Karma-Duped: A Cautionary Tale About the Murky World of Venture Lending - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-selkoe/karmaduped-a-cautionary-t_b_9860368.html <comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure I understand. The owner signed a deal giving the lender the power to place people in the company, and prevent any recourse.

> A bank can legally make you sign a release of any wrongdoing the bank may > ever undertake in the future (!!) as a condition of their loan. Crazy?

Not to rub salt in, but I think the "make you" wording is telling here. No one made anyone take this loan. This is not crazy; it makes sense that one party might want to protect themselves from lawsuits. What's "crazy" is accepting such a deal, giving them access to the company.

In essence, the owner put himself at complete odds with the lender. Indeed, it sounds like the lender had a huge incentive: loan X, if default, gain 2X. No one should have accepted it, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal. I suppose it's assumed that as a business owner, you'll have a lawyer or be careful when signing things, unlike payday loans and such.

On a personal level though, it does suck and it is really terrible when you have to work with someone that's trying to undermine you. It's incredibly frustrating.

<comment><USER3> And he mentions that in the article, he was very naive.

The sad truth is that this stuff doesn't get taught well (or conversely its the only good reason for getting an executive MBA where you learn from other executives). One of the random events that can make you a better entrepreneur is to interact with someone who is sociopathic early in your career. To experience the feeling that this person is totally on your side and then experience them ripping you to pieces for their own gain really helps add perspective to your future dealings.

<comment><USER2> More generally though: read everything you sign. Expect it to all be used. If you can never see a clause being needed, then remove it. If the other side insists then you need to figure out the real motives why.

<comment><USER3> If anyone comes away from this discussion with one thing to remember, remember Michael's words. If it is in the contract, it can happen.

This is a true story, but I've changed the names to protect the parties, they read HN so they can out themselves if they want to :-) There was a really egregious clause added to the BigCorp Employee contract and one of the new employees objected to it explaining how it could be used. That kicked off a really interesting conversation with HR at the employee intake session which went like this ..

"Oh we would never do that!", said HR.

So He said, "Well fine, lets remove it."

And then HR said, "Well we really can't change it."

"Why not? If it isn't what you meant, why did you say it?", responded this employee.

"Oh it is just boilerplate." HR said.

"Then remove it if you don't care one way or another.", employee responds.

"But that would take so long to get done." HR said.

"Not a problem! I _retyped_ it in and changed it and printed it out again we can use this one." said the employee.

"Oh but we have to have legal review all of it to make sure nothing else changed." says HR.

"Great, let them review it, I'm happy to wait.", they said.

"But we can't let you work if you don't have the signed paperwork." says HR.

"Ok, how long will legal take, a week? two weeks? Lets just move my start date back to then." offered the employee.

"We'll go see how long it will take." says the HR person, "In the mean time can you wait in the lobby?"

"Sure" says the employee.

The HR person returns, "I'm sorry, we've decided that you aren't a good fit for BigCorp. You can go now."

Security escorts our now non-employee to the door and watches them leave silently.

Every line in a contract has a reason for existing, who ever wrote the contract will have a number of them in there which can be used against who ever is signing the contract. A judicious person will identify those lines and have them removed, or develop strategies that will nullify them later. But you really do have to put yourself into the frame of mind that the other person is out to get you, or you might miss them.

<comment><USER4> What's to keep this non-hire from logging into Glassdoor and warning everyone else (and existing employees) about the offensive contract verbiage?

If that's not legally actionable, then what's the ethics / negotiation cost/ben of that same non-hire implying at the beginning that this would be the eventual recourse if (s)he wasn't hired?

<comment><USER5>
        What's to keep this non-hire from logging into Glassdoor
        and warning everyone else (and existing employees) about
        the offensive contract verbiage?

Nothing. As long as they remained factual. It's unlikely existing employees would have much response though, they already work at the company and will have accepted those contract terms. Different types of people (ie risk/reward and people coming from different cultures tend to take a different view over contract terms.

      If that's not legally actionable, then what's the ethics /
      negotiation cost/ben of that same non-hire implying at the
      beginning that this would be the eventual recourse if
      (s)he wasn't hired?

I don't think that would have much impact, and in the context of hiring someone it would probably look pretty bad.

An assumption in the underlying story is that the contract terms the company wanted _were_ unreasonable.

If it's in a company handbook then it's a standard term, so the organisation thinks it's reasonable - it's probably best to try and understand _why_ they want that situation. Assuming right from the get-go that it's something invidious and offering a threat that 'if I don't get my way I'll go public' isn't likely to get a sympathetic hearing in most situations (I think). While it's possible that someone is trying to screw you over, it's generally best to just assume their mistaken and to try and clarify why it's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a Boston native, I have spoken with multiple people who worked for / knew people who worked for karma loop. It (was?) a company that grew in spite of its culture / founder. Lots of drinking, open drug use, sex in the office, etc. Apparently the parties were wild, though!

<comment><USER7> You've just slandered an entire company based on third party information. Unless you witnessed it yourself.

<comment><USER6> It's also described in various articles about the company, if you want to read more. I post with an account linked to my real life persona and I stand by what I say.

<comment><USER7> I'm not questioning the veracity of the claim but rather the generalisation made of an entire company.

For what it's worth an online article is still a third party source just like the friends you mentioned.

Surprised that I got voted down so much. All I am saying is that sweeping generalisations based on information one has not witnessed is wrong. Is that so bad?

<comment><USER8> You did accuse someone of "slander" for saying something which has been repeatedly reported. Also, [http://smbc- comics.com/index.php?id=4105](http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4105)

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I tried to change the word "slander" as I didn't realise it was offensive. There does not seem to be a way to edit comments.

In any case my intention was not to be insulting or accusatory. It is just that from my previous work experiences when hearsay is passed around they become almost impossible to dispel - the onus of proof falls on the accused as opposed to the accuser(s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That was more like a rant than a "cautionary tale". Without any details, it was hard to make anything of that article, other than the author was angry and bitter at banks.

As a business litigator, I learned there are 3 sides to every story: one side, the other side, and what really happened.

<comment><USER10> From what I've seen in the news, it was just a chain of poor business decisions made by the company when they decided to expand and dumped a bunch of cash into side projects that had to essentially be written off eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I had literally liquidated everything (down to my wife's engagement ring and > all my savings, 401k, etc.) and (foolishly) put every penny I could find > back into Karmaloop to try to save it - yet they came after me anyway. [...] > A bank can legally make you sign a release of any wrongdoing the bank may > ever undertake in the future (!!) as a condition of their loan. Crazy?

Not sure about they details but they could have come after him to make sure he doesn't have resources to come after them, even though he already signed the contract. But perhaps the contract was signed as the CEO of the company but not as him personally?

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting article. I'm interested in the financial schemes (of the venture lenders) in the upcoming series of articles or any anecdotes from HN members. This article was more introductory than informing...

<comment><USER13> The financial model is pretty much straight out of real estate development and private equity. The best up side for the lender is often being able to call the loan and take control of the asset. My anecdotal observations imply that this is pretty common outside Silicon Valley because it's the model the local yokel investors know through experience. The popularization of "startup" as a synonymous with "new business" and the common idea among founders that raising money and pitching investors and getting mentored is the first priority make happy hunting grounds for this type of investor.

That's not to say there aren't vultures on Sand Hill Road, but the standard model there tends to have greater alignment of interests between founders and investors.

<comment><USER14> I saw this a lot first hand doing commercial small business real estate. Hard money lenders give someone a loan to start a restaurant, and if it fails to meet the obligations of the loan, they can foreclose on the restaurant and other property or assets the person has signed as collateral.

Taking money as a loan with a personal guarantee is always a very high risk situation and should be avoided unless you absolutely have to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really want to hear the other side of the story here. There's so much unfocused resentment in this article that I think something else is going on. (specifically, the asides about how the Venture firm flies private jets and hates minorities).

The whole point of venture debt is that if there is a bankruptcy, they get the whole company. Whether there was tortuous interference (I think that's the right term) or simply weren't willing to lose more money on this company, I don't know.

My basic take on the article is really just "man's company fails, he blames the last person to put in money".

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure that interpretation flies if the company never missed a payment.

<comment><USER8> Not missing a payment because the CEO is taking on personal debt to invest in the company is not really sustainable, and almost certainly a red flag to investors.

Based on the other article I link to, they seem to have been behind on their payments to everyone else as well. And were doing "deep discounts" to keep cash flow high. Clearly a bubble situation in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Weird coincidence, I was just reading about this story earlier in the week.

