Black Swan Seed Rounds - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/black-swan-seed-rounds <comment><USER2> I don't think black swan is an appropriate title. This investing is more like when a small group of people split a large powerball jackpot; statistically unlikely, but not really fitting the definition of a black swan (at least as proposed by Taleb).

His rules:

1\. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.

2\. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).

3\. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs.

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

On a related note, Antifragile is a fun read. Taleb is extremely sure of himself, and extremely passionate. His books and ideas (culminating in Antifragile) can be pretty seductive in the moment.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a difference from a Powerball jackpot. There, the upper limit is defined. Whereas there's no upper limits on Sam's investments.

They're perhaps not black swans in the sense that Sam is aware they may increase in value, but other than that they seem to match the criteria in a way that Powerball doesn't. Taleb has spoken specifically about how black swans are not lottery tickets because of this calculability.

<comment><USER2> The limit doesn't matter so much as striking it in the first place. Realistically, all of the mentioned investments are within the realm of reasonable thought. The presumption of a black swan is that it is completely outside the ability for one to rationally assess a system then predict it with decent success. 5/40 would be a phenomenally high success rate.

Lottery is totally not black swan, which is exactly what I was trying to say. Despite having prior knowledge of the company's situation (unlike a completely random lottery), it seems to me that these investments are closer to the lottery than black swan.

You don't place bets on a specific black swan, but you could place a different, outside bet on a disrupting event (kind of the idea of antifragile, benefiting from disorder). I think under Taleb's comments in Antifragile, living life as an artist as opposed to someone who is inherently reliant on the stability of say, an office job, is placing that bet every day.

<comment><USER4> I also misunderstood this

        It's more like when a small group of people split a large powerball jackpot

as

        [A Black Swan is] more like when a small group of people split a large powerball jackpot

<comment><USER5> Why is it even unusual for multiple people to split a _large_ powerball? By definition: a large powerball means there's more tickets and thus more possible matches for the random draw.

Another minor point: there's gotta be dozens of people playing the Lost numbers, the Miami heat starting lineup, etc... every time, so there are natural clusters of group splitting jackpots for lotto winners .

<comment><USER2> I just said group because presumably he wasn't the only investor in those companies, so a group of people stand to profit. If he was the only investor I would have said individual. It's also meant to highlight the fact that multiple people are in on this, whereas an actual black swan event is something that tends to be much more difficult to predict or be a part of.

I would be amazed if someone could go 5/40 in predicting black swan events under their original definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's no evidence here that successful seed companies are more likely to look like bad ideas than unsuccessful seed companies. If 4/5 black swans look like bad ideas when they start, but 4000/5000 of this year's startups also look like bad ideas, then there's no effect to explain. The only lesson is that seed investing is just throwing darts.

<comment><USER7> And being wealthy and well connected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sam, could you (or any other Angel investor) talk frankly about the money your put in and what your exact returns have been. How much have you had to reinvest in later rounds too. I can't find any really experienced angel to talk frankly about this with me.

<comment><USER9> in 5 years, when the numbers should be real, i will shared all my aggregate data.

the normal warning i give people: seed investing has always been hard, and likely to continue to get harder. valuations are up on average maybe 3x since i started, and it's not clear the companies are 3x more valuable.

<comment><USER10>
       > valuations are up on average maybe 3x since i started,
       > and it's not clear the companies are 3x more valuable.

This is something I've been thinking about as well. Are companies creating less value? Or is the value being going elsewhere?

In a constrained supply there might be an argument that things that wouldn't have been funded before, now are, and those represent less value creating ideas. But it seems YC is always oversubscribed, would that keep the quality high?

Is the vision of the investors getting cloudy, or more specifically are there still companies that are 3x as valuable but they are being funded elsewhere?

Or is just the capital availability pushing down the yield price on seed rounds?

I don't have any answers, but its interesting to think about.

<comment><USER11> > Or is just the capital availability pushing down the yield price on seed > rounds?

This is almost certainly the case - I recall valuations in 2009 / 2010 vs now, and the gap is absolutely crazy. A lot of that has to do with the deluge of angel money floating around partially as an offshoot of the big-name IPO's like Facebook, but more broadly, we are in a financial world that is desperately chasing yield anyway it can get it - and a seed round is the lowest level commitment of it (that and the high end rounds). The rub, as it lies, is the middle tier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> to be clear: i don't think seed investing is random. far from it. i just think it's really important to think independently and take the time to really get to know founders and understand businesses instead of just following other investors.

<comment><USER12> Curious thought- you mention the (unsurprising) thought that people who are good at fundraising aren't necessarily good at running a company.

But, all other things being equal, I'd expect someone who's good at "winning" at the game called "raising money" to be the type of person who is better at winning at other games, e.g. running a good company. In other words, while being good at raising money doesn't necessarily mean they're good at running a company, I'd still take them over the "average person".

You seem to imply the opposite in your post - is that really right? Maybe people who are good at fundraising have spent too much time/energy on that vs. getting good at building a company? That sounds specious to me.

<comment><USER13> If the skillsets needed to found a company are largely independent and time spent learning them is a limiting factor - both of which are true in my startup experience - then time spent learning the fundraising skillset cuts into time spent learning customer development, or the particulars of your market, or engineering, or hiring, or management. You'd expect skill at fundraising to be anti-correlated with some other important skill, then, because you don't have time to get good at some other skill you need.

I've never seen a startup where the founders knew everything they needed to at company formation. Usually it's one giant, steep learning curve.

<comment><USER12> That makes sense.

But let's say you have some underlying quality, say intelligence or ambition or determination or "grit". This quality will probably correlate with success at both fundraising and building/running a company.

Now I don't have anywhere near the experience of YC or even you, but I wold imagine that at least intelligence and determination are positively correlated with both. So I'd expect someone who is good at fundraising to also be good at the rest.

There could be a few reasons why this might not be the case. It could be that we're looking at a small subset who have already passed an intelligence/determination threshold, above which these 2 traits matter less, and time spent developing the proper skills matters more. It could be that there are other factors in raising money or building/running companies which matter more, which would be an interesting conclusion to me.

Or it could be that I've made an error in reasoning somewhere :)

<comment><USER13> Let's say that having high intelligence makes you 5% more effective per standard deviation at everything you do, but deliberate practice makes you 10% more effective per week at whatever you practice.

Now take two founders, one of whom is twice as effective at fundraising as the other. There are a couple possibilities: maybe he spent 7 weeks more time practicing fundraising than the other, or maybe he spent 6 weeks more and is 2 standard deviations more intelligent. If he spent 7 weeks more time practicing, then the other founder who devoted that to, say, customer development will know the market twice as well. But even if he spent 6 weeks practicing and gets a boost from his higher intelligence (equivalent to 1 week of practice), the other person is still 60% more effective at the other stuff.

This model is very much simplified, but illustrates a big point that I took a long time to learn: small broad-based improvements take much longer to pay off than targeted, high-% improvements in narrow areas. So yes, being intelligent is nice, it helps slant every skill you learn in your favor. But it is no substitute for actually practicing hard and removing errors.

There are similar counterintuitive principles at work in many other areas. I've found that engineering tools or frameworks that promise a few percent improvement in productivity are rarely worth learning and almost never worth developing unless they have a huge userbase, because it may take you 2 months to develop them but if they save you 5% in development time it'll take 40 months to break even, by which time they're probably not applicable anymore. Similarly, you are almost always better off hiring the person with little experience who is really passionate about your company, rather than the guy who is seemingly a genius at everything he does but really doesn't care about you or what you do. It's probably also behind the YC advice to be "narrow and deep" when building for customers; you can improve the product much more quickly when directly targeting a small userbase than when trying to please a large one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A recent blog post [0] from the Economist stated that buying random stocks on the stock market actually performs better than valuation-weighted investment and conscious investment. I wonder if the optimal strategy is to just invest randomly?

