Valley VCs Sit on Cash, Forcing Startups to Dial Back Ambition - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-09/more-venture-investors-are-sitting-on-the-sidelines <comment><USER2> It's really weird how this article tries to frame the situation. It's almost like the startups feel entitled to the funding.

The point of funding should really be to enable faster growth than they might otherwise have been able to achieve, but if a business can't at least survive without huge influxes of investments then is it really a business that they should be investing in in the first place?

<comment><USER3> Here's the somewhat ironic "catch 22" to the whole thing:

If you're a startup and you _don 't_ take VC funding, then you have the luxury of simply enjoying organic growth and funding expansion by re-investing profits into the company. Well, as long as you can do that in the face of competitive pressure. Strictly speaking, unless it's a "network effect" situation like a social network, you probably don't _need_ to grow fast.

Unless you take VC money. Then, the simple act of taking their money now means there _is_ pressure to grow fast, but it comes from the investors and not from the market per-se. And this is because VC funds are time-boxed and, by definition, have to generate whatever return they're going to generate by a fixed point in time. And the older a fund is (eg, the nearer it is to the end of it's life) the greater the pressure.

This is something I think more entrepreneurs should think long and hard about. Don't raise VC money just for the sake of doing it. Even if you can. Do it IF and only if it's the only (or at least surest) way to reach your goals. And always remember that the VC's interests do _not_ necessarily align with the founders (at least not 100% so).

<comment><USER4> > _unless it 's a "network effect" situation like a social network, you > probably don't need to grow fast._

Uber seems like a weird example of this. It was said (and remains said) that they're operating in a winner-take-all space, and they expanded as if they were a social network.

Despite the aggressive expansion and marketing, a majority of people I know in the Bay Area now use Lyft exculsively. The last few times I've said "I'll get an Uber," somebody's actually paused and said "Wait, why don't we take Lyft?" I'm not even sure why. When asked, they just reply that they don't like Uber for some non-specific reason.

They're expanding around the world and into new products and concepts, but haven't even seemed to nail down a loyal customer base on their home turf. Anecdotally speaking.

<comment><USER5> Can anyone make a rational argument why uber-type companies are winner takes all?

<comment><USER6> The network effects come from the driver side of the market. If you have all the drivers, then you have the quickest pick-up/most availability which means best passenger experience and then most customers. This in turn means best utilization for drivers, so you get more drivers etc etc etc.

<comment><USER7> Network effect usually implies some kind of lock-in. Unless Uber is willing to go exclusive and qualify the drivers as employees, getting more drivers out on the road also means getting more Lyft and Gett drivers on the road, as most will just have multiple apps running.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to switch between apps. I've asked all my drivers the same question, and they all say that it's more trouble than it's worth because at least in the Bay Area, there work is constant as an Uber driver.

<comment><USER9> I feel like almost every über I see has a lyft sticker too. The UX of switching apps seems like a minor inconvenience given that most of them use waze to navigate anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been in tech only 6 years and I am already bored of these cycles of VCs becoming frenetically exuberant followed by cautious times. Their advice to startups changes depending on what time it is. It's all so predictable yet people are surprised every time. Any entrepreneur building a business factors these in and approaches fund raising based on that knowledge. I don't even know the point of these articles any more.

<comment><USER11> Well as the saying goes, "It is always new to someone." :-) And that is largely true. Here in the second decade of the 21st century people are getting funded who were blissfully unaware children in the dot com crash, or the semi- conductor recession, or the great social is the new webvan pullback.

A publication can get a lot of clicks and buzz from folks for who it is new, and so they report it as new.

But the articles are all part of the system which trains and educates entrepreneurs. It provides examples and stories of people who bring to market real solutions, those who bring "fad" solutions, and those essentially bring "me too" type solutions. This system also trains investors, where each cycle has a few winners which spawns some additional limited partners (or general partners) in various VC firms who also look at how their money is spent and where its going.

As much as it would be great, there isn't really a course of study you can take that will teach you this stuff, you kind of have to live through a cycle or two, absorbing all the experience you can. If you want to be able to really internalize and understand the stuff that someone like Danielle Morrill is talking about you need context, and the context comes from experience both in the good times and the bad times.

So to answer your question about the point of these articles, it is the same reason they teach freshman Calculus or Composition. Everyone needs to know this stuff and every year there are new people trying to learn it. The message that value is always appreciated over hype is pretty timeless but sometimes it takes a couple of cycles to really understand and distinguish between the two.

<comment><USER12> This is really a great explanation.

Earlier today I gave a friend a 5min primer on venture funding. After we'd parted ways and I walked back to my office I had that phrase "you can't teach some of this stuff" rolling around in my head for a while. You can't teach all of it but you have to get people started with something.

It's evolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In other news, "Suits Make a Comeback!"[0].

Investors can't just sit on money. They have to get returns, and that means that they have to put capital to work.

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER14> I don't get how this article is related to the essay you linked to. Do you mean that this article is likely a PR piece? Who would be paying for it?

<comment><USER15> Silicon Valley Bank.

"SVB counts among its customers 65 percent of U.S. VC firms and half of all VC-backed companies."

That's the only complimentary sentence about any of the firms mentioned in the article. It's also a bit out of place - the article reads just fine without it, and that information isn't needed to make the article's point.

Plus, the tags at the bottom are "Silicon Valley Bank" and "Money".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Valley VCs Sit on Cash, Forcing Startups to Dial Back Bullshit

FTFY

<comment><USER17> This is amusing accurate. Wayyy too many startups, even YC funded ones, have products that are difficult to profit on, or worse, don't really have a market in the first place.

For every "next Uber or Airbnb," there's hundreds of Shutdownifys.

<comment><USER18> Yeah I never understood the idea around "we'll figure out monetization later!". Yeah maybe you will but you're operating a business. Shouldn't you, I don't know, have a good idea or 3 to do that out of the gate?

Startup culture is weird sometimes.

<comment><USER19> A common assumption, which is sometimes even right, is that getting a significant number of users is harder than monetization. Put differently, your startup is most likely to fail (in this view) because it doesn't produce something that anyone wants to use, not even for free. So the main goal up front should be to figure out how to make something people will use, and then figure out how to reach them. Succeeding at that, but then failing to monetize the product, is a real failure mode too, of course. But many VCs are betting that failing to get users at all is the biggest early risk, and that it's easier to solve monetization later (if you ever get users) than it is to work on the monetization plan up front, and then later try to solve the but-we- have-no-users problem.

Part of this makes more sense if you're looking at it from the perspective of a VC betting on 100 companies, than from the perspective of a single company. The funnel they're looking for is: some subset of these companies will get a ton of users (hundreds of thousands, maybe millions), then a subset of those will be wildly profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In theory this won't affect the decision making process of top-tier VCs. A good invesment is a good investment regardless of the prevailing funding climate.

In practice, I'm guessing if the LPs get cold feet, then VCs will be forced to triage their funding decisions accordingly. How much this matters given the sheer size of some funds, I'm not sure.

<comment><USER10> Agreed -> a good investment is a good investment regardless. The best startups often have raised in the worst of times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Mike Volpi quote is curious:

"Right now, we don't really know what things are worth...When you don't know what something's worth, you don't know whether you are getting a good deal or a bad deal, so the obvious thing to do is, not much."

When you invest in startups (with the exception of late-stage, pre-IPO investing) you never really know what things are worth. The business model of VCs is to make a bunch of high-risk bets, most of which will fail, in order to get a couple of big winners. What's really happening is that VCs aren't willing to invest at valuations that companies expect based on recent history. This is similar to housing bust, when home owners refused to sell because they continued to believe that their homes were worth what they were before the financial crisis.

<comment><USER22> Came here to say this. It's a copout. They didn't know what things are worth a year ago either, particularly early stage cos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wait, what? VCs' valuation of _their_ money exceeds their faith in your "unicorn" startup idea? Ohhhhhh nooooooooooo

</comment><comment><USER24> If we look at this from a risk-reward perspective and define 10 as the maximum reward for the maximum amount of risk then we have the entrepreneur who is a 10 for obvious reasons, an Angel who invests in the entrepreneur (maybe not the idea really because it might pivot a few times) maybe at an 8, then VCs at 7, bigger institutional investors at 5, and so on and so forth until the average teacher in Michigan who's pension allocates .001% of AUMs to VC at maybe .5 it becomes clear that if that structure becomes unbalanced the overall value creation cycle starts to become disfigured. In other words everyone tends to forget what's really important. For example if an entrepreneur doesn't feel that there is a great deal of risk to their personal livelihood as well as a great deal of reward for taking that risk and an inherent difficulty of having to earn every single cent (i.e. if they assume they can find easy money) then they are probably less likely to dig as deep as they can to come up with ingenious solutions to problems which is really the core of the whole tech startup scene. And then we can back trace that all the way back to the teacher in Michigan who might think that they are better off giving their money directly to someone who is a "VC" in SV. Basically the whole risk-reward equation becomes unbalanced. As a result when S#$$ hits the fan for them, everyone who doesn't really understand that model/equation will slow down. But my theory is that the ones that actually stick to the fundamental rules will keep plugging along with a small grin on their faces because they are glad that they are the ones who actually start to lead again and create value with a lot less BS!

