Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/25/is-the-fbi-dumb-evil-or-just-incompetent/

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the hard-headed privacy freaks usually sharpening my pitchfork when there is an outrage against civil liberties. I'm _that guy_.

I once had a job that involved investigations of criminal activity (not law enforcement or government related, just a company protecting its own users and employees).

In this case, I had identified, with certainty, one individual that was engaging in significant fraud. He appeared to have several accounts, and it was appearing highly likely that he had a few accomplices.

During the investigation, I was fully willing to violate everyone's privacy to find everyone in the fraud network. This included data that was already submitted voluntarily, private communications, as well as embedding tracking objects and invisible flash objects to retrieve IP addresses of users surfing behind proxies (this used to be an effective way to unmask users). I didn't have a second thought about it. Why would I? I didn't care what the legitimate users were doing, wasn't going to stalk them, wasn't going to pay any attention to their personal affairs. But, to weed out this problem effectively, I needed to sweep everything. I'm trustworthy, just doing my job, and I certainly trust myself enough to disregard or ignore information that wasn't pertinent.

After being entrenched in the investigation, I had a fairly exhaustive list of the bad actors. Initially this was just basic hard data, (such as correlating IP addresses), but then there was kind of a "sixth sense" that I also started relying on, where I couldn't articulate the signal, but some behavioral cues just _felt_ like they were related. You know, "gut instinct". So I ended up digging into those accounts, and confirmation bias took over. I did find many more bad actors, but I was thoroughly convinced that a few cases were also related, which ended up being suspended, and it turned out that they were actually unrelated and legitimate. That's when I started to reflect a bit.

I didn't go through with the most blatant of the proposed violations, although at the time I was willing to initially. I now realized how egregious that was, and noticed how easily I fell into that mindset. If asked, I think the words "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" could have naturally rolled off my tongue (though, this certainly would have alerted me to the errors of my thought process).

So I concluded a few things:

\- _Most_ of the time, these blatant, sweeping violations, are most likely not malicious and probably do have good intentions. I very much understand what frame of mind most of those people are in. It's not an opaque three letter agency, it's made up of regular individuals with tunnel vision on their legitimate objectives (stopping crime).

\- When you look at criminals day in and day out, and are on a mission, everybody starts to look like a criminal.

\- The "working backwards" approach - finding signatures of bad activity, and applying it to other data, then "confirming" the new matches, is a well- understood statistical fallacy, aptly named, the prosecutor's fallacy[1]. If you spot it in court, your defense attorney can try and point it out to the jury - and good luck explaining it to your "peers" who probably play the same lotto numbers because theirs is "due eventually". But let's face it - <USER2> life is already ruined by then. You're on all the watch lists, your vehicles are bugged, you've got huge legal bills and no job, and maybe if you're extremely unlucky, you're even in Guantanamo. Everything prior had little or no judicial oversight, no way to defend yourself, and is from a system that is invariably full of investigators who are not self-aware enough to always catch themselves doing this, especially when the cost of missing an actual threat is extremely high.

And for bonus points:

The interface that a coworker created to do some of the data mining (let's call it the "lawful intercept interface") had an SQL injection bug in the logic that parsed login history. It wouldn't have been difficult to discover and exploit without even knowing this interface existed, due to the error a user would see on login if they had certain bad characters in the affected field. I found it roughly a year later and reported it to the CTO in a message from his own account, after using the bug to take his auth cookie out of the DB (we were friends, so I knew he would be a good sport).

tl;dr It's mostly good intentioned individuals with tunnel vision, who are very misguided, and who don't understand the side effects and costs of what they propose.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy>

<comment><USER4> Please tell which US citizens are in Guantanamo because they were "extremely unlucky". You make it sound as if the FBI is picking up Soccer Moms for no reason and mysteriously spiriting them away to Guantanamo.

<comment><USER3> No, I don't make it sound like that at all. Hence, "extremely unlucky." And I didn't say US citizens went to Guantanamo.

If you aren't aware that there were many documented false positives who were sent to Guantanamo or other CIA detention facilities, you aren't paying attention, because there were some very high profile cases. Here is one example:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri>

 _Khalid El-Masri is a German citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian Police, and handed-over to the U.S. CIA, whose officers interrogated, sodomized and tortured him. While in CIA hands, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in a black site, interrogated, beaten, strip- searched and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, tantamount to torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him._

 _In April 2004, CIA Director George Tenet was told by his staff that El-Masri was being wrongfully detained. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice learned of the German citizen's detention in early May and ordered his release. Shortly before el-Masri was released, in May 2004 the US ambassador to Germany informed the government for the first time of his detention._

* According to a December 4, 2005, article in the Washington Post, CIA agents discussed whether they should remove El-Masri from Macedonia in an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to Khalid al-Masri, strongly suspected as a terrorist.*

I can't think of a worse way to completely ruin an innocent man's life. He was basically a "Soccer Dad".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission.

Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations.

The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use encryption, or otherwise would be so stupid, that one can find them easily in any case. In the real world a lot of these cases are broken on a "lucky" break or two. Someone improperly or not using their encryption software once, for example.

I think it seems foolish to accuse them of being dumb, evil, or incompetent. Given the stakes they deal with, and the amount of data they have to sift through, I think its very reasonable that they try to reduce the amount of work they need to do to find credible leads. And I'm sure they try to institute methods to minimize abuse, but I'm sure they are also aware that some abuse will happen.

While some of this feels like it may cross the line, I think it's a line that a rationale organization, with their mission, should push against.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Most of us here are privacy advocates, and I think society needs our voice. However, we're only one side of the coin.

Imagine a world where _every_ phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible.

There are many kinds of dystopias. Big Brother is one. Rule by competing gangs is another. We're shooting for some compromise where both individuals and society's rights are balanced.

It's hard.

<comment><USER7> "Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible."

So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that?

There was once a time in this country when communications _could_ be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. We still managed to prosecute criminals then. Yes, sometimes criminals got away with their crimes, but _that is what striking a balance is all about_. The FBI is not trying to strike a balance with this proposal, they are trying to shift the balance in their favor.

<comment><USER8> > There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous > -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access.

Federal authorities always had wiretapping powers pursuant to a warrant. If you mean before that, it was also a time when limited communications forced more visible means of coordination. Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications, even pursuant to a warrant.

<comment><USER7> "Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications"

I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitimate reason to have an Internet connection using it to communicate. There is a matter of distance I suppose, but so what? Postal mail has always allowed people to communicate at a distance, and it has always allowed anonymous senders.

Why not require all restaurants to record their customers' conversations, just in case the FBI needs to investigate it later on (with a requirement for a warrant, of course)? The same reasoning applies to this FBI push for expanded wiretapping power.

<comment><USER8> The difference is that if you plot a crime in a restaurant, there are potentially dozens of sources of evidence linking you to the meeting: patrons and servers might see you, security cameras might record you, people might see you drive there, a credit card bill might link you to a meeting there, etc. If the same crime is planned in a chat room, the only thing police may have to go on is logs hosted by the intermediate service provider. Technology makes the real-time communication _more_ anonymous and less traceable than was practical in the past. Even postal mail, besides not being real-time, isn't as anonymous as electronic communications without the possibility of obtaining logs via a warrant.

The focus of privacy activists is in my opinion misplaced. People want an internet that's never monitored, never recorded, never wire-tappable. That's never going to happen, nor is it apparent that it's desirable. What we want is something that preserves the scope of investigative powers that have historically existed with the telephone system. That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.

<comment><USER9> Where does "restaurant" come from? Can conspiracies not be planned in a private residence etc.?

Even with a restaurant, you're relying on someone present giving evidence to law enforcement. That works just the same with encryption -- if you have an encrypted chat room with five people and one of the participants sends the logs to the FBI (or is an undercover agent), the FBI will have the logs. If no one does, the FBI will not, which is the same as it is when co-conspirators meet in a restaurant.

