Prostitution in Germany: Has liberalisation gone too far? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21589922-has-liberalisation-oldest-profession-gone-too-far-giant-teutonic-brothel

<comment><USER2> I'm German and I feel this article fails to grasp the atmosphere around here. The country is certainly not one giant brothel. Growing up here, brothels have the same aura as sex shops, sex kinos, and whatever other sex industry places exist. In fact, many times they're joints offering multiple services. Yes, they can be seedy (especially in "big" cities around the train station area), but if you look hard enough you can find them in pretty much every larger town. They're by the road side, or even as is the case in my home town, smack in the middle of the shopping district. It's not like there are prostitutes standing around everywhere, for the most part they are just large hotel-like buildings that look a bit like clubs.

In fact, from outside presentation, it's easy in some cases to mistake a bordello for a girlie bar, a private nudist club, a massage parlor, a swinger club, or whatever. When I was working on our startup, we were selling some of our old displays once and a middle aged business woman came in to buy them. We got talking and she told us she was running a brothel. Being a business ourselves, we quickly exchanged stories and experiences that sounded very similar (we were a software startup that had nothing to do with sex). The gist of it was for me, that looking into this somewhat alien world, these brothels are just normal small businesses. I'm sure there are brutal mafia-owned exploitation joints in this country, but the average urban brothel seems to be more like a mom and pop shop. The article claims that only 44 sex workers took advantage of social benefits, but that simply cannot be the whole story. This brothel owner I talked with told me that while the girls register with other occupation names officially, every single one of them was getting a normal wage, with taxes and everything.

From where I'm standing, the fact that it's not illegal helps a lot of people with no discernible downside.

Are there appalling slave labor shops based on human trafficking? I'm sure they exist, but they _are_ illegal. I'm also sure those do not make up the vast majority of brothels in Germany. As for the rest, it's difficult to make a convincing argument that the country would be a better place for anyone if they would be driven underground.

Anecdotally I do get the feeling that prostitutes as a profession are mainly serving an older generation though, so I'm not sure if they remain economically viable anyway.

<comment><USER3> Nice post, however, I would not agree to this statement:

"Anecdotally I do get the feeling that prostitutes as a profession are mainly serving an older generation though, so I'm not sure if they remain economically viable anyway."

Prostitution is tied to the nature of the sexuality of men - which is likely not going to change in the next time. There is a strong demand for uncomplicated, quick, cheap sexual satisfaction within the male population, and prostitutes cater to this demand. The image of the 60 year old unemployed client is wrong.

There was a nice article in the last FAS (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 17.11.2013, a leading German newspaper) that reported on a biased podium discussion of a well known stone age feminist. I found the article to be nice because it discussed the needs of prostitutes e.g. respect of the customer, hygienic business practices, safe environment, etc.

<comment><USER2> Like I said, you are probably right that my perception in this regard is not representative of German society as a whole. However, I consider myself to be male, and I have to object to a blanket statement like

 _> Prostitution is tied to the nature of the sexuality of men_

It's obviously not tied to _my_ nature nor the nature of most men in my social circle. Are we not real men, then? I get that the intent here was probably to express how prostitution is fueled by male desire, but I don't agree with the implication that this is how all men feel.

<comment><USER3> You are right, I should have been more precise.

What I meant to say is that prostitution is one way to satisfy the unfulfilled sex drive a man has. I was not talking about feelings, but about a - so to say - intrinsic biological potential to find a mate and copulate. A man will consider the offer of a prostitute on a simple sexual basis if he is attracted to her. It is a biological drive that each individual seeks to have satisfied. If this drive is not satisfied, the stimulus for attraction can be lower.

Of course, there is also a strong emotional factor involved, ethical components, fears (e.g. STDs, being caught etc). But I was not referring to that.

Please note that I was not trying to picture men as animals - on the contrary, I was just trying to show that male sexual behaviour has strong biological components. As does the sexual behaviour of women.

I would like to know what factors are the most important in the rejection of a prostitute's offer, as I think that prostitution it is part of a deep sociological process. It would not surprise me if the hygienic component would be the strongest one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in Germany and it is by no means a "giant brothel". Yes, there are large ones scattered around motorway exits and industrial parks. To me, them being tacky capitalist sex shopping centres is preferable to being underground, dingy and dangerous.

Trafficking and exploitation is definitely a problem but I'm not sure if the law change from 2001 has made matters worse or better.

<comment><USER5> But it is so typical for the Economist to make far fetched claims. In my view it is one of the most overrated magazines. Their use of statistics or their pseudo objective way of juxtaposing views doesn't hide that essentially their articles are just a collection of anonymous opinion pieces.

<comment><USER6> I used to read the Economist, and I was very much under the impression that they were champions of objectivity, and that they provided a very critical and unique point of view. Nothing further from the truth: they also have an agenda, so they shoehorn the facts to their conclusions. Exactly as everybody else is doing (maybe not so cleverly). I stopped reading it when I could pretty well predict what they would say about a certain topic. And currently their "I told you so" attitude disgusts me profoundly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hah. I like how they describe their figure of "400,000 prostitutes catering to 1m men a day" as the "best guess". What they really mean is that - as usually happens with this issue - some politician or activist group (probably either right-wingers or a feminist group that wants to impose the Swedish model on Germany) has made up a number out of whole cloth. Every time you see a statistic like this, always try and find the actual factual basis for it - good luck though because it won't exist!

<comment><USER8> This '400,000 prostitutes' figure seems to have originated from Hydra e.V., a prostitutes association [1]. It is at least three years old and seems to include part-time prostitutes as well. Generally, it seems to be an upper bound.

[1] [http://www.bmfsfj.de/BMFSFJ/root,did=132012.html](http://www.bmfsfj.de/BMFSFJ/root,did=132012.html) (German)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it can safely be stated that the law changes makes life easier for "regular" prostitution, i.e. prostitution going by the law. It doesn't criminalize anymore, it doesn't exclude. It's not just about welfare, like the article seems to mockingly assert at a point, it is about social security, medicare, ...

As for whether it leads to more prostitution overall, that is not scientifically established.

Admittedly, there is a sector of prostitution, where that law didn't change a thing. That's where the actual crimes happen.

Nobody created the liberalization laws with the intent to lower prostitution rate overall.

The situation before was a bit more aweful than with the (liberal) law. Prostitution was legal, but only doing it. When it came to legally enforce payment, sex workers didn't have much in their hand. That arguably supported pimping and bringing the "sex business" into shady regions.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you read the comments at the guardian, there are many well reasoned arguments. Some points include \- parallels to war on drugs (a failure) \- separating forced vs voluntary workers \- ability to report crimes where it's legal \- provides an opportunity/income for some to better themselves

One of my ex girlfriends became a prostitute. It's one example only. She loved (and supposedly still loves) sex. She was never for long term commitment. She is financially doing well. She featured in a documentary on the industry, and she provides counseling for abused women.

Very insightful posters. Glad to see common sense prevail, rather than the usual gender war (emotive) arguments.

Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER11> The drug wars already tell us you can't get rid of some perceived evil by outlawing it when theres a huge intrinsic demand. Outlaw the buyers, the sellers, the importers.. it has all been tried a billion times, and all attempts have failed.

The problem with the laws in Germany is that liberal laws can't change society. If prostitution is this shady thing where only drug addicts work.. well then no matter the laws, the development of a proper industry is harmed. It will take at least another generation to get rid of the old mindset.

<comment><USER12> > The drug wars already tell us you can't get rid of some perceived evil

define "evil"

<comment><AUTHOR> > define "evil"

Whatever the law makers define as undesirable for society.

Notice parent comment uses "perceived" evil.

Law makers perceive drugs as harmful for the users and society, they perceive drugs as evil. The accuracy of their perceptions are not discussed in parent comment.

<comment><USER12> Right. In my opinion some of drugs can be called evil but prostitution is something natural and not evil at all

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One giant brothel. Isn't it awesome? What's wrong with you guys!

</comment><comment><USER13> > Has the liberalisation of the oldest profession gone too far?

No

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER14> The ending was a bit fun for a Swede:

>> But whereas progressive Swedes view their state as able to set positive goals, Germans (the Greens, especially) mistrust the state on questions of personal morality as a hypocritical and authoritarian threat to self- expression. Only this can explain why Swedes continue overwhelmingly to support their policy, and Germans theirs.

Sweden is consensus driven. Only one opinion is allowed at a time in many subjects. No media(/political party) is arguing the German solution in Sweden, it would just be impossible.

Me? I have an unusual attitude in Sweden. I ask: What works best? Frankly, I don't know. The Swedish way sounds nicer, but... does it _really_ work?

(I don't really trust Swedish research on this, a large part of that will come with an agenda.)

Some other Swede will comment and claim I'm totally misrepresenting everything about just one opinion at a time.

Then I will point out e.g. that in Sweden housing just isn't being built, because it would lose votes (and probably lobbying from the big building companies that like the present situation). This at the same time as the population is increasing quickly. This is insane -- but the media isn't screaming at the politicians anyway. Another thing not discussed [immigration].

(There, I saved HN from a few more stupid comments.)

What I would really want to see is trafficking statistics for Sweden and Germany. This is a modern slave trade that destroy people's lives by torturing them for money. Worse than heroin.

