London's GPS-based speed-limit trial puts Big Brother's foot on the gas pedal - <AUTHOR> http://www.autoweek.com/article/20090708/CARNEWS/907089996 "Drivers in the trial get a switch to choose how the speed limiter operates. Advisory mode gives a dashboard warning when the speed limit changes. Voluntary mode overrides the throttle so it slows the car and prevents the driver from speeding.<p>One potential problem is that GPS signals fade in the shadow of tall buildings in big cities. Lines admits that this does happen, but the system is programmed to assume that the limit is unchanged until the signal reconnects." <comment><USER2> Man I'd hate to be in a situation where I could get out of a situation by stepping on it and being held back by some helpful little box. It hasn't happened often in my driving career that stepping on the gas was a better option than braking but the few times that it did happen I was _very_ happy to have that option.

<comment><USER3> I'm not in favor of these devices, but if I was, I'd counter that argument by suggesting they be tuned to 5mph over the posted speed limit, and allow a burst of ungoverned speed up to one minute if the accelerator is fully depressed.

<comment><USER2> tough to be you when you're trying to get to hospital with a wounded person and the governor kicks in.

There is no substitute for human judgment. If you can't play by the rules you should lose your license, everybody else should be in full control of their cars and be held fully responsible in case they abuse their power.

The only way I'd have peace with this is if it came with an 'override' button and all I'd have to do is give a valid explanation for the use of it (or pay a hefty fine).

<comment><USER3> It's illegal for you to drive like an ambulance to the hospital in your own unmarked car.

<comment><USER2> It isn't where I live.

And better your own unmarked car than none at all.

In fact my insurance policy explicitly states they'll reimburse me for damage to upholstery when transporting accident victims.

<comment><USER3> That's really interesting, and I'm surprised.

My new position, if I was going to argue for adoption of GPS-based speed governors, would be that there could be an override switch that required a service appointment to reset, a small EZ-Pass-style transponder, and a hefty fine for getting caught disabling your governor.

Now the .001% of drivers that need to make emergency runs to the hospital can do so with no interference, and minimal after-the-fact overhead to comply with the enforcement system. I'd probably still keep the 5mph buffer and the minute-long burst, since you can't hit a switch in a driving emergency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Voluntary mode overrides the throttle so it slows the car and prevents the driver from speeding._

Kudos for the Orwellian naming convention :)

<comment><USER5> I think the point is that _in this trial_ drivers get to choose whether the device is actually limiting their speed or not; what's voluntary is their choice to be limited by it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I get it, but I still think it's ironic. I mean, if this becomes required someday, it could still be called "voluntary" because you don't _have_ to drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Like many road-safety campaigners, Lines is very persuasive with his argument. "There are 200 people killed and 2,500 seriously injured on London's roads each year, and it costs £1.2 billion [about $1.9 billion]," he said._

This argument is not persuasive at all. Lines offers no evidence that regulating speed by GPS would produce a net decrease in traffic fatalities, injuries or economic damage. It is reasonable to assume that if all vehicles were required to equip such a device, some of each of the following (in unknown proportions) would occur:

* Some crashes caused in whole or in part by excess speed would not occur.

* Some crashes that could have been avoided by accelerating suddenly and briefly exceeding the speed limit would occur.

* Some people would be exposed to dangerous situations, such as criminal assault that they may have been able to flee in an unrestricted car. It is probably safe to assume that some criminals will figure out how to bypass the devices on their own cars.

* Some people requiring urgent medical care will suffer increased harm or death because they could not reach a hospital as quickly.

And I'm probably forgetting a few things. Without some analysis of the likely changes in these outcomes, it's impossible to say whether the harms cited by Lines support the introduction of such devices.

<comment><USER7> The sad thing is, even if it led to a net increase in death and injury due to the causes you described, the traffic regulators would likely still see it as a gain, because it would reduce the number of "traffic deaths". (Even if it lead to a larger increase in "crime deaths" and/or "medical trauma deaths".)

It's another case of being careful what metrics you use, and what you optimize for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really hope this doesn't go anywhere. I hate this idea. If you have the option to speed but don't, you are still free. If you don't even have the option you aren't.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what happens when the GPS miscalculates which road I'm on and cuts my speed limiter to 25 MPH on the freeway.</comment>


Cost of Living, Traffic Driving Millennials Out of Bay Area: Study - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Cost-of-Living-Traffic-Driving-Millennials-Out-of-Bay-Area-Study-417724893.html <comment><USER2> Here is some unsolicited advice from an older person to a younger person in the Bay Area.

Buy a house that you can afford, now. Maybe in Tahoe or Sacramento even. Or out in the country somewhere. Maybe you'll have to live in your car in San Francisco during the week and visit your house on the weekends.

But it will be YOUR PLACE. And here is what will happen financially. On a long enough timeline, California real estate goes up. If the value stays completely flat, you will build equity and own something that you can eventually sell for use toward your down payment for your next house. You will have the option to AirBNB it. You'll be able to invite your other awesome young friends on weekend getaways.

The key to this entire thing is the "you can afford it" part. If you found a place for $100k we are talking maybe $700 a month. If the value goes down 10%, it doesn't change anything for you long term, you can still afford the $700 a month.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cost of living vs wages situation is even worse in Toronto, Canada. The reality is that if you don't have (a large enough) bank of mom and dad behind you, you gotta hustle to get anywhere. I think "the hustle" will be the defining paradigm of my generation, and honestly its a good thing. The only person who can help you, is you and nobody else. Some people think big government will crank down on wealthy overseas buyers with multiple properties, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that... I'm quite sure the people who could do it already got large cheques from interested parties to make them reconsider.</comment>


The Man Who Invented Libor (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-11-29/the-man-who-invented-libor-iw3fpmed <comment><USER2> David Enrich wrote _The Spider Network_ about the manipulation of Libor in the 2007-ish era that resulted in a long prison sentence for the trader Tom Hayes (who may have Aspergers').

Libor like 'gentleman's agreements' depend on a shared understanding of the barriers. Tough if you don't see barriers...

<comment><USER3> Why does it matter that he have asperges?

<comment><USER4> It was an obnoxious piece of the trial. Not relevant imo.

Maybe relevant for who he is as a person I suppose, but not according to the trial evidence and the case as it was brought before the court.

<comment><USER2> The reason I mentioned it is that the condition may have been the reason that Hayes did not 'see' the boundary between a bank taking into account its advantage when arriving at its own Libor submission on the one hand, and the wholesale cooperation between several banks and brokerages on the other. That boundary was largely social and not documented/codified.

I was thinking in terms of mitigation.

<comment><USER4> I would think anyone even remotely familiar with economics would realize how significant even small groups of agents and how they can have rippling effects across an economy.

Maybe there was a lapse in judgment somewhere, but that doesn't excuse him from doing what he did, and that lapse can't justify his actions, which caused HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of misleading money to move around.

However, I think he was too harshly sentenced, and I think these "make an example out of him" cowboy judges only exasperate the situation even more. If I were committing global-scale fraud right about now, I'd spend even more time and take even more caution to make sure that I can't be caught or unmasked. Hayes will serve as an inspiration to future fraudsters, you can count on that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/youtube-accidentally-permanently-terminated-my-account-4b5852c80679 <comment><USER2> I keep hearing stories about similar issues. Suddenly someone is terminated from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of reversing such decisions.

This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.

From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary. And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.

I do make backups of google content every so often.

I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.

It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems?

This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time. This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.

<comment><USER3> It used to be much harder to knock someone you didn't like offline. You used to have to organize a DDOS attack. But now, all you have to do is organize a much easier mass-flagging attack. We need to update our threat models to account for how unreliable major platforms have become.

We can no longer rely on these companies. After big tech spent so much time investing in their own infrastructure, they are undermining themselves like this.

We need to just accept that a major liability of using a major platform like this is that your content may be removed and your account deleted, for unknown reasons.

Want to host your podcasts? Well don't rely solely on Apple Google or YouTube, they are not up for the job. Instead, you have to span it on multiple platforms and tell your audience where to find you if you get deleted.

<comment><USER4> This concept of de-platforming is becoming more and more prevailant.

The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming vs a Denial of Service de-platforming. I think while the big techs have a legitimate concern for de-platforming things that are deemed hate speech, this same power can be utilized by individuals to target a de-platforming for people whose opinions they don't like.

I think big techs should consider a public-court like system - where in order to deplatform, a jury of peers should be used to make judgements.

<comment><USER5> > The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming

I can try to give some guidelines, I'd love to see improvements (and also like to know if anyone points out I'm wrong :-)

Legitimate de-platforming is

a) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on a request from law enforcement followed by a review by the platforms staff to verify that the request is genuine and that the reasons stated are valid.

