New Data on T Cells and the Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/new-data-on-t-cells-and-the-coronavirus <comment><USER2> > [T]his paper shows that these patients still have (17 years later!) a robust > T-cell response to the original SARS coronavirus's N protein, which extends > an earlier report of such responses going out to 11 years. This new work > finds that these cross-react with the new SARS CoV-2 N protein as well. This > makes one think, as many have been wondering, that T-cell driven immunity is > perhaps the way to reconcile the apparent paradox between (1) antibody > responses that seem to be dropping week by week in convalescent patients but > (2) few (if any) reliable reports of actual re-infection. That would be good > news indeed.

<comment><USER3> Could a lab theoretically take your T-cells and "upgrade" them with all kinds of immunity robustness against say 100 viruses?

<comment><USER4> Totally. This is called "adoptive cell transfer" and it's one of the hottest areas of biotech at the moment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptive_cell_transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptive_cell_transfer)

<comment><USER5> Wow, sure it's not at "super human" immune system levels yet, but this is the type of research that feels like we're entering SciFi territory.

<comment><USER6> you type into your glowing device connected nigh-instantaneously to a hefty proportion of the world.

<comment><USER7> So, like an 1840s telegraph, but a bit better and with more spyware?

<comment><USER8> This cell transfer thing is just like a vaccination, but better. And a 2020 car is just like an 1820 train, but better. And a computer is just a programmable loom, but better.

<comment><USER9> Haha, I was with you until the computer comparison. A 2020 car can go an order of magnitude faster than a 1820 train. A 2020 computer can go so much faster I can't even estimate how many orders of magnitude with certainty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In addition to these promising results, note that southern U.S. states have been dealing with a dust storm from the Saharan desert, which increased air pollution in late June, [https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/saharan- dust-...](https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/saharan-dust-storm- expected-to-cause-dangerous-air-pollution-in-u-s-this-week/)

 _> The dust cloud is bringing dangerously high levels of fine particulate pollution (PM2.5, particles less than 2.5 microns or 0.0001 inch in diameter) and PM10 (particles less than 10 microns in diameter). Air pollution aggravates COVID-19 symptoms, leading to expected increases in hospital admissions from the disease in regions where dust concentrations spike._

We don't yet have good data to correct for the health impact of breathing in these minute particles from Africa, especially for those with pre-existing conditions.

<comment><USER10> I'm in the south. Not a sign of dust here. Even my dark colored car is clean.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was several weeks ago. Some photos here, [https://www.msn.com/en- us/weather/topstories/the-sahara-dust...](https://www.msn.com/en- us/weather/topstories/the-sahara-dust-storm-has-reached-the-us-mainland-heres- what-it-looks-like/ar-BB160EHk)

<comment><USER10> In New Orleans saw nary hide nor hair of the dust. Maybe it's coastal areas only?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The paper speculated that this might be due to cross-reactivity with proteins from the "common cold" coronaviruses", and raised the possibility that there might be a part of the population that has at least some existing protection against the current pandemic."

...this might explain why different parts of the world (e.g. east Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, vs. western Europe) have vastly different outcomes that don't seem to correlate well to genetics, culture, or policy. If a "common cold" coronavirus hit east Asia in the past, but never made it to western Europe, it could explain the different impact.

<comment><USER12> There are two different strains. An older one based in Asia that appears weaker. A newer one found in Italy.

This research came out months ago but no one is mentioning this.

<comment><USER13> Was the research peer reviewed? Published in any journals? Rigorous? Documented?

<comment><USER14> They're referring to a paper published in Cell.

"Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus" [https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdf](https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674\(20\)30820-5.pdf)

There's a more infectious mutation that overtakes the original form wherever it spreads, including Asia, although it's not more severe. I guess Asian countries would have an advantage because they faced the original form first and got their act together, while Europe and the East Coast of the US faced the more infectious variant early on. (The West Coast, on the other hand, started out with the original form, probably because the virus came directly from Asia. The variant didn't even show up in the Bay Area until May, for example.)

<comment><USER15> It's true that the G614 form overtook the D614 form, but that is not necessarily because it's more infectious - it could be drift and fixation.

The news and views bit on that Cell paper puts it in context:

[https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30817-5.pdf](https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674\(20\)30817-5.pdf)

Another study didn't find an effect on transmission:

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108506v4](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108506v4)

> The D614G mutation displays only three independent emergences that qualify > for inclusion in our analyses. While this limits our power to detect a > statistically significant association with transmissibility, the low number > of recurrent mutations leading to the D614G allele suggests that, rather > than being a driver a of transmission itself, it arose early and went up in > frequency by hitchhiking with one of the deepest branches in the global > phylogeny as the SARS-CoV-2 population expanded.

People are still working on this, and it should become clearer in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If there is a nearly harmless coronavirus going around, whether it is a common cold or previously unidentified virus (as the article suggests), that provides partial immunity to COVID, what is stopping us from purposefully infecting people with a less harmful illness to protect from COVID? Isn't this how the first idea of vaccines came about with Cowpox and smallpox?

<comment><USER17> > _what is stopping us from purposefully infecting people with a less harmful > illness to protect from COVID?_

Something like will be illegal in (guessing) 4 separate ways.

It's too far outside too many boxes. Sit down!

<comment><USER18> Definitely too far if handled by government, but if the possibility exists as individual choices, some people would definitely go for it. Chickenpox parties are a thing, after all.

<comment><USER17> True.

You can also make a good argument for variolation. Which is to infect yourself with a _small_ amount of viruses.

This will (ideally :) create a small infection that your immune system can beat off in time, and then you'll be immune after a minor time sick.

Apparently, people did this with smallpox in the pre vaccine era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's not new, it's more evidence:

At the end of May, however, an immunological study by the University of Zurich was published, which for the first time showed that the usual antibody tests that measure antibodies in the blood (IgG and IgM) can detect at most about one fifth of all coronavirus infections.

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108308v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108308v1)

At the same time, the Swiss study may explain why children usually develop no symptoms (due to frequent contact with previous corona cold viruses), and why even hotspots such as New York City found an antibody prevalence (IgG/IgM) of at most 20% – as this already corresponds to herd immunity.

The Swiss study has in the meantime been confirmed by several more studies:

A Swedish study showed that people with mild or asymptomatic disease often neutralized the virus with T-cells without the need to produce antibodies. Overall, T-cell immunity was about twice as common as antibody immunity.

[https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably- higher-t...](https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-than- tests-have-shown)

A large Spanish antibody study published in Lancet showed that less than 20% of symptomatic people and about 2% of asymptomatic people had IgG antibodies.

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)31483-5/fulltext)

A German study (preprint) showed that 81% of the people who had not yet had contact with the new corona virus already had cross-reactive T-cells and thus a certain background immunity (due to contact with previous corona cold viruses).

[https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-35331/v1](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-35331/v1)

A Chinese study in the journal Nature showed that in 40% of asymptomatic persons and in 12.9% of symptomatic persons no IgG antibodies are detectable after the recovery phase.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0965-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0965-6)

Another Chinese study with almost 25,000 clinic employees in Wuhan showed that at most one fifth of the presumably infected employees had IgG antibodies (press article).

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20130252v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20130252v1)

A small French study (preprint) showed that six of eight infected family members of Covid patients developed a temporary T-cell immunity without antibodies.

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.21.20132449v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.21.20132449v1)

<comment><USER20> 1\. Dozens of localities have controlled the virus via lockdowns, social distancing and masking, they all show similar curves to NY but with lower peaks. NY therefore offers no evidence that herd immunity has been reached.

2\. Your Spanish study shows 90% of those with a positive PCR test also had antibodies. The low symptomatic positive rate could be easily explained by other seasonal illnesses with identical symptoms.

3\. There is no evidence beyond supposition that I can see for the Wuhan clinical workers having the virus. An alternative explanation is that protective equipment and protocols were effective.

4\. The idea of 80% of the population being T-cell immune seems inconsistent with the outcomes on the Diamond Princess.

I think you are cherry-picking data to support a far-fetched theory. The outcomes in confined places where the virus infects everyone, like the Diamond Princess or nursing homes, seem especially hard to square with the idea of widespread t-cell immunity.

Edit: I was misremembering the Diamond Princess, not everyone on the cruise ship got the virus. However, Marion Correctional Institute in Ohio had 80% test positive for covid; the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington had 2/3 test positive. These don't seem consistent with widespread T-cell immunity.

<comment><USER19> Interesting you mention the Diamond Princess, it actually supports the "far- fetched" theory. And it's not as far fetched as you think, it's gaining more ground and does explain places like New York, London, Sweden, India etc.

[https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/immunity-to- coronavirus-...](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/immunity-to-coronavirus- may-be-far-more-widespread-than-thought)

"In the accidental experiment of the Diamond Princess – a close community where the infection was allowed to spread unchecked for a fortnight in January, and everyone was eventually tested – only 17 per cent of passengers and crew became infected."

