Coding Horror: Are You a Digital Sharecropper? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001295.html <comment><USER2> The underlying theory of Web 2.0 is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Your video of your college roommate lighting his farts on fire would have basically zero value if you put it on your own personal web page (unless you happen to be Perez Hilton). Post it to Facebook, and suddenly you're an Internet celebrity, because millions of users are already coming to Facebook every day to see content just like yours, and because Facebook's architects made it perfect for viral distribution of information.

If you're interested in making money off of your content, there are sites out there that will help you try, from Shutterstock to Google Knol. I've tried many of them, and the pennies that I earn don't come close to covering the cost of my network connection, much less my computer. If you're going to call Facebook contributors sharecroppers, that's fine, but they are sharecroppers who spend all of their time arranging the seeds into a posterized mural of their pet cat, not planting them in the field and toiling to harvest the crops.

<comment><USER3> It's the classic content owner's mistake of overvaluing the content, and undervaluing the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if the sharecropper analogy holds up. Sharecroppers essentially rent land, paying the landowner back with a share of the crops grown on it. Assuming the crop doesn't fail, both the cropper and the landowner make money.

On most web sites that aggregate user content, the content contributors make no money, and often the web site doesn't either (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook). These are more like online collaborative hobbies, where everyone involved is doing it just because they enjoy it and have some time to spare.

<comment><USER5> I think it's intentionally inflammatory, for teh clicks.

<comment><USER6> Atwood linkbaiting? That would never happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's sort of bizarre that he picks out Wikia as a negative example. The communities on Wikia can and do take their content somewhere else, including the entire edit history, attributions, and all. Original contributors retain copyright, and everything is clearly licensed under free licenses that permit the community to take it elsewhere (and commercially exploit it if they want; this is not a right that is reserved to Wikia). You can download the regularly-made content dumps easily; you don't need a special scraping tool. And finally, the software is open-source, so you can put a downloaded dump into a MediaWiki install in an afternoon.

How much of that can be said of your Stack Overflow contributions?

</comment><comment><USER8> I think Coding Horror has already given whatever value it could. It's time to move along, perhaps.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it seems these days that Jeff Atwood is a has-been who keeps rehashing the same old points that he made on his blog 5 years ago. I'm not sure why we give his blog posts such prominent attention on HN…

<comment><USER10> "Prominent attention" is just people voting with their mouse. If nobody upvoted, the posts would go away. So clearly some HN readers are getting something out of his posts.

<comment><USER9> _clearly some HN readers are getting something out of his posts._

That's exactly my point—I don't understand what so many HN readers get out of the banal tripe that Jeff seems to be spewing in almost every post these days.

<comment><USER11> He's famous, and programmers _love_ their celebrities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate > gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.

Good to know!

<comment><USER6> Wait, what does that even mean? Corporations can use Stack Overflow, for free, just like anyone else. Why hire a consultant or invest in training when you can just drop a question out into SO? I didn't realize SO's karma was that magic bill-paying kind. Attribution is a positive thing, okay, but let's not pretend that it somehow erases the 'sharecropping' aspect of the site.

Also, just for the record: comparing web 2.0 participation to sharecropping, complete with picture of black farmers, is completely idiotic and more than a bit offensive.

<comment><USER12> Just for the record, I'm black and I have used the sharecropping analogy for what happens when you decide to write applications for a proprietary platform like OS X, Windows, or iPhone.

Actually, I haven't made that direct comparison to iPhone, but anybody with a text editor can take my old, old article about Konfabulator and Panic and do a little search and replace for themselves.

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in- orchard...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard.html)

<comment><USER6> I don't think the analogy to sharecropping itself is offensive, I think including the picture that makes it clear we're talking about the post-Civil- War, legalized slavery version of sharecropping is what crosses the line. Without that, I think it's merely stupid, because web 2.0 participation is completely voluntary and usually done for fun or reciprocity.

I also agree with your point, that the sharecropper analogy holds better for earning your living by developing on someone else's platform.

<comment><USER7> I think the post-Civil-War version of sharecropping was also "completely voluntary"; sharecroppers could, and did, leave for the cities. Due to institutionalized racism, they didn't have access to the kinds of government farm support that kept their landlords solvent enough to keep from having to sell them the land. (This is a problem that still exists in the US.)

Or maybe you mean "completely volunteer", in the sense that nobody is getting paid. But it seems to me that a lot of people receive something of value from their participation in these sites, even if it's not financial in nature.

<comment><USER6> I meant the first interpretation. If you think post-Civil-War sharecropping meets the standard of "completely voluntary", you need to do some reading. You can start here:

<http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3590>

<comment><USER7> Thanks! It says:

"Though much has been made of the system of peonage that kept sharecroppers in perpetual debt, tying workers to the same plantation year after year, there is significant evidence that Georgia croppers moved rather fluidly from place to place and from one form of labor to another. Certainly the reality of life as a sharecropper was a factor in the out-migration of rural Georgians in the 1910s and after. The sociologist Arthur F. Raper found in his study of Macon and Greene counties that of those Georgians fleeing the rural part of the state in the 1920s, the greatest numbers came from the ranks of sharecroppers."

Frankly, it sounds like a system of unjustly exploiting ignorant poor people that was roughly on par with the one described in Chicago in "The Jungle" at the same time. But that's pretty much what I thought before I read your link, too.

Maybe you could describe what sense you think it fails to 'meet the standard of "completely voluntary"' in?

<comment><USER6> I like how you ignored the part about lying to illiterate people about their debt, that was awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some good points about contributing your time for free, but the comparison is a bit inflammatory. Sharecroppers had no real choice, lots of risk, and such an arrangement was their only income.

Most instances of investing your time in an online activity are not so vital to one's financial income.

Contributing to stack overflow helps other programmers, gives you a some exposure, and perhaps answers questions of your own. Founders of SO put up capital and energy to build and maintain the site, and don't claim ownership of user-contributed content (cc-wiki license), and get revenue from advertising.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm reminded of the trouble that LiveJournal has had balancing the interests of its users and investors. They have millions of users, but many of those users post on topics that are, ahem, not what mainstream deep-pocketed advertisers want their names next to, and the users get very cranky when the LJ administration acts against their interests.

The "digital sharecroppers" may not be working for _money_ , but they are expecting something less tangible in return for their efforts, and the things they want are not always compatible with _the site owners_ making money.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let me know when I can trade in my Stack Overflow karma for cash.

<comment><USER15> If you're someone who has karma coming out of their ears from helping people, it's almost worth mentioning on a resume.

Having more official awards beyond medals for a certain tier of users might provide some value. It would have to be to be difficult to game, and provide proof of some personal quality (technical knowledge, helpfulness, etc.).

The best way to do this might be to have some subjectivity - (semi-)annual awards for the top X users. Of the users with high karma, judges could choose the most meritorious.

<comment><USER11> The high-karma users there seem to get their karma by spending their entire day not working. I don't know how this would look good on your resume. (Jon Skeet, for example; does that guy do any programming anymore, or does he just tell people who can't read the manual how to do addition in C#?)

Also, a lot of questions are of the form, "What's the most awesome word to describe how awesome programming is?". Before these were forced to be community wiki, people really racked up the reputation points on these.

I only answer questions there because if I don't, someone else will. And their answer will be wrong. (Like, "you can't access databases from Perl." WTF.)

<comment><USER15> Maybe it'd be better to just print one or two really good replies and bring them to the interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping>

</comment><comment><USER16> {a slightly tweaked quote from the article}

So if you spend a lot of time creating content on someone else's _company_ [..] I think you should be asking yourself some tough questions:

What do you get out of the time and effort you've invested in this _company_? Personally? Professionally? Tangibly? Intangibly?

Is your content attributed to you, or is it part of a corporate pool?

What rights do you have for the content you've contributed?

Can your contributions be revoked, deleted, or permanently taken offline without your consent?

Can you download or archive your contributions?

Are you comfortable with the business model and goals of the company you're contributing to, and thus directly furthering?

Ultimately, you have to decide which is more important -- building your own brand, or building the brand of the company you're contributing to?</comment>


Should I become an intern after graduating a bit ago? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN!
So I received a startup intern offer for user research/product in Europe. I'm not sure if I should take it?
My dilemma here is: will an internship achieve my goal which is to expedite my skill building within my field of interest?
A little context: My goal is to become a good UX researcher. I graduated 2 years ago so I'm really looking to sharpen my skills and understand the easiest way, imo, is to work under a more experienced researcher/mentor. I've worked in consulting/various ux research environments, but this would be my first real startup.
But from this role, I would given a high level of autonomy and from my understanding the first dedicated intern for this type of role. These aren't terrible things depending on what you want, but I want to pick up best practices or at least have an idea before I tread out into the "real" world myself. You never know what you don't know right? The people seem great though and the startup is doing well.
I'm sure I'll still learn a lot at this startup, but vs to learning directly under a more experienced researcher in a similar environment… I'm thinking the later would be optimal? The only thing is I just have to find it,haha!
It's just for 5 months so it's not the end of the world. It could also be a great opportunity to really challenge myself as it could be a "training" ground + I get to travel to europe (From north america,haha!).
So, I'd love to get your opinion if I'm thinking about this correctly! <comment><USER2> being an aspiring ux researcher myself, i understand your dilemma. IMO, I would take the offer. The pros outweigh the con you've mentioned and this would be an experience you can ponder upon and contrast with once you get a junior ux researcher role under an experienced senior researcher.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks haha! Do you mind expanding a little more? What do you see as the main pro/con here?</comment></comment>


Arctic Summer Melt Shows Ice Is Disappearing Faster Than Normal - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-19/arctic-summer-melt-shows-ice-is-disappearing-faster-than-normal <comment><USER2> There is something that you can do.

