Is Anyone Buying the Googlephone? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/is-anyone-buying-the-googlephone/

<comment><USER3> I bought one, and it's awesome. It's obvious, to me, that this is going to be a slow burn product, but burn, it will...in a year, there will be a dozen Android phones, spread from low end to high, and the market will begin to look drastically different. Apple will likely find themselves in the same boat they were in two decades ago going up against the ridiculous variety of PC compatible machines, with a single somewhat pricey product. Apple is about to be engaged in war on a dozen fronts, and I suspect that it won't be able to withstand the onslaught (sales of iPhone may continue upward, since the smart phone market is growing so fast, but I think its market share can only go down from here, if they use the same playbook that used for Macintosh vs. PC).

<comment><USER4> I've got one too and I'm very happy with it. I've used the iPhone quite a bit and it's ok. So far I like the G1 better. The buttons on the front and the scroll ball make it a little easier to navigate around. The standard applications work well. I like how the notification bar works. I was surprised at how much was already in the Android Market on day one. It seems like some of them are also on the iPhone, but there are some exclusives too. Locale is an especially cool application that isn't possible on the iPhone. There are quite a few that make use of the GPS. One that I found amusing, although still innovative, is iSafe. Among other things it can alert you when you enter a high crime neighborhood or when there is a registered sex offender nearby. Call quality and reception are generally good. I like how the screen automatically locks when I put the phone up to my ear during a call. Overall, I'm impressed by it. I had expected it to be much less polished than it is. It's also not nearly as ugly as it looks in the pictures. It's actually kind of nice looking in a minimalist way.

I do have a few gripes, though. First is battery life. I expected it would be mediocre, but it's downright terrible. I have to recharge it in the middle of the day. The silver lining here is that the battery is removable so I can carry a spare with me. I really hope they come out with a higher capacity battery soon. Another part that could have been better is the keyboard. The keys are just a little too flat and feel just a bit spongy. It's not a bad keyboard by any means, but I would prefer one more like the Sidekick. Multitouch would be a nice plus too.

It's also worth saying something about the first paragraph of the NYT article. The author says there was no one waiting in line at the store for the G1. That's because we didn't need to. People who preordered the G1 had it delivered. I even had mine delivered a day early. I'm not sure that there would be people lining up otherwise, but it's still a little misleading.

<comment><USER5> _The author says there was no one waiting in line at the store for the G1._

This just pisses me off - it encourages companies like Apple to hype up a product and then slowly sell it in three locations in all of NYC. The news isn't that people want an iPhone, the news is that Apple can be a dick to their customers for publicity and they put up with it.

<comment><USER4> Good point. This has been going on a very long time too. It's not reserved just for Apple products. Video games are a prime example. I remember this stuff going on back when I was playing NES. It really pissed me off when they created artificial shortages when the original Zelda and Double Dragon were released. And don't forget about the GMail launch when it was invitation only. This kind of thing is just another tool in the standard marketing toolbox.

<comment><USER6> There can be actual shortages. Take Gmail as an example. Such a service requires a lot of resources - storage, computing power, support staff. . . It's a lot easier to provide those things for 100,000 people than for 10M people. The invites provided them a way of ramping up rather than having to meet all of the demand on day 1. It also allowed them to see exactly where they needed to optimize before they got millions of users.

If it was just a marketing thing, why didn't Yahoo and Microsoft roll out their increased storage all at once? No, those two increased their storage gradually because it's the only practical way. By limiting invites, Google got to increase storage in a similar, gradual way.

With Apple, many stores were at fire-code capacity when the iPhone came out. Apple didn't sell out of iPhones at most locations. The lines were due to the fact that Apple can only have so many people in a store at any given time because we can't have two different pieces of matter occupying the same space at the same time. So, trash Apple if you want, but the lines were real. More people wanted to get a peak at the iPhone than the stores had capacity to fit people in.

I think the iPhone is a defective device and want an Android phone when my carrier gets one, but one needs to be objective: the iPhone generated buzz that the G1 isn't. There are many factors including the relative size of T-Mobile and AT&T and the fact that the original iPhone allowed AT&T users to buy new wherever they were in their contract while the G1 mandates in-contract users have to pay an additional $220. The fact remains, the iPhone generated buzz that the G1 hasn't. The lines were real. People were excited.

<comment><USER4> No one here is trashing anyone. Maybe you misunderstood. I am also aware that there are real shortages, particularly when hardware requiring new manufacturing processes is involved. But the fact is that artificial shortages are a commonly used marketing tactic and that is the point the parent poster and I were trying to make. The article implies that the lack of lines and shortages is the result of a lack of interest. That may not necessarily be the case.

There are plenty of reasons why there isn't much hype around the G1 and you've pointed a couple of them out. I think it's also obvious that Android, and particularly the G1, were not marketed nearly as heavily as the iPhone. It also may be that the iPhone has achieved critical mass and people just aren't interested in the knock-offs that are coming out now.

Your statement about in-contract users having to pay an additional $220 is incorrect - at least it was a few weeks ago when I ordered mine. At the time I preordered I believe it was $199 for new customers. I was still in contract and mine came out to about $338 with some BS activation fee and sales tax. I did notice that the G1 is $179 now so that may have changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _Just a couple talking to a salesman who too was figuring out how to work the new mobile phone which is powered by Google's new Android operating system._

This line in particular makes me realize something important: All of the media exposure that the iPhone got, including (and especially) the iPhone ads, effectively acted as tutorials on how to use the device long before someone actually bought one.

Pre-launch consumer exposure to the Android interface, however, hasn't been anywhere close to what the iPhone received. That's partly because the iPhone sucked up the novelty factor, but has there even been a memorable advertising campaign for the G1 in which the interface is front and center?

<comment><USER7> that kind of thing is apple's speciality. Hard to beat them on that turf.

But it's easier (and cheaper) to follow. Once people know (from the iphone) what a phone is supposed to do, they'll be able to get other phones to do it too.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, are you speaking as somebody who's used Android? I'd like to know how similar the two interfaces are.

<comment><USER9> They're pretty similar. Both have a home screen with icons for programs, a button to return to it, and a similar touch-screen web-browsing interface.

Notable interface differences are the slide-out keyboard on the G1, two-touch zoom gesture on the iPhone, the hardware "back" button on the G1, and the "system-tray" at the top of the G1 that notifies you when a background process has something to say, like you just got a chat or an email or a download finished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How ridiculously easy to use is the G1? For example, how many clicks does it take to capture a photo and email it to a friend?

On my iPhone I count 6 clicks to get into the "To:" field in the email, and then 1 more click to Send.

And where is the G1's "display" appeal? As O'Reilly once said (when thinking about ringtones), people will pay more for display than consumption. For many (me not included?), the Apple logo on your phone is a personal exhibition of good taste. What does the G1 do for a person in this regard?

<comment><USER11> It depends on how you have the phone set up and how well you know it. The obvious way:

\- One tap to open the menu of applications

\- One tap to open the camera application

\- One press of the camera button

\- One tap to choose to share the picture

\- One tap to choose gMail (vs. messaging)

At this point you are in the To field, but you need to slide open the keyboard to type the address in. So it is essentially the same "number of interactions" as the iPhone. If you're a power user or curious, you might have figured out that you can also launch the camera application directly by pressing the camera button, which collapses the first two steps to one.

...Which highlights one of the strengths and weaknesses of the Android platform. While the iPhone has just a few inputs (the screen and main button being the obvious ones), the G1 has many (screen, five main buttons, trackball, the keyboard, and the keyboard slide). This gives the G1 more (and potentially faster) ways to do things, but it also means that the user may not always be able to guess which input is required to accomplish their goals. The G1 apps are pretty good about telling the user when they need to do something out-of-the-ordinary -- the camera app, for example, points out the camera button on the casing -- but third-party applications may not be as careful, or they may neglect to handle all possible inputs in an Android-consistent manner.

I think it's a difference of philosophy, much like the difference between Apple's preference of a one-button mouse versus the preference of multiple- button mice on other platforms. One button is easier for users to learn and developers to implement consistently, but more buttons let you do more stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not only are my wife and I planning on getting one but I can name about four others who are also planning on getting one.

For a lot of people price is really an issue. But I still think that Andriod is just a better phone system.

<comment><USER8> What makes you think it's a better system? And what sort of people are those others who want to get the Android? Are they tech-focused? Because it seems to me that Android has the advantage there, but that it's got nothing that appeals to consumers. Not like the iPhone has.

<comment><USER4> What do you think the iPhone has that Android doesn't have? As someone who has used an iPhone and now owns the G1 I can tell you that they are incredibly similar. A friend and I were comparing the two side by side. Most of the applications are comparable and in some cases we both had installed the same exact applications from the respective App Stores. I doubt most average people would know the difference if they were using Android in an iPhone case or the other way around. The two platforms have far more in common than you may think.

