Ask HN: Would like to work for free - <AUTHOR> I have tried to get programming job in the past but I noticed that I needed to work under a professional programmer to pick up the core skill set. I have good working knowledge of  C language, I am a bit rusty in Clojure . I can easily pick up Python. I would like remote(job) structure and I would be working for 3 hours a day. Currently I am gradually learning and coding toy languages (interpreter/compiler). I have contributed to an open source interpreter. I have also started out surveying computer vision .
If you have side projects or you are independent programmers and won't mind having someone working with you , please contact me.
I am not limited to the above mentioned languages. I have studied computer algorithms and language complexity from a decent university. <comment><USER2> I'll bite.

1\. What kinds of things have you built in C (or other languages you know). Is any of it posted in a public repo? 2\. Do you have any experience with web development? Do you want it? 3\. What sort of experience, if any, do you have with testing? 4\. If you're based outside the U.S. there may be some grey area but FYI as of a few years ago I'm pretty sure it's no longer possible to work for free for a U.S. company (you can "donate" your skills to non-profits, though). You'll most likely have to be paid minimum wage.

<comment><AUTHOR> My github handle [http://github.com/janus](http://github.com/janus) . I have posts on github. I have contributed to citrine programming language. I have done commercial web app using Clojure in the past . I love web development, I would accept it with two hands . I have not done much on testing except basic ones that returns true or false . I am based outside the U.S . I won't mind donating my skill .

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yea, we're working on www.altheamesh.com. Happy to have you help. We're working with C, Solidity (Ethereum language), and trying to decide between Rust and Lua for some daemon code. Click on the link for "Chat" at the top and say hi.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I will take a look.</comment></comment>


Californians are paying billions for power they don't need - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/#nt=notification <comment><USER2> _Critics agree that some excess capacity is needed. And, in fact, state regulations require a 15% cushion. California surpasses that mark and is on pace to exceed it by 6 percentage points in the next three years_

Hmmm... as soon as I hit this point in the article I really lost a lot of enthusiasm to keep reading.

The article throws out all these shocking stats about too many power plants, show a scary graph where the supply keeps going up even though demand if flat. Frightening!!

The they readily admit that a 15% surplus in generation capability is a good thing! In fact it's a requirement by law. Suddenly a 21% excess doesn't seem all that scary.

<comment><USER3> I think the real question (not addressed by the article) is how much projected surplus there is as older plants reach their scheduled closure dates. Especially given the experience at San Onofre where the plant was closed early due to unexpected problems, it's reasonable to consider capacity if the 2.2 GW at Diablo Canyon goes offline before the current schedule of 2025.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure you mean MW. Diablo Canyon supplies about 8.5% of the states energy.

<comment><USER5> > I'm sure you mean MW.

Unlikely, 2.2MW is pretty much nothing, it's the nameplate capacity of a single relatively large wind turbine (but not a huge one, the current record- setter is the 8MW Vestas V164). Even in SMR few commercial design go that low, there's only ABV (3~10MWe) and the quite odd ELENA effort (68kWe), but most designs are 2~3 digits electrical.

Diablo Canyon has a nameplate capacity of 2240MWe over two reactors, which is about 2.2GW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In 1999, I worked in IT, and one of the graphs we had on our "big board" was a feed from the CA power grid, showing utilization vs peak generation capacity. We had to keep an eye on it because if usage got to close to capacity, the state would start rolling blackouts, which might shut down the server room in our office, so we had to be ready and shut down any non-critical machines so that the rest could shut down after switching to the UPS.

It was not a good time. It's also important to remember that these things take a long time to build, so they were still being approved when solar was expensive and server rooms were still expanding.

I think it's a good thing that they are over provisioned and anticipating future growth. I would assume that generation will get closer to the demand curve over time as it levels out.

<comment><USER7> If you're referring to the CA electricity crises of 2000/2001, these were caused by Enron manipulating energy supply.[1]

Smartest Men in the Room is a great book about Enron's history.

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

<comment><USER8> But not the subsequent ones?

"the ISO has imposed short rotating outages in 2004, 2005, 2010 and 2015, mostly related to unexpected transmission line or power plant outages during periods of unusually high demand." \- Rueters

<comment><USER9> That sounds like an issue of transmission capacity and redundancy, not energy production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am tangentially in this space in that we build tech that allows for demand response capabilities, specifically for mini-split and other air conditioning systems ([https://flair.co](https://flair.co), shameless plug).

This article seems to be missing some important details that are rather relevant in statements of 'capacity' and 'demand'. Specifically, demand is dynamic with energy 'rush hours' at certain times of the day and lows at others. One reason that this is relevant is that often times these companies build 'peaker' plants to handle the rush hour loads that may be present significantly less than 1% of the time. Its not that you neceisarily need to speak to this phenomena but treating demand as a static number leaves a bunch of things unclear. For instance, what is the average over capacity and what is the excess capacity at peak demands.

Another thing that was missing to me - electric cars and gas systems. At the moment a decent amount of space heating, water heating and cooking systems require gas but arguably as we begin cleaning our power sources, it will make less sense to use gas and having more electric capacity will make making this sort of decision or switch much easier. Not to mention safer given the massive gas issues in southern california recently...

In terms of electric cars - I haven't seen the growth numbers or how much anticipated load there is but it seems like electric cars over the next 10 years may add a nonnegligable load to the grid. This is also complicated as the solar generation capacity and localized storage (power walls and other similar at home batteries) markets are just starting to get interesting. I would love to see a more comprehensive story with numerical predictions about where additional loads and suppliers are headed instead of bickering between industry veterans. It seems like depending upon how those shake out, this excess capacity could prove even more foolish than some are arguing or it may seem forward looking. Interesting article but missing some of the more dynamic and relevant questions so making a more conclusive judgement is limited at best imho.

<comment><USER11> Completely anecdotal, but among apartment-dwellers, I doubt electric cars will take off as much as one might expect.

I live near the Palo Alto-Los Altos-Mountain View border, and I've lived in two apartment buildings, one of which was just built (I was the first to move into my apartment, 12 months ago). My first place had no electric vehicle charging at all, and the second has a total of four spots, which aren't shared.

I already have my own electric meter for my apartment, and I'd be perfectly happy to pay for a second meter at my carport, but I don't see that happening soon, and so that makes me wary to buy an electric car.

<comment><USER12> "For residential leases signed, renewed or extend on or after July 1, 2015, landlords are required to approve a tenant's written request to install an electric vehicle charging station at the tenant's parking space if the tenant enters into a written agreement which includes requirements regarding the installation, use, maintenance and removal of the charging station, requires the tenant pay for all modifications, and requires the tenant to maintain a $1,000,000 general liability insurance policy. The charging station and modifications must comply with all applicable laws and covenants, conditions and restrictions. The tenant is required to pay the cost associated with the electric usage of the charging station. The landlord is not required to provide the tenant with an additional parking space in order to comply with this law. This law does not apply: (1) when parking is not included as part of the rental contract; (2) to properties with fewer than five parking spaces; (3) to properties subject to rent control; (4) when 10% or more of existing spaces already have electric vehicle charging stations."

[http://www.kts-law.com/electric-vehicle-charging-stations- fo...](http://www.kts-law.com/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-for- california-landlords/)

It doesn't cover all cases, but its progress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder about this article. Natural gas plants are mostly fuel cost over their lifetime. It's common to run natural gas plants only during peak periods, and startup and shutdown are straightforward. There's nothing wrong with 47% utilization of a natural gas plant.

I'm happy having lots of redundancy in electric power. California has earthquakes, wildfires, and droughts. Keeping the power on through those is worth a little extra cost.

Also, think of it as being electric car ready.

<comment><USER14> The article doesn't address this, but the interactive graphic does: 831 out of 1170 California power plants (71%) are operating at less than 1/3 of capacity.

<comment><USER13> That's about normal. The peaking plants shut down off-peak. Last night's California power demand was about 20GW at minimum. Peak today is about 30GW. The historical peak (Jul 24, 2006, hottest day recorded in California, with 38 heat-related deaths[1]), was 50GW. Generating capacity has to be sized for that peak.

[1] [http://www.caiso.com/outlook/outlook.html](http://www.caiso.com/outlook/outlook.html) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_heat_wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_heat_wave)

<comment><USER14> Initially you mentioned that 47% is fine, now <33% utilization is also fine, okay, but what kind of utilization isn't?

<comment><USER13> Generating capacity is needed based on the peak, not the average. On the peak hour of the peak day, you'd like to have 15% more nameplate capacity than you're using. Some stations will be out of service for maintenance, and something may fail.

PJM training on this: [1]

[1] [http://www.screencast.com/t/9qPkoGacrnm](http://www.screencast.com/t/9qPkoGacrnm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Excess power is kind of like garage space. If there's any available, we'll usually find some to take.

