Where Behavior Model meets Early Adopters (Customer Development) - <AUTHOR> http://raywu.tumblr.com/post/28921584460/behavior-model-early-adopters

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this post after having been inspired by Nir Eyal and BJ Fogg's behavior design.

The intersection of product development in the scope of Lean Startup & behavior design is really fascinating.

Would love a bounce ideas with HackerNews</comment>


Ask YC: What do you do if American economy enters a downturn? - <AUTHOR>

An economic downturn seems to be very soon. What do you do then? Will there be many startups break down? <comment><USER3> Even with economic downturns, there are still some fundamental truths that will prevail, and industries that grow during recessions. Use these trends to your advantage. For instance, businesses always want convenient ways to make more revenue/profit and cut costs. And curiously, Hollywood also tends to grow during recessions: [http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb- dyn/news/80-03102008-1501254.h...](http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb- dyn/news/80-03102008-1501254.html)

Most startups break down no matter what the climate. An economic downturn may be a contributing factor, but not the main culprit.

</comment><comment><USER4> How many times must this question be posted here before people learn?

</comment><comment><USER5> There are a few factors at play that keep me optimistic.

First, the web continues to attract double-digit increases in advertising dollars. While this growth might slow, it seems unlikely to reverse. This means the web industry will continue to expand even if the economy as a whole does not.

Second, when the economy slows people tend to save and invest instead of spending. Given that many startups are driven by angel investment or venture funds, that's a good thing.

Third, web based and open source technologies are making huge gains in big business. They'll be increasingly attractive as companies tighten their belts. Given that the YC crowd is focused on this sort of development, that puts us in an enviable position.

I would start to worry if Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's web division, IAC, etc start making big layoffs. They could flood the market with competent programmers, driving down market rates and increasing competition for investment dollars. (Although I'm sure there are some companies fighting for talent that would love for that to happen.)

I think there's a greater risk of VCs moving to greener pastures - solar, biotech, etc - as web applications become commoditized.

<comment><USER6> In a downturn:

1\. advertising dries up completely. 2\. people tend to curb risky financial moves, such as early stage capital 3\. businesses will cut back on almost all new development

The big question isn't, "Will it get bad?" but "Just how bad will it get?"

<comment><USER5> Look at this graph of television ad spending over the last 30 years - <http://www.nextcenturymedia.com/images/Image3.gif> \- (the associated article - [http://www.nextcenturymedia.com/library/dougross- article-b.h...](http://www.nextcenturymedia.com/library/dougross- article-b.htm) \- is less pertinent.) While there is a noticeable lack of growth during recessions, it's anything but _dried up completely._

Jeff Bussgang does a nice job of explaining why VC funds are more attractive to investors during a downturn - [http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2008/01/whos-afraid- of.ht...](http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2008/01/whos-afraid-of.html)

The sky is not falling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Geographic arbitrage (i.e., use my open airplane ticket to Europe). Web 2.0 companies have an advantage no business has had in the past - <USER2> mobility.

</comment><comment><USER8> Remember that shifts are cyclical, temporary, and not the end of the world. Be happy for other countries which are finally getting a break.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, when the US economy has a downturn, the world economy follows. See the Nikkei's dip following a larger dip in the US last week. Obviously, the EU is providing a much needed foil to the phenomenon, but it's still a fact of life. As the US economy goes, so goes the world.

Of course, optimism will spike when the new president takes office, and we'll see at least a short bubble early in 2009. Whether it will end up having a permanent impact on the economy is another matter...

Anyway, smart startups are better equipped to deal with downturns than larger companies, despite the common "retreat to quality" wisdom that a couple of articles have talked about recently. Fewer employees, the expectation to run unprofitably for a year or two built right in, and a much tighter fist holding the cash. Dumb startups would fail, regardless, and those businesses in between small startup and mid-sized business--the no mans land where many "successful" early stage startups fail--is probably even more dangerous during a downturn. So, be thankful you're a smart early stage startup! (And, if you're in no man's land with a million or ten in revenues and no clue how to scale to the next level and steadily increasing expenses, best of luck to you. You'll want to hang on tightly, keep your hands and feet in the car at all times, and hope the rails carry you out the other side safely.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Focus on creating value for your customers. Startups are inherently risky, but more mistakes are made when times are good than otherwise because teams are more careless. A downturn is a great time to start a software company that provides value to its customers.

</comment><comment><USER11> I believe Bram Cohen said something along the lines of "Programmers don't take vacations any more. They just wait until their current company implodes, and then take a little time off before finding a new one."

</comment><comment><USER12> if you are young, and single and with a normal job:

1\. Make sure you are in good terms with your parents, or sister/brother, so if you loose your job, you can live in their basement for a while.

2\. If you loose your job, now it is the best time to work on that idea... for reals. Necessity is the mother of all inventions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Probably. But others will spring up in their place, and will have less of a frothy environment to grow in.

</comment><comment><USER14> You work smarter, and cut out the fat of what you do. Then you abolish the Federal Reserve.

</comment><comment><USER15> lay off two members of my personal mariachi band

</comment><comment><USER16> same thing I do when the economy enters a boom period.</comment>


Tea Party Republicans sketch out Internet policy - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/tea-party-republicans-sketch-out-internet-policy/?comments=1#comments-bar

<comment><USER2> Man, in trying to discredit the value of government and highlight individuals he's getting dangerously close to wrapping back around to the fact that the government IS individuals - all of us US citizens in particular.

<comment><USER2> For instance, part of the reason governance in Washington is so bad is Congress in general, but as he points out, one should not discredit Rand Paul in particular for being a large part of the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you can still edit the link, how about fixing it to link to the story, not to the comment?</comment>


U.S. Google antitrust case set to expand with GOP states joining - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-12/u-s-google-antitrust-case-set-to-expand-with-gop-states-joining <comment><USER2> I don't get why people are so comfortable with the idea of politicians wearing their dislike of certain corporations on their sleeve, such as Senator Warren seems to do for Google.

Anti-trust regulations are not supposed to be used as generic legal cudgels against corporations you don't like. They are supposed to be, you know, for making sure that the market remains sane.

Right now, it almost feels like "We don't like Google, and we gotta throw the book at them so that at least some page sticks". This attitude is akin to selectively weaponizing the law. Kinda like the landlord finding a reason to evict you so he combs through the lease agreement and finds a clause that your curtains need to be white but you actually have pale yellow ones. Sure, you are technically in violation of the lease, but it's very clear why this is being done, and the curtains have little to do with it.

And it explains why, for example, no one cares about Comcast or the fact that a handful of payment processors basically run their personal fiefdoms about who or what they will allow on their platform, while we are asked to be over- worried by vague claims of 'Russian tampering'.

Application of these regulations should again focus on the actual harms rather than getting some kind of cruel pleasure 'destroying' companies. The government has a lot of power, and often for good reason, but that power can only be respected when it is wielded dispassionately, not to settle personal scores.

<comment><USER3> > I don't get why people are so comfortable with the idea of politicians > wearing their dislike of certain corporations on their sleeve, such as > Senator Warren seems to do for Google.

You're talking about elected officials. Transparency of beliefs is exactly what you should want. That's the entire point.

> Right now, it almost feels like "We don't like Google, and we gotta throw > the book at them so that at least some page sticks". This attitude is akin > to selectively weaponizing the law.

Senator Warren is a lawmaker. She makes the laws. Throwing the book is the job of the executive or judicial branch. Hopefully Senator Warren has a good reason to justify her beliefs that the people agree with, but if she believes Google is bad for society in specific ways, it is literally her job to create laws that make it more difficult from them to do that. This article is about the justice department doing things and Senator Warren is mentioned as encouraging them to move faster as an aside.

> it explains why, for example, no one cares about Comcast

Senator Warren does. [https://thegrio.com/2019/12/20/elizabeth-warren-blasts- comca...](https://thegrio.com/2019/12/20/elizabeth-warren-blasts-comcast-for- threatening-civil-rights-in-byron-allen-lawsuit/)

I don't have any particular thoughts on Warren. But I do think large tech companies wield too much power and should be broken up to reduce this power. I would vote for lawmakers who felt similarly. That's about it. I'd be down for a political platform that is exclusively just wanting to reduce the influence of a handful of specific companies.

<comment><USER4> But she's not making new laws here. She's declaring that they're breaking old laws that already exist - and a huge portion of the public case she's presenting is "well, I don't like how they're using their power". It's like seeing a DA indict a guy for murder, and then deliver a bunch of press conferences about how he's a greedy businessman who'll no longer be able to get away with overcharging the public for poor quality services.

