A challenge to startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-12-18-startup-challenge.html <comment><USER2> Thank you Colin for writing this. I think it's necessary to champion how much we rely on Open Source to encourage giving back.

This has been a very recent topic at our company that was bootstrapped early this year and now is humming along nicely. We are formally implementing an Open Source Friday each month (would love to do every Fri, but company not doing quite that well). We're suggesting three avenues, but we're not limiting it to these:

1\. Contributing design (we're trained designers that also develop) work to projects we actively and implicitly use.

2\. Open sourcing our own novel technologies and working on documentation, issues, and community.

3\. IF (there better be a good reason) we have to work on this Friday, half of the revenue for the day will be donated to supporting Open Source Software.

We'd also love to hear ideas from others on ways designers could help out the Open Source community.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" How lucky I was to be running a startup company now rather than two decades ago."_

In some ways, it's harder. Two or three decades ago, there was a huge software vacuum - there were obvious niches no one had filled yet. If you could build it, they would come. Now, there's something for almost every niche, no matter how obscure. Also, the price point for software is way down. People complain about $5 now, when they used to be willing to pay $95.

Yes, today anybody can do a startup. There's even "Startups for Dummies"[1] It's easy to get the component services, from hosting to credit card processing. So everybody is doing it.

Most phone apps lose money for their creators. Small ad-supported sites are much less successful than they used to be. It's worse than starting a restaurant, the previous way to spend time and money and go broke.

Yes, there are big winners, but not very many of them.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Online-Start-Ups-For- Dummie...](http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Online-Start-Ups-For-Dummies- ebook/dp/B008TSC4UE)

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not quite sure I totally agree with the authors view of 'giving back' but this is a much needed article and we need more of this. I think it's a bit risky to conflate start ups and businesses that are solving problems with 'giving back'. Let's celebrate these startups for innovating, solving problems and being successful, but let's not mix that up with 'giving back'.

Giving back would be getting involved in social causes, solving problems for free with no expectation of any return, and in this context giving back to the open source community. Stripe is awesome but in this context it would be great to hear about how they are supporting open source projects they are built on than how they are solving problems in payment processing.

Open source funding is a bit of a mess at the moment. There is a huge lacuna on how to highlight startup companies (and thus encourage others) that are successfully built on open source contribute back. Companies that use open source should at least have a page listing the projects they are using and how they are giving back. There is no visibility or any initiative that tracks and encourages this positively. Without focus and organization nothing happens. Another important thing is giving back should be simple funding for open source projects and not hiring the developers or adding developers. That seems to be more about gaining influence than supporting the project for everyone.

The more worrying thing is a general lacuna of user representation in open source in an organized fashion, developer funding of popular and interesting projects that are not a part of the startup scene and just general funding. The inevitable result is open source will if it's not already, be hijacked by corporate interests. Ultimately money makes its own agenda, and if users do not secure their interests others will.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the public good and making a profit are unable to coexist. Y Combinator has greatly aided startups, but has made a great deal of money in the process; Stripe and Amazon Web Services are very much the same.

To be sure, there are some causes which can operate as charities; but if your goal is to simplify credit card processing for startups, can it be achieved in any manner other than in the form of a corporation? My own startup falls into the same category: I wanted the world to have a solid, secure, online backup service for geeks, and it turned out that a company was the only natural way for Tarsnap to exist.

While I absolutely agree about the importance of open source software -- and that's how I've primarily given back to the community -- I don't think all the other ways people improve the world are in any way diminished by the fact that they make a profit in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I asked this last year and got no replies -[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863782)

What are good tech projects to donate to in 2016?

<comment><USER7> How about the organization that supports Git, QEMU, Samba, and a pile of other projects? [https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/](https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Creating better technology in the world is giving back.

<comment><USER9> Technology is not always positive! Do you think the people who designed and built Room 641A were giving back?

<comment><USER10> I don't know -- I think we're all pretty lucky to have had the advances in optical technology and associated manufacturing of said technology that allowed 641A to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to do nothing this year, neither for startups nor for open source software, because it's hard to draw water out of a dry well. And I feel shittier about that after reading this post.

I hope 2016 is better.

<comment><USER5> Please don't feel bad about this. The challenge wasn't to _do_ something; it was to _think_ about what you can do. If the answer is "I can't do anything to help right now", that's a perfectly legitimate answer.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but it's the same answer I would have had if you posted this last year too. That's what makes me feel shitty.

The only thing I've been able to do this year was find vulnerabilities in popular PHP projects and get them fixed. But that's par for the course and nothing special, really.

<comment><USER12> > The only thing I've been able to do this year was find vulnerabilities in > popular PHP projects and get them fixed. But that's par for the course and > nothing special, really.

I wish I could reach through the screen, grab you by the shoulders, and shout: "THAT IS _NOT_ PAR FOR THE COURSE! THAT IS A _CONTRIBUTION_! YOU HAVE DONE GOOD! FEEL GOOD FOR DOING GOOD!"

You are blinding yourself to the value of what you have done. Please, let yourself feel happy about it.

<comment><USER11> It's kind of hard to feel happy about something that:

        - Takes very little time or energy
        - Makes you no income
        - Doesn't usually lead to friendships
        - Doesn't require much intelligence, to be truthful

There's no self-actuation, no challenge, no engagement, and ultimately no reward.

It's just become routine, something I do to pass the time when not writing code for a client or when I need to unwind after a long day.

I'm aware that it's a contribution and it does matter to some people, but I'll never capture any of those $ of value anyway so it's hard to get worked up over it.

I think the most valuable thing I've done for open source in the past year was send the guy who runs dotdeb one of the items on his Amazon wish list as a thanks for making the release candidates for PHP 7 available on Debian Jessie.

In the grand scheme of things, the needle remains unmoved.

<comment><USER13> and yet, your action prevented multiple someones from encountering a bug and took a little entropy out of the system...

Thanks for preventing others from experiencing a bit of pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dispiriting. Colin is not bad at business. If he ran tarsnap like Patrick suggests, it would be a step back.

I don't understand what, exactly, drives Patrick on this crusade to maximize financial rewards for "our kind".

<comment><USER5> Is this intended to be a response to Patrick's blog post from last year?

<comment><USER14> It is, and apologies for being offtopic, but you linked to it in this post.

On-topic: our business did our standard EFF donation, but after reading this, we'll do more.

<comment><USER5> _apologies for being offtopic_

No need to apologize, I just wasn't sure if it was deliberate or if you had clicked through and forgotten where you were on the stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > the demands of the Occupy movement that the "1%" pay higher taxes.

Those demands are purely class warfare, though. They're ceremonial, not serious proposals to fix inequality or budget issues.

Maybe I'm wrong. Show me some serious proposals that can improve the circumstance of the poor or close the deficit based on taxing the 1%.

The broader point is well taken, though -- that we expect people with disposable time and money to use some of it to benefit mankind.

EDIT: I'm getting some downvotes, probably for the politics? (I didn't bring it up). The point is that the other examples are about the need to make a difference. The Occupy demands are substantially not. I wouldn't mind hearing contrary thoughts on this.</comment>


Nice Overview of what OAuth is and how it works. - <AUTHOR> http://jusarg.com/overview-of-how-oauth-works-in-3-steps/

<comment><USER2> Wow, that really was an overview. Like a rocky planet transiting a blue giant star.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does not explain anything technical. Pointless.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a high-level overview of what OAuth is since I never found a decent 'What is OAuth' type post when I was first learning OAuth.

Its not meant to be a coding tutorial (although I might make one, I also included a link to one within my post).</comment></comment>


What's expected of us - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html <comment><USER2> Oh my... another meditation on the issue of free will, and the existential angst we would experience if we learned that our choices are deterministic. Personally, however, I think that the whole question of free-will vs. determinism is a false dilemma. For me, another issue is more important:

Determinism vs. randomness.

If my choices are not deterministic, they must be random. I would rather be deterministic than random. In any case, if they are random, it means that I don't have free will either.

I like to think that all my choices are a result of the past; my genetics, my childhood upbringing (that I don't even remember, but which formed the neural pathways in my brain), my early memories, my environment, education, experiences, friends, knowledge that I have absorbed from the world... In each and every moment, I make a choice, which is the best choice I can make given my brain power/structure, my motivations and the external constraints given (is it raining? can I fly? when do I need to pay the rent). Even my motivations are largely determined by my genetics - avoid pain, strive for pleasure. I definitely hope that my choices are not random.

How does morality come into play, if our choices are deterministic? It doesn't - my morality is my internal concept that I use to make choices more quickly/easily. I don't impose my morality on other people and I don't really care how they make their choices, but I support different forms of punishment that modify the incentives of other people so that the society can function.

