jfasi

In anticipation of a slew of "this is so obvious" comments that quote from the brief, I urge you to remember that there's an opposing side to this argument: no matter how compelling or obvious this brief's arguments may seem on their own, the court will be weighing them against the arguments of the opposing side.

Without seeing those arguments, we can't really make any substantive judgements about this brief.

Thanks for the link! I've updated my comment.

True, this post contains speculation on some matters, but if a professor at Cornell whose work focuses around distributed systems who authored the selfish mining attack isn't an "expert," then I don't know who is.

> At the start of February 2014, illegal access through the abuse of a bug in the bitcoin system resulted in an increase in incomplete bitcoin transfer transactions and we discovered that there was a possibility that bitcoins had been illicitly moved through the abuse of this bug.

...

> We believe that there is a high probability that these bitcoins were stolen as a result of an abuse of this bug

I find the insistence that this catastrophe was brought on by a protocol bug very suspicious. A recent post on HN by an expert elaborated on why transaction malleability wasn't likely to have been the source of this exploit [1]. Meanwhile Mt. Gox is insisting that they were robbed by a bug in the protocol.

This could be the position advised by Mt. Gox's legal representation, in a sort of "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" sort of way. If this line is actually true, then either the transaction malleability issue is much much bigger than we anticipated, or the bitcoin protocol has some vulnerability that we don't know about.

That's scarier than a paltry exchange collapse.

[1] http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/03/01/what-did-not-happen...

I disagree in terms of regulation: there is plenty of regulation on broadband internet, except it tends to discourage competition against broadband providers.

This isn't a problem that is going to be solved by placing regulations on the industry. Your example of past subsidies provides an excellent argument for this: given the political clout these entities hold and have in the past used to stilt legislation in their favor, what leads us to believe we're going to do any better with new regulations?

At the end of the day, the market is demanding better internet service. While telecommunications providers are certain to wage war against the injection against honest competition into their sector, things are actually looking pretty good in my mind. The FCC sees market demand and is working to tear down anti-competitive legislative barriers [1]. Smaller efforts such as Google Fiber are doing the hard work of convincing the public that better service is within reach.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/20/fcc_s_pla...

I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry. TWC and friends were established to enact a business plan that's been viable and profitable for centuries: laying down expensive infrastructure is economically feasible if most of the cost comes up front and you can charge rents on it for decades. Stability is crucial. This is the economic reasoning that built the cable TV network, and the phone network before that, and the power grid before that, and the railroad network before that, etc.

Trouble is, this business model severely discourages new development (witness the "No one wants gigabit" rationale). Why interrupt your twenty year plan just to extend its life a year or two into the future? This isn't a bad thing if your industry is basically a utility industry, where technological changes move at a glacial pace. God help you if you enter into the technology industry armed only with the economic and managerial tools of a utility juggernaut.

So we've got ourselves a conflict. On one side there are irritated customers wondering why their service is so poor and why their bills are so high. On the other there are communications utilities providers: while they have a legitimate business need to keep their networks profitable, they are paying the price for committing the gravest sin possible in the technology world: complacency.

Acquisition fever is certainly a force pushing innovation downward, and I think the argument this article puts forward is sound. On the whole, however, I think innovation in the technology sector is driven by other factors. In particular, the barriers to entry for a new company in the technology space are extremely low.

Once upon a time a young company needed to devote significant monetary and human capital to building their software and hardware platform. Today, they can use open source frameworks and commodity hardware. Marketing once meant medium to big media buys, which had high entry costs and provided little to no insight into their success. Today you can literally buy attention by the individual customer, and enjoy a deep and detailed understanding of the success of your campaign. In addition the (relative) abundance of early stage investors means if you have an idea, you can bring it into reality with (relative) ease.

Innovation is so cheap that it doesn't have to happen inside a big company anymore. If a team gets bought out and cannot pursue a new opportunity, someone outside the company will step up and go after it.

Just to be clear, this approach is awesome and completely correct. However, it's important to remember that this policy isn't stable. It's liable to change with the FCC chairman. Should the next administration choose to regulate ISPs more loosely, these gains will be reversed.

The only solution is for Congress to pass these regulations and enshrine net neutrality as a fundamental principle of internet regulation.

> The FBI already owns 5 to 10 percent of [bitcoins], which are now out of circulation.

Given that money laundering and drug transactions have become major parts of bitcoin's current use case, law enforcement's tendency to seize bitcoins puts yet another deflationary pressure on the system. The biggest obstacle to bitcoin becoming a currency rather than a speculator's darling is the stability of its value. Meanwhile, the system's incentives seem to promote hoarding in hopes of a price spike.