>That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.

The FBI has plenty of tools available. Even if data is encrypted, law enforcement agents with a warrant would still be able to obtain information from ISPs as to who is communicating and when. In the most serious cases trotted out to justify new powers, the FBI can install a listening device or put a trojan on the suspect's communications device.

The way to strike the right balance here is to make wiretapping extremely technologically difficult but not impossible. That makes it very hard for criminals or anyone without government-level resources, and makes it very difficult for governments to engage in unjustifiable dragnet surveillance of innocent people, while still allowing governments to capture the communications of suspects in the rare and most serious cases where the existing evidence justifies that extraordinary level of invasion into the private communications of citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The last line is the most important: if there is a backdoor (that is the Lawful Interception interface) there is no guarantee that it won't be used by unauthorized third parties.

Anyone could have predicted that something like the Google hack was going to happen. I also seem to remember that there was a similar incident involving the cellphone network in Greece.

<comment><USER11> On top of this, the FBI doesn't have a "going dark" problem. For more on this please read Trevor Timm (an activist for the EFF and Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation) on the topic here: [http://dprogram.net/2013/04/17/going-dark-whats-so-wrong- wit...](http://dprogram.net/2013/04/17/going-dark-whats-so-wrong-with-the- governments-plan-to-tap-our-internet/)

"Trevor Timm: Well, yeah. They've been complaining about this "Going Dark" problem for years now and we've never really seen any actual evidence that this actually exists. The FBI or the DOJ has to report the number of times they run into encryption when they ask for surveillance. Every year they have to report back how many times they ultimately couldn't get the information they sought; the number is always 0—for the last 11 years."

He shared this on twitter a while ago: <https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/331985318620327936>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption?

I was trying to do this by piping the output of my webcam to openssl and then to netcat, which sends the packets to a publicly addressable server (Amazon instance) that relays the encrypted packets to another computer behind a firewall, that decrypts the video stream and plays it in MPlayer. It works, but the latency is about 10 seconds. To reduce the latency, I could delta- encode the video stream, leverage the GPU somehow, but I'm not sure how to get the latency down to the 200ms required for seamless conversation. Also, it should be noted that there is little code behind this, mainly just unix utilities and pipes.

PS: Also I could remove the Amazon piece and forge a direct P2P connection using NAT hole punching if the routers on both ends permit, but this is not always reliable and isn't a huge source of latency.

<comment><USER13> Apparently FaceTime [1] and iMessage are end-to-end encrypted with unique session keys. Whether Apple has access to those keys is not known though (the key exchange isn't documented as far as I can tell).

1\. [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/facetime-calls-are- encrypted...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/facetime-calls-are-encrypted- and-hipaa-compliant-when-using-proper-encryption/11166)

<comment><USER14> Any communication that you don't set the keys/are able to track them should be considered unencrypted in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I say all of the above. There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power. People who are attracted to these things are susceptible to logic failures in pursuit of their interest in exerting Authority and Power.

<comment><USER16> Many people are drawn to law enforcement out of the desire to help others and do good for the world. Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well- respected profession, especially outside of an internet forum.

Your comment pisses on every person who ever went to school to study criminal law, many of whom did so for noble or at least neutral reasons.

<comment><USER7> "Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession"

Unless you are doing this:

[http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/01/secret_government...](http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/01/secret_government_informer_karen_sullivan.php)

It is not as though this is some kind of new, unprecedented behavior either:

<http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover>

So let's say a young man is thinking about joining the FBI; he wants to do good for the world, maybe help catch a serial killer or take down a child abuse group. How does he know he will not be asked to conduct surveillance on an anti-war group? How does he know he will not be asked to dig up some dirt on a civil rights leader?

This "honorable profession" you are defending has always had a dark side.

<comment><USER17> So all the good guys who could disinfect the system from within should just turn down the chance and ensure only bad guys get into the position of power and authority?

<comment><USER18> It's not that "bad people" are the ones drawn to become cops and prison guards, but the inverse: working as a cop or a prison guard changes you to behave a certain way.

The "Stanford Prison Experiment" is a good example of this phenomenon: <http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/career-advice/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I vote a little dumb, a little evil (you know, the banality kind) and pretty incompetent.

Anecdotal, but the FBI's first web site was hosted by a NASA machine. I think the FBI was traditionally an IBM shop, and mainframes and the web didn't work well together at first.

In more verifiable evidence of incompetence, there's the Virtual Case File epic fail ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/08...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html) just one of many articles about it) followed by a minor debacle in Sentinel (<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407922,00.asp>)

<comment><USER20> This has happened on a vastly smaller scale at a few places I have worked. Another flaw seems to be that none technical people ask for something to appear in the new system when they have no idea. The system is built, exactly as requested, and it sucks. Having a competent software engineer on staff who understands the field is vastly more handy than a fat wad of cash paid to outsource. I'm sure there is a good middle road, but companies I have worked for haven't found it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've read that quantum computing is picking up, so please correct me if I'm wrong... it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right?

This push to "stop terror" via reading the general public's email/chats/etc. seems more like Big Bro and less like a viable method to stop the next 9-11. Sure, the bros from Boston weren't exactly sophisticated, but I find it hard to believe nobody in Al Qaeda knows how to use PGP.

Still, I'm voting for incompetent. If they want to know what kind of porno we all like, fine.

<comment><USER22> "it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes"

I think you mean that it is hard to factor the _product_ of two primes, factoring primes is pretty easy regardless their size.

<comment><USER21> Of course. I took it for granted that the audience here would know what I meant. My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most of these debates seem to start from the idea of a yes or no ballot to formalize a panopticon and I think that only makes it more likely that society will go there (I mean: please, somebody, think of the children).

IMHO, the idea that law enforcement should have either all or no access to online data is a false dichotomy.

Wiretapping capability is less relevant than ever IMHO, in a time with more privately-owned cameras and personal communication devices than ever; it is more likely than ever that criminals _will_ leave physical evidence of physical crimes, and so there is less reason than ever to invade people's privacy or criminalize thoughts and suspicion/conspiracy/planning of physical crimes when the damage comes from the follow-through, not the imagination. Violent crime has been declining In Canada and the US for decades. This idea of urgency simply doesn't fit those facts.

The Internet is basically a bunch of random thoughts. In a sense, people are having public conversations, but in another people are simply thinking out loud; the more we hold to criminalizing thoughts, the more we create problems by that process and criminalize freedom of thought.

I'm for warrants, and against vigilante justice, but I also really think we need to dissect this idea that only law enforcement should have, or even already has, the tools to address all dangerous situations. IMHO, the less individuals rely on institutions the better, since it is well known that power corrupts. So far Canada and the US have had pretty good luck and the public has had _some_ success holding institutions accountable for abuses of power, but I don't get the impression that influence is as strong as it needs to be, going forward (and I don't know how to fix it while continuing to empower institutions that quite predictably stray from their mandates rather than close shop). IMHO, Institutions pose an unnecessary risk as they continue to grow and claw for more power - in this case, pushing for more surveillance capabilities. I would rather be responsible for myself, without the help of institutions, wherever possible.

As we create new potentials, and empower people to help themselves, I think the role of institutions should decrease. Take the recent article on the French police offloading missing person searches on Facebook for example. ( [http://www.itworld.com/networking/357720/french-police- end-m...](http://www.itworld.com/networking/357720/french-police-end-missing- persons-searches-suggest-using-facebook-instead) ) As much as I don't like Facebook, I think that's the right tool for that job, and I would like to see more work to empower individuals in that sense. It's a wonderful thing to be not needed because you actually solved a problem. I, for one, would love to not need to rely on (and pay for) the police or government because I was safe and had a voice of my own.