Edit: "k__", read the article. It isn't outlawed to sell sex in .se, it is outlawed to buy it. That is a difference compared to drugs. The effects of this is uncertain.

<comment><USER7> Sweden's handling of sex workers gets a lot less scrutiny than it really ought to. In particular, while it's _technically_ true that they don't criminalise the actual prostitutes (unless they're migrants who aren't legally allowed to work in the country), _Sweden criminalizes everyone around them_. For instance, there's an explicit provision requring landlords to evict any tenants whom they have reason to believe are having sex for money in the leased property and making it a criminal offense for them not to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> The UK has had some changes to its prostitution laws.

It's legal for two people to exchange sex for money.

But then there are some added technicalities: two or more women cannot share a property to use for sex work (because that becomes a brothel); people cannot control sex workers (pimping is illegal); it's illegal to pay a trafficked worker for sex; etc etc.

These have been added over the years, and so we have a confusing situation. People don't really know what is or isn't legal.

With this kind of stuff law should be clear because it's mostly about telling society what is acceptable. That guides people into making less unacceptable choices. (EG: Curb crawling: "Pay women to have sex is okay; but don't approach women on the street in your car and ask if they're prostitutes". That law should be about guiding people to use advertised prostitutes, but it's used to clamp down on all prostitution.)</comment></comment></comment>


Choosing the right JavaScript testing tool - <AUTHOR> https://gojko.net/2018/02/25/javascript-testing-tools.html <comment><AUTHOR> "How to select a tool in an ecosystem that generates frameworks faster than a Zerg Swarm, and kills them with the enthusiasm of Darwin on amphetamines?" :D</comment>


Depression Classic - <AUTHOR> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/223625/depression-classic <comment><USER2> > _Now you can no longer figure out what it is that moves other people to > bustle about out there in the world, doing errands, rushing to appointments, > picking up a child from school. You have lost the thread that pulled the > circumstances of your life together. Nothing adds up and all you can think > about is the raw nerve of pain that your mind has become—and, once again, > how merciful it would be to yourself and others to extinguish this pain._

We need another word for what is described above. Most people understand ordinary depression, because most people feel down sometimes and they have techniques for getting out of it. They try to get the "clinically depressed" person to try these techniques.

When I was in my cycle of doom I would set as my goal of the day to get up and take a shower and often couldn't accomplish it. Forget doing the dishes. I knew I needed help, but without medical insurance I couldn't afford it and didn't have the energy or will to try to get medical insurance.

Finally, my family intervened and I was locked up as a danger to myself after I verbalized a few dangerous thoughts. I'm on insurance now and taking medication and things are much better. I'm not necessarily happy, but at least the "black dog" is gone.

<comment><USER3> The way I've often described this to people is that at some point I got off the merry-go-round and I haven't a clue how to get back on. This was (and remains) a turning point in my own depression, which is why it's interesting. Prior to that I felt like I was holding on to _something_ for dear life, then at some point 5-10 years ago it became a feeling much more akin to the above. "Nothing adds up" is a great way of describing it. I also sometimes say I feel like I'm living a in mirror universe where nothing makes any sense.

And I'm speaking as someone who deals with this every day, not as someone who's recovered and is looking back. Recovery isn't possible anymore, unfortunately. I guess my advice to anyone is if you're not as far along as I am... Don't get off the merry-go-round. You really can't get back on.

<comment><USER4> >Recovery isn't possible anymore, unfortunately.

It is important to separate what we know from what we suspect.

<comment><USER3> It is important to realize that other people in this world may have lived longer, gained more experience, and understand more than you do.

It's also important to realize that a huge part of depression therapy is trying to convince people they can be "cured" or can recover, when evidence points to that being highly unlikely - all the actual studies suggest that it causes permanent, irrevocable changes. And the author of the very book we're discussing specifically expresses skepticism about the efficacy of therapy.

It doesn't always get better. In fact, most times it doesn't.

<comment><USER4> I have 0 experience of your life. What I do know is that if there's a small chance that I'd never have to suffer another major depressive episode again, I'd consider that good information to have. Even when the odds aren't in my favor, I consciously make the choice to focus on the possibility. This isn't Pollyanna, it's practicality -- thoughts impact mood. Part of CBT is learning about your thinking, and one of the things that helped me get into a pattern of recognizing my own thoughts was to separate observations, suspicions and conclusions.

<comment><USER3> I appreciate your trying to help, and I don't mean that in any kind of a condescending or patronizing way. I shouldn't have been so quick to disregard what you're saying. And it's certainly true that variations of "binary thinking" are a hallmark of depression - although I guess what you're describing isn't quite binary thinking even if I think it comes from the same place, an absolute certainty of negative aspects of something and bottomless doubt of anything positive, or anything else at all about it. I'm glad you found CBT helpful to you and I wish you luck and happiness in your future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Writing about a lack is difficult, and perhaps no one has ever captured > exactly what it feels like to be depressed, simply because one can't > describe a negative.

For those who haven't seen it, Allie Brosh's comics on the subject come as close as any other work I've found to "describing the negative" here:

[http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures- in-...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in- depression.html)

[http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression- par...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part- two.html)

Often the best way to grapple with the intangible is to do so through humor.

<comment><USER6> Allie Brosh is wonderful. Her toys analogy in part 2, and "Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything" is just so perfectly spot- on.

</comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo Depression is a funny thing to write about. If someone is depressed reading about someone else's depression is preaching to the choir, but if they aren't or have never experienced it, it's hard to understand what's going on. But for both groups it's kind of crushing because it reminds you that some people just might not ever be happy and it's not really their fault and that's hard in a culture which says "be happy" or "just do X and you'll be happy".

I saw the article mentions _Noonday Demon_. I've never read it but a book that cites it and I personally found a depression classic is _Lincoln 's Melancholy_. It is remarkable both how miserable he was and how far he drove himself because of or in spite of it. I don't think you can know Lincoln, the Civil War, or his impact on the US without understanding his depression.

Unfortunately it also makes a lot of modern politicians look very superficial and fake in comparison.

[https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression- Challe...](https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challenged- President/dp/0618773444)

<comment><USER2> In my opinion it doesn't have a lot to do with happiness or unhappiness. Unhappiness is an emotion that at least fills the void. I'm unhappy now and I'm happy about that because I have a plan to get happy. Clinical depression is about the void, the nothingness, can't find a reason to live and don't want to live because this emptiness and emotionless existence is dreadful.

<comment><USER7> Do you think it has to do with being detached socially from other people, even family members?

<comment><USER8> My experience with depression is that it does what it can to feed itself. Whatever triggers it (for me I am certain it is brain chemistry) doesn't really matter.

Depressed people detach socially from their support network because that feeds the depression, and any plausible explanation feels as true as any law of physics. All you have to do is pick one: "These people don't care about me/They can never understand/They are better off without me as I will just hurt them."

One way I describe depression is that it's a detachment from reality. Whatever reality you are actually in, depression bends and warps it to such a degree that mentally healthy people could not understand even when described to them.

<comment><USER9> I can vouch for this. I had a small group of close friends, who all seemed to tolerate the fact that it doesn't naturally occur to me to pick up the phone, invite them over etc. But after 2 years of serious depression, they've all drifted away from me. I don't blame them: I imagine it just becomes untenable to keep trying with someone who doesn't answer their phone, or never replies to your messages...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A great description of the feeling of depression can be found in the Netflix stand-up special of Neal Brennan, 3 Mics. (He's also the co-creator of Chappelle's Show, and quite funny.) It's really difficult to convey the feeling of depression to people who don't have first or second hand experience with it, and I think Neal did a great job with that task.

<comment><USER9> The author of 'Hyperbole and a Half' also gives a fantastic explanation (the whole blog post is well worth a read, [http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression-...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression- part-two.html)):

 _" I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler. I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was. But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same... I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience._

 _Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything. "_

<comment><USER10> I totally agree. I bought her eBook and binged it in one day. Reading about her initial escape from depression was great, laughing at the absurdity of a kernel of corn under her fridge. I should revisit that book soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "Men," she writes, "have cannily figured out how to sidestep the implication > of moral failing that attaches to mental illness—as well as the specific > criticism of self-indulgence that is attributed to more introspective > accounts of this condition—by insisting on a force outside themselves, or on > a purely genetic susceptibility."

I stopped reading here.

<comment><USER12> I didn't, but perhaps I should have. From there it delved into how truly horrible and abusive her childhood was. Which, to me, is much more relatable to outsiders than having depression with no obvious cause. Like apparently men are genetically impervious to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It sounds like the book in reference is talking more about clinical depression than, well, depression as a phenomenon.

I'm not going to pretend like I don't still have issues to work out, but I've been heavily depressed many times in my life, and I eventually thought of an interesting question that changed my outlook:

Watch some of those old home videos of you from when you were around 7 years old. The age isn't that important, but I think that's a golden number in this case. Look at that boy or girl who is playing in the fountain, popping bubbles, imagining dogfights with toy airplanes, and shouts "YEAH!" when asked if they want to ride the sled down the hill again. Is that child fundamentally who you are? Why not?

