End of the Road for Xmarks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=1886 <comment><USER3> Man, I'm gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work & windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I'd have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I'm not alone.

It's really unfortunate that they won't even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I'm sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to create a profitable business.

<comment><USER4> I cannot comprehend how they aren't even going to TRY to charge for ANYTHING.

How the fuck do they think this whole cash flow thing works?

2 million users, and they don't even put out a god damn paypal donation widget? Show ads? Freemium anything? Charge something outrageous, lose 90% of your 2 million users, and you'll still have a significant monthly income.

This is just the stupidest news I've heard in a while. Zero respect for these guys, they clearly don't have even a shred of business sense.

<comment><USER5> Zero respect for the people behind the service, really? I have zero respect for your comment but I stop well short of saying I have zero respect for you.

Things are probably not that simple. They have investors. It may not be a case of "Hey, we can make a business that pays for three guys to eat." Perhaps their investors need to see a certain minimum return or else the investors would rather close up shop.

Maybe they have a better buysiness idea and it's better to close this one and put 100% of their energy into the new idea. Have you heard of justin.tv? IIRC, a large number of people on reddit were criticizing Justin and his partners for selling their previous startup on eBay. They got some money and started again with a blank piece of paper.

I am not saying that you're wrong about what to do given the information you have. I am saying that (1) It is difficult to be absolutely certain that they are making the worst possible business decision in this case given how little we know, and (2) Even if they are making the worst possible business decision, how does this extend to having zero respect for the complete human beings who laugh, love, play, and built something many people value?

p.s. The company is for sale. If you have an opinion of how it ought to be run, there's no better way to make your case than to buy it for a fire sale price and run it. In all honesty, I would be absolutely delighted if you were to make a go of it. That would be a very inspiring story.

<comment><USER5> p.p.s. I was exaggerating when I said "zero respect for your comment." I was just trying to make a point about the difference between criticizing someone's point and criticizing them personally. But now that I think about it, I was a little rude. I apologize.

<comment><USER4> I'm a big boy on the internet, I don't mind a flame at all, especially in response to a provocative post.

If you spend years, and millions of dollars, and don't make _any_ attempt to bring _any_ money in the door, I think you are making a mockery of the entire startup culture.

It's a business. What part of that do they not get?

Maybe maybe maybe, maybe they could try being a business and not seriously expect that some magical revenue stream is going to come knocking at their door with sacks full of cash.

Who funded these people? How can you seem to be so technically competent and marketing savvy, and not have a shred of business sense?

Are they going to go "focus on the next thing"?

Do they really deserve to be given funding for anything?

I think if you take someone else's money under the pretense of creating a business, you have some responsibility to the entire system to actually _try_ to create a business. And they haven't!

<comment><USER5> I wasn't flaming you.sifting through your follow-up, I find a few interesting items. First, indeed who did fund them? Have you asked the investors if they are unhappy? Ifnthe investors are unhappy, what went wrong with the governance? Why are we even assuming management is to blame? How do we know what happened? Maybe the finders wanted to generate cash flow but were nixed by the investors who wanted growth at the expense of revenues in the hope of being bought by Google?

Another thing. What is this responsibility you speak of? A funded startup exists to find an equilibrium between the needs of the investors and the needs of the founders. Nobody else gets a say in what happens. They have zero obligation to do what you want them to do if you aren't sitting on their board.

It sounds to me like you have strong opinions about what is and isn't the right way to do a startup. You might be right, but still there's something disquieting about taking a culture based on disruption and revolution and writing rules for what is and isn't the right way to revolt against the existing business structure.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, maybe the investors told them not to generate cash flow. In which case, the investors are twits and deserve to lose their investment. My point is, whoever made that decision has been hitting the silicon valley kool-aid way too hard.

(Do you really think I'm saying they are responsible to my opinions? You seem like a smarter guy than that.)

I do have strong opinions about the right way to borrow money from other people:

When someone like Xmarks.com flops, it makes startups look bad to the 2 million users who are going to think twice about storing their data on someone's servers. It makes startups look bad to people who would like to make a return on their investment.

You can disrupt and revolt and rethink and metaprogram all you'd like, especially if you're sitting on VC funding. You can call cashflow an "existing business structure", but at some point, eventually, I think you need to charge something for something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it's hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free_

After taking so many knocks, it's easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn't involve a large engineering investment - <USER2> charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need to move on anyway, you might as well. Those users might appreciate the value of what they have now that it is about to disappear...

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's because it creates an obligation for them to continue the service for a reasonable amount of time.

<comment><USER6> Fair point, but how about this: they've committed to 3 months anyway, so why not try charging for 3 months? Just don't touch the money coming in during that period. If they reach the end of that time, and it's not working, issue refunds and shut down. There is some cost to this (transaction fees etc), but seemingly minimal compared to other running costs they've already committed to (because if it fails, the number of transactions will necessarily be low).

They might struggle to get people to sign up when there is doubt about the service surviving. But that cat is already out of the bag, and as I alluded to earlier they could also play this to their advantage (charging now is not a money-grab, it's simply a matter of keeping a valuable service viable).

<comment><USER8> I agree 100%. This whole thing reminds me of reddit's recent budget issues and how their appeal resulted in a huge boost for them. Just looking at the comments on this blog post make me think that simply including a 'paypal donation' link at the bottom of this blog post ALONE would have generated enough funds to keep them running for for some time.

This is a bit of a harsh thing to say... but is it possible they were not able to find a business model due to lack of trying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They are failing because they can't even _ask_ people to pay for their service. They skipped that and went directly to we are shutting down our servers in 90 days.

DHH needs to give them some scream therapy about business models. The one he does about asking your customers to pay for your service.

<comment><USER10> I am now going to repeat what you said, but with more feeling:

 _We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it's hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free._

Ask me! Ask me! Why don't you ask me ?!!!

Native firefox syncing isn't going to help me sync my Firefox bookmarks to my iPhone, is it? Maybe that is worth something to me, ya know?

Isn't it completely ironic, that on top of HN right now is PG's Y-combinator screed, with how important it is to launch as soon as possible with as little functionality as you can in order to let users guide you to what they really want? So users are okay for telling you what features they want but they are not okay for telling you whether they want to pay ??

I mean okay, maybe I am a complete aberration in being willing to pay a few bucks for xmarks. But _they didn't even ask_. Maybe there would have been enough other aberrations out there to keep it going as a low-key low-turnover service.

This is the thing that bothers me with the start-up world - it seems so bi- modal: make it big or go bust. What about a quiet, modest little service that can pay for itself and maybe a bit extra?

Bah. I'm sad.

<comment><USER11> FWIW, Mozilla has an app for syncing your bookmarks to your iPhone:

<https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/>

<comment><USER10> Yeah - thanks for pointing that out. It's not a true bidirectional sync though, like xmarks, right?

<comment><USER11> No, it doesn't do bidirectional sync, at least not yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 2m users * 1% conversion rate * $10/yr = $100k = probably not enough for a VC- backed startup.

My suspicion is that because users just used the browser's internal bookmarks they couldn't easily add affordances that would draw attention, leaving no surface on which to advertise. I guess this is one advantage that delicious had, although breaking the bookmarking paradigm to do so was very painful in other ways.

I no longer believe startups who claim their value proposition is "the data will be really valuable someday."

<comment><USER13> Yep "probably not enough for a VC-backed startup" is the key here. This would have been a nice bootstrapped business. For them taking VC put them on a road that unfortunately wasn't the right one for them and forced them to swing for a bigger outcome than was possible. Sad.

<comment><USER14> $100k is an ok number for a one-person outfit, but it would be hard to support even one employee on that number.

In face, their current model of altering the Google SERPs almost certainly generates more revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.

<comment><USER16> Ditto here but I can't think of a way to bring those bookmarks over to Safari to sync with the iPhone, aside from using Xmarks. Any ideas?

<comment><USER15> Instapaper. I know that's kind of a cop-out but incidentally it (and Google) have killed my use of bookmarks apart from a relatively svelte bookmarks bar. Instapaper is my reading queue, Google is my long-term memory. Bookmarks are more like shortcuts for me now.

The nice thing is that I can "bookmark" any link from any browser that I use, as well as twitter and RSS. And I have them instantly on my iPad, phone, notebook, or any machine with a browser without installing any software or extensions.