</comment><comment><USER25> Or they could diversify and invest in more projects with smaller sums, couldn't they? Would probably require more people to manage the increase of investments.

<comment><USER26> Valuations are out of whack. They are smarter to sit back and let the unsustainable ventures die out and then invest in the viable ones after things level out.

I mean, even a touch screen toaster that costs $1,500 got invested in. Who is going to pay $1500 for a touch screen toaster? [http://www.juneoven.com](http://www.juneoven.com)

<comment><USER27> It will sell. It's just the beginning of the IoT revolution.

<comment><USER28> I took a look and it is very nice, but $1500 for a toaster oven? Holy shit no.

<comment><USER29> I've never seen a countertop oven, except as a "feature" of an expensive microwave. As I understand it, results for baking especially would be poor, as the oven has less air mass and less heat capacity.

(At least, that's the reason my mum gave for not using the feature on her fancy microwave. She used to be a professional cook.)

<comment><USER30> Wait, really? Never one of these? [http://www.amazon.com/Better-Chef-Toaster- Broiler--Stainless...](http://www.amazon.com/Better-Chef-Toaster-Broiler-- Stainless/dp/B00PBC14KM/)

Besides the price, the low thermal mass is a selling point -- throw a couple chocolate chip cookies in there and you don't heat up the entire house in the middle of summer just for a fresh baked treat.

<comment><USER29> I forgot to say I've lived mostly in the UK. A quick search shows a couple of models are available, but that's a tiny selection compared to most appliances, and they're being sold at a very low budget shop.

Britain doesn't really have snack food like America. I've never thought to warm up a cookie, and without air conditioning I doubt I'd want a warm snack in the summer. Ice cream!

Though thinking about it, the most common thing to serve during the day as a snack is cake. There's a decent variety here (remove "vegan" and anything that says "salted"): [http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/category/dishtype/cakes-t...](http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/category/dishtype/cakes- tea-time-treats/)

(Or, perhaps with smaller houses on average people don't want to use up the space for one, and wealthier people with space don't want to heat up processed foods.)

Most British people own a toaster. Do Americans? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toaster)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Investors market. Tighter conditions, preferences, ratchets.

<comment><USER32> Words. Punctuation, plural nouns, haiku.

<comment><USER33> This. Absolutely made my day! Thanks.

<comment><USER34> Agreed. I can't explain why I found it so hilarious. But I cracked up pretty hard at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems like these VC cycles are akin to a natural selection process for startups. Those with legitimate market fit and pricing schemes will have the highest fitness and thus survive; new startups will (hopefully although historically not so much) attempt to copy a similarly sustainable architecture. So in essence these cycles are beneficial to startup market health

</comment><comment><USER36> I think it is interesting that this article is critical of valuations changing over such large time spans when the public stock market often marks up and down stocks by a significant amount on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER37> >For most firms this is a pause, a reset —not a meltdown

Well, isn't that just a nicer way to put this?

</comment><comment><USER38> Their service here in Washington, D.C. is awful. I used to love Uber, evangelized it to friends, was even the first to show Sanju Bansal how it worked when we were at a gala. Everyone else was fumbling for their S-Class keys while our twin black Navigator vehicles proceeded to pick us up at the entrance. That, to me, was the Zenith of Uber. The entire VC set of the city was waiting for cars and drivers gridlocked in the garage and lot, while some kid with an app summoned two fully appointed SUVs as if from nowhere. I wore Uber shades, tried the various promotions. I was thrilled, absolutely certain that they were one partnership away from Google to automate city transport and leapfrog our ailing transport grid. Then something changed. The lines between Uber and UberX blurred, and UberX drivers changed from well-dressed folks owner-operating, or working for car fleets, to guys with Jack Daniels hats, ponytails, and (this is literal) body odor. Uber decreased in quality, both in fleet and drivers. Ubers used to be spit-polished tire-black shined towncars, and the drivers were excellent. Never an open door missed, a bottle of water offered, mints stocked, radio preference, and an AC at a comfortable temperature, which the driver would immediately offers to adjust. It wasn't just the network that made Uber. It was the service. It literally outclassed the transportation of millionaires, with service options of the Four Seasons at the price of a Motel 6. The service has now become so bad, that power users are like sailors following the rats off a sinking ship. Then it's disclosed that one of the main showrunners has been spending all his time on some fucking branding project? And when it's finally released, the material he produced looks like it was created by a sentient bag of cocaine. "We're particles that unite to form atoms, to something... something... interaction between meatspace and cyberspace.... unity, and particles and shit. Yo, you gonna hit that?" Are you serious? In summation: No moat, no network effect. It was nice of you to pave the way for self-driving car fleets, but unless you reorganize management from the bottom of the floor up, your balloon's about to deflate faster than Napster. Peace guys. *Full disclaimer: I did turn down a second round interview at Uber due to their policies regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act. My consulting rate is $500/hr, and I'd consider fixing this mess with the ADA for half that. I wish I had the opportunity to speak to your board for five minutes about the damage their ADA policies are causing. Imagine a girl, unable to move unassisted, alone in the snow, as her driver throws her wheelchair to the curb screaming at how he doesn't accept people "like her."

<comment><USER39> Quality of Uber in markets outside of NYC (where you need TLC car and thus mostly just get professional livery drivers) is really appallingly bad.</comment></comment>


Cell size and scale - <AUTHOR> http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

<comment><USER2> That zoom effect is great. It reminds me of the ZUI (zooming user interface) described in Jef Raskin's book, The Humane Interface. Oh how I wish someone would build a desktop OS with a ZUI.

<comment><USER3> Also reminds me of Seadragon from Microsoft Research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A carbon atom is bigger than a water molecule? Interesting.

Speaking of the carbon atom, there is no way that what seems to be its nucleus is even _remotely_ to scale.

<comment><USER5> Best I can tell, they have it wrong. They might be interpreting size differently than I expect but Carbon should be around 220pm and Water around 310pm.

Rough estimates for diameter are based on molecular mass and density; density being variable. I'm curious how they did their calculations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if it's actually wrong, but rather a function of how they draw atoms versus molecules.

Diameter is a funny concept for atoms and molecules because electrons orbit at different distances around the nucleus probabilistically. The depiction of this carbon atom I think represents this, with the lighter color areas denoting areas of lower probability.

However, drawing such a diagram for a molecule isn't very pretty, because the orbitals for each atom in the molecule overlap. They probably drew the water molecule using intermolecular distances, and then filled in the distances so that each atom was a sphere. In actuality the electrons are found with some probability outside this area.

<comment><USER5> If they're drawing Carbon with respect to its orbitals then they are completely wrong.

Carbon has both S and P orbitals whereas water has hybridized orbitals. This would mean both their carbon and water are drawn incorrectly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, as I look at carbon more closely, that's exactly what they're drawing. The inner circle (s orbital) has two yellow dots (electrons) on it, and the outer circle (p orbital) has 4 yellow dots. It does look like they totally ripped off this lady's drawing though: [http://www.dorlingkindersley- uk.co.uk/nf/ClipArt/Image/0,,_1...](http://www.dorlingkindersley- uk.co.uk/nf/ClipArt/Image/0,,_1584216,00.html)

Clearly they aren't drawing the orbitals for water, which I already stated.

But you're right, carbon is probably too big. Wolfram alpha says the diameter of carbon is 134pm, and we all know WA is right about everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, I actually submitted feedback about this on the site. Their response:

"Thanks for your response to our website.

Depicting the size of atoms definitely has its challenges. We've been getting a lot of comments and feedback about this.

The radius of a carbon atom is not a measure of the size of its electron cloud, but rather the distance between the nuclei of two adjacent atoms. See <http://www.chemguide.co.uk/atoms/properties/atradius.html> The size of the carbon atom in our activity is based on its van der Waals radius (170 pm), not the covalent or ionic radius (around 77 pm). See <http://www.webelements.com/carbon/atom_sizes.html>

The sizes of the atoms in the water molecule have been adjusted to make them consistent with other atoms depicted in the activity, although the overall diameter of the molecule is the same.

Sincerely,

Sheila Avery Genetic Science Learning Center"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't know that chromosomes are so big. The photoreceptor (or sperm, for that matter) seems way too small to fit 46 (23). What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> DNA only exists in the form of chromosomes at particular parts of a cell's life (namely, cell division) and is a highly organized structure consisting of DNA and of proteins.

Neither sperm nor photoreceptors undergo cell division, so for all its existence its DNA exists in an undifferentiated mass inside the cell. DNA is long, but skinny, so it compacts quite nicely.