[0]: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/06/financia...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/06/financial- knowledge-and-investment-performance)

<comment><USER15> That's really an argument for buying index funds, since the costs and fees of buying and selling random stocks would eat away any profits very quickly.

(Even just buying and holding truly random stocks is still less likely to be a better investment strategy than index funds after taxes and fees are taken into account, let alone the volatility).

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I think I wrote hedge fund when I meant index fund. To clarify I've just replaced it with "valuation-weighed investment".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few more reasons raising a quiet/controversial seed round might be a good signal:

1\. Publicly raising a large seed round creates a lot of hype when the product might not be ready yet, or even before there's any product/market fit. As a founder, that creates a lot of pressure to satisfy the hype, and also might cause you to attempt building a product that satisfies the opinions of the blogosphere, rather than your customers. In contrast, when you raise a quiet round, you can build your product and achieve product/market fit without worrying about the outside world, instead focusing purely on your customers.

2\. If no investors are questioning the model, you should be alarmed. Almost by definition, no company seeking a seed round has proven revenue model. Knowing this risk, you should expect some fraction of investors to be questioning it. If none are, then it's likely a signal that they've been swayed by smooth-talking founders who are very good at raising investment, but, as you mention, not necessarily fit or ready to build the business they're hyping.

So if we assume quiet seed rounds help with success, this leads to some questions about YC, which is essentially a loud seed round. Namely: should you announce your YC acceptance before you have product/market fit? Should you go through YC in stealth mode until ready to capitalize on hype?

It seems your observations can tell us a lot about the value, or anti-value, of product hype. The lesson seems to be, in the words of Denzel Washington/American Gangster, "the loudest person in the room is probably the weakest."

</comment><comment><USER17> I suspect there's also an inverse correlation between the amount of money raised at an early stage and founder focus going forward.

It's easy to interpret a large seed round as early success and become side- tracked or overestimate what your company's impact really is at that stage. Which can impact focus and lead to disaster.

<comment><USER18> While there might be a point where an effect like this would take place, I think you'd have to raise an extremely substantial seed round for that. I don't think it would be a truly inverse correlation, at least not a normally distributed one. It would probably be one sided as well, because getting no funding shouldn't increase focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Make your own decisions" is good advice, but I think the main question is whether there exists any reliable means of distinguishing the good contrarian vs. bad contrarian investments--or whether it's just luck. The title seems to imply that the answer might be just luck.

</comment><comment><USER20> What's an approximate range of $ raised/valuation that makes for a Black Swan seed round in your opinion? It's hard for me to understand what the implications are of this besides "don't believe the hype" without having some relative sense of that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't basing the multiplier on valuations at the latest investment round disingenuous? After all, its just a number the owners and investors hope someone will eventually pay for the company. It's the asking price set by people hoping for large returns.

<comment><USER22> Well it's a number that some people (the investors in that round) DID pay for a chunk of the company. If those investors have any sway on the board then it's well below the asking price for the entire company.

<comment><USER21> A valuation based on an investment round is the valuation of the complete company, not just the amount invested. So if I invest $1M for 10% of a company, that "values" the company at $10M.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the case of competitive seed rounds (like mentioned Optimizely), would be interesting to hear why someone like Sam's money was accepted over others -- any thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER24> Does Sam Altman continue to do angel investing or now that he's running YC he's stopped as part of their policy?

</comment><comment><USER25> So investing at the seed stage is random. I'm surprised that VCs don't help new companies more in the early stage to mitigate some of the common failure patterns, for example the list PG had in 2006. Perhaps couples counseling for YC founders? Every little bit reduces investor risk even a little.

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

<comment><USER26> "Engineered random". Sam still gets a better deal flow than most of angel investors are out there, so even "meh" companies with high risk have passed some initial filter.

Any angel investor without the name or brand recognition gets much worse deal flow _plus_ the companies subject to negative selection bias, as they've been rejected by sama, SV Angel, YC, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> he lists four: teespring, zenefits, stripe, and optimizely. anyone know the fifth?

</comment><comment><USER28> This essay might be remotely insightful if Sam explained why great companies "often look like bad ideas at the beginning" and "look really risky at the seed stage".

</comment><comment><USER29> Teespring and Zenefits I've never even heard of until today. Are they rolling in the bank and disrupting their respective industries?

And Stripe, there was huge pent-up demand for a PayPal alternative before they came on the scene. How could anyone say that was a "black swan" bet? It doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER30> When Stripe came out it did not compete with Paypal, it competed with companies like Braintree. Stripe was never just a traditional payment gateway. It created an API for payments and a dashboard for managing invoices and recurring customers.

Pent-up demand for a PayPal alternative are from sellers who have a customer facing PayPal payment mechanism. Customers know they're paying with Paypal and customers usually have a PayPal account they use to pay you with. PayPal can hold on to customer funds like a bank.

With Stripe, a customer doesn't know you're using Stripe and if they had a Stripe account they wouldn't be able to see all the purchases they made at various sites that used Stripe, they're just not the same thing.

PayPal now owns Braintree, so they now do compete with Stripe.

<comment><USER29> I recall Stripe was being positioned as a PayPal alternative to collecting international funds, but that wasn't the point.

My point is there is no black swan here. Far from it. It makes no sense in this context.

<comment><USER30> The argument that Stripe was a black swan comes because getting into established industries with significant regulation used to be considered dead on arrival, now it's hip.

<comment><USER29> That's the heroic narrative used by investors like Sam, but I don't believe it.

<comment><USER31> Keep in mind Stripe's original name was /dev/payments. If you do some research you'll see they were in a pretty bad spot right until they opened publicly as Stripe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Andrew Zimmern Made a Food Show About Politics - <AUTHOR> https://www.worth.com/why-andrew-zimmern-made-a-food-show-about-politics/ <comment><USER2> Hmmmmm, the show is on MSNBC, and it's beginning as the presidential election heats up.

The suspense is killing me-- I wonder which side of the political aisle the show will favor?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a detour into trendy territory for a short term gain that will ultimately dilute his brand.

<comment><USER4> Cashing / selling out?

For me, I think this will be interesting. Looking forward to seeing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the headline I was hoping he'd be covering the rather weird divide of diets that's forming between left and right in America. How libertarians and conservatives are exploring options like carnivore and low carb high fat ketogenic diets, whereas more liberal sensibilities are embracing vegetarian/vegan clean eating diets. Both have come to the conclusion that the standard American diet is deeply flawed. It's weird because it feels like we're seeing the origin of red/blue tribes with dietary restrictions as part of the tribal taboos.

It's hard to invite someone to dinner when there is literally no overlap in what you eat.

<comment><USER6> See, a show on that would actually be fascinating.

Unlike the show the article describes, which looks rather like a standard political hate show like everything else has become.

We are, though, seeing the dietary divergence you describe. More and more food items are either "liberal food" or "conservative food" \-- and not always just in the vegan=blue/meat=red dimension anymore.</comment></comment>


How We Went From Being Virtually Unknown to 3k Signups a Day in 5 Weeks Pt 2 - <AUTHOR> http://dshipper.posterous.com/how-we-went-from-being-virtually-unknown-to-3-0

<comment><USER2> I've seen this friend map on Facebook in the last few days and noted it as one of the very few naturally spreading apps I'd seen on FB of late.

I think the last one was the "what writer are you" thing, which was also a HNer.