Not that this is problem in and of itself. Bitcoin's decent anonymity creates very real value, and it looks poised to be a medium of exchange. It just puts a damper on the hopes that future transactions will be denominated in bitcoin rather than dollars.

This implies a somewhat one-way relationship between companies and their engineers: engineers give their time and talents, and in return companies give their money and equity. Under this system, why not be selective about who you hire? If you want great work, you need to hire a great engineer.

In actuality, the truth is great people aren't found, they're made. The role of a good leader isn't to squeeze great work out of his employees, but rather to develop within them the capability to do great work. Applied to hiring, this means having an understanding of the support and growth capabilities within your organization, and finding candidates who have the most potential to gain from it, rather than hiring those who are already well-developed. Applied to hiring rockstars, this makes them even more valuable: not only would they be producing outstanding work on their own, they would actually be improving the quality of the work their peers produce.

> if people are going to turn down the certainty of a huge salary at Google, they should get a reward for taking that risk.

I often see a disconnect between perceptions of expected success of founders and engineers. I've observed this is particularly pointed for non-technical founders. To generalize, a young entrepreneur with some success under his belt is starting a company. As far as he's concerned his company is all but guaranteed to succeed: he's got the experience and sophistication necessary to make this happen, the team he's hired to his point is top-notch, he's got the attention of some investors, the product is well thought out, etc. He approaches an exceptional engineer and extends an impassioned invitation and... the engineer balks.

What happened? Is he delusional about the company's prospects, thinking he's got a sure fire hit when he's actually in for a nasty surprise once his hubris collides with reality? Is the engineer a square who would rather work a boring job at a big company than live his life, and wouldn't be a good fit for the team anyway?

I propose a different resolution: our confident businessman is certain about the success of the company, not the success of the engineer as part of the company. He knows the company's success is going to rocket him into an elite circle of Startup Entrepreneurs. The engineer, on the other hand, doesn't see the correlation between the company's success and his own: even if the company takes off to the tune of eight to nine digits, his little dribble of equity is just barely breaking even over the comfortable stable position he's in now.

My god.

You're right, I did slightly misinterpret the post. I've removed it and supported my argument in a different way.

Also I don't appreciate the implication that I don't write software on a team for a large project, because I do.

This is a fascinating example of the power of biased randomness. The gameplay challenges this article points out are notable because they require sequences of inputs that are both specific and lengthy. Even if the input stream were random, there would still be a nonzero probability that the correct sequence of instructions would be realized.

On the other hand, this stream isn't random. If it were truly random, the player would just move pointlessly in a horrible Brownian motion. It's nonsensical, to be sure, but in some weird way it encapsulates knowledge about the game, and as a result the game makes progress.

It sort of enlightens other places where true randomness is required, and the presence of any information or understanding radically changes the behavior of a system. In cryptography, even the slightest weakness in the probabilistic underpinnings of a cryptosystem can render it useless. In finance, even the slightest edge over the market can be leveraged to produce gains.

I find it fascinating that that the consensus among the responses in this thread seems to be somewhere between Li Ka-Shing being a hypocrite, that buying food for people richer than you is crazy, that his advice is useless, etc.

Sure, there are cultural incongruities. Americans don't understand buying lunch for your superiors, and the advice to beat yourself up if you fail to see progress is directly opposed to the "do your best" attitude that lives on this side of the Pacific, but the lessons are the same.

In the end, the moral is simple: wheeling and dealing. Being crafty. Placing yourself in a situation where opportunities find you, not vice versa. Focusing your personal development on becoming competent enough to act on your opportunities.

What bugs me is that this sort of hustling is necessary to thrive in any business, not just software. I suspect HN's criticism of this advice might be a sign of wantrepreneurship rather entrepreneurship.

> The day of reckoning still looms – it’s just been pushed out as the major Internet players have developed ingenious ways to stretch those available numbers.

To me, this indicates something either broken about IPv6 or a lessened severity of the IPv4 problem: If it's better to apply bandaids to IPv4 than to roll out IPv6, then either IPv6 is not easy and flexible enough to be a viable alternative, or the problems faced by IPv4 are not as intractable as was suggested.

The author asserts that "more ads, fewer users, lower revenue, more ads" is an unavoidable death spiral. In actuality, any property owner with a rudimentary awareness of the concept of diminishing returns will understand that there's an equilibrium point: too few ads and you're not monetizing to the fullest, too many and you annoy enough users to damage the property.

I like the concept of a service that tracks adblock usage. That's actually something that's missing: insert a tiny javascript tag that adds a Google Analytics counter for adblock usage.

Read on, I promise I raise a good point. As for losing credibility, I suggest you might find discussions more meaningful if you focus on the argument presented rather than an inferred standpoint of the author.

Sorry, I somehow missed that site from reading your docs. I'm willing to chalk this up to my own mistake rather than bad design on your part.

