Facebook's PR feels broken - <AUTHOR> https://themargins.substack.com/p/facebooks-pr-feels-broken <comment><USER2> > I'm sure, internally, it's looked at as the "mainstream media trying to get > clicks...

I interviewed with FB shortly after the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out (but long enough after that it was clear to _everyone_ that FB had screwed up big time).

When it was my turn to ask questions in one particular interview, I gave a standard fallback when I have nothing else: "[despite all the blahblah positives], having worked at other technology companies, what's your least favorite thing about working at FB?"

This guy was a FB vet (maybe 5 or 10 years? Very long in FB time, I think). He gives me this spiel about how hard the teams work to maintain user privacy and how unfairly they're being treated by the public and the media, and how hard it is to work in an environment where everyone treats you so unfairly.

I was floored. Not even a hint of apology, remorse, or "we could have done X better". "Unfair. Fake news. We're doing great things, and no one thanks us enough." And from someone that had probably made a _mint_ having been around at FB near-IPO time. It was my first or second of the day, and while no one else was so blatant, the sentiment persisted throughout the rest of the day.

I bombed the interviews hard, they didn't want me back, but I had basically decided I'd never work there by the time lunch rolled around.

<comment><USER3> Someone who worked at Facebook for the better part of a decade responded that they felt the media coverage was unfair to Facebook. You were suprised by this response because from an outsider's perspective you felt that Facebook employees should be apologetic? What makes you more qualified to judge whether the public perception was accurate as compared to someone who actually worked there - an "FB vet" in your own words?

Having dug into the Cambridge Analytica story, I can see a number of reasons why Facebook workers would feel wronged by the coverage. In particular, many outlets omitted or downplayed the fact that Cambridge Analytica had lied about the purpose of their data collection, falsely claiming that it was for academic research. Dozens of other academic institutions were similarly allowed to solicit data from users, yet those go unmentioned because most people don't see users voluntarily sharing their data for academic purposes. But that's what Cambridge Analytica was, from Facebook's perspective. The picture painted by the media was one where Facebook brazenly sold people's data to nefarious actors, when in reality Facebook treated Cambridge Analytica just like other academic organizations in allowing them to solicit users for data - except it turned out that CA had lied about the purpose of its data collection.

This story leaves makes me more empathetic towards your interviewer. If my company was so throughly demonized by the media such that candidates discount my own experience actually working at the company and are "floored" when when I tell them that the reality is different from public coverage, I'd be pretty salty too.

<comment><USER4> >What makes you more qualified to judge whether the public perception was accurate as compared to someone who actually worked there - an "FB vet" in your own words?

For starters, most of us here don't benefit financially from putting a positive spin on disasters at Facebook. As the Upton Sinclair saying goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

I've not talked to Facebook employees personally but I've witnessed the same degree of delusion at other large tech companies. Some are straight-up like a cult with employees willing to defend just about anything their company does regardless of how hazardous it was. Which is even more baffling if one takes into consideration that these are usually salaried employees working there only for a few years with no personal stake whatsoever.

The point isn't even to discuss some sort of internal nuance about the technical details of CA. If you are a company as large as Facebook and you allow user data to be abused to this degree, even if there is some nuance to it, when facing the public you apologize, tuck your tail between your legs, admit that you screwed up, and fix your problems, and you turn the arrogance and the world saving rhetoric down a notch.

<comment><USER5> I was working at Facebook when the CA story broke, but not when the events happened. I was in a department far removed from any of the involved parties. I haven't worked for them for several years now, and I currently own no FB stock outside of broad-based index funds¹.

As I recall, the sense of unfairness that was going around was rooted mostly in it feeling like old news. CA was the ghost of a bad policy that had already been rescinded, and there was very little awareness of that in the media coverage. Instead, there were loud calls for Facebook to do something, but every reasonable thing had already been done years before.

When I worked there, nobody believed that the policy which birthed CA was a good idea, which is why it was long gone. Also, everything had played out already in the public eye (in the tech press) -- anyone who had been paying attention should have known about most of these things already.

¹ It seems silly to make all these disclaimers, but they seem necessary with the mood here.

<comment><USER6> I remember all the puff pieces when Obama's campaign did something similar in 2012, where his app would drink down all the data it could from the social graph. When CA broke, I was asking people why they thought this was news and why I only used Facebook to shitpost on company pages, it wasn't exactly a well kept secret that you could do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel pretty contrarian about this piece. In the same piece that talks about how dangerous it is and how regulation is needed because facebook has the _ability_ to influence public opinion, they talk about how "totally normal" it is for the media to act as mouthpieces for whomever wants to pay. No mention of how Fox News can swing public opinion, and really needs to be unbiased and in fact needs regulation to that end. Or any number of other media. And then it includes a gif making fun of zuckerberg for being robotic while complaining about him writing a post that was human instead of corporate.

<comment><USER8> Comment talking about bias, only mentions Fox News. Welcome to hell (imo, this is what you get when you don't teach people how to argue and feed them too many Disney films).

No, the press shouldn't be regulated. Yes, bias is normal. No, Fox News doesn't "swing public opinion" (they reflect views that already exist, and pander to them). Life is difficult, you have to think for yourself.

<comment><USER9> You seem to be arguing two different things: first, Fox News does not influence public opinion; second, that it shouldn't matter if they do because adults should think for themselves.

The second is fundamentally a subject view of the world, so you are neither right nor wrong. I disagree with you strongly. We should be concerned about things that harm the our civic health even if we ourselves to blame for them. I think there's a clear parallel to our actual health: when 80% of our population is overweight or obese, it's maybe time to think beyond "adults are responsible for what they eat" and towards "the world would be better if we could make progress on this issue". Ditto our past history with smoking. We know that people are subject to persuasion and psychological manipulation and exploitation of their cognitive biases. A model of the world that has everyone as solely responsible for their own destiny is a pretty useless one, in my opinion.

But, your first claim -- "Fox News doesn't 'swing public opinion'" is an empirical one. Either it does or it doesn't. You're either right or wrong.

DellaVigna and Kaplan's 2007 piece in the Quarterly Journal of Economics investigates this question. They exploit the fact that the phased roll-out of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 impacted 20% of the country. This allows for a natural experiment where some markets are "treated" by Fox News and others are not.

Okay, so, first, should we believe this design? If the entry of Fox News into a market was random, then this is an experiment and we have a treatment effect. If the entry of Fox news into a market was conditional on market characteristics that we can assess, we have "selection on observables", and we can recover a treatment effect. We need only a good selection model. It is also the case that if entry into a market was non-random, but conditionally ignorable with respect to the potential outcomes of the market (e.g. random with respect to politics), we can get a treatment effect without knowing the full selection model. So we have some different routes to the answer here.

The answer is between #2 and #3 -- Fox News did enter markets in a non-random way, but not based on demographics or past voting history, based mainly on geographic considerations. Given the regulatory and infrastructural component of entering a new market, this is probably not surprising, but it does guard against "Fox entered conservative markets first" as a counterclaim.

Now, having clarified the design based considerations, the authors find that Fox News was responsible for a ~0.5 percent vote share increase in Republican vote share in the presidential election of 2000. Whether you consider that large or small depends on your frame of reference. My sense would be that 0.5 percent is small cosmically, but it's maybe possible that you could have an election where that kind of margin is decisive. Remind me again, was the 2000 election close?

This is a fairly credible and careful design published in a good journal and widely cited (1486 citations, which is quite high for a nonmethods economics paper). That doesn't make it true, but it does suggest that the field of Economics views this as an important paper and that it has been exposed to scrutiny from a wide variety of sources.

If there's a little contempt in my reply here, it's because I think your off- hand claim that media diet, priming, and framing effects are solely demand driven and have no actual impact on viewers seems to fly in the face of like 50 years of communications, economics, and political science research. In other words, it feels like your first reply was "50 years of research doesn't matter, humans aren't influenced by any of this stuff". Maybe that's not what you meant, but when I see someone flippantly respond without evidence, I think "Welcome to hell" \-- imo, that's the kind of thing we get when we don't teach people to argue.