Granted, this won't apply to everyone. I've known people personally whose early childhoods were lousy. But there are lots of people out there who, like me, are fundamentally happy, curious, and enthusiastic, but were lied to by society. Society told us big lies, such as that we can't be truly happy unless we have things to demonstrate our status. We're told that, by a certain age, we should have a significant other, cars, gadgets, a "career", and more. If we get the sequence wrong, or it doesn't happen on time, we disappoint ourselves. Even when we get those things, they're rarely as satisfying to have as we thought they'd be. This is largely because we sacrificed our inner child in order to seek the approval of everyone else, only to discover that most people around you don't actually care if you have any of those things. It doesn't matter how many things you have to show off your status -- if you're being a miserable person, you're not going to get the approval or acceptance that you're seeking.

The idea of "loving yourself" first seems cliche and silly, and I thought it was, but there's a lot of truth in it. Taking a look back to childhood, before you were tainted by negative experiences, might give you the best insight into who you are. I began to feel much happier the more I got in touch with that 7 year old boy who only needed the unconditional love from his parents and an unabashed imagination. Getting in touch with your child doesn't mean behaving like a child, but it does mean learning how you could once experience happiness without the need to show status, own the latest fancy toys, have a "respectable" job, have an attractive partner, a backyard, retirement plan, yada yada yada.

The irony of learning who you are through your child, and rejecting the lies of society, is that you can re-learn to be self-amused and radiate those positive emotions, which will get you far more approval and status than you could get with anything else.

It might not be true for everyone, sure. But if that "missing piece" to your life has been inside you the whole time, and you aren't seeking it out, that's tragic.

P.S. I know that clinical depression is not the same. I have first-hand experience with this, and I certainly wouldn't tell someone with serious issues in their life or inexplicable depression to just "be happy".</comment>


Running a marathon is as traumatic as having heart surgery - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/943754/marathon-running-causes-temporary-kidney-damage/ <comment><USER2> More specifically, "80% of runners who completed marathons had kidney function that looked similar to patients who just underwent heart surgery. ... most runners had levels of creatine (a chemical produced by muscles at work) and inflammatory proteins present in levels similar to patients with acute kidney injury."

That is a narrow lens for saying "as traumatic."

<comment><USER3> I think the argument would work better if it were reversed. "Having heart surgery is as traumatic as running a marathon."</comment></comment>


Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period - <AUTHOR> http://techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml

<comment><USER2> The problem with this post is that it neglects recouping non-marginal costs. If the factory costs you $100 Million to build and you sell the cars for $20,000, which is the marginal cost, how are you going to recover the $100 Million?

<comment><USER3> This is even more glaring in the flawed movie analogy. Consumers of movies are not just paying for the experience of the movie. The movie itself is the main distinguishing factor. There is no "perfect competition" across all movies as the article seems to imply by limiting the differentiating factors to things surrounding the movie itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another problem with this post , is that it goes under the assumption that prices in a competitive market becomes the marginal cost. but price in the competitive market goes towards the marginal costs. there's still some profit margin even in competitive businesses like walmart , commodities markets, netbook markets .

<comment><USER5> It is talking about digital goods, not physical goods like walmart, oil, netbook, etc.

Also, from what I understand, Masnick does understand that prices in a competitive market will go toward marginal cost.</comment></comment>


The nil-nil philosophy. - <AUTHOR> http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/11/10/the-nil-nil-philosophy/ <comment><USER2> I liked (and remembered) when you posted the comment. I like the blog post as well. It's a great mentality to live by but the level of discipline to stick with that mentality must be a real challenge. And discipline is already a major lacking factor in my life; insight on how to improve that would be welcome, from anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the end of the day ask yourself if you're above zero. If not, donate $100. Easy motivation, and then either way, you will be! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The idiom "Don't rest on your laurels" means essentially the same thing.

"to be so satisfied with your own achievements that you make no effort to improve"

<http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rest+on+laurels>

</comment><comment><USER4> At the same time, the best is the enemy of the good. Relax a little.

</comment><comment><USER5> His example assumes that widening your lead in a rugby game when victory is already certain is in fact _better_.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I wondered about that too. Part of the problem with the analogy is that it isn't clear that _is_ the best strategy. Players get hurt. Usually, if you are way ahead, you gradually take your best players out of the game to protect them.

I see where the advice is coming from, I think, but the analogy fails.

<comment><USER7> At the same time, on an individual level, you'd still expect players to play hard and be focused, right? I think that's where this applies. While the players on the field might not be the best players, they're still gonna play _their_ best. (...I was hoping the extended analogy would translate to life, too. But I'm not seeing it.)

<comment><USER8> Even then it's far more complex. Using football as the example rather than rugby, if a team is winning with minutes to go you'll often see them taking the ball to a corner flag and trying to kill the game, rather than still "playing as if it's nil-nil". On the other hand, there are times when a team who has a lead will adapt to defend the lead (changing tactics, taking off attackers and replacing them with defenders, etc.), will then concede a goal, and will end up worse off than if they'd kept the offensive strategy that gave them the lead.

<comment><USER9> I'd say the 'nil-nil' approach is the safe option. You CAN achieve greater things in the context of a season by conserving energy where appropriate, but it's a lot easier to get it wrong and end up losing net energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's easier to think it in the morning than it is to feel it. To think it, all I need is to write myself a note or get an email sent to me each day. (I'm getting <http://dailyhi.com/> and so far it's helped.) To feel it I often need to read something enjoyable, or get outside and exercise, or do something different from the day before.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Play the point, not the score." - Brad Gilbert

<comment><USER12> He was our group's coach for a few weeks (I went to the Bollettieri tennis academy for high school) and it was apparent his philosophy of the game was on a different level than any of ours. There's a big difference from understanding the theory and putting it into practice- your emotions are not so closely connected to your rational mind, so what you set out to do can easily be interrupted by a natural frustration to losing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It also does not matter if yesterday's score was 0-10 and you are down by 10. Don't get depressed, try scoring one today!

</comment><comment><USER14> So, from a computer scientists point of view, you could say that the nil-nil philosophy is the greedy algorithm applied on yourself?

</comment><comment><USER15> I prefer the more intuitive method. After some success, take a break. Then when you feel lazy, do something. Repeat.</comment>


Vevo has tens of millions of revenue but not profitable. - <AUTHOR>

What's the point of telling the wolrd that you have tens of millions in revenue but ultimately the company is not profitable. TC Article here in case you missed it: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/vevo-is-seeing-tens-of-million-in-revenue/
I run a company that has almost a million in revenue and we're profitable, not hundreds but 6 six figures and growing.
Is there a bubble here? or SV is going to self implode soon. ie. DemandMedia style. <comment><USER2> I think this is partially the reason YC stays away from music company startups.

</comment><comment><USER3> if I recall Youtube was never profitable during it's run as a startup.

Some models require massive adoption before the value goes up. If they succeed in being a go to music destination, the money will likely follow.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Youtube was different because they have almost zero revenue and crazy burn rate.</comment></comment>


Google and Amazon Vie for Big Inroad into Wall Street Data Trove - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-30/google-and-amazon-vie-for-big-inroad-into-wall-street-data-trove <comment><USER2> The CAT on HN! I went to one of the early meetings for this project (years ago now!) It was a question and answer session for potential bidders.

My favorite question: "How long is the contract for?" (the SEC reps look to each other, and then respond...)

"There is no term."

"And the bidder is committed to storing all generated data?"

"Yes."

</comment><comment><USER3> This has come up on HN before... One of the bidders has apparently run a load test on Google Cloud with some impressive numbers: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial- servi...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-services- firm-processes-25-billion-stock-market-events-per-hour-with-Google-Cloud- Bigtable.html)

<comment><USER4> Yep that's FIS, running atop our now Generally Available release of Cloud Bigtable ([https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/](https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/)). With the HBase compatibility, several folks have swapped out Cassandra for Bigtable (like Spotify, mentioned in our GA announcement [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Google-Cloud- Bi...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Google-Cloud-Bigtable-is- generally-available-for-petabyte-scale-NoSQL-workloads.html)).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so I want you to use Bigtable ;).

<comment><USER5> ~20GB/s read/write over a thousand+ cores seems slow, especially for embarrassingly parallel data such as this (split on security). That works out to megabytes per second per core. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> They're not doing sequential scans of files on disk, they're doing random reads and writes in a database, where each write is replicated and durable, in parallel, across the entire key space of market transactions. The task was to reconcile market transactions end-to-end by matching orders with their parent/child orders (e.g., as orders get merged/split or routed from broker/dealers to others or to exchanges to be executed), thus building millions (billions?) of graphs across the entire dataset. You can see more details in the video of the presentation at the bottom of this blog post: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial- servi...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-services- firm-processes-25-billion-stock-market-events-per-hour-with-Google-Cloud- Bigtable.html) but I presume you're much more familiar with the intricacies of the stock market than I am. :)

Here's the performance you can expect to see per Cloud Bigtable server node in your cluster, whether for random reads/writes or for sequential scans: [https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/performance](https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/performance)

Here's a benchmark comparing Cloud Bigtable to HBase and Cassandra that may be of interest (on a different benchmark than presented in the FIS blog post, but shows the relative price/performance): [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/introducing- Goo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/introducing-Google-Cloud- Bigtable.html)

Disclosure: I am the product manager for Google Cloud Bigtable. Let me know if you have any other questions, I'm happy to discuss further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is a section from the article I found interesting:

"Some worry that any insight into what could be the world's largest repository of securities transactions will provide ways for either company to profit beyond cloud services....It's also specified in the CAT proposal that whoever wins the bid must ensure the security and confidentiality of the data, and agree to use it only for appropriate surveillance and regulatory activities."

