Obese Pipes - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/01/09/Fat-Pipes <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I've been designing and troubleshooting networks at ISPs for about 12 years. Below are my observations of the problem given what I know to be true from experience. I do not fully understand the problem as described but I will do my best to drop some knowledge.

I would be very surprised if any ISP is still using routers and switches that buffer anything in software. Even modern store and forward switches only use a very small hardware buffer for packets. All major vendors use layer-3 hardware switching on their carrier platforms. The ASICs and TCAM are designed to run at a high enough clock rate so that buffering in SW isn't necessary.

That said, wireless routers almost always use software buffers. And so do most home CPE devices like DSL routers or something like DLink, Netgear or Linksys. This article is strictly talking about buffering at the end-point. Or host buffering.

There are a few quick and dirty solutions that involve TCP windowing. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_tuning>

But bear in mind most protocols that need very low latency are UDP so this might not help.

It's really really really hard to do any kind of latency testing without a hardware based packet sender and analyzer. Without it you never really know if the problem is your OS or the network device you're testing.

If the problem really is because your CPE device has too bigbuffers than build your own. Get a *NIX box and make the network buffer really small in the kernel. If you no longer have bad latency than you found the problem. If you still have bad latency then look for something else to replace.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how it matters whether the buffering is implemented in software or hardware; it's still there and it's too big.

 _If the problem really is because your CPE device has too bigbuffers than build your own._

I think Gettys wants to solve the problem for everyone, not just ubergeeks.

<comment><USER4> What he's saying is that you can make custom hardware that's fast enough so you don't need any buffering.

<comment><USER2> That's right. But this hasn't trickled down to the consumer market yet.

Maybe there is a market for a pro-sumer home router or cable modem? It would cost more than your typical Best Buy Netgear or whatever. But it would implement L3 forwarding in hardware and have advanced congestion control and QOS.

My guess is the market research has been done and consumer router manufacturers have determined that not enough consumers are willing to pay for things they don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One effect some older gamers may have noticed over time – lag has gotten worse. I used to be able to ping 5ms to servers in the Bay Area on my old Pacific Bell DSL connection back around 1999/2000. Now I'm lucky to get 50 from Comcast.

It also means that most online action games have come to be built around prediction and latency compensation management. Games feel mushier, and they're easier to cheat (by intentionally lagging your client, etc.) because lots of games no longer use the centralized server model. Good prediction requires a dedicated server to run its own 'master' logic on, so that clients can't cheat. If you saw the paper from Valve recently here on HN, that's how it works.

The reason to not run dedicated servers is that it's cheaper. This is what most Xbox Live and PSN games do – just dumbly pipe data between clients. So it becomes a trust-based peer-to-peer system, except you can't actually trust the other peers. And predictably, the games end up feeling like crap.

Lots of games also have latency in their own local engine. Multiple rendering passes with buffering, physics thread synchronization, and then TVs that buffer the video, interpolate frames, and apply sharpening. The cumulative effect is like a car that's been built up with cost-cutting engineering, loaded down with driving aids, and designed to look good for 11 months. Numb, mushy, and ugly this time next year.

<comment><USER6> I wonder how far away from your servers you are. Even 50ms from your computer, down the wire, through who knows how many network appliances then onto it's target is pretty damned good if you think about it, and at 5ms it's just nuts. _Light_ will only go about 1500 KM that fast..

<comment><USER5> I'm in the Bay Area. The servers are in the Bay Area. I don't see why that's unreasonable. People don't know what they're missing now.

<comment><USER7> I think burgerbrain is asking how far you are network wise from the target servers. Comcast, along with most of the other big residential ISPs, is notorious for having bad internal routing. It's possible your previous PacBell DSL connection had better routing to the servers in question, but Comcast doesn't. What does a traceroute look like?

My fiber connection at home pings an average of 12ms to my colocated server in the same major city. However, a friend's cable modem connection through Time Warner, just two suburbs over, pings at an average of 43ms. My traceroute? 10 hops. His? 21 hops, and goes by way of Houston.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Without careful investigation I think it's wrong to assume that larger buffers are what is causing the difference between ping times between two different ISP at different points in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Guys, this is not traffic shaping by his ISP. I think it's just a poor calculation job by scp; I see this mis-estimation all the time when I copy a movie from my desktop in my bedroom to my TV in my living room over 20 feet of Cat 6 cable. scp starts at about something 200MB/s and then eventually converges to the real speed of 30MB/s. There is no traffic shaping, but there is one write at the beginning that fills the kernel buffer without blocking. (Why does this get "bigger and bigger every year"? Because people are setting it bigger. By default, the tcp write buffer is something like 4k. I have mine set to ~512k.)

If you want to accurately measure your bandwidth, try iperf. Between my server on Slicehost and my desktop at home, I get about 6Mbps. And I pay for 6Mbps DSL. So there is not some conspiracy here, people are just measuring wrong. scp is not a benchmark.

<comment><USER9> This is not scp's fault, it really is buffer bloat. It is noticeable in DSL connections, but it is worst with 3G connections.

When I run some (down/up)loads via my UMTS dongle, I easily fill the buffer in my modem, the buffers at my ISP. I can still ping remote hosts, with a latency of up to 60 seconds. The problem is, TCP doesn't understand what happens, because the packets get acknowledged after all. Only eventually my TCP connections throttle themselves, and it reaches a somewhat stable balance where the buffer still introduces about 10 to 20 seconds of lag.

The solution for me was to shape my own traffic on the edge of my "network" and to never let the buffer be filled in the first place. This leads to a much better ping (< 1 second) and a higher bandwidth utilization (when looking at the big picture).

<comment><USER8> Don't you think the slow part is the link between your modem and the ISP? My guess is that the buffer you are filling is your TCP write buffer. If I make mine tiny, then scp reports what my bandwidth actually is.

I blame scp because it chooses a moving-average algorithm instead of an instantaneous rate-of-change measurement.

I don't have this problem with my UMTS dongle; ping times are about half a second, but TCP works fine at this latency. You need a big buffer to keep the data flowing, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "There's another overly-fat-pipe symptom that's been increasingly in my face. I routinely copy big files here and there around the Internet, most commonly from my laptop to tbray.org." ...and then Tim describes a symptom of a fast initial burst followed by a much lower average transfer rate.

Note he is going external (over the internet). The problem is quite likely traffic shaping by his ISP. I would contend it isn't really a "fat pipe" issue so much as his ISP ...um... stretching the truth with respect to how much bandwidth they _really_ can give to him. ISPs are in a "bandwidth battle" (kind of like the CPU clock rate wars) - they advertise the maximum bandwidth that they can theoretically provide, but if all subscribers tried to use that much bandwidth at once, the ISP does not have the back-end infrastructure to handle it. As a result, the ISP does traffic shaping: transfers a short burst (the initial burst in the case of a big file transfer) at maximum speed and then throttles the connection so that the _average_ bandwidth doesn't overwhelm their back-end capabilities.

<comment><USER11> I observe this with "PowerBoost", and that was the first thing I thought of when I read what he was describing.

<comment><USER12> I love the marketing. "PowerBoost, the few seconds before we throttle your connection."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Speed" is related to _both_ bandwidth _and_ latency. High bandwidth with high latency will "feel slow." Unfortunately, everybody talks about bandwidth and ignores latency.

The "fat pipe syndrome" is a _latency_ issue, not a "speed" (aka bandwidth) issue. Most home routers (and, I suspect, many commercial routers) only advertise _bandwidth_ and not their latency.

ISPs also advertise their best case (burst) bandwidth and are typically silent on their latency and average bandwidth.

<comment><USER13> It's both. A long-running, high-bandwidth stream will cause short-lived, low- bandwidth streams to be squeezed out, because the TCP congestion isn't being managed properly. The first stream will see _relatively_ good speed but shonky latency, while the later streams will see bad speed as well, when they should share the bandwidth equally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is probably more of a function of the way TCP operates than the potential upstream bandwidth. Basically envision TCP increasing exponentially each time a successful transaction occurs, and then cutting in half when a failure happens. After a certain amount of failures it will linearly grow, which is where you see accurate data rates. When TCP is scaling exponentially and decreasing by half, it's pretty difficult to guess the bandwidth. This probably takes under 10 seconds to stabilize. The only way to display accurate data would be to wait. So then the choice is really whether you would like to see nothing, or see the raw data of what's happening in TCP.

<comment><USER13> As I understand it, it's caused by failures not happening when they should, so that TCP can't do its flow control properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or, run egress traffic shaping. Put a hard limit on the upload rate from your PC to your device, put this at about 98% of your actual "line rate." Problem solved?

<comment><USER16> This could work ... if you only have one machine on your local network and your outbound link can sustain that data rate 24/7.

It's not really a practical solution for 99% of cases.

<comment><USER15> You do the egress shaping at the router, not on each individual machine. And you shape the entire interface, not individual traffic flows.

As far as jitter in the outgoing rate, that's what the buffer is there for. What shaping helps you avoid is: a) filling the buffer and those side-effects and b) prematurely filling the buffer at a high rate while the rest runs at a low rate.

<comment><USER16> The problem isn't the buffer being full, it's a problem with the buffer being large and full. Buffering less and just dropping packets when your smaller buffer fills (or even before then) lets the congestion control stuff do its work.