<comment><USER5> The example you gave is disingenuous. The reasons to not like Google go hand in hand with their position as a monopoly or member of an oligopoly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google et al are no saints. However, I can't help but feel like all this misdirection and grandstanding is the establishment's territorial reaction against the rise of another powerful opponent.

Whoever wins we lose.

<comment><USER7> A lot of this is basically just the republican establishment pissing into the unknown. They don't understand the scale at which google operates - the people at the committee Google's CEO testified at seem to think liberals with dyed hair get to go through and manage every single search result one byone.

Trump would not have won without social media, for example. The republican party didn't even ratify any policy at their convention, just sweating allegiance to the man - that is the position they base their actions from.

This isn't an establishment thing as much as an explicitly partisan play by part of the establishment.

<comment><USER8> Given the other side of the aisle's behavior, the Republican party doesn't _have_ to. They just have to point at looting, riots, unmanageable fires, monument and cultural destruction, things cancel culture, etc... and say "Say what you want about how we do things, but that isn't us."

And the sad thing is, it isn't right, it _shouldn 't_ work. It shouldn't be convincing. It shouldn't be reasonable. They should have to fight to articulate, react to, uphold, and reify the values of the public at large. They should have to claw and change, evolve, and do something. In this year though, it's laughable. I can't take any political party in the United States seriously given the repeated failures at generating reasonable candidates.

The fact we have the fundamental dysfunctional logic that we have to put up with the big two National conventions candidates because the anything else is a wash just demonstrates how broken the system has become, and why the Founders were wary of the social construct and institution in the first place!

<comment><USER9> The lootingv and riots are mostly far right nutjobs trying to create the appearance of chaos.

The fires are occurring in largely Republican areas of the west, on federal land mismanaged by a republican administration. And cancel culture is worse on the right side of the aisle than it is on the left, see e.g., what has happened to every former Trump ally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow a lot of comments in the theme of 'but what about this OTHER company acting anticompetitively'.

Okay, so let's bring action against them too. The answer isn't to ignore all of them.

<comment><USER11> The gist of it is that those other corporations cowtowed to the administration and could then got away with scummy antitrust behaviour. There doesn't seem to be any cases on the horizon for any of the others.

That's the problem - some people would consider that corruption.

<comment><USER10> "The gist of it is that those other corporations cowtowed to the administration and could then got away with scummy antitrust behaviour"

I think the reality is simpler; antitrust enforcement in the states is laughable and historically has been more the exception than the rule. Even the golden age of robber baron breakups was a historical anomaly due to a freak accident.

Having worked on a ton of competition filings, I can tell you that this isn't an administration specific issue; competition law itself has been defanged by a history of refusal to enforce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok interesting-- after this do

Experian, Equifax, etc

Coal mining and other swine industries that are politically connected and valuable. Of all the bad actors in the world, this seems like a funny prioritization but we live in dumb times

Another self-inflicted wound in our economy

<comment><USER13> Experian: 34.63 billion market cap

Google: 1.024 trillion market cap

Experian is also really evil, but it's not obvious to me how they're anticompetitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everyone loves to saber rattle about FAANG and antitrust, while we all sit back and let Charter and Comcast make contracts to not compete with eachother[0], we rapidly head towards having one major national bank[1] and somehow the big 4 always seem to spontaneously engage in the same bad behaviors, and Ma Bell has much been re-assembled to it's original state[2].

We desperately need a new trust buster president.

[0]: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/05/comca...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/05/comcast-and-charter-agree-not-to-compete-against-each- other-in-wireless/)

[1]: [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in- on...](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-one-chart/)

[2]: [https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time- warner...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time-warner- merger-breakup-bell-system-chart)

<comment><USER15> Ma Bell being reassembled is orders of magnitude less problematic than it would have been in the 1980s. Back when you only had 1 choice for local phone (no cell phones) and long distance calls were a quarter a minute (or more). I haven't made a normal phone call in years and have decent cell options. If I wanted a local phone I could use VOIP or get a real line (via centurylink).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why aren't "blue" states going after Google, that's the real question. It's as though they might prefer Google to be an insurmountable monopoly with total control of web search or something.

Google doesn't know it yet, BTW, but it will benefit from increased competition, just like Microsoft did. I was at MS when Google became a force to reckon with, and we used to joke that if Google did not exist, MS would just consist entirely of sales people, lawyers, and managers of all sorts. It was not uncommon at the time to have 1:1 program manager (aka people who mostly just sit in meetings and report "status" to each other) to dev ratio in teams. This is _excluding_ people managers. With competition in place you have to actually hire people who can do the work, and pay them well so that competition doesn't hire them away from you.

Google's org hierarchy when I left a few years ago was already 2 levels deeper than Microsoft's in late 00s, so I'd argue it's well on its way there. It's an inevitable consequence of not having to compete. You grow a massive amount of counterproductive barnacles.

</comment><comment><USER17> That Elizabeth Warren tweet mentioned in the article stands out to me. She has spoken about breaking up big tech in her campaign as well.

While I completely agree with regulation ensuring fairer competition; as we are seeing how much abuse total control over a computing platform can lead to in Apple vs Epic case, is breaking them up the right way?

R&D is costly, and these companies spend a lot on it which is the reason US is still the leader in a lot of tech areas. The ability to spend that much just comes from their size. Breaking up companies might lead to inability of companies to go for moonshots and invest in cutting edge stuff. With China catching up and it being unlikely of them to restrict their companies this way, will it reduce competitiveness?

<comment><USER18> Why should consumers subsidize R&D by a company with no accountability to them what so ever?

US is the leader in many tech areas due to free market competition as well as defense spending, not Google's R&D. Google is also happy to sell their R&D to China, but then somehow finds it uncomfortable to transact with the DoD.

Hard to make case Google is a net positive for the US with a straight face.

<comment><USER17> They shouldn't, the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and respect for user data, not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by breaking them up.

I will be really surprised if Google sold their R&D to China, as it makes no sense whatsoever, but my comment was in general about all US big tech companies.

<comment><USER19> > the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and > respect for user data

Yes, so what we're saying is there's clear evidence that they have failed at adhering to those regulation, so should be broken up.

> not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by > breaking them up.

Siri, define competition.

<comment><USER17> > there's clear evidence that they have failed at adhering to those > regulation, so should be broken up.

If there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then I am all for taking action. If the existing regulations are insufficient, I am all for introducing new ones as in the case of App Store debate.

> Siri, define competition.

I meant competitiveness in terms of R&D by cutting their cash flows.

<comment><USER19> > If there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then I am > all for taking action.

Cool, so that is why they are taking Alphabet to court, because of alleged anti-trust violations. If the court determines there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then Alphabet might be broken up.

Glad we agree that we ought to enforce our anti-trust laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://archive.is/12VZ4](https://archive.is/12VZ4)</comment>


Ask HN: How to get input on New product Ideas - <AUTHOR>

I'm at a start up and we've just come up with our next possibly great product.  Our target customers are managers and store owners at corporate hardware stores.  I'm trying to get feedback on my idea but it seems I keep on getting the cold shoulder.  What's the best approach?  Should I just start out in full pitch mode?  Is it just a numbers game?  Thanks for your input!!! <comment><USER2> Ask people who's opinion you trust.

Ask the people who you are going to be selling. Considering you got the cold shoulder doing this maybe you are talking to the wrong people... maybe you should be targeting the technical portion of said company.. If you are going for managers/owners I'd go full on pitch quick and easy.

Make an example product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great insight. I was focusing on how I was asking, I need to refocus on who I'm asking.</comment></comment>


Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/05/recipes/ <comment><USER2> Another even more egregious example -- around 10 or so years ago, I was a big proponent of the writing website Urbis. It was a site where you could submit a piece of writing and get feedback from other users. You can still see its activity on the Wayback Machine. It was an interesting site still without equal as far as I can tell.

From what I understand, one day, the creator decided that the site wasn't making him any money and shut it all down. I foolishly didn't back anything up and all my prose was gone. Granted, my teenage writing wasn't about to win any awards or woo any publishers. But some of the stuff I wrote was meaningful reflections on experiences at the time, meticulously edited and reviewed, and I still wish I would have been able to read them now.

What really irks me is that all he had to do was give me one day and I would have been able to save all my stuff. I have very little sympathy for any company that does anything like what Rachel describes here.

<comment><USER3> Did you at least get your money back?

<comment><USER4> i'm assuming it was an ad supported service.

