https://panopticlick.eff.org/ <-- check how unique your browser is.
Instead of a script to embed, these firms could provide an API to identify users from the server side. The scripts that captures the profile would be served by the sites themselves rather than from third party services.
Toast.
A possible solution would be anonymize the browser fingerprint, at least in private mode, ie lie about the details of the system.
Google, Mozilla, Opera, can you hear me?
--
Surprisingly, AdBlockPlus doesn't seem to block it.
Edit: actually it's LeadLander.com as pointed out by NiekvdMaas here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891764
We can tell the world all day long this is Bad and Unsafe, but within six months it'll be more popular than ad retargeting and the meebo crapbar (because, hey, analytics!).
It's pretty easy to guess company name from IP address, especially if you don't care about accuracy. You can kinda sorta do this in Google Analytics under Audience > Technology > Network. That seems to be roughly what they're doing in the screenshots posted. IMHO, this is not the most serious privacy issue on the web.
I would be very curious to hear exactly what percentage of visitors it is able to supply Name and Email for (and how many of those fields look bogus). This sort of individual-level tracking across sites is obviously possible, but I don't think it's common. Google/DoubleClick do not, as far as I know, do any sort of tracking at the level of an individual's name or email address (And why would they? It's asking for regulatory problems and it doesn't really help them much -- they target ads to groups of similar people based on demographics, not to particular named individuals.)
The second a prospect submits a web form, all that previous web activity is tied to their email address (and any other info you collected via the form). You now have a real lead.
I don't see any privacy issues with this.
What I would see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query "Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?" and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.
The moment you start giving my PII to a company that I didn't voluntarily give it to is when I feel a line has been crossed.
Pharmatrak eventually won on appeal though, arguing that they had no intention of collecting personal information, which exonerated them because only intentional eavesdropping is a crime.
The company in the OP's article could make no such arguments though. I suspect that their main difference is that they make no assurances of confidentiality to the websites using their software the way Pharmatrak did. Which 1) is just really creepy, and 2) sets them up for trouble with users in California, because California's wiretapping statutes say that it's a crime unless both parties agree to it. [3]
[1] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets001737.shtml
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug
[3] I'm not sure if this applies to police, but it definitely does to private parties: http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/california-recording-...
Edit: Added third reference.
The article goes into depth about how much personal information is sent along to advertisers including a popular dating site's apparently anonymized information about drug use, and sexual orientation.
I think we need a non-profit service that defines a set of privacy licenses (akin to CreativeCommons' licenses) which companies can opt to label their websites/apps with. There would be no policing/auditing [2], but companies found to violate the privacy licenses would be obliged to donate a sum to an organization like the EFF.
That the privacy policies would be encompassed by one simple privacy licence badge would allow users to quickly and easily identify a company's privacy policies. I believe users would gravitate toward using services that display this license.
Edit: it appears such a service is in the works - http://privacycommons.org
[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732478440457814...
[2] The auditing process would likely become complex, costly and corruptible
On the other side, most startups including YC ones, use some sort of tracking for analytics to improve usability and internal flow, so advocating against all trackers and for all users installing a blocker is a double edge sword.
It wouldn't completely work here (e.g. EFF's panopticlick could still fairly uniquely identify me, or IP address would give away info if I'm not going through my VPN), but it improves things.
It feels kind of extreme, but it's worth it to me. My experience is not broken that much, and I feel like various sites are aggregating less about me. These tracking technologies not such an issue now, but I foresee at least the possibility of abuse in the future, so I figure I'll do what I can now if it's not too much hassle.
Lastly, at its heart most of this is about advertising, something I know I'm very susceptible to (try as I might to convince myself I'm not). So the better I am at blocking out these things, I think the less money I'll spend in the long run on frivolous nice-to-haves.
I can't imagine that I'm alone in this train of thought.
Proof: http://o7.no/Z0huP7
I get emailed by them for every startup I'm involved with and that first email is mostly the same every time as you can see in that screenshot. (Compare it with the one posted in the article and you'll see).
They seem to be targeting startups and make it look like some big VC firms are visiting your site to get you interested. I'm not sure how they come up with the 'search terms', but I guess they could just look at your META-tags or make them up.
In their email they do say it's a "mock example", but still I find it very deceptive.
Today, I get an email from a site that I visited yesterday and haven't heard from in 6+ months. It's too much of a coincidence for me to assume it's random so I dig into their website a little and they're using one of these services.
TL;DR: even though I'm relatively paranoid with giving out details online, one of these networks seems to have successfully identified me and provided my email to a website that I visited, who then reached out and tried to sell me shit.
What's the big deal?
"Do I _have_ to give you my number before I buy this?"
"yes, but it's for return purposes only"
Of course I received 'promotional' txts the next week. I was hesitant to give it to them for just this reason, and because I acknowledged I had a phone number I felt obligated to give it to him. Dick Smith is a member of a larger chain it's no stretch of the imagination to hook up CCTV cameras to an OpenCV instance and send txts to customers when they walk in.
No matter the law, morals people hold, or customer wants large companies are always motivated by profit margins. The Consumer Guarantees Act, the Privacy Act, the Bill of Rights Act all become murky when you're dealing with new technology, and law will find it hard to keep up.
That said since a (very) long time I'm using separate Linux user accounts to: check my professional email + G+, surf my personal email + G+ + FB (my FB is using a fake but plausible name) and a third one to surf the Web.
The one surfing the Web is linked to a fake online identity: entirely made up, with fake friends / fake G+ circles, fake StackOverflow / OpenID and basically fake everything.
I then only ever surf using a transparent proxy for anything "work related": the IP can't be linked to my fake IP.
It's not difficult to set up: I did set up the transparent company Web proxy (VPN would to too) myself and basically Linux user accounts take care of the rest.
Now I'll start using different browsers too and, why not, maybe Tor in one of the account.
I take it I could take all this a step further and whitelist websites that my "personal" account is allowed to connect to (using iptables' owner-uid mod).
After that, I looked at the URL-bar and it took that long for me to click.
Say you own a sports website, a fashion website, a political website, and a gaming website. The user only specifies a tiny bit of information on each website. Each bit is collected into a single user profile from which they can refer to do things like figure out what product advertisements to show them. They use the same techniques to identify users that don't have accounts, and still collect their viewing/interacting habits and add them to the profile.
Sometimes they'll send you an e-mail telling you to check out their gaming website if you're not signed up, because the comments you write in their other websites' forums have to do with gaming. Sometimes they just sell the information to a gaming company. In the case of Target, they might send your teenage daughter a list of baby products for the little one you didn't know she was expecting.
This is not some horrifying violation of privacy. There is a price for all the free shit you get from the internet. Usually it's paid for by all the personal information you leak onto the net. They're just mopping it up and selling it back to you.
I.e. if I have to fill out a form somewhere, I would not only submit it once, but several times (ideally automated), ideally with realistic data, i.e. other businesses in my area (so geo-location won't raise a red flag then).
If I visit the next website which employs the same network, they can't really identify me - they have a big set of businesses I could possibly be (or they just take the last one, which would be fake).
At least currently, they do not seem to verify whether the filled out form can be properly validated, i.e. if the user clicked on a confirmation mail or similar.
Anonymity by obscurity :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-ZLw2Q7U2M
and the company: http://www.immersivelabs.com/
http://occupycorporatism.com/disney-biometrics-and-the-depar...
and "A front page HN story about how being on the front page of HN changed my business"
and "A rambling article about how voting is broken on HN"
and "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup"
Anybody interested in more, I refer you to my javascript parody of two years ago, "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline": http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731
item from a different URL
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=193b767bbb3b0eb0d949d592...
two months ago. (That is shown by the date on both submitted mock front pages of HN, and by their identical text.) It's funny, and memorable enough that I still recall the last time this was posted.
Despite this being a parody, I would still like to point out "a labor of love you can say mean things about". I have seen it happen here way too often. Someone posts something and the crowd goes wild - "this is a feature not a product", "as a designer I can tell you you suck", "another cool aid drinkers pretending node.js is cool" etc. Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it. And the worse part is, you pretend you were doing him a favor - "I was only giving feedback which the poster asked for". The poster asked for feedback, not for insults. It doesn't matter if you are a programming god(most of the people doing it aren't, but still) - there is a difference between feedback and "look at this pathetic shit thinking he is worth anything".
I am sure I am not the only one who thinks people go overboard with their so-called feedback. pg especially made a post about the flood of launches coming in and being nice to them.
Please be nice to them. For you their launch may be "yet another YC startup," but for each individual startup this is their big moment.
So, guys, should I or should I not learn to code? :D.
http://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/
Some of the examples look curiously close to actual news, but they're all random. Really.
It also turns up as the first hit for "hacker news parody" or "hn parody" on Google.
"10 mistakes that I made during my unsuccessful YC interview, 9 of which PG probably didn't even notice"
"Show HN: My first (read: I'm younger than you) app I hacked up in less than 20 mins (read: I'm smarter than you), because I had nothing else to do (read: don't feel too cozy in your job, cuz I'm dropping out of college any day [if my parents agree, that is])"
"How I made big bucks with something so trivial that I'm surprised my cleaning lady did not think of it before me"
"Apple is no longer as innovative as they were 5 minutes ago"
Plenty of discussions that mix a lot of fancy Latin expressions and Scotsmen
Recruiter: a derogatory term for somebody that knows less about a specific field than than the experts in that field they hire
Fanboy: favoriteGadget.brand != other.favoriteGadget.brand
Fanboy of a Recruiter: greatest insult on HN
The next level is a realization that it isn't any different form /b/ - just a flow of a community-generated content about some buzzwords.))
Well, we must admit that a distribution of our interests is a little bit broader, but it is a substitution-based activity nevertheless.)
..but then some other guy would defend it by saying "but it is hacker-y, etc"
"Woz disagrees with something Apple does."
"Why this wildly successful and profitable company is doomed. Someday."
"Commonly-used technology is obsolete."
"You are not cool enough to succeed, especially if you are in any way successful. Please develop impostor syndrome."
