TV is broken - <AUTHOR> http://minimalmac.com/post/18189678921/tv-is-broken <comment><USER2> I made nachos for my niece once. Put Doritos on a cookie sheet, smothered them in cheese, and put them in the broiler. She thought they were weird and broken because I didn't use the normal plain-style tortilla chips. Her mom made her a new batch the right way.

Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the outside world things seem strange.

Like the above anecdote, I remember thinking it was weird when a neighbor made Taco Salad with Frito's instead of Doritos.

I remember how weird my grandmaa's house seemed all around when visiting. The food was different, the board games were different, it was all strange.

I think this anecdote is the same. Its not so much a case of the wisdom of the children, but just another example of a child not understanding that the entire world isn't like their sheltered existence. [I don't intend sheltered as a pejorative here.]

I'm sure there were plenty of other things on the trip that seemed broken, but none happened to be as evil as commercial TV.

<comment><USER3> Wait, you use _Doritos_ to make nachos?

Weirdo.

<comment><USER4> And fritos for taco salad? I'm so very confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are many other things that are broken too.

My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up.

Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on.

As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV.

We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.

<comment><USER6> Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours by a factor of 50 and you don't increase the supply of viewers at all?

I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe there were twice as many things I wanted to watch. When it reached four times as many channels, though, there were still only twice as many things I wanted to watch. Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days, because the budgets for the good shows were being spread among more shows to provide vehicles for more ads in all those new broadcast channel- hours.

Then, along came TiVo. Ah, TV was fun again. I could skim the cream. Couldn't imagine life without it. But as the years passed, the things I grabbed with TiVo were losing quality, too, seemingly bleeding budget to the shows "out there" that my TiVo and I ignored.

Then, my TV set broke. I assumed I'd have to get a new one quickly because, of course, everyone had to have a TV, right? I was sure I'd go crazy without it.

But I didn't. As time passed, I found I grew less motivated to get a new one, not more.

Well, after years of no TV, we finally got one a few weeks ago, so we wouldn't have to gather 'round the laptop for Netflix and slide shows of family vacations. The image is spectacular. But I can't believe what I'm so clearly seeing. They may call themselves The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Food Network, Science Channel, or whatever, but they're all "Paid Programming", reality for rednecks, and pseudoscience for suckers, punctuated by screaming ads.

Even the islands of quality have clearly suffered extreme beach erosion.

But at least DVR technology has improved. Sorry, JUST KIDDING. You'd think that after years of Moore's Law, Comcast could make a cable box that didn't act as though I was waking it from a nap with each key press. You'd think that a product called an "HD DVR" would have an HD interface (wouldn't you?), instead of one with the display resolution of the lower half of a Nintendo DS. You'd think with so few needles hidden in the haystack of broadcasting, their interface would help you navigate the guide and find shows to watch, but apparently nobody at Comcast HQ has ever used Amazon to find a book.

Either that or they never watch TV.

<comment> DanI-S Some validation: In the UK, the BBC has a pretty fixed budget, a pretty fixed (low) number of channels and a pretty fixed audience. They have continued to produce a high quality output of world-class educational and entertainment TV for a good chunk of the last century.

They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites.

It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And there will never be any ads.

<comment><USER7> Actually the BBC had it's remit massively widened by the last government so that it had to fill sections of DAB, a large amount of Radio channels, Freeview, set up iPlayer and run a whole load of channels that aren't even targeted at the UK (such as BBC Persian), largely to meet the FCO's propaganda needs. Additionally, the dodgy dossier episode has emasculated and distorted large chunks of the BBC's programming leading to some completely bizarre side effects[1].

The BBC still does produce a large amount of quality progamming, but budgets and purposes have been affected. Top Gear for example used to be about cars but is now an entertainment show - a wildly successful entertainment show, but no longer something you'd seriously watch to get an idea of what cars to buy and what to avoid. The BBC is also responsible for the One Show, which one day will be recognised by the UN as a crime against humanity. There's also been considerable dumbing down of shows like the Apprentice and Dragon's Den over time, eschewing quality in favour of personalities and entertainment. The natural history unit still put out good documentaries, but even they're not entirely untarnished[2].

The quality of news has also suffered, particularly thanks to spin doctors in previous administrations, the simon gilligan dodgy dossier affair and other stresses on the BBC. When was the last time you saw a proper debate? The other week I saw Alastair Campbell jogging around forests, talking up the end of civilisation through alcoholic poisoning brought on by drinking at home, demanding minimum pricing as the only way out but completely ignoring the impact of the smoking ban as a factor in home drinking increases. It was a terrible attempt at a documentary and a case study in what's wrong with the BBC at the moment.

I do apologise for getting on my soap box about this, you didn't deserve it for pointing out the good stuff. Still, the BBC is not a perfect organisation and the amount of media it has to produce combined with political interference has meant that quality has dropped, perhaps not as much considering the volume of material it puts out, but it isn't immune.

[1] - [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/today- pr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/today-programme- the-ladykillers-graham-linehan)

[2] - [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8950070/Fr...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8950070/Frozen- Planet-BBC-faked-polar-bear-birth.html)

<comment><USER8> Good points. I generally agree.

But I don't think your second reference is really a fair criticism, and I think this was blown completely out of proportion in the UK. I certainly didn't feel that the series was "tarnished". After all, getting a camera inside an actual polar bear den in the arctic? I think that'd be somewhat invasive. Still a beautifully shot, enjoyable and educational series.

The BBC has also been responsible for all of Adam Curtis's documentaries, which are often excellent, and still get made (although the most recent one was perhaps not so good, but I digress).

Proper debate occasionally happens on Newsnight, although I think Jeremy Paxman's role has developed into some sort of entertainer of late.

They did spend a lot of time paying vast amounts to... Jonathan Ross.

<comment><USER9> About Adam Curtis: Watching, say, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" was fun. But I don't see any reason to believe that his other documentaries about subjects I know less about are any more trustworthy than that piece on computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would observe that in some sense this isn't just a "kid growing up with different tech gets it better than the adults" story. My wife and I both feel the _exact same way_ about TV, in our mid-30s. We just have the historical perspective such that we don't have to ask "why". Also it's less cute when we ask why. But otherwise the same.

<comment><USER11> There's no age limit her. We're in our 40's, we watch a lot of series and movies, but we've rarely seen commercials in the past 10 or so years. Sometimes we start watching a show or movie more or less by accident, but that usually ends at the first commercial break.

Both of us find it hard to imagine people can actually tolerate watching TV that way, even though we've done the same for a long time.

But imho it's not so much TV that is broken. It's advertising. In today's world of on-demand personalized information, advertising has zero value. It's just noise. In SF movies we often see a world full of advertising everywhere, with lots of sound and motion. I like to believe the (near) future will be exactly the opposite: the advertising industry, no longer adding any value or generating any ROI, will collapse. Taking old school "broken" TV with it.

<comment><USER12> "But imho it's not so much TV that is broken. It's advertising. In today's world of on-demand personalized information, advertising has zero value."

What happens to Google & Facebook without advertising?

<comment><USER13> Their advertising is less broken.

I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads.

<comment><USER14> _I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads._

You can; it costs $50/year, though: <http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html>

<comment><USER15> The (paid for) Google Apps for Business still has a line of Ads at the top of the email listing. No ads down the RHS, though.

<comment><USER16> You mean the bar that says "Web Clip?" You can turn that off. Mail Settings -> Web Clip tab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The real issue with TV is that the audience is aging and eventually dying off.

TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV.

Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time. In my case I remember sharply losing interest in TV around the 1990s. Even around 2000 I felt insulted by advertising that is aimed at people who don't have money -- only medicare benefits they can spend and the hope that they can hire a ambulance chasing lawyer to make a big killing.

TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.

Some day the last television viewer will die and the cable companies and networks will turn off the lights. Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.

<comment><USER18> >TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.

I am curious about what you mean by 'TV for kids'.

It seems to me that 'kid shows' have been pretty good since the early nineties (Ducktales, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, the DC Animated universe cartoons). More recently: Kim Possible, Spectacular Spider-Man, Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Titan, Transformers Animated, the Avengers and Young Justice have been _phenomenal_ with respect to writing, voice acting and animation. This is one area where I'm a little envious of kids these days.

I grew up with cartoons made to sell toys. They get shows made to tell (good) stories.

EDIT:Spelling

<comment><USER17> Where do you see these?

I certainly never see them on cable when I visit friends and family. I saw Kim Possible once a long time ago, and I also was really impressed with Teen Titans, enough to get the box set.