The plural of anecdote is data, so my new assumption is that every viral app I see on FB is a HN project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I'm glad you liked the app and definitely glad we can continue in the tradition of good Facebook apps from HN regulars

</comment></comment><comment><USER3>
        "Mark had created a website called ThreeWords.Me which went very viral and he had posted to Hacker News asking for advice about how to keep his server up."

I remember seeing that, anyone have a link to that Ask HN? Google isn't really helping me.

<comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051288>

Admittedly the mixture of punctuation plus the fact the page's name wasn't in the title would likely cause Google a fair chunk of confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, but you should be able to remove people from the map. There's always that funny guy in your friend list who fills in Timbuktu as the place they're living in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thanks for the suggestion I'm glad you enjoyed the post

<comment><USER6> Can I make another suggestion, too, then (and also related to 'removing people')? I live halfway around the world from where I grew up, so most of my friends are either "back there" (childhood friends) or "over here" (friends I've made in the last few years).

I'd love some way of just seeing friends that I grew up with that are now living relatively close to me, if that makes sense. As in, is there anyone nearby now that I grew up with? I don't know if it's possible, but seeing that on a map would be really cool and helpful, actually...

Anyway, just a thought. Nice work, by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll definitely look into that it's a cool idea. We are looking around for some way to pivot WhereMyFriends so that could be a interesting direction

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the site doesn't do anything, when i click on go to your map ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you by chance already make an account in the past few days?

<comment><USER7> no , first i've heard of it</comment></comment></comment>


Taboola, Outbrain and the Chum Supply Chain - <AUTHOR> https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-supply <comment><USER2> Here's Adblock Plus adding Taboola to their "Acceptable Ads" programme to allow those ads to show - enabled by default when you install it: [https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991)

If you haven't already switched, please install and encourage others to install uBlock Origin: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

<comment><USER3> From my anecdotal experience, ublock origin is also faster. This is apparently backed up by at least some testing: [https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad- blocking-extensions-tested...](https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking- extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/)

<comment><USER4> adblock plus is a protection racket iirc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally, someone is talking sense about these shitty Taboola, Outbrain clickbait ads.

I have all the reputed news sites asking me to disable adblockers only to be shown the scum links from Taboola and Outbrain. Most times ads from Taboola and Outbrain keep showing up even when i specifically disable those divs.

<comment><USER6> I am constantly surprised how many "reputable" sites stick these bottom- feeders on their page. I feel like it must impact readers' perception of those sites when they are trying to be all highbrow, and then the bottom of an article is stuffed with crap that most tabloids wouldn't publish.

<comment><USER7> Because they have bills and wages to pay. They more than likely have tried different methods of monetisation as well, it just didn't work as well.

Which is why this field is in dire need fir reinvention. It's terrible, but it works. The challenge is making it work, without being terrible.

<comment><USER8> > Because they have bills and wages to pay.

That's a rationalization that works for all kinds of terrible things. It's never good enough to excuse the behavior.

It's a terrible product, a terrible experience, and nobody benefits from it except these companies and the people responsible for revenue at whatever publisher is infested with these ads.

I work at an ad supported site, we trialed these things and I'm sure that any of the journalists at places that have these things hate this crap as much as their users do but they don't have any say over its inclusion. It's some finance person, running the numbers.

<comment><USER7> So what should the "finance" person do? Stop thinking in a financial way? Pretty sure the journalists like having a job, too.

These ads are there because they work, savvy users might not like them, you don't, I don't. It's time for new players to step up and disrupt this market, but not if that means a loss for businesses. That's the challenge.

<comment><USER9> Grow a backbone?

We're not talking about whether the CTA button should be light blue or dark blue. We're talking about decision to unleash some of the worst garbage Internet has on unsuspecting and unwilling people. It hurts individuals, and drags down both the industry and the society at large. Someone in the company should be able to say "no" to that.

The author of the article described some of the consequences, strongly implying but stopping short of saying one thing out loud, so I'll say it here: chumboxes are unethical products, and showing chumboxes is unethical behaviour too.

(But yeah, I do understand competitive pressure. That's why I hope we eventually get around to killing Taboola and friends through regulatory means.)

<comment><USER7> > Grow a backbone?

No idea what this means from a business perspective.

<comment><USER9> Business is made of people. People are entities with conscience. Conscience, when applied, can be a market signal.

<comment><USER10> The issue is that the web-driven model of free content is unsustainable to the point these junk ads leading to junk sites are attractive to finance. The big issue is that the economics of journalistic and creative content aren't sustainable ethically any more.

I don't think anyone LIKES renting a storefront to a pawnshop, for example, but if they are the only ones who want to rent your location, you're screwed.

Essentially ethical business would wind up needing the journalism market to implode, ending up with a few state-subsidized outlets that could more or less survive with no advertising at all.

<comment><USER11> Nobody's asking why they're attractive to finance though. These ads pay for themselves on a cost-per-click level. It isn't views that makes the money off these ads, it's clicks. That means that people are clicking on them. What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting some sort of benefit from them.

<comment><USER12> >What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting some sort of benefit from them.

How do you go from "people exhibit this behaviour" to "this behaviour provides them some benefit"?

Most of the ads are hyper-targetted to psychological weaknesses we have in the same way that drugs hijack our reward pathways.

<comment><USER11> Heheheh I know we spend a lot of money trying to make that happen but from where I sit we're not that good at it yet, at least in the realm of native advertising.

I've had plenty of people say to me (and plenty of frugality pundits write) they had to get off of social media because they feel manipulated by their personal network into buying crap they don't need. I've never heard somebody say they need to opt out of Outbrain ads because of the same thing.

<comment><USER12> You dispense with "they provide a benefit" and instead land on "we're not great at being malicious yet".

Literally the top post from this comments section is someone highlighting adblocking software to get rid of the stuff.

I get that a job is a job, but don't drink the industry kool-aid.

<comment><USER11> Eh not quite. I said they must provide a benefit, otherwise people wouldn't click on the stuff. You said, "No they're being manipulated into clicking on the stuff." I responded with "Outbrain is not nearly as good at manipulating people as social networks."

To me that means there are other reasons people are clicking on the stuff and yeah I like to believe it's because they get some benefit from it (even if it's the same benefit they get from watching trashy tv or reading pulp fiction). I don't like to believe that because I think ads are awesome, I like to believe that because it feeds my belief that people do much of what they do out of free will. If we're puppets of corporations we're willing puppets of corporations and blaming ad networks won't change us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few years ago I got really into the (ad-supported) solitaire game included with Windows 10. I wasn't really surprised that almost all the ads were Outbrain/Taboola type chum, targeted at senior citizens. I was surprised that almost all of the ads were scams, promising 0% interest mortgage refinancing or threatening that you could lose your Medicare benefits, etc. I wonder why we haven't seen backlash towards companies hosting obviously malicious ads.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's what I don't get: What is being exchanged of value here?

In all but one case in this analysis, the only thing that is worth something is the click. A click not leading to a credit card transaction.

Take the case of the 5G ad. If you convince a user to click on that and then on one of the ads on the google results, someone gets $10. Nothing of value unless the user also has interest in the super specialized networking equipment being sold, something that seems extraordinarily unlikely.

This is a form of fraud isn't it? You're just putting a few million page views in the mix and calling it legitimate behavior when someone accidentally clicks once in a while.

<comment><USER15> Someone eventually either buys something, or the company that's paying for the last, most expensive, click goes out of business. But there's a lot of those companies, so there's always (so far) someone paying for those clicks.

<comment><USER14> In this view, the sucker is the VC? I'm not saying that's wrong, but wow.