To complete the picture, i would really like to respond here with a very long-form comment of at least 8 paragraphs, in which i address one by one a number of points that irritated me in a boastful way that makes my arguments sound authoritative and deep, while in reality it's just my brain-fart of the moment. I should also add a couple of references in square brackets, because that's what scientists do[1] and people seem to believe scientists (what's more, the most respected scientific journals use the vancouver reference style, which makes me look even more knowledgable). Because of the outrageousness of my long-form comment (and because it takes up a large portion of the screen real estate), people will upvote me and respond with equally half-cooked comments , some of them applying Godwin's law, and others merely acknowledging this application of the law.
Unfortunately, i barely made it to 3 paragraphs and i 've more or less run out of stupid things to say.
Looking forward to the new version of your website that will be implemented in a single var javascript statement, because that's my favorite programming paradigm this afternoon.
[1] they really do
When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.
Poor choice, imho. I'm curious what the actual overhead is for people like me. I have 1 account (as in: 1 email address) that is hosted by google apps. I was going to set up an account for one of my other domains, but not for $50/year. (Per account!)
So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA because o my familiarity with it.
But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free: https://domains.live.com/ I wonder what things will look like when we evaluate google apps next year?
by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.
One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space.
Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.
[discuss :)]
I can't tell you how many small forays into new business ideas I and other folks I know have used google apps to kick off. For a business at high risk of failure and no budget in the early idea stages it was so useful to be able to stitch together a team and workflow really quickly using google apps to see how things pan out. This puts a real damper on kicking off new collaborative ideas
If you want a guide, this one seems pretty good:
http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-do...
Between the mistaken despair over having no good free alternatives to Google Apps and the platitudes and awe over the Gmail/Google Drive integration (which Hotmail/Skydrive have had the exact equivalent of for years) a couple weeks back, I'm starting to wonder why nobody here, when they are all quite tech-literate, seems to have any clue about Microsoft's honestly rather impressive cloud offering.
Most likely they're all in denial.
If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.
I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.
I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.
Anyone working on something like this?
No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value.
US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.
So this move is going to add $600 per year to our costs - all for virtual accounts that don't actually use Google Apps at all.
Hopefully this was unintended, and Google will continue to provide free accounts for domains linked to Appengine apps - or provide another mechanism for linking and authorising sending addresses.
I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.
I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.
I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.
Their strategy is to grow the web. This works because they make more money from the web being used. It also makes people love Google, which is important because switching search engines is easy. The love also helps in hiring.
However... they have introduced internal cost accounting, so that products must pay their way - a little internal market. IMHO, this is potentially dangerous, since there already is a market (the real one), and it ignores the advantages of a firm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)
But they don't follow it absolutely, e.g. android isn't paying its way. (NB: Apple is focussed on making better products, not on growing the web).
If google can see that other firms are better placed to do a better job of growing the web in some respect (or they can apply pressure on them to do so), they are happy to step aside.
Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
Not to mention that I cringed throughout this announcement. They are doing it because it benefits users? C'mon, just tell us you love the money, nothing wrong with that.
Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please.
This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion.
The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors.
The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).
I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.
This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.
Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.
1) On giving too much away…
Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-...
At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long.
2) On Charging too low...
Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing. Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier).
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.
Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice.
It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.
They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.
I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.
It's certainly not worth $50 per year because the little ones get maybe 1 email a month from grandma. Since Google does not allow kids on gmail, where should families go now?
1. Google: can focus on customer service,
2. Google's share holders: more revenue,
3. Competitors: more competitive advantages,
4. Startups: time to disrupt,
5. Users: Email should be decentralized, why rely on a single provider is a good thing?
There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.
As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.
If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.
It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.
Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.
The first group"small businesses"can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it.
The second group"enthusiasts"even if they could afford it, likely cannot justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay $50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.)
Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users & no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users, limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher price.
I use Google Apps for a small blog that I run and I gave out email addresses to all of the writers. Eventually we had 11 writers and they only allow 10 free so I upgraded that one. People can't do that now. It's either all or nothing.
Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.
Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...
At the very least there will be less potential customers now. I imagine some people would have been willing to pay $0 to Google and $15 per user per month for some kind of project management offering, now it's $65 per month, which is really going to hurt new sign ups.
Also for anyone with an existing free account who wants to add new domains, don't forget you can add domain alias's. So you keep the same account but just make it so email from two+ different domains can come in. For tiny ideas that always have the same 1-2 employees it's almost preferable to a whole new account anyway.
If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this correctly?)
If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now.
Yes, this benefits no one but google. Then again, google has been providing benefit to millions of people with google apps. Running your own e-mail server is not trivial. There's a reason there are no good gmail alternatives--it's harder than it looks.
If I were them, I would have charged for it from the beginning--it's a really useful service. And they could have been real dicks by forcing all current free users to start coughing up dough.
3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other enterprise stuff)
A slick feature rich UI
Custom domains via MX
Solid spam filtering
There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.
Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage. Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a good company.
Likely to be disabled very soon.
This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be free.
Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will get what you pay for - nothing more.
And I don't think there will be "cheaper" alternatives: but I do expect emergence of more expensive and better alternatives (if you can fork $50/year than you can fork $100/year - free is different story).
Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it. Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+ once they have a substantial following.
Forwarders in cPanel simply copy all incoming mail to email@mydomain to myother@email. If I didn't already create an email account email@mydomain, the incoming mail WILL NOT be stored on server which makes this a feasible solution. If I had, incoming mail would be copied to myother@email.
It sucks that they've removed the free version; it's definitely a step up from managing multiple individual gmail accounts or creating a shared account of some sort. (I use one for one of the side jobs I do; it's a pain in the ass.)
However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.
Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.
I'm not liking the direction they're going as I use all of the above frequently (including signing up new domains for GApps regularly). It always comes down to money at the end of the day.
Buy one user account - set up a ton of aliases. Set up filters to Gmail inboxes.
Yeah, that feels dirty... I know.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756314
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-...
What is the definition of a startup these days, anyway?
Having Guido on board to make python its systems language makes sense - and would be enough to tempt him away from google.
Further, donning our tinfoil hats, is it reasonable to suspect that Google is phasing out the use of Python internally? I've heard rumors that Python is no longer permitted for new projects within Google; hoping some Googlers here can confirm or deny this.
Python has been a backbone of Dropbox since its early days as it
allowed the startup to write code once but deploy it across platforms.
Guido is an exceptional engineer as well, not just a guy who knows Python really well. The dude is seriously one of the rare gems in the community.
The article seems to think that Dropbox hired him for his thorough knowledge of Python, which probably had some role in the hiring decision, but I expect that the primary motivation was to acquire an excellent engineer.
IMHO, Python would have been in a far better place if Guido and his team would have been getting paid to maintain and evolve Python, the language, rather than apps and platforms based on Python. I think in the early days at Google he was able to do so, later, appengine took most of his time.
Dropbox is still a startup - despite the substantial investments rounds - since it is still relying on external money (investments) to grow.
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/detail?r=f66cc90304...
PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it.
I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case.
It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site.
In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else.
But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site.
If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped.
Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.
Some potential options:
a) Keep all the facts. Remove conclusory statements which suggest that this is a bad idea.
b) Remove the discouraging facts. Add new facts which tend to not be discouraging, such as "Monthly cable rates are high relative to many B2C products and lifetime values can easily hit the thousands of dollars, allowing you to spend a lot on customer acquisition." Add conclusory statements suggesting that this makes founding a cable company a good idea.
c) Remove discouraging facts about the cable industry, replace with to-do action items which accurately describe the process of how one would set up a cable company (regulatory approvals you'll need, who to hire, how much to raise, etc etc), and very carefully attempt to phrase "Convince investors to stake you with $X0 million" in such a way that it does not sound discouraging.
d) Remove everything about starting a cable company. Treat the question as a springboard about "How to disrupt the cable industry?"
e) Something else?
I would love to know all the things involved in starting an airline. How are planes actually bought? How are mechanics actually procured? What kind of safety regulations are followed? etc.
I once read the book "Starting & Running a Restaurant for Dummies" just to find out how it's done. It's fascinating!
But turning it into a Wiki, for anything, would be so much better. You can have summary sections, that link to fuller articles, you can cross-reference how to hire a chef (both for the restaurant, and for the airline catering), and so on.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378
You asked for advice and received some great information. Just because the overwhelming advice is "This is not a great idea, you will need a lot of money to fight established, entrenched businesses" doesn't mean the advice was unhelpful.
Did you want everyone to sugar coat their opinions with "Yeah! Go get them tiger! We believe in you!", or did you want serious advice that can lead you to making an informed, rational decision?
If you were a CEO of a company, would you want your employees to tell you whatever you wanted to hear ("yes-men"), or would you want people who actually advised you and helped make an appropriate decision (even when it may be counter to your opinion)?
I agree there is a very large snarky dick contingent on HN who pollute potentially productive conversations with "What a stupid idea" type of comments. (Unfortunately I think this is a symptom of the human race, not just HN.)
However, there are some exceptionally bright people who hang out here who I would love to just brainstorm with--throw ideas out and see what happens. This site has an above-average level of these people I think.
I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Even if I have no interest in starting a new courier service or whatever, I find it quite enjoyable to take the lessons and skills that I've learned and apply them in a new problem space. I especially love hearing feedback on those ideas from people who've worked in those spaces.
The most promising ideas are the ones that might sound dumb to someone entrenched in tradition.
"I want to launch a new courier service. How would I get started?"
This seems much more in the 'fishing for ideas' stage and hoping you can crowd source the process of creating your business while paying nothing for the privilege. Most people aren't going to help you.
"I've started planning my new courier service. It will be mostly in the healthcare industry as hospitals are over-paying on delivery costs of fragile medicine. I've worked out some ideas on how I can better fit and transport fragile medicine. However, I don't know how I would get contacts in the medical industry to test drive the technology. Who should I try and talk to and does anybody know of any existing studies into this? Anybody work in the field of transporting fragile goods and know what certifications are required?"
This is much more in the field of 'asking for feedback' and is very unlikely to be brushed aside.
Trebuchets using only materials in the office. Conquering South Africa. Lesbian strip clubs. Realistic world domination. What the world would look like if D&D rules actually applied. AI for storytelling. Etc.