<comment><USER16> What do you mean by Google? Google Bookmarks, the Chrome sync? Google Notebook? :)

<comment><USER15> Oh, just Google's search. If I want to find something I previously read I Google it now instead of sifting through crufty, old, poorly organized and needlessly hierarchical bookmarks. Tagged bookmarks would help there I guess (like Delicious) but then you have to tag everything...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My experience with Xmarks was not a great one. I used it when it was first called Foxmarks and enjoyed it. Some time after the name change, I noticed that one of the updates had turned on by default some extra overlays on the google search results page touting their rankings.

The blog post suggests that this was a bonus feature, or a value-add, but that's not how I saw it. A previously well-behaved bookmarks sync plugin all of a sudden decided to impose on my preferred search engine. That's a spammy low-class intrusion into my browsing experience.

I turned off the feature, but every time I updated the plugin thereafter it was turned back on by default. I jumped ship as soon as Chrome presented a viable alternative.

</comment><comment><USER18> "For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service."

Not a bad hypothesis, one I see regularly but 90 days to close sure illustrates the downside and value of searching for that monetization model earlier rather than later.

<comment><USER19> I think it's a fairly shocking hypothesis.

My feeling was that the lesson from this is don't go into a business if you don't have at least a vague idea how you're going to make money out of it.

I love XMarks and I'll absolutely miss it (and would have considered paying for it) but this would seem to be niaivity in the extreme.

<comment><USER14> It was founded by Mitch Kapor. I think he knows a thing or two about starting companies...

<comment><USER19> I don't care who founded them, they've just announced that they're closing citing a lack of a viable business model.

That would seem to suggest that they might have thought about revenue a little earlier in the process and I have a feeling that with hindsight Mitch Kapor might agree.

<comment><USER14> Funny. Do you have any actual information about how early they tried to find a business model? I suspect you don't.

So, the situation is this: we have a product lots of people want. The naive business model (freemium) won't work -- a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that.

What do you do? Go forward building a very popular product and look for a business model, or quit because you can't think of how to make money from day 1?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really hate to see Xmarks shutdown. Been a happy user.

For not going the charging user route, could it be that they took some rounds of funding and expanded their company structure and infrastructure greatly to the point that it couldn't be sustained without a huge success? They expanded into the search and other stuff besides bookmark sync'ing. Those are the ones that don't pan out and dragging down the whole company.

Instead of shutting down everything, it would be better to keep the bookmark sync part and dump the rest, and start charging users. Not sure whether the investors would go for the low return route.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's always sad when someone's dreams are shattered. But what I don't get is why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and whatnot. There may not be a business model that supports all that, but there may be a business model that pays for the labor actually required to provide a syncing service.

In a way this is like shutting down all the cafes that failed to become Starbucks.

<comment><USER22> My guess is that this has a lot to do with when they started. In 2006, the cloud platforms we take for granted today didn't exist. Running a service meant buying servers, hiring an ops team, etc. Starting today, you could probably bring a sync service up on App Engine in a few weeks and operate it for a couple hundred bucks a month.

I started my last company in 2005, and I've often thought that if we had started a couple of years later when the cloud platforms were available, we could have been a lot more successful. Instead we built a product and an organization around an obsolete technology stack with a high cost structure, and there was no going back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there any other sync services that work across both Firefox and Chrome?

<comment><USER24> This is my main use case. I would gladly pay for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I, for one, am extremely disappointed to hear this news. I use Xmarks extensively on chrome and firefox across 3 computers. It is so easy to setup and use. I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and never finishes setting up.

I think I'd have paid for Xmarks as a service.

<comment><USER26> > I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and > never finishes setting up.

Same here. I tried really hard to make Chrome sync work reliably across the multiple devices I use. Kept duplicating my bookmarks, deleting new bookmarks, and just randomly making extra folders. XMarks is just so much nicer and works across all the browsers I use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> _Wow, xmarks is dead because they couldn't "find a scalable business model" with two million users._

<http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850>

<comment><USER28> xmarks: _@PinboardIN hey if you've got some good ideas, we're all ears!_

and, of course, pinboardIN: _@xmarks the model that has worked well for us is 'charge people money for a useful product or service'_

<comment><USER29> exactly. The hardest part is having the balls to charge for lemonade in the first place.

edit: source, patio11: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668553>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> From "build something people want" to "built something people want" to "can't monetize 2 million users."

Any other examples of this?

<comment><USER31> Reddit? But at least they tried charging their users, and it worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> sucks to have this ending after all your efforts. Xmarks was a great product. Hats off to you and your team and good luck in your next adventure.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone else find it odd that two million active users is "not enough users". Most startups would kill for that.

<comment><USER34> Reminds me of the old dot-com screed: We lose money on every customer, but we make it up in volume!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I find it strange that there are no buyers interested in your user base. I'd love to hear more about the monetization efforts that you attempted, as I would have imagined there should be numerous ways to leverage those users. But, of course, if I was an expert, I'd probably have the capital to make an offer.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sorry to see them go. I've been using their extension in Firefox since the beginning and it has always performed exceptionally well while synchronizing thousands of bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER37> Huh. I was actually looking for a Chrome bookmark sync for my iPhone two or three weeks ago and I came across Xmarks. I didn't choose it because I was really hoping for a standalone app that would interface with Chrome's built-in bookmark sync. While it's sad to see any popular software company shutter its doors, since it is going away (in a comparatively short 90 days, no less) I'm personally glad I didn't start using it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sad to see them go, but this might be a good lesson for several people out there who go into startups with the "make product now, worry about revenue model later" mentality. While that can be successful in many cases, there is a downside as well where many businesses don't survive.

Either way, I'll miss xmarks since I use it on all my computers and my phone :( Thanks for the great product for the last several years.

</comment><comment><USER39> They might've been doing this already with their Google search enhancements, but why don't they make their free version of the extension hijack (in a very open way to the user) Google queries and insert their own affiliate id so that they get the credit? Seems like an unobtrusive enough way to finance a free product, though it might step on Mozilla's toes.

</comment><comment><USER40> I use the Xmarks firefox plugin, but with my own server. It's always supported that. I expect that'll keep working for a while until a newer Firefox breaks the plugin, so I'm still in the same boat of needing to find another sync method. But I might have longer than people who use the service. Or shorter, no way to tell, really.

<comment><USER41> I'm in the same boat. The article didn't explicitly mention the situation where users are syncing to their own servers. I'm wondering if that would really be impacted seeing as you're not really using any of their server resources?

<comment><USER40> Hopefully they'll open source the plugin so we can keep it updated for changes to Firefox. Though I'll probably just switch to another solution, especially if there's another that uses my own server. Or maybe just Dropbox.

I only switched to Xmarks after Google Browser Sync went away, I guess I should just get used to this.

<comment><USER42> While maintaining cross browser capability, I couldn't agree if xmark could work with dropbox or my own server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't believe a team with so many users hasn't began charging them and when things get rough they want to shut down instead of charging because they think users will not pay?

Two million users? Sorry but they know nothing about business and it's worse for the ones who backed them... How on earth they're going to let this go this way?

</comment><comment><USER44> I used Foxmarks for a long while when I was using Firefox, until Google Browser Sync came along, which has also passed. It was a great idea at the time. In its modern iteration, however, I felt like the best part about it was the inter-browser interoperability. I used it more recently for a time when I was still mostly using Chrome and then Firefox on some machines (such as BSD boxes).

All of the newer browser sync options that I am aware of are in a convenient location--built into the browser. Opera, Chrome, Firefox, et all are all getting bookmark sync options. However, I would much like to see a way to sync easily between the different browsers again. This is what made XMarks useful once it evolved past being only for Firefox. For now, I'm using all Opera, partially so I can keep everything together including my mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER45> Oops. I just switched to Xmarks after Chrome's sync ate a chunk of my bookmarks because of a version mismatch.

<comment><USER46> It's okay. I've had so many problems with xmarks and chrome that you'll be glad you didn't get to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Lessons learned:

1\. Adding a feature to someone else's product is a risky business model. If it's popular, the product-maker will implement your feature, at which point your goose is cooked.

2\. Adding a free feature to someone else's free product isn't even risky. It is among the surest methods of losing money.

3\. Know when to sell. The missed opportunity here was search. With their data and methods, Xmarks was able to improve query results for a predictable fraction of searches. At this point (2008), they should have sold to one of the up-and-coming search engines -- Windows Live or Ask.