<comment><USER15> I've been doing this in my home networks for years, and this is exactly what egress shaping does for me. The local router drops packets, the internal clients back off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Buffer bloat is a problem. But, as he quite accurately puts it, there are no really good solutions out there. For those of us in the middle of the network, there is clearly no good answer. We need to provide RTT * BW * <some fraction>. We can argue about the fraction, but the RTT is a function of the flows involved anyway. As a flow can have an RTT anywhere from 0ms to 300+ms, we can't provide the _right_ answer.

The hosts can do better. As he points out, Linux is optimizing for long-haul performance, which is not entirely unreasonable. Linux _could_ do much better, but it would have to have buffering adaptive to the particular transport connection. Not there yet.

So in the end, he ends up throwing stones all over the place. Gee, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER18> Cringely thinks 'bufferbloat' will become a major issue in 2011: [http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-prediction-4-bufferbloa...](http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-prediction-4-bufferbloat- may-be-terrible-but-your-cable-isp-wont-fix-it)</comment>


I Almost Rage Bought a MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-almost-rage-bought-a-macbook-pro <comment><USER2> Based on 4 of 5 of your points:

* An extremely polished OS that feels smooth and is rock solid

* An OS that doesn't phone home with sensitive information regularly

* Flawless support for multiple monitors and virtual desktops / workspaces

* Unix(ish) based solution for all development related libraries and tools

Why the hell is "You can run Windows with a Linux VM approach similar to mine" a reasonable choice?

<comment><AUTHOR> It fits that criteria, although I should have written *nix.

Windows gets a lot of flack but it's honestly pretty stable. I haven't had a BSOD in like 10 years and I routinely have 100+ days of uptime without performance degradation.

That's 100+ days of heavy development, virtual machines, recording screencasts, etc..

<comment><USER2> Dont have enough experience with it to deny that. But it sends data home, works only suboptimal with multiple screens (given better than mac, but not as smooth as Gnome + X) and depending on unix while only having it in a VM sounds far from optimal too.

If its polished and feels smooth is probably depending on who looks at it.</comment></comment></comment>


Google+ comes up short - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/07/google_comes_up_short.html?cm_sp=most_widget-_-blog_posts-_-Google+%20Comes%20Up%20Short

<comment><USER2> The author seems to be suffering from a classic case of confusing personal anecdotes and preferences with actual insight and analysis.

He seems to have joined G+ with some sort of expectation that he'd find a full-baked, revolutionary new site that would change his perception of social networking. It's evident from his article, indeed his very first sentence, that he doesn't think Facebook has any shortcomings that need to be overcome.

If you're starting from the position that "Facebook works just fine, I don't need a better way to share things online," then yes, Google Plus is not solving a problem for you.

There are a lot of people who just want to use the Internet to share family pictures and funny jokes they've heard, and don't care about or understand things like owning their data, controlling their privacy, or ensuring that different sites and protocols are interoperable and predictable.

They won't rush to join G+, because they are fine where they are inside the walled garden of Facebook, just like they were find inside AOL's walled garden in the 1990s. Eventually, Google+ will be for them, but not right now.

I'd call that "early days," not "coming up short."

<comment><USER3> _"If you're starting from the position that "Facebook works just fine, I don't need a better way to share things online," then yes, Google Plus is not solving a problem for you."_

Yes, exactly. And for the _vast majority_ of Facebook users, that's where they're starting. And that's the guy's point. And he's absolutely right. Google has an uphill climb with this one, because they're competing against two established players who already do a great job of what they do.

 _"There are a lot of people who just want to use the Internet to share family pictures and funny jokes they've heard, and don't care about or understand things like owning their data, controlling their privacy, or ensuring that different sites and protocols are interoperable and predictable._

The only people I hear complaining about Facebook and Twitter on privacy grounds are the same people who complained that iPods were over-priced, that Macs aren't open enough, that VHS was inferior to Beta, and that MP3 was going to fall to Ogg Vorbis _any day now_. Could they be right? Sure. Do I think that's likely? Not based on past experience. Realists know that "good enough" carries the day -- especially when "good enough" is actually pretty darned good.

Maybe Google+ will be a vastly better experience in a few years, but right now it's clunky and awkward, and the payoff for using it is low. Literally _everyone I care about_ is on Facebook, and if they make their groups feature slightly more prominent and easy to use, they'll have matched Google+ feature for feature. That's the point of the essay: to make a compelling alternative to a strong competitor's product, you have to do a lot more than add a few basic features.

<comment><USER4> " Literally everyone I care about is on Facebook"

Everyone I cared about was on Friendster and on Myspace too.

My favorite people who I'm friends with on Facebook tend to rarely post on Facebook (if at all) or use Twitter as their main outlet.

I enjoy the social purge as my list get re-populated by my true friends of the time and the quality of the content re-aligns with a better signal-to-noise ratio.

On a side note: photo uploading is way better on G+. I've been extremely unhappy about the re-encoding on Facebook which outputs my photos with less quality (despite uploading at a high quality setting) where as Google retains my original image and scales it according the browser size. That alone makes my experience vastly better as nothing annoys me more than seeing friends use my low-res photos of them as their profile photos when they should have access to a high-res version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to basically be a giant troll... if you can't see what problems Google+ claims to solve for a consumer, you aren't looking very hard. As far as I can see, there's two giant issues that G+ addresses and one that's arguably more important, but also more invisible.

1) It's not Facebook. Don't discount how much some people __loathe __FB as a company, and (in my opinion) rightfully so! They've made a business out of tricking users into accidentally over-sharing, they've engaged in some pretty stunning acts of censorship, and keep changing the UI in drastic steps that shock their existing userbase. (I have some sympathy with this last one, but it is a widespread complaint, nonetheless.)

2) In G+, privacy controls are manifest and obvious. There's little functionality in this realm that FB doesn't also offer, but it's not actively hidden from users on G+, but rather promoted to a primary feature of the UI.

The other thing that I think G+ does right is to get away from the "one-size- fits-all" model, under which every contact is a "friend". When you hear people saying "they're my Facebook friend, but not a __real __friend," it's clear that FB has flubbed it. G+, like Twitter and other such social media networks, allows for asymmetric contacts, which really lets the user control how they want to use the site.

Anyway, that's just my 2¢.

</comment><comment><USER6> He might be right. Google+ may never challenge Facebook or Twitter.

This doesn't mean Google+ will be a failure though, because unlike what he asserts, Google+ _does_ offer one thing they don't: A tight integration with the Google services. Each of the various services used to have their own ways of sharing, now (or soon) they will have the same interface, namely Google+.

People may still use Facebook to keep track of old acquaintances and twitter to follow celebrities, but use Google+ to share photos from Picasa and their Android phone with their family, share documents from Google Docs with their colleagues, and Hangout with their friends. Which also explain why Google+ put Circles first, the various services doesn't overlap that much.

Joshua Gans will most likely be an active user of Google+ because of one these services, namely Google Search. Google Search is being tied to Google Profiles through the rel=author tag. This will put his name and picture next to his writings. The user clicking on them will go to his profile page. If he also share links to his writings on Google+, these will be shown alongside his profile. That will be hard to resist for any blogger.

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920)

TL;DR: Google+ mainly makes Google better. It has overlap in functionality with both Facebook and Twitter, and make take marketshare from those, but that is not the sole success criteria.

<comment><USER7> Correct. People also need to realize Google+ isn't just the site you see when you go to plus.google.com. It's a Google-wide initiative that affects almost all of their properties. Truly, an improved version of Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got an invite on G+ this morning and logged in. Here are my thoughts...

I found it had a very very prominent user interface of "who sees my data", and the 'circles' interface is very - IMO - obvious.

This is very reassuring: Google's obviously not trying to go the sketchy route of "how much data can we send out to everyone unannounced", at least not at the start. I left Facebook for that reason, and don't plan to _ever_ go back.

Although, I found it a little confusing about following. "I added so and so to my following... I hope they didn't get an invite!!!!" Because that would be awkward - I just want to see what some of the influential techies are doing and perhaps to talk with them, not to "be friends" ala the Facebook/Livejournal approach.

<comment><USER2> They'll see that you've placed them in a Circle, but it's no different than following them on Twitter.

If someone is an influential techie on G+, they get lots of people following them, and they won't even take a moment to consider whether it's someone trying to be "friends."

That's one of the fundamental differences with G+. It's not like FB, forcing you into an all-or-nothing approach to sharing.

<comment><USER8> That's what I figured. It's like Dreamwidth in that respect; separating out "people who read you" from "people you read".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google+ solves a lot of issues. It is easy, rather than confusing, to set up lists of friends, and using them is likewise easy, rather than frustrating. Video chat that's free and easy to use (as opposed to easy to use but not worth the expense in the case of Skype or incredibly expensive and inordinately difficult to use in the case of many corporate IT solutions).

It doesn't solve _every_ need that Facebook doesn't, but it does address quite a few of them.

</comment><comment><USER10> >> Facebook provides "hyper-local news," allowing people to broadcast [...] to their social circle [...]

Nope, FB allows people only to broadcast to their social network. That is what G+ "solves for consumers". The "hyper-local news" becomes targeted, really only to the social circle that's interested.

How ironic, that the author used the G+ term "social circle" to describe what FB is doing.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author forgot to do one very important step, send out invites to people in your closest circles that aren't on G+ yet.

<comment><USER12> It's even more natural than that. On the first day I simply organized my contacts and started sharing. Some of them are now on G+ and some are not, but all of them get notified when I share something with them. And they can see it in their inbox whether they signed up or not.