I'm interested in the scuttlebutt but at the end of the day I think this is a story of an entrepreneur who was fundamentally unprepared for massive success and then made a series of very expensive mistakes (including poor choices w/r/t executives and advisors) that proved deadly to his business.

</comment><comment><USER17> c.f [http://www.complex.com/style/the-rise-and-fall-of- karmaloop](http://www.complex.com/style/the-rise-and-fall-of-karmaloop)

</comment><comment><USER18> Breaking down this story as someone naïve to the company and coming from the equity side.

> _Comvest blocked other capital sources, jacked up fees, interfered wherever > possible (among other things, they inserted an incredibly destructive and > incompetent full-time advisor, and they simply delayed and dragged when time > was of the essence)._

Lenders are not shareholders. Unless you violated your indenture, they shouldn't have been given the right to "jack up fees" (interest?). They shouldn't have been given veto rights over corporation actions (again, unless Karmaloop was in violation of its indenture).

> _Comvest came after me personally for $5+ million [guaranty]. Comvest knew I > didn 't have any money - I had literally liquidated everything_

Never personally guarantee company loans. (Curious to hear who Karmaloop and the author's counsel were when this was signed.) If you do, maintain (a) insurance _or_ (b) savings to cover the liability. Either way, this could make Comvest's claim a consumer loan, thereby qualifying for regulatory action, _e.g._ from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and/or the author's state banking regulator(s).

> _A bank can legally make you sign a release of any wrongdoing the bank may > ever undertake in the future (!!) as a condition of their loan_

If you signed under duress ( _e.g._ without counsel representing you), or believe Comvest did something illegal, you can terminate "for Cause". There are lots of ways to sue or arbitrate around this kind of language. If, on the other hand, you broke your indenture - that's why you hire counsel _before_ signing.

In summary, venture debt isn't inherently evil. It _is_ debt, however - lenders should be seen as being separate and distinct from shareholders. Throwing in warrants can increase the pain a lender is willing to take before they drop the axe.

That said, this doesn't sound like predatory lending. (Or venture debt; more like private equity). It sounds like Comvest got tired of management barely making payments while threatening Karmaloop's future ability to pay, found Karmaloop in violation of its indenture (or some consulting contract Comvest and Karmaloop may have signed for the "fees"), and decided to see if they could salvage the investment.

<comment><USER19> What's "barely making payments" \-- either you make your loan payments (and on time), or you don't, no?

<comment><USER8> I assume it's some version of him saying to the lender "I'm mortgaging my house, selling my wedding ring to put money into this company, is there any way you can let us get by with lower payments" and the bank saying "No. We have a contract, and we're willing to put you into bankruptcy if you can't pay us."</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are torrent tracker websites like 1337x.to and thepiratebay.org illegal? - <AUTHOR> Some of the founders of the pirate bay did jail time, but not for running the pirate bay afaik.
1337x.to has been a fairly solid service for a number of years now.
Just curious what the legal framework is for running something like that, as I had an inkling to trying my hand at making yet another torrent tracking site recently.
Any advice is appreciated. <comment><USER2>
      as a bare minimum you should try for  somthing like

any media that you wish to work with must be yours, or you clearly must own distribution rights.

when you create a tracker it tracks bit torrents and if its public anyone can use your tracker if they are not blacklisted. you will need a huge black list to keep out trouble

you will need a probably commercial grade connection if you tracker becomes popular

you might fit the definition of a broadcaster and fall afoul in certain jurisdictions in the near future

i didnt mention money, if you get money from such a site and there is any pirate material on it you run the risk of being accused of piracy for monetary gain and you start doing the kimdotcom dance it doesnt matter if the money was for t shirts and hats it will be considered a ruse to conceal piracy profits

Two things that are getting increased scrutiny are encryption and streaming [especially porn] the legal standing of these activities may be modified soon in the US

</comment><comment><USER3> What jurisdiction?

If you're in the US, see Metallica v Napster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I wouldn't be opposed to setting up the server and corporation in any country that I had to to get it done.

I am based out of Canada and we have extremely good file sharing law precedent set many years ago by the RIAA trying to sue a Canadian for sharing movies online.

The judge said that you are allowed to share movies with friends, and nobody can determine how many friends any one individual has so sharing with thousands of millions through torrent is OK too essentially.

Also torrent tracker websites are not file sharers.

Thepiratebay and 1337x don't actually host any files.

<comment><USER2> the question of facilitation of piracy can be an issue

it doesnt have to stick if you get enough copyright trolls on you your wallet will get thin as you handle multiple court cases regardless of outcome

I recall something about canada considering a publicly broadcasted TV show to be in the public domain so that things like threes company or happy days are fair game in canada... is that true?

<comment><AUTHOR> Never heard anything about the public broadcasting > public domain loophole but it doesn't sound too far fetched.

If anything, we are liberal with our copyright laws up here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Should You Avoid Commenting Your Code? - taha-sh http://taha-sh.com/blog/when-should-you-avoid-commenting-your-code <comment><AUTHOR> _" Code tells you how (or what), comments tell you why"_

No matter how meaningful function and variable names are, I'll still take commented code over non-commented code any day, but the rule for good comments is to commend _why_ the code is doing what its doing, not what its doing.

I've worked with enough complex code in my time that I now heavily comment my code and really appreciate well commented code. But, again, don't tell me what the code is doing (provided the code is clear and reasonably named), instead tell me why its doing what its doing.

I suppose the key is not to use comments to offset bad code, but rather use comments to augment already good code. That is, write good code first, then good comments.

</comment><comment><USER2> In that example you gave you would move the documentation (how a premium customer is defined) into the function.</comment>


The difference betwen skill and luck. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/untangling_skill_and_luck.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam.

You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so on until you find a manageable number of people who now believe you have some amazing insight into the future.

As much as we may want to think things are not random, sometimes they really are, sometimes they're just probabilities.

<comment><USER3> Warren buffet says what if all that predict successfully come from the same village, wouldnt that tells you something?

<comment><USER4> The same rules of probability apply, so it depends on the number of villages making predictions divided by the improbability of successfully matching that village's predictions. If there were only 10 or 20 people buying lottery tickets, and one of them actually won, I'd pay very close attention to that one person's methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      > Always compare results with a null model that reflects luck.

If nothing else, playing poker has taught me _this._

It's possible to win lots of money based on making exceedingly poor bets and getting very lucky. There's one card left to come, there's a 5% chance an Ace will come, but if it does you'll have an unbeatable hand, if not, you have a hand that beats 66% of the possible hands. Do you bet? What happens if the Ace doesn't fall?

A poor player who gets lucky will attribute his success to his obvious skill.

A skillful player who gets lucky will chide himself for making a poor decision.

<comment><USER6> If nothing else, playing poker has taught _me_ this: The correct answer is _always_ "it depends".

<comment><USER7> You are now 2/3rds of the way to being a successful lawyer, accountant or economist!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best single comment I've read about luck was written right here on HN. I've detailed it here: <http://techneur.com/post/1321568428/luck-ii>

In summary, I made a comment about Zuckerberg and the value of Facebook. Someone responded that he was lucky. To which someone else responded with this: (Can't find original HN comment)

 _"This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck's success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air?

There's no good reason to believe that Zuckerberg is lucky at all. Saying he was in the right place at the right time has this tacit assumption that if he were somewhere else at the wrong time he would have tried the same thing and fell flat on his face.

It seems because Facebook is an outlier, people feel safe talking about the luck factor, but that's meaningless because we all exist with individual circumstances, and by that measure everything every one of us does is based on luck. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery."_

<comment><USER9> _Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook._

In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook. Having used both Friendster and MySpace, I'd say he did better than either of them. But by the time Facebook was big enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those two, success to some large degree was already assured.

 _Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery._

This is precisely the point: there may very well have been key moments in Facebook's history, over which Zuckerberg had not control whatsoever, yet which ultimately determined the company's fate. We know the economy is a nonlinear dynamical system, and in such systems small perturbations in the input can lead to large changes in the output. There's no reason to suppose that similar effects don't play a role in the life cycle of individuals or businesses.

<comment><USER10> "In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook."

Yes we can. If there were tons of social networking sites out there at the time, and Facebook came out on top, there must be a reason.

<comment><USER11> Luck? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The difficulty in separating skill and luck is unconsciously illustrated by the author himself in his basketball example. We're asked to consider how much of a 'hot hand' is attributable to chance, and how much to skill. But what is chance in this context? Clearly he doesn't mean the likelihood of a ball launched in an arbitrary trajectory finding its way to the basket. More likely, he means the shooting average of an average basketball player in the type of game being observed (pickup game, college, etc). Clearly skill contributes to such a baseline average.

