Why 'Do It for Me' Is the Next Big Thing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/19/why-do-it-for-me-is-the-next-big-thing/ <comment><USER2> Can we please stop to assume that younger generations don't want to own and do things?

I don't know where this self-proclaimed fact comes from but hell I know a lot of people that define themselves __not __as non-materialistic AirBnB-Homejoy- Uber users. Instead, like everyone else on this planet, they want to express status with watches, cars and houses. Some maybe even enjoy mowing their lawn and cleaning their house, as it cleans their mind from stressful work related stuff.

Yes, Uber and AirBnB are great services and we will use them a lot more in the future, but this doesn't mean that everyone will use a dogfood-delivery or brush-my-teeth service. The DIFM-Economy surely will exist, but it will probably be far smaller than silicon valley based journalist imagine it.

<comment><USER3> You're definitely not wrong. Of course there are those in the younger generation who want to own things. I bet _most_ of them do, in fact. I own my car, of course, and although I'm happy renting an apartment now, I'll be getting a house once I settle down and have a family.

But there's no denying that there are those who just don't want the hassle. I have a friend who uses Uber to get anywhere -- even if it's a 5 minute drive. Most of my friends don't own homes and don't intend to (anytime soon, at least). I have a tenant who makes a very good living, has a very large savings account, and a very high credit score, owned his own home previously, and chose to rent from me because it's just easier.

There's a pretty big market for those sorts of people -- and I think that's what the article was getting at.

<comment><USER2> Alright, I accept that and I don't think its a phenomena caused by our wealthy society for a specific generation, as some self-proclaimed millennial- educators suggest. Essentially what they're saying is that we millennials do not want to own things, because we already did had strong abundance of that in our childhood. Firstly, that is certainly not true for most people I know. Secondly, people I know that had strong abundance in their childhood, strive towards even more now.

I think its owed to the fact of these peoples' current living situation as well as the state of the economy that there are some people that actually don't want to own things.

But lets face it: To much of your money (at least in percentages) in a bank account ultimately is worth nothing. Spending it on services does - on the long term - not yield as much value as ownership. Think about it: You can sell your car after using it for 5-10 years. Same goes for your house, phone, watch, laptop, apartment. Ownership returns securities, and people need securities!

I think people from our generation just ride this wave because of convenience but will ultimately converge to the ownership-game as everyone else.

<comment><USER4> > _You can sell your car after using it for 5-10 years. Same goes for your > house, phone, watch, laptop, apartment._

Seriously?

Well, all right, _houses and apartments_ are still securities. But how much does a 10-year-old car depreciate? I'd expect it to lose 70%-90% of the price of a new one. Phones, laptops, even non-mechanical watches — they lose close to 100% of value over 10 years unless you can sell them as collector items.

Imagine that you could own a nice jug and come buy your milk with it. Nice, and your children could reuse the jug or sell it. But most people prefer to buy milk in disposable cardboard and plastic containers. Possibly, in 30 years they will use a different (but still disposable) container entirely.

Technology moves too fast.

<comment><USER2> Good point, but selling an item is not the only security/value ownership provides.

I can do what ever I want with the item. I can use the item whenever I want. I can still lend the item to someone. Etc...

Also, you don't have to necessarily sell the item once its lost all its value, but prior to that. And actually, I do this with my MBP every few years. I buy it intentionally, because I know its value isn't going to decline as fast as other laptops.

Still, after 5-10 years you at least get SOMETHING out of your car for example, in contrast to all those Uber-rides you took 5 years ago.

BTW.: These examples were probably not the best ones. I'm trying to think about better ones right now...

<comment><USER4> I see your point: ownership provides better _control_. You can do things that are not possible with a rented item. Sometimes this makes perfect sense. I'm glad I'm not renting my computers and can do whatever I please with them.

Still for some other items for which the amount of control you need over them is acceptably low, you can rent them. I'm fine buying a ride in a subway train or a taxi.

These two approaches have different strong and weak sides, so they will probably coexist for a long time. What we see now is that people start to _need_ less control or maybe even _less use_ of certain things. I don't own a car which is perfectly reasonable in NYC; if I lived outside a metropolis I'd own one. Not owning a house has drawbacks but also has _upsides;_ possibly these upsides, like more mobility, start to overweigh the downsides. For instnace, living in San Francisco or on Manhattan is quite possible when you rent an apartment, but buying a house there is mostly for millionaires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading this article leads me to believe the writers at Techcrunch are slowly discovering basic economics, and they think it's revolutionary.

      Instead of selling "software-as-a-service," these DIFM companies are
      delivering "software-with-a-service." The result is awesome customer
      experience that can only be delivered with a human touch.

Techcrunch has it reversed. These companies are selling a service, and happen to effectively use software to create their competitive advantage.

</comment><comment><USER6> So suddenly everybody is rushing to build a human dispatch service for everything, and the end result will be that there will be one winner, who cashes in a big percentage of every transaction in the particular market segment. The actual AI can wait, because what matters now is the cornering of the market.

As you can see, this development does not make me happy.

<comment><USER7> Why not? I'm not trying to be snarky, what specifically don't you like?

<comment><USER8> Many of these companies aspire to things that are great for themselves, like controlling markets and integrating vertically, but not so great for everyone else.

<comment><USER7> Is this generally different from the world of business and entrepreneurship where companies aspire to have market share, profits, etc..? IE, specific to the 'Do It for Me' market?

<comment><USER6> The problem is mostly that these companies seem to try to put a wall around a market and try to become the gate-keeper for that particular market, and will then become the regulator of that market. This goes against the principle of "free markets".

Besides these "do it for me" markets, roughly the same pattern is seen with app-stores, and probably many more markets.

(Of course, in a truly free market it should in theory be possible to create such nested markets, but this just shows that the concept of a totally free market is nonsense, and that we should act against these patterns.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >> This is the first generation of teenagers that doesn't universally wish to own their own cars, many instead preferring to be shuttled around with the help of a smartphone app.

Alternatively, people like taxis. Especially young, urban people who have a bit of spare cash and like to drink.

<comment><USER10> ... and this is not really a new thing. Car ownership in dense urban areas has been a hassle for decades. You have typically exhorbitant local permit fees/taxes, you pay for parking, or have to hunt endlessly for street parking, your insurance rates are higher, gasoline is more expensive, etc. and none of those things are recent developments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a young "millennial" myself, my rent/service oriented lifestyle is based around how free it makes me feel to not own anything. Ownership comes with hassles, and upkeep costs that I would rather not pay if I can just solve a problem directly, and it is hard to change course once you have bought things. I felt anchored by my car, the amount of time I spent servicing it, parking it, driving it and paying for it until I spent all the time selling it for a fraction of it's original cost. Money in a bank account represents any asset I can imagine. Today solving problems quickly through services is so frictionless, committing that money to a particular form often seems like a losing proposition.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seriously? This needs to be a buzzword? Jeez!! It is how the economy has worked since.. always.

I hire a carpenter to do it for me. A cleaner to do it for me. IT company X to do it for me. Contractor Y to build it for me. Baker Z to bake it for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> This should be obvious. Concierge style services married to digital communication and software dispatch, it's a natural combination.

<comment><USER7> "Concierge" is an analogy in this context, I think. That is, it's a starting point for your brain to have something to graft onto. In reality, the service is bound to be very different from a concierge once it hits legit MVP (with enough 'V' to genuinely validate a business) levels of traffic, the concierge analogy will start to be something deep in the identity of the actual product rather than the product.

You might have "classrooms" in your elearning software, but it's relationship to an actual classroom is metaphorical.

Anyway, the actual work is figuring out how to scale this. If scaling means a linear increase in people, you've got a hard problem to solve. It's not impossible. Uber needs another physical car for each simultaneous passenger. But, it's fundamentally different difficulties than "scaling" of a software.

Metaphors are tricky.

<comment><USER13> Certainly. But "concierge" gives you a good handhold to understand a lot of the potential businesses that haven't emerged yet. Using the concierge model makes things like shyp and magic seem pretty obvious, for example. From there I think it's a lot easier to see what's possible, where the easy money is, and what the outlines of a viable product look like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> DIFM = the "whole product" as described by Geoffrey Moore in "Crossing the Chasm." He suggests that you partner with third-parties so that your customers get a complete use case, usually your technology only solves part of the problem and leaves the customer coming up with the rest.

</comment><comment><USER15> Stop jerk tech

We don't want more slaves to increase inequality</comment>


Cisco's CEO is stretching his company in all directions. Can it hold together? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14303574

<comment><USER2> The Cisco smart grid initiative makes perfect sense to me; it's barely even an extension to what Cisco already does.

Here's the situation they find themselves in: if they can control or influence the design of residential power meters, which are tiny boxes made by 10 different companies that cost less than $1000, then they can dictate terms for how those meters will talk to the utilities. And what they'll dictate is IPv6.

The result will be massive purchases of IPv6 connectivity gear, by utilities, from Cisco. They have to see it as a second ISP gold rush.

Since smart meters are deployed in only a tiny fraction of markets, but will absolutely inevitably be deployed everywhere in 10 years, it may be that all Cisco has to do to make this happen is buy a smart meter manufacturer; these are companies with (perhaps) 8 figure revenue streams.