<comment><USER10> What a thoughtful and well articulated reply (sincerely). I hope some day one of my stupid opinions gets this treatment.

<comment><USER8> Understanding that everyone is biased is not a "stupid" opinion. It is reality. Thinking otherwise is certainly a very common belief, and quite "stupid" indeed (the hallmark of stupidity is thinking you are becoming more intelligent, the stupider you become).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This part really struck me:

> It feels like finance in 2009.

> One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply > because you were told to go. On the other, you had the classic Gordon Gekko- > ish types reciting Liar's Poker anecdotes ad nauseam.

> Enter the crisis and everyone was equally tarred as the bad guys. The former > have slowly made their way out (mostly over to tech), while the latter > remain[...]

It does feel like the tide of public opinion might be turning from "too uncritical" to "too critical".

At least, as somebody who spends too much time on both Hacker News and Twitter, this seems believable to me.

<comment><USER11> I don't really agree with the idea that people are being too critical of FB, or these massive social media giants in general.

People vastly underestimate the power of data IMHO and therefore the responsibility that comes with it. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder wtf we were doing just like any other decade, cause hindsight is 20/20 (after a certain number of years out ofc).

I don't think our society is really prepared for the digitization of so much information and there will be growing pains.

<comment><USER12> I studied a bit of politics, anthropology, history in my 20s. The one things that frightens me the most is that a relatively "safe" constant of pretty much all dictatorial / totalitarian / fascist / <insert_new_dystopia> regimes of the world, going back _millennia_ , is control of information, and thereby the population.

It's one of the simplest rule of a State hostile to its citizens: the more you control information, the stronger the leash. The tighter your hold. And if cruelty is on the menu, the worse it can get with more, better, faster information.

So I thought, when Facebook really took off, "people do this now because there's this fad, this dopamine of novelty, but surely soon enough it'll recede" and I was damn wrong.

I also thought, "oh but governments with half-decent minds will undoubtedly choose to increase protection for citizens, enact "digital rights" to further the reach of the sanctity of one's "home territory" to internet, a "digital democracy" in terms of infrastructure rules so to speak, and again I was dead wrong — they're doing it the exact opposite direction, proving that the concepts were not lunatic and very much implementable, but as it turns out in the form of "digital authoritarianism".

So yeah, I'm the usual optimistic about most things, even the worst like climate change; but in this case, I know no example in history to disprove this assumption: in the current context, if any major western country falls into dictatorship / totalitarianism / etc, it may get very dark very fast. The powers of such a modern incarnation of extreme regimes would be, well, unprecendented, and that's kind of understating orders of magnitude in scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing this piece really brings home to me is how unethical it is for media to sell sponsored content intermixed and indistinguishable from their own content. How do you trust a media outlet when their content is for sale? I know this practice pre-dates the internet, but it's hugely damaging to people's faith in the media.

I think Facebooks' failure in PR is more a symptom of how far Facebook has slid down the ethical slope into outright corruption. As you do more and more heinous things, it becomes more difficult to defend those actions.

<comment><USER14> It's almost like there's a reason the FTC requires disclosure of paid content...

<comment><USER13> In this specific case, it was clear Teen Vogue and Facebook were trying to do exactly that, and the fact that they pulled it suggests to me that omitting the "Sponsored Content" warning was part of the terms of the deal. I suspect this is extremely difficult to police and people get away with it all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It still amazes me that the line of reasoning they publicly went with, around their decision not to fact check political advertisements, is that no one company should have that amount of power. The logical conclusion of their own argument is that Facebook should be broken up.

<comment><USER16> While I agree Facebook is doing a bad job with regards to political advertising, I am actually really glad facebook isnt stepping in and deciding whats truthful or not. Does anyone really think that we should give Facebook any power over our political system or give them the power to be the gatekeepers of what political ads we see? I think facebook should do what twitter did and just totally get out of the political ads game, however, since theyre not, call me crazy but I am kinda glad they arent deciding whats "right" and whats "wrong". Facebook has already proved to us over and over that they don't know the difference between right and wrong and that they make decisions that are bad for society.

<comment><USER17> Disagree. Since they have chosen to platform those ads, they should at least be held to the same standards as networks and not show ads that are provably false. It would be better if they didn't platform them, or better yet, they didn't have that much potential influence in the first place.

<comment><USER18> > same standards as networks and not show ads that are provably false

I was going to ask you for a reference on this, because I was pretty sure that no such standard existed.

I was quite wrong!

[https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/complaints-about- broadc...](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/complaints-about-broadcast- advertising)

"Broadcasters are responsible for selecting the broadcast material that airs on their stations, including advertisements. The FCC expects broadcasters to be responsible to the community they serve and act with reasonable care to ensure that advertisements aired on their stations are not false or misleading.

The FTC has primary responsibility for determining whether specific advertising is false or misleading, and for taking action against the sponsors of such material. You can file a complaint with the FTC online or call toll- free 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357)."

So we have:

"The FCC expects broadcasters to be responsible to the community they serve and act with reasonable care"

and

"The FTC has primary responsibility for determining"

So...maybe we should give online advertising the same treatment?

As an aside: this FCC regulation surprises me; I'm quite aware that there are numerous limits to free speech, but I didn't expect this to be one of them.

I've always been an ardent believer in expansive free speech, and I still am, though age has allowed me to accept more limits. Though it doesn't feel right to me, the negative impact of (largely?) unregulated online political advertising is big and getting bigger.

<comment><USER19> I think that's only for local TV though for the FCC ones, like your ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS affiliates. They have other obligation like providing children programming which is usually early on the weekend, in exchange for the airwaves too. So cable and satellite network stations are treated differently. So like cussing on the local TV stations is a no, no but a show on HBO can cuss all they want.

Then also some states like Ohio it's illegal to sell ads to businesses that aren't solvent, Facebook is currently being sued by school districts for selling ads to a charter school that later ended up closing, which I feel is a huge overreach since most of it's automatic and the school themselves decided to buy the ads. So I guess you have to do a financial background check before selling ads. Probably easier to just exclude Ohio from selling ads, but the lawsuit hasn't been settled yet. So far no activity for 7 months but still on the docket as a open case.

<comment><USER20> No, online ads do not get an exception with the FTC. The FTC enforces truth- in-advertising laws on ads across all mediums.

Edit: FCC -> FTC

<comment><USER21> > _The FTC enforces truth-in-advertising laws on ads across all mediums._

Hahahahahahaha yeah sure they do.

<comment><USER19> Yeah. I thought I seen something before that Hollywood had some exemption, so movies could have paid placement without disclosing it. Like I think the Emoji movie could be an example, never watched it but remember seeing posts saying it was nothing but a big advertising. The first Jurassic World had a bunch of product placement too, people didn't like. Maybe it's mentioned in the credits somewhere though? I liked the movie and kinda felt the brands added realism. Like real brands sponsor stuff at Disney, so makes sense for a fictional theme park around dinosaurs but I know some feel it takes away from the movie.

Then there's another show about entertainment and news, and the woman on their sometimes gets dresses provided to wear. I noticed that's mentioned in a text overlay at the very end... However guides for YouTubers say you should mention say it on audio too, don't just put in the text description or on the screen as text.

Then Apple gives TV shows and movies free iPhone's and Macbooks for promotion... I seen it mentioned in the end screen but don't remember ever hearing a voice over saying products provided by Apple, but if you are a YouTuber you are supposed to mention you got a free Macbook every time you mention it according to one guide. So seems unequal and some confusion out there too. I know some tech channels, rving, camping, etc will accept free products to review, but if you use or mention them in any future videos or blog posts, people might of not seen your first post where you reviewed and disclosed you got it for free to review... So I guess you have to repeat a bunch of legal jargon in every video then.