<comment><USER48> I do not necessarily agree. There are a _lot_ of good _businesses_, which basically _fill the gap_ in other product.

xMarks is not like an cut-n-paste iPhone app (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html>), which becomes _useless_ after the vendor decides to implement the feature, rather a decent service (Chrome/Mozilla sync does not solve the syncing problem across browsers/iPhone/iPads etc.) which could not its business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Looking for the list of all auto manufacturers? Or presidential libraries? Or art supply sites? A casual comparison of our results with those of the major search engines would convince you that we were on to something. We recruited a group of non-technical subjects to do a usability test, and it flopped. Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL."

Why did they assume their primary market was going to be non-technical people? Why not build some thing like stumbleupon of 100 Million bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER50> Nobody's mentioned this yet, so: this is particularly notable because it's "Mitch Kapor's startup" (famous for Lotus 1-2-3). Used to be called Foxmarks.

</comment><comment><USER51> I hope they could open source their code or their sync protocol, or at least release a guide how to setup thirdparty sync servers.

</comment><comment><USER52> On an opportunistic note, I do wish they'd everyone access to their "1 billion bookmark corpus", in anonymized form of course.

</comment><comment><USER53> Aren't there several YC companies who do searches of browsing history?

At the moment I rely on Firefox awesome bar, but I have a nagging feeling that it is not reliable (keep not finding sites I was sure I had bookmarked). So a better way to search and organize bookmarks is still being called for.

I can't imagine that there isn't a market for better bookmarking...

</comment><comment><USER54> Todd, will you open-source any code?

<comment><USER55> Opensourcing the corpus would be more interesting but I suppose with their privacy policy this is a no go.

<comment><USER54> 100% agree. I had that question included in my first draft of my original comment, but figured anonymizing the bookmark data is a very tricky/impossible task so I removed it. See AOL search data[1]. Maybe Xmarks could sent an opt- in request to users and release the data of people who are comfortable with it. I would be fine with it, personally; all my bookmarks are on delicious anyway.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Our newly launched service Zukmo is a good alternative for Xmarks.

I just posted a request for it to be reviewed (under Ask HN): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735218>

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm afraid to go back to Google for bookmark syncing because the last time Google offered the service they shut it down. That's how I got to X/FoxMarks in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER58> I would pay for Xmarks.

</comment><comment><USER59> xMarks has an amazing set of data. A set of tagged bookmarks on a large enough scale is essentially like running mechanical turk (with 2,000,000 users) on the entire internet (better yet, only bookmark-worthy parts of the internet), and asking it to "describe this page in 10 words or less". The results, I think, are the most accurate description of URLs you could get on such a large scale. Essentially every site that has over a certain amount of bookmarks is _guaranteed_ to be of high quality and very relevant to what it's been tagged as. (The only problem is when sites change, domains expire, etc).

When I was making MoreOf.It, I scouted the competition in depth. The only one that stood out was xMarks, and similarity search wasn't even their main gig. They understand the richness of bookmarking data. They've separated URLs into categories, and have the highest ranking sites in those categories. They also nailed similarity pretty well. I might even say their results are better than mine, because they have a much larger index of sites.

Two and a half years ago, when I first built a prototype of similarity search, there were hardly _any_ meta-websites. Besides Quantcast and their ilk, and bookmarking websites, and maybe a couple of bullshit "site worth calculators" (which just multiply site traffic by an estimated CPM), there was hardly anything happening in the meta-site space. Now, there are tons more services that cater to people Gooling an actual url or site name. To name a few, CrunchBase, AboutUs.org, BackType, UberVU, SimilarSites, SitesLike, and sites that aggregate results from these (QuarkBase). "Meta" is blossoming, and it seems like xMarks could take advantage of this with their rich dataset.

For example, as someone told me I should do, they could sell analytics information to websites about their competitors. If you're ZipCar.com, for example, you would pay to know the following: How have people described zipcar.com in the last (x amount of time), and what are the trends of those tags? How is my popularity vs. an automatically generated list of my competitors [ala: similar sites]. Which competitors are trending, and with which tags? Any new competitors that are breaking through the ranks? Some information could give cues to alter your business: What types of tags are related to my business are trending right now (i.e.: perhaps "bike share" is becoming more and more popular. I think that's valuable information. And, like an arms dealer, you can deal to both sides of competition. With 2,000,000 users organizing this set of data (for their own benefit of course), it's pretty confident sample size and it's win-win for everyone.

Frankly, I don't understand what benefits "synchronizing" offers. Why not just store your bookmarks on any number of bookmarking websites (Delicious, Google, etc), and then log-in to that website from whatever browser/computer/device you want? I do, however, see value in the analytics of what people bookmark, and how they bookmark it.

<comment><USER60> Unfortunately, that dataset would only stay amazing until they tried to use it to power a search engine.

History has shown that any time user-generated content is shown to users, spammers will quickly set themselves up as the ones generating 99% of the content.

<comment><USER59> It's only worth spammers time if their search is a successful product that spammers want to be a part of. Even still, with 2m users, I'd imagine that bots wouldn't have a substantial effect on the data, not at least without easily beind detected.

Search is beside the point, though. They said they tried it and it was amazing but only for some things. It's true, just search delicious to get an idea of the type of search possible. It's very good for most things, but worthless for finding any content that people wouldn't tag, like 98% of the content of any URL.

My hypothesis was that their data could be used for other reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Excellent service. I have been using xmarks for a while.

</comment><comment><USER62> I never used them because there are plenty of _intranet_ related bookmarks that I wouldn't want appearing on a search engine. This service could have lead to some nasty data breaches. It's probably better for the internet in general if they fade away.

Having said that, it sucks that they ran a popular service that they couldn't monetize.

</comment><comment><USER63> That sucks. How do I synchronize my passwords with Chrome now?

<comment><USER64> Check out <https://lastpass.com/>

<comment><USER65> I didn't know about it, it's really great. It's sort of a synchronized keepass with better browser integration. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> In my fantasy world, Marco Arment would buy Xmarks and combine it with Instapaper. I'm sad to see Xmarks disappear without any viable alternative. I'd gladly pay $15-20 per year if that's what it took, but I imagine it could be even cheaper since cloud storage is so cheap: [http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of- a-g...](http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-gb-in-the- cloud/)</comment>


Sean Parker: War on Music Piracy is a Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20020470-501465.html

<comment><USER2> Who cares what Sean Parker thinks, what's Shawn Fanning up to?</comment>


Ask HN: What site or app have you built with Flask? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I built [http://solarpi.tafkas.net](http://solarpi.tafkas.net) to monitor a photovoltaic installation.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://testdriven.io](https://testdriven.io)</comment>


Scala is Unfit for Serious Development - <AUTHOR> http://codemonkeyism.com/scala-unfit-development/

<comment><USER2> Good article, sensational title. A more apt name would be "Scala can sometimes be a pain in the ass for Serious Development".

Using an RC is risky, even if it has a high number attached to it.</comment>


Gremlin Brings Chaos Engineering as a Service to Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/18/gremlin-brings-chaos-engineering-as-a-service-to-kubernetes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to give it a go: gremlin.com/k8s

You can run heaps of chaos engineering attacks

</comment><comment><USER2> Related, open resources for chaos engineering:

[https://openchaos.io](https://openchaos.io)

Including:

[https://chaostoolkit.org](https://chaostoolkit.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> From a business perspective, what's your moat (in a Warren Buffet sense)? If you get good initial traction, how do you prevent copycat products?

<comment><USER4> By innovating. They have clearly deeply thought about this space and probably have a todo list 1000 items long. By simply copying item 1, you will miss out on the rest until they have been released, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Really excited to launch this today! You can totally give it a spin for free : ) Love to hear what you think!

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who can't access techcrunch from europe?

</comment><comment><USER6> Confusing name as Gremlin is a well known graph traversal language that has existed for years. It's not always easy finding documentation for Gremlin as search results are often polluted by unrelated stuff... this will make things harder still.

<comment><USER7> I came to the comments to post a similar thing. Was utterly confused how "graph db" and "chaos engineering" go together. Can't you add a distinguishing prefix, like Chaos Gremlin or something like that? I'll start using "Apache Gremlin" for the traversal lang, but that only works if your Gremlin gets a prefix, too.