The amount of potential energy from rooftop solar is insane. It's so powerful and cheap that in my home buying selection I'm avoiding homes with obstructed south-facing rooftops.

Rather than building plants we should be expanding the "dumb" residential grid to handle many, many more kW of residential solar and fairly subsidize the owners who feed it.

<comment><USER16> Rooftop solar is already oversubsidized by net metering in many places. I would be much more for it if rooftop solar could guarantee capacity (and therefore actually reduce infrastructure costs on the grid) and was paid the wholesale instead of retail costs for electricity but as it is the utility companies are losing money for all the power that goes on the grid and that money is only going to people rich enough to buy dollar panels. I haven't talked to someone recently but last time I checked residential solar was often inefficient compared to commercial solar and a subsidy for the rich

<comment><USER15> The issue as you say in the beginning is capacity. Part of the solution is certainly energy storage (and here's tons of innovation happening here, ala tesla batteries etc). The other part is smartening the grid to utilize the most power when it's the most available.

I can imagine a desalination plant that cranks during the hottest part of the day when electricity is cheapest, and slumbers during the night.

Of course most of these problems are usually issues of economics. When it becomes cheaper to do it then it will happen.

<comment><USER16> The problem right now is that if you look at it economically rooftop solar doesn't make a lot of sense and is mainly being driven by subsidies (which are being paid for by everyone else). My guess is that large scale commercial solar will end up generally more economical than rooftop solar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> $1 billion is about $30 per California person.

So Californians can spend a billion without it being much of an emergency.

Doesn't mean they should be happy with waste/poor regulation, just that billion isn't all that impressive a benchmark given the population of the state.

<comment><USER18> And it isn't exactly self evident that it is "power that they "don't need." Increasing power production would reduce costs for everyone, which would be great for consumers, especially the poor.

<comment><USER17> The way generation is regulated, excess capacity doesn't necessarily reduce rates (the utility gets approval to increase rates to cover the capital cost of generation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excess power in California? Sounds like a good time to build a desalination plant.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe electricity rates in California should be dropped to increase demand. The state has one of the highest electricity rates in the country [1].

[1] [http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/204.htm](http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/204.htm)

</comment><comment><USER21> I fully recommend The Grid by Gretchen Bakke. It goes over this subject in great detail.

Link: [https://smile.amazon.com/Grid-Fraying-Between-Americans- Ener...](https://smile.amazon.com/Grid-Fraying-Between-Americans- Energy/dp/1608196100/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder, if there were more data center capacity in the state, would that help?

For example, take Tracy, or some of the land around SR 46 west of Lost Hills: If a cloud provider built facilities there, that would add a fairly constant draw on the state's power supply, with some small flexibility[1]. I wonder if that would be enough to reduce CA electricity prices (as weird as that might sound).

[1]: In the case of AWS, imagine if there were a power shortage, they could respond by massively increasing spot prices, causing load shedding, and allowing hardware to shut down.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not saying the article is perfect, but I'm seeing the same one or two counterarguments presented over and over again in almost identical fashion. Am I paranoid or are we being astroturfed?

</comment><comment><USER22> My dream is solar shingles, like what they advertised late last year, and a Tesla house battery, but my electricity costs are $50/month, maybe $60 if I decided to get lazy and use my heater downstairs in the morning. And this is for a reasonably-sized home in the SF Bay Area. Even if I got AC (I currently don't have it), it still might not be enough to justify solar panels. I think I would have to convert all my gas appliances to electricity, and then it would push me into territory that would justify them.

<comment><USER23> Solar panels can still make sense, you can sell the excess energy you don't use. The amount you currently spend doesn't really affect how profitable solar panels can be. It's rather a concern if you want to be independent of the grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So basically a regulated public utility used its position to build plants to push independents out of the market all the while knowing the capacity wasn't needed. It was a power play supported by the regulating committee that should have said no.

The first step in fixing such issues is to block those companies protected by status of being public utilities from contributing to political campaigns.

The issue not covered by the article from what I can see is, how much of this is baseload power and no peak power or variable (renewable)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure how the author managed to write this article without mentioning that California imports over 33% of its electricity every year. Up from only 25% net imports 6 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would be happy if we could just turn off coal[1] rather than these plants.

[1] [http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/tracking_progress/docume...](http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/tracking_progress/documents/current_expected_energy_from_coal.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER27> Californians are paying a lot of money for things they don't need. A high speed train, subsidies for dairy and what not.

</comment><comment><USER28> Early 2000s Californians were having rolling blackouts. Was it really bad planning or due to Texas energy crooks Enron?

</comment><comment><USER29> Higher energy prices lead to less electricity use which leads to less greenhouse gas emissions.

</comment><comment><USER30> So Tim Burton's second Batman movie?</comment>


La Vida Robot: How underdogs took on MIT in underwater bot championship (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.html

<comment><USER2> Podcast: [http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-01-14/joshua_davis_sp...](http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-01-14/joshua_davis_spare_parts_four_undocumented_teenagers_one_ugly_robot_and_the_battle_for_the_american_dream)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the story adapted into the movie Spare Parts [1]

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3233418/?ref_=nv_sr_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3233418/?ref_=nv_sr_1)</comment>


Bezos, are you listening? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/bezos-are-you-listening/

<comment><USER2> The ratio of books on my wish list to books available for Kindle is about 10:1. If this is typical, perhaps Bezos simply doesn't want to offer a feature that could only serve to get people frustrated.

<comment><USER3> Agree'd. The percentage of books available in digital form is still frustratingly low. Being reminded of that every time you go out to buy one (and have to settle for the 4th or 5th choice as usual) is bad enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A subscription model similar to NetFlix is the most logical way to sell books on the Kindle since books are consumed in a similar way to movies.

I suspect Amazon would get a lot of pushback from publishers, worrying that Kindle book sales would hurt their existing retail sales and damage their relationship retailers.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can add Kindle books to your wishlist with the universal wishlist bookmarklet: <http://www.amazon.com/wishlist/universal></comment>


A Thread about Internet Archive's "Silent Killer" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204428311553642496 <comment><USER3> The Internet Archive is absolutely essential to Wikipedia, whose articles are required to be verifiable to reliable sources. When pages go offline, the link rot makes it harder for articles to be verified. However, if the Wayback Machine has an archived copy, that copy can then be cited as the source and made available to readers and editors. The Wayback Machine now automatically archives every new external link added to the English Wikipedia.

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

The Wikimedia Foundation's budget is about 10 times that of the Internet Archive. If you see the fundraising banner on Wikipedia and want to help out the site, but don't think the Wikimedia Foundation needs the donation, consider donating to the Internet Archive instead.

[https://archive.org/donate](https://archive.org/donate)

<comment><USER4> > The Wayback Machine now automatically archives every new external link added > to the English Wikipedia.

Links submitted to Hacker News should be auto-archived, too: I often stumbled upon dead-links [0] which otherwise had generated insightful discussion on news.yc. Adding _archive_ next to _web_ would work nicely.

[0] Launch HNs, in particular.

<comment><USER5> It is possible to do that nowadays and that is one of the things I suggested implementing in tildes.

[https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/586](https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/586)

I believe all link aggregators should do this, they're a great way of getting defacto quality/interesting content discovered by the archive.

<comment><USER6> > A mechanism to save pages to the web archive has now been implemented. Just > need to ping this URL: > [http://web.archive.org/save/<insert](http://web.archive.org/save/<insert) > URL you want to save>.

It's been on our list to do that for some time, but this should make it much easier. Thanks!

<comment><USER7> I hope you folks implement this, and also that YC sets a recurring donation to the archive. (Possibly tied to how many URLs you submit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've discovered their efforts to archive old dos games... fully playable in the browser through a dosbox build in WASM as far as I know. That's a really impressive cooperation of very old and very new technology - 16 bit up to the edge of JS (- edit: or rather, the edge of browser based computing).

And on that train of thought, I just had a little flashback about storage sizes. There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement, and some 50MB drive was huge. The classical example: Monkey Island, Indiana Jones or Day of the Tentacle on ~12 floppy disks. But you had to choose which 1 or 2 to install because you didn't have enough space on your hard drive, or you had to swap disks every few screens :)

Or, they are archiving a lot of video playthroughs in the lets-play style from video sites, in case those sites go through a meltdown like viddler does.

I guess I'm rambling. Point is: This isn't just a storage dump. There are also interesting projects around the internet archive to make the old things accessible on new systems. Very worthwhile donating to.

<comment><USER9> > There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement

I don't know what storage medium that refers to. Plain old 3.5" floppies only went up to 1.44 MB.

<comment><USER10> You know how old computers always rounded things to the nearest _pi_...

<comment><USER11> Get out of here.