</comment><comment><USER24> You don't need such a long argument to prove FBI's stunning incompetence, an example like failing to prevent the Boston bombing where they couldn't find their assess with two hands would suffice.

<comment><USER6> >> failing to prevent the Boston bombing

OK, you're in charge of the FBI now. There are tens of thousands of public events today in tens of thousand of venues.

Protect them all. Go.

<comment><USER25> No I am not. I can't protect them so I wouldn't try to become the leader of the FBI. I also can't do surgery but if I come in to have some work done on my hand and leave with a foot chopped of I am going to sue the doctor.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. The FBI was unable to perform their job properly. Then they ask the public for help. What, the bomber didn't leave behind any Facebook conversations to track? Boo hoo.

<comment><USER25> Exactly, the US has DHS, FBI, CIA and a dozen other agencies.

Letting anything through should simply result in the leaders going to the electric chair.

<comment><USER6> >> Letting anything through should simply result in the leaders going to the electric chair.

My, you have high standards. I hope you've never released a bug. Every line of code is available for your inspection and behaves deterministically. Unlike, say, people, who are nearly uncountable, much less predictable, much less controllable.

To avoid letting _anything_ through would require being omniscient and omnipotent.

Please at least try to give others the benefit of the doubt that you'd like them to give you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What happens when the FBI becomes infected with people like Lerner who use their power to persecute political dissidents?

<comment><USER19> What do you mean "becomes"? J. Edgar Hoover actually did use his power to persecute political dissidents. I say this whole FBI backdoor/legal intercept thing reeks of trying to do that sort of thing again.

I mean, it's pretty easy to monitor Quaker anti-war activists: they do everything publically and invite participation politely. No agency needs wiretap access to monitor them. So, who are they going to monitor with this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _So the FBI would only be able to wiretap suspects who are either too dumb to use encryption — in which case they ought to be easy enough to catch without wiretaps_

I think the author under-estimates the difficultly of catching criminals.

<comment><USER29> Agreed. The dumb ones will work out of 'the game' quickly enough and are quickly replaced.

The bigger problem is not 'catching' them, but prosecuting them effectively. This requires prioritization of limited resources based on severity of offense, availability of sufficient evidence, and difficulty of prosecution. The last is ugly because it's almost directly economic, in that the ability to afford legal counsel creates some level of inequality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI, or at the very least be a bit more outspoken about them?

<comment><USER31> Until recently the US Government was issuing tech companies National Security Letters (different from subpoenas, they do not require judicial approval) and the letters had built in gag orders. In other words if the recipient could not discuss what was being requested by the government, or even challenge the request in court without criminal penalties. Recently courts have reviewed this and given a partial lift on the built in gag orders. (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Think like a sysadmin in a big corporation. Assume that there are devices (the BYOD trend) that you have no root to/ no way to monitor them. It will drive you crazy if you have a mild case of ODC(and in IT it comes with the profession) no matter what the real risk is. Now you are in FBI shoes.

With the devices so closely integrated into the cloud we are already close to the "day every iDevice was wiped irreversibly and huge part of the world stopped". Let's not make it closer.

</comment><comment><USER32> Cant the companies that would be affected just split off the operational side of the business to be outside of US jurisdiction, you know like some do to avoid paying tax (not to grossly over-simplify the issues...)? You know facebook could still exist as a US corporation encompassing the intellectual side of the company but create and icelandic company that actually deploys the servers and processes the data. Or something.

</comment><comment><USER33> d) all of the above?

<comment><USER29> Do FBI contradict myself? Very well then FBI contradict myself, (FBI am large, FBI contain multitudes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why would the FBI be interested in social networks? I don't think criminals and terrorists communicate using Facebook.

<comment> brown9-2 Not true.

<comment><USER34> Can you cite any sources? I just find it implausible that anything other than petty crime would be discussed over social networks.

<comment><USER35> [http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/01/10/tech- terr...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/01/10/tech-terrorist- social-media.html)

[http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/27/world/rivers-social-media- terr...](http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/27/world/rivers-social-media-terror)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> i guess they don't care about anything else as long as they can do their job

<comment><USER29> We obviously need a test-driven government framework. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd say they're a little of all of those things and more. They are, after all, human. They get paranoid and worry, they make mistakes, they grasp for power when they can. It never works out like they want though, because they are human.

</comment><comment><USER38> I believe that the CIA is much much worse than the FBI.</comment>


Track 84 Aircrafts the FBI Uses for Surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://blog.enigma.io/track-84-aircrafts-the-fbi-uses-for-surveillance/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I'd like to see someone grab all this data and then do some analysis and come up with a list of addresses that may be under surveillance.

You could probably even come up with probability data per address, based on how likely it is to be at the exact center of however-many flight paths.

Here's an example of an especially regular flight: [http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/N539MY#667fc34](http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/N539MY#667fc34)

It looks like they followed someone from one of those neighborhoods over to that big circled-in area just south of the Pentagon. You can even tell that whatever they followed was probably driving on I-395.</comment>


Barcelona: The most wired city in the world - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/07/29/barcelona-wired-city/

<comment><USER2> "Consider for a moment the possibilities of Wi-Fi-fitted lampposts, each with its own IP address, monitoring the numbers of Facebook posts, tweets, or credit card swipes as you stroll by with your smartphone (which identifies where you are from) and withdraw cash, buy shoes, drink a soda, and visit a museum."

Can the journalist explain us how a lamppost can do that? Even assuming that the tourist is connected to the free municipal WiFi -most of them don't-, how can the council track https traffic with Facebook, or Youtube? It is not only technically "challenging" but also illegal under Spanish Law.

In my opinion, this is a long and sensationalist article to explain that Barcelona signed a big contract to build municipal network that covers all the city using Wifi and FO and that, thanks to this network, now it is really cheap and easy to deploy sensors around the city that allow Big Data applications.

Buy the way, Catalonia has the biggest Open Wifi network in the world, with more than 30.000 nodes:

[http://guifi.net/node/17714/view/map](http://guifi.net/node/17714/view/map)

Many users of this network where pushing the councils of their towns to collaborate in the project installing public nodes in order to expand the network. Also, a lot of research has been done about protocols to manage big open networks.

The municipal network in Barcelona is not connected to Guifi.net, but I wonder if Guifi.net had somehow influenced the council of Barcelona to take this decision.

I think it is also interesting to note the hate that they thrown at the newly elected Mayor at the end of the article. But in any case, I guess that it is always good news for the citizens of a city if Fortune.com don't like their Mayor.

<comment><USER3> Regarding guide.net.... The local governments are not big supporters (except towns where the ADSL is not working).

Free or community driven projects are seen as unholy or something like that to these mafia, i mean government workers. I would not be surprised if we get a call soon that these installations are illegal because they are unfair to Telefonica or something similar./Sarcasm

<comment><USER2> Not all councils behave like mafia. It just depend witch political party is ruling the city. Actually, some local governments are quite open to backup initiatives coming from the civil society. You know, governments are there because of an election, so they are not better of worst than the people that voted them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Consider for a moment the possibilities of Wi-Fi-fitted lampposts, each with > its own IP address

I hope they're talking about IPv6, not IPv4.

<comment><USER5> I'd assume it's a private network, why would they need public IPs?

<comment><USER6> In order to be easier to pwn!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The question, of course, is who gets access to the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's an application process to access the data. The application can be found here: [http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/](http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/)

> Big Data CoE Barcelona is a new centre driven by Barcelona Digital > Technology Centre, the Government of Catalonia, the Barcelona City Council > and Oracle that will build, develop and provide tools, data sets and value- > added Big Data capabilities to enable companies on defining, testing and > validating Big Data models before its final implementation. The center will > also offer training services for professionals looking for specialization > within the field and a dissemination programme focused on showing trends and > Big Data success cases to spread among businesses a new culture based on the > value of the data.