New York (and similar UK and Sweden) has a higher death rate since they moved sick patients into care homes and decimated them. As you said everywhere saw similar curves no matter how strict or lax a lock down they had. Implying something else is going on and not the lock down.

Studies looking at the impacts of lock down on the curve are showing very little correlational [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(20\)30208-X/fulltext)

"full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality."

So, to me at least, it does seem far more plausible that t-cells are more a mitigating factor then lock downs.

If I am cherry picking, seems to be lots of cherry trees to pick from.

I see no reason why t-cell should not offer some protection, like it does with other coronaviruses. And why we would assume that everyone is just as susceptible when we know the risk profile varies wildly.

EDIT: for your explaining your edit of "Life Care Center in Kirkland", the reason they have more antibodies is that we all know the older you get the less t-cell protection you have. A "life care" center one assumes is full of old people, hence lower t-cell protection. And it explains why children have more protection as their t-cell protection is stronger.

<comment><USER20> Everywhere saw a similar _shape_ of curve, i.e. exponential increase until the lockdown, then slow exponential decrease. The peak of the curve differed widely, and countries that were slow to lock down like the UK, Sweden and USA have seen some of the worst outcomes.

Correlating lockdown policy to outcome does not make sense because lockdowns are instituted in response to case levels in the first place. It is like correlating fire trucks and fires, and finding that fire trucks cause fires because there are more of them in dry, fire-prone areas.

Sweden provides something close to a natural experiment, it has similar culture and climate to its neighbors but a far worse outcome after it did not lock down.

Prisons are not especially weighted toward older people and they have seen outbreaks with as many as 80% being infected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> curious who wins the vaccine race. my understanding is the RNA vaccines being researched by Moderna and Inovio don't stimulate T-cell development, in which case they seem like poor candidates compared to the adenovirus candidates like the Oxford one that do.

<comment><USER22> so mRNA vaccination is an offshoot towards technology which was created about a decade and a half ago to make more efficient monoclonal antibodies for the lab. The process is to extract B-cells from a challenged organism (almost always mouse) and then fuse them as 'hybridomas' with immortal cancer cells, select single cell clumps that show an immune response out of multi-well plates, and then use those immortalized cells to make that one antibody forever.

So indeed the mRNA vaccines come from technology that is highly optimized to elicit a B-cell response. (Not to say that it doesn't stimulate T-cells, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't).

<comment><USER23> Wait I'm a little confused. It seems like injecting people with an mRNA, which their cells then translate into an antigen that provokes an immune response, is a very different technology from monoclonal antibodies. They are both related to the immune system, but mRNA vaccines are at least partially about stimulating polyclonal antibody production, as opposed to monoclonal antibodies. Can you articulate why you think mRNA vaccines were derived from monoclonal antibody work?

<comment><USER22> I just remember talks (I was at a cutting-edge immunology research center, The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego) about using mRNA vaccination in the 2007-2009 era to make monoclonal antibodies. Oddly, I can't find any publications from that era on it (but I can find a few papers from 2017-2019 using that exact methodology), so it appears that either i was mistaken, or it quietly pivoted to human vaccination as a target. It's really not possible for me to be mistaken about the timeframe, though, since I have been out of biology since 2015.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Future of Organization - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/deep-code/the-future-of-organization-b26219e5fc95

<comment><USER2> I am not sure to like the double meaning of sustain here:"The protocol should sustain any potential operational failure, fraudulent activities, or malicious attack."</comment>


Privacy Inequality: The Most Brutal Form of Inequality You've Ever Imagined - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/privateid-blog/privacy-inequality-the-most-brutal-form-of-inequality-youve-ever-imagined-e674d4f3cd42 <comment><USER2> The irony of hosting this on medium is not lost on me, with a floating element telling me: "To make Medium work, we log user data and share it with processors. To use Medium, you must agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy."</comment>


Founder of FSFE receives Cross of Merit from Germany - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=403

<comment><USER2> Fantastic, and lovely how he speaks of sovereignty in the context of his acceptance of this award -- that communities and software live outside the state, without need for its approval to function on a human level. Hanseatic acceptance indeed.</comment>


Show HN: Pytorch Text Recognition Tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/s3nh/pytorch-text-recognition <comment><USER2> In the example on the readme, why does it reverse the order of "casteli" (3) and "castle" (4)? It's a bit surprising that it understand the rest of the ordering (including the "and" in the center), but flips those two.

Also, if I were a developer trying to use this, I'd be constantly annoyed at receiving a dict with keys like "0", "1", "2" rather than just getting a list.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the example, text is not sorted by it's corrdinates but by appearence of boxes in first network. It is visible in more complex documents, that crnn network did not create boxes in descending order (word-by-word).

also, good point about the list. dictionary keys has no logical usage in this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome, definitely a ton of use cases for this. It would be interesting if you put some background into why you made this project in your README. Some inspiration always helps.

Also some examples of where else you've seen it applied could spark peoples imagination to help people get some more usage out of your work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for feedback! I'll add more general information. In my opinion theres a lot to do in complex document classification, I'll try to add some demo to make things more intuitive. thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How to train this model in other languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> the hardest part in training model in foreign languages is to get correctly labeled dataset. I worked with pretrain model on Polish language documents and based on this experience it is relatively good if you are using some text similarity measures. There are some examples/pretrain models with Korean/English/French language

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And CRAFT stands for what?

<comment><USER6> The topic list gives the answer [https://github.com/topics/craft](https://github.com/topics/craft)

Fist repo: Character Region Awareness for Text Detection (CRAFT)

[https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT-pytorch](https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT- pytorch)

Which has a nice video demo.

[https://youtu.be/HI8MzpY8KMI](https://youtu.be/HI8MzpY8KMI)</comment></comment>


Tesla's Elon Musk is raising an important question about job titles - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/work/1443954/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-is-raising-an-important-question-about-job-titles/ <comment><AUTHOR> The work duties of knowledge workers today is so different from the archetypal "job" of yore that it's time to develop a new framework to think about work. A job is a repetitive task; knowledge workers today don't work jobs, they are decision factories.

<comment><USER2> Consider the oldest knowledge workers - professors.

Some of the job titles for professors are: tenured professor, full professor, endowed professor, assistant professor, associate professor, adjust professor, teaching professor, and professor emeritus.

Going back to the essay, job titles also help prevent people from being punished for not doing things they don't want to do which are outside their job title domain - at least in places with decent worker protections.

Suppose someone hires me as a senior DBA, then three months later moves me over to iPhone app development, where I have no experience. I do poor work, so the employer decides to cut my pay.

FWIW, there are job titles which are not so limited, like "Fellow" at some companies. So I think it's a mistake to say that job titles only mean Taylorism-style factory jobs.</comment></comment>


Tesla strikes another mammoth energy storage deal in California - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/california-utility-looks-to-add-gigawatt-hours-of-battery-storage-before-2020/ <comment><USER2> Is lithium ion batteries the best choice for large scale energy storage? Has this been real world tested or are these few deals going to decide the trend?

Just few years ago, storage was considered a big problem and batteries were considered not so viable. What changed? Density and reliability?

<comment><USER3> Not only have prices _drastically_ dropped in the past few years, but they are expected to drop _another_ few X in the next few years.

[https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery- cost...](https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery-cost- dropped-80-6-years-227kwh-tesla-190kwh/)

[https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla- battery-c...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery- cells-this-year-100-kwh-tesla-battery-packs-in-2020/)

I think we'll reach $50/kWh well before 2025. That's also around the same time we should have a global production of about 800GWh-1TWh per year (bulk of that from Chinese factories), or about 20x the current production.

Assuming an _average_ battery size of 50kWh for an EV by then, even that capacity should only be enough for around -15-20 million EVs a year, or about 20-25% of the annual car sales. I may be a little optimistic here on battery size. It's possible many EVs will be super-cheap with 30kWh batteries, but we'll also see many more buses and trucks with 300+ kWh batteries. We'll need to go from 1TWh to 2 and 3TWh pretty quickly especially if we are to use batteries for utilities, too.

Around the same time we should begin to see car makers start using the much safer solid state batteries in their EVs. These will be more expensive (probably not more than what Li-Ion batteries cost _right now_ ) and they will start shipping in $50,000+ EVs at first, but they will eventually trickle down just as Li-Ion batteries have and will.

What I want to know is why do smartphone manufacturers think it's okay to sell $800 phones with 3,000 mAh batteries about four years after shipping them for the first time on the market. They did exactly the same thing with storage. They kept 16GB as default for a few years in their flagships, to the point where it cost them 4x less/GB than it did when they first launched with a 16GB drive.