I doubt many people get free Apple products as vloggers, but one of the examples was if you got a free knife as a hunting channel, you should disclose it in future mentions. So that's a more realistic example probably, but wouldn't surprise me if someone even forgets who sent them a knife if they collect them after the initial review. Then recently the FTC set more rules for videos targeted at kids on YouTube, and some lawyer mentioned he spoke with the FTC and some of these people don't even own phones or really understand what YouTube even is. Also not sure if I remember if the Price is Right mentioning products they are giving away, I think they just show the car yet as far as I know GM or KIA is giving it to them for free for the product placement, I bet if a YouTuber gave away cars they'd have to disclose it much more. I guess the old media probably can afford more people in DC than the independent vloggers can.

Then if you got paid to go to a conference, and wanted to live tweet about it, you have to mention it in every single Tweet some how from my understanding. Not sure how you'd do it with the space limit. Maybe when I read these things, I'm taking it more literally than most do. I bet a lot of businesses are out of compliance with many things if you look for it. I was reading up on PCI recently for credit card processing, and I helped a lady once years ago with her shopping site and if I remember right she just gave people a generic admin login shared between people, but I guess that's a major no no as everyone should have their own separate account. Then some web hosts market their servers as being PCI compliance too, but wonder if it's really true. Just seems like a lot out there, but I do remember hearing once that the average citizen commits 3 felonies a day.

I think it'd be fun to be a travel vlogger some day, so I think my personal policy would be not to accept free stuff to review, but I know some companies just send people stuff in general if they post a PO Box without asking, so wonder if they feel pressured to review items... but I think the whole idea of fans sending you random stuff is creepy, there's some vloggers who do mail vlogs and people send them candy and stuff... Mommy and daddy says not to take candy from strangers, yet you let random people from around the world mail you candy... I rather just use things I paid for myself, and if I liked it enough mention it on my own. Don't want to feel obligated to some brand.

I do think the general idea of the FTC is good though, don't want companies lying and scamming people. There's probably selective enforcement too, for like the most outrages cases.

<comment><USER22> > Maybe it's mentioned in the credits somewhere though?

There's a credit for a product placement researcher and a "thanks to Thermo Fisher for lab equipment" (plus a couple of others that don't stand out as companies you'd recognise) but there's no "Promotional Consideration from ..." section in the credits that I can see (Bluray version, 2:04:21 length)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> LOL "Before 2019, it felt like the Facebook communications machine was a well- oiled, unstoppable juggernaut." Umm how about Cambridge Analytica?

Facebook's PR has been troubled for a very long time. To suggest that they has a stellar image before 2019 is a joke. I can list many other slip ups where Facebook could have come out and said something (or even better, did something) and then weeks later they come up with a weak statement. If that's great PR, I'd like to offer my services to anybody who needs it.

While I'd agree that "No one ever broke rank. The messaging was crystal clear.", the message was always an awful one and now they have a relatively negative reputation despite being a remarkable success.

<comment><USER24> Cambridge Analytica is one of FB's most known debacles but how did the PR team specifically fail?

<comment><USER25> How about by using "We can do better" over and over after every single gaffe that it's become a joke to people outside the SV bubble?

<comment><USER24> FB stock hit a low at ~$157 right before Zuckerberg's April 10, 2018 testimony to Congress, and bounced back into a steady increase, hitting a then-all-time high in late July before going into a dive after the earnings report. The July 2018 dive was attributed to missing revenue expectations, but AFAIK, the general opinion [0] was that when it came to public fallout specifically related to Cambridge Analytica, FB weathered it quite well – hence the stock's steady climb from Zuckerberg's testimony until the July earnings report.

That confidence in the stock is obviously not just from good PR, but I don't see the evidence that the PR folks fucked things up either, given how much potential damage the CA scandal was predicted to cause.

[0] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed- aft...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed-after- revenue-user-growth-miss-2018-07-25)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.

Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.?

<comment><USER27> I think the argument goes like this:

1\. The US Presidential election is decided by a small percentage of voters who have an open mind and live in the right districts.

2\. Facebook's targeted advertising allows advertisers to efficiently buy the votes of these select voters.

3\. Without Facebook, this wasn't already happening.

Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I'm willing to believe #2. But I'm not so sure about #3.

<comment><USER28> > 3\. Without Facebook, this wasn't already happening.

> Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I'm willing to > believe #2. But I'm not so sure about #3.

I think you overstate #3 a little bit. It could have been happening without Facebook, but at a lower scale and not effectively enough to matter.

I think there's also a #4:

4\. Facebook ad-targeting allows the influence to be covert, because watchdog group members are probably not part of the targeted demographics.

<comment><USER29> 4 isn't right (anymore) because they made all political ads available to anyone who wants to see them. [https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=2...](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=288762101909005)

<comment><USER28> > 4 isn't right (anymore) because they made all political ads available to > anyone who wants to see them.

I think #4 is still valid:

1\. Facebook may not be to correctly identify political ads vs other ads.

2\. Their Ad Library seems to be missing important information [1].

3\. A disclosure like the Ad Library still obscures influence campaigns by greatly reducing the ability of watchdogs to _passively monitor_ the political discourse. Instead they have expend much more manpower to actively monitor the library with the right search terms, and if they fail to do that they'll miss things.

[1] [https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad- transp...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency- tools)

> Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the > company says is an alternative to ProPublica's tool. However, Facebook's ad > archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important > targeting data and doesn't even include all political ads run in the U.S.

> Our tool regularly caught political ads that aren't reflected in Facebook's > archive. Just this month, we noticed four groups running ads that haven't > been in Facebook's archive:

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've worked in media, and I can confirm the "packages" that sponsors buy as described are totally normal in media.

There's a reason editorial departments are totally separate from ad sales.

FTC disclosure of paid content is extremely important and taken very seriously (at least where I worked and by the FTC).

IMHO Facebook doesn't have any reputation left to tarnish, but Teen Vogue screwed themselves here, badly.

<comment><USER30> In my experience, editorial departments of most outlets are no longer separate from ad sales. On paper, maybe, and as a concept/line that too brass can say publicly, but the four major outlets I've worked all had edit staffs that end up being influenced heavily by the business side. Sometimes censorship, sometimes decision making and influence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is it just me, or is this completely bonkers? Let's say that teen Vogue were transparent about the article being sponsored. Meaning it would have had a tiny print somewhere saying that the article is part of a partnership with Facebook. How would that matter? Most people reading it would hardly notice it, even if they do notice it , it will hardly change the way they process the information in the piece. Our mind have a hard time knowing where certain facts it recalls came from. The bad thing is not the non cohesion of the Facebook PR it's the total lack of regard for truth and ethics that these corporate MBA and media types have. If it gets the job done then it becomes good, as in: morally good. Even if you manipulate the truth, bend the mind of the masses towards misconceptions, but do it well, then you are being ethical and good. Only if you fail then something is not good. That's a pretty messed up moral system.

Corporate shouldn't be able to buy anything from media outlets other than Ads that look.like ads and completely visually separate from actual journalistic pieces. Anything else is just unethical.

</comment><comment><USER32> I feel like the actual change is not really Facebook PR but the reporting about it? The TeenVogue affair seems to have caused a dam-break which shifted "reporting facebook as disfunctional" right into the middle of the Overton window all across the board regarding online media.

Facebooks strategy was always running away from a trail of PR bodies via sheer sized based on "customers" (which should be called products, to be honest) which did and do not care. I mean sure, this PR debacle is not a bath in glory by any means. But I can not think of any PR campaign in response to the countless past scandals which made me think "Wow, nice catch". At least in Germany, their response to the accusation of manipulating elections was a billboard campaign advertising that in Facebook you have a settings page where you can click switches and thus be in full control of your privacy (:D).

Was there ever any effective response to Zuckerberg abusing his company data to crack journalists accounts? I can even remember an age old thing where Facebook made all your posts visible forever on your board or something which was just drowned in the ongoing unchallenged growth of Facebook after some time...

To clarify, I am glad that media is finally elevating from lizard memes but I reject the notion that this current affair is the first visible crack of rotten foundations one could have observed.

</comment><comment><USER33> I was wholly unsurprised to see that last tweet coming from someone on the Hillary 2008 campaign. It reads just like the kind of defensive use women as human shields to deflect criticism attitude that came from the campaign when faced with a real primary challenge both in 2008 and 2016.