Finally, I don't think that the future is predictable, even though it is deterministic. Like you don't know what 1048936701349 * 13046871435 is before you calculate it, like even the computer cannot predict the result before calculating it (i.e. the fastest calculation algorithm is also the fastest prediction algorithm), the same way we cannot predict the future before it happens, i.e. before the universe "calculates" it.

<comment><USER3> _If my choices are not deterministic, they must be random._

But this is not what is classically understood by free-will, and I suggest that it is your dilemma which is false. Quoting Aquinas, "Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act."

I anticipate that free-will thus understood is likely ruled out _a priori_ by your philosophical disposition. Nonetheless, I think you can perhaps come around to see that is logically opposed neither to determinism nor randomness in the human brain as observed from an objective standpoint.

<comment><USER4> As I see it, if you consider the universe to be a series of states[1], either the next state is perfectly determined by the previous one, or there is a (finite) set of possibilities for the next state. The latter therefore exhibits randomness.

I'm happy to be challenged on my philosophical disposition though, because I'm aware that there are whole schools of thought that seem like vague informal nonsense to me, and I'm not so arrogant as to assume I'm simply smarter than them.

[1] I don't understand relativity well enough to adapt my argument to it, so I'm happy to accept a counterargument there.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, what I am saying is that you can have the deterministic universe, or the random universe, and still have free-will, properly understood.

Note that from the outside, free-will is by definition apparently "random". It is a black box not determined by any variables in the greater world. What matters is that the free-will is _mine_ or _yours_ \-- that the entity known as to me as _myself_ or to you as _yourself_ should also possess this power of determination which to the outside world appears random.

To witness to the lack of a logical incompatibility with determinism, you can posit a model wherein the will does something like project itself in both time directions in such a way as to keep up the "illusion of determinism". Not that I think such a mechanism is actually in place; this model is just to show there is no logical contradiction, and there could be other models that do the same.

<comment><USER4> I seem to have misunderstood your post (and possibly conflated it with others). I thought you were arguing that "free will" was a third possibility, distinct from a deterministic or probabilistic universe.

I am entirely happy to accept that free will is compatible with determinism, and it sounds like we have similar views on this issue. Personally I consider ownership of "will" to be a far more important notion than that of some abstract metaphysical "freedom".

<comment><USER3> Probably due to my sloppiness, let me try to sort it out...

Free-will is a third possibility opposed to determinism _of choice_ and pure randomness _of choice_.

But it is compatible with a either a deterministic or a probabilistic _universe_.

<comment><USER5> I'm still confused by your point. "Because by his free-will man moves himself to act" seems to beg the question. Which direction does a woman act? I'm assuming her actions are determined by "who she is". If not, what are we referring by "her".

My choice of the feminine above was a choice, but not one everyone would make. So how could it be anything but determined by who I am?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the Isaac Asimov spoof article "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" which describes "experiments" on a substance that reacts so aggressively with water that it reacts before the water is added. Can't find the text unfortunately, but Wikipedia has a summary: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline)

<comment><USER7> I just read about that in Asimov's autobiography. He wrote it when he was a grad student at Columbia and was worried that it (a satire of chemistry papers) might harm his chances of passing his final (oral) PhD examination. His examiners never mentioned it until the very end... when one asked him what he knew about resublimated thiotimoline, at which time Asimov burst out in a fit of nervous laughter.

He passed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I really hate about these sorts of stories and attending discussions is that we all pretend we know what "free will" is, when no one has ever come up with satisfying definition (just look at the Wikipedia page). My humble opinion: all hand-wringing about lack of free will should be put on hold until we can answer the following question:

In what way will an entity that has free will behave differently than both a fully deterministic entity and an entity that is deterministic excepting occasional random events?

I have yet to see either an answer to that question, or a definition of free will that leads to one. Until then, I consider all speculation and meditation on the "revelation" that we have none to be a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

</comment><comment><USER9> The predictor already exists, there's a common FMRI experiment in neuroscience where with about 80% accuracy the scientists can predict you're about to push the button about one second before you decide to do it. Someone no doubt will post a link, I don't have time to Google it now. I'm guessing it's the inspiration for this story.

I'm more curious about what you guys think. I've long thought the arguments against free will are much stronger than those for it, but it's an unsettling idea to live with.

<comment><USER10> It'd be a "predictor" if an FMRI could predict that the neurons are about to light up a second before _that_ happens, rather than just measure the delay between neuron activity and conscious perception or conscious motor control.

Regardless, if anyone finds the thought that an FMRI can detect you making a decision a significant amount of time before you're aware of making that decision particularly interesting, this book dives into that research and much more about the nature of consciousness from a neuroscience and information theory POV:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-User-Illusion-Cutting- Consciousnes...](http://www.amazon.com/The-User-Illusion-Cutting- Consciousness/dp/0140230122)

<comment><USER11> Yes, loved the User Illusion. Fascinating Stuff.

Also, lately I've been hearing a lot about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Hypothesis)

in which the brain is likened to a person riding and elephant. We can train the elephant, but mostly the elephant repeats its program.

It's billed as about "happiness," but imo that's only one slice of it. It applies to all habits, including eating, exercise, improving sw development skills...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone that liked this should definitely check this one as well by the same author: [http://infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm](http://infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm)

<comment><USER13> I highly recommend Ted Chiang. I really enjoyed "Story of your Life" available in this short story collection of the same name: [http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others- Chiang/dp/193...](http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others- Chiang/dp/1931520720)

Some of the stuff is a but uneven but he's written some of the most thought- provoking sci-fi I've read in some time.

<comment><USER14> Looks like "Story of Your Life" is going to be made into a movie. [http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/10/ted-chiang-story-of-your- li...](http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/10/ted-chiang-story-of-your-life-film- adaptation)

<comment><USER13> Hmm. I'd like to say I'm excited but I really don't see how they will capture that story effectively in film.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The question of "Do we have free will?" always becomes a lot less confusing if you question the question itself, by asking what you mean by "free will" in the first place. There are some nice posts on Less Wrong that deal with this, they're worth a read if you're curious:

[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution)](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_\(solution\))

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd say this touches more on the mechanics of time travel than free will.

So if this "predictor" is nothing more than a circuit that sends information to itself in the past, there must be a "me" that pressed the button without seeing the light, before the data is transmitted to the past to the "me" that then sees the light but at that exact point splits off into a separate timeline. And then I would have free will again.

Of course I am assuming time travel where travelling forward in your own timeline is impossible, something the article seem to not really go into.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does such a detector imply that there is no freewill? Would determinism imply it?

Imagine the predictor works, what does that mean? One second prior to the action, the course you would take is set. This is actually probably a point in favor of the possibility of freewill; humans are course-taking machines, we have a whole life (and our evolution before that) to acquire dispositions that will one day help us survive. What kind of freewill do we want? Do we want to be "free to dodge a brick when thrown at us" or "free, one second before the brick arrives, to duck or not duck". Which of these is the important one? The kind of freewill we really want isn't the kind where we are free floating actors, it is the kind where our history, personal and evolutionary, dictates our present. The point is, real freedom is not about being without limits, it is about having sensible responses to ones environment; creatures evolve the freedom to avoid being eaten, the freedom to anticipate others' actions, the freedom to manipulate other agents with our clever words. Dan Dennett makes a better case for this than I, please look into his wonderful books on the topic.

Daniel Dennett: \--Elbow Room \--Freedom Evolves

</comment><comment><USER18> Just because you can predict what simple decision I will make before I am aware of it consciously, does not imply I don't have free will. All it says is that my conscious awareness of some other part of my brain making the decision is delayed by x milliseconds i.e. we are not making decisions in the upper layers of consciousness, but below it.

When you think about it, it is what I would expect. Your awareness is the product of nerves firing, so they have to fire before it can be reflected in your consciousness. If you decide to recall some information, the neurons storing that information have to be activated (they have to fire). If you can create a device (and we have) to detect those nerves as they are firing you will know what person is trying to recall before (by some miniscule lead time) they are aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sadly we're not informed what happens if you program a robot to press the button at fixed intervals unless it observes a flash.

<comment><USER20> Some simple resolutions would be: a freak lightning strike disables the robot's button-pressing hardware. Or a cosmic ray flips a bit in its machine code, causing it to shut down. Or the robot's designer suffers a heart attack before turning it on.

These may seem like contrived examples, but when you eliminate all outcomes that aren't self-consistent, it may be that _all_ the remaining possibilities are contrived. Probability gets weird when time travel is involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ted Chiang's Predictor would be quite the expansion pack for Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's a similar appearance by Vernor Vinge: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v407/n6805/full/407679a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v407/n6805/full/407679a0.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> I _love_ pieces of writing like this.