If you wanted to get all blue-sky about the opportunity, you could point out that Cisco would end up with a _second_ end-to-end network, including the last mile, that would touch every residence and business in the country, all running on equipment that Cisco had de facto design control over. What else could they do with that? Who knows. I'm sure someone there has some idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft's present is Cisco's future. Cash rich but without any innovation. Just copying whatever the new kid on the block is doing. It's just one paradigm-shift away from obsolescence.

<comment><USER2> There's just a huge difference between the way those two companies do business. Microsoft builds things. Cisco buys them. They may have comparable positions in their respective sectors, but they have utterly unrelated business development models.

<comment><USER3> Cisco does build things. Lots of switches and routers, they are all built in China by Foxconn. I think what you mean to say is that Microsoft is a software company while Cisco is a hardware company. Two different ways of doing business.

<comment><USER4> No: what he means is that Cisco buys other companies - its growth has been fueled by continual acquisition of other companies. See the 170 references at the end of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_Systems) most of which are about single companies acquired by Cisco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comes off as a bit of a puff piece. It's interesting to contrast the perspective in this article with the employee reviews on Glassdoor.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes? No? Who cares? Take it to motleyfool.</comment>


Tell HN: Sun, Sand and Startups - networking in NYC on July 22nd. - <AUTHOR> http://sunsandandstartups.eventbrite.com/

<comment><USER2> Arg! I keep barely missing these (flying back into town later that night).

I've been hanging out in nyc while trying to get connected. Seems like the Ace is a popular spot, but where else should I be co-working to meet people?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to meet with fellow HN'ers!

Also, there will be another one in Barcelona soon, I will post it here as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish I could be there</comment>


World's Worst Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/?hn <comment><USER2> My local library's site is worse. It doesn't _look_ as bad, but it takes a ridiculously long time to load. That is much worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen worse.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to beat <http://yvettesbridalformal.com/>

<comment><USER5> Mother of god!</comment></comment></comment>


Craigslist releases new mobile app for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/craigslist/id1336642410 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure this is a direct competitor or not but just to pass on info to HNers, here in Japan Mercari is #1 for buying and selling used stuff online.

It's mobile 1st. Take a picture of the item you want to sell, add a price and it's on sale. They've done nearly everything possible to make things as seamless as possible. When a sale happens you get notified where and how to ship it. They partnered with the post office and the 50k+ convenience stores so you can ship from the stores. At both locations they auto print labels via QR codes and offer fixed box sizes. I think they do a little bit of escrow (not 100% sure the actual mechanics) but I believe the buyer pays immediately but the funds are not forwarded until the buyer approves the item. (really not sure about this part)

Certain things seem like it might only fit Japan. The convenience store partnership is huge since, at least in populous areas there is always multiple within 2-5 min walk. Even post offices are relatively many. I also don't know to what extent a more trustworthy populus helps.

They are hiring like crazy and hiring foreigners as well if you want a job in Japan. They're probably the #1 company for running dev meetups in Tokyo and those meetups feel like SV, all English, in rooms that might as well be at Google Mountain View including food and kitchens etc..

AFAIK they've had no luck replicating their success outside Japan

<comment><USER3> In Australia where I live, selling goods online outside the likes of eBay and normal ecommerce has become a generally painful experience.

Facebook marketplace (and Gumtree to a lesser degree) have given the buyer this weird desire to lowball on pricing to the point of insult. It's almost like as soon as people open Facebook, they become this extreme version of themselves, and this extends to "haggling".

<comment><USER4> Definitely a lot of tyre kickers. Every time I've marked something I'm selling as e.g. '$500 negotiable' I get tons of messages saying "what's your best price" or "what's your lowest offer?"

That's not how haggling works. My lowest offer is $500 until I hear yours.

Aside from that, I've had good experiences selling old video game consoles on Gumtree.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I do this when I don't want to haggle; I just want a price on which I can decide a simple go/no-go.

<comment><USER6> I would always mark up my prices for things on forums a little bit so I had room to haggle it down but I never entertained people asking what my lowest price was. If you can't afford sticker price, you can afford to haggle. It was a pretty niche marketplace so there was pretty much never going to be anything like those crazy thrift store finds where someone buys something worth $5000 for $5, all the sellers usually had a good idea what their stuff was worth and priced appropriately. There were always the morons who priced their junk 5x it's market value but those people were too stupid to haggle with, they would get insulted when you offered a good market price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have yet to use the mobile apps, but kudos to the Craigslist team for making their website one of the best mobile experiences out there. Loads quickly, easy to navigate, and isn't missing features compared to desktop. Certainly doesn't have the look we expect from a modern website but there's a level of usability we can all aspire to.

<comment><USER8> I find craigslist's fast loading pages to be problematic.

I think their website would be improved by rewriting it entirely in JavaScript, transpiling the JavaScript to JavaScript, requiring the JavaScript to render, re-implementing the entire UI in JavaScript including hyperlinks, then running JavaScript on the server to generate HTML, sending the HTML to the browser, also sending the JavaScript bundle with megabytes of hipster fonts and random people's github repos to insert spaces in a string and stuff, then finally re-rendering the client's page after the multi-megabyte JavaScript bundle finishes downloading.

Now _that_ is the nice modern user experience I have come to demand as a user in 2019.

<comment><USER9> If a site feels unusable like this it's because you're the not the user. News sites, for example, are SPAs because they want to sell you ads. It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the business using it.

<comment><USER10> How are SPA-s and displaying ads related? The reload / page model benefits news sites more since they can generate more pageviews and hence ad reloads. There really is no connections. Devs implement SPA-s because they think it's better user experience (yes, it's hard to get it right).

<comment><USER11> I doubt anyone relying on ad revenue to run a business equates pageviews with HTTP requests to the server anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For anyone who hasn't used Craigslist in years due to FB groups/Marketplace, OfferUp, and others: IMO it's only improved since the rise of competitors. I did lots of buying and selling on Craigslist as a college student, then stopped using it for years until recently.

<comment><USER13> I paid $5 to post a used truck for sale ad on craigslist. The only responses I got was from scammers. I posted for free on facebook market place with copy pasta text + pictures. 10+ inquiries and sold it in 2 days for my asking price. craigslist is going down the tubes and they are just cynically capitalizing on every bit of revenue they can before it fades into obscurity.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Except you need a FB account. Craiglist isn't going to track you all over the web and include your sales and purchases in your advertising and whatever other profiles.

There's a lot of funny business on any public want-ad board. I appreciate one that doesn't want to know the intimate details of my life for their financial benefit. I have to laugh at calling Craigslist the cynical ones in this case...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love how their product screenshots show a 2 BR Victorian in San Francisco for $2,000 / month. At least they're honest about how many scammy fake listings are on their site.

<comment><USER15> A classic case of your designers placeholder finding its way past final review

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google Play Store link for Android app:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist.CraigslistMobile)

The Android app requires you to sign in with a Google account, which is disappointing in terms of privacy.

<comment><USER17> Wow the reviews are night and day between Google and iOS.

<comment><USER18> They require access to your google account to sign in which is clearly not needed. Most people HATE this, myself included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Craigslist has held on to its market share quite strongly for a long time, but more recently it has clearly started to weaken with Facebook Marketplace and a plethora of more special-purpose apps that are much more mobile-centric. I'm glad they are finally starting to defend their share. I'll be curious to watch: time will tell if they were too late in transitioning to mobile or will it be just fine for them.

<comment><USER20> I find that Nextdoor gets me more responses on for-sale items and none of them are scams. On Craigslist I get fewer and the majority are scams. I only bother with Craigslist these days when I'm looking to buy, or if I'm selling an item expensive enough to worry about getting the best price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone use CL anymore? It's basically all spam (Keyword dumpers that CL doesn't care about apparently) anytime I search for anything, and I used to be able to sell a laptop on there in 1-3 days. Now I can go weeks without getting a legitimate response.

So much spam on the other end of it as well.

<comment><USER22> I use it and it works fairly well. I wish they wouldn't allow on actual stores and spammers.

I recently graduated and moved to a larger city than my college town and I've found that Craigslist is actually worse in the larger city. Less people who respond overall and there's always someone who responds 45 minutes across the city.

<comment><USER23> You can filter the stores out using "by owner" instead of "by dealer". Some spammers will have their listings as by owner but... it gets rid of most of them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used to work at the company (Mokriya) that had previously released an "official" CL app. CL's attitude towards apps was funny. I never got it. The lead dev told me they were hard to work with and were against providing APIs. No wonder they got their lunch eaten by facebook and other marketplaces.

</comment><comment><USER25> Traded a Hank Williams CD for an old canoe once. Looking forward to the future, CL.

<comment><USER26> Your comment captures the essence of Craigslist of yore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was hoping the font was times new roman. Still, great they kept it plain looking.

<comment><USER28> Looks like the default San Francisco on iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's crazy that searches for craigslist in the App Store does not actually show the official app anywhere

<comment><USER30> When a new iOS app is released usually it takes at least a day to appear in App Store search results. (Source: am iOS developer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The website works just fine on mobile. Why in the world would I download another app?

