Emails while commuting 'should count as work' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/education-45333270 <comment><USER3> After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly.

The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many.

I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it.

We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees.

Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment.

(P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year?

As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade- offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)

<comment><USER4> >After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly.

>The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many.

These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics).

Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.

<comment><USER5> > I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - <USER2> > many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I > lack data and drive to prove this point sadly)

So what is it that has convinced you that we're losing, in the face of evidence to the contrary?

<comment><USER4> I apologise for the following unstructured stream of unconsciousness. It would be interesting to know what age group you are in as that could well colour your perspective.

For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live in a world where (thanks to things like QE) it's easy to make money if you have money - equity markets have gone through a sustained bull period and housing prices have seen a sustained period of growth which has only in the past few years cooled down.

An easy thing for many people to relate to is house prices (which is often most people's entry into wealth). If you live in a major city like London, good luck buying a house without parental help. The past decade has seen growth which has basically been faster than most people can save at. What's even more crazy is that the gap is small enough to see within (half) a generation - I have an older brother and people in their mid 30s face a very different situation to people in their mid 20s now. If you got on the housing ladder around or before 08 you'd have made widened the gap between those who didn't in a stepwise fashion.

Meanwhile, my father was able to buy a house and have a kid when he was 27 after arriving in the UK with nothing on his back - he didn't even have a university degree. Contrast that with today, people who work in classically "elite" jobs live paycheck to paycheck in the city. Do you know any junior doctors in London? Most of them are amongst the most miserable people I know - they work all kinds of crazy shifts (night oncall) then have 1-2 hour commutes home.

So if you're in a situation where most people are struggling to move out of home, let alone get on the ladder, while it is known that the rich are getting richer can we say that we live in more equal times?

<comment><USER6> What is your comparison point? Things get better all the time, but it really depends on what apples you compare which oranges to, and which flavour you prefer, how the comparison is viewed.

So, is the comparison point Roman London? During the Blitz? When Pea Soup was a common pollution issue ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog))? Or is it a period post war until about 1980 when assets hadn't caught up to a booming economy?

Some parts of life are more expensive in a few world cities that are more than their local population, places like London, SF, NYC, Paris. In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones. On the flipside, supply has not kept up, as most world cities have housing approval procedures that are glacially slow, and held back by NIMBYs.

But even then, the London of 1950 wasn't the place it is now, and lots of things like air quality have improved vastly, as has what is available to do - from eating to drinking and general entertainment.

Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.

<comment><USER4> >What is your comparison point?

I guess my parent's generation i.e. post-WW2. Your insight about assets not catching up is valid, although social mobility was very high for the times.

>In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones.

This is presentation of facts I've previously struggled to articulate so thank you for framing it much more lucidly than I ever could have. This particular insight unfortunately somewhat agrees with my viewpoint that "global inequality has gone down but local inequality has gone up globally". Like I said, I haven't got any data to prove it, but I would willingly put money on betting that there is some Simpson's paradox schenanigans going on here. China, if anything, is a great example of this - the Beijing middle classes are doing "o.k." and there are tonnes of billionaires in China, but equally, there are plenty of people still living on 100USD a month (or less).

>Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.

I think that is a fair point, the only difference I'd argue, is that my parents came to the UK and did well for themselves by playing the same game as most the people around them. Sure, I could move to China on an expat salary (I have recollections of 200k PA USD for "english teachers" in South Korea being passed around a while back, or teachers at Harrow Beijing getting paid 100k+ PA) but is that really something any of the locals can do there? That's almost soft colonisation in my eyes. I recently had a chance to discuss local software engineer salaries with a local mainlander and he quoted salaries of 20-30k USD for fresh CS grads in ShenZhen. And he scoffed as if that was a big number. Really puts things into perspective when you compare that to Ivy CS fresh-grads in SV (120-200k when I last checked)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please don't read/send email while driving.

Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career, at this job and the next. Don't just give that time away to your current employer for free - unless your employer is a charity.

Edit: Even if you work for a charity, giving away your time for free may not be a good idea. ;)

<comment><USER8> _Use your bus /train time to study things that will help your career_

Or leave 45 minutes early and work those 45 minutes on the train.

<comment> loup-vaillant That one is less socially acceptable, if at all.

<comment><USER9> Luckily for me acceptable where I work.

Nice deal for everyone: they get access to a larger pool of potential employees. I get to live where I want.

And I make sure I only write the hours I actually work while commuting. (Right now I'm reading HN instead.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I disagree strongly with this statement in the article:

 _" There's a real challenge in deciding what constitutes work," said Dr Jain, from the university's Centre for Transport and Society._

"Work" is anything I would be doing while sitting at my desk in your office building. So if I'm doing that on a train or in your office they are both "work." And if my train ride takes 1.5 hours to the office and 1.5 hours home, I'll get on the train around 8AM and leave the office at 3:30 to arrive at the other end by 5PM and count that as an 8 hour work day.

On the other hand, if I am in my car driving, I don't think of it as work until I can actually concentrate on doing work.

<comment><USER11> Possible alternate definition: Anything that you wouldn't do if you weren't paid for it.

This would include driving to the office.

