The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - <AUTHOR> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/23/impossible-music-black-midi/ <comment><USER2> People have been doing this kind of thing with trackers for some time.

Here's Vache by Venetian Snares, from 2006: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2f5gOo1VEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2f5gOo1VEM)

And here's a webcam video of the sequencer data scrolling past: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK- EzEa45U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U)

The techniques are much older. Here's a screengrab of the OctaMed tracker running on an amiga, playing back the original drum tracks from Aphrodite's jungle classic Beats Booyaa from 1994: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVSe9DubE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVSe9DubE8)

And here's the whole of Beats Booya to hear it in context: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vts6rqJHMK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vts6rqJHMK8)

Real producers chop their beats in hex ;)

EDIT: also, most music software includes something called an arpeggiator, into which you play chords, which it breaks up into little sequences of notes according to different parameters. Set the interval down to 20ms or so and you've got your black midi :)

That's also how you get those distinctive chord-like sounds out of monophonic soundchips in oldschool video games.

<comment><USER3> I rather like Chris Cunningham's interpretation of what it would take to perform Aphex Twin's "Monkey Drummer" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB08leFMRnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB08leFMRnM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm incredibly surprised by the negativity of the comments here. Taking a medium, in this case a piano midi track, and pushing it far beyond its limits, while still resulting in something resembling music, is just about as close to hacking as you can get.

Also, constraints breed creativity, and this is just another example of that.

It's not the type of music I would listen to generally, but insisting that this should be the case completely misses the point of what's interesting about it.

<comment><USER5> Actually, this is kind of the opposite of constraint breeding creativity. You have removed the constraint of having to make a piece of music playable by a human and now you might have a 20 million note song not because it sounds good but just for the novelty of having so many notes. Like any other medium for art, there will of course be good and bad pieces created. But a million old- school geocities web pages w/ autoplaying embedded MIDI tracks I think serve as a good example that the default judgement is going to be harsh.

<comment><USER6> There's plenty of constraints in this style. You need to have very many notes. It must be a single instrument. It should presumably sound good or otherwise have some musical value. There is a lot of exploration possible within these constraints.

Most of the criticism in this thread are just eloquent formulations of "Get off my lawn" and "your a faggot". No different from the literally tens of thousands of previous instances of situations where a new artistic medium or expression has been criticised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play.

This, however, is just ridiculous.

The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of millions of notes to be unplayable. This is better examined not as impossible music, but as an experiment that asks the question "how many notes can you use at the same time and still make a coherent song?"

The debate between music that's playable and music that's impossible would be better served by more realistic examples, instead of a small sub-culture.

<comment><USER8> Ever played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...

<comment><USER9> Igudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w)

<comment><USER10> This had me in tears of laughter. What a genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People here with critical perspectives are missing the point. "Where's the value?" The answer is that the people who make this music are not making music _for you_. They make it more as a personal challenge and/or to one-up their friends.

There's a long history, going back to 80's[1], of artists abusing various computing platforms to write somewhat melodramatic music that pushes the boundaries of both traditional pop songwriting and the computing platforms themselves. This tradition is closer to hacking than it is to pop music in that it follows its own internal logical of oneupmanship and works aren't produced for any audience outside of the "scene" itself. Black MIDI is just another plausible and entertaining development in that context. Probably some kids who got into the scene and wanted to distinguish themselves by doing something new.

It is indeed also in some respects "good music", but at this point it's already so weird that it's not particularly enjoyable to most people. I happen to have been following this sort of music for awhile, since at least the explosion of the chiptune/micromusic scene in the early 00's, and I've learned to enjoy it such that I liked the pieces linked in the article and in this thread. I liked them both as cheesy sentimental pop music and for the "hacks" (e.g. playing a bunch of notes to make a phased "kick" sound) in the same way that someone might appreciate technical guitar playing. Another poster was spot-on when he said that this is basically hacked additive synthesis – that's precisely the joy of it! Ultimately, it's just another acquired taste, like wine or classical music.

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

<comment><USER11> Some "scene" music that I actually listen to:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWublSn0cMfeFUiD04gA3GIdS) (FM funk)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl7TjvZzWMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl7TjvZzWMY) (Zabutom)

Basically just really good 4-part harmony on 8-bit chips. It's really not unlike pre-Rennaisance church music (early polyphony), or a lot of modern choral music.

<comment><USER12> That first one reminds me more of a jazz / electro / rnb / funky house type of thing. Mixed with some japanese video games of course. If that's done entirely on one 8-bit chip it blows my freaking mind.

<comment><USER13> I don't know if it's done on a real chip or not, but that's FM synthesis, like produced by the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM2612](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM2612) in SEGA machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The way I see this is another form of additive synthesis, with poor (technical) sound quality and less control/expressiveness¹. I'd guess a lot of music would appear "black" if represented as MIDI sequence for a pure sine- wave synthesizer.

[1] not to disparage it too much as an artform. Art forms from what the artist able to with the medium of choice, and the choice of medium does not it make it automatically better or worse

<comment><USER15> >MIDI sequence for a pure sine-wave synthesizer

Interestingly, we do have this, and it is a crucial component of lossy audio compression techniques such as MP3 - it's the Fourier transform. Essentially you can convert any audio signal into sine intensity per frequency over time, and vice versa. The space-time resolution is somewhat adjustable, so quicker reaction time can be obtained at the expense of squishing nearby frequencies together. I would not describe a lot of music that I have observed as spectrograms as being "black," in fact there are visible patterns that correspond with the harmonics of the sounds being played.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Frank Zappa was doing something very similar with the Synclavier in the 80s ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavier)).

He also has a piece called 'The Black Page' due to its density of notes on the page - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page)

Both together here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOK98q_ILA&list=PL945B5DD750...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOK98q_ILA&list=PL945B5DD750E1E5A0&index=1)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I was surprised by the lack of a reference to The Black Page in TFA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fitting that both the examples are of Touhou song remixes, as Touhou is kind of the video game equivalent of black MIDI (shoot em up with ridiculous amounts of projectiles) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMDqub_UKA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMDqub_UKA)

</comment><comment><USER19> Back in the 1930s and 40s, the term "Musique Concrete" would apply to this genre. Back then, "Musique Concrete" was making music via recording technology that could not be played live.

Unplayable music is not new. Some better-known examples are how Queen used to just step off-stage in the middle of Bohemian Rhapsody and play the tape of the mutli-tracked vocals; or how The Who used to screw up on stage playing along with the taped parts of Quadraphonia. Even the Beatles' live performances of Paperback Writer were weak because they used so much multitracking in the studio.

What I found interesting was that many of the multi-note combinations were just hacking the synthesizer to produce different sounds. A talented keyboardist could program MIDI sequences triggered by a single keypress and perform some aspects of "Black MIDI" live.

In contrast, I didn't think that the two examples were pleasing to listen to.

</comment><comment><USER20> MIDI was never intended to be playable by people. It's just a protocol, you can do whatever you want with it. So saying that this is "impossible" doesn't make any sense.

That said, this music sounds atrocious when you run it through a computer, it'd sound better if it were spread out across multiple instruments, but whatever.

<comment><USER21> Yes if you displayed the full orchestral score to Beethovens 5th on to a single grand stave it would look "black"

<comment><USER22> Whilst clicking through the related youtube links, I found a 3D representation / rendering of one of these tracks (instead of the 2D one shown on most videos), with the notes cascading downwards onto ten rows of keys - gives a bit more perspective to how they made it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, it is definitely interesting.

But in this form, I really see no value.

I'm only hearing noise in those videos, the noise from the switching on of the note (that slight 'tack')

The synthesisers apparently can't handle that amount of notes without some artefacts.

And see, they're only adding huge amounts of notes, but no pitch shift and no volume control (apparently)

This could be interesting with different (softer) instruments, better synthesisers focused on more notes and more "playfullness" rather than just hammering notes

<comment><USER24> We do know that more interesting things are certainly possible with many many notes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4)

<comment><USER25> I read a fair bit of scifi, and wonder what an alien life form would sound like, trying to pronounce English. This is pretty damn close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me of the kind of stuff I made while screwing around in Scream Tracker as a teenager 20 years ago. The difference is I recognized that it was garbage that nobody would want to listen to.

</comment><comment><USER27> hey this reminds me of the talking piano ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4))

MIDIs can do that too right?

</comment><comment><USER28> The effect is just reminiscent of a very simple FM synth; you start with a sine wave and add another waveform whose cycle starts below the audible spectrum. Start cranking it up, and you don't hear any "pulse" it just takes on a different timbre.

So, by playing a bunch of notes really fast, you just end up with a different kind of buzz.

I'd rather just use a synth. This is like monkeying with waveforms using a step function. Kind of limited.

</comment><comment><USER29> And... a month ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112)

</comment><comment> V-2 Holy smokes Batman, 21 million notes

Who'll be the first one to present a novel 21 million pages long :) It's quite a challenge as well (AI might help to take it in foreseeable future). Obviously haters gonna hate - shame on the haters.