(Still sore Apple did not stick to the 1kB = 1000 bytes of the original MacOS and gave in to the "powers of two" insanity ;-)

<comment><USER12> I don't get why you are being downvoted. Are people not familiar with the expression "get out of here" used in a friendly manner? Or do they really downvote you because they think it is so bad that you think that 1kB should be equal to 1000 bytes? I mean, I don't agree with you either but IMO the downvote should only be used for things that are either factually wrong, or which detract strongly from the conversation, or which contribute nothing at all. I think your comment is nice and it does not deserve to be downvoted.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, apparently downvotes can be used as a "disagree" signal. Usually when I see a comment being unfairly downvoted that way, I upvote as a counter- balance, even if I disagree with the argument (i.e., how many bytes in 1kB).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I encourage everyone to also do their own thinking of what did you enjoy in the internet or computer software in the 80's, 90's and 00's and see if it is still available somewhere.

I found out that the local games scene I used to love as a kid had been almost wiped off the face off the earth. These were small non-commercial and shareware games localized in just one language so it was already a niche. The free hosting services of the 90s are gone so those sites are down and no one wanted to keep paying for hosting for 20 years+ on sites that get very few visitors nowadays.

The only way to get these games again was to find a Discord group and a friendly stranger who agreed to seed a torrent (which had 0 seeds when I found it). I'm looking to upload them to a couple of different places and compile a basic website catalogue (static site on CDN) one of these days. For the layperson, these games are already gone from the internet.

The internet archive does a great service but it is breadth-first and quite surface level. The depth has to come from people who were familiar with the sites at their peak. And there's a big change that no one is doing that for your specific interest.

<comment><USER15> BlueMaxima's Flashpoint is a fabulous archival project that is saving as many Adobe Flash games/animations as they can before browsers pull support at the end of 2020. Really cool, since Flash games are a similarly concrete slice of culture/history that will just be gone if they're not archived.

[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/)

<comment><USER16> Looks like its a huge amount of work to strip the DRM out of the games which stop functioning when the original website stops working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Although efforts like internet archive are noble (and I find it occasionally useful), I'm not sure it's always so great that everything anyone does online will be permanently archived.

I know many people feel that everything should be available forever. But for me... it's pushing me away from doing much on the web. I liked it in the 90s when things were more ephemeral. When you could make mistakes and not have them easily found by anyone with a few clicks, forever.

<comment><USER18> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it.

This argument is so horrible as to be actively harmful to Archive's work. Jason Scott is a god, and if we didn't have him, we'd have to invent him.

WE DO NOT GET TO CHOOSE WHAT THE FUTURE FINDS INTERESTING.

We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture, and we can do so without having to worry about physical space or staff to work the "library." It's a remarkable time we live in, and yet, 99% of our society either doesn't care, thinks this work is stupid, or actively works against it through horrific copyright laws.

We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived. I can go to Rembrandt's house and see where he lived, where he painted, how he worked, where he slept and ate and mixed his paints and taught his classes.

Atari's old HQ is just another office building. The source code to those games is mostly gone (thankfully, it's assembly and easier to disassemble). We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from.

Deleting some old tweets is one thing, but actively worrying about Archive's work is just harmful to us all. We need 10,000 more Archives, dammit. It's supremely important work that is helping stem the tide of lost culture due to stock market forces. Geocities is gone forever because Yahoo! didn't find it profitable. This cannot keep happening.

<comment><USER19> I'm not convinced it's dangerous to explore whether there are benefits to ephemerality.

I'm also not sure your Rembrandt example shows what you suggest it does. The average Atari 2600 programmer would be more equivalent to the hundreds of now unknown artists in Rembrandt's time. The John Carmack's of today will be remembered in detail with or without blanket archive efforts.

Maybe, just maybe, Rembrandt's Status in our minds is a result of generations of people each seeing the individual value in his work. That is, each generation does indeed get to decide what future generations remember. Or at least it used to be true until the digital age.

Maybe the change is an improvement. But maybe not.

And libraries are the epitome of what you're fighting against. They are by definition works chosen by humans based on judgment calls of their perceived value.

Let's at least acknowledge that blanket archive efforts are a fundamental change in themselves and a departure from the human status quo for thousands of years. Then let's debate whether the change is an unabated good.

<comment><USER18> In 2008 I found a parcel of bare EPROMs at a flea market container 27 games. 1 of those games was Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, and it was spread across 12 chips, each one showing a progressive state of development across 9 months.

To my mind, this was the only known find of a vintage Atari 2600 game and its iterative development process. So, 30 years later, the only reason we had this snapshot is because someone found these chips and sold them at the flea.

The current state of digital preservation is abhorrent. Those roms would have taken up less than 1/4 of a 5.25" floppy, but the company behind them never thought to preserve that information or data.

Take2 Interactive republished BioShock in 2012. They couldn't find their source code. They didn't save it. They had to go machine to machine looking for it. The reissued game is not the same as the original.

As a society, we don't place any value on this stuff, but the potential value of it cannot be understood until the future has occurred. Letting it vanish is a disservice to the future. In the past, if a book was published, it wasn't going to vanish if the publisher went out of business, there would simply be no new copies.

In our digital online age, things vanish in seconds, days and hours. This is also a very different state of affairs. In the past we could not save everything, but everything didn't have a clock counting down from the end of the quarter over its head, counting the seconds until it is deleted.

The Library of Congress tries to save everything. Yes, libraries weed the stacks and choose items to host. This is due to space concerns: they can't host everything ever. Digitally, they can, and many host reams of microfilm and old newspapers because they can.

Libraries can, thanks to tech, now host every book ever, digitally, for very low costs. Copyright prevents that.

This is an unabated good. Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to. Why in the every loving fuck would you worry about that?

Most likely, only for personal reasons. This is a humanity level problem. Your personal worries are irrelevant in 100 years when everyone who ever knew you is dead anyway. Geocities would be more interesting at that time, as a subject of study.

<comment><USER20> Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale etc choose to save everything they are mandated to, and a fair bit extra besides. That includes everything published. They don't save their water cooler chats, personal letters and everything sent by post, everything said on the phone or Facebook, etc.

The bar - perhaps found accidentally - seems quite important in deciding what _must_ be archived, and what probably shouldn't.

<comment><USER21> And yet, hundreds of years later historians and linguists crave for letters, and post, and telegrams to get a glimpse of actual life outside official publications.

<comment><USER20> Sure, and a hundred or more years later the family of the author, or relatives of the recipient can decide to release the family letters or telegram from WW1 or the US Civil War etc. That delay, usually at least until the correspondents have died, is important. The affair, the less than ideal belief, and all that other imperfect demonstration of humanity can no longer hurt or embarrass. It ceases to be private and personal and moves into the historic.

Releasing whilst the probably famous sender is alive is most often in the realms of to do damage, simply tasteless or paid for revelations in the gutter press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, copyright conditions are apparently another silent killer [1].

A website can be archived, vanish from the web, and then vanish from the archive for technical copyright reasons (new owner's robot.txt file on the root). So "archiving the archive" might be useful. Or something.

Ezboard was an old discussion site that contained much of interest - <USER2> and now the archive is not accessible.

[https://archive.org/post/389127/ezboard-content-suddenly- not...](https://archive.org/post/389127/ezboard-content-suddenly-not- available-in-the-new-system-why)

<comment><USER23> TIL they still follow robots.txt -- [https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for- sea...](https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search- engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/) mentioned that they were planning to stop doing that (and I remember reading a news article based on it claiming that they already stopped following robots.txt, hence my confusion). Truly a shame. I get following robots.txt at collection time, I don't get following a robots.txt that was added later.

<comment><USER22> Well that was 2 and 3/4 years ago and ezboard is still gone. I hope they didn't erase but rather excluded but legality and all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > A shutdown announcement put these at risk. We worked with the founder, @tedr > (RIP), who'd left the company, to save as much as we could. 3.5 Terabytes

I work for a company that owns a website containing information that in my opinion is valuable to the public. The website may go offline forever in the coming months. How can I get in touch with the Archive, to ensure that the content is saved? Parts of the content are not easy to index (e.g. there are "hidden" pages that you will only find if you have the exact URL), I can assist with that.

<comment><USER25> Other than irc, you can send a DM to [https://twitter.com/textfiles](https://twitter.com/textfiles), or email at email@example.com.

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems they could save some money by moving a bunch of infrequently accessed data to warm storage. The entire archive does not need to be accessible 24/7.

I would be perfectly ok if I was trying to see a copy of a web page from five years ago, and it said that I had to make a request and it would be available in five or ten minutes.

I think I could wait five or ten minutes for a web page to get pulled from the archives.

<comment><USER27> Practically speaking, how would warm storage like that be implemented?

<comment><USER28> Usually tape libraries.

A problem with most forms of warm storage is that they involve moving media around, which itself can lead to degradation.

