The 'Blurred Lines' case scared songwriters, but its time may be up - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/arts/music/blurred-lines-led-zeppelin-copyright.html <comment><USER2> Shocked the story didn't mention the Fogerty suit - the strangest copyright -music case of all

[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john- fogerty-...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-fogerty-was- sued-ripping-john-fogerty)

<comment> g-erson Something weird going on with that page! The article number in the URL changes back and forward between 2 numbers as you scroll! Makes coming back to HN a bit tricky!

Interesting read though

<comment><USER3> In my case it changes when the _next_ article comes up. This is a really weird page format some online news magazines have adopted, where they simply add different articles at the bottom of your original page, infinite scrolling style. If you scroll back up though, it switches back.

<comment><USER4> I hate it when pages do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My (least) favourite example of this is that Iggy Azalea gets a song-writing credit for Classic Man. [http://www.mtv.com/news/2215334/iggy-azalea-fancy- classic-ma...](http://www.mtv.com/news/2215334/iggy-azalea-fancy-classic-man- jidenna/)

If you listen to the two, you can spot the similarity but... it's nowhere close to sampling or plagiarism. They've got different melodies, different feels, just a similar prominent keyboard sound.

But no-one wants a court case, so the writers of Fancy get a cut.

<comment><USER6> My least favourite was Quentin Tarantino demanding a songwriting credit for Fun Lovin' Criminals' Scooby Snacks, just because it sampled a few seconds of dialogue from Pulp Fiction.

<comment><USER7> Would you prefer he demanded royalties instead, as their label would if he used a few seconds of their output in one of his films? Or that they just be able to use the sample without credit _or_ royalty?

<comment><USER6> He did demand royalties, he gets a 40% cut as well.

<comment><USER8> Roughly 40% of the lyrics are dialogue from two of his movies or describing scenes from those movies (Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), so a 40% cut of the songwriters' share of royalties is appropriate.

<comment><USER9> He didn't write any of the song. He just made something that contributed to it.

Saying he wrote part of it is like the person who mixed Davinci's paint claiming to have painted part of the Mona Lisa.

<comment><USER10> It's more like if Mona Lisa incorporated a background from another artist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> NYT draws the wrong conclusions. In each of these cases, the jury sided with the more popular and well known party. These were all jury cases where perceived career accomplishment is the common thread, as the law itself twists in any way necessary.

<comment><USER12> The "Dark Horse" case didn't seem to break for Katy Perry...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how well the 1987 album [1] would do in this new climate?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_(What_the_Fuck_Is_Going_O...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_\(What_the_Fuck_Is_Going_On%3F\))

<comment><USER14> I've told this story before. In the early 1990s I worked for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label, back when they were dominating the UK and European pop charts as The KLF ([https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/...](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/how- three-austrian-unknowns-misunderstood-klf-s-the-manual)).

One day we received in the mail a cassette tape and a letter from a law firm representing a composer or publisher (I can't remember which) of a famous Broadway soundtrack from the 1960s. The letter accused the KLF of infringement. The cassette contained one of the songs on the Broadway soundtrack, an instrumental section of which repeated a three note riff that sounded a lot like the same three-note sequence from one of the KLFs biggest hits. The rhythms and song structures were otherwise nothing alike.

It didn't seem like an obvious example of copying, and it was quite possible it was a coincidence or some obscure influence on The KLF or their core musical collaborators, who would have been youths when the Broadway soundtrack was released.

"Are you going to fight this?" I asked the label's president.

Her answer: "No."

From The KLF's perspective, it wasn't worth a long, expensive legal fight they might lose. I think a lot of it related to the problems it encountered with the "1987" album you mentioned, which had been partly done to ridicule the record industry but really took a lot of energy to deal with when the legal troubles emerged.

Also, the label president didn't say it, but potential bad press could have also been on her mind. At the time, the KLF had the British music press eating out of their hands, and a public legal fight could change the narrative of the KLF as being brilliant pop iconoclasts to something less favorable.

<comment><USER15> I need to tell you this: in the 2000s we worked off the strategy and tactics outlined in The Manual and had a string of global chart topping successes

I can only assume others did the same...do u know the bigger story?

<comment><USER14> I would love to hear more.

I've heard of at least one other band that had this kind of success, and it does not surprise me in the least. Drummond knew how the industry worked as a musician, manager, and skeptic, and in that book outlined a formula that could work. It was a bit of a piss-take but there were nuggets of wisdom and truth.

<comment><USER15> Trying to keep this account disconnected from my real life persona so won't name names.

But we had a series of number ones around the world in countries like the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, Brasil, France, Italy, China, Australia...really every country you have ever heard of.

Of course some of the tactics had to be translated into 2000s world but I still recommend aspiring music artists to read it when they ask me for advice today.

It's of course not the only strategy that works...but I'd say it's the easiest to execute if what you want is commercial success

So in either case the book levels the expectations ("sex, drugs and money will always be a problem") and establishes some fundamentals...and it's of course a really fun weekend read.

Many of the general ideas also translate 1:1 to startups or really any kind of endeavor and have served me very well in my career

<comment><USER14> I always remembered the line from the book about finding a bass line being like a "panther on the prowl" and IIRC mentioning Billie Jean or some other Michael Jackson song as an example. It really made sense.

The same section also warned against hiring some "thumb-slapping dickhead" to play bass which made sense from their perspective (The KLF never used bass players) but doesn't hold true for all types of songs, even dance music.

<comment><USER15> I remember now

One of my takeaways was to not try to do everything yourself...if fact to try to do nothing yourself except piecing together existing stuff in novel ways

I just watched a YouTube video of one of the producers of Demi Lovato and he frames it like this:

"What makes a great producer is not the ability to play any instrument or be a good engineer or anything. You can find others to do that for you. What makes a great producer is the ability to know how to tell a compelling story with your work!"

Paraphrased from here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kre17S89-j8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kre17S89-j8)

I think this is true for any product...your are selling people on a story/vision...of what could be, not what is!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Zeppelin have long been known to be notorious plagiarists:

[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/led- zeppelins-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/led- zeppelins-10-boldest-rip-offs-223419/)

<comment><USER17> I think I saw a news recently that they've been dismissed for gateway to heaven

<comment><USER18> Stairway is not a ripoff of Taurus and it never was going to be, but there are plenty of other accusations against Led Zeppelin that are more credible. I have Spirit's eponymous album, the part in question that is "ripped off" is so basic and found in so many songs you'd die before you could list them all.

(FYI—You the news you "think you saw recently" is in the linked article above the fold, which features a photo of Robert Plant right next to the headline.)

<comment><USER19> Stairway to Heaven has contrary motion in the top voice of the guitar arpeggio, which I consider a really substantial change. They did grab lots of blues songs, occasionally gave some form of credit, otherwise not.

It's an interesting question: blues is mostly delivery, so if you take a concept like 'lemon' or 'leave me' and deliver it in shrieky overwrought British rock star fashion, aren't you rewriting it, perhaps significantly? You can't copyright the pentatonic scale. It'd be like someone copyrighting the monotonic drone and then filing suit against half of EDM. I performed for a livestream recently and used a riff from Plastikman 'Marbles', except that riff is only note-note-rest-note-note-rest repeated infinitely on one note. Part of it is the tone and context, and I wasn't cloning that, just the way the extremely brief three-note chunk cycles over a 4/4 beat. Plagiarism? Plagiarism because I know of 'Marbles' and found it inspiring? What if I picked a simple repeating pulse because I'd heard that in some minimal techno, and intentionally did my own take on that because I'd liked it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This might be one of the stupidest arguments I've ever heard:

"Thin copyright might apply to a doll or a painting because, for example, there are just so many ways to paint a tomato," Busch said. "Creative choices are limited. It has never applied to music because there are literally an infinite number of creative choices in creating a song."

... So you're saying there _aren 't_ infinite ways to paint a tomato?

<comment><USER21> That's a terrible argument isn't it? There's a finite number of musical notes, a finite structure to them and a finite number of effects. We're guaranteed to end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER22> > We're guaranteed to end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner > rather than later.

Technically that's fine. Copyright only protects originality, not novelty as with patents. Coincidentally creating the same melody as someone else doesn't violate their copyright. If they sued they'd have to prove that it wasn't coincidental with evidence that you heard the original melody, a prerequisite for proving that your melody was derivative.