Are these on a channel they don't get? On AMZN or Netflix? Or do you just have to get them through BitTorrent?

There might be some good stuff, but it's never on. Spongebob Squarepants is always on... I wonder if there's a connection.

<comment><USER19> Kim Possible: Disney Channel Sponguebob Square Pants: I think Nickelodeon Teen Titans: I forget, probably Cartoon Network.

Honestly, the only way I'd ever go back to cable is if I had an a la carte system; and then I'd take Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, G4, Discovery Channel and their affiliates. I don't want/need the rest...

(also, haven't paid for cable in > 2 years. Netflix, Redbox, Vudu are my friends)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's not really TV, it's TV networks that are broken. Hulu (and other online archives) may be even more irritating than broadcast TV. It's difficult to find what you want; you are hit by download limits in the middle of a program; there are still commercials, and it's the same ones over and over and over, and the repetition can drive you nuts; browser crash means starting over sometimes, or if you can go to where you left off, you have to endure skipped commercials.

I have an expensive cable package. But I am also a frequent Bittorrent user because the process of finding and watching is far preferable to the online services, and sometimes the cable on-demand service. As a result, I often "steal" via Bittorrent, content I've already paid for. Not sure whether I'll keep that expensive cable package much longer.

My kids are older and know what commercials are, but they are growing up knowing that TV networks (via cable or online) are just not usable. They have now, and will expect in the future, a large selection of content, and instant delivery with no interruptions.

<comment><USER21> Hold on ... Hulu has download limits in the middle of watching a program? I've watched Hulu from 5 AM till 5 PM almost uninterrupted, the only interruption is between shows they will say "You've been watching for 3 hours, are you sure you don't want to take a break?". That repeats every two hours or so.

Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming my content when I want. Also they are not NEARLY as long as the commercials on TV and if a TV commercial is really loud (I'm looking at you eHarmony commercial) and you complain they will actually do something about it.

Hulu may have its limitations because of stupid studio rules, but overall the experience of watching content online with Hulu is pretty straightforward and easy.

<comment><USER22> I really wanted to like Hulu. I even paid for Hulu Plus so I could watch it on my PS3 and get access to the larger library. But on my PS3, Hulu streaming was flakey. And then the commercials. The commercials ended it. After watching on Netflix, I just couldn't deal with Hulu's commercials. They're nearly as grating as cable TV, and for some strange reason they always seemed to be inserted 5 seconds away from where the content was written for them to be inserted: music, COMMERCIAL, finish music, fade through black.

I would happily pay for Hulu Plus Plus, where the extra plus means I pay more and they turn off the commercials. But I'm unwilling to pay for Hulu Plus at all.

<comment><USER23> I was looking at using Hulu Plus to augment my Netflix subscription, but when I found out that even the paid version had commercials I changed my mind.

At one point they were experimenting with a "Watch one long commercial at the beginning then no interruptions" thing, which was fantastic, but I guess they nixed that, because I haven't seen it the last few times I've been on Hulu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've had almost identical conversations with my child in the past, which is not surprising since we do not have cable or an antenna. Who would easily accept the broadcast model who was not brought up with it?

Perhaps more interesting is my older brother (approaching retirement age), who doesn't stream content but consumes through cable. Even when watching currently playing shows he records to DVR and delays watching long enough that he can skip commercials.

It seems to me that the old broadcast model was always awful, but it used to be the only thing going. The first hints of its eventual demise really first appeared with easy access to movie rentals and home video recorders.

<comment><USER25> The behaviour of your brother is one I see amongst my friends & I. We routinely watch sports on tape-delay (particularly NFL which has an amazing ability to take commercials right when things are getting exciting) just so we can skip through commercials.

<comment><USER26> My wife and I try to do the same. We like to try to time things just right so that we could still watch the ending in real-time. Starting a football game at halftime usually works pretty well.

This year, I watched all NFL through the RedZone channel. It increased the amount of games that I could follow, but eliminated all the commercials. It does take some of the suspense out of it though, since you don't really get a good flow for a single game. It also helped that I recently moved to CA from Indy and got DirecTV Sunday Ticket to watch Colts games. That was before we knew how bad their season was going to be, so I wasn't too invested in following particular games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have given up on most TV - especially cable TV. Almost 3 years ago my wife and I moved and decided to not startup cable TV. I setup an antenna and run MythTV, Boxee and anything else that will run on a browser + flash. I run a virtual machine for Netflix. When we started this experiment, I thought we might go running back to cable. What we discovered is that there is a ton of content available. The Mythbox nicely removes commercials.

When people hear that I don't have cable, many are confused that I can receive HD programming over the air. The cable companies have done a brilliant job confusing the public into believing that you must have cable to watch TV and/or access HD content.

We couldn't be happier. I challenge anyone to give up paying for cable tv. Good luck!

<comment><USER28> This isn't about cable. It's about the whole model of unidirectional media. Dieing out, if you have not noticed.

<comment><USER27> I complain about cable television in any conversation about TV!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Almost all my big screen watching is through Roku of mainly Netflix streaming. I cut cable over a year ago and very rarely watch network TV (NFL football games are main thing I watch over the air).

I feel like the young girl every time I'm at a friends house and trying to navigate whatever cable/sat guide they have. Seriously, it's 2012 and I'm paging through this endless list of "channels" labeled by NUMBER and a CALLSIGN? 1006 WKOW-HD. 12.1 ABC. Try to watch Jeopardy and get assaulted with denture paste, hearing aides, and adult diaper commercials! What the heck is going on? It is truly astonishing how bad the UI for these set-top boxes is, combined with the process of finding out what and where the correct ESPNx channel (HD or not HD) is to watch the game.

Huge potential for serious changes in this industry. I don't like to throw such a vague word like "app" around, but that is the future. ESPN will have an app that will deliver their content in the best way. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work Major League Baseball is doing on mobile and TV. They're able to provide the video/audio, but augment it with other datastream. For sports this makes so much sense.

<comment><USER26> The best app I've seen for this is HBO Go. It has a huge back catalog of HBO content and a revolving set of movies. It pairs great with an iPad. But, in order to get it, you still need a cable or satellite subscription (and HBO).

<comment><USER30> Absolutely agreed - phenomenal. I also have enjoyed the additional content they sometimes add for HBO Go users.

Showtime has started doing this thing where you logon to their website _while_ the show is premiering to do/see something but I've never done it because I DVR Showtime shows. Showtime had a press release that they were going to launch their own version of HBO Go but I've not see anything.

I'm excited. I think premium channels like this are going to be the change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I could imagine a similar and opposite article, "Netflix is broken", written from the perpective from an older person instead of a younger one: Why do I need to sign in? Why do I have to choose something to watch – why doesn't it just let me start watching immediately? Why is it so hard to change channels? Why do I have to watch things on my small computer screen instead of my large television screen?

<comment><USER32> If Netflix had a 'random' button it would be their greatest innovation ever.

<comment><USER33> Sometimes I end up picking or asking my girlfriend for random numbers just to shuffle TNG episodes, since that's how I'm used to seeing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Broken for whom?

Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.

Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.

<comment><USER3> >TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.

That's exactly what's happening, though. Most adults _don't_ sit through commercials any more. The percentage of people who don't get their shows through the internet and don't skip over commercials with a DVR is something like 33%. I'd bet my last dollar that demographic skews elderly in a major way, too.

<comment><USER34> Interesting. Do you have a source for that?

When visiting DVR-using friends, I see them watching some commercials (especially, if it's interesting, the first one of a group). And I know that some people who get their TV over the Internet end up seeing ads (e.g., Hulu, YouTube, network sites).

So I suspect that a fair number of ads still get watched, but I can't quickly find any data on how many versus past years.

<comment><USER3> I can't find the source, but I think it was on HN within the last year or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The problem with tv for the past 50 years or so is that it has encouraged a passive relationship between culture and its consumers. It kills conversation, discourages activity, its one-sidedness is bad for people. The internet has come to the rescue, allowing people young and old to be more active participants in their own culture. Hopefully this unidirectional mode of content delivery will die off completely within in the next 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think everyone agrees that commercials are annoying but I don't think TV is broken at all. After all, most of the content we stream with other means originated as TV shows or Hollywood movies.

So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees?

When I was a kid in Germany there were three channels, all publicly financed, to a large extent via a per-household radio/TV fee. TV was only broadcasting for a few hours a day. The overall quality was very high and commercials were in a block between shows. I'd love to go back to that model but I doubt the general public would agree.

<comment><USER37> >So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees?