I would like to see some write-one _and really last forever_ form of storage to come into widespread use. That seems ... like it's still a few years off.

And you still have the issue of how such storage is read, and how that affects total lifetime.

<comment><USER29> Sounds like what they're doing at Microsoft with Project Silica [https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite- project...](https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project- silica-superman/)

<comment><USER28> That definitely is in the direction I'm considering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been archiving the FDA.gov site at archive-it.org .

Leaving a lot of dead links on the FDA site. Sometimes they tell you to look in the archives for the old information, without giving you a link to it, and sometimes they don't, they just expect you to know.

Now why can't the FDA afford the space to keep their pages forever on their own site? Fill in your favorite conspiracy theory...

Some of the information that has been removed, such as the 2015 hearings on Fluoroquinolone antibiotics, are important health research as just one example.

[https://archive-it.org/organizations/1137](https://archive- it.org/organizations/1137)

<comment><USER31> > Now why can't the FDA afford the space to keep their pages forever on their > own site? Fill in your favorite conspiracy theory...

This seems like a prime example of Hanlon's razor. Tight government budgets and lowest-bidder contractors not bothering with page permanence strike me as the most likely explanation.

<comment><USER32> It may also be worth observing that it's how pretty much any private company website operates. Arguably the FDA should be different and archive old, even outdated, content. But, while private companies may explicitly archive some materials like press releases and earnings reports, 99.9% of their focus is on the current content and they'll mostly just delete anything that's not in service of today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Pretty amazing what they do with 1/10th the revenue of Wikimedia and quite a lot more data to manage.

<comment><USER28> IA are a capture process. Wikipedia supports active updates to content, under contentious circumstances, as well as structuring content for useful access (something IA also does, but under looser conditions).

Both are highly worthwhile projects -- some of the best of the Web. But a straight apples-pomellos comparision is difficult.

<comment><USER33> Wikipedia also gets a lot of that done with free labor. And, over the years, their spend has increased quite a lot more than their content, update frequency, and so on.

I think it's a fair enough comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The real "silent killer" I see here is the reliance on mirroring. One-failure protection, with a 2x expansion factor. As it happens, I work on large storage systems, where 2x is our maximum expansion factor and for that we get resistance to as many as _nine_ simultaneous failures. Across power and network failure domains, with multiple kinds of background scrubbing to detect loss of that redundancy. Oh, and 60PB is something we might add to an existing cluster for a day to absorb transient I/O load. There's also a bunch of monitoring and automation stuff that should be considered "table stakes" for storage at these scales. Seems like an opportunity to use what I and others have learned for a good cause, to make this valuable resource more efficient _and_ more durable all at once.

<comment><USER35> Is that different techniques or you just have vastly more resources? I'm sure they'd accept your help in either case if you offered directly.

<comment><USER34> It's different techniques (erasure coding). As it turns out, applying those techniques would _reduce_ need for additional physical resources as well, since it allows data to be stored more efficiently with the same physical resources. It does require more CPU and memory relative to bytes stored or spindles to store them on, but it's easy to make that tradeoff and still come out ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I donated a week or so ago. The Internet Archive has come in handy many times for me, not just for the Wayback Machine but also things like their live music archives. They're an indispensable resource.

<comment><USER37> They also archive ROMs for different consoles.

<comment><USER38> Which is a copyright violation, right?

<comment><USER37> ROMs are legal at least here in the USA. Doesn't stop big companies from bullying little sites and becoming copyright trolls. The Internet archive will not be easily bullied to take down legally archived items thankfully.

The trick is you have to create the ROM yourself apparently. Sharing it is bad. I would assume copies made by anybody would be identical, so it would be interesting to see such a case in court against The Internet Archive, not that I want them to get sued, but would love for them to win if they did.

Nintendo is the most aggressive about ROMs than anybody.

<comment><USER39> _Nintendo is the most aggressive about ROMs than anybody_

They are, but they're also the most proactive in making their old games available on new hardware. It wouldn't be fair to call Super Mario Bros "abandonware" because Nintendo has done a lot to keep the game alive and accessible to new generations.

<comment><USER40> They have been caught putting other people's "illegal" roms on VC

<comment><USER37> [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did- nintendo-d...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo- download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us)

Here's an article that asks this very question, not sure if it was posted on HN prior or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Setup a monthly $5 donation. It's not much, but I know how valuable the archive is... they're doing the work the library of congress SHOULD be doing.

<comment><USER42> > I know how valuable the archive is

How valuable is it?

<comment><USER43> Data is generally hard to put a value on.

<comment><USER44> When I took an animal communication class in college, there was a formula for the value of information (not data).

I don't remember the exact formula, but it was similar Shannon's equation. Basically, the more valuable information is, the larger the change it affects in the probably of what an organisms next behavioral state is. So, if information signaling didn't change the behavior of another organism, it wasn't considered communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Internet Archive donations are matched 2-1 currently, for those interested.

[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

<comment><USER46> Who's matching the donations?

<comment><USER47> I guess the Pineapple Fund

[https://pineapplefund.org/](https://pineapplefund.org/)

<comment><USER48> It is not the pineapple fund, although it has been a lovely time working with them. Regardless of the cryptocurrency discussion, the fact that someone who feels some sort of windfall would immediately have an urge to share it with organizations that need it is laudable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> IA and WBM are great and essential, like a Library of Congress/Smithsonian. What's frustrating about some old websites like Microsoft or Borland's FTP download area is that dynamic links weren't followed and can't be followed and websites that used user-agent filtering. CDN links also weren't captured well.

There's so many retro patches that just don't exist publicly. For example, a number of files on SciTech's IA's WBM have zero captures. Most FTP sites weren't captured in WBM adequately either. There are spots of FTP archives hosted here and there on IA and elsewhere, but they're not like WBM for static content sites, and a single snapshot archive lacks the history and the changes, before and after. It is what it is, unless folks donate their vintage personal/work local mirrors to add to the collective.

<comment><USER50> Donating your copy whenno authoritative source exists is a great chance to retroactively update the past.

Anything that was not securely scanned by WBM but was donated should have a different and clearly denoted status, if admitted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The Internet Archive is great, but it risks becoming a single failure point if we rely on it too much. Also it would be good to take some of the server load off of them. One possible solution is for smaller archives to exist. So if you're interested in archival, and you have some spare time and cash, consider not only donating to IA, but also setting up your own archive site with content on whatever category or topic that you found interesting enough to archive.

<comment><USER52> Exactly, decentralization is the way to go. Data hoarding is a hobby. Just checkout r/datahoarder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The British Library's web archive[1] does similar archiving work, but limits itself to 'British' sites - in other words, sites with a .uk domain. I've had good dealings with the admins before, when I submitted some of my personal sites for inclusion in the archive.

Interestingly, the British Library uses web crawlers based on the Internet Archive's Heritrix web crawler[2], which demonstrates how important IA's work is for many other archival organisations' work.

[1] [https://www.webarchive.org.uk/](https://www.webarchive.org.uk/) [2] [https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3](https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3)

</comment><comment><USER54> A linear amount of data could be saved if we extricated text content from the HTML skeleton that contains it.

I wish Semantic Web had taken off. "Pages with styling" was suboptimal. Web apps are a such a weird evolutionary branch we've descended into that don't relate to documents.

Content instead should have fallen under a type of ontology: news item, blog post, technical reference, comment, status update, ... If we'd adopted such a markup grammar and styled around it, we could parse out meaning, have stronger links in the graph, and compress.

Semantic Web would have happened if commercial web didn't outpace it.

<comment><USER55> Once you start transforming a document you always risk discarding information that later will turn out to be useful. Besides, I bet images, videos and other non-text data dwarf the space required by HTML markup.

<comment><USER54> Yes, that's what I expect to be the case. I'm just musing over a world built in semantic markup rather than presentational with arbitrary structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> TIA should get money from the UN. Or be the only beneficiary of a flat tax on network ports - I bet even just $5 on every small router sold in the US (which is basically nothing) would generate a ton of money for them.

</comment><comment><USER57> Let's not forget that we can all participate in archiving web data using IPFS[1], which the Internet Archive is also using.

And coming soon, you'll be able to get paid to make content available using IPFS and FileCoin[2].

[1]: [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

[2]: [https://filecoin.io/](https://filecoin.io/)

</comment><comment><USER58> It's too bad that there's not a vaguely-somehow-related-but-not-really and impossible-to-censor service that retains stuff that sites have excluded using robots.txt or whatever.

<comment><USER59> Is this supposed to be a veiled reference to archive.is? I'm not sure what point you're making.

<comment><USER58> No, I wasn't thinking of that site _per se_.

I was thinking more about the 90s era dream of uncensurable "data havens". That led to Freenet, for example. Which is slow, and forgets stuff that doesn't get accessed. And Tor onion services, which are more readily taken down.