[1] [http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/about-big-data-coe- barcelona/](http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/about-big-data-coe-barcelona/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "IDC estimates that by 2020, the Internet of Everything will monitor and manage countless activities in our lives, from the moment we awake to the moment we fall asleep, from catching the bus to filling the refrigerator, walking the dog, and watering the garden."

And you think Revelation 13:16-17 is a joke?</comment>


Pizza Hut workers deliver free pizza by kayak to Harvey victims - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pizza-hut-workers-deliver-free-food-kayak-harvey-victims-article-1.3457618 <comment><USER2> Where is the tacocopter when we need it?

<comment><USER3> On some FAA approval desk

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been awesome the last few days to see stories like this. So many Houstonians serving one another after this terrible tragedy.</comment>


Sign in with Apple JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/signinwithapplejs <comment><AUTHOR> So, here's what I'm really curious about. Anybody know why they didn't use OAuth 2.0? Some of the bits of this API smell somewhat like OAuth, but this seems simpler and is handled mostly in the frontend (via an iframe I assume) vs. the URL redirect dance of OAuth.

Is this what OAuth should look like in a more front-end centric web day and age?</comment>


One line browser notepad - <AUTHOR>

Open a new tab and type in the url tab:
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
Browser notepad :) <comment><USER3> A neat aspect of this is that you can also use it to edit webpages based on the current structure in a WYSIWYG fashion. Just go to some page (Hacker News, Facebook, etc.), press Command-A, Command-C, open this URL into a new tab, and press Command-V.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love this, I've been using this exact thing for a couple of years now - <USER2> think it appeared on HN before, I definitely can't take credit for it.

I have it bookmarked, and use it quite frequently, as it's the quickest way to write stuff down for temporary use.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this also.

Any way to prevent TAB from unfocusing the textarea? Perhaps a javascript in the URL?

</comment><comment><USER6> nice !

any way to save it offline ;-?

<comment><USER7> Just click the "save" button in your browser - the file gets saved as a .html.</comment></comment>


The Fallen of World War II – Data-driven documentary about war and peace (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fallen.io/ww2/ <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9615519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9615519)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Russian tower just keeps going. Insane. Also the current time zoom in at the end is rather unexpected.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's an extremely powerful visualization and well worth a few minutes. I'm perhaps a wee bit skeptical of some of the historical data (8m deaths attributed to "Fall of Rome" for example), but I didn't see anything that detracted from the general authoritativeness of the presentation and conclusions.</comment>


Ricky Jay's Magical Secrets (1993) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus <comment><USER2> This beautifully written _New Yorker_ profile is what first got me hooked on Ricky Jay. It was clipped for me by a kind coworker at Harvard's Cabot Science Library, who thought I'd like it. She was right. I bought and devoured Ricky's book _Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women_, and later delighted in his brilliant show (recorded as an HBO special) _Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants_.

A few years after the profile was published, I got curious about Ricky's website, rickyjay.com. I discovered that not only was there nothing on the site, but the domain itself was unregistered. Concerned that some squatter might snap it up, I registered it myself.

Over the next few years, I made several attempts to track down Ricky so that I could give him the domain, to no avail. Then I had a stroke of luck: while attending a performance of Michael Moschen (whose remarkable "juggling" skills were featured in the movie _Labyrinth_ ) at UC Irvine, I happened to recognize Ricky standing in the lobby during intermission. I introduced myself and got the ball rolling on the domain transfer, which later resulted in the site you can still see today.

A few years later, Ricky himself was performing at UCI, and my father and I had the good fortune of joining him onstage for a demonstration of card control and three-card Monte. After the show, Ricky was kind enough to sign my copy of _Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women_, as well as give me the card he'd cut neatly in half with a pair of giant scissors.

A few years after that, I learned that a young woman I was acquainted with knew Ricky well. When I told her the story of rickyjay.com, she insisted on setting up a dinner with Ricky and his wife Chrisann. Ricky recognized me from the Michael Moschen performance, and we ended up having a lovely time talking about magic, history, and various other subjects.

The last time I saw Ricky, I distinctly recall thinking that he didn't look particularly healthy, so when I saw his name trending on Twitter I feared the worst. Alas, it was the worst. And yet, what a joy Ricky Jay was to all who knew him and his work. RIP to one of the all-time greats.

<comment><USER3> What a great story - probably the only time I've heard of domain "squatting" (I hesitate to use that word since it has a negative connotation, but) used for good!

<comment><USER4> nyt.com counts, in my opinion. Here's an entertaining history: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/insider/putting-the- times...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/insider/putting-the-timess-first- email-address-to-bed.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you haven't seen it, the Ricky Jay documentary [1] is very interesting. Much of what he did was simply pure hard work. Being able to feel an exact count of cards as he split a deck at any point and the ability to count in his head, while simultaneously speaking makes much of what he does seem like magic, but is simply him knowing where all the cards are at all times. Which seems impossible (i.e. magic), but is simply very, very, very hard.

1\. [http://www.rickyjaymovie.com/](http://www.rickyjaymovie.com/)

<comment><USER6> What he did was very, very hard. And he did it very, very well. However, just because a magician says he's dealing from the middle of the deck, or that he knows how many cards he's picked up by feel alone doesn't necessarily mean he's telling the truth. Nevertheless, he was one of the best card handlers around at the time of his death, second only perhaps to Richard Turner

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting side note: his friend Persi Diaconis (mentioned in the article) is the author of many interesting probability papers, including the proof that "7 riffle shuffles is enough" ([https://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/aldous86.p...](https://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/aldous86.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER8> His death is a true loss to Magic. He was nothing short of an artist in every sense of the word.

<comment><USER9> His live show was among the best things I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568467)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5568374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5568374)

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's someone who knew him very well's personal tribute:

[http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-loving-tribute-to- ri...](http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-loving-tribute-to-ricky- jay.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't know who Ricky Jay was but ages ago i ran across this youtube video and was just floored, the whole thing just builds and builds and builds.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWvRorX0KhQ&t=](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWvRorX0KhQ&t=)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the audio on this one is mesmerizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ricky was in HBO's Deadwood and was fantastic. This guy was just such a good actor in each of the movies he was in. Then I found out a while back that he was actually an incredible magician also. He's so much fun to watch... definitely a big loss for humanity.

</comment><comment><USER15> A massively inspirational talent. Makes me want to be the best in the world at something.

</comment><comment><USER13> There have been a lot of great Ricky Jay videos being shared around after his death but I feel like this is the one where you really get to see him start to explain a tiny bit of what he can do.

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

It's a very modern format where he's demonstrating to professional poker players how easily they're going to get hustled. It's my favorite video of his.

</comment><comment><USER16> His books are a hoot too, definitely check them out if you like weird culture.</comment>


Groupon is a straight-up Ponzi scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.knewton.com/blog/knewton/from-jose/2011/06/03/groupon-is-a-straight-up-ponzi-scheme/ <comment><USER3> "The local merchants will have to stop using Groupon en masse not long after they first start experimenting with it. "

\- "66% of Groupon deals are profitable for the seller, and 40% of businesses would not use Groupon again, according to a Rice University study." [http://blogs.pitch.com/fatcity/2010/10/do_restaurants_get_a_...](http://blogs.pitch.com/fatcity/2010/10/do_restaurants_get_a_good_deal.php)

"optically, Groupon revenues look high — which they use to raise a financing round at a high valuation."

\- Let's assume every investor that put money in just missed this obvious cost or doesn't care, article still leaves out one of the most compelling parts of their financial model - the minimum 10%+ breakage that Groupon splits that is PURE gravy.

"most Groupon local merchants . . . have no margin to spare or wiggle room in their operating costs."