The Android SDK allows for some more possibilities than what is allowed on the iPhone, but this seems to be purely a business decision on the part of Apple. As far as features that appeal to consumers - branding and fads aside - <USER2> think it's pretty much a wash. The big difference is Apple's far superior marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Android is a step in the right direction for phone software, hopefully there will be more official devices sporting it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Umm its on T-Mobile and their 3G coverage pales in comparison to Verizon and At&T.

Definitely want one, but am waiting!

<comment><USER4> I haven't used Verizon, but I have used ATT and currently have a G1 with T-Mobile. Data speed has always been better with ATT, but the rest leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. That said, the speed on T-Mobile isn't as bad as I thought it would be. On my old phone data speed was atrocious, but it's pretty usable on the G1. What's interesting is that I live in an area that T-Mobile claims does not have 3G, but in many of the places I go the phone says I'm on 3G.

It's probably worth noting that T-Mobile costs quite a bit less than Verizon and ATT. They also offer some neat features like WiFi calling (not on the G1) that the others don't.

In any case, it really sucks that people who don't like T-Mobile have to wait to get their hands on Android. I guess the bright side is that it will eventually be on other carriers unlike the iPhone. I probably would have gotten one of those long before Android was available had it not been an ATT exclusive. These carrier exclusives are terrible for consumers, but the situation only seems to be getting worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> no. was interested to read there is no headphone jack. imagine watching YouTube on the bus without headphones! you either can't hear any sound, or bother everyone around you! bzzt - wrong answer, try again Google!

<comment><USER11> There is no headphone jack, but you can apparently use an adapter to plug standard headphones into the mini-USB jack.

<comment><USER15> ah, excellent, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> the writing style seems super lax for the nytimes , felt more like reading a blog. The g1 is good the battery is the same issue as the iPhone if you use it to surf for 5 hours it's going to get low, give it a week then it will last all day plus ; after the coolness wears a little .

<comment><USER17> It is a blog.</comment></comment>


A New Console for Windows – It's the Open Source Windows Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ANewConsoleForWindowsItsTheOpenSourceWindowsTerminal.aspx <comment><USER2> Nice looking. That's what the windows terminal should have been like. I've always thought that they made the windows terminal ugly and hard to use because they wanted to discourage using the command line in favor of the gui.</comment>


Tempup artists: on tech's version of the sexual revolution - <AUTHOR> http://beyroutey.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/tempup-artists/

<comment><USER2> Good read. This coincides with my own impression after reading HN for a while. I suppose the problem of "Feature, Not a Company" sets in for any maturing market. But aside from "plumbing" start-ups discussed on HN (like Heroku, Phpfog or Parse), I rarely see anything that would be viable as a long term stand-alone business, as many of our business-side colleagues would also assert via "Porter's Five Forces"-type analysis. So I guess now it's all about making a quick lottery ticket type start-up and trying to get acquired. That's why you need VCs, 'cause they can negotiate a much higher price for your little company that you can.

<comment><USER3> VCs _hate_ acqu-hiring. It murders their returns: they'd far rather you take a 50% risk of failure to get 5x the offer and _can and do screw entrepreneurs by forcing them to turn down life changing money to do just that_. Their business model means if you can't 10x investments they do not want you and acqu-hiring will not 10x any investment past seed stage.

Acqu-hires are really, really not the main game being played at startup incubators or in the Valley. To the extent that HN believes this, HN's zeitgeist believes something which is at odds with measurable features of the material world. (e.g. To use YC as an example, if _every company other than Dropbox_ sells for 1 million an engineer, Dropbox is still the majority of the portfolio!).

<comment><USER4> I'm a little mystified by this idea, can you help me out?

When you filter "all startups" by "the sort of startups I am likely to start", that search query doesn't terminate at a factory in China, or negotiating to buy a hundred racks at Rackspace. It terminates with three software developers in the spare bedroom for a quarter, at which point ideally a continuous revenue stream has been generated that can fund the next project.

By analogy, the fact that most furniture purchased in America is mass-produced is not really relevant to a master woodworker, if demand for his work far exceeds supply. You can make the argument that he is "at odds with measurable features of the material world", but I believe a fairer characterization would be that his value system is just different than IKEA's, that they exist in different markets.

<comment><USER3> I wish you, the author, and everyone else happiness. I am really not trying to convince you of the moral righteousness of the VC value system, which I don't participate in directly. I'm just trying to explain accurately how it actually functions: _anyone who says that VCs are aiming for acqu-hire exits is mistaken_. Don't believe it, don't repeat it, don't make consequential decisions based on it: it will not end well!

<comment><USER5> VCs tend to like acquisitions like that a lot more than they do outright failures, especially if they get some or all of their investment back. Same player shoots again.

Think of them as the emergency landing instead of as an alternative exit and it may start to make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In almost every case these investments are part of a portfolio for the investors. Seems unrealistic to expect anything less from the founders.</comment>


Uzbl: a browser that complies with the Unix philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/Dieterbe/uzbl/tree/master

<comment><USER2> This stems from a three page[1] discussion on the Arch Linux forums. And there are the five pages[2] discussing its developement.

It could turn out pretty good, as the *box window managers compare to heavy desktop environments. It could also turn out pretty bad, like if someone thought emacs was too kitchen-sinky and so rebuilt TECO.

[1] <http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=67463>

[2] <http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=70700>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's amusing to see that for the author the unix philosophy means that it comes with no convenience features.

The problem, imo, is that his browser is still made to be used by humans. I see interesting uses for it though, for instance it could relieve the pain of parsing html with a script.

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe browsers do one thing and one thing well, and that's browse the web.

<comment><USER5> That's pretty vague. "Browsing the Web" includes and is not limited to:

\- Watching videos \- Listening to music \- E-mail \- Word processing/spreadsheets/etc \- Video/audio calls \- HN and other discussion sites \- Blogs

The Web itself has become highly generalized, to the point where a Unix-style Web browser seems superficial. It seems to be little more than a cleaner and more extensible browser design.</comment></comment>


Unexpected Life Found in the Ocean's Deepest Trench - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/25/372894314/unexpected-life-found-in-the-oceans-deepest-trench <comment><USER2> This is why the term "habitable zone" can be a bit laughable.

<comment><USER3> So far as has been observed, life does require liquid water. Some life can cease activity when dry and then restart when water resumes, but no life has been found that can live in an entirely dry environment. If this proves to be a requirement for life, that does validate the notion of a habitable zone.

<comment><USER2> > So far as has been observed, life does require liquid water.

That's a bit like a newborn baby saying "so far as has been observed, there are only a couple people in existence".

<comment><USER4> That strikes me as a reasonable assumption to hold, pending evidence to the contrary.

<comment><USER2> A baby doesn't have evidence that there's stuff outside his/her perceptions. We do - knowing that we keep finding extremophiles in hot springs and underground rocks and water in unexpected places like Mars and Europa, we should be a lot more careful than a baby when we say "this is how it is".

<comment><USER5> But then again, this is an universal counterargument and can be used to dismiss any kind of selection as hubris. We need to act to the best the information available allows us and learn from mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what functionality eyes serve at that depth, and if none, why do the fish that live at these depths have them?

<comment><USER7> That reminds me of something I didn't really like about the otherwise excellent Europa Report.

<rot13> Jul jbhyq gur Rhebcn perngherf unir ribyirq ovbyhzvarfprapr, naq rfcrpvnyyl gur novyvgl gb hfr vg sbe pbzzhavpngvba, tvira gurve raivebazrag? Nyy yvsr ba Rhebcn jbhyq unir ribyirq va n yvtugyrff bprna, beovgvat n eryngviryl snvag Fha, ohevrq haqre n eryngviryl guvpx pehfg bs vpr. Guvf frrzf yvxr vg jbhyq cerpyhqr gur qrirybczrag bs gur rlr (jr frr gung gur rlr vf fryrpgrq ntnvafg va pnir-qjryyvat svfu, sbe vafgnapr), naq guhf jbhyq znxr ovbyhzvarfprapr varssrpgvir naq na haarprffnel jnfgr bs cerfhznoyl fpnepr erfbheprf. </rot13>

It's not a major point, but it struck me as odd given the otherwise rigorous nature of the film.

<comment><USER2> Yvtug zvtug or cerfrag ba Rhebcn'f bprna sybbe sebz ihypnavfz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, it's surprisingly crowded. This makes me optimistic for exploration of Europa.

<comment><USER9> Apparently in the article it's mostly fueled by surface life; but there is also life around geothermal vents

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how sensitive these forms of life that live in such hostile conditions are to climate change. Perhaps in the future, we will farm them for food once the oceans acidify.