</comment><comment><USER34> Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. They make a product that billions consume, but that many people think is doing damage to the environment (even though many of those critics still consume the product).

That's why their PR machine is now switching to these slightly astroturfy campaigns. The next step is an advert along the lines of "They call it pollution. We call it life".

<comment><USER35> Oil so useful that modern society would collapse without it.

Facebook is not meeting a core need. It's peddling something entirely optional to society. At best it provides entertainment value, while being extremely addictive and dangerous.

Facebook is like crack.

<comment><USER34> Human connection is a core need. Facebook provides it (or something a lot like it).

<comment><USER35> Human connection can be had in many alternative ways, with a lot less drama and controversy.

Reading these posts full of hyperbole, one would think human society couldn't exist without Facebook.

<comment><USER36> It certainly could and did for thousands of years... but it would be very different. If facebook went away you would just get other companies springing up to fill the void (Snapchat, Tiktok, etc). That's how you know it's a core need.

<comment><USER37> I don't understand how "it would be very different" if other companies were to just spring "up to fill the void."

Doesn't this phenomenon merely indicate that some market forces believe that the industry Facebook works within has potential for more profits than are currently being extracted?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> i don't think FB ever had great PR.

The Social Network was largely a negative portrayal of Zuck and FB.

I remember when FB bought Instagram there was a lot of initial backlash.

Most of the positive stuff around Facebook was mainly due to the huge upward movements in it's stock price post IPO that solidified Zuckerberg and Sandberg as business geniuses. Would argue that their individual profiles became much more positive as the stock price increased, but would not really ever say Facebook the company was really perceived in a positive light outside of business community.

<comment><USER39> Ben Mezrich, author of the Accidental Billionaires which was later adapted into the Social Network, has a differing opinion: like Liars Poker and Wall Street, the movie made Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg more well known and popular than before.

<comment><USER38> highly doubt it but would trust internal Facebook data on any bump in users if that was the hypothesis

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In my opinion, the problem with Facebook isn't really the PR. Yes, Facebook's PR is broken as the article describes, but the real problem started years ago, back when it was a "well-oiled machine".

The problem is that there is a huge distance between what Facebook PR says and what Facebook does. The constant apologies for misbehaviors that never are never corrected, the apparently deliberate misinterpretations of much of the criticism leveled at Facebook, the continual discovery of new misbehaviors that should have been stopped, and so forth.

That Facebook has now taken an official public stance of being antagonistic, dismissive, and condescending is bad, but it's just bad icing on an already bad cake.

<comment><USER41> Yeah it seems like whatever rules there are ... there aren't many.

The whole VPN they ran that tracks kids ... that's not even a mystery as far as being a terrible idea.

Then Apple told them to knock it off.

So Facebook renamed it (sloppily too) and put it up on the app store again until they got caught again.

Kids, users, other companies, they don't care.

How can a PR person even craft a response like "hey we did wrong but we're sure we won't ... well yeah we probabbly will do that again, maybe immediately"

<comment><USER42> As someone that knows the person that originally tipped Apple off about the tracking... this is such a misinformed editorialization of what actually happened where I don't even know where to start.

<comment><USER41> Can you help clarify what really happened?

<comment><USER43> From a factual perspective, it wasn't on the App Store. (It was distributed via an enterprise certificate, which I find to be even worse, since they are explicitly not supposed to be used in the manner that they were.)

<comment><USER42> Not going to comment on whether or not it was philosophically correct, but I will note that Google (not to mention dozens of other companies) were doing the exact same thing — just that they didn't get called out for it until a few days after.

IMO, I wouldn't be surprised if this happened this way cause Apple had decided to use FB as the fall for a PR media blitz. (In particular, Apple made the decision to "enforce on FB" basically the day after their "someone else can turn on your camera with FaceTime without you knowing" bug.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The beginning of this article really plays out like the author is just against Zuckerberg simply talking to people with conservative viewpoints.

Being willing (and encouraging) others to listen to other viewpoints should not be considered a PR issue.

<comment><USER45> That is what Zuck thought. And it would be missing the point. That is not what the author took issue with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The author reads way too much on Zuckerberg's response. It Makes me question their perception of the events and as a result, the analysis as a whole.

<comment><USER47> If _I 'm_ interpreting it correctly, it appears that the author is actually _offended_ at the suggestion of listening to viewpoints that conflict with their own in order to possibly learn things from it.

<comment><USER48> I didn't read it like that at all. As stated in the article, the offending bit was the last two lines. "If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do" is the smug, condescending jab that was completely unnecessary. It is inflammatory for no benefit.

The start of the response was perfectly fine and I did not feel the author took offence to it.

<comment><USER49> And the author should not take offense to that either.

I have no idea why people would take offense to 'If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do'. Maybe the same reason they would be offended by talking to a person with different opinions.

<comment><USER50> >> I have no idea why people would take offense to 'If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do'.

On its own it's an innocent enough statement, and even correct. But in this context, i.e. when people are accusing you of something, and it is part of your response, it comes off as very condescending and smug.

There is a reason PR departments exist: they tend to be hypersensitive to the different ways in which a piece of communication can be perceived, and to dull its sharp edges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> From 2017:

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Is Hiring a Team Worthy of a 2020 Presidential Campaign - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's latest hire is further fueling speculation that he could be planning a 2020 presidential bid [https://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg- team-20...](https://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg- team-2020-presidential-campaign/)

>Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant,

>In January , Zuckerberg, 33, and Chan, 32, hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama's 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. They also brought on Amy Dudley, a former communications adviser to Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, is also on the charity's board.

>And Zuckerberg's personal photographer, Charles Ommanney, was the photographer for Bush and Obama's presidential campaigns, Business Insider reported.

Joel Benenson and David Plouffe are working elsewhere now. Amy Dudley is still the spokesperson for Zuckerberg iniative.

Zuckerberg has had incredible PR army working just for him, not for Facebook. I think there has been switch in his personal ambitions and change in PR people.

</comment><comment><USER52> Facebook's PR isn't broken, Facebook's just doing some really bad stuff

<comment><USER53> Are you disagreeing with the argument in the article? Or is this just a comment on FB in general.

I agree they're doing bad stuff but I think the argument in the article makes a very good point about how they used to be good at handling PR for their evil and getting away with it and now they seem to have lost that touch.

I doubt the level of evil has changed dramatically in the last 18mo but the PR reactions have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup.

> something noticeably changed. They got combative. They got sloppy.

An interesting take, whatever you think of the underlying merits of the company and the complaints against it.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact, _unless_ you think that the company was better before and is worse now, it should be striking how much the narrative has changed without any underlying change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Read this thread. I have been noticing a lot of reporting on tech by NYT etc, is wrong, not complete. In this case, a lot of arguments are there. But, an example from the past, they spread misinfo about Google's revenue figure from news industry([https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/that-4-7-billion-number- fo...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/that-4-7-billion-number-for-how-much- money-google-makes-off-the-news-industry-its-imaginary/))

[https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1214685876095045632?s=1...](https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1214685876095045632?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER55> > One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the > power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision > alone, to resist the temptation to "change the outcome"!

Oh, he better be careful. That's pretty close to pushing a right-wing talking point /s

Facebook, etc.. Is no different in its power to influence elections than traditional news papers ever have been. The only difference is a matter of scale and homogeny. Today, instead of thousands of media publications, each pushing their own biases and perspectives (which they always have), you have a very small group of tech giants that get to decide what you see (and even more frighteningly), what you're allowed to say about it. Sure there's more media outlets today than there's ever been, but a small handful of companies get to control their reach, and (again more frighteningly) their ability to collect revenue.

Then you have the issue that traditional media has always represented a diverse set of opinions and world views. You have conservative and liberal outlets, outlets the promote free market ideas and those that promote socialist ideas, outlets that promote regulation and those that promote small government. The small number of organisations that control access to ideas and speech today all represent an incredibly homogeneous political world view.