<comment><USER5> I'm assuming (maybe incorrectly) that was corey_moncure's point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why I don't trust my own videos/photos/documents/notes/etc. to "the cloud". How many examples like this have there been where peoples stuff just disappears one day with no way to bring it back? More than I can count.

Though, saying I don't trust my files to the cloud is not the same as saying I don't use the cloud. I keep two copies of all of my files in 2 physical location. However, both of those physical location are within 10 miles of each other, so I also mirror everything to the cloud. That is, I always have 3 copies of all of my files, 2 in physical location and 1 in the cloud.

I know so many people that have all of their important videos and photos in one location (their phone, the cloud, a hard drive in a drawer, etc.) I can't imagine how they sleep at night knowing everything could go poof at any time. I've tried explaining this to some of them, but they think I'm paranoid.

<comment><USER7> I need to add cloud mirroring. What cloud service are you using?

I was about to give Backblaze Personal a try, but stopped because I don't like how they handle encryption. If I'm understanding their site correctly, restoring requires giving them your key. I'd prefer something where decrypting for restoration is client side.

I'm currently contemplating Backblaze B2 or Amazon Glacier using Arq or Duplicati[1] or something like that. (Or maybe using something I write myself which can better adapt to my specific needs).

Also eyeing OneDrive, since I have 1 TB of that from my Office 365 subscription, and am only using a whopping 300 MB of it.

Hmmm...could I make a large disk image and store the .dmg file on OneDrive, and then mount that image and use it as a Time Machine volume, thereby getting a cloud Time Machine backup?

[1] or duplicity or duplicacy...I'm not sure which of the three similarly named backup programs I'm thinking of!

Edit: looks like the answer to that last question is no. Time Machine does not seem to allow using a mounted image as a Time Machine volume.

<comment><USER8> Arq goes to OneDrive too. Just remember to exclude the Arq files from files that are downloaded by default if you're running the client. I'd look at B2 as well, but for the few terabytes I'd use it for it's a bit expensive with the plummeting Australian Dollar.

<comment><USER9> "Just remember to exclude the Arq files from files that are downloaded by default if you're running the client."

Funny you mention that. I'd been trying to figure out why my disks were running out of space. Turns out my Amazon Drive desktop client was syncing the encrypted Arq files back to my laptop, then those were being fed back into the Arq backup set. You can imagine how quickly that spins out of control space- requirements-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of the issue that came up recently with Twitter (I think?) re- using image IDs that were very old. A lot of professional sports teams ended up with very odd/cryptic posts.

Here is an article with __NSFW __examples:[https://deadspin.com/this-is- probably-how-the-cubs-ended-up-...](https://deadspin.com/this-is-probably-how- the-cubs-ended-up-with-porn-in-an-1829312053)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I laughed very much at that article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > someone who really gave a damn got their hands dirty

Although this person is the hero of the story, I feel obligated to point out that in today's JIRA-driven "what have you done for me lately" close-the- stories what's-your-velocity we're-about-to-downsize-so-you'd-better-prove- you're-valuable culture of "efficiency", the person who did this either had a LOT of job security (as in, compromising photos of the CEO in a public bathhouse job security) or did this on their own time while spending their "working hours" closing tickets and attending conference calls.

<comment><USER13> I've never worked at companies where using Jira was synonymous with bug quantity over quality. There will always be buglets, bugs, Bugs, and then BUGS.

On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled "is this even maintained?" because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as "will revisit later" so the issue count doesn't go up).

It's not a technology problem. It's a people problem.

<comment><USER14> _On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled "is this even maintained?" because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as "will revisit later" so the issue count doesn't go up)._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Add to this youTube's annoying habit of leaving placeholders for deleted videos in my playlists but not telling me what it is that got removed, thus preventing me from ever finding it again. I fail to see what purpose is served by deleting the metadata as well as the possibly-copyright-infringing content.

<comment><USER16> You can always almost find out by just Googling the video ID, especially if it's been submitted to Reddit or a similar link sharing site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like another outrageous case of digital sharecropping, where the value of the service was primarily provided by the users and the community they formed, yet such value was not respected, and people's work--a cherished part of their lives--was casually thrown away.

My more noble and magnanimous side would wish that unnamed service's owners and developers success in the face of such an awful mistake, while my harsher side feels like failure would serve them right for not respecting their users and not valuing things that should be valued.

<comment><USER18> Maybe we can file a patent application for a business process that discovers product features by learning behaviors within an online community. Even if we have to narrow the claims to product features that alienate the community I think we would still be able to find investors.

Full disclosure >> _posting this here to establish prior art_

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos > twice...videos are big and space is expensive...

And yet... from people who never pay the bills for anything, all I ever hear is 'space is cheap, computing is cheap, blah blah blah'. It's all 'cheap' until you have to pay for it.

<comment><USER20> In this case they destroyed the company instead of just saying 'space is cheap' and paying for it.

It isn't free, but it's certainly cheaper than killing your entire company.

<comment><USER21> Well, they clearly didn't realize that they would end up deleting their original data because they had tried to skimp on storage…

<comment><USER20> I think that's the point though - you never realize this kind of failure until it's too late. That's why you're better off biasing towards just paying for space and being careful with added complexity unless you really need it.

Being cheap about this is just likely to lead to more bugs and cost in debugging later anyway. There are tradeoffs and exceptions, but there's a reason the saying exists.

<comment><USER22> It's not just about the cost of file storage. Storing information can be a legal liability.

This is why businesses that deal with information need staff who are able to reason about the lifecycle of information.

<comment><USER20> True, but in this case they were storing what was the core value of the site and what the users were using the site for. It'd be different if they were just collecting all PII forever because they didn't want to think about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >Even inside the company, the internal tech support is essentially gaslighting the employees who report this problem, by saying things like "it never existed"

It's mind-boggling that this happens but having experienced it myself, it sucks. Attempting to address an issue that sure seems to be due to another team's system is already difficult, so when they respond "it's not us" you're not only left holding the bag but questioning yourself for doubting that system.

<comment><USER24> Some companies are caught in a cycle where they're not charging enough to their customers, much less enough for tech support, and as a result their policy seems to be to frustrate you as much as possible by denying everything if you contact them with problems, while refunding you store credit if you persist. Please send photos - you send photos - "we don't see anything wrong." A refund doesn't actually solve the issue!

Obviously, sympathy is limited for a free service, but I've encountered this with a paid service. And a few weeks later they announced broad based price increases, which made for a clearly implied backstory. Not enough money for labor costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know what product she's referring to?

<comment><USER26> Dear HN,

This post goes out of its way to avoid naming the site in question.

If you know the answer to the above question, think carefully before providing that name here or anywhere. Ask yourself how invoking their name specifically contributes value to this story. Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so.

If you can't think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you've got is "we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid", this post already does so and without doxxing them.

If you truly feel that it's necessary, proceed, but I think honoring the author's clear intention to avoid naming them is the appropriate decision here as well.

<comment><USER27> Hmmm. Inclined to agree if you replace the company in this argument with a person.

Very disinclined in actuality, since this is a company providing a service to people who have handed over custody of their personal data (It sounds like very high-value data! Cooking videos aren't easy to make!) under the assumption that they will get something out of the deal, i.e., the videos would be hosted and they would be warned if they were going to be deleted (or at least apologized to if they were deleted by accident and not lied to).

>>> If you can't think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you've got is "we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid", this post already does so and without doxxing them.

Hmm, how about "we should hold them up as an example for _users_ to avoid".

Doxxing doesn't exist for corporations, it only exists for individual people. The proper term of art here is whistleblowing or journalism. And the reason the author avoided mentioning the company name is probably to cover someone's ass who signed an NDA.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, generally agree with all this. I don't think we need to shame them, as the gp initially mentions. But I personally have an interest in understanding the exact issue, seeing the response, etc. I.e. I believe there's value in knowing the company, the actual incident, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is reminiscent of the Reply All podcast's episode about a photo storage service that had major problems. If i recall correctly, _some_ photos in that story were actually recovered, but it took a while.

...Okay, I did a little looking, and the followup to this episode was about a month later[2], and actually some pictures were able to be recovered after another company bought out the first and tried to save the photos. In any case, it's an interesting case study of an incident that shares someof the same themes.

1: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/71-the-picture- taker#e...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/71-the-picture- taker#episode-player)

2: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/77-the-grand- tapestry-...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/77-the-grand-tapestry-of- pepe#episode-player)

</comment><comment><USER30> Remember: your users are people, not faceless lab rats.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not sure if the "moments" stuff is that "14-years-old". I'm not sure about the Snapchat implementation but the things on Instagram and FB etc. surely have people of all ages using them. Though yeah that's not the main point of the article I know.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can someone explain what this "moments" concept is? I'm unfamiliar.