That's the theory. In practice the first person to publish the melody often wins, _especially_ if their version was popular--e.g. a radio hit, which by itself provides circumstantial evidence that you had heard it.

<comment><USER23> Wow - never knew that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What really interesting about Blurred Lines is that it was more the feeling of the music than the actual note for note, which was the center of the discussion. If you don't understand music and what it entails you could be convinced that it was the same.

Such an interesting case.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, it was getting close to copyrighting a _genre_.

Very dangerous stuff.

<comment><USER26> Exactly, I immediately thought of all the bog standard country, rock and blues songs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://archive.md/e2Kih](http://archive.md/e2Kih)

</comment><comment><USER28> A reasonable thing would be to consider "fair use" as any clip less than, say, 10 seconds.

<comment><USER29> Would it? Could a movie include a 10 second clip from Star Wars without trouble? Even something iconic like the title card?

<comment><USER30> Probably. Would it hurt Star Wars?

<comment><USER28> Nope. In fact, it would be good advertising for Star Wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All of these NYT stories bring up a blocking modal dialog requiring me to log in or create an account (I guess this is a slight improvement from making me pay). Is this the same for everyone else? Why do other sites that show a dismissable overlay get raked over the coals as if they are criminals?

What value is there in posting a link on HN if it's behind a pay (or temporarily free) wall? This goes double for the WSJ. Let's not debate business models here, but asking what's the intent/requirements, and why the double standard?

<comment><USER32> There is no rule against pay walled content, and most NYT stories have numerous people complaining about it. The NYT and WSJ posts still get votes because they're large enough that many people are subscribers, and their paywalls are trivial to bypass.

<comment><USER33> The workarounds for WSJ do not work anymore for me, eg the redirect from FarceBorg will still get the "subscribe" page. Also FT. They appear to have removed workarounds. Are they STILL valid HN submissions ... even when there is NO workaround?

Or maybe there is one and i haven't twigged to it yet:-)>

<comment><USER32> [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

<comment><USER33> Ah yes, "Bypass Paywalls" i do have this extension installed and have been using it for months. WSJ seems to have wizened to his workarounds, and others like the FB redirect. Eg it does not work for

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/rbc-sheds-light-on-chinas- rebou...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/rbc-sheds-light-on-chinas-rebound- after-coronavirus-11585128601)

But i will submit a request at his github site.

In the meantime, AFAIK, there is no workaround for WSJ. Is it still OK to submit them to HN? i do notice there have been few recently.

<comment><USER32> The latest release notes from seven days ago say they fix the WSJ, but there's also a commit saying that they are temporarily reverting while they wait for Mozilla to sign the update. So there seems to be a way to bypass it still, though I'm not sure what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If I repeatedly linked to my own site with a title that interested you but all you could see on my page was an unskippable ad demanding that you sign up and pay for my unrelated product, wouldn't my site be banned from HN? Why do sites like nytimes get a free pass with their paywalls?

<comment><USER35> I feel the same way. My intuition tells me only some small percentage of HN readers have a NYT subscription, so these posts are of little use. Though the posts keep appearing, so perhaps I'm wrong, and it's really substantial...like at least 25%? What's the threshold where it makes sense?

<comment><USER36> The value in HN is mostly in the comments, not in its role as a link aggregator. A good 90% of the time when the link is to something I cannot access I can still get all the salient points necessary to understand and benefit from the discussion just from reading the comments. (Also, if it is a story on some reasonably current event or some well known subject there is a good chance a quick visit to a search engine will find some other article that covers nearly everything in the submitted article but that I can read).

I think of HN as like a social gathering. Each discussion thread is like a small group of people at a party standing around talking about some topic. It's a big party, and there are dozens of such small groups, constantly forming and breaking up, as people move from group to group.

If I'm at a party, and I see a group discussing a book they have read and I have not, I'm either going to ignore their discussion completely if I'm not interested in the topic or am planning on reading the book later and want to avoid spoilers, or go ahead and join in if I'm interested in the topic and and not worried about spoilers and they are discussing it in general enough terms.

I'm not going to try to tell everyone at the party that they should only talk about books that everyone there has read.

If there is some particular site(s) that someone just does not want to see on HN at all, it's easy to address that with a couple bookmarklets. Here's one that will hide NY Times articles from the listings:

      javascript: (function () {
        var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
        for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
          if (stories[i].href.includes('://www.nytimes'))
            stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = 'hidden';
      })()

It would be easy to expand it to cover multiple sites.

Here's one to unhide them:

      javascript:(function () {
        var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
        for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
          stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = '';
      })()

Stick those bookmarklets someplace easy to invoke, and then at the cost of one click per page of 30 links you don't have to see the site(s) again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can't read the article. I feel like this just encourages low effort comments from people skimming the headlines.

<comment><USER38> There are several easy workarounds already mentioned in the comments: hit escape, disable javascript, clear your cookies, or visit the archived version at [http://archive.md/e2Kih](http://archive.md/e2Kih)</comment></comment>


Why you should steer clear of the $99 HP TouchPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/108481-why-you-should-steer-clear-of-the-99-hp-touchpad

<comment><USER2> Very poor article. This is more about how you shouldn't buy it if you want to put android on it really quickly and easily. Most of these tablets are realistically going to end up one of three ways. Given to your kids, given to your parents, or given to the drawer after they're played with. None of these issues really apply, other than the lack of warranty (which is inaccurate, there is a 90 day warranty on them). For $99, you CANNOT get a comparable device anywhere. Period. If you want to spend double the money, then you can get a kindle fire, which is a smaller device, but will be around longer.

<comment><USER3> I mean, there was the whole thing about the novo7 going for 99$ yesterday. It feels like it's only going to be a short time before 99$ tablet opportunities are everywhere.

<comment><USER2> There is a difference between a $400 tablet selling for $100 and a tablet made to sell between $100. Quality tablets won't be that cheap for quite some time, because it isn't really possible to get quality parts, assemble them, and ship them for that little.</comment></comment></comment>


ISPs won't promise to treat all traffic equally after net neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/15/16768088/internet-providers-plans-without-net-neutrality-comcast-att-verizon <comment><USER2> How many articles are going to be posted that amount to just spreading FUD about the Title II change? The level of fear mongering in this article is ridiculous -- no shit huge corporations aren't going to make commitments 24 hours after a major regulatory change to a random journalist. Sure they could have been planning for a while but you think they're going to break a major announcement to an accusatory journalist looking to whip up a frenzy?

A bunch of low level PR workers at a company not saying something isn't even worth a tweet but here we have an entire article.

At least let ISPs actually do something nefarious before you try to hang them -- thanks to RIFA they at least have to tell when they do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Few industries should be allowed to regulate themselves.

Information, health, food and weapons are examples of company's that need constant regulation from public bodies.

<comment><USER4> Not sure if you include it under information, but education is another I would add.</comment></comment>


Html5 Gallery | A showcase of sites using html5 markup - <AUTHOR> http://html5gallery.com/ <comment><USER2> the feature I liked is to filter by category, so I find the cat I want

</comment><comment><USER3> Great to see interest and momentum building in HTML5.</comment>


A Third of Antidepressants Are Prescribed for Something Else - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/2017/off-label-antidepressants <comment><USER3> Drug companies have aggressively and unlawfully marketed off-label use for decades, with the most egregious examples being psychiatric drugs.

Pfizer were fined $2.3bn for off-label promotion of Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox and Lyrica. Eli Lilly were fined $1.4bn for off-label promotion of Zyprexa. GSK were fined $3bn for a slew of misconduct, including off-label promotion of a dozen drugs. AstraZeneca were fined $520m for off-label promotion of Seroquel. Abbott were fined $800m for off-label promotion of Depakote. Novartis were fined $422m for off-label promotion of Trileptal.

Despite these huge fines, the unlawful marketing continues. I don't think we're taking the issue nearly seriously enough. For years, drug companies have been telling (and even bribing) doctors to prescribe drugs with serious side- effects to vulnerable patients based on no real evidence.

There's a deep malaise at the heart of the pharmaceuticals industry. Marketing has become the core function of many drug companies. Blatantly fraudulent marketing is endemic. Drug companies are chalking up billion dollar fines as a cost of doing business.