This is it. The same as music has been doing for years. It's not like there's not an existing model for this, direct to video movies have existed for a long time (though they were generally considered "low quality" and thus didn't get theater time). Netflix is already in the original content business and I think we'll see more of that. The problem then becomes the translation of content silos to the Internet. I have a Netflix subscription because it has the most stuff. I have no intention of getting a subscription to Hulu Plus or the myriad of content producers individual plans (the future HBO.com, AMC.com, etc.) Hopefully they can find a way to aggregate pay-per-view into a consistent online platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My nine year old has never been entertained by cable or broadcast TV.

On broadcast TV there is nothing but the e|i junk that is so unwatchable that the category must have been invented by the author of "four arguments for the elimination of television".

On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems.

At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder.

</comment><comment><USER38> It would make me a proud parent to know that my kid doesn't know what a cable commercial is.

Slightly off topic, but the messages, subliminal messages, and methods of targeting these commercials do are sickening. I think some of them and their authors should be tried for criminals.

How is it okay that, for example, jewellery commercials basically attempt to trick female minds into defining love and levels of love by the metals and rocks their loved one purchases for them? How is a 5 year old supposed to know better?

</comment><comment><USER39> Advertising needs to be turned upside in the DVR/Digital streaming era. Imagine if the show you watched ran ad-free, and instead simply had a 'Sponsored By' section on the shows start page (basically a newly designed 'landing page' for each tv show). Then we viewers would simply choose to watch the ad's when we/if we wanted. And even if we didn't watch an ad, just seeing a Tide logo on that page would cause some to buy their product ('cool they sponsor Family Guy...' for example).

The thing that advertisers don't seem to understand is that we consumers are actually interested in the right ad's. I would choose to watch the new trailer for Game of Thrones - Season Two for example. Or an add for the new Honda Element, if I were shopping or just curious what the new model looked like.

All the sponsored by ads could be google-style customized to the viewer, and the view-rate would likely be higher than it is now where I DVR skip pretty much all ad's since there is no easy way for me to know what is being shown.

On top of all that, advertisers would be able to know exactly how many people were actually watching their ads. They could even add in interactive 'like/dislike' voting to further determine the effectiveness of the ad.

I thought of all this 5-6 years ago when DVR's really got popular. It seemed to me an obvious way to 'evolve' TV, and I'm pretty surprised something like this hasn't already happend. I guess it's expecting too much from an industry that is used to just shoveling ads at us from all angles, the idea of 'choice' is probably pretty scary/imposible for them.

Maybe this is the way Apple intends to crack TV?

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm baffled every time I'm watching broadcast TV and see an ad for something I would never in a million years purchase...and if the advertiser just had a couple pieces of info about me would never bother showing me that ad. I guess this will eventually come with IPTV and ad platforms for broadcast that more closely resemble targeted advertising online. The sheer inefficiency of shotgun approach broadcast advertising is crazy to me.

</comment><comment><USER41> For all the folks that still watch broadcast television (I do): starting in December 2012, the "CALM Act" takes effect, restricting the use of louder than normal commercials.

[http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting- lou...](http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting-loud- commercials)

</comment><comment><USER42> I act just like that four year old now when I'm around a "normal" tv. It had been long enough that I decided to simply go in assuming that tv must be fixed by now, and I can pick a show from a menu, netflix/hulu style, and get what I want immediately.

I went through the motions, and had an entertaining exchange with my sister. Something like:

Me: "I just selected 'Modern Family'. Why is 'Modern Family' not playing now? I just see a short description and no 'play' button."

Her: "Don't you remember how tv works? It's not on right now, this is just a tv guide"

Me: "I guess tv is worthless. I hope nobody paid any money for this"

I wasn't being deliberately obtuse. I was genuinely surprised at how much it sucked, and I really do not understand why so many people pay so much money for it.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm in the UK.

Until a few years ago I didn't really mind ads - I would happily sit through them until my show came back.

Then in mid-2009 gocompare.com launched their ad campaign (with Wynne Evans singing.) They pushed it really hard - it was on nearly every show on every channel. The song was so irritating that I got into the habit of muting the TV during the commercial breaks.

If I had been a TV network executive, I would have refused to run those ads. They are so awful that they encourage viewers to avoid ads, and I'll bet it has decreased revenue from other advertisers.

Example: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1)

</comment><comment><USER44> Broken as if the internet has no commercials? TV exists cause it's simple: streams of stories at the press of a button. No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue.

<comment><USER45> It doesn't take hours to find stuff on line that is worth watching.

Just use Google: [http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chr...](http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hurt+locker+torrent)

Or some similar search engine.

<comment><USER46> It really does take hours to find something worth watching if you don't already know what you want to watch.

I do not watch much TV to begin with, but when I do, I will load up Netflix and see if anything catches my eye. Most times I'll spend 30 minutes looking for something and then simply give up and move on to something more interesting. Having access to even more content just makes the problem worse, not better.

Sometimes I'll catch wind of good programming recommendations from others, but those sources are easily exhausted. The internet does a much better job. I can just turn up here and I'll probably find at least 50% of the links interesting at any given time. TV needs something like that.

<comment><USER47> > TV needs something like that.

Seriously. Someone make a hacknews/reddit-style discovery system for TV. Channels become subreddits. If you finish item one, item two starts automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Nobody's mentioned tiling? And then also tiling. And then tiling and more tiling, and then the good part is coming up and--tiling. And here's the big play and it looks like they might just make a touchdow--tiling.

I miss analog.

</comment><comment><USER49> TV might be broken, but the inability of a child to focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time isn't the best evidence. It definitely brings up some interesting things to think about, though.

First, while the attention span of adults is normally quite a bit better than that of kids, the digital age is eroding our ability to focus on one thing [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Faceb...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Facebook- internet-wire-brain-shorten-attention-span.html). While this may be a temporary trend as we adapt to the information overload the internet can provide, I think it's fairly safe to say that people 10 years from now will be far less likely to sit patiently watching TV than people 20 years ago.

The most obvious implication from this may be that commercial advertising, rather than TV in general, is going to need to adapt. I imagine part of the reason why people under 30 are cutting the cable in increasing numbers is because they aren't willing to sit through loud, irrelevant commercials in order to watch something they don't _actually_ want to watch. The tolerance of the consumer for TV style advertising is shrinking proportionally to the consumer's attention span. This should be good for subscription services like Netflix, and would be good for HBO/Showtime if they didn't for customers to pay for cable/sat in addition to their services.

<comment><USER50> Do not cite the Daily Mail. It is not a news source or source of information about science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I paid for Directivo for 10+ years, long before HDTV. $100+/month.

Now, I have a Samsung 55" LED with a beautiful picture that I bought online for cheap. I plugged an older Macbook Pro into it via hdmi. Couch Potato, Sick Beard, $7/month lifetime unlimited usenet account from a thanksgiving special, mplayer extended to play it all. I haven't seen a commercial in years. As the author says, if it isn't online, I don't watch it.

TV isn't broken, cable companies are.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's unfortunate that windows media center hasn't caught on in a bigger way. I use it on my casual home theater and my larger more serious home theater. I have a channel master 4221 antenna that feeds into 2 HD Homerun tuners and clearQAM feeding into a couple more. This gives me the ability to record/watch 4 channels at once from any networked media center in the house. Media center has a fantastic interface that aggregates all the channels available across all tuners and hides the complexity. It allows you to easily record series and find shows across any of the tuners, all while looking beautiful. In addition to the great tv viewing experience, there is the wonderful media browser addon that beautifully indexes your digital movie collection and plugins like showanalyzer to automatically skip commercials in recordings. With TMT 5, I get a blu-ray player built right into media center too.

I honestly could not imagine a better setup. The only issue is that the initial setup is way too hard and time consuming. But the result can't be beat right now.

<comment><USER53> That channel master 4221 is an AWESOME antenna. I didn't have a car when I bought mine, so I had to walk with it for 2 miles to my apartment. I set it up in the closet (which is completely not recommended... multipath, etc., etc.) and still got unreal picture quality on my computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> And this is why this form of media is losing. Because it's worse, and any 4-year old will notice. Especially a 4-year –old. More and louder commercial won't fix the problem, it will just keep the next generation even further away. Like black-and-white silent films, it lacks basic features that the new generation is taking for granted, around user control, choice and interactivity.

</comment><comment><USER55> Very interesting anecdotes, but I don't see how it shows that TV is "broken", other than OP's daughter thinking it was broken when first exposed to commercials. Additionally, Hulu / Hulu+ and streaming shows directly from a network's exposes you to as many commercial breaks (albeit shorter) as watching a show on cable.