<comment><USER12> It's not reasonable to expect your employer to pay for your commute time if you don't use that commute time to work. You can work for them on the train. You shouldn't work for them on the train if you're not getting paid for it, but you're generally also not expected to work on the train. You can't work for them while you're driving. You can think of that driving time as work, but you shouldn't expect your employer to consider it work.

Where you choose to live and work are up to you, and need to be factored in to the burden. Commuting is only "work" if you're expected to do something during the commute.

<comment><USER13> In Norway you have to be paid when you 'are available to the job'. If you are on standby the minimum pay is 1/3\. If you have to work outside your normal workhours the pay is minimum 50% extra.

If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.

<comment><USER14> That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be competitive on cost. The rest of the world can't pay for overhead like that.

<comment><USER15> >That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be competitive on cost.

When you can offload the consequences of poor planning or lack of foresight onto your employees (in the form of making them stay late, come in early, be on call or have arbitrary schedules, etc.) at zero cost, that's going to discourage good management and honest project planning.

If I don't have to pay a price for underestimating how long it will take to do something, then am I not subtly incentivized to lowball estimates for everything knowing that it's really no skin off my back if it takes longer than expected? It's all coming out of my employees' hides. There may be fuzzy, unquantifiable effects on morale, psychological health, creativity, etc. on my staff that hurt the organization in the long run, but compared to the hard data on quarterly returns they don't weigh as heavily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, obviously.

Doing things which are part of work counts as work is hardly an innovative statement.

The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office?

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's this black and white. First, I'm sure plenty of companies are basically stealing from their employees, but this is also situational.

I answer emails and slack whenever I can. On the flip side, I get work from home privileges, I show up when I want, I leave when I want, and I get put on exciting projects instead of boring ones. People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. I typically don't bill time until my laptop comes out.

I'm two-minds about this. Companies really do abuse their employees and try to get all the work they can out of them. This is a problem that leads to abusive employers. But employees also look for ANY entitlement they can receive, whether or not it is useful to their professional development. This is also a problem that leads to lazy and useless employees. It's sort of a feedback loop. It's also probably very different outside of my field (and probably most people's field on this site), which is software development.

<comment><USER18> > People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead > projects with demanding clients.

Why not? Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure. That's what on-call is for, and on-call engineers and management should rotate and be paid for on-call duty. For them, it's working hours. When I'm on call for a client, I bill _for being available_, so basically for keeping the phone on.

<comment><USER19> "Demanding client" doesnt mean unlimited funding. i find that the most demanding ones also look most closely at their bills.

<comment><USER18> "Demanding client" is usually code for "behaves like a spoiled child because nobody dared to tell them no." The most demanding clients I've witnessed were mid-level managers from MTV and Universal Music. Called for work being done on a weekend just because they felt like.

The way I usually approach these discussions is "ok, you can have the feature built this weekend, this means people need to work their weekend, that costs 50% extra and means that the people working extra hours will be unavailable some time in the future." Same thing with 24/7 support. It just costs money. Staff needs to be available. 90% of the people decide that Monday will be good enough.

The hard fact is that someone needs to pay for 24/7\. It's either the client, the employer or the employee. It's just that a lot of employees don't realize that they're getting shortchanged here with talk about engagement and promise of better projects and I'm trying my best that this doesn't happen in my company on my watch.

<comment><USER19> Then they may go elsewhere, to someone not on a 9-5 monday-friday culture. Many now space people out (ie some on a w-th weekend) so the company can provide 7-day service at normal rates. I used to work in film/tv. 7-day service is a norm.

24-hour is harder, but when you have clients across different time zones, it is also a norm. Again, with big films scattering themselves across the globe, it is expected that someone in authority picks up 24/7 because your 3am is sometimes the client's 10am.

You can charge more for this, but the client doesn't want to hear complaints. You will be judged on service rendered for a given price. The firm down the street, the one who can provide people on a sunday without overtime, will win the next contract.

<comment><USER18> You may have misread what I wrote. I'm not at all opposed to flex time, work schedules that include the weekend, people preferring off work hours. If someone prefers to work weekends and have weekdays off, fine. If someone prefers 6x6.66 hours instead of 5x8, good with me. People that work on drilling platforms or on ships have even more extreme schedules. Still, this is all fundamentally different from constant availability for a single person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If your employer tracks you by the hour, then _of course_ email while commuting is work. Also thinking about a design while taking a shower in the evening is work. Also waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep because work issues are bothering you is work.

Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour is beyond my understanding.

<comment><USER21> > Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour > is beyond my understanding

Because in some countries it is a legal requirement. Where I work, in Austria, there is currently a legal limit of 10 working hours per day and a total of 50 hours per week, except in exceptional circumstances. Therefore, all employees must log their working hours.

I found the process odd when I first moved here. However, over time I have come to appreciate the advantages. I have absolutely no pressure from my employer to work excessive overtime and there is no default culture of long working hours. After 14:00 on Fridays, every week, the office is 90% empty.

I hope this small example helps you to understand why employers in some locations have to track people by the hour.

<comment><USER22> Are you salaried or are you paid per hour?

<comment><USER21> Salaried

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel one of the aspects of this that's not covered is:

Yes while the employer may not be able to legally force you to handle emails outside of official work hours and doing so counts as working...