<comment><USER20> Perhaps the app can manage to remember your address and phone number, instead of making you type it in every time even when you are logged in to your account? I dunno just guessing at some improvements they can make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Love the category menu. Everything still looks like a scam, but now it looks less scammy.

</comment><comment><USER33> Forgive my ignorance, ( Not from US ) how does Craiglist make money?

<comment><USER34> Listing some sorts of items costs money. I recently sold a used car and had to pay them a small fee.

<comment><USER35> Really? I was unaware of this change, haven't sold a car in a while (but have sold several on CL in the past).

I guess the spam level got too intense, which I can definitely vouch for. Lots of not-believable deals that were basically phishing scams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is Craigslist still the way to go for finding a place to rent in the Bay Area? As far as I recall, it was a pretty poor experience, but it was the only place that had the listings.

</comment><comment><USER37> What's the link to download it on the Play Store?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist.CraigslistMobile)

(found both these apps via a banner on the mobile website, btw. No press releases that I've seen.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm on the Italian App Store and I just get a "not available in your location" error, which is somewhat galling.

</comment><comment><USER39> I recently moved and tried selling stuff on craigslist. The amount of spam and shady emails I got was overwhelming. They never figured out how to control that.

<comment><USER40> On the buy side, it's also getting tots redic.

I've mostly monitored furniture classifications. The "by dealer" sections are all but unusable, with repeat and keyword-stuffed listings. This has been going on for at least a decade. It's bad enough that I don't bother.

The individual sales listings are much more viable.

IMO: Craigslist should start charging for business listings, at least in regions for which spamming is prevalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Has Craigslist ever taken investment? It always smelled like a purely bootstrapped company to me...

<comment><USER42> One of the original owners sold a stake: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist/investors...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist/investors/investors_list)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Wow so Craigslist launched a iPhone app — like 5 years too late.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ionic or native?

</comment><comment><USER45> Have to sign in just to save a search?

no thanks

<comment><USER40> Use RSS feeds:

[http://septicscompanion.com/blog/2013/12/how-to-monitor- lots...](http://septicscompanion.com/blog/2013/12/how-to-monitor-lots-of- craigslist-sites-at-once/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Mobile computing has finally arrived

</comment><comment> crooked-v It really says something about the iOS App Store that I literally put in "craigslist" as a search term and this app doesn't appear at all in the results.

</comment><comment><USER47> Better late than never I guess. It's pretty sad how little Craigslist has done to keep up with the times.

</comment><comment><USER48> If I had equity in craigslist as a employee or investor I would be furious.

Think about how much value has been lost to offerup & letgo because they literally took over a decade to release a official mobile app. There is no excuse besides incompetence and gross negligence.

There should unironically be employee lawsuits at the management.</comment>


Lithium Technologies to Acquire Klout - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/02/11/exclusive-lithium-technologies-to-acquire-klout/?utm_source=appnet <comment><USER2> One thing worth noting, for those that are questioning the "sanity" of this or asking how Klout can be worth $100s of millions, etc:

"...a mix of cash and Lithium private stock..."

So take any publicized valuations with a very very large grain of salt. It's fuzzy at best to value a deal based on the stock of another company which itself has a valuation based on the fractional investment pricing of 3rd party VCs.

(Note: I don't have any skin in this game either way, so please correct me if I'm wrong somewhere!)

<comment><USER3> Lithium is pretty late stage so the stock value is probably close to reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Klout is a perfect example of great marketing trumping great product. Klout scores influencers, but in reality it's not that much superior to tools like Followerwonk, BuzzSumo, or Twtrland. But they came up with a score that ppl could digest, they had a memorable brand, and they created PR with the gamification of these social scores.

I might be wrong, but the real value if any in Klout is that they have a bunch of data aggregating social media profiles for a bunch of influencers, but only some of it is public like Twitter - stuff like Instagram/FB is opt-in (I might be wrong). But all in all, it's not something you can't gather on your own with a year worth of development.

<comment><USER5> Klout was the first modern "love-to-hate" startup. It's the proto-RapGenius.

<comment><USER6> RapGenius is a bad example. Their product (crowdsourced lyric annotation) obsoleted other lyrics sites almost immediately. That they had to play the dirty SEO game is unfortunate, but not surprising, given that they were competing against a field of even dirtier sites.

Klout, on the other hand, offered little more than reputation snake oil, which is why few take them seriously and the investors are lucky to be leaving with the shirts on their back (which is what a low nine-figure sale means). Much like Quora, there was a focused bubble of intense love, with a very long tail of disdain outside. Except Quora has a purpose.

<comment><USER7> Obsoleted is pretty strong - do you have data to support that?

<comment><USER8> Have you seen other lyrics sites? They're tripod-level garbage.

Rap Genius:Lyrics Sites::Stack Overflow:Q&A sites

<comment><USER9> That's not what obsoleted means, and subjective. When all you want is lyrics and the lyrics are the same across all sites the sites themselves are pretty interchangeable.

<comment> vertex-four Depends. When I'm looking up lyrics, I'm looking them up to try to figure out what they mean. Before RapGenius, the only decent crowd-sourced lyric meanings site was SongMeanings. RapGenius, on the other hand, has a much better interface for allowing the community to pick apart songs, without any of the shady stuff (on the site itself, at least).

<comment><USER7> All great - but not proof that RapGenius has obsoleted traditional lyrics sites like azlyrics.com or metrolyrics.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate to jump on the Klout-trashing bandwagon...but it definitely was floundering around. Its new redesign made it look like another generic social aggregator, contained significantly less data and insights (hard to believe, but yes), and was unreadable, to boot. But the randomness of the "Klout Perks" initiative seemed to be a sign of real meandering..."Use Klout and get a deal on Chicken McNuggets!" ([http://www.publicrelationsprincess.com/2014/02/mcdonalds- chi...](http://www.publicrelationsprincess.com/2014/02/mcdonalds-chicken- nugget-publicity-blitz-too-little-too-late.html))

Yeah, hard to say what their pivot was going to be, so this acquisition is a better outcome than where things seemed to be heading.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ugh. Klout is the worst sort of horoscope scammy bullshit out there, it sucks that the industry is so broken that worthless companies like this can make profitable exits.

<comment><USER5> The last valuation for Klout was $200M, and they are being acquired for "low nine figures" ($100M-$200M). This is far from a profitable exit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://xkcd.com/1057/](https://xkcd.com/1057/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't get it. This is completely baffling to me that this is a company worth 9 figures.

<comment><USER6> And worth nine figures to another company which appears (from TFA) to be worth nine figures itself. The Valley is amazing sometimes.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Raise $100 million.

2\. Hire 100's of talented engineers for above average salaries and perks.

2b. Make them do something that sounds challenging and hard to understand, but ultimately useless.

3\. Sell to a greater fool as an acqui-hire for $150 million

4\. Earn a few million in profit.

5\. Repeat! (because you didnt get a 100X return, just a slim one)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps the take-away lesson here is that the hiring process hurts a lot, and companies will pay millions of dollars to avoid it.

<comment><USER14> So, a startup that hires a bunch of developers to hack as a team on some open source project and fires quickly then flips the team to a bigger company[1] could work?!?

sadly, I thought of a domain name for this: teamchurn.com

1) obviously paying a chunk to the team

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Who would buy a failing start up for $100m? I guess that's why I'm not an investor.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what Klout's "klout score" would be for themselves, if they examined their mentions on social media.

I haven't heard anything about this nonsense for months.

<comment><USER17> Klout's "klout score" = 87.

[http://klout.com/#/user/klout](http://klout.com/#/user/klout)</comment></comment>


Why Governments Don't Get Startups - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2011/09/01/why-governments-don%E2%80%99t-get-startups/

<comment><USER2> I'd rather government not even try to understand startups or business in general. That way they wouldn't try craft policies to stimulate business which are invariably misguided. It'd be better to just lower taxes and reduce regulatory burdens and just let things happen on their own. Even if they did make policies that they thought would help the lack of knowledge would make their ideas nothing more than guesswork and they wouldn't defend as being based on science or research or whatever.

I'm not sure a society needs more startups and I have no way to know so I wouldn't think to make a policy to help create startups. It seems to me that the presumption that society cannot produce the things it values is very arrogant. The whole point of the price system is to allow society to communicate to entrepreneurs what is valued and what isn't. Let others in society (not in government) communicate to the entrepreneurs what they should be building.

<comment><USER3> More start-ups are an inevitability of the future in my vision. I'm not discouraging or encouraging it either way, in fact it's probably not the best outcome, but because of popular media and the cultural dramatization of the start-up world and how entrepreneurial innovation works, people think it's a "Let's work out of a garage for awhile and then see what happens" type of thing.

I really hope that methodology and philosophy never becomes the penultimate choice for those that want to start their own business or innovate something.

The government could potentially destroy that balance though, I agree.

Where there is a need, there will be an innovation of some kind. The best ideas come partially from necessity.

<comment><USER4> _I really hope that methodology and philosophy never becomes the penultimate choice for those that want to start their own business or innovate something._

If "let's work out of a garage for a while" is the second-to-last choice, what is the last choice, and is it better or worse?