<comment><USER56> Tomorrow, Hacker News will be discussing a story about a 14 year old boy who discovered that some rats prefer raspberries.

If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story.

TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.

People buy devices to mask these problems, but they really don't solve them.

Hulu is slightly less broken. Netflix Instant Watch is even LESS broken.

<comment><USER57> _TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed._

Not sure your market or cable company. But in Berkeley (and SF) with Comcast under on-demand I have a section called "TV Shows", the "All Shows" section lists about 300 TV shows.Each with about 8-20 episodes. All On-Demand all with rewind, pause etc. The exception is it won't let me FF through the limited ads embedded in the streams.

Assume this was all current content. How much would you pay for this service? With Ads? Without? Because its not anywhere near the $10 price you're paying now for Netflix or Hulu.

<comment><USER56> I have money, and I want to watch Season 2, Episode 2 of the West Wing, which my friend just told me is worth watching.

I cannot give them my money, to watch it. I could wait a couple days for Netflix to mail me the DVD, but by then the impulse might pass.

TV is broken.

<comment><USER58> It's not ideal that you have to use a mishmash of services to get what you want when you want it. But there are multiple delivery mechanisms for a lot of popular content.

For instance, you could watch the West Wing Season 2 on iTunes: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing- season-2/...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing- season-2/id203756198) Or Amazon Instant Video: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_titl...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_title_1)

<comment><USER56> ...neat. Substitute another movie or show that you'd like to watch but can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Yes it is. The problem with TV is that advertisers have a lot more money than you do, so advertisers get to dictate how TV works.

I'm looking forward to a world where people produce content and I give them money to watch it. It works for the porn industry, so why not everything else? (Probably the same reason why our cell phones don't treat voice and data as the bits they are. There is more money to be made for the middlemen by offering "value add" instead of a "dumb pipe". And there's one thing middlemen do well: keeping themselves alive at the expense of everyone else.)

In the mean time, I'll just pirate everything. That cuts out the middleman!

</comment><comment><USER60> So what happens when a kid who is used to TV goes to watch Netflix and the stream gets interrupted (like we all know it would on a typical hotel wi-fi network). If you've watched videos online before, you know it's just buffering, but the tv-oriented kid would do the same thing as this guy's kid did: ask if it's broken, or why we stopped it.

I'm not saying that there are no problems with the way TV is presented, but to raise a child in a relatively TV-less environment, marvel at their confusion over how it works, and then come to the conclusion that TV is broken... that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.

<comment><USER61> My 5 year old had a much easier time understanding that Netflix needs to buffer or downgrade sometimes than why there are advertisements on television.

I think that's because Netflix buffering has an explanation that directly relates to the activity itself, whereas the explanation for advertisements is a lot more abstract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> In the last week or so, it's become clear that Google is planning to offer some sort of IPTV service over its fiber network in Kansas City when it comes online later this year. [0] It will be interesting to see how disruptive their offering will be. Even just selling programming a la carte would be a huge improvement over what the cable companies offer, but I have a feeling Google will (eventually) do more than just that.

0\. [http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google- giving-s...](http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving- stronger-signal.html)

</comment><comment><USER63> This sounds stupid but I always thought there weren't commercials for channels that you actually pay for? That the advertisements were to compensate for channels that didn't cost anything?

I haven't really watched tv since the mid 90's and never in the USA so I might miss something obvious here. But where I lived, regular channels were broadcast nationally over the air and they had commercials. I always thought the popularity of cable/satellite subscription was based on you getting rid of the commercials, not _paying for_ seeing more commercials on more channels?

<comment><USER64> Unfortunately, that's incorrect. The cable channels, as mentioned upthread, early on promised "since we can restrict access, unlike broadcast, we can just charge people and we won't show ads." That's not true in 2012. It is extremely, extremely rare to find television without frequent and intrusive advertising. HBO has less toxic advertising practices and better content, which is why you see them mentioned so often in this context.

Basically, the main television networks are all double-dipping (cf Marco Arment: [http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in- ipad-m...](http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad- magazines) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> My 3 yr old kids had exactly the same reaction to a nearly identical scenario. Though, we subscribed to cable TV after my father in law threatened to not come visit any more if he couldn't watch his live sports with the clicker...

Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.

</comment><comment><USER66> Here is how we are trying to fix TV with HTML5 video support, so any video web site can get on TVs: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBZ1xdcC1Q>

The folks at PandoDaily ran a nice article about us, too:

[http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring- the-...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-internet- to-everything-plugged-into-your-tv/)

</comment><comment><USER67> Some people have mentioned the cable boxes are the issues but no one has mentioned Scientific Atlanta by name. If I'm not mistaken they have been producing horrible boxes for multiple carriers for years!

As a Cablevision/Optonline subscriber, I find that using their iOS app is way ahead of using the actual cable box interface.

Is it IR that just makes the interface slow or is there some other hardware constraint that?

<comment><USER68> Most cable set tops have dedicated decryption, video/audio decoding chips so the main CPU available for running the UI is very weak by design. Cisco & Motorola make these set tops pretty much by spec of what the big cable providers want. They don't want a general purpose platform and truly just don't understand why they might want a better user interface. Only in the last year or so have these set tops started to get faster but they are still gimped by the guide software the cable providers use. They usually opt for consistency over quality. The same guide that runs on a 2012 set top needs to work on a 1997 set top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I had exactly the same problem with my daughter (now 3 years old). She grew up playing with an iPhone and an iPad. The TV was broken in two ways:

1\. Touching the screen (and swiping) didn't do anything.

2\. The concept of having to _wait_ until a specific time to see a show was completely alien.

Thank heavens we at least don't have commercial breaks in kids programs (Poland).

</comment><comment><USER70> Older people might think Netflix is broken, but the fact is they'll be dead soon and with them goes their opinion that the old way of television was better. That being said, most of us probably know both sides of the argument pretty well, and I've got to say that I like the newer, streaming versions of television better.

</comment><comment><USER71> Thanks for posting this, and thanks everyone for upvoting it. It's even better the 4th time it's made it to #1 on hacker news. I gained some new insight into how TV sucks and the Internet is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER72> i can completely relate. it is a legit challenge to describe advertising- funded media. there was once a concept of an editorial firewall, which seems cute in an antique sense of the word, possibly believable circa 1971. advertising, for one reason or another, seems to have the effect of shaping whatever it funds towards a decreased intellectual stimulus, ie lower curiosity. there's something to think about with respect to Super Bowl ads being the most valuable on TV.

</comment><comment><USER73> TV is outdated, but so are a lot of more important things: cars/transportation, government, "economics", agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure, humans, natural language.

<comment><USER74> You're a human, typing in a natural language, on a computer powered by the electrical infrastructure provided by his government. That computer only exists because of the manufacturing capabilities we gained during the industrial revolution 200 years ago, which, in addition to being the source of the modern economy, could not have happened if it weren't for the rise of totalitarian agriculturalism 10,000 years ago. That 10,000 years is a pittance compared to the millions of years of human history spent focused more on hunting, gathering, and herding than on cultivating crops. The origin of language in humans is hazy, but we've only been around in our various forms for a few million out of the billions of years of Earth's history.

How could all of these _brand new_ things possibly be outdated? ;)

<comment><USER73> When is the last time you upgraded your operating system, bought a new computer, or bought a new car?

The pace of technological evolution is exponential, not linear. <http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns>

We have to operate on a day-to-day basis, not a cosmological one. We should apply current scientific knowledge on a large scale immediately.

* Cars/transportation -- Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Can Really Take Us <http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/>

* natural language -- Problems with natural language for requirements specification [http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requiremen...](http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requirements/NL-problems.html)

* government -- Politicians Are Not Trained To Solve Problems <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=related)

* economics -- ARE ECONOMICS A SCIENCE OF TRUTH OR AN IDEOLOGY OF POWER? <http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html>

* agriculture -- Urban Farming: Hydroponics in the City <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo>

* manufacturing -- Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA>

* humans -- not really quite outdated yet, but soon. Jeopardy! IBM Watson Day 2 (Feb 15, 2011) Part 2/2 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=related)

* infrastructure -- Evacuated Tube Transport <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk>

<comment><USER74> Well, thanks for this. But you do realise I was just playing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I have a TiVo and TV works just fine for me.

(It's hard to fathom now, however, how I ever coped with TV before getting a TiVo, which I've had for more than a decade now.)

</comment><comment><USER76> once upon a time i visited my father's house. when he started watching TV my 3 year old ran to the televisionscreen, tried to swipe it, pushed on some things on the screen, even did a two arm multi arm gesture to minimize the current screen - nothing happened - he turned away quite bored, i was very proud.

