W3C Proposal from MS, Google, Netflix for adding copy protection API to html5 - <AUTHOR> http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html <comment><USER3> Since nobody else is saying it.

The issue with this proposal is that it it creates a segmented web, whereby if a vendor does not ship a "CDM" for a particular platform, you will never see DRM'd web content for that platform.

To those of you who are thinking "Woo! Now there's any easy way to get my license keys!" you have missed the part where there's a media layer interacting with a DRM stack - this is essentially the same situation as today.

The only thing this does is give blessing to break principles of universal computing. I am opposed.

<comment><USER4> So, much the same as at the moment where if there isn't a version of Flash (or Silverlight) for a particular platform then you can't watch Netflix/Hulu/Whatever.

<comment><USER5> Point me to a platform without Flash support.

EDIT:

I meant, show me a platform where users can't get Flash for free easily. AFAIR on Windows, Unix and MacOS (I used only the first two) you can just download a free player...

<comment><USER6> <http://www.apple.com/ios/>

However - I don't think Apple would implement these extensions in Safari...

<comment><USER5> Ok, fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally I see this as a short-term gain for MS, Google and Netflix and a long-term loss for everyone else. If we implement this, then we delay a web where copyright enforcement, except in cases involving the most egregious violations prosecutable in court, is viewed as the exception rather than the rule.

I am opposed. Leaving out DRM helps establish new social norms that benefit the commons over individual players. We all end up richer in the end.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't work if you can't get content providers in the door.

My attitude towards DRM changed somewhat when I saw what happened with the online music stores. DRM was absolutely required for Apple to get major labels to the table. Then, over time, DRM was chipped away, to the point where the iTunes Music Store is DRM-free, Amazon's MP3 store is DRM-free, etc.

If we can skip the DRM phase entirely, sure, I'd be on board. But is that realistic?

<comment><USER7> Content providers will be forced through the door by competition from copyleft and creative commons content.

Competition is the easiest way to combat DRM.

The presence of DRM legitimizes a social norms of restriction. The lack thereof legitimizes social norms of sharing.

DRM is a tangible embodiment of the the tragedy of the commons. DRM is analogous to a series of electric fences partitioning off the commons so that only some cows from some individuals can graze in certain places, but no other cows can graze there. People will invent electric fences for use in chipping away at the commons, but it would be a disaster for society to standardize the electric fences so that anyone can chip away at the commons effortlessly.

I'm of the opinion that if some entity wants to cripple their content with DRM, that is their prerogative, but they shouldn't get help from W3C and other bodies creating open standards.

On top of all that, as a developer, DRM is one more layer of bullish*t to deal with. I'm perfectly happy paying for APIs based on usage. I connect, you measure, you charge. Last thing I want to encounter are APIs which require me to implement a cumbersome layer of DRM to use content.

Lastly, I can only see the presence of DRM reducing accessibility of content for special needs users, such as the blind, because any form of DRM is likely to reduce how you can manipulate content. What if the DRM prevents close- captioning? text-to-speech? Addition of semantic data? etc.

DRM is wrong. It doesn't not produce a better environment for the consumer because it reduces competition.

DRM introduces friction. Friction reduces "liquidity". Lower liquidity results in a smaller market with fewer options.

REST vs SOAP is a perfect example of unnecessary friction in a "technological market". A market with DRM would have the same impact on innovation as a SOAP- based market.

<comment><USER9> > DRM is wrong. It doesn't not produce a better environment for the consumer > because it reduces competition.

The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you assume we would still have the same content available to consume without DRM.

However, the whole reason to allow copyright in the first place is to create an economic incentive for those who can to create and share works. And the whole point of DRM is that people weren't honouring copyrights, so the incentive wasn't working. Clearly there is not sufficient incentive for the major content producers to share their movies via on-line systems without DRM right now, because they have almost unanimously refused to work with such systems, and no-one has been able to force them to do so through commercial pressure.

> A market with DRM would have the same impact on innovation as a SOAP-based > market.

The market already has DRM, and there are more (legal) ways to get access to the latest video content today than at any time in human history. But right now, implementing adequate DRM takes more effort than it should, and _that_ has an impact on innovation by at best reducing the efficiency of services working with DRM'd content and at worst rendering services that would otherwise have been successful and beneficial to consumers commercially unviable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- html/2012Feb/0274...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- html/2012Feb/0274.html)

Hixie's response: "I believe this proposal is unethical and that we should not pursue it."

It's safe to say I'm very happy with Hixie being the editor of the html5 spec.

<comment><USER11> Benevolent dictatorships are great as long as you agree with the dictator.

<comment><USER3> I do rather wish he'd elaborate.

<comment><USER3> As it turns out, he did elaborate (as did others):

<https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10902>

There's some vitriol from various parties in there as well, and all the points you would expect from people trying to create an open, accessible, and compatible presentation standard. Standards at its finest!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this proposal (which was inevitable eventually) is a direct result of a couple things.

\- Apple decides (wrong or right) to not support Flash on a wildly popular mobile platform

\- Flash begins its demise in general (again inevitable but IMO a little too soon)

\- Adobe cedes further development on Mobile Flash

\- secure video content deliverers are immediately faced with loosing the only existing "secure" video "standard" on the web and having to develop platform specific solutions

\- a proposal is put forward to put DRM into HTML5 video (which it is going to have to get eventually for ubiquitous adoption, like it or not)

That's the chain I see.. which may have pushed this HTML5 DRM thing to the forefront before it has been properly hashed out. Not placing fault on any of the parties there, just a chain of events to me.

<comment><USER13> Don't forget the popularity of netflix/hulu/itunes and however else people are duped into supporting the content cartels. The 'web' was on its way to becoming a receive-only ghetto as soon as 'apps' started to replace static pages. The money to be made by giving the masses a hip new cable TV is a nasty accelerant.

<comment><USER14> _The 'web' was on its way to becoming a receive-only ghetto as soon as 'apps' started to replace static pages._

I disagree completely. It's now _much_ easier to create and distribute your own content than it ever was, in great part exactly because of the new interactive websites.

Youtube alone is a great example. Sure, it has plenty of old media content (and plenty of abusive takedowns), but how many hours of amateur stuff is being viewed every single day? Probably orders of magnitude more than there ever was on the web ten years ago.

Then there's Flickr, Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, deviantART (140k submission/day) and so many more.

Sure, Netflix, Hulu, etc are major players, but I don't think user generated content is being replaced - TV is.

<comment><USER13> Sure, the actual volume of publishing and types of content have increased, but the range of abilities has dwindled. Users are only able to interact with each other through opaque centrally controlled services where the middlemen choose how and what the services support and approve (sound familiar?). Having different executable code and a data silo for every implementation of the same idea puts the users at the mercy of the proprietary services (see: any time people whine about a website changing). Their only choice ends up being _which_ company to resign themselves to.

<comment><USER15> > Users are only able to interact with each other through opaque centrally > controlled services, where the middlemen choose how and what the services > support and approve

Previously, normal users were unable to interact with each other at all. Do you really think grandma/your uncle/etc would have learned to write HTML, found a place to get hosting, and put it online, if only Facebook hadn't come along?

Oh, and by the way, it turns out you have _even more_ options for putting your HTML content online now [Heroku, AWS, Linode, Wordpress, Jekyll, etc], thanks in large part to the financial and social capital influx that came to the Web during the "Web 2.0" boom.

<comment><USER13> "Normal users" certainly used email clients, installed web browsers, and used local page-creation tools. That certain technologies have made these tasks easier does not mean that those specific technologies were the only way forward, or that those technologies are without drawbacks. Publishing Turing- complete blobs clearly gives the creator the most freedom and power, but at the expense of limiting the consumers' options to "experience content as intended" or "don't".

My whole point is that this philosophy of server-knows-best is causing the 'web' to revert to the standard creator -> middleman -> passive consumer chain. Of course many different "ways" of publishing are flourishing - <USER2> are the middlemen!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I understand correctly, this is to protect the content during delivery over Internet. But the user agent is free to do whatever it wants with the content once it gets the decryption key. I suppose servers could decline to give the keys out to untrusted user agents.

<comment><USER17> It may be possible under the proposal but is distant from the intended or anticipated uses.

This proposed extension appears to provide a means for distributing keys between DRM chips/implementations (BD+/AACS/etc) and a remote license server. The reason this is a HTML specification extension is that Netflix and Google want to use <video> within HTML -- thus the browser environment must become responsible for interfacing between the DRM implementation and license providers.

Knowing the "keys" being transmitted is not useful because they'll be encrypted using public key cryptography. A heavily protected/tamperproof[1] DRM chip will have access to the actual keys required to decrypt the content. This could take the form of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as part of the widely criticised "Trusted Computing" initiative (is this one of the reasons why Microsoft is involved with the proposal?).

Some of the motivations of pushing towards this heavily restricted and inaccessible method of delivering content could include:

1) Ability to lock content to particular devices (iPhone users can access a TV show 2 weeks before anyone else).

2) Taking control over the purchasing cycle of consumers by forcing constant hardware upgrades.

3) Renting content for short durations of time under very specific conditions and limitations.

4) Pricing content on a per-user basis (some users pay more than others for the same content)

[1] Security Engineering, Edition 1, Chapter 14 by Ross Anderson - <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-14.pdf>

<comment><USER18> "It may be possible under the proposal but is distant from the intended or anticipated uses."