Regardless of how ridiculous the premise, they'll work on it until they have at least a plausible solution. Ignoring impossibilities and slim chances and jumping straight into brainstorming and crazy ideas is a lot of fun. I'd rather have more of those conversations.
If you want to build a cable company, a payments system, a new government, or colonize mars there is no high level answer. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sub-questions that need to be answered. Eventually so many that you need to hire people to ask and answer them, and you won't even know what the question was.
The truth is that if you really want to go to space, no one will help you. Not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't. We can speculate, and dig up research or law or economics---but at the end of the day, all you're doing is inviting us to help design your bikeshed. If you can break down the problem, figure out which questions to ask, what information you don't have, and who does, that person might be able to help you. By the time you've gotten that far, you're already on the verge of sinking your life into this---and if you want to build a cable company, that's what it's going to take.
The hard part of the process (and I believe the limiting factor in a new company's success), is arranging the contracts with the content syndicators. Find my e-mail in my profile if you're serious.
This would have been both more convincing and shorter without the anti-male bit. I realize that western media is pretty insensitive to this variety of sexism, but a quick test is to try substituting "black", "female", or "Jewish" where you've written "male". If it sounds offensive, then it probably is.
I think the original question is worth picking apart if the answers are being criticized.
>Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?
> I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started?
The original question is worse (by a long way) than most of the answers. Most of the answers pointed out the major challenges or suggested better ways to achieve the vaguely stated aims although there were some useless dismissals.
The question indicates (possibly wrongly) a massive lack of understanding of the business "Basically, my understanding...[something basically right but oversimplified]". It is badly punctuated "fox" rather than "Fox", 'dont' rather than "don't". The question also fails to really be clear about what he wants to do. Does he really want to run a cable company maintaining wires in the ground and boxes in homes? Or is this mostly about securing more favorable and flexible content deals? Or is there an implicit assumption that he needs to own the cables to get the deals? What scale does he want to start on? A small town/city or national?
I didn't see the original question while it was active but if I did I would have pointed out how hard such a business is to break into especially if top grade content is required due to the maze of exclusivity contracts and the value of them which means massive amounts of money are needed to make the sellers choose non-exclusive options. Even companies like Microsoft and Sony with massive deployed platforms (Xbox and PS3 in particular) need prolonged negotiations to get any content and aren't anywhere near being able to offer full cable replacements and even with their own content Sony can offer only what is not exclusively licensed elsewhere.
However that doesn't mean that the video space can't be attacked as Netflix is showing but it will in my view need to be an indirect attack that builds audience until it can compete head to head for the major deals and content as a viable distribution platform and pricing model. Note that when the competition really starts costs may rise not fall as the platforms will compete for the most important content potentially driving up content prices for all the distribution platforms.
Asking people for the miracle upon which you'd like to build a business, that anyone could build given that miracle, isn't a request for constructive feedback. At its absolute best it is a request for an IP handout.
In an analagous fashion the "quality" (using karma as a metric of quality) of comments on HN are also quite high and drop off steeply approaching zero. This is reflected both in the comments, and in the karma distribution [1]. The trick is to keep the noise floor high enough for quality reading and low enough that you don't miss out on new people making great comments.
It wasn't a frighteningly ambitious start-up. It was the same old idea, done hundreds of times across multiple countries, with a minor adjustment in its pricing structure.
There was some interesting analysis and procedures in that thread about how to go about it, but the best post for the OP was really about how, as a company, he would be paying to license certain channels, and if users only subscribed to one or two instead of all of them, he wouldn't make enough money to keep in business.
As a user he can whine and complain all he wants about a la carte being rare, but as a business, he has to make enough money to keep running and he didn't understand that. Pointing out big problems in his plan is doing him a favor because he can then change the plan or address them.
Why can group-mulling of ideas, be a terrific endeavor?
1) It can stress-test your idea and expose the glaringly gaping holes you might have overlooked, in the very fashioning of the prospect itself.
2)Some ideas may not lend to "socialization" because of their inherent nature. Helps to have them flagged -- if not decimated -- before you even begin.
Eg: A startup seeking to disrupt the litigation law market isn't very readily socialize-able as one targeting the fitness trainer market.
3) The group-mulling process need not be just one-way beneficial. The "mullers" stand to benefit from having their horizons broadened too.
They might for once realize, that there are entire industries -- non-glamorous but nonetheless high gravity, real-impact ones -- waiting to be disrupted beyond the Mayorvilles and Filtergrams of the valley.
This kind of mulling happens on Quora all the time.
HN should encourage it.
Again you are just being asked to mull.
Not leak insights from the equity-research desk at Goldman Sachs.
Chill with the dressing-downs.
' I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started?'
This, to me, reeks of laziness. The OP would have done better to say 'this is what I've done, research, and/or these are the ideas I have. Am I right, wrong, or close?'
So problem #1 is that, from the looks of it, the OP didn't do any research before asking the question.
Problem #2 is that the question is a lazy one.
I can guarantee you that Elon didn't ask these type of questions, but instead presented lists of assertions and hypothesis which he was prepared to test and/or validate.
A really good story related to all of this is the way Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic: http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-a... couldn't find a better source, but I heard him tell the same story at an event)
"Q: How do you know when you're thinking too big or aiming too high (if that's even possible)?"
"A: In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with
(...)
My real problem was: I didn't have confidence. And I didn't know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should've written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would've been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff."
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/how-do-you-know-when-youre-thin...
Because the inquiring mind did zero research and asked a question so broad and so vague that it was impossible for anyone to answer it without months of work and very specific knowledge.
To quote Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I don't think anyone was wanting to sit and spend hours explaining to the author how to do something incredibly difficult and complex without the author putting anything forward. Why not just take that knowledge and do it myself?
I love this idea and I think we should run with it. Go to:
http://howdoistart.wikispaces.com/
and edit away!
This doesn't mean reading it's Wikipedia entry.
Ideally, it means spending several years working for the current market leader in that space.
Barring that, reading as much as you can about the history, economics, mechanics, and current players in that space.
If possible, become a customer of one or two of the market leaders. If that is not feasible, again get to know people who are customers (again they may become your first target customers).
Befriend several people who do work in that space (they could become your first hires).
The deeper your understanding and experience in a market, the more likely you will succeed in disrupting it.
Elon Musk started from very low hanging fruits for him, whose success enabled him to move on with more ambitious goals. This model is easily replicable, so if you have ambitious goals, first build capital with something easier. Which, I think, most of people here are doing.
But I do always find myself needing to point out: Hacker News is the most constructive and positive community on the internet. Yes there are lots of dicks and know-it-alls with "why didn't they just do this?" syndrome, but you won't find another anonymous discussion based community of this quality anywhere.
Using your example of Elon Musk, you can see even his start ups have a progression of ambition. That is, space travel and electric car companies are much less feasible than a payment system or news site.
What is the difference between Musk and you today? Simple. Investors trust him with large sums of money since he has led successful companies before.
There is a reason YC companies generally have low capital requirements. That is the lack of track record of the founders (and that business experience does matter).
For your cable idea, the path towards that goal may very well be starting other companies first. Or be an industry insider who has the experience and connections to convince the incumbents to invest in you (like Pandora).
"Hey Gaius, weren't you going to build a Cylon detector? You talked about it for months"
"Yeah, but it was too hard and I didn't know how to start"
"You suck"
A more practical benefit of telling all the people you meet is that one of them might know or be associated with someone who is connected with the industry.
It's called "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started".
+ <script language="JavaScript1.2">
Are you sure, like, really really sure, you want JavaScript 1.2?
+var speed=1
please run jslint on your code before submitting a pull request
There are so many errors that JSLint gives up on this code at 39%.
+temp=document.body.scrollTop
You really shouldn't declare a variable without using var - can lead to all sorts of scoping problems.
Oh, good catch! You should submit a pull request to fix this
+<mass of span elements>
There's a couple of redundant span elements here, when you get time, you could optimise this
+ <p align="center" dir="rtl"> </p>
It's great that you've made sure that non-breaking space is read right to left, your readers would have been screwed otherwise.
+ $bind_port_p="IyEvdXN...<base64 encoded string>";
It's going to be hard to comment on these Base64 encoded C and Perl programs in their current form.
That daemon() function call is going to cause problems on a whole bunch of non-Linux architectures. Solaris doesn't have it for example.
You should definitely consider supporting IPv6, you can't just assume IPv4 connectivity...
You're also missing a return at the end of main().
1911990 is not a good password. Your birthday?
Let's hope you didn't use that for your email account, lovestory8976@yahoo.com
can you use a sha512 hash, instead? it's more secure.
+
Hmm the HTML isnt compliant. Please rebase from master, squash the previous commit and resubmit.
Thanks for your invaluable future contributions
With Githubs ease of merging and automatted testing by Travis, it's easy to forget that changes may be actively malicious and not just buggy.
Edit: un-checking "show inline notes" helps.
Edit 2: So if I understand correctly, OP tried to hack into a website... by submitting code to github. I was confused at first because that would have been (very) wrong way to "hack", but as it turns out, that is indeed true. And rest is about the code he/she used. It seems to be auto generated in some wysiwyg html editor that uses old html.
[0] https://github.com/maxymax/WordPress/commit/2fa93590c7881fab...
Pretty disturbing stuff, to say the least. Combined with the english text about the Zionists leaving Palestine, I just wanted to shed some light on the intention of the defacement.
Or how did he think that he can pull this thing off? is there a "10 ways to hack a website" where a git pull is one of them?
The fact that there is a code snipped a tutorial on "How to Create a Website With Notepad" and the whole thing seems like it came out from an old WYSIWYG editor, the thing obviously was made by a script kiddie.
script kiddies uses git now? wow
Here's last year's winner: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...
Please report? https://github.com/ahmedalex
P.S. If you're not a jerk and would love to help with the new CoderDojo.com site, let me know rebecca (at) coderdojo.com
https://github.com/Incognito/CoderDojo-Kata/commit/d6c4163ab...
Suddenly all the smart comments feel a lot less fun
[1] http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/tikkundaily/israeli-minist...