Determinism isn't something I've explored quite satisfactorily enough just yet, and reading articles such as this one sends me straight back into the depths of the literature.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is known in the dynamical systems literature as strong anticipation:

[http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/7493/2/Dynamical_mech...](http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/7493/2/Dynamical_mechanism.pdf)

[http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1521.pdf](http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1521.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> My predictor says that some of you will want to read The Hundred-Light-Year Diary by Greg Egan (in Axiomatic [1]) ... if you like this kind of thing.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_%28story_collection%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_%28story_collection%29)

</comment><comment><USER25> Why is greater than one second is a problem? You can chain many predictor together using robots that when seeing a flash from one predictor presses another predictor. That way you can move the message back in time many seconds.

</comment><comment><USER26> Cool idea for creative writing class, would've helped in plausibility if they'd thrown a few nano and quantum randomly into the essay instead of "negative time delay circuit".

</comment><comment><USER27> Relevant: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake)

</comment><comment><USER28> That reminds me of Feynman's Thesis and his (failed) attempt to build his Feynman's Radio...

</comment><comment><USER29> Reminds me of Comed-Tea in "Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality":

"If you drink it, something surprising is bound to happen which makes you spill it on yourself or someone else. But it's charmed to vanish just a few seconds later"

<comment><USER30> Except of course, that was done via a cheap trick with minor prescience: the tea transmits an urge to drink into your mind when it detects that something funny is about to happen.

<comment><USER29> You might want to add a spoiler warning to that, as the actual mechanism behind it is not immediately revealed in the story :-)

Still, I don't see why the Predictor couldn't work in the same way - how would you determine that it doesn't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Even if we were free thinking individuals, able to make rational decisions on our own, we base those decisions on past events and the current situation. So even if you get to choose, you'd probably make the same rational choices as long as your past experience and the environment is the same.

This would be true one second ago, and a second ago this would be true about the second before that.</comment>


Ask YC:  When is a relational DB the wrong tool? - <AUTHOR>

The thread about Amazon's SimpleDB got me thinking about this, as did a recent night spent wading through some material on XML, XSLT, and XML Schema.
Since I've gotten into web programming, I've been  stuck (happily) in a LAMP and RoR mindset:  model data, normalize, create schema, lean almost entirely on SQL statements wrapped in whatever scripting language I'm using.
When have you forgone the relational db in your web apps with good results? <comment><USER2> SQL is good for doing arbitrary queries. Most web sites don't need to do that!

Look at duels.com (a simple player-vs-player game). On each page it needs to know your stats/equipment and that of the person you are dueling. In an SQL database you might store the person/stats in one table, the inventory in another, and the fight record in yet another. In SimpleDB the stats and inventory could be in one domain with fight record in another.

SimpleDB or even dumb file-per-player based systems don't pay the overhead for allowing arbitrary queries so they scale better. Your SQL store will be slowed down by the weight of inactive players and their inventories and all the indexes and data they have lying around. Using in-memory caching (like memcached) is a popular way to pay the SQL cost less often while keeping the arbitrary-query ability on the back end.

And of course don't forget that SimpleDB is hosted by a farm of machines tweaked and maintained by someone else. Your MySQL setup will never be that cool.

Edit: and as for XML,if you add that to SQL, well now you have two problems.

<comment><USER3> I'd caution against using the filesystem unless you think things out very carefully. Typically you'll have a binary tree for the index in an RDBMS which gives you log(N) scaling on lookups for joins etc. If you use the filesystem your lookup time will probably be linear. You also pay a penalty in space for the fact that files have to be a whole number of inodes, so having many small files is a really inefficient use of disk space.

In essence, RDBMS are highly optimised for the sort of things people do with databases, but you need to know what you're doing with them.

<comment><USER2> Definitely, you don't want to scan the filesystem to do searches. But finding user 1234's profile in profiles/1234.data is easy. In my experience this works well (even with the wasted space) though operations like fsck start to get painful when you have 1 million+ files.

An anecdote on bad linear search: in the 90s I worked on a system in C++ that made heavy use of inheritance and other C-plus-plus-ery. There was a bunch of file opener classes each that found files in a different way (regexp, straight path, glob). They differed only in a method named match. The base class called match on every file name in the directory until it returned true. That was fine for regexps but even if you opened a file _by name_ it took N/2 syscalls to readdir to find it! This worked OK until someone created a directory with 10k entries on a production box. Ouch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mnesia looks like something that might be interesting. I have never used it, though, I'd be curious to hear more from those who have.</comment>


Q: Remember that container per HTTP request demo? - <AUTHOR> It's been a long time, but I remember seeing a live demo of a stack (erlang, iirc,) that spawned a new container/vm for every http request, printed some metrics, and terminated itself.  Of course, now I can't find it with the obvious keywords & google.  Was hoping that someone else here remembered the demo, and can remind me? <comment><USER2> [http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/03/25/mirageos-vm-per- url...](http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/03/25/mirageos-vm-per-url- experiment/)</comment>


Copyfight: EFF co-founder enters e-G8 "lion's den," rips into lions - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/eff-co-founder-enters-copyright-lions-den-rips-into-lions.ars <comment><USER2> The thing that strikes me whenever I hear those crusty old old-media guys talking is that the reality of the generations growing up today is so entirely different. Nobody I know in my generation, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, gives a _shit_ about copyright. _Nobody_. Everyone downloads music, movies and TV shows freely and without thinking about it.

That's not to say they don't ever pay for stuff, just look at the success of iTunes or the record-breaking opening weekends of popular movies. But the young generations fundamentally do no have any respect for copyright, especially if it restricts their abilities to enjoy consumption of content.

The times, they are a-changin', whether "the industry" likes it or not.

<comment><USER3> You're right about the times changing. But "the industry" has good reason to be concerned - in a world where people don't pay for their product (or certain aspects of it), they won't keep making that product. And I share their concern - I love movies/music/television/etc., and I'd really hate to live in a world without them.

<comment><USER4> It's 10 years since Metallica sued Napster. We just had a major motion picture (The Social Network), set in the past, where this event is in the past in the film.

If piracy could kill the music industry, it would have killed it by now. The music industry is not dead. Ergo piracy will not kill it.

<comment><USER5> The MPAA famously predicted that it would die due to home taping because of the VCR, only to go on and make billions from it.

The industry has always been short-sighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-R > _"When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to > make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that's not an > easy decision to make. But if you do make that decision and it does turn out > to be Avatar, then you'd like to be compensated."_

This seems to imply that 20th Century Fox feels _entitled_ to making the kind of profits that would support such exorbitant investments. I liked Avatar as much as the next guy, but the concept of making that much money off of something like music or film is a relatively recent phenomenon, dependent upon the combination of wide distribution with artificial scarcity. Even if Avatar couldn't be made without the kinds of conditions that allow for those kinds of profits, I'm pretty sure I'd trade it for all of the direct and indirect casualties of the recording and film industries; but really, I'm just thoroughly unconvinced that high quality work can't be motivated by more reasonable profits and other less tangible benefits.

<comment><USER6> the decision to invest the $100M is a business decision. Wanting the laws changed to favour your business decision is understandable I guess but if you extend that line of thinking - why aren't they lobbying for, oh I don't know, people _have_ to go to the cinema once a month? or that there should be a cinema tax. Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry.

see how far you get with any investor if your plan involves changing the law to create more favourable conditions for your profit.

these business models will all eventually die and be replaced by younger people who grew up in this copy and copy alike world and will find new ways of making money but there might be a hell of a lot of collateral damage to the law as they go down.

<comment><USER7> _Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry._

We already have the IP tax. In my country, it's essentially a value added tax on all digital mass media, regardless of use. The money from that is lumped in with the money from concerts and from playing radio in public, and goes to an entertainment organization that then distributes it to its members and partners as it sees fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The metionned 'HADOPI' group has been very productive as an entertainement provider lately. In particular, the specifications for 'netwotrk security softawre' (that should help one prove his innocence in a piracy trial) are a great read :

* compliant software must implement reversible hashing (my favorite)

* use of compliant software may not be used as an argument to prove one's innocence in court

* cloud computing is actually a 'network protocol'

etc.etc.etc.

(a short analysis (in french) [http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi- analyse-speci...](http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-analyse- specifications-fonctionnelles-moyens-securisation.htm))

</comment><comment><USER9> The whole idea of the "eG8" is offensive both on the one hand to the concept of the real G8, and on the other hand to the accordance by which matters pertaining to the politics of the Internet should be debated.

The G8 is a group of elected officials who represent their respective countries based on democratic process.

The eG8 is a bunch of industry folks who represent no one but their own self- interests.

If the 'real G8' was the heads of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Toyota, ConocoPhillips, Samsung, Berkshire Hathaway, Ford, etc we'd all horrified and out raged.

If the eG8 was a private meeting of industry folks to shoot the shit on whatever, go in right ahead. But if they're going to debate policy it's a total red flag.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry frankly.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article: "Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost."

Is that accurate? I thought copyright was invented specifically to give a monopoly to creators, in order to encourage innovation/creation.