<comment><USER6> Cool. But that also means that photoreceptor cells and sperm divide from cells quite unlike themselves, right? Or does that work differently?

<comment><USER5> Stem cells are totipotent and can give rise to any type of specialized cell in your body. Cell signaling induces horribly complex signaling pathways that lead to profound changes in transcription of that cell's DNA.

As an embryo, your gonads start in your chest and, through signals from your brain, end up in your pelvic region.

Erythrocytes (Red blood cells) are a great example of specialization. Before they become erythrocytes they have a nucleus. Their nucleus is ejected, their shape completely changes from spherical to flat-with-a-dimple and they are not a red blood cell. Obviously, erythrocytes cannot divide.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the explanation!

<comment><USER5> Cells are great. You're welcome.

<comment><USER7> No wonder you, amoeba, think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's like a choose-your-own-adventure version of the Eames Brothers' "Powers of Ten" movie!</comment>


Schilling says collapse of 38 Studios cost him baseball fortune - <AUTHOR> http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/baseball/mlb/06/22/curt-schilling-video-game-company.ap/index.html

<comment><USER2> Put a bunch of money into a high risk endeavor such as an MMO and you might lose it all. Even absent the government loan situation and even if they did launch, he was statistically unlikely to recoup that money.

Hard to feel too bad for the guy, at least he can easily get a cush analyst job on TV, make tens of thousands doing speaking engagements or whatever other opportunities his fame still allows. He's still a lot better off than the grunt employees who are currently in the midst of a creditor money grab and who just relocated to a place without many alternative options for their industry.</comment>


Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay - <AUTHOR> http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay <comment><AUTHOR> I am sure most of the readers have heard about Peter Thiel's class on Entrepreneurship at Stanford. I think most people have also read Paul Graham's article on startup ideas.

This class from Peter Thiel provides some more thoughts on how to pick a startup idea.</comment>


Supermicro hardware weaknesses let researchers backdoor an IBM cloud server - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/supermicro-hardware-weaknesses-let-researchers-backdoor-an-ibm-cloud-server/ <comment><USER2> There's a good talk on securing bare metal cloud servers against such attacks, that was given at B-Sides in Portland, by two respected security people who worked on securing bare metal cloud infrastructure for one cloud provider: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEVVRkd- wPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEVVRkd-wPM)

Boiled down it comes to: Trust absolutely nothing. When a customer finishes with a server, wipe absolutely everything, re-flash every single bit of firmware on every single device in the machine, and _don 't_ use the standard flashing mechanisms to do so. It's worth a listen/watch.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _This indicated that the servers ' BMC firmware was not re-flashed during > the server reclamation process._

I'm not surprised. Unless you pay for their "enterprisey" datacenter management products (which are still relatively new), it's a PITA to perform BIOS and BMC firmware updates. Additionally, Supermicro specifically recommends that you _DO NOT_ flash the firmware unless you are experiencing issues that a new version is suppose to fix -- unlike pretty much every other vendor (like Dell, who makes it fairly easy to do so).

<comment><USER4> Flashing the Supermicro BMC is so easy and reliable that I used to do it frequently.

Flashing the Supermicro BIOS, yeah, that's a disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could someone speak to the write endurance of BMC flash, vs whatever flash BIOS/UEFI lives in, vs NVRAM where now certain boot parameters are stored for persistence? Is it a total non-concern? It's not a user replaceable part.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a bit shocking that the people who develop the firmware for these embedded computers is not more concerned with their security. I understand you are not supposed to attach them to untrusted networks, but can we really call any network trusted these days?

Do people still teach about the Maginot Line in schools?

<comment><USER7> >Do people still teach about the Maginot Line in schools?

No.

There are plenty of other opportunities to teach the value of making your adversary (be that adversary man made or natural) work every step of the way and they are missed too. Nobody (for large values of "nobody") gets taught about the value of layered or redundant systems until college and those that do get taught it in college usually only touch on it in their mandatory ethics elective.

FWIW I named the last firewall I configured "Little Maginot".

<comment><USER8> Another (perhaps more) common use of the term Maginot Line is as a metaphor for expensive efforts that offer a false sense of security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This highlights how the sterilization process many cloud providers (IBM in this instance) have is not cleaning out every nook and cranny.

They should, audit every bit of firmware (indeed it's odd how the researchers changed one bit in the BMC firmware and no checksum flagged it up on boot) and whilst this is daunting, it isn't that hard as they just have to compare and verify it is the same as the known safe image. Sure they could blindly reflash, but then they would miss any attempted expliotations and equally shorted the life of the hardware by increasing the odds of the flash memory failure.

Whilst people see BMC's as one avenue, a server/pc has many components, all with their own firmware and in many cases, own CPU. Be that a network card, graphics card and even keyboards and mice (though the later, not so much a factor in server environments, still a consideration).

Security is and always will be a mindset. You need to think like somebody who wants to break into your environment, and then counter those ways. But so many avenues. Imagine your sat at your desk as an administrator and one morning you get a nice shiny, cool top of the range keyboard sent, dressed up as a gift. How many would think, cool, plug it in and feel all fuzzy? How many would audit the firmware on that keyboard? How many would question the random gift at every level?

I'm sure IBM are not the only ones who would fall foul of this avenue of BMC exploitation, but I'm disappointed that for me, basic sanity checks in their sanitisation process to decommission and recommission a server are being overlooked.

Still, when you hire a car - do they audit the cars management engine firmware? Do they erase previous BT and WIFI connections stored on the radio? Well, from my experience - they don't.

Remember - you can pay an expert all the money in the World, but do check their work.

<comment><USER10> > Do they erase previous BT and WIFI connections stored on the radio?

I've pulled many contact details from cached data on rental vehicles. Always worth checking what the stuff you pair your phone with asks for and keeps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any chance they have stumbled upon the same weakness that Bloomberg tried to report[0]?

The industry at large has been pretty sceptical of Bloomberg's claims, and rightly so, but what if they just got the details wrong and it was this (or similar) vulnerability in the BMC software, rather than a dedicated spy chip, that they meant to write about?

0: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the- big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how- china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies)

<comment><USER12> I think it's possible Bloomberg's "tiny chip" was a BMC, and that BMC was found with a backdoor in it, but the backdoor may not have necessarily come "from factory," but was later added by someone else.

Either way, this looks terrible for SuperMicro: "Yeah, our servers don't come with built-in backdoors - it's just SuperEasy™ for attackers to add one once shipped -- please buy more now."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article looks written to hurt supermicro here.

It looks like the blame squarely lies with IBM (for not correctly resetting the BMC between users of the machine), or Intel (for a poor design which allows this in the first place)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm a little curious why the BMC hardware is even exposed to the customer at all. Is it provided as a feature or is this just an oversight? Can't they just hide all of this hardware from the customer's OS?

<comment><USER15> Bare metal customers get access to the whole machine. We get to access the BMC for remote management (console, power management, etc). Apparently, you can configure the BMC via tools running in the host OS, without needing to authenticate to the BMC; I've used this to fix BMC provisioning errors, that would otherwise require a SL tech to fix via physical console in the bios screen.

<comment><USER14> Ah, interesting. I wrongly assumed the SoftLayer bare metal servers might be closer to EC2's bare metal offerings where, from the outside, you're given the same set of management tools as a VM, and from the inside, a fairly limited hardware surface area is exposed to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this vindicate Bloomberg or is it a different BMC vulnerability?

<comment><USER2> Totally different. This is a compromise via a known firmware issue with the standard components on a motherboard.

The Bloomberg article was about a hidden chip being installed on a motherboard that provided a backdoor.

<comment><USER16> Strikes me as odd that they didn't acknowledge the recent history of reporting on Supermicro BMC issues (in order to clearly distinguish them).

<comment><USER3> If you read about both, it becomes pretty clear (at least, it did to me) that they aren't related.

Bloomberg's story was about a (supposed) backdoored chip installed into the server at the factory, this is about flipping a bit in the firmware installed on the existing BMC.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unethical human experimentation in the United States - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States

<comment><USER2> The experiment on pregnant mothers in Tennessee is just awful. One article cited [1] reads:

> During the 1940s, 800 pregnant women, the poor patrons of a pre-natal clinic > at Vanderbilt University, were given a "cocktail" including a tracer dose of > radioactive iron. The object of the experiment was to determine the iron > requirements of pregnant women. Ongoing lawsuits point to a higher-than- > usual incidence of malignancies in the children of the women subjected.

[1]: [http://news.psu.edu/story/141518/1996/03/01/research/subject...](http://news.psu.edu/story/141518/1996/03/01/research/subjected- science)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nowadays, it's pretty regulated. Which makes smaller, pilot projects more of a hassle, but not impossible. You just have to be persistent with the paperwork, and luck out with an IRB or IACUC (for animals) that has good, well-informed members, and not a bunch of incompetents riding on their high horse.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the other side, you have scientists who do dangerous experiments on themselves: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- experimentation_in_medicin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- experimentation_in_medicine)

For example, Dr. Jesse Lazear helped confirm that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever by letting infected mosquitoes bite himself and then dying of yellow fever.