Always a scary sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone explain how this differs from HTTPS in terms of features and goals?

<comment><AUTHOR> HTTPS is is fundamentally incompatible with caching proxies, CDNs, etc. This scheme would (amongst other things) allow secure exchange of keys (and other data, such as license) while distributing the bulk of the content via http.

This means that the heavy lifting of distributing video can be done by CDNs, with the high-value keys/licenses going over secure links.

And there's more to this than just the transport encryption: it provides a standard API for decryption modules in the client, so a browser doesn't have to understand the details of every technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> This means that if a provider such as Netflix wanted to, they could supply you with (say) a USB crypto dongle that you would plug in to your PC, which could then interact with your browser to authenticate you, and potentially even decrypt content (or rotating media keys) on the fly. This is, I believe, pretty much what a lot of cable access cards do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the proposal's abstract:

 _No "DRM" is added to the HTML5 specification, and only simple clear key decryption is required as a common baseline._

<comment><USER17> Please explain why the specification makes continued use of the word "license" -- a word that has little meaning outside the context of Digital Restrictions Management.

Why did they feel the need to use the word "license" and not just "key"?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Proposal includes a good FAQ section;

[http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- medi...](http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- media/encrypted-media.html#faq)

</comment><comment><USER21> How does this fit in with an open source model? Surely you can just extract the keys/license without reverse engineering anything then?

It's daft.

<comment><USER22> Restricting what you can do with data doesn't fit well with open-source. If you can read a stream and decode it to a screen or speaker, you'll also be able to save it to a file. If you can't change the software to do whatever you want it to (and download copy-protected streams is one thing you may want) it's not open-source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability. <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission>

IMHO, it's against of those principles.

<comment><USER24> Indeed - this is the first thing I looked up. It's directly against the Mission of the W3C to support proposals such as this. If people want this feature, it is going to have to be a non-W3C standard.

I've been commenting against various forms of anti-web proposals such as this for more than a decade. Every 3-4 years somebody proposes to accept RAND (non- free) licensing terms. This time around it's non-free content distribution. Let's hope the W3C remembers who they are, and what they're for, once again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This proposal reminds me of the RFC specifying a security flag in the IPv4 header.

<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt>

<comment><USER22> Yes, but it was published a couple weeks too soon. Someone may take it seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Presumably this is to avoid the need for Flash for video streaming.

I believe the two main advantages of Flash over the Video tag are that Flash can encrypt, and flash can do adaptive rate streaming - and adaptive rate streaming is also going through the standards process at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> An MPEG standard for adaptive streaming (DASH) has just been ratified:

[http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Arti...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=79382) <http://dashpg.com/?page_id=25>

Firefox and Chrome both seem to be working on implementing it:

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=702122> <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=109652>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm glad this is being discussed. It's is an important proposal, and as long as it's thought about carefully, will help move our web video service forward.

My experience recently is with Lovefilm, where they switched to silverlight delivery of content citing "anti-piracy measures" [1]. If we want to move to a www with HTML5 only video, an addition to the standard is required.

Whilst there will no doubt be people opposing any copy protection, I'm sure many can cite examples where it's exclusion is hampering the web.

[1] - [http://blog.lovefilm.com/uncategorized/why-were-switching- fr...](http://blog.lovefilm.com/uncategorized/why-were-switching-from-flash- to-silverlight.html)

<comment><USER17> The proposal is an additional layer of cruft that doesn't assist copyright holders in any way with protecting their content. Content protection should be as simple as refusing the stream content to unauthenticated and unauthorised clients. 1990's era HTTP specifications are perfectly acceptable (and widely supported) means to accomplish this.

This proposal _is_ DRM in the sense that it makes it much harder for paying legitimate users to access and control what they've purchased. It continues to provide incentive for users to pirate content using far simpler and more accessible channels.

<comment><USER27> > Content protection should be as simple as refusing the stream content to > unauthenticated and unauthorised clients.

This is about _copy protection_. You can argue that that is practically impossible to do, but this isn't about about client authorization.

<comment><USER28> I would argue that the problem space reduces to the same thing. Once you hand someone encrypted content along with a way to decode it, you've essentially given them the content and have to trust that they won't copy it. You have no way to protect the content from being copied if you have given out the secret to decoding it.

<comment><USER29> you can logic all you want. the fact is, content providers want certain implementations of DRM. if "web standards" do not allow for these implementations, then they won't use those standards. you're not going to convince content providers not to have DRM just because its not a web standard - content providers never cared about web standards to begin with.

the question is whether you care more about the adoption of the standard or the purity of that standard. if html5 doesn't include methods for DRM, then hulu and netflix will continue to use proprietary extensions. how much do you care about adoption? if only 50% of sites use it, is it still meaningfully a standard?

<comment><USER30> I think the penalties associated with using plugins is simply the price DRM advocates should have to pay. I don't think it's the job of the W3C to make it easier on them to maintain this practice. The short-term gain of getting large media players on-board is outweighed by the long-term prolonging of the life of DRM and delaying the advancement of social norms and business practices for media distribution, consumption and ownership.

Looking at the companies that control media today and trying to mold the environment of the web so that they survive is exactly backwards. Instead, I think the W3C should focus on creating the best environment for an open web possible, and let the companies that exist now adapt to it or be replaced by those who can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess Mozilla could implement this and still allow the user to save the .mp4 in Firefox.

For DRM to be "effective" you have to control the client and not allow arbitrary implementations. Or what am I missing here?

<comment><USER3> The DRM stack is outside the browser.

<comment><USER32> How is that different from some binary-only browser plugin (with limited availability on platforms that the DRM vendor doesn't want to support)?

All it does is giving credibility to DRM ("but the W3C has a standard for that!")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hollywood tried to get a form of content control into over-the-air broadcasts; they got a lot of pushback and ultimately failed. Now over-the-air broadcasts are done entirely in the clear.

Requiring DRM for the web is ridiculous as long as the content is being broadcast in the clear over-the-air.

Now it's up to us, the tech community, to push back against this attempt at control. The broadcast situation shows definitively that DRM isn't an absolute requirement for the content industry.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's funny that "unauthorised" copying of not freely available material has value whereas "unauthorised" copying of freely available material has nearly zero value (you could just copy/download the original).

So, effectively, by putting up DRM and copy protected content, they make up themselves the whatever value "piracy" has.

</comment><comment><USER35> This sort of thing has to happen, as great as the idea of media embedding in HTML5 is there needs to be copy protection.

<comment><USER36> No, there's no need for copy "protection".

<comment><USER16> I think the "need" comes from the content owners, who refuse to license their material to services that don't implement a form of DRM that they approve of.

It would of course be much easier if the content owners some day understood that DRM solves absolutely nothing, only makes the UX worse, and the content is still being copied freely out there, despite all the protection.

<comment><USER37> _I think the "need" comes from the content owners, who refuse to license their material to services that don't implement a form of DRM that they approve of._

Poppycock.

If I were unwilling to come to work unless I was to get €1,000,000 per day and the system wasn't set up to do that, then I would have to stay at home all day. I would have no right to insist that just because I find the current system unsuitable that it should be changed.

<comment><USER9> > If I were unwilling to come to work unless I was to get €1,000,000 per day > and the system wasn't set up to do that, then I would have to stay at home > all day. I would have no right to insist that just because I find the > current system unsuitable that it should be changed.

And if you were unwilling to consume content unless you were to get it without any technical measures to enforce the terms on which it is offered and the system wasn't set up to do that, then you would just have to do without the content. You would have no right to insist that just because you find their current business model unsuitable that it should be changed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Voice isn't VOIP, and other things you learn from readers - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/mobile-amp-wireless/75774/google-voice-isnt-voip-and-other-things-you-learn-readers <comment><USER2> Google Voice = free text messaging over the data connection.

That means an end to charging rates of $1000 per MB for SMS data. The biggest ripoff they've got going would be gone.

Of course they're in no hurry to let that gravy train come to an end.

<comment><USER3> To clarify, it's free outgoing messages, if you're using a GV client to send them. Incoming messages to a GV number will forward to your phone(s) at whatever rate you're being charged.

Or you could prohibit GV from sending the phone texts, but then you'd have to go online to check for incoming messages.

<comment><USER2> Forwarding incoming SMS messages is what you do when there's no Google Voice app.

With a Google Voice app, you can directly receive SMS messages sent to your Google Voice number, no forwarding (and thus, no carrier charge) needed.

At least, that's how I assume it would work on the iPhone, because that's how it works on my G1 right now.

<comment><USER3> Really? That's great! I'm on the iPhone and that's how it works for me. I have an unlimited text plan so there's no big issue for me, but for people without unlimited texts or Android phones, your texts are forwarded to your number.

Even more reason to consider an Android phone. I've been on the fence for a while.

<comment><USER2> For the record, you have to be sure to go into your GV account and uncheck "Receive SMS on this phone" for your mobile phone. That turns off the forwarding.

The GV client app periodically polls GV for new messages, and will alert you when you get one. This does mean, however, that there is usually a delay of a few minutes before the GV client polls again and you get a notification of the new message. (You can force the client to update at any time by opening it and hitting Refresh, if you're expecting a message).