I think that statement is conflating two separate issues in order to confuse people (the logic being, we needed copyright before mass distribution was possible; it's possible now; therefore, we don't need copyright).

<comment><USER10> Try again.

The argument is not that copyright is unnecessary. The argument is that "honoring copyright" and "taking legal action and attempting to secure government oversight to prop up an obsolete, commodity-based business model" are nowhere close to being the same thing.

To assert that Barlow is attempting to confuse is totally disingenuous. The two issues _are_ conflated. They're conflated because the rights-holders have conflated them. He's not sitting on that stage debating a panel of artists and philosophers; the majority of them aren't even proper economists. They're just the guys who have the most to lose if things change, and they're attempting (I would argue illegally/unconstitutionally, but until we can get a handle on lobbyism, 1st and 4th amendment rights violations, and continuing trends towards oligarchy in this country... que será, será) to leverage as much influence as they can muster to legislate their poor business model into continued existence in a world which no longer supports it.

Let's take the honorable Mr. Gianopulos' example: when someone asks you for a couple hundred million dollars to make a movie about some blue aliens, you'd like to be compensated.

First of all, "some blue people on another planet"? Now, I'll be the first to say that I felt _Avatar_ was mostly _Pocahontas_ with better visual effects. But come on. Gianopulos was a poor Greek kid from New York City, he attended college and law school, then immediately went to work in Hollywood. This is his entire life. He's on a stage insisting that the sanctity of these (his?) arts must be protected by any means (currently legal or not) necessary. And he _still_ can't get six words out of his mouth without being completely dismissive of the art he professes a desire to protect. This is one of the two biggest successes of the man's professional career. I wonder if he refers to _Titanic_ as "some fucking thing about a sinking boat."

(The attitude illustrated in the preceding paragraph is the foremost reason many of us consider these people to be pig-fuckers, incidentally. I'm going to step outside the bounds of rational discourse for a moment and risk some downvotes to make an audacious assertion: If you (not you, edanm, who I'm replying to, but you, the reader) believe that these multi-billion dollar media conglomerates actually concern themselves with art or the livelihoods of artists, or that they intend to protect anything but their own bottom lines, _or_ that they are somehow entitled to the role of sole, perpetual rights holders and distributors of any media created by anyone, anywhere, ever (as their comments indicate that they believe they are), you need to please see your way right the hell out of this discussion—maybe do some light reading, I'd recommend starting with Lessig's _Free Culture_ — because you clearly don't understand what the fuck is going on here. Yeah, there was a lot of hyperbole in there. I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to sort out whether or not I'm full of shit.)

Now, down to brass tacks. What Mr. Gianopulos is really concerned with is _Avatar_ as a vehicle for his well-deserved compensation. So let's take a look, shall we?

       Avatar budget: ~$237,000,000
       Avatar worldwide gross as of Jan 2011: $2,039,472,387+

According to News Corp's 2000 Annual Report [1], 20th Century Fox grossed roughly $1 Bn worldwide for all films released in FY 2000, and nearly half of that (~$494 M) was a result of them duping viewers worldwide into watching _Star Wars: Episode 1_ (including me, on opening day, the bastards). I was a freshman in high school by the end of FY 2000, which means Napster was in it's last throes, but Opennap networks were as numerous as they'd ever been and more configurable clients like WinMX were widely distributed, Newsgroups and IRC Warez/Scene channels had been hot for years, and the Kazaa's of the world were coming soon, with Torrents and an infinity of blogs posting an infinity of Rapidshare links on the horizon. I "knew" (on the internet) a guy at the time who had over a terabyte of music available for download, when a terabyte was an unfathomable amount of data. He had a cushy job where he could more or less take home as many hard drives as he wished, whenever he wished, and he filled them up largely with multi-hour trance and techno DJ sets, at quality levels way above the average back then.

All of this is to say, in FY 2000, if you knew how to work the internet and were so inclined, you could get anything you wanted, for free. Maybe you had to wait a few days for it to download on your dial-up connection, and it may have occupied 20% of the remaining free space on your 20 Gb hard drive, but you could get it. All those people who paid repeatedly to see "The Phantom Menace" multiple times in theatres? They _definitely_ knew how to download a copy of it well before it was released on DVD. And yet they still paid. Weird, right?

Flash forward a decade, when broadband is prevalent, storage is cheap, and the tools and understanding required to download any given copyrighted work are not merely the domain of geeks and organized crime, but are in fact readily available to your dentist, my mom, an increasing percentage of the elderly, and everyone on earth under 25 years old. Also, probably dogs. Yet 20th Century Fox managed to nearly _double_ FY 2000s yearly gross with _a single film_. But Mr. Gianopulos is concerned about compensation. Better call the lawyers. Actually, better just get international heads of state to issue mandates that henceforth Sony/BMG, Time Warner, CBS, NewsCorp, Viaporn...I apologize, Viacom, NBC/Universal/GE?/Comcast??/Whatthefuck and the weeping ghost of Walt Disney are the sole arbiters and proprietors of any creation which may be construed as "media," and furthermore will act as government contractors wherein they will be responsible to define and enforce the meanings of the words "art," "artist," "music," "culture," "innovation," and most importantly, "deserve."

None of this even begins to address the astronomical budget of a film like _Avatar_ in an age when a $200 cell phone can record higher quality video for a longer period of time than a $15,000 professional camera and $40,000 worth of film could 15 years ago, nor the fact that marketing ANYTHING to a worldwide potential customer base has gone from "complicated and expensive" to "marginally free, and the easiest shit ever." My passion, music, also suffers great tribulation resulting from the decisions of the aforementioned pig- fuckers, and as you'd imagine I have quite a lot to say on the topic, but I've already written a ton here, best to let some of you tell me why I'm doing it wrong before I carry on.

[1] <http://newscorp.com/report2000/filmed_ent.html>

(edit: changed caps to ital, removed superfluous characters)

<comment><USER11> Yea, many of this I am well aware of already. In fact, I have a series on artificial scarcity and it's problems. The problem is how to get the media companies to finally change and fix the problem completely. Doing the debugging to find out exactly what is happening internally would be a good idea.

<comment><USER11> For example, has someone investigated the exact history of "Hollywood accounting"?

<comment><USER10> I, for one, would _love_ to know where those hundreds of millions to produce _Avatar_ went, for instance. I wonder what slice of that pie was attributed to "Marketing Expense." Turns out it's free to upload a video (like, a trailer, let's say) to YouTube and link to it elsewhere. Go figure.

But insofar as media conglomerates addressing this matter internally, why would they? It's not a problem for _them_.

Their revenues have been on a steady climb since ever. They know god damn well how little overlap exists in the groups "definitely going to pay for it" and "would consider downloading it for free." But they would have you believe that every "illegal" download represents a lost conversion.

Now there's blood in the water, because "Hollywood" is one of the few industries left in America which still makes any money, and as belts continue to tighten, highly compensated lobbyists (including the _most_ highly compensated, Cary Sherman [1]) will be more and more successful in convincing conservative politicians that they need to vote to protect entrepreneurship and (not really) free market capitalism, and liberal politicians that they need to lend their support to secure the livelihoods of our poor struggling artists. The more sinister elements in all of our governing bodies will jump at any opportunity to introduce legislation which further erodes liberty but allows them to monitor/control that damn Internet thing. All the while, most artists still get fucked by the system, ClearChannel/LiveNation/GoldenVoice are still shitty, evil monopolies, and the executives of major media firms laugh uproariously all the way to the bank.

I sincerely doubt that the change will come from within. Not that there aren't people who work for those organizations who care passionately about the arts, who understand technology and its implications in significant and meaningful ways, who generally have their hearts in the right places. There will be a place for them in the arts economy of the future, but somebody new will be signing their cheques (or bitcoins).

The decision-makers at the top are the ones who give off the impression that they'd prefer to hide in their opulent executive chambers, doing their damndest to legislate their competitors out of existence, and ultimately bleed to death, gripping stacks of money, gold bullion spilling from their pockets, then actually compete on the free market, and perhaps die an honorable death.

The Guardian conducted an interview with electronic music pioneer, brilliant composer, omni-talented artist and all-around genius Brian Eno last year, wherein he stated the following:

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along."

Two important points here:

1\. This was going to happen no matter what. These firms rose to prominence during an odd period in the ongoing history of our world civilization when ideas, emotions, and artistic expressions could be recorded, duplicated, and feasibly distributed to consumers around the world. They happened to exist at an exact moment on the timeline when it was just cheap enough that it could be accomplished, but just expensive enough that a large firm was required to organize workers, consolidate (what was, at the time, very expensive) equipment, and coordinate distribution to drive marginal costs down. That moment in time is passing. Marginal costs to produce and distribute media are rapidly approaching zero.