The account should still not be deleted for a certain number of days, and if requested by the user or organization, relevant details should be made available to them to take fight it in court against the relevant law enforcement agency.

b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on an written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and verified by a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account was deplatformed should be made available.

<comment><USER3> > b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on > an written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and > verified by a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account > was deplatformed should be made available.

That alone would be great. They should have to justify exactly why they removed someone. And by making it explicit, they open a pathway for legal action.

But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually welcomed by the public when it happens. Most public utilities that we enjoy today started out as being completely private.

The fire dept would let your house burn down if you were late with your bills. The telegraph company would ban you from their private network if you were a journalist that criticized them. The electric companies would make you agree to onerous terms to get electricity. And currently we have this mess with private medical insurance companies and tech platforms.

It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.

<comment><USER5> Edit: added quotes. Added part about not wanting any social network nationalized.

> But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities > and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually > welcomed by the public when it happens.

Even just a real threat that it _might_ happen might, if it became visible enough, drive some introspection and push them in right direction.

> It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.

Assuming you are from US (but mostly valid anyway): Not sure if I'd want your president, now or in 6 years, to have more say over the biggest social media networks than they already have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many Google accounts are arbitrarily nuked, and host content that is not famous enough to make the front page of HN, or Reddit, or some other noisy social media site?

<comment><USER7> plenty, on HN there is a chance you will know someone at Google or Twitter or can raise attention of someone who works there. if you have a legitimate case it seems people will try to help some out. but that is not the way to handle it en masse.

the big companies have decided that customer service is not for users (we aren't customers). once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.

<comment><USER8> > once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.

then charge for it? Even support that only deals with account terminations would be worth $5, $10 a month to quite a few of us, I would think. You have a busy YouTube channel, ten bucks a month is not that much to ensure it doesn't go up flames accidentally.

<comment><USER4> how come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used to cover the cost of such support?

It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service provider. If the telephone company shutdown my number, i have the telecommunications onbudsman to call and get the problem fixed. Granted, youtube isn't as essential as a phone, a similar body should exist to ensure that online service providers are treating customers fairly.

<comment><USER9> > It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service > provider.

You aren't paying for the service though, the people who buy ads are.

<comment><USER10> Isn't taking this as an absolutist view kind of myopic? Sure, people don't pay anything to watch and each person's eyeballs aren't worth that much. But pretty much the entire value of the service is locked up in the crowd of these people, led by the minority who actually create things. Annoy enough of the creators (or lose the trust of those who see what happens to their peers) and they'll start to leave, taking your advert-viewing crowd with them. The network effect makes this really difficult and slow to begin with, but we're already seeing attempts by people like Wendover Productions with things like Nebula and CuriosityStream. I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next few years (and if it's similar to anything that's happened historically?).

<comment><USER4> > things like Nebula and CuriosityStream

i wish them success, but i doubt they will see the sort of revenue possible with youtube. These premium subscription services are more like netflix, where they need to provide value proposition to the payer. They don't scale tbh, as the majority of the internet is non-paying. I suppose with a large enough backlog, it can start to look attractive for viewers to pay to subscribe.

But then you have to see that every company wants their subscription. If you wanted to have access to each service, you'd end up paying 100's of dollars per month. So more likely to happen is that people see a specific series they want, and pay for just that month.

Youtube's business model is much more broad and does not depend on quality content, but on the existence of a large audience. I think creators go to where the audience is, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would guess that someone nefarious got access to the Google account associated with that youtube account...

If you can log into an account, it's pretty easy to get an account permabanned.

Just paste some links to well known child porn trading sites into the description, and the account gets banned within about half an hour. Someone at my school modified a chrome extension to do that and half the schools youtube accts got banned forever!

<comment><USER12> Agreed.

The co-timed arrival of the email about his GSuite account, and the removal of the YouTube (which GSuite support said was coincidental and unrelated) seems likely to be the product of a malicious activist working through the OP's accounts trying to cause trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like youtube account has been restored. Update from the medium article:

>> UPDATE: We're back as of 8:39pm EDT April 11, 2020! I received the following email from YouTube: Hi there, After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is once again active and operational. If you forgot your password, please visit this link to reset it: <snip> Sincerely, The YouTube Team

<comment><USER14> No apologies?

<comment><USER15> Please lets not start this. Apologies means nothing, especially coming from companies.

<comment><USER16> What I'd really want is not an apology but a post mortem: "here's what caused this to happen and here's what we are doing so it doesn't happen again"

<comment><USER17> This is what's important from a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I liked how Google's pro-forma email didn't fill in the blank as to why they flagged the account ... but they still sent that message. Surely that's a pretty easy failure to capture, I'm surprised Google can't spot such failures.

<comment><USER18> You're talking about a company who recently stuck a big logo on the spacebar of their Android keyboard

<comment><USER19> What??? Source? (iPhone user here)

<comment><USER11> Googles companywide policy is to prominently display the Google logo whenever Googles AI or aggregate data is being used. It's part of their efforts to make the public understand that collecting aggregate data can benefit the public.

The keyboard uses googles AI to predict words using their language modelling, hence why it needs to display the google logo. With the "G" button removed from the top left, they decided to brand the spacebar instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another fun thing that can happen with YouTube channels is getting them banned because you used titles and thumbnails that were too similar. This can get flagged as spam, which also increases the likelihood of just getting reviewed algorithmically.

Basically no appeal process unless you can explore some unofficial means of appeal like this one.

How's that for motivation to work on your thumbnails not and naming things "Show X #1..n".

Yes, this specific issue might be automated more because of coronavirus, but the general issue is not a novel one.

\--

The only silver lining is that this doesn' take down your entire Google account like some YouTube bans do. (Woo!)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm glad it was resolved, but what am I supposed to do when Google wrongfully suspends my account and my submission here doesn't make it to the front page?

<comment><USER22> It'd be really cool if OP could document exactly what happened, and how exactly it got fixed. Or if someone else could leak relevant information anonymously. But I appreciate that nobody involved would want to attract attention.

<comment><USER23> How can anybody do that if Google doesn't provide such information?

<comment><USER22> Someone at Google could. Someone at Google fixed it, and others there are likely aware of the circumstances.

<comment><USER24> That's not going to happen. Google won't say a word on this.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I know that "Google" won't. But there have been leaks about many issues. And this is arguably a huge, if poorly reported, issue. Perhaps not relative to the total user population, but huge in absolute terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's quite possible that it was a politically motivated complaint. We'd never know.

<comment><USER26> It obviously is. People sitting down and calmly discussing private property can only be seen as threatening if you are a capitalist or a landlord. They are scared, given the current crisis. I would be scared too as a capitalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I met Alex once in some online chats during startup school a couple of years back where he was working on a universal basic income system. Very smart and interesting guy. Very disappointed that somebody like him has to deal with this, it's probably a major blow to his project

</comment><comment><USER28> It's interesting reading about what Karl Wikderquist's writings are about to get some insight into who orgranized the "report brigade" to get him banned:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_anthropological_criticism_of_contemporary_political_theory)

<comment><USER29> Interesting point. There's nothing much that's outright wrong with these claims, in fact many social scientists even of a fairly libertarian bent would basically agree with them. And these days basic income is increasingly being proposed from all sides of the political spectrum.

<comment><USER28> I can certainly see a brigade of youthful libertarians hitting the "report" button en masse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Too many problems from Youtube in the last year with banning/deleting accounts.

I wish we had a good alternative

</comment><comment><USER31> I love Google's products, and I put up with the fact that they harvest my data. But to have such terrible support for their services is absolutely ludicrous. I've seen too many stories of people losing their content, email addresses, services they rely on, or livelihoods. All because Google is too cheap to provide a reasonable way for customers to talk to a person about their problem.

I understand this is expensive and hard, but to be a company worth 100s of billions, and still neglect this is unacceptable. I think that there is a social responsibility that comes with running such a large and important web service, a responsibility that Google is neglecting.

<comment><USER32> It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.

<comment><USER33> YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike Google for.

They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)

Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.

<comment><USER34> _> made very few improvements to it,_

Before the acquisition Youtube were getting their ass kicked about all the copyright violation on the site, they were losing money, they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators, they only supported low-resolution video, and only in an Adobe Flash player.

All of which changed after the acquisition.

I would agree, of course, that there's plenty wrong with Youtube these days, and the pace of innovation has dropped a lot.

<comment><USER35> > _they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators_

This is the one point that makes YouTube so difficult to shake. The money is attractive to creators and YouTube offers the most money with the largest audience. YouTube themselves actually gets 45% of the revenue, while the creator gets 55%.

<comment><USER36> 70/30 sharing on the ad platform side is common. Take away that, and you have YouTube taking another 21% for hosting, engagement, and tooling.