</comment><comment><USER33> I spotted Facebook does this on more than several occasions. "Videos are big and space is expensive and we are cheap". Not only videos, but images would also spontaneously go for some users.

</comment><comment><USER34> I make it a point to Dropbox critical files(non-media) & do monthly backups of my phone & Mac to 2 physical drives. I'd love for something which does this daily of specific folders on my phone & Mac & makes sure there are no duplicates etc. And then on a monthly basis archive them to 2 or more different cloud storage vendors.

</comment><comment><USER35> Daily reminder that there's no "cloud", just other people's computers.

</comment><comment><USER36> Surely there (should be) a duty of care over other people's data - and the loss here is actionable and costly.

I am a great believer in regulation through being sued to smithereens

</comment><comment><USER37> Just another reminder that if its not on _your_ disk drives(1), you don't have it.

(1) Yes, that is plural.

</comment><comment><USER38> oof gaslighting

</comment><comment><USER39> That's sad</comment>


Quora: Truths about the "outside world" - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Im-pretty-sure-my-reality-is-stuck-in-a-bubble-of-tech-startup-culture-What-are-some-things-Id-be-shocked-to-learn-about-the-outside-world/answer/Susan-Wu

<comment><USER2> _Most people have never heard of Instagram, Square, Dropbox, AirBnB._

 _Most people don't follow the stock performance of Zynga/Facebook and pepper their daily conversations with who has raised what, or how much startup X was acquired for._

Impossible!</comment>


Stock and Flow (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890 <comment><USER2> Another classic Snarkmarket post is Bless the Toolmakers: [http://snarkmarket.com/2011/7320](http://snarkmarket.com/2011/7320)

</comment><comment><USER3> Analogous terminology for Stock and Flow are the Garden and Stream metaphors explored in Mike Caulfield's _The Garden and The Stream: A Technopastoral_. [https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a- te...](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a- technopastoral/)

<comment><USER4> recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337759)

<comment><USER3> I became aware of both of these articles through Tom Critchlow's writing on Digital Gardens.

In this piece, he references the Garden and Stream concepts, while also adding in his own, Campfires. [https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and- wikis/](https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and-wikis/)

Then in this follow on piece, he touches on Stock and Flow referencing the original article. [https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital- garden/](https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/)

<comment><USER4> The "campfires" remind me of HN: more eddies than a stream, but still on the involuntarily short term side, like visiting a garden with a tour group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relevant essay when thinking about stocks & flows in a system: [http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places- to...](http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene- in-a-system/)

<comment><USER6> That was a beautiful read. After a few link hops from Donella Meadows ... it seems there was a programming language to visualize flows -

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DYNAMO_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DYNAMO_\(programming_language\))

I came across stocks and flows a couple of years back and it certainly changed my thinking. Interestingly this is something we sorta commonly use in backend dashboards to understand the behavior of the system, especially with regards to data. I always thought there ought to be some similar ways to envision economy with this and I find infographics trying to bridge the gap albeit still static though.

<comment><USER7> You may be interested in reading more about system dynamics. There are a number of good books out there:

\- _Thinking in Systems_ , also by Meadows

\- _Business Dynamics_ , by Sterman (slowly working through this)

\- _Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics_ , by Morecroft

\- _General Systems Thinking_ , by Weinberg (on Leanpub you can get the PDFs, it's 4 books there, as I recall the first two were published as one book when it was published as a paper book)

<comment><USER6> Awesome. Pretty much the only book I partially read on systems thinking was introduction to cybernetics by Ross Ashby.

[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Ashby's book is pretty decent, considering that Cybernetics as a field can feel unapproachable to lay folk. In terms of DNA, cybernetics and systems dynamics both draw deeply from the well of early control 20th-century theory and so there are some conceptual overlaps. In relative terms I think cybernetics does a better job of surfacing the contributions of information theory and system dynamics does a better job of surfacing the impact of stocks and flows on overall dynamics (as its name would suggest).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hobbit vs. Giant: A Tiny Example of Using Closures in Javascript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flyingmachine/closure-example

<comment><AUTHOR> I threw this together this afternoon to give an example of how one might use a closure in javascript.</comment>


GitHub commit history attributes squashed commit to committer instead of author - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/32457 <comment><AUTHOR> Per Twitter, GitHub's CEO is looking into it: [https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1235611575555256322](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1235611575555256322)

EDIT: Fix to be deployed today: [https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1235613794560118785](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1235613794560118785)

Twitter can be useful on occasion!</comment>


What's new in Cassandra 1.0: Improved memory and disk space management - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-in-cassandra-1-0-improved-memory-and-disk-space-management

<comment><USER2> (This is part 2 of 4 planned about Cassandra 1.0. Part 1, compression, is linked at the bottom of this. Parts 3 and 4 will cover leveldb-based compaction and performance.)</comment>


China's war chest of rare earth patents - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3019290/chinas-war-chest-rare-earth-patents-give-insight-total <comment><USER2> I don't know about rare earth patents, but in software, I have first hand experience in seeing just how trivial patents can be. I've seen patents so trivial, you could write the essence of it in One short line of javascript code. The patent office doesn't seem to take the "must be non-trivial" part of the patent requirement seriously at all. Handing out monopolies for trivial ideas, left and right, isn't going to end well.

Even joel Spolsky said 99.9% of the software patents out there were trivial.

<comment><USER3> There isn't a "must be non-trivial" requirement of patents. The broadest statement in 35 USC 101 can be boiled down to "new" which is interpreted as "novel and non-obvious." If these "trivial" patents are "novel and non- obvious" then they are likely eligible for parenting in the US.

<comment><USER4> What's the formal distinction between 'trivial' and 'obvious'?

<comment><USER5> The fast inverse square root calculation is computationally trivial (literally one line), but highly non-obvious.

<comment><USER6> An also not something that I would want patented, nor patentable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Without respecting US IP, hard to imagine there will be a lot of respect for Chinese IP from the US. Maybe it doesn't matter?

<comment><USER8> There are two problems with your statement:

1\. If the United States does not honor Chinese IP, that calls into question all patents in the United States. It sends a message that American courts will ignore intellectual property when the US government tells them to. Law becomes political and arbitrary.

2\. Discussion of Chinese non-respect for IP is hugely overblown. Compared to other developing countries, Chinese IP enforcement is actually fairly good, and it's been improving rapidly over the past several years. Nowadays, Western companies regularly sue over IP in Chinese courts, and they usually win. China is one of the largest venues for IP litigation in the world now.

Given the huge volume of patent royalties that American companies earn in China, it would be very foolish for the US to blow up the global patent system. The US probably has more to lose here, given that it's a more developed country with more IP.

<comment><USER9> Ah yes, this is partially true: in national courts in China, foreign companies often are successfully able to defend their IP, only to find that enforcement relies on separate local jurisdictions which have little interest in enforcing rules against their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why should anyone respect China's patents when they flout patent law that puts them at a disadvantage?

<comment><USER11> Because we aspire to the rule of law, even if they don't.

<comment><USER12> While I completely agree that the US should aspire to hold the law in high regard, there is plenty of cases where it's disregarded against bad actors.

Consider the sanctions against countries (Iran comes to mind at the moment) where that country is not allowed to pursue perfectly legal actions because of 3rd party pressure.

Sanctions against China won't work though because their international political clout.

But since much of the rare earth patents are probably needed for making defense systems, I think it can easily be set aside as a "national security", "self defense", etc... I am sure a savvy lawyer could come up with the argument.

<comment><USER13> > But since much of the rare earth patents are probably needed for making > defense systems, I think it can easily be set aside as a "national > security", "self defense", etc... I am sure a savvy lawyer could come up > with the argument.

We can desire to violate the treaties to our hearts' content, but if we don't actually have the elements the patents are referencing we won't be able to violate any of the patents.

<comment><USER12> Rare earth metals are _not_ uncommon, we have tons of them in the US, just not the processing capacity. Which is already starting to change.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, but even for example with a wartime suspension of their patents, we would be cut off from supplies immediately and it could potentially take years for our domestic pipeline to start delivering.