Personally I'm more impressed by someone who puts together 210 words, but just the right words

Yes there are acclaimed authors who invent challenges for themselves, such as Georges Perec who wrote one novel without ever using the letter "e" etc.

It's quite fun, it's just meta - it's a bit of "literature about literature", or "music about music", so to speak.

Your goal is to prove a point, and art as such (the way I see it, of course) is not about proving a point.

If you need 20 million notes to achieve a certain effect, why can't this effect defend by itself, why the need to put this fact upfront, give it a name etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Composures have been making "impossible" music for a long time. They just relied on _orchestras_ to play them.

Here's one that does sound pretty great just on piano, though: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss)

</comment><comment><USER31> Exactly how many voices do these playbacks include? This couold be limited to just 16 simultaneous piano notes. I'd rather hear it played back on a clean sine synth, where it's possible to distinguish individual notes. I like how Black Midi shares some characteristics with Spectral music ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music)), but the implementations are in most cases still crude experiments.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would definitely recommend checking out Conlon Nancarrow as well, who was mentioned at the start of the article. A lot of his stuff is somewhat abstract, and sometimes his rhythmic patterns are really too odd to be heard (e.g. 7:17:27). But then he also has pieces like Study #3a, which is just a bluesy boogie-woogie that just builds. (I would love to actually be in the physical presence of a piano playing that piece; it would be like it was possessed.)

</comment><comment><USER33> I went to play Fujiwara no Mokou's Theme through my Roland Atelier AT-30 [1], but the MIDI file (at 194.4 MB!) is a tad too big to fit on a 3.5" floppy disk.

It's got a pretty decent sequencer, and had no problems playing Circus Galop.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVuNg9XWcBA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVuNg9XWcBA)

</comment><comment><USER34> I almost like it, but it just has... it has... too many notes. Yes, that's exactly it. Too many notes.

<comment><USER22> Pff, needs more notes in that case. MOAR!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> These style of music would make an awesome soundtrack to bullet hell style games. Here's a mashup of a bullet hell playthrough with a black MIDI: [http://videodoubler.com/combo/saved/464](http://videodoubler.com/combo/saved/464)

</comment><comment><USER36> This is my new favourite genre of music. It's like a computer is tickling my brain.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is pretty interesting. Reminds me of the "speaking piano" a little bit: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4)

</comment><comment><USER38> I've always thought it would be interesting to see what a really good composer could do with a band (orchestra?) comprised entirely of pianists. I imagine it would be an interesting challenge all around.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would suggest Dan Deacon for someone who writes "unplayable" yet very tuneful pieces: eg.

[http://youtu.be/TPg4Vcr56F0?t=10m15s](http://youtu.be/TPg4Vcr56F0?t=10m15s)

</comment><comment><USER40> To quote composer John Adams, "We forgot that music was supposed to sound good."

</comment><comment><USER41> It is impossible to listen to it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER42> Snow Crash, anyone? :).

</comment><comment><USER43> Must...resist...from spending my entire lunch looking at all the videos and wikis.

</comment><comment><USER44> very cool

</comment><comment><USER45> As a pianist I do not understand the purpose of music that is not playable by humans. In my understanding music is a communication method between human souls. A computer has no soul, likewise Black MIDI "music".

<comment><USER46> Pianos don't have souls, either.

Maybe I'd understand your complaint if it was about computer composition of music, but this is just using the computer as an instrument. Would you say flute players can't play music "with soul" because they aren't directly whistling the noises? Why not? How is that qualitatively different from using a computer to play your composition?

<comment><USER45> Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

<comment><USER47> That sounds kind of esoteric / superstitious to me. Has this been blind tested? Anyway... computer music has the soul of the people selecting the samples and the parameters for instrument synthesis, and choosing when and how to play them. That's why all that is done manually. Heck, on the C64 (probably not just there) it wasn't unusual for composers to write their own composing software and playback routines.

<comment><USER45> In the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul.

Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.

<comment><USER48> Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply.

For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc.

This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to it. You could tell us which piece you think has more, or any (I'm not sure if soul is quantifiable or just a binary existence) soul.

<comment><USER45> No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported. These emotions are unfortunately not sufficiently presentable in MIDI files or music notation. As Mahler said the essence of music is not in the sheet. Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.

<comment><USER47> > Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.

Music that wasn't written on and for a computer, no. Yet it's perfectly possible to manually craft "variation of duration, velocity, loudness" for every single note of every single instrument -- just not by feeding music in standard musical notation into a sequencer unchanged! I agree that MIDI isn't very sophisticated, but it's hardly the last word of music written on and played back by computers. Just consider how young this all is! I'm pretty sure physical instruments and the songs played on them started out kinda simplicistic, too. And tribal music for example often isn't so much about expression emotion, but putting people into a trance-like state by endless repetition, and techno does that just nicely already. It's not my cup of tea generally, but I get the same out of chip tunes: I don't need sophisticated music, I just need a canvas for my ears and soul to draw on, I can fill in the blanks or dream up harmonies on my own.

> An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported.

True, but also

a.) it doesn't stop there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if a simple "gridlike" composition makes me sad, happy or gives me goosebumps, that's "soul enough" for me. Even the soul of a simpleton is still a soul :)

b.) the computer enables composer and interpret to be the same person.. and if they so desire, they can put endless amounts of detail and emotion into a piece. Personally I have no doubt that people like Mozart would have been all over computers as an instrument, and the wide range of expression they offer already.

<comment><USER45> The problem lies in the context. If we speak to each other we take human context into account. So does a musical interpret. It is just another medium. Music instead of words. A computer does not understand human context. This has already be proven by Weizenbaum with his program Eliza. If the Computer does not understand emotion, he does not understand how to create music. There is no possibility to formalize music exactly, so that a computer can play it accordingly. I doubt that this will ever be possible because a true artist takes human context into account in his performance. So there is no static formalization of music. The only solution would be that the composer plays live on the computer. But an instrument that can not be played by humans is useless in this situation.

<comment><USER47> With computer music, the act of composition and the act of playing it are one and the same. It's like writing a piece, having an orchestra play it, then going back to the score sheet and changing something, over and over. Usually at some point time, patience and/or inspiration run out, long before the song is really good -- but that's a limitation of the state of the art(ists), not of music made with computers in general, IMHO.

<comment><USER45> No it is not. There is no orchestra. There is an context less, static description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI. These description gets transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless notes if a computer plays it.

<comment><USER47> As I said already, MIDI is kind of crude and hardly the last word. The description can be as detailed as the brain of the composer can handle it. The acts of composition and performance are indistinguishable. You could even manually set the amplitude of 44100 (or more) points per second if you wanted to... arguably the musicians that can make full use of the possibilities that exist even now haven't even been born yet.

Someone else made a very good point about paintings, and you kind of missed it by saying computers can't paint like Da Vinci or Shakespeare -- of course they can't, just like a brush or a pencil can't, and just like a piano can't compose. Do reprints of Shakespeare's work have soul in your opinion? And do they have more, less, or just as much soul than exact reproductions of his original handwriting? Is it possible to communicate soul by typing as we do right now, or would we have to see and smell the hands doing the typing for that, and heads pausing in reflection? Can a photo made with a DSLR and tweaked in a RAW converter have soul? Can a big format analogue photograph? What resolution does soul have, what resolution does our perception of it have? If facial expressions convey soul, does imperfection of sight reduce the amount of soul being communicated? Why does a piano piece that can move one human deeply leave another completely cold? Why can a landscape, even one devoid of plants and animals, make the soul sing, why does soul get perceived where none was put into? If it's because God created it, how does this not apply to computers as well? So many questions ^^

<comment><USER49> He's making a more fundamental mistake, borne by his lack of emotional range.

He's arguing that every poem cannot have a soul, only during the recitation of a poem, by a live performer, can the work take on the kind of soulful meaning.

Yet this criteria, a human must perform art for it to have a soul, eliminates _all_ non-performance art. Painting, sculpture, etc. all has no soul.

Yet this is obviously not true. A great painting has soul just as much as any other art.

So what happens when you have a poem, crafted as a sculpture? We've already determined that sculptures have a "soul", therefore something like this [http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ- aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANW...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ- aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANWQ/kghdAVLFdWI/s400/Laguna+beach+park+poem+sculpture.jpg) has a soul, but no human performed it. The emotional connection is made via the writer and the sculpture (who may even be the same person). Yet, no human can "perform" this sculpture.

In cases like the OP, the music we have here is no different than a sculpture of the composer's intention. No human performs it, yet it's no less valid than if it was written down for an orchestra of painists to perform.

<comment><USER45> Do you know and understand the painting "This is not a pipe" by Margritte?

<comment><USER49> That painting hangs in pretty much every independent coffee shop and cafe in probably 50 countries.

<comment><USER45> Great, and what does it mean?