</comment><comment><USER77> My favorite experience is when the iPad runs out of batteries (blessedly more frequently now) and the kids realize they have nothing to do but read.

Throw away your TV? So 2006. You want to take care of your kids? Cancel your streaming video accounts.

I like Shiela Ash's question about cigarettes: "Why would you pay for something that goes up in smoke?!"

Modified for streaming: "Why would you pay to rot your kids' brains?!"

</comment><comment><USER78> _I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy._

No. You shouldn't have. Thanks for making the free hotel wifi choked for everyone by pulling down a long-term video. What you should have done was bring along some videos of your own.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm sure most of that didn't happen but it's a cute story to drive a tired point.

</comment><comment><USER80> Folks do not want to pay the amount commercial free TV would cost. Full stop.

If the "investment money" ever stops supporting youtube/hulu/(insert profitless service here), then goodbye web substitute.

Even The Daily Show has gone into full annoyance mode lately.

<comment><USER81> Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost, but the money is eaten up by ESPN's multi-channel presence in basic-cable packages. Yes, your cable dollars subsidize ESPN.

<comment><USER80> > _Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost_

Not even close. Take the entire amount of advertising $$ spent on TV ($100B+) and divide by the folks watching. That is the money that people would have to shell out one way or another.

<comment><USER82> Eh, do you have a citation for it being $100B or more a year? I can only find figures for about $60B:

[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-07/tech/30048336...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-07/tech/30048336_1_ad- spending-online-advertising-ad-business)

(The UK's is about $2.5B, despite it having around 20% of the US's population. Quite a stark difference.)

<comment><USER83> Another question is what percentage of that $60B actually funds TV content and how much is spent on producing ads and other advertising-specific overhead that would presumably vanish if we payed for completely ad-free TV.

<comment><USER81> Here's an article that describes a $77.5B TV advertising market in 2008:

[http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/can- google-c...](http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/can-google-crack- tv-ad-market-96740)

Here we see a 750MM subscriber base in the US:

[http://www.bgr.com/2011/05/19/internet-and-telco-tv-eat- away...](http://www.bgr.com/2011/05/19/internet-and-telco-tv-eat-away-at- cable-tv-market-share/)

So, that's what, ~$100 per subscriber...PER YEAR, to compensate for zero commercials? I hope my math is wrong!

<comment><USER82> I have a feeling I'm being terrifically dim, but how can there be a 750 million subscriber base in the US?

<comment><USER81> That is a good point!

Old numbers of ~160MM households as below, with 58% subscribing to basic cable[1], gives us ~93MM

77.5B / 93MM = $833/yr, or $70/mo.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Bloomberg offers a great iPad app, where you can live stream, or watch episodes on demand. The future of channels are apps.

I've never personally ordered cable, and grew up with out it as well.

</comment><comment><USER85> this story seems a bit manufactured. i get that the kid makes the whole thing more endearing and maybe more poignant, but the writing seems inauthentic and intentionally crafted to drive home the obvious point (a point that every tech-savvy person in our modern world already agrees with)

</comment><comment><USER86> they're only just now realizing this?

</comment><comment><USER87> Such a good post. Tv is broken.

</comment><comment><USER88> This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies.

I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere). When I get around to watching it has all of the episodes of the shows I care about. Many of them come from ShowTime, HBO, PBS or the Movie Network, having no commercials. Of course I explicitly pay for those channels individually, well outside of PBS.

Other channels have a different business model, but strangely neither my children, my wife or I have any mental issue with it -- it's just the way it is. Nor do I have an issue when a play has an intermission, even though really I'd just like them to keep playing through.

In some ways this reminds me a bit of this submission from the other day - [http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth- that...](http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that- torrents-the-crown/)

<comment><USER89> The article is saying that for a child raised (mostly) on commercial-free media (Netflix), advertisements are so intrusive and annoying that the child rejects watching TV outright because of the commercials.

I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?

<comment><USER88> The title "TV" refers to a physical medium. If it meant "the commercial- supported major networks", then perhaps it should have said that.

Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change. If you give your child maple syrup when they're accustomed to Aunt Jemima, they will ask you what it is. They will probably ask for their Aunt Jemima back. Children are not savants supplying higher information (and I say that as a very proud parent of four of them): They are creatures of routine and habit. A day later they would happily enjoy maple syrup, rejecting their old standby.

There just isn't anything profound or particularly insightful about that observation. It doesn't merit the "TV is broken" bit.

<comment><USER90> > _"Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change."_

My own niece certainly notices that records are different than music from my Boxee. But records don't really bother her. She thinks they're weird because they're so big, and you have to find them and put them on the player and be careful with the needle.

But she happily drags out the player, shuffles through the handful of records I have and listens to them from time to time.

Yet she had a very similar reaction to what's described in the article, when she (briefly) saw Shrek on Cable. Her grandmother (the only one in her family who watches broadcast anymore) flipped through the channels and passed Shrek, whereupon my niece convinced her that they should watch it. After the first commercial break she asked if we could just watch it on the Boxee.

So it's not "child notices change". Not entirely. It's mostly "child dismisses interstitial advertising entirely".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Cable TV started out with the premise that it won't have ads and slowly it started adding them. Hulu already has ads.

I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix started ads soon, since they seem to getting slowly crushed with the high cost of licensing content.

<comment><USER92> ...and as ads increase, so does piracy.

People will pay for no ads, but they won't pay for ads for very long, especially my generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Commercial television is a horrible user experience. Public service broadcasting in the UK is slightly less horrible. It's quality is declining as the BBC has tried to spread itself across a multitude of markets at the same time as trying to keep the license fee under control.

The bias of the BBC has always been in dispute. The right wing think the BBC is left leaning (because by their simple ratonale anything state funded is). The left wing want to keep the BBC out of the hands of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The Scots, Welsh and Irish see the BBC as a propaganda machine for Westminster.

However, regardless of it's flaws, the BBC is probably the premier broadcaster of quality television on the planet; though I fear too many changes from idealogical government intervention will change this for the worse.

</comment><comment><USER94> Perhaps a better title would be "advertising on TV is broken".

No one pays any attention to it anymore. And most people I know, like me, don't even have broadcast TV. Or cable.

I watch shows, yes, on DVD -- and largely on my own terms. No adverts.

<comment><USER45> No it is tv that is broken. I have some channels that don't have ads at all (not even between shows) but I don't watch them, because you have to watch at a particular time, can't really pause them and the movies are years old.

<comment><USER94> "and the movies are years old."

... and, that's bad? Personally, most of the movies I might want to watch are certainly in black-and-white anyhow.

<comment><USER45> Not everybody is a hipster :)

I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. And recently the explosions have become more awesome, so I prefer the never movies.

You keep Casablanca, if you want.

<comment><USER95> > I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the > pretty girl once he is done blowing things up.

Die Hard is "years old" (24 of them, actually) and is an awesome movie in this genre. In fact I am going to preemptively declare you to be an action movie hipster if you like them but not Die Hard.

Being old doesn't make a movie bad. Being bad makes a movie bad. Sometimes that's because the times have changed and the plots are hard to relate to, but usually it's got nothing to do with the age.

<comment><USER45> It is okay, but the CGI explosions aren't as good as in the new movies (they properly wasn't even CGI then).

<comment><USER96> Absolutely true. For example Ronin (1998) has much more awesome special effects than the average 201x CGI infested equivalent. I was surprised by the perceptiveness of a youngster who pointed this syndrome out to me, he recognises the superiority of movies half a generation older than the movies made for his generation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Epic's Fortnite standoff is putting Apple's cash cow at risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21369460/apple-fortnite-app-store-services-business-model-epic-games <comment><USER2> >It's the same logic driving Apple's own pursuit of subscriptions: getting users to pay continuously for services means increased revenue. Apple even went as far as to lower its 30 percent take down to 15 percent after a year for developers willing to commit to subscriptions.

I wonder how much this, vs. a more constant revenue stream, is the reason for so many apps becoming subscription services.</comment>


Show HN: A community-curated list of open companies - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/waldyrious/awesome-open-company

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been collecting info about this kind of companies for quite a while, and warmly welcomed the creation of the Open Company Initiative ([http://opencompany.org](http://opencompany.org)) in 2013 -- co-founded, among others, by Chad Whitacre from Gittip/Gratipay, who holds a pretty strong stance regarding organizational transparency.