And then there's Dr. Werner Forssmann who developed cardiac catheterization by putting a catheter in his arm and guiding it into his own heart. He then walked up the stairs to the X-ray department to get a picture as proof. He got fired for doing this, but later got the Nobel Prize.

</comment><comment><USER5> which then lead to: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm working on a project to create a more humane channel of scientific discovery using human volunteer testers from around the world.

It's collaborative like open sourcing, but I call it "open suffering". Many hands make light work, as they say.

Visit [http://selfexperiments.com](http://selfexperiments.com) to find out more. I can be contacted using the email in my profile. I have several interesting experiments in the works.</comment>


Direct Casting vs. As and Linq Single, SingleOrDefault, First, FirstOrDefault - <AUTHOR> http://magenic.com/Blog/PostId/77/direct-casting-vs-as-and-linq-single-singleordefault-first-firstordefault

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that I tend to use SingleOrDefault/FirstOrDefault, combined with an immediate null check, so that I can throw an exception with a more meaningful error message than "Sequence contains no elements" or "Sequence contains more than one matching element", particularly in Release builds that strip line numbers from log messages.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg married - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/zuck/timeline/story?ut=32&wstart=1335855600&wend=1338533999&hash=10100387011762121&pagefilter=3 <comment><USER2>
      The last week for Zuckerberg:
      Monday: Girlfriend got M.D.
      Tuesday: 28th birthday.
      Friday: IPO.
      Saturday: Married.

<http://twitter.com/#!/gizmosachin/status/204032145591767040>

Amazing!

<comment><USER3> I'd guess that the first two are coincidence, and the latter two chosen. Interesting to try and see a person just through the purity of fact of choice rather than media narrative.

<comment><USER4> Was the IPO Hackathon his stag do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner For the HN crowd that likes random behind-the-scenes details:

In the photo, the sun is low and behind them. This makes great rim light--and looks fantastic through the veil--but it also means you need to use strobes or a reflector to light their faces.

It's probably a reflector, gold side up, something like this: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/justin_fotog/6018934549/>

They're _super_ glare-y to look at; it's kind of hard to keep your eyes open and make any kind of normal face...

<comment><USER5> It's really common to see people squinting / looking horrible with reflectors. I would guess a flash because Priscila looks quite relaxed, and most wedding photographers work without assistants.

<comment><USER6> I would guess that a Zuckerberg wedding afforded a second shooter and/or assistant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations Mark and Priscilla!

<comment><USER8> Frankly that's all that needed to be said. No talk about pre-nups, IPO's or Facebook. Just that a high profile, but obviously loving couple tied the knot. Makes me smile just thinking about it.

Congratulations to them both as well.

<comment><USER9> It's inspiring for me that Mark went through such an incredible ordeal in the founding of Facebook but he was still able to make it work between him and Priscilla. It shows that you can have a relationship while also trying to change the world (and, hell, your partner may be what gets you through).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see a lot of posts regarding gold-digging and motives - and I just want to say that _if_ there's one person you can marry knowing what their true intentions are, the only thing better than a college girlfriend is a high- school one :)

(Kinda like Mr and Mrs Obama)

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. Gotta hand it to a couple who's kept it together for over nine years, through the birth and growing pains of an unprecedented company, and med school to boot.

Congratulations!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Man, this kid is having the time of his life right now. How can any guy beat IPO + married in two days? Good for him, and take that vacation while you still can!

From what I hear, the pressure starts to build when your a public company. Those quarterly earnings should be interesting.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, pressure from people who have authority to fire you. I don't think that's the case for Zuckerberg.

 _"Even after the IPO, Zuckerberg remains Facebook's single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. And he controls the company with 56 percent of its voting stock."_ (<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47491836/ns/business/>)

Does anyone know what sort of recourse the minority shareholders and the other 44% voting holders have if Mark runs the company into the ground?

<comment><USER14> Pretty sure he's not planning on running it into the ground.

<comment><USER15> No on said he did. Nobody plans on running companies into the ground.

It still occurs with unsurprising regularity. Lots of interesting books out there which talk about why.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately people _do_ plan to run companies into the ground (usually so they can exit the smoking shell with a fat profit) which is why these laws are necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As erdemozkan stated in a duplicate discussion: _Mark married Priscilla one day after the IPO. That means they were waiting for IPO to get married._

Sorry for asking a question that may seem obvious to others, but _why_ were they waiting for the IPO? Is it for financial or legal reasons, such as a Community Property State?

Did Zuckerberg sign a prenuptial agreement? An internet search implies he didn't. This reminds me of Tom Leykis' advice that everyone have a prenup, for many reasons. On the other side, some spouses have created companies by divorcing a business owner and taking half of the company.

How has Mark Zuckerberg protected his ownership of Facebook from his marriage? How would you?

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3997659>

<comment><USER18> He didn't "wait until the IPO" according to people who knew, he waited for her to graduate. The timing of the IPO is very hard to predict given it requires sign off by the SEC, graduation on the other hand, pretty easy.

I don't doubt for a minute that they have some sort of agreement in place in the event of a separation. While most might think such an agreement would benefit Mark, the real beneficiary are Facebook shareholders if splitting up required selling shares to split proceeds. That could really move the stock unreasonably.

However, as I know a number of people who are (some of whom merely were :-) very very wealthy, they share a common difficulty in dating post wealth. Not that every potential spouse is a "gold digger" but the people who are inclined to be one come out of the wood work apparently. It can be a very sad thing, being lonely and knowing how that makes you a target. So having someone you know (and knew) when you were just a crazy dreamer, and they still wanted to be with you, is a very priceless thing.

<comment><USER19> _So having someone you know (and knew) when you were just a crazy dreamer, and they still wanted to be with you, is a very priceless thing._

Amen. I agree, minus the prenup part though - I'm not cynical about Mark/Priscilla's love for each other because of your last sentence there, like I highly doubt that the Gates have that kind of arrangement either. As someone who's young, crazy, and laser-focused on the startup game, and still so far away from where I want to be in life, that's something that's in the back of my mind all the time whenever I'm seeing someone special. Thanks for the comment.

<comment><USER20> > As someone who's young, crazy, and laser-focused on the startup game, and > still so far away from where I want to be in life, that's something that's > in the back of my mind all the time whenever I'm seeing someone special.

Shouldn't you keep "I should get rich first" in the back of your mind instead? You can always not marry them.

<comment><USER19> Oh it is. 24/7, but not when I'm hanging out with her, or at least I try not to : )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you're not on Facebook, it's just this pic. <http://imgur.com/zxZkN>

<comment><USER21> I have a Facebook account, I just refuse to login to it unless I want to actually access my Facebook account.

<comment><USER20> It's ok, the tracking cookie they leave on your machine while you're logged out will eventually correlate to a login session and they'll have your browsing history anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I guess his girlfriend finally got tired of seeing wedding ads every time on Facebook.

<comment><USER23> Like being married helps with that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ok. In what way is this Hacker News?

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I too was surpised by how many people in the HN community love gossip news...

<comment> mkr-hn Random celebrity gets married: off-topic

Tech celebrity gets married: 200+ votes

Reddit is at least aware of the inevitable failings of any successful community and lets me hide boring stories and collapse boring discussion threads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This thread really is an embarrassment. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I look at Mark, it's hard for me to look at him as a regular human being, he has so much people under his position I tend to forget guys like him can also get married and laugh about small jokes. With that much money, how do you get to trust anyone?, how do you talk to new friends knowing they're telling you the truth. That's why I think he's some kind of cyborg. Well I wish him good, and I think he's made a great decisions by still keeping facebook under his control.

<comment><USER28> I suspect it helps that he was dating this girl since before The Facebook. She was, presumably, into him before he was "The" Mark Zuckerberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, what a week for the two of them!

Monday: she earned her MD.

Friday: Facebook goes public.

Saturday: they get married, to the surprise of their guests. [1]

[1] [http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn- zuckerbe...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-zuckerberg- marries-girlfriend-20120519,0,3666424.story)

</comment><comment><USER30> thank god this is on hacker news

<comment><USER31> Why?

I mean, I know it's interesting to think about how you manage Facebook and a marriage at the same time, but this news doesn't seem god-thankingly urgent.

EDIT: Ah, sarcasm. The bane of net conversations everywhere.

<comment><USER32> I think he was being sarcastic... That's how I read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This really stimulates my intellectual curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER34> Did they also hack this to autopost to Facebook?