<comment><USER49> You've got to be kidding me. It means it's a painting, not an actual pipe. And by extension, other representational art is not what it represents but something else. But it doesn't matter to you, because the painting is not being performed by a human, and is the same every time you look at it, therefore it, you claim, it doesn't have a soul.

<comment><USER45> A painting exists to moment it is drawn and it is persistent more or less for at least a few hundred years. Music on the other hand is ordered vibration of air molecules (and this is something different than a composition, hence the pipe example). These vibrations are vanishing immediately. Therefore a painting does not have to be performed like music.

Every form of human art has a soul, a painting, or the actually played music. Computer made "art" does not have a soul, although it may have the same physical structure than a human made one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intel says 10nm chips still on track, despite report they're canc - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/22/18009784/intel-10nm-chips-canceled-report-comment <comment><USER2> Typo in post title.

Also fairly sure that there was already essentially the same article from ars posted earlier - but I don't know the rules around separate reports parroting the same press release :-/</comment>


Ethereum miner with Terraform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/17twenty/ethereum-miner-terraform/blob/master/readme.md <comment><USER2> Or, in other words: "Just spin up this infrastructure -- which includes pre- generated SSH keys, an sshd that's apparently accessible from anywhere in the world, and a pre-compiled miner that you can't audit -- to mine some cryptocurrency -- _for me_ \-- at a huge loss".

Yeah, I think I'll pass.

\----

 _ETA:_ The readme says to pass in "wallet_address" but I don't see that referenced anywhere in main.tf, although I do see this: [https://github.com/17twenty/ethereum-miner- terraform/blob/ma...](https://github.com/17twenty/ethereum-miner- terraform/blob/master/files/eth.service#L7).

I've never used Terraform, though, so maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like you _can_ pass a wallet address in, it just won't be used. If that's the case, I don't see how this is anything but a "scam". Someone who knows Terraform please look into this and tell me I'm wrong.

One last thing: the readme says it uses the "Deep Learning AMI for Ubuntu 1604" [0], but the AMI ID in main.tf ("ami-37bb714d") doesn't match any of the IDs shown in the screenshot on that page (but perhaps they were updated or something?). I don't know if that's something to worry about or not but, at this point, there's no way I would trust this AT ALL. Also, "ami-cd0f5cb6" is referenced in a comment in main.tf but there's no indication what that refers to (I don't use EC2 so I'm not sure if it's possible to find out or not).

[0]: [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/07/aws- deep-...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/07/aws-deep- learning-ami-for-ubuntu-now-available-with-cuda-8--ubuntu-16-and-latest- versions-of-deep-learning-frameworks/)

<comment><USER3> When you pass in a variable into terraform it becomes an environment variable, presumably used by the precompiled code

<comment><USER4> it will make more sense with something like

      data "template_file" "eth_service" {
        	filename = "./files/eth.service"
      	vars {
      		wallet_address =
      "${var.wallet_address}"
      	}

      }

with

ExecStart=/tmp/ethminer -G -F eth-us.dwarfpool.com:80/${wallet_address}

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or the ssh private key present in the repo? (no way to know the server IP though)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy Ether\Ethereum\Gas (whatever the correct name for the currency is)?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this profitable?

<comment><USER2> The readme shows roughly 4.5 Mh/s which might get you maybe $10/month if you're lucky.

A g2.2xlarge will cost you $0.65/hour.

So, no, it's not anywhere remotely close to profitable -- unless you've stolen some AWS credentials or (like what's apparently happening here) you get others to mine for you and eat the AWS costs.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Node.js open source library to send transactional notifications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/notifme/notifme-sdk <comment><USER2> We just wrote something similar, using RabbitMQ ([https://github.com/richthegeek/beatrix](https://github.com/richthegeek/beatrix)) as the main manager for things.

Seems like retries and delays are not part of this, but I guess they are added easily enough to the individual queue system used. Any desire to build them into it? Retries should be easy enough if you're happy to modify the bodies, although delays are not so easy (we're using the 'delayed message exchange' plugin for Rabbit to do this currently).

Maybe some built-in/example queue integrations (Rabbit, Redis, etc)?

Also, it's not super clear to me how you might host the SMS/Push/email/whatever provider on a different process/system to the publisher?

But it looks lovely and clean! Major props!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice, queue integration examples are one of my next steps. I didn't include the queue inside the lib to give the choice to users, but I intended to write a few ones. Would you want code one? About the consumer, it's running on the same instance than the producer for more simplicity (but you can always run instances that only do consumer job).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is a "transactional" notification? This doesn't seem to be explained anywhere in the README.

<comment><USER4> A notification that is sent based on some trigger. I think the terminology comes from email marketing [https://sendgrid.com/blog/marketing-email-vs- transactional-e...](https://sendgrid.com/blog/marketing-email-vs- transactional-email-whats-difference/)

<comment><USER3> That's what I assumed, but it would be nice if that were made explicit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I added the word "transactional" to say that we can't send batches with the lib. Anyway it's not a hard limitation because you can always make a loop.

<comment><USER3> I would really suggest clarifying what you mean somewhere then because I don't think anyone would interpret it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shameless plug here.. I've been working on a service that kinda solves a similar problem, called Postways [1].

Even though Postways also provides a unified API for sending email, SMS and mobile push, the main focus of Postways is actually on managing the message templates. When you work with a team where not everyone is a developer, updating the actual message text can be a major problem, especially when the message text is in source code or various different places.

[1] [https://www.postways.com](https://www.postways.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> from the docs this looks like a really practical library. The testing and dev tools look great.

whats the backstory for this library?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi hitgeek, thanks for your comment. The backstory is quite simple, the initial plan was to make a saas api service, but we don't like cold calling so much, so it ended up as an open source project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The logo looks like a recoloured Telegram logo [0]. I'd recommend you change it before this gets big to avoid trademark shenanigans.

[0]: [https://telegram.org](https://telegram.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Which looks like [http://fontawesome.io/icon/paper- plane/](http://fontawesome.io/icon/paper-plane/) I don't think our logo harms them in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there any well-tested Node.js libraries to do scheduling alongside something this? E.g., if I wanted to send the notifications once a week, etc.

<comment><USER9> I've used [https://github.com/kelektiv/node- cron](https://github.com/kelektiv/node-cron) in the past, which could be run in the same process as the web app or in its own process. Works really well for recurring jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes thanks, using something like node-cron can resolve your problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> fallback + round-robin : <3 Awesome idea. fallback : could be very usefull if you main provider is down round-robin : send more free emails using multiple providers

</comment><comment><USER11> ahh this looks awesome! will try it out. I love the fact that you can use any queue with this <3</comment>


Ask HN: Self-taught devs – anybody struggling with Git/code mgmt too? - <AUTHOR> As per title: I program since I was 14 on various languages, but don't have a formal CS education. My coding skills served me well as I was able to build a saas product and company which we sold a few months ago - so I'm pretty happy with them. However, I'm self taught and I never quite worked as part of a large professional team, so my knowledge of code management/ git/ cicd practices and generally "working as a team on the same code" really sucks. Is it just me or common to other with a similar experience? What's the best place to up my game in this area?<p>Thanks to anyone who wants to help <comment><USER2> It's extremely unlikely a formal CS education would have helped. Not a single professor in mine even mentioned version control, let alone taught anything about it. It's not the type of knowledge CS focuses on anyway.

Likewise for all our new hires (we tend to aim for recent bootcamp and college graduates): None of them had used version control before and all had to learn on the job.

As for git specifically, this is the single most useful thing I've ever seen for creating the right mental model of commits/branches - it's helped almost everyone I've sent it to: [https://learngitbranching.js.org/](https://learngitbranching.js.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic, thanks for clarifying. Resource looks super helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you like books I recommend Humble and Farley's "Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation". It was written before cloud native practices like containers were mainstream so not all the advice will be relevant but it has good chapters on source code management practices and CI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that may be really helpful. Will see if I manage to find a copy</comment></comment>


The Long and Epic Journey of LambdaCase (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://unknownparallel.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/the-long-and-epic-journey-of-lambdacase-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> And the happy conclusion: LambdaCase did go into GHC 7.6.1. [https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_gu...](https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/glasgow_exts.html#lambda- case)</comment>


Uber hit by legal setback in Europe - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/11/technology/uber-not-tech-company-europe-court/index.html <comment><USER2> As much as you guys love to hate on Uber, do you honestly want to go back to a world without it?

Just in case it isn't clear, Uber is just the easy whipping boy because of bad PR -- the legal hurdles Uber is going through will crush Lyft just as quickly (probably faster because they have a smaller legal team).

Taxi unions aren't going to say "oh, but Lyft doesn't have as much sexual harassment in the workplace, we'll let them slide."

This is a reactionary kick by a protected industry, but if the legal framework ends up crushing hail-to-ride companies, those laws aren't going anywhere for a long, long time.

The change will only happen if it's not-explicitly-illegal and people are able to use the service to see the value; if one of those stops, we're going back to unavailable, dirty, unsafe, cabs with perpetually broken credit card readers.