But the problem is that there's no way to know in advance whether something is about to disappear from the Internet Archive. So you'd need someone inside who'd discreetly alert the backup service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The Internet Archive is a fantastic and important initiative and we should definitely support it.

 _But:_

Let's also support the public service players in its space that often get forgotten or marginalised by it's well funded marketing.

I'm thinking particularly of the various national libraries that preserve content under incredibly tight budgetary, PR and legal constraints that the IA is relatively free of.

On IA-aware media like HN, there is a tendency to present it as the only preservation initiative out there, which is absolutely not the case.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initia...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives)

</comment><comment><USER61> Some things about internet archives which isnt as obvious unless one has been there in person \- Housed in a church its not what a typical software development shop might look like, its mix of open office and workshop floor. \- A big workforce actually does a lot of manual work of scanning books and transferring from different media types \- Its a interesting experience to tour the data center which is in the office itself. I cannot remember but there was something special about those machines to control the heating

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't understand why archive.org keeps all kinds of formats, .ogg and .mp3, .pdf and .jpg for the same resource? Why not just whatever the original format was? Sometimes its a dozen or so formats it seems like.

There are probably a lot of reasons, but I don't know where to chat about it to learn more.

edit: now that I think about it, if the original is pdf, then jpeg makes sense for loading one-page-at-a-time in the browser, but it seems like mp3 transcoding to ogg is reasonable to leave up to the user?

</comment><comment><USER63> I found out about the Wayback Machine back in 2007 or so. I was young and just starting to explore the internet and found it incredibly fascinating to explore news sites as they were on the day of major historical events (9/11, etc). The amount of times I've relied on the Internet Archive by way of the Wayback Machine is numerous. I'll be adding them to my modest donation list, along with Wikipedia and similar public service sites.

</comment><comment><USER64> PSA - Many companies will match donations. Apple, my employer, does this through a site called Benevity.

</comment><comment><USER65> The Internet Archive is amazing in many ways. Kind if sadly, for me, the most amazing thing is that they haven't been sued out of existence. How do they manage to operate with copyright laws being what they are?

<comment><USER66> They've been granted a DMCA exemption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Is there any way to download warcs collected by the internet archive? I'd like to try and back some up and use them for some search algorithm benchmarks.

</comment><comment><USER68> This is one of the last bastions of the internet I remember as a kid. People publishing knowledge because they could. Sharing things that were interesting. Giving to other people. Sure there has always been seedier elements or commerce, but by and large this was a place to grow and share knowledge. By most every measure today the internet is a better place than it was but I still miss those days...

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm somewhat curious about their backup methods - mirrored drives aren't great even if they're stored at two seperate locations.

Surely this would get enough support that they could host torrents of the content stored in chunks, and have many peers download and seed many chunks making the backups entirely distributed? I'd gladly seed a few hundred gigs of data to ensure they maintain good backup procedures.

<comment><USER70> Not sure why are you being downvoted. That was actually the first thing I thought - what is the backup strategy? Mirroring is for performance + service continuity.

Let me remind that there already was a fire that destroyed some equipment for internet archive but luckily not digitalized data: [https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5076166/the-internet- arch...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5076166/the-internet-archive- seeks-donations-after-fire-destroys-equipment)

Luckily that article from 2013 mentions: > None of the Internet Archive's digitized data was lost in the fire as backups are held in multiple locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Don't forget [https://www.ft.com/content/5be1f2ee-d60b-11e9-a0bd- ab8ec6435...](https://www.ft.com/content/5be1f2ee-d60b-11e9-a0bd-ab8ec6435630) (discussed under [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21007476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21007476)).

</comment><comment><USER72> Perhaps they could get a grant from OpenAI or some similar AI research firm; someday, when the technology arrives, the Internet Archive will be the ultimate corpus.

</comment><comment><USER73> One of the replies on Twitter exhorts them to "charge people" in all caps. It'd be a sad to a library put behind a paywall :(

<comment><USER32> While I tend to agree in this case, lots of libraries are behind a "paywall" in some form or other. The are explicitly membership-only private libraries but many, e.g. university libraries, also restrict access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator some years ago and put it online (telnet em.prirun.com 8001). The Prime was a minicomputer from the 80's. I worked with Primes for many years and also worked at the company as an OS specialist for 18 months.

Seven versions of the Primos operating system, from rev 18 to rev 24, have been recovered from disks, 9-track tapes, and 8mm backup tapes. The company died around 1992.

There has been a _huge_ amount of Prime software that as far as I know, is lost to time. Oracle ran on it. SPSS. A native DBMS. Every one of the major OS revs had 5-10 minor revs. Some software products are only available for certain revs. I actually used rev 12, so at least half of the OS versions are completely missing. And Prime released source for their products. Most of that is missing.

For me personally, the emulator was / is a very rewarding project, and maybe for a handful of others who are still alive and used Primes in high school, college, or work. It's been really fascinating to "relive" my Prime days now and then, and others have made similar comments.

But how valuable is it really? Is it more than just a curiosity now? Sure, for a current or future computer historian, it might be viewed as a gold mine, but as time goes on, it has less and less value IMO, especially as the people who actual used one die off. If in a few years, only 10 people in the world care about such a thing, does it make sense to save it for all time? I have my doubts. And if I did have _all_ of the versions of Primos, and all of the software ever written for Primes, would it make a difference even now, when there are people alive who actually used this computer system? Also seems doubtful.

To me, an "archive everything and let someone else figure out if it's useful" strategy seems impractical. If I had my choice, sure, I'd like to have every major version of the OS and all of the products for each version. But all of the dot-revs too? Nope - not important. Would I like _all_ of the manuals? Yep!

Some of the products like Oracle, DBMS, etc. were a bitch to configure back in the day, and certainly would be even harder now with very few people around to help. So even if I did have them, I doubt I could get them running. And even if they were running, they were a specialty product at the time, with few experts, so finding someone today that would be interested in them would be a needle / haystack thing.

It all reminds me of family pictures. Before my grandma died, she went through a large box of B/W photos, explaining to us who all the people were, and we wrote on the back of the photos. But just 3 generations after her, the generation after me, no one knows the people in the photos (except my mom is in some - their grandma). In a way it seems that this family history is somehow important, but no one younger than me is interested _at all_. And truthfully, I never look at the pictures myself. I ended up scanning the photos with my mom or grandma, putting them on a digital picture frame for my nephews, and leaving the rest out. I asked them first - they didn't care about any of the others.

I'm not an archivist, but it seems to me that curation is a much more important aspect than grabbing everything and keeping it alive forever. Not curating seems like a "scale to infinity" problem. Those tend to not end well.

I think the IA is great project and am not intending to be critical, but giving my own perspective about preserving some very small piece of computer history.

</comment><comment><USER75> Twitter is the worst choice for publishing. This involved so much more text- scrolling and photo-expanding than is necessary.

Edit: If anyone would care to explain why they feel that chopping an article up into pieces of arbitrary size makes for a good user experience, please do so. I know Twitter gets a pass from HN in general but it is simply not suited to this type of content by design. This was a conscious choice by its creators.

<comment> jon-wood There really needs to be a new rule added to the posting guidelines about not complaining about the format when Twitter threads make it to the front page. No, it's probably not the best possible format, but every single time the comments are inundated.

<comment><USER76> There really needs to be a new rule added to the posting guidelines about not posting Twitter threads

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> What does marie kondo think?

<comment><USER78> What does lazylizard think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> It seems like all those things they backed up didn't seem to impact anyone's actual life. People lost files, websites, communications, whatever, and yet they kept right on living life. So I can't help but think that this is all a waste, like people who take pictures everywhere they go, and never look at them later.

Is there any useful purpose to all this other than nostalgia? And at what point does the nostalgia overwhelm the useful purpose?

<comment><USER80> Seems to me like it could come in very useful in a legal case, with very significant and real impacts on someone's life.

<comment><USER81> Also useful for various research, in the same way as going to the archives in a library can be useful.

Even if most data is uninteresting doesn't mean that there are data there that is very useful to someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Why not just let old data die? What's the point in devoting 10TB to saving data which maybe 300 people will check in the next 25 years?

Information destruction is not necessarily a bad thing.

<comment><USER44> Selection is destruction, and destruction is selection. (but not even a blackhole can destroy information?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Here's what I thought this would be about:

There's a problem with the Wayback Machine in specific which can kill your ability to access it quite silently, unless you know how to use the browser's development tools and interpret headers.

It has to do with cookies: Somehow, the Wayback Machine sets cookies... and sets cookies... and keeps setting cookies, until it overflows its own ability to _accept_ cookies. At that point, your browser tries to access a Wayback Machine page, handing the server all of the cookies it currently has, and the server refuses to deal. It absolutely denies everything, sending an error header and a blank page. You have to clear all web.archive.org cookies to get anything at all, at which point it works perfectly.