With basketball we have a skill that can easily be measured for nearly anyone: we just have them toss a basketball a few dozen times and we have a good gauge of how skillful they are compared to others. But what about, say, a venture capitalist? The game that they are supposed to be skilled at has so much overhead that very few are ever played, and not all those that want to play can (you've got to have a lot of money to even sit at the table). It's quite possible that success as a VC is entirely attributable to luck, with no contribution from skill at all. For these kinds of activities we have no way to generate a meaningful statistical baseline. We can only engage in a thought experiment: if hypothetically the success in question was actually due solely to chance, would the world we see look any different?

</comment><comment><USER12> "In the mid-1970s, a man sought a ticket that ended in 48. He found a ticket, bought it, and won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied, 'I dreamed of the number seven for seven nights. And seven times seven is 48.'"

Something tells me this guy did well by not taking math in grade school too seriously.

<comment><USER7> If he'd paid attention to maths, he wouldn't be playing the lottery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > He found a ticket, bought it, and won the lottery. When asked why he was so > intent on finding that number, he replied, "I dreamed of the number seven > for seven nights. And seven times seven is 48."

Need say no more.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Reversion to the mean. Any system that combines skill and luck will revert > to the mean over time. This means that an extreme outcome, good or bad, will > be followed by an outcome that has an expected value closer to the mean.

So if I toss a coin 10 times and it comes up heads, the next toss is more likely to come up tails? I smell a rat.

<comment><USER15> No, it means that in the next 10 tosses, you still expect to get a 5/5 split, so over these 20 tosses, you'll probably have 15 heads, which is closer to the mean.

I've seen this analysis in sports. In baseball, for example, you generally expect teams to win one-run games as often as they win games in general (that is, there's no "great closer" effect). So if you see a team winning 80% of their one-run games in the first half of the season, you can expect their record to be worse in the second half.

<comment><USER14> Ah, I see, thanks.

<comment><USER16> No dude- you were right and he was wrong.

<comment><USER14> No, he's saying that if you have a few outliers to begin with you expect to get more normal-looking data later on, drowning your outliers in them. If you get 5 heads initially and then another 5 heads and 5 tails, it's still closer to the mean than when you began.

<comment><USER16> That can't be right, since the each point in the data is independent. In a 50/50 coin-flip game where you get 9 coins come up heads, the probability that the next coin flip results in tails is still 50%. What you need to understand is that probability deals with uncertain events. So instead of thinking about the final count needing to be around 50% heads and 50% tails, you should expect the count of the yet undecided part to converge around 50% heads, 50% tails.

<comment><USER15> I just noticed this thread continued, but I'm not sure what you're worried about. The two things you said:

* the final count will be about 50/50

* the remaining part will be about 50/50

are actually the same thing (since we're talking about a limit). That is, we could flip a fair coin a billion times, get all heads, and still, in the long run, expect the _total_ ratio to converge to 1/2 (imagine flipping the coin forever - that initial billion flips won't even be a blip on the graph).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "I dreamed of the number seven for seven nights. And seven times seven is 48."

I think his lack of multiplication skills won him the lottery. It was luck indeed.

</comment><comment><USER18> It was interesting but I was hoping for some more concrete suggestions than just a 'you should consider randomness vs luck.' What is a better way than ESOs? Give me a concrete example of how to untangle this rather than just saying untangle it. It doesn't have to be universally applicable but an example would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER19> "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson

</comment><comment><USER20> The author has an entire paper dedicated to this [PDF] <http://www.cscs.umich.edu/documents/Luck.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER21> Luck = Skill + Opportunity</comment>


Show HN: Golang automation for mining cryptocurrencies on the Spot Market - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexellis/spotminer <comment><USER2> Be careful with this kind of stuff.

Someone posted a link [0] to a GitHub repo here a few days ago that would fire up a miner on some AWS GPU instances... except that they hard-coded their own account (wallet) into it so any profits would go to them. It hit the HN front page pretty quickly.

This might be completely legit but, at minimum, take a few minutes to look through the code before you just blindly deploy it.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249372)

<comment><AUTHOR> Always read the code - this is why I'm not supplying a binary.

I don't even know if this is valid within the T&Cs - but I hope it will be interesting and of educational value at the least.

<comment><USER3> But you are supplying a binary !

This docker container calls a pre-compiled binary ./cpuminer. There is no way to tell if this binary faithfully uses the bitcoin address provided in the command line (yes there is some code there but you cannot confirm that this it was compiled from that code.)

But it gets worse. Even if someone does disassemble the binary, you could update the the docker container to add this capability, and nobody will be able to tell because the image gets pulled each time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you taken a moment to read the README? The Dockerfile is linked in the mine-with-docker project. You are well within your rights to rebuild that. The concern raised was what happened with the cloud API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems the repo has a hardcoded mining address here, isn't it? I'm not sure how do you configure a user at a mining pool, but be careful.

[https://github.com/alexellis/spotminer/blob/master/main.go#L...](https://github.com/alexellis/spotminer/blob/master/main.go#L161)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've fixed that - it was unintentional and thank you for pointing it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So if enough automated miners hit Packet.net's spot market does that mean that it'll take the cheap supply away so that non-miners will be competing for cost-effective instances?

</comment><comment><USER6> How quickly will I lose money with this?

<comment><USER7> Slower than if you used dedicated EC2s

<comment><USER6> Heh that's fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the spot instance which can be used and not lose money on mining with 'em?

<comment><USER9> It's not for GPU coins, but some altcoins are pop in and out of profitability on CPUs, if you balance it in realtime you can make money. (I have an employee doing this as a learning project)

But if making a lot of money is your goal then you're better do it it trading, no I'm not going to elaborate

<comment><USER10> Is trading really better? With this you're basically guaranteed a profit, as long as you can find a spot instance cheaper than the mined amount.

<comment><USER9> youre guaranteed a small profit. Trading is greater risk greater reward.

Mining might get you hundreds, low thousands a month. Trading is 10s thousands / low hundreds thous. Month

<comment><USER10> I remember seeing stats that something like 90% of the traders lose money trading stocks. I'm sure it's the same in crypto, though it's compensated by the nearly constant growth. I doubt though that many traders beat the simple buy-and-hold strategy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to determine equal pay for genders at a company? - <AUTHOR> I have a question sparked by the NYT Gender Equality link on the main board as well as a throw away comment by a former co-worker yesterday.
With a few women at my past work, I've had the discussion about equal pay for experience and, since the majority of payroll is opaque, the general assumption is that they get paid less, even though that workplace claimed to be "very progressive".
The general assumption for pay was that it was whatever you were able to negotiate when you came in.
Beyond that though, how would you figure out if a company actually was or was not paying people equally for equal amount of experience, regardless of gender?
I guess the easiest answer would be to have enough trust and honesty with some of your co-workers that you could freely discuss it. Since I was not in the same profession as them, I had no trouble discussing my salary but, especially in the US, it's seen as something that's not done.
I don't think this previous company were consciously nefarious, only that the operated like a company does, getting people to work for as little as they'll accept.
Curious what others think. <comment><USER2> I read some years ago about this problem in a paper. They solution they had was this:

1\. Make buckets of "pays", say 80-85k, 85-90k, 90-95k, and so on, you can decide bucket length

2\. you have two people at hand. we will come to know if there is a wage difference between these two.

3\. put box in a room, send one person in, with a chit, ask them to put the chit in the box with the label of their salary.

4\. get the person out, send second one in, ask them to open the box of their salary range and tell if they find a chit or not.

If they find the chit, they have same salary and the information is complete. if they didn't find the chit, there is a difference.

I am sorry I couldn't find the link or search it back. Hope the grammar/english wasn't too shitty.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no solution other than anonymity. Humans are and will forever be inherently biased. Therefore the solution is to remove information we don't want to influence us. In your case, this means gender.

Other than anonymity, which is the general solution, you could just not allow negotiation or adjust wages (which will be to you/your company's detriment).

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems like the salary band, determined on experience, would at least give room for negotiation or adjusting wages, at least the hiring level.

In terms of a company with the wage structure it currently has, you would have to the executive level be interested in "normalizing" the wages, which would probably also cause a ruckus.

Not to mention if you have people that, due to client relationships, work on more monetarily significant projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Closest I've seen anyone get to success on this front is to have per-title salaries with very narrow pay bands, like "Developer 1: $80K-$90K". Not really practical in a small shop though. If there's no next rung, better people will immediately know that they've topped-out and just leave, but at least it's honest.