2\. The inevitability of these changes in market conditions is no reason to vilify media conglomerates. They did just spend about 60 years betting on _all_ the wrong horses, but no one could _know_ that the Internet (and all it entails) was coming. The reason to vilify these organizations lies in their reactions to these changes. I'm not going to go down the list, suffice it to say that much resentment towards labels/studios/production groups/etc. has built up, not just on behalf of artists and others with a dog in the fight, but in average consumers. That resentment just didn't exist a decade or two ago. The "rights-holders" fought the inevitable, and now not only are they going to lose, but they've so antagonized their customers—the only people who may have been able to prop them up long-term if only due to sympathy—that people who previously wouldn't have given a shit are now positively giddy at the idea of someone like Jim Gianopulos standing, defeated and alone, with nothing but a stupid look on his face and all his fucking whale blubber.

I assert that in no way is the continued existence of these lumbering, bumbling, crumbling dinosaurs a requisite condition for humans to have the opportunity to create, distribute, access or enjoy art, in any of its forms, anywhere.

I'll be happy to watch them suffer, and eventually die. And that's on them. 100%.

[1] [http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/05/21/a...](http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/05/21/another- member-of-the-overpaid/)

(edit: quote formatting)

<comment><USER11> "I, for one, would love to know where those hundreds of millions to produce Avatar went, for instance."

Not what I mean. I mean things like exactly when and why they started doing it.

"I sincerely doubt that the change will come from within. "

Yea, but someone else could do the debugging and maybe fix the root cause.

<comment><USER10> My apologies.

If I've assumed at least one thing correctly and by "it" you mean producers and studio heads artificially inflating budgets in order to ultimately line their own pockets and the pockets of their friends, I would find it hard to believe that there has been any point in the entertainment industry's history when that _hasn't_ been prevalent.

As to the "why," what, you don't like money? Here, have some more money, now now do you like it? Rinse, repeat.

I'll venture that we're doing the debugging right now, as we discuss this matter. The debugging occurs every time a 14 year old reads about these issues and wonders how the hell it could be possible, let alone legal, for these entities to behave so miserably.

I'll indicate once more that I believe the root cause of this excess lies in these unsustainable institutions and the selfish people who lead them. Leave art to the artists, we'll/they'll figure out how to make money doing it, I'm sure. If you're a failed lawyer or a failed artist or just a plain-vanilla opportunist and you want to run a commodity business, sell canned peaches. Or literally anything else in the world where there's an economic incentive tied to an actual physical object, anywhere but your own mind.

<comment><USER11> "and the selfish people who lead them. " I believe "legacy MBA" are the key words. The old MBA courses taught a lot of horrible stuff, including self- interest and control which are probably big factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I see all this talk about regulating the internet over the last years, I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there...

<comment><USER8> >I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there...

That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is that now they try to mess with it anyway.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but that does not keep those same people from claiming the authority to "regulate" and "change" it. Though I am wondering how they are actually going to enforce all that on something as vast and international as "the internet".

And, let's be honest, all this was and is about absolutely nothing but the music and movie industry crying over allegedly lost sales. Only the wordings used to describe it have changed. (now it was "a more civilized internet"... that sheer smug-ness is hard to miss.)

How can two expendable industries have that much influence on politics??? Even with all their lobbying and "donations". It is not like we would suddenly lose our western culture without them.

<comment><USER13> Governments have their own non-industry agendas too (i.e. WikiLeaks).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm glad he went I guess, but I think Cory Doctorow had the right idea. All this will serve to accomplish is give the summit an air of legitimacy and they'll just make the invite list more exclusive next time. Meanwhile none of these pig-fuckers are interested their arguments being challenged on their merits. They know what they are about, and it is decidedly not the best interests of society, or even creative expression.

 _"Speech has to be free but movies cost money."_

I doubt he even meant this to be a double entendre. He is literally trying to be reasonable by suggesting that people should not have to pay blood money to 20th Century Fox in order to post something to their blog. He is seriously trying to illustrate benevolence here.

So I doubt that trying to reason with these people serves a purpose.

<comment><USER15> Is it a form of censorship to not go to a powerful forum about censorship and give your ideas against censorship?

If all those against, lets say "censorship", are silent when a major debate is being heard on it, then who do you think will get all the PR, and win in the end?

I think for Cory it is a privilege that he was invited and it would have been a privilege to take part in the debate. It is an important debate, whatever their motives may be. We are at a turning point, and all voices ought to be heard, lest we, our society, makes an irrational decision because of the silence of some.

Speak louder. That is, after all, what needs to be protected.

<comment><USER14> I am torn on that because I'm not sure that choosing not to attend was a wise decision.

But anyone who didn't back the interests of mass media going into that forum had to know that the deck was stacked against them. That is, that they would be regarded as a sideshow - a token representative from outside the sphere of consensus. That's all John Barlow is here. Let's have EFF put together a similar event and see how many representatives from the copyright regime show up. Let's see if they get Jim Gianopulos from 20th Century Fox.

Let's not pretend this entire conference was anything other than a PR stunt. These are the same assholes behind ACTA.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HandBrake, a tool for converting video to widely supported codecs - <AUTHOR> https://handbrake.fr/ <comment><USER2> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13258029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13258029)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Show HN" implies that this project is your own personal work. Is that the case here?</comment>


'Small' Nuclear War Could Trigger Catastrophic Cooling - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/44380-small-nuclear-war-could-trigger-catastrophic-cooling.html <comment><USER2> Hooray! A solution to global warming!</comment>


Ask HN: How to engage Mobile Audience? - <AUTHOR>

Has anybody here tried engaging their audience through games, quizzes, sweepstakes, coupons, surveys, giveaways etc. If yes, what has been your experience so far. What tools did you use, if any? What was the response like? <comment><USER2> Mobile marketing through Twitter and Facebook is generally effective. Unfortunately they want to milk you to death with Ad costs so they have a policy against sweepstakes, coupons and giveaways. Quizzes are not really effective unless they generate some type of controversy. What do you mean by games in specific?

<comment><AUTHOR> "What do you mean by games in specific?"

Like making user play some game on their mobile phone and giving them some discounts based on the win. The overall game experience could be designed keeping in mind the branding and philosophy of the business involved.</comment></comment>


5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Developing a Successful Mobile App - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/12/06/mobile-app-development-pitfalls/ <comment><USER2> egads... mashable is putting out more and more fluff. i guess it generates page views and ad dollars, so more power to then... i guess.</comment>


JSON to Protobuf? - <AUTHOR> Are there any libraries available for converting json data to protobuf message format? <comment><USER2> [https://godoc.org/github.com/golang/protobuf/jsonpb](https://godoc.org/github.com/golang/protobuf/jsonpb)</comment>


25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die. - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ <comment><USER2> I tried to give OS/2 a try, but what happened was kind of bizarre. I had a DEC PClone with a 486 (cannot remember if it was DX or SX) inside. OS/2 needed a graphic driver for the S3 chip. I called DEC support to ask for the driver and they said they didn't have it but IBM did. The DEC rep kept me on the phone while he called the OS/2 support number. DEC had incredible service at the time.

Then the bizarre happened. The IBM support person said I needed to sign an NDA to get the driver. Both the DEC rep and I tried to explain to him I was a humble end user and not interested in anything but the driver. There must be a mistake as I did not want source code. Nope, just the driver required a NDA and some verification. I said I would think about it, and we hung up. The DEC rep apparently had quite a few people gathered around him and they were laughing pretty hard. He then asked if I would like a nice copy of Win NT with no NDA and all the drivers for my machine.

I really wanted to like OS/2.

<comment><USER3> I used to do OS/2 support as an IBM co-op back when I was in college. In many ways it was pretty sweet -- I did some cool stuff with the built in Rexx interpreter, which -- though not as or widely supported as, say, perl -- was still pretty nice.

Regarding your specific problem, I'd add that IBM's support structure was byzantine, with multiple groups with different agendas and tons of snafus like: "this isn't our issue, contact Thinkpad support," followed by "this isn't a Thinkpad issue, contact OS/2 support." (Aside: I once tried to get a different IBM group to handle an issue I believed to be theirs, and after getting rebuffed multiple times, I wrote a rather angry response which got me in trouble with my manager. Learned a lot from that -- mostly, don't write angry.)

9 times out of ten, the issues we received boiled down to a) missing / out of date drivers for some piece of hardware (as in the S3 chipset you mention), or b) incompatibilities/errors running existing windows apps. I think OS/2 failed for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, even though it was better than windows (for a while), people just didn't feel a strong need for pre-emptive multi-tasking, so it was never a strong selling point, _especially_ if it meant you couldn't run the latest PC games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article.

My attitude towards pagination wasn't always this way. Over time, however, it's just annoyed me more and more. When I get to the bottom of a page as I'm reading an article and see that I'm going to have to click on these tiny numbers multiple times, wait for a new page to load each time, all while interrupting my train of thought, I get so annoyed that I immediately say "NOPE!" and hit the back button, no matter how good the article is.

