Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal - <AUTHOR> http://rungoterminal.com/ <comment><USER7> There's literally nothing about this I like.

A terminal with a gradient background might look pretty for screenshots, but for long sessions it just adds to fatigue and makes text harder to read. "Saving your favorite commands" in a normal terminal involves writing an alias into your rc file, not a bunch of button clicks. Same goes for the whole "interactive flags" thing.

Whoever made this clearly hates the terminal and wanted to bring a hipstery web 2.0 approach to the terminal. My question is, WHY?

Oh, and it's PAID? Fuck that. Learn to use a proper terminal or don't bother, simple as that. That isn't me being a crotchety old timer, that's me giving you serious life advice. You will _always_ be faster in the terminal if you learn to use it properly. a 2 hour tutorial in shell scripting and learning to use `man` is worth far more to your career than 10 bucks. Learn it the right way if you're going to bother.

</rant>

<comment><USER8> I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author found it necessary to create it, etc.

<comment><USER9> > what language it was made in

HTML + JavaScript + Electron

Just download that archive, extract its content, and you will find the "goterminal" script that is basically an ASAR archive [1] with a copy of CEF [2] as the webview for the web application that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create.

[1] [https://github.com/electron/asar](https://github.com/electron/asar)

[2] [https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef](https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef)

<comment><USER10> > that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create.

That's unpleasant. This is a forum for programmers. Care to explain why you are criticizing a participant for programming?

<comment><USER11> I see at least two possible reasons to create such a terminal: One: The author might have problems with how other terminals work. The other: The author just wanted to create something, without providing a superior value proposition. If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time.

<comment><USER10> > If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time.

What an absurd, and disgusting, point of view. The author is free to create whatever the fuck he/she wants, for fun. It's not wasting anyone's time -- no one else is obliged to spend any time interacting with it in any way.

You should really reconsider your position. One point is that, while you may have the skills and experience to only work on projects that improve the status quo, many of us do not; and even those who do, as beginners had to pass through the stage where they did not.

<comment><USER11> If a project does not improve the status quo, I think it should not be presented as something one "should have".

The time wasted is exactly the time it takes to find out that "elegant and efficient" is at best hyperbole, at worst a lie.

<comment><USER10> Have you ever met a novice programmer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a paid terminal emulator, written (by all appearances) in some kind of Electron-like (so a much much higher footprint), with a GUI for what can already be done via aliases, functions, and scripts.

And no telling how well $TERM detection works (show me vim! Show me something that wants 256 colors!)

If it was free, I might still not use it, because my terminal emulator needs to be lightweight and bulletproof, not heavy and shiny. A terminal emulator is a hammer -- simple, solid, good for constant use -- not an art piece.

<comment><USER13> This is how Emacs looks in it - [http://imgur.com/E6cLkoF](http://imgur.com/E6cLkoF) . Turning off the theme I am using fixes it, but many emacs shortcuts don't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just what I've always wanted from a terminal - things I can only do with a GUI and mouse. /sarcasm

This product seems to fundamentally misunderstand people that use terminals. Perhaps it would do better to instead become more of a thing that puts quick GUI wrappers around terminal commands and tries to parse the output and present it in a pretty GUI way for people who'd prefer not to get their hands dirty? Otherwise, this seems like what aliases and functions in my bashrc are for.

Either way, why is there a group of people that seems to think we desperately need to take applications that we are already running natively, wrap them in HTML/CSS/JS, throw them inside of a webview, embed that webview into a separate Chromium instance, and string it all together using a tool and execution environment designed to take a client-side single threaded web scripting language and use it for making servers? (Mugatu: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills - does nobody see this?!?)

<comment><USER9> > why is there a group of people that [want to wrap everything] in HTML/CSS/JS

I believe you already know the answer to your own question, because to be honest I think the answer is pretty obvious; but in case you are actually curious about the answer here is what I think (mostly sarcasm, don't expect much):

The majority of people making these applications are web developers who are frustrated by the difficulty of learning one or more of the popular GUI libraries available in the market (Cocoa, QT, GTK, etc), they found Node- Webkit and then Electron and realized that they could target desktop users using the same stack they have been using so far (HTML + CSS + JavaScript). Since they are web developers and many of them were originally designers, it is makes sense to think that they can make shiny websites to attract people into trying their projects.

I think most of these programmers just want to show up, try this new Electron thing, and get acknowledged by other people. I don't think they believe their applications are actually good because it is obvious that they are not (as in this case). As much as I hate this trend of web applications disguising themselves as (native) desktop application I have to agree that Electron have allowed some people to... Hmmm, you know what? I don't think Electron has allowed anyone (with the exception of GitHub) to accomplish anything, fuck that trend.

<comment><USER15> Well there's Slack and VS Code just off the top of my head

<comment><USER9> Slack started as a website, then created the desktop and mobile clients, so if I stick to my statement "accomplish anything" I would still keep Slack out of the list because the "desktop" client does not provides anything special over the original web interface. About Visual Studio Code, I don't know what have Microsoft accomplished with that project yet, but I will give you a point for that just because.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This appears superficial, and that this is paid as well with no (visible) published open source turns me off. The mistakes in the GIF communicate that this was a slapped-together product.

Additionally, requiring mouse clicks for a visual replacement of the alias command with a few extra bells and whistles is not the greatest appeal to a community of developers.

I hope that the fact that this was written in Go does not outweigh its shortcomings in the eyes of HN.

<comment><USER9> Don't be fooled by the name, this application is not written in Go, that is just a random word that they chose for the name. The application was written in HTML and bundled with a webview powered by CEF (probably Electron). Just download the application and execute `strings goterminal | grep chromium` and you will see what I am talking about; again, this has 0% Go code.

EDIT: Here is the list of 720 NPM packages used by this: [http://pastebin.com/raw/VhnuuDdX](http://pastebin.com/raw/VhnuuDdX)

EDIT2: To rub salt into the wound, this thing is ~620MB of HTML + JS + Electron, that is more or less how an entire Ubuntu installation was six years ago, like really? An entire basic Linux installation could have been included in all this archive and these guys decided to fill it with JavaScript code. Isn't a terminal emulator supposed to be lightweight?

<comment><USER17> > this thing is ~620MB of HTML + JS + Electron

Is it 620MB of source text? I'm not a web guy, so I literally I can't understand this, unless, since it's a web tech, 30 minutes of cat videos are required in the source.

<comment><USER9> Yes and no; there are some binary files too, but there are ~534MB of JavaScript code mixed with additional assets. Once you extract the content from the archive (using the tar.gz version) you will find a directory with multiple sub-directories and files that roughtly weighs 636MB distributed like this:

        9.1M - content_shell.pak
        60M  - <USER2>
        9.8M - icudtl.dat
        4.0K - <USER3>
        2.5M - libffmpeg.so
        18M  - libnode.so
        20K  - <USER4>
        352K - <USER5>
        404K - natives_blob.bin
        536M - <USER6>
        604K - snapshot_blob.bin

The directory "resources" contains the ASAR file plus another sub-directory named "app" that contains the assets and the "node_modules" tree, this directory alone weighs 534MB because of the 720 NPM packages required by the application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Amusing idea, and this kind of "quick GUI-builder" mechanism reminds me of ifttt or zapier in the way it gives more scripting/glue power to people who normally have access to less of it. And this would be useful for a mobile or tablet application, where GUI shortcuts to save typing help a great deal.

But the demo video shows one major issue that breaks its primary functionality as a terminal: the font rendering has a vertical spacing problem going on, with lines 1.5x spaced, which would break many screen-oriented applications, especially those that use line-drawing characters. Notice how at 22s into the video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbDxvJn1jV0#t=22s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbDxvJn1jV0#t=22s)), the inverse-colored character shortcuts at the bottom of nano's UI have space between the white boxes; the white boxes should touch, like this: [https://imgur.com/q0TERnM](https://imgur.com/q0TERnM)

This is either a bug with the terminal itself, or a bug with the font used. I looked for a bug tracker to report the bug, at which point I noticed that it wasn't FOSS, and promptly lost all interest in taking the time to make such a report.

Also, while I realize that this uses a browser engine for its UI, there's something surreal about a terminal emulator bundling libffmpeg.so.

</comment><comment><USER19> This isn't even a decent terminal emulator in the basic ways. It has an enormous memory footprint, abysmal compatibility, and very little in the way of novel features to offer.

If you use a better shell (like fish) it leaves this even less appealing. I'm sure this took some work to do, but I don't know anyone with a job to pay for it, which would use it.

The word "efficient" describes the exact opposite of what this is.

In addition to all of that, the package includes all of the build-time dependencies with it. And the package they use for the terminal emulator part of it is explicitly abandoned by its author ([https://github.com/chjj/term.js/](https://github.com/chjj/term.js/))

Nobody should pay 10 dollars(let alone 20 dollars for limited ongoing support) for more than half a gigabyte of unmaintained, deprecated open source code, plus about 2000SLOC of proprietary code for a sidebar which does something which is basically already built into the shell.