So, there is a small catch. I use a limited texting account. People whose texts I'd want instantly text my "real" phone number. People whose texts can wait a few minutes get my GV number. :)

EDIT: There's a third party Google Voice app (named simply "GV") which allows you to set the message polling as rapidly as every minute. I'm giving this a shot now. :)

<comment><USER4> The iPhone gives apps push functionality starting with version 3, so on a native app text messages would be instantaneous.

<comment><USER2> Right, but the "problem" is that unless you're using SMS forwarding (and any carrier fees that incurs), then an incoming SMS to your Google Voice number isn't arriving to your phone as an SMS message. Instead, the Google Voice app is polling the GV service, not unlike checking email, and notifying you of any new messages it finds. How instantaneous you get the message depends on how rapidly the app polls.

The official Google Voice app on Android waits a few minutes between polls. The 3rd party "GV" app lets you set it more aggressively (though naturally, there's a battery trade-off that comes with doing so).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It isn't VoIP but it's setting up a great potential end-run around the cell monopolies, since it lets you route calls to any number, including VoIP numbers such as SkypeIn numbers.

<comment><USER6> Sort of. The biggest threat is to the international toll charges. And, assuming they can position Google Voice correctly, to SMS.</comment></comment>


Airbnb: Not Necessarily a Wolf, but It's No Lamb Either [Update] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revaluate.com/airbnb-necessarily-wolf-lamb-either

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to get some opinion about this analysis. Does the sharing need to be regulated?</comment>


US House of Representatives Hearing on the Dangers of Deepfakes and AI - <AUTHOR> https://lionbridge.ai/articles/deepfakes-a-threat-to-individuals-and-national-security/ <comment><USER2> Beyond geopolitical concerns - as the tech becomes more widespread and easier to use, to the point where teenagers start using it to punk one another, no one will believe anything they see, hear or read ever again without an extremely robust digital provenance system (and who built that system? are they to be trusted? does it rely on intrusive measures? etc)

It's great the developers and researchers are taking pause - this is great tech that could be used positively and creatively in so many areas - and with any new tech comes pain from misuse.

If history is anything to go by, legislation is likely catch up slightly too late to stop the cultural impact, be overly broad, drag in a lot of relatively harmless outliers, undermine the positive use-cases and won't deter dedicated high-stakes bad actors.

<comment><USER3> Personal SSL certificates? I don't see why original media can't be signed by the creator. We'll see similar measures as we do for entering passwords into non-SSL web pages:

"Warning: this video is unsigned and claims to originate from NYTimes.com."

<comment><USER4> Because that still relies on trust.

<comment><USER5> Trust, to me, is not the problem. You can build trust. Known-good certificates can be distributed physically, and require signed messages for replacement. Or, we can develop schemes for distribution digitally via validated channels. For example, each worker at a company has a particular known-good digital presence, verified by their own public key, and distribution happens with them as the source, essentially creating an expanding ring of trust to the key being distributed. Violating such a ring of trust is not going to be easy, if it is well enough built.

There are two issues I do see, though, and they're kind of the same issue. Right now, we have this concept of a central store of public certificates. It makes it easy for you to get a certificate for a particular entity, but it also makes the central store a target. If you can compromise a central store (or a machine that is attempting to access said central store), you probably have the resources to at least redirect the user to your own site and leave them none-the-wiser, and you probably have the resources to man-in-the-middle their connection entirely and just snoop your heart out. So central stores of trust are a bit of an issue, and the ways around that are non-trivial to set up. A good example is probably KeyBase, who allow you to certify your various online presences with your private key. So if someone wants to replace your information on KeyBase with their own one, and they have the resources to do so, now they also have to compromise all the places you've distributed that key to. Or, they have to compromise one of those centralized stores of trust....

The big issue with centralized stores of trust is that they build blind trust. That's the big issue with humans in general, though. We don't want to question what we're watching. And we probably don't want to be bothered with validating that the "trusted source" of the certificate used to sign this content is actually _trusted_. It's just too much mental overhead. We want it to be automatic. We want central stores of trust, because it's just _easier_. The work is going to be convincing people that _easier_ is dangerous, in this case. Or, it's going to be to convince software companies to build in inconvenient technology and not make it trivial to turn off.

<comment><USER6> "Easier" is the whole point of the society you live in.

To be fair, the point of society is trust. It's a way to trust information and ensure the species is safe.

The whole point of using markets and capitalism is because they generate more trust worthy results than top down driven systems.

Until this mess, which makes it seem like a central authority will be better than a system that leaves nodes on the three open for manipulation.

Essentially, we had a distributed decision making society. Now we found a hack to break that society structure. The cost for such a society to manage verification is absurdly high - every person will have to spend non trivial effort to verify that they are not being manipulated.

In contrast central decision making societies like China will just avoid that cost and be more competitive, beating out western democratic systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It feels like we're having the 1990s debate on "weapons-grade" encryption all over again. Yes, some software has the potential for abuse. But there's no reasonable way to stop it from being written and used. New technology springs up to counter whatever harms arise, society adapts, and we move on.

<comment><USER8> Don't expect it to turn out the same this time. Back then, technology was seen as full of promise and potential. Now, thanks to a number of actors like the familiar Facebook, our industry is no longer seen in the same light.

<comment><USER7> My point still stands:

> But there's no reasonable way to stop it from being written and used.

Can't stop encryption, can't stop P2P file sharing, can't stop deep fakes either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Imagine someone calling your grandparents on the phone with your deepfaked voice crying and saying you've been kidnapped and need $10,000 to come back home.

<comment><USER10> Deepfake voices would twist the knife even deeper, but they aren't necessary. This kind of scam already hits seniors all the time:

[https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct- perspec...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec- phone-scam-fraud-fake-lawyer-call-seniors-0122-20190117-story.html)

[https://www.aarp.org/money/scams- fraud/info-2018/grandparent...](https://www.aarp.org/money/scams- fraud/info-2018/grandparent-scam-scenarios.html)

[https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family- emergency-...](https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency- scams)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What are the top ten "bombshell" audio or video recordings from the 21st century so far which ignited action because we believed them (probably rightly) to be truth, which might these days (or soon) be plausibly denied as deep fakes, leading to inaction?

<comment><USER12> I don't think this falls into that category, but the first example that comes to mind was the 1938 "war of the worlds" radio broadcast[0].

The dramatization was written as a news report and didn't identify itself as fictional until well into the broadcast. Angry callers reported mobs taking to the streets, but the scale of the reaction has been debated.

0: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_\(radio_drama\))

<comment><USER13> That was from the 20th century, not the 21st century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Media that is not cryptographically signed and authenticated by inclusion of the signature in a trusted register or blockchain cannot be trusted to be authentic.

<comment><USER15> That's true, but it also gives plausible deniability to accidentally taped evidence (e.g. mic left on before/after a press conference). The person making the newsworthy statement, could always claim it is a deep fake.

Of course, if reliable sources were present at the occasion, they could jointly sign a recording, but under other circumstances it could be fake.

Another potential problem is producing fake confessions in e.g. criminal cases. The person who allegedly confesses would not sign the recordings, an the police's signatures are worthless if they are fabricated.

<comment><USER16> > _Another potential problem is producing fake confessions in e.g. criminal > cases. The person who allegedly confesses would not sign the recordings, and > the police 's signatures are worthless if they are fabricated._

To look at it from the dystopian, draconian point-of-view, deep-fakes created and used by the local justice system[s] could be signed by a police officer (who's intent is "solving the case, no matter what").

No matter how many witnesses and experts that you throw at it, the court will almost _always_ believe the officer (because of unjustly doted infallibility) and that deep-fake could cost someone their life.

Just as other tools have been used for good and bad, on both sides of law enforcement, the probability lends to this equally be abused; especially, in areas where " _south of the Mason-Dixon line_ " and " _the south will rise again_ " are still parts of every-day parlance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Citron is currently writing a model statute that would address wrongful impersonation and cover some deepfake content."

Existing libel laws would cover this, no?

<comment><USER18> Hmm I think it depends on alot of things. Public officials have little rights in terms of satirical parodies, so there could be grey areas in terms of using deepfakes to impersonate officials doing stupid things. Articles in the satiracal site, theonion.com, are often libelous but since it's on a comedy site it is allowed.

<comment><USER19> Great, we're going to give Trump the ability to throw Alec Baldwin in jail.

<comment><USER20> Or you can have the daily beast doxx you for doctoring a parody video... of a politician

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This might be a good opportunity for camera manufacturers to introduce a feature to sign video with some sort of authentication. If a video is true and real, then it could be authenticated by Canon, Sony, Apple, etc. Any video without this authentication should be suspect.

</comment><comment><USER22> Photoshop is more than _30_ years old. And in three decades, the impact of manipulated images on people's reputations hasn't been quite as devastating as people once feared.

Why won't it be the same this time? It's much easier to fool a human than to fool tools designed to detect manipulation, and that's limited fake photos' impact severely. As long as we have ways to detect fakes, and media responsible enough to do the cursory investigation required to verify authenticity, I don't see why manipulated videos poses any greater risk than manipulated photos.

<comment><USER23> > In three decades, the impact of manipulated images on people's reputations > hasn't been quite as devastating as people once feared.