<comment><USER8> "A gremlin is a folkloric mischievous creature that causes malfunctions in aircraft or other machinery."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love chaos as a service. You should try it for free and teat your systems</comment>


Ask HN: What's Your Favorite Technology? - <AUTHOR> Was asked this in an interview once, and found it strange that when I cited SQLite as a great example of excellent engineering, the interviewer wanted something more "recent."  Curious what others think! <comment><USER2> I'm a big recent fan of AWS. I know I am late to the party. I've only used it for a year. But the biggest impediment and obstacle from me to go from idea to implementation was always dealing with the infrastructure and Neto folks. Being able to have access to any infrastructure I needed via an API call was a revelation.</comment>


Reverse Engineering the Soundcloud API - <AUTHOR> https://pythontips.com/2018/04/15/reverse-engineering-soundcloud-api/ <comment><USER2> The only reason I continued to read was this:

> We will create a Python script which will allow us to download even those > songs which are not enabled for downloading.

and then he goes on downloading the 128kbit/s web-player mp3... that was very disappointing.

It's like saying "How to download music from Spotify," where I'd expect you to use libspotify or the web API before reading the article, but suddenly I find myself reading about how I can record Spotify music with the "voice memo" app of my phone and a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the difference between this and the info publicly available at [https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api](https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api)?

On a related note, the soundcloud API is horrible. Their solution to rate limiting is to require a client_id and then stop giving them out. So those few client_ids out there get abused by everyone (since they are simple to grab from locally running apps) and nobody can stream anything past a certain point in the day. Such a hack. But hell, at least they have something!

<comment><USER4> To use the APIs properly, you need to register an app to authenticate, whereas with this approach it's jacking a client ID generated for the Web-based client, it appears.

This approach is necessary because SoundCloud shut down its API app registration form about 9 months ago (around the time they made big layoffs) with no sign it'll open again. Even when registration _was_ open it was just a Google form and people got rejected after waiting weeks for a response - [https://twitter.com/JamesPaulDuncan/status/86719870256109158...](https://twitter.com/JamesPaulDuncan/status/867198702561091584) \- so I'm not surprised people are hacking around it.

I haven't seen SC respond to any of the numerous requests about this on Twitter either, so I suspect anything that doesn't directly make money at SoundCloud doesn't get attention anymore.

<comment><USER3> Reverse engineering the client ID generation would be more useful (maybe their web clients just grab from a pool, I have no idea).

Stack Overflow is full of questions regarding app registration and rate limiting. If writing audio service integrations, steer well clear of SoundCloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who actually has audio content posted on SoundCloud, this line gives me pause for thought:

> We will create a Python script which will allow us to download even those > songs which are not enabled for downloading.

What is the possible reason for making this achievable? For his next trick, will he post how to download any app from the Apple App Store for free too?

Do programmers only consider their own code sacrosanct, but anyone else's creative output free game?

Note: I make most of my content on SC downloadable anyway because I don't make money from my music, but the principle is still the same - I want the right to control whether my creative output can or cannot be downloaded.

<comment> squeaky-clean It's not like anyone who wants to download music from soundbutt will be referring to this article and writing their own script. There are dozens of GUI tools and extensions that do exactly this already.

> I want the right to control whether my creative output can or cannot be > downloaded.

Then you can't ever upload it online to a place where it can be streamed, ever. Or if you do you have to put audio "watermarks" over the track, and make sure you always have certain sections watermarked so no one can ever play a full "pure" version of your song. (Otherwise someone will just cut together 2 recordings with different spots watermarked).

This method doesn't download the high quality original file. Only the 128kbps compressed file that is used for streaming audio. No matter how much you lock down the website, browser, file format, even the OS.... A $2 pair of cables plugged into a recorder can accomplish the exact same thing and is impossible to counter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The easier approach:

[https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl)

youtube-dl can download content from just about everywhere, including SoundCloud.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's been a little while since I played with it, but I was wondering how the "private" soundcloud embeds worked. I was seeing musicians and music sites utilize them. The main difference with them is that you can't click on them to listen to the track on Soundcloud.com, you can only listen to them when they're embedded elsewhere.

Turns out, if you view the source on one of those embeds the full URL is right there. It's even called "permalink_url" and has the secret_token for the track as well, which is what lets you listen to private tracks directly on Soundcloud.com. The url structure is:

[https://soundcloud.com/[user]/[track]/[secret_token]](https://soundcloud.com/\[user\]/\[track\]/\[secret_token\])

If I recall correctly, the API also lets you look up some info on private tracks with that secret_token. Not sure if all of this was intentional, but I reported it back in 2016 via their "whitehat" channel and didn't receive any type of response back.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just use youtube-dl[1], which downloads embedded Soundcloud media just fine.

[1] - [https://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I wasn't interested in downloading the file really. I have a different tool I use for that. Was more just curious about how private the "private" songs really were, when shared in an embed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TLDR: find how SoundCloud generates stream links by observing the browser's Network tab (one request to an API endpoint with some data from the page's HTML) and converting that to Python.

A good tutorial for beginners but I'm quite disappointed, I was expecting more complex things like actually reverse-engineering a DRM scheme.

<comment><USER9> Nah, the worst SoundCloud has done in my experience is to blacklist an app I registered with them that called their undocumented APIs after watching what their apps called.

Fair enough, I guess it violates TOS but a bit annoying since public API is basically abandoned and lacks a lot of features.

<comment><USER10> You wouldn't have happened to have been using the api-v2?

<comment><USER9> Yes, I did :)

Can't remember why, I think some fields needed to stream in the same way as the app, or read some metadata, were only present on v2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think this qualifies as reverse engineering. The author merely saw how soundcloud streaming worked & automated it using python.

<comment><USER6> That qualifies as reverse engineering.</comment></comment>


Musings on the Future of Docker from Logentries' Brendan Dillon - <AUTHOR> https://blog.logentries.com/2014/05/musings-on-the-future-of-docker/

<comment><USER2> One of our core business values in transparency. Feel free to reach out and ask what's next. We'll be happy to talk about it.</comment>


There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/world/142171?page=entire <comment><USER2> I'm living in Bucharest, Romania, and I can confirm this part. A few years ago I used to live in a somewhat less respectable part of the city (not a ghetto by any means, the communists made sure we don't have those, just closer to the periphery and poorer). For some reason it use to be a stop point in girl trafficking - lots of young girls worked at the corner of the street for a few weeks at a time. Many of them from Moldavia, and I presume going further west. At one time I was actually offered a woman for around $200.

A few points:

\- Most girls were not slaves per se, kidnapped and hold by force. All, as far as I can tell, were driven to this by poverty, lack of any prospects in the village of birth or both.

\- I am not against prostitution as a job, especially since I've seen it done successfully and with quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. But in some conditions it can be worst then anything you can imagine. I am especially suspicious of anything that looks organized. I'd guess this is a direct consequence of it being illegal - Amsterdam seems to have managed to make it both organized and civilized.

\- I'd have liked to make some comments about corruption, politicians and the way things seem to be "settling in" in the last years, but it's all speculation so I'll abstain.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery, > believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned > through bloodshed.

Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers, after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history._

This just seems like a bunch of self-promoting nonsense. His great-great- great-grandfather didn't shed blood with the idea that after the US Civil War was over slavery would be eliminated from the face of the Earth forever and ever. The point was to eliminate US Government legal acceptance of slavery.

Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do.

> _While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that > five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight down to Port > au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport_

I find this a bit disingenuous. 'Just five hours away' implies something that is a lot closer than New York and Haiti. At least he was nice enough to qualify himself, but stating like that comes across as trying to make this emotionally-charged rather than a rational discussion.

> _They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50. Now to put that in > context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their > soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of > about $40,000._

I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go?

There's also the difference that when slaves were being sold for $40K is was to put them to work in a money-making enterprise (i.e. plantations) _and_ the slaver traders were selling them in a US market. Plantations owners weren't shipping themselves across the seas to buy slaves directly in Africa. For that matter, today the costs (and risks) of travel are _hugely_ less than they were in the past.

In this example, he's going to another country and buying a child that will make him no money (housework and personal sexual favors are not a stream of money). Not only that, that $50 or $100 does not account for how he would them import that child back into the US. I would venture a guess that -- especially nowadays -- it's pretty expensive to get papers to bring a slave-girl child into the US (at least through 'public' ports of entry like airports).

> _If you were to plot slaves on the map, you'd stick the biggest number of > pins in India, followed by Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more > slaves In India than the rest of the world combined.

And yet, if you look at international efforts or American pressure, India is largely let off the hook because Indian federal officials claim, "We have no slaves. These are just poor people. And these exploitive labor practices," -- if you're lucky enough to get that term out of them -- "are a byproduct of poverty."

Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt._

Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would _really_ like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously). India especially seems to have problems with this due to population density and the caste-system that their society still holds on to.

I'm interested if this is an increase in the percent of the population that are slaves, or just an increase in the number of slaves because the population has exploded across the board. I'll admit that it's also possible that there is an increased demand for slaves as the Indian middle-class has taken off. I remember reading that a lot of Indians work on visas in the US for a while, but end up moving back to India because when their wives move over here they are disappointed that the middle-class doesn't have servants (as one in India would expect to have at that income level).

> _Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. > Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose > grandparents took a debt._

If this is the case, I hope that he's including 'indentured servants' in the numbers of slaves when he's looking all the way back into history. Indentured servants were often in the same situations he's describing now (even though most elementary school textbooks like to gloss over that fact by claiming that the servants were 'only' there to work off a debt and they were free to leave when they were done; conveniently leaving out the number of servants (or an estimate) that _actually_ worked off their debt).

> _They can also get involved with Free the Slaves. And they can talk about > the issue more. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He > needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be > a part of his legacy._

Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?

<comment><USER4> I really don't understand what you're arguing against here.

> Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the > costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all > that we really can do.<

No, there's quite a lot more we can do. Foreign policy is all about influencing what goes on beyond your own borders.

> I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in > today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to > make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go?

The word "equivalent" in the original article is clearly meant to convey that it's $40k in today's money. (as would even a tiny amount of knowledge of economic history, surely?)

I don't know how far $50 will go on the average Haitian salary, but surely part of his point is that in this case there is a population (visiting American tourists) for whom $50 is disposable income. It was never the case for historic US slavery that the price of a slave was anything less than an investment.

(And slave importation may not be the end goal. Maybe you just want a slave for two weeks while you enjoy your holiday. Is that less reprehensible?)

> Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the > United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population > for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for > comparison, obviously)

Well, yes, comparative numbers would be interesting. (and I'm fairly sure nobody would be surprised to learn that there is less slavery per head of population than previously - but does that make it any less bad?)

I don't think human misery works on the calculus you're trying to apply. One million people in slavery are going to be fairly unhappy, whether they're embedded in a population of 50 million or 5 billion. If the number of people in slavery is increasing, that's bad, even if it's going down as a percentage.

> Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery > world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do > you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of > war/bloodshed?

Do you really think that's what he's asking for? Do you really think an appropriate alternative is just to shrug your shoulders, put it in historical context and do nothing?

Do you really think that if something can't be fixed immediately, or its fix isn't immediately obvious, we should just not bother thinking about it?

<comment><USER3> > _No, there's quite a lot more we can do. Foreign policy is all about > influencing what goes on beyond your own borders._

My point was that he was acting like the Civil War was a 'war to end slavery world wide' and he almost comes off as surprised that a Civil War years-ago in the US hasn't affected the slave trade on the opposite side of the planet. The point of the Civil War (in terms of slavery) was to abolish the plantations and make the slave trade illegal (i.e. to 'free the slaves').

Abolishing the legal trafficking of slaves is one step in the process, obviously, but a major step nonetheless.

> _It was never the case for historic US slavery that the price of a slave was > anything less than an investment._

This was mostly due to the cost of trafficking in the slaves. If I go down to Haiti the slaves that I could buy there aren't shipped from the other side of the world. If one wanted to buy a slave in Africa in the early 1800's I'm sure it would have cost you a lot less than right off the slave boats in the colonies. Even shipping a boatload of slaves around the world now would probably cost _a lot_ less than it did then.

I guess what really irks me about this -- and my point -- is that presenting the low-cost of purchasing a slave today comes across as shock-value to get an emotional response. And the response that he seems to be going for is to get people thinking that globally humans have de-valued human life more now than in the past. My argument is that you can't compare the price of a slave in the 1800's to the price of a slave now and use the severe difference in price as proof that the people of the 1800's put a higher-value on human life.

> _(and I'm fairly sure nobody would be surprised to learn that there is less > slavery per head of population than previously - but does that make it any > less bad?)_

Doesn't make it any less bad, but it feels very deceptive to use raw numbers like that without presenting relative numbers. It feels like they are trying to get people to reach the wrong conclusions, but with the right intentions.

> _I don't think human misery works on the calculus you're trying to apply. > One million people in slavery are going to be fairly unhappy, whether > they're embedded in a population of 50 million or 5 billion. If the number > of people in slavery is increasing, that's bad, even if it's going down as a > percentage._

Maybe the problem here is that I'm not mainstream enough to be the intended audience. I feel like I want to see all of the numbers, and when numbers are pushed off to the side, it feels very deceptive to me.

Aside from that, I feel that the best way to measure progress is whether or not the numbers are going down as a percentage. Especially compared to the percentage of population growth. If the number of slaves goes decreases by 2% and the population grows by 1%, I see that as a net win. I also think that it's unrealistic to think that we will ever get the number of slaves down to 0, though I would hope it's possible... even if it has to be on the long-long- term.

> _Do you really think that's what he's asking for?_

He said: _He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy._

That comes off to me as _too_ positive. That sounds like he thinks President Obama is going to abolish slavery. 'The true abolition of slavery' will not be part of Obama's legacy unless he actually abolishes all slavery.

I'm all for better foreign policy regarding slavery, don't get me wrong, but I thought that this guy's message was too positive. Better US foreign policy regarding slavery is a win as long as 1 slave gains freedom over it, but I daresay that foreign policy alone might not make a dent in world-wide slavery for at least a decade (though I'm really pulling that number out of nowhere; feel free to contradict me).

In general, I'm not disagreeing with the need to combat slavery. I'm disagreeing with some of what this guy is saying because it's coming across as deceptive (even though the intentions may be good) and too overly optimistic (I believe in setting realistic goals).

<comment><USER5> I'm curious about your reactions because I felt a similar sense of unease while reading this article -- feeling that I was being sold something, instead of learning something. I managed to set it aside because I encountered various vestiges of this industry where I live in S.A., and was spurred to look into it a bit.

      That presenting the low-cost of purchasing a slave today
      comes across as shock-value to get an emotional response.
      And the response that he seems to be going for is ...

I'd say that this seems at odds with

      I feel like I want to see all of the numbers, and when
      numbers are pushed off to the side, it feels .. deceptive

Although, as you mention, it'd be nice to see ALL of the numbers. Still, you could probably suss up your own percentage comparison with wikipedia.

But here he's just presenting a solid, straightforward bit of data: the retail price.

You said that this is (or feels) a bit disingenuous -- giving us data out of context to provoke emotion; NY isn't Haiti; it's hard to get the slaves across borders; slaves were money-making operations in the past and aren't anymore, which is why the price is down.

Incidentally, human slaves ARE still money-making machines, albeit less completely than during the days of slavery. Brothels are the most straightforward example -- in the country I live in (most of the time), prostitution itself is essentially legal; it may be illegal, but the enforcement is all of the regulatory type (stay-classy headline: "Officers Check Douches In Area _Prostibulos_.")

Despite this, human trafficking is a not-insignificant component of the prostitution industry there. Why?

The economy is getting better. A pretty young teenage girl has way, way more options than selling her body. So the only way to get and keep 'good talent' is, essentially, slavery that starts really young.

Now, in that context, it's clear that the retail price _is_ an important part of the equation. If one of the ways you make money is the sex tourism industry (either globally or regionally), clearly you've figured out how to scale either the movement of your humans or the business of attracting customers to you, and the price of the humans is an important data point; the fact that it's so low, given how much harder smuggling people is than cocaine, is a disheartening problem for those considering where to target disincentives.

      it's coming across as deceptive (even though the intentions may be good)

I think that it may be feel that way, but as the facts seem to be solidly behind (essentially) everything he's saying, I'd ascribe that more to the artificiality that comes from other sources.

Like being asked, over and over again (speaking engagements, book tours, countless one-off interviews like this one), to try and squeeze the impact of an important message through the needle-eye of interview questions of variable quality.

<comment><USER3> > _I'd say that this seems at odds with_

Well, to put my thoughts into more clear terms, I felt that presenting the one figure while 'withholding' the others is what made me feel like it was being presented for shock-value.

> _Now, in that context, it's clear that the retail price is an important part > of the equation. If one of the ways you make money is the sex tourism > industry (either globally or regionally), clearly you've figured out how to > scale either the movement of your humans or the business of attracting > customers to you, and the price of the humans is an important data point; > the fact that it's so low, given how much harder smuggling people is than > cocaine, is a disheartening problem for those considering where to target > disincentives._

1\. Don't immediately think that because there is a steady stream of women into brothels as slaves means that they are necessarily being imported. Trafficking in humans is relatively easy (so far as transportation goes), until you have to cross a border/checkpoint.