Depending on your job, if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon b) be late to respond to "emergencies" and this can affect how people perceive your overall effectiveness and performance.

Of course, company culture can minimize last minute requests, unrealistic deadlines, etc. to minimize these "emergencies" that need quick replies but many don't.

<comment><USER24> You could just bounce that back with "A lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on mine". If a project is due soon and needs your attention outside of work hours, it should've been planned earlier.

Yes I know that's an ideal world etc. But how did people handle that before there was email? That's right, they didn't, and it had to wait until tomorrow.

<comment><USER25> Before email there were phones, and from speaking to older friends in manufacturing it was pretty common for people to be called at all hours of the day and night to fix critical machinery (on the phone or to attend site in person) whether officially "on call" or not.

This is not a new phenomenon.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm not trying to justify this behaviour. It was wrong to intrude into people's personal lives and expect unpaid work then and it's wrong now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does this open the door for me billing my evening shower when the design finally clicks in my head?

<comment><USER24> Depends - what did you do at work while that design didn't click?

I was on HN, not doing much work worth paying for.

<comment><USER26> I believe the answer to that is "dealt with the thousand distractions an open office floor-plan encourages while answering intrusive emails". The shower would have been the first time all day I could think for 10 minutes uninterrupted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von Braun

Of course lawyers bill for research, phone calls, and emails. So do consultants. Why would considering work emails during commuting counting as work be at all a controversial? What's the contrary argument?

</comment><comment><USER28> If you reply to emails before 9 and after 6, you're telling your manager/client ... hey! I am at your disposal 24/7\. By the way, if your boss gave you a "work laptop" you're already screwed.

<comment><USER24> Not just your manager / client, but your direct colleagues too.

<comment><USER28> It's shocking to see people take pride in staying up all night to finish a presentation before a 7am call. We're all suckers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We have an electronic time sheet, and I've always added answering emails during commute as work time. Nobody ever complained.

Maybe it's different in the UK, but I don't understand the big deal.

<comment><USER30> It's not a UK thing, it's a company thing. For billable companies like legal and accounting, you are more likely to bill hours wherever you are. For most others, it is "up to you" if you want to do work outside of paid hours but if you don't, maybe you won't keep up, maybe the boss won't like you etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The question I often ask clients is, are they busy doing other people's work from their mobile emails?

Looking at the types of emails we send/recieve, a trend seems to emerge, some people ask a lot more question using email, and some emails require us to do a lot more answering.

Today's email habits are still rooted in the blackberry culture that created it - there was no structure and framework around email use.

I still believe mobile emails are more beneficial for the people asking the questions, and not so good for people who have to answer answering the questions, often on their own time to keep up.

How does poor planning on someone else's part require you to reply instantly, or within the same business day? Very little should be that critical if the organization is truly-proactive.

Processing several hundred emails a day used to be a norm on a few recent projects. A few trends emerged to manage sanity:

\- Poor emailing habits exist. Triaging is incredibly important, on top of GTD. Those 2 minute email replies can really add up, scheduling replies is important.

\- The more we try to get ahead and email in our off time, the more replies we recieve in a vicious cycle. The more we send emails. Our time will never scale to meet the available time of all the people we simultaneously communicate with.

\- I try to use mobile email only to read emails and to write as little as possible.

\- Where I do have to write mobile emails, especially after hours, I consider if I want to be at the top of the person's inbox or not, and that's probably best achieved by scheduling an email to go out at 7 or 8 AM instead of the night before.

\- The email scheduling feature in Aquamail is invaluable. I wouldn't be able to switch back to iOS without a comparable email client. Boomerang is handy too for automatic follow ups that can be scheduled at the time of sending.

\- Try to centralize communication as much as possible and check email 1-3 times a day. Email can be followed up on, it isn't always the case with Slack. Slack/Chats are extremely valuable for realtime input.

I'd love to hear any other tips or strategies folks are using to manage their email flow.

</comment><comment><USER32> Really these sort of metrics are missing the point in my opinion along with "employee engagement" and "focus" tracking. What they should care about is the deliverables and not some puritan pennywise pound foolish get as much toil out per dollar.

IT is one classic example with the lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. If everything is secure and operational and all desired expansions are either met or properly analysed as not worth it then their slacking off doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER33> I am guilty of triaging emails on the underground train in on the morning.

No one seems to have mentioned my perspective: Its not that I feel compelled to do this (far from it), its more that the commute is _BORING AS HELL_.

At least for London, the wifi and network is only available during the 30 seconds you are in a station (i.e. not in the tunnels), so more productive things that need a persistent network connection wont work very well (e.g. Duolingo, netflix etc). You cant even look out of the window since its in a tunnel the whole way! :-)

The other alternative to doing emails is reading cached news articles (I actually do this a lot - load up a series of 10-15 articles before getting on the train), or desperately trying to connect to the wifi then load a webpage in the 30 second window you have before you are back in a tunnel.