I don't think of it as a 'social network' I have to 'invite' people to. I think of it as amplifying my sharing.

<comment><USER13> That's what I did too. Of course, most of the links that people get in email are broken... but it would be great if it worked!

<comment><USER12> Can you forward one of the broken links? Agaram at google. Thanks!

<comment><USER14> the unsubscribe link was 404ing for days and days

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The millions of people that have joined Google+ and the throngs of people that have buzzed about it would beg to differ with the author who is obviously is trolling.

Also, he conveniently omitted from the article the fact that he's a visiting researcher at Microsoft. Possible conflict of interests?

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one thinking that this article is just a pile of bullshit?

\+ launched 12 days ago, isn't it a bit too early to talk about its defects?

<comment><USER17> _Definitely_ too early to talk about a lack of network effect. Facebook didn't start life preprogrammed with users; it was Myspace that had all the users and content!

<comment><USER16> Yep.

As it happens all to often, many people write only because they have a keyboard.

But that's not even surprising, if you consider that they probably are the same people that, in real life, talk only because they happen to have a mouth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-llwYjxv8Y&feature=play...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-llwYjxv8Y&feature=player_embedded) says what Google+ solves in a very entertaining way.</comment>


CoffeePack, a MessagePack implementation in pure CoffeeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/devongovett/coffeepack

<comment><AUTHOR> Works in both Node.js and the browser</comment>


Nuts and Bolts for an online Start-up. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ourdailybriefs.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm beta testing a gift concept for women. It's a line of edgy underwear to give your BFF. I am looking for cost effective ways to market them organically. Can anyone recommend a great omnichannel app to help build community. We have a good content strategy but I would love some recommendations on must have apps/process/considerations etc. Any lessons learned from other startups would be wonderful. THANKS</comment>


Yahoo announces 2,000 job cuts - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-statement-131500015.html <comment><USER2> I am frustrated to see a great company get destroyed like this.

Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo! says:

"We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. "

In the background, unstated but assumed, is the theory of business "core competence". I believe the phrase was invented by by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel in this May, 1990 issue of the Harvard Business Review:

[http://hbr.org/1990/05/the-core-competence-of-the- corporatio...](http://hbr.org/1990/05/the-core-competence-of-the- corporation/ar/1)

Sometimes a great essay gets badly misinterpreted.

Since that time, there have been many, many books that have developed this idea. See "Strategic Management and Core Competencies: Theory and Application" by Anders Drejer.

Inspirational for this concept was what Jack Welch argued for while he was CEO of GE, during the 80s and 90s: the company must be in the #1 or #2 spot in any industry, otherwise they will leave that industry. This is taught to MBAs. I have the sense that most of them draw this lesson: shrink the company down and focus on whatever currently works. My concern is that this frequently means focusing on what works in the short-term, without much thinking about where growth will come from over the long-term.

The original essay by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel can be interpreted in another way. This sentence sounds like it is describing Amazon.com, constantly inventing new services:

"A few companies have proven themselves adept at inventing new markets, quickly entering emerging markets, and dramatically shifting patterns of customer choice in established markets."

When CEOs have no idea what a company should do in the long-term, they claim that the company is going to focus "our efforts on our core businesses". There is absolutely no hope for a company that follows that strategy. Especially in technology, where things change quickly, one needs to be inventing the new, new thing, or one is dead.

<comment><USER3> > _I believe the phrase was invented by by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel in > this May, 1990 issue of the Harvard Business Review_

A quick search of google will show you it was around quite a long time before that.

> _Inspirational for this concept was what Jack Welch argued for while he was > CEO of GE, during the 80s and 90s: the company must be in the #1 or #2 spot > in any industry_

Jack Welch took an industrial organization and mortgaged it. GE capital was an enormous percentage of the company when he left. Sure enough, a credit contraction caused GE to take a bailout in 2008.

He talked a great game, but their performance was exposed after he left.

<comment><USER4> From Wikipedia:

"A core competency is a concept in management theory originally advocated by CK Prahalad, and Gary Hamel, two business book writers."

No doubt the phrase was used before then, but I've never heard anyone suggest that the very specific business meaning it has now existed before their article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yahoo has over 18,000 employees (and not 14,000). The extra 4,000+ are contractors. This is a scheme that the bureaucrats at Yahoo figured out pretty early: announce layoffs, and then bring the employees back as contractors. "win-win for everyone", they joke.

I really, really hate to see people get laid off; But this was a long time coming. As an ex-Yahoo, I hope they cut out the thick layer of bureacracy thats sucking the oxygen out of that place. Ever seen the algae that suffocates a pond? The middle managers there are like that algae. And then there the VPs: at last count Yahoo had over 200 VPs. Really, What do these fuckers do!?

If Yahoo can become more engineering-centric, it has a chance. If the middle managers (and VPs) win out, stick a fork in it; theres no hope.

<comment><USER6> >And then there the VPs: at last count Yahoo had over 200 VPs. Really, What do these fuckers do!?

These folks simply have goofy titles.

I used to have one of the world's largest banks (by AUM) as a client. They had over 200 "Vice Presidents" in one building, as it basically was their preferred title for "manager".

<comment><USER7> At Bank of America, VP was one title _below_ most managers. VP basically meant "didn't get completely fucked in the offer negotiation process".

<comment><USER8> Bank VP is a different situation, most branches can not issues loans without a VP present- so there are many people with such title. There is standard and there no confusion that this is a high title in banking. Other titles like "Executive VP" are used to identify actual officers. That being said- I would still be interested in hearing if everybody at Yahoo is a director and/or a VP.

<comment><USER6> >Bank VP is a different situation Not in investment banks, which have no retail presence at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems that I'm the only one here in the comments with this opinion, but I think it's "not a bad thing" (TM).

Yahoo! _can_ still make money. It can still be a "successful" company. What it's not any more is a giant that can be ranked along the likes of Microsoft, Google, and as of very recently and who knows for how long, Facebook. What it needs to do is become much, much slimmer. Focus on its core products, come up with good ways to capitalize on their (still) enormous user base while it lasts, and cut the fat.

The fact of the matter is that any company going from one of the biggest giants in the industry to "just another tech company" has tons of fat it needs to shave off. Yes, it sucks that our friends and family are losing their jobs, but from Yahoo!'s point of view, it's really the only solution at this point. They've tried to maintain their "giant" status for a few years now, and a demi-merger with MS would have been their last hope. But it's clear that it's not working and Yahoo! needs to slim down, focus, and then worry about reclaiming its spot in the limelight. You can't rebuild while losing money at the seams.

I would argue that to maintain their _core_ identity and products, two thousand employees isn't even close to cutting it. They need to cut anything that takes too much effort/money, employs too many employees, and isn't one of their core strengths. They don't need 14k/18k employees, they need to get rid of eight to ten thousand of those and hire just a hundred or so hard-core R&D idea/deployment heads, and work their way from there.

The only thing that Yahoo! _can't_ do is pretend everything is fine and dandy until it's too late to do anything about it. Like it or not, the people (these human beings with families that are about to lose their jobs) that were hired during days of yore are simply not sustainable nor in the company's best interest to keep.

<comment><USER10> Just a quick point: Yahoo is quite profitable [1], just not as profitable as some investors wish. I only see one quarter of the last 20 with negative EPS.

<http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/YHOO/tab/5>

edit: Also, I see essentially no hope for Y! though I'd love to be wrong. Consider:

(1) they should have _owned_ the display rtb market. Instead, internal bickering and stupidity handed it to Google. Y! had the first rtb system (rmx), and screwed up so badly that the current next best rtb system compared to google -- appnexus -- is run by the former rmx cto. This will be the next business that is material to google's earnings and yahoo _should_ have owned it.

(2) Scott is talking about ditching rmx and apt. Pray tell, what the hell is he going to run Y's business on, and why is it going to be any cheaper if they're paying for that software from someone else?

(3) They gave away search, and decrease market share and search rev every quarter. Golf clap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a little meta, but am I the only one that feels a little weird up- voting headlines that are bad news? It sort of feels like I'm saying, "2000 job cuts? +1 That's what I like to see!"

Also, it's a little weird to be reading a piece about Yahoo, under a Yahoo domain that talks about Yahoo in the third person (e.g. "Yahoo! today confirmed...", a whole section titled "About Yahoo", etc).

<comment><USER12> Don't think of it as 2000 job cuts, think of it as 2000 prisoners set free.

Inertia can be a difficult force to combat when working for a large company. From personal experience, being layer off, or having a project cancelled, is the ultimate incentive to find something better.

Of course this is stressful, and no severance package makes much difference to the stress of a real human being with responsibilities and bills to pay, but I do believe that the upside is significantly bigger than the downside

<comment><USER13> I don't think that is a fair assessment of the situation. While some people may be in a position where getting laid off from their job is a welcomed incentive to pursue bigger and better things, there are also those people that rely on that steady income to pay their bills and keep their families clothed, fed, educated, and healthy.

I also want to say, although I don't mean to imply that this was your personal assumption, that not every person working for a technical company in the valley is a risk taking entrepreneur. Some people just like to program.

<comment><USER14> I expect they're also targeting a lot of senior (read: high-salary) employees who are more likely to be the family bread-winner types. (Although for legal reasons Yahoo! will go to great pains to point out that they are not in any way targeting older employees.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't say this to be snarky, but I will say that this post about yahoo is a link to yahoo's press release portal aggregating third party press releases kind of indicates where they're going.