And out of principle, I'm not installing any 3rd party software (like readability, etc.) to handle this for me. I shouldn't have to. Site owners who run articles need to find better ways to get page views, ways that aren't inconveniencing everyone using their site. Some might say "well that's just how it is!"... and I say only if you allow it to be.

So as a bit of a followup to this rant, if you submit articles like this to HN and there's a printer friendly version (or even a "view all" version), please submit that URL instead.

<comment><USER5> Readability didn't work for me on this page anyway. Very frustrating that content producers do this and provide no way to view the whole article in a single click.

<comment><USER6> As far as first world problems go, this one is really annoying. Especially if you send an article to the Kindle and don't notice that you only got a part of it. After a few times, I learnt to view and check first but it really kills the flow.

<comment><USER5> I have to admit... I did have a "First world problem" meme image in my head as I posted this and thought it might not be an appropriate complaint to raise on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time, since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two Windows sessions to communicate over null modem to test a game.

However, there were defects both large and small that didn't seem to get resolved -- from missing files on the custom Windows installation to filesystem corruption when the swap file filled up (this last one was the final straw for me).

Still it's interesting to think how its shared DNA is in Windows today, just as NeXTStep is in Apple's products. In fact many APIs between Win32 and OS/2 are similar (I once made some OS/2 API bindings for Borland Pascal).

<comment><USER8> I remember buying multiple copies of OS/2, but never installing it, at one point it was so discounted that it was the cheapest way to buy good quality floppies. IIRC warp came on about 40

<comment><USER9> Yes indeed. I remember thinking I had gone to heaven when I got my hands on a Warp 3.0 CDROM. Installing any OS that has 40 floppies is painful. Kind of reminds of of the slackware days as well...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this brings back memories. I was a total OS/2-Head until about 1993 or 1994 when I got both an Yggdrasil Linux CD for my 486, and, a NeXTCube; and from there, ended up a Unix fan.

The problem with installation, was that all development was done on PS/2s. The developers never did much testing on non-MCA (MicroChannel Architecture, a pre-PCI intelligent bus design) hardware.

That is why, for instance, when installing OS.2 2.0 and 2.1 on certain PCs you had to disable the CPUs L2 cache by using the legacy "non-turbo" mode and do part of the installation in 8Mhz AT mode; otherwise the installer would crash and you wouldn't know why.

I think a lot of OS/2 users went to Linux and their disgust for MS' admitted astro-turfing and plain outright lying, fueled Linux adoption.

ADD: OS/2 ran well in 32MB and flew in anything more than that. Unfortunately at that time, 32MB was hundreds of dollars, and some systems couldn't even take that much RAM.

<comment><USER11> Hey, nice to meet you .. I also had Yggdrasil (and SLS!) systems back in the days of OS/2, which I very briefly flirted with (IBM compilers, yay!) then seguéd back to MIPS and RISC/OS and Irix and SGI (grr.. why you no make laptop, SGI?!! wtf..) with a bit of a dodgy diversion from Linux in the 90's through NextstepX86, sustained a lusty affair with a BeBox, until .. like a lot of other people .. here I am with my 'best unix workstation ever', an Apple.

Apropos the living-on factor of OS/2 nuts keeping it running, its a good, healthy thing to 'not-abandon' technology.

There is a scale to this.

I personally really like the guys at forum.Defence-force.org, burning the machines in current glory with new code. The Oric-1/Atmos is still a computer, and its values during its market period rose (and fell!), but yet the working machines, today, are still getting new code written for them.

It is actually some sort of utter joy to have new titles for a very old, memorable machine or system, which can still be enjoyed!

Computers don't die. Their users do. Lets hope the kids can still turn every single one, on ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating systems.

The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2 was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the sales people. He had bought OS/2, installed it, and the next time he used it hit the one time only long bootup time. He was ranting how he immediately took it off and reinstalled Windows. There must have been at least 10 other customers who heard this.

I wonder how often this scenario happened.

<comment><USER13> Never used OS/2, so maybe you can clarify this for me:

I thought that one of the limitations of OS/2 was that while it could run DOS programs, it could only run one DOS program at a time (in addition to a number of native ones). Is that correct?

<comment><USER14> No, OS/2 2.0 and later could run any number of DOS and Windows 3.1 applications at once. I'm not sure about the 1.x series. You're probably remembering Windows 9x's feature of being able to automatically reboot into MS-DOS for running games.

<comment><USER12> You are correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to be the Editor In Chief of the OS/2 e-Zine! (<http://www.os2ezine.com>), although I began as just a contributor. The e-Zine was started by Trevor Smith, who slowly handed over more responsibilities until eventually retiring to do other things.

I have fond memories of that era, and of constantly working to keep your chin up as IBM's support grew more and more reluctant. Probably the most important lesson I walked away with was understanding how deep the roots of zealotry can go, how something as cosmically unimportant as an operating system can get woven into a person's identity until the two are indistinguishable.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was at IBM in the mid-90s and OS/2 was my first prolonged exposure to GNU tools. I got in deep with TCP/IP as part of practicing to become a "Certified Engineer." We ran NCSA httpd and cgi scripts on it. Mucking with OS/2 and its configurability on a PS/2 tower (that you could about crawl inside of) lead directly to mucking with Slackware and working our S. American teams who'd created an MCA patch for the earlier Linux kernels. (Getting DOOM to run on that PS/2 386 was a banner evening.)

Marketing was always an uphill battle. Fans didn't like the Betamax analogy, but it was apt (w/r/t stronger specs and weaker sales). MSFT already knew how to market a dung pile.

I didn't realize NYC Transit used it. I still see it in ATMs and know UPS had a huge install, enmeshed base.

</comment><comment><USER17> A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.

<comment><USER18> Same thing here, also 2008, but with an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin. The machine crashed as I was using it and permanently relieved me of my bank card, but the up side was that I got to watch the entire OS/2 Warp boot sequence play out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> OS/2 Warp has a nice system. Too bad IBM refused to support it.

They had a golden opportunity, when it was clear that PCs would be transitioning from 16-bit operating systems to 32-bit operating systems. Microsoft had WinNT for 32-bit, Win3.x for 16-bit. WinNT didn't do a good job at the time running people's existing 16-bit Win3.x applications, so migrating to NT was a tough sell. This put MS in a hard place, because they needed something that ran existing Win3.x stuff reasonably well but supported 32-bit for the future--in other words they needed a transition system.

That transition system was to be Win95, but it was months away when Warp came out.

Warp had _excellent_ Win3.x compatibility. In fact, it arguably ran Win3.x applications better than Win3.x ran them. And it had excellent 32-bit support.

IBM should have aggressively pushed Warp as the 32-bit successor to Win3.x. They could argue that instead of waiting for Win95, switch now and you'll get the benefit of 32-bit, and you'll get a better 3.x experience than you have now (or that you'll have under Win95).

What would Microsoft be able to do? If they countered by downplaying the importance of 32-bit, they'd just make people reluctant to switch to Win95 when that came out.

Instead, IBM basically just made Warp available, and then ignored it. Here are some examples of how they ignored it.

1\. They didn't spend any money promoting it in stores. A lot of consumers do not realize this, but in retail stores shelf positioning is for sale. When you see a product featured in an end cap, or on a shelf at eye level, or in a high traffic location, it is because the manufacturer of that item paid to have it put there. If the manufacturer doesn't pay for good placement, their product goes on in inconvenient shelf in a less trafficked part of the store.

Guess where OS/2 was in Egghead and CompUSA? Someplace in back, where the lighting was poor, sitting on the bottom of a shelf.

2\. They didn't give a fuck about existing developers. I recall reading a column by, I think, Jerry Pournelle, where he went to a trade show. First he went to the IBM booth, told them he'd heard about OS/2, and would like to develop for it. He asked what he needed to do.

They have him a form to fill out. It was an application to apply for developer status. It asked all kinds of details about what he planned to develop, his business plan for it, and so on, and there was an application fee.

Then he went to Microsoft's booth, and said he'd heard about Win95, and asked what he had to do in order to develop for it.

They gave him the SDK and tools right there.

3\. They didn't give a fuck about beginning developers. Flash forward to after Win95 was released. Microsoft made developer tools available IN THE RETAIL MARKET. They were for sale at places like Egghead.

Think about that. Some kid playing with Win95 gets an idea for a game, and wants to start programming. He could go out to his local software store, and get everything he needs to start being a Win95 programmer!

Could you do the same for OS/2? Well, actually you could--but not from IBM. Watcom C/C++ was available in retail shops and could build OS/2 applications, and even had some licensed libraries from IBM included. However, Watcom really was aimed at the professional developer. The licensed documentation wasn't as complete as the Microsoft documentation for Win95.