I urge you to read the GSK settlement agreement. They admitted to promoting the prescription of Paxil to children, while having no evidence of efficacy and hiding evidence that it increased the risk of suicide. They admitted to hiding evidence that Avandia increased the risk of congestive heart failure and myocardial infarction. They admitted to bribing doctors to prescribe half a dozen drugs for off-label use.

This level of corruption would be outrageous in the developing world, let alone the richest country on earth.

[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead- guilty-...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and- pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report)

</comment><comment><USER4> Thats because antidepressant is just one of the many activities of such class of drugs. Its like saying that Viagra is a pulmonary hypertension drug, prescribed for something else. Indications are not binary things.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention chronic conditions can easily depress someone.

<comment><USER6> As true as that might be, I strongly believe depression as a disease/condition should only be diagnosed (and thus treated) if there is no _real_ cause for the symptoms.

Being sad and unable to leave the bed because (your dog died | you are morbidly obese | you are going to die in 3 months) doesn't qualify as depression.

<comment><USER7> Respectfully: the entire mental health profession and the DSM-5 explicitly disagree with your belief.

Conflating depression with "being sad" is to misunderstand what depression is, what sadness is, and how we qualify depression diagnoses. Sadness is natural and healthy. Depression is natural and _unhealthy_.

While the word 'depression' is abused in pop culture, showing enough symptoms of major depressive disorder over a long enough timeline is the literal textbook definition of being depressed.

Not getting out of bed because your dog died is arguably a natural reaction to sadness. Not getting out of bed for three months, refusing to eat because you're trying to die, cutting off lifelong friends, and undergoing severe personality changes because your dog died is really, really, something else.

And, on a personal note, distinguishing between what is and isn't a "real" cause for a feeling is a pretty offensive judgment and implies a very dismissive attitude towards peoples pain... I mean, someone who is unable to function in society 15 years after their kid died doesn't get to be depressed because they have a "real" reason to feel bad? And people who kill themselves from a major cognitive imbalance don't have a "real" cause for feeling that way? Bleh. That's a half step removed from "suck it up" or "snap out of it".

<comment><USER6> I haven't conflated sadness with depression. I was _in fact_ stating the opposite.

Unfortunately I am very aware of most of the symptoms of depression as I have suffered it myself in the past. And yes, I did take antidepressants. I am not against their use at all, only against misdiagnoses.

15 years of mourning the death of a loved one is of course abnormal, as I have stated already in another response around this thread, but... is it depression? Or is it lack of coping mechanisms? Maybe learning to face reality is better than depending on a daily dose?

<comment><USER8> Not a doctor, but: it seems the real problem with your claim is that it's patently absurd to say that a symptom can only be a symptom if it has no cause. Symptoms present themselves that we might find the cause of the problem.

Do you mean no cause other than a chemical imbalance? I still think that's shaky ground, but I don't really know enough to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently started suffering from chronic headaches that usually start in the morning when I wake up, and come and go throughout the day. After getting an MRI and ruling out a brain tumor, we've been trying a variety of medications to take care of it.

The most successful so far is an anti-depressant. Duloxetine. SNRI. I do have some of the side effects - my libido is markedly decreased, but it was fairly high to begin with, so I'm probably at about low-average now. I can still get in the mood on demand, and still want to initiate several times a week, so I'm more than happy to make the trade off to not have a basically constant headache 80% of my waking hours.

Off label prescription is a pretty common thing. Personally, I'm glad for it.

<comment><USER10> This may interest you: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/08/curing-the- incurable/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/08/curing-the-incurable/)

<comment><USER9> Thankfully, mine are more of a mild annoyance than cripplingly painful.

I'll check out Curable though, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm actually more surprised to see original content on digg .. and to see digg for that matter, than the actual content of the article.

<comment><USER12> Same here. Surprised that Digg still exists! Remember the Digg vs. Reddit Wars of 2006?

<comment><USER13> I don't think there was a war: Reddit started growing, and Digg shot itself in the face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some anti-smoking drugs are actually just antidepressants sold under a different brand name. It's literally exactly the same drug with a different name stamped on the pills, but it's easier to get people to take the drug if they think it's a "pill to help you quit smoking" and not an "anti depressant"

<comment><USER15> In my experience, they were quite upfront about the fact that it was an anti- depressant that had the effect of aiding quitting smoking, because it fairly obviously dealt with the predictable effects of trying to quit smoking: anxiety, depression, irritability. You're making it sound like a stealth SSRI channel, and it's not.

<comment><USER16> I am not sure if all physicans have adequate training on psychoatic drugs, but giving SSRI to a patient with both bipolar and personality disorder can have very negative effects. So if a non-psychiatrist prescribing antidepressant to someone without adequate psychatric evaluation (and evaluation can be off too), you can end up making the patient ill.

So if I were given SSRI to quit smoking, my mental health may get even more worse.

Disclaimer: have bipolar and personality disorder.

<comment><USER15> I understand. I also understand that even with a psychiatrist prescribing it appropriately, with full evaluation and diagnosis for depression, a particular SSRI can make the patient worse, not better. I've had friends spend years working through various prescriptions (and combinations) to find what worked, and it often included some hellish periods when they felt far worse until they hit on the right drug(s).

<comment><USER16> Yeah. In fact, I think psychotic prescription is a trial and error treatment. It sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Yeah, this is a consequence of the fact that "antidepressant" is a marketing word, not a physically descriptive word.

<comment><USER17> Yes, drugs have all kinds of secondary effects, and some may be useful for many things. (aspirin being the most notorious)

Once you test something out on enough people it becomes much easier to find these patterns of secondary effects.

It is actually kind of unfortunate that because of the stigma associated with mental illness some patients will refuse to take anti-depressants when prescribed for other conditions where they could be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two other interesting examples:

Trazadone is one of the most commonly prescribed insomnia medications. It isn't FDA approved for that. It is a decade's old generic antidepressant. The sleep dose is much less than the regulated theraputic dose.

Through mechanisms not fully understood, people with liver disease often experience intense skin itching. Standard dermatology approaches have essentially no effect. SSRIs are one well tolerated treatment.

In neither case is their obvious profit motive or overselling by drug companies.

<comment><USER19> Sure but _shouldn 't_ those drugs undergo FDA approval for those uses? You make it sound as if they're very effective without many side effects so (as far as FDA approvals go) it shouldn't be too hard.

<comment><USER18> No, I was just noting two other examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is not in the least remarkable. The article does not mention it, but several maoi inhibitor drugs are effective for common varieties of epilepsy and have been used for decades.

<comment><USER21> Yup, most drugs used in psychiatry also have indications for neurologic conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's an interesting counterpoint to the anecdote at the start of the story. I have chronic treatment resistant depression. Gone through many different treatments. The thing that works best for me is a treatment I receive for something else. A THF-alpha inhibitor (in my case Etanercept), so I'm in practically the opposite position to the guy in the article.

I suspect there's a link in some form of branch of depression that comes with the autoimmune grab bag of fun.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am glad that Briggs could heal his ulcerative colitis with an unorthodox treatment.

"On occasions when she stopped taking bupropion, the blood and abdominal pain returned until she started taking the drug again."

Yet I guess I am unimpressed when I hear that symptoms diminish with use of a drug like bupropion. Eventually when the patient gets tired of the side effects they will get off the medication. This will leave them with the return of the illness they used the drug to treat in addition to the damage it caused in other parts of the body. Masking symptoms is sort of psychiatry's gambit so I guess this is nothing new.

</comment><comment><USER24> Tricyclics in general are very powerful antihistamines (this may be the real reason they work, for some in fact.)

Ginger is also a very powerful antihistamine - comparable to drugs - <USER2> fewer side effects, however.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just asked a retired pharmacist and clinical social worker (two family members) about this. They said that there were numerous things that anti- depressants are prescribed for (smoking cessation, OCD, anxiety, etc.) which are NOT off-label uses.

</comment><comment><USER26> Crohn's can also be improved with Glycine according to someone I know who started taking it for other reasons. A bit of googling then showed there may well be a connection, so the result made some sense. YMMV of course.

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't take an article about drugs seriously if it's written by someone who takes antidepressants for depression/anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER28> My mother had a stroke and was prescribed Clonazepam for her nerves and anxiety from the after effects.