<comment><USER4> Because unlike storage, the energy density of a battery only increases very slowly if at all. So it becomes not a trade in price, but a trade in size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous thread on China winning global race to control batteries [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16356343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16356343)

'Tesla' is essentially panasonic partnership in battery manufacture

'Panasonic is the exclusive battery cell supplier for Tesla's current production models, making them in Japan as well as at the $5 billion Gigafactory'.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panasonic- batteries/panas...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panasonic- batteries/panasonic-to-consider-more-investment-in-teslas-gigafactory-if- asked-executive-idUSKBN1JS08J)

Musk is a little like Branson in his branded businesses with v major stakes owned by others. (in the case of Branson mostly Saudis)

<comment><USER6> I think Musk is like Branson in you give him money to do X he'll actually try and do it rather than come up with cunning plans to screw you.</comment></comment>


Thomas Piketty's new War and Peace-sized book published - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/09/thomas-pikettys-new-magnum-opus-published-on-thursday <comment><USER2> > Among the proposals in the book are that employees should have 50% of the > seats on company boards; that the voting power of even the largest > shareholders should be capped at 10%;

This is really the solution to the heart of the rising inequality problem [1]. I don't know at what point in the history of world was it decided that shareholders would get the vast majority of voting rights. But it is time, that got changed. Labor needs its voice heard.

[1] Economic inequality is bad because rich people have more political power than poor people. Democracy = equal political power for all.

<comment><USER3> Democracy = people get a vote. Not necc equality.

There's a long history of well intentioned policy experiments such as these manifesting in massive suboptimal outcomes. USSR had some ideas too.

If you put a limit on the voting power of the largest shareholders for public companies, you radically disincentive companies from going public.

Access to the financial returns from the best companies in the world, and participation therein through public equity markets seems like a good thing for equality and something we shouldn't be fighting.

I like a world where founders and owners have a vote consistent with their economics, and if they make bad decisions, have to sell more shares and get diluted.

A world where founders and owners don't go public, and employees don't get _any_ access to financial returns or voting stakes seems like a likely outcomes from ^ proposal.</comment></comment>


This is how much money people with your personality make - <AUTHOR> http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2013/11/10/this-is-how-much-money-people-with-your-personality-make/?tid=sm_fb

<comment><USER2> The Meyers Briggs test is well known to provide almost NO valuable predictions of human behavior. It is merely a measurement of preference and its test- retest is about 50/50 after just 5 weeks! Pretty useless, yet people continue to bring it up as some kind of data-driven insight into your true self. Bollocks!

Sources: [http://priceonomics.com/the-economic-dominance-of- entjs/](http://priceonomics.com/the-economic-dominance-of-entjs/) [http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/15/myers-briggs- pr...](http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/15/myers-briggs-problems/) [http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/Articles/develop/mbti.pdf](http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/Articles/develop/mbti.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The biggest complaint in the mostly opinion links you posted regards people who are borderline members of one category or another. But in the categories where people are solidly one way or the other, the derivative information about how they prefer to communicate and operate is very helpful in group situations.

If a group attends a working session on its internal communication with an MBTI expert (so, everyone's already taken the tests and shared their types), the magic that ensues in terms of improved communications is striking. I've seen it done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link for a quick test:

[http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi- win/JTypes2.asp](http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp)

As an INFP, I guess it makes sense that money was never really a motivating factor for me. Progress and self-actualization, the human endeavor, equality, all that stuff is always at the forefront of my mind, and the tedium of the daily grind just sucks the life out of me like nothing else. Unfortunately I have trouble communicating ideas to others, because I can't convey the whole context of what I'm considering, so my arguments sometimes sound scatterbrained even when they are solid. It's difficult to explain how/why the concrete is more difficult for me than the abstract, so I just tell everyone my short game stinks.</comment>


Request FaceBook New Message Invites - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/

<comment><AUTHOR> FAQ's: <http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=new_messages>

Your email address will match your public username, for example:

Profile: facebook.com/username Email: email@example.com</comment>


A simple fix for the default Apache config - <AUTHOR> http://redromelogic.com/blog/display?id=42

<comment><USER2> Wow that's a linkbait title if I've ever seen one. All this articles says is you should make sure you enable cache headers and mod_deflate where appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> my sys admin skills suck (I guess it's the same for the ppl that voted this up) - this is new info to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Damn, I was fooled. I thought this was a dupe of "Your apache config sucks" I'd seen earlier; turns out it's the same post with an edited title

</comment><comment><USER4>
       ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"

I guess someone is not planning on updating any images or css for the next 10 years.

<comment><USER5> Rails's view helpers for linking to css, js, and imgs tag ?<timestamp> onto the URL so that the URL changes when you push your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> VERY linkbaiting title. And it's worthless. Just a link to YSlow would be better.

<comment><AUTHOR> happy? or is there a better title?</comment></comment>


Networks are Killing Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificblogging.com/adaptive_complexity/networks_are_killing_science <comment><USER2> Linkbait is killing journalism.

I don't know whether an editor or the writer himself is to blame, but the headline pretty much contradicts the article's thesis: that because network techniques are not tested in accordance with normal scientific method, the claims of their proponents are unverifiable and ultimately such techniques will be limited by their inability to prove or explain the phenomena they seem to expose and may even be dismissed as a high-level form of paraeidolia.

 _Here's a prediction of my own, one that I'm willing to put to the test: if complex systems researchers don't get serious about the scientific method, their field is going to fizzle out, if not crash and burn._

Doesn't sound too worried about the future of 'proper' science, does he? I think he's right, insofar as non-scientists are deeply suspicious of any kind of modeling (see the climate change debate for example), so using controls, double-blinds, and so on are the best way to advance this empirical technique.

<comment><USER3> There's a huge potential flaw in your prediction: you assume that the true efficacy of the techniques they use will determine the survival and popularity of the research techniques. In the cases indicated, the people deciding whether to continue funding the research are _not_ scientists who understand causal relations worth a damn, and they're very susceptible to spin (in the political sense of the term "spin", of course).

The saddest thing about it is that I'm positive there's something to the theories involved, but they're being squandered by people more interested in the popular _appearance_ of success than they are in true efficacy -- possibly because they ego-identify with the successes of their pet projects, and ensure that they don't pay enough attention to the right factors to recognize the difference between appearance of efficacy and true efficacy.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps I missed this in the article, but in what "cases" are the people deciding whether to continue funding complex systems research not scientists?

My guess is that a majority of the research into complex systems is funded by the NIH and the NSF. Both of which make funding decisions largely based on the opinions of other scientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree. I think the underlying issue here is that computer models are given way too much credit. A computer model is only as good as the software it runs on and the assumptions about the real world that this software makes.

If as scientist, you want to test assumptions, it is better not to rely on complex computer models that hide all their assumptions under the hood, but to make simpler or as simple as possible theories that can test assumptions one at a time. If you know all your assumptions are reliable then you can cobble them all together in computer models. And of course keep everything open so that others can check your work.

One of the most obvious and disastrous examples of failure of computer models is the economic crash that just happened. A bunch of bankers and rating agencies had a lot of fancy complex computer models that proved that their mortgage backed securities could not possibly lose value. So the securities were rated AAA, and everyone treated them as essentially risk free. Well we all know what happened next.

<comment><USER6> The economic crash is not a failure of computer models or even complex models. It's a failure based on a single simple assumption: house prices never go down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author seems to be confused. Scientists do try to validate their models (even the sniper author, via correlation). They _do_ understand that their model must predict the future ... however, in some fields (like preventing sniper attacks, psychology) there are many external variables, so it is difficult (if not impossible) to prove that the model is exactly correct. However, that does not mean that the results are not on target or that we cannot learn anything from the study ...

If anything else, no one will take a scientist's model seriously unless they use it to predict future events accurately -- this is a fundamental requirement of a model, after all.

<comment><USER8> "If anything else, no one will take a scientist's model seriously unless they use it to predict future events accurately -- this is a fundamental requirement of a model, after all."

Except when it comes to many many people trying very hard to spend trillions of dollars to fight something that is only predicted in models (failed models) - global warming.

Here is a link to Freeman Dysons discussing this subject:

<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html>

<comment><USER7> When politics get involved it gets ugly. Special interest groups always try to confuse the public over results which would have otherwise been accepted by the scientific community. This causes the public to form opinions on things which are not based in science but in emotion. For example, global warming, evolution, ex-gay therapies, etc.

Global warming is definitely scientific fact, but the issue here is moreso how much money do we need to spend to mitigate the (still somewhat unknown) risk.

<comment><USER3> > Global warming is definitely scientific fact, but the issue here is moreso > how much money do we need to spend to mitigate the (still somewhat unknown) > risk.

I think there's something to the indicators that global temperatures have been rising, of course, but the "science" involved has been so damned sloppy that we can't even get credible estimates of past trends, let alone credible predictions of future trends. There's a lot more at issue than "how much money do we need to spend". Hell, there's even significant doubt about the question of whether what is currently occurring is inconsistent with natural cyclic trends, and many temperature sampling sites have been found to be compromised by virtue of placement in the middle of parking lots and the like.

Get me some figures that don't look like they were compiled by twelve year olds, then we'll talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is about the 'inductive fallacy,' more or less. Karl Popper wrote a long work (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) on the scientific method, putting forward the criterion of falsifiability as an alternative to the positivist approach of model-building.