I've completely solved this problem by blacklisting web.archive.org in browser cookie blacklists. I haven't had it happen since then. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is diagnosed and just needs to be solved. At _their_ end.

<comment><USER84> I've run into this problem as well. I used to use a Chrome extension which I authored that saved all of the pages I browsed to the wayback machine (in another tab), and I would frequently need to clear my cookies to keep the thing working.</comment></comment>


The Prevalence Of Threats: How Popular Is The Malware That Infected Your System? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.immunet.com/blog/2010/10/26/the-prevalence-of-threats-how-popular-is-the-malware-that-in.html In my last blog post, I talked about the infection rates of Immunet users (namely looking at how many threats we blocked on different machines).  In this post, I'd like to dive into how frequently a piece of malware might show up on a given system. <comment><USER2> Right around half of "all threats" are only found on one machine. I'm assuming that's one Windows machine. What's the point of a signature-based detector again?

Also, I'd like to see the same kind of figures for Linux.</comment>


SnappyData: OLTP and OLAP Database Built on Apache Spark - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SnappyDataInc/snappydata <comment><USER2> Interesting and much needed!

Few questions if the maintainers / owners read this:

1\. what is the license? it seems to be not commercial friendly at the moment, but I couldn't tell if it's GPL / AGPL or something else

2\. what are your plans for supporting network/graph data structures, graph analytics etc.

3\. visualisation plans?

4\. is the target to become a fully fledged BI tool? compete with the likes of Tableau / Spotfire only on top of Big Data? (if so I'm very interested!)

<comment><USER3> 1> Most of it is straight up Apache 2.0 license. The only thing that is not Apache licensed is the approximate query processing piece which is closed source right now. We intend to build out a community and that predicates that much of what we do has to be open source

2> Since we have spliced a database into Spark such that Spark and Snappy share the same memory space. Everything that Spark supports will be supported. The data can be accessed as data frames and accessed using the Spark API (and we will be a 100% compatible)

3> Absolutely. In upcoming releases. Both from a data standpoint and from a management and monitoring, and security.

4> I think becoming a full fledged tool is not on the cards. Think of this as a enterprise class real time operational analytics platform. But we intend to integrate and work closely with the leading tool vendors (especially the AQP piece is great for aggregate class visualizations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks very interesting!

Would you be interested in helping us write a SnappyData connector for Metabase? github.com/metabase/metabase

<comment><USER5> Metabase looks very interesting. We will go through it in more detail. Can you point to any doc on what it takes to create a connector? Note that Snappydata has two straightforward entry points - SQL (e.g. JDBC connector) or using the Spark APIs. Looks like the SQL connector route is the simplest?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This can be great if it lives up to it's promise.

I could not find any performance numbers from real-life scale deployments. Will have to wait before giving a verdict.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi hsshah, we talk about some benchmarking we did in our technical paper (page 10, "Experiments") [http://www.snappydata.io/snappy- industrial](http://www.snappydata.io/snappy-industrial). This is not a real- life scale deployment, but may be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why add Spark? We run Spark in prod and have to actively patch the code based because there are so many ways to make it crash and burn. LDAP is a solved problem, why add Spark and instability to the mix?

<comment><USER3> Fundamentally, any enterprise today has to deal with OLTP data, OLAP data (transactional plus other sources), Streaming and finally machine learning. Our premise is that you can choose to use 4 different platforms for each one or move to a unified platform. Spark offers streaming, it offers Spark SQL and there are a bunch of machine learning libraries available on Spark. Also, everyone who has anything to do with data has a connector to Spark so it becomes a good data integration platform. The API is uniform across these. So it forms a good substrate for what we are trying to do. As for bugs, it is a platform that is growing rapidly , going through some growing pains, and over a period of time, it will mature. We believe that the core capabilities will become powerful over time (SparkSQL, Streaming etc.) It is a somewhat opinionated choice but one that we think will pan out over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also (correct me if I'm wrong), the stability of SnappyData will depend more on GemFireXD (related to Apache Geode), the in-memory database that has been integrated with Spark to form SnappyData, then it will depend on Spark. GemFire has been in development for over a decade and has a multitude production use cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if they added Spark into the mix just for marketing purposes. Since its born out of Pivotal, I guess they'll end up gemfire much more than Spark.

<comment><USER5> @superkk Ironically, we debated this extensively and concluded the reverse (primarily because we believe the Spark API is succinct and integration with the eco-system will be easy) - much more like spark than Gemfire. In fact, the API is pretty much Spark. For instance, you don't care about updating data, you just use the Spark DataFrame API. ( [https://github.com/SnappyDataInc/snappydata#quick-start- with...](https://github.com/SnappyDataInc/snappydata#quick-start-with- scalasparksnappy-programming) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> does the snappy in snappydata inspired/referred from "snappy compression"

<comment><AUTHOR> No we were not referring to snappy compression when we came up with the name.

<comment><USER10> I think we're running out of good names for things, especially since Spark uses Snappy (compression) itself.

It is time to build a tool on top of SnappyData called Spark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks very promising!

Any plans to expose a Python API in addition to the Scala API?

<comment><USER5> Yes. Hopefully soon.</comment></comment>


Show HN: a simple music listening app backed by node.js and redis - <AUTHOR> http://binb.jit.su

<comment><USER2> Great use of iTunes api and Levenshtein distance algorithm (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance>)

</comment><comment><USER2> It's sleek!

</comment><comment><USER3> great ui and performance</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News Slack channel? - <AUTHOR> Hey HNers,
Some friends and I thought it would be fun to join a Slack channel for Hacker News.
Does something like this exist?
Thanks, J <comment><USER2> Why sign up for some closed source, proprietary, for profit service like Slack, for a community like this? Especially when there is #startups and #hn on Freenode.net IRC?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm also interested. Would love to maybe set something up if it isn't currently available...

</comment><comment><USER4> What will happen to the archive?

Also, do you mean team (vs. channel)?

</comment><comment><USER5> or any sort of irc channel?</comment>


Dependency Heck – Swift - <AUTHOR> http://bartstechblog.blogspot.com/2019/10/dependency-heck.html <comment><AUTHOR> SPM is not the greatest "package manager" out there, but set a standard just because it's part of Swift. For me it's a vendor political decision that forces us to use it eventually.</comment>


A Peek Inside Google's Gmail Usability Lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/22/a-peak-inside-googles-usability-lab/

<comment><USER2> Peaks are for summits, It's a 'peek'.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps they have a mountain in the lab so they can test how usable things are at altitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It also has a number of discrete cameras (and a microphone) that keep an eye > on the user herself as well as the screen.

They only test females?</comment>


Ask HN: Is My Google Account Being Attacked? - <AUTHOR> This afternoon I was logged out of my google account on all my devices. On my laptop I noticed a popup from Google drive and that chrome was not logged in. On my phone a play services popup. I went to log my phone back in any my Google authenticator app no longer shows my account (looks to be in a fresh install state). I used a backup code to get back in. The google security page showed no changes to the "Authenticator app ". There are no "security events" listed and no new "Recently used devices". Anything else I should check? Am I just being paranoid? The coincidence of the authenticator app losing the account synch seemed odd for a coincidence. <comment><USER2> I have a related experience. my two way authentication has a registered phone number that I don't recognize at all. The number has a Florida area code, but I have never been to Florida before. I emailed google, asking if my account was hacked, who (ip address) added that number and when did that phone number add to my account. no response :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Same thing happened to me and some other people:

[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=signe...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=signed%20out%20google&src=typd)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear it is not just me. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I also got logged out of Google on my Android phone yedterday.

</comment><comment><USER5> Same here</comment>


Facebook establishing a venture arm to invest in startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/facebook-establishing-a-venture-arm-to-invest-in-startups-91d9ee71-2282-4032-8f31-45b861a6ba9c.html <comment><USER2> It's pretty interesting that FAANG doing venture capital is basically like legal insider trading.

They clearly have data on web traffic, consumer usage, advertising spend, etc. that other VC firms and investors generally don't have access to.

They can use this to understand entire markets, see who the incumbents are, estimate revenue/users, see who's up-and-coming, etc. Obviously within some margin of error.

I wonder if this is how Facebook identified that Instagram was on the path to success, and knew $1B was a great deal. Meanwhile everyone at the time thought they were crazy for spending that much.

Since startups aren't publicly traded, I don't think insider trading laws apply to trading their securities. FAANG is legally allowed to use their access to information to make better investing decisions than other companies are able to. (IANAL)

It seems like they have a high chance of getting a great ROI. Once you're a big tech company, this is just another way of monetizing the vast troves of data you have.

<comment><USER3> That's not really insider trading. Matt Levine pops up here all the time, and one of the really distilled mantras he has: inside trading isn't about _fairness_ , it's about _theft_.