<comment><USER29> Different class of drugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's because antidepressant are a miracle drug. Sedentary work weeks and normative society will always drain your energy and kill your soul.

I have the opinion that most people should use antidepressants.

</comment><comment><USER31> I figured it was going to be something like Wellbutrin to quit smoking which, while off-label, kinda makes sense. But IBD? Can't say I saw that coming. Because I'm not all that interested in the topic I just skimmed, but I gather it is not well understood why such wildly off-label use works? (And "no, go read the article" is acceptable. :-) )

<comment><USER32> Um... Smoking cessation is not an off-label use of bupropion (Wellbutrin), it's an FDA approved use and it's very openly marketed as such.

As far as the reason it seems to work, that was given as:

>Studies on mice had shown that instead of blocking the action of inflammatory proteins, bupropion appeared to lower the production of those proteins in the first place.

Bupropion also FDA approved for weight loss when mixed with the opioid antagonist naltrexone (brand-name Contrave).

No use "make sense" more or less than any other use use, it's a substance that has lots of effects on the body.

<comment><USER31> _Um... Smoking cessation is not an off-label use of bupropion (Wellbutrin)_

It was twenty some years ago when I took it. I obviously haven't kept up with the latest, but a quick search says FDA approval came shortly after it was prescribed to me. Mea culpa.

And thanks for the answer.</comment></comment></comment>


Incarceration Rates per 100,000 population in 1925-2014 - <AUTHOR> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png <comment><USER2> Why is this never cited as a reason for the huge drop in crime during the last few decades?

<comment><USER3> Because almost all countries have seen the decrease in crime rates, yet almost no countries have seen the same increase in incarceration rates.</comment></comment>


A Personal Appeal To Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/20/ligers-and-tigons-and-wales-oh-my/

<comment><USER2> This article doesn't cover the pros and cons of having the advertisement, nor does it present insight into how the advertisement could be improved. As is often the case with TechCrunch articles, this serves no useful purpose at all.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. While certainly not an in-depth analysis, it provides a succinct complaint: the left alignment of Wales' mugshot on the donation banner makes it look like Wales is the subject of each article. The article further supports this assertion by including screenshots of a bunch of tweets that say the same thing.

I didn't really find it funny, but it does talk about a real issue for Wikipedia readers. It even suggests an alternative -- right-align the image.

<comment><USER2> The word _succinct_ means "Briefly and clearly expressed." There's nothing succinct about six screenshots that take half the height of my 15" laptop's screen.

<comment><USER4> The best part is the twitter quotes in the special frames - how else can we convey and support the idea if not by quoting random strangers from 160 character-limited message service?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wikipedia's decision to left-align Wales' picture has been tremendously effective at spreading the news that Wikipedia is running a funding drive.

So far I've read about here, the Register, Reddit, Techcrunch and a couple of other blogs who couldn't help pointing out the hilarity.

Money _could_ buy that amount of publicity, but by gum it would be expensive. Congratulations to all involved.

</comment><comment><USER6> "especially the 20 bucks I'm about to throw at you". This is very cheap on the writer's part. I agree, Jimmy Wales' face showing up is super irritating, but I personally did not like the tone.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry Techcrunch, The Oatmeal already beat you to the joke:

<http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales>

</comment><comment><USER8> Usability and design considerations aside, I find it more worrying that this year's campaign seems to be entirely centered around him and that in general Wales is acting more as the face of Wikipedia than he used to. All that can lead to is making the project more vulnerable through personal critique on Wales, like happened with WikiLeaks/Assange.

</comment><comment><USER9> After reddit submits, now HN article and more coverage this is transforming into an epic example of usability fail. I cannot think of any precedent or similar mistake.</comment>


Ask HN: If WinServer2019 was made free to use tomorrow,would you start using it - <AUTHOR> If Microsoft decided to make using Windows Server 2019 (all edition) free to use tomorrow, would you start using it?  And if so how?
Would you be more likely to adopt it if Microsoft open-sourced it? (I know very little chance of that)
In either case Microsoft could make money on support, and consulting services.
I think more competition on the server side, than various flavours of Linux and some flavours of UNIX would be  healthy.
For a time I worked in Windows only enterprises and I had little to do with administering any of the servers, but code got deployed to them and I never had any issues with the parts of the server I used.
I would think that there are some workloads and tasks that might make more sense to run on a Windows Server vs a Linux one but I am not sure what (aside from legacy Windows only applications) <comment><USER2> Microsoft made their consumer OS basically "free" and in doing so loaded it with so much telemetry, data collection, bloatware, and dark patterns, that it is unusable without significant and ongoing intervention.

So, no, I would not want them to have to find alternative income streams from their server OS.

<comment><USER3> Are all of these things included in the versions of Windows they make available on Azure..? I wondered that, but wasn't going to make an account just to find out.

My kid wants a laptop for gaming... he's been using my MacBook Air for KSP and Minecraft for a long time, and I won't be buying a new machine until the new models are out and proven... so I've conceded to getting him a gaming laptop for the time being.

It'll be Windows. It'll probably be our only Windows machine for the foreseeable future, but I know we'll have to de-clutter it when it gets here. And I still need to research that.

<comment><USER4> Is there a HN approved way of doing this?

I recall there being various solutions that cleaned older versions of Windows, but perhaps did so a bit too aggressively (disabling services left and right in the XP era), so experts recommended against using them. I have no idea about the current state of affairs, but may find myself in the same boat soon and need to know.

<comment><USER5> > Is there a HN approved way of doing this?

Yes. Not using Windows to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Simple answer, No. Microsofts overall approach to licensing is complex enough that you have to be an expert in their license to even have an inkling of an idea what is permissible and what isn't. The OS layer is just the tip of the iceberg. It's not immediately useful in and of itself without things like SQL server, IIS/Asp or whatever their web app layer is these days, etc. The would have to shift gears on pretty much every technology to make it worthwhile for a Linux/*nix stack developer to look in their direction.

<comment><USER7> MS cannot even explain their licensing at any detailed level unless you are speaking with one of their own 'Licensing Experts'.

Not exaggerating -- this has scenario has played out again and again in my dealings with MS going back almost 30 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Former Senior Windows SysAdmin here --worked in large scale infrastructures and was the lead in a team dedicated to securing hundreds/thousands of servers.

My answer: No f __*ing way.

I've seen too many times that pattern of "oh we fixed this security flaw on a patch tuesday only to realize it opened a backdoor in some other way". Securing Windows boxes is a pointless rat race. They have backdoors in them, guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER9> I administer a few Windows Servers. Unless you're heavily in the MS ecosystem (Azure, AD etc.), or have software that only run on Windows, I can't think of too many advantages that Winserver has from a server management perspective. Maybe the admin GUI?

I understand that even on Microsoft Azure, most of the VMs being hosted are running Linux.

[https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in- microsoft-a...](https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft- azure-over-50-percent-fo-vm-cores/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Active Directory is a blessing compared to the hellish OSS alternatives. Don't reply with suggestions to use FreeIPA. It can be just as bad or worse.

<comment><USER11> Samba is pretty decent

<comment><USER12> Thats like saying tires are a decent replacement for Uber.

<comment><USER11> How? Samba supports AD, and can work as a replacement for Windows AD (or together with Windows DCs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been using Linux for a long time, Windows servers have only been a small part of my experience. At one point I decided I was going to invest more in the open source side of things, I learned Linux / Python / Bash / Go / Nginx and Apache, etc. I can use .NET and Windows server but I prefer not to. I guess at this point what I'm saying is, it's too different from what I've invested my skills in. I'm going to guess that others probably feel the same way. Linux has huge mindshare in this space and making Windows server free is not going to convince people to switch.

</comment><comment> jf- Going against the grain here, yes, I would.

Professionally I haven't been very involved in deployment, but my experience deploying personal projects to, and configuring, Linux servers has taught me that the process is confusing, poorly documented and difficult. Don't get me wrong, it's doable and I've done it (likely poorly), but after a day of stitching together steps from blogs and frequent back-tracking and starting from scratch, you have to wonder if there isn't a more user-friendly way.