Also, there is no clear roadmap for this; so it's totally unclear what "3 years of updates" means when half of the thing is deprecated and it hasn't even left beta!

</comment><comment><USER20> If you're like me, you'll think, "aliases!"

But, the shell is a bunch of nontrivial things to learn. Tools like Go Terminal_ could make a less discontinuous learning path for shell. I recently had to teach[0] someone a bit of shell, and I kept tripping over explanations of:

        command -[flags] arg1 arg2 arg3 | something else

Merely explaining that -xvf modified tar and how was a challenge. After I explained it, the user appended -xvf to cat in a different session. The above line would be a dozen lines of code in a blub. Shell takes a long time to grok.

All that said, I wouldn't call Go Terminal_ "efficient" ;).

[0] I did a terrible job.

<comment><USER21> > But, the shell is a bunch of nontrivial things to learn.

Yeah but if you're gonna learn this trade, you kinda gotta learn these things eventually, so why settle for a pacifier indefinitely?

<comment><USER20> I should have been more explicit. I'm wishing for a less discontinuous shell- learning-path, meaning to say that you'd stick with Go Terminal_ until you found you wanted something that zsh or tmux or whatever offered you.

Everything I've learned in programming I've learned that way: do something the repetitive way until I notice it, then research or do something better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting concept, but I'm not sure who this is directed towards. I can see some people using this, but not that much. (experienced) Developers will naturally go towards the features that shells like bash/zsh offer (e.g. aliases), and most inexperienced developers... well, I don't see them putting that much effort into configuring their terminal, and besides this, most people in the Linux world will hardly pay for something that they can get for free from somewhere else, unless it really is a necessity, which doesn't seem to be the case here. That said, I wish you the best on that. Always good to see different stuff.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was trying to install this .deb package with ubuntu software center. My system warns with the below message.

 _" This package is of bad quality:

The installation of a package which violates the quality standards isn't allowed. This could cause serious problems on your computer. Please contact the person or organisation who provided this package file and include the details beneath.

The package doesn't provide a valid Installed-Size control field. See Debian Policy 5.6.20."_

</comment><comment><USER24> You've been lambasted!

While I agree with pretty much all the criticisms raised by others, I would just like to qualify that I like the idea of attempting to disrupt the traditional terminal.

A terminal will always be a window from GUI land to the shell, but that doesn't mean we can't play with it! :)

</comment><comment><USER25> In my experience, terminals like xterm and rxvt ran extremely efficiently on machines 23 years ago, like, oh, a 66 MHz 486 DX2 with 8 Mb RAM. I can't say that I ever had a complaint with the speed of scrolling, or rendering of characters, or general responsiveness.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like a visual version for an alias list.

Here are somethings which might be more substantial improvements.

A status bar which helps in understanding what a command does. So you type 'command -xva a b' and the status bar gives an English description that the command is going to do such and such(based on flags) on files a and b.

Simple discoverability like an interactive version of reading man pages or apropos, where after typing something like git or ls, the user who doesn't remember the exact options, can press some shortcut and type a english description like 'hidden files' 'reset' and the status bar displays the relevant flags and their description. This kind of semantic autocomplete, would save a visit to a long man page.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why is the download 100MB big ? Isn't it a bit heavy for a simple terminal ?

<comment><USER9> Because it bundles Electron [1] which weighs (for version 1.2.6) around ~40MB, if you also include the size of the 720 NPM packages [2] that this application uses then you get the same size that you are complaining about. However, if you also extract the content of the archive you will notice that it actually weighs ~620MB LOL.

[1] [https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v1.2.6](https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v1.2.6)

[2] [http://pastebin.com/raw/VhnuuDdX](http://pastebin.com/raw/VhnuuDdX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is this some type of sponsored post shit?

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't know how much of an advancement this is for a seasoned user, but I do think this would be a great learning tool since you can visually see all the commands generated by the terminal.

That's what shines in my eyes from this project.

</comment><comment><USER30> I might not see a developer using this, but an administrator I could. Needing to run one-off scripts and server management. However only if it would work remotely, and with host specific configuration and command options.

<comment><USER31> The proper response to seeing a systems administrator using one-off scripts from his workstation to manage systems is to fire him immediately and hire someone competent.

<comment><USER32> Right, because any sysadmin worth his salt is going to embed that ugly hack right into the infrastructure for all eternity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> IMO, it makes no sense.

</comment><comment><USER34> alias is free</comment>


Standout Companies From The Fifth 500 Startups Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/06/here-are-10-standout-companies-from-the-fifth-500-startups-demo-day/

<comment><USER2> The one that really shines out at me is Privy, great potential there.

<http://getprivy.com/>

Need to do a bit better at communicating the value proposition on their homepage though.</comment>


Ask HN: Can't iTunes Match be used to actually "pirate" content? - <AUTHOR>

Since iTunes Match will be sending to Apple server the fingerprints of the songs on one's computer, could one not, theoretically, fake iTunes into believing that an audio file with a given fingerprint actually exists on your computer?
This attack vector was used by Dropship to transfer files across Dropbox accounts (Ref: http://razorfast.com/2011/04/25/dropbox-attempts-to-kill-open-source-project/), but the implications were minor since, from a security perspective, the attack was on a fellow user. Here the attack is on the iTunes system as a whole, and enables you to download songs that you have not purchased and have not ripped or downloaded.
I can already imagine networks popping up where people share their audio fingerprints. <comment><USER2> Most likely so. But that $25 or so per year is most likely not going to Apple but being split by the record labels. Others have pointed out this is kind of a piracy amnesty. The average person just isn't going to go nuts pirating music to get some sort of deal. Those aren't the kind of people buying iDevices. Besides which, don't people have to upload the music for the scan? Broadband uploads speeds are crap, again whittling away whatever incentive people might have to load up on stolen music.

<comment><AUTHOR> I realized that the $25 per year was a form of piracy amnesty the moment I heard about it. The way I see it, people pay $25 per year to get an all-you- can-eat music service, since they can always legitimize content they keep on downloading from illegitimate sources.

My question, however, is whether it is even necessary to download any illegitimate content. Nobody needs to upload any music to any servers (iTunes Match claims not to), all they need to do is to trick iTunes to make it look like "Song X.mp3" is actually on their hard-drive. In order to do that all people need to find out is what data iTunes sends to mothership about a particular song. A similar feat was achieved by Dropship.

<comment><USER2> Maybe this helps: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/what-you-need- to-k...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/what-you-need-to-know- about-itunes-match-your-questions-answered.ars)

So it does scan, not require an upload unless it's not matched. Very interesting. It's not a service I'll be using, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Turned 7 years old on February 20 - <AUTHOR> http://ycuniverse.com/hacker-news-sixth-birthday

<comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News also got a server upgrade a year ago: [http://ycuniverse.com/hacker-news-upgrade](http://ycuniverse.com/hacker-news- upgrade)</comment>


Show HN: Generate an image of all your GitHub Contributions - <AUTHOR> https://github-contributions.now.sh/ <comment><USER2> I thought it would create a random image based on my commit patterns...

Cool nonetheless but I'm a bit disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dracula looks supercool! Thanks for making this.</comment>


'The Amazon Effect': Now Murdoch's Gunning for the $10 E-Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/behold-the-amazon-effect-now-murdochs-gunning-for-the-10-e-book/

<comment><USER2> It's unfortunate that this has been legal since 2007. Between 1911 and 2007, a manufacturer could set whatever wholesale price they wanted, but was not allowed to attempt to control what retail prices others could resell it for.

Now Macmillan-style agreements where the manufacturer can demand a contract that lets the manufacturer set the retail price are legal, thanks to: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Product...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Products,_Inc._v._PSKS,_Inc).

The old rule seems more reasonable to me. If Macmillan or Murdoch or whoever wants to raise the wholesale prices they charge Amazon, that's perfectly fine; they should charge whatever they think their product is worth. But what price Amazon then chooses to turn around and retail it for seems like none of their business.

<comment><USER3> For those also having trouble with the link, the actual address contains a period at the end.

I assume HN believes the period was punctuation and is removing it when it converts to the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel so sorry for Amazon. They revolutionized online shopping and made everything so cheap with _out_ crappy products or ripping off the original producers.

:(</comment>


The Groovy Conundrum - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731 <comment><USER2> This article's concluding paragraph...

> The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which > is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give > Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you'll find the > language is easy to learn, but hard to master. Fortunately, this limitation > is not incurable. However, time is of the essence as Groovy's principal > competitor for the hearts and minds of Java developers — Scala — has a > small, laser-focused company behind it, which revs the product frequently > and generates considerable documentation. If Groovy acts soon, it can retain > leadership among Java alternatives. If not, it will have to resign itself to > being an also-ran.