\- The author misses the entire point of Groupon. Restaurants, spas, etc have fixed costs on food, rent, staff etc - filling in gaps to cover dead zone times w/groupon manages and mitigates those costs.

Their opportunity to improve on the above point is spelled out by their VP "If we can eliminate 10 percent of perishability, we can change the dynamics for small business owners," he says. Small businesses would become more like airlines, matching supply against demand to maximize revenues."

ref breakage - [http://www.quora.com/Groupon-IPO-S-1-Filing- June-2011/What-i...](http://www.quora.com/Groupon-IPO-S-1-Filing- June-2011/What-is-Groupons-redemption-rate)

ref perishability - [http://moneyland.time.com/2011/03/18/impulse- shopping-2-0-gr...](http://moneyland.time.com/2011/03/18/impulse- shopping-2-0-groupons-new-deals-tempt-anyone-whos-hungry-or-bored-right- now/#ixzz1OFeK6lY0)

<comment><USER4> I want to thank you for your insights regarding breakage and perishability - <USER2> had never considered this aspect of the Groupon model (having simply concluded that the reasons so many spas and restaurants were represented was due to their relatively higher margins compared to retail stores), but, particularly for restaurants, this would seem a great boon.

One concern the article seemed to overlook is the fact that Groupon's business model has a near zero barrier to entry - as demonstrated by the entry of so many Groupon clones into the picture of late. Given this and the fact that for many businesses (with exception of spas and restaurants) the 75% cut in revenue may in fact be unsustainable, won't this turn into a race to the bottom as to who offers the most advantageous cut back to the local merchant?

"Try Grup-on! Like Groupon, only we split 40-60!"

".........................................30-70!"

".........................................20-80!"

etc.

<comment><USER5> I suspect there is a reasonable barrier to entry - in that the large number of engaged mailing list subscribers required has a big first mover advantage. Nobody is going to want to be signed up to dozens of different daily deal mailing lists, so with Groupon already having a ton of subscribers they get a much better pitch to the advertisers.

I think a possible competitive strategy is much more highly targeted mailings - instead of approaching advertisers saying "we have 170,000 subscribers in your city", go with "we have 15,000 females in the 30-45 year old age bracket who earn over $85k" or "we've got 22,000 working mothers of 3-7 year old children", or perhaps "we've got 8,000 people who dine out 3 or more times a week in your zipcode". (I have no idea if Groupon are collecting and/or using detailed demographic data about their subscribers...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love quotes like this:

 _they were never Groupon revenues in any meaningful sense of the word. But, optically, Groupon revenues look high — which they use to raise a financing round at a high valuation._

The idea that investors aren't able to fundamentally understand that 50% of revenue walks out of the door is just insane. I've raised a bit of money in my life and never once did I run across an investor who wasn't far better at understanding my own financial statements than I was.

It's not so much commentary on the article itself, but it shows a supreme lack of understanding of how the whole fundraising process really works. Surely Jose already knows that?

<comment><USER7> There are at least two types of investments.

1\. Sometimes one invests in a company because it has a sound business model and you know that it will have long term value.

2\. Other times you invest because the company is hot and rising and you plan to get your money out of the company before the party comes to an end (if you know a stock is going to rise, you might as well buy it and take profits as it goes up.) It can be very profitable for those in at the beginning, not so much for those left holding the relatively worthless bag.

The fact that the original founders are taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of groupon before the IPO reinforces many people's fears that Groupon is this second type of investment.

<comment><USER8> In my opinion, the second type is not investing. It's speculating.

"An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."

-Ben Graham, from chapter 1 of _The Intelligent Investor_

<comment><USER9> Uh, in your parent post you essentially claim all investors are savvy.

In this post, you define non-savvy investors out of existence.

I'm not concerned with the true definition of an investor but all this redefining won't change the point that by looking hot and looking good one can get people to toss one capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a technicality, but there's a difference between a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme. A Ponzi scheme needs an information asymmetry: investors don't know that their money is being used to pay off previous investors. A pyramid scheme is open about the way it works and the pyramid nature, but people invest anyway.

Since Groupon's investment and revenue strategies are known to all, this would be closer to a pyramid scheme than a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER11> I thought a pyramid is multi-level marketing. I get n people to pay me something while they each get n people and so on until there aren't any other people entering the scheme.

How is Groupon like that?

<comment><USER12> With multi level marketing you are actually selling a product. A straight out pyramid scheme you don't sell anything or at least it's not necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" In fact, Groupon immediately remits half of those "revenues" back to the local merchant — they were never Groupon revenues in any meaningful sense of the word. But, optically, Groupon revenues look high — which they use to raise a financing round at a high valuation."_

Except from another S-1 analysis earlier today ([http://m.minyanville.com/?guid=34936&catid=4](http://m.minyanville.com/?guid=34936&catid=4)), they're taking more like 60 days to pay back merchants.

 _"Another concerning part of their current liabilities is that $290 million of it is "accrued merchant payables" -- in the US they take up to 60 days to repay merchants. So that $290 million is merchants who have rendered services waiting to get repaid by Groupon."_

So does that mean a collapse will come quicker or slower when it finally happens?

</comment><comment><USER14> How hard would it be for Groupon to switch their model from targeting local merchants to spraying discounts from national brands? For instance, instead of Fred's Deli Grouponing cat food for ten cents a can and eating that loss, Friskies does targeted geographic campaigns like that to get rid of dated inventory they know are at local merchants? That'd be more efficient and effective than a weekly printed flyer coupon, no?. Other than doing that, given the large amounts of money I've seen reported being extracted from Groupon, it does smell like a pyramid.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is very poorly written. My favorite line:

"Except that all that Groupon revenue is unprofitable so more and more Groupon revenue is actually bad."

Umm, no. Groupon isn't selling something below marginal cost. They're unprofitable due to fixed costs (advertising, sales force, etc.). Their revenue has almost zero associated marginal cost and is actually quite good and in fact is what they're banking on.

I don't think he really understands what "Ponzi Scheme" means either. Groupon doesn't depend on newer people to pay off older people. What he's trying to say is that it perhaps isn't sustainable, but that's not the same as a Ponzi Scheme.

<comment><USER16> I believe that the author was referring to "Groupon Revenue" for the merchants, not Groupon itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a good, clear explanation of Groupon's business model. I think one of the following must be true: 1) Groupon does not realize the Ponzi-like nature of their business, and this led them to turn down Google's offer. 2) They do realize it, but common sense was outweighed by hubris -- they thought they could keep it going until the IPO, or maybe the next offer from Google. 3) They're really, really smart and are working on plan B. That would be one hell of a pivot.

I'm betting on #2.

<comment><USER18> Excuse my ignorance but at what stage in an acquisition do you have to open your books to the acquirer? Any chance that they didn't want to give google this opportunity?

<comment><USER19> Google would have reviewed their books and could easily see how shady it was, but likely didn't care. Look at Youtube and how long Google bankrolled them before they hit profitability. Adding Groupon to their portfolio and integrating it with existing and upcoming products would have been a big win for them.

I'm guessing what others have said is right: Groupon management figured they could get more value by pushing for an IPO. They're likely right, although I can't see Groupon surviving long afterwords. If Google had bought them, then it had a chance to be a long term company. Now, it's an excellent investment for the founder and early investors, and the public will get screwed.

<comment><USER20> To my knowledge, YouTube only breaks even.

<comment><USER21> add to that, the primary cost of youtube is probably bandwidth; and I believe Google probably pays less for bandwidth than anyone else; Google is uniquely suited to make the YouTube model work. On the other hand, the big cost for groupon seems to be salespeople. Unless google can replace flesh and blood salespeople with something automated, that wouldn't be nearly as good of a fit. Google doesn't have cheaper fleshy sales people than anyone else.

edit: on the other hand, what if google was buying the fleshy sales people? what if that is what they wanted? I mean, groupon is doing okay at penetrating the small local business market in a way that google isn't.