Without the wartime excuse I don't foresee it getting any better for the speed at which we can start mining (pretty sure it would take multiple acts of congress to allow for the environmental regs to be ignored), and if we start violating China's rare earth patents willy-nilly I don't picture them helping us with that by continuing to sell the raw materials to us.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but until there's war, patents are just a business issue, not a catastrophic one. So there really is no issues here accept who makes more money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To get a sense of the severity of the problem check out this graph: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare- earth_mineral#/media/File...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare- earth_mineral#/media/File:USGS_rare_earth_oxides_production_graph.PNG)

Couple that total production dominance with the upswing in patent applications and this could spell trouble.

</comment><comment><USER15> Rare earths are a key source of foreign currency for China, currency is presently needs to import all manner of products globally. But China is hard at work trying to make the RMB a global currency - most recently through a gold/oil/RMB market. So, understand that once the RMB ascends to a status similar to the EUR or USD you will rare earth prices skyrocket and patents enforced.

</comment><comment><USER16> What are the chances the US government can put pressure on the patent office to invalidate said patents?

<comment><USER17> Or, maybe, you know, let's keep the world trading peacefully, letting every corner of the world do and sell what they're best at?</comment></comment>


Essential advice on how to cut a cake fairly at a party. - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/teaching/cs70-s05/Notes/cakecutting.pdf

<comment><USER2> Anyone know a way to emulate a Scribd embed in Silverlight? Maybe someone should start a site that does that. TXT in PDF in Scribd just isn't convenient enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just make sure the ratio of people to cake isn't too high.

</comment><comment><USER4> You probably want a "[pdf]" at the end of the title so the scribd-haters among us don't twitch and ignore the article.

<comment><USER5> Look at the links. The main link is directly to the PDF. The [scribd] link is to Scribd's rendering of the document.

<comment><USER4> I don't mouse over the links when I'm scanning the front page to determine what is crap and what I want to read.</comment></comment></comment>


Linux Mint 16 "Petra" Xfce RC released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2516 <comment><USER2> I was very disappointed with the debian version of linux mint. It was just awful. I have used archlinux for 2 years and I wanted a rolling release easy to use, but mint debian was slow, had connection problems and overall crashed way too many times.

I moved to crunchbang and it works very well. All out of the box. Fast, very fast. Very nice design overall. I don't understand why its releases never reach the front page of HN.

<comment><USER3> I'm about ready to move back (from Ubuntu) to Arch for the rolling release support. Can't stand having to do "upgrades".

<comment><USER4> Could not agree more, although I dislike Arch. The reason I do is since it's extremely unsafe, I would want something as bleeding edge as Arch but with a purely functional package manager like Nix or GNU Guix. (I know you can install Nix on Arch but then I will still have to use Nixpkg repo.)

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by unsafe? It seems stable enough for a laptop. I wouldn't run it on a production server though.

<comment><USER5> Many AUR packages just pull from the HEAD of some git repo or pull down X random tarball from a URL.

With something like Debian, you have layers of package maintainers in the middle to insulate against attacks, and specific, immutable bundles of data included in the packages themselves. Also, the entire Debian infrastructure (signing keys and all) being compromised, and such an incident going unnoticed, is a much less likely occurrence than the same for the hosting site some individual software author uses.

Sure, you can still add third-party repositories to Debian and install deb packages from outside the main sources. But when you do that, you're making a conscious decision to do so, on a package-by-package basis. Any package you pull from AUR could be vulnerable, unless you manually check the source of each and every one. When you install from the Debian repos, you can trust that a certain standard of quality and security is being upheld.

<comment><USER3> How does this compare to the safety of Ubuntu? Is a rolling release distro inherently less safe than a fixed release distro?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this somehow more notable than other distro + desktop releases?

<comment><USER7> I'm wondering that myself. Mint doesn't normally use XFCE, or at least didn't when I used it in the past. It was always a fork of GNOME. So maybe that's the news?

Mint is also pretty popular as an alternative to Ubuntu for Linux newbs, so I can see why people think it's interesting and upvote. We get a fair amount of distro release announcements on HN.

<comment><USER8> Indeed XFCE is a new option. It used to be only MaTe or Cinnamon desktop environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know upgrades-in-place are not officially supported by Mint, but has anyone done it for 15->16 without exploding their system?

</comment><comment><USER8> I swapped Ubuntu for Mint Cinnamon,

Mint Cinnamon for Xubuntu.

Maybe Mint with XFCE is what I really want :P Will try it for sure :)

<comment><USER10> What was wrong with Mint Cinnamon? I've been using Mint 13 for a while and I was just about to upgrade to 16.

<comment><USER11> Its nice, but occasionally Cinnamon seems to grab the CPU and take a huge amount of resources for no apparent reason.

<comment><USER12> Is it the nemo file manager? under some circumstances, nemo starts to hog memory and CPU. It has to be killed. It will restart ok when you open the file manager again. Aside that annoyance, all has been working fine. I don't recall exactly but it is a known bug in 15, so I expect it to be fixed in 16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One word, for those in the know ;-)

-Aptosid</comment>


The most ridiculous job interview questions - <AUTHOR> http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/05/the-most-ridiculous-job-interview-questions/ <comment><USER2> _Given the numbers 1 to 1,000, what is the minimum number of guesses needed to find a specific number, if you are given the hint 'higher' or 'lower' for each guess you make?_

Log_2 1000.

 _"How many balloons would fit in this room?"_

.64 * length * width * height (distance measurements roughly in feet).

 _"How do you weigh an elephant without using a scale?"_

Displacement of the zoo environment's pool.

 _"If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?"_

Let d = Log_2 N. Sum 2^(d-k) for k = 0 ... d

 _""You have three boxes. One contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled so that no label accurately identifies the contents of any of the boxes. Opening just one box, and without looking inside, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?"_

The fact that no label is correct reduces the degrees of freedom by one, making the problem solvable.

 _"How many ..."_

The packing efficiency of randomly organized spheres is .64. Know this number. Fear it.

<comment><USER3> Not to be too much of a smartass, but I'd be tempted to say "1" for the "minimum number of guesses" question. After all, you could be correct right off the bat and 1 is a technically correct answer to the ? as stated.

<comment><USER4> If we're going to be a smartass about it, the question never specifies that we're only looking at integers, so I'm forced to assume we're looking at reals.

Thus the probability of you correctly guessing the correct number within any finite number of guesses is zero.

<comment><USER5> _Given the numbers 1 to 1,000_

Seems to me like they're asking for integers, but suppose they mean reals. Depending on the distribution, you can still guess the right number with positive probability. It could be dominated by 500!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as I love logic puzzles, the _real_ question is "How can you convince someone with hiring authority in the company that you would be an asset to them personally?"

This does not typically involve resumes or dredging up old math team tricks on command.

<comment><USER7> As part of a technical interview, then yes it can help determine if the credentials (college degree) actually taught you anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Assuming that it was an interview for an electrical engineering position, the Intel question "Explain quantum electrodynamics in two minutes, starting now" doesn't seem at all ridiculous. If you don't understand the topic well enough to give a brief overview of the concepts, you're not qualified to work an engineering job in the semiconductor industry.

<comment><USER4> Quantum electrodynamics? Really? OK, give me your two-minute explanation starting now.

<comment><USER8> I didn't say that I was qualified to work an electrical engineering job at Intel. (I'm not.) However, I know enough (from watching Feynman's University of Auckland lectures - see <http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8>) to understand that QED theory is absolutely fundamental to Intel's business, both in chip design and in manufacturing processes.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure you're not getting quantum electrodynamics confused with quantum mechanics? Because QED barely matters in semiconductors at all. Pretty much anything you could possibly care about in semiconductors can be done with the plain ol' Schroedinger equation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I interviewed with Epic Systems last week, saw the question about flowers, and answered it correctly. If all but 2 are roses, all but 2 are daisies and all but 2 are tulips, you have three flowers (one of each).

Contrary to the article, though, Epic asked this on a written assessment test, so they were not so interested in thought process.

<comment><USER10> Would two gardenias work as well?

<comment><USER9> Seems it would, but there might be an issue with having a bouquet of two flowers. Still, I like your answer better... predicating on the empty set is fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of these aren't all that ridiculous.

The worst type of interview question is the "you either know it or you don't" type. There's some special trick to solving it, and it's so overused that half the people being interviewed have heard it before. The "blender" one here is an example -- I've heard it a couple of times before, but I've never thought of a good solution... I guess I'm not sufficiently familiar with blender design. Is it a good move just to wrap myself around the blade shaft?

 _"Using a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on how weird you are."_ : You could tell a lot about a person (especially a person straight out of college) by their answer to this one. Not sure what I'd give myself. Maybe a 2 pi.