PROTIP. better than calling someone a sheep.
The idea being that manufacturing was pushed abroad due to the appeal of cheaper labor, without a deep consideration of hidden costs or the overall context of such a transition.
GE, which is featured extensively in the article, actually managed to reduce manufacturing costs by bringing the fabrication of a water heater and other appliances back to American shores " largely due to the faster loop and better communication between designers, engineers, and laborers who all speak the same language and are in the same factory.
Hacker News discussion [2].
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...
Why?
The advantage you have in these cities (almost literally) in China dedicated to manufacturing is that almost the entire supply chain is local and very finely tuned. This is particularly true for operations that might do work for companies like Apple.
The PCB manufacturers, assemblers, chip makers, connector manufacturers, LED manufacturers, display manufactures, plastics and sheet-metal manufacturers and more, are all centrally located. If not, they are within the proximal geographic regions.
The same is true of qualified workers. Need 100,000 assemblers in a hurry? No problem. Technicians, engineers, managers, etc. Lots of them and easy to hire within days of your requirement.
In sharp contrast to this, the supply chain anywhere in the US is most-definitely not localized and highly fragmented. Virtually nothing you are going to use in electronics manufacturing is made in the US. That means that rather than your LEDs being a few hours away by truck they are three weeks away by boat --from China.
In terms of mechanical components, such as screws, well, yes, they are available in the US, of course. The problem is that they will cost more. No question about it. Because our industry, due to the need to survive, has had to focus on market segments that can pay a premium (military, medical, etc.) you can pay through your teeth to get anything made here. That's just the truth.
In terms of machining and bending metal or injecting plastics, well, it depends. If you are dealing with a unionized operation, forget it. Costs will be ridiculous. Plastics, in very large quantities, can be reasonable here. Punching and bending metal or machining metal could be plausible at a very large scale and with a very finely tuned factory.
Let's not add regulatory and tax issues to the pile.
Because of all of this and a few more data points from first-hand experience manufacturing in the US, my guess is that Apple is going to simply import pre-fabricated modules assemblies and parts. They'll have US workers bolt them together and test the finished product. You can slap a "Assembled in the US" (and maybe even "Made in the US" sticker on it and feel good about it.
Remember what Steve Jobs told Obama about manufacturing jobs coming back to the US. I don't think anything significant enough has changed since then to invalidate his statement.
Note two things: 1. I suspect this would be a Foxconn factory, not Apple (note how Tim Cook says "we'll be working with people"); 2. The total investment of the Foxconn factory in Brazil was 5 times bigger, so I suspect that Apple's $100m would cover only a fraction of the total investment required to build a factory in the US.
Regardless, that's good news for the American worker.
Not to be cynical, but I suspect that local, state and federal tax subsidies will yield a positive ROI on the $100 million. This looks like pure PR.
- upcoming changes in tax laws that remove the incentive to move jobs overseas
- IP protection. Its finally sunk in that their Chinese suppliers feed any engineering info straight to the local government.
- increasing jingoism in the United States
- realization that their current line of creating "good American jobs" through their retail chain is falling apart.
- the shine from all of the "good jobs" they created with their NC data center is wearing off.
$100 million is really chump change for this kind of investment for a company like Apple. It's about what Cook made from his first year as Apple CEO.
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/85170-tim-cooks...
Ironically the rest of his statements and the article as a whole are extremely vague. $100MM at Apple scale doesn't seem like very much and since (from the article) they won't be doing it themselves I'd love to hear more about where that money is going.
I'd pay $20 to see the modern equivalent of the NeXT factory for 30 minutes, from an overhead viewing gallery.
Obviously Apple wouldn't want to reveal trade secrets, but I don't think there's much secret about how Apple produces the desktop and laptop products.
[1] http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120123/ARTICLE/301239...
Now the big arena is mobile and this announcement is about Mac lines but it's not hard to believe that this is a tip of the iceberg investment and that Apple might increasingly move to a system of using Foxconn's non-China factories around the world. Apple is partly financing the Brazil plant for Foxconn IIRC.
Another aspect that hasn't been discussed is the opening around the world of rare earth mines (reopening in the case of the California mine). Part of the reason "those jobs [weren't] coming back" was because China's rare earth's monopoly increasingly was reserved for Chinese made products.
Apple spends a lot of shipping too, so I'm sure it's a balancing act between cost of labor/automation/shipping.
I'm willing to bet that the reason they're doing this is exactly the opposite. Integrating their last-stage manufacturing would be a great way of squashing those pesky product leaks from contractors.
Wonder if this is the first step towards a move across all products. It'd make sense to start with a relatively low-volume, high-margin product like the Mac.
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/rethink-...
Moving a plant here doesn't equate to moving manufacturing jobs here. The traditional fear of manufacturing in the USA has been high cost of labor including possible strikes.
If plants are able to replace bulk labor with robots, and have the rest of their labor be engineering-type roles, they'll have no problem moving here.
But it won't bring thousands of jobs, maybe hundreds, although they will be better paid.
I suspect this is to combat negative PR from their overseas subcontractors.
Also there probably is not much savings going on by making these parts in China. The expensive part would be if you were making your own motherboards and chips in the USA. Apple does not need to do it, and gets good PR in the process.
Many of the better museum exhibits tend to tie in things to people's daily life in the present. I searched an anachronistic term, "game of thrones."
The first "image" result for "Mad Men":
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| *************** |
| **** * ***** |
| *** **** |
| * * ** |
| ** ******** * |
| * * **** ** |
| * *** *** * |
| ** ** * * |
| * * * * |
| * * * |
| ***** ****** * * |
| * * ** * |
| **** **** * * |
| ************* * * * ** ** |
| *** * * *** * * * |
| *** * ** * |
| ** ****** ** * |
| ******* ********* **** ******** |
| **** ** *** |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+Quota exceeded :)
Admittedly this was their Dasher D200 (current loop) and LP2 era, but we did sometimes bootstrap DTOS (Diagnostic Tape Operating System) from paper tape if all else failed. We even had a couple of ancient punched card readers in stock for certain oddball customers, just in case.
I used to have a rig that looked like this in my parents dining room:
http://www.chookfest.net/nova3/ebay.html
They made me send it back after a couple of quarters of abnormal electricity bills.
Having to throw a card away because of a typo was somewhat inhibiting.
Quite a contrast to discovering WordPerfect and realizing you can make all kinds of mistakes without such waste.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/11/3754042/google60-google-n...
Sadface :(
Great experience though, props to those who made it!
We invented the "240-column" card to increase data storage (three 4-bit digits per column). Our cards looked like lace doilies. ('7' = 0111)
A real programmer measures his worth by how much he can accomplish, with what little he has. (Cue the penis jokes).
Try playing this the background: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLZGbJ5QE8M
I've been to this national park before. It's a beautiful place, but not one you want to get stuck in unprepared. The temperature estimates given by the police are accurate. It gets damn hot out there. The roads are gravel at best, and often just packed dirt or sand. You can very easily get bogged, if you don't know what you are doing. I got to a point where the road became unsuitable for my car, and I had to drive backwards for nearly 100 metres to get out as there was nowhere to turn. I would be concerned for inexperienced drivers with two-wheel-drive vehicles.
Map data is serious business, and this particular case is an egregious error.
Rangers are frustrated by having defunct roads or paths in GPS navigation systems as roads and having no way to get them removed.
I was traveling in Death Valley recently, and the span of "unpaved road" ran from "better than my driveway" to "I could try, but there is a 50-50 chance this rented jeep[1] isn't coming back."
EOM
[1] If you pass through, spend a day, rent a jeep. Don't do that to your own tires. The rental guy will tell you where to go to see the things you want to see.
Some of the stretches further East of Mildura run 100-200km without petrol stations and supplies. A number of the national parks in those areas are unmanned and irregularly visited, and there can be long periods even on sealed roads where you might not sight another car in an hour of driving. For one stretch (in and out of Mungo National Park), we stocked up on a lot of extra water as a precaution and notified family of our plans. Having an infant with us, I was very conscious of how quickly the temperature can rise once the air-con is off.
Can easily see how people might blindly follow maps/GPS and end up caught out. Especially when you're relying on cached phone maps data if your connection drops, as it does frequently out there.
One of the Apple Maps data sources is GeoNames (geonames.org), a free data source available under a Creative Commons Attribution license and also used with the search on OpenStreetMap. If you search for Mildura at OpenStreetMap (openstreetmap.org) you'll get the correct location of the town, but if you scroll down the GeoNames list you'll also be offered "Mildura Shire" as a search option. Click on that, and the pointer moves to a location similar to the Apple Maps screenshot, about 70km away from the actual town. It seems that's the location that Apple's search has chosen to prioritize, over the actual town.
Mildura Shire is listed in GeoNames as a "second-order administrative division", so it's probably similar to the middle of a county or council area.
This isn't a problem with datasets or incorrect data, it's a problem with how Apple is searching & prioritizing the correct data they already have. Choosing the "town" instead of the "second-order administrative division" would be appropriate here.
For what it's worth, GeoNames already prioritizes the town of Mildura correctly in their search engine.
Frankly, I don't understand Apple's decision in the context of the idea of being customer-focused. In other words, if you, as an organization, make decisions for the benefit of your customers --or, at the very least not to their detriment-- how can you justify pushing out Maps and not keeping Google Maps on there?
OK, I get it. It would have cost more. A lot more. Fine. That's your problem. Pay Google for another five years exactly because you care about your customers. At the same time, put out your own Maps app and --funny enough-- compete on the merits of the app, not the hype.
If in five years you can't turn Maps into an app that people will choose over Google Maps, then, well, why are you in the mapping business in the first place?
-- You should never blindly follow consumer-level GPS. Full stop.
Especially in remote areas/national parks/widerness areas. Hate to say this is "common sense", but really it should be. It really has nothing to do with Apple, the iPhone, or iOS. Its quite the opposite, there are errors on all sorts of digitized maps. Most people are not aware or the vintage of the underlying mapping data (pre-digitization) and the variances of map-set data even amonst variant databases of "real maps".