It's actually really cheap if you're thinking about it.

<comment><USER4> vimeo has a $55/month cost for 5T of videos. Most youtube channels that are businesses make way more than $55 per month, and youtube keeps way more than $55 of their ad revenue.

I dont think the major reason creators choose youtube because it's "cheap" \- it aint. It's the only game in town where there's sufficient advertiser demand to pay out money. And youtube knows this, and thus, can charge the 45% split. The "free" aspect is also keeping out new competitors - the business moat is huge. There's a reason why microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game.

<comment><USER37> Advertiser demand may be part of it, but there's also discoverability.

Turning up around YouTube must be extremely valuable. If your content is only on Vimeo, your odds of being chosen by the mighty YouTube algorithm are 0%.

> microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game

You're right really, and it's not really the same thing, but they do both offer free file-storage services capable of streaming video to the browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here's a note for everyone:

> _I do have backup archives of many of the videos and they will be back > online again as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I was not diligent enough > in keeping backups — especially early on. I am missing the following 21 > videos ..._

Another reminder, yet again, not to trust "Cloud Services" and always to have a copy of data you care about.

I hope the problem gets resolved and the channel is restored, I hope we get to hear what happens.

<comment><USER39> Well, don't trust "Cloud Services" unless you're paying them $10k+ a month.

<comment><USER40> Nah. With Google, the attitude of ad-supported extends to B2B. You can pay them a megabuck a year, and still get steamrolled by their AI having a random bug.

<comment><USER41> Do you have an example of paying customer giving Google >=$1m a year and still get steamrolled by AI without being able to get in touch with a human and correct the issue?

<comment><USER40> I had a very similar one in my career. It's a little bit more complex than that, though -- the value of us as a customer was >>$1 mil per year (Google had several dedicated engineers for the partnership), but it wasn't a flat-on paying customer relationship.

The failure happened in a different part of Google than the one managing the relationship. The people who wanted the partnership to succeed were in Google's cloud hosting business. The failure was in Youtube. It wasn't anything like a bad flag; just a straight-up bug (which caused us to move our videos to S3, and scramble to put together our own video player).

Yes, we could get in contact with a human. No, the problem couldn't be fixed. Yes, Google did ultimately lose >>$1 million/year in revenue in part as a result of this and other failures (to AWS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Which is why I would never trust Google for any business functions.

These things happen all the time with Google. The model is based on your value being your ad revenue. If the cost of support outweighs your future ad revenue, which it always does, you're ignored. Everything is automated, and no matter what bad decision the machine makes, you can't appeal.

Unfortunately, that attitude translates to GSuite for Business, Google Compute Engine, etc. A non-paying customer gets better support from Microsoft (which is built around B2B) than a business customer does from Google.

Google gives better technology than Microsoft, but at the end of the day, the risk just isn't worth it: If Google's AI messes up, you're out of business.

(And Amazon has better support and technology than Google).

<comment><USER42> Actually, when it comes to getting any kind of support from Google, connections are of paramount importance. I've seen countless stories of people having problems with their Google Play developer accounts, for example being terminated for no reason and hitting the wall trying to appeal the way they suggest. Yet, if you know anyone from Google's developer relations, you'll usually have all your issues figured out in no time by emailing them. They're really nice guys.

Of course it shouldn't be like this, but that's the way it's been for as long as I've been an Android developer.

<comment><USER43> That's nice when it works. (Didn't for me.)

But it's absolutely no way to run a business. Pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One day Google locked one of my gmail accounts and demanded a verified phone number in exchange for access. Luckily, that email wasn't that important. However this taught me a lesson: next time Google is going to lock my important gmail and demand an ID, W2, routing number, full address and medical records in exchange for access and then I'll have a hard choice. That day I finally put effort into setting up my own email domain.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's only a matter of time until the EU regulates something about this sort of arbitrary account termination with no recourse to a (manned) customer service center, probably with an escalation to a regulator.

If the UK's Online Harms regulator ever actually happens (and god help us all if it ever does) I'd expect them to do an investigation fairly rapidly.

Google would be better off getting ahead of this.

</comment><comment><USER46> I lost a 12 year old Twitter account (with nearly 10k followers) last month as well. No communication whatsoever from Twitter, even after I opened a ticket about it.

I'm beginning to think that publishing anywhere except my own site is foolish.

<comment><USER47> Did you change your birthday such that you were < 13 when you opened it? That is common thing that happens.

<comment><USER48> That's why you _always_ put down your birthday as January 1, 1901 (or whatever earliest date they allow).

<comment><USER49> Then you've violated the terms of service and when they find out they have an excuse to kick you.

<comment><USER50> Put in 01/01/1970 instead.

It's well safe for any age checks and limits, and it could just be there because of a *nix timestamp glitch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The fact that the only support you get from Google is if your HN post is upvoted enough to go to the frontpage should be something that would be a red flag to any business. Guess Google don't care, support cost money, and you can't add ads in there.

<comment><USER52> True story I had a major issue where a new Google cloud service was restarting instances that were relatively expensive and billing me for them about 4 years ago. it was doing so completely automatically and I would log back in and see that these instances have been restarted. Couldn't get anyone to help me until I went on the Google BigQuery subreddit and bitched directly to their chief evangelist. They finally fixed it after that. Lesson learned. That company doesn't know how to hire people who don't constantly want to do interesting things. it turns out that running a business and supporting customers isn't always super fun and gratifying.

And can we admit that while their tech is still top-notch their software libraries in the open source realm are not? Compared to pytorch tensorflow is a piece of s __*. It 's so so bad now.

They didn't do well in the front end space either. React blows angular 2 away. Remember dart? Neither do I. Sure do miss inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Twitter has suspended my account two+ weeks ago without a reason and didn't even notify me about that by e-mail. They don't respond to my appeals either.

Decentralize all the things.

</comment><comment><USER54> Some people are saying self-hosting content is the way to go. People interested pursuing that way can look into "IPFS". There's lot of tools to make the "hosting" part easy (static websites are easy on bare IPFS it self) Some keywords to search for are DTube, Temporal, Textile. I'm already on way to self-host my data, hope you can get on bandwagon as well.

</comment><comment><USER55> What you can do, is upvote the article so that eventually some YouTube engineer happens to see it. Not much else to do.

<comment><USER56> >>>What you can do

Support Other Video hosting platforms

Advise Creators to upload to multiple Platforms

When Sharing links, if the content it on another platform share that instead of YT

YT stays on top because people refuse to move off it

<comment><USER57> [https://www.bitchute.com/](https://www.bitchute.com/)

You can have it automatically pull content from your YouTube channel to your BitChute channel. Make sure to let your viewers know about it in advance, so when Google pulls the rug out from under you, for no reason, they know where to find your content.

<comment><USER58> Yeaaahhhh, bitchute is definitely worse having YouTube as a monopoly.

Bitchute is absolutely full of racists, conspiracy theories, and just awful people in general. I wouldn't touch it with a 2m stick.

<comment><USER22> That's a good sign, actually. Because it means that you'd need to push pretty hard to get banned.

<comment><USER29> Not necessarily. The platform might just have political biases of its own. But that's also why it can be good to have more variety: it means biases are a lot more likely to cancel out over time.

<comment><USER22> That's a good point. So yes, diversity is good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Happened to me years ago with Flickr... all my pictures lost, including family. This is how you learn the hard way that the cloud is just someone else's computer.

</comment><comment><USER60> The problem isn't so much that this happened. Account terminations are usually manual processes, so from time to time, a human's going to do the wrong thing. The real problem is that there's no recourse, and you get trapped in a customer (or non-customer, so Youtubers don't even pay?) service maze.

</comment><comment><USER61> Self-regulation has failed. YouTube, and others, failures to employ proper content moderation is hitting both consumers and creators. This market is broken

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm so conflicted because YouTube is absolutely in the wrong here, but Universal Basic Income is such a silly idea.

</comment><comment><USER63> I honestly kind of hate most of Google's products. While they are incredibly reliable, they often have inconsistent and poor UX, and are liable to either cancel or change the entire UI on a whim.

<comment><USER64> Redesigned Gmail is ludicrously slow and glitchy in so many ways that old- Gmail was not. According to about:performance, not only is it consistently the most demanding tab in terms of CPU (usually by a wide margin), but it also uses nearly double the memory of Youtube, which is itself also much more bloated than it used to be.

Google is supposed to hire the best and brightest engineers around, yet apparently they require 60-120 megabytes of RAM just to show a couple of lines of text on the screen. It's absolutely pathetic.

<comment><USER65> Plain HTML version is still available and very fast.

<comment><USER66> And wraps sent emails at 72 characters, which looks incredibly unprofessional. And doesn't autosave drafts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> It really sucks you can't run your own webserver and host your own videos.