The author is missing the point of Grails and Groovy's business model. A lack of usable documentation means developers must pay for SpringSource consultants and seats at conferences, where lots of money is made and divvied up. The Groovy "Bible" didn't bring in much profit for its authors so why should they bother with a 2nd edn? Grails and Groovy is about making money _now_ for those involved, not investing it. Even the "groovymag" charges money for an online subscription, while the "Week with Scala" is free! If someone seriously creates independent doco for Groovy, the next version of Groovy would change slightly to lessen the value of the doco and increase the need for a consultant or conference.

The author does correctly conclude that Groovy will soon be an also-ran because of that business strategy. Rod Johnson, former CEO of Grails company SpringSource, is now leading the board of that laser-focused Scala company. He no doubt understands the value of "taking a cut of a huge pie" instead of "owning all of a tiny pie", and is investing in growing Scala instead of strangling it. The project managers behind Groovy, Graeme Rocher and Guillaume Laforge, are probably incapable of changing their ingrained habits to steer Groovy in a new direction.</comment>


How to move a 200-ton spectrometer across Europe - <AUTHOR> http://www.fogonazos.es/2008/05/how-to-move-200-ton-spectrometer-across.html <comment><USER2> For those wondering why you'd need such a thing, here's the KATRIN project's website:

[http://www.katrin.kit.edu/](http://www.katrin.kit.edu/)

and the wikipedia article:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATRIN](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATRIN)

In short, it's an experiment to directly measure the mass of the electron-type neutrino. Very occasionally, when tritium beta-decays, the electron carries away all the energy. If the neutrino has mass (and we are rather certain [1] that it does), then there's a little less energy to carry away. The giant MAC-E spectrometer (actually a chain of them, of which the big one is the last) is the only known way of resolving the 13,000 electron-volt electron to less than an electron-volt.

It's a very hard experiment, but it's important, and nobody knows an easier terrestrial path to the same knowledge (cosmology limits are equal to or better than KATRIN, but there's a big difference between the cosmos and something you can do on Earth).

(Edit: and for you vacuum jocks out there, that entire volume operates at UHV. It's electropolished internally, and for their vacuum test, it pumped to below 10^-7 Torr on a single 6-8" turbo before bakeout.)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Mass](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Mass)

<comment><USER3> To followup: neutrinos have been established to have mass from neutrino oscillation experiments but those experiments have left a fairly large range of possible masses for neutrinos. Experiments like KATRIN will further pin down the properties of neutrinos as well as their rest mass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Zeppelins could solve transport scenarios just like this one, where you must transport a huge cargo from/to specific locations far from the shore:

[http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship- cargo-18...](http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-187/)

However, after hearing about this comeback for at least a decade, I'm a bit skeptic it will ever come true.

<comment><USER5> One of these efforts graced the Berlin, Germany area with a huge hangar: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter)

Luckily, they found a new use for the structure: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort)

<comment><USER6> This seems like a project for Elon Musk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Similar problem in the United States, moving a massive electromagnet from Brookhaven to Fermilab: [http://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/bigmove/gallery.shtml](http://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/bigmove/gallery.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a whole different thing, but they moved a 340 ton rock across Los Angeles County a few years ago. I have some pictures from when they parked it a few blocks away.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_Mass](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_Mass)

</comment><comment><USER9> See also: "Transporting the [Lockheed] A-12s to Area 51" at [http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-...](http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what the budgetary breakdown was between building and transporting. It sounds like a project management screwup to me. Poor initial specs, Delayed scope creep.

</comment><comment><USER11> The opposite solution is to be arbitrarily constrained by the transportation's environment. This is what NASA has done, their modules and engine parts are made to fit within the dimensions of the tunnels between the point of manufacture and the launch site where they assemble it all together.

</comment><comment><USER12> Shouldn't this have been better planned out before they built it? Or was there no other choice?

<comment><USER13> I'm sure they had one of those "Oh..." moments when they realized there was something that didn't quite work out.

<comment><USER14> There are a few moments in recent history where I wish I had been. This is one of them, along with the day after the 2007 iPhone keynote in the Android 1 offices, and when the French company realized they'd built their trains 1cm too wide for a thousand platforms [1].

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french- rail-o...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-rail- operator-orders-hundreds-of-new-trains-too-big-for-platforms-9412274.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible to have multiple helicopters work together to lift one object? If so, 10 of these could have done it :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26)

<comment><USER16> Hard to see how ten helicopters could maintain enough horizontal separation to work safely while carrying the load.

An airship might be a better alternative.

<comment><USER17> Or combine both, and you get a Piasecki PA97 Helistat.

It worked poorly: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7jENWKgMPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7jENWKgMPY)

<comment><USER10> Great share! That frame looked weak to the naked eye. Screw engineering calculations: anyone who's played a bridge-building game should have seen it coming!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds a bit of moving the Space Shuttle Endeavor across Los Angeles:

[http://framework.latimes.com/2012/10/15/time-lapse-video- spa...](http://framework.latimes.com/2012/10/15/time-lapse-video-space- shuttle-endeavours-trek-across-l-a/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm scratching my head as to why they couldn't ship the various pieces, and construct it in place instead ... but I'm not the expert.

</comment><comment><USER20> I really have a hard time believing there was no lower cost solution for a 400 km trip by land as opposed to a 9000 km trip by land, sea, and land.

What about an off road heavy transport trailer for the sections of road they can' t fit through. Or a quick build bridge structure similar to what is used by the military? Or some sort of land version of a lock (water transport)?

<comment><USER21> This is the middle of Germany. "Off road" means "across someone else's property, destroying a large strip of it". It looks like they had enough trouble getting it the last 7km.

I presume the height of it means it won't fit under bridges on either road or canal.

<comment><USER13> Germany is also home to enormously gigantic machines like the Bagger 288 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288)) that are so enormous you can see them from space.

The scale of this thing is staggering. In one incident it accidentally scooped up a bulldozer: [http://imgur.com/gallery/rU3XU](http://imgur.com/gallery/rU3XU)

Also shown there is what it looks like when it's on the move along a carefully planned and prepared route: [http://i.imgur.com/51x5NIR.jpg?1](http://i.imgur.com/51x5NIR.jpg?1)

I'm sure the budget for moving a scientific device isn't as huge as something involved in mineral extraction where time equals money.

<comment><USER22> You can't see that thing from space.

With optics you definitely would, but with optics you can see a single human from space.

<comment><USER13> It wouldn't take more than binoculars. The bare patch of ground this thing has made is gigantic.

It's not just the digger, there's this conveyor system that's an integral part of the system that looks miles long.

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,6.6073151,43657m/dat...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,6.6073151,43657m/data=!3m1!1e3)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What the hell where these guys thinking?!?! - <AUTHOR> http://startupflames.com/story/show/2

<comment><USER2> I knew we were headed for trouble as soon as I read "I was brought on to lead up the development of their software platform." That's the kind of thing founders should be doing.

<comment><USER3> Part of the problem was that the founders were not technical at all.</comment></comment>


Designer News Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://dashinsky.com/designer-news-statistics/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to see the comments on this submission: [http://aquatilis.tv/](http://aquatilis.tv/) ( [https://news.layervault.com/stories/21015-site-design- aquati...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/21015-site-design-aquatilis) ). I'm pretty sure that if the same site was submitted here, 80%+ of the comments would about how slow and heavy the page is, but it is not even mentioned once on DN. (I'm using a maxed out rMBP with 16GB of RAM, a Core i7 and and a 2GB video card and it can't scroll the website smoothly).

<comment><USER3> I have an older 4GB RAM MBP and it feels smooth to me. The scrolling is janky because of parallax, not from performance problems. After that site loads it's fast and usable.

I've seen ad infested blog posts give this MBP way more trouble.

My main gripe with the Designer News site is the main and comment pages are not well designed. Huge amount of space between headlines and comments makes it hard to skim. This statistic page looks and reads much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having never seen Designer News before this, the icons were meaningless to me. A tooltip on hover or something similar would be really helpful.

(I realize this is mostly a problem with DN, but either way I think it's good UX.)

Otherwise, very cool!

</comment><comment><USER5> Any recommended reading from that list?

I see a lot of meta-posts, and many links i've already seen on Hacker News

<comment><USER6> Check out the top, I'm sure you'll find something interesting.

If you're web-developer try Top posts > CSS. Also try top stories from GitHub and top-Medium posts (they are a lot of tech-realted and not necessary design- realted topics).</comment></comment>


Test your website's loading speed through multiple locations - <AUTHOR> http://www.webpagetest.org/

<comment><USER2> <http://just-ping.com/> seems better

<comment><USER3> webpagetest actually renders the document and all referenced items. It's more similar to what firebug/yslow will tell you, and very useful for designing a site to load quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure this is a metric a web developer should care about. I always assumed the website would deliver the same X bytes of data, at the same level of performance for each request, regardless of source location. If this, or any other test says your site is slow from a particular location on the net, what can you possibly do about it? You aren't really measuring your web site performance you are measuring the quality of the pipe in between the two sites, something you have no control over.