<comment><USER3> > _As much as you guys love to hate on Uber, do you honestly want to go back > to a world without it?_

As an European? Yes.

Things were evolving fine in Europe; from our POV, Uber isn't doing anything innovative - they're just a personal transportation company (we have those) with a cute app (we have those) that tries to outcompete everyone by unilaterally deciding that laws don't apply to them.

> _Taxi unions aren 't going to say "oh, but Lyft doesn't have as much sexual > harassment in the workplace, we'll let them slide."_

I wish this would stop; I get that sexual harassment is what media loves to write about, but this was not remotely the biggest or most wrong thing Uber has done. Their whole business model is antisocial.

<comment><USER4> Business models need to be "social" now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, indeed. The German constitution clearly states

"Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good."

([https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...](https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html#p0085))

<comment><USER5> This is very interesting. What are the limits on this?

The prior sentence refers to inheritance, so it's clearly about personal property also (if not exclusively). But if someone inherits a Porsche, in what way is it supposed to serve the public good?

Also, the following sentence discusses expropriation (which appears to be what is known in the US as eminent domain). And the title of the section is "Property — Inheritance — Expropriation".

I wonder if this means this section (including the intriguing sentence you quoted) is just talking about rules for inheriting and expropriating property. That is, perhaps it's not a general rule for property to serve the public good (just that it may be called to do so in cases of expropriation).

I would be very interested to know how other people interpret this sentence and the section in which it's found.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is number 14, so it's a basic right – articles 1 through 19 – we open our constitution with our rights, we don't add them as an afterthought in some amendments. ;-)

So paragraph 1 guarantees property and inheritance. And makes both subject to limitations, set out by law (freedom of art, for example, is not limited by laws, at least not literally in the text of the constitution).

Paragraph 2 lays out one such limitation: social benefit.

Paragraph 3 lays out a means to achieve that: expropriation (exceedingly rare, I think it is sometimes used for huge infrastructure projects like Autobahnen or railroad tracks, but only after years of negotiations).

So it is indeed a general rule, not a detail to expropriation.

To your question about the limits on paragraph 2 let me just throw in a bit from the German Wikipedia, without having checked it:

* Not all property is subject to this limit to the basic right to property, but only such property that has "social relevance"

I would interpret it so that apartments and housing are clearly having social relevance, but your Porsche probably hasn't.

Furthermore:

* Those limitations to the basic right to property must be rooted in fomal law, not just regulations or jurisprudence.

<comment><USER5> Super helpful, especially the "social relevance" limitation. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If by "major legal setback" you mean "was correctly categorized as the thing they are".

It's always been ridiculous to me that America lets companies self-opt-out of the rules and laws, just because they feel like it.

<comment><USER7> Even if it's correct, it's still a setback for the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From another news source, this has knock on effects for VAT..

> As a supplier of a transport service, Uber may be liable for value-added- > tax, or VAT, imposed on businesses that supply goods and services.

I can't imagine the stress, even if alot of it is self induced, that the company is under right now. You have to feel some level of empathy for the company's employees.

Most of them probably came from other well paying jobs and were already counting their option payouts int heir heads.

It's easily conceivable at this point that Uber could IPO well under its $50+ billion private valuation.

Top things I would do even though I'm wildly unqualified to give Travis advice..........

1) Drop self driving cars completely. YOu aren't getting there first, second, or anywhere close to third, just partner with a car company and call it a day.

2) Settle Google's lawsuit, hopefully 1 will help

3) Hire a new CEO, Sheryl Sandberg is almost certainly not available but someone who can show that change will and is happening internally.

<comment><USER9> > 1) Drop self driving cars completely. YOu aren't getting there first, > second, or anywhere close to third, just partner with a car company and call > it a day.

You realize that it's literally impossible to become profitable if they don't have self driving cars, right?

<comment><USER10> There are plenty of profitable companies providing taxi services you can order via an app

<comment><USER3> Not Uber, however. They seem to be either betting on the self-driving to pull them out of the borrowing hole, or at least they use it to make VCs keep giving them money they use to subsidize their rides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat misleading title. This is just a non-binding opinion; the court has yet to make a final (binding) ruling.

That said, there is a high chance that the court sides with the opinion. From the article:

> A final decision in the case is expected before the end of the year. While > guidance from the Advocate General is not binding, the court typically rules > in similar fashion.

</comment><comment><USER12> Taxi company considered taxi company. Full news at 11.

</comment><comment><USER13> Uber has hugely optimized the way I get from place to place. The only thing I need is a phone and there is no messing around with cash. While I don't agree with all their policies (like a 30% tax on drivers), their user experience is several orders of magnitude better than a normal Taxi. I'm currently in Costa Rica and the drivers are always friendly and courteous. They usually have new(er) cars and are happy to offer you some candy or change the radio station to your liking. None of that has ever happened in a Taxi. In the long run, Uber's business model is to get rid of the drivers and operate self-driving cars. I think we are close to that day, they just need to survive until then.

</comment><comment><USER14> Robert Pirsig's recent death reminded me to read, much-belatedly, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of its central tenets is that the highest good, or highest Quality, in technology, results from an integrative approach where the worker doesn't separate from the work, but rather identifies with it and becomes one with it. (A prerequisite for this is an awareness of Quality that is largely precluded/prevented by the usual rational/analytic view of reality that we normally associate with technology, but anyway...)

So here you have Uber, which has always been in the business of ferrying people around, but tries hard to separate itself from the business of ferrying people around. "We're not a transportation company, we're an app." "They're not employees of Uber, they're contractors." "They're not taxis, it's ride- sharing." "Uber's not liable for this tax, the driver is." It's not us, we're not the ones, we're not doing it, we're not involved, we're not responsible. The ultimate schism between the doer and the act. They're not exactly rushing forward to integrate the whole system under a unifying banner of Quality, are they?

If anything they're the epitome of the rationalist/analytic view of reality complete with all its schisms, all of which results in the kind of drab ugliness (on the human end mostly) that makes people want to shoot themselves in the face. Ugliness (poor quality) papered over with cheap stylistic embellishments that make it "not just depressingly dull, [but] also phony."

</comment><comment><USER15> Pardon my ignorance as I couldn't find a lot of information on this but if Uber became a transportation company wouldn't that require full-time contracts for all the drivers that would use the application? This seems quite restricting as the purpose of the app is to allow anyone to join the platform and for the driver to drive only when he feels like it.

Forcing licenses doesn't restrict the number of possible drivers? In my country most licenses are held by cartels who don't let any new incumbents in the market.

Also there are some who don't want to be taxi drivers but just do this in off time in the weekends. In my country people that drive for Uber need to have either a juridic registration either as a company or as an authorized person and since Uber has forced online transactions, predetermined pay and a review system, the tax evasion is nonexistent, there is no pay cheating and the drivers behave (as opposed to the taxi drivers who due to cash transactions do a lot of tax evasion, temper with the registering devices and don't care about customer feedback even refusing rides based on tipping).

I hope that if the legislation changes then it also brings the old system to the 21st century.

<comment><USER16> That would entirely depend on the local laws, but I don't think requiring companies to have full-time contracts would be a common rule – a transportation company still should be able to use contractors. (E.g. I'm pretty sure my local bus company occasionally hires a driver for just a day or two)

This here would be primarily clarifying that Uber is the one offering the service, fulfilling it using contractors, and can't claim that the contractor is directly offering to the passenger, and they just provide a place for the two to find each other.

If that "transportation service" is covered by local laws about Taxis/cars- for-hire/... is not something discussed at this level (and if the answer is yes, then if it is in compliance with them), as far as I understand. The ECJ was asked to clarify on the platform-vs-service-provider point, not the local issue of what specific kind of provider they are and what rules apply to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is this guy's opinion on BlaBlaCar? It's been quite popular in Europe for a while now. Is Uber being legally challenged only because it directly competes with taxis while BlaBlaCar doesn't?

<comment><USER18> BlaBlaCar seems to be a service to link people going somewhere with other people who happen to be driving to the same place and have space in their vehicle.

It doesn't look on demand, or anything really like a taxi service, so it's quite unlike Uber or other taxi services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Freakonomics radio just broadcast an episode on Uber (and self-driving vehicles) last week. Pretty interesting analysis of the impact of Uber from an economic perspective.

[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-dangerous- machine/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-dangerous-machine/)

Note: This is a rehash of 2 earlier podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER20> 'non-binding opinion'

This is speculation, not news.

<comment><USER21> Semi-true, as the ECJ tends to follow the Advocate General's opinion. So that opinion is, in fact, somewhat newsworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why Europe will never be able to catch up to America when it comes to tech.

<comment><USER23> Maybe. But at least we don't have Politicans who say that people won't die if they don't have access to health care [1].

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/05/06/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/05/06/nobody- dies-because-they-dont-have-access-to-health-care-gop-lawmaker-says-he-got- booed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I already live in a world without Uber, like most people who use public transit. I've used it a few times when I've been with other people, it's near but it's hardly the new foundation of society. If the whole firm was suddenly wiped out by a disease contracted form a dirty telephone the world would keep turning just fine.