4\. They didn't give a fuck about developers who actually developed for OS/2. If you persevered, and actually made OS/2 software, you were on your own. They wouldn't help promote your application. They wouldn't feature it in any ads or provide any co-marketing funds to help you promote it.

<comment><USER20> Didn't Microsoft win by putting itself into position to preinstall its OS on new computers?

<comment><USER19> Preinstalls discourage other operating systems for two reasons:

1\. they set a functionality mark that a on-preinstall OS needs to surpass in order to interest someone in switching (especially if the new OS costs money),

2\. they enable inaction. What I mean by this is that you may find the features of a new OS interesting enough to want to try it, but doing so actually will take some effort. If you procrastinate, you've still got the old OS.

Before Win95, the preinstalls were generally either DOS, or DOS + Win3.

When Win95 came out, it was an immediate hit via retail sales. On launch day, many stores were open at midnight to sell it as soon as they could, and people lined up to buy it. I don't have the numbers handy, but I'd be surprised if Win95 on the first day of availability did not surpass OS/2.

This shows that there was a significant number of people in August 1995 for whom an OS of Win95's level could entice them to want to try it sufficiently to get them to actually go out and buy it and install it.

If IBM had properly marketed OS/2, those people could have been their customers. IBM could have established themselves as the preferred 32-bit PC OS before Win95 got out of the gate, and vendors would have been rushing to sell preinstalled OS/2 systems.

One can make a good case that after Win95 came out and was getting preinstalls, no amount of effort by IBM could have overcome that--Win95 was good enough that OS/2's advantages probably were not enough to overcome procrastination. But by the time Win95 was getting preinstalls, Microsoft had already won from IBM's indifference pre-Win95.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was an OS/2 user from 1993 - 1996 or so. I have very fond memories of it - for those lucky enough to have a supported machine, it felt indestructable. You could do the most obnoxious things inside a DOS session, and the most that could be trashed was the DOS session itself. At the time, I was doing x86 assembly and C programming for a college course. The kind of pointer mistakes that would cause (or necessitate) a reboot on DOS only took out the session on OS/2.

I only stopped using it because I changed computer to one that didn't have a nicely-supported Cirrus video card (my replacement machine had a Diamond Stealth), and there were no drivers for the new machine. Graphics drivers on OS/2 are a separate story! Two years later, I was on Linux full-time, but I still find myself longing for a Workplace Shell clone.

</comment><comment><USER14> OS/2's big problem was it needed 8MB of RAM to run acceptably. 4MB (the stated minimum requirement) was just enough to boot it up and, maybe, run one very light weight application (with the HD thrashing trying to swap memory in and out). Things where worse with Win-OS/2, which was a full copy of Windows 3.1 running in a VM. You really needed 16MB to take true advantage of OS/2 multitasking capabilities. IBM should have billed it as a workstation OS until consumer hardware caught up, just as Microsoft did with Windows NT.

<comment><USER22> That's exactly why Windows 95 succeeded. At the time 4mb of RAM was a lot. But pure 32-bit OSes like NT and OS/2 ran 16-bit apps in their own full VMs. Which is great from a design perspective but lousy for end-user performance on average hardware since it meant about 4mb of overhead per app. Win95 ran all 16-bit apps in a shared VM and used a few other quick and dirty tricks to keep RAM usage low even if you were running lots of 16-bit apps. The end result was a system that traded maintenance cost and stability for better support for older apps on more modest hardware. In the end it turned out to be one of the most successful software products in history, even though it gave MS so much technical debt it took them nearly a decade to work through it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My first computer had OS/2 Warp 4 installed and I loved it. I remember checking out the first SuSE Linux release at that time and I was puzzled how primitive it looked compared to what I was used to from OS/2. A few years later, I switched from OS/2 to Linux and have been using it ever since.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1.44" huh? Not 3.5" 1.44MB maybe?

<comment><USER25> This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 - Preparing Your System."

(Somebody went and edited the main article, thus rendering this thread moot. Quite a shame, really. Typos can be fun. ;) )

<comment><USER24> I remember my dad having a Zenith MinisPort with a 2" floppy drive. Even as a kid I remember thinking "Ok these are just ridiculously small."

The OP is also the author of the article, so I'm not surprised he went and fixed it. But I'm a little miffed he didn't even give me a thank you.

<comment><USER25> We stumbled upon either a 2" or 2.5" floppy early in my college career. None of us had ever heard of such a beast - it was a bit like alien tech landing in our laps. We figured it was "the future" and that smaller floppies would see mass-adoption, as some sort of CD-killer.

Then our professor destroyed our dream world and said they'd died off in the 80s. (And then wisely predicted flash-like memory would kill off all of them.)

<comment><USER26> There's a wide range of weird floppy sizes. Perhaps one of the best known was sold for the Amstrad PCW - a popular word processing system. (This machine kept CP/M alive during the 80s and into the early 90s.)

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW>).

There were others. Here's a 2" drive - yet another failed Sony media format. (What's their ratio of successful : failed formats?)

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The title is a bit misleading. OS/2 (especially Warp) wasn't a failure from a technical standpoint. Rather, IBM treated it like a redheaded stepchild which detracted from its core systems of mainframes and AS/400s, because--you know-- this pc on every desktop thing is just hype.

As an aside, this reminded me of an old Dilbert from that timeframe (mid-1995): [http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...](http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/20000/1000/000/21019/21019.strip.gif)

</comment><comment><USER28> OS/2 is still in use in NYC's subway MetroCard system... shocking. The city is probably being squeezed out of tons of money to maintain technology that is ancient.

<comment><USER29> I don't find it all that surprising. A few large insurance companies still have a lot of their (core) software written in COBOL and outsource its upkeep to IT companies. It's a big expense, nobody likes it; but replacing it would cost more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I learned multi-threaded programming on OS/2 (coming from VMS) and it was a pleasant experience.

</comment><comment><USER31> Microsoft's OS/2 Crush Plan makes a good read today.

<http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/OS/2_Crush_Plan>

</comment><comment><USER32> Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819> . I posted a lot of comments to it.</comment>


JONO - musical instrument for daring - <AUTHOR> http://jono.zvukolom.org/

<comment><USER2> tried it on lion and it will not load - just dies before even showing interface and says "report this error" etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> which version of Lion do you have? i have no problems on the latest one

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "for daring"?

<comment><AUTHOR> for you, darling</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's with the black bar at the top? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> gets added when someone relevant has died. Today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14118290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14118290)

</comment><comment><USER3> The death of Bob Taylor.</comment>


Booth babe debate is back, in time for summer cons - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.csoonline.com/security-leadership/2226/booth-babe-debate-back-time-summer-cons

<comment><USER2> Three page loads to read minimal content and get served with maximal ads. Here's the print version to get all the content (badly formatted) and minimal ads:

<http://blogs.csoonline.com/print/2226></comment>


Multi-media journalists face jail time after reporting on ND pipeline protest - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/15/multi-media-journalists-face-jail-time-for-reporting-on-north-dakota-pipeline-protest/ <comment><USER2> One of them is Amy Goodman, who, if you've ever listened to NPR, you've heard. The public prosecutor is saying that since she was showing the viewpoint of the Native Americans, she wasn't actually doing journalism, she was just promoting their disruptive behavior. Rolling Stone magazine claims that it's not the public prosecutor's job to decide what is and isn't journalism ([http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-on-amy- goodman-a...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-on-amy-goodman- arrest-for-covering-dakota-pipeline-story-w444754)). Goodman has devoted her career to independent journalism, I'm sure she's going to fight this.

</comment><comment><USER3> "For those unfamiliar with the pipeline protests, the Standing Rock Sioux are seeking to halt the construction of a $3.8 billion pipeline saying its development will encroach on their tribal burial sites and taint their water supply at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation."

OT: I hope they're provably documenting water analysis now, so they can show degradation of water quality and safety later.</comment>


The TapIt Cap: Tap for Growlers - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1732077870/the-tapit-cap-the-beer-growlers-best-friend

<comment><USER2> The key to fresh beer to drink the growler in one sitting..

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure most people don't want to consume 64 ounces of beer in one night.

<comment><USER3> Well, most don't. But shared among two or three. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Python Fire, a library for automatically generating command line interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/03/python-fire-command-line.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Meh just ok for POC. Take the time to build a proper cli which tells you all the parameters and args it would take.

$ ./example.py Type: Example String form: <__main__.Example object at 0x10674d890> File: ~/tmp/example.py

Usage: ./example.py ./example.py hello

$ ./example.py hello Hello world!