<comment><AUTHOR> "If this, or any other test says your site is slow from a particular location on the net, what can you possibly do about it"

Basically it nails down to reducing the number requests and the roundtrip time per request (aka latency).

\- Use a CDN to reduce latency (e.g. cachefly, cloudfront) \- Outsource some javascript libraries (e.g. jquery) to google's CDN \- Move servers closer to customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I expected more than 2 locations. But better than nothing I guess</comment>


With 8.7% market share, Apple has 75% of cell phone profits - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/02/03/with-8-7-market-share-apple-has-75-of-cell-phone-profits/ <comment><USER2> That is an astounding graph. I didn't consciously realize this till the example of Apple made it clear a few years ago, but market share is actually an unambitious thing to aim for. When people treat market share as a proxy for profit share, they're implicitly assuming all the competitors are roughly equivalent. But Apple shows that if your products are sufficiently more desirable than competitors', you can make market share and profit share diverge.

<comment><USER3> They can only diverge so far though. For example, Apple needs a reasonably sized slice of the pie to maintain the App Store. If they had 0.1% of the market, there would be drastically fewer people willing to write apps.

<comment><USER3> Another thought- market share is often desirable not only for profit, but influence in that market.

Clearly Apple has demonstrated you do not require market dominance to influence or even drive the market, but their success in that regard does not appear to be easy to replicate.

<comment><USER4> Large market share might also lead to more stable profits, though I'd want to look at empirical evidence before saying for sure. Large profits on small market share reeks of an unstable situation, because at least in theory very high margins shouldn't be stable in the face of functioning competitive markets. My guess would be that high profit margins can evaporate overnight more easily than large market share can evaporate overnight (look at how long AOL has been cashing in on the very slow draw-down of its once-large customer base). Though it probably depends on how fast the market typically turns over. On the other hand, arguably Apple is in something of a luxury goods segment, and economists have long recognized that luxury goods operate in strange ways when compared to "normal" neoclassical markets.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but AOL is a subscription service. Phones last 2-3 years tops. In that time frame if your product is made obsolete you can lose your pants overnight regardless of whether you sell 10s or 100s of millions of units today. Large marketshare is no guarantee of anything in the fickle tech world (look at Nokia), so I'll take profit over marketshare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While this is extremely positive for Apple, it isn't necessarily bad news for Google and Microsoft--their profits and losses simply aren't captured by this chart. It compares profit from a firm that makes both software and hardware with firms that only make the hardware.

</comment><comment><USER7> As was noticed a long time ago on roughlydrafted.com (before it became a pure fanboi site without anything interesting to say), it's exactly the same in the PC market. Apple grabs something like 80% of the market in PC over 1000$, hence they grab almost all of the hardware margin; then Microsoft grabs most of what remains, and all PC makers are fighting over breadcrumbs.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but they're much happier making budget hardware, handing over the majority of their profit to Microsoft and fighting tooth and nail over bread crumbs than they would be otherwise. Gotta pursue your dream dont'cha know. It's a freedom thing. Also, even if they make a loss, they will make it back in volume. (since that appears to be their _actual business strategy_ , whether to place sarcasm tags around the preceeding sentence is left as an exercise for the reader)

Small nitpick: roughlydrafted was _always_ a pure fanboi site with little or nothing of interest to say.

<comment><USER9> He's certainly a fanboi, but he's been very insightful too.

<comment><USER8> he suffers from Gruber-syndrome.

Which is to say, that he will argue till the cows come home that market share is udderly (sic) irrelevant...

...right up until Apple gets a market share lead in something, when he will whip out the megaphone and start screaming about how "we" are winning now.

He's _almost_ as bad as the people who - in complete disregard of the facts, keep slamming Apple no matter what they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple went from 4% market share with 50% profits sometime in 2010, to 8.7% market share with 75% profits. Which seems to imply they are also making their devices, on average, cheaper.

Is this the start of them slowly adjusting their prices to grab some more market share? Especially now that they actually have phone models to serve multiple segments of the mobile phone market?

<comment><USER11> Or pie got larger, which seems more likely.

Most of the price of the device is negotiated with the carrier, not the consumer. So a "free" device is really $600, and a "$199" device is $800.

<comment><USER12> Or the profit everyone else was making went down. Apple could make a dollar of profit on $50 billion sales and if everyone else was losing money, that'd still be 100% profit share. Still wouldn't be good for an Apple investor. As much as market share is a poor metric, profit share has similar problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of something mentioned in a (very interesting) lecture that hinted there is some deeper fundamental reason for apple's advantage. The clip is: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RYXqCtsZsc> (watch from 21:00 for the exact part).

It claims that Apple has some major advantage in terms of capital cost for the devices themselves. It mentions their chips but I don't see how they can have such a major advantage.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any insights into how they might be able to have radically lower costs.

The guy seems pretty credible.

<comment><USER14> He's talking about the supply chain optimization. One example is the dram chips used to build the iphone came from Samsung. They were sourced at quantities so large they are actually cheaper for Apple's iPhone than they are for Samsung's own phones. Streamlined products where the only segmentation is storage space make this possible. They can actually request such a large order their competitors can't match and get squeezed to the end of the manufacturing line while also paying more. To match they have to spend more. This hurts even more if your'e not controlling the distribution.

To the average non-techie all they have to decide is what color and storage size they want. This makes the device friendlier to consumers and takes away stress of understanding the hardware choices. The customer is actually happier if they don't have too many choices. People pay as much for this as they do the curated apps.

<comment><USER15> I've read elsewhere that Apple also started fronting the capital for the plant investment required to build the components they need, in return for very favourable lock-in agreements ("We will always be able to buy your product at 10% less than anyone else." That kind of thing.)

In short, Apple is thinking big & thinking long term all the time & they are reaping the benefits. Even if you don't like the products (and I personally find the whole walled garden thing somewhat creepy) you have to recognise that their strategic thinking is what's lead them to this dominant position in terms of profits.

(There's also the taking advantage of something approximating slave labour in China thing of course, but sadly that's hardly limited to Apple: like everything else they just seem to be better at it than anyone else is.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's worth pointing out that this isn't profit share of the entire global market, but profit share of the space occupied by 8 competing phone companies. There is of course a lot to be gleaned from this chart, but I'd like to see the same with an 'Other' bracket too.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if the innovator's dilemma will apply here, with cheap Android phones (and Windows too) catching up with the iPhone and they can no longer charge a premium.

<comment><USER18> I doubt it, for several reasons.

1) The premium is invisible at the point of purchase... the iPhone 3GS is free, and the iPhone 4 costs $99.

Where Apple seems to be getting its profits are in the prices paid by the networks. I'm sure Verizon would love to pay Apple the same rate for the iPhone that it pays for, say, the HTC Rezound. But if Verizon drops the Rezound from their lineup, no one will care. If they drop the iPhone, they're going to lose share, because a substantial chunk of those customers will slowly bleed off to AT&T.

And AT&T is not going to play hardball with Apple. AT&T has witnessed first hand what having Apple in your corner does to your marketshare, and they will not fuck with that.

2) Android doesn't actually have a price advantage. IPhones aren't more expensive to build than Android phones, nor are the licensing costs cheaper. Apple has strong supply chain and patent advantages here, matched perhaps only by Samsung.

3) Achieving parity with Apple is proving pretty difficult. Android has strategic innovations in licensing and openness, but Apple has strategic innovations in supply chain, battery life, credit card database, and design that are entrenched. Entrenched in that even if Google/Samsung put their organizational oomph behind matching them, it's not certain they would succeed.

<comment><USER19> >AT&T has witnessed first hand what having Apple in your corner does to your marketshare, and they will not fuck with that.

I'm pretty sure AT&T/Cingular was the largest wireless provider before the iPhone. Perhaps the iPhone kept them going while they would have been bleeding to Verizon*, but it's hard to say.

<comment><USER20> _I'm pretty sure AT &T/Cingular was the largest wireless provider before the iPhone._

Nope: [http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/11/verizon-retakes-us- wirele...](http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/11/verizon-retakes-us-wireless- subscriber-lead-from-atandt/)

<comment><USER19> Hmmm... so much of those numbers are confused not by actual subscriber decisions though, but by mergers (Cingular/AT&T then Verizon/Alltel). It's very difficult to say how the iPhone affected market share because companies were busy buying and selling subscribers. I'd like to see new user contracts between June 30, 2007 (iPhone release) and now. But... not enough that I'm going to go digging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I take any comparison between Apple and Samsung financials with a grain of salt. The two companies have vastly different reporting requirements and ownership/control structures.

To a lesser degree, this also applies to the other not-US companies listed.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's also interesting how well Samsung has protected its profits.

Q4 2008 was the only time they really struggled, but their Android devices seem to have done well in gaining the share back quickly and protecting it well.