I'd hope that windows server offers this, though I don't know that it does, as I haven't much experience with it. As windows is considerably more GUI centric than Linux that could be a big plus for me personally. I'd certainly check it out, at least to compare the experience to Linux.

But currently, given that windows servers are not free, Linux wins hands down.

</comment><comment><USER14> No. Even if open sourced, no. There would be no benefit to me in doing so (client or server) as it only has value for Windows users, which I no longer am. I was a Windows user long enough to be able to say with a fair degree of certainty that its code base would have little that I'd be interested in.

Look at it this way: if IBM released for free, or open sourced, a port of its mainframe OS for PCs how many people would start using it? Unless one already had a significant investment in IBM mainframe software, probably not very many.

I'm all for competing ideas and alternate Operating Systems but don't view commercial platforms as the place to look these days for good ideas/implementations.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd stay on Linux.

I've had too many experiences with sysadmin automation working out of the box on Linux and being a total pain on windows to consider a switch.

For example: a project at $work was to deploy osquery on all our servers, and write some of the data it produces to Kafka. The Windows package was delayed for about 9 to 12 months compared to the Linux packages, due to a chain of bugs, these bugs being fixed but not released, then the release was tagged but there were no official builds etc.

Various config management tools seem to have only half-baked Windows support, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER16> I might use it as a desktop, or for servers that had to run Windows-exclusive software, but I wouldn't go out of my way to use it if Linux was available as an option.

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be a huge expense for us to convert anything to "Free WinServer". We would have to redevelop all of our infrastructure for deploying software, porting and testing the software, configuring, monitoring, and deploying machines... We're probably talking six figures of time and on top of that the opportunity cost of not working on something else. We already have tools and experience for using Linux for everything that doesn't absolutely require Windows.

We really only run Windows for: MS-SQL, our dev workstations, and the backup server for the dev workstations.

One real pain point for running Windows is the regular BSA or similar audits. We try very hard to make sure that we are properly licensed, but when the auditor comes knocking we have to spend around a week going through and verifying everything, making sure that no licenses have expired, etc...

Even buying servers is made harder with Microsoft... "Ok, the license price specifies X per core and Y for memory, so to hit the licensing and system sweet spot we need this many cores but no more and this much memory."

With Linux we can just pick the system sweet spot for our use, and then at the end of the year we send donations to open source projects we use. That can sometimes be painful, (had problems with paypal for some of the most recent donations), but the licensing terms are much more obvious and less specialized.

</comment><comment><USER18> No.

.net core runs on Linux. Why would I invest in a new Windows server?

<comment><USER19> Ironically, kernel security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We have a datacenter license which isn't really that expensive, relatively speaking. Windows isn't the expensive part. It's everything else.

Our SAN is expensive. Easily 10x the cost of the raw storage.

VMware is expensive. Backup software, management software, Exchange, our wireless network solution, our MDM solution, that's all expensive.

RHEL isn't free either.

<comment> pickle-wizard You are not kidding on the price of SAN.

I just started a pilot program with the iXsystems TrueNAS, which is the supported enterprise version of FreeNAS.

It was easily a 10th the price of everyone else I looked at. Plus the support contact was inexpensive.

Now if I could just figure out something about our VMware licensing. I've looked at RHEV, but we have a lot of automation built around VMware. It will be very expensive to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't. I'm an ASP.NET Core dev which is a MSFT technology and it runs better on Linux.

I still choose Windows for development.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally? No.

I gain nothing from Windows except overhead, particularly when it comes to servers.

I generally pare my servers down to little more than the kernel, a firewall and my very small handful of binaries for my application.

</comment><comment><USER23> The TCB would need to be open-source, e.g. Hyper-V, MinWin (or whatever the smallest core of windows is called these days). There are several virtualization-based security features in modern Windows, that would be especially useful if the hypervisor could be inspected and collaboratively developed, even if a Microsoft CLA were required for code contributions, and they retained patents. An OSS TCB would ensure absence of telemetry. They can still sell closed-source components that run on the OSS TCB.

</comment><comment><USER24> All of the languages I want to write software in work the same or better on Linux compared to windows. All of my administrative and user experience is with Linux. Linux seems to have better performance for almost every possible use case, and has ZFS. I just don't see any compelling reason to use Windows Server for anything other than legacy. MS would have to cut me a sizable check each month for my trouble.

</comment><comment><USER25> It depends on the use-case, but probably no. For most use-cases I can think of (Active Directory), the cost is already negligible for a business.

What use-cases would be attractive for free versions? I can think of one, VMs. But that experience already sucks. Windows images are larger, slower to boot, and harder to automate.

It could be quite useful for CI though. And more CI providers might start offering Windows platforms if it became free.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wouldn't start using it for things I currently use Linux for. The overhead is just to high.

However, I might start to split my Windows Server VMs into multiple ones, so one VM per function. Currently to conserve licenses, we put multiple roles on one VM (and sometimes they have different requirements wrt. RAM or CPU heavy, or critical vs non-critical...)

</comment><comment><USER27> So far, the only use I've had for running Windows machines was running Adobe After Effects for a render farm, because you can't run the Adobe suite on Linux. I struggle to imagine workloads I'd want to run on Windows machines voluntarily honestly, but I'm also unfamiliar with the ecosystem from a sysadmin perspective.

</comment><comment><USER28> As a decades long FreeBSD and Linux user, I can say no, I would not use Windows on a server come hell or high water for jobs that are already better served on open source platforms. It is seldom the best tool for the job and Microsoft's own metrics show that Linux will become predominate even in Azure.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a good point. Most people when comparing the popularity Linux vs Windows Server or Apache vs. IIS ignore the fact that Windows Servers costs a bunch. A proper comparison would be if both were free or cost the same. I wonder how the server wars would have turned out if that were the case.

</comment><comment><USER30> No. The point of Windows Server at its peak (around 2000) was that it was an easy to manage server OS.

I don't want to manage any servers. No boxes, no kubernetes, no anything. I have have some code, I pay my cloud provider for an execution environment and that's it.

</comment><comment><USER31> What would it buy? Unless the org suddenly switches to a different tech stack that requires winserver, it's kinda the worst of both worlds - none of the upside of Windows, none of the huge open source ecosystem of Linux.

</comment><comment><USER32> No. If it had something you needed, and that you could only get from Windows, you'd be using it already. Any shop that can make use of an alternative pretty much already does, and would have no reason to switch.

</comment><comment><USER33> I know great strides have been made in recent years, but Microsoft would have to communicate a much better 'configuration automation' story to significantly move the voluntary adoption needle for this crowd.

</comment><comment><USER34> I probably would have a few years ago, now-a-days almost everything I do seems to be deployed as a linux container directly or linux containers by way of 'cloud functions'

funnily enough I use windows as my workstation os

</comment><comment><USER35> Very small (less than 20 people) non-tech businesses, especially those with on-site culture can actually benefit a lot from such a deal.

The management UI's are actually useful and almost a must have for many people.

</comment><comment><USER36> It might cause me to upgrade current windows servers instead of migrating them to Linux. But I doubt I'd start new projects with it.

If mssqlserver also became open source then that might change my mind.

</comment><comment><USER37> I would have put it in a virtual machine to play windows games more easily. Gaming on windows server 2019, how fun is that!

</comment><comment><USER38> The cost is stepping in the Microsoft tarpit. No chance in hell I'm getting near it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd prefer to avoid the skillset lock-in, even if it was free.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is something I call a "wish in one hand, sh*t in the other , see which fills up faster" scenario. There is no way Microsoft could make as much as they do now on Server if they switched to a "services and consulting" model.

<comment><USER41> Also currently there is a bit of an incentive to make it user friendly.

If it becomes "consulting-ware" like Linux there would be an incentive to make it user-unfriendly and complicate it with high costumizability, bad UI and bad defaults.</comment></comment>


Minneapolis will become the first U.S. city to end single-family home zoning - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2018/12/minneapolis-single-family-zoning-housing-racism.html?via=gdpr-consent <comment><USER2> Hideous. I live in a high density building and the neighbors are so loud and disrespectful. Supervisors and police do nothing about it.</comment>


Lovely site design (animation) - <AUTHOR> http://www.georgeandjonathan.com/#3 <comment><USER2> Great funky downtempo spacey MIDI inspired music. Go through all the tracks -- the animations vary. I love the little forefinger on the lower right.</comment>


The Disruption Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> I definitely feel that the valley (in particular) is clinging to _process_ over _result_ , and this essay nicely uses data to skewer one of the major fetishized processes.