</comment><comment><USER68> I have all my photos including many precious pics like my daughter's first birthday, etc backed up only with Google photos (as GPhotos often cleans up my phones it removes the original too).

Post like these are a true wake up call. I definitely need to setup something like syncthing to backup at least one more to good old usb 1tb drive. I guess you should too if you're in the same boat.

<comment><USER69> Make sure you get a Google Takeout, but realize that much of the image metadata is deleted (and sometimes outright changed) from the originals.

My takeout failed with an write until I requested an archive that was only photos, and only a year-subset of my library (which required me to make a manual album).

I also tried the open source "timeliner" project, (which does incremental backups very conveniently), but due to Google's API, all GPS tags are stripped from what the images that it can pull down.

If SyncThing doesn't work for you, you can also try Resilio Sync.

If you need software to manage all your photos and videos, you might want to try PhotoStructure! (I'm the author, details in my profile).

<comment><USER70> Is there a method for automatic backup of Google Photos? Something that a script could do, without manually using Google Takeout.

Also, is there another service to backup photos that doesn't modify the data? I was thinking of using Nextcloud. But the prices for Google One are quite attractive.

<comment><USER69> [https://github.com/mholt/timeliner](https://github.com/mholt/timeliner) is the script I referenced, and it does incremental backups. It is limited by what Google's API exposes, though, so what you get back is not what you uploaded: it's got many tags stripped, including GPS.

It's really best to back up the originals that are on your phone. SyncThing and Resilio will do that automatically to your NAS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Yahoo, with malice aforethought, deleted my email account of 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER72> > company x permanently terminated my account

> account gets reactivated after a complaint to customer support

So it wasn't permanent.

</comment><comment><USER22> For what it's worth, I believe that "recklessly" is more accurate than "accidentally". In the motor vehicle context, for example, people acting more or less prudently, and in good faith, occasionally have accidents. But when people aren't acting prudently, we call them reckless.

</comment><comment><USER73> You don't own your social media accounts. You need to build your own brand with your own domain and collect email addresses of your customers.

<comment><USER74> Emails aren't safe. I have a large following, but if 0.1% of people mark you as Spam, you lose your abilities to send.

<comment><USER75> It's wild really, I've been seeing emails from totally trusted sources - credit card bills, bank statements - and people that I have in my contact list go directly to my spam box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The fact alone that they are banning "content" (it was just a harmless title and a pic) about private property in this period is not a coincidence.

There was no way to link that title "Boston Basic Income #98: Karl Widerquist on Private Property" to any violation of the law.

I think they are just scared that in this period, talking about private property will bring people to uprise/unite to stop paying rents. YouTube is still part of the capitalist system and will do its part to protect it. And nobody is talking about this kind of censorship.

</comment><comment><USER76> > accidentally

Google don't accidentally terminate accounts or remove/block videos.

They intentionally left that job to AlGoRiThMs instead of using actual people capable of reason/thought. That's no "accident".

<comment><USER77> You're not wrong, but you are probably being downvoted because you're trying to be cute with your capitalization of the word "algorithms". Please don't do that.

<comment><USER78> Well, "accidentally" also communicates that it was done automatically without human review and that human review ended up reversing the decision. I don't think splitting hairs with "well technically they intended for it to happen automatically so it couldn't have been accidental" adds to the discussion. Automatic processes absolutely make mistakes.

This should be obvious after 10 seconds of thought, but here's an example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I would support legislation that mandated they have phone support, were required to publish their content guidelines and decision making manual, disclose who did the review, and provide for a neutral* third party to arbitrate disputes.

*yeah yeah I know "neutral"

</comment><comment><USER80> YouTube is also banning all cryptocurrency channels, strike by strike. For no reason. It's disgusting. I know, because I have such a channel with a strike. 2 more and it's permanent delete. Can't appeal, as the livestream was deleted before it was in progress. No response to appeals for over a month and a half. (You get 1 warning before the strikes start, I was able to appeal only that.)

</comment><comment><USER81> Only channel I like on YouTube is applied sciences, hopefully it will never get deleted.

<comment><USER82> That channel's probably fine, he works for Google.</comment></comment>


Show HN: mysql proxy logger: a golang server for logging mysql queries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/senthilnayagam/mysql_proxy_logger

<comment><USER2> Nice one senthil. Will have to try it out sometime</comment>


Developing a startup team - <AUTHOR>

Hi, my name is Tolu and i'm 17. I'm working on a new website as a project/experiment into building a startup. I've always been interested in building fantastic products that users enjoy and love using.
I'm currently underway in building an MVP with a team of 4 other people. The hope is that if the site really takes off we incorporate as a startup and if not well lesson learned and life moves on. However I do now see a real chance of this becoming something. Now my question is at my age its to expensive to get a full fledged developer or designer or whatnot, but its a lot harder to keep my team members who are friends and colleagues interested in the long run. How do I do keep them committed in the long run, eventually build a culture we can expand into a company culture and really build this?<p>P.s This is my first post, I really love just perusing this site. Any thoughts, advice and nuggets of wisdom is greatly appreciated <comment><USER2> So five people work on a project with the goal of earning money from it and incorporating in the future.

The others might be your best friends but my advise is to setup a contract first outlining exactly who owns what in that project. Even if you verbally agreed on 20% each there will come a situation where you argue that one person spent more on postage and the other spent more on legal fees or yet somebody else put twice the hours in as the next. Or you worked from somebody's living room (kind of an expense). At that point you will argue about percentages again so better to have it in writing as soon as possible. Source: been there, done that.

A contract also helps establishing that work created for the project belongs to the full team. E.g. nobody can go out and sell/reuse the domain or logo without the other people's permission.

To break the ice maybe just point to the movie 'the social network' (the one about the Facebook where the Winklevoss twins didn't set a contract).

<comment><AUTHOR> For some reason, I knew that movie would be referenced. But yeah that is sound advice. Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Currently, how your team is organized?

Do you have at least a developer? Do you have a designer?

<comment><AUTHOR> For all intents and purposes, I'm the CEO and lead developer. Everybody else is a developer. We are currently in the process of getting a designer. The main problem is getting one that is willing to just join the team for later equity, but this person would need to think long term.</comment></comment>


Should digital monopolies be broken up? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-moves-against-google-are-about-protecting-companies-not-consumers-should-digital?fsrc=nlw|hig|27-11-2014|NA <comment><USER3> Google has commited the evil crime that of not playing nice with the big german media companys and they have spend the last 5 years going after google.

You might not be a google fan, but let me tell you, you dont want to support Axel Springer over google.

The german hacker scene has spend years and years fighing against all the laws Axel Springer tries to push threw governemnt that would hurt the internet.

The lates one, "Leistungsschutzrecht", actually passed, but now instead of google paying them money, google kicked them out and everything happend as hackers said it would, the websides lost a lot of views.

Now that they have (finally) figured out that was a unbelivably stupid idea, they are moving forward to the next part of government that they can manipulate and target against google. My last information was that the antitrust people to told them that they should better calme them, or they would be investigated.

Now they probebly just do what everybody does when they cant pass a law in germany. They move up to EU level, force the EU to it, and then the EU forced germany to do it. The same allready happend with the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" (mass surveillance).

They generally have a hard time passing these idiotic laws because the german hacker community is very, very politcal but the managed it with the "Leistungsschutzrecht" but not with the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung".

I for one thing, that even if google had some unfair market position, its well deserved. I dont use them because they force me, or I dont have any other choice. I use them because they are far better then the competition. Based on the same idea on could block any tech company that has a technical advantage or a unique product. You might also want to arrest Brad Pitt because he has a monopoly on beeing Brad Pitt. Google is in competition with lots of alternative search engines that are more or less specialised, and even if they were not, I dont see why one should go after a company that is so good that nobody wants to compete with them.

If everybody was complaining how terrible google is and how much they hate it, but they cant find a alternative, then we might strick up a conversation again.

<comment><USER4> This is just dirty playing at it's finest, trying to dissolve a company that actually does work and instil it with even more bureaucracy.

I don't complain that google uses it search to improve it's own products, it's awesome actually. From knowing what kind of food I prefer to show me recommendations, to targeting me with ads that actually interest me. I'd rather pay 10$ for a gadget I saw on an ad than for a penis enlargement pill or give my credit card number because I am a millionth visitor.

What do you believe could be hidden motives behind Axel Springer trying to push google out? More money for them from ads?

<comment><USER5> That law allows AS to get money for "snippets". Google then decided not to show snippets for any site for which it had to pay up (but just link with title).

AS reports that their traffic went down so much due to that shorter format that they project a 7-digits loss a year per site. (at first they gave permission only for some sites to get directly comparable data)

So AS gave Google a revocable free license to show snippets and complains that they were pressured into doing so because "Google has a monopoly".