2\. In the context of his Haiti example, he's being slightly deceptive by only quoting the retail price and forgetting to include the hidden fees. Even if he just flew down to Haiti to buy a slave, abuse him/her for a few days and then fly back to New York, the cost of the flights and accomodations are _not_ being quoted there. Sure, if he was a Haitian, he wouldn't have those costs, but how many Haitians have $50 USD to buy a slave? It might make sense if Haiti has a sex-tourism industry, but I've never heard of it. (Of course, I'm not exactly on the 'pulse' of the sex-tourism industry or anything)

> _I think that it may be feel that way, but as the facts seem to be solidly > behind (essentially) everything he's saying, I'd ascribe that more to the > artificiality that comes from other sources.

Like being asked, over and over again (speaking engagements, book tours, countless one-off interviews like this one), to try and squeeze the impact of an important message through the needle-eye of interview questions of variable quality._

If that is the case, I feel he should work harder on his delivery of the message. I know that it might look like I'm tearing him a new one in my comments, but I do feel that his cause is a noble one. I feel that he does have valueable experience, information, anecdotes to bring to the table. I just think that he needs to refine his delivery of the message and his call for action. I could just be getting too picky/OCD over this though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Debt slaves are not held by debt. Debt is merely the nominal excuse. The use and threat of violence coupled with an insulation from or complete lack of law drives slavery. And that is why I think it is such a pervasive problem. Solutions that work may require carrying a bigger stick -- and using it. That terrifies me. I abhor state military intervention, but I also abhor slavery through violence. Most people are similar which is why they stress alternative measures like economic disincentives and UN resolutions which don't seem to work well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For anyone wondering about the credibility of this interview, Skinner's book got blurbs from Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel. <http://acrimesomonstrous.com/>

<comment><USER7> Since when does a politician's blurb, and Bill Clinton's at that, add any credibility to anything?

[http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/C...](http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/ClintonWarCriminal_Herman.html)

The blurbs often benefit their utters more than the books they're affixed to: looking at the list of people and institutions who gave feedback on the book, I can say a good chunk of them are karma-whoring themselves on the author's good standing.

<comment><USER8> Elie Wiesel is a whore? I think you should maybe google the name before you imply such a thing...

<comment><USER7> I named Bill Clinton, not Elie Wiesel. Also, visit the book's site and see who gave it feedback:

<http://acrimesomonstrous.com/>

The who's who of fascist warmongers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence._

My first thought was, "Wow." My second thought was, "I wonder how many people end up in similar (very loose sense of the word) situations based on lending that's occurred in the last 5 years.

<comment><USER10> What "lending over the past 5 years" are you referring to? Microfinance?

Or are you talking about credit card debt in the first world? In the US, the only consequence for failing to pay your debts [1] is an inability to get further credit.

[1] Child support debt excluded. You go to jail if you can't pay that.

<comment><USER11> maybe the op was just wondering what amount of slavery he could personally have prevented. that was the thought that crossed my mind. not that "throwing money" at a problem is a reasonable solution, but how different is my perspective on money than "a slave." or rather, i wanted to add that perspective to my thought process.

ps - donations to credible organizations _do_ help.

pps - somewhat relevant fiction making the rounds these days by Stieg Larsson <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson> I really respect Larsson's response to things he felt were immoral. he set out to change them. 1+ investigative journalism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of a recent article in BoingBoing, about some Arabic city (Dubai?) where people have to build skyscrapers to pay their way out of poverty, and they have to drink almost-salty water instead of fresh water, in bunks, etc.

Ah Google found it on the first query 'dubai slavery salty water':

[http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann- har...](http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the- dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Some of the situations described sound absolutely terrible. While we're on the subject, though, I want to point out that slavery is a spectrum, not a binary condition.

I don't doubt his number, 27 million, for a certain cutoff point of who is considered a slave and who isn't. If you move the cutoff around, though, you can truthfully say there are billions of slaves, or maybe even zero.

</comment><comment><USER14> "I was able to negotiate for a 10-year-old girl for cleaning and cooking, permanent possession and sexual favors. What do you think the asking price was?

TM: I don't know ... $7,500?

BS: They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50."

This fails the smell test for me. at $1 per day for food & shelter, he can buy her for less than it would cost them to keep her for 2 months.

Most likely, he was being scammed in some way. They were probably planning to rob him and had no intention of selling the girl.

</comment><comment><USER15> I recommend the book "A Crime so Monstrous" for people interested in learning more on this subject.

</comment><comment><USER16> Per capita or total?

<comment><USER17> >there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million.

Total, clearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Define slave.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's repeated a few times in the interview:

>slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence

>TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.

>BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

<comment><USER18> In other words, different definitions from what was used in the past. Need a common definition for a meaningful comparison.

<comment><USER19> I'm confused -- what was the old definition of "slave" which was so different from "person forced to work and prevented by force from leaving"?

I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people fitting that definition at the moment, but I can't see how someone fitting that description is anything other than a slave. (Hmm, though I suppose legitimate prisoners can be forced to do work without being "slaves" so perhaps the definition does require tinkering around the edges.)

<comment><USER20> The "held through fraud" part maybe what distinguishes legitimate prisoners from slaves. Although, that part of the definition does seem strange, I'm not sure if we'd always want to require that someone be held through fraud to be considered a slave (someone chained to a post and forced to do hard labor is still a slave in my book, but I don't see any fraud involved).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21>
        Slaves !=  Wage Slaves

<comment><USER22> There's a movie about modern slavery (haven't seen it, don't know the quality) titled "Call and Response."

If you're in the Silicon Valley a group showed the movie at the Red Rock Coffeehouse in Mountain View on September 19, 2009. I'm not sure when the next showing is ... if you're interested contact the Red Rock or more likely the Highway Community (<http://www.highway.org>).</comment></comment>


Nourishing a Culture of Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/02/nourishing-a-cu.php <comment><USER4> Very good post, lots of good points.

One thing I remember reading that really stuck with me - most people externalize failure and internalize success. Meaning, when things go wrong, they point to external factors. When things go right, they credit their own skill and ability.

The opposite way is to externalize success and internalize failure - <USER2> means claiming responsibility for it whenever you don't get desired results, but being very skeptical of your successes and looking for where external factors broke your way so you don't get too high on yourself.

Turns out, externalizing failure/internalizing success makes you _much_ happier but much less able to produce results.

Whereas internalizing failure/externalizing success makes you _much_ less happy but _much_ more able to deliver results.

Now note, this only applies in cases where your incentives come from producing results, as opposed to convincing other people you did well. That's the trouble with middle management and with politics - you win by convincing people you're doing a good job, more than actually doing a good job. That's very conducive to blaming external conditions for everything going wrong, and claiming personal success for everything that went right... which is much less conducive to results.

Nasty, huh? Actually that's why self-employment/entrepreneurship is so cool - we get paid for results, not for convincing anyone we're doing well in spite of the results. Thus, while it's still hard to claim every failure as your own and be skeptical of the successes, we do get compensated better for it.

<comment><USER5> One question pops up from your post: What happens when you internalize both success and failure?

<comment><USER6> Educated guess: mood swings.

When you succeed, you're on top of the world and can do no wrong. When you fail, you're a loser who can do nothing right.

<comment><USER7> There is a big difference between saying:

"Wow, I really screwed the pooch there. It's going to take a while for me to live this one down. I better get to work."

and

"Wow, I really screwed the pooch there. I'm worthless and I can't do anything right. I should go drink."

One of those, I think, is a healthy way of accepting responsibility for failure. The other is not.

The same, really, goes on the upside.

<comment><USER6> True.

I was making a shoot-from-the-hip guess. The difference between the two approaches which you mentioned is a correct sense of proportion. Of course, the same applies to the other ways in which one internalizes/externalizes both success and failure.

<comment><USER7> It's got nothing to do with proportion. Assuming you don't consider suicide a rational choice, the first is always going to result in better outcomes for the individual who screwed up than the second, no matter how dramatic the failure.

I mean, proportion has something to do with how publicly and how strongly you repent for your mistakes, but I don't see any case where it is in your best interest to accept that you are worthless.