The bottom line is if you're driving into a wilderness area like a national park, you should not be depending on your cell phone for your own safety. One of the first things they tell you if you read the pamphlet outside of a hiking area is: do not depend on you cell phone.
So sure, the map data is inaccurate. The more dangerous thing about this is that your battery has a finite lifespan. Also your signal is not guaranteed.
You need to bring water, you need to bring supplies. You need to bring warm clothing.
Seriously.
At least this story is hitting the HN front page. Because the park rangers were hitting Google's traditionally deaf customer service ears (which must have been super-frustrating because people had already died and/or gotten into life-threatening situations).
I lost the link to that article, sorry. If I happen upon it, I'll post it here.
On the one hand I suppose it's people's own fault for venturing into dangerous terrain unprepared. But on the other hand, what's the use of having GPS Maps when you don't know when it's trustworthy or not? Great effort by OpenStreetMap (read below) of cross-checking their own maps for consistency with competitor maps, is at least a step in the right direction.
FYI, when you travel make sure to bring extra clothes, water and food. Australia is a massive land mass and it is hard to fathom for people form a lot of countries that it can be a very harsh place for the unprepared.
http://blog.australian-native.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009...
Never have a single point of failure. A paper map or extra GPS at the bare minimum.
Look at other companies that does map, google map started out using Tele Atlas, NavTeq serves yahoo, bing and mapquest. Let's face it, spatial data cost money to collect and even more costly to update/maintain. Nevteq and Tele Atlas are gigantic companies for serving basic spatial data for a reason.
I guess apple didn't do sufficient data QA before saying, "hell yeah we are going with OSM where every big player is going with commercial data."
Without a solid baseline data, any fancy pants software development would just evaporate in air.
I have to say though, the GUI for apple map and functionality has very high usability. Apple just need to adapt a different mindset when dealing with data-dependent applications.
(disclaimer: I am a PhD student in Geography with CS background, did my share of processing spatial data for the last 8 years)
A buddy and I travel the back country of Death Valley regularly and the stories we have heard, the vehicles we have seen trying to go places they shouldn't, etc. are just amazing. At a certain point, however, common sense and personal responsibility need to be considered.
[1] http://www.usaprepares.com/survival/husband-died-just-six-mi...
I think it's because I've done long journeys powered by digital maps but I always made sure that there was an agreement level between two, or that it looked sane on a tried and tested road map. As good as they've gotten for the most part they're still prone to bugs, or to lose signal. Paper maps are a car essential still.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/travel-news/taking-th...
It's been 1.5 months since we've had everyone we can think of submit the problem. Still not fixed.
What does it take for Apple to actually "fix" an incorrect pin location and label?
Google seem to have already started down this path with the Map Maker functionality. http://www.google.com.au/mapmaker
I'm ashamed to say I didn't know until TFA that Guido is the BDFL...I actually thought Linus had inspired it, though that's because he seems to be the one who most frequently causes others to invoke it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life
Also kind of funny that Matz is the only creator of a recent [*and major] language that isn't in that Wiki list. Is he really that hands off of Ruby (compared to Guido and Python?)
- 2/3 currently work for YC companies.
- 3/3 have at one point worked for a YC company.
That I find extremely impressive. Speaks a lot to the calibar of the YC program. A big congrats to Dropbox too! :)
I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough value to cover.
This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another - of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth".
The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards paid advertising (and its ilk).
When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts of journalists of old.
This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences. Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long term harm.
Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their role as a reliable neutral arbiter?
tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.
The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie policy" popups that we have to "agree" to and further balkanization of the web. Additional costs to having a website (are there any scaremongering companies offering auditing to make sure your website does not expose you to legal risk?). Disempowering people by raising the barrier to running a site.
All downside. No upside from any perspective. We can't even blame lobbies or interested parties because literally nobody got anything positive from this. Just pure stupidity.
They should have know better than this.
Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some time back regarding internet filters. But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned.
One last thing: Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go.
[1]http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergl...
Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the "Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only one.
And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing new under the sun.
What is really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this.
Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear...
... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought.
Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.
Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled.
My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.
Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).
The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.
Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele
But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.
1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd.
2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask to use their content.
3)If we believe that intellectual property has become an obsolete concept altogether, we should be prepared to accept all of the consequences of this, e.g., a site might pop up using a new TLD that accepts a search query from a client, passes it on to Google using a spoofed IPv6 address, and passes the result back to the client. We also shouldn't care about plagiarism, trademark infringement, etc., because the Internet has clearly made these concepts obsolete and laws related to them unenforceable.
[1]http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf German)
[EDIT: spelling]
What the German publishers don't seem to understand is that their once so valuable and scarce goods (information and news) are becoming less and less valuable. Looks like they are trying to defend a dying business model with legislation.
Herbert Simon said in the 70s: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Google is a major dispenser of attention, and I think the German publishers are doing themselves a huge disservice by making it harder for Google to send attention to the publishers.
The big unresolved issue is: how can we finance good journalism in an era where the value of static information approximates zero very quickly? Maybe the answer is in moving away from static information to an information process as the product... Something that can't be copied easily.
"What's wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don't want to pay for it."
What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes.
Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there is such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?
"Taxing times
As newspapers' woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes"
Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences :
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...
So taking all the philosophical statements out of the way, what is the econimical case that the newspapers are making? If Google actually showed a bigger part or the whole articles, they'd obviously be taking revenue from newspapers, but it's not the case.
Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the creators can't.
Next time a German native speaker tells me his loves his mother tongue because of the possibility of concatenating words together, I will point them to that hashtag.
This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause.
German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.
It seems like a scary prospect to think of the ways google, a private company, could start to use its unparralled reach to lobby for legislation in its favor around the entire globe.
Being able to weave together text|markdown, tabular data (in almost any format you want) and images ( whether from matplotlib, raw captures, or synthetic assemblies ) in one environment is very powerful.
I suspect that with some additional tools IPython notebook will become the integrators workbench par excellence, useful in many contexts.
The "run" command for running python scripts:
* -t to print timing information
* -p to print profiling info from profiler module
* -d run the script under pdb interactively (with -b to set line breakpoints)
* -n to set __name__
All of these things can be done fairly easily on their own, but doing it through IPython makes the output so much easier to read and work with.
Whenever I'm working with data I need to visualize, I like to use:
ipython qtconsole --pylab=inline
I like the qtconsole feature but i find it less than perfect to install:
1. pip install ipython
2. <system package manager> install qt4
3. pip install pyside / qt4 bindings
The better feature, for me anyway, is the notebook interface (it starts a local web server and gives you a rich web guy, somewhat like a Mathematica idea of interactive notebook editing with inline charting etc.)
But, that's a whole other bunch of dependencies that aren't in scope when installing ipython.
Not sure of the best fix, offer ipython and ipython-full-stack on PyPI?
It's a great project, and lack of funding has prevented them from delivering on Py3k.
Love iPython, except for one thing I can't seem to figure out.
print "Hello World"What is going on?! I don't get how this split is supposed to work and it always throws me in it when I least expect it. I just want to do a simple edit to my previous command :(
If creating forms on the same was a bit more simpler, then it would be biggest boon to a data analyst since excel sheets...dare i say.
It would lead to quick fix applications, rapid prototyping for reporting applications. And it can be hosted and shared directly: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/
It sort of inverts the Office Space formula and shows the sometimes taxing, even soul-crushing nature of entrepreneurship.
It seems to follow the pattern of Office Space and Idiocracy in being panned by critics and ignored by audiences at first, and then quickly developing a cult following and being recognized as pretty brilliant.
Here's him asking about ruby: http://www.tout.com/m/t0x6dh
judge drawing on one of our desks: http://www.tout.com/m/q8ppc1
here's the full stream: http://www.tout.com/hashtags/MikeJudgeToutHQ
"First rule of Silicon Valley, you think about the user, the experience. You don't think about the money, ever."
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wmzwXd31Rw8/UI6hLHjRvnI/AAAAAAAACK...
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:/osyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyoSomething about having a command line interface really makes it feel like you are communicating deeply with the software, as opposed to poking around its surface in arranged flows. With a command line the interaction is different - it is exploratory with freestyle flow composition, and that can be really fun.
Modern graphical interfaces combined with a means to freely manipulate data and compose commands seem to be quite rare. I have always wished to have a full command line accessible in RPGs inside the game's menu system, so I could script some tedious things.
Put ddg inside a linux shell and let me interoperate with linux commands.
eg. ddg reviews samsung note | grep "note 2"
Let us make it so!
Google Search (with Instant Search enabled) has had keyboard navigation for a long time. After you hit enter on a search, hit tab and you can navigate the results with your arrow keys. And when you go to Google's homepage your cursor is automatically placed in the Search box, so you can search Google with only a keyboard.
This includes returning images, for example type this "qrcode http://ddg.gg/ into the cli.
ps. !Bang tags don't seem to work though.
<whine>
I get that the current look is the stereotypical "hacker" style terminal, but none of my terminals have such a small font or high contrast coloring :(
Ctrl + doesn't seem to increase the font size, either.
</whine>
'pronounce castle' to pronounce a word (say castle). (uses [:0] http://www.forvo.com/)
When you type pronounce castle however - it searches for it, and doesn't pronounce anything.
Now what I really want is an xterm that can render HTML/CSS. That way I can interleave my unix dweebry with outputs that use a modern display language.
Please let us know if you see anymore issues.
[1]: https://github.com/timothyandrew/DuckDuckGo-TTY-Homepage
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
I'm interested in adding SnowPlow support to this (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow) - our tracking API is very similar to Google Analytics's.
We've just gone through the quite involved exercise of mapping SnowPlow to Google Tag Manager (http://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2012/11/16/integrating-sno...) so I was a bit surprised in the code to see this mapping for GA events:
track : function (event, properties) {
window._gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'All', event]);
}
I think you might be making the assumption that events consist of an event name plus arbitrary JSON envelope. This is a very MixPanelish view of the world - it doesn't really translate to Google Analytics, Piwik, SnowPlow, Omniture...
Specifically...