 _Just in case it isn 't clear, Uber is just the easy whipping boy because of bad PR_

Umm, no. I defended Uber in its early days against the unethical actors int he taxi industry, and it would be hypocritical of me to ignore Uber's own apparent lack of ethics.

Your parade of horribles is manipulative, to put it mildly. I can't help wondering to what extent you're financially rather than just emotionally invested in the firm.

<comment><USER25> > _I can 't help wondering to what extent you're financially_

Your comments have become increasingly uncivil lately. Would you please fix that? This one, in particular, crosses a line into personal attack that's not allowed. Surely you've seen one of my bazillion comments about this: [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20astroturf).

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317517) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER24> Why is it uncivil to ask whether someone might have a financial interest in an outcome? It's a common enough situation, and I think an entirely reasonable response to hyperbole.

One of pg's most famous essays, The submarine, identifies the phenomenon of apparently disinterested reportage or commentary actually being engineered by those who are commercially interested in a particular point of view gaining popularity.

I reject your claim of incivility and stand by the legitimacy of my inquiry. I have always made a point of preemptively declaring an interest or lack of same when it appeared my comments might be read as advocacy on behalf of a specific firm.

Since you've detached this from the discussion I'm going to go ahead and say that I am having increasing doubts about your neutrality as a moderator.

<comment><USER26> Just for what it's worth, I think that essay did more damage to discussions on HN than pretty much anything else he's written:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.paulgraham.com%...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.paulgraham.com%2Fsubmarine.html&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

In the overwhelming majority of the cases it's cited, it's used mostly to suck the oxygen out of a discussion, so that rather than discussing the merits of an argument, we're instead required to first resolve the motives of the people making the argument.

I think you should keep declaring your interests in controversies! That's a good thing. I try to do that too. But I'm sure you've seen instances on HN of people litigating this issue and it making for stupid, angry, pointless flame wars. Even if you're very careful about when you deploy this challenge, the rules have to work for the median HN commenter, not just the super careful ones.

 _Shortly afterwards_ :

I also think Dan is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by not updating the guidelines to say this directly and announcing the change --- I know that's because they have bigger plans for the guidelines, but it would save everyone some time to make this incremental change anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> EU, where millions of hours go into accepting cookies popups - says it all about EU legal system.

<comment><USER3> You only spend time and money on making a cookie popup if you're tracking your users with third-party analytics. I.e. a minor inconvenience if you're fucking your users by funneling their data into the adtech industry. So while the particular implementation may suck, I generally like EU's approach to privacy and data protection.

<comment><USER28> He said accepting. The amount of time that goes into adding the cookie popup is minor compared to the time each user has to waste on it, in aggregate.

Has the law actually reduced the usage of third party tracking?

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. The actual implementation of the law really, really sucks - it's a waste with little effect on anything (except training every user to unconsciously dismiss yet another popup).

<comment><USER27> That's what I said. We judge laws not by their intention, but on the outcome. Outcome of cookie law is one giant net negative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> And I say NO to uber, simply because they "taxate" my countrymen with 20..30% of tax on their work, while UBER itself is paying (if any) taxes in different (heaven like) jurisdictions and none in my country.

<comment><USER22> If you don't like Uber don't take Uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Regardless of whether its classified as a digital service or not, the spirit of these taxi and even rental laws and hotel laws (applicable to AirBNB) are grounded in protection of consumers and communities in general. While these laws need updating in many cases, Uber and AirBNB shouldn't be exempt from them especially when the price differences being offered by them are only possible due to them skirting the laws.

For what its worth, they did "disrupt" the economies in question and made the incumbents appreciate the consumer more, but also profited highly from it. Now its time to stop the free lunch and even the playing field.

</comment><comment><USER31> If Uber weren't paying the drivers, then they would be neither employees nor contractors but just people using their site.

I wonder if it makes sense to charge the drivers a "listing fee" and somehow have the transaction happen directly between the rider and driver. It seems like they'd be further away from being a taxi company if they did that.

Their best bet is for the users to be the one breaking the law: If you fine a million people you'll just be voted out of office.

I wonder why they even need to "operate" in Europe at all. Local servers reduce latency, but aren't strictly necessary. I guess there's payment processing with a local bank, but foreign credit card transactions are a thing.

<comment><USER32> Courts around the world haven't been especially lenient towards websites and services which deliberately facilitate the breaking of laws.

<comment><USER31> What does the court's opinion matter if you don't have any roots in their country?</comment></comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds Interview, Part II - <AUTHOR> http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/openvoices/2008/02/03/linus-torvalds-interview-part-ii/

<comment><USER2> _Linus Torvalds: Patents are nasty. It's kind of hard to really say a lot more than the fact that patents on ideas in general are a huge mistake and the whole notion that you can have patents, business models and software is pretty broken to begin with._

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this very interesting, especially the beginning about software patents, where he compares the situation with cold war (big companies) and terrorists (patent trolls), and later what he concedes about innovation and open source.</comment>


Online, We Pay With Our Time Spent Searching - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/business/11every.html?hpw <comment><USER2> This guy would count the time spent travelling by plane as a cost and ignore the time we would have spent walking to Europe.

</comment><comment><USER3> wow the journalist is clearly inefficient at finding and bookmarking stuff.

Also 3 mins spending does not equate revenue for that website. In fact Web Design is supposed to make the search time smaller.

We dont pay with out time, we just waste it fighting inefficiency</comment>


First, second, or third is great--anything else and you have problems - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/04/1st_2nd_or_3rd_.html <comment><USER2> I know this is way off topic but every time I see that pic on his blog, I become unnerved. I'm not sure he's a real person. He's kind of plastic looking. It's almost like he's Steve Ballmer's avatar.

<comment><USER3> He thinks you're a sharp looking guy, too

:D

<comment><USER2> I suspect you might actually be Don Dodge. Is that true? Judging by your comments, you don't seem to be a very big fan of YC.

:D

<comment><USER3> In general, the YC idea of small seed amounts is a good one.

I'm also an entrepreneur myself.

It's just when the bubble mentality starts creeping back, I feel the need to call bullshit.

Just think of me as the proverbial grain of salt.

EDIT: No, I'm not Dodge. That creepy guy can write his own comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny... GE's policy was that they wouldn't be in any business they couldn't be first or second in.

But suddenly, we've added third. Because MSFT is 3rd in search. hah.

<comment><USER5> It depends on the market - some markets seem to support 3 major players, while others only support two. Think GM, Ford, and Chrysler for the U.S. car market; Toyota; Honda, and Nissan for the Japanese car market; ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and ConocoPhillips for the domestic oil market; Apple, Commodore, and Tandy for the 1970s PC market; and Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung for the cell phone market.

Oftentimes that equilibrium is unstable, too. Chrysler got bought up by Daimler-Benz, Nissan seems to have disappeared, _all_ the 1970s PC manufacturers ended up as bit-players when IBM and clones took over the market, and ConocoPhillips is clearly doing its best to become the #2 U.S. oil company instead of the #3. So they're both right, it just depends on what time horizon you're looking at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a flash from biology while reading this: they say that two specie can never occupy the exact same biological niche. One of them will always have a higher growth rate, which will drive the other to extinction. If that applies to business, being consistently second would be leading to bankruptcy...</comment>


VuduTab:A fun way to discover movies.A slick movie poster on new tab of chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vudu-movies-tv/loledhmlekkjcecaccalhimjceabmgap

<comment><USER2> Would be nice to still have the Google search and recent tab thumbnails. Maybe just change the background of the new tab page instead. But still pretty neat!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will keep that in mind, google does not seem to be allowing me to pull most visited website data from the history, though :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good work !! Would be nice to have a wish list & price updates on promotions

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! will keep those features in mind :)</comment></comment>


[Ask HN] How do I counter an investor trying to outsourcing our dev? - <AUTHOR> I am a big believer in having a small in-house team over an army of outsourced development. Sadly our investors thinks the opposite and wants to force us to use outsourced development to put us "5 steps ahead of everyone else". I'm am plagued by nightmares of having to manage these people remotely, being the CTO.
We just received this email explaining their stance. What are my arguments against this? Deep down I feel like I recognise that it will cause more problems that it's worth but I'm just having a difficult time verbalising my arguments.
---
Regarding outsourcing, in my almost 17 years of working with development I have never met a software developer that thought that outsourcing was a good idea, and across the board they have all reacted as you have, saying that we would like to have fewer people employed in close proximity rather than outsource.
I really do understand the reaction, but at the same time, everyone I know who has implemented a well-thought out dev outsourcing  strategy has pushed their business 5 steps ahead of everyone else by introducing scalability and cost efficiency into their business model. It is always something that has to be forced on the dev team by upper management at too late a stage in the company's development, always causes a lot of resentment and conflict in the established dev team, increasing the chance of failure, and usually ends up getting the acceptance of the team as a good idea that makes them all richer and more successful. I've always sided with the developers on this, and every time it has ended up being the worst management decision I have ever taken and crippled our competitiveness.
We are building a potentially huge business here with multiple million dollar revenues in a few years, this has to be managed very cleverly and with a forward-thinking strategy to have a chance of success. We have an opportunity to build this into our strategy from the beginning and harvest those advantages at an early stage, increasing our chances of a successful outsourcing strategy many-fold.
The VC's will place a high value on having such an outsourcing strategy in place and in several cases will reject the idea without one. Our current projections underestimate the number of developers that we are going to need to pull this off and also do not address the fact that we are going to need effectively around the clock development to keep up with the customers demands, which in itself requires multiple time-zone location.
An outsourcing strategy does not necessarily mean we cannot have a dev team here at home, or that we have to have 10 developers in India this month, but it does mean that we have to have a strategy for outsourcing and implement it in the next 6-12 months to get it into the DNA of the company. As soon as we have more developers, the CTO is going to have to spend time managing multiple teams and outsourcing, and we need to have a general strategy for that from the beginning that we can defend during VC due diligence. <comment><USER2> The VC's arguments are quite sound.