As the cost of producing fakes approaches zero, the noise-to-signal ratio increases until people distrust everything they see and hear. I'd argue we are already on that path, and have already begun feeling the consequences. (Read about the Russian "Internet Research Agency" and their role in tampering the US 2016 election.) Deep fakes accelerates that trend.

> As long as we have ways to detect fakes, and media responsible enough to do > the cursory investigation required to verify authenticity...

Media is becoming less prone to cursory investigation (fragmentation, understaffing/lack of revenue). A GAN is specifically designed to fool detection, and they're only getting stronger.

<comment><USER24> > As the cost of producing fakes approaches zero, the noise-to-signal ratio > increases until people distrust everything they see and hear.

This is a bold face lie. The cost of producing the fake is nearly irrelevant, what matters is the reputation of the broadcaster. This has been so simce time immemorial and did not change with Photoshop.

Many journalistic revelations stand, even though they could be trivially faked. The Snowden documents would cost trivial amounts of money to fake (it's a bunch of PowerPoints), but people believe it, because se US government issued a warrant for his capture. The metadata is much harder to fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This page has an invisible Facebook like button on top of the text

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been thinking about this some recently. Is some scheme like the following remotely plausible?

\- Have a piece of hardware in-frame that can show hashes that is hooked to the operating cameras.

\- In each frame show the hash of the previous frame (low latency would be required, as would the transmission of the full-quality original).

\- Publish the original seed and the final hash (and, since the original is broadcast, the whole chain of hashes can be verified).

<comment><USER27> The fakes can do this too, though...

And how do you validate what is displayed on TV? Who will validate most videos they see?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> We've had fake news and media for years. People wisen up, even if deep fakes come about reputable media outlets will call it out.

If you want to do something more without hurting free-speech improve existing slander and defamation laws to specifically target deep fakes.

Hold the platforms accountable the same way copyright has, its worked wonders.

<comment><USER29> > We've had fake news and media for years. People wisen up

I haven't seen much evidence of this. Now we've got a significant portion of the population who calls every news report that conflicts with their view of the world fake news and then turn around and consume media which has been measurably shown to be among the most inaccurate available. All of this behavior is supported by the President of the United States. When will people wisen up?

<comment><USER30> The time scale for wisening up is measuring in years, probably 5-10 years minimum, maybe more. People and societies take a while to clue in and adapt. It will happen though. Mass social media use is a relatively new thing.

Deepfakes wont be any more challenging to deal with than the struggle for accurate information in the pre-TV, or even pre-print days. People will learn to look for reputable sources, and propaganda will keep trying to trick people in new ways.

<comment><USER31> I don't see any evidence of this, at all. I see a large portion of the populace gleefully indulging in their own self delusion, even when the ability to verify or disprove content is so easily available. To the parent's point, "fake news" has just become a convenient word to shout when you don't want to hear or believe something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This particular issue is "vexing" to put it mildly. It's nightmare fuel to be honest, because when you start trying to think of solutions to deep fakes and fake news, you very _very_ quickly, run up against the assumed norms of our enlightenment era ideals. Free speech, expression, and government control.

Because it's clear, that there's no private solution to essentially an evolutionary war between carnivore (malicious humans) and herbivore(people who don't want to be manipulated).

Right now, the Chinese total control model is the model that's working, and while on HN we may find it abhorrent, people in high places are being forced to make pragmatic choices. For them a Chinese styled information system will win out.

To prevent this, I think it's increasingly time to re-examine our norms on information and expression.

In general, taking a step back - human society (markets, media, reporters, books, news) are effectively a giant solution to finding out what is "true" and what is "something else".

We are excellent at solving these problems, we build families (parents are decision makers and know what information and implications make sense), clans (what is ideal for this group of people with similar genes I can trust), businesses (contracted people with relatively aligned interests), and more. You get the drift.

So the question resolves to: How, do we organize ourselves, to verify information, to at least keep parity with the verification rates before the internet era.

The key difference, is the mass production of information/content. The rate of content generation outstrips the ability to verify.

This last part will not change. We will always lose as an information society, if we get into a pure verification war with computer generated information.

This leads to the first conclusion:

1) clear measures to control the rate of generation of fake data.

to be blunt: this means jail. Punitive and clear response to stop this behavior, across borders.

Here's where a decent chunk of HN will be aghast. This is what I meant by our values coming into conflict with the necessities of the solution.

Which brings us to problem 2/ addendum to solution 1.

2) who watches the watchers?

If govt has the power to punish people for "fake news" how do we know that's not misused for "inconvenient news".

Well, the weak solution that presents itself is a fire walled agency, with guaranteed ability to be funded, in order to seek out and identify manipulation and spread of faked information.

Hopefully, this agency won't crumble on day 1, on the inherent contradictions of its role and responsibilities.

Some structure of this sort, gives us a pathway through the near future to deal with this issue.

Hopefully, it can be used to buy the time to solve the issue we are facing.

The irony, of advocating for a ministry of truth, in order to save the truth, is not lost on me.

But unless action is taken to stop propaganda, mass produced information creation, then it is a guarantee that our old human ways of assessing information will fail.

The only option which will be left on the table is dystopia, or some bizarre world where nothing and anything is true.

<comment><USER32> >Punitive and clear response to stop this behavior, across borders.

Good luck punishing "fake data" from China/Russia.

<comment><USER6> You develop similar capacities as them and then agree to not use it.

<comment><USER24> What, you think Putin is blackmailable? He is already accused of being a murderer in the west, what kind of leverage can you add from that?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arc Cross Reference Wiki - <AUTHOR> http://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/arcxref

<comment><AUTHOR> To understand Arc fully, I set up an unofficial wiki site for Arc documentation.

(Maybe I should post this in Arc forum but I don't have access yet).

<comment><USER2> You can use your news.yc login/pass in the Arc forum.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know. The problem is that I forgot news.yc pass. (I can still post because of cookie) Asking pg to reset the pass of both.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If a friend ask you to dress him would you do it? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> As in put their clothes on for them since they are injured and can't do it themselves? or

Becoming their own unpaid wardrobe consultant?

<comment><AUTHOR> Be their style consultant - the friend would be competing with other friends to do this and be incentivized

<comment><USER2> So I'm competing with my friends to get our common friend mark to wear the most ridiculous style possible without him noticing thats what we're doing? Sounds fun

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL - the guy invites up to three friends to curate looks for him for a given occasion with a timeline and budget

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If this is a product idea valuation post, yes. I think there are alot of people out there that take pride in their personal style and would love to help out their friends when it comes to clothes and what goes well with other clothes. I think it is an interesting idea. The only worry I would have with such a service is people being too embarrassed to ask. But good luck!</comment>


Pioneers in Online Learning: ArsDigita Computer Science University - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/arsdigita?tab=about <comment><USER2> > After running from September 2000 through July 2001, seeing the first class > to graduation, the program was forced to shut down.

I wonder why it was forced to shut down?

I bet a few of the graduates are on HN, so maybe someone has the backstory?</comment>


The Open Book Sale of My $600K eCommerce Store, With Financials - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all - OP here. I know drop shipping sites tend to illicit some curiosity (as well as a lot of skepticism) online, so I'm happy to answer any questions as honestly as I can here in the comments.

<comment><USER2> As someone who has zero experience in this area, but is curious about it for that same reason, I want to thank you for your voluntary transparency. The piece itself is also well-written and is an overall enjoyable read. I wish you all the best!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - appreciate that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> According to "The Portable MBA", the selling price for a business like this should be about 2X gross profits, so we'd logically expect about four price cuts before someone bites (predicting a sale at $145k).

<comment><USER4> From what I understand, the value would be based on a multiple of each traffic source and the likelihood of it standing the test of time... SEO traffic can expect to trade at 1.5x-2x Paid search traffic at a 6 month multiple direct navigation traffic at a 3x-4x multiple

Also, It would be based on the previous 6 months average... Not the current year sales...

Personally, I am way to skeptical of this guy finding a buyer, and than scamming him by buying up inventory through friends and entities he creates, knowing he will get 2.5x+ on each product he buys.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, the trailing six months isn't a meaningful figure given the annual seasonality of the niche. Value would be over stated in the spring (when profits are high) and under stated in the fall (when profits are low).

And while, theoretically, it could be possible to create a ton of fake transactions to boost the sale price, it'd sure be a heck of a lot of work for little payoff. You'd need legitimate transactions, otherwise you'd simply be returning the motors and reducing revenue.

I suppose I could start a trolling motor MLM and ruin all my personal relationships to boost my chances at a slightly higher sale price...

<comment><USER5> > And while, theoretically, it could be possible to create a ton of fake > transactions to boost the sale price, it'd sure be a heck of a lot of work > for little payoff. You'd need legitimate transactions, otherwise you'd > simply be returning the motors and reducing revenue.

It'd also likely be fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real value in this sale (which the author readily admits) is the organic traffic that he'll get from publicizing the sale. Pat Flynn did the same thing with [http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/niche-site-update-new- cont...](http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/niche-site-update-new-content/). The people reading about how to create niche sites are actually the ones bringing the most value to the author's niche site. It's a clever model for social seo.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the other sentiments here on losing the reverse auction. There's no need for it; pick a number that's objectively fair and leave it at that.