<comment><USER16> Often, yes? Idlewords had a good post about this a few years ago: [https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm](https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm)

<comment><USER11> "... a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity."

Such a great article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So I was idly wondering whether the UK Advertising Standards Authority had had a runin with these people, and found surprisingly few examples.

[https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe- srl-a16-335037...](https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe- srl-a16-335037.html) mug with "C" handle and "UNT" body, banned

[https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads- native-...](https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native- advertising.html) Ruling on "native advertising", mentions Outbrain ruling [https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain- Inc-A13-251818.html](https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain- Inc-A13-251818.html)

<comment><USER18> UK ASA, is fairly toothless in general.

Where they have leverage is with TV (which submit semi-voluntarily) or where the advertiser is regulated by another body, like financial services, pharmaceuticals or gambling. In these cases, the regulators can and do hand out fines based on ASA results.

It seems like their website isn't displaying all the rulings though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have worked in ad tech. It was fun. These types of ads were a funny joke.

I have also worked for US defense related companies. It was also fun and the tech was top notch.

Most people's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if you think deeply enough. Quite a shame.

<comment><USER9> > _Most people 's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if > you think deeply enough. Quite a shame._

It is true. There are degrees - some of the jobs don't hurt others, and some that do don't do it on purpose or as a primary outcome. A company making screws and nails likely exploits only its employees.

Some are taking advantage of their customers but still deliver a basic need. Think grocery stores that like to screw with food quality to the limit allowed by laws and social tolerance. You don't get exactly what you think you paid for, but it won't otherwise hurt you either.

Some jobs can involve hurting people, but at least have a somewhat plausible justification for it. E.g. some of the defense work can be justified by just protecting your borders and deterring attacks, and the hurt isn't realized until some external party tries to test your defenses.

Then there are jobs that are purely about exploiting other people, without giving them much of value. A lot of advertising is this. Chumboxes, telemarketing, e-mail spam, native advertising, retargeting... I could go on. It all essentially boils down to treating human beings as exploitable resources - bags with money that you get to squeeze out by applying psychological pressure. It does feel very much like factory farming.

(Yes, this post is sorted in descending order of what I think about occupations. Yes, I think defense companies can be morally superior to advertisers. The former help maintain a bubble of law and order in which we can happily live. The latter exist to screw our lives up.)

<comment><USER7> Whatever makes people sleep at night :).

<comment><USER9> Well, I don't work or plan to work at a defense contractor, so it's not like I'm having trouble sleeping. So far, the worst thing I can say about the work I did in the past is that some of it was probably a waste of time and resources to work on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I sincerely hate these accursed things. Loathe them. Installed an ad blocker with the specific intent to rid myself of them.

<comment><USER21> I hope you installed uBlock Origin and not Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin), because these people bought into the protection racket euphemistically referred to as ""Acceptable" Ads" back in late 2014

[https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991)

There's even a FAQ entry on the Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin) website (they're almost certainly the same company)

> "I want to support websites I love. I just don't want to see ads from > Taboola!"

which is answered with

> We hear you. [...] We agree that Taboola (and to a somewhat lesser extent, > Outbrain) ads aren't "acceptable." We're hopeful that now that the > Acceptable Ads list is under the control of that third-party board, Taboola > and Outbrain will be removed from it. We encourage you to voice your opinion > of Taboola ads on the Acceptable Ads forum.

The Wayback machine only has it since 2018 but I think it's been there since ""acceptable" ads" was transferred to the completely-independent-and- objective-no-hidden-agenda "third-party board" in 2017. Guess what one of the oldest and the most viewed threads on the forum is about?

[https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60000...](https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/6000092027-why- does-adblock-allow-non-intrusive-ads-)

Very crafty.

<comment><USER20> That's horrifying. But nah, I'm using 1Blocker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I interviewed for a role at outbrain as like a... Junior account manager or something, before retraining as a Dev. So glad i missed that noise. I was a tester at an agency and that was ok and worked on some cool stuff... But this would not have been my speed at all. I didn't really know much about outbrain when I interviewed for the job, what an eye opening article.

<comment><USER23> Always do cursory research first! There are people that unknowingly work for adware trojan companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Easily one of the grubbiest forms of advertising on the web. Hollow, vapid and devoid of value other than for the advertiser. "Chum" is the right word.

</comment><comment><USER25> A decade of free online news subsidized by the dying gasp of the news industry has set us up perfectly for this.

Going forward, that subsidization will finish evaporating and the only news media that can earn ad dollars will be either sponsored content or have chum strewn across them. Buy gold, miracle cures, payday loan, t&a.

Expect the chum to be optimized, enhanced, and enriched.

<comment><USER26> Or, you know, stuff people are willing to pay for. WaPo and NYT, among others, have seemingly done okay after paywalling their content (with admittedly relaxed rules to preserve inbound hits from Google, Twitter, etc.).

The real problem is the lack of a payments infrastructure that doesn't have tremendously high fees for small amounts, especially small recurring payments. I'm willing to pay for a WaPo subscription upfront, for a year, and that makes the credit card fees acceptable on their end. But the amount I'm willing to pay for other sites is smaller, and that probably makes it prohibitive for them to accept credit cards directly, and there's no other good standard way of getting paid.

Ironically Google is in the best position to do micropayments (hell they could even do impression-based micropayments!) because it's not too dissimilar from their ad-revenue billing. But of course they won't, because they're an advertising company.

But the faster we kill ads, which basically means the more people who use adblockers, the more market pressure will be created for someone to act as a clearinghouse for small payments between content creators and consumers. And the stuff that people aren't willing to pay for, won't be created, or will be created only if it's someone's hobby or scratches their creative itch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> An interesting ethical question is who in the supply chain is responsible for the chum content, and how much. Lets assume an ad is an out-right scam of some sort. The advertiser is obviously guilty, but is the ad aggregate to blame (outbrain yes, adsense no)? The hosting website? (no, but their reputation should be affected). The CDN (no, and cloudflare's attempt was censorship), The hosting company or the domain registrar or my ISP (no) Maybe the browser itself or the OS or my router (no) or the adblocker failing to block the ad (yes, if it was via acceptable ads).

There are many (more) players in the "supply chain" yet we perceive their respective responsibility differently, perhaps arbitrarily. I wrote my gut reactions in parenthesis above, but I can't see a strong rational behind my own sentiments.

</comment><comment><USER28> I call these arbitrash.

I hate them with a passion, partly because I understand (deep down) why they continue to exist: they sometimes work on me, in the sense that they arouse the basest form of curiosity and I get the impulse of clicking on them. I like myself a little less for it, even though I never actually do it.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's about he difficulty of brands coexisting with news content. Traditional content-based and even remarketing ads are risky to run against news articles. Too many of them are depressing or controversial-- nobody wants to accidentally advertise cheap flights next to a plane crash article, or _anything_ opposite a polarizing political piece.

The chumbox advertisers, being nameless arbritrage affiliates or fly-by-night sellers, have zero brand equity. They have very little to lose if they accidentally get their ad running against the wrong message.

</comment><comment><USER30> Taboola and Outbrain are everywhere. They pretend to be:

"Taboola and outbrain are clearly filling a need in the market. There is a gap between what publishers can monetize through their existing direct and remnant channels, which outbrain and taboola help fill. They also provide the sites with deeper engagement by cross linking related content that people are likely to read."

That was funny..

With that in mind it is very interesting to note that these are both linked with Israeli intelligence and do more than just provide third party advertising. To me it is a good idea to block them off.

<comment><USER31> I saw that they are Israeli companies, but what ties do they have to Israeli intelligence (beyond, I suppose, that their Israeli employees had previously done mandatory military service)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The world of affiliate marketing is a really interesting one. A lot of developers won't find their nirvana here, and that's understandable, but when you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really interesting problems.