Advocate that governments cut down on soot emissions.

This accounts for a significant portion of the current temperature rise in the Arctic -- but, most importantly -- an unknown amount of the loss of snow and ice cover.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists- track-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-track-the- source-of-soot-that-speeds-arctic-melt/?redirect=1)

Unfortunately, this form of carbon (soot) is not as useful for funds transfer...

Between cutting down soot (all Chinese power plants could be outfitted with soot collectors in one year), and planting trees (which is the least expensive, most accessible option for sequestering carbon dioxide at planetary scale), we could actually start to impact arctic snow cover and permafrost within _a couple of years_ , within a budgetary envelope that every developed country could easily manage.

But, once again -- unfortunately, neither of these options appear to be _politically_ attractive, because the primary goal seems to be wealth transfer, not actual harm mitigation...

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on what you meant by "funds transfer" or "wealth transfer"? I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER4> Pollution is a commonly-used example of a _negative externality_ [0], or a way to shift business costs onto a third party.

In the parent example, the implication is that rather than investing money in reducing pollution, that money can instead by returned to the investors as dividends, and the global public must bear the impact of the unmitigated soot emissions.

The "wealth transfer" in this case is represented by the costs absorbed by the public (in terms of increased healthcare costs, endangered coastal real estate, disaster relief costs, etc which may result from pollution and/or anthropogenic climate change) being transferred to the investors/owners/operators of the polluting companies in the form of reduced spending on mitigation technology.

That was my interpretation of the parent's meaning, at least. At the time I posted this comment, there were three different interpretations of the same comment, which is very interesting.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> in the 2007 time-frame, the US National Snow and Ice Science Center showed up en-masse in California and were _flipping out_ about ice changes, semi- desperate to find some way to communicate to the public about it. Post-"Inconvenient Truth" and early days of Twitter, the idea that if "somehow, someway, people could know about this" things would get better faster, was the knee-jerk idea amongst people who were immersed in details.

Twelve years later.. and .. recurrent headlines on YNews ? US EPA being dismantled, with the legal authority to regulate air pollution at the center of it.. Mixed signals from the other world economies, while posturing for trade routes through the Northern passage, and billions bet on small changes in oil prices each day .. Whats to worry about.

Is it that goof founder of 360-dot-org that said something like "Do something, just do something" ? Panic and gossip are clearly not enough.

<comment><USER6> The trouble is that if the "we" who are doing something does not include China and the rest of the world in coordination, then it is just sacrificing local economics in vain.

The idea that the rest of the world is going to follow suit automatically based only on morals is far from obvious.

It doesn't seem that anyone in the mainstream has really found a way to come to grips with this, that at its core any solution is a global coordination problem. (Even putting aside that half the US has found it more politically useful to deny the problem entirely.)

<comment><USER7> I grew up in New Zealand, and now live in America.

In New Zealand, people with high carbon lifestyles say "well regardless of what we do, nothing matters if Americans don't change"

Now I live in America, where people with high carbon lifestyles say "well regardless of what we do, nothing matters if the Chinese don't change"

And I'm sure in China they say the same thing back to the US.

It's fun shifting the blame.

<comment><USER6> > It's fun shifting the blame.

I don't think blame is a useful concept at all. The question is, within the complex world of economics and politics, starting from the point we are at today, what would a pragmatic solution look like, that is actually possible?

It is far from obvious that the best solution is to make local sacrifices, then hoping the world will follow. It might be that we all (in the world) need to agree to make sacrifices together first, put some rules and treaties in place, and then start improving together in coordination.

It sounds so Machiavellian but, if we are already making the economic sacrifices (that other countries aren't, but would like us to), I wonder if we aren't even losing potential bargaining power in coordinating globally?

<comment><USER8> "what would a pragmatic solution look like, that is actually possible?"

William Nordhaus' climate club:

[https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001)

[https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free- riding/](https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's scary, but there's nothing I can do. We need approachingly authoritarian action on this issue by world leaders. They've had the data for decades. And the longer they wait, the more dramatic the changes to everything will be. Certainly economic freedoms taken for today will be a thing of legend (and possibly horror.)

<comment><USER10> Dumping a trillion dollars over twenty years into wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and power-to-gas would go a pretty long way without draconian measures. Providing strong monetary incentives to insulate buildings and install heat pumps doesn't have to be authoritarian either.

<comment><USER11> None of these will work because a significant portion of the population in countries with elective governments do not believe in climate change at all. This means they will viciously oppose all climate change action plans so long as they are allowed a voice. Authoritarian measures become necessary (even if I don't necessarily advocate for it) when a large portion of the population are too short-sighted to decide what's best for themselves.

<comment><USER12> That's what taxes are there for. E.g. in Germany we managed to implement a system to increase the share of renewables. That it wasn't perfect to begin with and was then screwed up but successive governments is a different story. What matters is that it worked.

I have the impression that most people opposing clinate change are afraid that the will loose something by the necessary changes, their cars, their perceived life style,... That's where politics come into play. Politicians have to communicate the necessary changes and come up with ways to manage the change without screwing the average Joe over. They found ways to divert billions to corporations with the best lobbyists, so there should be enough funds to combaz climate change. And once the western world started we are already half way there. The Paris accords used to be a global treaty, so there can be a global approach.

<comment><USER13> Hallo Leute. Believe me I would really like nothing more than for you to be right when you write: _it worked_ The share of renewables may have risen, but at huge costs, and most importantly the installed capacity of non renewable plants has not been reduced, mostly because of intermittency of renewables. The net result: all the plants, just with lower utilisation. For nuclear this is a tragedy because the marginal costs of production are minimal, lower utilisation just hits profitability, which may indirectly be raising risks. For coal, well just look up how much the Energiewende Germany still mines... More on this here: [https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal- choices/...](https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/what- transition-are-the-germans-up-to-exactly/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you're interested in following the latest climate change related news check out Paul Beckwith's YouTube channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr546o7ImhGM57qoY0hHvkA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr546o7ImhGM57qoY0hHvkA)

He does 15 minute videos reviewing the latest papers and news.

Headline: everything is happening faster than predicted.

[I'm not affiliated with Paul in any way, I just like his videos.]

<comment><USER15> No, the climate models the businesses and politicians found acceptable are watered down models that showed that we had a lot of time before we needed to make changes, thus letting the businesses and politicians pass the buck.

The more aggressive models and the scientists that supported those models lost funding and were shouted down. Some of the models that got buried fully expected the changes to be happening at the pace we are witnessing. Some of those models said that once the permafrost started to thaw that it would release so much carbon, methane and nitrious oxide withing 10-15 years that the earth it's self would surpass human generated output. If those models are correct then it means we've passed a climate tipping point and nothing humans can do will reverse what's been set in motion. Event if human greenhouse gas output is reduced to zero overnight, the earth itself is now driving the changes to the climate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Minor nitpick: 20,000 square km is not equal to 12,427 square miles. Looks like the author divided the area by the km/mi ratio instead of km^2/mi^2. I'd email the author but the mailto: is improperly formatted.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's what we can do:

1\. Refuse to support politicians that do not see this as the grave issue it is. Most other political issues won't matter if we cannot change the course of global warming.

2\. Spread awareness. Update yourself on the facts, and share them with your friends and family.

3\. Plant trees like crazy.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Ice flows are melting faster than average rates observed over the last three decades"

This is actually normal for averages - some years are higher, some are lower. Otherwise it wouldn't be an average.

Maybe the state of affairs is still alarming, but then they should describe it better.

</comment><comment><USER19> Honest question. If during the warmest periods ice melts all over the planet, wouldn't ice cores lack carbon measurements for those periods? I'd love an answer from someone with some expertise.

<comment><USER20> Sure, but that hasn't happened for at _least_ 2.7 million years.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/record- shattering-27...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/record- shattering-27-million-year-old-ice-core-reveals-start-ice-ages)

<comment><USER19> That article says that the oldest ice in the core was 2.7 million years old. It actually mentions gaps in the record and ability to date ice only with a 100k year margin of error. This does not imply that we have a continuous record of carbon levels for the past 2.7M years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article shows a graphic of year round shipping lanes by 2075

That seems like an un-dire consequence of the ice being gone

What am I missing? I should put a downpayment on beach front property in Nevada?

<comment><USER22> Just don't buy any property in Miami

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> News like this seems to be dominating my feed lately. Very depressing.