 _"Explain to me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years."_ \-- sounds like a silly question, but _wow_ you're going to be able to find out a lot about a person's world view by the way they answer that.

 _"If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?"_ \-- this I don't like. It makes me feel like I'm being interviewed by a nine-year-old. Also, is it too obvious to say Batman? Probably.

 _"What is your fastball?"_ \-- What? Is this a baseball thing?

<comment><USER11> I like the fastball question. To me a fastball is directly challenging the batter. No trickery. Your best against my best. Hit it if you can.

<comment><USER4> I still don't get what the question is supposed to mean.

<comment><USER12> I believe it is asking what you think is your greatest strength.

<comment><USER7> What is your best move. Depends upon the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone is interested in answering such questions, or are interviewing for positions that would require them to answer such questions, they should read the following book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts- Puzzle/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts- Puzzle/dp/0316919160)

In my past life, I used to work in private equity, and as such before landing that job has a lot of interviews which posed such questions for trading, banking, quant hedge funds etc.

The ridiculousness of these questions amazes me; most companies spit out the same 1000 questions or so across multiple candidates, and eventually people just learn the answers to such questions and memorize them.

I think case interviews, where you actually have to solve problems are much more effective, and can be used towards different positions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe I'm getting old, picky, arrogant, or some other malady, but I am simply uninterested in working at a company that asks these types of riddles. There are many more practical ways to gauge people's thought processes, and I'd like to think that my PhD and patents are superior evidence of abstract thought than answering questions that are common enough to have books published about them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the Saki character who was asked a young woman how many chickens she could keep in a pen of certain dimensions. His reply "Whole crowds, as long as you keep the door closed." satisfied her, or at least closed of further questions.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this Glassdoor's way of pranking CNN?</comment>


Bitinstant Has Shut Down (For Now At Least) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitinstant.com/

<comment><USER2> This must be the first time their team has done any professional work. You don't just shutdown your site in the middle of a craze, you see what happened to mtgox. These guys are way over their heads.</comment>


Curl vs. Wget - <AUTHOR> https://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html <comment><USER2> For my usage:

* Wget's the interactive, end-user tool, and my go-to if I just need to download a file. For that purpose, its defaults are more sane, its command line usage is more straightforward, its documentation is better-organized, and it can continue incomplete downloads, which curl can't.

* Curl's the developer tool-- it's what I'd use if I were building a shell script that needed to download. The command line tool is more unix-y by default (outputs to stdout) and it's more flexible in terms of options. It's also present by default on more systems-- of note, OSX ships curl but _not_ wget out of the box. Its backing library (libcurl) is also pretty nifty, but not really relevant to this comparison.

This doesn't really need to be an "emacs vs. vim" or "tabs vs. spaces"-type dichotomy: wget and curl do different things well and there's no reason why both shouldn't coexist in one's workflow.

<comment><USER3> > This doesn't really need to be an "emacs vs. vim" or "tabs vs. spaces"-type > dichotomy: wget and curl do different things well and there's no reason why > both shouldn't coexist in one's workflow.

Totally agree. I love curl for testing API request/responses manually. It's usually a huge part of navigating my way around a new API that doesn't have a client library available for whatever language I'm using at that time.

I also use it for weird requests that need special headers or authentication.

Wget is the first thing I turn to when I'm downloading anything remote from the command line or scraping some remote content for analysis.

<comment><USER4> Random plug: Another invaluable tool for API analysis is [http://mitmproxy.org](http://mitmproxy.org).

<comment><USER5> Thanks for mentioning it! :) One of the authors here, happy to answer any questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite use of wget: mirroring web documentation to my local machine.

        wget -r -l5 -k -np -p https://docs.python.org/2/

Rewrites the links to point local where appropriate, and the ones which are not local remain links to the online documentation. Makes for a nice, seamless experience while browsing documentation.

I also prefer wget to `curl -O` for general file downloads, simply because wget will handle redirects by default, `curl -O` will not. Yes, I could remember yet another argument to curl... but why?

That said, I love curl (combined with `jq`) for playing with rest interfaces.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the jq tip. I hadn't seen that before. Link if anyone's interested:

[https://stedolan.github.io/jq/](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/)

<comment><USER8> Underscore CLI looks interesting as well, though I haven't personally had much of a chance to play with it. It does require NodeJS, which might be a deal- breaker for some, but if it's already in your toolchain then it might come in handy.

[https://github.com/ddopson/underscore- cli](https://github.com/ddopson/underscore-cli)

<comment><USER9> I've written a similar tool underscore-cli and jq called jowl. It's designed to be easier to learn (for JavaScript developers) than underscore-cli or jq. The README includes a comparison.

It's still early in its development, and would benefit from a tutorial and a few more features, but it's getting there.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/jowl](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jowl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also putting this out there—for nicer REST API interaction on the CLI, and a little more user-friendliness, you might also want to add HTTPie[1] to your toolbelt.

It's not going to replace curl or wget usage, but it is a nicer interface in certain circumstances.

[1] [https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie](https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie)

<comment><USER11> This is an extremely minor quibble, but the dependency on Python makes me less inclined to use it. I'm stuck on Windows for a lot of the work I do so configuring Python is never fun and there is no one line installation method from what I can tell.

Putting it up on chocolatey[0] might be a good idea. Not sure how feasible that is however.

[0] [https://chocolatey.org/packages?q=httpie](https://chocolatey.org/packages?q=httpie)

<comment><USER12> Should have lead that comment with "I'm on Windows, so".

Of course it's going to be miserable to use any command-line tool on Windows. It's Windows.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure why you feel like that, I switched back to Windows after ~1 year of using OSX, I wouldn't say its "miserable" there is really nothing I could do in OSX's command line that can't do in windows.

<comment><USER14> What is your Windows command-line environment? Plain CMD prompt or Cygwin? Or something else?

<comment><USER15> Powershell is very powerful and for windows it beats cygwin/mingw. Not quite sure how it measure against Linux shells running on Linux, but Microsoft has really made a proper shell for windows, too bad it looks so different.

Obviously if you work in a cross-platform environment, cygwin/mingw is still the only thing that will provide you some sort of consistency in your workflow on Windows machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Though only briefly mentioned in this article at the buttom, I'd like to give a huge shoutout to aria2. I use it all the time for quick torrent downloads, as it requires no daemon and just seeds until you C-c. It also does a damn good job at downloading a list of files, with multiple segments for each.

<comment><USER14> +1 for aria2. It's like the VLC of command-line download tools - it Just Works with anything.

[https://aria2.github.io/](https://aria2.github.io/)

<comment><USER17> Also can be installed with brew.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I instinctively go to `wget` when I need to, uhm, get the file into my computer[1]. `curl -O` is a lot more effort :P

Other than that, curl is always better.

[1] Aliasing `wget` to ~`curl -O` might be a good idea :)

<comment><USER19> I use wget for downloads because it follows links by default and resume is just -c. I never figured out how to make curl do the equivalent of -c.

<comment><USER20> Lets compare the length of the man page:

        $ man curl | wc -l
        1728
        $ man wget | wc -l
        1096

How about the --help output?

        $ curl --help | wc -l
        178
        $ wget --help | wc -l
        176

The wget help is nicer, grouping options together by category and with longer text. curl just has a long list of options in alphabetical order. How many (long) options do they have?

        $ curl --help | grep -- -- | wc -l
        175
        $ wget --help | grep -- -- | wc -l
        137

I'd say it is a lot quicker to work out the flags etc you need with wget because there is less to look through.

<comment><USER21> "I'm glad I typed `man wget` instead of `wget --help`" \-- no one ever

You want the `wget --help` text over the man page, 99% of the time. The other 1%, you want the full info manual. The man page is an awful mix between the two; too dense for scanning through for the flag you need, but not containing the full information when you need specifics.

<comment><USER22> > no one ever

Except [at least] me.

I like man better because it's consistent. Some tools want --help, -help, -h, -H, -\? etc.

I like man better because I can search it.

I like man better because it gives me the details, not just a list.

<comment><USER21> For all of the reasons you gave (except search--that's what grep is for), I usually reach for `man`. But, for wget the information density of the man page is just wrong. At least these days it has some more information in it--it used to just be a reformatted version of the --help text, plugged into a generic template.

<comment><USER22> grep on help output is annoying sometimes since many programs send it on stderr and you need to redirect it if you want to pipe it to grep.

Plus even if grep matched something you can't read the context without extra options.

man is much easier than doing all that, but the time you have your full search command you would have already gotten your info from man.