Yahoo News is still the top news site. Yahoo business/finance is still among the strongest financial properties. The good news is that Yahoo's not going anywhere. The bad news is they're not going anywhere.

<comment><USER16> Really? Top three stories on Yahoo News UK right now are "Driver survives 200ft truck plunge", "Labrador 'adopts' abandoned duckling" and "Flying car cleared for takeoff" [1]

By what metric exactly is Yahoo News still the top news site?

[1] <http://uk.news.yahoo.com/>

<comment><USER17> _By what metric exactly is Yahoo News still the top news site?_

ComScore. Yahoo gets an enormous amount of traffic: Alexa also considers Yahoo as a whole the #4 site (behind Google, Facebook, and Yahoo). And Y recently hired a White House correspondent ([http://news.yahoo.com/yahoo-hires-first- white-house-correspo...](http://news.yahoo.com/yahoo-hires-first-white-house- correspondent-150334586.html)) and has made some other fun hires in the reporting space.

My friends who work in tech don't visit Yahoo. But my extended family in the Midwest sure does!

Full disclosure: I work at Y, but definitely don't speak for Y. If you have ComScore access, you can double-check the "#1" stat I cited.

<comment><USER18> "Alexa also considers Yahoo as a whole the #4 site (behind Google, Facebook, and Yahoo)"

From looking at Alexa, I believe your second "Yahoo" should have been "YouTube."

<comment><USER17> You're right. The "edit" button has expired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, I just lost one coworker and my boss, both of whom were good people and good workers. I think this seals my decision to move on; I only really came to work here because I did internships and felt like I owed it to my boss to put in a year or two... but if she's gone, then I've got no reason to stay.

Anyone looking to hire in the Bay?

edit: make that two coworkers

<comment><USER10>
       Anyone looking to hire in the Bay?

Are you kidding me? Easier to make a (short) list of who _isn't_ hiring in the bay right now. If you want to work on hadoop / clusters / ad tech / rtb, send email to ehathaway at quantcast and I'll send your resume to our internal recruiters. I am, btw, an engineer, so feel free to ask any question that isn't directly covered by my nda and I'll answer or tell you I can't.

<comment><USER20> earl's profile page does this right: his email is in his "about" section.

Since this will probably stay at the top of the "looking for work" comments, here's a quick note -

Please put your email info in the "about" section of your user profile.

* Unless you're like me, and don't want to publicize your email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The CEO, Scott Thompson is apparently leaning on a group of management consultants from Boston Consulting Group to come up with a turnaround plan and these firings are apparently the result.

Do CEOs really ask outsiders for ideas on how to run/turn around a company? I am in the wrong profession! I wouldn't mind dispensing advice on how to do things I have no experience in doing, all the while pulling in 300+ $ an hour. Somehow I can't visualize (say) Steve Jobs outsourcing thinking and decision making.

The closest thing I've seen in software is a couple of instances of bringing in agile methodology consultant/book author types to save failing projects. Those didn't work out well either.

<comment><USER22> IBM was turned around by a formater McKinsey consultant, Louis Gerstner.

<comment><USER23> Was it? Or rather _is_ it? Any details?

<comment><USER24> They've certainly "turned around" where it matters to the company: [https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:IBM](https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:IBM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yahoos –

Today we are restructuring Yahoo! to give ourselves the opportunity to compete and win in our core business. The changes we're announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done. The outcome of these changes will be a smaller, nimbler, more profitable Yahoo! better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.

Over the last 60 days, we've fundamentally re-thought every part of our business and we will continue to actively consider all options that allow Yahoo! to put maximum effort where we can succeed. As part of this process, I believe we have to focus to win in a select group of core businesses globally:

· Core Media and Communications: Our content, media, and communications experiences must be best in class. That includes getting today's core properties right and innovating on a next generation of great product experiences across all screens.

· Platforms: We must make our core platforms and systems a genuine strength for Yahoo! – platforms that we can really leverage to support our massive scale, drive the deepest personalization, and boost speed to market.

· Data: Our massive data sets must become a genuine competitive advantage for Yahoo!. We have to unlock the value in our data to allow us to really understand our 700 million users, encourage and win their engagement and trust, leverage everything they do with us to more fully personalize their experiences, and to give our advertisers the immediate insights they are rightfully demanding.

We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate jobs, which means losing colleagues and parting with friends. Today, we will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or a phased transition. We value our people and for those who will be leaving, we thank you for all you have contributed to Yahoo!. We will treat all of our people with dignity and respect, providing resources to help manage through their transition.

Change is never easy. But the time has come to move Yahoo! forward aggressively with increased focus and accountability. Our values have always been about treating all Yahoos with dignity and respect, and today is a day to embrace those values. This is an amazing company with exceptionally talented people and I know we will all do our best to encourage each other through this difficult period of transition.

Thompson-Scott.png

EDIT: The mail sent to us by our respected CEO Scott Thompson.

<comment><USER26> re: Data.

not sure how they are going to unlock their data as they cut back on y! labs.

<https://twitter.com/#!/smolix/status/180064462294876162>

<comment><USER27> Yahoo's research divisions do great work that basically never makes it out into the wider company past the prototype stage. It is an awesome, wonderful waste of money.

<comment><USER28> Wow. I had no idea Yahoo! had their own "Bell Labs." Neat. (Or perhaps, tragic)

<comment><USER29> Two layoffs ago they cut 'brick house' which was a hands-on innovation cell, purveyors of live.yahoo.com (a 2007 version of chatroullete with many more features and 5-way video chat) and fire eagle, the GEO standard, and other nice stuff.

man, it's depressing to count a company history in 'layoffs'

<comment><USER30> 5 way video chat == Google hangouts?

<comment><USER31> Yup. They are similar. Yahoo! Live was pretty awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Always sad to hear about that many people losing their jobs - but, at least the technical job market is as strong now as it has been in a decade.

With a workforce at the end of last year of >14,000, this is clearly a substantial reduction in headcount, but the company isn't exactly "closing up shop."

I'm curious about what areas will be hardest hit by these layoffs. Really good stuff has been coming out of Yahoo research over the last several years, and it would be a shame to see that investment pulled off the table.

</comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps the crux of the issue are the problems PG observed at Yahoo! over a decade ago are still an issue today.

As long as PG's observations hold true I think Y! will have a difficult time turning itself around.

PG's canonical article about Y!: <http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html>

</comment><comment><USER34> Not a good day to be a contractor and the least senior person in your group. If anyone has been through corporate layoffs before, do you know whether they usually target the most senior people (because they're the most highly compensated) or the least senior (because they're easily replaceable)?

<comment><USER35> There are essentially two kinds of layoffs: "We're getting rid of Division X and everyone in it" and "We need to reduce expenses and so we're laying off people." In this case, it sounds like a little bit of each.

There are entire companies dedicated to executing (pardon the pun) layoffs "correctly" and there are as many ways to do it as there are managers, but they essentially fall into three categories: cost-based (get rid of the most cost), skills-based (get rid of the people who don't have skill X that we totally need) and performance-based (get rid of the people who suck). Most of what you're talking about sounds cost-based, in which case there's two philosophies: get rid of the most senior people who charge the most (hello, age discrimination lawsuits) and get rid of a lot of junior people whose productivity is lower and expect the senior people to pick up the slack.

And yes, I have had the privilege of working in a Fortune 500 company and helping put together a layoff list - worst job of my life.

<comment><USER36> I haven't run into this in person, but my dad worked for years at a BigCo engineering firm that had multiple rounds of layoffs, and they seemed to use a fourth strategy: try to get as many volunteers as possible by offering some severance packages, and just take whatever random assortment of people said yes. The theory was that that was the way to reduce headcount with the least impact on morale, since nobody was actually being fired. In practice some people were strongly hinted that it was in their best interests to take the package, though. It also tended to be de-facto biased towards getting rid of the older/more-expensive employees (who would just take early retirement) without overtly singling them out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Gruber nailed it: "This rings a bell, circa 2008"

 _the steps we are taking are not easy for us as a company, but as we become more fit as an organization, decision-making will be faster and it will be easier for us all to get more done and stay focused on our strategy._ —Jerry Yang

[http://allthingsd.com/20081021/jerry-yangs-complete-memo- to-...](http://allthingsd.com/20081021/jerry-yangs-complete-memo-to-the-yahoo- troops-about-layoffs/)

<comment><USER38> that was the "no sacred cows" themed layoff, IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm an ex-Yahoo. I have friends there and have sympathy for how hard today must be.

But I strongly think this is the right move for the company. They had way too many people, more than what they need/afford and were the cause of much overhead. Of course, it all depends on whether they're laying off the right projects/people.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope they fired the marketing experts who made the decision to have flying cars and zooming coke cans in my face and disrupting the home page. What a joke. Yahoo was my home page for years and when they started that non-sense I switched to duckduckgo.com and haven't been back.

</comment><comment><USER41> They were trying to hire me right before the news hit. They have a lot of nerve. I am dumbfounded. Good thing retaliatory managers have left me without references and I would bomb out of the process for that reason, rather than for a lack of technical ability.

In other news, I have made a string of bad decisions as far as who to work "for." I should do something about that. Perhaps I should let someone (more capable) decide what I do next.

Sometimes its good to have no choice but to follow your dream, all else and all other's (face saving, arrogant) bullshit aside.

</comment><comment><USER42> Savings of $375M annually would imply an average of $187500/ employee. Does this seem high to anyone else?