<comment><USER19> If there's one thing Google has shown disdain for, it's fleshy people who aren't coding. See: customer service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Calling Groupon a ponzi or pyramid scheme is missing the point. All investments are like that. You buy a stock at X in the hopes that you can sell it for more than X.

For Groupon, you would want to look st two things. First, how much money do they make on a deal minus what they spend to get the deal done? Second, how.many deals can they sell?

If a deal makes $5000 and costs $500, you'd want to sell as many as you can. Since all of their deals require a person to complete the sale, and there is a lot of demand for deals, they hire a ton of people to sell a lot of deals.

As long as they can raise enough investment until their cash flow catches up, they are good to go, assuming demand for Groupon deals stays strong of course.

</comment><comment><USER23> Inflammatory headline... "Groupon is not sustainable" might be more accurate.

</comment><comment><USER24> Unlike the other tech IPOs, this _is_ a dot-com, and I worry they are going to take the good companies down with them.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think Groupon's rapid growth was mostly due to fear from competition. They wanted to expand as rapidly as possible because everyone was having their own Groupon-like deals. If something grows so much out of fear (and, of course, greed), you don't learn from your mistakes. You don't have time and patience to change course and fix what's broken. So Groupon has built a very vulnerable system that can collapse just as fast as it was built.

I believe that the concept of social buying is great, but its complexity deserves more respect than it has been given. There has to be a balance between the amount of money merchants are willing to risk to introduce themselves to new people, number of those people becoming repeat customers, how much long term boost does the merchant get from those repeat customers, etc. It takes time to find out what is working and what is not.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just a friendly reminder to all the bloggers out there: You _can_ be sued for these kinds of statements.

<comment><AUTHOR> You likely have a fundamental misunderstanding of libel law. With libel, truth is the ultimate defense, and somebody's opinion isn't really libelous as long as it's presented as opinion. Unless the facts in the post are made up, which seems unlikely, the writer is fine.

<comment><USER26> _Groupon smells like a ponzi scheme_? Fine. _Careful, Groupon could turn out to be a ponzi scheme_? Great.

 _Groupon is straight-up a ponzi scheme_? That's pushing it, and would raise any lawyer's eyebrow.

The problem here isn't so much about facts and opinions, or even necessarily the presentation, it's about the term "ponzi scheme" which is very, very legally charged. Check out the episode of Bullshit! on pyramid and ponzi schemes-- not so much for the content of the episode, but for the fact that they _avoided saying "ponzi scheme"_.

Or, imagine this: The New York Times ran this piece, even in the opinion section. Does it seem like a libel case now? Keep in mind that _libel_ and a _libel case_ are entirely different. A company could very well bring a case to court and drain thousands from you in legal fees just to protect their reputation.

And they'd have a pretty good case too. Yeah, malice probably isn't there, but they could certainly argue a reckless disregard for whether or not this was actually true.

<comment><AUTHOR> Anybody can file a libel case, just as anybody can have a libel case laughed out of court.

The reason why you don't hear about libel cases being prosecuted every day is that libel is unbelievably difficult to prove.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bitcoin, Groupon. Everything is a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER7> Other hot companies are clearly NOT Ponzi schemes, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Zynga. Everything is not a Ponzi scheme, but some things are.

<comment><USER28> I agree with you, but you have to admit, U.S. dollars themselves are a bit of a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER29> While this is nearly true, it acts very slowly, and most people don't know how U.S. dollars work. Since everyone is robbed of some small value rather than a small group being robbed of all value, you can't expect people to notice.

Unfortunately most attempts to explain to the general public how U.S. dollars work contain other assertions that are plainly ridiculous (see <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXjoAP7jm6Y> or <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ>), and the more tame treatments of related issues lack depth (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Meanwhile, many early-adopting merchants find that the burst in customers > immediately disappears, and since they can't perpetually discount 75%, those > merchants stop using Groupon.

This is the crux of the argument, and no sources are provided. If you're going to write a persuasive argument based on empirical data, you need to cite your sources.

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't the "social proof" for a lot of investors the supposed $6B buyout offer they rejected from Google, last year? Was Google just way off in their valuation?

Remember all those stories about how Youtube was just a huge liability, and they were burning through bandwidth expenses, and it was so stupid for Google or anyone to buy it?

<comment><USER7> Being part of Google changes things as (1) Google can finance a money losing operation for quite some time and (2) Google offers integration into its huge ecosystem, especially its existing robust advertising network.

Thus Google brought a lot to the table in such acquisition which would increase Groupon's value.

<comment><USER31> This is the most insightful and concise thing I've read about the Google proposal so far. Google offering B$6 doesn't mean Groupon is worth B$6 on its own, it means it's worth B$6 _to Google_.

Google is not Warren Buffet investing in the hope of a passive but safe return on investment. Google was betting that Google + Groupon was worth more than Google + B$6.

<comment><USER32> You mean

Google - B$6 + Groupon > Google

or

Google - B$6 + Groupon > Google - B$6 + investing in other ideas or companies

<comment><USER31> I wrote something along those lines originally, but it seemed simpler to leave the details out. I trusted HN readers to fill in the rest :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How many more of these 'Groupon is a Ponzi' articles are we going to see before the trend dies down ?

</comment><comment><USER34> _"let us briefly examine the tulip mania that is Groupon."_

Yesterday I equated the bitcoins craze to tulip mania [1]. I wonder whether the author of this blogging read that on HN, and thought he could use that for Groupon, too. He also linked to the WikiPedia article, like I did.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612858></comment>


Edgeio To Shut Down - In The DeadPool - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/edgeio-to-shut-down-in-the-deadpool/ <comment><USER2> Jono December 7th, 2007 at 12:39 am _Wasn't it ironic that you, Michael, are so well versed in understanding how Web 2.0 startups succeed, but for whatever reason decide that pouring money into a project with no revenue (dot com bust era style) was the way to go?

Shouldn't you know better?_

Michael Arrington December 7th, 2007 at 12:43 am _Jono - that is indeed ironic._

</comment><comment><USER3> Arrington> In general I'll say this - it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.

This is why EC2/S3 are so great. People can go crazy working on building out super scalable infrastructure ahead of time and the damage is minimized. It's just a waste of time instead of time and money. Since you're wasting so much less money you have more time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Give the system to me I will host it for free for 40% of the business. I will get a few servers and host it at calpop.com. I will take in the leads that come in from the site and evaluate them for business ideas and I will play around with the system and see if there isn't something that someone would pay for using it. I would be willing to spend $299 a month plus the cost of a few servers. Hopefully the code is not so balkanized it is not unmanagable.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be- right-90-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of- time-and-why-id.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like how you just post every single TechCrunch entry.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's with comments 138-142?</comment>


Lovebook – Find a girlfriend with Facebook ads - <AUTHOR> http://trylovebook.com

<comment><USER2> this is brilliant lol</comment>


From Massachusetts State Trooper to iOS Developer - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/20/smoopa-state-trooper-ios-development/

<comment><USER2>
      "These kids are coding like mad scientists," he said.
      "I found their videos to be some of the most
      user-friendly ones."

That's a really unique way to learn!

</comment><comment><USER3> First I thought this is one of the signs of a bubble, like when taxi drivers are talking about how the latest tech IPO will make them rich. But in this case, he seems to have a serious interest in programming.

<comment><USER4> Can't it be both?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great story about an amazing iOS developer!