I also believe this is an area that is still craving for real innovation and solutions. There is a lot of money to be made here, but no one has really "cracked" it yet, not truly.

<comment><USER32> I'm just wondering, what's value does affiliate marketing deliver?

There seems to be little legitimate money to be made and it mostly hinges on tricks & dark patterns to mislead customers into bad deals as far as they're concerned.

<comment><USER33> > I'm just wondering, what's value does affiliate marketing deliver?

For most pages, I'd say very little to the customer, a lot to the merchant: the merchant can't claim things about the product for legal reasons, can't make up fake reviews/testimonials etc, so they outsource that task to the affiliate. Of course, they don't say "just claim some bullshit", but they accept that it's done, and it will be done because there's a lot of incentive to do it and none to not do it.

What I'm really surprised with is the whole couponing sector of affiliate marketing. It doesn't provide any value to the merchant, because people typically look for coupons _after_ they've decided to buy something at a specific store. You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but there's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them.

<comment><USER9> > _You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but > there 's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them._

It's price segmentation. There's lots of people who will not buy some types of stuff unless they can find a deal. Coupons let you profit off those people, sometimes enough to make it worth to pay a middleman to take care of the work involved in distributing them.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but you don't _need_ the middleman. You can (and some large shops do) just publish the deals yourself. Add a /coupon/ or /voucher/ page or whatever the local term is and put your deals there. You'll rank for it, people looking for a deal will find it and use the "no shipping" or "5% off for new customers" deal you provide. Same effect, only you don't pay 1-10% to some affiliate publisher that has lots of incentive to damage your brand by advertising coupons that don't exist etc because the he only needs the click to get paid, leading to additional support and annoyed customers. I just don't see the added value that an affiliate publisher generates.

<comment><USER9> You almost never _need_ a middleman. But companies, especially smaller ones, are limited for time and attention. Someone comes in and tells you they can do a service X for you that'll cost you Y and net you Z, Y < Z, many companies will jump at it - Y is still much less than it'd cost them to run X themselves (hiring people, figuring out how to do it effectively, etc.).

That it later turns out that the deal was bad for the company long-term - well, that's the reality of business. Plenty of dishonest and exploitative companies exist and are successful.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but freeing resources is something that I do consider a value. In this case, you still need to handle coupon codes, you need to create those coupons, you need to transmit those coupons to affiliates - the only thing you don't need to do is publish them on your own page.

It may be that some consultant talks shops into it, I just never understood what the value proposition is. "Look, just pay somebody 5% of your revenue and deal with annoyed customers instead of spending an hour on this once" doesn't sound that attractive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Taboola and Outbrain type ads are what you get when you don't have good ad targeting available. FB and Instagram ads are _much_ higher quality because of the targeting FB offers.

</comment><comment><USER27> How are they different from Adsense?

<comment><USER35> Adsense generally involves [theoretically] context-sensitive text links to regular company websites designed to look like context-sensitive ads, whereas Taboola/Outbrain generally involves a big box of fake news links of the "Secret Brain Pill Used By Millionaires" type, designed to look like a list of news content.

<comment><USER36> Google are very fussy about who can advertise and what. They'll ban spammy behavior. If your content is not relevant you pay more. If your site score is low you pay more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> So what they're saying is, we follow this one simple trick? I just don't believe that.

</comment><comment><USER11> I work for Outbrain, and I'll say upfront that, yeah, we can do better. Advertising is advertising, and it's not the ideal way to monetize content, but until the world finds a successful way for people to pay up for what they enjoy it's what the industry has to work with.

That out of the way I have a few issues with this piece.

1\. Ranjan did an interesting thing that chum purveyors like us do all the time. He lead the article with a disturbing screenshot of the lowest piece of crap chum he could find. That draws you in to read more because who wouldn't stare at a train wreck right? What he didn't say is that the screenshot he showed isn't an Outbrain widget. In fact almost every recommendation in that widget breaks Outbrain's content guidelines ([https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/](https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/)) and would be removed from our network. Tying those ads to Outbrain is not accurate.

2\. The block of chum below the first one, with the 5G and such? Yeah totally Outbrain. Ranjan went through all the ads there and found none of them are harmful. Yeah some are vapid entertainment, one is a nonsensical link to a dying search engine, but a few of them _gasp_ are actually useful. Somehow though the fact that people make money off of advertising is bad.

3\. None of _either_ example are worse than what you would find in the back pages of Psychology Today or Popular Science back in the day. Those publishers were as responsible for those ads back then as WaPo is for the chum at the bottom of its articles today. If you read our content guidelines you'll see that Outbrain takes that responsibility seriously. We're guests on our publishers' pages and we never forget that.

I think this article could have gone a whole lot deeper into the terrifying world of ad arbitrage, programmatic buying, behavioral tracking, GDPR skirting, etc. and it would have been more meaningful, but the fact that it is complaining that these chum buckets are as bad as display advertising in the magazine era isn't really saying anything new.

</comment><comment><USER38> So these ads are largely unobtrusive and provide an extra income stream for the WaPo - it certainly feels a bit seedy, but is this actually a bad thing?

<comment><USER17> They're obtrusive - disturbing images of rotting teeth, etc. Taboola and outbrain are the two places I will block at hosts file level even when not running an adblocker simply because of how ugly their ads are.</comment></comment>


Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process (1985) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The theorem only applies to perfectly asynchronous systems, which assume that algorithms are deterministic and have no clocks. We must introduce imperfect heuristics like timeouts in order to conclude nodes have crashed by deduction and be able to reach consensus in concrete distributed systems.

This paper is referenced in chapter 9 (Consistency and Consensus) of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what exactly were you trying to argue against. Pretty much all real world distributed systems are perfectly asynchronous, don't have perfect clocks perfectly synchronized to rely on them, don't have bug-free real-time algorithms, OS and hardware, etc. So real world is exactly where the paper applies, i.e. it is impossible to guarantee consensus in bounded time. Sure, with large enough bound and large enough quorums you can get very high probability of achieving it in bounded time, but never 100%.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I was trying to say, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a piece about this paper a few years back.

[http://nateburke.com/open/?p=52](http://nateburke.com/open/?p=52)

Tldr: Romeo and Juliet was a much earlier distributed system impossibility result.</comment>


Ask HN: How Should the Web Evolve? - <AUTHOR> There are so many client side frameworks and of course HTML and CSS. But from a user angle, all I need to do is to get the UI in my mind to surface magically or less painfully. But the moment you use any framework and code, they take a part of your life away. Are we stuck ? What is really holding us from making a Web user create a Web page or a Web client App with little effort? <comment><USER2> I thought this was an interesting take: [https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after- tomorrow/](https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/)</comment>


Big Win for User-Generated Content Hosts in Vimeo Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/big-win-user-generated-content-hosts-vimeo-case <comment><USER2> Glad to see this. I just subscribed to the Vimeo $60 plan in order to upload my daughter's Irish dance recital.

YouTube flagged the audio as infringing on some commercial recording even though it was a live performance of very old traditional tunes; apparently the software matched three jigs to someone's CD version. They put the burden of proof on me,caught in an overly wide net. Luckily Vimeo's more laissez faire.

<comment><USER3> I was pushed over to Vimeo for similar reasons. I uploaded a game trailer (that the publisher had given me rights to use) to YouTube, and immediately after the upload finished was given the message "This video has been removed due to a Terms of Service violation". No further details or way to contact YT were given, so I decided at that point to look at alternative hosts.