How will they actually enforce such clauses? Who is going to monitor what goes on inside these big corporations?

And why not initiate a sort of private-public partnership to form an independent entity dedicated solely for this purpose if there is such a desperate need?

If Wall Street was too big to fail during the last recession, does it not mean that now Amazon and Google are also going to be conferred with the same blessing once they become the repository of such information, especially if there really isn't any simple way to enforce these clauses? So two of the biggest tech companies are now becoming candidates for bailouts - so the threat they pose with the data they already possess is not enough for people?

Would love to hear thoughts from the folks who are already working in fintech who might be more familiar with the enforcement of such clauses.

<comment><USER8> I don't have direct experience to answer your question, but I think perhaps audits are part of the answer.

Really, you can go a long way by asking "who has access to the system storing the data", "what is the policy for granting and revoking that access", "what are the policies for handling the data (to avoid leaking it)"?

I've worked at big tech companies but never come across a customer credit card number because there are policies for handling that data and audits to make sure they are obeyed. I think basic checks will go a long way.

(Granted, you're talking about a situation in which a company would have an incentive to subvert the controls on data; that's not really the case for credit card data.)

<comment><USER7> I would expect as much. But in these cases, would the auditors be expected to make their findings public?

My understanding is, the typical audit is stakeholder driven. For an audit of Google and Amazon's data handling policies in these kind of scenarios, who is the stakeholder?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an excellent idea, and clearly it would also help the SEC investigate illegal trading. Prediction, based on the exceptional efficiency of Wall St lobbying: the Congress will refuse to give the SEC the funding for this.

</comment><comment><USER10> There must be more to this than what it says in the article. Where I work, I can look at the exact state of the orderbook, for tens of thousands of securities, on dozens on exchanges, at any point in history, or live. I can run simulations over the data in a few minutes per day simulated.

It didn't cost nearly $100M to build.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there not feeds that already collect this data? I was just listening to a podcast that described something similar from Nanex called NxCore.

<comment><USER12> Existing market data doesn't include info like the actual names of the firms/individuals behind each order. From the article it sounds like they might be including (or proposing to include) that level of detail.

For anyone doing trading, or considering it, it would be _immensely_ useful if you knew which orders were from the same firm, even if you didn't know the real names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here is the video from Sungard FIS and Google Cloud discussing their approach:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqOpaCS117Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqOpaCS117Q)

TL;DR: They achieved a peak of 56m qps and sustained 38m qps when processing market data.

(disc: I work at Google)</comment>


Forget the Pixel 2's display problems, Google's new flagship far too fragile - <AUTHOR> http://bgr.com/2017/10/20/pixel-2-bend-test-failed/ <comment><USER2> The Google Pixel is incredibly fragile as well. Not the screen, the screen/display lens is indestructible. No... they put a small, poorly engineered glass panel at the top back of the device for no reason. The panel is weak, but to add to it there is empty space behind it making it simple to fracture. Luckily the replacement glass is ~$10.</comment>


Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html <comment><USER2> The thing is that _subjectively_ "FTL" travel, a la Star Trek, is totally possible thanks to special relativity contracting distances between objects.

A little math shows the relative velocity in which you travel one light year measured in a rest frame, in one year in your spaceship's frame, is 70.7% of the speed of light.

If you happened to be moving at the ludicrous speed of the "Oh-My-God" cosmic ray recorded in 1991, it would take you _three seconds_ of your time to travel to the center of the galaxy.

That should be good enough for anyone!

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/)

<comment><USER3> The center of the galaxy is 32,000 light years away. 32,000 years will have passed at the center of the galaxy by the time you get there in your 3.2 second journey. If you then turn around and go back, another 32,000 years will have passed before you get home.

It might feel more like time travel than space travel.

<comment><USER4> This is one of my theories about why there isn't any alien life around. There is some party far in the future with a beacon or message that shouts "JOIN US HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF GALAXY R345Q2 10 BILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE!"

After about 10 thousand years of hearing the beacon and being alone we finally get restless and just build a couple thousand giant spaceships and join the rest of the universe in the most cosmopolitan place ever.

<comment><USER5> Huh, this is a really fun thought experiment. Does anyone know any scifi books that explores this (or a similar) concept?

<comment><USER6> As vslira alluded: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_the_Universe)

<comment><USER5> Oh, I've read that five part 'trilogy' several times :) I guess I should have said...

Douglas Adams' books have been a major fixture of my life since I was 12. He really was ahead of his time. Actually I don't think said time he was metaphorically ahead of has come yet :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.6468.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.6468.pdf), which accompanies a theory recently published in the Archive of Formal Proofs: [http://www.isa-afp.org/entries/No_FTL_observers.shtml](http://www.isa- afp.org/entries/No_FTL_observers.shtml)

It states rigorously what it means to be an object ("observer"), and what it means to travel faster than light, and proves that observers cannot travel FTL. In special relativity, though, not GR yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thinking you can go faster than light for communication is the same as believing perpetual motion or even being a flat earther.

You can't do it, there are no hacks to do it. It's a law of the universe. No matter how many SciFi movies tell you other wise.

I just don't get the acceptance of this anti-scientific concept.

<comment><USER9> We've only been doing this science thing in a serious organized way for between 100 and 200 years depending on how you count it. It's only since WWII that we've done it in a _really big_ heavily funded way (cold war and all that). You're probably right, but I can't bring myself to be quite as dogmatic about it.

I do very much doubt FTL, not only for the physics reasons but for other circumstantial ones. If FTL is possible then the Fermi paradox goes from being an intellectual curiosity to a near metaphysical emergency. If there is FTL then either we are absolutely alone _or_ there are aliens everywhere and they are hiding from us or for some reason we can't see them. That's because the first expansionary intelligence to discover FTL will fill at least the galaxy if not the entire universe in a geological eye-blink. Since ubiquitous aliens hiding seems less likely, if a pathway to FTL _were_ discovered I would immediately conclude that we are alone in the galaxy at least and possibly beyond.

<comment><USER10> >If FTL is possible then the Fermi paradox goes from being an intellectual curiosity to a near metaphysical emergency.

Maybe. Maybe not. This is how UFO conspiracy theorists reason - "Here are some phenomena I don't understand, I can't think of any plausible explanation for them, therefore, must be aliens".

There may be some hidden reasons why we can't detect FTL civilizations.

<comment><USER9> Way off in tangent land now but: while much of "ufology" is indeed silly, "the aliens are here but they are not communicating" _is_ a valid hypothesis for the Fermi paradox (with or without FTL).

There are numerous rational reasons that an intelligence exploring the universe might choose to be very very careful about initiating communication to the point of taking steps to avoid even accidentally revealing itself. Some of these are altruistic (e.g. prime directive and contamination concerns) and some are self-interested (see game theory, and consider the apocalyptic destructiveness of conflict between really advanced intelligences).

<comment><USER11> It seems implausible that all of the aliens would agree to ignore us, even less so for them to consistently arrive at that conclusion in an independent manner. Then again, Earth might be exceptionally boring and consistently uninteresting to spacefaring aliens. Who knows? Maybe life is really rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with the link that it really depends on what you mean by FTL. At first glance refrigerators seem impossible because they would reverse entropy. The key is that it does not practically matter if they do or not, they just need to achieve the desired result. I would personally consider FTL anything that would beat light traveling through unaltered space-time.

</comment><comment><USER13> Two previous discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Is%20Faster-Than- Light%20Trave...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Is%20Faster-Than- Light%20Travel%20or%20Communication%20Possible%3F&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).

</comment><comment><USER14> There should be (1998) in the title.

Not that it changes much...

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice list and currently no. But many theory's that say it is possible, no experiments shown it to happen and indeed faster than light gets for many down to causality. Not saying it is impossible, but in theory anything is possible until proven or disproven.

Another article that raises the same question is [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150318-will-we-ever- speak-...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150318-will-we-ever-speak-across- galaxies)

Now one aspect I'll add is that it may be possible but would the integrity of the information communicated be maintained and with that it would still be a case of no.

For me a related theory is that black holes convert mass into energy and that energy dissociates with current space and time and some of that ends up at physical location in space of 0,0,0 and time 0 as that is the earliest point in time and space. That and with all black holes over time venting so to speak to that point in space in time, was the reason for the big bang. Again a theory of mine. Now in that case something from now has gone back in time and yet has it gone faster than light? Or indeed is there anything sent that is recognisable from when it entered and in that case - no. So again whilst FTL communication may be possible, the whole aspect of integrity of that communication is a whole other aspect.

Equally the speed of light, there is another theory that the speed of light has varied over time (VLS Variable light speed) and whilst some observations lend themselves to this, it is still a theory. So that is another aspect in this that needs to be factored in. In short light may of been faster in the past, or it may of been slower and that add's a whole new layer of complexity upon this issue.

Science is fun isn't it, be darn boring when we as a species learn it all, but not in any of our lifetimes and that for me is a good thing. Though like many theories and great scientists there are and still are people who just dismiss without debate and with that how many people in the past burned or killed for saying the earth is not flat. Still be interesting for constructive perspectives and debate upon this, but alas as a subject many just dismiss and blindly label. Which is sad, in any time, even today :(.