<comment><USER23> And, more surprisingly, the same for is true RIM, except the last quarter. Nokia is the big looser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So this proves yet again that Apple products are ridiculously priced :)

<comment><USER25> Perhaps the carriers feel that way, but price points for consumers are:

1\. Free 2\. $99 3\. $199

<comment><USER26> The figures aren't just for the US. So they include many countries where bundling phones and contracts is either illegal (some Nordic countries) or dying fast (e.g. France since Free)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In Austria people take Android smartphones for free with their contracts but outside of a hardcore geek circles I have never heard of anyone paying up front for one. They are simply cheap enough to be a substitute for featurephones. I know people earning less than 1500$ per month who pony up 300eur and 40 per month for an iphone. At least here Apple has won the smartphone wars.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this because Apple sells so many more high-end phones than (say) HTC? Or is this because HTC has lower margins on its high-end offerings?

</comment><comment><USER29> Small nitpick...

"As the iPhone's share of the market in terms of units shipped has grown from 3% in second quarter of 2010 to 8.7% last quarter, Apple's share of the profits has swelled from 39% to 75%"

Eyeballing the graph, it doesn't look to me like Apple's share of the profits was 39% in Q2 2010, more like 60%. Anyone else see this?

<comment><USER30> It appears to reach from around the 50% mark on the graph to the 90% mark.. so 39% looks ok to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Obligatory comment about competing on features/image/design/story/etc.. anything but price.

<comment><USER3> I cannot agree with this, at least not entirely. While it is a risky path to tread, historically market leaders have leveraged price to very great effect against newcomers, and newcomers have done the same to crack open closed markets.

See Hyundai, for example. For the past few years they have been leveraging price to gain entry to the North American auto business. It's working.

<comment><USER4> Also worked for Wal-Mart and Amazon. Everyone else (local bookstores, boutique retailers, etc.) is desperately trying to compete on everything but price, but Wal-Mart and Amazon continue to steamroller them primarily by winning on price.

<comment><USER31> Good points. I guess my comment was a bit too all-inclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> lessons learned:

1., There is no such thing as a loss leader. If it doesn't make money, cut it. Apple TV is considered a hobby - but it is profitable. Yes, there is a grey area, but at Apple it is very small.

2., Your company runs on money, not market share. This has to be the focus. How can you guarantee the constant influx of enough money? Satisfied customers pay more, pay more often. The quick buck loses you money long-term.

3., Focus. You can't manage hundreds of products. you confuse your customer. Do a few things and do them extremely well. Makes it also easier to market, analyze, etc.

<comment><USER29> _1., There is no such thing as a loss leader. If it doesn't make money, cut it. Apple TV is considered a hobby - but it is profitable. Yes, there is a grey area, but at Apple it is very small._

Pretty sure Apple itself contradicts this. Afaik, the iTunes music store was in fact run as a loss leader for some time, before Apple was in a position to argue for better terms. For all I know, it might still be a loss leader (though I doubt that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> first thing that came to mind <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle>

</comment><comment><USER34> What is the time lag on this graph? How much of Apple profits are from amortized phone contracts that are now 2yrs old?

<comment><USER35> As of Q1 2010, Apple uses reporting that accounts for the revenues and profits of phones in the quarter that they're received. (<http://investor.apple.com/financials.cfm> \- the Form 10-K/A explains the changes on accounting principles on the Form 10-K from how they used to be (amortized over 8 quarters) and how they are now (all reported in the quarter where they're received.))

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think that's a sign that you're paying too much for an iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't doubt that Apple has vastly greater profits than any of its competitors, but stats like this are cooked to make the ratio seem even more impressive than it already is. The notion that a feature phone and an iPhone are substantially in the same market is silly. It's akin to categorizing ThinkPads and land line handsets as part of the same market. Of course, journalists optimize for the most dramatic headline, not the most informative or truthful article, so we're not going to see many apples-to-apples comparisons on this subject in the tech press.

Also I have a non-rhetorical question. Apple, and several of the competitors graphed here, have many lines of non-smartphone products. Is this graph tracking the profit/loss of their smartphone divisions only, or profits of the company as a whole? If the latter, then the comparison is silly, isn't it? And if it's the former, how does this analyst account for costs shared among multiple divisions, such as iOS development (which is a cost that's shared with their iPad and to some extent even their Mac divisions)?

<comment><USER5> Your first paragraph is fallacious.

If the graph includes feature phones then that will necessarily dilute Apple's profits since they do not make a feature phone. Therefore that makes Apple's numbers appear less impressive.

I don't have an answer to your questions, but I'm sure Mr. Dediu would be happy to answer them transparently. He's not a journalist cooking sensational stats, he's a serious amateur analyst who tries to make revealing graphs with an intellectual honesty that is refreshing and a community-driven feedback process that is producing better punditry than most of the professionals. I know a lot of people have a chip on their shoulder about Apple, but it is possible to be both interested and impressed by Apple and also still be a rational observer.

<comment><USER37> The headline manufactures drama from the contrast between "8.7% market share [in units sold]" and 75% of profits. This is the silly part of the coverage.

It's not Dediu's fault that Elmer-Dewitt at CNN Money chose to be ridiculous, so your defense of Dediu's integrity is beside the point.

<comment><USER38>
      > This is the silly part of the coverage.

Can you explain what's so silly about it? It's a fact, and fascinating one, I'd say.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UBS Is Fined $4.2B in French Tax-Evasion Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/ubs-is-fined-4-2-billion-in-french-tax-evasion-case-11550668920 <comment><USER3> Another slap on the wrist. No one goes to jail because of Deferred Prosecution Agreements

HSBC got fined about half that when they caught laundering money for the Mexican cartels a few years back. True story: HSBC had to design special teller windows because the standard ones were too small to fit the sacks of money that were being brought in and laundered. If you want to know why these guys don't go to jail, pull up a bottle of lithium and sit down with The Chickenshit Club.

<comment><USER4> HSBC allegedly laundered (not revenue, not profit, they _laundered_ ) $880 million.

They were fined $1.9 billion.

Not "fined about half"

<comment><USER5> They were caught with $880 millions. That doesn't mean they laundered only that.

<comment><USER6> People and 'the News' most times don't read the details, which is logical since we never get the full reports on our hands. The scope of the audit/examination should document the limitations/boundaries of the examination. E.g. X, Y, and Z, countries, A, B, and C subsidiaries, for the period of dd/mm/yyyy to dd/mm/yyyy. And which transactions where checked? All deposits? From all business lines? E.g. bank deposits OR their investment brokers?

There are many ways to get money in a large Banking group like UBS, HSBC, and others. They have become Lernaea Hydras and for a good reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No paywall [https://outline.com/YSFyPN](https://outline.com/YSFyPN)

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know what the likelyhood of the 4.2B being paid out is? I imagine that UBS will go through all possible appeals processes.

Also if the article is right in that this was affected by the protests, then that is a big win for protesting.

<comment><USER9> UBS's market cap is $46B. After this was announced, their stock fell 4%. This drop, if permanent, would equate to a loss of ~$1.84B in market cap.

There are many factors that could be influencing price, but if we attribute this 4% delta entirely to the announcement, the market is guessing the actual penalty will amount to $1.84B. This could be bc the market thinks UBS can appeal with a 50% success rate, or can negotiate the penalty down by 50% with high certainty.

Edit: I hadn't considered tax implications. If UBS is able to deduct these penalties pre-tax (which I'd assume they would), then it suggests that they are very likely going to have to pay the full penalty. Of course, this is all guess work. e.g. the market could be scared that this sets a precedent for future additional penalties which would decrease the signalling towards full payment on this penalty.

<comment><USER10> This isn't quite right -- The 4% loss could just represent the delta between what was already priced in and the actual loss. This case has been a long time coming so the expectation of the penalty should have been priced in long ago.

Secondly, and it depends on the jurisdiction, but penalties and fees associated with wrongdoing generally aren't tax deductible.

The US clarified this during the TCJA but most countries agree: [https://www.clearyenforcementwatch.com/2018/02/1962/](https://www.clearyenforcementwatch.com/2018/02/1962/)

<comment><USER11> There's also that weirdness of financial companies having price-to-book less than one... (For UBS it's around 0.9. Don't ask me how it makes sense.)

<comment><USER12> There may be good reasons for that.

First, there are two ways to value companies, depending on what kind of companies they are. The two extremes are on one side a consulting firm, where the value is worth only the present value of the future fees to be earned by the consultants. But the company itself has no asset, very little debt, and its balance sheet is pretty much irrelevant to its valuation. The other extreme is an investment fund, where the company is worth exactly the current market value of its assets, it has no other future revenues other than the expected incomes from these assets.

A bank is somewhere in the middle. It is kind of an investment fund in the sense that all its assets are financial assets that can be sold pretty much at their book value (unlike a factory where the book value may mean very little in term of how much the asset is really worth). But the book value may differ from the fair market value (that's often the case if there are bad loans). But part of the value will also be generated from profits that are unrelated to these assets: fees on payment processing, advisory fees, trading income, etc. So part of the value is also a PV of future revenues.

And these future revenues may be negative. If you look at the past 10 years, banks have experienced huge revenue volatility. From trading losses, fraud (Kerviel style), fines (like UBS here), bad loans (RBS and HBOS style), etc.