1. It includes code to load up various analytics tools even if you never use them. For example, if I only use GA and Mixpanel, do I really want to serve the bytes for all the other plugins to my users? Maybe it would be useful to only package the JavaScript that a certain site needs.
2. The script still blocks the onload event. See this post for a way around that: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2012/the-non-blocking-script-...
3. How does having multiple analytics solutions on a page affect the load time of that page?
Lastly, I couldn't tell from the docs how to call methods before the script has finished loading. Is it similar to GA's method queue pattern?
We could contribute integration to https://bitdeli.com for those who want to build their own analytics. Is it enough to add a new provider to availableProviders?
Anyway, there is a rising field ("language-theoretic security") that studies this phenomenon. If this Pokemon example interests you, then you should give it a look.
Then, within the game, the invalid-length-list is used to overwrite other arbitrary locations, including a function pointer to an update procedure. Once that's overwritten he can jump to his own code and it's "game over" as in, he completely controls the hardware.
But from what I can see, it wouldn't be possible without the initial hardware resetting during a write. Not that it diminishes the awesomeness, it'd just be a bit purer if it was a software-only hack.
Given the complexity and freedom of access that a videogame has, I'm not surprised that this hack is technically possible, but it is very impressive that someone's managed to do it!
I've noticed similar behavior before in the Fire Emblem series.
http://m.ign.com/walkthroughs/520430
The guys that do these tool-assisted speed runs are incredible. One fellow plays 4 Mega Mans all at once with a single controller doing input for all 4 games at the same time.
This Pokemon hack is insane, but was inspired by a guy who uses it to beat the game in around 2 minutes. That particular speed run abuses the fact that everything in the game has a simple identifier. So, what he does is inserts a warp point into his inventory, drops it in front of himself, and walks through it to the end of the game.
https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal
https://bitbucket.org/iimarckus/pokered
(Red is fairly close to being the same as Yellow. But there are definitely differences.)
The Cortex project they having going is stellar and there are some great examples of Clojure-java interop.
For those that are wondering if something like this is possible outside of computers/video games, I would recommend a study of Lucid Dreaming. If brain hacking is possible, this has to be the best method of entry into the system.
For example, having a few bananas in your fruit bowl does not give you a position in the banana market. Owning thousands of bananas you intend to resell, or shorting a banana company, gives you a position in that market.
Likewise with housing. Owning enough housing to live in (at whatever standard of living you intend) is a market-neutral position, so you should not be particularly excited by price changes in the market. If you own too little housing, you're "short" and price raises are a negative, and if you own excess housing (extra properties, or a larger-than-desired property) you're "long" and price raises are a positive.
Specifically for HN, the high cost of housing severely restricts entrepreneurship. If you are paying 50% of your income on a rent or mortgage, you are of course less likely to start a business, and the cost of doing that business in terms of employees salaries and commercial rents make it less viable.
Also consider that your suppliers, and their suppliers, and their suppliers ad infinitum, all have the same high costs ultimately derived from high housing costs for their employees.
This all adds up across the country and the whole economy is made less competitive and agile as a result. With lower housing costs there would certainly be less unemployment.
The sad thing is that the even intelligent people are duped into believing the myth that high house prices are good for them. Clearly lower prices mean more disposable income, which is usually a good thing? Clearly high house prices barely benefit anyone as we all need a house, and the next house you buy would likely have gone up by a greater price than the one you have now? And yet we persist - 'we MUST get on the housing ladder' and we blame those nasty banks because 'they aren't lending any more' when all they are doing is scaling back lending multiples from the absurd back to the ridiculous.
All that high house prices achieve is to keep young people into debt serfdom, keeping us on a treadmill servicing massive mortgages for the same bricks our parents bought for 20% of the price. We really could be out doing something much more worthwhile.
Edit - you may wish to read this to put the madness of this credit bubble into perspective:
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=5...
What about the ability to rent? As demand for purchasing housing goes up, demand for renting typically goes down (ie. either levels off or regresses). Sure over time both go up, but at a particular slice of time, usually on a cost of living basis one is advantageous over the other. And while you're renting at a cheaper cost than it would be to essentially rent money (let's not kid ourselves, you don't own a house if you have a mortgage), you have liquidity to place in other investment vehicles.
Small observation... maybe there's something to it, maybe not, but it seems I'm 2/2 on calling when market swings happen here in downtown San Diego over the past 10 years. Take a look at the delta in rental prices in properties in various classes and compare verses actual selling prices. Just like a P/E for a company, if you can't at least turn a profit on owning a piece of property as a rental, it is likely overpriced. As much as people love to talk about various market factors much of this is emotionally driven.
For instance, last year I observed an entry level condo complex in a marginal area rent 1 beds in the $1800-1900 range. The latest comps for that building were $150k for like properties. About 5 blocks away 1 beds in a luxury high-rise were renting in the $2200-2300 area. Comps? High $300k. At the height of the market comps for the luxury high-rise were in the mid $500k area and the marginal property were in the upper $300k area. Back when that was happening, the luxury high-rise unit was renting just shy of $2k. The marginal unit? About $1400. I took another 4-5 other buildings in the area of varying quality and this trend was intact. To be fair this is a small, insular market and these swings are largely driven by speculation from the bubble-tastic situation many overheated markets found themselves in (ie. people owning and flipping multiple properties found the bottom of the market being rented cheaply).
However, if they do they "lose" on the transaction: and this proves the "covering a short" nature of the transaction.
Wonderful piece.
The article misses that rising house prices can also be good for a person who intends to move to a place with cheaper housing.
Net net: rising prices good for near-term retirees and rental property investors, bad for almost everyone else.
Also housing markets in different places don't move in unison so there is some room to trade markets and turn a profit.
Not sure any of this effects the point of the article though.
- Author fails to acknowledge that the point of making money an a house ('using it as investment') hinges on not rising prices, but prices that rise faster than inflation / COL, and/or inflation being above the mortgage rate the house was financed with. So no you're not 'just covering a short position', you're covering a short position and going long at the same time, with the same vehicle. But this is of course where the analogy falls apart. I posit that his analogy is unhelpful in understanding the role of a house in personal wealth management.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/hedge-funds-crowd-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/business/financiers-bet-on...
[In Focus] Google Shuts Down Gmail To Show Its Immense Power http://onion.com/UxyLs8
Edit: Nobody was using Gmail at any point.
Thread from the other day:
"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."
It sounds like something an airline might say after bumping you to another flight!
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...
EDIT: Thanks @mpeg for pointing out that this is a different outage. Still yucky copy though.
"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."
"Novità! Le app Gmail per dispositivi mobili sono appena state aggiornate su Google Play e nell'App Store di Apple. Ignora"
Translated: News! The mobile Gmail apps have just been updated on Google Play and App Store.
I wonder if this is related...
Still no update
I use different browsers (in incognito mode), from different user accounts, to surf the web / do online banking / browser hacker news etc.
No plugins, no "sync" (heck, I don't even know what that "synch" for Chrome is), no issues.
I'd really love to investigate and find out why these two related products behave this way but honestly I'm way too lazy.
edit: typo
Speculation that it is happening to many users.
By chance, I just read a typical life insurance contract and it already stated that if you have undergone a genetic testing, you do have to disclose your results if you enter into a life insurance contract >300.000€. This was stipulated in the contract and not under general German contract law. If you do not disclose your results, the company can void the contract any time and/or terminate it any time in the future.
This is going to be THE most important issue with genetic testing - the implications for your insurance contracts. Obviously, your test results can have massively positive or negative results.
http://blog.goldenhelix.com/?p=1534
in which he applied his own industry knowledge to his updated 23andMe report. His conclusions suggest that the product needs much more work:
"I promptly sent an email off to 23andMe's exome team letting them know about what is clearly a bug in the GATK variant caller. They confirmed it was a bug that went away after updating to a newer release. I talked to 23andMe's bioinformatician behind the report face-to-face a bit at this year's ASHG conference, and it sounds like it was most likely a bug in the tool's multi-sample variant calling mode as this phantom insertion was a real insertion in one of the other samples."
. . . .
"But because GATK has been used so prolifically in publications and is backed by the Broad Institute, it can be viewed as a 'safe' choice. As small labs and clinical centers around the world are starting to set up their DNA-seq pipelines for gene panel and exome sequencing, they may choose GATK with the assumption that the output doesn't need to be validated.
"And that would be a mistake.
"GATK is as susceptible to bugs as much as any complex software. Their new mixed licensing model (free for academic, fee for commercial) is intended to add more dedicated support resources to the team. I suggest they think about adding dedicated testers as well."
So for those of us following along at home, the crucial idea is that most of the "information" that 23andMe provides paying clients has not been validated. Not only has it not been validated as to correctness of the genome analysis software (the industry scientist's observation), it has even less been validated as a clue to clinically significant disease risk for the majority of diseases that afflict people in developed countries. Pay your money for the service at the new lower price if you like, but prepared to see your personal genome results repackaged and reinterpreted for years to come before you learn anything from them that will help you improve your health.
I just used 23andme from Canada during the $49 A/B testing. Delivery was next-day, and other than 15ml of saliva being a lot to collect, the process was pretty smooth. They say it'll take 2-3 weeks, but realistically it took them about 4 business days to process my sample.
Unfortunately, almost all the results are for Europeans. There may not be that much of a difference between Europeans and Asians (I'm not sure), but it's worth mentioning. They also don't test for repetition induced diseases, so things like Huntington's won't show up.
http://too.blogspot.com/2008/09/lrrk2.html
Because of 23andme he found out early that he has a high chance of getting parkinson's disease. He now has the chance to prevent (or at least prepare for) it.
Still, I'm glad I did it, 23andMe is a very enlightening experience. I even found some distant relatives I never knew about.
Overall I am pretty disappointed with data I received from their service. For example I supposedly have genes that make me risk for obesity, yet I was most of my life very skinny and in recent years gain some weight because I thought it wasn't healthy to be so skinny. So, I wonder what kind of useful into others can get, when we can't even confirm basic info. I also believe (it was a while ago) that color of our eyes was 'guessed' wrong'.
I've done both, and to be honest, FamilyTreeDNA seems more comprehensive to me.