<comment><USER16> When exactly were people burned alive, or killed in general, for saying the earth isn't flat? The first article of the _Summa Theologica_ discusses how to prove that the world is round; no Christian took Genesis' cosmography particularly seriously until biblical literalism and the Reformation.

You might be thinking of the heliocentricism mess; but Bruno was burned for beliefs that had nothing to do with heliocentricism, and Galileo was only confined to house arrest -- and that after the Pope had tried to compromise with him, and Galileo responded by putting the Pope's arguments into the mouth of a simpleton in a revised version of the _Dialogue Concerning Two World- Systems_.

This is a tangent to your main argument, but it's an important thing to get right; you can't reach truth if you start from misconceptions...

<comment><USER15> [http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Bruno_Giordano.html](http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Bruno_Giordano.html)

Yip your right, my mistake, good to learn. Least none can name and was indeed thinking of Bruno at the time, my bad.

Thank you for the correction and sorry for the misconception correction by me.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for not turning it into a fight! (And I apologize for my contentious tone; I was inappropriately gearing up for battle there.)

I thought you might be thinking of Bruno, the scientist who really was burned at the stake; it's a good thing for everyone that this wasn't for his science. (Of course, it would've been better if people weren't burned at the stake in general. Certain modern elements have reminded us of how painful a death that was...)

I also learned a few things about Galileo from Biography Base's article on him; thanks for that link!

The more I learn about that case, the less it sounds like Religion versus Science and the more it sounds like a conventional miscarriage of justice. A frail, sick, stubborn old man should never have been treated like that, even though he _did_ call the Pope a simpleton. The Pope is the Pope, and has certain standards to maintain; it doesn't reflect well on Christ when His Vicar abuses the courts to make trouble for people who insult him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it is imaginable I believe it is possible. Within our current understanding of physics not doable, but that's just theory.

</comment><comment><USER18> You know, the Speed of Dark makes the Speed of Light look slow.

<comment><USER19> And Ludicrous Speed makes Speed of Dark look slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm with Betteridge on this one.

<comment><USER13> Please don't post unsubstantive comments; especially not predictable meemy ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> He forgot the permutation operator in quantum mechanic... Where causality is put at the intrication level, and measurement of two intricated quantic system are coupled by one another if and only if you can make in the same hesienberg window of dE.dt ~ hbar/2\. Hence potentially being an ansible (like in orson scott gard books. (quantum teleportation, alain aspect 1997)

The only problem is having synchronization of time over distance and hoping the dE.dt does not require exponential energy growth over intended distance of communication and that the energy per bit is not too expensive.

But yes this article was indeed done in 1998 where USA university may have discarded science from under developed countries such as France.</comment>


Choosing a language or framework? (This is the answer/list) - 2013 + 2014 lag - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/Q80WcazP

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if the pastebin link is showing, so here it is again: [http://pastebin.com/Q80WcazP](http://pastebin.com/Q80WcazP)

I wanted to write everything here on HN itself, but I was restricted to a 2000-character limit, so my next best option was pastebin (sad, I know) but I was eager to share this, which I spent a bit of time writing.

Enjoy (or not).</comment>


Plane shot down with missle over Ukraine - o0-0o http://news.sky.com/story/1302864/malaysian-plane-shot-down-with-295-on-board

<comment><AUTHOR> Dup. There is an earlier link to CNN</comment>


Android Is Having A Cinderella Moment - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1780303/android-is-having-a-cinderella-moment

<comment><USER2> short version: 40% smart phones run Android, 28% run iOS, implies that you've got nearly twice the available market with Android as you do with iOS, doesn't mention fragmentation in the Android market at all so loses out on the objectivity measure.

When I first heard Andy Rubin talk about Android he said in that talk that his #1 goal was to disrupt the phone business. I think that goal has been achieved. I wish I were eloquent enough to explain the difference between Android and iOS to developers in a paper, I'd called "The Nordstrom's and the Flea Market" :-)</comment>


Drop Table Companies Ltd - <AUTHOR> https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10542519 <comment><USER2> The registrant himself: [https://pizzey.me/blog/no-i-didnt-try-to-break- companies-hou...](https://pizzey.me/blog/no-i-didnt-try-to-break-companies- house/)

<comment><USER3> Nice of the author to be careful with the joke. I seriously hope company name x'); DROP TABLE 'Companies';-- wouldn't work either though

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone also has a "DROP TABLE" license plate, apparently it once worked against a scanner too.

[https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed- tr...](https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-traps-and- clears-your-record/)

<comment><USER5> The ",0,0" makes me think the person had inside knowledge

<comment><USER6> Or they started adding parameters until some test procedure started working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussed in 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13280494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13280494)

</comment><comment><USER8> Bobby Tables. Founder, CEO.

</comment><comment><USER9> I always keep multiple bobby table contacts in multiple variations in my address book in case it gets leaked somehow.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there any example of SQL injections that worked IRL ? That's so funny.

<comment><USER11> There's the stories of people named Null that make various systems crash or reject them, probably because they coerce to strings before checking for a "null" value.

<comment><USER12> I had a classmate named «Faux» (which means "false" in French) and it caused many bugs with Excels spreadsheets in our school.

<comment><USER13> Just having those Unicode characters in his name is bad enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

<comment><USER15> LITTLE BOBBY TABLES you say? [https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11244754](https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11244754)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like it didn't work!

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this even real? I can only imagine the look at the chambers of commerce when somebody registered this.

Also, this looks a typical system that would be vulnerable to this. At least where I live the details are always entered by a clerk, the systems are old and were never meant to be used directly by outside parties.

<comment><USER18> It was online so no 'looks' but I did end up having a very odd phone call at one point.

<comment><USER19> In all seriousness, doesn't this cause problems for you when registering for bank accounts, or trying to do any business activity with your company name? I think the whole thing is hilarious, I just can't believe it seems like you're actually _using_ the company!

<comment><USER18> Haha! Yes, that reaction happens a lot - a friend tried to discourage me from doing it actually for that reason, but I told him I'd just rename it if it became burdensome. So far it has only been a little bit burdensome.

Bank account was actually incredibly easy, that is the one I expected to be difficult, too. I had no problems at all, I made an account with the usual process. Should note I'm using one of those new-fangled 'challenger banks' so they're probably quite tech savvy/their systems aren't 50 years old, that probably helped.

The worst one has been the domain name, oddly. I wanted to get the .ltd.uk domain name (only available to registered companies in the UK) to basically complete/highlight the joke. But, I have been waiting for over a year or something now for it to actually be registered, it keeps being rejected by the registrar (there is a weird validation process to make sure you're a real company, etc). I could have sped it up by trying with a better registrar who are more aggressive at getting things done, probably, I had a few offers from smaller registrars - but I just went for the .co.uk in the end instead.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eharmony & Match.com for  Co-founders. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Can someone build a match.com for people looking for co-founders. We are having a hell of hard time finding one. Please don't tell me craigslist.

<comment><USER2> perusing new.ycombinator lately has made me think this would be a good idea as well.

i'm moving to SF soon though so i don't think it'll be that big of a problem.

eHarmony though? ugh. they are certainly good at spamming you to death for the next 18 years of your life if you decide not to sign up for a paid membership, (i only walked through the interview b/c some buddies of mine were all doing it for fun!)</comment></comment>


Sequence Caching: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://seiler.us/2018-10-02-sequence-caching-oracle-vs-postgresql/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the write-up. Nice to see how the other side works from time to time.</comment>


Why developers should care about system packages - <AUTHOR> http://morethanseven.net/2011/01/16/Why-developers-should-care-about-system-packages.html

<comment><USER2> I have never shipped unix software that used the system package manager, for a number of reasons. If you want it to be cross platform, you need to build/test/ship the fallback tgz manual install anyway. Packages don't save any work, they only increase the size of your build farm and testing matrix. The software was usually built against specific versions (often modified) of 3rd party libraries. We can't rely on the system to have them, so we need to ship them too, so it's not like relying on system packages would reduce our download size at all. All told, the number of customers who care is very small, either because people just don't care or because the people who care don't pay for software.

That was for commercial software of course, but even for open source software, I'm not sure why it's the author's responsibility to go setup a dozen different VMs. That really is the package maintainer's job.

<comment><USER3> * The software was usually built against specific versions (often modified) of 3rd party libraries. *

That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen... maintaining a different version of libraries outside of their main development trunk means that:

1\. Extra steps when a new main version comes out - you have to repatch your differences in.

2\. #1 incurs a delay, thus a longer time that your customer are running without patches, which may be a security issue.

3\. You won't do #1 at all. Thus you become reliant on old, unmaintained, buggy, security-holey libraries.

The only time I can think this is acceptable is to fix problems that upstream won't fix, or are platform specific (ie, not with your custom software, but with the OS underneath everything).

<comment><USER2> Patching in new versions isn't usually a huge deal, it's just not worth the trouble. Let's say we're using version 1.2, and we fixed a few bugs in it over the past year. Now version 1.3 is out. Should we upgrade?

Maybe 1.3 fixes a few bugs we haven't encountered yet. But that's unlikely. We've been using it for a year. Far more likely, as in practically a certainty, is that 1.3 will introduce some regression that won't be discovered until it affects some customer.