<comment><USER23> |& is useful in these cases, as it redirects both stdout and stderr to the piped process's stdin. It's a cshism, but it works in both zsh and modern bash. Much nicer than typing _cmd 2 >&1 | cmd_.

For context try _grep -2_ , where 2 is the desired lines of context.

      $ wget --help |& grep -2 base
        -i,  --input-file=FILE           download URLs found in local or external FILE
        -F,  --force-html                treat input file as HTML
        -B,  --base=URL                  resolves HTML input-file links (-i -F)
                                           relative to URL
             --config=FILE               specify config file to use
      --
                                           existing files (overwriting them)
        -c,  --continue                  resume getting a partially-downloaded file
             --start-pos=OFFSET          start downloading from zero-based position OFFSET
             --progress=TYPE             select progress gauge type
             --show-progress             display the progress bar in any verbosity mode

(Not that I'm arguing that this is an excuse for wget's [and GNU projects' in general] man pages sucking, but it's a useful workaround.)

<comment><USER22> I know how to do it, that's not the question.

But rather, doing all that seems easier than man to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Wget can be typed in using only the left hand on a qwerty keyboard!"

I love both of these, but wish that curl was just like wget in that the default behavior was to download a file, as opposed to pipe it to stdout. (Yes, aliases can help, I know.)

<comment><USER25> Streaming to stdout is more Unix-y, allowing you to pipe the response into further processes. For example:

        curl http://api.example.com/json | jq '.["someKey"]' # etc., etc.

<comment><USER26> It may be more unix-y, but it's less user-friendly if the expectation is to just download a file.

EDIT: Wow, surprised by the downvotes. I don't think I said anything controversial (y'know principle of least surprise and all), but maybe I was being a bit too opaque: _wget_ , by virtue of being the first on the scene, built an expectation that $THING_THAT_GETS_URLS would result in a file without any other input/arguments. Curl, to this day, surprises me because I was around when wget was all you had.

<comment><USER27> Nonsense. You can use both tools. 'curl' is 'cat url', and by default is meant to behave like 'cat' \- that is, send stuff to STDOUT. 'wget' is 'web get', and gets an object from (only) the web or ftp, and plonks it on your filesystem. They both do exactly what they're supposed to (according to name), by default.

<comment><USER26> > 'curl' is 'cat url',

Whoa... TIL something! I don't know if that's the official etymology, but that's a great mnemonic!

EDIT: ... and yes, I use both tools :).

<comment><USER27> Well, it looks like I was taught wrong, and it's not 'cat URL' (though that's a good way to think of it), but the rather more direct-to-STDOUT-sounding 'see URL'. TIL something too :)

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

<comment><USER28> My first impression is 'cat URL' not 'see URL'. The wikipedia article does not have to be official.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use wget when I need to download things.

curl is for everything else (love it when it comes to debugging some api)... Httpie is not bad too for debugging but most of them time I forget to use it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Since aria2 was only passingly mentioned, let me list some of its features:

\- Supports splitting and parallelising downloads. Super handy if you're on a not-so-good internet connection.

\- Supports bittorrent.

\- Can act as a server and has a really nice XML/JSON RPC interface over HTTP or WebSocket (I have a Chrome plugin that integrates with this pretty nicely).

They're not super important features sure but I stick with it because it's typically the fastest tool and I hate waiting.

</comment><comment><USER31> Curl gets another point for having better SNI support, as wget versions until relatively recently didn't support it.

This means you can't securely download content using relatively recent (but not the newest) versions of wget (such as any in the Ubuntu 12.04 repos) from a server which uses SNI, unless the domain you're requesting happens to be the default for the server.

As an example, I found the file [https://redbot.org/static/style.css](https://redbot.org/static/style.css) only accessible with SNI. Try `wget [https://redbot.org/static/style.css`](https://redbot.org/static/style.css`) vs. `curl -O [https://redbot.org/static/style.css`](https://redbot.org/static/style.css`) on Ubuntu 12.04. Domain names which point to S3 buckets (and likely other CDNs) will have similar issues.

</comment><comment><USER32> For me defaults matter... 99% of the time when I want to use wget or curl, I want to do it to download a file, so I can keep working on it, from the filesystem.

wget does that without any parameters. Curl requires me to remember and provide parameters for this obvious usecase.

So wget wins every time.

</comment><comment><USER33> If nobody's tried it, _axel_ mentioned in the report as possibly abandoned has the awesome feature of splitting a download in to parts and then establishing that many concurrent TCP connections. Very useful on individual TCP flow rate- limited networks.

<comment><USER34> Haven't found anything better than axel to saturate the link yet.

<comment><USER35> Try saldl[1]. It depends on libcurl. So protocol support should be good and reliable.

[1] [https://github.com/saldl/saldl](https://github.com/saldl/saldl)

<comment><USER33> [https://github.com/saldl/saldl/wiki/saldl_vs._aria2](https://github.com/saldl/saldl/wiki/saldl_vs._aria2)

<comment><USER35> FWIW, this page is incomplete and outdated.

For example, `--mirror-url` was implemented. So, it is now possible to download from two sources concurrently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> We are forgetting our long lost cousin, fetch. [http://www.unix.com/man- page/FreeBSD/1/FETCH/](http://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/1/FETCH/)

</comment><comment><USER37> wget has the amazing flag `--page-requisites` though, which downloads all of an html documents' css and images that you might need to display it properly. Lifesaver.

<comment><USER38> wget has another great flag, -k, which changes references to the css, js, and images to absolute URLs, resulting in a 1 page download that still looks like the original page. It's useful for making dummy pages for clients. I wish curl had this for my OSX friends who need the functionality above. Getting a wget binary onto OSX is a pain but curl is there by default.

<comment><USER39> Whoa, nice, thanks for the tip! That's amazingly useful and I seriously wish I had known about it earlier!

For OS X users, you can get wget pretty easily with Homebrew¹. Just install it, then enter the following:

brew install wget --with-gpgme --with-iri --with-pcre

…well, those extra options aren't strictly needed. Just what I used since I wanted wget compiled with support for those things (GnuPG Made Easy², Internationalized Resource Identifiers³, and Perl Compatible Regular Expressions⁴).

You can see all the compile-time options _before_ installing wget by typing in:

brew info wget

――――――

¹ — [http://brew.sh/](http://brew.sh/)

² — [https://www.gnupg.org/related_software/gpgme/](https://www.gnupg.org/related_software/gpgme/)

³ — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_resource_ide...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_resource_identifier)

⁴ — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Compatible_Regular_Expres...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Compatible_Regular_Expressions)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> After vi vs. emacs, this is truly the great debate of our generation.

<comment><USER41> Come on people, who already emails with curl. Admit it.

<comment><USER42> This would be better directed at those who use Outlook. The ones using curl to send mails will be boasting about it ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Really interesting. Under curl he has:

"Much more developer activity. While this can be debated, I consider three metrics here: mailing list activity, source code commit frequency and release frequency. Anyone following these two projects can see that the curl project has a lot higher pace in all these areas, and it has been so for 10+ years. Compare on openhub"

Under wget he has: "GNU. Wget is part of the GNU project and all copyrights are assigned to FSF. The curl project is entirely stand-alone and independent with no organization parenting at all with almost all copyrights owned by Daniel."

Daniel seems pretty wrong here. Curl does not require copyright assignment to him to contribute, and so, really, 389 people own the copyright to curl if the openhub data he points to is correct :)

Even if you give it the benefit of the doubt, it's super unlikely that he owns "almost all", unless there really is not a lot of outside development activity (so this is pretty incongruous with the above statement).

(I'm just about to email him with some comments about this, i just found it interesting)

<comment><USER44> "almost all copyrights owned by Daniel." and "389 people own the copyright to curl" aren't mutually exclusive. I think Daniel was saying that most of the code is copyright to him, and you are saying that the rest is copyright to 388 other people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Unmentioned in the article - Curl supports --resolve, this single feature helps us test all sorts of scenarios for HTTPS and hostname based multiplexing where DNS isn't updated or consistent yet, e.g. transferring site, bringing up cold standbys, couldn't live without it (well I could if I wanted to edit /etc/hosts continuously)

</comment><comment><USER46> wget was the first one I learned how to use by trying to recursively download a professor's course website for offline use, and then learning that they hosted the solutions to the assignments there as well..

I did well in that course, granted it was an easy intro to programming one. ;)

</comment><comment><USER47> > Wget requires no extra options to simply download a remote URL to a local > file, while curl requires -o or -O.

I think this is oddly the major reason why wget is more popular. Saving 3 chars + not having to remember the specific curl flag seems to matter more than what we can think.