Of course, Christensen _was_ onto something (his model is illustrative in regards to DEC, and it is also an excellent explanation of the dreadful economics of hospitals). But his model was descriptive, not prescriptive.

What's a bit uncharitable about this essay is the condemnation of the widespread enthusiasm for Christensen outside 128 & the valley. If you work in one of the many legacy industries it's no wonder you look desperately for some life ring to cling to. It's unfortunate that the choice du jour doesn't actually tell you what to do.

Despite all that, this insightful essay is also a testament to how a liberal arts degree can be useful. Useful to me, as the reader of a good essay I mean -- for most people it sadly isn't useful to put much food on the table.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with the key point that "Not everything is in the act of disrupting or being disrupted." There are businesses that can maintain incremental improvements for a long times, especially in services. The folks mowing my lawn and doing the dry cleaning don't seem to be in need of disruption as much as improvement. (ok - so I don't have a lawn, and my dry cleaner is ok, but the point is the same)

On the concept of Christensen cherry picking his cases... Well, that's what they do at HBS. They use the case method to explain things. It works for strategy, which is almost impossible to quantify anyway. (Too many moving variables, and the answers seem obvious afterwards) For proper economics, that's another story. Go to the University of Chicago instead.

</comment><comment><USER4> The author had some valid points. i.e., Christensen cherry picked cases to support his theory. There are many cases which contradict the theory and she supplied some as convincing counter examples.

That being said, I don't really know what the point of the article was. She didn't offer an alternative, just kinda shrugged and said "you can't predict the future," which seems like a cop out. At least Christensen was trying to make sense of the world while she was basically just saying it is hopelessly chaotic so we should proceed with our lives and businesses with no plans because there is no way to predict anything. That seems horribly nihilistic. I mean, sure, Disruption Theory has some issues. But that doesn't mean you should do away with theory completely.

<comment><USER5> The author's point is to critique the theory and bring thinking closer to reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like well researched academic flames.</comment>


Shitphone: A Love Story - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e66434807 <comment><USER2> The dichotomy of premium products and the shitworld makes a fun read, but between Shitphone, Premium Shitphone and iPhone, the author skips right over the most worthwile category: price-performance, value, or whatever you want to call it.

Extremes, of course, always make for more interesting writing. Still, let's not forget about the perfectly viable middle ground: Where an $80 Shitphone is a hassle to use and an $800 iPhone seems wasteful, a $300 OnePlus One or Nexus 5 will deliver about the same utility at a bit than half the price. As far as I can tell, this will hold true for almost anything: $10 headphones typically won't fit well or sound good, but at $60, a pair of Shure SE215s sounds just as good as $200 beats. A $10k Kia will teach you to hate your commute, while either a $25k Jetta or a $75k Model S will get you to work comfortably -- one of them will just cost three times as much.

It's an interesting testament to an excess of purchasing power that premium brands like Apple, beats (or large parts of the fashion industry) managed to grow to their current sizes. And it'll be interesting to watch how this whole "good enough computing" plays out.

<comment><USER3> I have a somewhat different approach. I generally either prefer to get a "shit" version of something or a super-premium version. If the thing is simple and timeless and easy to transport, I opt for the timeless route. If I think I might not keep it for more than a year or two, I usually get the cheap one.

Midrange "luxury" items seem to be barely better quality than the best-cheap- options available, while most of their cost seems to go to marketing (or styling, in the case of clothes/fashion products). They also quickly depreciate.

Super premium items, however, usually retain their value and are significantly more satisfying to hold/use. The place where this has been the _least_ true, in my experience, is with electronics. All electronics depreciate quickly. There is no timeless smart phone.

Incidentally, Kia has been doing a great job lately. I rent a car almost every week, and after comparing the Kia Forte with the Jetta and the Optima with the Passat, I prefer the Kia in both cases. The VW automatic transmissions don't seem to shift very smoothly, and I actually found the trim levels to be comparable and the Kias more fun to drive.

<comment><USER2> As someone who found a bit of an interest in fountain pens some years ago, I understand and shared your penchant to go for super-premium when it comes to timeless items. I have bought the occasional $500 pen (Graf von Faber Castell and Caran d'Ache have a couple of very beautiful items), but after one of the more expensive pens suffered some scuffs from light use and a friend of mine broke another one's clip, I came to the conclusion that I have a tendency to, as they say, break shit. I enjoy using them. To me, the little marks in the pens' platinum-covered cap don't take away from their sentimental value, but if I were to ever try and sell them, I wouldn't hope to ever get my purchase price back. The same, I believe, holds true for watches. When I noticed I had lost my $30 Cadence in a Metro, I barely scoffed. Since I had liked the design, I had an identical backup at home. Losing a timeless super-premium $10k Omega, on the other hand would've been a more severe problem. The pens, the Rolex watch and many things like them will retain their value just fine -- if you never touch, use, or in any way enjoy them.

My initial comment went in exactly the same direction as yours on midrange "luxury" items, with the possible difference that I would consider an iPhone, the beats earphones or (to a lesser degree) the Tesla as the midrange pseudo- luxury choice. In my opinion, a large part of the retail price of each of those lies in the brand value and in the marketing done by those brands. As I view it, their prices are determined not by their cost or performance, but mostly on what the customers will pay. In my perception, the midrange choice (Shure Earphones, Nexus or -- as others mentioned -- Moto E/G, Jetta) more closely reflects the cost to manufacture the item. Their profit margins are slimmer and, more importantly, more consistent.

As a final point, my apologies to Kia. Being European I tend to stick to public transport, rarely drive, and if so, tend to get cars with a manual gearbox. I was going to go with Dacia (Renault's Low-End Brand, I believe) first, but couldn't tell how well-known they were in the States. I also was under the impression that VW's interior was considered to be of rather high quality while I have read some negative comments on Tesla's.

<comment><USER4> I've slowly come to the belief that if a product can't survive light use without damage, it's not a quality product, no matter how expensive it is.

This is why I prefer tough soft-touch-plastic ThinkPads to dentable aluminum MacBooks, super-reliable Hondas to repair-prone BMWs, and unbreakable Corelle dinner ware to delicate fine china.

I don't need my belongings to punish me for being a clumsy monkey. A product which silently conforms to the realities of human use is a beautiful, and sometimes rare, thing.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, I have the same sentiment but the opposite conclusion. The plastic case on my most recent Thinkpad spontaneously cracked around the fan vent. Never dropped, babied it everywhere, no idea how it could have happened. The laptop still works, it just can't be moved anymore.

So I switched to an aluminum laptop. Life's too short to put up with crappy Lenovo plastics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really excellent (and funny) article, founded on an excellent premise: _The highest-end branded version of a product offers a chance to taste the luxurious future of technology; the shitworld version lets you preview a more practical future — the future most of the global electronics- buying public will actually enjoy._

I bought a 'shitphone' last year after I damaged my main one in a fall, but it was mostly still working and I thought that I would be able to repair it (I wasn't). Some things the new phone does significantly better; the camera is slow but turns in surprisingly good images (in sunlight; there's no flash), the battery life is excellent and it recharges super-fast, it feels a bit more rugged and so forth. As the article says, the big downside is delay - I use Android and the hardware in this thing is really not up to multi-tasking, so now I mainly use the phone for texting, calling, and email, occasionally maps or web searches but only when necessary, sometimes as a music player.

At this point I'm thinking about buying a good phone again, because the downsides are an annoyance if I'm busy and need to depend on it for work stuff; on the other hand, I rather like the fact that I spend a bit less time fiddling with my phone than I used to do, and am more engaged with the world and whoever I'm with. This includes the dog; I'm increasingly struck by how many people go to a dog park and then spend the whole time sitting on a bench hunched over their smartphones. I'm seeing more overweight dogs whose owners take them out as a matter of necessity but don't really exercise them, and then give them extra treats out of a sense of guilt. I love that I _can_ put a computer in my pocket and use it anywhere, but I don't want to go back to being buried in it.

</comment><comment><USER7> For just a tiny bit more, he could move up to the Moto E/Moto G, which are a lot nicer than the BLU phones I've seen and experienced. The sub-$200 phone market is an amazing quality-for-money price point right now.