<comment><USER35> Of course, the ring had a wireless electromagnetic sensor and Mark was using gloves so it only triggers when he puts it on her finger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm kinda disappointed that he didn't wear his trademark hoodie to the wedding like the way he did to the IPO roadshow. :/

<comment><USER37> I'm not--someone who takes marriage more seriously than running a multi- billion-dollar company, has their priorities straight. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Regardless of your individual opinion of Zuckerberg, it is really sad that this thread contains comments outside of "Congratulations". He is a large part of tech whether you like it or not, and should be considered a peer that merits nothing but support on his special day.

</comment><comment><USER39> > You must log in to see this page.

Fail.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how thick the stack of pre nup papers are.

<comment><USER41> I seriously doubt there was a pre-nup.

California would shred through it anyway.

<comment><USER42> How do you know they signed the marriage paperwork? A wedding isn't a paperwork party and CA isn't a common law marriage state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> People should be happy for Zuck and Pricilla. Any claims by those who don't know Pricilla that this is other than for love should really get a check-up on their humanity. Not that they'll ever read this, but congrads to them both.

<comment><USER44> Hey, not bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The title is fine, I had no trouble understanding it. The ambiguity of "married" did not lead me to believe that Mark acted as officiant in a wedding ceremony, nor did the open-ended past tense of of the term lead me to believe that Mark was married 150 years ago. If you can't access the page that the link points to, and are really concerned about the truthiness of the title, then there's this website called google.com that makes finding answers fairly simple. If you think that this is celebrity gossip and that searching for the truth would be a waste of time, then don't...

</comment><comment><USER46> they married because she finished med school, not because of the IPO.

<comment><USER47> That would be quite a motivator for PChan to stick through the MD slog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The photos are not tagged! shame on you Mark!

</comment><comment><USER49> Congratulations Mark and Priscilla!!!

ps. He is wearing a suit to honor HIS WOMAN. He is showing her that he can suit up for her

<comment><USER50> please don't think of her as "HIS WOMAN" (or him as her man). this implies ownership, and marriage is not about ownership. he might have worn it out of respect/love for her, yes.

<comment><USER51> Please stop that PC nonsense. Marriage is ownership -- they have a monopoly on each others sexual-ability and in the event of a divorce they will properly have to split the money fifty-fifty.

<comment><USER52> "in the event of a divorce they will properly have to split the money fifty- fifty."

Yeah ... 'cause I'm sure a guy that just became a multi-billionaire didn't have a prenup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sorry but... how is this relevant?

</comment><comment><USER28> That's a rather eventful 36 hour timeframe for Mark. I wonder what it all felt like?

<comment><USER53> Based on the picture, I'd guess "exhausting."

<comment><USER28> Yeah, he looks a bit dazed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Whether it's rational or not, this makes me like Zuckerberg a lot more. It seems like a good way to keep your head focused on what matters, to marry the same week that your company goes public.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is very off-topic, but then again, the entire thread more or less is. So with that disclaimer: does anyone else think he looks like a much, much slimmer, younger Michael Caine?

</comment><comment><USER55> Place 1 on the front page of hacker news? WTF?

<comment><USER56> Totally agree... Is it gossip news or something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Perhaps it's the British in me, but yawn.

</comment><comment><USER58> Mazel Tov to Mark & Priscilla .

Nice simple way to have a wedding.

</comment><comment><USER59> You know how I know he's in love? He put on a tie.

</comment><comment><USER60> Hope and wish that relationship will not go up and down and severe hiccups like Stock Shares.

</comment><comment><USER61> If I were Mark I would proceed to run the company into the ground. Just for fun.

</comment><comment><USER62> I think he just needed some financial security before he settled down.

</comment><comment><USER63> "in front of a very small number of family and friends, around 100."

indeed...

</comment><comment><USER64> When/How/Why did HN turn into an entertainment gossip site?

</comment><comment><USER65> I cannot comment on the content at all because I can't access the submission.

Pages submitted to HN should simply not be behind login walls, which is why I flagged this.

This thread already has multiple references to the fact that you have to log in to see the submitted post. There are many HN users without a FB account. For them, the headline of the submission cannot be verified by clicking on the link.

Although there is a large intersection between the two groups of HN and FB users, you don't have to be signed up with any other webservice in order to use HN. This is not only about FB. As a matter of principle posts to HN should be accessible for all HN users without requiring them to sign up with any other webservice.

However, this is up to PG and the HN community. It would be good if PG provided a guideline whether submissions behind login walls are accepted or not.

<comment><USER66> Dis-allowing links like this seems extreme. I think appending something like "[requires facebook]" to the title as a matter of etiquette would work.

As a kind of loose analogy, no one really has problems with links to pdfs, but you don't need to have a pdf reader to sign up for HN (and I often see the "[pdf]" notice appended to such links).

<comment><USER67> That's not an analogy. Anybody with a computer can get a PDF reader without giving your information to a third party. There many PDF readers, not just one.

I vote for disallowing links that require login for the reasons explained in grand parent's comment.

<comment><USER68> it's a photo of someone who just got married. lighten up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> _Chan's ring featured only a "very simple ruby," a source authorized by the couple to speak told the AP._

That explains why she isn't smiling :) . Seriously people, smile for crying out loud. You know billions of people will see that picture over the years.

<comment><USER70> eh, this comment seems like a fractal snapshot of the whole thread.

why on earth do you feel any kind of right to be telling some random people you don't know how to behave? why does hn feel the need to have some private moment from these people's lives on the front page? why does this matter to me, a hacker? but is a wedding private? isn't it a public statement? why does a hacker like zuckenberg (sp?) need to make a public statement like this (i've been living w the same person for 20 years and neither of us see a need to get married)? and why rings? what the kind of ancient property-related crap is that? but that gets back to public statements. and why can't he do his tie up - he looks a mess? and now am i as bad as the person i am replying to?

and most of all, why take a photo with their washing line in the background?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Zuckerberg,congratulations

</comment><comment><USER72> tl;dr

On the heels of his decision to accept the public's money, Mark Zuckerberg ensures for himself a future tax break.

</comment><comment> no-espam He's not too smart is he? Married in CA right when the money starts rolling in. HALF! I hope he has a good prenup.

<comment><USER73> This is one of the most disappointing threads I've ever seen on Hacker News.

<comment><USER69> On the other hand the reality is that divorce does happen and for people with $20 billion fortunes is different. I wonder if the Google founders have prenups in place.

<comment><USER74> Though to be fair, if you have a lavish lifestyle and go from $20bn to $10bn, I suspect it's going to hurt a lot less than having say $4m and losing half.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I wonder how many mistresses he is allowed?

</comment><comment><USER76> Off topic. If you're bored:

insanitology.com

[just a few funny interesting vids]

</comment><comment><USER77> Can you imagine if Mark had married a man? Now THAT would have been interesting, if only for the media reaction. Now trying to guess who would have been the perfect husband for him... :)

</comment><comment><USER78> I first saw the news on CNN and groaned at the headline.

<http://cl.ly/0S0Q1D1D2c1y1I42393B>

Yet, it seems to be fact.

I believe Zuck believes Facebook is the vehicle for these announcements and interactions, ergo his play. The announcement via FB is fair and true. I think it's a good move.

I'm disheartened to see it right after the IPO. It's rare a wedding happens overnight, let alone an IPO, so it feels deliberate to me.

And yet, given how blindsided they were with Beacon and its ilk, I can imagine the circumstance being nothing more than.

tl;dr: I don't understand Zuckerberg or Facebook.</comment>


Microsoft's anti open source propaganda video - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzdykNa2IBU

<comment><USER2> I was amused to see Microsoft selectively quoting users regarding Office's adherence to standards and its compatibility.

They do make some valid points re support, however my personal experience in the enterprise is that the average desktop user almost never calls for support from the vendor. It's usually IT support who gets the call or the person in the next cubicle (often myself). Which means that support is more dependent on the level of familiarity within the customer organization rather than vendor support. So yeah, Microsoft will usually win there, because more people know Office. As more people use Open Office, it's going to be less of an issue.</comment>


Show HN: Hooks – Get Custom Notifications for Everything Important to You - <AUTHOR> http://gethooksapp.com <comment><USER2> The landing page doesn't tell me what this does at all. I get that it does alerts that somehow get onto the apple watch, but nothing else.

"Discover our channels" \--> what are channels?

Ah ok after watching the video I get a much better idea of how to use the app. I'm curious to know how many people actually click on the video to watch it. IMHO good direct copy on the landing page is worth more than a video hidden behind a click.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're totally right. Let's change it :)

<comment><USER2> Awesome I see you changed the copy :)

Can I suggest you change the headline to "Discover our alerts - subscribe and get notified on your Apple Watch!"?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are thinking on removing the watch from that image as people may think its "just for watch" (whatever that means). What do you think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI, there is a text version of our main alerts:

* Sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL games and scores

* Music concerts

* Videogames releases, Twitch streams

* Weather: rain, ice, snow, temperature drop

* TV shows

* Lottery results

* Pollen, allergy alerts

* Meetups

* Films by rating, director or starring

* Top restaurants

* AMBER alerts

* Shipment tracking for every courier

* Website down

* Horoscope

* Earthquake

* Mentions of you or your brand

* Online courses

* Alexa rank

* Currency exchange rated including Bitcoin

* Stocks

* Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, Quora updates

* Reddit, ProductHunt, HackerNews top articles

<comment><USER3> This is really impressive. How did you secure the games and scores data?