<comment><USER3> Working out of one's mother's basement was my thought. :P

Atleast a garages these days have some panache!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Start-Ups as understood in the USA is also strongly connected to the peoples philosophy and culture. Knowing a little about the German and UK start-up scene, I feel that European entrepreneurs and investors favour a more risk-averse and engineered approach instead of the "let's do it and get rich or die trying" approach I feel is more common in the US. Just applying the US approach to another country where people think and feel totally different about the topic of founding companys can't work. But why should there not be other approaches that also work fine? Of course they might not lead to the same goals, Steve Blank has defined for a Start-Up-Ecosystem, but why should they? Maybe less innovation and less compensation might be okay, if you get also less risk for example.

<comment><USER6> > Maybe less innovation and less compensation might be okay, if you get also > less risk for example.

You're assuming something about the value of the innovation and the cost of the risk.

Would you be willing to pay 1000 failed startups for one Google? I would, because the cost of those 999 startups is largely borne by the folks involved while I get significant benefits from the existence of Google.

Safe is usually just losing slowly but surely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where I live bootstrapping is a necessity rather than an option. Founders and early employees carry tons of risk, and once the business is profitable the idea of taking funding on worse terms than are available to much riskier early-stage startups in the US is laughable. Companies grow organically because it makes the most sense to fuel growth with revenue.

Given that the vast majority of startup financing in the US is late-stage, it seems to me that a lot of companies that take investment in the States are doing it to de-risk participants, exactly the same thing that happens when pre-revenue founders take funding to pay themselves salaries. I think this is a good thing, but the insinuation that the rest of the tech world is building digital surf shops because we are beach bums who don't understand scalability is insulting and inane.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've interacted with several government groups over the past few years, each with a mission to help startups. I've also worked several times with large companies who want to "foster innovation" and "empower teams" -- ie, actually start making something that people want instead of being stuck in paperwork- land.

I like what Steve has done here. He has a tendency to over-think things but understanding the different kinds of startups is critical to understand why things are so screwed up. The only thing I would add is that political groups, that is, groups of people who make decisions, make decisions based on politics. What else would we expect?

That sounds a bit circular, so let me expand it out. If I am part of a committee who has ten million to spend to bring jobs to the region, my primary goal is to make us all look good, to look as if we are bringing jobs to the region, to whatever group set us up. It is not, necessarily, to bring jobs to the region. I can't, for instance, blow the ten million for twenty years in a row and then end up with a Yahoo. The numbers might work, but the politics never would. The acceptance criteria is not the jobs, it is the appearance.

That's not saying that somehow there's anything crooked going on. It's simply _damn hard_ to fund startups, as any VC will tell you. It's not hard, however, to construct some system of allocation and reporting that makes things look as if they are going along nicely, as any consultant would tell you. So a thousand government startup programs hum along, all giving out money and doing things that look important, all reporting back with solid numbers on how things are changing, and not much else happens. Everybody wants Google or some big startup that was formed somewhere else to move in -- that generates a lot of publicity and makes even more money flow in. Nobody wants a hundred lifestyle/small business startups that might employ 2-4 people. As Steve points out, those guys don't get their pictures on the front of magazines. Hell, most of the time you never even know they are there. Kind of hard to put that in an annual report somewhere, kind of hard to do a standup with the local TV station outside a new warehouse, kind of hard to do a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the local pols, even if the impact is the same or greater than the big score.

What would I do? Beats me. I think the problem is somewhat intractable. But if I had to, I'd work on things that formed communities -- incubators, free wi- fi, regular talks from industry leaders, open-air forums, free beer night, setting up near a college, etc -- and ditch any kind of reporting whatsoever. I'd definitely ditch business plan competitions and other wonkish old and tired ideas that seem to be everywhere but never amount to much. My only metric would be startup attempts and the size of the community actually interested in entrepreneurialism. From there I would get the hell out of the way. Then wait about ten or fifteen years.

<comment><USER9> > _It's simply damn hard to fund startups, as any VC will tell you._

This is the crux of it right here. VCs have the opportunity to directly earn themselves millions of dollars by making good funding decisions. Some of them are good at it, but there's no formula to apply; it requires intelligence, savvy, drive and a good dose of luck.

Now if you think about how government works, even the most upstanding public servants with the best of intentions _simply do not have what it takes_ to make the right cut-throat funding decisions that are necessary. Hell it might even be illegal in some jurisdictions to show the kind of aggressive preference that is required.

All the cynicism about bureaucrats wanting to look good might be true, but even if it's not, they're still fucked if they try to do it themselves. The best a government can hope to do is to not get in the way of people who _are_ capable of doing it.

<comment><USER8> _"...All the cynicism about bureaucrats wanting to look good might be true..."_

No cynicism was intended. I'm simply trying to share my direct experiences, as indicated. My interests are in solving this problem, not throwing mud around and claiming it is impossible. When given a bucket of money, a vague and somewhat impossible task, people create systems of allocation and reporting that show progress, even though no actual progress is being made.

This has nothing to do with the government, government programs, or bureaucrats -- one of the big mistakes funded startups do is generate a lot of activity and paperwork without generating any results. There are a ton of startups generating mountains of paperwork -- reports, contracts, studies, research, white papers, market position statements, etc -- that will never have enough business to break even. Why? _Because results are freaking hard_ , that's why. It's difficult to dynamically create a flow diagram full of ideas of various providence and adjust and tweak it as necessary. Much easier to construct some other, simpler measurement criteria that's more doable and simply measure against that. This is an attribute of groups of people put into stressful, complex, and difficult-to-tract situations that have to report to other groups. Organizational setting is not important. Apologies if somehow it read cynically. There is a great tolerance for dealing with uncertainty involved in the area of value creation that most people, frankly, find very uncomfortable.

<comment><USER9> Actually no it didn't read cynically, that was just an addendum directed at the prevailing stereotype of government workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's because startups don't have as much cash as large multinational corporations. It's hard to understand someone who has very little cash ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> Time to elevate this thread and the original post to the White House BEFORE the President's "jobs and economic recovery" speech next week. Seriously.</comment>


Show HN: We built a tool to save and practise relevant words to learn languages - <AUTHOR> https://wordeys.com <comment><AUTHOR> We started working on Wordeys this summer (on a cool hackweekend at a farm), after we felt like there was a gap between learning the basics of languages and mastering languages. On top of that, when using existing language learning apps we always feel some sort of annoyance; it's really helpful at first, but then it gets boring, time consuming and irrelevant.

That's why we made a tool that lets people save relevant words, grammar and vocabulary into lists, which can be practised (like flashcards, but with soft spell checks). This enables people to only spend time and effort on the stuff they need.

By focusing on a minimal, clear UI and integrating Google Translate we make it possible to build these lists really quick.

We would love to hear everyones thoughts on this!</comment>


Twitter Symbols - <AUTHOR> http://twsym.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> While I certainly am not questioning the potential uses of this, it also gives me have horrible flashbacks to the days of using MSN Messenger -- when 75%+ of my contacts felt it necessary to have to at least two smiley faces, three hearts, and a music note on either side of their actual name.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, we launched this like 2 years ago (okay, September 16, 2008 to be exact) at TwitterKeys.com. Was wildly popular for a week or two and then died off.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is potentially really handy, but it failed my math test:

       ∃ x | x ∈ ℝ

But, then again, it's Twitter, not Mather.

</comment><comment><USER5> At first, I asked myself "why shouldn't I just use the character map application built into every (windows) pc?", this may be organized, better, so I realized that the real question is "why is this branded as 'twitter' symbols?"

<comment><USER6> SEO

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I miss the recycling symbols: ♺, ♻, ♲, ♼ and ♽ Useful for "classic" retweets.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are much more typographically useful symbols. I made a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the ones I use:

' ' " " — … • ½ ™ Ⅳ and lots of other ones that are much less useful.

</comment><comment><USER9> ___1\. Doubleclick character and press Ctrl+C, 2. Open your Twitter and press Ctrl+V_ __

Does not work in Opera (10.52).

<comment><USER10> Double-clicking the character doesn't always work for me in Opera 10.51 (winXP), but highlighting the character by click-dragging always does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So that's what they're called.</comment>


Dropping Linux capabilities to improve container security - <AUTHOR> http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2016/10/17/secure-your-containers-with-this-one-weird-trick/ <comment><USER3> I wrote an open source BPF tool recently that shows which capabilities your application is using, live, for the purposes of determining such a whitelist: [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-01/linux-bcc- securi...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-01/linux-bcc-security- capabilities.html)

<comment><USER4> As you guys are using FreeBSD at Netflix, have you reached over to OpenBSD and tried pledge[1]? It looks like a terrific addition to the sandboxing suite of tools. It seems like it would go hand in hand with your whitelisting tool if only they ran on the same platforms.

[1] [http://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man2/...](http://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man2/pledge.2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's da to see the word "container" used synonymously with "Docker container". There are other container-technologies out there, and this one only applies to Docker.

Have we landed in what seems like yet another mono-culture situation where there are actually several viable technologies at hand?

If so, that would be a real shame. Docker is broken in quite a lot of ways and needs all the competition it can get.

<comment><USER6> Could you elaborate on (or link us to examples of) those 'quite a lot of ways'?