The problem with the secrecy surrounding this topic is that instead of hashing out the differences in compensation and provided-value up-front, the acrimony gets dragged-out over time, and under opacity people tend to assume the worst.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it seems like it would open up such a can of worms which, in my mind, just seems to be a part of the difficulties of addressing the equal pay for equal work stuff.

Not to mention that taking a full maternity leave puts women six months behind on things which maybe they're penalized for, whether consciously or subconsciously, when men might be able to take a shorter leave (even if they did want longer).

<comment><USER4> I know this is all anecdotal, but most people are A-OK with someone making more than them if that person is also obviously providing more value.

With the ad-hoc thing we do in tech, where everyone is working in the same pen and has a similar title, but some are making more and some are making less, and the ones making more are often providing less value and only have a higher salary because they were hired during a better market, you end up with a lot energy being expended on intrigue/sabotage/oneupsmanship that could have been spent on the product.

Take sales for example. You can make a decent estimate of what another salesman on the team is making just by looking at the board and multiplying, and if it comes out higher than what you pulled, it is really hard to pin that on anyone but yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd wonder if given the prevalence of the bias - you could simply make it be a function of company size.</comment>


Security for Elasticsearch is now free - <AUTHOR> https://www.elastic.co/blog/security-for-elasticsearch-is-now-free?blade=tw&hulk=social <comment><USER2> Free, not open source version. Obviously a reaction to Amazon's fork- not wanting to give them any code to pull into their version.

It will be interesting to see if this is enough to retain the majority of the userbase or if we'll still see a majority migrate to the 'Open Distro' fork.

<comment><USER3> I was under the impression that they already opened the code for X-Pack features.

<comment><USER4> Were these features licensed in such a way that you could freely use them, though? Or was it 'open' as in "you can see the code" but it's not FOSS?

<comment><USER5> x-pack is not FOSS which is why amazon can't use it.

<comment><USER4> As I thought - thanks for confirming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know it's hard to make a buck with an open source business model but deciding to charge more for security related features is always so frustrating to me. It leads to a culture of insecure deployments in environments when the business is trying to save money. Differentiate on storage or number of cores or something, anything but auth/security. I'm glad they've finally reversed this.

</comment><comment><USER7> This (while perhaps not perfect) is massive for us, it's going to be especially useful for Kibana authentication to add readonly and write users, something we've wanted for a long time but haven't been able to afford as a non-profit, charitable organisation.

I know it's not all 100% open source, but it's better than a nginx reverse proxy hack or similar.

Thank you Elastic for continuing to create fantastic software.

<comment><USER8> Did you apply to this program? [https://www.elastic.co/elastic-search- awards/](https://www.elastic.co/elastic-search-awards/) That could help your hopefully.

</comment></comment><comment> tedk-42 Running Elasticsearch on K8s storing 16TB of compressed logs across 6 data nodes and ~4600 shards.

We're a really happy ES customer. We've on ESv6 at the moment and it's been running amazingly for us. We've halved our storage and running costs by moving from 5 to 6.

We've always been a licensed customer and they are in front of AWS with their features (we run our k8s stack on AWS though :) )

<comment><USER9> That's an insane number of shards, you should be closer to 500 for that amount of data and only 6 nodes.

<comment> tedk-42 It's due to the number of indicies/indexes stored from our various data sources. Yours and another poster's comments are interesting so we might look at ways we can reduce the shard count given the new info on overhead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. Three hours ago someone in our Ops team shared a link to "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" [1] and it's also featured on the AWS console login page.

Is this a very rushed reaction to it? Or is this related? I would really love to have a clarification of what's happening in that space.

[1] [https://opendistro.github.io/for- elasticsearch/](https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/)

<comment><USER11> opendistro has this:

[https://github.com/opendistro-for- elasticsearch/security](https://github.com/opendistro-for- elasticsearch/security)

which has feature parity with the free version elastic just released afaict.

<comment><USER12> No it doesn't - for example LDAP/AD are paid feature in ES

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Too little too late? Trying to charge for TLS was a very poor move and it's made me not trust ElasticSearch...

<comment><USER14> Why don't you want to pay for a feature that you need? The company that pays your wages makes money from selling something. Of course you sell what people need

<comment><USER15> The last time i talked to Elasticsearch about pricing, it was so extremely expensive for our use case to the point of it basically being a non valid option for us.

<comment><USER16> I think what most people miss for these and similar services is you're paying for really good, on call, white glove Elastic support. In my experience they can often go as for as to replace having a search specific ops team. The cloud hosting isn't really where the value is.

<comment><USER15> I guess my issue is that we didn't want or need support. We just wanted x-pack features such as Auth and the Alerting plugins.

We were already hosting it fine ourselves on AWS, as we had devops people very familiar with ES. However the price they quoted us per year was insane for our cluster size for ~20 nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's also a lesser known project out there: [https://search- guard.com/](https://search-guard.com/)

Paired with an OpenResty reverse proxy I was able to set up a reasonably secure cluster back when X-Pack was prohibitively expensive and the AWS offering wasn't under their BAA.

Big thanks to that team of contributors!

</comment><comment><USER18> Some of the worst breaches of 2017-19 have been due to open ES clusters, some on AWS. This is a welcome change. I just spun our AWS ES cluster down in favor of BigQuery, but while I was setting it up security for it was a big chore, with defaults that are in no way sane. AWS EC2 does a great job at secure defaults for auth and firewalls, RDS even moreso. Why was ES left to wag in the wind out of the box?</comment>


Snowden calls on France's Macron to grant him asylum - <AUTHOR> https://www.apnews.com/ce77f2972da445b2aae79a34c4437eb6 <comment><USER2> There is no way any European government is strong enough to grant it. Still, important to rub this fact in their face regularly, since many base themselves solely on appearances.

I hope we see more people like Snowden, even if that kind of work comes at huge costs. Overwhelming parts of the press failed in covering this topic too.

<comment><USER3> I very strongly want to believe this is not true. European governments can take their own decisions on issues like this, and can't isolate a single EU country for sanctions of whatever sort.

But most EU countries tend to have a very strong separation between the government and the judiciary, so even if the government supports asylum for Snowden, the judiciary might decide to honor an American extradition request. Although many EU countries don't extradite when there's a risk of death penalty, unfair trial, torture, or anything like that.

<comment><USER4> Do any of those extradition exceptions apply in this case.

The only one I have ever heard allaged in this case is "unfair trial". But the details of that are: 'US law does not have an exception that covers Snowden's actions".

I happen to agree that the US should have some form of public interest exception, but as a legal arguement it doesn't make sense. No one would argue that a murderer cannot get a fair trial because there is no victim annoyed me exception.

<comment><USER5> At least four exceptions could be invoked.

1\. Unacceptable punishment. This could certainly be invoked, since Snowden faces Espionage Act charges. The current charges don't carry the death penalty, but the possibility of further charges might be raised. But as with Assange, it wouldn't bar extradition; the US simply agrees not to seek the death penalty and then the process continues. Solitary confinement could also arise here.

2\. Lack of dual criminality: the Espionage Act is extraordinarily broad, and I don't know whether France's espionage/treason laws are comparable. But since Snowden faces theft and computer charges which have clear dual criminality, I don't know how this would proceed. The US _might_ have to agree not to pursue Espionage Act charges, but you'd have to ask a lawyer.

3\. Unfair trial: this is subjective, and not covered by the US/France extradition treaty. The European Court of Human Rights has stated that a merely unfair trial is not a bar, and requires a "flagrant violation of human rights", but France could potentially apply a narrower standard. And while unfair trial isn't a basis to reject a US extradition, it is a basis to grant asylum, which would take legal precedence.

There _is_ a good candidate here: the Espionage Act bars any question of whether the information was justifiably secret, bars defendants from introducing key evidence in their defense, bars the defendant from discussing their intent, and doesn't require proof of real or even _potential_ harm to convict. France could argue that Snowden faces conviction over harm which was both unintended _and impossible_ in the course of exposing an illegal action.

Of course, this would again be moot if the Espionage Act charges were dropped (although not if asylum was granted first). And it could be tough both legally and politically depending on how France's most secretive prosecutions are structured.

4\. Politically motivated charges: this both grounds for asylum and a treaty bar to US/French extradition. It's also incredibly subjective, so it certainly _could_ be invoked by a French court.

Snowden's actions don't fall under any of the explicit categories for which political extraditions _are_ required (those are things like attacking diplomats). The US could argue they fall under the "serious harm" clause, but that's neither clearcut not an actual requirement to extradite. (It merely must be taken into account by the surrendering nation.)