<comment><USER24> Is this a variation on the common lament that the media always shows negative news, or sadness about the oncoming climate crisis?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's a more quantitative view, to get an idea of how serious this season is. Summary: its still early in the melt season, but this year is somewhat ahead of every previous year.

(via the excellent arctic sea ice blog's regional data aggregation page: [https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional](https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional))

This first graph is arctic sea ice area, including the sum of all of the sub- regions that are what you normally think about as the Arctic Ocean. Several other bodies of water also get seasonal ice coverage adjacent to the arctic basin.

[https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s- sites.googlegroups.com/site/ar...](https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s- sites.googlegroups.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/amsr2/grf/basin-area- multiprod.png)

There are three clusters of lines shown here. Each one corresponds to the reports provided by a different sea-ice monitoring office. Differences in technique have been used by commentators to kibbutz about the finer points of what constitutes a record minimuim in the past, so its common for independent observers to show multiple institutes all together now. While the details differ, the broad picture is the same for all three offices.

The three clusters have been offset in the vertical axis to visually separate the three institutes. Roughly 2/3 of the arctic basin melts out each year.

Each institute reports both sea ice area, and sea ice extent. Ice area is the total area actually covered by ice. Ice extent is somewhat trickier to understand. Much of the summer ice pack isn't a big chunk of ice, its composed of many different chunks, and they will break up and merge over time. So many of the map grid cells are only partially covered by ice. When the fraction of coverage is greater than a certain threshold, then the entire grid cell is counted towards "ice extent" \- the amount of ocean that has some ice floes in it. With that definition in mind, here's the current graph of sea ice extent, along with some recent historical context:

[https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s- sites.googlegroups.com/site/ar...](https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s- sites.googlegroups.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/amsr2/grf/basin-extent- multiprod.png)

One thing of note: The current record year for melting is 2012. You'll note that the shape of that year's curve is quite a bit different from every other year's curve. 2012's weather patterns drove a melt that was so substantial that every year since has followed a different trajectory than the years prior to 2012, because so much multi-year ice melted out. At this point in the Summer, several years have had less area and/or extent than the previous record.</comment>


Peer to Peer (P2P) in Flash Player 10 beta - <AUTHOR> http://justin.everett-church.com/index.php/2008/05/23/astrop2p/

<comment><USER2> This is useful mostly because it debunks some of the incorrect and unfounded speculation about the topic.</comment>


The Mayo Clinic embeds its engineers in real patient treatment - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2019/12/18/mayo-clinic-artificial-intelligence-acid-test/ <comment><USER2> The interaction between statistical methods (algorithms and data analysis) and actual work is critical and fairly obviously important. But articles like this show how it is still something we need to focus on.

My father, William Hunter, and George Box worked on these ideas and applied statistics decades ago.

Related: Two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity. [https://williamghunter.net/articles/managing_our_way_to_econ...](https://williamghunter.net/articles/managing_our_way_to_economic_success)

The Scientific Context of Quality Improvement

[https://williamghunter.net/george-box-articles/the- scientifi...](https://williamghunter.net/george-box-articles/the-scientific- context-of-quality-improvement)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article. Shows the risks/difficulty in applying machine learning models in the wild. Also shows the more sober side of applying ML models, where a domain expert says "Yeah, I know, I didn't need an ML model to tell me that". ML models will make mistakes based on bias, but hopefully in the long run they will outperform humans.

<comment><USER4> I'll know an ML model works when it sides with me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a weird headline. The "acid test" is that the AI must actually help patients. I don't mean to be flippant, but that seems pretty obvious.

Most of the article is the way that the Mayo Clinic embeds its engineers in real patient treatment. That's actually interesting.

<comment><USER6> Ok, we've changed the headline to use your phrasing. Let's focus on what's interesting in the article now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with this approach for software devs in any business. One of the cool things one of my employers (a manufacturing company) did was send me out for a day to a plant and have me see how everything worked. It made some of the websites I was building for our plant workers much easier when I already had a good idea of what they needed it for.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're not focused on the patients right from the beginning, you have already failed.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's going to take a long time for the "AI" hype cycle to fully run its course. Expect many more of these articles.</comment>


The Secret to a Successful Windows Phone 7 App - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg490348.aspx <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what's more offending - the blanket statement that says I'm a fool for fart apps or the blatant sexism. And sorry Microsoft, just cause you are finely coming to the party doesn't mean the rest of us buying smartphones for .. oh .. years now .. are early adopters. Possibly the worst MSDN Magazine article I've ever read.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I spend a lot of time with MS technologies. I make a living from them. I have a free WP7 MS gave me at PDC that I like. But this article made me cringe. If this is the sort of angle MS is going to take with their phone they might as well just stop now.

</comment><comment><USER3> He should give some examples of WP7 apps that are more "successful" than those iPhone fart apps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Duplicate:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2005582>

No comments there, though.

</comment><comment><USER5> A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (WarGames)

</comment><comment><USER6> The same old condescending Microsoft. The only difference is that nowadays they arent winning.</comment>


DuckDuckGo: A New Search Engine Built from Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://ostatic.com/blog/duckduckgo-a-new-search-engine-built-from-open-source <comment><USER2> "It's like the evolution of the LAMP stack that has served so many sites so well for many years. Too bad there isn't a snappy acronym like LAMP for it. Maybe we can call it the Duck stack."

Nginix, Memcached, PostgreSQL, Perl, FreeBSD.

Duck stack? Is DuckDuckGo really the first to ever use these together? I highly doubt it. This article is very kiss-ass and I can't tell why it's on a site that talks about open source software. Writing your crawler and backend in Perl doesn't mean you're built from open source, nor does using FreeBSD as your operating system. Or does it? Also, I noticed in the first sentence they link the words "search engine" to DDG instead of "DuckDuckGo" (the first word in the first sentence). This article is contrived and looks more like someone just paid to have it written up.

<comment><USER3> Afaik ddg does not have its own crawler (yet) but is built on top of other search engines, it does pull in a lot of data from different sources.

<comment><USER2> From the article: "DuckDuckGo also uses it's own web crawler: the DuckDuckBot."

Plus I'm pretty sure I've heard the DDG guy mention it before on HN.

<comment><USER3> Ok, neat, thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this getting voted up just because it mentions DDG? It's fine for HN to have a crush on DDG (it's a good site), but I'd like to suggest that we should be a bit more discerning about what we vote up.

</comment><comment><USER5> DuckDuckGo is not open source, it may use some Open Source code but so does Google and tons of other web apps.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure why people are voting you up. Nowhere in the article (or even in the title) does it say DDG is open source. It says that it is _built_ from open source.

<comment><USER6> I'd bet that just about every search engine (aside from Bing, but probably part of that one too) is built in open software. I wouldn't pick this out to be Duck's distinguishing feature.

<comment><USER2> I'm not defending what the article said, I'm merely pointing out that the parent comment should be downvoted rather than upvoted because he's arguing something _no one said_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> DuckDuckGo is a pretty well done site. I don't know if DDG is doing anything revolutionary with their software stack, but the stack is working well enough that one guy is essentially providing a useful alternative to Google. Consider the amount of brilliant engineers working on Google search, and you have to be a touch impressed.

Of course, this extremely light weight development means he can have enough success to live on without worrying about monetizing as effectively as Google. Since he doesn't track searches as much as Google and thus cannot provide advertisers the same amount of targeting, this is important.

I look forward to tracking the site's evolution!

</comment><comment><USER8> Aside from Bing and Yahoo I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER9> new?

<comment><USER3> New to those outside of a very limited audience.

Just like google wasn't new by a long shot any more when suddenly the mainstream press started writing about this great new search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry. Guilty as charged. I voted it up as soon as I saw DuckDuckGo in the title. I didn't know I was this simple, but I seem to automatically upvote everything relating to DDG...

<comment><USER10> Why the downvotes?

I thought I was being honest. To me, the fact that I did upvote the link without thinking made me curious/interested. I didn't realize that I was so simple.

I wasn't making a joke and I was sincerely sorry.

I think it probably shows you, no matter how clever all of us think we are, most of our actions are automatic and non-voluntary.</comment></comment>


The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes <comment><USER2> Not only is it bizarre that crash tests are done only with male dummies, it's also bizarre that they're only done with average dummies. Nobody is average. You want cars to be safe for unusually tall, short or heavy people as well, don't you? The sexism of the situation makes it even worse, but even if you ignore the sexism, it seems really hard to justify such limitations on safety tests.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the issue is the world is built for the average. Try being really tall and doing the dishes in a normal sink. Your back aches after bending over the entire time. Then there is finding your self on the hall floor with blood everywhere trying to figure out what just happened. Turns out the meter box was just a little to low for your head to clear.

</comment><comment><USER4> That was fascinating/depressing, sounds like an important and overdue book.

So far the only comment was the shameful one by "xndgg" who at least apparently had the decency to feel ashamed enough not to want the comment linked to their usual username. And at least it was quickly [flagged][dead].

</comment><comment><USER5> Lunar calendar was invented by women to track their periods?

<comment><USER2> Impossible to prove, but a plausible theory. It's incredibly useful for women to know when 28 days have passed. It's significantly less useful to men.