Or you can get paid-for Duolingo or download netflix shows the night before etc. Its all a bit of a faff though really, while your inbox is sitting there full of juicy unread emails from your colleagues in another hemisphere that you'll need to read _at some point anyway_ .... too tempting to jump in and start triaging when your alternative is staring at the floor or the blackness outside the windows :)

<comment><USER34> Duolingo? Netflix? Why aren't you replying e-mails? Tunnels are no excuse, mortal [1]

[1] [http://www.offlineimap.org](http://www.offlineimap.org)

 _(Wink)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I absolutely consider time commuting as part of my work hours. I leave the office early and count the 45 minutes on the train as work time. Whether it's answering emails, writing some code, or working on documentation it's definitely work.

<comment><USER36> I don't log hours so it's kind of not relevant, but I mentally count lunch, especially if with coworkers. I can't quite bring myself to count the commute (also 30-45 min here). Counting both reduces 'real' working hours considerably.

Picking one or the other would be nearly equivalent anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> As a consultant, I've billed for work, regardless of where I did it. At home. On trains and planes. On the beach. In Internet cafes in Amsterdam. Why not?

But on the other hand, I recall being shocked (this was some years ago) when a seriously enterprise-level customer service rep emailed me at midnight. Because, you know, I was billing for reading her message, in 15-minute blocks, but she was paid on a salary basis.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've largely disconnected from email, both work and personal. I guess one day I just smelled another internal phishing campaign and decided that it would be the last I participated in. After that I informed my bosses that if they needed to reach me then to do so in team chat. The unspoken part of that was, "and if that's a problem, then fire me, please."

</comment><comment><USER39> Was expecting a mention of BMW who were forced to switch off their email servers after working hours I think after a court ruling brought by a union in Germany.

</comment><comment><USER40> Of course it does. I charge hours in my in transit because I am emailing and interacting with people at work and in my client projects.

</comment><comment><USER41> If you take into consideration the near future of autonomous cars where people will be capable of working during their commute, which some people have up to 3+ hour commutes - absolutely this should count as working hours. Hopefully it also means less hours in the office.

</comment><comment><USER42> Should surfing the web for a couple of minutes during work hours be deducted then?

</comment><comment><USER43> Slack should count as work too while commuting. I'd prefer emails but now you are de facto on call when you have Slack on your phone.

<comment><USER34> Problem is that not everything on Slack is... "productive"... (Though the same could be true for e-mail.)

<comment><USER43> I'm not talking about shooting the shit but video conference calls eating up precious data, panic support channels to fight fire....

I feel like companies use Slack exactly for this reason...it tethers your employees to a very intimate possession-your smartphone and it's far more invasive than a phone call or email and your are expected to respond _immediately_.

It has all the dynamics of any email or regular office conversation. Somebody has a grudge in the office and want to make you look bad for remote working? Call them and immediately hang up and tell managers 'so and so isn't responding in real time' or take a convo out of context where emoticons play a far more conflicting messages to the receiver. For example, somebody using a animated flashing parrot and mistaking it as a slight.

I feel like Slack has been more times counter-productive than advertised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I still don't understand why half the threads on HN talk about how there's not as much work anymore due to automation, and the other half talk about how people are overworked and working longer hours. We can't have UBI because that would encourage people to be lazy, but all jobs are bullshit anyway. When are we going to rise up and seize the means of production?

</comment><comment><USER45> If engineers had our own unions, we could actually have these discussions with our employers.

</comment><comment><USER45> _Commuting should count as work_

<comment><USER46> Oh no, lets not reward people who do not value their time, and choose to live further from work than others.

<comment><USER47> I've lived where I live for 18 years. I've been in my current job less than a year. Does that justify pulling my kids out of school just before they do their exams so I can move house?

Where you live is not a simple choice for many of us. History of previous jobs, family commitments, schools, house prices, etc., etc... Like lots of things, it's a compromise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Women joining the workforce increased the labor supply which decreased wages on the whole. This makes it so many women HAVE to work as opposed to GET to work. A double income for many families is required nowadays.

<comment><USER49> Women joining the workforce lead to a long term decrease in the labor supply. The only reason wages haven't gone up is a massive influx of foreign born workers that keeps supply high.

<comment><USER50> ... because they were not home having babies?

<comment><USER50> please not that this is not a rhetorical question on my part. down voting statements looking for more information/ clarification seems out of place here</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Would you work for a Google-like company that gives you 100% freedom?  You will be fired if you don't make money though. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> IMHO "100% freedom" is utopia. You don't have 100% freedom even on a start-up. In a corp like Google you have managers, and in a start-up you have customers...

Having said that, if you work for a big high-tech corp (like I did, although I never worked for Google per se), you will find that it is _hugely_ difficult and frustrating to push your own idea through the system.

</comment><comment><USER3> That would be Y Combinator.

<comment><USER4> One huge difference with YC is the funding amount. YC essentially pays a low salary for a few months to build a prototype. That narrows the talent pool down to people with very minimal financial requirements (couldn't be more than ~5% of the total Great Hackers in the US).

Google could afford to take all the other ~95% of Great Hackers by paying a high salary until the project is either killed or a success. The big problem is that Google doesn't fire people for failing, they just move them around like most big companies do. They suffer from the "good effort" syndrome, where people are rewarded for "trying" even if when they fail to produce "something users want".