The problem isn't that those organisations have done a poor job of controlling the flow of information, it's that they have the ability to do it in the first place. Those companies should not have the ability to act as gatekeepers who determine the credibility of information, or the moral implications of speech. In a free society, that responsibility falls of on the shoulders of every individual, and to have an authority doing that on their behalf denies them the opportunity to do so themselves.

This is also a matter of values, not constitutional law (as people often like to derail such conversations by claiming regulation would violate 1A). The law that empowers these companies to to moderate content is the Communications Decency Act, not the 1st amendment.

<comment><USER56> > > One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the > power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision > alone, to resist the temptation to "change the outcome"!

> Oh, he better be careful. That's pretty close to pushing a right-wing > talking point /s

> Facebook, etc.. Is no different in its power to influence elections than > traditional news papers ever have been. The only difference is a matter of > scale and homogeny.

That's an empty argument. Everything is about the scale, by that argument each individual has the same power as e.g Facebook to influence elections, it's just a matter of scale. However, scale is the difference between effectively no power and a lot of power.

> Today, instead of thousands of media publications, each pushing their own > biases and perspectives (which they always have), you have a very small > group of tech giants that get to decide what you see (and even more > frighteningly), what you're allowed to say about it. Sure there's more media > outlets today than there's ever been, but a small handful of companies get > to control their reach, and (again more frighteningly) their ability to > collect revenue.

> Then you have the issue that traditional media has always represented a > diverse set of opinions and world views. You have conservative and liberal > outlets, outlets the promote free market ideas and those that promote > socialist ideas, outlets that promote regulation and those that promote > small government. The small number of organisations that control access to > ideas and speech today all represent an incredibly homogeneous political > world view.

> The problem isn't that those organisations have done a poor job of > controlling the flow of information, it's that they have the ability to do > it in the first place. Those companies should not have the ability to act as > gatekeepers who determine the credibility of information, or the moral > implications of speech. In a free society, that responsibility falls of on > the shoulders of every individual, and to have an authority doing that on > their behalf denies them the opportunity to do so themselves.

> This is also a matter of values, not constitutional law (as people often > like to derail such conversations by claiming regulation would violate 1A). > The law that empowers these companies to to moderate content is the > Communications Decency Act, not the 1st amendment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is a place that famously had a motto "move fast and break things." In other words, fail early and fail often. For that culture to succeed you need people willing to admit (and tolerate) mistakes. Sounds like that's pretty well gone.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am not sure I completely buy the thesis of this essay because...

1\. Facebook has NEVER had positive PR. The tech-media has always used FB as the Silicon Valley punching bag. Name me one good article in the news about FB? At some point you're just numb to it all.

2\. Facebook has had leakers for years, and especially when Boz makes posts!

To say that Facebook PR is broken implies it wasn't before. I'd argue that FB has long needed a comms team representative of the company it actually is. FB comms feel designed for the old college only network FB once was. When Google can do similar misdeeds and get only a tiny slap on the wrist, I do agree it's probably a comms problem in the end.

Also, to completely write off Sandberg because of one corporate misstep reeks of "Cancel Culture" hysteria, but that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER59> The org chart shown in the article is old by 2 years and seems like an oddly selected on for that time. A current org chart would shown a different split between men and women.

</comment><comment><USER60> Not everything is run by PR or fixed by PR or even measured by PR (except for PR personnel of course).

Sometimes things are just bad and it takes time to realize.

Regardless of the packaging.

</comment><comment><USER61> The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica story is completely baffling to me.

Here we have a company whose business idea it is to lock up as much of the web as possible on their platform. Contacts, messageboards, photos, events, calendars, chat, dating, anything goes really. They then earn money from selling data.

Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks where a company has used data from Facebook unethically. How was this not expected? Had it been better if this company used their data a little less unethically? Had it been better if Facebook sold PR-as-a-service directly instead of enabling an ecosystem of smaller companies offering this?

(Because the latter is what is going to happen over the long run should Facebook continue to be successful. When there is no room to grow anymore the ecosystem is going to be cannibalized.)

This is all inherent to business models dependent on data ownership. Upon observing the majority of the population migrating to closed platforms, the discourse among the people who care about open data must instead be framed in terms of how to shape the conditions of said business models. Codifying data ownership is one way to move forward, GDPR being the most known example. It may be blunt but it at least poses the question of who owns which data.

</comment><comment><USER62> Stifling a glib, sarcastic response, who do we feel has good PR that's working, and not in some sinister meaning of 'working'?

What groups and activities do people who think this way hold up as positive role models?

<comment><USER63> It's not English, unfortunately, but Berlin's subway operator (BVG) has been doing an excellent job at PR for the past 5 years or so.

They use mostly (self-deprecating) humour, both on billboards as well as individually as Twitter messages.

This strategy seems somewhat risky. There were some where I thought "funny, but I wouldn't want to be the one posting this".

Hard to describe, because it's mostly a function of each tweet being really good. They must have some larger advertising company behind this, with tons of talent.

They have seen a spectacular improvement in public approval, and even on such measures as violence against employees, fare-evasion, and vandalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> > You have someone like Antonia Woodford, rightly called out[2] for the > absurdity of saying to combat misinformation you should require "advertisers > use their real identities". She has Yale, McKinsey and a rapid rise at > Facebook, on her resume. This is the profile of someone who I imagine isn't > wanting to bunker down in a Trumpian hole of calling everything critical: > "fake news".

I don't understand. How is it "absurdity"? And the linked Gizmodo article doesn't seem to call it absurd either.

[2] [https://gizmodo.com/teen-vogue-yanks-puff-piece-on- facebooks...](https://gizmodo.com/teen-vogue-yanks-puff-piece-on-facebooks- anti-disinform-1840889839)

</comment><comment><USER65> I believe on this forum PR means pull request.

</comment><comment><USER66> At this point it is arguably obvious that Zuckerberg is a textbook sociopathic CEO who will say whatever is expedient to business needs. After constant misleading and outright false statements, not a single word that comes out of Facebook can be trusted. It's self serving corporatespeak taken to an extreme and I simply cannot fathom how so many people, including news media especially, are uncritical and even trusting of FB public statements.

Zuckerberg's dumbfucks quote is consistent with the content of every public communication major steering decision FB has made to date. He is truly the embodiment of lawful evil.

</comment><comment><USER67> Understatement of the century

</comment><comment><USER68> Just their PR?

</comment><comment><USER8> When you have a guy who works at a company wondering if his company was responsible for an election result and making LOTR references...then you know something has gone wrong.

No, Facebook isn't powerful enough to sway an election (I get that some people are really angry about Trump...if you aren't thinking rationally, don't have an opinion rather than start up with the conspiracy theories). No, business/life is not like LOTR. There aren't goodies and baddies (irony, this is part of why Trump was elected).

</comment><comment><USER69> > Those last two lines. We all know that style of communication. Sardonic. > Snarky. Sneering. Derisive. Whatever you want to call it, that mocking tone > captures a dangerous combination of insecurity and arrogance. It feels like > when Trump ends a tweet with SAD!. You read that and just think, what a > dick.

I get that's it's kind of sarcastic, but I don't really think "what a dick". It's not great for someone in his position to be sarcastic like that, but I think more "he must be hounded by people who are ready to burn him at the stake for having lunch with certain people so.."</comment>


Frequently Asked C/C++ Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineeringblog.indiabtech.com/2009/10/32-frequently-asked-cc-questions-you-must-know/

<comment><USER2> If you needed this article, you didn't belong in the interview in the first place.</comment>


Food Menu – Discover foods in your city - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/food-menu <comment><AUTHOR> Food Menu is a community for foodie and you get to discover foods in a better way. It got featured in Product Hunt Upcoming. You can check it out and subscribe to get early access. [https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/food- menu](https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/food-menu)</comment>


Fuzzing vs. Property Testing - <AUTHOR> https://www.tedinski.com/2018/12/11/fuzzing-and-property-testing.html <comment><USER2> Of interest is Crowbar[0,1], a testing tool for OCaml that combines Quickcheck like property testing with AFL fuzz.