There's no real basis to assume why a man would have made that calendar, and yet, quite often that assumption is made, because women tend to be forgotten.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-ishango-bone-the-worlds- ol...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-ishango-bone-the-worlds-oldest- period-tracker)

Apparently, the periods hypothesis is not favoured for a variety of reasons... And just because counting to 28 is more useful to women than men (men and women who tracked the moon phases for millennia don't agree) doesn't make it more likely to be periods counting.

Plus the numbers on the bone are not 28 but "are understood to indicate 9, 19, 21, 11; 19, 12, 13, 11; and 7, 5, 5, 10, 8, 4, 6, 3"...

9+19=28, here it is!

LOL that's numerology, not science...</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101728447 <comment><USER2> Awesome response to the C&D, via spokesman Jonathan Friedland:

 _" This is about consumers not getting what they paid for from their broadband provider. We are trying to provide more transparency, just like we do with the ISP Speed Index, and Verizon is trying to shut down that discussion."_

<comment><USER3> Playing Devil's advocate here for a second:

If Netflix is 35% of global internet traffic at peak capacity (as per the Akamai CEO's comments at a number of events), is it really fair to treat them like every other company? That is to say, if Netflix is really the sole driver of Network upgrades, why does Verizon have to subsidize their costs of business?

I'm not taking the stance that this is correct, only querying as to why the dynamics here are such that we automatically assume Netflix is in the right. Guilt tripping Verizon into adding more routers is a major net positive to Netflix's business.

Yes, ISP customers are paying for access but the business reality is that the ARPU per subscriber is decreasing every year at a rate lower than additional subscriber acquisition can sate. As Wall Street demands growth, it has to come from somewhere, and since Carriers are not able to sell consumers additional services (no matter how hard they try), they need to find another set of wallets (content providers). They're not utilities and have a profit motive, right?

Again, I'm not saying this is correct, simply trying to add another viewpoint to the conversation.

<comment><USER4> If you want to play devil's advocate then let's advocate for all the devils.

If Comcast wants to offer their customers video over a traditional cable network, they _pay_ content providers.

Why should the Internet be different? Shouldn't ISPs be paying people who provide the content their customers are buying?

<comment><USER5> Remember that when the cable companies started they were competing with over- the-air TV. To convince people to switch to cable, they had to provide something valuable enough to justify the cost. Content was that thing.

The reason ISPs can charge both the customers and the content providers is because we have no other choice. Where I live I have a choice of two providers: Comcast or Verizon. My choices are: use one of these two, or have no Internet. Not much of a choice.

<comment><USER6> Actually, it was both content and quality. They used to advertise that a cable signal was clearer than one from an antenna and stood up to weather, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a genius move. It's exactly what needs to happen to get consumers to realize that it's their ISP fucking them over, not Netflix.

The average joe isn't outraged enough about net neutrality. If only they'd start doing this to other known bad actors _coughcomcastcough_ , that might just be what the doctor ordered.

I wonder why they ponied up the money to the protection rackets first, and only then started pointing fingers. Maybe the agreement gave them access to some better data? If not, this should have been done months ago!

By the way, don't bother with the comments on the article page unless you want to lose all faith in humanity :(

<comment><USER8> From a strategic perspective, I think paying off one of the ISPs in this case strengthens their case by showing that the problem is a shakedown for money. If they didn't pay up and the issue was never fixed then the ISPs could attempt to play it off as some larger-than-money issue. They've proven the problem is greed.

<comment><USER7> Even better, it attacks Verizon using _their own words against them_.

Verizon: Netflix performance sucks because their traffic is congesting our network!

Netflix: Our performance sucks because their network is congested!

Verizon: OMG WTF you can't say that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's frustrating that Verizon and friends can make grandiose statements in their advertising about "unlimited bandwidth", "faster wifi" ,"stream 5 things at a time", etc, etc. Or lie to customers, My mother just called Comcast to downgrade her service and the CS Rep said "WiFi won't work with our Economy Plus internet plan"

Yet when another entity does something as simple as showing an error message that casts them in a negative light, they are willing and able to threaten legal action.

They stretch the truth as far as they can, yet give not an inch when confronted with truths they don't like.

Remove government so we can add customers! But we need government so we can slap Nextflix when they say something we don't like!

I don't have a good answer how to fix it, it's just very plain to see, and frustrating.

<comment><USER10> What do they mean WiFi won't work? How is that anything other than a blatant lie?

Reminds me of the late 90's when my ISP told me I couldn't get cable Internet because I didn't have a 486. I lied and told them I did to have the modem sent to me to hook up myself. It's a computer network, once it's in my house I can expose it as I like.

<comment><USER11> _What do they mean WiFi won 't work? How is that anything other than a blatant lie?_

They probably mean the WiFi built into the cable modem.

<comment><USER12> How would _that_ be anything other than a blatant lie? Are they going to mail the customer a different model of modem? Do any current cableco-provided modems not have built-in wifi?

<comment><USER13> > Do any current cableco-provided modems not have built-in wifi?

No, but all of their features can be enabled/disabled by the ISP remotely.

<comment><USER10> I know for my ISP the user names and passwords used by support are all freely available online. I needed a tech to come in because they couldn't troubleshoot my issue (magically fixed the next day) and he was flummoxed when he couldn't log in because his passwords didn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like Verizon's treading VERY dangerous waters here. If they sue Netflix for libel over this, then they're going to have to go through discovery. Since the claims center around network congestion, that means it'd be fair game for Netflix to go after every scrap of paper they have about the state of their internal network, oversubscription strategies, data about advertised vs. actual customer performance, any history of traffic shaping, and they'd be able to depose employees about all of these things.

As much as I'd love to see all of that information come to light in a court battle, somehow, I don't think Verizon would...

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, what a stupid move on Verizon's part. I have to believe the Streisand effects will far and away outpace any remedial action they might try to achieve here. While I get that they are irritated by their customers calling them up knowing more about how broken their network is, than the tech answering the phone, but this is going to be the new reality. With Google, Netflix, and no doubt Amazon providing more information to their customers about exactly why their product is having issues.

<comment><USER16> Until the law firm responsible for their client getting Streisanded suffers significant and public repercussions for doing so, they'll continue to advise this kind of action because _billable hours_.

<comment><USER17> That's why I just tweeted this @Verizon:

.@Verizon if it weren't for that C&D you sent to @netflix I would never have known how shitty you've been to your customers. THANKS!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Verizon fios customer here. There has been a noticeable drop in the quality of streams in the past couple of months. The picture went from excellent > barely functional(after the FCC ruling) > watchable(after the peering agreement) still not great. Kudos to Netflix.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, same here. I was watching a movie on Roku/Netflix 6 weeks or so ago. Quality was 2* (out of 4, meaning OK, but visible encoding artifacts now and again) and yet it still fell back to the buffering screen 8 times in 30 minutes. I got fed up and rented the same movie on Amazon (still on Roku) and watched it in HD without a single instance of buffering. After it was done I switched back to Netflix and tried to watch something else, and again hit buffering every couple of minutes. It's not usually that bad, but it clearly illustrates that somewhere in the Netflix -> Verizon connection that something is badly wrong.

<comment><USER18> That's funny. I'm using a Roku as well and had pretty much the same experience except I rented a movie from M-Go. Of note, I'm paying for "Quantum" speeds 75/35.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, likewise. On speedtest.net I'm 57 down, 38 up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In the cease and desist, the Verizon's lawyers allege that Netflix can't possibly know if the network slow-down is coming from Verizon's network or other parts of the internet. I actually chuckled when I read this -- because after reading Netflix Tech blog (here: [http://techblog.netflix.com/](http://techblog.netflix.com/) ) and seeing Netflix's open source contributions (here: [https://github.com/Netflix](https://github.com/Netflix)) I have a feeling Netflix probably has a LOT of data to back up these assertions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love what Netflix is doing with this. Not so much because I am totally convinced that they are 100% right and the Cable companies are 100% wrong.

Mostly just because I 100% hate all the cable companies.

<comment><USER22> Do you consider Verizon a cable company? I don't.

Come to think of it, what really separates cable and telephone companies these days? Most of them sell the same things as the others (TV, internet, phone), and the distinction is largely historical and technology based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I believe that the solution is forcibly separate infrastructure from service. The same company that provides the infrastructure should not be the same company that provides the service to the customer.

There are several nations around the world where this is the case. It reduces the barriers to entry for ISPs, creating an environment where there are dozens of ISPs to choose from with differing levels of customer service and pricing plans.

The primary problem with Comcast and Verizon is that they can leverage their customer base as a negotiation tactic rather than solely on the state of the network.

</comment><comment><USER22> Netflix is angry because Verizon isn't giving Netflix the bandwidth that Netflix paid for[0]. Netflix should ignore this C&D on free speech grounds, and tell Verizon to get lost, because corporations are people[0] and have free speech.

[0] I wish I was joking about that.

</comment><comment><USER24> How do we get ISPs classified as common carriers?