And then you can have all sort of weird technicalities. Like the book value may be increased for gains on own credit (if the company fair values part of its liabilities). That's a paper gain that the market is unlikely to give any credit for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What happens if a fine is greater than the value of a multi-national company's operations in a country? As $4.2 billion is ~10% of UBS's market cap, does UBS derive more than 10% of its value from within France? If not, might they just abandon operations in the country for the government to seize and avoid paying the fine, or would EU or international-level agreements or courts enforce payment? Anyone know of any precedent regarding such a scenario?

<comment><USER14> Court orders can, and are, routinely enforced in other countries. The interested agent goes to country B courts with a decision from country A and asks for a local enforcement order. When granted, this has the same power as a court order from country B. Even if UBS decides to abandon all assets in France and never do business there again, agents of the French state can get the fine from UBS assets in other countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> €3.7B ($4.2B) is last year profit. Fine is €4.5B($5.1) Here is link to not paywalled article [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ubs-trial-fraud/ubs-to- ap...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ubs-trial-fraud/ubs-to-appeal-after- fined-4-5-billion-euros-in-french-tax-fraud-case-idUSKCN1Q91DR)

EDIT: Actually fine is €3.7 + €800m in damages.

</comment><comment><USER16> We are shifting more and more towards a legal system where not only those who actually did something wrong (here the tax evaders), but also those whose services have been used to do so are considered guilty. Another example is copyright, where websites are increasingly held liable for user uploads. I'm not convinced that this is a good development.

<comment><USER17> If a stranger walks up to you, and gives you $10,000 to drive a large, heavy, body-sized bag to the outskirts of town, and dump it in a river, I think most reasonable people would consider you to be at least an accessory to murder. On the other hand, if you were a department store clerk who sold that bag, most reasonable people would consider you in the clear.

There's a spectrum for this sort of thing, and I think UBS was clearly on the 'knowingly profiting from crime' side of it.

<comment><USER18> I think we are talking about a company calling people to ask them if they have a bag to dispose of and organizing conferences on the fine art of bag disposal, a primer on material science, some workshops on bag design and the intricacies of selecting rivers.

They were cold calling the customers accross the border, not closing their eyes on the paperwork associated with the money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if they will rethink their "fat billboards at Beijing airport" marketing strategy. Who wouldn't love to see China fine a Swiss bank?

</comment><comment><USER20> Big banks a such an easy target these days. Everyone in hates them and politicians love that because they can extract big fines. win-win-win. Until all the banks go under at least - US banks are mostly solvent still, European ones look like all the big ones will go under.

<comment><USER21> > Until all the banks go under

If 2008 taught us anything it is the fact that big banks don't "go under" because they are considered "too big to fail" and as such will not be allowed to fail.

The German term for this is "systemrelevant", (systemically important) which imho fits way better than "too big to fail" because it's way blunter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The predicate for this dates back a long way. I believe UBS were offered an initial sum of $1.1b to settle a few years ago and took it to trial [1]

> The judges' move followed a failed plea bargain between national financial > prosecutors and UBS representatives, the first time such an out-of-court > settlement was tested in France. French magistrates reportedly offered UBS > to settle the case for 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), after considering > an initial deal of 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion). - <USER2>

However the basis was

> The assets illegally concealed by French clients in Switzerland between 2004 > and 2012 allegedly amounted some 10 billion euros ($10.75 billion).

Another quote puts it at $600billion[2]

I'd love to know the definition of "illegally concealed" in these circumstances

The chances of it being reasonable I'd consider very slim; France is not a reasonable country nor is it run by reasonable people. France is a failing protection racket running out of people to shake down, by and large. When the people who run the socialist party government budget are offshoring their wealth - perhaps your country is fundamentally broken.[3]

[1] [https://www.apnews.com/2c7032c7d75a40728395587fd917517e](https://www.apnews.com/2c7032c7d75a40728395587fd917517e)

[2] [http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/04/europe-loses-billions-to- tax-...](http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/04/europe-loses-billions-to-tax-evasion/)

[3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/three- ex-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/three-ex-ubs- officials-said-to-face-arrest-in-french-tax-probe)

Edit: Downvotes without comment. Not exactly productive conversation.

<comment><USER23> I can see why you are being downvoted, but you are right, France isn't a very reasonable country. France has some of the most absurd, protectionist, socialist, anti-market laws the world has ever seen. Hopefully they are getting the message that their stodgy old world socialist world-view is self- defeating and unproductive.

America has some problems, but there's a reason why they have a GDP 40x larger than France with only 5x the population.

<comment><USER24> I won't enter into the policy discussions about wealth distribution, and you are right that the GDP per capita of the US is larger than that of Franc, but. The difference is more that of 43K vs 59K. So not 900%.

In fact, the GDP per capita is 100$ less than that of the UK, and more than that of, for example, Japan or South Korea.

Also of note may be that France, unlike the US, does not dispose of oil resources, which makes comparisons not quite as simple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

<comment><USER23> Sorry it's not 40x it's more like 10x for GDP. But there is a difference between GDP/capita and PPP. If we're talking about standard of living PPP is a good measure. But if we're just talking about "wealth" then I think GDP/capita is a better measure. Or actually, just total GDP is probably a better measure than per person.

<comment><USER24> Even at nominal GDP it is 59k vs 39k, so 50% difference and not 100%.

And I'm not sure to understand why you prefer one mesure over the other. Pure GDP does not take into account systemic issues, such as the cost of health care or education. And the point of the discussion was the relevant merit of various economical systems.

But I did not post in order to correct some semantic point. But rather to explain the non-commented down votes.

In your original post you made an extraordinary claim, that was off by an order of magnitude. I pointed this out, and instead of checking facts, you downgraded your claim, even though a simple Google lookup would have been enough to know that even that was wrong by 100%.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\)_per_capita)

In my mind this is an example of why it is difficult to have meaningful debate in our society. There is no point in debating if one or both parties are not willing to challenge their understanding of the facts.

<comment><USER23> I'm not the one who originally posted. The 10x GDP is just based on raw GDP numbers. I don't think they're biased. As are the population numbers.

<comment><USER25> As of 2018, the US GDP is 7.34x the one of France, not 10x. And in 2019, the US population is 4.91x bigger that France population, leading to a GDP per capita being 1.50x higher, not 2x.

You cannot round numbers at 1 significant digit and use them for further computations, that's butchering math.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unsupervised machine learning with basket clusters - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/unsupervised-machine-learning-for-fun-profit-with-basket-clusters-17a1161e7aa1 <comment><USER2> Here's my understanding of what's going on:

He has a dataset that links companies to each element of the periodic table (Intel would likely be highly linked to silicon, while not as linked to nitrogen as a fertilizer company). He then uses some clustering and whatnot to produce groups of stocks he is trading as a unit.

How he picks what to trade is kinda hand wavy (Is he trading all baskets and only reporting the good one?). He also mentions using Google trends data, which might be some signal for his clusters. Given the lack of detail, my gut reaction is to assume he made tens of these strategies and has kindly reported the best one to us.

At the end, you see he is a financial consultant hoping to build his resume up through posts like these.

</comment><comment><USER3> So the author was able to beat S&P500 by 10% over a period from June-2016 to June-2017 using this solver. The most important question is whether the same underlying relationships will hold true for 2017-18.

This seems like a classic example of hindsight. There are many things one can tell on hindsight when the results are out. The key is if they will hold for the future too. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't matter if you can do it once. You have to do it consistently over years, which is not possible. I know about Renaissance Technologies, but I suspect they have insider information or some other angle and it's not all about their algorithms.

<comment><USER5> That is a rather large accusation. Can you restate that as something constructive or helpful to the conversation?

<comment><USER4> Do you understand investing at all? People have been attempting to "beat the market" for decades and nobody has been successful. There is always the "reversion to the mean" issue in every case. People with algorithms think they are beating the market then something changes and their algorithm no longer works. Except for Renaissance--they have consistently been beating the market, or so it appears.

Does that help?

<comment><USER6> No, it doesn't help all. You have yet to provide any evidence for your accusation of insider trading (or "something else"). You can't really accuse RT of wrongdoing, just because you don't understand their methodology.

Also -- if I were a quant that managed to beat the market consistently, I would shut up and go straight to RT, for two reasons. To avoid toxic dubious comments like yours, and because RT can pay me better than your standard hedge fund.

<comment><USER7> Except that Renaissance trading doesn't really want to hire quants. They wish to hire scientists and mold them in the Renaissance way, which is something you'd know if you were a quant.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/simons-hedge- idUSN21355752200...](http://www.reuters.com/article/simons-hedge- idUSN2135575220070522)

<comment><USER4> It's a good article, but it's all that you will find about them, no real details on how they are beating the markets over and over again. It's simply not possible to be that successful for so long. The article states that some experiments succeed and some fail and that their strategies peter out over time and they have to develop new ones. Okay, but never booking a loss?