<comment><USER48> I'm always amused by people who do the opposite: using wget to send get/post requests to web servers and having to add `-O /dev/null' (or, even worse `-O - > /dev/null'to keep from saving the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Curl scripts allow open connection to view all new logs in a session.

can wget do similar? I did not know it can or could however from my point of view if it cannot this is like comparing a philips head screwdriver to a powertool with 500pc set.

<comment><USER50> What do you even mean by logs in a session?

<comment><USER49> for example, in troubleshooting with a bluecoat proxy, I can run a curl session in conjuction with grep to check for very specific types of traffic and leave that script open while I might have an end user test.

<comment><USER50> Sorry, can't imagine what you mean. Do you just start curl with a list of urls to process and grep for errors? Any specific examples?

<comment><USER49> it acts like a live packet capture of a log file.

not sure how else to describe other than I do not think wget is capable of such functionality.

<comment><USER50> sooo... "wget -O - .... | grep ..." ?

<comment><USER49> havent not worked with it in that matter, however like someone above said.

typically I use wget to download, and curl to troubleshoot http https.

however, if that is capable of keeping everything open I suppose thats a point for wget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> aria2 is much more reliable when downloading stuff, especially for links which involve redirections.

For example here's a link to download 7zip for windows from filehippo.com.

Results:

* Curl doesn't download it at all.

      curl -O 'http://filehippo.com/download/file/bf0c7e39c244b0910cfcfaef2af45de88d8cae8cc0f55350074bf1664fbb698d/'

gives:

      curl: Remote file name has no length!

* Wget manages to download the file, but with the wrong name.

      wget 'http://filehippo.com/download/file/bf0c7e39c244b0910cfcfaef2af45de88d8cae8cc0f55350074bf1664fbb698d/'

gives:

      2016-03-03 18:08:21 (75.9 KB/s) - 'index.html' saved [1371668/1371668]

* aria2 manages to download the file with the correct name with no additional switches.

      aria2c 'http://filehippo.com/download/file/bf0c7e39c244b0910cfcfaef2af45de88d8cae8cc0f55350074bf1664fbb698d/'

gives:

      03/03 18:08:45 [NOTICE] Download complete: /tmp/7z1514-x64.exe

<comment><USER35> The URL does not work right now. But I tried another one from the same site.

No client can get this right, always. aria2c is not more reliable. It's just choosing to take the filename from the redirect URL. It appears to be the right thing to do in this case. But it would fail if the start URL was actually the one that had the right filename.

Hosts can use the Content-Disposition header if they want to make sure all (capable) clients get the right filename.

In saldl, I implemented `--filename-from-redirect` to handle your use-case. But It's not set by default.

<comment><USER42> Thanks for the explanation. But generally I have found aria2 to be more reliable in such scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Useful to know: If you use the Chrome dev tools, in the network tab, you can right click on a request and "Copy as cURL".

</comment><comment><USER52> My usage pattern has been:

      - wget to download files (or entire sites even)

      - curl to debug everything http/https

</comment><comment><USER53> For certain case like creating a Telegram bot which has no interaction with browser, do you think we can make use of curl (post request) to make PHP session works?

As there's no browser interaction in Telegram bot, the script just receives response back from Telegram server. This might help to kerp track of user state without a need of db?

</comment><comment> X-Istence I use curl because it is generally installed. I prefer not to install wget, especially on customer machines because it stops 90% of script kiddies. For some reason wget is the only tool they will attempt to use to download their sploit.

<comment><USER54> Pretty sure skiddies will not assume most victims have wget already, they'll just ship it with the exploit. If not installing wget is an annoyance to a hacker, they're already in too deep ;)

<comment> X-Istence Your stock standard drive by PHP exploit attempts usually attempt to "wget" another PHP file to public_html.

They try wget, fail, and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I should probably write a "saldl vs. others" page someday.

> _Wget supports the Public Suffix List for handling cookie domains, curl does > not._

This is outdated info. (lib)curl can be built with libpsl support since 7.46.0.

<comment><USER55> Released on 2015-12-02, so it wont be in many dists for some years. :-)

<comment><USER35> Stability and security comes first. So, let's ship an X years old curl release + patches ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Nowaday I just use httpie. It's in Python, so easy to install in windows, and let me work easily with requests and responses, inspect the content, add coloration, etc. Plus the syntax is much easier.

</comment><comment><USER57> I like Wget's option to continue a file download if it gets interrupted. I believe you can achieve the same thing in curl but its not as simple as just setting a flag (-c).

</comment><comment><USER58> >> Wget can be typed in using only the left hand on a qwerty keyboard!

Great!

</comment><comment><USER59> Wget is under GPLv3 so thats what I use more often. Sometimes I will use curl in certain cases, but yes, I will use a GPL product over a non-gpl product if given a choice.

</comment><comment><USER60> The "only need a left hand" sways me for wget.

</comment><comment><USER61> There is no other industry where tools are debated so much as in IT. We literally waste tonns of hours on arguing over minor differences and nuances that really should not matter that much.

<comment><USER62> There's a balancing act between trying to cut a tree with a blunt ax that one never resharpens versus spending all week in an ax store looking at different axes. (Speaking of which I'm doing something like that by looking at hn so I'm not trying to say bad to anyone else because I'd be a hypocrite if I did)

<comment><USER63> "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." \- commonly attributed to Abraham Lincoln

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> curl for checking http headers simply with: curl -vskL http:188.8.131.52 -H "Host: example.com" > /dev/null

<comment><USER65> Why don't you just use the -I flag?

<comment><USER64> For some sites a HEAD may return different headers than GET, so it is safer to return the results in full. Also using vsk shows the request headers, including IP so you can easily see if things such as roundrobin DNS is in use, again to assist with debugging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Who funds projects like this?

</comment><comment><USER67> TLDR: curl rocks.

<comment><USER54> Unless you want to download a web site for archiving purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Wget just werks.

</comment><comment><USER69> You should all check out wpull!

<comment> mh- [https://github.com/chfoo/wpull](https://github.com/chfoo/wpull)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Everything 6 years old is new again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241479](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241479)

<comment><USER71> > Updated: February 26, 2016 17:20 (Central European, Stockholm Sweden)</comment></comment>


HyveMind: Election Infrastructure on the Blockchain [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://freepdfhosting.com/408e68e786.pdf <comment><USER2> I would prefer an anonymous, supervised paper trail.

Multiple checks on the trail with the ability to vote anonymously, in person prevents both fraudulent entries and coerced entries. Blockchain only covers 1 of the 2. And makes the coercion part more realizable.

Anonymous supervised paper trail is how many many states do elections. Scantron style ballots are simple and reliable.

<comment><USER3> I believe that the main objections to this approach are subconscious and unstated. Or perhaps people just feel silly saying "That isn't fancy enough!" and "But but but you have to use a computer to do everything!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad someone else found my paper interesting enough to post here. I'd love to get your thoughts on the idea.

<comment><USER5> Aside from obvious things like the immaturity of the various technical components (blockchains, biometric security), I think you'll have a hard time convincing folks outside small circles of crypto idealists that sampling democracy is desirable. Even if it works at a technical level, most people want to explicitly chose who reps them and makes laws for them. Randomly selecting a sample to vote on a law takes that away, and isn't a direct digital version of contemporary representative democracies/republics. To channel Neo, the problem is choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some day someone will _surely_ find a real use for the block-chain.

Today is yet again not that day.

<comment><USER7> Prior to cryptocurrency there was no way to store your wealth online without relying on a centrallized third party that could theoretically confiscate it at any time. It's niche but it's not something to overlook.

<comment><USER6> Which cryptocurrency would you recommend as a reliable store of wealth?

<comment><USER3> I see what you did there! LOL</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Online video will soon be better quality than digital television. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.metawrap.com/2013/08/13/hevc-h265-and-uhdtv-4k-what-does-it-mean-for-iptv

<comment><USER2> 4K looks amazing. Unlike 3D it is a real reason to upgrade your TV.

Didn't know 4K monitors where already affordable... If they can get the refresh rates up it would be a no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER3> At what point do we stop? Is a 4K desktop monitor 'retina'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Using [http://isthisretina.com/](http://isthisretina.com/) (handy) it looks like the Seiki 50 inch 4k monitor becomes 'retina' at 99cm and the 31.5-inch Asus PQ321 at 64cm..

Personally I sit about 60cm away from my monitor and 50 inch is probably too big for me.. I don't want to strain my neck. :)</comment></comment>