Sue their pants off for the copyright infringement of their customers (and all the other illegal things customers can do). This why common carriers exist. They trade ultimate control over the transfer of content and treat it equally for the protections of being indemnified from the content itself. This is why the U.S. Postal Service can't be prosecuted for transporting a death threat letter. Make it about money and they'll jump on the common carrier bandwagon before you can blink.

<comment><USER25> They already have immunity for users' infringements via the Safe Harbor provisions of DMCA. The safe harbor provisions requirements are a lot less stringent then Common Carrier.

They must register as an ISP, can't modify data, and can't directly profit from infringement or promote it. Certain ISPs already have done things that should get them deregistered though, such as compressing images, replacing ads or injecting content. For example, comcast injects their copyright warnings into html pages transfered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Relevant. [http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa)

</comment><comment><USER27> Here is the actual Cease & Desist:

[http://recode.net/2014/06/05/verizon-threatens-netflix- with-...](http://recode.net/2014/06/05/verizon-threatens-netflix-with-legal- action-over-congestion-message/)

<comment><USER28> It's interesting how Verizon talks about the "panoply of middle-man networks" when that is really the Internet.

Verizon is a walled city. Verizon entices people to live in it's city and pay its rent because it says you can get deliveries from all over the world in the blink of an eye if you live in our city. It has high speed trains, and wide thoroughfares.

It also has a small gate that can let a few cars in at a time.

Outside the gates is another series of superhighways and supersonic trains that connect the whole world.

Netflix says "We can't deliver our movies because the gate to Verizon is too crowded."

Verizon says "You can't claim that, that's unfair. We offered to let you operate inside our walls if you wanted to pay our rent, but you didn't want to."

The problem is that when Verizon got all of its citizens, it promised that it would give them fast INTERNET access. It didn't promise them that it would give them fast access to things on the Verizon network, or things with special arrangements that bypass the internet and use a special toll entrance to the city.

There's no reason they can't widen the gate. The highways outside are absolutely fast enough to send as much traffic as they need into Verizon. But Verizon doesn't want to widen that gate, because they know if they don't, Netflix will have to pay them in order to deliver to their residents at a reasonable rate.

But they absolutely don't want their residents to think that they aren't getting their advertised fast access to the super-highways outside.

<comment><USER29> WRT that " _panoply of middle-man networks_ " ... it pretty much never works that way. Certainly not with a big player like Netflix, they're going to be buying from providers that peer with Verizon, vs. ones that have to pay transit fees to providers that then have peering with Verizon. The latter would make absolutely no sense in any way, technical or financial.

They're also doing this in concert with AWS, right? Another huge player.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It doesn't state it anywhere but I assume Netflix can be pretty sure of where the bottleneck is happening before transmitting that message correct? Given all the other factors that can contribute to a slow down.

<comment><USER31> > ...I assume Netflix can be pretty sure of where the bottleneck is happening > ...

It depends on how fancy they get with their detection routines. They can certainly see which networks the traffic is flowing over, but then there are multiple devices (and networks) in play to deliver that traffic to them.

For instance, just a one-way trip showing the devices that could slow down a packet of data can give you an idea of the number of potential bottlenecks:

        -> Chromecast CPU

         -> Chromecast WiFi chipset

          -> User's home network router (usually, but not always, provided by ISP)

           -> Cable/DSL/FiOS modem

            -> [[ ISP devices they directly control ]]

             -> Transit provider's network

              -> Netflix's network.

Netflix could certainly jump through hoops to isolate the bottleneck to the ISP network, but are they? Who knows?

I'm not sure they really need to anyway. The hockey stick graph they have showing throughput before and after payment looks like a classic mafia shakedown.

<comment><USER32> If a large majority of customers that use a particular ISP but are having streaming problems across different devices and if Netflix has no load on their network, then you can assume its a problem with the middle-man.

<comment><USER31> The point Verizon is making here is that Netflix has not done due diligence to verify that the specific customer they are showing the "Verizon Sucks!" message to is having connection issues that are provably Verizon's fault.

It seems to me that they're stopping one foot shy of calling Netflix out for libel. It's not libel if it's true, so it might be better for Netflix to only show the message when they can prove that the specific connection is being slowed because of the interconnect (or lack thereof).

<comment><USER29> I think it would be better put as "claim", vs. point.

At the bottom of this item you can see in a lot of detail how Netflix is making this judgement: [http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/06/netflixs- network-cong...](http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/06/netflixs-network- congestion-message-rolling-networks-just-verizon.html)

Sounds sufficient to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Two ugly chickens are coming home to roost here.

1) ISP's insisted on selling home bandwidth as functionally unlimited. They did this primarily so they would only have to offer expensive plans. Grandma can't get the 300meg email plan for $8, only the $80 plan. And then everybody tried to use it like it really was unlimited.

2) DRM. Drm makes it so that the net can't cache. 90% of netfilx bandwidth is likely the same 10% of videos. They all have to make the full trip through the wires. A local cache at the ISP to improve efficiency is impossible.

<comment><USER34> Regarding 2): Don't Netflix provide content servers / boxes / network devices that ISP's can put in the ISP's own data centres to help with exactly this issue?

[https://www.netflix.com/openconnect](https://www.netflix.com/openconnect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Netflix is paying someone for their traffic. Verizon customers are paying for broadband which includes streaming movies.

The ISP need to quit whining. They need to quit trying to get laws passed in every state that keep competition out.

Verizon 2014 1st quarter. $30.8 billion revenue $7.2 billion operating income [http://www.verizon.com/investor/news_verizon_reports_fifth_c...](http://www.verizon.com/investor/news_verizon_reports_fifth_consecutive_quarter_of_doubledigit_operating_income_and_earnings_growth_042420.htm)

no sympathy

<comment><USER29> And I'll bet landline CAPEX, even adjusted for getting rid of various territories, is flat or declining. It certainly is for AT&T.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Error message should include links to better ISPs in your area.

<comment><USER37> Or an affiliate link to sign up for another ISP in their area. Or Netflix should start their own ISP (as a reseller or white label).

<comment><USER38> In most cases, you don't have a choice of ISP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Maybe Verizon would prefer the more accurate "Verizon is deliberately slowing down your Netflix experience."

</comment><comment><USER40> 1) Why are ISPs not classified as Common Carriers? This needs to happen like _now_.

2) This makes me want to get a Netflix subscription just to support them, knowing I would never watch a single video from them. I'm signing up right now. Go Netflix!

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone have a screenshot of what the error message actually says?

<comment><USER42> "The Verizon Network is Crowded Right Now."

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/06/netfli...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/06/netflix-tells-customer-the-verizon-network-is-crowded- right-now/)

<comment><USER43> That seems like a very fair and accurate claim. They should've done it to Comcast, too, before they paid up, and when they did this to them:

[http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this- hilarious...](http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious- graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/)

<comment><USER44> They did for ATT atleast: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7854446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7854446)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Im sure most of the internet providers cap their bandwidth to services like this. I am confident that the main Swedish ISP provider Telia is capping as we speak.

I can see that ping times increases and it's always reoccurring around 9-10pm Fridays. Around 9:30 buffering speeds up, meaning most of the people giving up and switching to regular TV. One could argue that this is the time that Netflix/Youtube/Hbo/ViaPlay or any other service is used the most, but my suspicion is that capping occurs at those times, to validate the Fastlane/slowlane argument when the it arrives here in Sweden too.

I am currently collecting statistics to validate this. However, its insane that a ISP can cap and provide lesser service's on certain ports and argue that the fault is at the entertainment provider. Its also insane that when going from a "torrent way of life" to becoming a paying stream customer, I cant even watch my favourite show, when i want, on 100/100Mbit line.

ISP's are in the business of providing fast connections and high bandwidth, and that's what I'm paying for, however I want to use it. It shouldn't matter if I'm streaming from YouTube or downloaded illegal porn. Though it seems it looks like they want to sell me bad gasoline that doesn't take me anywhere, and say my engine is at fault.

</comment><comment><USER46> Someone please clarify my doubts. When I run a server, I have to pay for bandwidth costs. For eg. My website hosted on linode gets me 20TB of data transfer limit. I expect end users to be able to view content worth 20 tb of up/down data transfer. Netflix runs its own servers but the ISP providing connectivity must be already charging Netflix for a certain bandwidth and data transfer limit. If the ISP is charging for data transfer already, I expect the ISP to provide the entire service. For eg. Let us assume that Verizon charges netflix 1 usd per tb of data transfer. And Netflix uses 20000tb of data in a month. Then Netflix owes Verizon 20000 usd a month. And Verizon has to serve the data according to the bandwidth agreed to.

Is Netflix not paying Verizon for the bandwidth and data transfer?

If Netflix is not paying Verizon then why does my hosting provider charge me for bandwidth and data transfer?

<comment><USER47> Netflix has their own ISP.

Netflix's ISP and Verizon pay eachother nothing to exchange traffic (called peering).

Verizon wakes up one day and says, "Shit out of all the ISPs we peer with, Netflix and their ISP is responsible for 35% of our traffic, we have to do huge upgrades on the link to them, and they aren't paying us a dime"

That's my understanding of what is going on.