<comment><USER4> Considering the wide range of possible triggers that don't have any kind of formal api I expect the answer is by scraping the right sites.

<comment><USER5> At least the NBA and NFL write out RSS feeds of games as they're playing with the scores and plays as they occur, to varying degrees of specificity.

They're kind of a bear to parse, but it's definitely doable without scraping, in some cases.

<comment><USER6> Hi, do you have a link to these feeds by any chance? Was hoping for something like this for a POC. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> The NFL game feed is a combination of a couple of feeds. There's

[http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scorestrip](http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scorestrip) \-- which will show you the events and IDs that are currently going active. Right now, in the off-season, it will undoubtedly be blank. You can then take those values and plug them into this one:

[http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/game- center/%s/%s_gtd.json](http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/game- center/%s/%s_gtd.json) % (year, game_id)

For something to illustrate how they work together, you can check out this repository: [https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame](https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame)

I don't remember the one for the NBA, as I've never used it, but I saw an article on reddit a few weeks ago about how to get the data from the NBA using their RSS feed, so I have a good faith belief that it exists.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing this! The only thing I had found was stuff like SportsXML, etc. but it took me weeks to just get a demo data dump for a single game and the pricing was way too much to bite off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is just what I needed to filter the signal from the noise. Please add Github tracking for repositories that receive more than X stars in one day: [https://github.com/trending?since=daily](https://github.com/trending?since=daily) (and variations on this theme). I will be a long time user. Keep up the great work and integrate more services!

<comment><USER7> When I edit an alert template in my inbox, it doesn't currently update the table cell (at least for me), but if I click on the alert, I can see from the title that it has been updated. Additionally, you may want to consider separating the templates from the notification/alerts in the view somehow.. possibly a different menu

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right on the alert text updates. We will solve it asap. Also, as you said, we need to make more clear that notification-alert difference.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a "roll your own" approach I use Pushover on iOS (I know people using PushBullet on Android) and then either use the Email->Push gateway and/or I have a simple bash script "push" that I can pass a subject and message so that I can very easily setup shells scripts to send me push notifications when they finish (great for long running processes that you might run in screen). All the time in a screen I will do something like:

        cp /source/dir /target/dir && push "Moved" "Source Dir"

So that I'm not constantly checking screen or worse, forget about it and come back 1-2 days later.

<comment><USER9> I use ifttt + pushbullet for these kinds of tasks.

Pushbullet also has an api so you can directly push notifications to your device(s).

I wouldn't mind a clone of ifttt that let me customize my own channels.

The problem with these notification tools is that if something isn't already defined for you you're kind of sol. You can sort of hack it by making the thing-you-don't-have-a-channel-for output to a channel that is supported. E.g., if you want to be notified when your local library has a book in stock, you can get your library to email you, and then filter that in gmail, and have ifttt trigger on that email to pushbullet.

Kind of a hassle. #firstworldproblems

<comment><USER10> I've been using a huginn + pushbullet for this. It definitely lets you customize your channels (you can write your own in Ruby if you need full control).

[https://github.com/cantino/huginn/](https://github.com/cantino/huginn/)

<comment><USER8> I've played with Huginn before but never got it fully set up. I even started working on my own clone of it written in node.js with the idea that from the web interface you would be able to tweak the JS for each "trigger" and "action" or at a least extend them. Maybe I need to play with my own idea again or just give Huginn another shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If this is what I imagine this to be, you've saved me thousands of hours of development to make something I've wanted/needed for years.

Signed up, checking it out now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope it is :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't explain on the website, but how is this better than native notifications on iOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! What we do is to provide a lot of alerts that you can configure and that you can handle in same place. For example, you can create an alert that will notify you when your site is down, or when there's a new meetup in your town, when a music band comes to your city...

Try to ask Siri for that ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I'd really like to get are bank account and credit card activity alerts.

<comment><USER14> My credit card company allows me to configure email alerts. Kind of nice actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The up button at the bottom of the page leads to 404. [http://gethooksapp.com/app_landing_new/#intro](http://gethooksapp.com/app_landing_new/#intro)

Also your Press Kit is 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think it is solved now. We found the Presskit link was ok (its a dropbox folder). Anyway, if you need anything, just drop me a line at founders at gethooksapp.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a way to build completely custom alerts, ie something fired off by a script on the user's computer, through your app? If not, is there plans to add this functionality?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Not right now. We have an rss alert where you can put any rss you want, but I know, that's not enough. We will add a way to that soon, probably creating a custom endpoint per user or even a email gateway.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the reply, definitely looking forward to that feature being added!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [Disclaimer] I work at Semantics3.

We've been secretly working on a much more industrial-scale version of this, with a focus on getting price updates for eCommerce products.

Basically you can register a product URL, select the price change event that matters to you, and we'll push it to you via our Push Notifications API.

Its been in the works for a while, but we have MASSIVE scale. Our database is >60 million, and you can get price change push notifications on any of them.

Pretty useful if you're building your own shopping app and want the latest prices! It also helps, especially if you're trying to keep up with Amazon's pricing games.

Link: content.semantics3.com/webhooks-intro

</comment><comment><USER18> Android? No?

<comment><USER19> I use pushbullet [http://pushbullet.com/](http://pushbullet.com/) it's similar in it use of "channels" to notify you of something but doesn't have as many I think. It's also (from my experience) a little buggy

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since the app is free... privacy policy? I didn't find anything in your press kit or on your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, we are using something standard (we didn't had much time for this, we'll make a custom one soon) [http://gethooksapp.com/privacy_policy](http://gethooksapp.com/privacy_policy). You can see it at at apple store when going to download the app. BTW, we are using cloudkit for users log in so we dont know anything personal about you, but yeah, you're right, we have to improve that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How are you getting at the netflix data? They killed their API for all but a few platforms in the fall.

</comment><comment><USER22> What are the differences between this and IFTTT?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. I love ifttt too. We are focused only in notifications and sending relevant data to the user. In our opinion, this has many advantages (in that context), being the most important that our interfaces are made thinking just on this problem so we can make it more usable and also that we can hand-curate every alert and add new ones faster. IFTTT is more about automation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER24> 502\. Nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Solved, thanks for the notice!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you extend a programming language? - <AUTHOR> I want to know how do you extend a programming language?
For example, if I want to implement new set of operators or introduce the idea of group(a specific method to collect variables and functions), How do I do that? <comment><USER2> Programming language implementations typically involve several layers.

For instance, there is often a "lexical analyzer" that interprets things like word boundaries, numbers and string literals.

Then there is a parser that implements the grammar of a language and creates an "abstract syntax tree"

Then usually there are several phases of transformation before creating machine code or structures that are interpreted.

To add a new feature to a language you will probably need to change several of these layers. For instance, you will need to add new syntax to the parser and then add an implementation. In some cases these changes may be localized, for instance, if you want to add an unless() keyword which works like if() but has a reversed sense, you can probably write a transformation close to the parser which just replaces the unless(X) structure with if(not(X)). Other changes could be more extensive.</comment>


Huawei planned international robot espionage via email - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/30/huawei-t-mobile-emails-espionage-tappy-robot-steal-2012/ <comment><USER2> by robot they mean a fake finger that touches things on a phone screen repeatedly.

I honestly can't decide if this is all fake news for such an effort to steal something so silly and simple, or if there is a deeper supply chain monopoly based around the this automated device tester. Something like the robot being biased on the QA process and manufacturers only getting US gov certification if they pass that test, which they have to pay US companies, because the certification device is a trade secret, and because the device is biased you have to pay severals interactions to "reverse engineer" the false positive failures you get.

<comment><USER3> > steal something so silly and simple

According to Huawei, it took T-mobile 4 years to develop the robot and the software that controls it, and the Huawei engineers had difficulty building something of equivalent performance. Appearances can be deceiving [1], so it's probably not as "silly and simple" as you seem to think it is.

[1] How long could it take to make an easy button, it's just a button! I don't care what you say, you've got a week to do it!

> Something like the robot being biased on the QA process and manufacturers > only getting US gov certification if they pass that test, which they have to > pay US companies, because the certification device is a trade secret, and > because the device is biased you have to pay severals interactions to > "reverse engineer" the false positive failures you get.

As far as I can tell, that's nonsense. The robot clearly sounds like it was performing testing to evaluate and improve the touchscreen performance of phones T-Mobile planned to sell. Being able to pass the tests is clearly something a phone manufacturer would be very interested in.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hope they got A.X.</comment>


An insider's explanation of the Fannie Mae Meltdown - <AUTHOR> http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/07/fannie-maes-gol.html

<comment><USER2> To the finance & trading nerds out there: here's why callable debt is such a big deal. Like everything else in the mortgage bond world, it all comes down to prepayments.