<comment><USER7> Speaking as a former quant myself (1 year), I believe that there are transient patterns in the market.

The challenge is that those patterns appear and then they disappear mostly forever because they are frequently created by someone else's mistakes like Nassim Taleb buying way out of the money put options that never really created any significant profit. Free Alpha, get your free Alpha, right there.

To tap into those patterns while they are profitable, you need a lot of smart people, and a great deal of infrastructure for experimentation and delivery of strategies that can tap into those patterns before they disappear. While you're right that it is possible that they cheat, it's also possible that they have a sufficiently sophisticated infrastructure to actually make this work. It's kind of like how Nintendo only ships 1 out of 3 video games they develop. All IMO of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't help but feel that this is noise multiplied by noise. Regression to the mean ought to he coming up real soon.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is systematic semi-blind guessing at what other people will guess in the future are good investments. It sprays investment capital equally at companies that are not in any way equivalent. Hypothetically, just because two companies both have names that begin with "Z" and sell product on Amazon, that is not an investment thesis for treating them alike. Treating them alike _is_ a recipe for misallocation of capital, in the long run, which is what it seems sometimes we have in this economy in spades.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't get the strategy here. What's the investment thesis? Are they collecting news and trading on it? It doesn't seem to mention that.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm skeptical of the starmine dataset[0] being used:

"The dataset is based on relationships between elements in the periodic table and public companies."

This description is a bit vague.

[0] [http://starmine.ai/datasets/dataset_builder.html](http://starmine.ai/datasets/dataset_builder.html)

<comment><USER12> I'm having trouble deciding if this whole post is a sly commentary on how easy it is to get machine learning wrong.

Beat the market by 10% with k-means clustering and a feature set derived from companies and chemical elements! Hahahaha no.

<comment><USER7> I know, right? Now mapping it to the sequences coming from the numbers stations? Totally different story!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If this approach works, is it wise to be sharing it publicly?

Is there a danger than whatever gains you were able to capture with a unique insight will end up being shared with competitors?

<comment><USER14> Sharing it publicly is the author saying it does not actually work as he claims it does. You don't write a blog post on a method you created to make guaranteed money, you use it.

<comment><USER7> A couple years back there were some traders talking about trying to implement a really fast version of K-means for clustering stocks that are transiently correlated on some sub-reddit. I wonder if this guy is the one who started that thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this not a parody, making a joke about how sensitive to supervision "unsupervised" learning methods are?

<comment><USER16> If it's not a parody, it's one of the most unintentionally hilarious things involving data I have ever seen presented.

To anyone who takes this seriously: I have a price of butter in Bangladesh indicator which works REALLY WELL on the S&P500.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk's first LA tunnel with free rides to kick off this summer - <AUTHOR> https://newatlas.com/the-boring-company-la-tunnel-rides/54578/ <comment><USER2> I thought that the anemic pace of tunnel construction was more a political problem than a technological one. Either Musk has solved NIMBY-ism and red tape, or he happened to pick a convenient location free from these issues for his pilot tube.

I suppose much of politics is arguing over who's going to pay for something, and who's going to actually build it. With The Boring Company digging their own proving ground, these questions are moot.

Far from being a naysayer, I live in NYC, we need more tunnels dug than ever before. If this works, we'll take twenty.

<comment><USER3> According to Elon, conventional tunneling costs "as much as $1 billion per mile," which is the biggest reason we don't have more tunnels.

<comment><USER4> How is what he doing not conventional? That's a mail-order tunnel-boring machine he's got there.

<comment><USER5> And tunneling doesn't cost 1 billion dollar a mile. One Mumbai metro line is being built at 100 million dollar per km, the cost includes everything, stations, tracks, coaches, etc. And they're using 17 tbm for this purpose.

<comment><USER4> The cost is proportional to what kind of environment you're operating in. If it's ideal terrain it'll be cheap. If it's difficult, ever changing conditions with a high risk of subsidence damage to the structures above, get ready to pay way, way more.

See the Seattle "Big Dig" project for an example of how sideways things can go if you hit an unexpected snag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I crazy to be more excited about Boring than I am about Tesla or SpaceX?

<comment><USER7> Not at all. We could use some out of the box thinking of Elon's caliber here on Earth as well. A week ago I was in Moscow. Their subway is truly insane in its scale. It'd be pretty cool if something like this could be built in major US cities as well.

<comment><USER8> It's already built - in NYC. New York City Subway has twice as many stations as Moscow Metro.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but I don't live in NYC, and traffic is terrible where I live, and it's not economical to improve it without fast, cheap boring technology.

PS; interestingly, Moscow metro has more riders, in spite of a smaller city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article points out Phase 2 will look to connect LAX with the 101.

Does anyone know anything about the logistics of receiving approval to dig underground? From their FAQ (see below), it says they will partner with the City of Los Angeles, but does LA own mineral rights such that they could sell the needed territory surface for this ambitious project? I assume Boring is definitely not dealing with individual property owners.

"Blue indicates potential Phase 2 expansion options, and is included as a concept, not as a finalized alignment. Phase 2 specifics would be developed in cooperation with Los Angeles County, the City of Los Angeles, city governments in the greater Los Angeles area, and the general public. The Boring Company looks forward to receiving feedback from residents of the greater Los Angeles area on station locations and system improvements for Phase 2 and beyond."

[https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/](https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Where does it go to?

<comment><USER11> Read the article?

<comment><USER12> It just says it's under LA. And it says where it'll go. It doesn't say anything about where they specifically did 500 feet of tunnel so far.

<comment><USER13> Based on past coverage, it's underneath a parking lot across the street from SpaceX.

Edit: Satellite photos suggest here:

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/33%C2%B055'18.3%22N+118%C2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-118.3261516,17z/data=!3m1!1e3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That is the most ad and 3rd link heavy site I've seen on HN in a while. Does anyone have a better reference?

<comment><USER15> The 'announcement' on Instagram: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BinoVT6Acpd/?hl=en&taken- by=elon...](https://www.instagram.com/p/BinoVT6Acpd/?hl=en&taken-by=elonmusk)

<comment><USER16> That camera angle is dizzying!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So where is it exactly?

<comment><USER11> Did you not want to read the article?

<comment><USER4> The article is pretty vague on where it is, other than "Los Angeles", which as anyone knows is pretty _fucking big_.

<comment><USER11> "But first it's all about baby steps, with the company getting to work on its first test tunnel that begins at its headquarters in LA."

Is that not specific enough? Seems pretty clear to me

<comment><USER17> I was looking for a line on a map or something. And the length of it. I know it was 500' at some point, but now it's longer, though unclear how much longer. Or where it goes.

FWIW, Wikipedia answers my question. I should have checked there before commenting.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Los_Angeles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Los_Angeles)

<comment><USER4> How many vehicles per hour can his little tunnel handle? I'm guessing under a hundred.

<comment><USER17> Beats me. I'm really interested in seeing it in person. It could be 60 cars per hour, or 240. Either one seems plausible, just a matter of how often the next one is sent on its way, and what the queuing system is like. If the endpoints can keep up with enqueuing and dequeuing the cars, then you could stuff 12 cars a minute on there (720 c/h) and have a 5 second following distance.

I bet you're right, though. At least on this initial build out.

<comment><USER4> If this tunnel is working using the "skateboard" concept then you'll need a certain number of those on hand, plus some kind of turn-around system to get people on and off of them. Unless you had a massive staging and unloading area, 12 vehicles per minute is completely impossible.

I think your low-end estimate is much more reasonable.

I also think if people are manually driving cars it's only a matter of months until there's a _spectacular_ crash in the tunnel because some idiot thought they could drive up the wall at speed or something.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Discuss HN: Crowdsourcing Open Car Maintience Startup Idea? - <AUTHOR>

Ok, I'll spill one of my ideas here and see if it goes anywhere here.  I wished I had the resources to build this but, meh.  Hopefully someone interesting happens here.  So here I go....
Have you ever been to a mechanic for routine maintenance?  You'll notice they will say you'll need to do this or that or this for your car.  Then you'll go to another mechanic and they'll say something completely different.  So you then go to your car manufacturer website for the final authority.  I mean, they did build it, right?  Until you hit a wall.
Look at this for example: http://www.honda.com/ or http://www.bmw.com
Tell me, you need information on maintaining the $30,000 car you just bought.  Where do you get it?  Apparently you don't.  Even Dell has a better site than this.
It's not unless you use your master search engine expertise to end up well, here http://techinfo.honda.com/Rjanisis/logon.asp?Region=US or here http://www.bmwtechinfo.com/.
So the car manufacturers are keeping their mouths shut.  Where do you go next?  I'm guessing Google and forums, right?  Congratulations, by doing so, you entered Anecdotal Evidence Hell which ends up being just as bad as where you first started.
What I propose next is this.  The creation of a car website with the equal authority of Wikipedia except for car ownership.  It is a website where if a mechanic is saying you need a $600 car repair, you can quickly look it up on your smartphone and see if they are bluffing or might be on to something.  For the fun of it, it will also allow you to compare costs of different car maintenance in your area as well as link to some DIY wiki page should you try to do it yourself.  It will be the ultimate second opinion for your car.
So what do you guys think? <comment><USER2> Cool idea, but I see some problems:

* Car dealers make a lot of money on servicing their customers' cars. They don't have much incentive to make DIY easy, and may work actively to sabotage a project like this. Unless you build relationships with dealers and manufacturers into your business plan from the beginning.