[0] [https://github.com/stedolan/crowbar](https://github.com/stedolan/crowbar)

[1] [https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/extended- abstract__201...](https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/extended- abstract__2017__stephen-dolan_mindy-preston__testing-with-crowbar.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the things that I like about go is that the standard-library really encourages the use of writing test-cases. Most of the bigger projects have good coverage, and I try hard to get my own.

But nothing beats the sheer tenacity of running your code through a fuzz- tester. I've written a simple virtual machine, which interprets bytecode, and a BASIC interpreter amongst other things recently. Both of these projects benefited hugely from fuzz-testing, despite having high coverage via manually- written test-cases.

Fuzz testing is cheap and largely automatic, so if it takes a few hours or a few days to find an interesting result that's not a problem. I remember the first time I tested my interpreter when I had ~90% coverage of the code with my test-cases and it crashed via fuzzing within seconds! Magic!

</comment><comment><USER4> Related, I've been having a lot of success with Hypothesis [0], the Python property-based testing library.

[0] [https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

<comment><USER5> Hypothesis is my favorite. I also use TestCheck.js [0] for JavaScript and RapidCheck for C++ [1], but the Hypothesis generators seem the smartest, and they're easy to customize.

[0] [http://leebyron.com/testcheck-js/api](http://leebyron.com/testcheck- js/api)

[1] [https://github.com/emil-e/rapidcheck](https://github.com/emil-e/rapidcheck)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A good property testing framework has two properties, 1) inputs increase in complexity over generations, and 2) properties can shrink, enabling you to find "minimum error conditions", so property tests can help you identify the source of the error too.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there something like a good proptest in C++?

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/emil-e/rapidcheck](https://github.com/emil-e/rapidcheck) is not bad.</comment></comment>


Brotli vs. Gzip Compression. How we improved our latency by 37% - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/oyotech/how-brotli-compression-gave-us-37-latency-improvement-14d41e50fee4 <comment><USER2> Unfortunatly the linked nginx module [1] seems to be unmaintained since 2016. While there is a more maintained fork [2] it seems like neither the Ubuntu [3] nor the Debian team [4] want to package it due to open bugs and security concerns.

It's really surprising considering how widespread Brotli support is, that there isn't a better nginx support for it.

[1] [https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli](https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli) [2] [https://github.com/eustas/ngx_brotli](https://github.com/eustas/ngx_brotli) [3] [https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nginx/+question...](https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nginx/+question/678209) [4] [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919320](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919320)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can I use this in my own project? I mean, is there an open source library for that?

<comment><USER4> There's the Google Javascript library: [https://github.com/google/brotli](https://github.com/google/brotli)

Also, there's also a Dropbox Rust library: [https://github.com/dropbox/rust- brotli](https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli)</comment></comment>


A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure - <AUTHOR> http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201203#26 <comment><USER2> This is one of the most fantastic submissions to HN I've seen in a long while. It's relevant in many different ways; it's about a startup, it's about a minimum viable product, it's about untapped market potential, it's about economic success, it's about a jaw-dropping kludgety mother-of-all-hacks, and it offers insights about what matters, both to users in large corporations, and to the author.

And it's funny as hell.

<comment><USER3> Everything apenwarr (Avery Pennarun) writes is worth reading, be it code or essay. He's been writing much less since he's started working at Google, but there's a lot of history for you to read.

Of his open source stuff: bup is awesome, sshuttle is awesome, and wvdial is a lifesaver for those rare times you need it. I'm quite sure do/redo is awesome, although I can't provide 1st hand testimony.

<comment><USER4> Redo is great, I evaluated several make systems for our iOS C++ framework after I got too annoyed about the complexity of waf, and we ended up using redo.

Is redo awesome? Maybe. We have written a few "usability layers" on top of redo, so I can't evaluate it fully as it is.

<comment><USER5> redo as a concept is awesome. redo as an implementation just recently reached version 0.11. So I think your description of "great" above is more than generous enough at this phase :) Thanks for being patient enough to use it so early on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All that technical horror is precisely _why_ it's such a needed and profitable product. That's your barrier to entry.

The only happy ending I see here is if the founders learn to delegate, or work hard on finding the right people to sell this to. Not to a hacker -- to a businessman who would be genuinely happy to run a growing business, and not horrified by the technical kludges.

I always chuckle a little to myself when I see clearly talented programmers shying away from this kind of problem in favor of allegedly more interesting problems. I used to feel the same way. But it's mostly chasing an illusion. The real work of programming is _always_ about dealing with the messiness of the real world.

If you find a problem that doesn't have any real-world nastiness, you can be sure it's either (1) irrelevant, or (2) already solved for free by countless other smart programmers, because it's fun.

</comment><comment><USER7> This part really resonated with me.

 _So don't get me wrong. I like Access users. Access developers, in particular, are the anti-IT department, the rebels, the people who aren't willing to wait for the sysadmins to provision them a server, and they don't have to, because they can just share an Access file on the fileserver. IT departments hate them, which is how I know they're on to something. These are the kind of people I want to help. This is the sort of thing that's the reason I do the work that I do. No kidding._

While it feels a little weird hearing that talk in relation to a Microsoft product, I agree. Building and maintaining a successful (To whatever extent you would call such a niche market a "success") product that helps people solve their own problems instead of feeding the IT priesthood would be awesome.

And then when you talk about the implementation details. My smile turns to a horrified slack jaw expression.

I'd probably feel guilty about it, and I might even try to keep it running as long as I could, but I'd eventually have as much as I could take and give up.

<comment><USER5> True, it's a bit weird to think of a Microsoft product that way - but Access is a special case. Microsoft would dearly love to kill it and get everyone to migrate to MS SQL (and boy, do they push hard in that direction) but there are just too many satisfied users to let it die. So basically there's customer satisfaction in spite of their best efforts :)

<comment><USER8> The other player in the space is Filemaker Pro - a fair bit nicer to work with than Access, although still fairly horrible from an internals point of view (I think they've moved to using proper SQL and everything since I last used it though).

<comment><USER9> I used to work for a web developer who worked on a well known campground company's site. We had a process that built static html pages out of an old Filemaker database and then synced them to a cluster of Windows web servers. That process has been in place since 2000 and there's no rush to change it because, frankly, it works pretty well.

I believe it started that way because our original developer didn't know anything else.

<comment><USER10> I briefly had the pleasure of working on a similar thing: it sticks out in my memory because the stack that ran the web site was _entirely_ obsolete.

OS: Mac OS 9; DB: Filemaker Pro; templates: Lasso; webserver 4D WebSTAR.

This was in 2011.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated
        user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access
        database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser
        in flash.

If you asked me to describe the glue-code hackery project I would want to work on least in the whole world, I would have come up with something like that. There are probably uglier projects around, but I don't have the creative masochism to think of them.

<comment><USER12> An even worse project would involve automating a GUI-only application by moving the mouse in recorded patterns, for sure.

<comment><USER13> Fun fact: back in the day, Bingo Card Creator's "CMS" was a script which drove a mouse around the BCC swing applet, printed the card to a software PDF driver, opened it in Acrobat Reader, hit "Print Screen" on the keyboard, opened MS Paint, used dragging the mouse to hardcoded screen coordinates to crop the card, saved it as a GIF, and then put the GIF and PDF in subversion to be uploaded to the website later.

It worked well enough to justify learning Rails and Prawn to rewrite the whole thing server side, after which point I rm -rf'ed the directory that script was in and deleted the backup so that its vengeful shade would never trouble humanity again.

<comment><USER14> How much time did you lost over figuring out the recipe and scripting it?

Before I heard about configuration management, I had bash scripts to configure my server from clean state. I tried it locally hundreds of times to get every command right.

<comment><USER13> $150 for the script from somebody who did that thing for a living (apparently banks do this sort of hinge with regularity) and probably five hours lost to babysitting it and manually restarting when it hiccuped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice article.

I had a similar experience with my first company in college selling software to corporate customers who previously used excel to track everything.