But, fantastic nonetheless.
Luckily I got in during the sneaky "price test" on Cyber Monday at 50 dollars, so I'm good.
The truth is, we can only control efforts, not outcomes. Sometimes things aren't your fault, you are the victim and while believing its your fault may shield you from feeling bad about it, it ultimately sets you up for failure. When you believe everything is within your control you're in for a rude awakening because a lot of bad random shit will end up happening. Once enough bad things pile up and you're still thinking its your fault, those feelings you're trying avoid by pretending you're all powerful will begin to bubble up and then you think "not only is everything my fault, but no matter how much I learn I just can't get most things right. So now I'm in control and suck at it".
This is classic avoidance. A defense mechanism. A more healthy attitude would be to identify what is in your control as well as realize and admit the things that are out of your control and cope with them as they come. By all means, take responsibility and he in control of your life because lord know most people aren't but also remember that there's no shame in admitting some bullshit happened that was out of your control and subsequently feeling bad about it.
What happens if there's a natural disaster? It's your fault you didn't predict it and lived or worked in a certain place? What about a key figure in your business dying suddenly? Are you at fault for not keeping good enough watch? The example of someone being rude right in the article is a great one! Of course it isn't your fault if someone is rude (at least not always)! Sometimes people have shitty days or attitudes and it has nothing to do with you! Besides being a defense mechanism you could argue that this attitude may stem from egomania.
Lots of good stuff here, but I never found the reason I would most hope for: No one gives a shit.
In business, we all see it every day: who did this, who did that, who said what, who was right, who was wrong, who is hurt, who is angry, blah, blah, blah. The gossip part of our brain wants to hear more, but the business side doesn't; it just sounds like a whole bunch of played out drama.
Better to just shut and move on. Glad you did. Just not sure I'm glad why you did it.
This is a useful attitude. As news goes up the corporate ladder, it inevitably is colored in the most positive possible light. (http://www.davar.net/HUMOR/JOKES/SHIT.HTM is a funny, but true, take on this phenomena.) You need a constant vigilance for problems at the top to counteract it. And the common willingness to rest on your laurels and deflect blame elsewhere is not going to lead to that willingness.
Step back from your solipsistic convictions for five minutes and realize that your rationalizations here only serve the purpose of avoiding forgiveness. You have decided that not only are you not a victim but in fact you and you alone are responsible for everything and therefore you don't ever need to forgive anyone. Moreover you have now implicitly made the rest of the world victims. Hm...
This normally yields useful insight, understanding, and actionable ideas. Blaming others or the situation normally does not.
At it's core, this is about accepting and embracing agency - you have the power to effect changes. I think that so many people in the modern world suffer from learned helplessness[1], where they think that the situation leaves them with no ability to impact events. This is false. Something went wrong? Try something else!
[1] Important Note: This is about things that I do, not things that I am. If you blame yourself innately, that's bad and leads to low self-confidence. It's not yourself, it's your actions - and actions are changeable.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
You had terrible, awful expectations. You expected your employees to be dedicated to the benefit of your clients rather than themselves? This is capitalism. People have jobs because those jobs provide THEM a benefit. Especially today, where you as an employer make ABSURD margins of profit off of everything your employees do (as worker productivity is astronomically high thanks to computers and such - just ask yourself how productive your company would be if you banned any technology produced after 1980. Couldn't survive, could you? Yet, companies did. And they paid their employees the same average wages you are paying now. You're just getting far more benefit.)
Pick up a book on capitalism. It's likely not what you think it is. It is not workers making as little as possible sacrificing everything for corporate praying that one day they'll win the lottery and become CEO. That's not capitalism. Capitalism is based on free exchange to mutual benefit of both parties. Your clients use your business because it benefits them. You tend to your clients because it benefits you. Win-win. Your employees work for you exclusively and only because it provides them substantial benefit, and you provide them that benefit because you make profit off of them. Win-win.
Expecting a worker to be dedicated to your company above their own interests is disgusting. You would not in a thousand years consider cutting your projected profits in order to improve their salaries, so there is no reason whatever for them to display any loyalty to you. Workers do not exist to work. They are human beings who exist to seek their own enjoyment, and if you as an employer fail to provide adequate pay/benefits/etc they will leave you to fail on your own. That is how it should be.
There is an escape. If you really do want to build an organization with invested, loyal coworkers, you can. The first step is to read a book on capitalism. Understand what a persons compensation is supposed to be based upon. It is not supposed to be based upon market average rates. It is supposed to be based upon the value of the work being done. If one employee earns a million dollars for the organization, that employee deserves most of it. If you want people to be invested, you have to actually make it in their best interests to do so. Right now, it is explicitly AGAINST their interests to be productive for you. It can't help them, and can only cost them. You'll cap them out at what they can make based on 'market rates'. And the chance of them rising to senior management is an invitation to self destruction with no payoff.
Employees are not going to be dedicated to the poisonous cesspit modern business has become. Just not going to happen. It's not your fault, and it's not theirs. And you cannot fix it while maintaining the kind of absurd growth figures and profit margins that modern businesses are taught to expect.
From the description of Battered Person Syndrome [1]:
- The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.
- The abused has an inability to place the responsibility
for the violence elsewhere.
You don't control the weather, the people in the streets, the companies sending you checks, the currency exchange rates, etc.
That's NOT forgiving. That's playing the victim, them being wrong and charitably pardoning their horrible deeds mumbojumbo. "And then they bitterly stabbed each other again..."
Forgiving means deciding to let go of what has happened; letting go as in not letting what has happened influence your future life and decisions, and forgiving starts from yourself. The act of forgiveness is to free yourself from the past events. It goes like first realizing that past is past, you can't change it and nobody else can change it either, and that ultimately the suffering seeps not from what had happened but from the way how you still take it, and eventually realizing that generally you're just so much better off not thinking about it anymore, regardless of if you win or lose the corresponding power struggle inside of your head.
When you've already removed yourself from any emotional entanglements it's basically a no-op to forgive someone else because at that point you no longer care about what s/he has done. It's good to forgive others to encourage them to let it go but it's not necessarily for your own recovery.
http://www.chuckrylant.com/it-is-your-fault/
No need to get carried away though...
Having said that, and realizing this is a motivational piece "It's my fault" is a complex statement (combining loaded notions of Self & Fault), and some interpretations allows (you or others) to sweep real issues under the carpet.
When sh*t happens the real thing to do is to admit that there was a failure instead of denying it and have a frank conversation about it with the parties involved instead of blaming others. (Note: sometimes the same person may take both parts of this conversation.) Sometimes it helps to separate Responsibility from Accountability, and assessing "fault" usually is counter-productive in this regard. In contrast, the Truth and Reconciliation movement in South Africa is a prominent example of coming to peace without placing blame. There, they separate concerns which gives room to people to more easily admit their mistakes.
If you have a propensity to blame life and everything else in it for your woes then this is a great mindset.
A lot more of your life is under your control than you think. This attitude of "Its my fault" will let you discover a lot of those things.
Of course a complete apology feels good, it provides absolution. It will feel even better if forgiveness is tendered by the employees. But to reiterate the real challenge is not getting into situations like this in the future.
In general, this seems like something that should be done in moderation. A willingness to accept responsibility for some things and be proud that you aren't blaming someone for an outcome you created is healthy. At the same time, feeling as if you have the power to affect everything is not healthy. Some things are just outside of your control.
There is a name for this, which is "martyr complex": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr_complex
I personally have a lot of guilt and beat myself quite a bit, but I also realize constantly being the martyr and assuming I have control means my ego is as big as it is when I always blame others.
While blame can be placed and responsibility can be taken, that is a trap. It happens to be a trap that most of the country is in. It is Bush's fault. It is Obama's fault. Sound familiar? Instead we should be saying "How can we work together to make things better?" Sometimes feelings run too deep to switch into a Kanban philosophy where life is a constant process of potential and realized amelioration. We don't have to be liberals, conservatives, or martyrs to do that.
That said, Derek, I think realizing the leader should take responsibility is a great lesson for all. It is a step towards enlightenment.
Looking at my own behavior, it is almost always possible to find something I could have done differently that would have avoided an undesirable outcome. Over time this has improved my intuition of whether certain actions are better avoided, even if doing them is theoretically something that should be just fine.
Concrete example: you could complain about getting hit by a car yesterday, or you might re-examine what was so important that you decided that driving two hours a day was a good idea.
It's not that everything is my fault, it's that how my life goes is my responsibility. Born poor? That sucks, but what are you going to do about it? Even if you could find someone to blame for it, what good would it do? What possible effect could it have to find someone to point a finger at? If the answer is "no effect what so ever" then you're better off just taking responsibility for your situation and trying to do something about it.
In contrast, I have friends/family members who, no matter what experience based advice I might offer, have someone or something to blame for why they won't be able to take it and why they'll have to just remain miserable. And their situation doesn't change (maybe changing it really is outside of their power, but if so they certainly don't articulate this well). So I just don't see an advantage of their strategy.
No, it's not my fault if e.g. my country suddenly slaps a ridiculous tax on new businesses making my venture a negative value proposition over night. But I can still have some response other than just pointing my finger.
I respect Derek Sivers a lot, for a lot of things. But I honestly think, this one lacks the punch of some of his other (earlier) writings. For example, he was at his insightful best in 'ideas are just a multiplier of execution'. When I read that, I was blown away, "what clarity!" I thought. And it seemed like a genuine outpouring of a Doer.
But this one is ambivalence at its peak. Sort of Chicken-soupish. It lacks the balance, and is a bit extremist. Any very unlike the writings of a stoical mind (And please-please, I am not pulling any punches at all. I hold Derek Sivers, in high esteem. But even gurus, need some candid feedback at times), which I am sure he is, most of the times.
And I don't like manipulating people. Yes, it's a lot easier. yes, leaders do that non-stop. But personally I can't get around to doing that.
Also, if everyone was doing it, we'd probably play a much higher level of "manipulation game" and feel fake about everything we do.
Though I think it is a tad unfortunate that some remarks here are taking it too literally when it was clearly intended as lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek.