* DIY car seems to be dead or dying. In the 1970s, everyone knew how to change their oil. I'm not sure how many people in 2012 even know that oil is a thing that their cars consume. It might be very hard to achieve critical mass for a project like this.

* There are a lot of forums dedicated to various makes and models of cars. When information is available, it is usually easy to find there.

* Since this could be readily perceived as cutting in to the income stream of mechanics, you'd want to find some reason for them to buy into the project as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a person that likes to DIY, I feel your pain. I really wish auto companies would put their repair manuals online for free!

It's still pretty sparse, but one option is the Stack Exchange site for mechanics: <http://mechanics.stackexchange.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Good idea but to differentiate yourself from becoming one of the all to familiar discussion forum would take some effort. Ofcourse, using facebook, twitter etc to crowdsource would help.</comment>


Microsoft sees lower margins from cloud computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5541QU20090605 <comment><USER2> I think this is well-understood by all the players in this space. The problem with utility computing is that, well it's a _utility_. Ideally, the market becomes completely fungible, with the only differences being price and reliability.

<comment><USER3> There is a legitimate question about whether packaged software (e.g. Exchange) or SaaS (e.g. hosted Exchange) has higher margins, though. Getting customers to pay every month forever certainly sounds appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just about everything has lower margins than the Windows/Office monopoly...

</comment><comment><USER5> It's easy enough to realise that you're always selling less (computing power) than you pay for. The margins are inevitably small, but there are other reasons to get in the business. For Amazon.com the main reason was probably to build such a huge economy of scale that they don't need to buy extra capacity in Q4.</comment>


Troll Blasting Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://iptarget.blogspot.com/2011/05/troll-blasting-strategy.html

<comment><USER2> Marco Arment talked about this (not directly; he probably hasn't read this article) in "Build and Analyze" last week, and the conclusion he came to was: there's every indication Lodsys is totally prepared to litigate, and were you to challenge them, you would stand a very good chance of losing.

It's not a "small" risk this strategy asks you to take. It is, relative to the cost of simply licensing the patent†, a _rather large risk_ ; for most independent shops, you would be staking your company on the psychology of patent licensing shop.

Also, don't courts routinely combine cases, and routinely throw them out when they're filed in the wrong venue?

† _Which you probably no longer need to do after Apple all but threatened to sue Lodsys._

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like a conspiracy to commit an abuse of process. In other words, you're trying to use the court system for the express purpose of inflicting financial pain on an adversary in order to intimidate them into changing their behaviour, rather than to correct a wrong.

<comment><USER4> There's nothing wrong with 50 parties responding to the actions of another party in a perfectly legal manner.

> trying to use the court system for the express purpose of inflicting > financial pain on an adversary in order to intimidate them into changing > their behaviour

Does that sound unusual to you in some way?

<comment><USER5> Is that your unmotivated opinion, or are you in some position to make a reasonably firm declaration of how judges are likely to respond to this action?

Because you are posting here in a position where you may actually have some small influence on people making decisions that may destroy their companies, or compounded with the error of failing to properly incorporate, destroy their personal finances. Are you sure you don't perhaps want to walk back the certainty of your statement?

<comment><USER4> I certainly hope people do not mistake anonymous forum posts from unknown people, who make no attempt to claim or establish credentials, for legal advice.

Seems like I said that doing legal things such as filing lawsuits is legal, and companies often use threats of lawsuits or lawsuits to attempt to influence the behavior of other parties. Can you point out where I've gone wrong?

It appears to me that the only unusual element in the entire plan is several companies choosing to file papers against the IP troll on the same day. The article says "fight the trolls in court, but a bunch of us should agree to do it at once". You're asking me, how would 50 different judges in different jurisdictions see this... is there some reason they would care or notice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to hear grellas' thoughts on this.

I think there's a lot to be said for people being trolled to band together, search for prior art, file reexamination requests, etc., but I'm not sure that you can just find a lot of other people to file declaratory judgement actions with you. At least, not very easily.

IANAL, so if you're going this route, you might want to ask a lawyer to explain MedImmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U.S. 118 (2007) to you. Patently-O has a nice write-up on that, incidentally, which you can read here: <http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/05/the-multi-fac-1.html>

Basically, you have to have taken meaningful steps to do something that might be infringing. Also, the whole idea of it being a strategy works against you. The statute is _permissive_ , so the court has discretion in terms of whether or not to hear your case. If they think you're doing it to bankrupt your opponent, well, let's just say that they probably won't look upon that favorably. Just because the law gets used as a cudgel doesn't mean that judges approve of this. It's just that some lawyers know how to make fairness really expensive.

I honestly think that the best course of action is to work together to invalidate the patents. Even if you really do bankrupt the troll, they'll probably just sell those patents to someone else, possibly even another troll, during bankruptcy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I concur with tptacek's (and your) comments on this one.

Trolls are pros at one thing and one thing only, and that is working the litigation system (well, maybe also at "monetizing" IP in negotiating forced licenses under threat of lawsuit). To go against them in this way is like sending amateurs out to do a job for which they are highly likely to be overmatched. I thought this piece was thought-provoking and that is why I posted it - but, I am skeptical about an approach like this working, at least when the players are small, independent businesses who have nothing in common with one another besides a desire to resist the threats of the troll. Too much financial pressure, too much risk, too many uncertainties to keep people with disparate interests banded together over a long haul.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. I think you're absolutely right, which is actually kind of depressing in a way.

The NPEs (patent trolls) I've seen in the news are mostly run by lawyers and I don't think they'd just back down from a lawsuit quietly. It's also pretty hard to coordinate with the other people being sued.

That said, I don't think people should give up. Even if I don't think that one idea would work, I agree that it's great to see people thinking about how to cooperate on legal defenses. In particular, things like prior art searches should be the same for everyone. So if you happen to know other people being threatened, I think it really might make sense to work together to search for prior art so that you don't all duplicate the same work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't sound like any of these developers would have standing to sue. And personal jurisdiction would be a problem too, if they're just suing wherever they're located, instead of where the troll's located. If the troll is sure that a court doesn't have personal jurisdiction, it'll just ignore the suit (though of course there is some risk associated with that).

And when the article says:

> FYI - my definition of a troll is any party that intentionally misconstrues > the claims of their patent to assert it against another. They don't have to > be NPEs, all that is required is an intentional misconstruing of the claims.

You know he doesn't know what he's talking about. This is not a definition of a troll that _anyone_ uses.

tl;dr: Back to the drawing board.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds like unionisation. Not exactly a new idea? On the other hand, maybe the internet can provide alternatives to union.Or has this already been done?

</comment><comment><USER9> So it is basically a legal DDOS? There is probably a legal way out of that then.

<comment><USER10> A side note, Charles Stross's Accelerando is a great Sci-Fi book that deals directly with the ideas of a DDOS using the legal system and courts. Really a great read.</comment></comment>


How to harvest Facebook profiles from emails without logging in - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-harvest-facebook-profiles-from-emails-without-logging-in.html

<comment><USER2> Facebook's approach to images seems broken security-wise all around. You can also get to non-public images if you know the URL of the jpg--- linking to the image page won't work, but a direct link to the JPG will happily serve itself up.

<comment><USER3> This is notoriously hard problem to solve if you still want a traditional web server serving out static assets (which is the fastest way to do so). The only way I've seen to serve static content in an authenticated fashion is to serve it out of the application itself using the appropriate headers. I'm curious how others have solved this though...

<comment><USER2> It's not foolproof, but I think one common way is for the static-content server to check for an appropriate authentication cookie. In Facebook's case, an additional complication is that they serve lots of the static content off Akamai, so any authentication would have to be coordinated.

<comment><USER4> The cookie slows down the things a bit. I've never had such problem but what about complete randomization of static URLs, so they are not easily findable?

If the leaks are the issue, one might want to change the names, or just filesystem symlinks, periodically.

<comment><USER5> couldn't they just solve it by serving up an image with a hash of the facebook uid as the filename?

<comment><USER4> Facebook uid = users.id? It gives zero privacy then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've said it before, but I'd advise people change the email addresses they've attached to facebook. And definitely don't use the email address you give out to employers.

<comment><USER7> Or just adjust your privacy settings so that only your friends can see anything. I don't show up in search results for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a pretty clever trick. I heard from some people that after doing the bulk upload thing, if your account in any way promotes a business, it gets shutdown after about a week. Anyone who uploads large contact lists to facebook gets into some type of human review system.

</comment><comment><USER9> Please don't. :(</comment>