So they want to get Google to show full snippets (so AS gets their usual traffic and ad revenue), but to also pay for them (because there is that new law that allows AS to demand it).

<comment><USER3> Thats exactly it.

Im not sure how google 'monopoly' has any effect on AS. Its not like google is the only site that scraps media sites for news overviews and things like that.

As far as I know google does not give them lower priority in searches, so how would there search monopoly matter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One drawback in most analyses of digital monopolies I've read, including this one, is that they use a lot of past examples (IBM, Microsoft, MySpace or even Orkut) that do not capture the dramatically different tech landscape we're part of today.

Thanks to the trifecta of ubiquitous smartphones, pervasive Internet and no- holds-barred data mining, I'd argue that the tech landscape we inhabit today is very different from anything we've ever encountered.

Say a startup does create a better product than Google or Facebook, it can't charge for it, because everything is free. It certainly can't monetize it better than Google or Facebook because they have infinitely more data on users than any startup can even fathom. It has to go through Google's and Facebook's "gates" to find and retain customers.

Those precious few that do manage to pull off the impossible, like Whatsapp, will be quickly bought over by Google or Facebook. Thus closing off any gaps that existed in their defense and reducing the possibility of independent competition even more.

Any meaningful analysis of digital monopolies needs to understand this instead of just relying on past examples.

Edit: I'm not saying the EU is right, or that their motives are kosher. Merely that we need to do a comprehensive forward-looking analysis of Google's dominance, extrapolating from present data and trends. Using past data alone strikes me as lazy or self-serving.

<comment><USER3> Past examples also such because they are bad examples. The Antitrust case against IBM was dropped because it dragged on so long and by the end IBM had lost the monopoly allready. The real story is the guy who was going after IBM died and nobody else was perticularly intrested in keeping it going.

The same goes for microsoft, I dont think the antitrust laws led to the weaker market position it now has. There product sucked, people moved on, and forced microsoft to up there game.

<comment><USER7> Internet Explorer had greater than 90% market share at the peak, and Microsoft was vigorously arguing that it was such an integrated part of the operating system that having a choice was impossible. The whole problem with monopolies is that it doesn't matter if their product sucks because you don't really have any other options. People can only move on if they have a choice.

<comment><USER3> The hole court case was about bundling, nowdays everybody does that. Can you imagen any operating system beeing sold without preinstalled browser?

Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was not internet explorer?

When apple had much of the smartphone market, there was not antitrust against them, but there was a browser on that phone. Also if you cant put any software on a computer you sell, then the logical conclusion is that we should only be allowed to sell pre installed kernals, everything else would be abusing monopoly position (assuming there is a high market share in the OS). Microsoft probebly had 99% market share in defragmentation tools back then as well.

The faulty assumition is that the product is the operating system, in reality the product is more then just the operating system its a hole bundle of diffrent software.

<comment><USER8> > The hole[sic] court case was about bundling, nowdays[sic] everybody does > that. Can you imagen[sic] any operating system beeing[sic] sold without > preinstalled browser?

The case was in the days when browsers were much less interoperable. There was a real concern that bundling IE would make it easy for MS to make everyone buy IIS, because that would be the best server to use to serve sites for IE.

It didn't turn out that way for a variety of reasons (among them the rise of Mozilla, impossible to predict at the time, and the amazing growth of Apache), but that doesn't mean the lawsuit was wrong, knowing what we did at the time.

> Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was > not internet explorer?

ftp.mozilla.org or similar; BSD FTP ships with pretty much any computer.

<comment><USER3> Its the nature of markets and competition that you dont always know whats going to happen.

Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor it actually happens the state should stop it? Thats kind like the movie minority report.

Even if that had happened, they could have forced the competition to be more like IE but they could still have added features.

It was the same with IBM, everybody was afraid they would take over the world and explained why they need to be stopped, but things happend and they didn't. Thats pretty much the story of every single case, were some tech company seams like its talking over the world. Knowdays facebook seams to be the big baddy that need to be stopped. People are just afraid because the dont have the imagination to draw up alternatives.

All I see its companys growing and shriking and in 99.99% of the cases it not because of some antitrust laws.

> ftp.mozilla.org or similar; BSD FTP ships with pretty much any computer.

How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a FTP programm on there computer and how many would have known were and how to look for other browsers?

<comment><USER8> > Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor[sic] it > actually happens the state should stop it?

No, it is my opinion that when a company deliberately tries to break the law, it should be prosecuted for breaking the law, even if what it was trying to do was actually futile. Just like it's still a crime to mug someone even if it turns out they don't have any money in their pockets.

> How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a > FTP programm[sic] on there[sic] computer and how many would have known > were[sic] and how to look for other browsers?

So you give them a friendly interface, _like the browser choice screen that MS actually implemented_.

<comment><USER3> Binding two of your products to gather is not breaking the law. Trying to achive suggess is not breaking the law. Every company is trying to break the law, because every company tries to get 100% market share. Every company tries to integrate there products with each others.

> So you give them a friendly interface, like the browser choice screen that > MS actually implemented.

So Microsoft should give you a featrue to download from the competition. If anything the would just not tell anybody were the alternatives are and give people a easy way to download IE. So you would end up with the same problem, everybody would just be downloading IE.

It was enougth to give people access to the internet and everybody went and download the alternatives.

<comment><USER7> It turns out that anticompetitive, monopoly-maintaining behavior _is_ breaking the law. It didn't used to be, which is why we got antitrust law in the first place.

Every company tries to gain market share, but society, which creates the markets in the first place, suffers if they gain too much. That's one of the structural problems of capitalism.

If we are in favor of healthy free markets, we can't stand by as they decay into monopolies, which are not markets at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > European moves against Google are about protecting companies, not consumers

I'm pretty skeptical of all government antitrust infrastructure for precisely this reason. Why should I expect a government to use its antitrust authority _only_ against actual trusts that threaten consumers or industry (assuming for the moment that those routinely exist), rather than use it to _help_ certain corporations gain market power?

That said, most of my armchair research has centered on the history of antitrust in the USA (I recommend reading Gabriel Kolko for some distilled revisionist history on the topic), and I know little about how it works in Europe and elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> If you go a bit deeper and look at the news article from back in the day, some of the most well known journalist that were attacking the 'Robber Barrons' were actually relatives of the companys that were getting crushed.

In the time were the evil Standard Oil gained there monopoly the price of oil was falling consistently, and they were beeing accused of doing price gauging while in reality they were just more productive.

There are tons of other examples, one was the company that invented the cooled train cart so that local butcher were pretty usless. Guess who was attacked as beeing a evil monopolist? Well the company that manged to push down prices.

Its really sad that all the research going into that time is ignored by most econoimst, and they just repeat what they learned in collage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's look at things in perspective. Axel Springer with EUR2.8B revenue and 13,000 employees and few million readers is a modest size company, and not that important to German economy, much less to European. Certainly less important to Europe than Google is to America ($60B revenue, 50,000 employees, billions of users, facilitating foreign intelligence etc.). Further, it is likely to be even less important in the future since it's in a shrinking industry. Most of the revenue of Springer is still from print media.

Also, please note that the Germans take up less than 13 percent of the seats in the European Parliament.

I am neither German nor American. I don't hate Google and I use its services regularly.

But German interest in splitting up Google is certainly smaller than American interest in keeping it together. It's not like there is a single German (or European) company ready to take over search (or email or video or smart phones) if Google was split up.

And Google's monopoly in Europe is extreme. All web businesses spend a significant amount of time optimizing for this one gatekeeper. If you are not visible on Google, you are out of business. 90 percent of searches in many European countries are on Google. Not because it's much better than it's competitors any more, but because of habits and that it owns the platforms (Android, Chrome). The only challengers to Google that I have seen in the last 10 years is Apple and Facebook.

As I remember it, Google benefitted when Microsoft was forced to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and again when Microsoft was forced to give users a clear choice not to use Microsoft search in Internet Explorer.

The mother of all antitrust cases what that which ended with the breaking up Standard Oil, the Google of its time.

The European parliament doesn't have the authority to break up Google but the EU certainly has the authority to do so, and in general to regulate the businesses that operate in Europe.

Personally, I'd rather have EU force Google and the other digital giants to pay taxes in Europe on their vast European profits.

In a few years Google will likely be less important due to new technological developments, just like Standard Oil probably would have been less of a monopoly after WWI even without being broken up due to new technologies like electricity (instead of kerosene).

</comment><comment><USER11> "Like Facebook, Amazon and other tech giants, it benefits from the network effects whereby the popularity of a service attracts more users and thus becomes self-perpetuating."

The network effect is very clear with Facebook, but it is not clear to me at all when it comes to Google Search. The product doesn't seem to get any better or worse when more people use it.