<comment><USER5> 5%? Really? There's a huge class of young entrepreneurs, who have limited financial requirements (notice, I'm not using the word desires), and slightly older hackers who have greater requirements (car/house/etc) but probably have worked long enough to supplement the YC income with their own stock options, savings, etc.

If you really want to build something new and interesting, you should be willing to make financial sacrifices to make it happen. If you're comfortable, you probably won't be as hungry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Riches if you succeed and no job if you fail is like a startup.

It's still no substitute for people who want to do real startups. But a good salary during the effort is a great way to attract all the great hackers that need reliable income.

Getting a big check or a pink slip at the end is ideal.

<comment><AUTHOR> You might have a better chance of succeeding within a company though, particularly a company with massive computational resources and accumulated IP. Scalability would be much easier to deal with. There's also the issue with name recognition. Having your service on something like Google Labs would give it lots of publicity. Finally, your service could be added as a feature to a popular service such as gmail say.

<comment><USER4> Makes me think of the issues PG raised in "The Power of The Marginal". I think when you're an outsider it seems like those things are huge advantages, but when you have them they feel more like baggage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting idea. Rather then taking on all of the risk (and reward) by doing a startup that risk would be spread across all of the employees in the organization. Sounds like the organization would exist to provide "startup insurance".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is different from pursuing a startup because you are allowed to make use of massive resources and whatever IP the company has accumulated.

<comment><USER7> So basically something like the classic Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc. environment? But you have to make money, not innovation? If that's what you mean, no thanks...

<comment><AUTHOR> This would not be a research lab. The goal is to create something that makes money not publications necessarily. You can try to do something really novel just as long as it ends up making money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, as long as there are other Google-like companies that give me 100% freedom that I can go to when I get fired. ;-)</comment>


Java call stack – from HTTP upto JDBC as a picture (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/java-call-stack-from-http-upto-jdbc-as-a-picture/ <comment><USER2> Like what is the problem? Thanks to this stack trace your business logic fits into two lines. Do you want to have lines and lines of your own transaction manager? Lines and lines of your own DI framework? Do you suggest to write a HTTP web server yourself? Why don't we count stack frames in kernel space? And what do we have in JVM underneath us? And libc/Win32 layer?

I'm really annoyed by this kind of things like they have any meaning except "I don't know shit about how abstractions work in computers"

%s/you/picture author

<comment><USER3> _> Thanks to this stack trace your business logic fits into two lines._

Two function calls for business logic, a hundred dependency libraries, thousands of lines of stateful "initialization" code outside of the stack and a fuckzillion XML files for configuration. But yeah, everything's great!

<comment><USER4> It's called abstraction for a reason. Do you write your system code from scratch each time?

<comment><USER5> It's called abstraction, but at some point that becomes a euphemism for obfuscation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure I really see the problem. They picked a particularly pathological example, with a lot of heavyweight frameworks. It's a choice.

I just counted the frames from my typical stack, a Guice/Hibernate project. It was about 100 lines from a constraint violation handler in the postgres JDBC driver up to Thread.run(). This seems pretty reasonable, especially with the various layers I've added for authentication, declarative transaction management, AOP logging, etc.

Furthermore, IntelliJ is pretty good about only showing me what I care about. Overall I find the debugging experience no worse than Python or Ruby, and _much_ better than exceptions from Python or Ruby native libraries. It's orders of magnitude better than debugging Go, which destroys stack context with every "if err != nil return err".

</comment><comment><USER7> This is beautiful. Working with ES2015 async await style promises on the server now... you don't even get valid stacks.

<comment><USER8> Yep, a totally simple stack you can follow. Wouldn't it be nice in the async world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks like the perfect example to illustrate the point that Rich Hickey tries to make in "Simple made easy" [1].

This huge call stack has been designed to make your life as a developer _easy_ but the price you pay is an enormous amount of complexity.

I've been working a lot with a similar Java web stack and I feel how painful this complexity is. What is worse, is that I think that a lot of this complexity is incidental. There are libraries and frameworks designed to make some things easier, but in the process end up creating a lot of problems that then requires another library or framework to overcome that problem which also has other problems and so on... The result is a huge stack like this.

One concrete example of this is Hibernate. A tool designed to make it easier (apparently) to work with databases, but in the end create so many problems that the medicine ends up being much worse than the disease.

Resolving an HTTP request that returns a the result of a database call should not be this complicated! HTTP is simple! Why do we need so many calls to so many things. I'm not advocating for a flat stack of course, but certainly a stack this deep is a clear sign that something is wrong.

I very much agree with Rich Hickey, we need to stop thinking about how to make things _easier_ and start thinking how to make them _simpler_.

[1] [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made- Easy](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

<comment> le-mark _Resolving an HTTP request that returns a the result of a database call should not be this complicated! HTTP is simple! Why do we need so many calls to so many things. I 'm not advocating for a flat stack of course, but certainly a stack this deep is a clear sign that something is wrong._

Http is pretty simple, executing sql queries against a database is simple-ish (close those connections!). Authentication, authorization, marshalling, unmarshalling, transaction boundaries, ..., are not so simple, especially not when all taken together.