Not every bug in every program is a security vulnerability, and framing the issue that way distorts things.

<comment><USER4> Well, if you had uptreamed your fixes against 1.2, they would be in 1.3, wouldn't they ? I find it a poor excuse for not upgrade assuming API and ABI are stable.

It's just laziness. It's easier because that way you don't have to argue with Management. But you also don't educate on the necessity of fixing security issues. Hooray for 1.4 JVM still in production for instance. And it's perfectly ok. Until some breach happens .....

<comment><USER5> Not every upstream will take your patches. Not every upstream _can_ take your patches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I consider it a significant black mark on a product, open source or otherwise, if it doesn't have native packages for the most popular Linux distros. It's even better if they provide a yum or apt repository.

It _is_ a challenge to do so, but if we can do it for our products (which have vast and complicated dependency chains and need to perform a huge amount of post-configuration in order to be easy for non-technical users to use), damned near any other project ought to be able to do it.

The vast majority of really ugly security issues I've seen have been due to people having installed something from source, sometimes years ago, and not realizing they're running exploitable software because their package manager tells them they're up to date. This reason alone should be enough to keep people using the native package manager for as much as possible. But there are many other good reasons, a few of which have been touched on in this article.

<comment><USER7> Collaborating with distribution packagers is a lot better than maintaining your own repositories. Packagers should always be up to speed with the latest guidelines and best practices for their distribution. I have often seen badly built packages by upstreams.

<comment><USER6> That's not feasible in a lot of cases. Commercial software, for instance, is not generally welcome in distribution repositories.

<comment><USER5> No, but running a public repository for a given distribution is the way forward in that case, and that does involve knowing the lay of the land.

<comment><USER6> Which is exactly what I said in my previous comment.

<comment><USER5> Which is what I was agreeing with. Vociferously :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your post boils down to something like "developers should ship Debian packages because I use Debian and all my favorite software packages are out of date or non-existent".

Maybe you should move away from a distro that freezes for 6 months to roll a stable release which won't get anything more than security/crash fixes for 2+ years.

<comment><AUTHOR> That wasn't my aim. In fact I'm not using Debian at the moment as I indicated, I just know the commands better to give examples. This isn't about a specific distro, it's about the huge benefits of system packages and their toolchains in general. I'm not even really concerned with official packages and the official blessed package repos.

<comment><USER8> I've created hundreds of packages for OpenBSD and you just seem pretty gullible about the whole process.

You can't just write about the packaging process and hope people come forward to volunteer to do the actual work. There's a large amount of thankless sweat equity when you provide packages. People whine when things are broken and rarely send praise when it just works as it should.

If you really want to change the world, start with creating a Ruby apt repository for Debian/Ubuntu/whatever you use that people can actually deploy in production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For my money, here's what needs to happen (from a Ruby perspective; salt to taste):

1\. Debian and Ubuntu stop packaging any Ruby libraries which aren't dependencies of an actual end-user application. If rubygems itself is a library dependency, package it but _take away the gem command_.

2\. Make a public policy saying "If you want to do development, use RVM," and have metapackages with the dependencies for building each RVM ruby (so ruby- dev-mri, ruby-dev-jruby, and so on). Make sure that users know that if they think they need to run "gem install foo", then they need RVM.

It'd be nice for RVM to be able to build system packages, but I don't think it's necessary: there are already systems (nascent, but improving) for converting gems to system packages which handle dependencies nicely.

Is there anything wrong with this picture?

<comment><AUTHOR> RVM is great. But by design it's a solution to compiling software on every machine. This simply doesn't work for lots of sysadmins, especially with lots of machines - it means installing a complete build environment which opens up much more evil.

<comment><USER5> Well, yes. And that's the effective situation we've got at the moment.

What I'm proposing is a full acknowledgement of that: if you want to live on the bleeding edge, then that should be supported as well as possible, but a very clear delineation should be drawn between the responsibilities of the distribution and those of the developer/sysadmin. RVM does that very cleanly, even if you only use it with the system ruby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the reasons software gets released in scripts rather than packages is because the root package installation mechanism is root accessible only. Most companies restrict root access and package installation is blocked by proxies. The combination of which means that scripts that can be downloaded separately and run are much easier for enterprise developers to use and get started with.

Until the average enterprise realises that packaging and installation needs to be done better we will always have the need for mechanisms that hack around the problem that system admins cause for the users of the servers.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but developers have enough on their plate and knowing how to administer your workstation isn't the same as administrating a server.

That said, allowing user system wide installation could be possible. I think, at least under Linux, combining selinux and cgroup to provide sandboxed system wide user install could be possible but you'd possibly need to bypass classic unix directory ownership and permissions. That might require to much work or not even be impossible.

Anyone here with enough knowledge to confirm or refute my feeling ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a decently written guide for creating ubuntu packages? The package maintainers guide confuses the heck out of me and it's way too long and disorganized.

<comment><USER11> Theres a great programme called checkinstall that gets you 90% there. Rather than running 'make install' run 'checkinstall', or rather than 'sudo python installscript.pt', run 'sudo checkinstall python installscript.py'

<comment><AUTHOR> Checkinstall is brilliant: <http://checkinstall.izto.org/>

It's also guilty of being unattractive to the developers I'd love to see use it. The site says "Recent News: Dec 26th, 2009" and then concentrates on a NOTE TO SLACKWARE 8.0 USERS.

Showing the hello world of checkinstall would be much better imho, and it's what developers from the web world expect.

<comment><USER5> Checkinstall of Python and VirtualEnv is the only sane way I've found to do python development and deployment when you're developing on Maverick and deploying to Lenny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> devs, esp polygot/startup devs, need sysadmin xp/knowledge.</comment>


900 suspected pedophiles arrested as darknet child porn kingpin jailed for 30yrs - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/387317-pedophile-ring-arrested-playpen/ <comment><AUTHOR> It took over two years but 368 child molesters all over the world were charged (from 870 arrested) and 300 hundred children have been rescued from the clutches of these horrible people.

Nice! Playpen is finally cracked. FBI and Europol, keep up the good work! I wonder how they did it.

<comment><USER2> >I wonder how they did it.

From the article:

"The FBI has been criticized for what it called a "court-approved network investigative technique" used to unearth information about the suspects. It emerged that the agency, with court approval, seized and ran the pedophile website for 13 days in February 2015.

The FBI's command of the Playpen site enabled the agency to infect over 8,000 users' computers with malware and hack them. Notably, the site was said to be more efficient and even experienced a boost in audience numbers with the FBI in charge of its content."

This has been covered before on HN. See:

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi- operated-23-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi- operated-23-tor-hidden-child-porn-sites-deployed-malware-from-them/)

HN comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930735)</comment></comment>


Apple posts profit of $1.05B, ships nearly 2.3 million Macs - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/23/apple_posts_profit_of_1_05b_ships_nearly_2_3_million_macs.html

<comment><USER2> Cramer's analysis of how kids view macs these days is amazing:

[http://www.thestreet.com/video/10413205/index.html?puc=jjcho...](http://www.thestreet.com/video/10413205/index.html?puc=jjchome#10413205)

"[PCs] are not computers. Those are things that parents use. They are not computers. They are these devices that parents got because maybe they got talked into it or because they didn't understand what was cool, but they are not computers. A computer is a mac. Like an iPod is your music device, a mac is your computer, and these other things are just things that are from another day. They might as well be typewriters to these kids. [...] It only takes one session of watching your kids. The other companies that make these devices are no longer relevant."

<comment><USER3> That's a great quote.

In the same vein, I've been saying lately that people who think the iPhone is just one phone among many are just like people who thought the a computer was just another typewriter.

Ohh, wow. I just said something by Jim "Bear Sterns is fine" Cramer was great. A broken clock and all that.

<comment><USER4> "people who think the iPhone is just one phone among many"

The funny thing is, I use my iPhone maybe 5% to make voice calls. For me it's an ultra-portable PC, mainly used for email+web. So when people do say things like "It's just a phone", they really do completely miss the point.

<comment><USER5> Everyone that has held and used my iPhone has desired to purchase one. Several have, and it's not even available in Canada.

Why would you buy another mp3 player other than an iPod? Why would you buy another phone other than an iPhone? To think 5 years ago I was an Apple hater...they have really stepped up their game.

<comment><USER6> mp3 player: swappable memory cards/batteries, voice recording, radio reception, lower price, songs aren't "hidden"

iphone: never used one, possibly something with a keyboard. keyboard typing > touch screen typing > keypad typing

<comment><USER5> I have a few friends that work as product managers at RIM, I have used practically every device they have made with a zillion types of keyboards and keypads.

I can type way faster on my iPhone, but I do have to look at it to type. They can type on BB's without looking. The auto-correction on the iPhone is amazing...it takes into account my fat fingers.

Who wants swappable memory cards, or batteries? I have voice recording on my iPhone. Radio reception might be nice but there are some external addons for ipods.

I guess it depends a lot on the individual user, but Apple products work well for the masses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Franky I can see why. I used Vista for the very first time today at a clients. All I was trying to do was set up some email accounts and I realised that Microsoft had gone crazy during the years of development. I moved from Windows to Mac (and Linux) and don't regret it one bit. Now I've seen Vista I wonder how a company of that size can get something so wrong

<comment><USER8> Vista hate is amazing lately. What does setting up email accounts have to do with the underlying OS, again?