I can't imagine all of these employees are cream of the crop engineers/managers.

<comment><USER19> An employee costs more than their salary; there's health insurance/benefits, payroll tax, IT+support costs, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Dear Yahoos, you might have been let go, but you should be proud:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh4jvDsNtEE>

</comment><comment><USER44> Devs are fine. We lost all our QE.

</comment><comment><USER45> Any idea if they're laying off software devs? They're still in high demand here in NYC.

<comment><USER46> Of course they will be. They aren't going to cut exclusively from sales and service engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Random anecdote: A few days ago I was heading to Dublin Airport when I spotted the Yahoo! logo covering the entire face of very large building. First thought: "That's pretty cool", Second Thought: "Wow, those guys are still going?"

<comment><USER48> Yahoo recently retired their famous neon billboard that had been in downtown San Francisco for many, many years. The billboard was ugly, but it was a sad sign of the times when it came down. :\

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57327029-52/san- francisco-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57327029-52/san-francisco-to- lose-beloved-yahoo-billboard/)

<comment><USER28> it wasn't ugly :(

<comment><USER49> We can agree it was objectively very … purple.

[http://www.thesfegotist.com/editorial/2011/november/16/end-e...](http://www.thesfegotist.com/editorial/2011/november/16/end- era-yahoo-billboard-comes-down)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think I might have known at one point, but what does yahoo actually do? I can't think of a product / service. Search?

Irellevant is an understatement.

</comment><comment><USER51> Can someone explain "sophomore Computer Science and Business major" (me), why Yahoo's stock is going up with these news? (Currently it is +0.77%)

Thanks

<comment><USER52> It's because the fundamental issues causing the layoffs should already be priced into the stock (due to poor earnings reports and such). So layoffs are considered a good response to the fundamental issues and cause a price increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How ironic is that ?

<http://www.youtube.com/user/yahoo?ob=4>

</comment><comment><USER53> Sorry guys. :(

</comment><comment><USER54> looks like a lot of fat is being cut out.

</comment><comment><USER55> Well, Expected.

</comment><comment><USER56> HN readers should see this as an opportunity to hire experienced, qualified developers, systems engineers, and marketing people. Possibly for salaries lower than what otherwise would be the norm, especially in non-Bay Area markets.

<comment><USER43> "Qualified developers" ? You must be kidding, I worked at yahoo a few years. It is very true that I have met a few outstanding engineers over there, however, the average engineering skill level right there was the lowest I have ever seen.</comment></comment>


Germany's Giant Windmills Are Unpopular - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-31/germany-s-nationalist-party-has-wind-industry-in-limbo <comment><USER2> As a German I find that article... uhm... Interesting. I could also just call bulls*it.

First: With a population of about 2m and as part of former East Germany, Thüringen is _hardly_ representative of Germany (pop 83m). That's less than 2.5% of the population.

Second: In Bavaria the Green party did quite well (2nd strongest in 2018); and in Germany as a whole it does too. Edit: In Hessen (Germany's most populous state) state the Green party was the 2nd strongest as well.

Third: I'm pretty sure windmills are not among the major reasons for the popularity of the AfD.

<comment><USER3> > But in the first half of 2019, only 35 wind turbines were added — an 82% > drop compared with the first six months of 2018. Last year was bad, too: > Just 743 turbines were added, compared with 1,792 in 2017.

How do you explain that drop then?

<comment><USER4> Complex bureaucracy, a change in the law a few years ago that's now going into full force, lack of _political_ support (which is a very different thing than population support).

Every time surveys are done you get a vast majority (here's a recent one [1]) stating that they support more wind energy.

[1] [https://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=36393](https://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=36393)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I live in Germany and I am in the camp of those who believe that paying for pretty clean and sustainable energy source with having a couple of turbines installed and "ruining" the view of some places is worth it (as long as it is planned with at least some degree of care). But of course a lot of it is nimbyism as support for renewables and clean sources or energy is rather high.

<comment><USER6> And that's even if you believe the view _is_ ruined by windmills. Personally I don't mind seeing them at all, but there have been protests here against installing them off the beach. By now that windmill park is complete and all you can see from the beach is some toothpicks on the horizon on an exceptionally clear day.

I really wonder what causes this split among people, why do some people not mind at all and other people mind _so much_ when they are looking at the same things.

<comment><USER7> I wondered the same thing. In Massachusetts there were protests that help scuttle the cape wind project.. Wealthy opponents (Koch/kenedey et al) litigated it to failure, after raising 40 million to "protect Nantucket sound"

Plus Massachusetts. (generally has trouble getting anything done.)

[1][https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1462962/cape- wind-r...](https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1462962/cape-wind-requiem- dream)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unpopular compared to what? Open-cast coal mines and smokestacks? Nuclear plants? No electricity?

<comment><USER9> Yeh this whole thing seems like Germans are just unhappy with every solution, but I have a feeling it's media engine that decides this and not actual Germans.

<comment><USER10> My impression is that Germany is like California. They love technology and certain aspects of high modernity but never want to catch so much as a glimpse of the industrial infrastructure that makes or powers it. They also have a similar paradoxical "volkisch" fetish for organic food and natural medicine along with their high tech cars and computers and phones and techno music.

<comment><USER11> As a European citizen who looks at fat American people (and death statistics for American people) sometimes in disgust/pity I prefer to stay with my natural food, thank you very much.

As for wind mills I'm all for having many of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tony-allan For the curious -- German asparagus...

[https://www.hardthof-pfrengle.de/2017/04/05](https://www.hardthof- pfrengle.de/2017/04/05)

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://outline.com/uZrvnL](https://outline.com/uZrvnL)

</comment><comment><USER13> This article mis-states vox-pop as a broad story. I would have said _" German's decide they don't want in-fill of current giant windmills with more giant windmills but overall like clean energy"_ is more like it.

<comment><USER14> Bingo! I think you have it exactly right. Sure Germans do, and should, dislike windmills placed in unfavorable locations solely as a result of distorting tax credits, policy, and the like. I do too. Any rational person should. That does not make one anti-windmill. Rather, it makes one anti-idiocy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I live about 2km (1.24 mi) from 4 of such giant windmills. They don't look bad, but if you open the window on windy evenings you may hear them.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure I fully buy this op-ed's claims but honestly Germany isn't the ideal place for on-shore wind anyway. The capacity factor in Germany for wind is only around 20%. In the US it's more like 35%. So further expansion requires building a lot more turbines in a much smaller country.

</comment><comment><USER17> To think that with a bunch of gen 3 nuclear plants Germany could've been carbon neutral already just like France.

</comment><comment><USER18> bloomberg has an anti-renewables article at least once a week since, I dunno, 1 year or so?

It's ridiculous. No one hates renewables generally, anywhere, this is largely a propaganda item being pushed by big oil. Bloomberg should show some leadership instead.

Cue last weeks study in which offshore wind farm development even in only the select windiest stretches of global coastline provide over 30 trillion megawatt hours, aka about 10 trillion more than projected demand for next year or the year after, I forget which.

Cue Mark Carney, governor of Bank of England saying that the companies that don't adapt to the climate crisis fast enough will go bankrupt, as it will cost increasingly more the longer one waits. He also suggested, vis-a-vis the current state of the global economy and downturn concerns trade war etc, that this is actually the PERFECT time to invest in Green New Deals everywhere, lot's of investment, big projects, now, keep that balloon open and use that momentum to effect the necessary change NOW!

<comment><USER19> I don't know if you've ever lived in a windmill region, but everybody hates them if its in their backyard. _I support green energy, but god forbid it 'desecrate' a field within 40km of my property_. Suddenly every rinky-dink town has a _unique cultural character_ and every backwoods is a _natural habitat for endangered species_. Nobody can take even a little responsibility for the problems of society, its always _make somebody else pay for it_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is the headline a typo, or have we stopped calling these _wind turbines_?

</comment><comment><USER21> Kind of weird how anti-climate change-consensus AfD and other right wing parties are.

German polls suggest that the population is very supportive of the energy transition, so it seems oddly anti-populist to take such a position.

Which suggests they're probably getting funded by fossil fuel interests and/or Russia.

<comment><USER22> We are being bled dry by extremely high power prices. Left wing government has replaced nuclear by coal and opposes our fusion research. But somehow right wing parties and Russia are the baddies, and any critic is being is being [dead]ed within seconds. Right.

edit: took about two minutes

<comment><USER23> I am, within the boundaries of my understanding, for the nuclear power. So I'm not very happy that they shut them down, let's just say that. However, I don't understand how being against wind power helps this situation, at all.

<comment><USER24> IMHO, shutting down is not even necessarily the problem. Many of these reactors are _ancient_ , and the state-of-the-art has moved on. But lessons were learned and new reactors could take over and sometimes even help solve issues created by older models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Same in the US. 165 meters tall, loud, and built very close to residential. And, it's pretty much just the rural poor (< $8000 / year income) who suffer, and they see receive economic benefits.

<comment><USER26> Are they any louder in Germany than in Britain? It seems that by suffering, they are just missing the benefit of the quiet rural areas. City dwellers of most stripes suffer worse noise levels according to my limited research. One example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc)</comment></comment>


It's totally reasonable to chalk it up to cosmic rays (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/219983/

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of a PC game which included an automatic crash reporting system, and would also periodically conduct stress tests to be able to identify (and therefore automatically exclude) machines that looked like they were producing random memory errors. (The usual cause of which was overclocking.)