<comment><USER10> I have gotten into doing this sort of work (the scientific computer modeling part, not the "cargo-cult" interpretations thereof). Popper was the first person I went back to reread when I got into it. This is very important to understand (and so simple).

However, I disagree with the author that this type of work could be dispensable. You have to test your theories in order for them to be scientific, but you have to know exactly what experimental results your theories predict. These complex systems are too important to stop studying, and they're too complex to use "simpler" methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my experience, the best down-to-earth definition of science, referring to the process that the scientific community collectively performs, as measured by conference talks, proceedings and journal articles is: Science is anything which helps scientists think about their field in new or improved ways; with the comment that the ultimate goal (in the natural sciences) is to arrive at a testable theory.

The intermediate steps very often do not contain anything testable or repeatable.

</comment><comment><USER12> this researcher seems to take it for granted that there is something fundamental/sacrosanct about the "scientific method", but there isn't; it is a learning algorithm whose role is being diminished by new, more powerful learning algorithms.

<comment><USER13> That's actually not true. There _is_ something fundamental about the scientific method. Namely, it's _the_ learning algorithm; the only one that actually actually works (so far). Everything else is just variations on or approximations of this algorithm.

When you build a model and then do science (i.e. Hypothesis/Test/Explain loop) on the model instead of doing science on Nature, you learn a lot about your model. But you must be honest and admit that you have learned _nothing_ about Nature. What you _might_ have done is come up with hypotheses. But it's not enough. It's not science yet - it's just a complicated hypothesis. It doesn't count until you test it on Nature.

The point (and it's an obvious one, well-understood by most complexity researchers) is that your models need to enable you to _falsify_ them by doing real, repeatable experiments on Nature, not on models. There's no point building a model of a complex system if the only experiment that can falsify it is so complex that it can't be done.

A lot of time is wasted this way - in many ways it's the nature of the beast (it's called "complexity" for a reason). Nonetheless, this is frustrating to scientists who think the resources spent on learning facts about models might be better spent on learning facts about Nature - the more radical likely being willing to trade _all_ the modelling (and modelers?) for even a single properly verified fact.

<comment><USER12> when you train a computational model on half of your dataset and test it against the other half (which the author claims is Not Sufficiently Scientific), how is that qualitatively different from training it on all your data, and then "testing it on Nature" by gathering some more and checking your results? i am reminded of searle's chinese room argument.

> this is frustrating to scientists who think the resources spent on learning > facts about models might be better spent on learning facts about Nature - > the more radical likely being willing to trade all the modelling (and > modelers?) for even a single properly verified fact.

there is no getting rid of models. neither science nor any other human activity i am aware of is capable of verifying facts about the physical world.

<comment><USER14> >when you train a computational model on half of your dataset and test it against the other half (which the author claims is Not Sufficiently Scientific), how is that qualitatively different from training it on all your data, and then "testing it on Nature"

it would be essentially the same thing if you took half the data, made a model, tested it on the other half, got good results, and stopped.

but thats not going to happen. your fist model will stink. you'll refine it and try again. and you'll keep doing that. unfotunatly, this mean your model ends up being dependent on all the data.

the easiest way to prevent this is to build a model and the test it on real world data that occurs after you build the model. if it doesn't work, tweak the model, and then find new data again.

<comment><USER12> > your fist model will stink. you'll refine it and try again. and you'll keep > doing that. unfotunatly, this mean your model ends up being dependent on all > the data.

this is exactly what the scientific community as a whole is always doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Health Care Provider Suspends Chloroquine Prescription for Woman With Lupus - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/kaiser-permanente-lupus-chloroquine <comment><USER2> Drug is 8 cents a pill produced generic in India. They aren't going to export it any more but you had your chance. You wanted to protect local pharma against generics. They're protected.

Healthcare is full of artificially induced shortages in America, and Americans pay for that every day with their lives. Now, that's just slightly more obvious.

</comment><comment><USER3> The HN title is abysmal, here is the one from the site:

A Woman With Lupus Said Her Health Care Provider Is Stopping Her Chloroquine Prescription And Thanked Her For The "Sacrifice"

Gosh title case is jarring to read sometimes :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the abysmal title, but 'A Woman With Lupus Said Her Health Care Provider Is Stopping Her Chloroquine Prescription And Thanked Her For The "Sacrifice"' is 45 characters too long.

<comment><USER4> "Kaiser Lauds Lupus Patient's Cancelled Chloroquine Prescription as a Sacrifice"

Or just

"Kaiser Sacrifices Lupus Patient's Chloroquine Prescription"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So title is silly. They explained the drug builds up in the body and lasts ~40 days. Kaiser goes on to explain why it's necessary, steps to take if you start feeling worse, and that it's only expected to be temporary.

I really don't see the problem here. If you really can go 40 days then why not let people that critically need it have access?

<comment><USER6> The problem is that the drug doesn't stay at an effective level in the body for 40 days (it also takes more than a month for the drug to take effect), and the consequences of allowing lupus to flair include accumulating permanent damage to, for example, heart, lungs, kidneys and joints. Additionally, there's no good information yet on how an immunocompromised patient in a flair will react to coronavirus infection, beyond the general notion from our rheumatologist that putting your malfunctioning immune system into a state of dysfunction and then getting the virus that puts your immune system into a state of dysfunction is probably really bad.

source: my partner has rheumatoid arthritis and takes hydroxychloroquine, and we've been concerned about exactly this sort of thing happening for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/03/27/virginia- pharmaci...](https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/03/27/virginia-pharmacists- report-growing-demand-for-experimental-covid-19-medications/)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://people.com/health/kaiser-permanente-temporarily- stop...](https://people.com/health/kaiser-permanente-temporarily-stops- filling-prescriptions-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus/)</comment>


An 'artificial leaf' could one day power the world with clean energy - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/08/20/solar-fuel-artificial-leaf/

<comment><USER2> While this seems cool I've become skeptical of these sorts of announcements till there is a product with specifications and that someone can evaluate.

I guess all the _battery revolutions_ that go puff in the night has me just saying okay prove it.</comment>


How to Remove a Windows Computer Virus - <AUTHOR> http://valentinstanciu.com/2011/04/remove-a-windows-computer-virus/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for noting that it's a _Windows_ computer virus, not one of those menacing _malware_ viruses the media tells everyone, even Mac and Linux users, are going to destroy their lives.

Note that even though Macs and Linux boxes can certainly get viruses ([http://virus.bartolich.at/virus-writing- HOWTO/_html/index.ht...](http://virus.bartolich.at/virus-writing- HOWTO/_html/index.html)), statistically speaking, they absolutely will not. There's something else going on with Windows (cultural, baroque system interface, something) that allows a flood of malware.</comment>


China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/business/china-railway-one-belt-one-road-1-trillion-plan.html <comment><USER2> "Pursuing protectionism is just like locking oneself in a dark room," Mr. Xi told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in January.

I might agree with Mr. Xi, but the Great Firewall of China is a higher wall of protectionism than anything the West has against the Chinese. Forcing foreign companies to partner with Chinese companies and then transfer all of their closely held technologies and industrial processes to China seems pretty protectionist also. Maybe in Chinese culture being able to lock oneself in a dark room is a positive?

<comment><USER3> Those two aren't mutually exclusive. America is an incredibly protectionist country as well if you aren't aware.

[http://www.eulerhermes.com/economic- research/publications/Pa...](http://www.eulerhermes.com/economic- research/publications/Pages/protectionism-is-not-new.aspx?postID=1048)

In the past 3 years, America has introduced far more protectionist measures than other countries.

<comment><USER4> LOL nothing compared to China. China partners with startups, steals their IP and then escapes back to the homeland and no course of legal action. They get all the access to the West's markets and then give almost no access to their own. Their companies are all backed by the government and it's rigged in their favor. They cheat constantly, check out the EU scandal where they smuggle goods into London don't pay equal taxes as the EU companies, beat out competition who is playing fairly and then jack up prices.

Their immigration policies are one of the worst in the world. Human rights violations insanely high. They purchase our movie studios and then force on them Chinese propaganda and nothing negative on China ever. America is one of the least protectionist countries in the world if not the least.

<comment><USER5> China doesn't even allow its own citizens to read about things like the Tiananmen square massacre. If they could censor the rest of the world they would.

Even their citizens abroad will tow their party's line [0]

0\. [http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-essential- educati...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-essential-education- updates-southern-uc-davis-lands-the-dalai-lama-as-1487270569-htmlstory.html)

<comment><USER6> Bit pedantic but it's 'toe the line' [1]

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm struck by China's ability to attempt large, ambitious projects like this, compared to America's inability to do, well, anything really.

The largest infrastructure project I'm aware of in the USA is California's High Speed Rail (~$60B+), was approved a decade ago and is barely making any progress. The federal government is in complete gridlock. The most ambitious legislation passed in the last decade, the ACA, caused endless partisan warfare. Meanwhile, obvious policy wins like allowing more immigration [1] are not even discussed.