<comment><USER48> The traffic exchange would only occur once a customer routing data over a Verizon network uses Netflix, no? Meaning that the 35% of the Verizon network usage that Netflix uses, is due to customers actually using the connection they pay for, no?

As an ISP, I think if you are offering 100Mbps unlimited in/out, you should Expect full thrust from every connection, or at least be capable of delivering that. I know it's not really realistic, they need to assume that some people, sometimes are disconnected but if I am paying for a connection and a certain level of throughput, I expect to get that.

Just my point of view, correct me if my assumptions are incorrect!

<comment><USER47> Do you have any idea what internet service would cost if they built every node to handle 100% of the Internet's traffic?

<comment><USER48> Hence why I said "I know it's not really realistic". To answer your question though, I have no idea. Do you? I'd love to know what an ISP builds to expect in the terms of constant traffic..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> There is an easy and practical solution to this whole problem: If Verizon doesn't like the amount of bandwidth their customers use watching Netflix, they can always choose to block Netflix completely on their network, and inform their customers that they've done so. It would be honest, clean, fair, etc. Customers would be paying for exactly what they are getting, everyone could be happy with the arrangement.

Of course there would be a massive revolt of their customers if they did so. Because their customers WANT Netflix. So instead, Verizon will try very hard to make it "sorta" work and blame Netflix while trying to get money from them.

<comment><USER50> Perhaps I've misunderstood the situation in the US, but isn't the problem that Verizon are a de-facto monopoly in many markets? If customers can't say "screw you" then all Verizon need to do is avoid getting hammered by the DOJ anti- trust department.

<comment><USER29> Many customers, but perhaps not many markets.

I'm in the same position with AT&T, in a residence that's at the edge of two cities, but is unincorporated (not part of any city, just the county, state, and the USA itself). No cable service is available, the deals they cut with the two cities don't cover me. Those deals make them local monopolies, long ago the original AT&T (which got split up, and then recombined into AT&T, Verizon and Century) arranged a Federal and state level monopoly, except of course for many rural and otherwise expensive to serve markets, which are served by smaller telcos.

I have at least one option for a WISP, but it's awful; at least AT&T's ADSL here is reliable. For now, AT&T _really_ doesn't want it's landline business, wants to drop it for more profitable wireless. Ditto Verizon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Context - error message:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/files/2014/06...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/files/2014/06/netflix-verizon-640x294.png)

</comment><comment><USER52> Text of the letter in question: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/228334970/Letter- to-David-Hyman](http://www.scribd.com/doc/228334970/Letter-to-David-Hyman)

</comment><comment><USER53> It's funny that Verizon thinks Netflix is damaging the Verizon brand. As if there's anything more they could do to lower people's opinions of Verizon.

</comment><comment><USER54> I love it. Fuck you Verizon/Comcast/AT&T.

</comment><comment><USER55> What is the point of Verizon sending such a letter?

Do they think Netflix will comply? "Oh Jeez we hadn't thought this through but now with this letter and all, we understand! We'll just start blaming our own servers instead. Thanks."

Or is it simply a necessary step before they sue? But if they sue, isn't it likely they'll lose? (Sue over what anyway?)

<comment><USER56> Clearly they are just preparing ground for possible future legal actions against Netflix. I don't think on their sane minds that Netflix would ever comply to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder why ATT didn't C & D Netflix as well? Netflix had that notice for ATT too, just like Verizon. AT & T screenshot from a few days ago: [https://twitter.com/kunjanshah/status/473152026147557376](https://twitter.com/kunjanshah/status/473152026147557376)

</comment><comment><USER57> Whatever happened to the right to free speech? There are of course restrictions to free speech, such as you cannot yell fire in a crowded building unless there really is a fire, but this is not one of those scenarios. The behavior of Verizon and the other ISPs are grossly offensive!

<comment><USER58> Don't forget about defamation. Sure, you can spread lies in order to do me harm. But I can sue you for the damage done by those lies. Why would you think that lies that damage a reputation are substantially different from vandalism that damages a building?

Not that I think Verizon actually has a strong case for defamation. Netflix should have little difficulty arguing that they had good reason to believe that their claims are true. I don't think this is going to end well for Verizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This seems very naive on VZW's part its extremely easy to show that there is congestion at the ingress of one of your peers. Even if VZW is not a direct peer its pretty easy for them to get metrics off their clients deployed at the last hop.

</comment><comment><USER60> Netflix should also be including the phone numbers of city council members in the zip code of the account owner, and a link to example legislation for use of eminent domain seizure on last-mile cables.

</comment><comment><USER61> > "So Netflix is throwing up a 'The AT&T network is crowded right now' > message. Meanwhile, Youtube is playing 1080p no problem."

Netflix should try to explain that in the error messages too.

<comment><USER62> AT&T can choose to throttle specific services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Netflix could also make their buffering settings more advanced. i want a bigger buffer if my internet is unstable, and it should be transparant how netflix buffers..

<comment><USER58> If it takes 2 hours to send you 1 hour of content, no amount of buffering is going to give you the instant gratification you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Thank you Netflix for telling Verizon to go fuck themselves.

</comment><comment><USER65> I support this in principle, but I would bet a good portion of the buffering that happens for Verizon customers is due to issues with their own wifi network.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm on CenturyLink DSL and they don't show that message for me when there are speed issues... they apparently only show it to Verizon customers?

<comment><USER66> If you expend the list (include smaller ISPs) provided here([http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa)), yours is still above Verizon

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Hopefully YouTube will follow the lead.

</comment><comment><USER68> I thought they were paying fees to Verizon.

</comment><comment><USER69> Wow, Verizon... dumb move.

</comment><comment><USER70> Streisand Effect.

</comment><comment><USER71> Well I think we should introduce a tax on commuters because as it turns out they are the 90% of the highway traffic.If they want to get to work on time they can use the fast lane for a little extra and if they don't pay we just make them drive 10 miles per hour. I think this is fair. Ohh btw. if they complain about it, it is just them trying to influence policy that was set by good corporations so I don't understand why we should change it. :)

(please look up irony on wikipedia before downvote, thanks)

</comment><comment><USER72> Awww, poor Verizon...

</comment><comment><USER73> The heat is on!

</comment><comment><USER74> Is Verizon actively slowing the connection to Netflix.com itself or is the connection between Verizon and Netflix's provider (Cogent?) simply limited? In other words, are all Cogent customers suffering poor performance with Verizon customers?

Because the former is wrong and demanding more money from a single company hosted on a service provider you have specific peering agreements with is extortion.

The latter however, well, no one said there were unlimited pipes between every transit provider on the planet and if you're someone large like Netflix, sometimes you need to pay for transit on more than one provider to get the performance you need when your own provider can't or won't do so themselves. It has been like that for decades.

</comment><comment><USER75> Netflix may be reaping what they have sown here. They agreed to buy paid peering from Verizon, so if they don't have enough capacity into Verizon the onus is on them to buy more. OTOH if there is some kind of problem inside Verizon then the error message is justified.

<comment><USER76> But peering really only links the network at the "top level". Verizon could still have lots of congestion within their network which would cause lack of end-to-end available bandwidth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> This is exactly why I dropped Netflix. I want a high-def movie, not their whining about someone else's network. I have no problems streaming from Amazon. I have a choice of streamers. Other streamers work better. I have less choice of wired ISPs and they're harder to switch. Netflix would rather whine and preserve its profit margins than pay up. OK, fine, but since their whining does not get me the movie I want, I cut it off.

Netflix will find that most other people also do not care to hear their whining. I can understand why Netflix does it though...it's $8 a month. Between production costs, licensing costs, marketing, and profits, all $8 a month leaves room for is crappy movies, poor investment, and a continuous drive to shift costs to ISPs and whine about it.

<comment><USER78> You are paying your ISP to move bytes to and from your home. It doesn't matter where those bytes come from or go to; you are paying for that bandwidth. It's already paid for. You either get that bandwidth per your agreement with them or you don't.

It's not like Netflix is causing you to magically download more bytes. You chose to do this, and that's fine, because that's what you're paying your ISP for. Comcast, et al want to double-dip on this transaction and you should be extremely not OK with that. Why wouldn't the ISPs do the exact same thing to Amazon that they did to Netflix as soon as they become a big enough target and the legal precedent has been established? This is something that needs to be nipped in the bud, like NOW, before this becomes an established way for ISPs to do business.

Also, it's not like all of your favorite services that will someday be paying Comcast protection money not to throttle them are just going to swallow those costs. Those costs will get passed on to you one way or another. No good can possibly come out of any of this.</comment></comment>


Facebook's Bootcamp: how they scale their engineering team. - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/facebook-engineering-bootcamp/177577963919

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many companies do this. My first place after college locked you away in a hotel for three weeks of non-stop training (which they also called bootcamp).</comment>


Black Swan Farming - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, if you're going to succeed big, it helps to have a startup idea that everyone else thinks is bad. But this seems like only one of many factors that goes in to succeeding big. I'm inclined to agree with Jared Diamond: "We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."

I'm not an expert on any of Facebook, Dropbox, or Airbnb, but I've heard about competitors for all of them, including some rather early-seeming competitors. Was being first-to-market really the single, crucial factor in the success of all three? Or is there some other advantage, not related to being first-to- market, that having a crazy-seeming idea brings that I'm missing?