Like the people who track flights to speculate on M&A, or use satellite and aerial imagery to look at parking lots. Gathering information isn't a crime, in fact gathering and acting on that information is explicitly _what you want_ at an aggregate level. What you don't want is entities stealing or misappropriating information that doesn't belong to them. I think all the mentioned data categories are basically Fb's line of business, so if it's usable it seems like its pretty fair game.

<comment><USER4> And that exactly is the problem. The game is rigged in favor of folks who already have access to information (or can afford to buy it), not available to regular folks. That is how billionaires double their billions faster than me essentially playing lottery/roulette with my $1000 on Robinhood.

<comment><USER5> There is probably a useful fact that you know that billionaires don't. It is probably local or related to your technical expertise.

Peter Lynch famously researched companies by watching to see where his family spent pocket money. I recall reading analyses of trading performance by members of Congress -- they generally did about the same as everyone else _except_ in companies associated with their districts.

Anecdotally, it is easier to double small dollars than large dollars. Berkshire Hathaway's growth has eased for ~2 major reasons: 1) Prices have been high for the last decade+, frustrating the core algorithm of value- investing. 2) It is very difficult to put huge amounts of money to work.

The alternative to a world with asymmetric information (and probably impossible to implement at that) is one with zero privacy, where all information is open to everyone always. I don't think we want to live in that world.

<comment><USER6> On the large scale, wealth reliably collects progressively higher percentages of return the higher the base capital.

<comment><USER7> The absolutely dismal performance of most hedge funds indicates otherwise. In fact, it's probably easier to generate alpha using small amounts of money. When you're managing billions and billions of dollars, you're severely constrained in the types of strategies you can actually run. This is why, for example, that RenTech's Medallion fund is capped at 10bn.

Just by investing in an index fund, retail investors are getting a pretty great investment, essentially freeloading off of all the hard work the active funds are doing.

<comment><USER8> How does that bode for the vision fund? Doomed from the start?

<comment><USER7> I would say that the vision fund was predicated on a audacious idea that was either pure genius or absolutely idiotic. The idea is as follows, instead of investing our huge pile of money into a bunch of different companies, which takes a lot of legwork, let's just fund a relatively small amount and give them a bunch of money. We will give them so much money that it's not possible for them to do anything except totally crush the competition and control the entire market.

The problem with the idea, and the eventual reason it didn't work, was that though it was largest VC fund ever, 100bn isn't actually that much in the scheme of things. There's so much money sloshing around the system looking for the place where it will be treated best. So, in essence, what Softbank ended up doing was bidding up the price of the entire industry, creating massive inflation. If Softbank gives a shi-tton of money , and another VC gives a shit-ton to a competitor, they've both just wasted a shit-ton of money.

I actually don't think Masa is the compete idiotic everyone makes him out to be. He has a very high tolerance for risk, but that doesn't make him irrational. The Vision Fund might not be doing that well, but Softbank's stock is looking pretty good at the moment.

<comment><USER8> He's the inventor of the danged electronic dictionary man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're competing in any way, building in any part of the social media space, this is an invitation to have your product copied as soon as you see any traction.

Facebook doesn't need the money. It's looking for you to do the R&D.

<comment><USER2> I would guess it's more about the money than you think.

Public companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits and investor returns.

They're simply using the data that's available to them to make great investment decisions to make more money.

It seems like a conflict of interest to invest in a company and then turn around and compete with them. If the end plan is to take their ideas once they start becoming successful, you don't need to give them money in the first place. (Case study: Snapchat)

<comment><USER10> > Public companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits and investor > returns.

No, they don't. There are many articles on the subject, here is one:

[https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are- co...](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations- obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits)

<comment><USER11> Delaware companies do. See, e.g., Frederick Hsu Living Tr. v. ODN Hldg. Corp., 2017 WL 1437308, at *18 (Del. Ch. Apr. 14, 2017) ("[T]he fiduciary relationship requires that the directors act prudently, loyally, and in good faith to maximize the value of the corporation over the long-term for the benefit of the providers of presumptively permanent equity capital . . .").

Facebook is a Delaware company.

<comment><USER12> Has this law ever been enforced against a company; that is, is there a ore- existing verdict against a Delaware company for violating this statute? Or is this more of a hypothetical threat? What would the damages or penalty be for violation? It's not like you can demand money a company should have made without cause or more importantly, verifiable harm to the counter-party.

<comment><USER11> Certainly it has been enforced against a company (thousands of them), but in a way it is more of a hypothetical threat. I was not referring to a statutory law, but rather to fiduciary duties, which derive from the common law of equity. The quotation from the Hsu case I provided above is a clear depiction of the standard of conduct required of directors and officers of Delaware corporations. But in reality, fiduciary standards operate more like you suggested—as a hypothetical threat. The reason for this is that, although the standards of conduct demanded of Delaware directors and officers are onerous and exacting, the standard of judicial review of challenged conduct is ordinarily very relaxed. In most ordinary situations, the standard of review is the business judgment rule, which essentially punts on the question of whether a particular action violates a fiduciary duty. The idea is that courts do not supplant directors' judgment with their own. More onerous standards of review are available in other situations, such as mergers and transactions where an interested party sits on the board or is an executive. (Facebook is an interesting example of a controlled company, given Zuckerberg's ownership stake, and its decisions might be subject to more scrutiny, but procedural safeguards are generally available to cleanse even conflicted decisionmaking.)

It's worth clarifying that only those to whom fiduciary duties are _owed_ can ever sue for damages resulting from their breach. In other words, shareholders. That's how the threat gets operationalized—by a shareholder or class of shareholders suing the corporation for failing to maximize shareholder value through a fiduciary breach.

Anyways, the point I really wanted to make is that shareholder value maximization really is meaningfully encoded in American corporate law. If you meant to suggest that reality is less black-and-white than that, then I hope the foregoing ramble confirms that you are correct!

<comment><USER12> Thank you for typing this well thought out response! I see the fiduciary duty canard brought out and it usually functions in debate as a thought-terminating cliche. My comment was meant to elucidate whether or not it was the last word on fiduciary duty; your comment helps clarify the judicial and fiduciary reality on the ground, and really added a lot to my understanding of these issues. Thanks again.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for your kind words! I totally agree about how flippantly people throw out the value-maximization point. And it is definitely true that the real standards which govern directors' and officers' conduct are murkier than the maxim "maximize shareholder value." The Business Roundtable's recent embrace of stakeholder theory seems likely to complicated things [1], and efforts by influential people like former Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo Strine [2] and legendary corporate lawyer Martin Lipton [3] have meaningfully contested the accepted definition of corporate purpose outside of the academy in recent months. But I do think Delaware law is pretty clear on the principle behind D&Os' fiduciary duties. The best summation I have seen of it is in a talk that Vice Chancellor Travis Laster gave at UVA Law last spring; [4] it's a great talk. Cheers yo.

[1] [https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable- redef...](https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines- the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans)

[2] [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/16/purpose-with- mean...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/16/purpose-with-meaning-a- practical-way-forward/)

[3] [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/27/on-the-purpose- of...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/27/on-the-purpose-of-the- corporation/)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET8v47XPcUY&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET8v47XPcUY&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER12> Oh wow! Even more info. I remember hearing about the Business Roundtable on a podcast when it was breaking, but haven't heard much since.

Did it end up just being lip service, or are there lasting changes in industry or individual companies that we can point to which show prioritization of stakeholder value over simple shareholder value?

<comment><USER11> _That_ question is probably a bit over my head. My outlook is pretty grim and skeptical because of my experience with American capitalism so far. But the fact that people like Leo Strine and Marty Lipton are apparently meaningfully moving these ideas beyond the bounds of academia is definitely a good sign. (Slightly) more tangibly, 93% of investor respondents to a recent survey about corporate purpose indicated that it's important for a corporation to have a purpose, and 38% agreed that defining/managing stakeholder impact is an important reason to have a corporate purpose.[1] (This study was published on the HLS Blog after I wrote a more cynical reply to you yesterday and forgot to send it. Neat I guess.)

I read the Harvard Law corporate governance blog pretty regularly, and a staggering percentage of recent scholarship on there has been about corporate purpose, stakeholder capitalism, and ESG. ESG and stakeholder theory aren't exactly the same thing, but here's a good overview of how ESG might impact M&A and governance moving forward [2].

[1] [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/06/19/making- corporate-...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/06/19/making-corporate- purpose-tangible-a-survey-of-investors/#more-130582) [2] [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/02/20/the-coming- impact...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/02/20/the-coming-impact-of- esg-on-ma/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This will not work. If they are that good with information, they must be building products after products that people will love. Tell me one last known successful launch by Facebook in the last 2 years, outside tweaking their existing products.