People bemoan java as you are doing here, but the reality is other languages and frameworks, any that attempt to address the same problems and concerns have the same level of complexity. Java has the advantage of kick ass tooling, debugging, and monitoring infrasture, a lot in the jvm itself (visualvm).

<comment><USER9> Just to clarify, I am not criticizing the Java language. I'm criticising the use of excessive layered frameworks that increase complexity.

I like Java. It's simple and performant and has excellent tooling. I just don't like that sometimes I see a lot of incidental complexity in its ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seen this all over the place and it looks like a totally fine reasonable stack trace to me.

Anyway while the stack (hibernate, etc) shown in this stacktrace is still heavily in use, newer async java frameworks/tools usually result in very short stacks for me. Sometimes I get a trace and it's 5-6 frames. Of course then you may not know how you got there. So it's really not all that great.

</comment><comment><USER10> This should be titled "Acegi/Spring/Hibernate" call stack. And none of those technologies are needed to build a JEE webapp.

<comment><USER11> While that's entirely true, the glueing of those frameworks together is very common in the Enterprise Java development space especially around 2006 when this was taken.

I'm a big fan of the JVM and the Java ecosystem but in many ways the JVM ecosystem is split into two worlds: frameworks or libraries. This would be an example of a framework heavy development model where god knows what is going on between the outside world, your biz logic and the database calls.

<comment><USER12> > common in the Enterprise Java development space especially around 2006

Can you mention which frameworks and glues are common today ?

<comment><USER13> You can get a long way with just Spark: [https://github.com/perwendel/spark](https://github.com/perwendel/spark)

<comment><USER14> Official website, for those wondering

[http://sparkjava.com/](http://sparkjava.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rails code can get that deep, the difference being MRI doesn't have an inlining jit...

</comment><comment><USER16> Not every java web app needs to be this bloated. It's possible (even practical) to build robust, database driven web apps/web services without spring/hibernate and with far shallower stacktraces.

<comment><USER17> It's possible, but in my experience, frowned upon for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would love to see more visualizations of other frameworks in their respective languages. I wouldn't be surprised if they were just as big.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not sure it is any smaller today. Some additional layers not seen are the DTO transformations (not seen because they don't become part of the stack when it's hitting JDBC) but two more major subsystems. Many IDEs now automatically filter out these well known stacks from view.

Personally moving from a mostly Java background to entirely typescript on the backend and front-end.

<comment><USER20> Although I like TypeScript as a language, and use Node.js, also really appreciate sharing code such as (data types/interfaces etc.) btw frontend and backend, I think call stack is much worse on the side, especially when you start using frameworks. At least here you get a huge but relevant stack, you can find your business logic, but Node.js it's not rare to get irrelevant unhelpful stack traces which you can't figure out even if you dig in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks much worse than it actually is. You could implement it in a much flatter way.

      function HandleRequest(request : Request) : Response
      {
        LogRequest(request)

        CheckAuthentication(request)
        CheckAuthorization(request)

        var response = DispatchAndHandleRequest(request)

        LogResponse(response)

        return response
      }

This way you would have no deep stack traces and all would be fine. But only until you need to do some additional work somewhere right in the middle, say patch malformed requests between authorization and dispatch. With the above implementation you would be somewhat screwed, the best you could do would be reimplementing HandleRequest() with your additional step in the middle.

But with implementations like those show in the article you just have a list of steps with a common interface, each step does its work and then the next step gets called. If you need to do something new somewhere in the middle, you just add a new step to the list of steps in the right place and you are done, possibly simply by putting the class name of the new step in a configuration file.

      var steps =
      {
        new LogRequestStep(),
        new CheckAuthenticationStep(),
        new CheckAuthorizationStep(),

        // This stupid XYZ client always sends broken requests.
        new PatchMalformedRequestFromXyzStep(),

        new DispatchAndHandleRequestStep(),
        new LogResponseStep()
      }

      function HandleRequest(request : Request) : Response
      {
        var context = new Context(request)

        foreach (var step in steps)
        {
          step.Execute(context)
        }

        return context.Response
      }

This would still avoid deep stack traces because we are iterating over all the steps but note that with this implementation we would not really be able to abort processing the request somewhere in the middle, say if the authorization check failed, but we could fix this by adding a flag to the context and check it inside the loop after a step executed. But a more serious limitation is that every step only gets one chance to act, note for example that we have two separate steps for logging the request and the response.

Imagine we wanted to log the request duration, then we would need a step getting the current time at the beginning and another one getting the current time after the request was handled at the end. And the first step would have to somehow communicate the processing start time to the second one, possibly by storing it in the context. A much more elegant solution is to organize the list of steps as a linked list with all steps looking like this.

      function Execute(request : Request) : Response
      {
        PreprocessRequest(request)

        var response = GetNextStep().Execute(request)

        PostprocessResponse(response)

        return response
      }

This creates those deep stack traces but it also creates a huge amount of flexibility and extensibility. It surly looks crazy if you do not need it, but when you need it, it is really easy with this model.

</comment><comment><USER22> OT, but anyone have similar stack traces that show call stacks or abstractions in other layers, down to transistors, up to user?