I'm trying to figure out what the incentive would be for anyone to buy this, let alone folks in HN-type circles.

Yes, technically it's an ecommerce business, but with wages and salaries (outside of the general part-time site administrator) being non-existent, I don't see how it can stay afloat. You allocated a portion of the shared infrastructure expenses with the parent company; why is a portion of your salary not also included? Surely work goes into finding and brokering relationships with the motor manufacturers, selecting opportunities, setting the vision, etc.

On paper, even if you allocated 100% of the profits to pay for a person's salary, it can barely sustain a single person. The only realistic outcome is for it to be added into the fold of an existing company that wants to get into the high-end trolling motor space as a break-even business unit. Potentially serving as a loss leader to sell other higher margin items.

This reduces your prospective buyers down to about ten in the entire country.

One thing I love in your data: tracking traffic -> revenue. Cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions. Let me address them:

1) The rationale behind the reverse auction isn't 100% profit based. It's the best combination of being able to be transparent (for a good case study) combined with the ability to get a good value.

The reverse auction actually prevents people from waiting until the last minute because it creates scarcity. The moment someone places a bid, the store is off the market. So for people who really are interested, they only get one chance.

2) Small eCommerce business like this usually sell for 2-3x sellers discretionary earnings, which is a term for net income with a usual exclusion for one full-time salary. The fact that a full-time salary isn't included is part of the reason they sell for a smaller multiple.

From the original post:

Currently, my operations manager, Pat, runs the day-to-day operations. He works part time and spends up to two hours per day running the operations of TrollingMotors.net. For more details on exactly what he does, please see the section on Operational Responsibilities.

When calculating seller's discretionary earnings (i.e., income) for small eCommerce businesses of this size, wages for one person (often the owner) are usually not deducted. Given that Pat and my combined operational workload for the business is less than 15 hours per week, I didn't include any labor costs per this normal exclusion in calculating seller's discretionary income.

However, I realize that most people (myself included if I were you!) would want to see the financials including payments to an employee. That's why I've listed below how paying an employee would impact the bottom line. This is the anticipated cash flow assuming someone else was running the day-to-day operations of the business, effectively putting the operational aspects of the business on complete autopilot.

Cost for employee wages is $15,000 / year (assuming $50,000 full-time salary paid at two hours per day), reducing the net income to $50,000 from $65,000.

You mentioned it can barely sustain one person which, if this all they did all day, may be true (depending on where you live). But the operational time involved with running the business is 2 hours per day, which leaves a lot of time to do other things. Most of the existing work has been done (website development, supplier relationships, etc) and the product line doesn't change much so the website doesn't need to be updated frequently.

Two hours a day can seem really low, especially from the perspective of the seller as I obviously have a conflict of interest. That's why I added real data points to the workload required for operations. Over the last year, averages are:

\- 3 email tickets per day \- 4 phone calls per day \- Average call time of 8 minutes)

...plus some work at the beginning of the year to retrofit the website for the 20 to 30 new models that come out.

If you tried to take out a $150,000 full-time salary for someone out of the business, it obviously wouldn't make sense. But for someone who wants to get into eCommerce with a minimal amount of day-to-day work and quickly get a lifestyle business into their life, it's a much better fit.

Hope this helps clear things up, and let me know if I can answer any follow up questions. And glad you liked the traffic -> revenue chart! I think it's much more useful than simply traffic stats alone. :-)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the thoughtful answers.

Related to your #1, that makes sense if 100% of your prospective buyers know about the auction the minute it's opened, but in practice, many folks won't find out about the auction until, say, 30 days in, when they could have absolutely been interested in purchasing on day one.

In short, creating scarcity isn't the mechanism for the sale; knowing that it's even for sale is.

RE: #2, understood. I suppose it's just not clear that there _is_ additional administrative work that needs to be performed beyond the operational responsibilities you outlined, and it's not accounted for, where in virtually all other departments, it is.

Btw, in another post you talk about "illcit" questions; I think you mean "elicit," though it'd probably bring up both :)

<comment><AUTHOR> On point #1, you're right - not everyone will know about the auction right away. But I have been able to alert a large group of people early.

I have a good-sized email list, and they found out this morning. I structured the sale to (hopefully) get attention as well early on, and that has also seemed to work well. This was also the rationale behind the 5% referral bonus - to get people to spread the word. So there will be some buyers who, yes, won't see it until mid-way through. But there should be (hopefully) enough early on watching to get some serious buyers interested at the right time.

On point #2 - you're absolutely correct. The 2 hours / day assumes just the day-to-day operations. There will be other things that need to be done (updating site, misc. work, etc). In the full post, I do disclose this and am not trying to say it's 2 hours a day only, for the entire year.

But generally, with small eCommmerce sites like this, there is an exception for a full-time owner salary when calculating the earnings, which is what the multiple is based on. Given the fact that the total hours per week are 20 inclusive of maintenance (if being liberal) - and a 40 hours owner's salary is usually excluded from calculating income - I feel it's fair.

And thanks for catching the typo! Would you mind letting me know which post it was in? Appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is this more open than just about any auction on Flippa? Basic financials and traffic stats are the norm, not a special example of transparency.

<comment><USER9> You obviously don't visit Flippa too often. As someone who does, I can tell you that you have quite the wrong impression. Flippa is a cesspool full of people selling crappy sites at inflated prices and if you really want to get detailed info on a site, you usually have to spend hours and hours pulling it out of the seller. Something as detailed and transparent as the auction here is a _very_ rare exception. Not to mention that it actually seems a solid business with increasing revenue over the years. Most people sell their sites only when they start going down the drain.

<comment><USER8> Well, I admit Flippa looks worse than the last time I checked it out. There are plenty of auctions with just as much detail as this post though. So, it's as transparent as a good listing on Flippa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the transparency, I'll wager that this sort of behavior will become much more naturalized in the business environment at large as pre-internet behavior gradually becomes replaced with post-internet sentiment - for now it certainly reflects very positively on you and your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have a hunch that this way of selling might get more traction in the future as well. When you're selling a business, usually the more attention and publicity you get the more buyers (and higher price) you're likely to have.

There are a few things I'm not sharing (like the top selling products, for example), but for the most part, I think the advantages from being transparent far outweigh the risks.

<comment><USER11> I think you are right. Transparency rarely hurts.

<comment><USER12> I'd imagine it hurting a lot.

Not a dropshipper, but I believe one of the greatest costs is finding profitable niches. IE many sites won't make any money at all because there's no demand.

When you do find a profitable niche, being transparent can invite competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey, i highly suggest getting rid of the reverse auction.

Imagine X is the highest value any bidder attaches to ownership of the site. Even if the price drops below X, the bidder has an incentive not to bid (since they can potentially wait and scoop it up at a discount). You're throwing out money.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Thought a lot about the auction structure and decided the Dutch style (reverse) was the best given my goals.

I wanted to combine getting a good value with the ability to showcase the bid/price - and the process - publicly.

If I did a normal open auction, there is a chance everyone would wait until the last minute to bid. I'm managing bids manually, so it could get hectic. Plus, it wouldn't be as fun to watch for people reading.

Also, if there were NO bids early on it would really hurt the potential sales price with a lack of interest.

A full-on closed auction wouldn't be nearly as exciting for people to watch, and I wanted to generate buzz and interest, plus show the whole process.

With the reverse auction, the bid management is simplified - I only have to manage one winning bidder. It also allows the process to be showed publicly. Finally, it creates a sense of scarcity. If someone really wants it, they'll be more likely to bid early to prevent others from getting it.

So is it perfect? Definitely not! :-) Probably leaving some money on the table but I thought that this was the best structure to maximize value AND interest.

<comment><USER13> You forget the value of impulse when someone is bidding :)

This would maximize intrest, but not maximize value (money).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One very important note for anyone looking to purchase this site: a huge portion of his traffic - and revenue! - is from direct visits (no search).

That is a fantastic asset to the site and makes it very sticky in the face of Google algorithm changes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks kposehn! But that is a little deceiving. Direct traffic makes up about 40% of the revenue. But about 1/2 of that is phone traffic that we get because we take phone orders via our site, which appears as direct.

So 20% is true direct traffic. But that other 20% of the total probably is originally sourced from other places (referral, search engines, etc) but they just close the deal over the phone with us.

<comment><USER14> Even at 20%, that is still a Very Good Thing. I've seen a lot of ecommerce sites (10x or more in size) with far less direct traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for the awesome article and sharing the details! One random question from looking at the charts, how do insurance/product liability for drop shipping work? Are they generally not needed or covered by someone else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. It's really a personal decision based on risk. Technically, I think consumers can go after anyone in the supply chain so, even retailers or stores. So it's not a bad idea to have.

That being said, I'd say the majority of stores don't have it....

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few questions:

* Why is Q4 Projected so low compared to Q1-3? * Why are Gross and SDE Margin % falling consistently from 2011-2013?

I think one thing that pops out at me is that while most business get better margins as they scale, your margins are actually declining or stagnant, which seem to be driven by the decline in COGS.

<comment><USER2> _The trolling motor niche is seasonal, with demand peaking in the spring and summer and dropping off in the fall and winter months._

<comment><USER16> Thanks, that's helpful.

Any hints on the declining margins?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! I was actually wondering about that when I was drawing up the financials. I don't honestly have a good answer for that.