Borrowers have the option to prepay their mortgage by refinancing or simply by paying more than the minimum requirement. Because of the prepayment option, mortgages have a duration (defined as the average maturity of the cash flows, weighted by the present value of the cash flows) much less than their 30-year term. For example, the 10yr treasury note has a duration of just over 8 years, but FNCL 5.5 TBA mortgage futures (the most liquid type of mortgage-backed security) have a market-implied duration of around 5 years.

Duration also measures the sensitivity of a bond's price to interest rates: for longer duration bonds, you are discounting the cash flows further back in time, so the rate at which you value future cash will have a greater effect on the present value. Think about it: if you are to receive $1000 in six months, it won't much matter to you if interest rates are at 1% or 10%. If the financial situation is relatively normal, $1000 in six months isn't worth much less than $1000 now. But a 30-year bond yielding only 1% is almost worthless (why would you lock up your money for 30 years at such a low rate), while one yielding 10% is extremely valuable.

If prepayment speeds were static (i.e. if people always paid off their mortgages at the same rate), Fannie Mae could issue debt with 5-year duration (probably ~7yr maturity) at, say, 5%, and buy 30-year mortgages (also with 5-year duration) yielding 6%. They would thus make 1% per year, and on average they would pay off their own debt right when the borrower pays off his mortgage. Fannie and Freddie do issue debt in this form, referred to as bullets.

The problem is that agency bullets have a very different convexity profile than mortgages. (If duration is the sensitivity of prices to interest rates, convexity is the sensitivity of duration to interest rates). Bullets have _positive_ convexity: as interest rates go down, the bond has a _longer_ duration. With low interest rates, future money isn't worth much less than money now. So when you are computing duration, the large cash flows towards the end of the bullet's life are dominant. Mortgages are exactly the opposite: they have _negative_ convexity. As interest rates go down, a mortgage's duration gets _shorter_ because borrowers refinance out of their old mortgage into a new one at a lower rate. If rates go up, the opposite happens.

So suppose rates go up. The debt that Fannie issued trades to a shorter duration, but the mortgages they own trade longer. This means that on average, Fannie would have to pay off its debt faster than the borrowers pay off their mortgages. When Fannie's debt comes due before the mortgages, Fannie will have to refinance. And since rates went up in this scenario, it will have to refinance into more expensive debt than before.

Now imagine rates go down. Fannie Mae's debt trades longer, and mortgages trade shorter. So Fannie Mae is still paying debt even after it received the cash flows from the mortgages. Even worse, it's paying debt at above market rates now that rates went down since issuance.

Callable agency debentures fix this problem by giving Fannie Mae the same option that borrowers have. As borrowers call their mortgages in (i.e. as they prepay them), Fannie can call its own debt by paying it off early. Fannie can now make sure the duration of its liabilities (its debentures) is matched by the duration of its assets (the mortgages it owns).

I'd be happy to explain any other aspect of the mortgage bond market, if there's anyone out there who's interested.

<comment><USER3> Can you recommend a good introductory book on the subject?

<comment><USER2> EDIT: This primer from Goldman is a couple years old but still a great guide: [http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/finengineer/%5BGoldman%...](http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/finengineer/%5BGoldman%20Sachs%5D%20A%20Mortgage%20Product%20Primer.pdf)

As far as books go, there aren't any, unfortunately. I think it's because the mortgage-backed securities market is largely confined to professional investors and traders who learn everything on the job. Stocks are the opposite: it's dead easy to open an ETrade account and buy some shares, so there's a ton of information for individual investors.

Lots of people use Fabozzi ([http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Mortgage-Backed- Securities-Fr...](http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Mortgage-Backed-Securities- Frank- Fabozzi/dp/0071460748/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215915490&sr=8-1)) as a reference, but I'm not a fan... it's disorganized, not particularly well written, and doesn't provide much information on how the market works on a day to day basis. The Salomon book ([http://www.amazon.com/Salomon-Barney- Mortgage-Backed-Asset-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Salomon-Barney-Mortgage- Backed-Asset-Backed- Securities/dp/0471385875/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215915811&sr=1-1)) is popular too, but I've never read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand the whole "too big to fail" idea. They say that the collapse of a large institution would have a domino effect through the rest of the banking world, but how does it ever get that bad to begin with? If a particular institution is getting too big, shouldn't the other players want to hedge against its failure to protect themselves against the low-probability but high-cost situation in which a really big bank fails? Is this a situation where the market would behave like that in the ideal case (with perfect information, instantaneous communication, unbounded computation, etc) but we end up with "too big to fail" banks due to some sort of inefficiencies that occur in practice? Or is this situation due to government meddling (bailouts, guarantees, etc)? Or are these swings just due to humans acting emotionally/irrationally (e.g. in response to scare mongering news stories)?

This is just a total guess, but to me it seems like it gets this bad partly because of a feedback cycle between inefficiencies of real-world markets and government meddling. The players in the real world markets don't have perfect information and instantaneous communication, so they end up not balancing their potential payoffs against the risks. The government (or central bank, whatever) steps in to rescue the system when the situation gets bad by propping up failing banks. Sounds good so far, but the problem is that this effectively functions like a zero-cost insurance policy and insulates the banks from some of the true risk of their investments. This encourages the banks to take riskier investments, since they get part of the risk paid for for free. Now you've got a positive feedback loop: banks take riskier investments due to gov't guarantee, gov't steps in when the investment goes bad, banks gain confidence in gov't bailout and make more even worse investments, rinse & repeat.

It also seems like the governmental "insurance policy" encourages the kind of interdependency where one bank's failure can bring down other banks. It's more likely that the banks can collect on the insurance policy if many of them go down at once, but if only one bank is in trouble it's more likely that the government will just allow that one bank to fail. (I'm not proposing a conspiracy theory; I'm just saying that this "insurance" shifts the banks' costs/benefits towards mutual dependence and reduces the attractiveness of pursuing diverse/unconventional strategies.)

OK, that's my half baked hypothesis -- what's the real explanation?

<comment><USER5> >> If a particular institution is getting too big, shouldn't the other >> players want to hedge against its failure to protect themselves >> against the low-probability but high-cost situation in which a >> really big bank fails?

Evidence seems to suggest the market does not work this way. Sometimes, it appears not to work at all.

<comment><USER6> In this case as the author explains the reason they were able to grow so big is because of government involvement which through implicit and explicit measures made the risk appear artificially low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was predicted by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in the Black Swan.

We're reducing the small bank losses in search for "stabilities" that group up all the losses in on fell swoop.

Everything fails over time. Eliminating the small failures by making things too big to fail only creates the chance for things to fail in a biggest possible way.

This isn't going to stop anytime soon.

<comment><USER8> > This was predicted by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in the Black Swan.

I got the impression that he firmly asserted that he was _not_ in the predictions business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lets use the laymens sniff test to figure out the level of WTF present in our system, using IndyMAC as an example.

 _You_ have all your money in an IndyMac account. _They_ hold your mortage. IndyMAC collapses prompting the FDIC to take them over and bail them out. What happens:

 _You_ lose at least half (probably more) of all the money you have in the bank over $100k. _They_ get a fat bailout, so long and thanks for all the cash. _You_ are still expected to repay your mortgage in full.

I know there's probably some logical explanation in financialese showing that this is the right outcome... But, come on, they lose your money and still demand to be repaid... WTF?!

</comment><comment><USER10> damn. for a moment i thought it was Sallie Mae melting down and i wouldn't have to pay my college debt any more T_T

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only person who wishes they WOULD fail? It seems like it's the only thing that would scare these massive companies into taking less risks.

<comment><USER12> Think about the impact it would have on everyone else though. These companies aren't small companies. They're huge conglomerates that play major parts in peoples financial situation.

Sometimes taking risks is the best way to profit. And they're not called risks for no reason. And I doubt the company wanted to lose money intentionally..

<comment><USER13> The problem is these companies, with the implicit backing of the federal government take unnecessary and huge risks knowing they will be bailed out if they fail.

It's not "risk" if they only profit from the upside and don't take their medicine on the downside. Heads they win, tails you lose. :)

<comment><USER14> It isn't fair to paint Fannie/Freddie with the same brush that you'd use for (say) Bear Stearns.

These guys have been serving as the de-facto buyer of last resort for all of the bad debt that _other_ banks have accumulated. They're acting as the US mortgage-banking safety net, and as such, have knowingly taken on a huge amount of bad debt that other commercial banks wouldn't touch. If it weren't for Fannie/Freddie, the mortgage crisis would be _much_ worse than it is.

(That said...if they had the good sense to raise their lending standards back in 2003, we probably wouldn't be in this mess.)