I've been following US politics for the last 2-3 presidents (going back to George W Bush), and it makes me very pessimistic. I don't see how a country can expected to be exceptional, or even above average, with politics that are so dysfunctional.

Perhaps, though, I'd have a different view if I could see things from inside, within China?

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/95.html](http://paulgraham.com/95.html)

<comment><USER8> Aren't the projects in China executed at complete disregard to the rights of individual citizens? I.e. if your house is in the way, sorry, we'll give you some laughable amount of money and send police over to brutalize you until you leave. Under such conditions, it's easy to make lots of change quickly (in such spirit, Stalin was even more efficient - he essentially enslaved a part of his nation via Gulags and used the free slave labor to get done quickly various massively ambitious projects around the country).

Another aspect is environment protection - it's much easier to build infrastructure if you don't mind wrecking the natural environment around it.

<comment><USER9> I haven't looked it up, but I've heard from a local that if you are displaced by a government project you will "be rich". In his eyes it was similar to winning the lottery, if less extreme.

<comment><USER10> It does depend on the area

I remember coming across a few blocks of old densely packed single-family brick buildings in Shanghai that were about to be torn down. Each building had a large hand written banner above their entrance, half of them praising the communist party for its compassion or saying long live Chairman Mao (my interpretation was that they were hoping for mercy for being such loyal party members), the other half cussing out the party and local officials

<comment><USER11> I think the idea was that hanging pictures of Chairman Mao all over their building would make the government look bad if they knocked it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "Belt and Road" scheme is well known. The first container freight train from Yiwu, China to Barking, England, arrived January 15, 2017. Coast to coast travel time: two weeks.[1] Conveniently, China uses a 4' 8.5" track gauge, unlike Russian metric gauge, so they can move freight cars all the way without a gauge change.

Soon, of course, heavier rails, longer trains, faster trains, more trains, better gradients, more electrification, alternate routes... China is funding high speed rail from Belgrade to Budapest. Now that's an infrastructure scheme.

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38654176](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38654176)

<comment><USER13> With that timetable,compared to sea shipping we're talking about 3-5x faster time, but the cost will be about double - $8K-10K/container. But of course that saves money in warehousing and financing. So financially, today it makes sense for the more expensive goods, at $1.5M per container. And it's best because there's not a lot of capacity vs sea routes.

But i wonder: could those prices, with more/better trains etc, become close to sea shipping, such that aliexpress, which is extremely cheap but uses very slow sea shipping, start using rail ?

Because at those timelines, even if using a local fulfillment center, the storage period is very short, so the cost becomes quite low, and without lots of trouble, suddenly aliexpress can offer much cheaper goods than Amazon, all across Europe, with fast shipping. Heck, they may not even need to build warehouses, using uber like warehouse model(i.e. flexe).

<comment><USER9> Container ships are about 2.5 times as fuel efficient as trains. I'm not sure what percentage of total cost that is, but I imagine it is significant.

<comment><USER14> Trains can also run on electricity. Ships are far away from that.

<comment><USER9> Ships are also incredibly unregulated on the type of fuel they use and their emissions, which, while bad for the environment, lowers the cost significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With 60+ countries agreed to attend the event, Its interesting to note: India refused to take part on this OBOR project. China's arch rival Japan sent a official team, but India refused to attend the submit.

China repeatedly blocked India's move to Ban terrorist Azad[1], blocked their NSG bid and their flip-flop on Arunachal. so India prefers to stay away from China-led project.

Russia is watchful about rising Chinese influence in their regions. Once they used to be major partner and China played minor role. Now the trend reversed.Russia knows that too.

[1] [http://indianexpress.com/article/india/china-united- nations-...](http://indianexpress.com/article/india/china-united-nations- masood-azhar-jem-terrorist-india-4451956/) [2][http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/outlier-china- preve...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/outlier-china-preventing- indias-entry-into-nuclear-suppliers-group-says-us/articleshow/56559841.cms)

And Chinese media, says: India and Russia tipped to be the big winners from China's massive 'Belt and Road' investment: [http://www.scmp.com/business/article/2094224/india-and- russi...](http://www.scmp.com/business/article/2094224/india-and-russia- tipped-be-big-winners-chinas-massive-belt-and-road)

<comment><USER16> the event isn't that impressive

"The Chinese government had hoped to assemble a weightier guest list to Mr Xi's premier international forum. But many heads of state and government, especially from G7 and OECD nations, were reluctant to participate in what they thought might be little more than a propaganda coup for China's ruling Communist party.

Only seven EU heads of state or government, most from smaller eastern European countries, accepted Mr Xi's invitation"

[https://www.ft.com/content/f89060ac-36c7-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0f...](https://www.ft.com/content/f89060ac-36c7-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The scary part is china's protectionism. Small nations and businesses have so little possibilities to operate in china without getting robbed of IP or being outcompeted by state supported domestic ventures.

I fear the future of China being stronger superpower than the USA.

<comment><USER18> Protectionism has never made a country strong.

<comment><USER19> This is demonstrably false, and actually the opposite of most countries that have successfully developed. I was searching for "South Korea protectionism history" to find articles for a great example (as SK practiced heavily protectionist policies in the immediate post-war decades), and this came up: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/eu.glo...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/eu.globaleconomy)

Protectionism can be very successful for countries with underdeveloped economies.

<comment><USER20> Hell the icon of "free trade and capitalism" developed under protectionism.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_States)

Every nation needs protectionism to help its industries. It's only when you have strong stable industries/companies that you become anti-protectionism because you want your native companies to have access to foreign markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The "China vs America" narrative is unnecessary.

If China wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure to develop their region that's a great thing for America too.

Counterintuitively, it could even be better for the US than China. Eventually the demand for low-margin, subsidized, Chinese steel will flatten, while the demand for high-margin American technology and cultural products will grow.

<comment><USER22> without IP these high margin American technology is copyable, which China has already shown they can do that.

<comment><USER21> American technology companies don't rely on IP restrictions as much as they used to. You couldn't copy Facebook, Google, Apple, or Amazon's products and services effectively on a global scale even if they had no IP restrictions.

And China is the second largest market for American movies, which absolutely require IP law to function. So I think this concern is overstated.

<comment><USER23> China has shown that they are very adept at copying American high-tech innovation.

* Facebook: WeChat/Weibo

* Google: Baidu

* Apple: already being made in China, clones everywhere

* Amazon: Alibaba

<comment><USER24> re: Facebook

On the contrary, WeChat is leaps and bounds ahead of Facebook Messenger (which is a more direct comparison). If you've watched Facebook Messenger over time, it's actually Facebook Messenger that's aspiring to be the WeChat of the west.

<comment><USER25> I was intrigued by Tencent's offer of 1TB of storage, installed the app and it immediately started uploading all of my phone's content to their cloud. Haha, great fucking service, just amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bravo China. Instead of overspending on military conquer the world thru trade and investment.

<comment><USER27> I also applaud that idea.

But I do wonder if it's possible to protect/expand trade without military activity. Historically it seems military expansion is the tip of the spear for trade expansion.

<comment><USER28> There are plenty of examples in the late 20th century where military activity wasn't a help: Taiwan and South Korea have succeeded despite their military challenges -- and spend basically nothing militarily protecting their trade.

<comment> aaron-lebo They can only do that because someone else is subsidizing a large part of their defense (the US). Without that they would have been conquered by NK and China long ago.

Ironically, it is the US overspending in military which is part of what is driving his economic push for China instead of trying to compete militarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I found this talk with Niall Ferguson and Samantha Power pretty fascinating about the US - China power balance changing. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8yghOc- lMIM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8yghOc-lMIM)

Just one mindblowing fact from the talk - China has poured more concrete in the last two years than the US in the last hundred.

<comment><USER30> China is a hot mass, people look at it as valuable energy, but it seems it lacks structure to be able to handle itself without risk of collapse. I don't wish them to fail, I just wish things to evolve smoothly and peacefully.

<comment><USER3> > it seems it lacks structure to be able to handle itself without risk of > collapse.

Could you clarify? China was stable for like a millennium while Europe was fighting each other to no end.

<comment><USER30> I meant as internal structure, not international stability.

<comment><USER31> I don't know what that means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> From about 2005-2008 I used to live and own a house on the Laos and Burma borders of far south-western China and still often travel in the area. Laos is simply poor, being a landlocked mountainous country with minimal infrastructure or education surrounded by larger and more powerful neighbors. In the last 16 years, Laos has begun to get some better roads (largely with foreign investment), mobile telecommunications, a larger tourist industry, some dams and a great deal more rubber plantations. Otherwise, it is still a sleepy, mountainous, jungled backwater.

China has committed to building infrastructure to connect Laos and Thailand to Chinese rail and road networks. Relatively tiny Vietnam apparently made an expensive and partly abortive attempt to sponsor a road from Dien Bien Phu to Udomxai in the north, perhaps in a bid to counter growing Chinese influence, but China ran rings around them and the strategic significance or benefit of such a road is now negligible.

