro had an interface to use their normal go-pro mounts on a drone, but had a special case with a control port passthrough, they'd be in good shape. It is attractive to know that if I crash my drone, at least the camera won't die.

This looks like it gets neither good range/quality or durability, unless the camera is one of the "spare parts" that their site so glibly advertises.

Having flown DJI phantom 3s, and some custom drones to lift Canon 5D3s, I can tell you that the biggest source of nervousness in flying for me is recovering the camera. With a DJI, I am willing to take closer, riskier shots that often end up better. With the 5d3 and now 5DSr, I can get MUCH better shots, but it is risky. I suppose I would feel different if it were professional and I had full coverage insurance.

<comment><USER11> Huh? The new GoPro Hero 5 is waterproof without a case and fits on the drone...

<comment><USER6> Ah, I missed that. My go pro, the hero 4 black, is not waterproof and currently fits in that drone as well. Additionally, go pros have been used on 3DR drones for a while, but without the benefits of being waterproof. The case also affords protection for the lens, which the drone does not allow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would appear the drone is only capable of filming fit, attractive people.

<comment><USER13> Unlike those other marketing videos that use exclusively unattractive people

<comment><USER3> In fact that would be a nice thing to champion.

Unlike the trend that has most corporate ads show token ethnic people for "diversity" in numbers non representative of their percentages in the population and absolutely not representative of their corporate presence -- whereas e.g. the real Board of the company is 9 white men and an asian.

Non attractive people, on the other hand, or regular people, so to speak, are the vast majority -- fat, short, too tall, too skinny, etc.

So it would nice to have all ads display "attractiveness diversity". E.g. if a panel of independent "judges" deems that the people in the ad are too attractive (e.g. all model level pretty), the ad gets canned.

This would help with tons of people's complexes, things like anorexia, teenage anxiety, etc.

<comment><USER14> Marketing is often based on aspiration. Using the most attractive people doing the most exciting things is what sells for things like this. You would be willfully throwing out ROI to promote "feelings".... Tough sell.

<comment><USER3> > _You would be wilfully throwing out ROI to promote "feelings".... Tough > sell._

Hence the mention of panels that can axe non conforming ads, etc. I'm not talking about voluntary adherence to those advertising principles, rather something like regulation.

<comment><USER15> Might as well show your gopro languishing in a desk drawer for most of the year except for those uber exciting pool/beach shots you take with it ;) marketing is aspirational, by all means include fit attractive people of all creeds and colors but the message falls flat if you try to include signal noise just for the sake of being inclusive

<comment><USER3> > _But the message falls flat if you try to include signal noise just for the > sake of being inclusive_

That would be another benefit. Less BS consumption, better trade deficit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "After a planned early 2016 planned release, Karma is finally ready to take > flight."

"Finally" seems harsh to me in this context.

<comment><USER3> 6 months in tech are like 5 years in regular life...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> After all these years (yes, all 3-4 of them), you'd expect the battery life to be higher, like say 1 hour? Every drone seems to be stuck at between 20min - 30min of battery life.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does it have vision features like DJIs? Like follow and track a moving object

<comment> semi-extrinsic It doesn't look like it, no.

Shameless plug for a buddy of mine's startup: the Staaker drone does autonomous follow and track (based on radio signals, not vision), makes really sweet stabilised videos with different hover/follow patterns, and has gotten the best reviews out of all the action sports drones launched so far. It's almost like having a personal helicopter camera crew, but without the $10k/hour price tag.

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

<comment><USER19> Nice! How does it compare to the Lily -- [https://www.lily.camera/](https://www.lily.camera/)

It never shipped, but just curious

<comment> at-fates-hands Most drones do have this kind of functionality.

Even the 3DR Iris+ (which isn't supported anymore) has these features and you can still find it for $200-$300 less than the GoPro. The only problem is since its not supported, parts are harder to come by. The 3DR Solo is the replacement and they're supporting this model exclusively.

I believe all the Yuneec drones have all these features and well under the GoPro price point. For a few more dollars, you can get a lot more drone with they Yuneec Typhoon H: [https://yuneec.com/en_US/products/typhoon/h/overview.html](https://yuneec.com/en_US/products/typhoon/h/overview.html)

Just a personal preference, but I've heard DJI has the worst customer service. When I was in the market for my first drone (2014), I was shocked at all the forum posts about their customer service:

[http://www.phantompilots.com/threads/horrible-dji- customer-s...](http://www.phantompilots.com/threads/horrible-dji-customer- service.19877/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/djiphantom/comments/3b2jvp/honestly...](https://www.reddit.com/r/djiphantom/comments/3b2jvp/honestly_how_bad_is_the_dji_customer_service/)

Maybe they've gotten better, but I stuck with 3DR and have had good experiences with them. They respond to emails really fast, if I call, they're patient with me and have helped me out a few jams where my drone was acting up. I didn't have to ship it to them, they walked me through the troubleshooting until it was fixed.

Full disclosure: I own two 3DR drones and a Yuneec Q500. Both companies are US based companies with US based customer support.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Web based database design - <AUTHOR>

I remember someone advertised a web site where user could create the database schema online; create tables, manage their relationships (similar to ms Access "Relationship") etc. I have searched for hours but couldn't find it. I will apprecite any help about this. <comment><USER2> blist?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your reply; no, that one was something much more simpler. I was looking for something kids can use to design tables unserstand their relationships etc. I'm sure it wasnt flash. Havy use of javascript , I think.</comment></comment>


I won the green card lottery (well, not really) - <AUTHOR> http://alienfluid.posterous.com/the-us-department-of-state-sent-this-message

<comment><AUTHOR> The email is quite predatory and I suspect quite a few vulnerable people are going to fall for it. Just goes to show how sophisticated and targeted spam mail is getting (no longer do you just get emails for V1AGRA!).

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, that really is quite sophisticated. I was almost fooled by the first page, all the way up to when they discretely asked you to wire money to the UK.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Original email with headers: <http://alienfluid.com/email.txt></comment>


From Traditional Security Perimeter to Software-Defined Perimeter - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/zero-trust-network-in-the-cloud-from-traditional-security-perimeter-to-software-defined-perimeter-d0153zil <comment><USER2> > browser-based threats, including threats from malicious websites, are > nullified.

I'm skeptical about that.

How does this keep traditional browser-initiated 0day chains from compromising the machine?</comment>