</comment><comment><USER11> When I read articles like this, I think back to the Jeff Goldblum line in Jurassic Park: Life finds a way.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this really unexpected given all the other places life has been found?

</comment><comment><USER13> 95% of seabed is not yet discovered by mankind.</comment>


Indications that gene editing could undo ageing - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/08/65461/scientist-fountain-of-youth-epigenome/ <comment><USER2> "So potent was the rejuvenating treatment used on the mice that they either died after three or four days from cell malfunction or developed tumors that killed them later."

The key to making viable zombies is just around the corner, I can feel it...</comment>


Dropbox Hires Rasmus Andersson, Facebook's Mobile Design Guru - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/dropbox-rasmus-andersson-designer/

<comment><USER4> It seems like they are scoring a lot of really big power players from other great companies. Does it seem like everyone is going there until it goes public for the payout?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think that's pretty inferable. Regardless, Drew and company are doing an amazing job getting all this talent--coming IPO or not, these are a lot of power people coming in and they can't have been easy to attain.

It'll be quite the solid team to showcase to investors come IPO time.

<comment><USER5> But how will the product evolve with that talent?

The sync/sharing/storage aspect of the product is mature given the relative one-dimensionality of file storage.

Storage, Syncing and sharing should be ___transparent_ __to the users - <USER2> clearly, they need to ensure a continued robust, secure service - but one that never gets between a user and their data.

The acquisition of Mailbox is a great move assuming they bolt Mailbox on-top of Dropbox.

What I would like to see is API integrations across services such that I can eventually store all ___MY_ __data in __ _MY_ __account and allow other services access to it.

This could cause an issue for some services - but the fact is that I don't want to host all my mail with gmail, all my pics in FB, etc...

I want a storage glob and a set structure for "pics go here" "docs go here" "mail goes here" and a range of apps that access the data in an authorized, yet ad-hoc manner - but at the end of the day, the data is ___MINE_ __.

<comment><USER6> I'd like this too and might start work on something over the summer. When you say 'my' data I'm assuming you mean 'remains under my control'.

Some of the ideas have been research topics and may ripe for demos later in the year. If you've got s moment, you can check out perscon.net for an overview.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly what I was talking about. There are a ton of challenges - <USER3> obviously this is against what the market/industry is looking to provide (they want to control the service, and see your data as a part of their service)

But we need to move in this direction and have some balance between the user owning their online experience, especially when that experience is an actual extension of who they are - and services that are able to provide portions of that experience in a way where they can be profitable and viable businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facebook has mobile design? Maybe he did the decent bits, and feel free to correct me, but by the evidence of my Android facebook app I'd be glad to be shot of anyone in that department.

<comment><USER8> The design of the app isn't bad, but the implementation is worthless. I don't know if he's responsible, but the slide away panel has inspired a lot of imitation as a design pattern.

<comment><USER7> Ah, yes now that slide away panel is neat! That's decent and better implemented than the Android browser I first saw it on (racking my brains to remember which) but still it's just one innovation. Like putting the coolest new cupholding system in the execrable Dodge Neon. Call me curmudgeonly (I've just had a tooth implant so I have an excuse) but if you're actually in charge of interface and still you can't get overall UX even to be adequate in a major product, then you're not managing and communicating upwards well enough. Yes, I don't know the ins and outs of who owned the whole experience, but understanding the shoddiness of the roll out of their Android product in the past three years is very important!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So a great programmer, a great designer and all round nice kinda guy. I already hate him :/

</comment><comment><USER10> Rasmus is also behind the original design of Spotify interaction design, branding and more. He is one of the most talented designers I know about, this is really good news for Dropbox!

</comment><comment><USER11> He's a developer as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> He was wasted at Facebook. Loved his work till he went there and was disappointed someone with so much potential ended up in that talent black hole of a company

<comment><USER13> As a designer, he should've been able to sell his designs more effectively to the management. While I loved his work at Spotify, I wonder if I did anything significant at Facebook.

<comment><USER14> Or maybe they should've trusted him more given he has a good track record. Quite frankly, I don't think it's an isolated incident given what I've heard from other stellar designers who have left Facebook.

<comment><USER7> Can you tell us more? The interaction product between great designers and an org that can provide the environment which affords their talent to thrive is something which would benefit from some decent narratives.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A proposal for a better bookmarking service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joelewis/readmelater/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> This sounds like a service that I'd like to use, assuming that it had a strong privacy policy (never share my information with anyone, etc.) and was not financed by ads (I'd pay a yearly fee for it).

Another feature that I think is essential is having an effective way to search through my tens of thousands of bookmarks, including an ability to sort them by age. I'm constantly bookmarking articles which are interesting today, but which I'll have no desire to read in a year (e.g., political stories). In fact, it would be nice to be able to give a bookmark an expiration date when I create it, so I won't have to go back and manually purge all these unread bookmarks that I probably will never get around to reading. (Alternatively, there could be a feature that allows me to delete all bookmarks matching a particular hashtag that are older than a certain date.)

<comment><USER3> Auto-purging with an expiry date is a brilliant idea!

I have this huge repository of bookmarks too, most of which has become too outdated for me to visit again.

<comment><USER4> I can vouch that a personal crawler is useful - if a link goes away, I put it in an archive and update the link to The Wayback Machine. It's also nice to have a timestamp showing when the link was last available and the current "title" tag and meta description for the page (along with the original metadata on the date I linked the page.) It makes it easy to prune or correct broken links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds very nice. A feature I'd love to see is not directly a timeout but a periodic reminder. I often start reading something (or I do read it) and then decide that I don't have the time now, but would love to read it (again) sometime. Giving me some of the booksmarks I haven't seen in a while (months) would be great.

Also, obligatory: automatically archive each site that I bookmark. Too often I've found myself trying to return to a bookmark only to find the page gone.

<comment><USER3> Author of the manifesto here. Thanks for the validation.

> A feature I'd love to see is not directly a timeout but a periodic reminder

Makes sense. That's something I had in my mind too. The default behavior will be a timeout-less, periodical reminder. I just felt having a timeout will help me prioritize an article when I'm _in the zone_.

As for me, most times there's this bursts of interest in certain areas (the zone) that gradually fades away with time. I'd like to use the zone, to complete my reading list related to that area of interest and hence the timeout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's great to see ideas on improving something like Pinboard - but I don't think this service is for me. A bookmarking service is just a digital version of my personal bookshelves. Although I often try to organize books in order of priority - I ultimately have come to realize that I prefer a big bucket that I can dip into. I've also gotten much better at looking through my old bookmarks to rediscover good stuff. And cultivating that discipline within is more valuable to me than farming the discipline out to a computer to nag me about.

I realize I am portraying the system in a negative light - but I am tired of being surrounded by automated systems, notifications, reminders and such. I wouldn't be surprised if most people would find this system helpful and very useful. I do believe that as we build massive personal information 'stores' that we are going to continue to need new tools and better archival/navigation skills - this might be part of that, I'm just not on board yet.

<comment><USER3> Your point is completely valid. I wish I have that discipline to go over my bookmarks and read interesting items. Most times, I head over to HN and pick up more items for my reading-list than to go over my bookmarks.

This project should be helpful to people who aren't used to go over bookmarked links periodically unless encouraged to.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely - and I do hope that this project can help you achieve your aim! If you can do that and help others as well - then this will all be _very_ worthwhile. For myself, I feel like I get too caught up in solving my problems technologically, when the problems are human. Curating my links was very repellant at first, but has now become a favorite past time now that I feel some competence. But good luck to you - we are all different, with very different motivations and struggles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds interesting. I'm using a mix of Pocket, Todoist and an "inbox" browser bookmarks folder to handle my reading list. It kind of works, but I'm not 100% happy with this setup. While I like your "expire date" idea, for me personally it's more important to not get every interesting resource that I find onto my reading list in the first place.

A shameless plug - I have written Static Marks [1], my own bookmarking app. I'm using it for most of my regular bookmarks. I've tried using it for my reading list as well, but I've came to the same result as you did - I rarely went through the list to actually consume the content.

[1] [https://darekkay.com/static-marks/](https://darekkay.com/static-marks/)</comment>


Introduction to Copyright Law (MIT OpenCourseware) - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-912-introduction-to-copyright-law-january-iap-2006/

<comment><USER2> I just watched the introduction. It's much better than I expected. It's taught from an engineering perspective, so it's not only easy to follow without any pre-requisite law understanding. But it's also very relatable to our world. I specially loved when he said: "Argument from authority, which is a logical fallacy in science. Is how things are done in law."

Which reminded me from a quote by Neil. D. Tyson: "Eye witness testimony is the lowest form of authority in science. Which is sad, because it's the highest form of authority in a court of law."