To be clear, I can see cases where it may be in other people's best interest to give up on you, but I don't see any case where it's in your own interest to give up on yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In general, I agree that if a culture is to grow it needs to be capable of taking risks and making experiments. When every experiment succeeds, either you weren't innovating enough or you're lying and now supporting a failure.

When he starts complaining about social protections though, I'd draw the opposite conclusion:

 _Need health insurance? No problem, we'll make sure that's provided for._

The article seems to me to imply that this sort of protection is a brake on innovation. I won't disagree that it has the potential to put a brake on innovation through additional taxation (though not as currently implemented in the USA, where total healthcare spending is far from efficient), but as a concept it _enables_ failure and risk taking.

We talk about startups being ramen profitable, and that's fine. But my first employer was a startup who, when he started, had a wife and young kids - <USER3> needed 4x ramen + healthcare + education profitable. He's since made a success of the company and sold it, but how would he have been able to responsibly take the risk to start the company if its failure would have left his family not just bankrupt but without any form of medical provision? What if he also couldn't have afforded to educate his children? Would that have been good?

People are best enabled to innovate when they can be free to fail without a disastrous cost to their career and their lives - this is the lesson of the invention of the limited company and the prosperity that resulted from that. Social security safety nets such universal healthcare enable innovation over a wider pool of candidates because they reduce the harm of failure to the innovator and their dependents.

<comment><USER9> > (referring to healthcare) as a concept it enables failure and risk taking.

I cannot agree enough. Sorry for the sidetrack, but I have always thought about the scenario where say a person who is still far away from standard retirement age (maybe by about 20 years till medicare kicks in) has, say, just enough saved up to carry her through the rest of her life. If she doesnt have a working spouse with healthcare, she is forced to take a job. Whereas if healthcare was provided regardless of a job, it frees her from the necessity to work as well as opens up the job to somebody who needs the income as well as the care.

<comment><USER10> One consequence is that someone with specific life circumstances preventing her from leaving her job will now be able to do that to pursue something that might be better. Another consequence, and one that is unintended but virtually unpreventable for a government, is that someone with an idea he is less sure of and which is less likely to succeed will be pushed in the direction of quitting his job and pursuing his unproductive idea. My thought is that when a government does something like this, it pushes _everyone_ further in the direction of risk, similar to when the US Government promised to back the banks in the case of impending failure. And like the banking situation, while it is possible that a lot of the risky decisions will pay off quite handsomely, a lot of them will end poorly, possibly enough to swamp the ones that paid off well. In the aggregate this could mean a lot of otherwise productive people working on unproductive projects, leaving less productive people doing the stable, productive work.

That's why I don't think the government is the best tool to encourage or provide incentives for people to quit their jobs and work on startups. The government can't filter well enough to cause more of the good consequence and less of the bad.

<comment><USER9> The argument is not that the government should provide incentives for people to quit their jobs and work on startups. The way I see it, healthcare in its current state with its unreasonable costs, is a problem. Even if the average earner chooses to finance her healthcare herself, she will not able to sustain it. So this is a case of the government removing a roadblock so that the individual can weigh other factors to decide whether or not a job/startup/retirement is right for her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I literally cannot up-vote this enough. An "innovation lab" has to be based on failure tolerance and the process to achieve that has to be customer driven. (i.e. the lean startup methodology)

</comment><comment><USER12> Big companies are notorious for their low tolerance for failure, but I've been surprised to discover that many research institutions are maybe even worse. An academician needs a steady stream of hi-quality publications, i.e. stuff that people generally agree are worthwhile contributions. Truly new ideas are easily buried, because they don't provide a steady stream of results, and there is no time to pursue them. I wonder if there are any labs that actively try to fix this somehow.

</comment><comment><USER13> He's right about giant corporations becoming stifling to innovation, but I disagree about Norway. There is no reason why Americans should need to pay over twice as much per capita to provide the same barely adequate health care for their employees!

Startups are even more vulnerable to high monthly startup costs than they are to lack of financing. You can get by on credit cards working out of your garage, but not if you rent a large unit in an office park and not if you need to shell out hundreds per month per employee for health insurance.

Right now, college students are creating most startups. That's not only because they know the newest technology. They have no responsibility to pay for or protect a family. The single greatest innovation that would prompt the formation of more mid-career American startups would be any reform that takes the cost of health insurance off of corporate balance sheets. It seems most likely that would be some kind of "Medicare-for-All" system, though other innovations may be possible.

<comment><USER13> By "barely adequate" health care, I mean that we should focus much more on nutrition and lifestyle and less on drugs and prosthetic organs. It doesn't matter how many surgical robots a country has if we make food choices that amount to poisoning ourselves and lifestyle choices like we're trying to turn ourselves into veal. Forcing people to pay cash on the barrel-head for health care won't improve that because humans make emotional, not rational decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I liked this article a lot because I've just came to the same realization a few days ago. To encourage innovation you have to have a culture that encourages it ... that puts the emphasis on doing amazing things instead of not fucking up.

Big companies are all about not fucking up, and when there is a fuck up, bending someone over the barrel for it, so that it never happens again ... which is why they are places where innovation goes to die. I mean why would you attempt some crazy initiative when you'd just get dinged/fired if it didn't work out.

Google's masterstroke was is in empowering people to try new things without fear of failure with their 20% rule.

So whenever somebody asks how you/they can be innovative ... what they really should be asking is "how can we give people who work there, the freedom to try new things without fear of failure".

Any organizations that will do whatever it takes to possess that culture will generally succeed at this 'innovation' thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Failure also works well at company scales. When many hedge funds failed in 2008, some great people were released into the wild. As a result, NYC is now the #2 internet startup city.

The most limited, precious resource in the world is people and their time. So admitting failure and moving on is the best thing, continued death marches are the worst thing.

<comment><USER16> I was in NYC during that time period, and very few people (approaching zero) at the hot startups were from hedge funds.

You maybe had a DBA or sysadmin from a failed investment bank.

In fact, it seemed like a non-trivial number of startup engineers and product people in NYC were people who were sick of living in Silicon Valley.

Maybe it prevented certain smart people from going into hedge funds in the first place, but I wouldn't be so sure. Firms like 2 Sigma and Jane Street were still hiring, and actually had more startup-like attitudes towards workspace and technology than many of the startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > But to have more successes we must necessarily have more failures

I'm not sold on this. There's seems to be the popular belief that the ratio of failure:success is fixed, so to get more success, you have to get more fail too. Along with the "fail fast" technique that always reminds me of "the tortoise and the hare" fable. There seems to be an obsession with going as fast as you can, and not worrying if you fail.

Feynman's problem solving algorithm just seems more sensible: 1\. write down the problem 2\. think very hard 3\. write down the answer

<comment><USER18> Do you have a reference to Feynman's problem solving algorithm? I've never heard of it.

One counter example is Feynman's Rule: "If the sign is wrong, change it." There is a long story behind that, about Feynman heading off to present a big paper, asking a grad student to "check the equations", grad student calls with terrible news that there is an incorrect sign in the middle section, Feynman says "I feel it is right." and delivers the paper, and grad student finds a correcting error a few pages (and a few days) further on. Basically, if you understand the physics, you know the final sign, and (after the first time) there is no real need to verify every sign in every equation along the way. That story is really far from "a miracle occurs" and the answer is written down.

Feynman also was extremely interested in how he came up with breakthroughs, almost obsessed about it, and did some meta-research about creativity. He told one story about a solution to a superfluidity problem he came up with while walking down the street. It was apparently bubbling up in his subconscious, and suddenly he stops in his tracks. He raises his hands like holding an imaginary picture frame, and makes a motion with one hand: "If I just tap it here - Yes! The answer fell into place." It drove him nuts that he could not ever do that again. He said many times after that he held his hands up, tapped the problem he was working on, and ... nothing.

<comment><USER17> > Do you have a reference to Feynman's problem solving algorithm? I've never > heard of it.

Hmmm, just googling for it associates the algorithm with Feynman. You know, I'm not sure if I actually read it in a Feynman book or if it's random trash I read on the internet. Wikiquotes attributes it to "a fellow physicist".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great article. A good example of this flaw at work is energy policy. Too much activity centered on activity to make people feel like something is happening. Not enough on tax policy that would incent people to innovate on their own. Politicians want to be standing next to the money as it is being handed out.

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot of people keep parroting Google's famous "fail quickly" model of encouraging innovation. But they seem to forget another well known fact: Apart from their core search product, Google has not produced another successful product. I think the two issues are related and a blind acceptance of Google's philosophy might be more harmful than good. Especially if your company does not have the kind of cash reserves that Google has.