He is not saying he wants to outsource everything, he simply wants the culture of outsourcing in early to make it smoother in the case outsourcing is needed.

I would outsource non-critical areas of your development, like analytic trackers, admin dashboard, deployment scripts, reports, (bug fixing?) so that the core team can focus on listening to the customer and react quickly.

Having to deal with a global team has its benefits and drawbacks. My experience has always been great. Waking up the morning and seeing that progress has been made during the night is an awesome feeling.

Maybe your experience with outsourcing has been a negative one, but even if you disagree with your investor you could still agree to bring an outsourced team to develop second importance stuff to experiment and prove to your investor it is not a good idea to outsource. In the case outsourcing works for your project, you also win.

<comment><USER3> If it's important enough to get done, then it's important enough to be done right.

<comment><USER2> Outsourcing doesn't equal to poor quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As far as "does it EVER work" concerned: it does. It doesn't work well though. Most people can run, doesn't mean that most people can run as fast as Usain Bolt.

More at [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/502995/offshoring-does- it...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/502995/offshoring-does-it-ever-work)

Amongst other things, writing killer software depends on two pre-conditions:

\- Intimate knowledge of the domain, being at ease with the tools, identifying yourself as part of the group people (field) working in the domain. This is enabling factor.

\- External pressure or demand on the domain to change. This is a motivating factor.

Outsourcing more often than not gets it exactly the other way round:

\- Outsourced organisations are not exposed to the natural external pressure or demand exerted on the domain, they do not identify with the domain. Instead the motivation is extrinsic: KPI's, money and formal contracts.In other worlds they don't feel the users' pain.

\- External teams lack intimate state-of-art knowledge of the domain due to informational asymmetry; they don't directly work in the domain but provide services to the domain. That is to say they are less able to push state-of-art forward, but would rather produce more of the same. Due to the lack of information they work in a permanent haze, not being sure what the valid thing is and this creates a lot of unease, reduces amount of positive risk taking, and cripples creativity. Real advantages that software brings to the table in any business is through gains in effectivness not efficacy.

</comment><comment><USER5> It really depends on your business.

In my experience outsourced code is not as well supported, generally not as well written _but_ pretty good value for money. The major risk I always saw is remote devs disappearing (seen it happen plenty of times in the past) and you end up with a sub standard product which will cost a lot to fix.

A lot relies on finding the right place to outsource to :)

But as I said; it really depends on your business and the code that is going to be written. If you have a lot of wide ranging code outside your core "app" then probably it makes sense to start outsourcing aspects of it. Keep core development in house (it's too risky to leave that to anyone else).

You mention the issue of managing remote developers; this is a ball ache and a real pain, especially if they are in a foreign country. If you get someone awkward it becomes a pig to organise.

But it's not impossible; you just have to be firm and clear with your instructions. And set pretty rigid time limits.

(also it's worth pointing out: HN is indexing very quickly by Google and the email you posted is already searchable on there - so you might want to consider removing it or putting it elsewhere if you don't want to risk this being found :))

<comment><USER6> Surely no boss would have a big enough ego to Google his own emails? Oh, hang on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your train has already left the station. You're not going to persuade him not to outsource so don't try. Instead you should persuade him that maintaining control over your outsourcing is the critical requirement for success. And focus on how you want that to play out.

Regardless of whether you outsource to India, China, or a a guy down the block many of the same issues apply.

1) Can you fire the company if you need to? "All relationships end badly or they wouldn't end." When you have to fire the outsourced team, do you have the skills internally to take control before you find a new group?

2) Can you ensure the outsourced team doesn't do anything sketchy. Do you have a team internally that can protect against back doors, lockout triggers for non-payment, inappropiate code insertions, undesired use (or non-use) of GPL'd code.

3) Due-Diligence. How (specifically) do you plan to get through due-diligence -- not just with VC but with an acquirer who _will_ look at your code and how it was developed? Code review, architectural review, etc. Without a local team firming at the helm that process will go poorly and cost the company far more in a valuation hit then any cost/time savings.

4) Customer Data. Although it's just about impossible to avoid giving a remote team access to your customer data, you can't give them total control. You need a strong DBA locally to ensure your DB meets your security and privacy standards.

5) Around-the-clock development. The reason outsourcing is effective is not because it's cheaper (it's only marginally), not because they're better (they're the same as us), it's because you can do around-the-clock development. They check in code at 6 AM your time, you check in code at 6 AM their time. That's how you get ahead. If you simply transfer a single development team to a different time-zone, all you bought yourself is a 20-30% cost savings and a bunch of frequent flier miles.

So the net-net on your pitch is: control, intellectual property ownership, customer data, and speed.

I suggest you pitch: a) Acceptance testing stays domestic b) Design stays c) Software Architecture and Spec Writing stays d) Small team of the very best developers stay e) "everything else goes"

<comment><USER8> >5) Around-the-clock development. The reason outsourcing is effective is not because it's cheaper (it's only marginally), not because they're better (they're the same as us), it's because you can do around-the-clock development. They check in code at 6 AM your time, you check in code at 6 AM their time. That's how you get ahead. If you simply transfer a single development team to a different time-zone, all you bought yourself is a 20-30% cost savings and a bunch of frequent flier miles.

I'm highly curious on how this executes well in a high control environment. I've only seen this work at all well in very very loosely coupled codebases with huge amounts of responsibility division, and even that said, the technical and project leads seemed fully utilized handling the two teams.

Care to share the howto on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was in your camp a few years ago. Vehemently against outsourcing, nightmarish experiences with a number of firms. Overall, just a lack of results and confidence in the process.

Then we got lucky.

We hired a developer who had just moved here from Slovakia. He had lots of friends back home who were looking for work.

He now leads our 'outsourced' division which costs less than the cheapo corporations that spam me with 'OUTSORCED LABOR' e-mails. They work hard, they love what they're doing, and they are GREAT coders. We have a personal relationship with each of them.

The best part is, because they're each freelance coders, they can recommend 2-3 friends and vouch for them personally. They benefit from hooking their friend up with work and we benefit from their solid recommendation.

Would this work if we didn't have a developer from the country? Probably not. But it works for us :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd ask him to put you in touch with one of their portfolio companies who has outsourced successfully. If they can do that then you might learn something useful from the other folks - if they can't then they _might_ drop the idea (although probably not much chance of that).

</comment><comment><USER11> I am from the Philippines and like India or China we are also part of those outsourcing countries but not that popular though.

Companies in first world countries often think that quality goes down when they are going to outsource their projects. Maybe. But having worked in outsourcing firms (for a decade now) here in the Philippines, we always came across projects that were poorly written too. These projects came from first world countries that were developed by supposed-to-be the cream of the crop of software development. And these are not small companies by the way.

The current project that I inherited in my day job was developed by a company in Europe and it's a nightmare! The other project that I am working as freelancer is from US and I think I need not say more.

Anyway, I am not offended and I totally understand your situation. I hear these comments all time for years now and it's a shame that we all suffer from low quality projects wherever we are.

In the end, it depends.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you cannot articulate your reasons your 'gut feeling' might not be correct this time.

I've personally had some absolutely atrocious experience with outsourcing but also a very good one with a small Romanian outsourcing company[1].

[1] <http://www.softgress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> For quality technical work it is much better to have the team all in one place - arguing otherwise is silly. Countering this is (sometimes) large cost savings.

I am in the position of being just about the only remote worker with the rest of the team in Silicon Valley. I really have to make a strong extra effort to stay in touch and in sync with the home team. In my case, this is totally worth the effort, but my general advice to people is to get a small number of very good people in one place.

On the other side of this issue: I have worked with a lot of teams in India, Vietnam, Brazil, and Eastern Europe. Having many inexpensive and well educated/trained coworkers really opens a lot of doors to doing development that can't be justified with more expensive developers.