France isn't terribly _likely_ to claim this, since the programs and agencies Snowden exposed generally align with French intelligence interests. But a court probably wouldn't have much trouble justifying the finding: Snowden exposed embarrassing actions like spying on foreign heads of state (including France!), US judges have said some of the exposed programs are probably unconstitutional, and he contradicted official testimony to Congress. Combined with a charge that explicitly excludes defenses of public interest, government error, or harmless action, it would be easy to argue the US is using the trial to prevent scrutiny of political misbehavior.

None of that is going to _happen_ , obviously, and I'm not taking a stance here on whether it would be correct. But there's at least one extradition bar which could be easily invoked and justified if someone decided to do so.

<comment><USER3> This whole discussion has made me wonder how someone like Roman Polanski has managed to evade extradition for so long. That sounds like it should have been a much more cleat cut case for extradition. There was an extradition case in Switzerland at some point. Would Snowden be safer there?

<comment><USER5> That's a good question, since it's clearly not a political case. Some quick reading says there are two factors, neither likely to apply to Snowden.

France has refused to extradite Polanski because he's a French/Polish citizen, and neither country is obligated to extradite citizens. (If the refusal is purely citizenship-based, they're required to refer the person for domestic prosecution on request. It's not clear to me whether this applied or happened.)

Poland and Switzerland were both open to extradition (Poland declined to apply the citizenship exemption), but courts in both countries refused over issues with Polanski's trial and prospective sentence.

Polanski's case did start in the US. His attorney arranged an extremely lenient plea bargain of 5/6 charges dropped and 90 days psychiatric evaluation, which he accepted when he was released from prison after 42 days. After that, things get very messy. The exact terms of the bargain were unclear (90 days or time served). The original judge has been accused of misconduct. Subsequent judges have made legally-worrying comments like threatening to delay sentencing to increase time in jail.

Switzerland rejected Polanski's extradition over ambiguity between "90 days" or "time served", and the USA's failure to provide clarifying records. The rationale was that the judge had potentially committed to time served, and extradition isn't available after a punishment (probation doesn't count) is completed.

Poland rejected extradition over the behavior from the original judge and prosecutors, plus the behavior of subsequent judges and alleged destruction of records.

"Unfair trial" is a possible defense for Snowden, and Switzerland would probably be one of the safer places in Europe for him. But a _speculative_ claim of an unfair trial is quite a bit bolder than the Polanski decisions, which hinged on claims of actual misconduct during a trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strange idea, considering what France and other EU countries did not so long ago to Ecuadorian diplomatic plane suspected to carry Snowden. Also a big problem for Snowden, because even if granted asylum it's highly unlikely that US would let him get to France. Lots of NATO countries in between to fly over.

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

<comment><USER7> That just means they'd have to charter a special flight that used only Russian, International, and French airspace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I doubt Russia will let him leave.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hasn't Russia already granted him asylum?

<comment><USER10> There are a number of reasons that he might prefer not to live in Russia. An example obvious political reason: Russia has a lot of the same issues he criticizes in the US. He'd probably like to safely criticize Russia for these things as well. An example obvious personal reason: France is a much nicer country to live in (due to the weather if nothing else).

<comment><USER11> He would be safer though in Russia. It is far easier for the CIA to kidnap him illegally out of France, if they fail to extradite him legally. France might protest such an event a lot but it will unlikely lead to a military confrontation. The US would never likely do this in Russia.

<comment><USER12> What would be the consequences of the US illegally deporting Snowden from France like that? What would be printed in the newspapers?

<comment><USER13> "Snowden goes missing while hiking in Alps; assumed to be buried in glacier crevasse"

<comment><USER14> Presuming he does something stupid like that, and this cover would ruin US goal of making an example.

<comment><USER13> He wouldn't have to choose to go hiking, or even venture within 100 km of the mountains, in order for that headline to be reported.

USA has plenty of whistleblower examples anyway. We've tortured Chelsea Manning for years. Others who have been punished, to varying degrees, include Bill Binney, Reality Winner, and John Kiriakou. Presumably there are others of whom we're not aware. These people have done really small things to rouse the ire of the TLAs. How could they punish Snowden in a proportional fashion, anyway?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IDK, of all the choices France feels like an odd one. Is there some particular law(s) that would favor France over other countries?

What about Cuba? It's certainly not Russia, and it's unlikely the USA and Cuba will kiss and make up any time soon.

Or is this a PR stunt of sorts to sell more books? Note: I'm in favor of ES selling more books as I wish more people were aware of this issue.

</comment><comment><USER16> What is Snowden's problem with Russia? Its a beautiful country, the people there revere him as a hero, he's employed because of his talents as an engineer. The women there are beautiful, the common person is sincere and generous. Maybe he is constantly being harassed by Russian intelligence?

</comment><comment><USER17> Why would Trump administration want to prosecute Snowden?

<comment><USER18> Besides the fact that he committed treason?

<comment><USER17> Snowden leaks could have hurt Obama administration, but these leaks did NOT hurt Trump administration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He should appeal to Trump. Pretty sure Trump would enjoy trolling the Left forever about it.

<comment><USER20> "He should appeal to Trump. Pretty sure Trump would enjoy trolling the Left forever about it."

That's an interesting notion. Perhaps have Trump pardon him. Never gonna happen given who actually runs government.

There are a ton of people who are pro-Snowden who are anti-Trump so I do like the idea of watching the uproar. Honestly, I think that kind of paradox is good for peoples' minds.

<comment><USER21> They just won't discuss it. Think of how little reporting this received a few weeks ago: [https://apnews.com/cdda0a1c21124c4c8a2d68790d99bdab](https://apnews.com/cdda0a1c21124c4c8a2d68790d99bdab)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not difficult to imagine that criminals wised up from the revelations of Edward Snowden. It's not difficult to imagine that such data would be highly classified despite the programs' existence being disclosed by Edward Snowden. If that's the case, then a secret military trial is justified.

</comment><comment><USER22> I posted my opinion that taking him out is an option. It was flagged and then removed entirely.

Hacker News should reconsider allowing me, an American citizen, to suggest that an international fugitive who admits to committing treason and refuses to come home should be taken out.

Snowden's actions are an ongoing act of war against the United States. It is lawful to consider taking him out, in my opinion. I should be allowed a voice to express that view on hn, without concern about censorship, at least in this case.

This comment shouldn't be censored. Please don't flag it, moderators. Thanks.

Edit: if you're going to downvote, at least please provide a brief explanation.

<comment><USER23> It is unpopular to express opinions that violate the tenets instilled in every American in their civics / social sciences classes in high school.

Snowden had the same opinion though: [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-200...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-said-leakers-should-be-shot-then- he-became-one/3/)

I'm of the opinion though that Manning and Snowden leaked under orders from the CIA. Manning wanted assistance from Assange to a degree that would remove any protections Assange would have as a third party, and it is unlikely for Snowden to have obtained such a wide range of documents (allegedly scraping Intellipedia for backup) unless his superiors were totally unobservant.

To criticize the actions of either Manning or Snowden would be to criticize the US government.

<comment><USER22> Indeed, one can interpret the posts of "Q" to support this theory. Going in that direction of that conspiracy theory, however, it appears that the CIA was cleaned out and taken back (or is/was in the process of being taken back) with the appointment of Haspel.

Of note is an apparent exchange between "Q" and @snowden on Twitter, where it appeared that "Q" was able to compel @snowden to share a photo of someone from the Middle East while under duress or on the move. The evidence to support this is the garbled tweets from @snowden in response to "Q"'s demand, suggesting that Snowden really was on the move and being hunted, and under pressure to disclose the info.

Also of note was "Q" saying to @snowden (at the time) "we can take you anytime" which certainly was ambiguous regarding whether it meant kill, or capture. ("Take you out" would have left zero ambiguity). "Take you anytime" implied the possibility of a kill, at the least.

<comment><USER23> Qanon is just a parody of widespread political sentiments. Obviously no one with a Q clearance (which apparently includes Podesta) is a decent person.

The actions of various people acting as a result of the Qanon theories is potentially the result of other craziness that no one would acknowledge. It isn't unthinkable that the person who shot the head of the Gambino crime family was in some fashion harmed by the Gambinos.

I hope the FBI agents doing full time surveillance on the Gambino head spat out their coffee when they saw what happened.

Edit: If Snowden returns to the US, I wonder if he would become another Lee Harvey Oswald. He did defect twice.