Theres millions of opportunities like that to optimize a terribly inefficient corporate process with software.

But the problem is always

a) the problem set is rarely easily reproduced, meaning you're not really selling a product, but instead selling a product + consulting - since every process is slightly unique

and

b) you're dealing with terribly inefficient systems and the type people who would put together a terribly inefficient system (like you said, not necessarily meaning they are bad people but likely are not a good customer)

I still believe its the most straightforward way to make money in software outside of getting a job at Google/facebook. But its certainly not fun and not a traditional "high growth" startup.

</comment><comment><USER16> A fantastic read - thanks. Quite simply I'd hire someone to do the dirty work, pay them a decent salary and split the remainder of the income between you and your co-founder.

<comment><USER17> It sounds like he'd love to do this, but is unable to (he and his cofounder might be the only people on the planet with the requisite skillset).

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't be so sure, I can think of a bunch of people I know in real life that could handle it.

<comment><USER17> I think his article may have been a desperate plea for such people to come out of the woodwork. I implore you to contact the author and refer those people.

I've actually had the pleasure of meeting both of them in real life and they're great people -- honest, smart, fun to talk to -- I imagine they would be great to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google for the following phrase to find the site: "Run unmodified Access applications, right inside a web browser."

(Edited to remove link to not affect Google juice)

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds to me like you're good at creating software small-businesses, but you're not built for the tedium of running them.

I find it's often hard to discuss the business of software because of a variety of preconceptions people in the field have so let's turn this into a restaurant. You wanted to start an amazing new french restaurant, but to get started initially you decided you're going to be more of a cafe where costs are lower and it's easier to attract customers. In that cafe you start offering a few sandwiches, and some baked goods. Some of your baked goods were vegan. Soon you were inundated with vegans seeking baked goods, and you basically turned your whole operation into a pretty successful self- sustainable single-store vegan bakery. This wasn't the french restaurant you wanted to start (and could have sold to a restauranteur as some do once they show promise), nor is it a true "startup" success which would have had you opening in many cities, perhaps franchising, etc.

Nevertheless, you were to able to create a business (as you've done before), direct it into a market where you're not just making a profit, you're solving a true _need_. I don't know if it would help your self-fulfillment (because it sounds like you're lamenting the lack of it), but that's the aspect I would concentrate on, and just be aware that it is more likely than not that you'll get bored or disgusted with what you've created and move on to the next part. Just work out an efficient way to do this "moving on" portion, and I think you'd be able to do something you love and something you're good at. And in a few more of these, perhaps you'll create that one company that'll be your baby, not just your creation. (The trick is of course to treat them all as your baby at first)

</comment><comment><USER21> It is a beautiful illustration of how _just_ making money is not worth it for some people.

Loved it, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> How about trying to sell the company to <http://www.red-gate.com>, who IIRC built most of their business on making tools to deal with the awful parts of database systems?

<comment><USER23> Aren't Red Gate an SQL Server shop though?

<comment><USER22> They do all kinds of things these days including Exchange, .NET, Oracle, and other stuff. (Full Disclosure: I'm friends with some people working there.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It sounds like the plight of one of my coworkers. He started on a team that had to know significant details about how dial up worked. This was great work when dial up was big. One aspect to dial up were fax calls, and nobody wanted to work those issues. He stepped up, learned fax, and earned quite a bit of notoriety due to his specific fax knowledge. Wrote a book, some RFCs, promotions, etc.

The only problem? He 10 years later he still sits around fax machines, listens to users who still use faxes (problem customers), and talks about one of the true dragging edges of technology. And it doesn't port well to other newer technologies.

<comment><USER25> Isn't he in a great position to disrupt, or at least provide information that other people need to disrupt?

People know the reasons why faxs suck. What they're not so sure about is why fax is still being used; what problems fax solves.

<comment><USER26> > why fax is still being used; what problems fax solves.

You give someone a telephone number, then you hear a noise and a document magically appears.

Sure, there's software solutions. People can email documents to an email address, and your computer can automatically send it to the printer. Unless your computer is off, or the app isn't running, or someone queued up a hundred pages in the printer, or the printer is out of ink, or the person sends you a file in an incomrehensible file format.

These issues are all solvable, but it's less effort to buy a fax machine and plug it into a phone line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If I were you, I would hire a good entrepreneurial hacker who's looking for some autonomy and upside, give him/her 20% and a small salary, and leave me and my partner on the board.

</comment><comment><USER28> Now if only there was a way to convert those Access databases into modern web apps based on MySQL and an HTML interface, that could really be a cash cow...

<comment><USER29> You just described "a couple decent developers + ruby on rails + custom development".

The interesting bit is trying to create the next Excel or Access. The most recent (aborted) attempt was DabbleDB (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB>).

<comment><USER5> Well, no, rewriting from scratch in Ruby is _not_ , in any way, equivalent. If you're going to rewrite from scratch, by all means, Ruby seems to be the way to go. But that's way too expensive and risky. What people want is to take their current app and make it happen.

DabbleDB failed because it was trying to completely replicate Access, without being compatible with Access. And no, uploading your _data_ is just not good enough. Access is not a crappy mysql; it's an IDE with a GUI editor and a programming language _and_ a crappy mysql. DabbleDB was just a crappy mysql.

The huge business opportunity here is not to _compete_ with Access. It's to let people leverage their existing huge - monstrously huge, seriously - investments in Access databases, adding just enough functionality to keep it alive.

Once you have the cash cow taken care of, then sure, see if you can add some features and replace Access entirely. But then Microsoft will probably not like you as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Your story sounds like a classic reason people sell small businesses: not excited about it anymore. Either figure out how to get excited again (perhaps by hiring people who like to do the parts you don't like), or sell the business to somebody who can be excited about it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel the same way about cross-browser testing. Everybody knows that this is the worst part about web development. A number of startups already exist to solve it, but there's easily room for more solutions. This is a blindingly obvious startup idea.

But I get indigestion just thinking about it, because this means taking on the worst aspects of everyone else's job. There's no major win that I can offer for being clever, just for being more willing to focus on unpleasantness.

Or am I kidding myself? Is that focus on something unpleasant the very soul of entrepreneurship?

Sometimes you luck out, and something that everybody hates is something that you love. But there are some things which are probably universally unpleasant to even think about.

<comment><USER5> Be careful. I'd see this as a blindly obvious _technical_ need, but not so much a _market_ need. Do business decision makers know they want to pay for it?

I love Steve Blank's "hierarchy of needs" concept when evaluating business value for a new product. Look for the diagram in [http://steveblank.com/2010/03/04/perfection-by- subtraction-t...](http://steveblank.com/2010/03/04/perfection-by-subtraction- the-minimum-feature-set/) .

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the link, that's a great way to evaluate ideas.

As for this specific problem - it's hard to say without doing surveys, but I'd say every webdev shop in the world does all 5 to some degree, unless they are developing for a corporate intranet with a controlled client base.

The spread of browser platforms right now is the largest it's ever been. There are many shops who have to fight IE6 on the rearguard while trying to be iPad- compatible in the vanguard.

The higher end shops do some formal or scripted testing, but my intuition is that what the average person really want is to do a quick check by hand in one browser, and somehow magically know that it works on all the other ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why not try and sell the company?

There are people who would love a revenue stream and don't mind boring work. People who would rather be in a position to work in Thailand, or India, for example...

</comment><comment><USER33>
        > Customers need this so badly that they're willing to pay a lot for it.

        > It's just about providing something people want and are willing to pay for.

Truth.

As for your problem, I'd recommend open-sourcing the code and stepping away if you really can't stand it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER34> I shuddered when I saw the word Access Database. (bad memories of porting those evil things). I don't care how much money is in those things, I will leave it to someone else :) Much like these guys are trying to do.