</comment><comment><USER23> My application server has 8 methods from thread to your code: [http://test.rupy.se/?id=2](http://test.rupy.se/?id=2)

And an integrated distributed async-to-async database that is just as shallow: [http://root.rupy.se](http://root.rupy.se)

Feel free to use it: [http://github.com/tinspin/rupy](http://github.com/tinspin/rupy)

</comment><comment><USER24> The fact that Spring even exists should be a big red flag for the value of static typing. People routinely make mistakes using type systems. And when done correctly I see static type systems work very well solving problems that they themselves created.

<comment><USER25> How do you get from deeply nested method calls to "people routinely make mistakes using type systems"?

<comment><USER24> The gambit of static typing is that the type checker can attest correctness. But the result, if indeed that the type checker does this (provide a mechanism of provable correctness), you still have to deal with protocol bloat that type systems incur. Hence the deeply nested method calls: that's a result of adopting a static type system.

I'm saying that with all that overhead, people still routinely make mistakes using static typing systems. They get the compiler to tell them that they're correct but their code is still not working.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Much Revenue Do Your Favorite Websites Get from You? - <AUTHOR>

I thought for concreteness of discussion it might be interesting to consider how much each of us pays in to some personal favorite websites, and how much it costs the website to keep us interested.
Among the websites I enjoy best, I probably provide the most revenue to Amazon.com. I spend several hundred dollars a year there, easily, and the more I come into money, probably the more I will spend there. A lot of the page views I do there turn into adding books to my wish list and eventually to my shopping cart, so the company is monetizing my browsing behavior pretty well. On the other hand, the company has to maintain warehouses and a physical inventory and pass through shipping costs, so not all of its considerable implicit revenue per page view turns into earnings per page view.
At another extreme, Hacker News gains no revenue whatsoever from my browsing behavior. It may gain for Y Combinator some kind of business reputation value insofar as I would be very likely to recommend an application for YC seed funding to any young entrepreneur who develops out of my math coaching program, and to my own children, but chance for YC to invest in the next great start-up as a result of my browsing here is quite speculative, to be sure. But then again it doesn't cost HN as much in server hardware or staff time to curate the site to draw me in for lots of page views as it does Amazon.
Where do your favorite sites fall between these extremes? (Do you have even more extreme cases among your favorite websites?) How many websites you read regularly appear to gain net earnings from your browsing behavior? <comment><USER2> Not much. Facebook makes almost nothing off me, Twitter doesn't make money off anybody, reddit & hacker news both have very little or no ads.

CNN / NY Times / Local news. I RSS all of it, so no money there....

I have found myself buying from Mac ISVs a lot more recently. Macheist, Coda, a few games. All within the last few weeks. Not quite my "favorite sites", but I am giving somebody some cash.

And yeah, Amazon. Although it's not in my favorite sites list either, it's just a well run store.

So I suppose I only pay for goods, either physical or digital, and not content.

</comment><comment><USER3> On Reddit I'm not sure I ever clicked on an ad, but I went to their office and gave them an expensive bottle of vodka, so they probably monetized pretty well from me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. I imagine you're an exceptional user among the Reddit user base when you make trips to the office with fine liquor.</comment></comment>


Most Unreadable Scrolltext Scroller Compo (Mibri Edition) 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1913&when=2020 <comment><USER2> I've always wondered if people found scrollers to be as hard to read as I did.</comment>


Udacity changes policy from lifetime access to content to 12-month access - <AUTHOR> Looking for some advice and potential guidance as to what to do because I believe this violates their terms. Over a year ago I and many others signed up for their nano degree programs which cost over 1000$. They claimed at the time that graduates of their nano degree programs would have lifetime access to the content. On October 3rd, 2018 they decided to change that policy, even affecting people who paid for the nano degree prior to this change and telling them they'd only have access to the content until October 2nd, 2019.
Now there are a few things this company has done over the last year that is nothing but a cash grab and deceptive towards customers such as removing their initial 50% money back if completed before 12 months, more than doubling the cost of certain nano degrees ( eg: React) without changing the content even having overlapping content in some of the nano degrees. However, changing this policy and affecting people who bought the product with that in mind is absolutely disgusting. Does anyone know if this is legal? Can they be sued for this? Should I be contacting the better business bureau? I appreciate any help!
Link to change of policy: https://udacity.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015665011-How-long-will-I-have-access-to-Nanodegree-program-content-after-I-graduate- <comment><USER2> Note to self: never sign up for any paid offering from Udacity. Whether that's legal or not, it's a dick move.</comment>


Child advocates: Halt production of 'creepy' interactive Barbie doll - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/03/11/259366/child-advocates-halt-production.html

<comment><USER2> I'm kind of surprised about the lack of interest in this, considering the recent shitstorm about the listening speaker from Amazon.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you design websites for bootstrapping? - <AUTHOR>

How do you design websites easily for bootstrapping your startups ? I'm comfortable with html/css/javascript but I find it difficult to design elegant UI. Any suggestions ? <comment><USER2> I think if I were in your shoes, I would purchase some decent looking themes from themeforest or similar, get an icon set (if you need one), and pay for someone to do a logo. Do what you can in CSS/HTML to get something cohesive together. Maybe pay a designer for a couple of hours just to review what you have done or give some pointers. This will be quite a bit cheaper than hiring someone to do the whole UI.