<comment><USER8> My wife and I both have Moto G's and they are amazing value. I couldn't imagine spending the kind of money some people do on smartphones when great options like the Moto G are around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently dropped and broke my smartphone, which, by Iphone standards was probably shit, but it cost 300.00 bucks, which is nice for me. I bought a $40.00 ZTE piece of stinker at Target, and I am a VERY satisfied customer.

I can look up restaurant addresses, read HN, shop for crap on Amazon and REI, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup while waiting for a haircut, and send all the texts and make all the phone calls I want. If I run it over or fall overboard with it in my pocket I don't care. With the money I saved I bought the shittiest Garmin GPS available for about $100.00, which I can even use without a cell network. Sometimes my friends complain about the sound on my shitty phone, but I don't care.

Plus, I stare at a computer all fucking day, I know all I need to know about programming for at least the next five years of stateworker career, and I would FAR rather read a print book, go for a sailboat ride, have a dinner party, or dig some vegetables than spend another f-ing second computing even with a really nice screen.

Oh -- I write this on a 12 year old macbook running FreeBSD, which I used for my dissertation, from ~2000 lines of Octave matrix code to typing it up in Lyx/ Latex. Works far better than any new Windows piece of crap for actual computing, isn't occupying space in a landfill, and I have money left over to buy rain gear and boots for getting outside.

It's not shit -- it's manure...

</comment><comment><USER10> For what it's worth, I pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy S2 in 2011, at a time when I decided to join the ranks of the "edgiest" among us (after going through an HTC diamond and a Nokia N900).

Five years later, almost to the day, I'm still sporting my S2; I just haven't had any compelling reason to change it. It does its job now as well as it did back then, and in some cases actually performs better thanks to software updates. The battery outlasts most of my friends' phones even though it was never changed. The phone itself seems to be indestructible: I never protected it (cases, screen protectors, etc.) in 5 years, it has been through just about everything you can imagine and more, yet the only damage is a vague scratch on the screen I can only see in a very awkward angle and a some slightly chipped paint by the ear piece.

I don't know what makes this phone so particular, but for the same reason I wonder more and more what genuinely makes a lot of the new expensive hardware that particular either. In any case, it will be a sad day when I have to part with this phone.

<comment><USER11> YES, I'm typing this from my uncased, unscreened S2, which has been dropped _hard_ , _many_ times. The thing is indestructible, which is all the more incredible when you consider that it doesn't really look it

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am also a lover of shitpliances. A long-time shitphone user (before Android shitphones it was years-old Sony Ericssons and Nokias), I also buy shitty used laptops, tablets, TVs, sound bars, and... that's it actually, I don't own any other technology. But I always buy the lowest possible priced hardware that will do something I want. I like to think that i'm cheating an industry founded on selling the hapless techno-dweeb on electronic appliances that will lose 80% of their value in two years.

I can remember exactly the moment I realized the ridiculousness of the overvalued tech gadget. Finally armed with enough money to buy my own computer, I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a tech gadget that highly, and would only pay the bare-bones price. (That idea is probably why there literally became a market called the "barebones PC", computers with random commodity parts pieced together by the purchaser, like a made-to-order self-assembled Model T Ford).

My current shitphone is a $75 AT&T Go-phone with 1GB RAM and a dual-core 1.4ghz processor. I refuse to update any apps for fear they might use more RAM or CPU for some improved feature and make the apps less stable than they already are. I enjoy dropping it onto concrete in front of people and watching their gasps and cringes, only to show them how the seemingly plastic screen remains unblemished. I might be a shitphone sadist.

<comment><USER13> > I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium > Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a > tech gadget that highly

You are overlooking the fact that that machine was right at a breakpoint where we switched over to heavy commoditization. 64MB of RAM was big and very expensive at that point, 4GB hard drives were only surpassed by 9GB SCSI drives (which were full 5.25" and almost 1.5-2" thick--they would jump out of your hand if you flipped one over due to gyroscopic moment), and the Pentium Pro 200 was a _LOT_ faster than anything short of a high end RISC microprocessor _IF_ you were running Windows NT.

Then everything went haywire. Memory prices crashed, disk drive densities shot through the roof, and processor development underwent massive acceleration. All of these absolutely crashed the price of computers.

Realistically, however, the primary driver of computer performance was _NETWORKING_ performance. Every time your "internet connection" jumped an order of magnitude, we needed better computers. You can see the break points-- 300 bps, 1200bps, 9.6kbps-14.4kbps, 28kbps-56kbps, 128kbps-512kbps, and 1Mbps-3Mbps. New apps also popped out at each of those points: bbs, email, graphical internet, the web, audio/MP3, and finally video.

At the 1Mbps mark, the telecom companies started dragging their feet about network speeds and computer sales slowed down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We could have shitphones.

Or, you know, do what Google did with the Moto G: unspectacular but very usable hardware, no crufty software layer above the OS, at a good price point.

</comment><comment><USER15> The other solution is to buy used phone. Premium phones are outdated so quickly, you can easily find a good deal on swappa or similar websites. I'm on my third smartphone since I left my flip-phone in 2009 and I never paid more than $200.

<comment><USER16> > The other solution is to buy used phone.

This is a good idea if you can find a reputable service that will guarantee your money back.

I bought a used Note 3 off of ebay. I got it, popped my SIM card in and worked perfectly. Then one day I couldn't make calls, use data or register at all on the network. Turned out it was on a carrier payment plan and the original owner stopped making payments. So T-Mobile blocked/blacklisted the IMEI number. T-Mobile refused to talk to me about it or even let me pay it off. I sold it on ebay for about $350 - afterwards I realized that for $50 I could have had it "fixed".

And I'm sure I'm not the only one that has been scammed like this. The sad part is that it only scares people away from wanting to do business with honest people like me because of all the idiots out there.

<comment><USER17> I have had good experience with swappa.com (Bought 2 devices from there). I am not sure if it would have helped in your case though.

<comment><USER18> Swappa has a 100% refund if you get burned by a bad ESN. I too bought a premium used phone through Swappa without any issue.

>" If you were to buy a device on Swappa that could not be activated due to a blacklisted ESN then you would be entitled to a refund no matter the seller's stated return policy."

<comment><USER16> I don't think would have helped me. When I got it - the phone worked perfectly. It wasn't until months later when the guy stopped paying the monthly fee and T-Mobile blacklisted the IMEI number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's another alternative for the frugal technologist: _Get a secondhand phone._

In 2012, I bought a used Nexus One for $30, wiped it clean, and put Cyanogenmod on it. The phone was already two years old when I bought it, and it had scratches all over the place (except, thankfully, the screen itself), but it served me well for another two years.

Recently, the Nexus One finally broke, so I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. The previous owner had only had it for 6 months, and it was in an impeccable condition (not a single scratch), so I had to pay a hefty $100 for it. Again, I wiped it clean and put Cyanogenmod on it. It feels twice as fast without all the Samsung bloatware and carrier garbage. I fully expect to keep using the Mini for the next two or three years, at which point I'll probably buy another used phone.

Sure, it takes a fair amount of research and luck to find a phone that has been well cared for. And I obviously won't take any chances with the stock ROM, who knows what it might be infected with? But as long as you're careful, and if you buy locally from ordinary people (not professional dealers), you can get last year's mid-range phone for the price of this year's shitphone. Why get a $80 shitphone if you can buy a non-shit phone for $60? People in wealthy countries switch phones a lot more often than what even the cheapest phones are designed to last, especially if said phones are kept encased in lots of fancy fabric, rubber, and plastic.

In addition, since you're no longer a slave of your contract, you can also save a lot on the monthly phone bill. I only pay $8/mo on average, while everyone else in my country seems to be stuck with $40+/mo two-year plans.

<comment><USER20> Cyanogenmod -- which includes Privacy Guard -- does wonders for old hardware. When apps can't wake the device every minute to ask for location or hammer on background data, suddenly the lowest hardware becomes snappy. The updated graphics drivers help too. It literally added another year of life to both my Galaxy S1 and S3s.

Just picked up the octacore Galaxy Alpha for $350 off-contract. Just like new cars, the premium for brand new on-contract phones rarely pays itself back in productivity.