$ ./example.py hello adsf Hello adsf!</comment>


Apple Pay Overtakes Starbucks as Most Popular Mobile Payment Platform in the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/23/apple-pay-overtakes-starbucks-in-us/ <comment><USER2> It's surprising that Apple Pay works at a variety of stores as opposed to just one but it still took this long to become more popular than the Starbucks app. I personally still only use the Starbucks app as Apple Pay still doesn't work with my credit union.</comment>


Please, Please Don't Use "CSS in JS" - ezequiel-garzon https://medium.com/@ajsharp/please-please-don-t-use-css-in-js-ffeae26f20f <comment><AUTHOR> > _browser-based CSS, one of the simplest and most reliable parts of the web > development stack_

This is absolutely ludicrous. CSS is weird, complicated, and insanely unreliable. Sometimes it's hard to figure out how things will work when just reading the standards, and then browsers all have incomplete or buggy implementations of the standards.

I'm not saying CSS in JS is the answer, but CSS is broken enough that we're already using tons of not-CSS solutions to write it.

> _vendor lock-in built-in_

I don't understand how using an open-source library is getting locked into a vendor. You could have made the same argument about React, but there are already frameworks that implement the React API. Why would this be any different?</comment>


Cnyks, make any JavaScript es6 class runnable - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/131/cnyks <comment><AUTHOR> Looking for feedback/criticism from fellow readers Have a nice day !</comment>


People Chose Bing Results Over Google in Blind Comparison Tests–Really? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/thedetails/archive/2012/08/06/bingchallenge.aspx?form=MFECOM&publ=NWSL&crea=EML_MFECOM

<comment><USER2> I started using Windows 8 a couple days ago and decided to try out IE 10 and Bing for a little while to see how it compares to my normal Chrome/Google search experience. I decided to end that experiment this morning. I actually like IE 10 and Bing is alright, but the issue is that for complex tech queries, I still get far better results on Google. I thought at first I wouldn't notice, but almost immediately I had to start entering searches in Google after they didn't work out to my liking in Bing.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my experience, it's not that Bing has bad results. Rather, the results aren't so much better that they justify switching from Google.

On the other hand, I've found that the Bing search ads I've run for my software product convert better than my AdWords search ads. Maybe Bing users are more likely to spend money?

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think this comparison is reasonable because the size of index at google is much larger than bing's. For some simple just for test queries, bing's results may seem to be better but in the real world a much larger index is much much more important.</comment>


Saying your email address over the phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthiasmcgregor.com/ideas/saying-your-email-address-over-the-phone/

<comment><USER2> The author references "I... A... S... India, Alpha, Sierra", and I immediately recognized those as words from the _NATO Phonetic Alphabet_ [1].

I have found it to be a wonderful tool when I need to spell out loud. Now that I have the alphabet's acrophonic words memorized, I no longer fumble to create words on the fly that match the target letter. Plus, there is no second- guessing by the listener, since the words in the alphabet were selected to reduce ambiguity.

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


YC: please, give me some feedback on startup business model - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I need any feedback for my startup's idea and business model and would very appreciate your help.  I don't want to go too deep into details, but one of the major points is that I'm going to ask subscribers to use my own IM client to stay connected (well, it could be some open protocol, like Jabber).  I wish I can propose something easier, either SMS, or Email, or other IM (ICQ, AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, ...).  Unfortunately, no one allows to perform bulk messaging (or it's very expensive).
From the other side, my subscribers will have motivation to use it, to stay updated and connected.  However, I'm not sure if downloading and installing one more client (and keep it running on your computer) becomes a barrier for a typical user and can keep them away of being my subscriber.
What do you think guys?
Oh, the business model is not connected to advertisement (although, it can take place), so it's not pay-per-view model.  The reason why I am mentioning this, is that recently I've been told that such requirement can lead you to feeling like being back to late 90's, when the market was full of numerous toolbars, advertisement panels, etc and a lot of people still sick of it.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I don't know how many people use Jabber, but when I first tried it it was pretty confusing (I figured it out 2nd time trying it, but IMO it should be a lot easier), so I imagine for a normal user it might be confusing to start using Jabber too.

As for your own IM client, users might be reluctant to download a new one unless there is a really good reason to download it (and to start it up each time you start the computer). If there is no good reason to be on it, then they might not. But you said that they'll have motivation to use it so I guess it should be fine. But if the motivation is that their friends are also using it, then getting their friends to use it too might be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> using a new im client is going to be a huge barrier, imo.

look at how many ppl still use aim, and how few people use even very powerful integrated clients, such as ichat, gtalk, and even msn messenger (lol).

</comment><comment><USER4> speaking of toolbar.</comment>


RFC 7282 – On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 <comment><USER2> Has anyone who has been at one of these meetings where humming occurred comment on the social aspects of it?

It sounds like a less wordy, more vague version (as you can't visibly tell who exactly is humming) of the "aye"/"nay" voice voting.

<comment><USER3> We used to use a show of hands (raised hands). However, participants with limited sight could not get a sense for the state of a room when a show of hands was called for. So we switched to humming. Now, you might wonder how that works for people who are hard of hearing, but oddly enough that has not come up as much.

<comment><USER3> If ever we have to, we could do both, and then still call it "humming" since it would still be that and it's a very pithy (two syllables) word for it.

It's also possible that humming has little to do with sight and more to do with using the volume of humming to help indicate the strength of the sense of the room -- that actually is a very useful aspect of humming. However, humming became a thing concommitantly with participation by people with limited sight, which is probably why I remember that as a motivation, but in fact it might not have been! It's been a long time now that the IETF uses humming...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was halfway and, despite making a lot of sense, I had to stop to check if it was published on the 1st of the month.

<comment><USER3> Oh? Why is that?

<comment><USER4> aprils fool</comment></comment></comment>


The Waif Startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-waif-startup/

<comment><USER2> This looks more like the "Emperor's New Clothes" startup.</comment>


EBay Deal With Buy.com Angers Site's Sellers - The golden era of sellers is over - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/technology/14ebay.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> _"It's a tragic ending to what was once a warm and fuzzy Silicon Valley story,"_

 _Many believe that eBay has violated the sacred tenet of the "level playing field," which its founder, Pierre Omidyar, established as one of the company's basic principles._

Sounds like with all the discourse amongst its users, and as it changes its business model, now is a good time to start creating an alternative to eBay.

<comment><USER3> ebay have just opened up the playing fied...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just like all the other eBay news, people will bitch for a week, then go back to selling on it. eBay is where all the buyers are, if you are looking for a deal on a new ______, you go on eBay.</comment>


Ask HN: Does selling electronic equipment at a loss actually happen? - <AUTHOR>

I'm really questioning the idea of selling electronic equipment at a loss to recoup by selling media related to that equipment. Does this actually happen? Does anyone have any examples with evidence to back this up? <comment><USER2> This is the model used by video game console makers. The cost to develop, market, and sell a console (e.g. Playstation, XBox) far exceeds the sticker price for each console sold. In 2005, each XBox 360 sold represented a loss of $126 for Microsoft. They make that money back on licensing fees they charge to game and accessory vendors, as well as through XBox Live subscription fees and on-console purchases.

Source: [http://www.gamespot.com/news/6140383/microsoft- taking-126-hi...](http://www.gamespot.com/news/6140383/microsoft- taking-126-hit-per-xbox-360)

Mobile phone carriers also employ this model. They often give away phones for free or at a token price of $99, when the hardware easily costs hundreds more. In exchange, you have to sign a 2 year contract, where you promise to pay them $1200-2400 whether you use the phone or not.

Dell used this model for a while with their Dell-branded LexMark printers. They would give the printer away for free with any computer purchase, but the printer only accepted Dell-branded ink, which was identical to the LexMark ink, but had a special chip that identified it. They sold this ink at quite a markup over the LexMark ink to make their money back on the printer loss.

To be successful at this, you need to have a captive audience and a lot of traction. The phone company has it easy because you sign a contract. With the video game console maker, you take a big gamble if the console doesn't take off (ask Atari how this works out). If you are planning on something like the Dell printer, be careful that counterfeiters don't steal your market.</comment>


Possible earthlike planet found in the Goldilocks zone of a nearby star - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/29/possible-earthlike-planet-found-in-the-goldilocks-zone-of-a-nearby-star/

<comment><AUTHOR> HN user avar posted a link to Phil Plait's writeup in this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741330>. Then HN user hartror suggested, "His write up is far more suitable for the HN audience, has plenty of science, grains of salt and uses the very scientific word 'probably' a lot (that isn't a joke)." So I figured it would be worth submitting. It seems to be a more levelheaded commentary on the discovery.

<comment><USER2> Having read both, I agree - this is a more balanced report. The other one seems to blur facts and supposition a bit. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Apart from the obvious fact that this is a very cool finding, I have to say I love the term "Goldilocks zone". I wonder if we can misappropriate it for other uses.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh, yeah! Thanks for reminder! Time to re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and to watch the Bladerunner again. Immigrate or degenerate.. ^_^</comment>