</comment><comment><USER14> What industry are you in ? What problem are you solving ? Often the ability of outsourcing vendors ability to help you hinges upon the answers to those two questions. If youre solving either - an algorithmically hard problem or a problem that requires iterative refinement, then you might have some valid reasons not to outsource. Otherwise having additional manpower available when needed might actually be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Outsourcing has pluses and minuses. Additionally, there is the question of domestic outsourcing vs foreign outsourcing.

Now all that said, what can you do to appease the investor, but give over to him? I don't recommend it, but hiring on the "worse end" of the below list has surely poisoned past companies I've worked with against consultants. Additionally, you can say "sorry, not going to do it". You didn't make him CEO. At the same time, you will likely risk further investment from the fellow, but if he didn't specify before investing he was going to force this issue, well, then you can point that out you're feeling betrayed here suggesting this huge of a cultural change.

Judicious use of outside development resources can improve a software company's morale. Pretty much all other uses tank it.

I'm not poo pooing external consulting in all cases, however I am saying _be realistic_ about what you're going to be dealing with when you hire someone at "1/5 the cost".

I contend, if your business plan _can be excuted by a bunch of external consultants_ , can't you instead build your company into a platform, and get third party developers to build on it instead, and make your money off licenses?

Sorry about the unorganized nature of the following points: They're not connected enough to really summarize further.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

With foreign outsourcing, you run into issues with cultural mismatch, as well as time zone issues. These are often huge issues for a company, and your relationship can get adversarial rather than team oriented relatively easy in that situation.

Additionally, around the clock development is rarely the boon your investor is making it out to be.

It is exceedingly hard to manage without sapping all the time of the people who are not on the same time zone as the majority of players . Large development teams basically in the same time zone are usually much more useful than the same size or smaller team spread around the time zones, as coordination get's more expensive off timezone.

Additionally, foreign outsourced firms suffer from legal risks and IP risks (where they steal/take/copy) your code. Trade secrets, etc, are much harder to enforce cross borders.

Lastly, with foreign outsourced employees, you lose key technologists every few years with no way to directly offer them better terms.

Domestic outsourced employees are STILL problematic (Disclosure, I currently run a product development company, so some people consider us domestic outsourced employees). With Domestic outsourced employees, you face several challenges still.

Firstly, if you gain enough control over their schedule or in-office work to make them like a real employee, you risk tax consequences.

Secondly, you can still lose technologists, however you can often mitigate this with buyout provisions with the providers (See contract to perm offers).

Thirdly, _any_ external employees is a trade secret risk. If the secret is such is can be done in secret, no way to tell if the domestic external employee is developing something offsite with someone else using your secret.

Domestic employees, whether external or internal, are vastly more reachable by phone (usually), and are definitely easier to reign in via law. Contracts are much more meaningful to someone you can easily sue the pants off of.

But even though domestic employees have some slight advantages, they have some disadvantages too

Most people who work domestically for per project hire, would make more in industry than they would working in a freelancing capacity. So the very qualified will _still_ get job offers you will find hard to counter due to the structure of your hiring arrangement.

Well, your "Individual chance of success" appears to vary widely depending on where you hire from. In the experience of teams I've worked with, and others I've talked to, here appears to be the lay of the land with foreign dev shops.(Please speak up with your own experiences; I'm going for full and complete rather than 100% nice; more experiences lead to more results):

Indian: Often one of the cheaper options, but also the one most likely to staff your team with people who completely lie about their competency (or just don't know they're bad) with the given technologies. It is nice that everyone speaks English, but that's often not as important as the huge cultural mismatch in which frankness and the ability to say "I don't like this, change it" without lots of pain to the people at the company you're working with aren't really there. Lots of "work to the contract" type stuff here which means specification but avoids deep design goals.

Many of the Indian development shops are "low prestige, low ability" workplaces for India, and once their employees gain real competency in a technology, they move to a more typical product company in India, leaving foreign consulting behind. There are some good experiences too, but they're highly depended on WHO you hire, and are often prefaced by "but these first guys we hired...."

China: Many _large_ companies have Chinese based consulting arms. They use them often especially in the embedded sphere. You do not often deal as directly with the development team in this country, but through an English speaking liaison. It's hard to get a cultural feel through that type of relationship, but in general, it feels more able to handle real criticism than the Indian experiences. Comments, names, etc are often understandable, but can be not, depending on the codebase. Things can get quite tied up in agreements here, then the agreements completely ignored (which I do not really understand why they spend so much time working on the agreements if they then know they're going to ignore them). Some companies even keep liasons up for daytime meetings with the US (others involve a late evening schedule to effectively meet). Costs are on average higher than India

Success in this sphere appears to be about fiercely contained components that have detailed specifications. More likely to have high ability folks, but still much in the way of passing off low skill as high.

Western Europe: Specfication stages seem to go much faster, however people in Western Europe don't feel like they work that many hours (probably true, but I don't know that much about European labor law). On top of the coordination, it makes for an interesting development. Similar skill variance as you see in North America, (with the good AND the bad). More realistic about schedules in my experience than their much lower cost peers in the developing world.

Eastern Europe: This is the place you hear the most good about. There are plenty of low skill people trying to pass themselves off as high skill people, but if you find good companies, they often hire several good people and fire the lower skilled ones. Things like oDesk work out okay to hire individual devs, but the company based solutions are often far superior (in both time, individual additional management of employees, and even cost sometimes). The time zone being far out of sync is the biggest issue in this zone. Prices are _all over the map_ though as far as work goes. I personally view that as a good thing, as you'd rather pay an amount in excess of the local norms if that gives you more team stability (for some projects).

North American: This place is one of the most at hand. It feels like you're working with someone you could "make permenant any day", and like you really have recourse of law to deal with them in case of trouble. In reality, it's pretty hard to hire people who work for consulting/product dev companies away; they often enjoy the life they have more than the additional cash you can toss at them. Additionally, you get the entire spectrum of americans here, including the used cars salesmen types who slide along on charm rather than ability, or secretly farm out your stuff to yet a third dev house. You can most easily hire these folks on from a legal standpoint, but these folks are often in the higher cost spectrum (and if they're not, you need to ask _why not_ ).

[I'm sure I've offended a few hacker news people, for that I apologize, but this is what I've learned working with people abroad and at home. Please join the discussion and add your experiences]

</comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps you shouldn't be countering but making an argument about timing. 'I think that is a good idea when we reach milestone X and this is how and why we would do it then'

You seem to acknowledge the need for it, yet don't want to start right now. So make that argument.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here is someone with experience outsourcing. And it is not good.

[http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/companies/outsourcing- cost-l...](http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/companies/outsourcing-cost-lie/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Hi Hates.

TL;DR: I'm sorry for your situation. Offshoring will fail. Find another job.

Here's my experience, some bullet points, followed by my advice:

Our bean counters have tried to offload our work overseas. Maybe 5 or 6 times now. It never works. Here are my disjointed observations:

#1 The motivation to offshore is to reduce costs. Company grows by cutting costs? Companies grow thru investment. My product is in an emerging market. What moron tries to cut costs during a turf war in a green field?

#2 Most projects fail. Offshoring just reduces the cost of failure.

#3 Most companies wouldn't send their work down the block (e.g. outsource to another company). Too many problems. Losing a core competency. Accountabilty, transparency, responsiveness, etc. Then how does sending it across an ocean make it all better?

#4 Offshoring will roughly triple your work (as a dev). Teach your replacements, manage your replacements, QA/test the crap they create, give up when you've run out of time, and end up doing a last minute rewrite.

#5 Want to know what working with offshore people is like?

First, take your experiences herding project managers, business analysts, QA, testers, etc. All those "value add" corporate drones.

Next, add language barriers, culture mismatch, timezone skew, complete lack of accountability and transparency, zero domain expertise, and very green developers.

That's what working with offshore "teams" is like.

#6 It's about the people. I'd outsource again if I was working with the best. I once sent a lot of our work to Europe (Belgium, Germany, Spain, France) because we found the best people to do some very specific work. The people we found were rockstars. Offloading specific tasks, plus all of the infrastructure and processes we had in place, was like a force multiplier for my team; it freed us up to work on other stuff. It was awesome.

#7 Time to market is more important than cost. I simply cannot imagine a scenario where contracting / outsourcing / offshoring will shorten a project's schedule. (With the exception of #6.)

#8 All the methodology stuff is mumbo jumbo. Agile, Scrum, SEI Level 5, ISO 9001, blah, blah, blah. Everyone we've worked with is well versed in all this crap. Doesn't count for squat.

There's a difference between saying and doing.

I'm sure you've interviewed lots of people. The candidates with resumes sporting all the vogue certifications are always a disappointment. They allegedly passed a test. But we give programming tests and they usually chowder.

Tell me what you've done. Not what you know. Methodology is moot if you don't ship a useful, usable product.

#9 During the last 5 years, our bean counters have tried to use Indians and Vietnamese. No expense was spared on training, sending people back and forth, etc. The people we got to meet were absolutely wonderful.