<comment><USER5> Sure. Here's the slide-set for a pretty good rant (although in Norwegian):

[https://kly.no/presentations/2016-09-24_Ignite- talk_Docker.p...](https://kly.no/presentations/2016-09-24_Ignite- talk_Docker.pdf)

The good news is that Google Translate understands PDFs and mostly gets it right:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fkly.no%2Fpresentations%2F2016-09-24_Ignite- talk_Docker.pdf&edit-text=)

That should be a decent start for further discussion :)

<comment><USER7> Yeah "decent". Whole thing is a childish speil about "docker bad, systemd cool, m'kay".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's holding back user namespaces with Docker, are containers requiring real root common or is there some other reason it's turned off by default?

I guess the explanation might be the example image here: it's called "fedora". I thought running whole Linux distributions VM/LXC-style under Docker didn't really work - the Docker people always said you're only supposed run one app per container. Has this changed?

<comment><USER9> The core philosophy of "one app per container" has not changed. Strictly speaking, this will never change because containers - whether Docker, ACI, or OCI - are _processes_ and not _VMs_. I recommend this accessible presentation on how to write a poor-mans Docker by hand[1] to remove some of the magic behind containers.

As with any philosophy, there are many smart people who hold an opposite view. Docker itself is perhaps deviating from the architectural simplicity of container==process, while the underdog rkt is enforcing this approach even at the cost of user-land usability (e.g. rkt cannot run containers as daemons by itself).

In practice, most containers must have an OS wrapping the application (unless you're distributing binaries), and that OS often ends up being a nearly fully baked version of Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora or whatever the person is most comfortable with outside of Docker.

edit PS: One common exception to this philosophy is a short-lived container for admin/management/debugging. Having a full OS with devel/admin tools is useful for investigation/maintenance purposes, then you kill it and nothing is changed in prod.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4)

<comment><USER10> > Strictly speaking, this will never change because containers - <USER2> > Docker, ACI, or OCI - are processes and not VMs.

Who died and made you king of definitions? Use of the word "container" for virtualizing a full OS instance predates [1] Docker, ACI, OCI.

[1]: [https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/bcantrill/public/ppwl- cantr...](https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/bcantrill/public/ppwl-cantrill- zones.pdf) (I wouldn't be surprised if there are even earlier IBM or FreeBSD uses of the word "container" with respect to OS virtualization.)

<comment><USER9> Haha, valid point. My thinking is within the current nomenclature and implementations of "containers" vs "Virtual Machines". These definitions could change drastically in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I never understood why container security needs to be treated differently then regular security for the os and process.

<comment><USER7> Because they are effectively turning into a mini-os.

The whole container hype is an offshot of the VM hype from a few years back, that was all about running multiple, apparently separate, servers on shared hardware. This by doing the OS and server installs into VM images that would be managed by hypervisors (effectively a stripped down OS that only existed to run VMs).

The VM approach have certain issues with overhead, as you are running multiple kernels and user spaces stacked on top of each other, with the underlying CPU spending time pretending to be whatever hardware the VM is presenting to the OS within it.

Thus you get containers, a chroot on steroids that is claiming to bring some of the benefits of VM (less idle hardware, thus getting all the accountants hot and bothered) but with reduced overhead. This by having the containers share kernel and general userspace.

Frankly we keep adding turtles to the stack.

We start out with a single cpu running a single process.

Then we stack multiple cpus into racks.

Then we implement timeshare so that each cpu can run multiple processes.

Then we virtualize the cpu into a process, that in turn are timesharing processes.

All this because hardware takes up space and electricity even while idle, but software do not. Thus the more software you can run on a single piece of hardware the "better".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So... coming from Rails land, where convention reigns, why is the locked-down list not the standard?

<comment><USER13> Docker has repeatedly optimized for usability (including dumb users) over security. User experience is "my app just works", not "my app works, but only after I remember to add these 10 capabilities".

Frankly, it seems like it's an explicit goal of docker to let people who know nothing about linux use linux containers. Another obvious goal is to ship fast, and add security later _maybe_ (see the disaster that is docker registry auth).

<comment><USER14> Linux had a remotely exploitable root privilege vulnerability in the recvmmsg system call just last week. Linux experiences local root exploits via innocuous-seeming system calls roughly every 3 months, last time I checked.

Containers cannot and will not provide effective security. Capabilities more generally cannot and will not provide effective security in practice. Capabilities have been around in Linux since before 2000 and they've always been trivial to circumvent because of kernel bugs. The problem has never been granularity of capabilities but about code quality and surface area. If you're concerned about security, you want at _least_ something like seccomp or pledge. But as the recvmmsg issue shows even that's not enough. Heck, virtual machines aren't even enough--Xen has had two privilege escalation vulnerabilities in less than a year.

Containers are about easing deployments. Docker understands that, I think. And while there are many aspects about the whole container phenomenon that I find very unpalatable, I applaud Docker for understanding that, or at least not peddling the security angle too heavily.

The only practical, one-size-fits-all security boundary for software as complex as Linux or Windows is physically separate hardware. Linux's recent recvmmsg exploit notwithstanding, direct remote exploits of kernels are rare enough that you can make an argument for their benefit without exploit authors rolling their eyes.

<comment><USER13> > The only practical security boundary for software as complex as Linux or > Windows is physically separate hardware

So because you can't really secure a linux kernel perfectly, you might as well not bother with even trying at all?

Defence in depth. Sure, I understand there might be exploits that affect my system, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't use prepared sql statements, shouldn't run my processes as uid!=0, shouldn't use selinux, etc.

None of what you said is an excuse for not having more secure defaults and encouraging users to practice defence in depth better.

<comment><USER14> Using prepared SQL statements is about writing correct software.

My point is that expecting containers to "secure" broken software is a delusion, especially when the implementation enforcing the constraints--in this case, the Linux kernel--is fundamentally broken from a security perspective in the relevant dimension (that is, local exploits leading to privilege escalation).

Arguing defense in depth in this case is like arguing that stacking 3 web application firewalls on top of an application is better than just 1. The problem being that none of them are capable of addressing the bulk of the proven exploits.

Back to your prepared SQL statement analogy, consider that nobody should be running software with root privileges today, regardless. Whether your network daemon is run in a container or not, it shouldn't being running as root in its steady state. So trying to lock down a container in such an instance is like trying to prevent SQL injection in software that concatenates data into the SQL statement string. It's intrinsically a failed strategy, and not in any sense an engineering solution. It's like saying doing something is better than doing nothing. Well, actually, in reality that's not the case; in reality sometimes doing something is just as bad as doing nothing (sometimes it's even worse, but that's not the argument I'm making here).

There are other, similar reasons why it's a bad strategy to see containers as a security measure. And I fail to see how anybody who has spent any amount of time in this industry, and who has spent any amount of time applying privilege separation principles, could reasonably disagree.

Now, can containers help you write more secure software? Yes, depending on context. But not to the exclusion of other techniques. Containers don't add a useful security layer by themselves, and shipping with slightly tighter capabilities doesn't change this fact in practice. Again, saying that shipping with slightly tighter capabilities (the particular capabilities system at issue here) is better than not is a distinction without a difference when most kernel-based root exploits are in innocuous system calls (e.g. networking system calls) that you could never lock down in a default container setting. If an application writer can't be bothered to make their software work without root, there are evidently other things going on.[1] Again, the problem in reality is software quality--bad kernel quality, bad application quality--and papering over this doesn't help.

[1] A simple, single setuid call shortly after application startup would work at least as well as narrowing process capabilities, though likely be more effective. Even better, write your application to inherit socket and file descriptors so inetd or systemd can implement those privileged operations. These are minimal things all _correctly_ written software should support. If an application doesn't support at least the former, it's fundamentally broken and it's foolhardy to believe this can be papered over. Also, newsflash, systemd doesn't solve PID file races for uncooperative network daemons. That's another instance where people believed somebody came up with some magic software that inherently solved a problem without having to fix the underlying software. The difference being PID file races aren't a comparable security issue because they usually already require local, root capabilities; and systemd's solution arguably makes such a race meaningfully more difficult to exploit. So a misinformed engineer's decision in that context is unlikely to be part of a chain of events leading to billions of dollars of valuation going up in smoke.

<comment><USER15> Why would you use pid files when you've got systemd available? All the process management can be done directly with children or cgroups for some crazy runaway processes.

<comment><USER16> Or, more generally:

> _Why would you use PID files when you 've got proper service management > available?_

as of course the flawed PID file mechanism was addressed long before systemd was even an idea.

cgroups do not solve the problem of "crazy runaway processes", by the way. cgroups are not jobs (in the Windows NT and VMS senses), and lack the functionality of a true job mechanism.

When systemd terminates all of the processes in a cgroup, it doesn't issue a single "terminate job" system call. There isn't such a thing. It sits in a loop in application-mode code repeatedly scanning all of the process IDs in the cgroup (by re-reading a file full of PID numbers) and sending signals to new processes that it hasn't seen before. There are several problems with this.

A first problem is that systemd can be slower than whatever is reaping child processes within the process group, leading to the termination signals being sent to completely the wrong process: one that just happened to re-use the same process ID in between systemd reading the cgroup's process list file and it actually getting around to sending signals to the list of processes. The order of events is: (1) systemd reads PID N from the cgroup's process ID list, then its timeslice happens to expire; (2) process N is scheduled and exits; (3) process N's reaper (its parent, or a sub-reaper) cleans up the zombie in the process table; (4) some vital part of the system is scheduled and spawns a new process re-using ID N; (5) systemd is finally scheduled, works down the list of PIDs that it read before, and merrily kills the new process.