Take a look at the happiest couple you know. They aren't happy because they are perfect for each other and always have the same opinion, but rather because they are forgiving of each other's faults.
To accept the obvious truth is really liberating. It takes away all bad feelings you had for people involved on situations where you've felt the victim. And it also makes you see that if you're responsible for your mistakes, you're also responsible for your success. There's no luck, it's your responsability to make things right.
Choose the moments to accept the blame carefully, like when no one else will accept it. In my experience, the consequences have never been bad and most people kind-of know you're taking one for the team and respect it. It defuses issues quickly and everyone can get on with fixing the problem.
I think this is what some Americans might refer to as being a stand-up guy. The only thing that surprises me is that this is news to anyone.
A short amount of therapy has taught me that I was always searching myself to blame for everything. This is inherent to very insecure people.
I felt very much happier when I realized that some things really are not my fault.
As with almost everything, you have to find a right balance for this.
The truth is that is everybody's fault when a bad thing happens. A more in depth view can be found at http://lucianmarin.com/archive/everybody-fault " I don't want write it twice, so sorry for the link.
Content is a $100Bn industry. Technology is 5-6x bigger, but the tech companies trying to disrupt content are an insignificant fraction of that industry.
Meanwhile, set aside whether you believe in the reforms proposed in the Khanna memo --- reducing statutory damages, increasing cost of enforcement, reducing copyright terms. Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?" Were its goals in the 113th congress realistic? Were its arguments persuasive? Something like 35% of all congresspeople are lawyers, and this memo starts out with a highly dubious argument about the meaning of the copyright clause.
It seems to me (and I am prepared to hear smart people tell me how wrong I am about this) that a reasonable short-term goal would have been to reduce the term of copyright, ratcheting it back to where it was, say, before Sonny Bono. Instead, this "RSC" memo proposed beyond that a gift basket of what seem like mostly not-useful policy trinkets for Redditors: expanded fair use for DJ culture (really? spend political capital to modify regulations on a $100bn industry for... DJs?), lower statutory caps for damages (the MPAA and RIAA already sue for a tiny fraction of the likely liability for many infringers), and punishing false copyright claims (the claims studios take to court are overwhelmingly not false; penalizing bogus DMCA takedowns wouldn't move the dials at all).
The real copyright reform is probably something like reduced term and compulsory licensing. What was the value to the RSC of trolling the Content industry for reforms that had no chance of happening, that wouldn't have actually kept people from being bankrupted by lawsuits, that wouldn't make it easier to launch tech companies, and that at the same time manage to almost uniformly enrage rightsholders?
Was this memo really "shockingly sensible"? A lot of smart people say it was. But I wonder whether they're more shocked that any conversation could have happened at all, and not really looking closely at the content of the memo itself.
And also the internet.
At least one thing is certain - there is vehement opposition to any sort of copyright reform, and it is embedded deep into the political system. I don't think I've ever heard of a policy proposal being met with this kind of reaction. Really pushed some buttons.
[1] http://blog.heritage.org/2012/12/04/huelskamp-amash-say-hous...
Drawing attention to the existence of "corporate welfare" does not go over well in the GOP.
And I was so proud of them for making a sensible stand on this issue!
Reminds me of an unicode lorem ipsum I came across some time ago which I forgot the name of. Anyone know it?
I imagine it would be a bit annoying if the image changed every time I reloaded the page which I do quite a lot while developing a web page. If I were to show a page I've developed to a customer I would not like to have to explain why the images are changing all the time.
Apart from that I find this really nice.
if you reset and repeat it happens very often, but once it rights itself its fine.
dodgy logic?
nice otherwise, but this is a problem i have to say i've never had. generally google has something for me or i need to make it. :I
EDIT: Knowledge isn't zero-sum. Here's an overview of a kick-ass way to spider/scrape:
I use Scrapy to spider asynchronously. When I define the crawler bot as an object, if the site contains complicated stuff (stateful forms or javascript) I usually create methods that involve importing either Mechanize or QtWebKit. Xpath selectors are also useful for the ability to not have to specify the entire XML tree from trunk to leaf. I then import pre-existing Django models from a site I want the data to go into and write to the DB. At this point you usually have to convert some types.
I find Scrapy cleaner and more like a pipeline so it seems to produce less 'side effect kludge' than other scraping methods (if anybody has seen a complex Beautiful Soup + Mechanize scraper you know what I mean by 'side effect kludge'). It can also act as a server to return json.
Being asynchronous, you can do crazy req/s.
I will leave out how to do all this through Tor because I don't want the Tor network being abused but am happy to talk about it one on one if your interest is beyond spamming the web.
Through this + a couple of unmentioned tricks, it's possible to get insane data, so much so it crosses over into security research & could be used for pen-testing.
In fact, the feds might think that clearing your cookies or switching browsers to get another 10 free articles from the NYTimes is also felony hacking.
Which is to say, be careful what you admit to in this forum AND how you characterize what you are doing in your private conversations and e-mails.
Weev now faces a decade or more in prison because he drummed up publicity by sending emails to journalists that used the verb "stole".
Since the third party service conducted rate-limiting based on IP
address (stated in their docs), my solution was to put the code that
hit their service into some client-side Javascript, and then send
the results back to my server from each of the clients.
This way, the requests would appear to come from thousands of
different places, since each client would presumably have their own
unique IP address, and none of them would individually be going over
the rate limit.
In the past, I have successfully used HtmlUnit to fulfill my admittedly limited scraping needs.
It runs headless, but it has a virtual head designed to pretend it's a user visting a web application to be be tested for QA purposes. You just program it to go through the motions of a human visting a site to be tested (or scraped). E.g., click here, get some response. For each whatever in the response, click and aggregate the results in your output (to whatever granularity).
Alas, it's in Java. But, if you use JRuby, you can avoid most of the nastiness that implies. (You do need to know Java, but at least you don't have to write Java.)
Hartley, what is your recommended toolkit?
I note you mentioned the problem of dynamically generated content. You develop your plan of attack using the browser plus Chrome Inspector or Firebug. So far, so good. But what if you want to be headless? Then you need something that will generate a DOM as if presenting a real user interface but instead simply returns a reference to the DOM tree that you are free to scan and react to.
The main caveat is that this may violate a site's terms of use and thus website owners may feel called upon to sue you. Depending on circumstances, the legal situation here can be a long story.
If a site owner changes the layout or implements a new feature, the programs depending on the scraper immediately fail. This is much less likely to happen when working with official APIs.
The biggest downside of scraping is that it often takes a long time for very little content (e.g. scraping online stores with extremely bloated HTML and 10-25 products/per page).
I do know that Selenium can be used for this...but am yet to see a decent example for the same. Does anyone have any good resources/examples on JS scraping that they could share??
I would be eternally grateful.
As a startup developer, third-party scraping is something I need to be aware of, that I need to defend against if doing so suits my interests. A little bit of research shows that this is not impractical. Dynamic IP restrictions (or slowbanning), rudimentary data watermarking, caching of anonymous request output all mitigate this. Spot-checking popular content by running it through Google Search requires all of five minutes per week. At that point, the specific situation can be addressed holistically (a simple attribution license might make everyone happy). With enough research, one might consider hellbanning the offender (serving bogus content to requests satisfying some certain heuristic) as a deterrent. A legal pursuit with its cost would likely be a last resort.
Accept the possibility of being scraped and prepare accordingly.
They could be used for computation, but (mostly) aren't.
Scraping used to be the way to get data back in the days, but websites also didn't change their layout/structure on a weekly basis too back then and were much more static when it came to the structure.
Having recently written a small app that was forced to scrape HTML and having to update it every month to make it keep working, I can't imagine doing this for a larger project and maintaining it.
Otherwise, great article! I agree that BeautifulSoup is a great tool for this.
Tried scraping Facebook. They have IP blocks and the like.
google as a search engine crawls most all sites, but offers very few usable stuff to other bots
http://www.google.com/robots.txt
Disallow 247
Allow 41
A simple API providing simple json response with http basic auth is far more efficient than a screen scraping program where you have to parse the response using HTML / XML parsers.
Navigation is great, so much better than Siri's dreadful voice, easy to navigate from A>B with a tap of your destination. Let's not even mention the street data.
Great 3D flyovers, but no satellite-3D flyovers (if you're worried about that you probably have too much time to waste during the day - this is a maps app, to take you places, not give you a tour of Los Angeles).
UI feels great - intuitive, fluid, multi-touch works fantastic. Heard someone mention that it "lacks polish" or feels "laggy" - not sure I agree with that - feels fast on an iPhone 5 and on a 4S side-by-side. UI is clean and not cluttered, that's a plus. Someone else mentioned that it's simply GMaps in a UIWebView - no chance for that.
Of course, the public transport data is second to none. The data in general - we won't discuss that.
Great release - welcome back
The transport directions are slightly better, it'll find actual options for me now but does still occasionally go "Nope, no public transport around you!" when I live near a bus stop. And a train station.
It's slightly laggy on my iPhone 5, I popped it up with a high view when I was on the train and it was very visibly jerky, Apple Maps was much, much smoother.
Hey guys, SIGN IN. You want your search history? SIGN IN. That's really annoying, and given when the whole Maps shift started it was rumoured that Google was demanding more and more information on the searches it points to Google really wanting that search history with your account.
POI stuff spanks Apple, easily. Apple sucks at that at the moment, the fact that Google can autocomplete a hell of a lot of it is much nicer.
I don't like some of the UX choices, the 'tutorial overlay' says the bottom right button is tappable but it's actually a slide over, tapping did nothing for me. Accessing Street View is non-intuitive. Occasionally it felt like there was a few too many taps to get me where I needed to be. This is all stuff they can work on though.
All in all, it's pretty good. I'll have it as a secondary Maps app, I'm going to try stick with Apple Maps though. Not because I'm a glutton for punishment but because it has genuinely started getting better for the use case I need it in. Choice is always nice though.
After playing with this app for 10 minutes I think this is far superior to the iOS5 Maps experience. It's an extremely refined and clean app that is extremely fast with lots of features. Start typing a street or location and it'll know what you mean within a few letters.