<comment><USER13> Actually if it weren't for the actions of Fannie/Freddie, the mortgage crisis would have needed to be dealt with sooner. By F/F taking on all the toxic loans that the mortgage banks wanted to dump, they allowed the problems to increase in size and scope thus prolonging the bubble much longer. All this quasi-government intervention does is to distort the true market. I want transparency in government and I want it in business. When you allow these mortgage banks to fail on their own (no safety nets), you clear the system of inefficient players and allow the market to adjust.

I'm all for free enterprise. You take risks, you make some smart moves, and you profit. You take another risk, you make some mistakes, you lose, and you can start over (and learn). You don't keep doing it like these banks did (I don't even know if you can call them mistakes, more like reckless disregard). Like degenerate gamblers who got their line-of-credit extended, they double- downed and lost.

Think about it, the average US citizen's safety net is quite small. Get sick, get dropped by insurance, lose your job and you're basically on your own. We're told to buck up, stop whining, take responsibility, and work harder. Fine, but don't tell me these companies need our sympathy and help. They profited handsomely during the run-up by making risky loans and lobbying for tougher bankruptcy laws.

There's no easy answer. Bail them out, the dollar plummets and the economy goes to shit. No bailout, the financial market freezes up and the economy goes to shit. I'm leaning towards no more bailouts. At least then we might be able to address the root cause, which I think was reckless risk taking and financial engineering, with the perpetuated belief that the US government (tax payers) would be the ultimate safety net.

Here's a good link regarding what the mortgage market might look like in the near future: [http://www.bubbleinfo.com/journal/2008/7/12/mortgage- credit-...](http://www.bubbleinfo.com/journal/2008/7/12/mortgage-credit- crunch.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'm a Paraplegic Who Used to Smuggle Ecstasy in My Wheelchair - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxdjg/im-a-paraplegic-who-used-to-smuggle-ecstasy-in-my-wheelchair <comment><USER2> The cops raided his place and found nothing, yet he plead guilty anyway?

Mind blown.</comment>


Telecom firms mine for gold in big data despite privacy concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/23/us-mobile-world-bigdata-idUSBREA1M09F20140223 <comment><USER2> What we need here isn't regulation -- the cell business at least in the U.S. has all kinds of regulation. What we need is the ability of the consumer to sue these companies if any of their data gets released.

Regulation puts all the risk in one bucket, the regulator. If the company can deal with the regulator, they're good to go. And we've seen how good government oversight of privacy is going to be.

Open things up for civil suits, on the other hand, changes the _economics_ drastically. Companies don't have to worry about making one agency happy. Instead, they have to worry about each and every customer. That's exactly the kind of care we expect from these bozos in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> Without regulation or a sudden increase in awareness, this sort of activity will only increase in the near future. Internet service providers who measure their success solely by profit are not going to forgo this revenue opportunity otherwise. It's just where their incentives are aligned (other than in places like Germany perhaps, where people tend to give more thought to information privacy issues).

Any thoughts on the best way to use the Internet while exempting oneself from this sort of analysis, without significantly degrading the experience? VPNs are the first obvious answer, but what's the best approach? Are there others?

<comment><USER4> Even with a VPN, there's quite a bit of data-mining that can be done just by looking at the total traffic, ignoring destinations. An interested ISP could probably still guess when you're watching streaming video, when people in your household typically wake up, sleep, and leave for work, etc. You could make that harder by padding the link with dummy traffic, though, like some darknet software does. That'd probably work, especially if we assume the ISP is just doing aggregate data-mining on usage data, not targeting you specifically and willing to spend much time de-obfuscating your obfuscation scheme. But it might be expensive to be pumping dummy data 24/7 if your VPN or home connection has traffic limits or bills by the GB.

Something similar is a concern with power companies as well. Even though electric meters only record total usage (kW being used by the apartment, not tagged with what it's being used for), the move to smart meters that record power usage frequently has led to some concern, because you can do all kinds of analysis just from the raw electric-usage data. Different devices/appliances tend to have noticeable signatures, so an interested power company can tell when the washing machine goes on, when the TV is in use, arrive at good guesses of your sleeping and cooking patterns, etc.

<comment><USER5> Not just when the TV is on, but also which programme is on TV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Operators might have shit load of data flowing through their network but they need the ways to structure that so its a big investment, on the other hand, mobile aggregators are freaking obsessed about mining every bit of info they have (i know this because I was hired to squeeze that juice) so they could push you more crap. Even if you don't participate in SMS games (quizzes, tv voting, etc) there services like emergency top up (for prepaid sims) that you probably used at least once or twice. Those are usually also provided by mobile aggregators itself or through MA partners, and they do know on which channel request came, what VAS app is that, how often you do this and etc. Ideally they can cross check your phone number on all of their services and content provider services to get plenty info to know who you are and what you will buy next.

</comment><comment><USER7> Obama's "reform" of the NSA spying practices makes this worse. He continues the data collection but leaves the data at the telcos. It is certain that they will 1> ask to be paid for the "burden" of collecting this info and 2> will monetize other ways as well since it's already lying around.

I really like O but sometimes he can be bone-headed.

</comment><comment><USER8> People complain about Facebook and Google, but it's the carriers that are the real problem.

We shouldn't forget that there are tools to avoid tracking by both Google and Facebook, but AFAIK there is no way to avoid cell tower triangulation and tracking. Nor am I aware of any laws regulating it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have worked around monetizing telco customers location in the past, and I don't think it was smart actually. And there is also a big economic issue, if I'm tracked for money as a customer, where is my share of the loot?

<comment><USER10> You get tailored advertisements so you just know what you really want to buy and so you don't need to invest time researching what product might better.

<comment><USER9> yeah, last time I clicked a related article on a news site, it happened to link to an article to a women's magazine, I got women's underwear advertisement for weeks afterwards.

So, no, I don't want to receive advertisement for perfume because I waited for my GF in front of a perfume shop, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat ironic this webpage contains dozens of trackers.</comment>


Music Industry after Scrath - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/creative-kids-turn-mit-website-into-a-piracy-haven-160123/ <comment><USER2> This is really sad. They've also had copyright disputes over a Pac-Man game a kid wrote[0] and a folder someone made called "Animation Hall of Fame"[1].

        [0] http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Removed_Pac-Man_Project
        [1] http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Animation_Hall_of_Fame</comment>


How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

<comment><USER2> Huge discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758)

Other submissions without comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664995)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9651122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9651122)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not once did I pick the 128kbps compression. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between an uncompressed file or 300/320kbps mp3, but I picked the uncompressed version 5 of 6 times. More likely through luck than hearing ability.

I tend to get my music v0 or v2 compressed. For archival purposes (and to re- encode for mobile devices where space is a larger issue than quality of sound) I might get it in flac quality.

For most music genres 196kbps will suffice. I'm not a snob over quality until it gets to 128kbps (or heaven forbid, more compressed).</comment>


How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> The question is, did they really have to engage in these tactics to "win"? This just makes Uber sound another notch less moral and legal to everyone further making it look like the evil corp. It's like their motto is the opposite of Google's 'Do no Evil'.

And I guess the other question here is: does this matter for people (i.e. consumers)? I would argue that given two equivalent choices, one would vote for the one with better reputation, so yes, it matters

<comment><USER3> Given #deleteuber, it clearly matters to _some_ consumers. I suspect that it matters enough to give competitors another few % of the market per major fiasco, but not enough to alter the overall trajectory of the market.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but I guess that they could also be winning even without shady tactics</comment></comment></comment>


EBook Teaches Brand Equity Which Means Higher Revenue for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.welcometocopyshop.com/ebook

<comment><AUTHOR> The first eBook of its kind, this one by Copyshop Founder Bridget Regan teaches non-writers to write brand-rich copy the easy way. And the best part: It's not a book at all. It's a fillable cheat sheet so that by the time you've finished it, your headlines, tagline, blog post ideas, and sales page copy is already done. Brilliant!!</comment>


Google suspended dev account and took down Google Play Apps. Need your help - <AUTHOR>

We run dating sites, and the app that was removed from Google Play store is designed and uploaded by ourselves. What this app does is simply providing functionality of our website so our users can do everything on their phones or tablets instead of having to go to our website.<p>The app has been on Google Play store for a few years and has accumulated tens of thousands of downloads.  Google said they'd determined that the main purpose of our app was to drive affiliate traffic to a website. But like I said, this is not true at all. We're not an affiliate of any website. Our website runs totally independently. Besides, inside the app there's no pointing to other websites at all. How can we possibly manage to drive traffic to another site without links? . We want to know which part of our app violated the policy, not just a vague statement like "Violation of the spam provisions of the Content Policy". We want to know what needs to be done so GP will reinstate our developer account. <comment><USER2> This is why I've been getting really annoyed with Google, everything is automated, but the systems aren't even close to being perfect. It will be difficult to find a human at Google to talk to, but I think it's your only choice so you can talk them through it.</comment>