<comment><USER22> Its unclear if QAnon is (was — 8chan is gone) someone close to Trump. It wasn't necessarily a parody.

Indeed, Anthony Comello, the man who murdered Gambino boss Frank Cali allegedly believed that he had "protection" from Trump. However, this could just be a creative defense derived after-the-fact, supported by Mr. Comello's interest in the QAnon movement.

The murder was apparently related to some dispute about dating Cali's daughter.

<comment><USER23> "I know"

"I understand"

"I'm getting ice cream."

Knowledge is only tested by hypotheses that result in expected results.

<comment><USER22> If you expect chaos and instead get an unexpected focused result, there could be something to learn about the nature of the mind's ability to prevent brain freeze simply by subconsciously regulating ice cream intake velocity. The observation of enigmatic coincidences is irrelevant fodder, unless there's sufficient reason to believe otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Best Buy Is Selling Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/07/09/026208.shtml

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why the tech media is making such a big deal out of this. The FSF clearly allows for this in their licensing. They could charge $100 or $1,000 for this if they felt like it, as long as they are not attempting to close its source.

<comment><USER3> The reaction should be positive, if anything. Linux distros have been for sale on computer-store shelves for years; OpenOffice.org shows up sometimes, too. Installfests sometimes ask for a few bucks for the disks if you want to keep them.

I believe the GPL requires a "reasonable" price, though, corresponding to shipping/handling/media/convenience. So $50-$100 is justifiable, but $1000+ less so. A court challenge to someone hawking $5,000 Debian licenses to BigCo would probably still be tricky, though, since it's easy to claim the extra cost is for installation support, expertise, etc.

Judging by past FSF lawsuits, it seems to be easiest to tag a reseller for failing to include a GPL notice or instructions for getting the source code.

<comment><USER4> My understanding of the GPL is that you can sell the software for any price you wish. However, if you do not include the source code with the product, you must distribute that _source code_ at a reasonable price to all askers.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you're right:

        Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

        Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part
        of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there
        is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the
        required written offer to provide source code that must accompany
        binary-only release.)

        Does the GPL allow me to charge a fee for downloading the program from my
        site?

        Yes. You can charge any fee you wish for distributing a copy of the
        program. If you distribute binaries by download, you must provide
        "equivalent access" to download the source -- therefore, the fee to download
        source may not be greater than the fee to download the binary.

(Source: [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMone...](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes when people "pay" for something, they value it more or perceive it to be better. If this aids *nix uptake, I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess if people want to pay for something that is widely reported as being free, then let them pay for it. Maybe once they become emerged in Ubuntu goodness, they will awake to their error in paying for something they could have burnt themselves for free - likely causing some customer relation issues for good old Best Buy along the way.

On a related note, I would personally like to offer 'air' (not to be confused with AIR), a simple and easy to use fusion of nitrogen and oxygen - for the low price of 19.99!! Also, for a limited time I am offering CrapSquad support for the low-low of 99.99 per service call. Act now!

<comment><USER7> Some people _like_ paying $$$ to people who give them valuable goods and services. Just because the distribution cost is close to zero, it doesn't mean that the _value_ of the product is close to zero.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the condescension. I couldn't agree more on cost not equating value - I am an avid Ubuntu user and would gladly pay for its value as an operating system. The above was a joke - apparently not a good one, but a joke none the less. It was intended to be delivered at the expense of BestBuy, not Canonical - surely you are not presenting them as providing valuable service ;) But alas, a joke that requires an explanation was clearly not a well executed joke to begin with - I retract. Thanks for the education on value and economics. sheesh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really good news and from what I've been read the tech media response is largely positive. I don't use Ubuntu or any linux distro for that matter, but if the option is there I would recommend Ubuntu over Vista, XP, most anything else (except OS X) because of the value of that deal. The funniest part of this story is one of the customer reviews on the BB website from a person in "Moronville, KY"

</comment><comment><USER9> Just curious... Do people really buy linux off the shelf? Why? The packaging? Docs? Box?

<comment><USER10> many, many years ago before i even knew what linux was, i saw redhat linux being sold at a computer store on the shelves with other software.

its box had screenshots on the back that made it look appealing, it came with a nice printed manual, and it was on a cdrom. this was back when everyone was still using dialup connections and the thought of downloading an entire operating system over it would have turned me off from trying it.

buying that was what enabled me to become interested in linux and unix in general. during my initial learning period, i consulted and made notes in that printed manual many times.</comment></comment>


How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2013/03/how-facebook-gets-away-with-being-broken-on-purpose/ <comment><USER3> Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getting, then don't pay for them.

If you think that you can complain "But they are my fans! They belong to me! I deserve the right to be in their feeds" then be happy that Facebook is smarter than you: All those lovely fans would be gone in a heartbeat if Facebook didn't protect the advertisers from themselves. If you and all your advertising friends had it your way, you'd spam users until there were no users left to spam.

<comment><USER4> Is there a button available to users that will cause stories posted by pages and friends to actually show up in the news feed? It seems like there is no solution available on the receiving end.

<comment><USER3> "Sort By: Most Recent" ?

<comment><USER5> Nope. This worked for a while, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OT:

One observation I have made is how facebook launches big changes in staggered roll-outs.

Among all the other obvious benefits, I feel a big one is that all people never get to complain at once. So even the most drastic of changes will be met with pockets of protests/backlash, giving enough time between different pockets for the uproar to cool off.

</comment><comment><USER7> Facebook is betting this will all blow over and everyone will accept it as the new status quo just like 80% of the previous evil changes they implemented. They are continually pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, and I think in this case they will probably pull it off like they usually do.

The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get", but I don't see it; Facebook's interest is to make money, not to guarantee equality of Facebook's posting. Even if you grant that their primary interest is to assure the highest quality feed, this doesn't go directly against that either since a paid post is not inherently worse than free one even if it skews that way.

What people are really objecting to here is the blurring of the lines between ads and organic content. Certainly it smells bad, but it's not the same as an investment bank shorting the very securities they're selling to clients, after all, you can still get something for free. All they've done is just is turned a formerly free service into a freemium service without removing any functionality. Sure they can ratchet up the cost arbitrarily, but you have no excuse to be screwed by that because you can dip your toe in any time to figure out if the ROI makes sense. If they didn't offer you the opportunity to pay for placement you would have been drowned out by the noise anyway. I think the business justification is precisely that: the stream is so noisy for most people that paid placement can be done without significantly degrading its quality. They may be wrong about this, but I don't see why they aren't justified to try.

<comment><USER8> You seem to have missed the entire point of the article. That point is there is a conflict of interest between Facebook and its advertisers. Something that's not true of most Internet advertising systems according to the author. That is the specific problem. Not that it used to be free and now is pay.

<comment><USER9> Google, the largest ad business on the planet, derives much of its revenue from a product that is directly antagonistic to advertisers: organic search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regrettably, I think a lot of journalists are also spoon-fed PR and don't dig deeper or ask more questions.

Just last week I saw two stories, one on MIT Technology Review [0] and another on Fast Company [1] about Facebook's up-and-coming "Entity Graph." Ostensibly aimed at bolstering their search and informational relevance, neither article reported that many of these pages are scraped/imported content from Wikipedia and have been there since 2010, then called "Community Pages." Fast Company goes as far as to compare Facebook's efforts in this area to Wikipedia's, but doesn't mention that millions of pages are taken directly from Wikipedia. I did some digging on my own and found that at the time this was started, Wikipedia's director of business development was quoted as saying this was a positive development and viewed favorably by the foundation [2], but neither piece of reporting mentions anything about it. Both position Facebook's effort as being grassroots and not something seeded/bootstrapped off of Commons and a not-for-profit site.

[0] [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook- nudges-...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook-nudges-users- to-catalog-the-real-world/)

[1] [http://www.fastcompany.com/3006389/where-are-they- now/entity...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3006389/where-are-they-now/entity- graph-facebook-calls-users-improve-its-search)

[2] <http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21721>

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the hoopla behind edgerank. Personally, I really like it. My feed is much cleaner. I get all status updates from the most important people in my life. And from other friends I get the most important updates.

As far as sponsored stories go, I prefer to those ugly banner ads. Much better UX and lot of times sponsored stories are relevant to me.

<comment><USER12> Fully agree, I really like edgerank. I sometimes need to optimize it by removing a specific person from the feed, but besides that its great. Can't agree on the sponsored stories though, so far I haven't seen a single one relevant to me or my interests.