This first video already cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had, and have read in the internet, including here in HN. I'm looking forward for finishing the course. I recommend this for any tech entrepreneur, and already shared it with my startup colleagues and friends.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got a system where I download the videos, convert them to mp3, rename them and order them, then burn them to an audio CD and listen to them during my commute. It takes me about 1.5 hours to do this. I wish there was a button: "CD image to burn mp3's to CD (for CD players that can play mp3)", and "download CD audio image to burn to 80 min CD".

<comment><AUTHOR> You should build this. I've often wanted to be able to have a button which will bundle OCW materials for offline use. Seems well within the terms of the licence.</comment></comment>


Why Live Chat Software Reviews Suck? - <AUTHOR> http://www.livechatinc.com/live-chat-software-reviews/

<comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about code reviews. Instead it appears to be advertising submitted by someone whose account was created an hour and a half before this was submitted.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is advertising or what?</comment>


Irish Lottery: Light trick 'caused number change' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41549781 <comment><USER2> That's why security fonts were invented.</comment>


A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/science/16obpitcher.html

<comment><USER2> There are few things plants like more than animal and human waste. I did an experiment in highschool about the filtering ability of native plant species. This was Florida in the mid-nineties. SE Water management district gave me a and a few biologists a 2 acre plot of land near the waste water processing plant and let me have at it. Using treated grey water, a bog was started at one end with rows and rows of sawgrass. The water that made it to the end was crystal clear.

After the experiments were done and went off to college, to pursue CS of all things. The district sold the land to developers who built yet another unneeded warehouse/stripmall in South Florida.

Later on the state and Fed went on to a billion dollar buying spree of tracts of land through the middle of the state. Those experiments are still continuing there 10 years after I published my results.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be awesome if someone could engineer houseplants like these, except on steroids, so they could handle larger loads more quickly.

<comment><USER4> Why can't the whole house clean itself? Nature manages it, somehow. There could be ants from the pharmacy to replace hovering and so on ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's called a lemon tree, and used to be a standard sight in just about every Australian backyard

<comment><USER6> Is _that_ why the song says "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat"?

<comment><USER7> Showing your age there...

<comment><USER6> I learned the song when I was just a lad of ten.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"Form follows function," Dr. Moran said. N. lowii's bowls "even look like toilets," he added, "though we were too polite to say that in the paper."_

Take note, students! There's no hope of those journal articles becoming less boring anytime soon. The writing process kills even modest attempts at on- topic humor...

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it somehow cool that there are people who have studied poop-eating plants for 20 years. Are there really 20 years worth of knowledge there?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but it's all crap. :D We're only just discovering the contributions of plants like this, usually when they disappear, eg mangrove forests in Florida.</comment></comment>


Retail Brokers and Price Improvement - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mkogan4/price-improvement-and-best-execution-8bd87e6aa7e3 <comment><USER2> In the long run, execution speed averages out for small investors.

<comment><AUTHOR> perhaps you mean execution quality? speed doesn't average out. if a broker takes 170 milliseconds to execute on average - that's an eternity.

It's hard to know if execution quality averages out. it's hard to interpret execution statistics such as the ones published by Schwab.</comment></comment>


Sony Finally Admits It Doesn't Own Bach - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it-only-took-public-pressure <comment><USER2> The major issue in this is not the bot/automated process that initially flagged the video (although I don't agree with that either).

The primary issue is that the appeal process was rejected. This shows that either all appeals are rejected outright or the person who was physically responsible for checking it didn't read the appeal or view the video.

I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably assume "this is me personally performing a 300yo song" \- either by reading the appeal notes or viewing the video could assume that it breached copyright.

This is why there needs to be damages / fines for all incorrect appeal rejections. Because if there's no penalty for getting it wrong, there is no motivation for a company to actually do anything about it.

If it costs them $1000 - $10,000 for getting it wrong, it will be more cost effective for them to pay someone $20/h to double check before rejecting an appeal.

<comment><USER3> Somebody presented the idea here on HN the other day about $1 fines - both for individuals and for the music copyright abusers.

The nice thing about this IMO is 1$ is a small amount for me and you, but for a big corporation like sony this will cost them thousands every time it gets invoked (because legal will probably get involved).

Of course it needs to be slightly more advanced I guess but it would be a good start.

<comment><USER4> This is probably a good idea, but it's not really implementable. Google isn't a law enforcement entity, so they are probably not in a position to fine anyone.

And IANAL, but charging for claims is probably not allowed by DMCA.

<comment><USER5> Google can ban youtubers for breaching a threshold of community guidelines.

Apply the same to process to incorrect flagging of copyrighted content. Break the rules, prevent Sony from uploading for a day or two (or some other functionality).

This will never be implemented because there is a symbiosis between a mega content creator and an advertising company.

Sanctioning a producer like Sony would be a sanction against google itself.

I'm afraid the little people will have to suck it up.

<comment><USER6> Or, decentralize, and stop being controlled.

<comment><USER5> I agree. I'm going to give Mastodon a try.

[https://mastodon.social/about](https://mastodon.social/about)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "...And if a takedown notice is wrong, a counter-notice can be sent by someone explaining that they own the work or that it's not infringement..."

I think "if a takedown notice is wrong" \- counternotice need to be sent back with a mandatory bill to pay to compensate for effort of receiving party to prove that takedown notice is invalid. This will curb down this BS practice of frivolous opportunistic notices.

<comment><USER8> That's true of the American legal system as a whole. It generally seems to ignore the cost to the victim of dealing with the legal system...

<comment><USER9> There is no good solution to that problem. Loser pays is even worse as you have to risk the loss if you incorrectly lose in court.

<comment><USER8> Loser or taxpayer pays, based on the judgement of the court?

<comment><USER9> That means I as a taxpayer lose when someone screws up.

<comment><USER8> Some of the time, yeah. It seems a lot better for all of us to front theses costs of government operation rather than foisting all of that cost onto people who were unlucky enough to be wronged or wrongly sued, by no fault of their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Technical solutions to this seem to be hindered by issues that affect other secure systems, such as: how do you _know_ who first published something (trusted/reliable time stamping servers?), and how do you know it's the same content?

As such, I suspect the best system is "hire a bunch of humans to check". And that's expensive, which is fine because it _should be_. These companies try to _completely decimate_ online publications just because it _might_ infringe on their precious properties, and that _needs_ to be a massive cost to deter frivolous takedown notices.

It's kind of amazing that sites so rapidly reached the point of just insta- killing potentially infringing content with no evidence. That has surely crushed some up-and-coming artists who probably said "screw it" after having their platform taken out from under them by mistake.

</comment><comment><USER11> The key take away that I get from this article:

"How many more ways do we need to say that copyright bots and filters don't work? That mandating them, as the European Union is poised to do, is dangerous and shortsighted?"

<comment><USER12> That is assuming that false positives for small artists are something that the big EU publishers worry about. They don't. Destroying the public domain and indie works is acceptable collateral damage for the politicians and a desired secondary effect for the publishers. The copyright filters will work exactly as designed.

<comment><USER11> I'm not assuming that the publishers worry about this -- I'm saying we should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why companies aren't being charged with perjury for putting false information on a takedown form. Prosecute a few of them, and the problem will fix itself.

<comment><USER14> Maybe not perjury, because DCMA takedown requests aren't sworn testimony. But this case isn't even about DCMA. It's just Facebooks takedown service to avoid DCMA invocation.

I'm not even sure who the victim would sue here. Facebook or Sony? Both, I guess, and let them sort it out ;) And yes, maybe in small claims court.

<comment><USER15> The law states you have to include a statement like this in the letter:

 _Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in the notification is both true and accurate, and I have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright(s) involved._

If you don't it should be dismissed outright.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. Didn't know that. But then, how does this apply to takedowns handled by Facebook etc? From what I've read, they aren't actually DMCA takedowns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't it kind of crazy how such a huge company can be so outlandish that it requires the general public and a musician with enough following to question such absurdity to force a human response?

<comment><USER14> That's reminiscent of issues re Google nuking accounts.

<comment><USER17> What gets me about when giant corporations such as Sony or others absurdly overreach like this is that they never publicly say sorry.

Just saying "sorry the process got confused, of course we don't own the works of Bach" would go a long way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems perverse in the context of the copyright legislation being discussed in the EU today.

On one hand, rights holders can indiscriminately send out takedown notices to any they suspect of infringing, and the burden is then placed on the poster to prove that it's OK. On the other hand, sites will be required to police all posts, just in case something infringing is posted.

So #1 - it's OK for the rights holders' bots to be inaccurate, but sites will be punished if theirs are.

and #2 - all responsibilities accrue away from the rightsholders. They get all the rights, but have none of the responsibility or burden for (accurately) watching over those rights.

</comment><comment><USER14> As EFF notes, this is great for him, but horrible generally, in that chances of success against jerks will likely be low.

Also, I wonder about speculation that Sony might have owned copyright for the score that he played.