Unfortunately, the model they've chosen for building up the directory is based on a specific pledge taken by the companies themselves, which makes community participation in expanding the list pretty much impossible ([https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/issues/10...](https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/issues/103))

So I decided to follow the example of the many awesome-x lists that have been sprouting up lately, and start a community-curated one for open companies, too. The list is by no means complete, so feel free to contribute your knowledge of open companies or other related resources that you think should be there.

</comment><comment><USER2> What is the definition of an Open Company?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's addressed in the first section in the document: [https://github.com/waldyrious/awesome-open-company#what- is-a...](https://github.com/waldyrious/awesome-open-company#what-is-an-open- company)

In short, there isn't a standard, universally agreed definition, but there's a common pattern in:

\- the definition I used ("a for-profit organization whose core practices are guided by principles of openness, transparency and interoperability. This philosophy can be summarized by the maxim: Share as much as possible, charge as little as possible.")

\- the Open Company Initiative ([http://opencompany.org](http://opencompany.org)) definition: "Companies committed to openness as a defining element in how [they] create value."

\- the Wikipedia definition ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_business](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_business)): "an approach to enterprise that draws on ideas from openness movements like free software, open source, open content and open tools and standards. The approach places value on transparency, stakeholder inclusion, and accountability."

\- the P2P Foundation definition ([http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Business](http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Business)): "a business that operates around the principles that are similar to those of the free software and open source movements, i.e. with 'free' and 'open' content."

Let me know if my synthesis (the first definition above) seems innacurate or incomplete.</comment></comment>


Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace Rocket Crashes and Burns - <AUTHOR> http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12522-crash-destroys-rocket-ahead-of-x-prize-contest.html

<comment><USER2> And to spice things up a bit, it seems that the reason for this crash was a bug in the vehicle's software: "Post-crash analysis has revealed what went wrong -- the automatic shutdown that should have triggered when Texel first touched down did not occur. That's because the computer was mistakenly told to expect a stronger signal from the touchdown sensor, beyond what it is actually capable of producing."</comment>


Amazon crash reveals 'cloud' computing actually based on data centers - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/158517/amazon-crash-reveals-cloud-computing-actually-based-data-centers <comment><USER2> From the article:

> _"Relying on someone else's IT to keep your business up and operating > perfectly is like walking across Times Square without looking at traffic and > relying on every bus, taxi bike and pedicab to give you the right of way > automatically."_

I enjoyed a quote I read on here the other day, paraphrased for symmetry:

 _Relying on someone else's Information Technology to keep your business up and operating perfectly is like relying on someone else's Structural Engineering to build and operate the skyscraper you use for your office._

Your business is unique in some way. Choose the right partners to rely on to do what they do well, so you can work on doing what you do better.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title reads like it's an article from The Onion and I blame marketers for that. "Cloud computing" is no more than letting someone else handle your server layer to varying degrees. Yes, there may be some bells and whistles here and there but, at it's core, they are still servers sitting in someone's colo. They aren't magical, they don't "manage themselves", and they aren't immune to downtime. You still need to _work_ to ensure stability. In some cases, you will even need to work _harder_ to do so.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's missing from "cloud computing" infrastructure is not some critical step that Amazon forgot.

It's a variety of competing "cloud" providers, allowing folks who run their services "in the cloud" to spread their machines/applications across multiple _businesses_.

</comment><comment><USER5> Complex systems fail, regardless of who owns the hardware.

<comment><USER6> Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. E. W. Dijkstra [1]

[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#How_do_we_te...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#How_do_we_tell_truths_that_might_hurt.3F_.281975.29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that many people forgot how and why Amazon began to market its cloud computing solutions. Amazon had to build its infrastructure to support the Christmas rush, and its platform is idle most of the rest of the time. So they decided to sell these available computing resources.

Of course, this platform may fail, but whatever infrastructure you're relying upon it may fail at some point. Even when you're relying upon trucks to ship your products in time, having a backup rail plan may be a good idea.

However, I hope you business is mostly idle around Christmas, because there's little doubt that Amazon will serve its own applications first, so you'd better have a serious backup plan...

</comment><comment><USER8> Everything was always a cloud, isn't it!! It's just that now it has become more prominent. Otherwise, except the ease of deployment and maintenance how is the current 'cloud based' setup different from the older 'non-cloud' based setups. For an end user the content always used to come from an unknown place which you can call a cloud or a server based on your whims and it still comes from the same unknown place 'The Cloud'. And for the vulnerabilities, it doesn't care what the weight of the host is. Even a personal hosting setup is equally susceptible.

</comment><comment><USER9> And this is why the business created BS25999

</comment><comment><USER10> you mean our servers aren't in the sky?!</comment>


It's no secret: Facebook's allure is its privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1529632920070715 <comment><USER2> Oh. I seriously thought that its allure was a mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism.

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook's secret is that there is no spam. MySpace is completely usually because of the spambots but Facebook has some kind of brilliant secret algorithm for keeping the network spam free.

<comment><USER3> completely _unusable_, not usually...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been reluctant to check out Facebook as me and millions of others have already gone through the trouble of getting a MySpace page up...that being said, private networks are very popular. File-sharing is no exception, and Shalsoft's GigaTribe, <http://www.gigatribe.com> , is a rapidly growing model for the swapping of large files between a private, encrypted environment of friends...

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a joke, right? Facebook encourages users to register accounts using their real name and then volunteer personal information with reckless abandon. But users need not worry because they can check a little box that says "shh! don't tell anyone!" but they didn't read the mouse print on the terms of service page that says Facebook can share it with whoever they want. If George Orwell only knew it would be this easy.

<comment><USER6> Even if you add all of that information, it's still private until you connect/friend someone. It maintains a walled garden to only people who are in your social arena (school, college, work, area), and that is what this guy is suggesting as the appeal of Facebook. I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ahem, what about this Mr Reuters guy? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540>

It's as if his whole article is a sarcasm piece.

</comment><comment><USER8> And to think I use it just because all my friends are on there..</comment>


Cow Magnets - <AUTHOR> http://www.magnetsource.com/Solutions_Pages/cowmags.html <comment><USER2> Grew up on a farm in Scandinavia and have witness a few of these up close. The amount of debris they can accumulate is staggering - mostly nails, and corroded clumps of metal (probably from old farming equipment). There was nothing particular about the fields where their food came from, in fact it would be considered very clean, almost ecological. But hundreds of years of harvesting will leave a footprint. Also, in the earlier days when renovation was not set in system they used to bury their trash (what else could they do really).

<comment><USER3> My father always explained that interest for rusty metall with the cows attempt to balance out a iron-deficiency. Could be wrong though.

Found there behaviour always fascinating. They internal groom-group friendships and the one or two weakest cows they would trash up to feed them too any predator(yes, they have a social life in that way).

Not happy how dairy farming selective breeding has crippled them. If you have to inject a hormon into a creature for milking, else it gets sick, you have overstreched it to the point of crippeling.

still like farmers though and without them cows would go the way of everything wild in that juicebox that is earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cows are hard to kill. My mother is a veterinarian and a professor of hers once told this story: He was on a farm treating a cow for calcium deficiency (common for dairy cows), which is easy to treat, you just pump a bunch of nutrients directly into the cow and they'll go from being more or less incapacitated to healthy in a short span. So there he was, IV into the cow and hooks up the bottle to it and empties it into the cow while talking to farm. Finishes up and goes to disconnect the bottle from the IV, looks at it, turns to the farmer and says, "I think I just bought your cow." It wasn't calcium replacement, it was Lysol that he had just dumped a liter of into the cow!

The cow lived, barely seemed to notice.

<comment><USER5> Why did he have Lysol in an IV though?! Also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow)

<comment><USER6> Wondering the same thing. How would lysol end up in an IV?

<comment><USER7> I assume it's a fill your own bag solution not a sterile bag that said medical grade lysol.

<comment><USER8> He filled up his own IV bag with Lysol?

Makes no sense.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps generic Lysol. Generic white bottle with lots of text is common on ranches.

<comment><USER8> Gross negligence at best?

<comment><USER3> Vetrinarys - those that treat cows and big animals are rare. And always on the job. As in really always. Knew four, 2 had cancer, one had a burn out, one gave the big animals up for the pet-doctoring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rather than putting magnets in every cow why not clean the fields of injury causing debris?

[http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G7700](http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G7700)

> From 55 to 75 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the eastern United States > have been found to have hardware in the reticulum. However, no damage or > perforations of the reticulum was evident.

[...]

> The magnet simply keeps foreign metallic objects adhered together in a ball, > reducing the chances of penetrating the reticulum. Of course, the best > preventive measure is keeping feed bunks, pastures, cow lots, etc., free of > potentially hazardous objects.