I can't say enough how proud I am that our overseas peers are working in the field and trying to get ahead in life.

Okay, done with the accolades.

Pretend for a moment that offshoring to India is workable. In our experience, the turnover is incredible. At one time, the programmers we trained would last maybe 9 months, and then zing, they'd be off to higher paid job. So then you start over again with fresh meat, which is a reset (e.g. the forming, storming, norming, performing cycle).

The Vietnamese people were super duper nice, and tried really really hard. But the language barrier proved insurmountable. I think there's probably some cultural stuff at play too, but we never really got past the most basic programming tasks, so I honestly couldn't say.

#10 Our product (was once) in a new market. Emerging. And still changing rapidly. All these offshore "bodyshops" want requirements and specifications.

Um, yea. Not possible.

We're making it up as we go along. The customer doesn't know what they want until they see something. (Typical of an emerging market.)

If you've ever written documentation (reqs, use cases, UML, specs, test plans, etc.) you know that it's just as hard and takes just as long as programming. In fact, it harder. Because you're explaining stuff to a green programmer who has no domain expertise.

Frankly, at that level of details, it's just quicker and easier to write the code.

#11 When (not if) the offshoring fails, you'll be blamed. You didn't try hard enough. Or you sabotaged the project.

As though Tinkerbell really will fly, if you'd all just clap loud enough.

###

Okay, I think that's my list.

Like I said at the top, we've tried this offshoring thing multiple times. I'm absolutely certain it'll continue.

Those of us actually doing the work have tried to argue, deflect, stop, etc. We always lose the debate. Now we're just numb and don't say anything.

The bean counters are not like you and me. They go nuts when they see 1/5th the labor costs. That's the only number they care about.

To them, we're all just interchangeable. They have exactly no idea what we do or how we work. Programming! Geesh! How hard could it be? And for these costs, I can get 5 times the number of programmers! We'll have 5 times more product!

I've been around a lot of professions. Programming is a weird thing. We're dismissed and second guessed all the time. What other profession is this poorly regarded? People don't second guess their architects, plumber, doctor, contract manager, mechanic, geologist, etc. (Or maybe they do...)

Okay. Rant over. Here's my advice.

Find another job. Something that'll make you happy.

I'm at a point in my life that I like having a steady job, health insurance, and accrued vacation time. And I'm not busting my ass working 80 hours a week making someone else rich again for a while. So I just smile, keep my head down, and quietly pick up the pieces after each failure.

Such a life.

<comment><USER18> " _Most projects fail. Offshoring just reduces the cost of failure._ "

BINGO!

When I saw that bit of wisdom some months ago I realized why the off-shoring craze had gotten so far. In many big non-IT themselves companies most IT project do indeed fail, so offshoring is a fantastic way to continue to pretend to do IT while spending much less money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are always lots of people on here who would be very happy to work remotely; why not go with that instead? (The difference isn't very large, when it boils down to it...)</comment>


Zynga sues former CityVille exec, accusing him of stealing game ideas - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/zynga-sues-former-cityville-exec-accusing-him-of-stealing-game-ideas/

<comment><USER2> If the accusation is true then I think this case is justified. Zynga have done a lot of things I disagree with. This isn't one of those things.

You can't just copy 760 company files which I assume are not public into your private Dropbox account. It may have been a mistake. It might not. Either way some sort of legal action seems inevitable.

<comment><USER3> I'm amazed at the kind of auditing info on Dropbox activity Zynga have access to. Guess that business account really paid off.

There's only a brief mention of 'security testing and auditing' here, no details as to the extent of what they offer (e.g. how Zynga discovered his attempt to 'cover up' copying the files:

<https://www.dropbox.com/teams/security>

<comment><USER2> I don't find it particularly amazing. I always understood that whatever you look at while in the office can be snooped on or logged.

It is a sensible business practice where your edge in a competitive market are keeping game mechanics and future projects under wraps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there anybody who's surprised by this? Zynga is always suing _somebody_.

<comment><USER5> Totally. It's their new monetization strategy. Didn't anyone get the memo on their last earnings call?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real revelation here is that zynga has trade secrets.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a certain irony here given that Pincus himself has stated his company is less about innovating and more on replicating tried and true models, and refine them to a high-margin point.

</comment><comment><USER8> The implication from the article is that this is part of a new way to keep employees from jumping ship. By making an example of this one, regardless of whether or not they did anything wrong, Zynga makes it less likely other employees would want to jump to another game house. Only Zynga would think of that strategy...

<comment><USER9> _Only Zynga would think of that strategy..._

Nope -- Like every other idea they have, they stole it. PhoneDog sued an ex employee for his Twitter followers:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/27/company- sue...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/27/company-sues-ex- employee-twitter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dubious lawsuits are a telltale sign of a company on its way down. When all else is lost, file lawsuits. What's to lose?

If we can't pay our bills with earned revenue, maybe we can get a few judgements for some quick cash.

Whether this applies to this case, I do not know. Draw your own conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sigh... Remember back in the days when "stealing" used to mean taking something away from someone?

These petty fights are getting tiresome.

<comment><USER12> You can't steal files from your old employer. I know almost everyone does this but that doesn't make it right.

<comment><USER13> I think you've revealed more about yourself by this. I have never copied a file I made for an employer (and there's some code from my last^2 job that would've been really useful in my current one), and I'd be amazed if more than a small proportion of people did.

<comment><USER12> I know about it because I manage a network of 100+ regular users. It is my responsibility to make sure they don't bring files from old job or take files to next job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not going to go into the ethics of the exec's behavior, but given the really valid possibility of Zynga going under, perhaps a valid strategy for the accused is to simply run out the clock?

</comment><comment><USER15> How does it feel, Zynga? You do this to all the indie developers everyday

</comment><comment><USER16> This brings up a question that isn't new at all: How do you secure your designs and data from "walking away"?

In the really old days a significant piece of work may have required a sizable external hard drive to steal. Then came writable DVD's and you could move ~5GB per disk with ease. With USB drives one could move 64GB for about $40 on a keychain.

Then there are services such as Dropbox. And, of course, anyone could setup a server for a few bucks and FTP gobs of files if allowed.

Other than reactively (lawsuit once discovered, etc.), how are companies protecting from having digital work product stolen by less-than-honest employees?

These days physical products are designed entirely digitally. All of the CAD, CAM, EDA and code are files that are easily moved. This can be a huge problem. How far does trust go? And how dangerous is the seemingly innocent "taking work home" event once and if an employee leaves the company?

<comment><USER17> My current employer blocked all external storage devices on company machines (this has been rather annoying for engineers, as you can imagine). Dropbox was blocked about 6 months later. I don't think Google Drive has been blocked yet. This is really kind of futile since someone who is really motivated to steal IP is going to be able to get around these restrictions.

A previous employer of mine had thousands of design documents stolen by an engineer (employee) from China, who then successfully fled to China. This made national headlines and was considered a serious national security / competitiveness issue. After this incident, all personal computing devices and storage media were banned from company premises. Random bag checks were routinely conducted at entry points to company premises. However, bag checks were fairly poorly done so I'm not sure what this really accomplished. I wonder how the company is dealing with the proliferation of smartphones though, because they haven't banned them from premises yet from what I understand.</comment></comment>


Student cracks theologian's baffling religious code - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-47028244 <comment><USER2> It seems Fuller was one of 12 ministers who founded the BMS World Mission.

"BMS World Mission is a Christian missionary society founded by Baptists from England in 1792. It was originally called the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen, but for most of its life was known as the Baptist Missionary Society."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMS_World_Mission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMS_World_Mission)

The original name didn't age well...

</comment><comment><USER3> I found surprising that shorthand compresses enough of the writing to resist statistical techniques, knowing approximately the corpus of language that the theologian would have used, and the source material he would usually quote from.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if it resists cracking by logical processes because it's not logical. For instance, the author may have not followed a _system_ , but chose symbols that were partly pictographic, or based on word associations that occurred to him at the moment. Plus, for the author, it didn't have to be archival, because he would have been aided by his own memory when reading it.

My best chance at reading my own handwriting is to ask: "Now, what would I have meant here?" ;-) I hope nobody ever tries to read my notebooks.

<comment><USER5> >Now, what would I have meant here?

Interestingly (to me, at least), this is also how I remember where I put something if I've misplaced it. I ask myself, and really try to visualize, if I were putting that thing away right now, where would I put it, and what was I just doing with it that might give me a bit more context about where I might leave it for myself cleverly next time? It usually works.

<comment><USER6> Heh, that's exactly what I do as well.. so it must be common to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are the translations public domain or are they considered derivative work?

<comment><USER8> They are derivative works which are eligible for their own copyright protection.

For example, the NIV, NIrV, and Amplified Bible translations are covered under copyright. Here's what you need to do if you want to use more than what their 'gratis use guidelines' allow - [https://www.harpercollinschristian.com/permissions/#2](https://www.harpercollinschristian.com/permissions/#2) .</comment></comment>