<comment><USER2> For copyright violation, the only option I was presented with was to send an appeal to the copyright holder.

Youtube just passes the buck to some copyright holder who in my case at least was completely unrelated to my recording, other than coincidental order of tunes. I don't know, maybe three traditional tunes played in that particular order can be copyrighted, though that's a bit ridiculous. Thousands of performances of traditional music would suddenly be infringing.

I was happy to give Vimeo my money to get around this, and I doubt I'll be giving Youtube money for any of their commercial offerings, until they can straighten this mess out. I do understand they're probably overwhelmed with sheer volume, but still.

And, of course, I've never heard back from the copyright holder, who has no incentive to get involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do Second Circuit decisions affect areas outside of the second district (NY, VT, CT)? If not, is the location of the host that matters?

<comment><USER5> As I understand it, and I have a weak understanding, the judgement only has a direct, enforceable effect on the area of jurisdiction, but can be cited by other district courts and ultimately the supreme Court in decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Between this and net-neutrality, it's a big week for the internet.</comment>


Show HN: Employee Onboarding Google Sheets Add-On - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/employee-onboarding-app/hmiefidoonaajllkjjhnhonkbcieincl?hl=en-US <comment><AUTHOR> Employee Onboarding App is a free Google Sheets add-on that lets you send as many customized offer letter email with PDFs attached as you want and also add new employees to your Gsuite, Google Analytics, and onboarding Trello board. Saves time to onboard employees especially for solo entrepreneurs and small HR teams.</comment>


American companies are suppressing wages for many workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-suppressing-wages.html <comment><USER2> Two words: pay bands.

Corporate HR policies in the modern era are essentially designed to commodify and drive down the costs of labor through information assymetry, rigid pay bands, and lawsuit mitigation.

Since most labor no longer organizes to negotiate for themselves, obviously the "Industry standard" pay bands are going to have a strong dampening effect on any wage increases even in the case of a worker shortage. Most individuals alone don't have the power or the information edge needed to beat an "industry standard" which has essentially been decided through collusion of the largest players in the market. See the direct email correspondence of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt for more info.

<comment><USER3> I've gotten pay significantly above HR's "pay band" and "policy", because I refused to work for less.

Workers have power, too. They can refuse the offer. If you're an employer and you want good people, you'll find out real quick about their power.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, lucky you being in a profession with an extremely high unmet demand.

Not so good for the poor chumps working in retail who've been told that unions are bad.

<comment><USER3> There's a wide variety in retail employees. They are not interchangeable. There's plenty of opportunity to show you're worth more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >In a new study for the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, we report survey results in which we find that one in five workers with a high school education or less are subject to a noncompete.

That by itself is a remarkable statistic. The original purpose of non-compete laws was to honor the value of an invention or trade secret and stopping key inventors from directly running away with an invention and thus lowering the incentive for innovation.

But surely not every fifth worker with a high school degree or less in the market is a researcher or crucially involved in the generation of trade secrets. Many people are simply selling their labour, and this data point suggests that non-competes are being abused to an extreme degree simply to chain employees to a business.

<comment><USER6> I suspect many of those noncompetes would not hold up in court.

<comment><USER7> Because folks without a highschool education can afford to fight a major company in court. /s

Sorry about the sarcasm, but this kind of abuse of the contract system needs to be stopped. You can only really invalidate an individual contract (ianal) as I understand it. So the fight would have to happen for _every employee_. While case law makes it cheaper, the reality is most of these folks can't afford to higher a lawyer for a few hours, let alone a few days.

<comment><USER8> My guess is that you could get a lawyer to take it on contingency if you were to be sued. The real issue would be the company hiring you.. would they be willing to take the risk.. They actually have no incentive to b/c they probably use non-competes as well!! So it will take an intrepid employee / applicant to make the case that they were not hired due to the non-compete. OR an employer willing to go to bat (which may happen if it's a doctor/lawyer or someone they feel worth going to bat for. And even then I bet people settle which means the law never gets its mettle tested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was surprised share buybacks were not mentioned. Seems like every company has been doing this over the past few years. I'm no finance guru: is there a reason buyback money couldn't be diverted into pay raises?

<comment><USER10> Pay raises lower the stock price. Buybacks raise it. CEO compensation depends on stock price. That's all.

<comment><USER11> . . . because stock is taxed differently than income.

This is a huge incentive behind how our system has become so broken.

<comment><USER12> No, it's because a buyback is purchasing an asset (a share of issued stock) and payroll is just an expense. You could argue that increased payroll increases retention which is valuable, but that's an indirect and uncertain way to increase the value of a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Because most people sink roots in their communities, they are reluctant to > quit their job and move to a job that is far away.

How common is this? As a child, my father changed jobs every few years, and we moved often as a result of that (until I was 10 at least). We even lived in France for three years because my dad thought it would be a good opportunity to learn about other cultures. So personally, I've never had any objection to moving for the best opportunity.

My wife on the other hand comes from a different background; she grew up in the same house in a rural town and thinks that moving hurts children's ability to develop friendships. She also believes that being close to family is more important than optimizing your career (although she has kindly agreed to move should a good opportunity arise).

Is the "stay in one spot" viewpoint becoming more common? I can see how this would lead to competitive job offers stagnating in a region if no one is willing to move into it or away from it.

<comment><USER14> IME, it's very common, the default for most. Once you have kids and buy a house you've decided to stick to the same geographic area at least until the kids are adults. I'd guess it's even more common now that more children are living with single parents, one parent will be deprived of easy access to the kids if they were to relocate.

It's the biggest reason people hate gentrification as well, they can quickly get priced out of an area they belong to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hasn't the US labor participation rate been dropping for over a decade?

If that is accurate, it makes sense that unemployment is down and still going down but wages aren't moving at all or as quickly. There's effectively "spare capacity" in the system in the form of people who were removed from the unemployment numbers but still wanted to work.

</comment><comment><USER16> What is frustrating is the problem can be attacked even without introducing any new law.

In many industries the reason employers have monopsopy power is regulations that prevents new players from eating the fat profit margins of incumbent players.

telecom, healthcare, real estate, legal services ......

Just like coders see every problem as a software problem - lawmakers tend to think any problem can be solved with more laws ! not realizing they are also playing the economic game theory charade.

In this case particularly, introducing more laws is going to make is harder for new players from gaining market share.

I am not also just making this up, France has some of the most progressive labor laws written with the best of intentions - but lawmakers failed to see the economical ramification of their laws. It made employers reluctant to hire full time workers - creating a painfully high unemployment rate.

A lot of American multinationals also have most of their growth happening outside US borders, I think stronger Unions and ill thought out reform is going to result in more aggresive offshoring.

I know supply side economic arguments has gone out of fashion - but by allowing entrepreneurs to more easily embrace globalization the same way as larger companies exploit it will more comfortably increase income without causing massive spikes in inflation.

This also includes less regulation so that workers can strike without legal trouble and cause trouble for employers, by dragging the process through the court system will just mean more money for lawyers - and large companies have deep pockets anyway to fight any potential lawsuit. Think about how things like fraud are already illegal but companies seem to get away with it anyway.

The only power labor has to collective withdraw it - which painfully show up in the balance sheet in every board room, its the only language capital understands.

<comment><USER17> You obviously didn't read the article and appear to be just spouting talking points. The three laws proposed in no way impede small businesses. Prohibiting anti-poaching , Limiting non-competes, and considering the labor market effects of mergers will primarily impact large businesses.

In fact, all those changes reduce friction and increase competition in the labor market. These should be precisely the kind of changes I would think you would support?