Additionally, Paul doesn't mention another way to be first-to-market: Come up with something so original that few others have thought of it. This could be another way to avoid competition, right? It's not obvious to me that wildly original ideas will always seem bad.

My take: Reality is a complicated place and reliable generalizations are few and far between :)

I don't think we can say much about what it takes to be a big success because there's so little data.

</comment><comment><USER3> see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497461></comment>


Who's Profiting from $1.2T of Federal Student Loans? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-11/a-144-000-student-default-shows-who-profits-at-taxpayer-expense <comment><USER2> I don't get their hand-picking of a woman who went to law school and ran up a 100K+ debt and then never even tried to pass the bar or worked with what she learned. I get that the tuition was inflated because of the increased demand created by easy loans that have the ironic intention of making education more affordable, but this doesn't sound like a case that warrants a lot of pity.

<comment><USER3> This is pretty common in the law school domain. People take the degree, realize that they'd be miserable as a lawyer, decide to finish the degree because of sunk costs, and then don't practice.

Common to end up with 200K+ debt. It's a real mess.

<comment><USER3> Edit: forgot one major element. A lot of schools have such poor placement that their unemployment rate is significantly worse than the national average.

This is all hidden on the front end by school marketing and the age old idea that law school is the ticket to the upper middle class (used to be, isn't now).

There are great tools _now_ to see how a school performs, but they've only been around a couple years. A lot of graduates who enrolled about 4-5 years ago found out they're more or less unemployable as lawyers, and it's not even worth taking the bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like the federal student loan idea misses the point of putting degrees "within reach" of everyone. First of all, why are interest rates 5%!? A properly state-subsidized loan would have an interest rate that makes it a net zero affair for the government. The current Swedish central bank interest rate of zero (actually slightly less) means my student loan interest rate for 2016 is 0.6%. Also, student loans don't count as debt in the sense of credit scores.

<comment><USER5> Yes indeed, particularly considering that such a subsidy should in net (though with significant latency) lead to higher tax revenues, more investment in the economy, more innovation in the economy, all that good stuff which a Government with a long-term view should be very interested in. In fact an effectively zero-interest loan is the very _bottom_ end of what should be offered by the government by that line of reasoning, the top end being completely free tuition.

Having a student loan with 'real' interest seems to be a policy drawn from looking at the investment->return (financial and otherwise) of a university education from the perspective of each individual (you want the gains, you shoulder the pain), rather than from the perspective of the society at large (all boats are eventually raised, therefore it's advantageous to invest our common resources in this).

My impression is that sadly, over the past 50 years in most western countries, this has been the trend for higher-education funding policy. I'm from the UK, and that is certainly the case there.

A side-effect of this focus on the purely personal financial investment aspect of higher education seems to be the newer Peter-Theil style attitude that in fact, university might not be as good an 'investment' as simply going out on one's own as an entrepreneur, once school is over. Whether this is right or wrong for any given individual is not an answerable question, but it seems very sad that this functional, financial aspect of things seems to be treated with more importance than the other benefits of a university education and experience, to the extent that it's now more and more being discussed as the primary (the only?) factor in the value equation of the whole endeavour.

I find this line of thinking sad both on the level of individual, and society as a whole. But I'm not saying it's a irrational way to begin thinking about it, given the way policy is going and given the way society is adapting its attitude towards the value of university education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> $45 annual tuition? The average American family income in 2014 was $53,657 according to CNN money.

Education is sadly out of reach at these rates. I'm very curious to see what free learning and degrees online can do to change this. Khan academy, edx, udacity, coursera etc.

Traditional education is literally pricing itself out of the market.

<comment><USER7> > I'm very curious to see what free learning and degrees online can do to > change this. Khan academy, edx, udacity, coursera etc.

The mechanisms are there. It's the cultural perception of alternative education that needs to change. It's the same thing going on with academic publishing. Everybody seems to agree there's a problem with the standard systems, but nobody is going to jump ship to the new system so long as the new is perceived as less prestigious (and this perception has a direct effect on your career).

<comment><USER8> There are many industries which require degrees to get into in the first place, especially Biology/Chemistry/Physchics and many other hard sciences. Some of those especially those that require labs and materials have a huge capital cost that keeps them within existing institutions. The rubber stamp at the end is just an agreed upon way to say "they have this basis of knowledge". If there was a way to get that basis of knowledge in other settings and a standardized way of testing whether you fit the professional criteria (such as the Bar exam for lawyers) there's no reason you couldn't go into it. Prestige matters SOME, but its more about the connections you get or are perceived to have after coming out of a big school. The info should be generally the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On one hand, there's an emotional and personal story of an individual graduate who got in debt and then didn't even try to pass the bar.

On the other hand, we have this citation: "On average, our graduates earn $750,000 more in their lifetime than if they hadn't received their law degree from Coastal Law."

I find it curious, how the article author decided to treat such a critical piece of information. Statistics gives a better view on a situation concerning millions of people than one emotional story. Yet, this citation is given without any analysis or proof. There's no attempt to understand, if this is true or not; instead, it's only present in the article as citation of a clearly interested party (the college administration), so that the reader who's already involved on one side of the debate, is ready to disregard it as excuses and advertisement.

May be it is excuses and advertisement indeed. But the article doesn't stop to think about it. The most important question you could ask yourself: is it worth it, for median student, to spend all this money? — is not addressed. What is it, if not bad journalism?

<comment><USER10> That $750k fact sounds fishy to me. People who self-select into advanced degrees generally possess qualities that are correlated with earnings (intelligence, ambition, rich parents, etc). Does the $750k figure compare that group against similarly ambitious and intelligent people who went another route in life? I have no idea how you'd create a fair control group to make such a comparison.

<comment><USER11> A well-paid lawyer makes several hundred thousand dollars more per year than the comparison group they're referring to (which as you suggest, is probably deliberately defined to be low-earning). Those are tough jobs to get, especially coming from an uncompetitive law school, but for those who manage to do it, their lifetime earnings could plausibly be $10 MM higher. It only takes a few of those to pull the average up by $750k.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The high prices of education are still worth the lifetime earning potential, or so I've read many times.

But that doesn't mean it is a good deal. The cost of Knowledge is trending to zero because of the Internet. So why is the cost of Education skyrocketing out of control? There is a growing disconnect between the actual expenses of education, and the shady accounting practices used to justify the exorbitant prices. I'm a graduate student paid below minimum wage to grade papers and carry out research, and yet the University rewards itself with huge sums of grant money from taxpayers to "educate me".

> Correction: I used to grade papers, now I just do research.

<comment><USER13> >The cost of Knowledge is trending to zero because of the Internet. So why is the cost of education skyrocketing out of control?

Because the purpose of higher education is not (just) knowledge transfer. Colleges that are expensive and worth it consist of a a great deal more than doing the readings and sitting in the lectures.

<comment><USER12> Very True! But are Universities today orders of magnitude better at educating people? Because it certainly cost a lot more today than it used to [1].

1\. [https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/college-cost- infl...](https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/college-cost-inflation-us- consumer-price-index_chart.png?w=1024&h=577)

<comment><USER14> > _But are Universities today orders of magnitude better at educating people?_

And this is where people start to see the clothes on the emperor for what they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Where does the money go? If you got someone paying $50k a year tuition presumably in a class with say 20 people total that's $1,000,000 per year. I mean, where's that money going?

<comment><USER16> This is always my question - also, remember that colleges and universities are moving more and more classes to adjunct professors (i.e. contractors without any tenure track), further reducing their costs.

Why is it that education has been able to steadily increase their costs 7-8% per year forever? I get it when people say that the loans enable this - but my question is, like yours, "where is the money going?"

I'd love to see a reporter do a complete audit of 10-20 educational institutions over a period of, say 5 years, to understand what the money is covering.

<comment><USER17> The most expensive schools are research universities. That's where the money is going: research is getting more and more expensive. By definition, the only problems remaining are the most difficult ones.

You used to be able to make great progress against a problem with a pen, paper, and a good mind. Now, to do anything notable, you'll need an observatory, a particle collider, a supercomputer, a top-tier bio lab, a chemical synthesis plant, etc.

Also, good pamphlet material like beautiful dorms costs a lot, but I find this argument to be weak considering most of the really expensive schools don't have very amazing-looking facilities.

<comment><USER16> Great points - any data you can point to on it?

<comment><USER17> Fair point, and no. Someone might be able to find some, and I'd be glad to see anything you might find!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Student loans are also some of the only debts that can't be discharged through bankruptcy.

<comment><USER19> The simplest answer tends to be the right one. Allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy and that will create pressure to not loan as much, and to keep interest rates low to prevent default. That will in turn put pressure on tuition to be low. The cognitive dissonance of idolizing the power of the free market, while special casing student loan debt, is somehow lost on a lot of otherwise rational people.

<comment><USER20> How about if students stopped going to colleges? Clearly students are being fooled into a slavery model. College + car + house and you're done for life.