<comment><USER11> Easier said than done. I live on a small farm with horses. Even after all these years, we still find barbed wire (very dangerous for prey animals whose response to danger is to bolt away at high speed) in the ground, or in trees, miscellaneous bits of farm equipment debris that's decades old, and all sorts of metal embedded in the ground. All of this stuff was from before we moved here, it's just extremely difficult to detect until you are literally standing over it.

<comment><USER12> Drive around with a generator and an electromagnet?

<comment><USER11> Most of the stuff is not just lying on the surface; it's partly buried or covered. I've gone to cut down tree branches and found sections of barbed wire 6 feet off the ground because it rose as the tree grew and snapped off when it was pulled too taut.

Not to mention that the ground isn't flat like a nice suburban lawn. There are creeks to cross, rocks (that we are constantly removing as water exposes them), fallen dead trees, tree stumps, wild grape vines, channels dug into the ground by rain. Obstacles galore!

You won't find many people more in favor of automation than me, but even I know when to stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> D-Coder Who else was expecting an article on a new way to collect cows into one spot?

</comment><comment><USER13> There are a couple of solutions taking the standard bolus and turning it into a connected pH sensor to monitor cattle health:

[https://connect.innovateuk.org/documents/3285671/6079410/Sma...](https://connect.innovateuk.org/documents/3285671/6079410/Smart+Sensor+to+Improve+Cow+Health.pdf/7a583c15-2d62-4916-b830-f84c7eb57ffc)

[http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/Presentation/ConnectedDev...](http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/Presentation/ConnectedDevices_22.01.13_DavidTegerdine_TTP- WellCow.pdf)

[http://www.wellcow.co.uk](http://www.wellcow.co.uk)

[http://www.ecow.co.uk](http://www.ecow.co.uk)

</comment><comment><USER14> You think that's weird? Wait until you read about cannulated cows: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow)

There are a bunch of these grazing around my hometown university's ag department.

<comment><USER15> In the 19th Centrury, everal experiments on human digestion were conducted on someone with a gunshot wound that left a fistula providing access to the stomach, somewhat like those cannula: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaumont#Experiments_w...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaumont#Experiments_with_St._Martin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My parents are vets (in Norway). The magnets I remember them using about 30 years ago were about 10cm long rods with a elongated plastic cage around them -- to offset the sharp ands of nails etc to protect the tissue.

</comment><comment><USER17> There was a lot of trouble around the Buckyball magnets a few years ago, with the U.S. CPSC saying that they were unsafe for children because if a child swallowed _two_ , they might attract one another from different locations within the child's digestive system and cause injury. (The manufacturer of Buckyballs was apparently very upset about the outcome.) It's interesting to think that swallowing magnets was seen as a serious threat to human digestive systems, but here is used to protect cows' digestive systems.

Is the difference just in the cows' anatomy and the size of the magnet, so that this magnet is guaranteed to stay in the first stomach and not go any further, while human anatomy doesn't work that way?

It seems like having cows swallow very small magnets (that can advance beyond the first stomach) would also tend to injure them, because those magnets could attract metal objects from one part of the digestive system toward another, as the CPSC feared with the Buckyballs.

<comment><USER18> The cow are gets a single capsule (either a single alnico magnet or a plastic capsule with smaller ferrite magnets in it, but the same size) about the size of your thumb. It never passes from the first chamber.

The Buckyball magnets are rare earth and much stronger than cow magnets. A kid who swallowed one might follow it up with another, or some bit of metal, after the first magnet entered the intestinal track and those two might snap together and cause damage.

I think the problem is there whether it is a buckyball magnet or a stack of discs for some craft or hobby. Kids love those kinds of things. You just need to watch them like hawks and be careful what you leave laying around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sorry, but I had to laugh about this a little. Depending on where you grew up (and perhaps when), this article may or may not be news.

Not that it isn't an interesting treatment idea the first time you see it.

</comment><comment><USER20> What about non-magnetic metal debris?

<comment><USER21> Not very common on a farm, nails and wire are always steel. Non-ferrous metals wouldn't be strong enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Remember my dad mentioned these from time to time.

Also I heard that local slaughterhouse staff were not allowed to tell when there was an emergency job as otherwise everyone would gather to see what this cow had eaten. (As mentioned nails and screws were common but i heard about one of them, not ours, eating a bunch of huge galvanized bolts. Investigation found out they were left behind by high voltage powerline technicians I think.)

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14590-and-on-that- far...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14590-and-on-that-farm-the- cows-face-north--says-google/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Has this been taken into account regarding the magnetically aligned cow theory?

</comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon What's the procedure to "deliver" the magnet? Surgery? Sedation?

<comment><USER25> Let the cow eat it, like it would the other things the magnet is supposed to protect against.

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Thanks for your answer. I imagine you must control this, no? Too many magnets would probably be harmful. Also, they may be fairly larger than what cows usually eats. Do you know for a fact it's done like this?

<comment><USER16> I can confirm this is how it is done. (I've done it a few times myself)

The one I used looks a bit like this one:

[http://www.kruuse.com/en/ecom/Hest_produktionsdyr/Vommagnete...](http://www.kruuse.com/en/ecom/Hest_produktionsdyr/Vommagneter_indgiver/prod_142070.aspx)

<comment><USER3> There was a drencher for calves i had to use. On the instruction diagram on the side, everyone smiled, the farmer, the calf, a happy little world of forced feeding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One marwel super-hero has similar magnets inside him. Cowmen or something.

</comment><comment><USER27> Used to play with these a lot as a kid. User "__bb" must have also spent some time on a cattle farm because everything (s)he's said about the magnets has been spot on.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if these magnets would work in spherical cows.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does this mean I can stick things like refrigerator magnets to cows?

</comment><comment><USER30> This makes me sad.

<comment><USER31> Why? It seems to prevent a really bad condition.

<comment><USER30> Well. On one hand, it does. But on the other... maybe we should improve the conditions.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Web App to Send and Manage Offers to Your Clients - <AUTHOR> https://dytto.co/?source=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! Thanks for checking out my first product. If you have any questions or comments, you can post them here, or you can find me on Twitter as @hkanaktas. I appreciate any feedback.

<comment><USER2> What tech stack did you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Backend is built with Laravel 7 and PostgreSQL. UI is put together using Tailwind CSS and some Alpine.js for simple interactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should give a preview of what an invoice looks like so I can see if our definitions of awesome are the same, and then decide to signup :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel the same haha

I have already built a middle page to preview before submitting, and will be deploying it in a few hours. Be sure to check back again tomorrow! :)</comment></comment>


Beginner's Guide to Linkers (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lurklurk.org/linkers/linkers.html <comment><USER2> One thing I found really interesting while playing around with gdb on a program with dynamic linking is that functions are linked lazily when they're first called. So rather than hooking up calls to printf/fopen when the program starts, those calls instead get hooked up through an intermediate table to jump into the dynamic linker's resolution code. The first time each dynamically-linked function is called, it goes through a process of looking up the symbol. Once it finds the actual address of the called function, it writes a jump to that resolved address over the spot in the intermediate table so subsequent calls won't repeat the lookup logic.

Pretty cool to watch it happen. The call lookup code in the dynamic linker involves a bunch of strcmp calls, which makes sense, but I still found surprising for some reason.

You can set the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to make it do all these lookups at startup time.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. You are referring to the PLT and the GOT, the procedure linkage table and global offset table. This is basically how PIC code works. I have seen it referred to in literature as a "thunk" or a trampoline as well. In case anyone is curious. This is a good post on it:

[http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/03/position- independent...](http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/03/position-independent- code-pic-in-shared-libraries/)

<comment><USER4> Yup, a thunk is a good term. It's also arguably the main primitive of Haskell—the entire program being a tree of thunks that continually allocate and evaluate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was a comment more than ten years back on _gcc-help_ by Ian Lance Taylor, author of gold and the gnu linkers:

      Passing commands directly to the linker requires
      that you know what you are doing.

I added this to my makefiles. It doesn't make the linker work any better. But it does make me think a little harder about what the linker is doing with my incantations.

Linker scripts [1] are a particular pain to get write and if you want to do something complicated on Linux or BSD, you'll be using linker scripts. These are a gnu linker thing. The OSX linker doesn't have the same. Indeed, linkers are different or duplicated on each platform.

      gnu ld
      osx ld
      gold ld (Google)
      lld (llvm)
      whatever Windows uses because I don't know
      ...

I'm not embarrassed to admit this: I get my linker command lines and scripts working and that's about it. But linkers should be easier to understand and use. There is even a security bug that relies on our not understanding them [2].