</comment><comment><USER6> Great to hear stories like these</comment>


N.A.D.D. - Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html

<comment><USER2> "... This innocuous condition reared it's head during Guns when it became..."

oops. ADD.</comment>


Jon Skeet: The 'Chuck Norris' of Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-34596634 <comment><USER2> I respect Jon Skeet very much and it's by his book that I learned C# when I needed. I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods, this being detrimental to the learning process. Especially in a global market without boundaries, like the software industry, it's easy to compare oneself with the best of us and this ends up being quite depressing. We shouldn't forget that such people are humans as well, continuously learning, improving and prone to do mistakes like the rest of us. Here is an example: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426754/linkedblockingque...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426754/linkedblockingqueue- vs-concurrentlinkedqueue/24439878)

<comment><USER3> The biggest issue with idolizing people this much in my opinion is that it puts a huge divide between you and that idol.

People have heroes, and heroes do things normal humans can't. That further translates into other parts of life where really terrible things are done by villains and the only ones being able to counter it are those heroes we created.

I don't understand why people fetishize names that much. It's almost as if they are subconsciously saying:

"Given that xyz is so much better than I and he's a genius, I can therefore never hope to reach that goal, so there's no point in trying"

While at the same time consciously saying: "I wish I could be like him"

As the germans say: "Keine Bange, der kocht auch nur mit Wasser"

There's a whole bunch of inventions we accredit to different people than actually did them and we praise them like gods. And there is no rational behind that behavior. Yes, it's still a great achievement, but no it doesn't matter as much as we like to pretend.

On a step further we get to the discussion of what success is. Is success when everyone knows you? Is it when you have a lot of money? If it's all about the money, no european startup will ever be as great as its american counterpart. There's just not as much money.

<comment><USER4> > The biggest issue with idolizing people this much in my opinion is that it > puts a huge divide between you and that idol.

If it's any help, I'd be happy to give a huge list of bugs I've caused due to inexperience and incompetence.

I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy the micro-celebrity status SO has given me, but I'd be happy to help correct any impression that there's a huge gulf between me and any "regular" programmer. Maybe a gulf in "time spent answering questions on SO" but not some massive intellectual divide.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, I was expecting a list of projects that you delivered with great code quality, tools you built to improve programming, and so on. I have that for Margaret Hamilton, from Apollo to 001. Bernstein of Qmail and Rod Chapman of Praxis Correct-by-Construction come to mind. Answering lots of questions about programming indicates _something_ about knowledge but that depends on the questions & answers. I know lots of programmers value people doing hands- on parts.

So, all in all, I guess I'm wondering what writings or work you did that puts you on list of top programmers. I mean, is it just how many aspiring or professional programmers you've helped day to day? The amplification effect of your SO activities on our field? Or specific, jaw-dropping software or books I don't know about? Or both?

Just curious.

<comment><USER4> Well, my C# book (C# in Depth) has been well received. I'd like to think my date/time library for .NET (Noda Time) is mostly well-written.

But no, nothing that I'd expect to put me in the top 15 (or top 1500) programmers in the world.

<comment><USER5> That's honest. Appreciate the feedback. In case you missed the other comment, I do think we should have recognition of contribution to _educating_ programmers in practical ways. I think your StackOverflow work and book should earn you some place high on that list. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought Jeff Dean was the 'Chuck Norris' of programming. He designed (with others) a lot of Google's biggest infrastructure projects as well as multiple iterations of the main search infrastructure.

Among others, the projects he's worked on include:

Spanner - a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database

Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate.

BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system.

MapReduce a system for large-scale data processing applications.

Google Brain a system for large-scale artificial neural networks

LevelDB an open source on-disk key-value store.

TensorFlow an open source machine learning software library.

See [http://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox- parc/all/](http://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/all/)

[https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Jeff-Dean](https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Jeff- Dean)

<comment><USER7> If Jeff Dean built Google, Jon Skeet is my Google. Atleast until Google is able to tell me where my program is supposed to store local files on the twenty different versions of Windows.

<comment><USER8> I have a big respect for Jon Skeet, but to dismiss Jeff Dean's work because Skeet is the one who provides copy-and-paste snippets for programmers is wrong on so many levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The common complaint about stackoverflow reputation is that it's a function of the number of questions answered and not actual skill. [http://stackrating.com/](http://stackrating.com/) gives an Elo rating of stackoverflow users, where you're rated by how well you answer relative to others (sort of like a ladder).

Jon Skeet is #2 on the Elo scale, so not only is he answering a lot of questions; his answers get upvoted more than others. He really _is_ giving good answers, in addition to being quite prolific. Eric Lippert might be the more interesting data point, though -- despite being 23rd in reputation, he's #1 on the Elo scale.

<comment> mark-r Thanks for the link to the Elo scale. Kind of depressing though when I looked myself up, I'm much lower there than I am on SO's rank.

<comment><USER10> I'm suspicious of the Elo scale, at least used to rank folks who aren't near the top of the reputation scales. I'm ranked 2600th for reputation, but 3.5 millionth for rating. I'm not surprised that other people are doing a better job of answering questions than me, but to say that I'm in the bottom 5% of users is highly suspect. I'm active in reviewing other users's flagged questions, I've seen what the bottom of the barrel looks like and my answers are certainly not it.

<comment><USER11> Not only that, but you've made 400 answers compared to my 125 answers but have almost 7x the SO score and yet I'm rated 12,975th compared to your 3,575,349th.

Definitely not right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is my favourite Jon Skeet Answer: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is- subtractin...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting- these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result)

It's not because he gives a wonderfully description of the problem and solution that makes you fully understand what happened. What makes it incredible It's that he solved it so comprehensively in 15 minutes from the time the poster asked the question. Most high calibre devs would be still wrapping their head around the problem after 15 minutes.

<comment><USER4> > Most high calibre devs would be still wrapping their head around the problem > after 15 minutes. reply

Most high calibre devs haven't stumbled into doing a lot of date/time work. That wasn't some clever decision on my part - it was working on the calendar part of Google Mobile Sync. Date and time is a rabbit hole that I just went deep on. A bit of luck rather than spectacular wide knowledge, I'm afraid.

I love that question and answer too, although I doubt that it's genuinely _helped_ many people. Time zone and calendar stuff has a _lot_ of amusing trivia. My favourite involves the 30th of February, which only occurred in 1712, and only in Sweden.

<comment><USER13> Having done some time in the trenches with calendar code, I would like the politicians and bureaucrats who define the rules to have some notion of the cost they inflict. Then perhaps we wouldn't have "let's change the DST dates this year (only) as an experiment" and we certainly wouldn't have leap seconds..

<comment><USER14> Politicians couldn't care less about the leap seconds IMO. It's the other geeks (non-programmers) who enforce its existence. In fact the leap seconds predate the modern computing era. I guess they didn't have such a big impact in 1970s. In fact I didn't learn about them until 2012 when many systems crashed after leap second.

Having said that, politicians changing DST rules with a few weeks notice (like Turkey last autumn) are nuts. The impact of such decisions is huge and worldwide (emergency patches etc.)

<comment><USER13> Politicians of some sort are in charge of whether leap seconds exist or not. afaik it is mostly a particular kind of religion (belief that human time must be in all ways bound to the heavens) that drove the political push for leap seconds. Like you I only discovered they existed when my kernels locked up..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've personally had questions answered by skeet.

It's totally unbelievable how quickly he understands the question and types out an explanation with code.

It actually boggles the mind how he can have a job and answer questions all day.

Here's an example

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3489197/is-there-a- shorth...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3489197/is-there-a-shorthand- for-form-begininvoke)

<comment><USER16> A while ago I thought his account was used by several people, since he seemed to answer questions all day, during day and night - I checked his statistics at the time. It surprised me to learn it's all done by a single person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Amazingly there's things even the Chuck Norris of programming doesn't know:

[http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon- skeet?tab=questions](http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon- skeet?tab=questions)

He's only asked 39 questions (about one for every 1000 answers), but I'm charmed by the fact that they're real questions, usually not particularly esoteric or "advanced". Turns out even Jon Skeet needs to ask how to "efficiently fetch a Mercurial change log in TeamCity."