And as someone with a lot of people in my friendlist that often post in languages I can't understand, I wish they allowed me to filter non-image posts by language (so I'd only see German and English posts).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If users wanted Twitter-like, see 100% of posts as the default, Facebook would have done it. They maximize for engagement 1st and then they monetize that engagement.

For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline "Suggested" of "Featured" posts than they have now.

Facebook with Edgerank is a far better experience than pre-edgerank. And if you don't like edgerank, you can make your default to see all posts from most recent to least recent.

<comment><USER14> I think most users _do_ want Twitter-like 100% visibility. And, at least when they first signed up (for those who signed up more than a year ago), they thought they were getting that. I think that the typical user has just given up on trying to keep up with and compensate the every-changing features and have settled for what they get and/or moved on to something else.

<comment><USER15> > I think most users do want Twitter-like 100% visibility.

Well, you're wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So this variation on advertising is just a consequence of Facebook using an algorithm to fill your "top stories" feed as opposed to a chronological feed. The NYT article that the OP refers to:

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when- sh...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when-sharing-on- facebook-comes-at-a-cost/)

\-- implies that Twitter has a better model because you still see the same tweets in the same order even with a sponsored tweet up top, because tweets always come in a chronological order.

Maybe that works for Twitter, but I know I don't check my own tweetstream as often as I do my Facebook newsfeed. If FB showed me everything my friends and acquaintances did by default, including everytime they did something in Farmville2, I'd be less inclined to check FB.

And it's not a fair comparison because the FB newsfeed shows a variety of actions, from wall posts, to a posted picture, to entirely new photo albums...Twitter shows, for the most part, one kind of content: tweets.

I'm not saying that the OP isn't right here, that FB's model at its core could be problematic. I'm just pointing out that it's an advertising system that is a consequence of "weighting" the importance of each feed item.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is what Overture was doing for advertisers back in the day - <USER2> based on payment

then Google came along and made pagerank -- so relevance was actually based on relevance and not just ads

but then it acquired overture's patents and made the adwords, which is back to paying if you want to be on top

So I see the same game playing out all over again. Facebook can be the overture and we will be the google :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this is a hint to the real opportunity for App.net.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have pioneered the 'feed'... but they're also abusing it. To mix some metaphors, they're polluting the feed with inserts and glitz, or strip-mining their audience's attention. Some necessary innovation in how feeds could be sorted/filtered, strictly for the user's benefit, has been foreclosed by their business models.

Perhaps it's a little like the first generation of search engines and portals: a haste to monetize has caused them to overlook how deep and universal a user- centric feed-service could be. They are locking up their proprietary 'sources' of events well, and thus slowing the emergence of alternatives. But at some point a 10X-plus-better uncorrupted competitor could emerge, first among geeky early adopters, making people look back at Facebook and Twitter like they were Yahoo/Hotbot/Altavista.

<comment><USER19> I hope App.net does well, but I (and I think others) would prefer a more open solution. Tent is doing OK so far, but we need something like IRC (which is still doing great).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is what sharecroppers get for promoting the use of Facebook in lieu of proper feed aggregators. Serves them well !

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not broken, it's working exactly how it's told to work. It's just not how you'd personally prefer it.

I'm personally happy to put up with advertisements and whatever they think they need to do to optimise their earnings on this so long as they don't screw up so badly that there's no longer any value for me in using the site. That said I'd happily get a paid membership for a couple of bucks a month, to browse it free of ads (and sponsored stories etc) and perhaps get to beta test changes. I don't believe any such thing exists but I think that would be cool :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Facebook has every right to promote paid posts, and Google has every right to promote paid links despite not exercising it. And we as users have every right to decide whether we find the Facebook feed and Google search results relevant and useful based on that. When Facebook's policy starts effecting the quality of their services for users and companies, people will stop using it, just as if Google's search results lowered in quality people would switch to something else.

<comment><USER23> This is a very useful insight.

If brands can't rely on Facebook to reliably deliver messaging to a significant number of their fans, then these brands will spend less resources (both effort and money) on cultivating fan bases on Facebook. Instead they'll focus on Twitter, Instagram or just reduce the scope of their social media campaigns in favor of something with more optimized results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The reason that tech journalists are often repeating stories that were broken earlier is that they are able to sell the stories to editors. As far as many editors are concerned "if it didn't appear in my publication, it hasn't happened yet." This phenomenon is not just limited to news media -- I'm often boggled by consultancies like McKinsey who are _still_ coming out with timely reports on "how CEOS can use social media."

</comment><comment><USER25> Y'know, Google has been doing this for a long time with AdWords: if your site doesn't have a high PageRank for the keywords you're targeting, you have to pay more.

I think the real problem here is the PR problem of charging for something that once was free. It wasn't a great idea, and the Tumblr example serves to illustrate how it could've been done differently.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure that's comparable; that's rewarding ads for being more relevant to the original search (or penalizing ads for being less relevant.) CPC services get paid for clicks but have views for inventory, so it makes sense they'd favor showing an add where the chance of a click is higher, raising the CPM.

On FB, you're getting charged just to show the post, so it's more of a CPM model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This just in: Facebook is a business and wants to make a profit.

Seriously, how is this surprising? You want to use Facebook to increase your own business, you pay them. If anything, being able to reach a fraction of your followers for free is an evolution of freemium.

</comment><comment><USER28> All Facebook gets from me in all this is that I spend less and less time on Facebook, because all I do is look at the news feed, and if there's only five new items from yesterday, then I leave. I wish I could say I was sticking it to them for being jerks, but I know they don't really care about me or need me. And it's not like all my friends are going to go to Google+, or heaven forbid Diaspora. Excuse me while I go post this story on my wall.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that the opposite is actually the case; If every time you looked at the newsfeed you saw 50 new items of which 45 are uninteresting, you'd leave and _not_ come back the next day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I ditched Facebook years ago, and I've never been happier.

<comment><USER30> Correlation does not equal causation:) But good for you! (on the happiness part)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> hmm, I think some different, unrelated issues are getting conflated here.

\- Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are (let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank

\- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

\- Yes, facebook defaults to the former setting, but that probably makes sense, right?

\- That "reach 15% of fans" number, I believe, is a result of edgeRank functioning correctly. Obviously even if everyone got reverse chronological feeds, your update would STILL only be seen by a small percentage of users because it would be pushed down by more recent posts, right? So whether the user saw it would be based on whether you posted it right before the user checks their feed, and would just incent everyone to spam facebook updates like crazy,(which is how tumblr is right now) ... am I missing something here about that stat?

\- Yeah, I guess maybe in both Google's and Facebook's case there are conflicting goals but I am not sure it is a conflict of interest. It is their business to make that newsfeeed (or Google's search results) as relevant as possible so you use their service.

\- The dubious thing about Facebook's method is the promoted posts are not as clearly delineated from the feed as Google's adword results are. That, in my opinion, is the controversial thing here. Not making a clear distinction between advertising content and "normal" content.

\- Ryan Holiday is a marketing genius whose primary tactic to to try to generate controversy, so, I think this article should be evaluated within that context.

<comment><USER12> > \- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and > simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like > tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

That's not true. I use most recent and while it's probably filtering less, it still filters.

<comment><USER32> It also resets itself to Top Stories say, every day or so. I would say I am surprised that with all the engineering talent Facebook has they can't manage to remember this one setting I have made about 20 times, but I am not that naive.

<comment><USER12> Might be a bug on your end, I've been using recent stories for a very long time now (always seeing the same stuff on top posts got annoying) and never had to change it back to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.

<comment><USER34> Source? I haven't heard anything about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I remember when this first was news. I also remember that facebook made it possible for a user to subscribe to ALL posts from a page that they "like."

A facebook like is not the same as a follower on twitter and I'm not sure why people expect it to be.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think this is an important but sad milestone: The day when "saying no" actually becomes a smokescreen for being broken on purpose. (Question: Has Apple already passed it?)

</comment><comment><USER37> So if I have no friends who paid to promote their posts and no pages who bought promoted ads for my demographic profile, my news feed will be blank, the story implies.

<comment><USER22> The algorithm probably works by showing paid posts to the people most likely to click on them, so people who don't click much don't get many promote posts or the non-promoted ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I thought this was going to be about the bug(?) where they spam you with notifications from yourself, and how they don't fix it because it hurts MAU.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is what happens when you build a business on top of free users then attempt to make money later - not that there is anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER23> It's a good business model ;) The issues with it are exacerbated by the promise they made to always be free (which makes it problematic to offer a tier of paid services even if users would be interested.)

They're getting around this by offering paid services that are outside their basic offering (services for business, messaging users outside your friend group, etc.)