<comment><USER19> I don't think I want to live with a legal system that claims that my performance (as a human player) of someone else's sheet music is somehow bound by copyright. I draw that line at recorded performances, wherein, say, the orchestra might have reproduction rights to their recording of a public domain work.

I think if the law is any more strict, things like covers wouldn't be able to exist legally, and looooots of genuinely entertaining small-time youtube entertainers that develop their talents by singing or playing covers would suddenly be under legal fire. Even a complete novice can sing along to something on the radio, so trying to claim that they shouldn't be allowed to do so fails my smell test.

<comment><USER20> Covers exist because of intra-music-industry rules: so-called "mechanical licensing". Arrangements and original compositions are very much subject to copyright...so this is the world you're living in, I'm afraid.

<comment><USER14> OK, but does the copyright for a score or an arrangement apply to just the thing itself (as in a file or printout) or also to music performed using that score or arrangement?

<comment><USER21> That's complicated, but here's my layman's understanding.

If you write down an original song in a score, then you have copyright for that song, including performances of that song. This is actually true for any time an original song is first placed in a fixed medium, so if you record a song but don't write it down, then the rules are the same.

If you make a novel arrangement for a public domain song, then you have copyright for that specific arrangement, including performances of that song.

If you transcribe a public domain song, then you may have copyright for that transcription (so if someone were to photocopy it, it may infringe), but you do not get any copyright to songs performed from that transcription.

Radio play of a song pays a fee to the owner of the writer's copyright, but not the performer of a song, so David Paich & Jeff Porcaro (or whomever paid them for ownership of the rights) are getting money every time Wheezer's cover of "Africa" plays on the radio, while Wheezer does not get money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've actually been really curious, does anyone know what kind of algorithm they use to detect similarities?

From what I've read of the tech behind Shazam/SoundHound, I was under the impression that the kind of audio fingerprints produced and indexed relied on the waveform/FFT and rhythmic input being identical, and that a band doing a really accurate cover would never trigger a match because it would be totally different in a million tiny details, the details used for the actual fingerprinting.

But clearly that's not the case here. No two pianists play perfectly alike, so what kind of algorithm is robust enough to match the underlying composition as opposed to the execution of it?

<comment><USER23> There's got to be some fudge factor in algorithms used by e.g. Shazam -- an FFT of a microphone recording is never going to be strictly identical to the FFT of the source material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This just demonstrates how absurd automatic filtering is. It simply equals blind censorship. Usage or presumption of guilt is a common pattern in copyright abuse, from such takedown methods to DRM and other copyright inspired censorship garbage.

</comment><comment><USER25> Earlier thread on this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17923138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17923138)

</comment><comment><USER26> So we went from small copyright violators being able to steal without repercussion to large copyright violators being able to steal without repercussions.

Social media went from one extreme to another. Now the big corporations can exploit social media to rob and steal.

This is exactly what it is. Theft by sony and other large companies. Since social media doesn't punish sony and large corporations for abusing the copyright claim system, they will abuse it.

Small copyright violators get suspended if they continue to abuse the system. Each social media platform has a threshold after which your account is banned. Why are corporations not held to the same standard?

If sony knowingly and willingly makes false claims X number of times, then their account should be banned and they should be prevented from making claims. Otherwise, they will claim everything since there are no consequences.

It's sad how social media went from user/people centric to corporate centric in such a short time. Youtube is no longer "you"tube, it's "CNN/HBO/SNL/Late Night Show"tube now.

<comment><USER27> Everything will devolve to control by rich and powerful unless the public acts to check it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there any reason this can't be done in reverse? (IANAL) Perhaps a small orchestra can put a bunch of stuff online, with copyright of their performance, and then issue takedown notices on all of Sony's versions.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. So what does happen with dueling takedown requests? Do first movers always have the advantage?

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure (not a lawyer). In theory, both request should be squashed, and I think there's a serious penalty for knowingly issuing a bullshit request, but i've never heard of the big guys being sanctioned, perhaps they lean on the excuse that their automated tools generate false positives. So you need to put up the content, and then point crappy automated tools at the big boys, maybe. I'm not gonna do it, but if someone who knew what they were doing managed to generate a ton of takedowns at the large providers, in a legally safe manner, it might at least prove a point and generate some press.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Jian-Yang But will they give Bach all the lost revenue due to takedowns?

<comment><USER29> Is this sarcasm?

<comment><USER6> What if I told you...there was an app on the market...

<comment><USER29> Bach died in 1750.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sony must be brought sternly to account for this fiasco. The penalty for this type of mistake should be costly enough that it will never happen again. If the United States will not update the DMCA to sharply penalize false copyright claims, perhaps North Korea should step in and address the situation.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hopefully the fine will teach them a lesson?

<comment><USER32> Who's getting fined, and by whom?

<comment><USER33> No one. That's the joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not sure why the link to Sony disagreeing that they don't own copyright to Bach links to a tweet by Jeff Bezos.</comment>


Queued At - Share Smarter Across Your Social Networks (Dallas Startup Weekend) - <AUTHOR> http://queued.at/ <comment><USER2> good luck with the pitch! knock 'em down</comment>


A lattice-based cryptographic library in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ldsec/lattigo <comment><USER2> Note that this comes out of a group at EPFL, a university known for cryptography research.

Can anyone explain how they're achieving comparable performance to C++ using Go, for someone who has never programmed in Go?

<comment><USER3> That's surprising to me, because I don't see any SIMD use in this library. I guess the C++ libraries they're comparing against aren't using SIMD either and aren't effectively using autovectorization. I don't believe that the Go compiler autovectorizes.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you are correct, the C++ libraries in this field have decent performance, but generally haven't been tuned to hell yet (though they do tend to use all the algorithmic tricks people know about). Which is good news for those of us writing non-C++ versions of these algorithms because it means state of the art performance isn't all that hard to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The Lattigo library unleashes the potential of lattice-based cryptography in > secure multiparty computation for modern software stacks.

To a layman like myself, what does this mean?

<comment><USER6> Here's my attempt:

 _Lattice-based crypto:_

Regular public-key crypto mostly use one kind of mathematical structures (finite fields) who have a known hard problem (finding the discrete logarithm of a number of a finite field) while the reverse problem (calculate the power of n of a given number) is trivial. You can do crypto on every structure for which it exists such a problem.

Latice are different mathematical structures, for which it exists different kinds of problems that can be used for crypto.

 _secure multiparty computation_

Let say you have some confidential data X and I have some confidential data Y. What we want to do is compute f(X,Y) without sharing the X and Y because we don't trust one another (or any third party).

I hope it helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "RNS-accelerated Fan-Vercauteren version of Brakerski's scale invariant homomorphic"

def outside of my skills ~~ Interesting nonetheless!

<comment><USER4> That's just a fancy way of referencing a particular paper. None of those terms mean anything outside this particular subfield.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lattices seem like they'll have great value, in general, once higher dimensional data structures become common geometric orientations like in crypto apps and databases.

<comment><USER9> Hey! Nice to see someone thinking so, do you think a lattice based database would be a good solution? I just implemented a lattice structure recently and anybody I try talking to about it looks at me like I'm crazy. I thought maybe I got something wrong about the structure but there are so many advantages.</comment></comment>


Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion - <AUTHOR> https://voxeu.org/article/artificial-intelligence-algorithmic-pricing-and-collusion <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the "Tit for Tat" results of simulations of the prisoners' dilemma[1][2], where cooperating strategies won over competing ones.

It also reminds me of _Colossus: The Forbin Project_ [3], a science-fiction movie from 1970 in which a supercomputer in the US and one in the Soviet Union learn to communicate with one another in ways incomprehensible to their human creators and together rule the Earth.

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

[2] - [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner- dilemma/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/)

[3] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbin_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbin_Project)

<comment><USER3> And that observation makes the article doubly weird:

1) Nobody needs an AI to figure out Tit-for-Tat is a good strategy. It isn't complicated.

2) The technical economic term for this collusion is probably something like 'efficient market price', where the sellers have agreed on what the fair price is to offer their service.

Collusion can't mean that the sellers all have an implicitly coordinated price, because the market is always going to settle on an implicitly coordinated price if conditions aren't changing.

Collusion is something like companies agreeing to strategically offer and not offer services to control their competitors. Like, maybe FedEx has a deal where they refuse to carry online goods that aren't bought from Amazon (don't ask me how to implement that), that would be collusion. I'm not getting a service for my online store because there is an exclusionary deal amongst the big players.

<comment><USER4> > The technical economic term for this collusion is probably something like > 'efficient market price'

That's definitely untrue. I mean, clearly an order book shows many sellers with different opinions about what a fair price is, but it would seem reasonable that the price in between the bid and the ask is a close approximation of the efficient market price.