Only way it could work is if they share their wealth in other areas / people which must be invested in and will not get enough capital if not for them. Ex: Google Venture - Solar City, Tesla.

But founders have to be fiercely independent and the companies must be independent. Like Elon Musk as founder and Larry / Sergey as investors.

Facebook DNA doesn't allow that, they are predatory in nature. Trying to diversify by external forces since internal options simply failed. Founders of the companies they acquired, left with very unpleasant experience.

Take their money, if you are ready to be as independent as Elon Musk were and ready to say NO to Zuck when and if you have to.

<comment><USER14> > Tell me one last known successful launch by Facebook in the last 2 years

Oculus Quest

<comment><USER15> They...bought Oculus. No?

<comment><USER16> Long time ago. Quest was developed way after that acquisition.

<comment><USER17> Facebook did the same thing they did with Instagram, they bought the company, kept it essentially independent with the founders continuing to run it as an independent management team. As with Instagram, Oculus is now big enough to actually matter to facebook, and so Mark proceeded to fuck with the successful management team until they quit. It's almost the perfect example of Facebook failing to innovate internally.

<comment><USER18> Isn't Oculus doing better than ever? Citation for "Mark proceeded to fuck with the successful management team until they quit"? (genuine question)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These kinds of articles about VCs and companies offering to invest big funds used to give me hope, but now that I've participated in bootstrapping a startup, I see these articles as bad news. They're going to fund my competition... Give them easy money and keep funding them until they get that big corporate exit and I'm out of business because my margins are too small and I can't afford bulk discount on Facebook advertising like they can with all that free money they got.

You know that someone else is going to get that funding, but it's not going to be you. It's more likely to help your competitor than it is to help you (the reader of the article). This is bad news for the typical reader of this article.

<comment><USER20> In a world of easy VC money (granted that may be over), how viable is bootstrapping in a competitive market?

<comment><USER21> Am working at a bootstrapped startup. Actually profitable. In a very competitive space. No VCs to answer to, no irresponsible burning of cash on marketing and bloating of engineering team. No AWS. No expensive SF office or lunches paid by VC money. Hiring is dictated by our revenue and profit growth, and no we don't spend VC money on absurdly overpriced engineers.

Because we're run super lean, we've been able to hire more and spend more on marketing during these tough times while businesses are downsizing or putting a halt on hiring/marketing dollars.

If the space you're getting into requires lots of capital, fundraising is unavoidable, but if you're thinking of even bootstrapping a company, it better be one that won't require a lot of capital (SaaS), and you need to run it lean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wouldn't take a penny from Facebook. You know they will lock down any patent you create and steal your IP.

<comment><USER23> Would you take a penny from Softbank?

<comment><USER24> A penny from Softbank? Didn't you get the memo? Softbank requires you to take at least 1 billion.

<comment><USER25> Getting funding from Softbank is like foie gras: they'd literally stuff dollars down your throat.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it might end up making your startup sick too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Naturally. How else are they going to monetize the data they have on business traffic?

Just think twice about turning down a deal from them, no matter how bad it seems, because they probably know a lot more about your market and their alternatives to your services than you do. And the strategy in monopolistic situations like this is join us or suffer.

Surely this how Alphabet has grown so big.

</comment><comment><USER28> A lot of people are rightly concerned here that Facebook will run this arm in a cutthroat way so as to stifle innovation and competition. Though they might, I have no reason to believe that's because they want to usurp and control every technology they invest in. I think Facebook knows that their core products and business lines are under threat of attrition, and the margins on ad revenue will get tighter. A venture arm, coupled with one of the world's beefiest analytics muscle, will probably return more than their core businesses, and insulate them from a potential turn away from social media as a profitable vertical.

That's what I thought they were doing with Oculus originally. Same with WhatsApp, then they started to commingle the branding.

</comment><comment><USER29> my (stupid) theory is fb/goog/youtube are now trying to help small businesses as much as possible on their platforms to drive more traffic and revenue since expansion is tapping out at some point

<comment><USER30> I don't think that's stupid at all. When you are as big as a small country, you legitimately do benefit from a strong, lively economy

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm actually more surprised they didn't already have a venture arm.

</comment><comment><USER30> I would dread having Facebook on my board. I intend to treat my future users very well and wouldn't want somebody with 1-2/5ths ownership in my company pushing me to chase their data

</comment><comment><USER32> This makes sense to me. Facebook knows that consumers are finicky when it comes to social networks and they need to stay on top of the latest fads. Once new social networks catch fire Facebook needs to do anything possible to gain control of them, and venture investing is one way to do that.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you were an investor in Facebook, instead of Facebook investing excess cash, wouldn't you prefer Facebook to return the excess cash to investors? Then if you agree that investing in startups is a winner, you could reinvest the cash through some venture fund? Or if you disagree and feel that there's a better use for the cash, such as investing in index funds or paying off your student loans or buying a yacht or whatever, you could do that instead.

One of William Bernstein's Efficient Frontier articles summarises some research on this:

> In the December issue [of Journal of Finance] Jarred Harford found that > cash-rich firms destroyed 7 cents of corporate value for every dollar of > cash reserves held. How does this happen? Let's take two firms, both of > which are considering a project or acquisition of marginal value. The first > firm is cash-poor, and must obtain the capital from a bank, or a stock or > bond issuance. This necessitates scrutiny of the project from the outside. > The second firm is cash-rich, and thus requires no outside scrutiny—they can > simply cut a check. Clearly, the cash-rich company is much more likely to > make this potentially unprofitable investment.

> Rajan, Servaes, and Zingales look at the performance of large conglomerates, > and find that investment capital tends to flow most readily to its least > productive divisions. The more highly diversified the company (i.e., the > less related its component businesses) the more dramatic the effect. What is > most interesting is that Harford's research found that cash-rich companies > are more likely to make diversifying acquisitions—in other words, to turn > them into the same companies that this paper shows are the least efficient.

> [...] the February JoF contains an absolute gem from La Porta, Lopez-de- > Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny on dividend policy around the globe. Their > primary finding is that in so-called "civil law" countries, such as most of > Latin America, Scandinavia, and southern Europe, where investor protection > is the weakest, dividend payouts are low. In so-called "common law" > countries—basically the world's English-speaking nations, where investor > protection is excellent—payouts are high. Which gets back to Graham's basic > premise; investors prefer dividends and take them whenever the law and > culture allow. The authors reinforce the points made by Graham and the other > pieces; "failure to disgorge cash leads to its diversion or waste, which is > detrimental to outside shareholders' interest."

> But what is most remarkable about this piece is its tone, which is almost > Menckenesque in its description of modern corporate ethics. They describe a > Hobbesian world in the kind of plain English rarely seen in academic > finance; "Firms appear to pay out cash to investors because the opportunity > to steal or misinvest it are in part limited by law, and because minority > shareholders have enough power to extract it."

\-- [http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/700/agency.htm](http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/700/agency.htm)

<comment><USER7> This is exceedingly fascinating. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Facebook is the modern day internet gangster cartel, they are not even trying to hide it any more. This is an obvious trap that is easy to avoid.

Sadly, I doubt there is any company that can take them on.

<comment><USER2> How does investing in startups make you an internet gangster cartel?

<comment><USER35> "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse..."

"... one billion dollars in cash and stock."

<comment><USER36> I mean, that's a bit of the stretch. The implication in "an offer he can't refuse" is that the mob is going to kill you if don't accept the offer, not that they are going to drown you in more dollar bills than you can swim through.

<comment><USER35> That was the point of the joke :)

I don't mean this impolitely - the fact it wasn't clearly obvious as a joke means I should have tried harder.

<comment><USER36> It definitely whooshed over my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I am surprised they have not started this sooner frankly

</comment><comment><USER38> Surprised that this didn't exist already.

</comment><comment><USER39> No good co will actually take money from the incumbent they're trying to uproot

<comment><USER40> Mozilla is funded by google.

<comment><USER15> But Mozilla is no longer trying to uproot Google.

Their job now is to keep Google from getting an antitrust lawsuit/similar sentiment etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So will this use data harvested from their malware apps (Onavo)?

<comment><USER42> I wasn't aware that installing something by yourself that provides you with a promised benefit could be considered malware.

Your accusation even conflicts with the basic definition of malware:

> Malware is any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a > computer, server, client, or computer network.

I know what you're getting at, but why chose such a loaded term that doesn't fit?

<comment><USER43> You forgot to include some more details from the Wikipedia article ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware)) from where you borrowed your definition:

> A wide variety of types of malware exist, including computer viruses, worms, > Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, and scareware.

It specifically mentions spyware, so let's take a look at that definition:

"Spyware is a type of malware that aims to gather information about a person or organization, without their knowledge, and send such information to hack another entity without the consumer's consent."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Let's spread the cancer!</comment>