At first, I think there is not point on going to college if companies/market are not willing to hire/demanding the skills you want to improve. Also, companies co-op with colleges by promoting higher salaries for certain college degree ... which the end up not paying anyways. Hence, there is no point on going to college. If you don't go, you won't have a loan to pay and colleges will be short on students. The education cost will have to come down in such situation if colleges want to survive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So, help me out here. Who is profiting from this? The companies who service the debt? Were costs for higher education in the US inflated under this program or is this a false impression?

<comment><USER22> I would say it is a way to boost the dollar. The alternative is everyone paying the education year by year, as taxes, during their lives as citizens. But here there are people who are forced to pay it all in one go. So this boosts the short-term demand for dollar, more than if it was spread out as a life-long tax. So it seems to me, all well-off Americans benefit, and it is at the expense of the poor, and the competing currencies. It doesn't matter if some default, as long as most pay it off. But I'm not an expert. It's just a thought.

<comment><USER23> It pushes higher money creation at the point of inception. Debt can be created instantly and enters the system and becomes "dollars" as another account is credited to balance.

Then over the lifetime of the ex-student they pay back this "money" plus interest which destroys the principal and consumes existing "money".

It should be noted that the creation of the debt benefits "growth" in the present electoral cycle whilst the repayment occurs mostly in other electoral cycles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > "As for Sofia, she says she'd like to meet with someone to work out a > repayment plan rather than field as many as 20 phone calls some days dunning > her for money."

Twenty phone calls per day is absolutely insane, and should not be legal. For that matter, _is_ it legal? If enough of these are coming from the same party or from closely related parties, then it's crossed the line into harrassment.

<comment><USER25> Unless she's racking up that many new debts daily, she could put a stop to it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Debt_Collection_Practices...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Debt_Collection_Practices_Act)

> The Act prohibits certain types of "abusive and deceptive" conduct when > attempting to collect debts, including the following:

> Failure to cease communication upon request: communicating with consumers in > any way (other than litigation) after receiving written notice that said > consumer wishes no further communication or refuses to pay the alleged debt, > with certain exceptions, including advising that collection efforts are > being terminated or that the collector intends to file a lawsuit or pursue > other remedies where permitted.

A collections agency that continues to contact you after you demand they cease contact starts to owe you money very quickly.

<comment><USER26> > A collections agency that continues to contact you after you demand they > cease contact starts to owe you money very quickly.

How do you collect that money? Do you have to hire an agency?

<comment><USER25> You can sue in small claims court, which doesn't require a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Take notes. There'll be money to be made shorting some of these public companies when the student loan bubble bursts and/or everyone starts to realize a university education isn't the only path to prosperity.

<comment><USER28> Can you provide evidence that it is a bubble? Can you provide evidence that it will burst, or a potential catalyst?

<comment><USER29> Seven million people haven't made a single student loan payment in at least a year [1] and the overall delinquency rate of loans in repayment is about 30% [2].

With the figure of student loans held by the Federal government going up exponentially as of 2008 [3] (and with tuitions soaring by 6% a year) the chart certainly looks "bubbly".

Investor Bill Ackman believes there will likely be some form of forgiveness as there is "no way students are going to pay it back":

 _When asked if he was concerned about bubbles forming in debt markets as central banks around the world continue to keep interest rates near zero, Ackman cited student loans as his biggest concern.

"If you think about the trillion dollars of student loans we have outstanding, there's no way students are going to pay it back," Ackman said. He foresees a future where debt-laden students protest government officials, leading to some form of forgiveness._ [4]

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/about-7-million-americans- havent...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/about-7-million-americans-havent-paid- federal-student-loans-in-at-least-a-year-1440175645)

[2] [https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the- economy/2015/april/delinqu...](https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the- economy/2015/april/delinquent-student-loan-borrowers-are-getting-further- behind)

[3] [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-17/washington-...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-17/washington- may-not-want-to-get-out-of-student-debt)

[4] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/04/13/bill- ackm...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/04/13/bill-ackman- herbalife-criminal-lawyers-student-loans-bubble/)

<comment><USER30> TBH we're well past the point where people should be in the streets protesting student loan payments. The entire economy is experiencing a lack of demand, partially as a result of young people being impoverished from a sycophantic education system.

A repayment boycott would ruin a lot of credit scores, but bring the problem into focus... consider that a huge proportion of people are already in default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The article doesn't mention the Federal takeover of the student loan system as part of the ACA passage in 2010. I don't know how it affected others, but I lost a number of incentives for making regular and early payments when this happened. The service from Nelnet was also considerably worse than my previous lender.

</comment><comment><USER32> Aren't the students profiting (i.e. education) as well? Trade is supposed to be mutually beneficial.

<comment><USER33> Last number I looked at was something like half of people getting Bachelor's degree are unemployed or underemployed. Don't know if it's inflated but job discussion forums are full of people with degrees in IT and Business that can't get jobs outside minimum or low wage. For for-profit, minimum payments can be around $2000 a month. So, a job offering $20k a year entry-level is a net loss.

What's happening is pretty obvious. People are told they need a degree to get a decent job with many companies even including that in job listings. Colleges and high schools show charts about how much extra people with degrees make. Then, people get degrees with student loans from colleges that often don't care about job placement or coaching on the major. Then, they get out into real world to find businesses all lied, don't care about them, expect more than the degree, and try to underpay them. Result is all kinds of people that can't pay their student loan bills.

Looks like a giant scam benefiting politicians, colleges, and student loan industry to me. Taxpayers and graduates are left with the burdens without rewards. A chunk of them make it, though, so it's not all losses.

<comment><USER20> I agree. And this is just one of the few recipes on how to enslave population. Let's just buy a car and a house next and we're granted for life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems like one of those out of sight out of mind kind of things that happens to a lot of students. You don't really sit down and calculate just how much money it will cost monthly to pay for your shooling. The 144k comes out to over 650 a month for 30 years depending on interest rates. That's the payment on a nice car, for the majority of your lifetime!

There are some holes in this story, but I still think the general point is there. For one, if you want to get a law or medical degree, you really need to be driven! otherwise don't do it!! Debt it terrible and can really ruin your life.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't understand why the Department of Education hires these servicers. Why can't they service the loans in house?

<comment><USER28> For the same reason the government hires construction firms to build roads, for the same reason the government hires contractors to build bases, the same reason the Federal Reserve uses primary banks as intermediaries, the same reason the military gets their fuel from tender offers and not their own refineries...

Plus, I can only imagine what would happen to the GOP/austerity/small government types if you started suggesting they move all those (necessary) function in house. Oh man that would be a fun debate to watch.

<comment><USER35> There's a couple of different categories there.

One is surge capacity for occasional needs. While the federal government is paying for some road building somewhere all the time, they might not want to hire permanent civil servants in a particular place for a project that's only going to last a few years. There's some sense to that.

Another category is where the government is buying goods or services off the shelf that lots of other entities buy too. That's your fuel example. Here again, there's sense to not duplicating effort.

But the last category is where the government is the only buyer and it's a permanent need. And that's where I don't see any sense to it.

<comment><USER28> Good points, actually, but can you clarify on what you mean with the government being the only buyer of student loans? All those other needs are permanent, too. "Roads" will permanently be under constructions somewhere, just as "loans" will always be outstanding somewhere. Fuel will always be needed, just in different grades, locations, and quantities.

Just to be clear on my point, it's not very hard to go and buy a portfolio of student loans for yourself (assuming you'd want them...)

<comment><USER35> The private student loan industry is pretty small as compared to the public market and the rules and considerations when servicing them are very different. So it is unsurprising that the big servicers for federal student loans are only in that business and not loan servicing generally. That's different in important ways from a refinery that sells fuel to all commers.

As for the road example, road building is an inherently local activity. If the federal government hired someone to hold a flag in Topeka it's be pretty unreasonable to expect him to start holding a flag in Phoenix next. So in that sense the need is temporary. But loan servicing can be done anywhere. My servicer is in NH for example. So the government could hire a bunch of people anywhere and bring it in house.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


23% of the Tor network's exit capacity has been attacking Tor users - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nusenu/how-malicious-tor-relays-are-exploiting-users-in-2020-part-i-1097575c0cac <comment><USER2> Edit: disregard; the title on this one was the subtitle of the post, which is fine

<comment><USER3> It's the subtitle. And the subtitle is more informative.</comment></comment>


Y10K and Beyond (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550 <comment><USER2> Cobol programmers in the year 9999 are going to be raking in the cash.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping they'd use something like DJB's netstrings.[1] That would seem to be a much simpler solution.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netstrings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netstrings)

<comment><USER4> Or speaking of DJB, TAI64N and let the UI display it however you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is a pity they don't address the problem of leap seconds in more detail - they will stop working long before Y10K

</comment><comment><USER6> I started reading this, scrolled back up and saw the date - Then it all made sense.</comment>


Tons of people are buying Fitbits, but are they actually using them? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/tech/2015/8/6/9110035/fitbit-fitness-tracker-watch-active-users-sales

<comment><USER2> I don't think specialized wearables are going to capture people's attention. General purpose Apple Watches and Android Wear are more attractive.</comment>