<comment><USER10> I wonder if non-compete agreements actually matter. I mean, come on. Lewandowski landed at Uber after Google. Does anyone cares if some dude from burger king will join KFC? Will BKing really sue him?

<comment><USER18> Probably not, but he would not dare join KFC for the fear that Burger King decides to sue him. Even if he wins the case, he will go bankrupt navigating the court.

And KFC would include a question on their hiring form "Are you subject to a non-compete clause?" to cover their asses. If he answers yes, he is immediately disqualified and KFC moves to the next candidate. After all, it's not like he has unique knowledge for which it is worth getting sued over, unlike Lewandowski. If he answers no and it is ever discovered he had lied, he is immediately fired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure how declining union membership is laid out, and then strengthening union membership is not suggested.

</comment><comment><USER20> " In other words, in the labor market, effectively a small number of employers are competing for their labor" This is not what a monopsony is. That's an oligopsony.

"Because most people sink roots in their communities, they are reluctant to quit their job and move to a job that is far away."

The effect of this is a wash because this is also a problem for employers too. The supply of good workers is smaller because few people are willing to move towns for one - which drives labor prices up.

"Unions used to offset employer monopsony power"

Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues!

I agree with the points about non-competes though.

<comment><USER21> > Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight > monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues!

If an opposing force of similar power is not the best strategy, what do you propose as an alternative?

<comment><USER22> We can enact laws to prevent the practices we as a society decide are unacceptable.

There are people here who are fatalistic and think that politics is unwinnable and politicians are in people's pockets, but laws can take away unions' power too, so I don't see politics as avoidable in any case.

I think framing a union as a monopoly is odd, but they become institutions in their own right, and theirs interests diverge from the wider group's fairly quickly.

The UPS union seems to want to force UPS to not invest in drones or self- driving trucks at the expense of everyone who would benefit from significantly cheaper delivery, and this isn't exactly an isolated incident.

The construction unions in NYC have secured themselves a deal where the government must use union labor, and unions negotiate a contract with their employers, who have no incentives to keep costs down because they pass all these costs on, and we get subways that are 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world.

We have a similar situation with construction unions & housing in NYC leading to increased costs and .: more expensive housing for everyone in NYC.

And the list goes on forever.

<comment><USER23> We can't even pass a federal budget, but we can make sure corporate lobbying gets their giveaways. Laws in the United States as of late almost never benefit the citizen, unless of course you consider corporations people.

<comment><USER22> Union organising won't save you if the politics are against you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Before the cacophony of "we need better laws! More government!" Please reflect that all the wage suppression that is commented on the article comes from laws in the first place.

It's amazing to me that the solution presented by those who are anti laissez faire are more laws to correct the past laws.

Market transactions only happen if they are mutually beneficial. Can't force any side as this will distort it.

Please look at the supreme labor laws found in Europe to find out what happens. To note, the Spanish, French, Italians face chronic young adult unemployment with roughly 1/4 people being employed.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Market transactions only happen if they are mutually beneficial. Can't > force any side as this will distort it."

I think the modern assumption is that things are distorted, and they are heavily distorted in favor of business...</comment></comment>


Fortune's Best 100 Companies to Work For - <AUTHOR> http://www.focus.com/fyi/human-resources/fortune-best-companies-work/

<comment><USER2> Under Accenture there is an employee title "Consulting Consultant". What does that even mean?

<comment><USER3> It means you have to make 0 real decisions, just recommend a lot of stuff, haha</comment></comment>


Golang-like channel in C# outperforms Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chrisdavies/Asynqueue/blob/master/go/readme.md <comment><USER2> I took a quick look at your code. Iadmit my C++ is getting rusty. And I haven't programmed Go in a while. I was familiar with Go's channel implement as well has its predecessors in Plan9 and Newsqueak. In part because I have done an implementation with the Stackless module of PyPy. The two problems I see are: 1) you don't implement the select algorithm. 2) Go channels where implemented to handle multiple CPUs. In a simple example, this is overhead for Go. With the asynchronous queue I am not sure if you are obeying Go's channel's rendezvous semantics. I also suspect Go's results may be different and closer to what you are doing if you used go channels with buffers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Go channels aren't as fast as they could/should be. Folks do go the mutex route when they need the extra speed.

My C# is non existent but if you get the WaitGroup concept (I may have missed it) in there as well this could be a handy package.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested in having someone with more knowledge of Go look at what I'm doing in the Go code and see if I'm missing something. Either way, I'm pretty happy with this implementation in C#.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the responses, both of you. I'll have a look at WaitGroup and Select. The C# solution does support multiple cores by virtue of its use of Task.

<comment><USER2> The select algorithm is described in Robert Pike's "The Implementation of Newsqueak." You may want to take a look at a paper called "Scalable Join Patterns" which is about implementing Join Patterns in C#. Join patterns involve channels. The take-away of the "Scalable" paper is the use of lock- free algorithms.</comment></comment>


With Apologies to John Gruber - <AUTHOR> http://www.oldfireball.com/gruber.html

<comment><USER2> Stupid name. It's more like you're trying to steal some thunder and grab his users.

This feels like the "how to get a hit in the App Store" articles. Take someone elses idea and redo it and make lots of money. Rehashing someone elses project to turn it into your own and make money.

Whatever happened to people having their own thoughts these days? Then again, with stupid articles on here about how ideas are worthless I guess this just comes down to the same ol thing. Beg, borrow and steal your way to success. Not that this is a bad thing for everything, but when we're talking about the written word and original thought is better than trying to be someone you're not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Grabbing users from John Gruber? That's impossible as his writing and style is impeccable.

I could've gone explaining myself for hours, but I like short and to the point writing. It was just an idea to build a Mac centric site, covering more technical things, as Gruber obviously swayed in another direction.

As you may know, thinking of a name and registering a domain is not easy today, so I went with the simplest path, a play on well know brand.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRiTpCji0I>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First post tells me what to do with scant justification; a thing DF has never, despite its other flaws, done.

<comment><USER5> Yes. If this is what Daring Fireball was like [1], then it's better off today.

That said, I feel like John Gruber used to be more of a curator that showed cool projects and things, and less of a market share analyst. I kinda miss that.

Anyway, you can't just replace John Gruber. As a writer, he's kind of one of a kind.

[1] <http://www.oldfireball.com/apps.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Why install another browser if Safari is already included?

Because Safari's about third on my list of browsers I'd use, below Chrome and Firefox and tied with Opera above IE.

Sorry, this first post didn't do anything for me. Also, exhorting us to on the one hand, avoid proprietary formats, and on the other, to use what Apple has given us and little else is either very clever satire or the height of fanboism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Safari is most polished of them all. I am not even considering non native apps (Firefox, Opera). While Chrome is good, it has various little interface, implementation and behavior oddities.

As for the second part, I am all for Crux, Slackware, JFS, OpenBSD, cwm, evilwm, ratpoison, urxvt etc. I am also tired. And MacBook Air gives me little friction.

</comment></comment><comment> X-Istence I would love to have an RSS feed so that I can add it to my RSS reader.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll consider it, but sites are meant for visiting and reading. I am old school like that.

<comment> X-Istence Then it is highly likely that I will never visit again. These days RSS is how I keep up with all the blogs I want to keep up with, with all the ever changing content. I don't have the time to go to all of my bookmarks one by one and try to figure out the new content from old content.

<comment><USER7> Seconded. If it's not in my Google Reader, I'll never visit it again, unless somebody happens to post a link to it on FB or HN or I accidentally google it.

<comment><USER8> TBH, I have zero interest in this site to begin with, but assuming it was covering topics I cared about, I would "thirded" this.