Software crashes due to hardware issues are generally not software bugs.

<comment><USER3> For those interested, guild wars is the game, and the process is covered below in the 'Your Computer is broken' section:

[http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this- anyway](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway)

HN Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939144)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The cosmic rays remind me of the xkcd comic about "real programmers".

Link: [http://xkcd.com/378/](http://xkcd.com/378/)</comment>


SF Ranks 13th for Tech Salary Value - <AUTHOR> http://sfist.com/2016/08/12/felicia_farewell.php <comment><USER2> This links to a a summary of a report on a blog. Direct link to the report: [http://offers.indeed.com/rs/699-SXJ-715/images/Tech%20Salary...](http://offers.indeed.com/rs/699-SXJ-715/images/Tech%20Salary%20Report%20eBook.pdf)

Cities are ranked for 15 professions. Ranking is both unadjusted, where San Fransisco wins, and adjusted for cost-of-living, where Austin wins.</comment>


Turning Information Security into an Epic Battle through Training Gamification  - <AUTHOR> http://www.yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/ctf365-turns-information-security-epic-battle-training-gamification/

<comment><USER2> I love what CTF365 is doing with Security Training Gamification! It's essentially a huge Capture the Flag game where hackers are doing everything they can to attack and defend servers!</comment>


Show HN: An alternative place to render your GeoJSON - <AUTHOR> http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?type=hybrid&src=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fiatjaf/5a5b49d4e3b9306cb1e8/raw/a2428d67a2d680ee0810c732f4cb2ef7a45e1e7d/map.geojson/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the explanation and documentation: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/geojson](https://github.com/fiatjaf/geojson) (basically just reference a file)

Other examples:

* [http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?type=osm&url=https://gist.g...](http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?type=osm&url=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fiatjaf/f3fede3ac0d9d5b32595/raw/4ad99d97b52d32f1efe6db60e30acda786e6ad4e/doulas.geojson)

* [http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?type=terrain&src=http://raw...](http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?type=terrain&src=http://rawgit.com/fiatjaf/maps/master/batata.geojson/)

* [http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?url=https://gist.githubuser...](http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/geojson/?url=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fiatjaf/f3fb3621dbeb38717431/raw/dacbded21836ad376a944964ba6295fa4d345f4f/map.geojson/)</comment>


Stellar.lol the first blockchain messenger - <AUTHOR> https://stellar.lol <comment><USER2> "Enter your secret key" it says, what could be suspicious about that?</comment>


Should Our Brains Count as Courtroom Evidence? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/should-our-brains-count-as-courtroom-evidence

<comment><USER2> I didn't know the recidivism rate was that high! 77 percent is unbelievable. Even higher in younger populations... I wonder how much of this is based on the system being rigged against parolees, but looking at the stats, while a significant number were drug offenses, for example, which might go undetected for a non-felon, about 1/3rd were property and 1/3rd violent.

The skeptic in me thinks, almost like something about the experience of going to prison makes one more likely to be a criminal. The optimist in me thinks we should be focusing less on predicting recidivism and more time trying to prevent it. There's a huge economic incentive to rehabilitation, but of course the system can't get out of its own way and treat prisoners like reformable human beings that we actually want contributing positively to society sometime in the near future. The unfortunate reality is some of these felons really are scum of the earth and can never safely be released.

It would be pretty interesting to find better ways of 'binning' felons to try to provide a more reformative atmosphere for the ones that could actually make it out the other side and back into productive society. Brain scan could be the _least_ biased way to do it if we can get the science down. The whole things sounds terribly problematic though.

</comment><comment><USER3> No.

Or at least, not in a manner that prejudices defendants.

<comment><USER4> If someone could prove that recollection is reliable, that might change things for me. But I agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be acceptable if the scan was entirely voluntary and optional, and the results could not be used to increase punishment (reduction is OK.)

<comment><USER3> I agree, and this works with our current level of technology. The problem is when the technology advances far beyond what we have today.

For the sake of argument, assume we have the technology to read someone's thoughts beyond any shadow of a doubt. Innocent people are no longer convicted as a result. Great, right? Well, not exactly.

Even if such technology was used only to acquit, the very fact that a defendant was still undergoing proceedings would be an implicit form of guilt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> pseudoscience.

one step removed from phrenology.

we do not have a comprehesive theory of the brain yet and so we are using a libary of fairly unreliable pattern matching to make conclusions.</comment>


Hackers Guide to DMCA Takedown Requests - <AUTHOR> http://some.gonze.com/2016/07/11/guide-to-handling-dmca-takedown-requests/ <comment><USER2> Can you explain why you would record an infringement before the three day window for counter notices has expired? You have no section for decrementing/annulling infringements or re-enabling accounts, so if you follow this process, I can disable your users' accounts simply by filing two bad- faith DMCA notices.

<comment><USER3> ...under penalty of perjury.

<comment><USER4> Yeah and I would like to see how often this actually gets enforced. The fact of the matter is that DMCA is being abused all over the Internet to silence people, but I can't say I've heard of a single case of "he abused the DMCA, now he's going to pay a huge fine."

<comment><USER5> In my opinion such a case is bound to come about. The Axl Rose 'meme purge' attempt via DMCA didn't seem to do much legally speaking, only be another Streisand Effect situation. The rights 'representative' though in the Axl case would - I think - be a good test for the legal aspects. Authorized representation makes sense, and if the rep can show tangible proof of assignment (i.e. owner genuinely owns property in question, like the photo rights) then the DMCA looks to be working as intended. Tests are pretty needed though, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Proposed improvement: mark the actions that are legally required. I've waded through enough technically-ambiguous regulatory language to know that having a clear requirement/recommendation distinction can be pretty helpful.

Other than that, seems like a decent guide (with the non-legal advice caveats). Good job, author.

<comment><AUTHOR> Marking legal requirements is a good idea. I'll consider that an issue to address.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have created an updated version to incorporate comments.

Most comments were about when to decrement the infringement counter. Some went to important unknowns like the threshold of proof before incrementing the infringement counter.

To facilitate ongoing work, I have created a Github version of the project:

[https://github.com/lucasgonze/hackersdmcaguide](https://github.com/lucasgonze/hackersdmcaguide)

</comment><comment><USER7> The flowchart doesn't have a path for if you get a notice that the agent has actually followed suit - I'll take that as a commentary on the process as it's so incredibly rare.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that the key point is that this is so rare. A simple chart like this is only possible if you're making a lot of 80/20 choices.

Any time something happens that falls out of an 80/20 choice, call a lawyer. This should happen rarely enough that the legal bills don't kill you.

(Note: if you are deliberately running an infringement business, there is no 80/20 path for you. Don't be this guy).

Maybe there should be a decision path for calling a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a pretty good guide generally.

I am a bit skiddish about the counter filing process. What is "filing suit" in this context? That process isn't clear to me.

<comment><USER9> Filing suit means starting a lawsuit against someone (in the case of copyright, a Federal lawsuit).

[http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/types- cases/civ...](http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/types-cases/civil- cases)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Forms Done Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.pineqube.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I'm a long time lurker at HN, and for obvious reasons cannot use my other handle. My partner and I built this in three weeks as a challenge to ourselves. It is is a form submission application with some cool capabilities like protected digital content downloads, custom webhooks, and a nice dashboard. One can point their contact/surveys/feedback forms to our endpoint and get nice visualizations, and integrations. We are both backend developers and the most challenging part for us was to learn and use vue/vuex and build a modern SaaS application. We are proud of what we've achieved in three weeks! Hosted on AWS, uses Django + PostgreSQL

We would love to hear the community's critique. Thanks!</comment>


Algorithms Explained: Diffie-Hellman - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/algorithms-explained-diffie-hellman-1034210d5100 <comment><USER2> Interesting explanation - thanks for sharing. I find it easier to visualise, through colours of paint, for a high-level metaphor of the DH key exchange process, which may be useful - [https://youtu.be/YEBfamv- _do?t=2m48s](https://youtu.be/YEBfamv-_do?t=2m48s)</comment>


Sketchcasting - <AUTHOR> http://sketchcast.com/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool app.

I tried to use it last night to make a presentation for YC.

Didn't work as planned. Couldn't draw fast enough to keep the flow going.

Also, it kind of made the presentation long and drawn out(9 minutes).

I want to present everything relevant in 3 minutes or less!

</comment><comment><USER3> Well done, but I don't see a whole lot of value in it.

<comment><USER4> _"... I don't see a whole lot of value in it. ..."_

I wonder about how creating tech tools like this can add more value? Is this an example of a tool looking for a market? (one hint is 10+ examples of what you can use it for) Or could it, if it solved one specific UI niche problem in a _"foo"_ app become a more useful and potentially more valuable?

        "Cool idea. How do I do it?
         Are you going to have a DIY
         blog/sketch. Are there issues
         about someone being artistically
         challenged - me?"

One reason I can see why the tool could look lame is it is only worthwhile to creators. If you are not a creator, artist, cartoonist, someone who draws then you can be left with what appears to be a trivial toy.