This is very interesting. Do you have any insider experience on the way music promotion happens that you could share?

> The "position would be different" for links that bypass a paywall.

This is interesting. It seems there is a growing burden on consumers of information to understand the intent set up by website owners and technology maintainers: Aaron Schwartz died because his use of curl was deemed hacking. A judge here is making a distinction between linking and linking that bypasses a paywall.

I'm afraid that people will one day be required to divine whether or not a site was meant to be viewed by them: suppose page A displays links to a paywall-less version of page B when the user agent is "GoogleBot" in order to allow news to be indexed. Meanwhile, all other user agents see a link to a paywalled version of page B. Suppose a bug causes that page to display paywall-less links to all agents, and visitors to that page follow through to the non-paywall version of page B.

Under this interpretation, visitors to page B's non-paywall version could be exposed to allegations of unauthorized access to computer systems (or its EU equivalent) and be charged with hacking. What's worse, it seems the burden to prove that the link was shown to them in a legitimate fashion falls on the accused, and there's basically no way they can prove that.

I'm not a lawyer, so my interpretation could be way off, but this seems like a credible threat.

Recommendation: I have the feeling your sales would be significantly boosted if you added some sort of tiered service plans on top of your free tier, instead of requiring the frictionful process of reaching out to a sales address.

This is interesting. IP address databases are typically bought and sold for figures in the thousands. This service presumably purchases one or some of these and attempts to make up the cost by providing it on an as-needed basis.

I wonder if there are any additional data sources that can just be bought wholesale and sold in pieces? Think of all the applications that needed very precise IP address data but couldn't afford the whole dataset. They can now exist!

I could also be wrong and this isn't at all the approach this service takes...

Namecheap is pretty great. The going rate for .io domains is about $80, and when I last checked they let you register them for something closer to $55.

It's interesting how the trend among big-time compiled languages seems to be implement statically-analyzable versions of key features from functional and dynamic languages. C++'s auto keyword and lambda functions makes a world of functional-like expression possible. Java's implementing python iterator and lisp sequence-like streams.

It's fascinating to me to watch experimental and niche languages blaze trails and then have the designers of the big compiled languages see the success of certain features almost as proofs of viability.

I consider this post part of a nascent trend to de-bullshit the startup and technology scene. For years the narrative has been "we in the tech industry are standard bearers leading society into a bright new tomorrow." The recent protests around the Google buses, as well as John Oliver's takedown [1] of the tech industry seem to be striking a chord with the public, and there's a lesson to be drawn: we tech folks are not as important as we think we are.

A business is just that: a business. Not a humanitarian aid mission dispatched from your benevolent head into a world made unbearable by its lack of smartphone apps and productivity software. It's an organization that is focused on delivering a product that people will pay for. I'm thrilled for the author that he found something he can profitably produce, and I commend him on his exit from the messiah complex echo chamber that's plaguing our industry.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/11/john-oliver-kills-at-crunch...

Here's my thinking about the decision on the part of an artist to release their entire catalog to the public for free: if digital distribution has rendered direct sales to the customer significantly less worthwhile than it once was, they need some alternate source of promotion and revenue. A move like this would likely increase the artists' visibility in the public's eye without significantly harming their total revenues.

Notice that they give out copies of their songs, but don't release their copyright: want to download their music to listen to it on your iPod? Awesome, enjoy. Want to remix it or use it in a commercial setting? The music isn't licensed for that, you're going to have to talk to their agents.

This move is genius: it increases artists' exposure, ultimately leading to increased sales, licensing, and presumably also concert revenues. There's basically no downside to this.

> Healthcare takes place between doctor visits

Just to let you know I like that quote a lot and I'll be using it myself.

The author argues that nine out of ten bad customers will self select during the trail period, but does not offer any indication for how to positively verify that. Perhaps those asking for discounts are doing so not because they are problem customers waiting to happen, but because your product is priced at too high a price point?

Can anyone recommend a strategy for verifying that isn't the case, rather than insisting that good customers will be happy to pay the price and damn the doubters?

What prevents RedHat itself from transitioning to the open source platform model this article touts? They've put out OpenShift, which is a Heroku-style deployment clone, so they're at least making steps in this direction.

Notice that morality doesn't have to have anything to do with this argument. As a matter of pragmatism, the operator of a Silk Road-type site is almost certain to harbor a conviction that he can do so without getting caught (regardless of whether the authorities have morality on their side).

The same same goes for stealing from your customers: of course you won't get caught, what are your victims going to do? File a police report that the money they gave to a contraband site to presumably purchase contraband was stolen? The same conviction that makes it possible for them to operate Silk Road 2 makes it possible for them to steal from their customers.