<comment><USER12> Yes, Google Search does get better the more people use it.

There are three reasons:

1) The actual search gets more signal. Literally from activity on the search engine, but also from many other places Google gets data.

2) The more popular Google is as a traffic source, the more people pay attention to getting that traffic. Website owners put effort into specifically making Google search results good.

Some of that is bad SEO, but a lot of SEO (i.e. making good websites) delivers lots of value, and it is basically all Google-targeted right now.

As a very simple (negative!) example - think of sites with a robots.txt that allows only a small number of search engines.

3) Advertising. Google's marketplace for ads gets better the more people use it, on both sides of the two sided market. Why's this matter? Because it generates money, more effectively than any competitor. And they use that money to buy engineers to improve the search experience (and, indeed, the ad relevance experience!)

To me, that's a very clear network effect.

<comment><USER13> > _The more popular Google is as a traffic source, the more people pay > attention to getting that traffic. Website owners put effort into > specifically making Google search results good_

I see this a lot and while it's true, it's also true that it's not all that difficult to keep the googlebot happy, you'd still be trying to keep crawlers happy if Google wasn't the most popular search engine, and, in fact, what you have to do for the google crawler is basically exactly the same as what you have to do for everyone else[1] (and not in the sense that everyone else just follows Google's lead in what they require because it's all pretty straightforward and generic advice and is, again, not all that difficult to follow).

[1] [http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster- guidelines-30fb...](http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster- guidelines-30fba23a)

<comment><USER5> even if there are engine specific optimizations (like the #! javascript single page application path thing they promoted for a while), the major engines usually converge towards a single format quickly.

And the fringe engines (YACY and the like) had no idea how to work with SPAs in the first place, so no loss there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No one is forcing you to use Google, Facebook, Amazon or any other Internet website. End of story for me.

<comment><USER15> I'm fully on Google's side in this news story, but the fact that no-one forces you to use them... that's irrelevant to monopoly or anti-competitive laws (both of which are good things to exist, even if they can lead to shitty attempts at execution).

<comment><USER3> What are the brilliant sucess storys of antitrust laws? I have spend a fair bit of time reasearching them and far more then 50% of the cases it was just losing competition looking for governemnt hand outs.

So if that is true, on what bases do you defend them?

Let me give you a example for another imaganry law. Assume cops are allowed to walk around with full automatic weapons. Now in the majority of cases this causes suffering for people who are not at fault. In a few cases it helped. Now, your argument applies, sometimes you need automatic weapons. My question is does that make it good these laws exist? (Note I know nothing about the this example or what the data is there, its a example).

Also in the antitrust cases there are tons of external cost. Companys spend there money on lobbying and laywers because they think its more effective then improving there product. Good companys getting hurt and also having to spend money on defence. There is also massiv amount of tax dollers spend on these things.

<comment><USER15> This isn't an area I've ever looked into, so you could well be right that the negatives outweigh the benefits. My gut instinct is to disagree with you, i.e. you'd have to show me the evidence to change my mind (don't get me wrong - <USER2> could equally gather it myself if I cared enough, and I'm not actually asking you to try to change my mind).

I'm defending them on the basis that the theory is good. For example the theory of cops having fully automatic weapons is good (they stop criminals, the more armed they are the more they can do that), but you're absolutely right about cost/benefits, and I'd always support less-armed police over more- armed police.

My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't relevant.

<comment><USER3> Well, Hacker News comments are not a format for this. I cant get all the sources in a short amount of time and doing this for one person in a tech forum is not really worth my time. Also if I just gave you things to read, you will have a bias starting point, I would only provide things that I think are good. So I can only advice that you start from blank and dive into it, see were your research leads you.

I can only tell you my story. I had the same opinion as you do now, and because I became intrested in economics I started reading a lot about it and these tech monopoly cases pushed my attention towards these antitrust laws and my research change my mind.

And its not even the case that these laws were put in place with good intention and then they were abused, but the other way around they were put in place to be abused.

> My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but > "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't > relevant.

The question really is, what is a monopoly. Its suprisingly hard to answer. Is the defintion that there are no real alternatives? Or that they have a market share of X%. Is a company that has a techniclly unique product a monoply because nobody else can produce it. If you think about it, everything is a monoply, nobody else can produce the exact thing you do. So there is a question about granularity of monopoly definition. Some might say 'over one market' but that is very vage as well. Take the car as a example, does it only compete with other cars of simular size or does it also compet with airplanes and trains? Does a car sometimes play in the same market as skype, because if I can work remotely I dont need a car.

In economics, price theory is used, when a company can push the price over some equillibrum price its a monopoly but that of course cant really be used in the case of google or the internet explorer case.

Also "you can choose not to use them" is relevant, because thats the last competition even the biggest monoply provider faces. For everything that is not a live or death question you have the option to not use it. Befor some pruduct/service X was invented you could live without X and now a monopoly provides X, you are not forced to buy X now, you can just go on with your live unchanged. This is very relevant in the economic analysis of markets and monopolys.

Im not saying monopolys are not sometimes a problem, im just saying that the issue is far more complicated then it seams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's nonsense like this that makes me really doubt whether Europe has a future. So much negativity.

</comment><comment><USER17> Europeans can flag these stories out of existence all they like but they are the ones stuck with these ridiculous rulings.</comment>


Ex-Green Beret Charged with Spying for Russia in Elaborate Scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/politics/peter-debbins-russia-spying.html <comment><USER2> >They plied him with gifts such as a bottle of cognac and the Russian military uniform.

> he traveled to Russia one last time in 2010, emphasizing to his handlers > that he wanted to pursue business there but that his handlers encouraged him > to get a job with the American government.

Not much incentive for risking life and liberty here. And a bad advertisement for any would-be spys.</comment>


Ask HN: How did your startup get its first users? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> First unassociated users I assume, for Tesults.com it was from a blog post on someone's site who I asked to look at the app because I felt it may be interesting to his audience.</comment>


EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook's News Feed Tick - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/ <comment><USER2> So in the graph-query language Gremlin (<https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki>), Facebook's secret sauce would look something like this...

g.v(user_id).outE('friend').as('f').inV.outE('news').as('n').inV.sort{ f.affinity * n.weight * n.decay }.reverse()

<comment><USER3> I know nothing about Gremlin so if this is an obvious question, my bad, but does it automatically calculate affinity, weight, and decay? I'm assuming it doesn't, but would I be blown away if it did.

<comment><USER2> In this example, affinity is an edge property (stored on the "friend" edge), weight is an edge property (stored on the "news" edge), and decay is a calculated value based on a timestamp stored as a property on the news edge -- I fudged on decay because I don't know what their decay formula is.

From what I could glean from the article, weight is static for each content type, and affinity is a calculated value. Facebook may update the affinity value after each user action or run some kind of PageRank-type algorithm for friends and update it periodically.

But in Gremlin, you can calculate PageRank in 2 lines.

<comment><USER3> You've got a new Gremlin fan. Playing with it right now.

<comment><USER2> Cool! :) Here's an 8 min screencast tutorial (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E>) by Marko, the creator of Gremlin.

You can ask questions in the Gremlin Users group: <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gremlin-users>

And if you're a Python developer, check out Bulbflow, a new persistence framework for graph databases that uses Gremlin as its query language (<http://bulbflow.com/>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Secret Sauce = Google's search algorithm. Facebook's news feed is just noise. Let's stop pretending Facebook is innovative.

<comment><USER4> Aww, down votes expected. _waves at Facebook employee brigade_

I'll just leave this link here for you guys to read: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797060>

<comment><USER4> Truth hurts, huh guys?</comment></comment></comment>


Teach Like You Don't Know - <AUTHOR> http://desmondrawls.com/2013/06/20/teach-like-you-dont-know/

<comment><USER2> I think there's a lot more to pedagogy than you're delving into here. It sounds to me like your teachers in question are largely lecturing with a bit of question. There's all kinds of other things such as "differentiated learning" (how do you teach a visual learner vs a kinesthetic learner), "inquiry-based learning", etc.

I think the larger issue is that many of those who teach programming (specifically) have not had any formal training in teaching.

<comment><USER3> I thought differentiated learning was starting to go out of style in pedagogy. The last I heard is that all (self-identified) types actually learn all three ways roughly the same speed, but that combining the three methods (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) was the key.

(Source: my Teaching English as a Foreign Language class a year and a half ago.)

That said, I'd agree with you that learning a bit about pedagogy is important. I'd argue that learning to program combines elements of natural language learning (grammar, syntax, vocabulary) and mathematics.

Natural language learning has plenty of resources on how we learn -- there's an entire field on second language acquisition theory. Perhaps it's time to start leveraging this foundation.