For a site like this that claims to not be about sponsorships/ads and is mostly just plain text... not having an RSS feed is either lazy, stupid or both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You don't read like Daring Fireball, old or new.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gruber is an excellent writer, no denying. I am not even going there. English is not my native language.

My idea was 'Back to Mac' version of Daring Fireball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Daringfireball was lovable when Apple was the underdog, but now it's just annoying. If you want to use the old daring fireball as inspiration, you should find a more interesting subject that you're in love with that nobody else is. Then once they make it big, you can sit back and gloat like Gruber does now.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bookmarked. I like the idea, and where you're going with your first post. I literally stopped reading daring fireball because of the politics posts.</comment>


Ask HN: What do executives do differently in their careers? - <AUTHOR>

I've been out of undergrad for 2 years now, and have worked in 2 mid-sized companies, and 2 very large ones (internships/full-time).
And as I navigate the org charts of these companies, I wonder: what did the executives at these companies do differently that got them to where they are?
At first, I naturally assumed it was experience and age (or time within the company), but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
What I have noticed is, generally, they tend to have MBAs or work on the business aspects of the company, or were executives/CEOs/Founders of other smaller companies that eventually got acquired.
I understand there is no single path or answer to this question but I'm curious to hear your opinions? <comment><USER2> Some observations from executives I've met:

1\. Take risks.

2\. Be willing to take on responsibilities that you don't know how to do yet. If you're competent at the task you're working on, you're wasting your time.

3\. Get to know all sorts of people throughout the organization. Not just the important people, but ordinary people working on interesting things. The important people notice that you know all the folks working on interesting things and start leaning on you to point them in the right direction.

4\. Be the best in the vicinity in at least one area - the best salesman in your geographic region, the best frontend engineer on your product, the best UX designer in your department. The best has options, because everyone wants to work with them; the mediocre usually have to make do with what they're assigned to. The best usually also have management turn a blind eye when they steal time away from their main projects to work on professional development, because they're still outperforming everyone else. This becomes a virtuous cycle.

5\. Volunteer for tasks that are a high priority for the organization. A lot of folks shy away from high-priority work because it's stressful; you have many powerful people breathing down your neck wanting things done yesterday. But everybody remembers who actually did that groundbreaking project, and it opens up opportunity in the future.

Some things I've noticed successful executives _don't_ do:

1\. Work 24/7. An occasional late-nighter on a critical project helps cement your reputation as a clutch player. Doing it all the time cements your reputation as a schmuck with no life.

2\. Talk a lot. The best executives I know spend about 90% of their time listening and 10% talking. People who keep their mouths shut and ears open when they join an organization tend to outperform those who keep their ears shut and mouths open after about a year (it takes that long for the phonies to shake out).

3\. Think of themselves in terms of one particular functional group. Being an executive is its own skillset - if you think of yourself as an engineer, or a salesperson, or a lawyer, you're artificially limiting yourself. Think of yourself as a provider of solutions - heck, doesn't patio11 give the same advice for small business owners?

4\. Be cynical. It's interesting that the Gervais principle is the top comment here - there's a grain of truth to that, but if you believe it too literally you're doomed to underperforming loserhood.

<comment><USER3> I think this is correct, but for all positions rather than just executives. If you want to be a Principal Engineer or a similar position in the technical track, this would also work.

Even with my company being so large, there's a few key names I always hear dropped. Those are the "A" players, and always busy. For new projects, they're always the first people managers try to draft on to their projects. This relates to both #4 & #5, where high priority people get high priority projects which leads to further high priority things.

What I'd like to know for my own career is (in a large and bureaucratic system) if there is a repeatable way to find the high priority projects. The "A" players get tagged first, and work seems to be silo'd so you don't hear about the cool/high priority projects until after it's underway and they've already staffed out the team through people they know.

My current strategy is to work with one of those "A" people in hopes of getting projects passed on that he's too busy for. We're in similar roles, and I work well with him. I recently got a fairly high priority project because of that, but I didn't know if anyone else had any strategies.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my mentors is an "A" player. He genuinely looks out for me, and even goes as far as throwing high priority projects at me. At first, I took this for granted, but I'm starting to realize that the things I'm doing right now are rarely done by other folks in my position.

Find an "A"-player and make her your mentor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> MBA programs are sometimes sort of a tool used to justify putting people in places they wee already selected for for reasons other than experience. Say you are a board member that wants your nephew hired on as a VP despite having never had a real job. The nephew would go to business school to fend off the obvious protest from the veterans of the org who (foolishly) put in years of work.

People that are bought out are sometimes given an executive title, but often are forced out as the whole idea of buying a company is that the new management wants control.

Other people hire executive coaches, lie profusely about their experience, suck up, and do whatever it takes to get into one of these jobs. Lots of execs are like this. I dare say most. It makes no difference to them what company they are at or even what the company's business is. You can be illiterate and follow this path. lots of people who do this can just barely send an email.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the most comprehensive (and correct IMHO) answer Ive ever read... [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office/)

<comment><USER6> This is awesome... I am able to visualize it all. Thanks for the link

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People at the "front-end" jobs (e.g. sales, marketing) tend to have the advantage here. Most tend to have wide interests, helping them bring a more balanced perspective to the table. All else being equal, education also counts.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is their entrepreneurial mindset. Engineers tend to focus on a single tree (the engineering tree), but an executive looks at the big picture - products, market, competitions, finance, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER9> Some people are just cut from a different cloth? You can get there, but you have to change your mindset about your mindset about many things.

</comment><comment><USER10> I worked at a Fortune 500 company for five years. Shortly after I was hired, the department I was in got a new department head. He was relatively young. They introduced him and he gave some speech. He talked about setting goals and working his way up from the entry level job he started with.

That fits with something I read eons ago: That the 2% of people with financial goals tend to outperform the other 98% _combined_.</comment>


Gobuntu has already failed - <AUTHOR> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/10/18/gobuntu-has-already-failed <comment><USER2> This article reminds me of a quote from a Bruce Sterling lecture: [http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/events/events_detail...](http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/events/events_detail/1943/)

"Hackers _love_ IP. I mean, Eben Moglen, I saw this guy. He says, you know, we're not going to be able to convince the ruling class to change things the way we GNU freaks like it, so let's just make it _really complicated_! Just go in there and _hack the living daylights_ out of intellectual property! Just _quibble, quibble, quibble_! Raise hell! NIMBYize all the time! Until people just become _critically bored_ with it, and they just throw up their hands, because _I just can't be bothered_. I can't keep track of all my licenses, and my this, and my that, and the other, and it's just completely unmanageable."

</comment><comment><USER3> If I release an open-source project with a logo of a little horse, and don't trademark the horse, then someone else can use that horse, completely separately from my project, to represent another project that has nothing to do with mine, and thus dilute my project's brand. Is there any way to reduce the impact of this _without_ closing the source to the artwork?

<comment><USER4> To clarify: (1) Your scenario = don't trademark, use open source license. (2) What Mozilla does = trademark, use proprietary license. (3) What Mark thinks should be done (afaiu) = trademark, use open source license.

I don't know a good way to reduce the impact in scenario (1) through legal means, but if you are worried about this, why not choose scenario (3)?</comment></comment>


Is the bizarre Sky Whale the future of air travel? - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2014/01/22/is-bizarre-sky-whale-future-air-travel/?intcmp=features <comment><USER2> This Fox News article is based on a Behance post: [http://www.behance.net/gallery/AWWA-Sky-Whale-Concept- Plane/...](http://www.behance.net/gallery/AWWA-Sky-Whale-Concept- Plane/11891085)

Those are the musings of a designer without any serious engineering considerations at all, and while cool, have very little actual technological interest.</comment>