But if you applied the technology to an application that users _"might"_ want (one that comes to mind is virtual birthday cards - sign the card with others & send it to someone) it becomes a powerful tool and maybe a business ~ [http://sketch.basement.org/2007/07/introducing_sketchcasting...](http://sketch.basement.org/2007/07/introducing_sketchcasting.html)</comment></comment>


Android Q Beta is out, with support for foldables, a new share menu, and more - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/android-q-beta-is-out-with-support-for-foldables-a-new-share-menu-and-more/ <comment><AUTHOR> The beta is open to any Google Pixel phone.</comment>


Cathedrals, Bazaars, and in Between - <AUTHOR> http://third-bit.com/2015/01/05/cathedrals-bazaars-and-in-between.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A welll thought out piece rom someone who promotes open source software and is the guy behind 'software carpentry', an initiative to teach researchers [mosly scientists] basic software skills.

I like the way he pointso out problems with both the cathedral and bazaar models but identifies that "actually matters is the people who build them.".

My favouite line: "One king, one law" can sometimes be a great force for good, but what you usually get is collectivized agriculture and UML.

<comment><USER2> The bazaar seems to have permanent and crippling ADHD and seems mostly dedicated to reinventing wheels. (There are exceptions, but maybe not as many as we'd all like.)

The cathedral is a centralised bureaucratic black hole.

This is another example where O'Reilly's attempts at social engineering have gone horribly wrong. Neither model is ideal, and both are somewhat wrong.

I'm surprised how little computer science is about project psychology, and how little effort has gone into defining the dynamics of successful and innovative developer teams.

There are a few heuristics that seem to work reliably - use a small number of the smartest people you can find, get them to peer review the design before anyone starts coding, and continue peer review as they work - but almost nothing (at least not much I've been able to find) about how to make innovative magic happen reliably.

Point is books like the C & B are story-telling designed to pander to a certain audience, not empirically tested science.

More of the latter and less of the former might do some useful things.

<comment><USER3> Nothing wrong with creating rounder wheels; especially for training.

I was at a conference where a panel of scientists were discussing how they manage research in their labs, and how to promote better productivity from their students with a focus on high-throughput methods. At this point, a single scientist on the panel interrupted with "we shouldn't focus on training for these intellectually bankrupt approaches, I'm interested in training scientists who can think."

When I was first learning to code I was completely overzealous with performance optimization and I implemented every single data structure and algorithm myself, from scratch. This included a lot of computer vision, and optimization and fitting code, and studying books like Numerical Algorithms, etc. While not efficient, I sure did learn a lot.

<comment><USER4> "a single scientist on the panel interrupted ..."

The response from the other panelist wasn't going to be the correct one, which is "Duh! Not helpful!"

Is that scientist making the claim based on evidence, or based on personal belief? If so, what is the evidence?

Do we train everyone to think the same way? Do we train them to think about problems in specific areas? Do we train them to think about historical problems? Would improved knowledge of the literature help identify unexplored paths, and keep students from revisiting old, well-trodden paths, or should some old things be left mostly unvisited?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In economics there is a theory about why companies are the size they are. In a nutshell, it comes down to, "The point at which the internal stupidity of a large organization exceeds transaction costs between independent ones." This has all sorts of interesting consequences. For example the existence of widely understood standards reduces transaction costs which favors small organizations. The demands of designing a large new integrated system favors large organizations that can exert centralized control.

In software design, the commodity at question is not money but both forms of cost still exist and trade off with each other. For example compare iOS and Android. The centralized control from Apple did allow them to build something new and complex, and to get a better user experience. But once the interfaces are understood and standardized, Android is able to generate something reasonably good, albeit with a lot less consistency and more duplication of effort.

<comment><USER6> On a side note, doesn't that mean a higher sales tax favors larger institutions?

<comment><USER7> that's one of the rationales between a Value Added Tax instead of a sales tax.

<comment><USER6> Right, that would follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd sure like more cathedrals in my life as an engineer. Whether we can build them is just a measure of our imagination, inspiration, wisdom, and ability to work together on a grand, well-conceived plan.

<comment><USER9> Are giant open-source projects like Chrome, Firefox, or FreeBSD cathedrals? Unlike bazaar poster child Linux, these projects mostly control their own roadmap and releases, without many competing distributions.

<comment><USER10> Linux the ecosystem is bazaar, sure, but Linux the kernel is cathedral with Linus at the helm. Arguably this is what makes Linux kernel so successful and so widely re-purposed yet most distros lacking in getting any traction. There's, again, a clear exception in Ubuntu which is a cathedral amongst bazaars.

So at the end of the day I personally feel that bazaar is the best set of training wheels invented but quality ultimately gravitates towards cathedrals. Both parties do benefit a lot from each other, so mutually benefiting, implicit agreement is at play here, which is something "A Generation Lost in the Bazaar" piece fails to acknowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who can do Cathedrals, do Cathedrals. Otherwise, do Bazaars.</comment>


Google Maps: What's Here? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/google-maps-finally-gives-me-the-feature-ive-wanted-from-day-1-whats-here/ <comment><USER2> This is a great feature that I've wanted for a long time. It's not much use to me in my hometown like when I'm Googling directions from my house. But poking around other countries, like when I was looking at Beijing during the last Olympics, it will be great.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just read about it at the source [http://google- latlong.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-find-out-w...](http://google- latlong.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-find-out-whats-here.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Try clicking some nodes on www.trailbehind.com and clicking stuff on Google.

Should I find a new business? :)

</comment><comment><USER5> -Pulls up area 51-

But really, This is a great feature for just exploring and learning about an area. The educational benefits would be pretty big in some older cities like Florence.

</comment><comment><USER6> Be sure you have a look at something that is similar but even more visual: <http://wikimapia.org/></comment>


Cloak and dagger: taking control of the Android UI feedback loop - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/06/23/cloak-and-dagger-from-two-permissions-to-complete-control-of-the-ui-feedback-loop <comment><USER2> "SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW and BIND_ACCESSIBILITY_SERVICE. If an app can gain both of these permissions, it's game on"....I mean c'mon....even before looking it up I could guess that BIND_ACCESSIBILITY_SERVICE would give an app broad permissions.</comment>


First Dark Matter signal may have been discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/15/dark-matter-signal_n_6316174.html <comment><AUTHOR> And yet this came out as well: [http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/dark- matter-still-mia...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/dark-matter-still- mia-after-most-exhaustive-search-yet/?comments=1)

Truly fascinating why we can't seem to detect dark matter on earth.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Published in PRL. preprint: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.4119v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.4119v2.pdf)</comment>


Democratic Debate Spawns Fantasy Talk on Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/12/21/democratic-debate-spawns-fantasy-talk-on-encryption/ <comment><USER2> The funny thing is that the "big project" should really be about stenography, not cryptography. It would have much a bigger impact.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure you mean stenography? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand)

<comment><USER2> No, you are right, the correct word is another. Steganography</comment></comment></comment>


Breitbart news site blocked by ad exchange - throwaway-hn123 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38076579 <comment><AUTHOR> Headlines like this along with the MSM's latest push to define "fake news" is pretty worrisome.

Even if you don't agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.

<comment><USER2> How is this frightening? Why should we turn a blind eye to a source that continually posts provably fake and completely contrived news stories? This particular source also targets an audience that is demonstrably not capable of discerning what is probably true and what is absurdly false. It's not worth the price and risk of reading such a source, when the content they provide that is true can easily be consumed from other sources that are far more reliable.

Let's call this for what it is and always has been: yellow journalism. It's fake, it's damaging, and with the internet it gets spread far too quickly. And then, when enough momentum around the fake story is able to clearly paint it as false gets noticed by the majority of people, this particular source never issues a correction. They just silently let their mistake fall to the wayside, never bothering to inform their audience of their calculated mistake and what is actually true.

When you fail to acknowledge your mistakes, and when you do those mistakes repeatedly to the point where it can only be assumed to be purposefully done, you lose credence. Or at least you should. I'm not sure what's going on with this fetishization of false equivalency in American journalism. Not all journalistic entities are on the same platform; some of them clearly don't mind hiring people that have no principles as a citizen of their respective country or even principles as a decent human being, nor do they have respect for their fellow countrymen and maybe not even themselves.

<comment><USER3> You're advocating for censoring a source with a better track record than, say, buzzfeed which should by your standard also be censored.

Rather than taking your opinion of Breitbart from the companies who stand to profit from the destruction of their competition, take a look at their front page right now and find just one example of fake news. Feel free to post your findings here.

The argument that "these words are too dangerous to be in the hands of the masses" is the same one used to justify the book burnings in WWII and similar thought policing throughout history.

<comment><USER4> Better track record?

On what axis? This stuff isn't single-dimensional.

Yeah, Buzzfeed may produce a lot more stuff, and maybe also a lot of fake stuff. However how much of that is harmless fluff versus hate speech and incitement to violence?

Also, frankly, looking at buzzfeed, i question that even on the dimension of truth/lie they fare worse than breitbart, particularly when normalizing against the total post count.

<comment><USER5> I rarely if ever have seen outright lies and propaganda on Buzzfeed, and I do see those things from Breitbart regularly. And now they also provide serious, top-notch coverage of a lot of serious news. There is no comparison between them and Breitbart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn't seem like a good thing.

<comment><USER7> White nationalism can still create and post content to the web. But there's no responsibility for other companies to financially support them.

If a company like Breitbart cannot survive without Google's ad network, the onus is on them to figure out they can support themselves. Especially if supporting white nationalism undermines Google/Facebook's ability to hire and retain their own employees or impacts their reputation in a negative way.

<comment><USER8> Breitbart isn't a white nationalist news source. Bannon might be an asshole but I urge you to judge it by the content on the site. I don't agree with most of it but I support their right to post truthful content and editorials as they wish.