<comment><USER2> I think the different sensory methods are somewhat waning these days, but the instruct / assess parts (in combination with something like Bloom's taxonomy) i think are used in combination with many other tools / methods these days.

In short, I don't think anybody is going 100% differentiated. I think it's just another tool in the tool box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "Not even good teachers, however, can see the plausible misinterpretations > before they happen."

Sure, they can. In my mind that's close to the definition of an expert teacher - experience and knowledge of misinterpretations is a necessary part of effective teaching.

This doesn't mean it's a good idea to directly bring up the misinterpretations before they happen - it's educationally more important to focus on the correct interpretation (in such a way that misinterpretations are avoided as much as possible).

(By the way, all misinterpretations are plausible - otherwise the student wouldn't be considering it)

</comment><comment><USER5> The thing is that people have different ways of learning, some are good with reading and understanding, others need hands-on and others like to hear it. The bad part is that our education system is currently tailored to an specific type of learner. Reminds me of the quote "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." So if you want to be a good teacher you have to understand that students are different, have different learning mechanism, different motivations and a preference over a certain type of thinking.</comment>


Neo-Nazies Publish All German Refugee Housing Units on Google Maps(in German) - <AUTHOR> http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik/internet-hetze-gegen-fluechtlinge-neonazi-partei-veroeffentlicht-asylheim-liste-bei-google-maps,10808018,31239126.html <comment><USER2> I am not sure that putting this map together, housing of so calles "refugues" \- most of them are opportunistic illegal immigrants (young males from countries without any civil war, countries like Tunisia, Albania, etc.) - makes you a "Neo-Nazi.

<comment><USER3> The widespread reasoning was because the title was "say no to refugee homes".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the greek's demands that Germany will pay back for what they've stolen during WWII (forced to pay the cost of the savage occupation) was important, especially as a reminder now that we see history repeating itself as if nothing was learned. They'll never change and the fact that neonazis are even tolerated there is disgusting.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that the alternative to tolerating them is to lock them up for expressing their opinion. It's already illegal to claim the holocaust never happened. What specific, actionable policies would you put in place?

<comment><USER6> Thinking about your point, I'm curious about how to determine the line between these groups and terrorist organizations. How do we tell the difference and why is it OK to lock one up but not the other?

<comment><USER4> That's exactly my point. It's terrorism. But when it's not initiated by muslims it's simply never called that.

<comment><USER7> That is not true. Germany has a long history of extremism and terrorism from the left and right side of the spectrum. The only thing missing is the international context, so there is no war against terror, for example, and the discussion is usually not global since there are no wars to fight in other countries since it's all homemade. Other European countries such as Ireland or Spain have had their fair share of local terrorist groups as well.

More info can be found here, just as examples for Germany:

for the left: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction)

for the right: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gaddafi? Kadafi? Qaddafi? What's the correct spelling? - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2011/0222/Gaddafi-Kadafi-Qaddafi-What-s-the-correct-spelling

<comment><USER2> Can anyone enlighten us regarding the correct spelling in Arabic? Not that I could read it, of course; and I assume that there is one.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia's good at this kind of thing:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_al-Gaddafi#Name>

(I did try to use the actual Arabic link to the article in arabic, but it escaped it in some way when I tried to cut and paste.

Let's see if this works:

معمر القذافي

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> His website spells it "Al Gathafi"</comment>


The Real Story Behind Why Flappy Bird Was Deleted - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/637115e0813a

<comment><USER2> Title: "The Real Story Behind Why Flappy Bird Was Deleted"

In the article text: "In what surely is one of the strangest stories in years we are unlikely to ever really know what happened."

Well, okay then...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, good catch. I meant to include the word "officially" in that sentence. Post has been updated to correct the mistake and clarify: the most likely reason why Flappy Bird was deleted is that he broke the rules, Apple found out, withheld his earnings, and forced him to take the game down.</comment></comment>


SpaceX Video – Reusable Rocket Test Launch and Landing - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/25597-spacex-reusable-rocket-falcon9r-video.html <comment><USER2> Stuff like this gets me pumped. We live in rapidly changing times and I love getting to see what Musk is doing.</comment>


Reasons You Should Use Private Search Engines - <AUTHOR> https://choosetoencrypt.com/search-engines/reasons-you-should-use-private-search-engines/ <comment><USER2> I use DuckDuckGo almost exclusively

<comment><USER3> I use StartPage sometimes...just depends on how I'm feeling at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually use Search Encrypt and like it. I've seen people complain about it online, but it's useful for keeping my search terms hidden or encrypted. I use Chrome as my browser, so I'm pretty much handing my info over to Google anyway, but I use SE.</comment>


$400 VC-Backed Juice Machine Is Completely Unnecessary - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/19/juicero <comment><USER2> Exactly what range of processing is done to the fruits and vegetables before packaging? How effectively washed are they given what we now know about pesticides and cognitive development? How environmentally destructive is individual shipment of the packages? How disposal-friendly are the packages? Are fruits and vegetables sourced in season, locally or organically?

I think we can guess what the probable answers are.

Process...

Step 1: Pick a natural, functional, thing like a fruit.

Step 2: Hype the crap out of it (or wait until someone else does).

Step 3: Re-invent some part of it (eg. fruit skin) as an artificial product (eg. QR-coded spacepack) so that you can charge money for it, even though this is both unethical and wasteful, and actually less functional in many ways (eg. hard expiry, juice only output, damage less apparent, etc.) than the original.

Step 4: Sell a subscription.

Step 5: Obtain some kind of industrial protection racket through regulatory means, by claiming the natural alternative is unsanitary, of dubious or dangerously uncontrolled quality.

This is basically how a lot of the pharmaceutical industry works (with a few extra steps like co-opting/corrupting established points of community trust, integrating an insurance protection racket, etc.), as well as diet pills, cuisine fads, juice industry, etc.

Was this really the top US hardware startup last year?

<comment><USER3>
      Was this really the top US hardware startup last year?

Maybe. Magic Leap raised $800 million in Feb 2016, but hasn't launched yet.

Carbon raised $80 million in Sept.

<comment><USER2> For reference they claimed $120M, then fired their CEO and replaced him with a Coca Cola executive.

I did some further reading on the business and answered some of the questions I had. They have a 3-stage wash for inbound vegetables, however it does vary per ingredient. Since many people in the industry integrate chemicals such as chlorine during washing for sanitation purposes, there is a significant likelihood that they are too and therefore there likely remains a percentage of residue. Ingredients are sourced to their southern California facility for washing, cutting and packing for national redistribution to 17 states. It's a pretty carbon heavy operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Doug Evans, the company's founder, would compare himself with Steve Jobs in his pursuit of juicing perfection. "

The hubris.

<comment><USER4> Eric Bachmann irl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also longer article on Ars: [https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/04/this-400-appliance-...](https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/04/this-400-appliance- that-squeezes-juice-out-of-a-bag-appears-unnecessary/)

</comment><comment><USER6> this has to be a money laundering scam, right?

<comment><USER7> They are just trying to copy the coffee pod people. It could still become a thing.

<comment><USER8> But the Keurig is turning a small amount of raw material (coffee grounds) into lots of coffee. I don't understand how the Juicero is different than bottled juice.

<comment><USER7> Lots of people buy expensive juicers with the idea that they will drink more delicious healthy fresh juice. But then they never use them because it is a hassle. This way they can pretend that they are getting fresh juicer-style juice.

> different than bottled juice

Maybe no different than Suja or something like that. But they charge $8/bottle - so maybe Juicero is cheaper in the long run, even with the wildly overpriced dispenser.

<comment><USER9> Juicero packs are $7-10, and are smaller.

In addition, you can get ready-to-drink fruit juices in larger quantities at your local megamart.

Note that the Juicero does not actually do anything other than open a packet and pour into a glass.

<comment><USER7> Americans spend $10+ billion per year on homeopathy. I don't think this product is targeted to people who value substance over style.

<comment><USER10> That's astounding if true. Normally I wouldn't ask for sources but if you have one please share!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Julia: A Fast Language for Numerical Computing - <AUTHOR> https://sinews.siam.org/DetailsPage/tabid/607/ArticleID/744/Julia-A-Fast-Language-for-Numerical-Computing.aspx <comment><USER2> If Julia had Go-style concurrency primitives (channels and lightweight threads), and M:N thread multiplexing, it would be the perfect language to implement my upcoming data flow based scientific workflow language ([http://github.com/samuell/scipipe](http://github.com/samuell/scipipe)).

Now I'm instead trapped with Go, which lacks a REPL, and leaves a lot to wish in terms of metaprogramming capabilities needed to create a nice programmatic API.

The lack of the mentioned features is my biggest concern with Julia.