</comment><comment><USER35> That is quite amazing. I am writing this as someone who has just rewritten an Access piece of crap for a construction company. I charged them $15k for 4-5 months of part time work. It is not a rewrite of their original app, it is an order of magnitude better, but if they saw your git versioning WINE running frankenstein, i wonder if they would have chosen that. Now i am off to sell this software again now that i have been paid to write it once. I wonder if you could get a nice income stream by referring companies who want to upgrade their application slowly. Now I am living in the USA, if I lived in another country I could take that $15k and live for 1 year. Here it is hardly much at all. I would love to take US jobs for $15k and finish them in 2-3 months. Low end US freelancer rates, but do a high quality job.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like a valuable contribution that increases the value of MS Access for its users by allowing it to become accessible for web-based applications. I'm searching for the company website that he did not want to mention in the article (if that says anything).

Great ideas alone do not make great entrepreneurs or profitable companies. At the end of the day, the way a person thinks is where they will eventually return. An employee can have a great idea and make an attempt at being an "entrepreneur" for a while only in the end to return to being an employee. Entrepreneurs think differently about how money is generated from someone with the mind of an employee- thinking on different sides of the quadrant. It takes a different set of skills and a different mindset. "Safe & secure" can be alluring.

</comment><comment><USER37> What would I do? Delegate the care and feeding of this beast to two hires and get a marketing guy to continue the push for new business/deals. In short: hire up until I had outsourced all of the objectionable aspects of the technology to someone else. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER35> How about value adds and referrals? Seems your company has no google juice. I did a few google searches and didn't find your because the term 'web hosting' is so SEM'ed to death. In order to compensate you could offer referral bonuses. It seems a lot of people would want your technology but talk to regular hosting companies. I wonder if you could get money that way. As for value adds, what about regular backups? People don't know about your git backed system, you could charge them for regular offsite backups. Any congrats on a good business.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ha! Awesome! There is nothing more satisfying than doing something "successful", hating it and leaving it behind (well, if you really don't like it). It's like a beautiful, perfect counterpoint to all the success-oriented, soul-sucking, _BORING_ corporate-speak we hear so much of.

Of course, one could adopt a more practical self-improvement oriented outlook and say, well, someone with a talent for figuring out what people need (or stumbling on it) would surely come up with something even better that you'd like doing, but hey, just enjoy your liberation.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow. That was the longest "do ONLY what you love, here's why" article ever.

<comment><USER40> The Moby Dick of blog posts. Boring, but that's that point.

<comment><USER41> I can think of no way in which this post is like Moby Dick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Assuming it makes enough money... why not just hire someone else to maintain it? As long as you're very careful about your documentation, even a pile of hacks like that could be interesting to work on.

</comment><comment><USER43> "They are up to something" Never saw it from that perspective (working in a company running at least one too much Access app). Got me to rethink my quite fundamental possition on that. Yes, that actaully is a huge business opportunity, one you could eexpand upon. And yes, I can completly understand why you don't want it anymore. My answer to the last question: Do everything you can to get that pharma deal and maybe another one and then sell it!

</comment><comment><USER44> If you're going to do something you don't want to do, just get a job. It's less risky, and usually better paid than a startup.

Starting a company is about working on something you're passionate about. I couldn't imagine starting something that wasn't really meaningful to me.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Most small business owners don't own their own business, they own their own job." (paraphrasing The E-Myth Revisited)

My POV is this person needs to start delegating as much of the business as possible and manage growing the business to support that.

</comment><comment><USER46> Why don't they just keep increasing the price to insane levels and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

</comment><comment><USER47> <http://eqldata.com> I knew it!

<comment><USER48> remove the link please. He started off mentioning he didn't want the google juice messed up. If his blog gets a lot of hits, think about how much more HN gets.

<comment><USER49> HN links are nofollow, at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Did anyone figure out what is the company behind it?

</comment><comment><USER51> Dude, just charge more. like 5x 10x more.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is an incredible piece. Brutally honest, and I can absolutely see myself in the author's shoes.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is the Moby Dick of blog posts. Incredibly boring, but that's the point: he's illustrating how boring his startup was, so he quit, just as HM illustrated the monotony of whaling by making Moby Dick beautifully written but unreadable.

Still, I hated reading it, and I didn't mind MD.

</comment><comment><USER53> > _"That is, C is little more than a portable assembly language."_

I know it's not really the point, but this is a pet peeve. No, C is nothing like assembly language. I seriously question whether anyone who repeats that frequently has actually done any assembly programming. It's an order of magnitude more tedious than writing C.

<comment><USER5> "Back in the day", pre-RISC, with fancy macro assemblers (like Turbo Assembler), programming in assembly was actually not that bad. C is obviously better, but not actually as much better as people seem to think.

Nowadays life would be a lot worse in assembler, because CPUs are designed to be programmed mostly by compilers, not humans.

(Also, the ways in which C is better than assembly roughly correspond to the ways in which our query language would be better than SQL. Like, say, variable scoping.)

<comment><USER54> One of the best assembler IDE was Turbo Pascal 6.0. One would write begin/end, stick asm block in the middle and the rest will be in assembly. Full debugger support too, it was very convenient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Failure is rambling on and on, tangentializing without purpose or value, puking endless stream ofwords mostly devoid of meaning.

Learn to get to the point, man!

<comment><USER56> This is not documentation. It is a narrative. A well written one at that.</comment></comment>


Burning a NeXT Magnesium Cube - <AUTHOR> http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html <comment><USER2> Too bad they didn't take video. For more images, be sure not to miss the link at the top of the page to the album: <http://picasaweb.google.com/nitrobaphotos/NeXTCubeFireAtLLL>

<comment><USER3> I missed that link, but thanks for re-posting it here. The real life photos filled in the gaps of the pictures I visualized in my head while reading the story.

Very cool and I can relate as we all have an old computer case in closet somewhere.

<comment><USER4> The case in your closet probably is not made of pure magnesium. That was the point of the burn.

<comment><USER5> the NeXT case was also not made of pure magnesium

<comment><USER4> Okay, what else was in it? And let's leave things like decals and paint off the list.

<comment><USER5>
      > magnesium alloy which is specially designed to be difficult to ignite

The story doesn't say what else was in it, but feel free to support the claim that the box was made of pure Mg and not an alloy, modulo things such as decals and paint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And sanding & polishing one:

pheatonforums.com is gone, but the 1st page of the project journal is on archive.org: [http://web.archive.org/web/20031011104839/http://www.pheaton...](http://web.archive.org/web/20031011104839/http://www.pheatonforums.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=137)

The directory of photos is still available: <http://planetcasemod.com/NeXT/> <http://planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Polish/bathroom.JPG> <http://planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Polish/done1.JPG>

And the UBB-code version of some of the posts to the board: <http://www.planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Back/back.txt> <http://planetcasemod.com/Phones/buffinghowto.txt> <http://www.planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Front/Finished.txt>

The magnesium "tarnishes" and requires monthly polishing. Sealing is "not the same as raw metal" [http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1028300977&postcount...](http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1028300977&postcount=31)

<comment><USER7> I have mixed feelings about this. However, the work itself is great. Well done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do this?

<comment><USER9> Fun? Curiosity?

<comment><USER8> I don't think it would be fun to burn down a Frank Lloyd Wright house or a 1963 Sting Ray coupé or smashing a Braun SK-4 turntable or a Beolit 39 radio.

There are objects that embody more than their function and the NeXT cube is one of them.

It's sad that someone derives pleasure from the destruction of such beautiful objects. I am glad there are people who preserve them for future generations, but only so many of them were ever built. When the last one is destroyed, what will we have? A small, but beautiful, part of our past will be gone forever.

<comment><USER10> This was not done when the Cube had established itself in design history. I believe Simson Garfunkel was doing this as part of an article for NeXTWorld Magazine or some such. It is a very old picture.

<comment><USER8> I think I owe him an apology. It's much easier to do something like it when the machines are still being built.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Second Avenue Subway and Property Values - <AUTHOR> https://www.christianmoscardi.com/blog/2017/12/18/SAS-real-estate-values.html <comment><AUTHOR> Author here! I'll keep an eye on this thread and would love to discuss anything in the post that's of interest to you.

<comment><USER2> I really like the theme on your blog.</comment></comment>