<comment><USER9> A quick search on the site for racial slurs will prooobably change your mind on that first point.

<comment><USER10> I checked a few articles, the word "nigger" is either in the comments or in quotes. It's true, however, that they don't abbreviate it as "n-word" like most MSM. But we all know what "n-word" means, so I find that practice kind-of pointless anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With authors like Milo Yiannopoulos posting articles like "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths" I would say they dug their own grave. If we really have to explain or justify why this is bad journalism maybe it shouldn't be considered journalism at all. I'm ok with that, but there should be open discussion and some methodology behind the future of journalistic classification.

<comment><USER12> Hi, I find your comment problematic for two reasons. 1) If you replaced "women" with "men" in that title, I'm sure you'd have no problem with it. In fact, no doubt you'd probably gleefully Facebook it to all your tweet snapchatters on Instagram. and 2) Milo is a homosexual. You speak from a position of straight white male privilege and as such you are in no position to judge his journalistic skills or even question if it should be considered journalism at all. It sounds like what you really want is to only classify "journalism" as "stuff written by privileged straight white athiestic males and females with a liberal bent".

<comment><USER11> I don't believe there should be a cap on anyone's education; male, female, or otherwise. I also don't think that Milo is qualified to define what the word "journalism" means any more than I am. I can write opinions on a blog or onto a piece of paper. That doesn't make my work "journalism." Neither does declaring that I'm a journalist or declaring that my work is journalism. Also, sexual orientation doesn't give Milo a free pass to write click-bait and pass it off as journalism. It also doesn't excuse him from saying misogynistic things. I will respect Milo's right to say what he wants. That's it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worth noting this is Appnexus, not Google AdExchange. Appnexus is still a very large ad exchange, but Breitbart's business shouldn't necessarily be affected. Its not unlikely that Appnexus and Breitbart don't even have a direct relationship, and Appnexus is just going to block bids on that domain.

</comment><comment><USER14> I see little wrong with this. I understand the idea that it's not necessarily right that ad companies stop supporting something based on ill-defined criteria, and I do support the idea that the criteria should be well defined. In this case, I think the criteria is pretty well defined: "pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group." Although the site says that they, "have always and continue to condemn racism and bigotry in any form," their actions, in this case articles like, "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths"[1], doesn't reflect that message and this in particular is discriminatory against women. There are other examples in the BBC article as well. The BBC article also mentions that the articles in question were written by a guest author, not a staff member, but the onus on posting something on the website falls on the staff, so that argument falls flat.

The other and simpler reality is that they are a private company that can do what they want when it comes to how they utilize their resources. If they don't want to serve ads on Breitbart then it's their choice. Even if they just arbitrarily chose to disallow Breitbart on their platform, it might be unjust but it's their right and choice.

On a more philosophical note, consider that all these issues of "fake news losing ad revenue" and the one mentioned here are generally only possible because the media is very free to post whatever they want and get paid for it, thanks to the USA's extremely free media laws. It isn't ideal for sure, but in some respects I'd rather have this reality where we worry about a specific news organization losing ad revenue than the reality where the only news that I can read is state sponsored.

1: [http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres- why...](http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why-there- ought-to-be-a-cap-on-women-studying-science-and-maths/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is quite frankly bad. Even the spokesman said he wasn't going to get into it (because it might hurt the PC police). It truly seems like there is a political backlash war going on. It seems so childish, but they are only trying to hurt Breitbarts bottom line.

We are becoming even more divided.

<comment><USER9> Demographically speaking the major "divide", is by age. All we have to do it wait 30 years and the divide will be over.

<comment><USER16> In those 30 years, many young liberals will turn into old conservatives. New liberals will be born to replace the ones who became conservatives.

This divide isn't going anywhere.

<comment><USER17> That isn't a universal pattern.

The generation after millennials is more conservative.

You should look up the statistics for political affiliation of Israeli youth.

With my generation I am far right. Among the younger generation I'm the moderate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As long as Breitbart has a large audience that advertisers wish to sell things to, economic pressure will lead them to advertise there. If this particular ad network won't, then they will find one that will.

Therefore this will not hurt Breitbart.

</comment><comment><USER19> Facebook wants no nipples, AppNexus wants no alt-right. Their house, their rules.

</comment><comment><USER20> I see a lot of concerns about censorship here.

One of the things that isn't really being talked about is the fact that Facebook, Google etc. are directly responsible for these organizations being promoted in the first place. Absent these content aggregators, Breitbart might never have had a significant following in the first place. In that context, them taking actions to lower its priority in various ways bothers me a lot less.

</comment><comment><USER21> > AppNexus has not given examples.

> But a spokesman said a "human audit" of Breitbart had flagged several > articles that had caused it concern because of the language they had > featured.

I'm not even a Breitbart reader but this strikes me as a ridiculously dangerous standard to use. "Human audit" is also my new favourite term for forming an opinion.

<comment><USER22> This is not dangerous in any way. This is not a free speech issue. Commercial enterprises are _entirely free_ to support business activity that they agree with, and refuse to support activity that they do not agree with. For those who are improperly conflating this issue with free speech or First Amendment rights in any way, you probably need a reminder:

[https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

<comment><USER23> History suggests otherwise, and so does the SCOTUS and ACLU.

[http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free- speech/](http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, AppNexus is certainly free to act out their ideological biases. I'm pretty sure there are more than one ad networks, including ones which don't make agreeing with network's management on political matters a prerequisite for doing business with them, and Breibart would be completely fine.

</comment><comment><USER25> >"Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America," he added.

If you define "pro-Israel" as "anti-Arab", maybe.

</comment><comment><USER26> Boycotting, ostracizing and shaming them didn't work the last fifty times, but it's bound to work this time!

<comment><USER27> It hasn't anything to do with Boycotting. It is just that some advertisers don't wanna pay to have their adverts shown next to those gross discussions.

<comment><USER28> This is probably the most important point to consider about this situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When will the liberals learn? Silencing only fuels this movement. Silencing is the path of least intellectual integrity. Don't they realize that every time they ban or block the alt-right, instead of refuting their arguments, the alt- right wins? People aren't that stupid, you can't just block the alt-right talking points out of their sight and thus out of their mind. Same thing with 'fake news'. The notion of 'hate speech' has been used so broadly that it is now inflated to complete meaninglessness.

<comment><USER30> Studies have shown that arguing with extremists makes them more resolute.

Also not doing business with them isn't silencing them they are just as free to pursue their mission tomorrow as today.

<comment><USER31> The embargo on South Africa in protest of apartheid worked. I don't see why something similar wouldn't work here. Breitbart is first and foremost a business, and they have lots of employees on staff pushing these messages of hate that need to be paid. If their income stream dries up it makes it much harder to continue doing what they're doing.

<comment><USER32> Small sample might be at fault here.

For a counterexample: has the embargo on Iran worked?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Market forces at work...</comment>


Peter Shankman HARO: The Email Newsletter That Grosses $1+ Mil A Year  - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/haro-peter-shankman/ <comment><USER2> A related article from earlier in the year about the money made from e-mail newsletters: [http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/feb2009...](http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090224_035701.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great interview. Shankman is smart, energetic, and hilarious.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discussion point for HN and Andrew Warner (if reading): How would you grow an email newsletter business from the ground up and get new subscribers?

<comment><USER4> you should watch the interview with thriller, covers a lot of those things.

But to save you time...good content + spam friends and family.

<comment><USER5> what's the link for the interview with thriller?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://mixergy.com/thrillist-ben-lerer/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Biofuels worse for climate change than gas - <AUTHOR> http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/08/25/u-m-study-biofuels-worse-climate-change-than-gasoline/89265358/ <comment><USER2> FTA:

> Despite their purported advantages, biofuels — created from crops such as > corn or soybeans — cause more emissions of climate change-causing carbon > dioxide than gasoline, according to the study from U-M Energy Institute > research professor John DeCicco.

This appears to be a false premise.

The emissions are immaterial, as the point of biofuels is that they are produced by essentially harnessing sunlight to synthesize fuel from emissions already present in the environment.

Therefore, if anyone wants to account biofuel emissions, they need to start by considering what these crops extract from the environment before releasing it back into it.

Another aspect that needs to be taken in consideration is the economical and political advantages of biofuel. Being able to generate an endless supply of fuel right in a nation's backyard, without having to haul it across the globe, is a huge advantage. Not having to negotiate with and appease shady OPEC members also presents numerous advantages.

<comment><USER3> The article explains that there is debate over DeCicco's research, but the point that DeCicco is making and is clearly explained in the article is that despite the fact that burning biofuels simply returns CO2 back to the atmosphere that was extracted by the growing corn in the first place is CO2 neutral, there is a significant cost in CO2 emissions in farming, transporting and processing the corn into fuel. It it the total lifecycle of biofuel that DeCicco is studying, and the real debate is if these lifecycle costs exceed the total costs (in emissions) of using gasoline in cars.

DeCicco's results seem at first to be counter-intuitive, but my understanding is that it is an energy intensive process to turn corn into fuel. In any case, the debate suggests that the benefit of the ethanol programs is at the least questionable and not going to solve our environmental issues. We need to look somewhere else.

I don't have a lot of hope that US ethanol policy will every be sensible as long as Presidential primary (caucuses) start in Iowa. Every candidate has to promise to keep the program going which keeps Iowa's economy going no matter what science tell us.</comment></comment>