From an economic rationalist perspective, I think China just wants more markets. If you were a massive manufacturer with 14(?) land borders and awesome infrastructure expertise, you'd be building infrastructure to connect new markets too. I don't think there's any kind of evil Beijing geostrategic scheme at play here ... there's very little to gain by controlling Laos (which economically China already does in the north of the country) ... it just makes sense.

Some images of the northern Laos road to Dien Bien Phu in 2012 (dunno if this new non-Picasa Google Photo link works) @ [https://get.google.com/albumarchive/106883718971909092529/al...](https://get.google.com/albumarchive/106883718971909092529/album/AF1QipOJtgKiJZdgruRyZhNTUk2bWY6_fXjzFYLosft7) or [https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOJtgKiJZdgruRyZhNTUk2b...](https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOJtgKiJZdgruRyZhNTUk2bWY6_fXjzFYLosft7)

<comment><USER33> There are repercussions of China's aggressive market hunting. Taking an example of Northern Laos, the Chinese have been buying farmlands and converting them into Banana farms. Lots of farmers have sold their land for good money. If you don't sell you land, you'll be a fool because a) the size of land isn't that big so you are dependent on your neighbours good will for letting the water flow into your patch b) the neighbours already sold their's to the Chinese. The Chinese also very cleverly opened a casino. So, now you have villages full of farmers who go to the casino and gamble the money back to the same people (because as the saying goes, the house always wins) who bought their lands. Lao women who used to work in their farms now work in these casinos. Drug abuse has always been a problem in Laos but with this inflow of cash, it has been exacerbated.

One might say, the Lao government is equally responsible - which is not entirely false. If a chinese company tried to buy an Indian farmer's land, there would be outrage but Laos is a tiny country so no real comparison. Anyway, the net result is a social impact that is far from the carrot of "economic growth".

<comment><USER32> {{citation-needed}} but perhaps. In my observation land has predominantly been used for rubber plantations rather than bananas. However, the rubber price crashed in recent years so a lot of the profits never materialized, maybe they are switching. Also, there are vast tracts (literally mountain after mountain as far as the eye can see of monoculture) of bananas inside of China (particularly in Wenshan prefecture, close to Vietnam), so on the fact of it it makes little sense to import them over bad roads from bad infrastructure regions in Laos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I recently heard Charles Hess from InferFocus talk about the changes coming from China. The United States is about to be passed up in a big way due to Xi's "China Dream"

[https://twitter.com/cervinventures/status/860307819030958080](https://twitter.com/cervinventures/status/860307819030958080)

<comment><USER35> What should the US do than? Spend our tax dollars on foreign handouts?

If US companies want to invest in SE Asia there is nothing stopping them.

<comment><USER34> I don't have an answer for you. But, I'd rather spend tax dollars building railroads in SE Asia than blowing up the Middle East. #Iraq2Trillion #neverforget

<comment> the-dude Dude, it is not 2 trillion by a long shot.

It is 268k ( [https://www.iraqbodycount.org/](https://www.iraqbodycount.org/) )

<comment><USER36> Did you really think he was talking about the body count?(Have 2 trillion people even ever lived...?) He's clearly talking about the projected cost of that war.

<comment> the-dude #neverforget

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There has been a lot of debate on India's refusal (for political reasons around disputed territory) to join the OBOR. Such debates are tempered by math that show that the trains are actually less efficient than shipping in lots of cases [1].

I wonder if the pure economic value , minus the investment leverage, still makes sense.

[1] [https://m.rediff.com/news/column/india-doesnt-want-to- join-c...](https://m.rediff.com/news/column/india-doesnt-want-to-join-chinas- obor-but/20170513.htm)

</comment><comment><USER38> It's interesting to note that China and India were the global economic juggernauts until only very recently:

(first google result to demonstrate the point) [https://infogr.am/Share-of- world-GDP-throughout-history](https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout- history)

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't this what the failed TPP trade deal was supposed to serve as a counter to?

<comment><USER40> I think that about 20% of TPP did, as you said, deal with real trade, but 80% dealt with treaties that would override individual nations' laws and use private 'courts' for disputes.

<comment><USER41> In terms of public perception, perhaps. In reality? The parent comment is correct: we let ourselves pick out the parts we didn't like, with a dash of knee-jerk opposition to "secrecy" on top, and completely ignored the broader context (trade, security, and international politics).

The good news is, against all odds, it looks like the other TPP members might forge ahead anyway even without the US (for now): [https://www.google.com/amp/asia.nikkei.com/amp/Politics- Econ...](https://www.google.com/amp/asia.nikkei.com/amp/Politics- Economy/International-Relations/Japan-to-push-for-TPP-11-by-year-end)

It wasn't concern for little countries or even anti-IP sentiment that killed the TPP in the US, though that provided useful cover, but nativism as embodied by Trump.

New Zealand, one of those little countries, just ratified the TPP a few days ago to "send a message" in support of free trade despite the US withdrawal:[http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/330574/nz-govt- ratif...](http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/330574/nz-govt-ratifies-tpp- despite-us-rejection)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Somewhat hypocritical considering China's established track record of creating walled gardens around its own economy.

</comment><comment><USER43> " _a difficult three-hour drive over potholed roles from the capital_ "

s/roles/roads/

Incidentally I have done this three-hour drive. Horrible indeed. The potholes limit your speed to 20-30 mph. I kept thinking on the way "what would really be the cost to repave a ~100-mile 2-lane road?" And "how high on this country's priority list would this be?"

</comment><comment> awinter-py Calling this a new marshall plan is a powerful analogy.

Not sure I agree or disagree. The marshall plan was focused on gaining allies, so in theory it was more economically selfless than this. But even if not perfect the comparison makes you zoom out and take the long view.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, they build roads and trains. Something that they know. The Question: Will it be enough? Some people claim that there are no more reasonable investment opportunities left in China.

"The power plants in Pakistan, as well as upgrades to a major highway and a $1 billion port expansion, are a political bulwark. By prompting growth in Pakistan, China wants to blunt the spread of Pakistan's terrorists across the border into the Xinjiang region, where a restive Muslim population of Uighurs resides."

Well, yes. But there may be other ways to do this. China just wants to have Pakistan as a close ally. If India is an ally of the US, it is a good idea to have an ally that can counter India.

<comment><USER45> Pakistan is closer ally than india for the US . Pakistan receives much more military aid alone every year than the Chinese investment

<comment><USER46> US is ally of Pakistan while China is rather a friend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Certainly more forwardlooking than Trump.

But I don't think Official China's shadow is a moral one, even if it allows trade to flourish. I certainly hope that the citizens force their government to be more moral and have a better focus on human rights.

</comment><comment><USER48> You cannot control Asia until the end game.

<comment><USER49> Unlike Risk this game NEVER ends. It will be played millennia to come

<comment><USER50> More like Axes & Allies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh yes, China, with the authoritarian government lead by a dictator, and has proven to engage in unfair trade policies and dumping of goods, and supports an evil regime in north korea, is going to help the region grow! /s.

Seriously, only third world countries welcomes Chinese loans that will never be be repaid. The 'Belt and road' scheme has been shown to be a failure thus far. No smart nation wants to have its economy/community/jobs/manufacturing destroyed by an evil government, just for cheap, shoddily made goods

Besides, China has no trillions to spend. It's massively in debt, suffers from capital outflow and rich fleeing the country. It has middle income problem and demographics issues. It's heyday was 2007.

<comment><USER3> > destroyed by an evil government, just for cheap, shoddily made goods

This attitude is why China managed to get itself out of poverty while other countries don't seem to get anywhere. While you may think phones made in China are cheap, shoddily made goods, guess what, there are billions of people in this world who don't have the financial resources of the 300M Americans to afford an iPhone.

The American model is to have a company create an amazing product at a very high cost (iPhone, Tesla) and have it "trickle down". What ends up happening are these companies monopolize the market, force everyone onto their ecosystem, and extract as much money as possible. Things do progress, but everyone gets locked into a system, and the company lacks incentive to keep innovating.

In China, they create cheap products, but in a few years, every single person has a smartphone. The technology is democratized and because of that, new technology can be built off that initial platform - now they are by far way ahead in things like fintech. Who cares if the product was initially cheap and shoddily made when the people there are upgrading their devices every year. The "cheap" device maker Xiaomi dropped to fourth place in China because consumers demanded more and more high end products. Within the space of a few years, the Chinese phone makers are making quality phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Its more like China vs Europe, USA would only benefit. USA can also use the same road to ship goods from West Coast to Europe.

<comment><USER52> You might want to look at a globe, the Pacific ocean is much larger than you appear to think.

<comment><USER53> The US and Russia have been talking on-again off-again since the 1990's about a sea tunnel from Alaska to Siberia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's interesting that a country of China's size works without any history of widespread religious belief.

<comment><USER53> Isn't the period from the end of the Three Kingdoms (~280AD) to the beginning of the Sui/Tang (~580AD) when Mahayana Buddhism evangelized China?