> Collusion can't mean that the sellers all have an implicitly coordinated > price, because the market is always going to settle on an implicitly > coordinated price if conditions aren't changing.

That's also pretty untrue, or so pedantic as to be meaningless. Clearly when orders are fulfilled on a proper bid/ask market, conditions aren't changing in any fundamental sense but the price definitely does.

You're really stuck applying Econ 101 in one of the worst places, retail. Your line of thinking has been completely co-opted by a very specific kind of consumption--buying all your things from the same few stores--where producers benefit from collusion, meaning coordinating pricing, at the zero-sum expense of consumers.

Ordinary consumers _could_ buy their goods at auction, or from artisans, or in pre-sales. Those are much better examples of situations where secular trends could sometimes show the symptoms of collusion without actual collusion. But sellers on Amazon? C'mon man, sellers coordinate prices via implicit information exchange on Amazon in a way that, if they were allowed to, they would just collude straightforwardly to do so.

<comment><USER5> > That's definitely untrue.

I think he meant Efficient Market Hypothesis, which could be posed as a strategy.

> That's also pretty untrue, or so pedantic as to be meaningless.

It's still collusion.

> You're really stuck applying Econ 101 in one of the worst places, retail.

This is Game Theory, not Econ 101. I also think it's one of the best places.

> But sellers on Amazon? C'mon man, sellers coordinate prices via implicit > information exchange on Amazon in a way that, if they were allowed to, they > would just collude straightforwardly to do so.

I've seen it happen. I've even seen collusion with online reviews on there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For the sake of a more informed discussion, here is a copy of the actual paper:

[https://a.qoid.us/SSRN-id3310310.pdf](https://a.qoid.us/SSRN-id3310310.pdf)

(Couldn't find it on Sci-Hub, so I paid $5 for it.)

Edit: in particular, it addresses a question I had after seeing the original article and graph… or tries to:

> On the face of it, one may wonder whether the algorithms are effectively > punishing the deviation, or whether instead the price cuts simply serve to > regain market share. Looking only at the non-deviating firm's behavior, in > fact, it is hard to tell these alternative explanations apart. But if you > focus on the behavior of the deviating firm, the difference becomes perfectly > clear. Given that in the deviation period (i.e., period τ = 1) the rival has > stuck to its old price, in period τ = 2 the deviating algorithm, which > meanwhile has regained control of the pricing, has no reason to cut its > price endogenously unless it is taking part in the punishment itself. If its > only concern were to maintain its market share, the deviating algorithm > would cut its price only in period τ = 3, i.e. after observing the rival's > price reduction in period τ = 2. Actually, however, in period τ = 2 the > deviating algorithm prices almost exactly the same as the other. This > clearly shows that the deviating algorithm is responding not only to its > rival's but also to its own action. Such self-reactive behavior is often > crucial to achieve genuine collusion, and it would be difficult to rationalize > otherwise.

The problem with this explanation is that the "AI" algorithm they're using is ridiculously simple. They talk about its input being "the set of all past prices in the last k periods"… and then, for their main experiment, they _set k to 1_! So unless I'm misunderstanding something, the input at each round literally consists of both players' chosen prices from the immediately previous round; the algorithm has no memory beyond that. So all it knows is that its price is lower than its competitor's; how is it in any way surprising that it would decide to increase the price for the next round?

And yes, I mean increase – the authors seem to claim it "cut its price endogenously", but on the graph, the price clearly increases at τ = 2 compared to τ = 1. It does keep its price "cut" compared to two rounds ago, before the intervention, but again that's not surprising since it only has memory of the last round.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER7> I don't think you are and thanks for the link. I need to read it again more carefully, but on a first read the results seem completely unsurprising. Seems to be a problem with labeling this behavior "collusion" in that it gives more agency to the agents than they deserve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think we are there for some of the lower demand products even though it's not collusion in the strictest sense.

If an algorithm's goal is to match a competitor's price then it's not possible to find a better price for any item.

In theory, those item's prices don't move constantly, therefore, all prices will be the same across the board. As a vendor, all I have to do is hike my product's price and wait for all the competitors to match it and then hike it again. If I'm a large vendor like Amazon then it's only a matter of time until I can sell a product at my designated profit without worrying that a competitor will beat me.

A smaller vendor has no incentive to lower the price since it knows that Amazon can always win the pricing war so they compete on service or other ways.

Before algorithms and the net, this was not feasible on lower priced items so vendors had to set prices independently. Now, it's easy to just match your competitor no matter the price of the item.

It's not a conspiracy by definition but it has the same ultimate result of algorithms rasing prices.

</comment><comment><USER9> Somewhat related, there's a great book, _Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory_ :

      https://www.amazon.com/dp/131662479X

The book is free to download on the author's website, per-chapter, eg. first one:

      https://theory.stanford.edu/~tim/f13/l/l1.pdf

Highly recommended. After reading the first 20 pages I understood why I innately hate buying/selling cars and real-estate in the real world [and why I'd prefer to do it on Ebay].

</comment><comment><USER10> It does not even have to be AI. If there is an area where the bulk of humans contact a single agency to decide their prices for them and that agency then tells every caller the same price (adjusted for quality differences), then you will get this style of collusion.

The agency can merely claim it is doing research on competitors to set prices, which is almost true since it looks at the prices it has told others to charge before giving you a figure.

Which is exactly what is happening with rental housing, the vast bulk of which use a shared revenue management system saas.

<comment><USER11> Also what is happening with wages. Companies relying sharing their wage data with each other through in organizations like Options Impact, and effectively colluding to match each others' comp.

<comment><USER12> > Companies relying sharing their wage data with each other

If the collusion was only accidental, then an enterprising company could _just_ increase their price a tiny bit, and attract better people than their competitors.

<comment><USER10> For this to work, potential employees would have to know about it while competing employers don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Imagine if the big world powers built computers with control over the nuclear arsenals as well as nuclear defense to have superhuman first strike and retaliation capabilities. Imagine if those computers realized that the biggest threat to peace is not the other side but the fact that humans, a warmonger species, control them. Imagine them colluding and trying to establish world control using their nuclear arsenals. Guess the movie title. It's a must watch!

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project)

It's a fantastic movie I ought to rewatch one of these days...

<comment><USER15> Surprised it hasn't been remade. Seems quite appropriate given the fear of machine learning lately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dynamic pricing developer here.

The bigger problem than collusion is the arms race between higher margins and higher ad costs. In the end Facebook and Google will take almost all the margin as consumers see prices rise until they receive zero net value from their purchases.

<comment><USER17> Is there any published evidence that Goggle and Facebrick ads are actually effective? Genuine question.

I don't know anybody who clicks them or takes any notice at all of them but maybe these people exist. I don't know of any company that is wholly reliant on some kind of advertising who uses them. Eg Chanel, Coca Cola etc. I do see a bunch of goog/face advertisements on tv and posters at bus stops where I do also see coke ads.

I don't know of any companies and products who road the early google advert trend to prominence. Do they exist?

My strong suspicion is that the ad industry is drowning in BS and always has been. Data cuts through that so I'd love to see anything that anyone has. Maybe it's not all a giant mountain of con?

<comment><USER5> > Is there any published evidence that Goggle and Facebrick ads are actually > effective?

Effective means ROI positive which is pretty easy to demonstrate.

<comment><USER17> This is a link to published evidence?

<comment><USER5> First, consider that no rational person or business would spend money on any marketing that isn't ROI positive (because then they would just be losing money).

Google and businesses aren't amenable to just sharing all of their confidential marketing data, but here's a birds' eye view:

[https://economicimpact.google.com/](https://economicimpact.google.com/)

<comment><USER17> Colour me unimpressed with a marketing document, unaudited that is literally selling the service. Without saying google are or aren't a con or having any view on it in the absence of real data, Bernie Madoff had marketing documents. There's a good reason to want, actual data.

Businesses do irrational stuff literally all the time. There is no business that has ever existed that was always wholly rational.

No data is no data...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "these autonomous pricing algorithms may independently discover that if they are to make the highest possible profit, they should avoid price wars. That is, they may learn to collude"

No, sorry, not what collusion is. It's pretty much business school 101 that price is a terrible way to compete unless you actually have a sustainable comparable advantage on cost or supply -- most people _already_ do this. Collusion involves an actual agreement of some sort. Even if parties are using the same software that operates with the same strategies, that's hardly different from relatively common knowledge about price competition.

edit: I love the concept, sci-fi-wise, though!

<comment><USER19> Different people can have different versions of the word "collusion" but the important definition is that in the law, and in most countries it does _not_ require an explicit agreement between parties.

<comment><USER20> I'm not aware of any definition of the word collusion, legal or otherwise, that doesn't require an agreement between parties. I can't see how you can have collusion without colluding.