Speculating here, but it could be minor changes in the manufacture pricing (they set minimum pricing levels). It could be slight differences in which supplier we use over time (given different costs at different warehouses). I'm really not sure. Sorry I don't have a better answer for you.

<comment><USER16> I'd like to see if it's decreasing margins over time on products or if it's due to a shift in product mix sold.

Would product level information be disclosed if I submit a request for the full prospectus?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great post and thanks for sharing.

How did you get started in this? I mean - why trolling motors? And, how did you find drop-ship suppliers for such a seemingly expensive/low volume- product?

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I picked the niche purely based on where I thought I could make money. When I started it, I had been running another drop shipping site for a few years already and wanted to try my hand in different market.

Finding drop shippers is actually a lot easier than you might think. You can't find them for every niche and market, but if you're willing to spend some time digging through Google you can usually find legitimate wholesale drop shippers without too much work. I did a video on it (see below) that might be helpful:

[http://www.ecommercefuel.com/drop-shipping- wholesalers/](http://www.ecommercefuel.com/drop-shipping-wholesalers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will you take bitcoin for the purchase price?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will if you will offer me a 60 day options contract to sell bitcoins at a fixed price after close! Otherwise, the volatility cold double or half the purchase price. :-)

<comment><USER19> You don't need a waiting period to accept bitcoin converted to USD.

[https://bitpay.com/](https://bitpay.com/)

[https://coinbase.com/](https://coinbase.com/)

<comment><USER20> Very disingenuous to post coinbase and say "no wait period" when you have to wait AT LEAST a week to get your bitcoins.

<comment><USER19> It's not disingenuous. You misunderstood. He was concerned about floating prices between BTC:USD. You don't have to implement your own waiting period to accept bitcoin into a static USD price with either service. If you do that, then there are the same short waiting periods that apply to every payment service that performs USD ACH/banking transactions before it gets to your bank account. The value doesn't change in the meanwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Part of the reason this is not a good business is you can't amortize advertising. ie no SG&A leverage going forward. unlikely to see decreasing marginal cost

why not post cash flow as well?

you will also get your ass kicked for posting projected financials without a series 7 & 63

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments. I do have a financial background, and to my knowledge companies usually don't amortize advertising. Amortization and depreciation is something reserved for large assets that have a significant upfront cost and a very long lifespan - like a building.

The benefits from advertising are usually used immediately. Buy a super bowl commercial? The benefits are definitely used up within that year, if not that week.

For a business like this, cash flow is essentially what you see on the income statement. No huge account payables (pay bills with a CC) and no non-cash expenses (like depreciation. Again, I'n not depreciating my advertising.)

Also, I do happen to have a Series 7 and 66 - but as I left the financial industry a while ago they aren't current. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's any rule that prohibits me from 1) selling my own business and 2) disclosing the financials without a license. Might be different if I was selling YOUR business for you.

If you have a financial background and/or sources for your points above, I'm very open to being corrected. Just let me know.

<comment><USER21> I was more wondering about working capital management RE: cash flow. I was originally an IB analyst @ BB.

The series 7/63 issue only applies if you don't leave the usual "forward looking statements etc" disclosure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm skeptical of OP, because I remember him on reddit saying he made over six figures on his drop-shipping sites... Unless he has other successful sites, he flat out lied about his successes, possibly to sell his ebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here! This is not the only drop shipping site I run, and I talk about the others on my blog. This specific site (TrollingMotors.net) doesn't make six figures annually - that's correct. But I do have stores that do (I mention my other stores on my blog). And, of course, the combined earnings are above the six-figure mark.

Also, I don't sell my eBook - I give it away for free. :-)

<comment><USER22> Then, sorry... I am an asshole. My bad OP, my bad...

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can you share the details of the site's tech stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. It's run on the Magento OpenSource shopping cart, and it's a LAMP environment.

<comment><USER24> Question on EcomHub. Did you use them right from the begining?

Also how did you get the intial product data i.e pics etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't use them right from the beginning, no. Have been using them to sync inventory for about 6 to 9 months now, and just recently started using them for order routing and sending out tracking numbers.

Original product data was gathered from the manufacturer, as well as independent research.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vim 8.1 - <AUTHOR> https://vim8.org/vim-8.1-released.php <comment><USER2> So, competition is good. Neovim introduces async. Bram, after years of refusing to do it, releases vim 8 with async. Neovim introduced an embedded terminal. Bram thereafter introduces an embedded terminal in 8.1. I'll be curious to see how close the two implementations are to each other.

</comment><comment><USER3> Man I wish I could switch back to Vim. GUI frontends for Neovim has made me want Vim so bad, but I just can't get away from Kakoune. The model of select first, action after (reverse of vim) is so so much better for me. Kakoune just gives me so much clarity over I'm doing at any one time. I guessed too frequently in vim :/.

<comment><USER4> > The model of select first, action after (reverse of vim) is so so much > better for me.

You mean, like the visual modes in Vim? Where you select text before running a command on it?

<comment><USER3> Sure, but that's just one aspect. For me, it's the most meaningful one though.

<comment><USER4> I get it that you have your reasons to use Neovim more than Vim, and a large number of them is probably difficult to articulate, but framing it like Vim had no mode for selecting text visually is unfair.

<comment><USER3> I don't think visual selections in vim work the same as in kakoune though, do they?

It's a powerful primitive in Kakoune, from regex to multiple cursors. My vim knowledge on selection mode is quite limited however, so I can't directly compare them.

Can you just turn on selection mode and use that all the time? I may have to try that, as it sounds like you're suggesting it's a first class feature in Vim. Something I never got the feeling of.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think visual selections in vim work the same as in kakoune though, > do they?

I have no idea. I've never used Kakoune.

> Can you just turn on selection mode and use that all the time?

How would you use _that_? Have a text selected all the time or what?

<comment><USER3> Not sure, I've not used selection mode all the time lol. You're the one who _(due to my interpretation)_ implied Kakoune and Vim were similar on the text selection mode.

Ie, even ignore advanced features, Kakoune fundamentally is permanently in a select->action mode, rather than vim's action->motion mode.

You replied to my comment of the reversed select->action mode that Kakoune uses saying that Vim can do the same thing with Visual Selection mode. So that's why I asked, is that something I can just work in all the time? Because with Kakoune, I _am_ working in that all the time.

That's why I asked, because you countered saying Vim can do that, but I don't want to constantly go into visual mode. I work in Kakoune none stop like that, it's core to the editor. Can visual mode do that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tested :terminal but I still prefer my tmux + vim config (seems more productive). But, I have to say that for ssh connections this will be really useful.

<comment><USER6> I'm psyched about what this means for debugger integration!

<comment><USER7> That would be amazing - I use tmux + vim, and the one thing it's lacking is debugger integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want to learn Vim and tried several times (with vim modes form Intellij mainly) but failed under pressure to get actual things done. I see great potential and I know I have to sacrifice 1-2 month of productivity to get up to speed but I fail every time.

<comment><USER9> I've been a heavy Vim user for 20 years, and I hear people say this all the time. Recent converts especially love to write breathless blog posts exalting Vim's editing model as the One True Way, but the truth is that if your editing speed is the bottleneck for your productivity, you must surely be some kind of software engineering deity. There's absolutely no shame in sticking with a model that works for you if you're productive and efficient.

<comment><USER10> I think editing friction can take a toll on your total mental energy. I also think that workspace automation _can_ significantly improve the speed at which you complete a task. Vim macros make repetitive tasks on any size file a breeze.

<comment><USER11> I concur. It's often easier to reduce the negative effects of friction than it is to increase the positive effects of efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After running :terminal, is there a way to yank text from my editor window and paste it into the terminal? Likewise, is there a way to copy text from the output of a command (run in the terminal) and paste it into the other window?

<comment><USER13> For Mac OS, I'd suggest sharing the default storage buffer with the clipboard: [http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Mac_OS_X_clipboard_sharing](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Mac_OS_X_clipboard_sharing)

<comment><USER14> probably a good idea, but I've always gotten by with selecting text, then just `:!pbcopy && pbpaste` when I need to get something TO the system clipboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> prank your friends:

echo 'imap <esc> there is no escape ' >> ~/.vimrc

<comment><USER16> You'd still be able to use `C-[` though.

(And I actually use it in Termux)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, could do a second imap if you really want to be cruel.

<comment><USER17> You'd still be able to use <c-c>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone identify what font is used in the screenshots?

<comment><USER19> I think it's this one: [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cousine](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cousine)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are the graphics on this page created? - <AUTHOR> https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types <comment><USER2> It looks like the underlying tech is something called 'Piotr".

[https://www.zedalabs.com/team/piotr/](https://www.zedalabs.com/team/piotr/)

([http://www.piotrantkowiak.com/illustration-1](http://www.piotrantkowiak.com/illustration-1))

<comment><USER3> Step 1: `npm i piotr`

Step 2: `piotr awesome-illustration.svg`

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT

<comment><USER4> You forgot the step where you have to pay piotr. :-P

<comment><USER5> I thought you robbed Piotr to pay Paul...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The 3D-model look isn't consistent and seems to mimic n-gon (as opposed to quad or tri) modeling at best. The shadows are certainly just decorations drawn in.