A second problem is that a program that forks new processes quickly enough within the cgroup can keep systemd spinning for a long time, in theory indefinitely as long as suitable "weather" prevails, as at each loop iteration there will be one more process to kill. Note that this _does not_ have to be a fork bomb. It only has to fork enough that systemd sees _at least one more_ new process ID in the cgroup every time that it runs its loop.

A third problem is that systemd keeps process IDs of processes that it has already signalled in a set, to know which ones it won't try to send signals to again. It's possible that a process with ID N could be signalled, terminate, and be cleaned out of the process table by a reaper/parent; and then something within the cgroup fork a new process that is allocated the same process ID N once again. systemd will re-read the cgroup's process ID list, think that it has already signalled the new process, and not signal it at all.

These are addressed by a true "job" mechanism. But cgroups are not such.

<comment><USER13> You can also just freeze the whole cgroup, and then the kernel will cascade it to all tasks within said cgroup, and then you can do process management.

Most of what you complain about though is solved by duplicate pids not being assigned in short succession (which is generally true, though in reality is an implementation detail of linux which is not promised).

<comment><USER16> I was expecting someone to mention the freezer. Not only does systemd not use the freezer, but the systemd people explicitly describe it as having "broken inheritance semantics of the kernel logic". You'll have to ask them what they mean by that, but the freezer does not, for them, magically turn cgroups into a job mechanism either.

Which leads to another point. If you think that this is my complaint, you should read the systemd people on the subject over the years. They were rather expecting (version 2) cgroups to be a true job mechanism, and they've complained every time that it has once again turned out not to be.

Moreover: this is not to mention that Docker and others will manipulate the freeze status of control groups for their own purposes, and there is no real race-free mechanism for sharing this setting amongst multiple owners, such as an atomic read-and-update for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As they note, RunC is definitely a safer substrate for containers than fully- dressed Docker.

I assume that we have some OpenShift engineers in the house -- is v3 running directly on Docker and dropping capabilities, or does it run on RunC and then add them back as needed?

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're on the Cloud Foundry side of the PaaS fence, which I guess makes us the Montagues.

</comment><comment><USER18> Clickbait headline.

<comment><USER19> Also the actual headline and probably used tongue in cheek.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Project Atomic (mentioned at the bottom of the OP) looks super-handy.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Secure Your Containers with This One Weird Trick

tl;dr run SmartOS?

</comment><comment><USER21> so much talk about security but still the blog is served as http. SMH

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd find it a lot easier to believe this isn't a redhat FUD-job if the article listed the entire list of privileges and contrasted those that docker gives by default and those that require --privileged [1]. Also required would be meaningful discussion about how other defaults, such as networking, affect these capabilities.

>This one's easy. If you have this capability, you can bind to privileged ports (e.g., those below 1024).

Sure, it can bind to port 80 on a virtual network device that is unique to that docker container, _unless_ you give the container host network privileges.

[1] [https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#/runtime- privi...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#/runtime-privilege- and-linux-capabilities)

<comment><USER23> The article told you how to find the entire list of privileges. Just type `man 7 capabilities` or go here: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/capabilities.7.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/capabilities.7.html)

The `--privileged` flag is equivalent to giving your container all capabilities: [https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/97660c6ec55f45416cb2b2...](https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/97660c6ec55f45416cb2b2d4c116267864b62b65/daemon/exec_linux.go#L23)

I don't get what you mean by saying how networking affects capabilities. Because it doesn't?

<comment><USER22> The post chooses to emphasize the scary (ZOMG it allows port 22!) without the necessary information that the default networking mode is bridged, such that the container _wont_ be opening port 22 on the host. So the article implies that this _capability_ allows a security risk, but the default networking mitigates that risk.</comment></comment></comment>


Elite Dating Apps Threaten to Make America's Wealth Gap Worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-17/the-league-and-other-selective-dating-apps-may-worsen-inequality <comment><USER3> I can see the concern, but I'd place it way down the list of things that could make the wealth gap worse.

Debutante balls and other such classist dating practice have been around basically forever. I don't think digitizing them adds a particular new dimension of concern.

<comment><USER4> Came here to say that. I don't think it will worsen the current gap, dating has mostly been done among one's peer group, so using an app won't change anything.

<comment><USER5> This app is the manifestation of the social norms that already exist, not a catalyst for new norms.

<comment><USER6> The app can increase the degree to which the existing norms are realized rather than aspirational; to the extent that individual acheivement of the goals of the existing norm has adverse social consequences, that is rightfully a source of concern even if it involves nothing personally blameworthy and no change of norms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't help but think that this is really grasping for straws. Sure technically the headline may be correct...but there's nothing wrong with wanting to date someone in the same socioeconomic class as you. On top of that, the amount that this contributes to the actual gap is probably minuscule relative to the other big contributors that are more systemic and policy- oriented rather than cultural.

<comment><USER8> Especially so since many people on existing dating applications probably filter by similar criteria anyway.

<comment><USER9> Most dating apps filter by it too. If you are in the professional class, you will tend to be matched with other people in the professional class.

<comment><USER10> I absolutely do not find this the case in Tinder (or other obviously less 'filtered' and more niche platforms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, this is just the modern version of a process that has taken place since the beginning of time. It's called assortative mating. Basically, people tend to end up married to people who are of an equivalent class/quality/caliber. Now there is a dating app which augments the role of country clubs, private schools, and expensive neighborhoods in enabling the elite to find each other. NBD.

IMO, a much more troubling development is the way that the rise of college education in the 20th century has systematically pulled the cognitive elite out of most of the country and concentrated them in urban centers (where all the high paying jobs that demand elite cognition are located). Whereas the elites have always lived an existence far disconnected from the rest of us, now the upper middle class and lower middle class are similarly disconnected from each other.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Share of couples in which both partners have a college degree: now up to 15%

Wow I'm out of touch with the real world.

<comment><USER13> Outside of major cities, the rate drops substantially.

Also, many more women than men are college educated now, which is distorting dating in interesting ways, since most women (and some men) tend to want to date someone who is at least their equal with employment and/or education.

<comment><USER14> > Also, many more women than men are college educated now

No, not even close:

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational- attai...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment- of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/)

[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Err -- did you look at your graph? Your first link shows that 2017 was the first year that more women were educated then men....and your second link is from 2015, before the flip.

<comment><USER14> Of course I looked at the graph. Even though women earned more degrees than men in 2017, for nearly the entire history of the country, men earned substantially more college degrees than women. Thus, men currently hold significantly more than half of the college degrees right now. We're talking about prevalence, not incidence.

<comment><USER16> You are correct, but current college graduates (so 56% of them women) are in the "dating pool" much more so than the 60-year olds (where a higher percentage of men are educated, but not much dating going on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've learned to ignore news articles that talk about what _could_ or _might_ happen. That's not news, it's just speculation. The news is supposed to be things that _did_ happen.

 _Could_ elite dating apps exacerbate wealth inequality? Maybe. But people already segregate themselves by wealth pretty effectively. They would have to actually show that people who might have otherwise married someone of lower socioeconomic status didn't because of the app, and of course that's not available.

</comment><comment><USER18> Dating/marriage outside of your economic upbringing presents some difficult challenges that should not be trivialized. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to date someone that has a similar background to you. Relationships are much easier when you are with someone who share similar economic backgrounds and religious beliefs.

<comment><USER19> I agree completely. Been there, done that. Never again will I date someone from a a different socioeconomic class or who has any significant religious beliefs. I tried being open-minded and it was a disaster.

<comment><USER20> Was the issue the socioeconomic class or the religious beliefs?

I can see how different religious beliefs can be a very practical issue but it seems like socioeconomic class is a little less "dogmatic" and it would be easier to find a middle ground? That being said I can't really give life lessons here, I don't think I ever dated anybody outside of my "socioeconomic class", whatever that is.

<comment><USER19> Both, but the socioeconomic thing really killed it more than the religion. With religion, at least you can agree to disagree usually. But in a marriage, finances are shared to some extent, and you just can't get past that. When one partner is frugal and manages money carefully, and the other thinks "we're making all this money! why can't I spend it on xyz/tithe to my church/buy expensive gifts for my family/etc.?" the results won't be good.

<comment><USER18> I understand this scenario completely, but I was able to make it work with my wife (who grew up very poor). Ironically, many people that grow up poor seem to not realize that many people who have money tend to be frugal with it- that's it's not a sign of weakness to be frugal. My wife and I are on the same page now-a-days (I definitely learned some things from her as well), but it was a struggle for a while hence why I don't think it's good to trivialize in the name of social equality.

<comment><USER19> I tried too, but finally gave up. We just couldn't see eye-to-eye on it, and I am not willing to try again.

My new girlfriend comes from an entirely different culture geographically, but has extremely similar money-management practices as me, even though she didn't grow up in the same country (though it was also a rich first-world nation). There's challenges with her too, but finances aren't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Colleges themselves are a much bigger factor. If you go to an elitist college, you are much more likely to marry someone from that elitist college, and then to have a two-high-income household. It just seems inevitable, though - <USER2> want to date other people like themselves.