<comment><USER21> 'Tacit collusion' is a real concept; as far as I can tell (as very much a non- expert) it is legal in the US, but there's some ambiguity in the EU.

This (paywalled unless you have academic access) journal article looks very relevant: [https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/advance-article- abstract/doi...](https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/advance-article- abstract/doi/10.1093/jeclap/lpy051/5068278), and there's a blog post by the author here: [https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/business-law- blog/blog/2019/02/tack...](https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/business-law- blog/blog/2019/02/tackling-algorithmic-facilitated-tacit-collusion- proportionate-way)

<comment><USER20> Tacit collusion still requires a tacit agreement. From your linked article:

>In an article published in the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, I argue that such an approach would amount to a reversal of the burden of proof under existing case law, in particular on the prohibition of coordinated facilitating practices. Indeed, following the current position of the Court, in order to establish the existence of a collusive agreement solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence (such as the uniform adoption of an alleged facilitating practice), and without proof of reciprocal contact through direct or indirect communication, the existence of any plausible and legitimate alternative explanation must be ruled out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Neat work, but doesn't behavior require colluding to be considered collusive? Otherwise this is just another neat equilibrium.

<comment><USER23> Well, it's not just a legal question. The problem with colluding is that it involves effectively taking money from the non-colluding parties. And this causes those parties to not want to play anymore. If a small or medium investor know the algorithms are going to cheat them, that investor would not want to play the game and this, illegal or legal, prevents investing.

You have to keep in mind that markets are both a "game" and way that capital can be mobilized by society for productive purposes and one doesn't want to kill this latter aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to see this done, but over a larger scope where pricing agents are continually improving. I might be willing to believe that non-communicative collusion is possible if both agents are at the same "skill." In the real world, agents will be improved periodically to gain an edge over each other.

</comment><comment><USER25> Based on the graph, it looks to me like the agents are just doing some sort of average between the previous prices, and the "ideal" price. This is evidenced by the fact that they both update to the same value immediately post- intervention, and continue to set to about the same values on every subsequent step. The article claims "This kind of self-reactive behaviour is a distinctive sign of genuine collusion," but that seems like a reach.

</comment><comment><USER26> I heard from a friend Amazon dolling out tons of cash to their team of PhDs so they can design automated pricing for certain customers

<comment><USER27> Second that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is not new, it was already discovered (and also theoretically explained) by Steve Keen & Russel Standish (2006):"Profit Maximization, Industry Structure, and Competition: A critique of neoclassical theory". You don't really need AI to that.

Also, Alan Blinder's book Asking About Prices confirms this (and other things) in practice.

</comment><comment><USER29> In the end does this matter - my cost function is to get the most possible with the least effort, but there are case statements in the function labelled "do not rob a bank".

If your AI program commits a crime in the pursuit of your goals, both of you are going to jail, just as if your agent / lawyer / employee does.

</comment><comment><USER30> Side not: Is it illegal for independent contractors to collude on freelance platforms like Fever?

Or could this be considered a trade union?

</comment><comment><USER31> Things like this are how Soylent Green will happen without anyone actually realizing it.

</comment><comment><USER32> But people will compare prices, and alert the media/friends when they find discrepancies.

I've seen the narrative change in the last few years, Fast food was deemed low cost, but a Calorie Per Dollar comparison showed that eating fast food is significant more expensive.

If a single company doesn't play by the rules, the world will be aware of the price difference.

<comment><USER33> This assumes competitive markets which allow them to do anything about it. For example (in the U.S. at least), when your local cable company raises prices for Internet services that effectively signals to the local telco that they can too. Sure, the market notices this but has few, if any, other options. (a big assumption is that you even have the option of both cable and telco ISP service in your area.) If all it takes to end up in this situation are NN's learning that implicit collusion is good for profitability, I'd argue that it really isn't a competitive market.

<comment><USER32> True, heavily regulated government sectors struggle from this(medical for instance), but online is nearly anarchy. I don't see Amazon having ability to screw customers (forever).

And those sectors you are talking about need serious reform that the incumbents DONT want.

<comment><USER33> Regulated sectors are indicators of markets that aren't competitive since regulation tends to come in after it's well past obvious that markets have failed. When Amazon gets to their end game (which they seem to be pretty close to IMO) I think you'll be surprised at how much and long they'll be able to screw customers... after all, most of their competitors will be long gone and the few that remain will be weak so who's going to be able to offer an alternative in the short to intermediate term?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'll admit it. I'm a jealous developer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dangoslen/ill-admit-it-i-m-a-jealous-developer-4c526f0e0abb <comment><USER2> The best developers aren't putting out tons of content or courses. The people putting out popular courses are just the best course developers/marketers.

There are plenty of folks like Tom Christie, who has minimal social media following, but who built Django Rest Framework, which is used by tens of thousands of projects.

The best developers are leaders, whether or not they're thought leaders.

<comment><USER3> I remember reading the iWoz book by Steve Wozniak.

At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog.

It was basically "work alone".

EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."

<comment><USER4> Woz would have been nowhere without Jobs.

Jobs wouldn't have succeeded when he came back without Schiller, Forstall, Cook, Fadell, etc.

<comment><USER3> I took it to mean "get in the zone", not "don't play well with others".

<comment><USER4> How did that whole leaving artists alone to get in the zone work out when Ive wasn't reigned in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content.

It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.

<comment><USER6> I wish we could stop complaints about Medium from showing up on every post from Medium. It's a distraction from the content, and off topic, and yet the complaint shows up with remarkable regularity.

<comment><USER5> The content which you can't read unless you have an account. Post it as a comment and I'll delete mine happily.

<comment><USER7> Right click -> open in incognito tab.

<comment><USER8> Alternatively add a cookie exception to block all cookies from medium. Works a treat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am a good developer, and even better communicator. That said, I have no interest in social media. It just seems so forced.

<comment><USER10> Let's face it, it's not much to do with being a good communicator. People don't go on twitter because they want to be more effective at communicating, they go on twitter because that's where the audience is despite it being a terrible place for communicating complex issues. (Here, let me link you to that 27 tweet thread, which, inexplicably, is 27 separate posts instead of a single post _because we 're insane_).

<comment><USER11> The whole post honestly just sounded like he was jealous of the attention the 'thought leaders' were getting. Not only is jealous a petty thing to be, but that's a particularly petty thing to be jealous of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As Homer Simpson noted^, jealousy and envy mean different things. If you're jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you, whereas an envious person just wants to get other people's success for themself.

^ [https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA](https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA)

<comment><USER13> Where did this idea come from and why is it so often claimed? Never in my life have I heard someone use 'jealousy' in that context, yet it seems to be widely accepted fact on the internet.

<comment><USER14> When I google "define jealous" and "define envy", I read it the same as Homer. I think it's one of those pre-internet "facts" people learned in school.

If you're not aware, "literally" also now literally means "figuratively".

It's memes all the way down.

<comment><USER15> To me that meaning checks out, but is a bit archaic. It's how you might see it used in an older translation of the Bible, or a 19th century translation of the Greek tragedians, or maybe Tolkien, or something like that.

Modern, and especially colloquial, usage tends to be as a synonym of "envious", so far as I know. "I'm jealous of her hair". "His Instagram posts of his beach house make me so jealous". "Stop mocking her car—you're just jealous". I don't think I've ever heard or seen the older meaning intended in colloquial speech or all but the stuffiest of writing in the last 20+ years.

So, as is typical, two useful words have become one word through misuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am 100% part of those developers that is trying to improve their communication skills. Since February I have made it a big focus to try and find a voice.

It's super hard.

English is not my native language, and even if it were, I am not a good communicator. But I started writing tweets and a blog.

It's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I've had a lot of success, I have followers, readers etc... on the other hand, it's very hard to do it without compromising oneself and still finding an audience.

Twitter is also a world on its own. Hell, I don't believe I deserve the following I have and it's very hard to find a style of communication that works for developers on that platform. The result is that it's skews toward short, simple tweets, the simpler the better.

Being a good communicator is important, but it doesn't come without a cost.

<comment><USER17> > But I started writing tweets and a blog.

How did you get started? Any tips on getting dev blog readers (not that I have one yet)?

<comment><USER16> I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced. But I had the luck of writing one blog post that got a lot of traction and to have a website that can generate a bit of traffic to the blog.

The actual writing was really the hard part for me. Putting my knowledge to words is tricky. I struggle with finding topics and how to express them. What worked for now was more of a "whatever, let's just do it" attitude and try different things.

<comment><USER17> > I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very > unexperienced.

Nah, that is exactly why I asked you, and I mean that in a positive way.

Someone very experienced might have very well forgotten how it was when they started, or they might have started when online writing landscape was quite different. Or, worse, they might say "well, I just sent an email to my 5000-member email list, how else would you start a blog?" :)

What is your blog? I dug out [https://duiker101.net/](https://duiker101.net/) but that is returning 404 for me.