<comment><USER54> Isn't Buddhism a philosophy/approach to living rather than a religion?

<comment><USER53> You're thinking more of Theravada Buddhism which spread to Sri Lanka and Thailand, and the more recent Tibetan variety. The Mahayana version which took over China features statues of many different gods, often taken directly from Taoism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which is the best cryptocurrency to invest in right now, and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Don't consider as investment advice, just my own thoughts:

1st of all, investing in crypto is 100% speculation, 0% investing. I still do it though just for fun, for now, it has been working but all could be 0 tomorrow.

Coins to watch for:

NEO coin: it's the chinese ethereum, there's some talks in ICOs getting regulated there and its looked upon on being the "regulated ICO coin" sometime soon, speculation, but definitely performing well.

Bitcoin: just invest in the most stable one, why not?

Ethereum: smart contracts, the most stable also. Much better than bitcoin, just not as popular.

Monero: bitcoin, but fully anonymised. It's not so hard to trace bitcoin tx, but monero makes it sort of impossible.

Ripple: wants to kill SWIFT and partner up with a lot of banks, basically the "playing in the side of the banks" coin

Also, do your own research. Don't trust anyone. Avoid small coins if you aren't the person doing the pump and dump.

The only thing I would invest in is the IDEA. Blockchain is there to replace tons of industries, we just don't know yet how much time it's going to take, or who'll be the winner. It's very likely that the winner doesn't even exist.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin will always be there as the proof that blockchain model works. It will stay simple for the sake of stability.

Calling Ethereum better is like saying JavaScript is better than HTML.

<comment><USER4> AFAIU, Ethereum can do everything that Bitcoin can. In this sense, Ethereum is strictly better than Bitcoin. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER5> It does more than Bitcoin because it allows the founders to rollback transactions from the ledger if they feel like it.

Sorry, a bit trollish but am I wrong? In theory Ethereum does promise a lot but in practice, we're yet to see much in terms of useful smart contracts. And as we can see from the DAO debacle, they've broken their claims of "Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> None, it's speculation at best, incompetence most of the time, fraud quite often.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ethereum or Bitcoin for investing. They have real intrinsic value. Most the other currencies are just spin offs of the original deal or overly ambitious white papers with nothing implemented. Stay away from NEO.

<comment><USER4> How to calculate their intrinsic value?

<comment><USER8> Same way as you calculate USD intrinsic value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Starting your own blockchain and raising Bitcoin to distribute your new tokens seems to be the quickest way to big bucks.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some of ny picks: elastic is a supercomputer that will release product probably during the month, QRL is a quantum resistant ledger that will do the same, NEO is te new ethereum, Monero is the only super private one and Ardor will release mainnet in Q4 with very solid child chain tech.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this type of thread should probably be removed by moderators. There's like one every week or so.

You're basically just asking people to pump their favorite altcoin.

This is not a good way to do investing.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is time to buy tulips.

<comment><USER10> Same argument again without realising tulips offered no innovation while blockchain clearly does

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Investing in crypto is fantastically risky. The premise under which almost all investors view the asset is that it will be worth some multiple of where it is today, or zero.

To invest in any crypto you have to understand what separates each of them in terms of security from their counterparts. There is a significant amount of buzz that has no relationship to the value proposition of a given alt. I can think of only three (perhaps four explain later) cryptos that have any real ecosystem that isn't 100% controlled by the founders. That is bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum. Every other crypto is really just a crypto in name only.

In order to be a crypto in anything except name only you have to be able to validate transactions as they are attached to the blockchain of the crypto. Without doing this, all you have is an expensive distributed database, and when I say distributed, that's exactly the problem. Bitcoin is distributed. Every node holds a copy of the blockchain, and it is fantastically difficult to get each of these nodes to adopt consensus rules changes, especially changes that reduce the network security. That feature makes bitcoin more valuable than all other crypto currencies combined, because even if the most competent crypto open source development team, i.e. bitcoin core, chose to put forward a proposal that the node owners thought would reduce security, it would be rejected. No other crypto has this level of separation from the maintainers of the system, and the developers of the system.

In my opinion, unless you are a sophisticated trader, there is only one crypto worth investing in. If you are sophisticated trader, there will always be pump and dump schemes for new cryptos, and I expect there is a lot of money to be made. But that seems little more than gambling.

It is possible that the offshoots of some of these cryptos might gain traction. Bitcoin cash provides no real security because its node decentralization is almost non-existent, and it is controlled by a small group of miners, perhaps only even one. They can change the rules at any time. Same goes for Ethereum really. Vitalik Buderim might just to modify the consensus rules, and there's very little anyone could do about it. People will blindly follow him. But with bitcoin cash, it is possible that the chinese government will capture bitcoin cash, given it would only need to capture one company that exists in its country, and dictate that that is the crypto that must be used. Maybe that will make it more valuable? Maybe it won't? Can't say. It seems a big risk to me though.

So unless you really understand or believe in the value proposition of a crypto, and understand how it can be protected from capture, it's best to steer clear of all of them. There is only one crypto, bitcoin, that you can reasonably download and run a node, and ensure that your crypto is secure, at least in the short to medium term.

</comment><comment><USER14> not a single one is investment grade yet

</comment><comment><USER15> z-cash. IMO zkSNARKS have legs.

</comment><comment><USER16> Bitcoin.</comment>


Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense - <AUTHOR> http://www.hizook.com/page/hizookcom-frontpage-slashdot-reddit-digg-engadget-hacker-news-result-google-disables-adsense-ac

<comment><USER2> Two points:

1\. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.

2\. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.

The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.

<comment><USER3> Well said. Further to the above, Google had a very good reason to drop this particular site: Over the span of a week, their impression count shot through the roof with the sort of traffic that never clicks ads.

So all Google sees is a whole ton of 0.0000001% clickthru impressions coming from a former backwater site. If my ads were serving there, I'd certainly want them pulled.

Granted, Google is terrible when it comes to situations like this. But technically they did the correct thing here.

<comment><USER4> So "technically" allowing a number of days to go by without response, not providing a method to escalate an issue, or not providing a method for users to get any straight forward answers about a particular situation that Google initiated is, as you said, correct?

<comment><USER3> Hmm... You seem to have ignored the first half of the sentence your responded to. The part that says "Google is really bad at customer service".

So no, to repeat: It was poorly communicated, but it's good for business, both for them and for their advertisers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.

<comment><USER6> As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day".

I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve.

You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.

<comment><USER5> There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well.

Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would be difficult to have one-on-one conversations with all of them even if everyone at Google did nothing but try to provide that support. Historically, we try to tackle that challenge by reducing the need to talk to a person at all (e.g. our webmaster tools let people diagnose lots of issues without talking to a webmaster expert at Google). We try to pursue scalable communication methods such as forums and keeping an eye on the blogosphere too. I wouldn't claim that we're perfect--I'd be curious to hear more about the AdWords issue that you had--but our first instinct is to look for ways so that people don't need to telephone Google in the first place. I think a lot of companies do that; I can't remember the last time I needed to talk to Amazon or Facebook or Netflix on the phone, for example.

But I take your point, and while we do have support channels, I think it's good to keep an eye out for blog posts because that feedback can help us improve so that future people interacting with Google don't get as frustrated.

<comment><USER7> A part of that frustration has to be from that email that gets sent out. I haven't been on the receiving end, but I've read it in a couple of blog posts about this sort of thing, and honestly: that letter is awful.

It contains exactly one piece of "useful" information, the link to the disabled account FAQ. The rest is just simply terrible. It starts with a very serious accusation, intoning "significant risk" and "financial damage", but Google wasn't "compelled" or "forced" to act, it "decided" to, implying not that some mandatory threshold was reached but that someone sat down and worked it out and reluctantly agreed that this was the way to go, or worse, that sometimes similar situations might go the other way.

Immediately after accusing the person of being an evil bastard, it turns on the smarmy fake politeness. "Please understand" that we think you're an evil bastard. "Thank you" for understanding that we think you're an evil bastard. And thanks for "cooperating", even though you actually have no choice in the matter at all. If you have any questions, kindly fuck off and don't use the same method of communication we just used to reach you, here's a link to more standardized dehumanizing copy.

It reads like Google is breaking up with you while checking its phone, acting like you've done something horrible enough to merit no discussion on the matter, trying to act nice enough so you don't think it's a bitch, but making it clear it doesn't give a shit and really never did.

<comment><USER5> calambrac, I personally agree with you about the wording/tone of the current letter. I would like them to take a look at changing that, although no one will ever be delighted to get that letter.

<comment><USER7> That's true, it's always going to be a hard letter to get, and I'm sure that most of the time it's being sent to people who deserve to get it. I think a rewrite should simply dispense with the dire accusations, the fake politeness, and the implication that there's a significant human presence behind the individual decision. Don't waste people's time or patronize them, be direct about what's happening and acknowledge that there may be some kind of recourse if you want to work through the process. 'We're disabling your account because our algorithm told us to. We regret if this is an error, please see this page for more information if you feel this is the case.'