I made similar illustrations back in the early 2000s. I'd guess that a) the fastest and b) the most overall-effective way to go here is to pay an illustrator to sketch these roughly in paper or in digital form, and then on approval go in and draw with a vector tool. Enabling features like "snap to point" would help greatly here.

Take a look at some of the galleries on vector drawing software websites. You'll find a lot of things that you'd think were modeled in 3D, that weren't. Back when I was a production illustrator with my choice of 2D or 3D methods, vector 2D was such an obviously easy way to cut through a lot of BS. Vector- tracing 3D art was really only ideal for animation in e.g. Flash.

I still do some illustration work as a hobby, and if I created the art for 16 Personalities, I'd do it in 2D vectors. Heck, I used to teach Adobe Illustrator at my local college, and my Art 181 students would know the technical part of how to draw this by the end of the semester...they'd just need to learn character design next. :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone drew them? I swear, people are allergic to human effort these days. :)

<comment><USER8> Yeah I don't understand the question. What more than "an illustrator made them using some vector program" does OP expect?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps a tutorial for drawing in this style or similar?

<comment><USER8> Maybe, but HN doesn't seem like the place to ask for illustration advice? It's confusing.

<comment><USER4> Yea, there are graphics/artists Stack Exchanges for that kind of thing. I once asked how to add a fake cloud to one of my photos and got a really good response:

[https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/12858/how-...](https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/12858/how- to-a-make-a-cloud-from-an-outline-and-blend-it-into-a-photo-of-a-skyline)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi! I am the founder of Zeda labs who did the website, branding, and illustrations on 16P.

All those illustrations were created by hand. Sketched and then made into vector in adobe illustrator. It was a style that we custom made for this client.

If you have any more questions about them let me know. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> It was a project by [https://zedalabs.com/](https://zedalabs.com/)

I've msg'd their founder and pointed her here, so maybe she'll come and give some insight!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that! She could almost certainly provide some useful additional insights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> hand drawn in some vector program

the keyword to the look would be "low poly" (2D characters)

<comment><USER13> /r/lowpoly on reddit has a bunch of aspiring "low poly" artists.

<comment><USER4> I forgot about that subreddit. I use to get a lot of pixel art backgrounds from /r/PixelArtWallpapers/, but it doesn't look like people really post there any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any of these concepts can be your answer art/artist/illustration

The style of the illustration reminds me highly of Alone in the Dark

[https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware- screenshot.php?gi...](https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware- screenshot.php?gid=1737&idi=YWJhbl9pbWdfc2NyZWVucy9hbG9uZWludGhlZGFyay02LmpwZw==&tit=alone- in-the-dark)

</comment><comment><USER15> What is HN's take on MBTI? Apparently, there are entire communities on reddit dedicated to each personality type. If you go through them there's actually a pattern between people subscribed to MBTI subreddit which makes me think that MBTI to some extent is valid and not like astrology.

<comment><USER16> In my opinion, MBTI has a few key shortcomings:

1\. It creates dichotomies where it ought to create distributions. A slight J is going to be much more aligned with a slight P than with a strong J. Most people are distributed near the mean on most factors but MBTI tends to exaggerate the strength of traits.

2\. people misapply thinking-v-feeling and don't understand intuiting-v- sensing. I have talked to people who wear the label of "feeler" as an excuse for not thinking.

3\. You would think "introversion" was a disease from the way some people talk about their "inability to socialize at parties."

4\. MBTI projects static personality, in the sense that an individual won't adjust their behavior under different circumstances. I believe the creators allowed for some variability at work vs home, for example, but when you hear a person talk about their type they will inevitably say "I am an INTJ" as if it were some immutable fact.

Lately, I've found the Enneagram to be a more useful tool. It opens the door to explaining "healthy" vs "unhealthy" tendencies in the way people tend to respond. (I score as a 5 on enneagram and INTJ/INTP on MBTI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These graphics look great. However, I find the Star Wars classification of Meyer-Briggs types more entertaining

[https://www.personalityclub.com/blog/star-wars- personality-c...](https://www.personalityclub.com/blog/star-wars-personality- chart/)

</comment><comment><USER18> On another note, this is basically something like Myers-Briggs or the Keirsey Tempermant Sorter. I've never liked these tests as I have no preference for many of the questions, so my personality result changes each time I take it. I also don't like how they make everything black and white. Also, on this site I feel like over 1/2 of the 16 personalities describe me to a degree, so I find all of this highly suspect. In reality, people can be good leaders and still hungry for knowledge and a master of many toolsets. You can be an artisan, but still highly organized.

<comment><USER19> Labeling and organizing things (including people and their traits) is not bad.

<comment><USER18> I never said it was bad, only it isn't accurate to use a ~100 question test to do so.

Furthermore, some organizations will tend to only want individuals with a certain "type" in management, which leads to group-think and suboptimal decisions.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure if 100 question isn't accurate enough although the biggest problem with these is if they are written to be to generic like a horoscope where someone can find something they relate to regardless of the result and that the result could essentially match nearly anyone.

The 2nd part of your post isn't exactly an argument against its validity but against how the results are applied in a specific environment this is like arguing against the validity of genotyping because insurance companies might increase your premium.

<comment><USER18> Let me rephrase. It is mostly hokum with precious little legitimacy and to make matters worse, it is used for important things like deciding the fate of someone's career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> By white people, apparently.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hot Take: Meyers Briggs - Astrology for people with linkedin profiles.

<comment><USER23> Please don't post unsubstantive comments or snark here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The specific tool to make images such as those in the link would be great, they seem to look like vector graphics based on the actual images but also the simple fact that they are served as .svg, but I was just wondering if anyone had any further information that might be useful!

<comment><USER24> It's not about the tool, but about the ability to synthesise a photo into an illustration.

Adobe Illustrator. Sketch ([https://www.sketchapp.com/](https://www.sketchapp.com/)) Figma ([https://www.figma.com/](https://www.figma.com/)) Inkscape ([https://inkscape.org/](https://inkscape.org/))

Also they are simply served as an image. [https://css-tricks.com/using- svg/](https://css-tricks.com/using-svg/)

<comment><USER14> No. No automated tool is capable of this auto conversion as you have alluded to.

Some artist painstakingly drew these vector illustrations.</comment></comment></comment>


Functional programmers are smug jerks - <AUTHOR> http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=36534&page=1

<comment><USER2> .* programmers are smug jerks</comment>


Why do people clear the screen multiple times when using a calculator? - <AUTHOR> http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11660/why-do-people-clear-the-screen-multiple-times-when-using-a-calculator

<comment><USER2> Maybe It's because fundamentally we don't fully trust machines, so we have to make sure. Three times.

<comment><USER3> I think that is partially true, but it is partially because the design is bad for most peoples use. The comments in the link describe the follies of the CE/C button - one only clears the last input, one clears everything and they are easily confused. Pressing multiple times ensures you can actually start over like you wanted to do. This is also the reason I press them more than once - to make sure that I can start over when I want to, not after I have messed up.</comment></comment>


Records, Structs, and Data Transfer Objects in Python - <AUTHOR> https://dbader.org/blog/records-structs-and-data-transfer-objects-in-python#. <comment><USER2> good article, clear, and informative</comment>


Reinventing the Wheel: Discovering the Optimal Rolling Shape with PyTorch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/2019/04/29/reinventing-the-wheel.html <comment><AUTHOR> Let me know what you think!</comment>


Trickles – Stateless High Performance Networking - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ashieh/trickles/protocol.php

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this similar to continuation-based web programming, particularly those that passed the continuation to the client[1]?

[1] [http://www.crsr.net/Notes/InfernalDevice.html](http://www.crsr.net/Notes/InfernalDevice.html)</comment>


Nokia culture will out - <AUTHOR> http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/nokia-culture-will-out/

<comment><USER2> _Nokia's problem is not, and has never been, that it lacks for creative, thoughtful, talented people, or the resources to turn their ideas into shipping product. It's that the company is fundamentally, and has _always_ been, organized to trade in commodities._

Amen. How else to explain the continual production of a bewildering array of handsets that differ in only slight ways or in bizarre configurations. (On the latter, I'm thinking in particular of those handsets where they arranged the dialing keypad in a circle reminiscent of the old land-line phones. How in the world did those ever get into production?)

<comment><USER3> The article seemed like a lot of babbling from someone who spent a very short time at a company who's problems started over ten years ago. An insight here or there, yes.

Nokia for much of the later 90s and early 2000s was the handset of choice for the enterprise in Europe. Blackberry ruled the US market. At the same time, they had an amazing market opportunity in basic handsets in the US, Europe, and emerging markets. Nokia was the go to phone for "just working".

Things changed in 2007 w/ the iPhone and the subsequent drive towards an app based smartphone ecosystem. Before the iphone, there were "smart phone apps", but they were a small franctional percentage of what is available now. iPhone and Android have helped this app-based economy.

Nokia never got there. Developing on Symbian is a royal pain in the backside. Despite their working w/ Borland to develop tools for development, a simpler tool chain never emerged. Furthermore, a lack of an app store (ovi was late to the scene) didn't help things.

Nokia failed to adapt to this new world and proceeded to try and develop OSs at a glacial pace. The hardware has always been great, but an OS with an app (and developer friendly) ecosystem never emerged.