<comment><USER16> I put it under the main website, blog.hackertyper.net

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can improve your communication and inspire communities, without stagnating, by de-coupling it from your day-to-day; for example:

\- I'm a developer organizing indie conferences [0]. I'm always described as an "organization kind of guy." I don't go out of my way to influence on programming techniques.

Alternatively there are:

\- Developers who stream their projects, commercial or otherwise. They're well-known because people value insights from seeing someone do technical work.

I'm probably missing other cases of "influencers" who don't slowly stagnate by focusing too much on courses and marketing.

[0] [https://www.handmade-seattle.com](https://www.handmade-seattle.com)

(Forgive the plug; hoping it's relevant.)

</comment><comment> why-el I think this definition of success can be quite entrapping. Certainly, the pool of outstanding developers that do not fit these criteria is huge (in fact, the absolute dominant one, considering how narrow the definition is). As such, if you are a young developer, examine whether this definition suits your career aspirations (it seems to do so for author, which is OK of course), and know that there are many roads to "success".

I used to think the same thing for the better part of my 20s, but not anymore. I am also virtually non-existent online (in the author's sense), but I am quite satisfied with my career. I am of course one data point, but I have many colleagues and ex-colleagues in the same boat.

</comment><comment><USER19> *Envious Developer

(envy is when you desire something that someone else has. jealousy is when you're afraid you'll lose something you have to someone else)

</comment><comment><USER20> > They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail.

Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfabe.

Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. Typing out the code is the least important part of coding and by far the least interesting. But real work doesn't hold the attention of techbro posers long enough to sell ads now does it.

<comment><USER16> No. This is gatekeeping at it's finest. You can say that while they stream they are working on their social media presence more than the codebase, but streaming per-se doesn't stop them from being "real coders".

Everyone codes however they want. What works for you might be different for someone else. And wanting to do it while interacting with an audience or streaming themselves creating something they already know how to do are all completely fine things.

<comment><USER20> Yes. It's gatekeeping borne of jealousy. Keep introverted nerds in tech. Extroverted marketeers took our technology and perverted it into social media.

Woz said of his time building blue boxes purely motivated by intellectual curiosity:

> I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying > to make money. But then I thought we were all pure.

Tech is so impure today it reeks. Bring back the hackers who build things for fun. Bring back the nerds who don't care to make money.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Interactive edition of the Declaration of Independence - <AUTHOR> http://neatline.dclure.org/neatline/show/declaration-of-independence

<comment><USER2> This is cool. The supplementary information is really useful.

Not sure if this is intended or not, but the e's being are rendered kind of like c's for me (chrome, win7).

example: [http://i.imgur.com/IOxeyxO.png](http://i.imgur.com/IOxeyxO.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, weird, definitely not intentional - that may just be something about how the font (IM Fell French Canon, via Google) gets rendered on Windows. I'll see if I can find something better.</comment></comment>


Indiana standardized tests called into question after two days of crashes - <AUTHOR> http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013305030045

<comment><AUTHOR> To give a little context, Indiana's standardized test, the ISTEP, is being administered by computer for the first time. Testing was interrupted then cancelled after the web-based software provided by the vendor, CBT McGraw- Hill, crashed under the load.

I think this is noteworthy because frankly I have some questions both as a parent whose child was "impacted" (she'd call it "saved") by this and a developer. It seems like the contractor should be able to know the exact time, exact numbers and exact behavior of all their users. What are some factors that could lead to this breakdown? I want to know so I can avoid them.</comment>


Wayne Ting, nearly a billionaire. Or how Facebook won - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/12/wayne_ting_nearly_a_billionair.html <comment><USER2> Every new feature Facebook introduced has already been done by someone else. When it started, it was a simple clean website, and that ease of use attracted the initial users. Then Facebook was opened for apps, and there was a flood of zombie/vampire apps, and widgets to customize your page with. Like most geeks, I got sick of those years earlier, having visited enough PHPnuke-based portals and linkspam-based games.

But for many people Facebook was an introduction to the things you could do online. It was a structured, gradual, hand-holding introduction, which is what I think made it work.

<comment><USER3> Also one should recognize that Facebook never let the site degrade to the point that bad features caused people to leave. Appspam was a huge problem, for maybe a month-- then they started incremental steps to limit it, until now when there is so little of it on my Newsfeed I forget there _are_ apps. There is a threshold for people leaving and Facebook always skirts it, never enough to cause a mass exodus however.

<comment><USER4> _until now when there is so little of it on my Newsfeed I forget there are apps_

Recently I thought of trying out a few facebook games, just to see how things have progressed.

I literally could not figure out how to find the games. I have no "games" icon on the left toolbar as I deleted it a while back, and there is seemingly no way to navigate to a list of popular games from anywhere on the site.

I thought that was strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I had a dollar for everybody out there who claims that they were "nearly a billionaire" I'd be a fucking billionaire.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty simple: This article has nothing to do with what happened, only conjecture with hindsight. How many phone calls, or little decisions guided facebook through its early months? Many. Trying to pin down a reason why one site won out over another is just crazy. Things are not 3 variable functions, they are much more complex.

<comment><USER7> I'd say the important thing to take away is the network effect: once you start winning in a race to become the dominant network in a winner-take-all market, you tend to go on winning as long as you don't screw up too badly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Like this write-up by Wesabi's cofounder as to why they lost to mint much beter: <http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint>

<comment><USER9> Nice catch. And reminded me of Netflix's chief product officer summing up all his split testings as "simple trumps complete": [http://www.quora.com/What- types-of-things-does-Netflix-A-B-t...](http://www.quora.com/What-types-of- things-does-Netflix-A-B-test-aside-from-member-sign-up)

I think we're seeing a pattern here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the Social Network: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see a comparison of the competing interfaces. It's not about the functionality -- as Facebook has shown by attaining the large majority of its users after the Notes functionality was included, the ability to blog doesn't keep users away. If you present yourself as a blogging site, however, and no one wants to blog, then you're in for it.

I think it'd be interesting to see if there really was something better about the Facebook interface or if this whole thing should be blamed on network effects. People used Facebook when it was new for the same reason they use it now: the people they know also use it.

<comment><USER12> I was a freshman at Columbia at the time. CUcommunity's interface was MySpace- esque. The first version of Facebook was very spartan. No photos other than your profile pic, no wall, no messages. Basically nothing other than your info page. The upshot was that you used all of Facebook's features and a (small) subset of CUcommunity's.

Facebook was several months ahead on spreading to other schools, and that was huge. Probably the decisive factor. By the time CUcommunity spread (rechristened as CampusNetwork), I think Wayne is right that it was simply way too late. By the beginning of summer 2004, Facebook's position on college campuses was pretty obviously unassailable.

Edit: found some screenshots of CUcommunity/CampusNetwork: <http://www.wikicu.com/CampusNetwork>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Facebook didn't win because of better features. They went for the most valuable and influential users first. I think their initial user base, exclusivity and gradual expansion were their greatest assets.

</comment><comment><USER14> Moral of the story: Do one thing and do it better than everyone.

<comment><USER15> His guess at why Facebook won could easily be wrong.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I suspect that the "users weren't sophisticated enough" is bullshit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wonder who the first hundred or so users of Facebook were, must be amazing to hop onto a site (and a story) like that so early, and to have seen it expand the way it did.

<comment><USER17> My user ID on the houseSYSTEM Facebook was 1; Mark's was 1,234. On Mark's Facebook mine was/is 82, and his was/is 4. I've commented on the experience of being involved and "amazing" is one of many adjectives one could use. It's striking how few people want to hear what I have to say, anyhow.

<comment><USER18> Are you really working on FaceCash? It sounds like a parody.

<comment><USER17> Yes, and it's not. Did you look at the site?

<comment><USER18> Yes I did and it looks great! Are you seeing good adoption? Who are your early users? Any plans of coming to the UK?

(Sorry I realise my earlier comment sounds silly.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A few details in execution and a better name perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER20> Facebook bought close to $40 million of Friendster's patents.

Does Zuck really have over $1 billion in liquid assets?</comment>


Hackers to Trump: Don't Forget Your Base - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/dont-forget-your-base-867d304a94b1 <comment><USER2> Are these Russian hackers because the English was a little choppy?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Be considering this our form of protest. The password for the EQGRP-Auction- Files is CrDj"(;Va.*NdlnzB9M?@K2)#>deB7mN "</comment>


Snapchat Ends Growth Slump, Adds 13M New Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/snapchat-ends-growth-slump-adds-13-million-new-users-1226476 <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder to what extent Snapchat is attractive _because_ it's not part of the giant tech conglomerates and seems to have a slightly more sane approach to privacy than the rest.</comment>