<comment><USER8> Yes, it's a nasty, no-easy-solution dilemma: Shugging off the spammers yet not mistreating the "false positive" decent customers that your algorithm bans.

What I find distressing (and would find even more so had _I_ been the victim) is that Google refuses to to identify _which_ part of TOS have been violated. Police and courts have to specify which parts of criminal code a defendant is accused of violating. Can we not get similar fairness from corporate America?

Are you afraid that such clarifications would give too much useful info to actual spammers?

Well, maybe a _slight_ edge. But I might compare this to the dilemma that clarifying legal defendants their constitutional rights ("Miranda" in the U.S.) deprives law enforcement of some opportunities to tap some useful self- incrimination: It's part of the cost of valuing Constitutional rights. Would Google dare to offer its customers some Consumer Bill of Rights?

<comment><USER9> Google is in a contractual business relationship with its partners, not an hiring or governing relationship. The contract may suck, but does anyone sign up for AdSense because the contract is great?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On a side note, google should definitely get its act together related to customer service. I have heard so many horror stories about google's indifferent/insignificant customer service lately.

<comment><USER6> _On a side note, google should definitely get its act together related to customer service._

This implies that they're incompetent at providing customer service. My biggest fear is that this behavior is by design, that they are achieving all their customer service objectives, and that they have the metrics to prove it.

<comment><USER11> (Meaning that they have low customer service objectives?)

<comment> onreact-com Yeah. Don't pay people to do customer service is still more profitable than losing a few customers a they are not many search and Adsense/Adwords alternatives that can really compete when it comes to reach.

<comment><USER12> That's walking a very tight rope as the way you put it sounds very much like monopolistic behavior. I would suggest that it does not make business sense to have the government looking over you as being an evil monster, which, is most probably what will occur if the horror stories continue.

<comment><USER13> Governments move slowly, and execs (and shareholders) rarely look past the next quarter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's crap is that AdSense's TOS say that you can't run someone else's context- or content-sensitive ads. So you can't run both AdSense and whatever Yahoo/Bing/whoever has. If you could, stuff like this would be a great boon, not an automatic circuit breaker that cut you off.

<comment><USER15> My favorite term from the TOS is the one where they forbid you to talk about your accounts statistics:

" Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as "Confidential" or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority. "

For the whole thing see here:

<https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms>

<comment><USER16> You can bet they wanted to write _"The first rule of adsense is ..."_

<comment><USER15> That's definitely what it feels like. My main issue with this part of the TOS is this: Google is extremely lacking in transparency, the only way to puncture that is to team up with other publishers/advertisers and compare notes.

Right now the feeling is simply that you're being screwed and you can't even talk about that feeling or verify it.

At the risk of getting my adsense account blocked, and because I'm not going to let the big G muzzle me I'm going to post my adsense stats for July.

edit: they're up: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791158>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hizook could have prevented losing advertising revenue (or at least reduced losses) by having a backup or parallel ad network on their site. So if not Google adsense, what's the next best game in town?

<comment><USER17> I have used 'project wonderful' as an advertiser to great success. It's extremely transparent. <http://www.projectwonderful.com/>

It's really big with the webcomics people

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone ever fronted up to Google and ask to see some customer service there?

Over the past few months there have been a number of stories about Google's bad customer service particularly in relation to the AdSense/etc programs, so I'm curious if anyone has been brave/silly enough to try.

<comment><USER15> I know one of those cases personally and no, they're not 'brave/silly' enough to try because there appears to be some chance you get shut down completely if you become too vocal about support issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, the real problem here is that Google is a company that tries to be nice and pleasant to their users, but has to deal with unreasonable customers on a massive scale. In fact, not just unreasonable customers, but many who are actively attempting to systematically defraud them and their other customers.

So I think we can all agree that this was a pretty bad example. What are the best ways that others have found to handle things in similar situations without causing these kinds of scenarios?

</comment><comment><USER19> I remember a comment at some point by pg that customer service might be Google's Achilles heel. The evidence is accumulating. Any service that cannot be provided without it cannot be provided by Google and there is an opportunity to compete.

Judging by how keen people are to share google customer service frustrations at any opportunity, I think this is evidence.

</comment><comment><USER20> I made Reddit, Digg, and Lifehacker in one day and Google didn't disable mine. Apparently YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER21> Power corrupts.

<comment><USER22> Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incorrect (business) feature prioritization

<comment><USER15> I'm with the GP on this one, certainly after my personal experiences with Google on issues like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised to see the default thinking is that there is something dodgy at play here.

Jumping from 100 impressions per day to 10,000+ probably just triggered some automatic fraud prevention system.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, except for the fact that the person had been with AdSense for a year and there was no recourse after the trigger was hit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One has to understand that Adsense publishers are not clients for Google. There are millions of websites trying to get Adsense working for them, so Google here is the client.

Real clients of Google are Adwords advertisers, so these are the ones that they try to please. Anything that makes your site suspect will take you out of the network, and Google makes it very clear that they will do it first and ask questions later. I don't see this changing, because it is a really good assurance for advertisers.

<comment><USER24> Google doesn't have a phone support for Adwords either. That's another story, though. Google wouldn't have Adwords customers were it not for AdSense, so I think your point fails in that sense. Google "traps" your money, whether make legally or not, and you never see it again unless you manage to appeal "correctly." Furthermore, there is no proof whatsoever that Google returns all of that money to advertisers. I've never seen a trace of evidence they don't just mark that as profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This comes up all the time. Happened to me too, I gave up on AdSense as a result.

How all the crappy parking and spam sites keep their adsense going I'll never understand.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's because visitors from those sites are worthless. They may click on the ads, but they aren't going to buy anything and even if they do, the conversion rate is so low that the advertisers get mad at Google.

<comment><USER28> I fail to see how Google mispricing impressions is the fault of the Hizook admin.

Google already modifies the payout on clickthrough using a completely opaque system. If that system cannot handle traffic spikes, they shouldn't be defaulting to banning the Adsense account, they should just throttle inventory.

<comment><USER27> Google shoots first and doesn't ask questions later. I'm not defending google. I've been anti-google for years. I'm just saying why they disable the account. It's the easiest, automated solution to combat lots of problems like click- fraud, advertiser complaints, etc. If they don't disable the account, they have to constantly handle _this_ type of account, the high traffic, potentially high click-thru, but low conversion attracting account.

The other solution requires making a lot of changes to a lot of accounts. The advertisers' ad positioning, the rates for the ads, which affect other adsense sites, etc. In that case, Google runs the risk of angering a lot of customers, both advertisers, and real estate providers.

The other solution: ban the account -- angers only one real estate provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Although I am sympathetic to everyone's disgruntlement with Google over the adsense and adwords programs, it makes for very boring news for the rest of us unconcerned with revenue streams derived that way.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious to know why, on that page, there are three vertical AdSense banners.

</comment><comment> onreact-com This is a well known issue with the so called Digg effect. I warned people years ago not to aim for Digg traffic because Adsense tracks page impressions and click throughs and Digg users behave like robots, flooding a site with requests and bouncing off right away.

[edit:] Reddit is even worse, higher bouncer rate (95%+), and even lower engagement than Digg.

<comment><USER31> When you find an article on a site via digg you are supposed to check out the rest of the site?

That literally did not occur to me till I read your sentence.

I've certainly never done so, I've never even thought to do so. I've sometimes clicked a link inside the story text, but not often.

<comment> onreact-com Digg is only for posting ugly comments and offending others so that's why you actually don't have to click or even read something on Digg. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Didn't anyone else notice that Google's "explanation" for disabling the account was the same as in another recent story:

 _While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers._

This was on HN a while ago: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=781751>

<comment><USER33> That is one of those empty, formulaic phrases that mean the exact opposite of what they say. Like when a company says _for your convenience_ which really means _for this company's convenience_ or more commonly _we're about to make things harder for you_.

These formulaic phrases are spit out by the form letter generator and have no meaning.

<comment><USER32> I realize it's meaningless bullshit - I was just surprised that they're using the same excuse all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems like some lame automatic anti-fraud (too successful SEO) trigger at google, based entirely on statistics (like high-speed stock trading, etc.)

Those people had their top moment, but google spoiled their bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm very happy with the support I get from the Google AdSense team...but it sounds like i'm outside the norm....

<comment><USER35> and by outside the norm I mean someone interacts with me once every quarter or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, I'm so sad that blogspam-ing is becoming unprofitable. So very sad...

</comment><comment><USER37> waaah.

just be grateful that messrs. brin and page allowed you the privilege, for as such a brief period as it were, to make a meager pittance from these text and/or image based advertisements.

find no pity from me.

</comment><comment><USER38> If only Get Satisfaction could get the Google account. . .. Perhaps Google should acquire them; that would likely solve the customer service issues people seem to be so upset about.</comment>