<comment><USER4> I agree with most what you said but this one "Developing on Symbian directly is a royal pain in the backside". Developing for Symbian directly was and is pain - actually I have spend only couple of months trying to learn that (with some degree of success) and I have not liked that too much.

Later Nokia pushed message "use Qt for everything, now Qt is everything" (or at least I got it this way). That's the point there you are wrong. Developing for Symbian using Qt is not very hard. There are still some cases where you must use workarounds or think about specifics (like touch and non-touch Nokia phones are different), but overall experience is great.

The only remaining question for Nokia is "isn't it too late?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People who have one watch know the time, people with two don't.

Smaller companies have less ideas to execute on. Larger companies have so many that they are not able to execute any at all.

A company the size of Nokia should have been big enough to start dozens of Y-Combinator style companies from their own talent base, instead produces the same products years on end.

</comment><comment><USER6> If only QT/Trolltech had a well-know market value, then they could sell it.

<comment><USER7> Well, there's really only one way to truly establish market value. That's to sell it. Try to go for as high a price as possible and see what the market will bear. The market will usually be right on the matter.

<comment><USER8> By definition, the market is _always_ right on the matter. That's the point of market value. Whether it makes sense or not is another matter entirely.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fast database for React Native with multiple data-type support - ammarahm-ed https://github.com/ammarahm-ed/react-native-mmkv-storage <comment><AUTHOR> In the iOS implementation, a new dispatch queue is created on each 'set' or 'get' call, from which it switches to the main queue to call MMKV, wrapped in a try/catch block.

Inside the MMKV library, a NSData object is created, another class is used to write a single "int" value to it, then the data object is used as the "raw" value for the given key.

I haven't looked any futher but already this seems like a lot of work to set a number in memory. Is there any reason for this?

<comment><USER2> I think you are right. I was focusing on basic implementation. Now I will make the performance optimizations needed. For example using a single instance of created class for all get set methods and not create them on every call. Thanks for pointing it out.

The second thing about numbers is that its just in case you needed it for something, it is there but there are other ways to set the data too.

<comment><USER3> Why use a dispatch queue at all? You don't use an Executor on Android. Example usage of MMKV doesn't seem to show putting it in queues.

<comment><USER2> Basically I forked this code from another repo and worked over it so the initial work is theirs. I will look into optimizing this as soon as possible. What do you think? Should callbacks be used instead of Promise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We are using SQLite on React Native with the JSI without writing a java or object C bridge. As a result, all operations are much faster and almost all of them don't need to Promise callback. I don't see any reason to use this over SQLite. We can do same thing on SQLite much faster way.

<comment><USER5> The primary use of MMKV seems to be a replacement for NSUserDefaults. I agree the SQLite is probably the best solution overall, but this could be a faster alternative to anyone just using NSUserDefaults

</comment></comment><comment> c-smile Just for the note:

Sciter implements what I call "an ultimate data persistence solution" \- NoSQL DB integrated right into script VM.

You can open storage as:

        var storage = Storage.open("path/to/data/file.db");

Storage provides root object - normal script object (or array) that can be updated by normal script means:

        storage.root = { foo:[1,2,3], bar: {...} };
        storage.root.foo.push(4);
        storage.root.bar.newProp = 42;

All script objects that are accessible from the storage.root are persist-able - pushed to HD on storage.close() or storage.commit();

More details about architecture and implementation: [https://sciter.com/data- persistence-in-sciter-database-integ...](https://sciter.com/data-persistence- in-sciter-database-integrated-with-the-language/)

Overall feature set is close to MongoDB (modulo sharding).

DB layer uses Konstantin Knizhnik's DyBASE pretty much as it is: [http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html](http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the benefit over async storage? We've built a few RN apps and never felt it was too slow to work with.

</comment><comment><USER7> How does react-native-mmkv-storage store data under-the-hood?

When I was building SwiftStore - a KV store [1] for iOS, I went with LevelDB as the choice for the underlying database.

LevelDB because it's written in c++ and used widely as an embedded database. Integrating it as a static library in Objective-C is also fairly straight forward.

[1] [https://github.com/hemantasapkota/SwiftStore](https://github.com/hemantasapkota/SwiftStore)

<comment> ammarahm-ed MMKV uses mmap to keep memory synced with file, and protobuf to encode/decode values, making the most of iOS/macOS to achieve best performance and uses c++

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why use this over SQLite?

<comment><USER2> Its simple and easy to use if you dont have a very complex data structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised to not find any iteration or query primitives. No key scanning?

<comment><USER2> MMKV is a simple key-value store but the good thing is that it is fast, A custom indexer can be made for querying. However there is a method to get all the keys in the storage but its not exposed in react native side. Is that what you mean?

<comment><USER10> I couldn't find any numbers or benchmarks in the repo. What did I miss?

<comment><USER2> Go to github.com/Tencent/MMKV to see benchmarks for iOS and android

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> can someone tell me what this is used for? Is this like a replacement for localstorage?

<comment><USER2> Yes its a replacment, a very fast one with all datatypes support, not only strings.

<comment><USER7> Is it possible to use it at the native layer (objective-c / java )? My use case is for storing/reading info before react-native JS is bootstrapped. I've tried using AsyncStorage for that but the bindings for objective-c isn't straightforward at all!

<comment><USER2> MMKV is pretty straight forward, you can use it very easily on obj c or java only. Check the native code on the repo.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What can be done to stop this Covid-19 related fraud? - <AUTHOR> http://coronavirus.edatarobot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've searched around some of the testimonials images down that page, like a dozen so far, and all of them are either AI generated faces, stock images, people on other sites unrelated to the pandemic, even a painting! It's clearly a fraud, so what can be done to end it?

<comment><USER2> teaching people to think critically and always reach out to skeptics! our culture has been conditioned to follow marketing messages creating buying urgency but people are not trained to ever question those messages.

I think questioning messages should be one of the topics that schools should focus on.</comment></comment>


Updating the concept of free speech for the digital era - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jimmytidey/updating-the-concept-of-free-speech-for-the-digital-era-6d162625279e <comment><USER2> The author had a lot of good points, one I think he missed:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Upton Sinclair

Read more at: [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/upton_sinclair_138285](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/upton_sinclair_138285)</comment>


Why Apple Refuses to Put A Keyboard on the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/23/apple_ipad_air_how_keyboard_cases_explain_the_tablet_wars_and_future_of.html

<comment><USER2> This seems like fluff and hot air to me. Apple sold 30-pin keyboards with the original iPad, but nobody bought them unless they were trying to use the iPad to replace grandma's computer.

If you do want to use a keyboard with the iPad, you can buy and use the exact same bluetooth keyboard you can use with a Mac Desktop or Laptop.

The Surface keyboard covers show the kinds of compromises that Apple probably wouldn't make. The touch cover is a decent cover, but suffers from the same hovering hand-strain issues that make on-screen keyboards unpleasant to use. On the other hand, the type cover is a poor cover, in exchange for a slightly better keyboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'll be interesting to see if there is a convergence, though. As iPads get faster & Apple invests more in the iOS versions of their software, the iPad will naturally become a competitor to traditional laptops. The lack of a keyboard is a real drawback to that, though. The idea of Microsoft as the plucky upstart in that regard seems ridiculous enough to be plausible.

<comment><USER2> Personally, I think Canonical is heading in the right direction with regards to convergence, with Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Desktop running off of the same kernel and device. I suspect that it's going to be hard going for at least another two or three years, though, especially since they'll have to target existing off-the-shelf hardware, and virtually all of the latest-and-greatest devices have proprietary binary drivers for the graphics chips. (For a while, Google couldn't even release the _binary_ graphics driver for the 2nd-gen Nexus 7, let alone an open-source one.)

At this point, I think a converged device would only hurt Apple's profitability and brand. Why would you buy a Macbook _and_ an iPhone if you could get away with just one? Plus, we'd have to deal with the differing instruction sets. (It's one thing to write an app targeting mobile and compile it for ARM; it's another to suddenly expect 3rd-party developers to start cross-compiling desktop apps for ARM and phone hardware isn't fast enough to emulate Intel chips the way Intel chips emulated PPC during the last architecture transition.)

I know Microsoft has been trying to appear more vibrant with their university recruiting efforts; they often play up the opportunities to work on Windows Phone and XBox. At the end of the day, though, developers there still have to deal with the bureaucracy and code that hasn't been touched in decades. Microsoft has often been one to explore new form factors (Windows CE; XP-based tablets, XP-based media centers), and I'm sure they still pour lots of R&D into it even today. Making products that are good enough for users and priced low enough for people to buy them, however, is still a challenge, I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Why would you buy a Macbook and an iPhone if you could get away with just one?"

I agree, but I also see this as the moment their product line would start to calcify. I don't worry about Apple's ability to make the smart moves, but it seems like this will come to a head.

I saw this from another HN post, a quote from a Microsoft VP:

"Let's be clear – helping folks kill time on a tablet is relatively easy. Give them books, music, videos and games, and they'll figure out the rest. Pretty much all tablets do that.

"But helping people be productive on a tablet is a little trickier."

[http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/23/microsoft-bashes- apples-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/23/microsoft-bashes-apples-iwork- software-new-ipads/)

No matter who says it, it's true.</comment></comment></comment></comment>