<comment><USER3> Threading is already an experimental feature and Go-style concurrency will be a standard feature in the future. Well, technically it may be more like Cilk or TBB but it will be very similar to Go.

<comment><USER4> Cilk-style concurrency would be a really nice addition to Julia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also, Julia's home page: [https://julialang.org/](https://julialang.org/)

I toyed around with it for a while, and really liked it. I wondered to myself "what makes this language specific to numerical computing? it seems generic enough to be used wherever I'd want to use Ruby or Haskell..."

But then I tried using it. And even though the language is generic enough, the standard library just plain assumes you're only doing numerical computing, and makes everything else needlessly hard by trivial omissions.

That was like 2013 though, so maybe things are different now?

<comment><USER6> I was really REALLY interested in the language due to the clustering ability and their JIT they build into it. But it does seem like the language was build without any systems-usage in mind. How sad. Nothing will ever quench my thirst for clustering.

<comment><USER7> so... it was built for clustering but it doesn't quench your thirst for clustering? Please could you clarify.

<comment><USER8> The meaning was clear to me. It doesn't quench his thirst because he has chosen not to use it.

<comment><USER6> Yes. It is that I cannot use it for things that I'd like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> BTW is it just me, or do other people find that the interpreter is very slow to start under older versions of OS X?

That's one of my current obstacles to diving further into Julia.

<comment><USER10> It used to be a big problem. It's still not super fast (~1s or so), but we've been doing quite a bit of working at making it faster. If it's significantly slower than that, something else must be going on.

<comment><USER9> Thanks -- I'll definitely be giving it another shot, at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently started using Julia as my main platform as a replacement for Octave in my engineering classes.

I have found it an excellent language, as easy as Python to pick up and some great numerical primitives.

Using Juliabox in class means no installation woes and means whatever I do during lessons is available wherever I can get online. The ability to mix in markdown and code on the same page is brilliant for keeping notes. I realise that is not a feature of Julia but still, it is a benefit.

I've not done any heavy work in it but I'm really looking forward to doing so. I can dump Python, Octave and Limbo all at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's the best way to run a debugger through Julia code? I value an interactive debugger much more for this kind of nitty gritty numerical programming than I do for lots of other tasks.

<comment><USER13> Work on the debugger is underway, it should be in the 0.5 release in a few months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a question - I completely lost interest in Julia when I read it adopts many of the ugly language hacks of Matlab - why should I care about Julia when I can feel frustrated with Matlab already?

<comment><USER9> Such as? I'd be curious.

<comment><USER8> The literal syntax that you'd think would make an array of arrays concatenates the arrays instead. Sometimes. It depends on types. (Or have they fixed that now?)

Also, although this is of course a preference, 1-based indexing. I would rather have compatibility with C and Python and I don't care one bit about compatibility with Matlab.

These decisions make it seem that Julia just aspires to be "open source Matlab" when that already exists. It could instead aspire to be the good programming language that Matlab isn't.

<comment><USER10> > The literal syntax that you'd think would make an array of arrays > concatenates the arrays instead. Sometimes. It depends on types. (Or have > they fixed that now?)

Yup, we fixed that (deprecated in the latest release, will be switched over). It was super annoying.

There's been lots said on the 1-based indexing discussion, so I won't get into it here, but I can guarantee you that "open source Matlab" is not the ambition. Our ambition is to be the best possible programming language for technical computing and a great language for programming overall.

<comment><USER9> _There 's been lots said on the 1-based indexing discussion, so I won't get into it here._

It's not a deal-breaker, I suppose. Still, the rationale I've heard -- "We have chosen 1 to be more similar to existing math software"[1] (as opposed to basically every modern _programming language_ out there) just seems... weird. Perhaps "compatibility with traditional sequence notation in math and physics" (upon which presumably most software packages are based) would be a better statement of the case for 1-based indexing.

[1] [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/558](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/558)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Have they already fixed the need to "devectorize" the code to make it fast? This was the major drawback for me since I wish the code to be concise AND fast.

<comment><USER16> I agree, this would be good. Intel's ParallelAccelerator.jl [1] is making some progress in this area.

[1] [http://julialang.org/blog/2016/03/parallelaccelerator](http://julialang.org/blog/2016/03/parallelaccelerator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Prof. Edelman have a financial stake in Julia? He is such an enthusiastic booster of the language, that either it must be truly amazing, or there is an undisclosed motive.

<comment><USER10> Alan is one of the people who started the language (which is mentioned in the article). He is also one of the cofounders of Julia Computing (the company we formed to provide support and other services for the company). So from my biased viewpoint, the language is both truly amazing and Alan has a motive to promote the language, if only since he has a significant chunk of time and effort into making it a reality. I don't think it's fair to call it undisclosed however.

<comment><USER17> I think it's great that Prof. Edelman is dedicating his time to Julia and I hope he will be rewarded for it. However, I think that a statement of the sort you provided above should have appeared below the SIAM News article. This is something that would have been done in any major newspaper or scientific journal.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I don't disagree. I don't know why the SIAM news editors didn't. I do hope my statement here makes clarifies the facts at least for people coming from here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is super. Fwiw, Java and Scala aren't bad for numerical computing either: [http://nd4j.org/](http://nd4j.org/) [https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/](https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/)

<comment><USER19> How is nd4j compared to Breeze and jblas, which are used in Spark MLlib[1]?

[1] - [http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/mllib-data- types.html](http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/mllib-data-types.html)

<comment><USER20> See my post here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=11275071](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=11275071)

We have this concept of a backend where we had net lib java and jblas, but both are horribly slow/limited and need some updating which is why we added our approach to this.

If a new matrix framework comes out, I will just write a backend for it and allow people to keep the same dsl.

Breeze also isn't usable from java: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27246348/using-breeze- fro...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27246348/using-breeze-from-java-on- spark-mllib)

FWIW, we also support both row and column major (you can specify the data as well as ordering) very similar to numpy.

If you come use nd4j, it will mainly be for a dsl that encourages vectorization just like any other numerical language.</comment></comment></comment>


China Transforms from Copycat to Patent Powerhouse - <AUTHOR> http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/10/05/2010100500309.html

<comment><USER2> But are they any good? China's patent laws are worse than those of the US.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fake it until you make it, I guess.</comment>


Google, Facebook, and the Rest of the Silicon Valley Crowd Need More Physicists - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/01/move-coders-physicists-will-soon-rule-silicon-valley/?mbid=social_fb <comment><USER2> Personally I'd sooner hire someone who is expert in electrical engineering or operations research than a physicist, and I am a former physicist.

<comment><USER3> Care to expound on that? Not that I necessarily disagree with you or anything, but I'm curious.

<comment><USER2> Same useful familiarity with lapack; more practical signal processing background, system identification & etc. Also better work personalities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article argues that these companies want physicists to handle the abstract math and numerical programming that machine learning requires. But physicists don't have a monopoly on those skills; they are taught in plenty of engineering disciplines and applied math programs. I would even argue that as long as you can handle the math, you are better off with an education focusing on an engineering discipline so you can learn the design aspects of building large pieces of infrastructure as well.</comment>


Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center now open to more companies - <AUTHOR> http://atdc.org

<comment><USER2> The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) strives to be the world's best technology business incubator. Our mission: to increase the technology business base in Georgia by helping entrepreneurs launch and build successful high-tech companies. For more than 25 years, ATDC has provided strategic business advice and connected member companies to people and resources they need to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked part-time at an ATDC company while I was in school at Tech. It was a scrappy startup with a lot of smart people. Overall, it was a very positive experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> i'm having a little trouble finding out exactly what ATDC actually does, what services it provides, etc.. can anyone help me out here?

or are they still working that stuff out?

<comment><USER2> See my comment above. Basically the ATDC is state funded and is here to help Georgia entrepreneurs be successful. We provide services, educational programs and other stuff to help startups.

<comment><USER4> i understand that. but that is a very generic answer. what specific services does the ATDC provide? for example, i see in the press release that it mentions coworking space and leasing office space. i don't see that mentioned anywhere else -- no information on where, how much, etc..

i'm curious about these things, i live a block off of technology square.

<comment><USER5> 1) Subsidized office space. You can get an office there for about a grand a month that can house 4 people comfortably. Compare that with the rents in the rest of the building, and you'll find they are much more expensive. What this does is create a density of startups and a critical mass around which an ecosystem has formed.

2) Access to people like Lance Weatherby and other Venture Catalysts. ATDC companies have raised over a billion dollars of VC. The staff helps.

There are fringe benefits, but those are the main ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> and the associated Georgia Tech press release: <http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=3183>

</comment><comment><USER6> Good time to be in Georgia :)</comment>


Too Much Free Software (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20060420173041/http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/774/ <comment><USER2> I no longer believe in free software, meaning that if it's free, there is something the software gets from you in return</comment>