<comment><USER9> on Mac, a reasonably nice email client comes with the OS.

<comment><USER10> in most Linux distributions, a reasonably nice [insert arbitrary commonly used application] comes with the OS

<comment><USER9> why is that a reply to me?

<comment><USER8> I assume because it uses your argument against you.

<comment><USER9> umm, i gave a reason that email setup would be relevant to os (i.e., in a vista criticism). i did not say "omg mac is so much better than linux".

<comment><USER8> It wasn't clear whether you were criticizing Vista or responding to my claim that the goodness of default email clients was irrelevant to the evaluation of the OS.

These OS war threads are always overheated and people basically read what they want to read into your comments. Sorry for misunderstanding. I'm pretty done with this.

edit: I will say, though, the post re:linux also could be understood to point out the weakness of your argument in general, and not so much to claim that linux is better than both OS's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This works out to be around 3.5% of world wide pc unit shipments for '08.

<comment><USER12> The article is talking about one quarter, not all of '08. Source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently got a laptop from CDW from work with a Vista install. It would only boot up half-way, then start over... infinite boot loop. I spent five minutes checking the BIOS details, before I broke the labeling on the XP downgrade CD and did LiteStep shell replacement.

</comment><comment><USER14> companies are capitalizing on the huge subset of windows users who want a more OSX like experience but either can't (work) or won't (expense) get an apple.

<comment><USER15> I just bought a 3-year-old used iBook G4, that the previous owner had upgraded RAM and HD for, and the performance is just fine (I don't play games or do heavy media stuff). It cost half of what my new cheapo PC laptop did and it seems like quite an improvement. So I don't think that the price should be an excuse.

<comment><USER16> First gen macbooks should be quite affordable now.</comment></comment></comment>


Why did the original code for FIND.COM use lop as a label instead of loop? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/04/16/10607806.aspx <comment><USER2> But wouldn't the colon at the end disambiguate? It seems like the colon is mandatory for labels and forbidden for opcodes.

(My comment, which got flagged as spam. Is spam-flagging common on that blog, or is it just random?)

</comment><comment><USER3> I enjoyed the linked post[1] at the bottom more than the post itself.

        #define while(x) if(x)

Too bad April 1 is already gone, I'm kind of tempted to try and sneak that in.

[1] [http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/c.language.pran...](http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/c.language.pranks.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Then why is it `lop:` instead of `lop`?

Doesn't the colon mean label?

<comment><USER5> The post says the colon is optional. Seems like a poorly thought-out syntax.

<comment><USER4> Okay, so maybe "lop:ret" and "lop ret" can be parsed the same (agree about the poorly thought-out syntax), but I don't see why "loop:ret" needs to be parsed as "loop ret" unless the colon is actually whitespace in masm.</comment></comment></comment>


Why do you want libc to be 5 times slower than other libraries? - <AUTHOR> https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-help/2008-08/msg00007.html

<comment><USER2> This post is really old (2008) and probably already resolved. Here is the jist of the optimization that this person provides:

memory and string functions in libc have poor performance because you are not using XMM registers and you have no efficient way of dealing with unaligned data. The most efficient way of copying data when source and destination have different alignments is to read aligned into XMM registers; shift and combine consecutive reads so that they fit the alignment of the destination; then write aligned

</comment><comment><USER3> For those that don't know, Agner's manuals ( [http://agner.org/optimize/](http://agner.org/optimize/) ) are considered to be the #1 resource for learning and reference when programming optimized assembly

</comment><comment><USER4> Worth reading the followup: [https://sourceware.org/ml/libc- help/2008-08/msg00009.html](https://sourceware.org/ml/libc- help/2008-08/msg00009.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wasn't this the post that eventually caused the eglibc fork that eventually became the primary glibc fork and merged back in?

</comment><comment><USER6> So some guy complains that a code path in libc is slow, but refuses to actually do anything to fix it. What's noteworthy here? Besides, this particular complaint is 7 years old. Poster: is this still an issue?

<comment><USER7> Why are you automatically obliged to fix it JUST because you mentioned it? If they just didn't know in the first place then everyone would have benefited, and if they did then something was clearly seriously broken in that development community.

<comment><USER8> Because in FLOSS, nobody is entitled to a pony.

Besides, the glibc developers _did_ optimize memory and string operations, and the result was that people moaned because their buggy Adobe Flash players crashed because they were relying on particular implementation details of previous un-optimized implementations of memcpy that were explicitly not guaranteed by C99.

[http://lwn.net/Articles/414467/](http://lwn.net/Articles/414467/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > a.) GLIBC is a GPL licensed project where the copyright for the code in > question has been assigned to the Free Software Foundation. All code that is > contributed must be copyright assigned to the Free Software Foundation. This > means that, regardless of the license of the reference code, we can not use > 'open source' code from other projects unless it has been explicitly > copyright assigned to the FSF.

Such free software!

<comment><USER10> You're free to take the GNU GLIBC apply your own patches and use that patched version to compile, use and ship your own software (assuming you comply with the GPL). What you are not free to do is require that your patches be included with the official distribution of GLIBC without agreeing to their terms.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What preparations are you making for a no-deal Brexit? - <AUTHOR> Without wanting to get into the tragic and ugly politics of it, and acknowledging that anyone reading this is probably going to be the least hardest hit in the eventuality of no deal, I'm still intrigued how people are preparing their business and personal finances for the next couple of years. <comment><USER2> I met a guy travelling who's business will no longer be profitable. He is planning on documenting on facebook or a blog the closing of his business and the firing of around 50 workers in the days leading up to brexit. Two are his sons and one is his wife, so you can imagine he's not happy about the situation. Oh, and he's probably leaving the UK.</comment>


Free business book summaries - <AUTHOR> http://www.squeezedbooks.com/

<comment><USER2> This is a great concept for books and articles in general. A while ago I was thinking a collaborative book summarizing site would be a good idea; if you could pull it off, scaling to massive amounts of summaries would be easier.</comment>


Live-Blogging Apple's Press Conference - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/16/live-blogging-apples-press-conference/

<comment><USER2> I wonderd if setting up a specific service/framework for liveblogging on events like this could be a viable business? Or is twitter + #hashtags enough?

<comment><AUTHOR> CoverItLive provides such a service already: <http://www.coveritlive.com/>

ArsTechnica is currently using their service to cover this same event: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/liveblog- iphone-4-...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/liveblog- iphone-4-press-conference.ars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, they're giving everyone a free case. How much is that? I know it's about $20 retail but how much does it cost them as a write-down?</comment>


DeepHeart: A Neural Network for Predicting Cardiac Health - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jisaacso/DeepHeart <comment><USER2> Applying convolutional nets to one dimensional time series data is a fairly common problem in medicine, and the techniques here can certainly transfer to other medical domains. Besides the plethora of opportunities in one dimensional signals (ECG, PCG, PPG, EEG, etc), many medical problems pose similar challenges to machine learning techniques. For example:

* Massive class imbalance -- we have much more data for healthy patients than for sick patients, especially at the scales required for deep learning.

* Heavy amounts of noise -- Medical imaging is a difficult feat and noise is a fact of life. Not only that, but data is hard to come by and some noise in the labels is likely.

* Long term outcomes -- trying to predict diseases or other long term results from signals is very difficult, especially when the outcome is not immediately obvious by looking at the input.

TLDR: Imagine that you have to compete in ImageNet, but the images are full of noise, half of the ones labeled "dog" are actually some sort of bird, and instead of guessing what's in the image, you're given an image and then asked to guess if that image, when painted in watercolor, will make a baby smile.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ML community has techniques for building methods to address low signal to noise, class imbalance, noisy labels and smaller sample sizes. I definitely agree, all of these are issues in medical datasets. Part of the exciting challenge at the intersection of medicine and machine learning is around scaling data collection while respecting patient privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would have been interesting if it were able to do prediction based off a mobile phone sensor (like the heart rate apps).

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree! The challenge is collecting a large number of heart recordings from mobile phones, along with professionally diagnosed abnormalities. That's one reason this physionet dataset is so valuable.

<comment><USER4> ICYMI: cardiogram is doing this with the apple/android watch (possibly other devices). they're not using phone sensor data yet to my knowledge though...

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the shout-out! We posted a few example normal and abnormal heart rhythms from Apple Watch here: [https://blog.cardiogr.am/what-do-normal-and- abnormal-heart-r...](https://blog.cardiogr.am/what-do-normal-and-abnormal- heart-rhythms-look-like-on-apple-watch-7b33b4a8ecfa)

Joe: this is really cool work! Happy to chat if you'd like: email@example.com.

<comment><USER6> I've seen you post before and I think you guys are doing really interesting work.

[edit - noted attribution to wrong author, after a long day!]

<comment><USER5> I know the feeling. :) Thanks for the comment and the earlier warning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People may also be interested in the Framingham Heart Study[1] which among other things generated the following calculator:

[http://cvdrisk.nhlbi.nih.gov/calculator.asp](http://cvdrisk.nhlbi.nih.gov/calculator.asp)

[1]: [http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/](http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I know I may be asking to go down a rabbit hole, but:

(1) Does the NN use a deep architecture?

(2) How does the CNN performance compare with other algorithms?