<comment><USER21> What about GMail?

<comment><USER22> For that matter, what about Android?

<comment><USER23> Android was an acquisition

<comment><USER24> it wasn't that successful before the acquisition

<comment><USER23> So success defines innovation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Your message is somewhat contradictory. You describe the need for failure, but what you ultimately describe is emotional failure, perhaps with some external, material loss. In much of the world and time up to this point, failure has meant a significant risk of irreversible loss to self. As in, for example, health that cannot be recovered. A social judgment or status that will not be forgotten and cannot be escaped.

So much of the current talk about innovation, entrepreneurship -- I'm thinking of the lastest U.S. Administration program. A basic reason for the existence of this board. It takes change as a basic premise, a fundamental good.

Here's the secret: Social structures develop and evolve to promote stability. It's that stability that allows a greater combination and coordination of effort in more advanced works. That enables and makes sense of deep and long term investments, material and intellectual.

Those patterns can become constraining. Society reaches a limited "set point". Then change eventually overcomes inertia and shifts society out of this local maximum and back onto a course of less limited growth, of renewed prospects.

And since society is (increasingly) complex, opportunities for change exist, in aggregate, constantly, although in greater or lesser degree in different segments at different times.

Failure becomes desirable, when the benefits of trying outweigh the costs. When it won't kill you, or your family, or irretrievably break you -- then maybe you'll give it a go. Or when there is nothing to be gained in not trying.

So, move past "Change!", and ask how to make change happen. Help its agents get unstuck from local maxima. And ask what the goal is: An endless, exhausting treadmill of ever increasing change? Or a happier medium, when people can create and feel useful and e.g. still have a family and kids before their 40's?

This may be one component in why you don't hear so much about "blockbuster, breakout" start ups in Norway, to cite your example. Because people can grow their business to the point of having a good quality of life, without feeling that they must be the biggest because it's "winner takes all".

(This is speculation on my part, but based upon some years' observation, reading, conversations, etc. And my speculation about Norway is quite limited and takes your citation of their startup rate as fact, because I've never been there.

Also, admittedly, they have a lot of oil revenue at the moment, which certainly doesn't seem to hurt their aggregate well being. Something which is due in part, again, to preventing a "winner takes all" structure sought by "big oil"; regulation that has been cited and discussed here, before.)</comment>


Is Copyleft Really Right for Open Source? - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2010/12/7/is-copyleft-really-right-for-open-source

<comment><USER2> > _There's a problem in the software development world, a practice that breaks > down the free and open exchange of information. [...] I'm talking, of > course, about copyleft licenses such as the GPL._

It takes some spectacular mental gymnastics to believe that requiring available source code hinders "open exchange of information".

> _The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the most well-known example of a > so-called "copyleft" license and it requires, among other things, that any > project which utilizes GPL code that is released must, itself, be released > under the GPL._

No, the GPL requires that anything dependent on GPL code must be under a __compatible __license. You're free to release code under the BSD or X11 or zlib or apache (etc...) license. The author is just repeating the same tired old propaganda that's been shoveled out by proprietary software vendors for years.

> _I've never built an open-source project so large or complex that someone > else, given a little time and elbow grease, couldn't work out a similar > solution in a reasonable amount of time._

Most interesting opinions come from experience. If the author has never built anything significant, perhaps they ought to stop and consider where their opinions come from.

> _So how do I get people to contribute? It isn't going to be by using the > GPL...people will say "screw it" and build their own version of my library > that they can use without worrying about overly cumbersome licenses. [...] > No, I get people to contribute by giving it away as completely as possible > (I use the MIT license, but also like the WTFPL) and asking them to > contribute interesting stuff back._

This assumes that the same people contributing code would refuse to do so if the project was GPL-licensed, which to me seems extremely unlikely. I have released software under several licenses (including GPLv2, GPLv3, X11, and BSD-3); every single person who has begged me to change from the GPL to a proprietary-friendly license has __never __contributed a patch. Not a single bug fix, nor test case, nor even benchmark. Every contribution I've received, large or small, has been from people who are themselves working on open-source software.

> _Copyleft licenses are simply not necessary for the vibrancy of the open- > source community when it comes to simple libraries and, in fact, are more > likely to hinder the community by encouraging the creation of multiple > libraries to accomplish the same thing simply to avoid the requirements of a > license like the GPL._

Does any HN reader have a case where a member of the "open-source community" was harmed, hindered, or even momentarily annoyed by having to use GPL'd software? Because I can't think of any case, nor any reason why one might occur.

> _The Affero GPL is a variant of the GPL specifically designed to address > software that runs on network servers (such as web applications). It > requires that any server running the software (or a modified version > thereof) must make available the full source code of any modifications._

This is also wrong. The AGPL is, like the GPL, a copyright license. It only applies if the remote application (or derived data) is itself being sent to a client. For example, if I let an AGPL'd httpd serve my files, I am under no obligation to do anything at all regarding its source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Most interesting opinions come from experience. If the author has never > built anything significant, perhaps they ought to stop and consider where > their opinions come from.

The problem is that 90% of open-source libraries ARE small-to-medium size projects like the ones I've built. I didn't say I'm new to open source (I've released numerous successful projects) or even argue that for many big complex projects the GPL or other copyleft licenses are the wrong way to go. I'm simply stating that for projects like the ones I build the GPL is more likely to reduce user adoption than help build a contributing community.

> This assumes that the same people contributing code would refuse to do so if > the project was GPL-licensed

Not at all. I can't think of a reason that someone would refuse to contribute to an open source project because it was under the GPL. However, my argument is that many people will never even start using a library to begin with if they don't want to put up with the licensing headaches entailed with GPL.

> This is also wrong. The AGPL is, like the GPL, a copyright license. It only > applies if the remote application (or derived data) is itself being sent to > a client.

I'm not extremely well versed in the AGPL, I'll concede. Are you saying that someone could build a fork of Diaspora (say Facebook forked it and rewrote their entire site on top of it), made it available to the public without releasing the source and it would be compliant with the AGPL? If so, I retract my statements about the AGPL, but I'm under a different impression.

<comment><USER2> > _The problem is that 90% of open-source libraries ARE small-to-medium size > projects like the ones I've built._

What's your definition of "small" and "medium"? I'd say a small project takes about a week to go from nothing to a working prototype, and medium might take a month or two.

I might be misreading, but "I completed the first version in a day or less" makes it sound like the releases are basically just a few small utilities.

> _Are you saying that someone could build a fork of Diaspora (say Facebook > forked it and rewrote their entire site on top of it), made it available to > the public without releasing the source and it would be compliant with the > AGPL?_

I don't know anything about Diaspora, so I can't completely answer this question. However, assuming their protocol library is separate from the user interface, Facebook could indeed build support for Diaspora protocol into their site, using the AGPL'd Diaspora libraries, and not have to release source code.

The AGPL is IMO poorly considered. The authors _wanted_ it to behave as you describe, eg, as a sort of super-EULA that covers how the code can be run. However, since it's a copyright license, it doesn't have any action mechanism. If I modify an AGPL'd server, then run it on a publicly accessible host, I'm not doing anything that requires copyright permission and thus am not subject to the code's copyright license.

Note that some cases (such as JavaScript-based applications) will require copyright permission for me to host, and thus, be covered by the AGPL. However -- and this is a funny part -- they'd also be covered by the GPL! In other words, anything the AGPL can do, the GPL can also, and the GPL doesn't have aspirations of EULA-ship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dear jmillikin Let me make a helpful suggestion that is purely intended to be for your benefit (and if you work for a company, it would significantly help them too): contact an attorney who is familiar with Open Source legalities to get clarity on the obligations associated with distributing derivative works that use GPL. I just checked to make sure that you don't work in my company, 'cuz if you did I'd be very motivated to meet with you ASAP and help you understand some of the issues that GPL poses.

I don't mean to be condescending in my tone. Seriously. But Open Source licensing confuses many people -- and many form their opinions based on blogs (which are probably not very admissible in court), and not on the license text. Many people want and wish that the licenses work in the way they think it ought to. But that's not the way the legal system works.

Much like lawyers can't grok why a misplaced semicolon can cause a computer program to crash, developers don't seem to understand how contract language is interpreted by the legal system. In both cases though, the "interpreter" is very literal and does not heed to the authors intent as much as we might hope.</comment>