See their post about always being free: <https://www.facebook.com/facebook/posts/10150420085741729>

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What is really broken with my feeds is that I click for more feed and it shows me the same feed I read in the same identical order.

</comment><comment><USER41> _Facebook posts are seen by only a woeful fraction of a company's total fans or subscribers (often less than 15 percent). And conveniently, that percentage is controlled by Facebook, while the site simultaneously offers an expensive "service" that allows companies to pay to reach its own fans. This throttling quickly became a source of millions of dollars of revenue for the social network.

It's about as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get. One that only Facebook would dare to try._

It's less malignant than Google, Google also claims that they are impartial.

Google updates the algorithm or adds another 5-6 ads a page, you lose traffic; you have to advertise; they make money. They have a conflict of interests in wanting to have sites advertise and judging by Google's earnings it's working, _for them_

<comment><USER10> There is a world of difference between Google changing their search algorithm and Facebook holding friends & followers an entity has already reached, connected with, and/or "acquired," hostage for money.

<comment><USER41> _changing their search algorithm_

Changing it but what's the real reason of the algorithmic changes, not the stated one? Google controls both search and advertising.

Facebook cannot afford to let every business spam every person that has a "like," it would replace email spam in a short time. Of course Facebook would go out of business soon</comment></comment></comment>


Peter Thiel's Bet on Donald Trump Pays Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/peter-thiel-bet-donald-trump-wins-big.html <comment><USER2> It's two days after the election and the NYT is proclaiming that Thiel's bet has paid off. It's way too early to say this. For whatever political pull Theil has gained, I believe he has (at least potentially) lost a lot of respect in other areas. Does that matter? maybe, maybe not. But my point is, it's a bit too early to tell in either case.

This is a true example of don't count your chickens before they're hatched.

</comment><comment><USER3> "against Senator Bernie Sanders,..., it "would have been much tougher for Trump to win, and a healthier race for the country."

</comment><comment><USER4> Lets wait a few years, and see how the economy fares (not to mention rights for gay people) before we declare a payoff for Thiel.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote this essay (from my HN comments) about Peter Thiel before Trump got into power.

[https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the- wolfe-b8de...](https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the- wolfe-b8de..).

And here is the original comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413)

Here is a teaser:

"I think what most passers-by to Thiel's Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.

If you watch Thiel's presentations going back over a decade, you'll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.

This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."

</comment><comment><USER6> ...and now every other executive in SV is pushing for Calexit.

It would be something if the end result of Thiel backing Trump is that Silicon Valley ceases to be part of the United States.

<comment><USER7> LOL, Silicon Valley thrives on Wallstreet's dollars, they'd leave and the whole ship would sink within the first hour.

<comment><USER8> Well, they're not "Wallstreet's dollars", it is international capital and it is happy to invest anywhere so long as it believes it will get a return. Possibly even happier to invest in an independent California if the government is likely to be beholden to its needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does Theil want a candidate against net neutrality?

<comment><USER10> Maybe he wants to make money with charging people twice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be unfortunate for the tech industry if Thiel gets to act as their representative in Washington.

<comment><USER12> But ultimately what they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, hard to deny it's been a good year for him. Unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember the last Thiel thread was a holy war filled with people who thought outspoken Trump supporters should lose their careers on grounds of bigotry and hate speech propagation (citing [https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/) among other things).

Revisiting that thread with the knowledge that Trump would win and that Trump supporters were not some vocal minority is sobering.

<comment><USER4> Look at the numbers; they're still a vocal minority, they're just ones who vote as a bloc and have the geographic advantage. Trump got less than Romney after all.

The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process, the winner is _always_ going to be decided by a "vocal minority".

<comment><USER15> > The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the > voting process

Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.

I'm amazed so many people actually do vote.

<comment><USER16> "multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook"

No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.

<comment><USER15> > but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a > democracy

Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.

<comment><USER4> You'd need _perfect_ security... I mean perfect, or that would be a trivially easy system to control. The irony that the government subject to such a process would be needed to ensure the sanctity of that process should not be lost on you.

<comment><USER15> True, but our current system is more like security through size in that we hope the sheer number of votes drowns out voter fraud.

They both have problems and I'm not saying one is totally better than the other.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is ABI, and What Should WG21 Do About It? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p2028r0.pdf <comment><USER2> One benefit of taking an ABI break is that it's a chance to fix the divergence that has emerged between the LLVM world's and the gcc world's interpretation of the C++ mangling spec. [https://github.com/itanium-cxx-abi/cxx- abi/issues/68](https://github.com/itanium-cxx-abi/cxx-abi/issues/68) Although no-one seems to care about that except me.

<comment><USER3> You're not alone! There are dozens of us!

Mangling is a buggy, half-assed mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could someone add C++ somewhere in the title? I don't think that WG21 means anything to people who don't follow C++ ISO committee business.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think there is an intrinsic tension in how C++ is being developed: the desire to expand the language and the desire to maintain backwards compatibility pull in different directions. As this proposal notes, there are many mistakes in the language and the standard library that can't be corrected because of that desire to maintain compatibility.

Essentially, I think that over the next decade the desire to maintain C++ relevant will eventually win out and there will be several breaking language releases (or perhaps a very big one) where C++ will correct itself. Stroustroup's comment about how there is a "smaller, safer" language inside C++ waiting to break out come to mind. However, the impact on the ecosystem will be large, as it was with the std::string breakage, but probably worse.

If it turns out that I am wrong then I think that C++ will just eventually fade out, crippled by its own weight and internal inconsistencies. It will always be there because of how much software is written with it, but "I'll be the next COBOL" is not really a great life insurance policy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note, WG21 here is the C++ ISO committee.

This is about whether C++ should guarantee explicitly ABI compatibility till the end of time or should attempt to break the ABI more aggressively.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some men just want to see the ABI Burn.

I think there are many compelling arguments to "living at head" and committing to breaking backwards compatibility. If it means making many base constructs of the language as performant as expected.</comment>


Machine Learning Is Not As Cool As It Sounds - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2008/05/machine-learning-is-not-as-coo.html

<comment><USER2> Sorry but text extraction is interesting and uses machine learning in its own right.

[http://tomazkovacic.com/blog/14/extracting-article-text- from...](http://tomazkovacic.com/blog/14/extracting-article-text-from-html- documents/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who builds machine learning models, I have to agree. Cleaning up the data takes 90% of the time, and the fun of building models is all too quick.

Also, I think the post should just call it R, not GNU R. It is GPL, but not a GNU project.</comment>


Sorry, Apple: For the education market, Chromebook is the clear winner - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/article/3453943/sorry-apple-for-the-education-market-chromebook-is-the-clear-winner.html <comment><USER2> I always liked Steve Job's analogy of the computer being a "bicycle for the brain," allowing an unleashing of creativity and efficiency never before seen. While macOS and Windows 10 machines are more expensive, they at least allow the user to install and use more software that capitalizes on the creativity of young minds. Yes, pretty much any system with a keyboard will allow for word processing, but what about drawing, photo and video editing, advanced page layout (yearbooks, school papers), music composition, and more. The Chromebook is great for schools because they can be locked down to the minimum number of apps and configurations to be supported instead of letting creativity fly. I wonder how many kids would might have become early hackers/programmers will be stunted by the limited ability of a ChromeOS device that was more convenient for the school district to manage.

</comment><comment><USER3> _For classrooms, the Chromebook is far more than a cheap notebook. It's a gateway to all of Google's services._

Google was very consistent in its approach to the education market, making it easy for teachers and students to get on board.

My oldest child's public elementary school started having kids use Google Docs about 8 or 9 years ago. I purchased a Chromebook not long after so my Mac wouldn't be used for homework, and the younger sibling got a free Chromebook handed out by the school at the beginning of high school.

Docs, Drive, and a bunch of other G Suite for Education tools are now the foundation of both my kids' classroom experience. Neither has ever asked to use MS Office for anything, and no one in our family uses the equivalent Apple office apps.

Macs and PCs aren't banished from the school system, however. I see them in libraries and certain classrooms where special software or heavy-duty compute power is required. My oldest also used money from a summer job to purchase a new MacBook Air a few weeks ago to prepare college essays and to use at college.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm really not comfortable with using public funds to help expand Google's market and surveillance. Not when there are other, truly free office suites available, and Chromebook's hardly have a monopoly on cheap laptops.</comment>


iPhone XS and XS Max Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+XS++and+XS+Max+Teardown/113021 <comment><USER2> Really curious why the Intel part numbers are different between the XS and XS Max

</comment><comment><USER3> No FPGA anymore?</comment>