(3) Have you looked at how performance varies with different features, frequency cut-offs, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the great questions!

(1) The NN uses two convolutional units and a fully connected softmax layer. Relative to Inception V3 or highway networks _, this is _not_ a very deep architecture. I was looking for a balance between accuracy and training time (trained on my MBP).

(2) I looked into other neural architectures (LSTM and several fully connected) without much difference in performance. If you take a look at the physionet google group_ _, there are a number of other methods evaluated (logistic regression, SVMs, etc.)

(3) I did vary hyperparameters and saw a dropout of ~0.45 and frequency cut- off of 4Hz performed the best for this specific architecture. That said, I imagine the best performing features would be a concatenation of the output from several filters across a range of thresholds. Then the burden of deciding feature importance falls onto the learner.

_[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.06228v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.06228v2.pdf) __[http://physionet.org/challenge/2016/#forum](http://physionet.org/challenge/2016/#forum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Check ST elevation/ST depression in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST_segment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST_segment)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great idea. Well done!

Can't wait we figure out a way to collect these kind of signals in a scalable way.

Technology is great, but data is king.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I definitely agree that collecting these signals is difficult to scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How did you find this data, or this competition? I wouldn't mind trying my hand at this, either.

<comment><AUTHOR> All of the data can be found on the physionet site [http://physionet.org/physiobank/database/challenge/2016/](http://physionet.org/physiobank/database/challenge/2016/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> this reminds me of [http://rindexmedical.com](http://rindexmedical.com) and they have some device like this or some patent...

</comment><comment><USER13> I hate to be a jerk, but... what is the point of this entire competition? Physionet audio recordings of heart murmurs? Stethoscopes are on their way out.

Cool model, I guess. Does it get us anywhere new? I don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at the challenge homepage, [http://physionet.org/challenge/2016/](http://physionet.org/challenge/2016/)

tl;dr ECG is much more accurate but requires a careful, controlled environment. If it's possible to accurately predict heart abnormalities from sound, cheaper, easier to run screening tools can be developed for at-home use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> why not just use the ecg samples ? that would remove most sources of environmental noise that you have ?</comment>


Facebook to Show Ads on Messenger to Bolster Revenue Growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-show-ads-on-messenger-to-bolster-revenue-growth-1499790600 <comment><USER2> Yet another reason to uninstall Facebook, if you haven't done so already. I want a social network that lets me be social when I want, without forcing it down my throat (never ending birthday notifications were the final straw for me).

<comment><USER3> The website is pretty bad too, but ads are easy to block and it gives Facebook less rights on your device (as opposed to native app).

<comment><USER2> It's an option, but now I just use WhatsApp. I have a small number of groups for the people I care about, and now that WhatsApp has better archiving, I find it quite a pleasant user experience. I can even see photos someone shared to my group more than a year ago. I find Facebook redundant, because I don't aspire to be a pseudo-celebrity amongst people who hardly know me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My dystopian view of the future is one where bots will show up in your Messenger conversation and offer you deals "Hey I heard you guys were hungry, here's $2 off your next Chipotle order!" and people won't mind as long as their getting a deal.

<comment><USER5> In dystopian future they wont get $2 off but restaurant they go to increases price just for them.

<comment><USER6> I'm actually pretty surprised restaurants haven't tried a surge pricing model yet.

<comment><USER7> They have, it's called the lunch special, it just usually surges the opposite direction so that the restaurant becomes full during lunch times.

<comment><USER8> Yep. Or happy hour, or kids eat free on Tuesdays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Facebook are getting straight up annoying when it comes to their ads. The worst for me is their in feed video player. When an ad appears on a video, you can't like, comment, or share the video[1]. You're going to break my flow of using your own site so you can giddily inform advertisers that I paid more attention to their ad?

I think Facebook have rapidly transitioned to an ad first, rather than user first, experience.

[1]: Screenshot - [http://imgur.com/a/hCxOT](http://imgur.com/a/hCxOT)

</comment><comment><USER10> Once I see those, I will finally remove the last app I have from this wretched company. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER11> They were going to want to monetize Messenger eventually. I doubt it'll be too many ads since they have other ways to monetize Messenger too. Stickers aren't the same outside the east.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't use Facebook or Messenger. I am glad that I am not on it. I just have to figure out how to get out of WhatsApp. I also noticed that Facebook eco system is becoming more closed (no access to Facebook pages unless you sign up etc) on trying to get more people on it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Its difficult enough to have two different apps for facebook. If you don't install messenger you can't see messages in the native facebook app -- what kind of regressive technology is this?

<comment><USER14> I'm very glad Facebook and Messenger aren't the same app. They do different things and I'd hate to only be able to use one at a time, or have the chat UI compromised to shoehorn it into Facebook.

<comment><USER13> Make the messenger work in both the apps, why force people?

<comment><USER6> More development time for a small portion of the population that actually cares?

<comment><USER13> I am pretty sure the number would be close to atleast 20% of all facebook users who do not have messenger app. That's 200M people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Facebook will be screwed once everyone jumps ship to WhatsApp in protest.

:P

<comment><USER16> Why Facebook will be screwed? If I understand it correctly whatsapp is owned by Facebook and also can introduce similar features of messenger any time. So migration of users from one app to another should not be a problem for Facebook. Right?

<comment><USER17> Yes you're right, the joke went right over your head.

<comment><USER16> I see. I see the point of OP now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent, this will make it much easier for me to persuade people to jump ship!

<comment><USER19> What's the realistic alternative? Don't say Signal, because I'm sure your friends have plenty of friends that don't have Signal.

<comment><USER18> SMS, because in most places local SMS is free.

If that bothers you, other options I use on the regular include Skype, Steam, Wickr, Mattermost, Slack, email and XMPP.

XMPP's federated nature makes it ideal for this kind of thing, but people liked the integrated nature of Facebook back in XMPP's hayday. As Facebook poisons each component of their own product, that integrated nature gets less attractive. I know one person specifically who only uses Facebook for messenger these days. This will give me an opportunity to help him leave. I don't mind what he picks to replace it as long as it doesn't require me to surrender personal data to use, and there's a rich selection of options to choose from.

I know that's not good enough for you, I can think of a few people like you just based on your tone.

I stopped using Facebook in ~2009, and when I did, about 95% of the people I knew swapped right back to skype without an issue, but 5% never initiated conversation with me again, because they were so completely consumed by Facebook they'd forgotten how to even remember people without it. I occasionally hit them up via other people just to keep in touch, but ultimately it's not my job to try to give them perspective.

<comment><USER19> I'd be fine with using Skype, the problem is no one I communicate with uses Skype. Same goes with Steam, Wickr, Mattermost, Slack.

I think everyone uses email, but I don't have most peoples' email addresses.

I'm not saying the technology in alternatives isn't there. I'm saying the network effect isn't there.

<comment><USER18> >I'd be fine with using Skype, the problem is no one I communicate with uses Skype.

Have you tried asking them?

I've had good experience with meeting people half way. I tell people "I'm not going to use facebook messenger. If you want to know why, I'll grab my laptop and give you the full hour long litany of every crime they've committed against their users since the company was founded, but the short version is I'm just not. I'll use any communication mechanism you chose that a) does not require facebook or google accounts and b) works even marginally on an android phone without google play services or a linux desktop.". You'd think that would be a short list, but it's not, and I've never failed to find something everyone is happy with. Once it's installed, everyone gets push notifications and no one actually cares who the provider is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder whether Ads are an appropriate way to monetize messaging apps. It's such a fundamentally different context from just mindlessly browsing the news feed on Facebook or Instagram. I'm sure FB has done their testing but, ads in an utility app that you want as little in your way as possible like Messenger or WhatsApp still strike me as something odd.

</comment><comment><USER21> I got real busy working on a project and dumped Facebook about 4 months ago in a ruthless mission to delete all distractions. I haven't really missed it. I can call or text anyone whom I really want to speak to. And when I text comments or photos to a group SMS, I know Facebook isn't filtering it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've avoided Messenger and the Facebook app altogether. I've come to accept that my data is being sucked up, and it's a necessary evil, but I just don't want their apps on my phone. At least give me that in life.

</comment><comment><USER23> Already uninstalled Facebook, now I'm uninstalling Messenger. Too bad because messenger's not that bad but not worth getting ads from. Even Facebook is too milktoast at this point to even waste time reading their ads for.

</comment><comment><USER24> And then WhatsApp, the app can be killed, rebranded and re-skinned as FB messenger, and still retain the promise to customers and regulators about not advertising or monitoring communication

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised it took them this long. It makes sense unless they charge for API access instead

</comment><comment><USER26> You've got a smartphone so you've got a browser. No need for Messenger.

<comment><USER27> They block messages on the mobile site.

To bypass it you have to go on someone's profile and tell your phone to request a desktop site. Then it works.

<comment><USER28> I'd try [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com)

It's mobile centric, browser based and gives you access to Messenger. Also, doesnt require the "hack" of requesting the desktop site (which may or may not work.) The trade-off is that lots of automatic Javascripty things don't work the same way.

It's worked well for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We gotta blacklist pay wall sites from HN.

</comment><comment><USER30> How dare they monetize a free service with ads?

<comment><USER21> Yes they should get the money from selling your BigData profile AND pushing ads in your face.</comment></comment>