<comment><USER22> Yes - elite colleges, and top B-schools and the like, are often seen as part education, part networking...and part spouse-finding. For B-schools, more networking/signaling and spouse-finding than education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Elite dating apps are the absolute worst. I was invited to an Ivy League alum dating app, and I swear Mensa and /r/atheism on their worst days never came close to the amount of smug, self-satisfied posturing as I saw there. I don't even think there was a lot of actual dating going on, most people were just there to show off.

On the last of major socioeconomic problems in America, I really don't think "new apps for peacocking" is up there.

</comment><comment><USER24> I propose that the more wages stagnate and the COL increases, the more people are going to stick to dating and marrying people in their own socioeconomic class. I think there will be a threshold in which there is a clear choice to made between romance and lifestyle between two socioeconomic classes (barring the ultra rich). i.e., dating someone in a lower class than you incurs a higher cost that will have a significant impact on your financial plans (retirement, housing, edit: children, etc).

</comment><comment><USER25> I signed up for the "The League" a few months ago.

I appreciate that they added in options to be discrete, by excluding people at your employer or friends on facebook. Not that that kind of discretion was necessary, or worth the price.

As for results, well, imho they have been no better than tinder. Lots of flakes, and seemingly random matches. Funnily enough I met my current partner on OkCupid, which seems antiquated by modern dating app standards.

<comment><USER26> I feel like I hear more random success stories on OkCupid than anywhere else. It seems the commitment of swiping on <insert any of 20 apps here> is really thin. Not to mention that most people probably aren't looking to marry (or even date) someone from Tinder.

I'm curious about your experience. Do you feel that anything in particular made OkCupid more successful for you? I feel that the level of information / detail in profiles might help for a more successful match, but I haven't put in any time on the platform myself.

<comment><USER19> I met my current dating partner on OKcupid a couple years ago. I've tried Tinder and while I've had more matches on there, and got more dates from it (before I got serious with this girl), I think OKC is better for finding compatible people for the reasons you name: there's simply a lot more information and detail in the profiles. OKC makes it easy to weed out people who have incompatibilities because you can see this stuff in the profiles in also in the answers to the many questions. The only problem with OKC in my view is that Tinder and similar low-information phone apps have basically taken over, so it seems like the traditional sites like OKC are basically dying out from lack of users. Just like any social network, these sites depend on a "critical mass" of users to work well.

<comment><USER27> Maybe the audience for this was always smaller, but the niche of "find people who share interests with you" is under explored. FB cornered the social network market, but it was always deliberately the opposite of this: you only add people you already know.

I used to be a part of a social network which had more of an open-world policy, and I miss it.

<comment><USER19> Well, there is meetup.com for that: it's all about local groups organized around common interests. It's not meant for dating specifically (though there are singles' groups), but many people do say a good way to meet dating partners is to attend events that you have an interest in so you might meet someone who shares that interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have two issues with this article.

First, aren't people going to be looking to pair up with someone in the same socioeconomic class anyway? That's what we've mostly been doing over the course of history. That an app is based on this is not surprising. And I have a hard time believe apps perpetuate what we are already doing or exacerbate it.

The second is the graph in the middle regarding distance from city center and population with a degree. Haven't we, in general, been getting more degrees since the points of comparison? How is this, again not already distributed according to pre-existing trends? The curve also does not change significantly besides being shifted up (corresponding a generally high rate of university degrees). Is there a actually significant shift happening with those without college degrees with regard to distance from city center? I think not, or they would have showed it and it would have been more convincing.

</comment><comment><USER29> So if we date someone of equal earning potential we make the wealth gap worse...

If we date someone from a different economic class then one party is prone to abuse that power imbalance and take advantage...

Sounds like what we all need is an app that just randomly assigns partners to fuck each other.

 _It 's really the only fair thing to do... _

Sign up for the Beta at www.sex-with-randos.com.

<comment><USER19> >If we date someone from a different economic class then one party is prone to abuse that power imbalance and take advantage...

Yep, been there, done that. It isn't even always intentional, it's just that when someone from a very different economic background, and who has a very different approach to handling finances, marries someone who has high earning potential, I've found they just can't reconcile these very different viewpoints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> On a societal level, yes it's bad when romance stratifies along classist lines, not only because people miss out on potential compatible partners, but also because it increases inequality and cements generational wealth/prestige.

On an individual level, it's definitely a good idea if you're wealthy. Since so many things correlate so well with wealth, or have wealth as a prerequisite, it could highly reduce someone's signal-noise ratio if they're looking for someone with those traits. For example, if you're an entrepreneur, or an amateur tennis player, or someone trying to play the corporate ladder climbing game like the example in the article, and you want to find someone similar, you'll have much more success finding someone similar to you among wealthy people, even though wealth is not necessarily a prerequisite to any of those things.

<comment><USER6> > On a societal level, yes it's bad when romance stratifies along classist > lines

I disagree. It's bad when the society has poor mechanisms for distribution of the gains of economy, and with certain deficiencies the magnitude of the impact will be exacerbated by wealth-stratified life partner selection, independent of the degree to which this associated with romance. However I partner selection _is not th source of the harm_ , it's a factor which aggravates the impact of some actual distributional defects if they are present.

<comment><USER30> If class-based partner selection is not the source of the harm, but exacerbates the harm of inequality, how is it preferable to the alternative? If something is on fire, I would generally say it's "bad" to add fuel to it, hence my opinion. Of course I agree that this is more of an emergent effect of the classist society we inhabit than a cause of it, but most of the reasons that class-based partner selection can be "good" are precisely due to class inequalities in the first place.

<comment><USER31> "Classist society" is instinctive to all animals, it's just how mating and evolution works. I don't think we should, or are even able to, curb class- based partner selection to try and reduce wealth and income inequality.

My preference would be to strive make sure that all people have the opportunity for a quality education and upbringing, by ways of guaranteeing shelter, quality food, and work protections to allow parents to spend time with children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Elites are studiously silent about the familial basis of their relative success. Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage for the upper tier ... amplified by the insistence that family formation is ... an obstacle to autonomy." \- Patrick Deneen

Most of the upper crust finds marital/family stability to be very necessary to success, while many cultural currents try to express that its not a big deal (or that it is better to be a forever bachelor and forever child). Many of the upper crust probably try to downplay it too.

Think of how even the Clintons and Weiners[1] and Trumps are together _and stay together_ , for instance.

The problem isn't elite dating apps though, the problem is the common man and woman's perception and treatment of marriages/families. Elite dating apps are just signaling out in the open something that the elite have known for a very long time. The big advantage that the elite have here is recognizing the importance.

[1] wiki says:

> Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner withdrew their divorce case from court in > January 2018, claiming they did so in order to spare their six year-old son > further embarrassment.

The claim is one thing, but the truth is that in spite of his terrible flaws/nature/whatever, they both agreed they still have work to do, be it ambition or family.

<comment><USER33> > "Elites are studiously silent about the familial basis of their relative > success. Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage for the > upper tier ... amplified by the insistence that family formation is ... an > obstacle to autonomy." \- Patrick Deneen

Divorce destroys wealth. Wealthy people understand that marrying partnering is a partnership which a sprinkle of romantic interest. Middle class and below is fixated on "finding the one" who will complete them and with whom he or she can be happy together in a crappy studio apartment without realizing that the crappy studio apartment they are going to be stuck in because "love conquers all" is going to seriously negatively affect their relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Ladies, you asked for quality gentlemen: Men are verified grads of top > universities

So was the "quality gentleman" that sexually harassed a friend of mine.

Get an OKCupid account, and actually answer the questions. You'll get a list of people that are actually compatible with your values and beliefs. It's a far better way to date than any system that's based on superficial crap.

People on OKC actually took the time to sit down and think about their relationship goals. You shouldn't be surprised that people that are good at communicating goals generally tend to be good at accomplishing other goals too. So you end up with a better way to find goal-oriented people like that (if that's your thing) than this approach would ever provide anyways.

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I the only one who sees the silver lining in this? I don't want to date rich people.

<comment><USER36> For that reason? Yeah probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I doubt it.

Water finds its own level.

Most people date/marry someones equally attractive, from an equal class, with equal education. That's fairly standard and always has been, which is why most people marry someone from their college, a job, church, or some other shared experience. It's the shared experience that typically brings people together, and keeps them together.

And of course there are many cultures around the world with arranged marriages, and those almost always specifically aim to match equals from the same class background (or higher).

<comment><USER6> > Most people date/marry someones equally attractive, from an equal class, > with equal education.

Historically, the second has been strongly true, the first much less so, and the last basically false, though somewhat less untrue if you read "equal" as "in a roughly similar point on the distribution for their gender".

> And of course there are many cultures around the world with arranged > marriages, and those almost always specifically aim to match equals from the > same class background (or higher).

If someone is getting higher, the other partner is getting lower. There is a necessary symmetry there.