<comment><USER21> Custom roms all the way. I am surprised why so-called tech writers cannot root/install ROM and continue to be unhappy about their phone.

<comment><USER19> Well, you might not want to void the warranty on your new expensive gadget.

Which is actually ridiculous, if you think about it. Wiping the stock OS (usually Windows) and installing some other OS on a typical laptop does not void the warranty, and even if it does, nobody will care if you restore the stock OS before taking your laptop in for service. Why should it be any different for phones and tablets?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Last month my fourth iPhone in six years was, in medical terms, crashing. > The screen, which had pulled away from its glue, was behaving strangely. The > charging port, no matter how thoroughly I cleaned it, only occasionally took > power.

Maybe a solution is to treat your next expensive phone with a modicum of care? My partner and I have each had four iPhones over the same period with one cracked screen, and that's it (and I consider us heavy users). I can't even picture how to make the screen come unglued if I wanted it to...

<comment><USER23> If I have to go out of my way to wrap my phone in a protective case and treat it with extra care just for it to not fall apart under what I consider normal day to day use, then it is not fit for purpose as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised this article didn't mention the sweet spot of affordable-but- still-good phones out there. The Moto G could reasonably be called the flagship for this category: [http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/26/moto-g- review/](http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/26/moto-g-review/)

<comment><USER25> I have a Moto G, it's excellent. Ok the camera isn't fantastic, but it's fine for snaps.

I found myself finally out of an 18 month contract back in 2009 (Palm Treo 750v) and hung onto it for another year eventually biting the bullet and bought outright an unlocked vanilla HTC Desire for around GBP360 in early 2010.

Sadly wear and tear got the better of it in September 2014 and it wasn't behaving very well, but still not bad for a four year plus device that saw quite a bit of action.

After reading favourable reviews of the "G" I picked up a PAYG for GBP99. It's bloody brilliant for the money, it's also at a price point that if I do accidentally lose it, or drop it in the loo, a replacement isn't going to be an eye-watering expense. The only sad thing was that I managed to drop it in a carpark after owning it for only three days and cracked the upper LHS of the screen. My HTC would have just bounced, as it often did. However the "G" still works just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I feel like this is going to get bigger and bigger if the "premium" manufacturers don't get their act together. Premium hardware is nice, but if it is slowed down by bloatware and doesn't get software updates or patches either it has a hard time to justify the price. Replacing a 80$ "shitphone" (I don't like the term) every 2 years is easier to stomach than a 400$+ "premium device".

</comment><comment><USER25> Not a phone story but...I was in the market for a new portable DAB radio for the kitchen, I also needed one that I could plug my Android into and play podcasts. I'd previously been stung by paying £160 for a "quality" brand (Roberts) only to become less satisfied with it over the years (I'm a wee bit of an audiophile) plus it didn't even have an AUX input. I'd also auditioned Pure and Revo models but couldn't really audibly detect that they were worth the extra money - getting something with an AUX input seems to mean hitting the premium model price ranges.

To cut a long story short I ended up with a "Sandstrom" SDABXRW13 which is PC World (UK)/Dixon's own brand. Ok, it's not a total Shit-Brand but you all know the sort of thing, built-to-a-retail-price but passing itself off as some fancy Scandinavian make, often ending in disappointment after getting it home.

This is it here:

[http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd- audio/audio/radios/sand...](http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd- audio/audio/radios/sandstrom-sdabxrw13-dab-radio-black-wood-20841554-pdt.html)

The reality is that it's a well built, fairly decent sounding portable DAB radio and has exactly the same features I needed as an equivalent Pure, Roberts or Sony, which was going to cost me at the time £80-100 more. It doesn't have tone/eq controls but neither did many of the more expensive brands and to be honest it I mostly only listen to spoken word radio and podcasts, that said BBC Radio 6 sounds just fine.

I've had this unit for three months now and would happily recommend over a prestige brand leader.

</comment><comment><USER27> If one takes a bit of time to choose well, it's possible to buy good quality stuff at almost steal prices. Think Moto E, Acer C720, Nexus 7, Casio F-91, Duralex glassware, etc. None of those qualify as shit-x, yet their prices do.

</comment><comment><USER28> I bought an Amazon Fire Phone when they were on sale for $199 (and it included a year of Amazon Prime, which I already have paid for for nearly as long as the service has existed). It is basically a shitphone, though a quite high quality one (from a hardware perspective, the software is soundly in the "shitware" category). It has a weird/broken/old version of Android, has the Amazon store instead of Google Play (though Play can be side-loaded), and has some weird and ridiculous features that nobody wants and everybody laughs at when I explain it to them (the 3D stuff and the _four_ cameras on the face to provide the 3D stuff).

But, for effectively $100 I got a quite high end phone. And, it was fun to tinker with it, getting it whipped into proper shape. I may eventually root it and pop Cyanogen or some other ROM onto it, for now, it's a pretty solid phone.

If I hadn't gotten the Fire, I probably would have gotten one of the cheap Chinese imports like the author of this post. I refuse to do a subsidized phone, and $650 for a high end phone seems absurd.

</comment><comment><USER29> This thread has attracted some hilarious HNers.

Over the years, I've learned not to buy shitronics.

Not because they have shitty reliability.

I avoid buying shitronics because I run my electronics to the ground.

I'm currently typing this on 9 year old Core 2 Duo Dell that runs plenty fast.

Down in the basement is another Dell about 11 years old that's been running 24/7 for the past 10 years. Unlike my high-end Core 2 Duo Dell, the basement one is a Celeron POS that was a $299 special.

It was slow on day 1 and it is still slow on day 4015, but it keeps chugging along. And every time I use it, I curse myself for not spending a little bit extra for faster machine.

<comment><USER30> There are some really cheap options to upgrade that POS, if it is a socket 775 desktop.

Core 2 Duo is about the time when Moore's law really started slowing down, that is you can get by just fine with a 9 year old Core 2 Duo.

Even if you had bought a top of line CPU(Pentium D?) 11 years ago you it would still be sluggish today.

<comment><USER29> socket 478... lol

<comment><USER30> Yikes, socket 478 is pretty much a lost cause, you can't even get any dual cores for it.

You could buy a low end NUC (Celeron is fine) and it would pay for itself in a year and be faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh yeah, shitphones. My first smartphone was a shitphone, and after three years of living with a device that was constantly unresponsive, hung itself every other time someone called me (no kidding) and that I had to reset by taking out the battery every time I turned on Wi-Fi because syncing would overwhelm the hardware - after those three years of extreme frustration, I decided to never again be cheap on tools. There are things one shouldn't save money on - a mattress, a work chair and - for me - a smartphone. The constant stress and frustration just isn't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER32> > Whether you choose the luxury option, the commodity option, or something in > between, you are buying future garbage.

I think this is one of the biggest differences between today and when our parents grew up.

When something was made back then and when someone bought it, it was bought with the expectation that this should last. And it did. It probably still works and could probably be used by you if you wanted to use it. Basically decades (or in some case centuries) of durability.

Contrast that with today. If you buy something this year, servicing it next year will be unprofitable compared to throwing it away and buying a new one.

Take a wild _guess_ at which is the eco-sustainable one.

I wonder if or when the pendulum will swing back and we will try to strive for durability, and just how bad things needs to get before we understand that we need to go there.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand smartphones. I just carry a tablet in backpack, and still use my 10 years old dumbphone for calls and smses. I had company iphone 4 and it was worse phone and worse tablet, and was probably more expansive.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just tripped over this. $80 a month for a phone contract seems hugely expensive to me (and my Blackberry 9000). UK sim only contracts around £10 to £20 depending on term and usage levels. Not LTE/G4 of course.

</comment><comment><USER35> You can get Nokia Lumias for really cheap too, and they're very nice to use.

</comment><comment><USER36> The idea that if something isn't Apple, it's shit, is wearing a little thin.

Apple simply doesn't give me what I want in terms of features and freedom. I think their products look boring and ugly. So to me, Apple products are shit.

<comment><USER37> I think features and freedom are valid. And boring, but ugly? Can you please point out less ugly tech products? I'm sincerely interested.

<comment><USER36> All of their computers reminds me of 70's stereo systems and appliances. The only thing missing is some wood paneling.</comment></comment></comment>


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