<comment><USER18> Interestingly all the ones I clicked on had been tagged as inaproppriate questions by the moderators.

<comment><USER19> This is just a guess: A lot of those are old questions. They might have been tagged as inappropriate a long time after they were posted as policies evolved.

That being said, if you ask a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, people aren't going to like some of them. It's the cost of putting yourself out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seeing someone as the beginning and more importantly end of a given topic is dangerous, but so is the lack of inspiration and aspiration.

Jon's never claimed to be something he's not, he's contributed a massive amount of value by being such a major earlier contributor to a system that's grown to help millions of people daily. Nothing is perfect, but not aspiring to inspire for fear of being seen as something you're not will never help anyone.

Jon is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER21> While he sounds really intelligent, SO points are a really bad way of determining that. And the artical the story mentions is mostly about fame and publicity, not the best. I've had the pleasure to work with and know a few developers that should have be up there, but they work on commercial projects.

SO can be very swayed by names and becomes cliquish. There are a few ppl that have massive points that have questioned SO's methodology and scoring.

Sounds like an interesting guy, but the story seems really flawed.

<comment><USER22> It's more about being popular than being the best programmer in the world. He has answered thousands of questions with insane accuracy since 2008, making him one of the most popular names in the C#/Java world. Also he is very aware of it and is even quoted in the article saying that there are "far, far better programmers than me".

<comment><USER21> Looking over his answers, his breadth of knowledge definite impressed me. I don't know too many people that can discuss the intricacies of how architecture affects performance, then turn around and talk about enterprise platforms.

He also seems like a nice guy.

It makes me wish the article was better more than anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Jon Skeet answered several questions I had when learning c#, he's been an inspiration to me and extremely helpful on my journey!

His "C# In Depth" book is fantastic as well.

</comment><comment><USER24> It is deeply satisfying to see Jon Skeet in the mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER25> "All his Stack Overflow work is unpaid, done purely to help millions of people around the world he will never meet."

Atwood did an amazing job gamifying Stack Overflow, but I think it is worth considering that while the contributors gain little from the site financially, that was not the case for the founders.

<comment><USER26> Jon Published a book, I know at least 3 people (me included) who have purchased the book because of interacting with him through the site.

It's not fair to say he didn't benefit from StackOverflow and his revenue is linked to his contribution and the success of the site.

Note that there are at least 100 people with over 100K reputation in StackOverflow. Also note, it's completely fine to do something as a hobby without looking for profit - and it's fine to grow side profit through it.

I got lots of employment offers through StackOverflow for example.

<comment><USER27> Books usually lose you money.

Programming books doubly so, especially if your hour rate is that of a Google programmer, it's hardly worth spending half a year or even a year for the measly returns.

<comment><USER28> That book is doing a lot more for Jon Skeet than putting royalties in his pocket

<comment><USER27> Well, it's haven't "upgraded" his job -- he still works the same job at Google.

The fame from being "Chuck Norris" of SO is more than enough, and more impressive that having written a programming book anyway (with tons of people have done).

<comment><USER28> Tons of people have written a programming book, but Skeet wrote a _good_ one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I heard that when Jon Skeet divides by zero, instead of throwing an exception he gets thrown a thumbs up. Out of respect.

I also heard that Jon Skeet can't run Array.pop() because the entire array collapses out of sheer terror.

Did you know that Jon Skeet can fix any memory leak just pointing at the computer and saying, "No."

</comment><comment><USER30> The 'Chuck Norris' reference comes from this long-but-amusing meta thread: [http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet- facts](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts)

</comment><comment><USER31> I would have nominated Fabrice Bellard or Oleg Kiselyov as the Chuck Norris of programming.

<comment><USER32> He is on the list (11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> More like the Abrash of .net.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think it's a win for all programmers that one of us is being idolized like a basketball player.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just haven't stumbled upon a lot of posts answered by Jon Skeet even though I've always heard of him as the Chuck Norris of programming through SO. Is that because I'm not a C# developer?

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd like to see him on the QI tv show.

</comment><comment><USER37> hmmm, I thought Jeff Dean was the Chuck Norris of programming:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/astounding-facts-about- google...](http://www.businessinsider.com/astounding-facts-about-googles-most- badass-engineer-jeff-dean-2012-1)

</comment><comment><USER38> Given Norris's political views I'm not sure that comparison is a something I would want.

<comment><USER39> I agree, and find it downright creepy, cowardly and disappointing how many people would downvote you for disagreeing with Norris's right-wing [1] anti- gay [2] political views [3], without saying why they agreed with Chuck Norris.

How about Chuck Norris's brave brogrammer fans reply under their own name telling us what they like so much about his political views, instead of downvoting anonymously? Because if you have some anti-gay bigotry you want to spread, at least put your name on it, since that's what Chuck Norris would do. [4]

[1] [http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/chuck- norris](http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/chuck-norris)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/27/chuck-norris- an...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/27/chuck-norris-anti-gay- scouts)

[3] [http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/5-reasons-its-no- lon...](http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/5-reasons-its-no-longer-cool- chuck-norris)

[4] [http://www.newnownext.com/chuck-norris-hired-by-anti-gay- gro...](http://www.newnownext.com/chuck-norris-hired-by-anti-gay-group- marriage-sacred-union-between-man-and-woman/12/2014/)

<comment><USER40> This is a site about technology, not politics. I downvoted the original comment because it is not a good match for the topic or tone of Hacker News. I downvoted your comment because your tone is even more aggressive and antagonizing, and again, not on topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How is this top of HN with only 60 points and 10 comments?

<comment><USER42> Sunday

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Just how meaningful are these "reputation points" that make this guy number one?

If Visual Basic was the language with the most number of beginners and programmers, and I had the best answers to Visual Basic questions, I could be Chuck Norris instead.

But I don't find Visual Basic challenging or interesting. Neither C# or Java for that matter.

<comment><USER4> They're not meaningful at all. Hopefully relatively few people _really_ think I'm one of the "top 15 living programmers" or anything like that.

I'm good enough to make a living, and good enough to help people on SO. One of the nice things about programming is that what you find interesting, I might not and vice versa - hopefully there will always be enough people who find a variety of topics interesting to hope those who have problems in those topics. But yes, considering rep as a proxy metric for programming awesomeness would be a mistake IMO.

<comment><USER43> In case it needs stating, your contributions to the programming community are simply remarkable. And it is only right that your efforts should be better appreciated by the tech community and wider society.

But there are numerous unsung heroes who, for whatever reason, do not get the recognition they deserve.

Like those on Stack Overflow who are investing the same amount of time and effort as some of the top rep contributors, but in areas that are not as reputationally rewarding.

But there is also a large group that are not posting on Stack Overflow, who are more likely to be working somewhere across the thousands of forums, git repos and mailing lists that developers inhabit. Out of the limelight, and with no reputation points to show for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I guess being "bbc" is the only thing that made this post first page.

<comment><USER45> I don't know about that but I can report that Skeet went to Cambridge University, which tends to produce a chunk of the UK's governing elite.

The unfortunate thing is that in the UK, as elsewhere, programmers and technical people are generally regarded as socially inept boffins who don't quite "get" the way society works. Recognition of this goes back to C.P. Snow's Two Cultures from the 50s.

So being hailed by the BBC as the world's greatest programmer is a mixed honour. It comes with an implicit dose of condescension.

<comment><USER46> You need a chip for the other shoulder otherwise you are going to become really unbalanced.

<comment><USER27> What exactly seemed like he has a "chip on his shoulder" for you?</comment></comment></comment></comment>