<comment><USER31> Since women weren't typically attend higher schooling until very recently, it doesn't make sense to compare it historically. I've seen people go higher and lower within their class, but not really go from one class to another, unless the person is supermodel worthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is silly. Wealth inequality is a serious concern, but implying that wealthy people dating other wealthy people is making it worse is ridiculous. People can date whoever they want, it makes progressive movements look terrible if you push the notion that there must be economic balance among all relationships...

</comment><comment><USER38> This is an ad for the elite dating sites. It's on bloomberg, for Christ sake. Their target market is elites.

<comment><USER39> This. And it's written in a cancerous SEO-advertising prose, spelling out "The League" verbatim once every paragraph.

> But the med student says he prefers Tinder, a site with a reputation for > facilitating hookups, and the League.

That suffixed ", and the League".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Doubt it. More than anything I believe this caters to a population who enjoys the feeling of being "exclusive" or "elite". Whatever, if someone is buying someone will sell.

</comment><comment><USER41> ...no, they don't. Or at least not in the way that this article suggests.

First, we should divide "dating" into two markets -- one for sex and one for long-term relationships.

In my experience, existing dating apps overwhelmingly cater to the sex market. Even the ones supposedly designed to set up professionals are used by both genders to find quality people for quick flings. There IS massive "inequality" in the sex market -- women overwhelmingly judge men by a Pareto distribution, as evidenced by multiple studies (that I can cite upon request) -- but the fact that the average woman is uninterested in the average man doesn't stir within me a call for equitable distribution of sex partners.

Then there's the long-term relationship market, which I admittedly don't know has been successfully addressed by any app. OKCupid's premise was that it would set up compatible people for long-term relationships, but I think OKC is out of vogue now. This is the void that apps like The League are trying to fill, I guess, though I'm baffled as to their appeal.

For women (or either gender that wants to secure long-term commitment from a high-status, high-income mate), The League sort of makes sense. When you're done with your Tinder carousel and want to move on to a relationship, here's a pool of wealthy, connected men whose bank accounts suit your lifestyle aspirations. That's not a pitch that will inspire lust, but at least it's more palatable than admitting to being a sugar baby.

For men, though... why would you want The League? Even if you're an unattractive guy, making what amounts to a Tinder profile for your bank account is just a terrible idea. If you're attractive enough, you can just have sex via Tinder. If you want to pay for sex, there are existing options. If you want someone to love... apps that brag "half of its active members earn more than $500,000" and its kin are frankly not going to provide that.

\- - - - -

This article conflates two important ideas without really addressing either. There IS a very real, accelerating trend of what's called "assortive mating," where highly intelligent people move out of Nowhere, Kentucky to major cities where they meet spouses in line with their intelligence and success. These successful couples have more successful children, who then mate with other successful children, and so on. The less successful people are left behind, mate with other less successful people, and have less successful children who mate with other left behind children. This brain drain is both international and intranational.

Then you have the question of mating strategies, particularly the (traditionally female) interest in securing long-term commitment. The recent book "Date-onomics" did a decent job describing the massive demographic challenge facing educated women in this market -- educated women overwhelmingly desire more successful men, but men generally don't care about their mates' education or status. In fact, as men prefer to date younger women, aging women face the twin challenges of narrowing interest and increasing competition (due to population growth or cultural differentials like age gaps). The League and its kind deserve some respect for nakedly addressing these mating strategies -- men offer up their status and wealth, and women presumably only need to be young and attractive.

Dating apps probably DO accelerate assortive mating. Women are particularly sensitive toward status in men, especially educational attainment. (At least in the long-term relationship market, not necessarily in the sex market.) So ideas like The League and its competitors aren't necessarily a bad idea -- if you can market it as "OKCupid for successful people" rather than "Saudi prince seeking Instagram model." As far as I can tell though, anyone mature enough to want a long-term relationship is not in the douchey Vegas-ish market that The League is targeting. Anyone tasteless enough to want The League is probably more interested in its clique than its offerings. And that leaves wide open the potential market of "successful professionals who desire other successful professionals for long-term commitment without having to sort through the proletariat."

</comment><comment><USER42> There are a lot of things making the wealth gap worse, dating apps catering to the wealthy is a symptom, not a cause.

<comment><USER43> My sense is that this article is submarine PR, but I can't quite discern which of the companies mentioned commissioned it.</comment></comment>


Sony says PS 3 hacker Geohot has fled to South America - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/23/sony-says-ps-3-hacker-geohot-has-fled-to-south-america

<comment><USER2> His attorney says:

Hotz's attorney, Stewart Kellar, told Threat Level and IGN that Hotz has not fled to South America and that the missing components have been provided to Sony.

Its just Sony trying to declare him guilty in public.

He's on vacation: <http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/03/fearmongering.html>

<comment><USER3> Ugh. Fuck Sony - I'm used to anti-hacker attitudes from companies but this takes it to a new level. Not only have they decided to sue someone for doing something entirely reasonable to his own hardware (this after Sony _retroactively_ removed _advertised_ features), they are running a dirty campaign of defamation and mud-slinging.

I'm selling my PS3, or at the very least throwing it in the back corner of my closet. Sadly, this isn't as selfless of a move as it ought to be - the PS3 is already a console that the industry whizzed right on by and is literally collecting dust in my living room. Good riddance.

<comment><USER2> I stopped buying overpriced Sony tech sometime ago, about 10 years ago. After I bought a Vaio from them and they couldn't even provide proper drivers for it on their website. How difficult is it for a company to provide some drivers on their own website? When it came to deciding between a PS3 or XBox, we bought a Xbox.

My Sony purchases since then have been some CDRs (on sale) and an auto time setting alarm clock (couldn't find any other, and I need one that day).

<comment><USER4> These driver problems on laptops aren't uncommon, specially regarding graphics card drivers.

<comment><USER2> Never had any problems with Toshiba laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it fantastic how a company can sue someone for using something that he _bought_ in a way that was not intended by the company? This make 'ownership' kind of a funny thing since Sony still has rights on a product even if it does not own it any more (you bought it!).

I know that some other countries (e.g. Germany) allow anyone to do whatever he likes with something he bought as long as he does not re-sell it. But if he bought it, it belongs to him, and he is free to do with it whatever he wants-- be that using it as intended, destroying it, or hacking it.

What if Sony would declare it illegal to destroy your Play Station? Would they be able to sue you for throwing it out a window? Would they be able to sue you for indadvertedly breaking it during a power surge?

Seriously, this is very close to what is happening to Hotz right now. US law is fucked up!

<comment><USER6> Didn't he distribute his tools to others though, and isn't that what they are going after him for? If he said he hacked his PS3 but didn't tell anyone.. I don't think they would have a case.

<comment><USER5> But that is the point: He _told_ others, but he did only do it to his own stuff and he did not sell or otherwise distribute hacked PS3s. Also, he only told them how to run Linux, not how to play pirated games.

How is anyone supposed to do security research if one is not allowed to hack stuff?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it interesting that they need his hard drive or any equipment as proof that he did something illegal. At this point is it just Sony making stuff up about what he did before they have all the facts?

Protip: If your equipment is at risk being seized by the cops, feed it to tumblbeasts for proper disposal.

<comment><USER8> best to ignore that protip or face horrible consequences.

anyway, my understanding is that the lawsuit is still stuck at jurisdictional discovery, not full-on, let's find out if you did something naughty discovery. Which means they're looking for evidence of links to California (such as having a PSN account, which is a contract that, I think, claims Cali as jurisdiction) so they can sue him there, not in new jersey.

<comment><USER9> >best to ignore that protip or face horrible consequences.

I suppose it would depend on what was on it.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I would ignore that protip, instead of taking you to jail they would take you to the Mental Hospital for trying to feed something imaginary. If indeed Tumbleasts are imaginary. I still might not be convinced they are NOT real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it understand how a company that released some of the most creative advertising of the past decade (Sony Bravia adverts) could simultaneously be so PR-self-destructive.

Is the leadership of top companies really so blissfully unaware of the impact of social news?

</comment><comment><USER11> We had that "news" several times already (i.e. it's a dupe of a dupe by now) and - as commented here again, it seems to be blatantly wrong/false.

The linked article differs with every submission, but always repeats the "that guys seems to have fled" thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sony has every right to terminate the guy's PSN account if he turns out to have violated the user agreement.

<comment><USER13> I think it's gotten to the point that it's about a little more than Sony just disabling his PSN account.</comment></comment>


America's next president had better believe in restoring liberty - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/29/2016-presidential-race-surveillance-liberty

<comment><USER2> We better be really careful with the next one, unless we want to get "scammed" again by someone who just promises what we want to hear in a very credible way, and then does more of the same.

If such a candidate even exists at the next elections, I'd assume the whole government and all the traditional media will be against him and try to make him seem like a crazy person (much like they did with Ron Paul).</comment>


'The graveyard of the Earth': inside City 40, Russia's deadly nuclear secret - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/20/graveyard-earth-inside-city-40-ozersk-russia-deadly-secret-nuclear <comment><AUTHOR> After many years of dumping radioactive material and accidents equivalent to several Chernobyls, the locals _just wish to be left alone to live in "peace". They are happy in their fenced-in paradise._ because of the privileges they receive for living in the city.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk%2C_Chelyabinsk_Oblast#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk%2C_Chelyabinsk_Oblast#Radioactive_contamination_and_the_1957_disaster)</comment>