I can't sugar coat this: _linkers are a pain_. Taylor is right when he says _Passing commands directly to the linker requires that you know what you are doing._

[1] [https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/ld/Scripts.html](https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/ld/Scripts.html)

[2] [http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/papers/ndss17.pdf](http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/papers/ndss17.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the most fun work projects I had early in my career was writing a linker for PE files for an embedded PLC. Another team was writing some gcc compiler extensions and an emulator for the PLC that ran on Window's PCs with all the emulator code stored in DLLs.

The idea was pretty cool - you could write and test ladder logic in a Window's GUI and then click a button to generate an .exe file and upload it to the PLC. The PLC's RTOS would then call my linker code which would link up the symbol tables for the DLLs with the embedded code in the PLC and do some other minor relocations. By putting all the ladder logic code in the loaded .exe they were able to optimize for size/speed (using gcc and heuristics of the ladder logic diagram) instead of running a ladder logic interpreter in the PLC.

If you ever get a change to play around with a linker I'd suggest you do. It's one of those "aha" moments in CS about the userland/OS boundary.

</comment><comment><USER7> The "Turbo Pascal Compiler Internals", is also a nice source for it, for an alternative view not C based.

Beware that the content is not related to the original Turbo Pascal.

[http://turbopascal.org/linker](http://turbopascal.org/linker)

Or Oberon's dynamic linker based on strong typed packages, chapter 6 on [http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.Syste...](http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Fair warning for anyone about to spend much time looking into Wirth's personal material: much of it is unfortunately neither comprehensive nor up to date. If you start to dig in to the Oberon code, you'll find (non-trivial) gaps in the documentation and stuff that's downright untrue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Was going to throw the obligatory mention of John Levine's Linkers and Loaders but I see the author lists it as an additional reference along with some other interesting nuggets.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone explain to me what the addresses mean in the output of ld? Each process would load them in their own randomized address space, no?</comment>


What does it take to keep a conspiracy secret? - <AUTHOR> https://isene.org/2020/05/Conspiracy.html <comment><USER2> I'm unconvinced by reasoning that assumes that once someone inside the conspiracy decides to talk, the conspiracy will be unmasked. People may not believe them, particularly if the members of the conspiracy are in a position to undermine them.

For example, there are many conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. Supposedly in later life Van Risseghem admitted that he shot down the plane. But this hasn't led to the case being resolved, because we don't know if it's true that he said that, and even if he did we don't know if he was telling the truth.

Similarly, as I understand it, conspiracy theorists around the Kennedy assassination aren't short of statements, or reports of statements, by people who claim to have been in the know (for a number of mutually inconsistent theories, of course).

<comment><USER3> Yes, the conspiracy being unmasked just means it goes from being unknown to being a conspiracy theory, and that's a long ways from it being accepted as mainstream history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 125 people can do a lot

I bet secrets are easier to keep when they don't seem fun to brag about,

I suspect a fair number of war crimes and similarly un-fun secrets have been safely lost to history

<comment><USER3> 125 people can be a lot too, when you consider only 12 astronauts have walked on the Moon. So while the math might blow to pieces the fake Moon landing conspiracy, it doesn't for related ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about the manhattan project?

I don't like how this post generalizes. 2531 regular americans is not the same as 2531 Nazi officers who will have their families turned into soap if they don't keep their mouth shut.

The whole "loose lips,sink ships" mentality of WW2 is a very interesting case study where entire towns were in on a secret. Lots of other shady things were conspired by governments and inteo agencies from the 50's through 80's and lots of people were in on it.

Merely establishing prolonged social contact with an ex-military person is all it takes in my experience for me to be told of some conspiracy they've seen that I wouldn't believe (I don't even care!!).

A lot of the famous conspiracy theories are false flags but they have some root in reality. If someone told you have the stuff snowden leaked without proof would you not shrug it off as baseless conspiracy theory? Exactly how many people were in on it? His leaks happened in 2013 but they were from 2008!

In short my opinin is that the number of people you can include in your conspiracy largely depends on their incentive and intent to keep their mouth shut as well as your ability to mount false-flag misinformation campaigns before and after the fact.

<comment><USER6> I know someone very high up in the CIA. He told me about PRISM before Edward Snowden. He told me about Stuxnet before the public was aware of its existence. He told me a bunch of other stuff as well.

The things he told me were both fascinating and terrifying. It made me reassess how many US government conspiracies are crazy, and now I actually believe most of them are true.

<comment><USER7> Which of the following US government conspiracies do you believe are true?:

Aliens crashed at Roswell

Secret society rules the world/USA

Moon landings were faked

9/11 was an inside job

Something nefarious is being added to the water supply

The government created HIV

<comment><USER8> 1\. No. Simply impossible. Experimental aircraft maybe, but no aliens.

2\. Somewhat. The cabal is there, thankfully they dont control everything yet. See: Rothschild and sons; communism.

3\. No. A technical miracle, but they happened for sure. With a very high power telescope you can see some tracks the rovers left.

4\. Definetely. Theres enough circumstantial evidence to take to court and win. Biggest obvious one is Al Franken admitting on Congressional record that he got "the Jew call" (his own words) to not go to work in the towers on that day.

5\. Only through negligence and bad science. Fluoride at the end tap cannot be measured en masse effectively, so it is often overused. It is a potent neurotoxin, even at low levels. There is a chicken-egg problem with measuring many contaminants present in recycled water.

6\. Again, only through negligence. Insufficient standards in medical supply and waste disposal, needles being reused is how HIV got out.

Keep asking, I can do this all day. Ive been to the bottom of the rabbit hole and back. We have such sights to show you!

<comment><USER9> I can find no Congressional record of Al Franken saying this.

What I did find were quotes from his book and a lot of people saying that he was being sarcastic and if you read the next few sentences you can see that.

(I still think it was obviously an inside job though without even knowing about Al Franken.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh this is really good!

I've always been looking for sensible ways to talk about conspiracy theories. It's hard because as soon as you push back on them the immediate response is to accuse you of being part of it.

<comment><USER6> Obviously people who understand "math" are just part of the conspiracy, fellow conspirator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE- tpiAiiHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE-tpiAiiHo)

</comment><comment><USER12> That's what they want you to believe. Smh</comment>


Rosetta: Comet probe Philae now stable - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30034060

<comment><USER2> Apparently Philae bounced twice on the surface and landed three times. The first bounce took 113 mins! This isn't good news.

Here's an animation [https://twitter.com/ObservingSpace/status/532818633668304896](https://twitter.com/ObservingSpace/status/532818633668304896)

Fingers crossed 'stable' means that the mission can continue uncompromised.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I assume this means that as well as the harpoons, the ice screws in Philae's feet didn't work because the thruster wasn't functional.</comment>


Show HN: Searchcode server – powerful code search in your cloud - <AUTHOR> https://searchcode.com/product/ <comment><USER2> Looks very interesting! Is there a way to restrict search access with some sort of authentication, or is it meant to be placed behind a firewall/reverse proxy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi creator of it here. Ideally you would place this inside your internal network and as you say behind a reverse proxy or firewall.

If there is enough need I will consider adding authentication but it is not something that has been asked for enough to warrant the time investment yet.</comment></comment>


Google Being Sued Over Database Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/10/google-being-sued-over-database-architecture/ <comment><USER2> you know, lately I get the weird feeling that google is getting to look more evil every day.

dont actually know why...but people are starting to paint them a little less heroic-ly than they used to. Perhaps its just cause they're big.

Maybe its the same thing is m$? hmm. food for thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> The press loves two kinds of stories: 1) underdog does cool stuff, and 2) big fat corp stumbles

Google may be ending its period of #1 stories and starting a new period of #2 stories.

At the end of the article, the writer made some kind of slur to the effect of "since they were only looking for lawyers on a contingency basis, they must have a weak case"

To me that sounded like a cheap shot, probably delivered on background over the phone from a Google source. (I have no idea the merits of the case or of this particular story)

<comment><USER4> You don't need a Google source to recognize a patent troll. Honestly, I don't know why the media even bothers to cover these stories; there seem to be more of them every week and they're virtually all irrelevant.</comment></comment>


Opuss Goes Universal - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/opuss/id473948939?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> Really thankful Apple increased the OTA limit in iOS 5.1. Universal apps with Retina iPad images bump up the size dramatically. But it does look gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!</comment>


Your opinion matters, lets share it with the world - <AUTHOR> http://circleshouts.frendsdom.com <comment><AUTHOR> I am looking for some feedback on this website from this community of so many like minded founders and experts. Thanks for any advice or help in advance.</comment>