Learning to design isn't something that happens quick and some people just can't design, period. It isn't something that happens overnight or in a few weeks. It may be worth taking some design classes and getting into some design forums to get feedback etc, on what you have done, if you have an interest at getting better.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. get a book about design.

2\. Analyse sites you like and measure the proportions, relative sizes and shapes and font sizes etc.

3\. Create your site. Ask for feedback from designers.

4\. Once you've gone through that process, you'll start to get an idea of how time consuming UI and front end design is.

5\. if it's not for you - get some one else to do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> One word: simplify.

Once you've got that in mind I recommend using Fireworks for mockup. It has easy to use vector tools for creating layouts, trying different colors, manipulating fonts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bootstrapping is where you can compromise. Like skipping the nigh touts.

Skipping a good UI for whatever reason (for a web-startup) is a bad idea.

Bootstrap so you can save money for good UI.

</comment><comment><USER6> YR- send me a msg, I'd be happy to help guide you, or possibly invest in your startup in-kind.

email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER7> Send me an email at email@example.com. I might have something for ya.

</comment><comment><USER8> 99designs.com</comment>


Ways to help Crowdfunding sites improve fulfillment - <AUTHOR> http://www.hatchmfg.com/ways-will-help-crowdfunding-not-fail/ <comment><AUTHOR> How the rate of unfulfillment could be reduced on CF platforms?</comment>


Ask HN: Is Cloudflare ripping me off? - <AUTHOR> The reason I'm asking here is 9 days ago I asked Cloudflare to clarify the bill and I STILL haven't received a response beyond effectively them saying "I don't see the problem".
Cloudflare's latest invoice to me shows a bill of $1 for load balancing (I'm leaving out the billing for other services). The small number is not what's important here, so don't focus on that.
The Cloudflare load balancing service gives 500000 DNS queries for free, then $0.50 for each additional block of 500000 "authoritative DNS queries against Cloudflare's name servers": https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005254367-Billing-for-Load-Balancing
The bill shows 1.2 million DNS queries. If that is true then the pricing is correct.
The problem is there were only about 2.2 million total HTTP requests that went through Cloudflare that month. When you consider that most visits to my website result in over 30 HTTP requests over the 3 minutes the average user spends on the website, AND that most of my visitors are active users who regularly visit the website, I find it hard to comprehend that over HALF of ALL HTTP requests resulted in an authoritative DNS query.
Furthermore, the Cloudflare document I linked above says this: "You can reduce the number of authoritative DNS queries by configuring your Load Balancer as "proxied" (orange cloud) for your HTTP(S) services". All my requests go through the "orange cloud". So if that wasn't the case, how many DNS queries would there be? All 2.2 million HTTP requests?
Maybe I'm missing something here? Hence the Ask HN. <comment><USER2> At your volume, I wouldn't bother and I doubt Cloudflare is trying to rip you off.

That being said, they do offer advanced analytics features which includes DNS statistics [0]. Although pricing is unknown.

It's the Internet. Some script kiddie could have easily tried a bunch of random scripts on you, maybe testing your DNS to see if they could knock you out and perform DNS poisoning without understanding the implausibility of having any impact on Cloudflare.

If this is happening on a regular basis, I would open a support request and ask them to enable advanced DNS analytics temporarily to at least determine if this is coming from a single country, etc.

The other issue is that helpdesks optimize for impact so, although $1 isn't the core issue here, it definitely plays a role in you not getting access to the upper layers of their support org.

0 - [https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/](https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/)

<comment><AUTHOR> My total bill is not $1. Even if it was, they should be able to justify what they bill me for. So far, they have failed to.

I take your point. Though, the script kiddie scenario seems less likely than Cloudflare not billing correctly, based on my experience with large organisations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The ratio seems odd, but without detailed logs it's impossible to know if and how the requests got generated.

Is there lots of e-mail traffic through your domain, or is there other uses for the domain you might not be accounting for apart from the website? Web requests aren't necessarily the only cause of DNS lookups.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my content breakdown in the Cloudflare Analytics dashboard:

JSON: 45.1% (most user requests are for data from the API)

JavaScript: 28.7%

HTML: 12.3%

Other: whatever remains</comment></comment>


Tech House DJ Plays Same Sample For Five Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.wunderground.ie/tech-house-dj-plays-hi-hat-kick-drum-sample-five-hours-drugged-crowd-none-wiser/

<comment><USER2> If the DJ's name wasn't incredibly obvious ("DJ Robert Jonathan Swift"), this was satire—and not particularly funny satire at that.

</comment><comment><USER3> And this is why there is crumbled up paper in the MOMA.

</comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of Nathan Barley.</comment>


One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/one-of-the-greatest-environmental-crimes-of-the-20th-century.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568)

</comment><comment><USER3> "The Soviets killed some 180,000 whales illegally, driving several species to the brink of extinction"

For those of us that skip straight to the comments

<comment><USER4> The real meat of the article is _why_ they did that, though.

<comment><USER5> Since you made me curious I read the why :)

> The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for > little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by > an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that > drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the > Soviet Union's actual demand for whale products. "Whalers knew that no > matter what, the plan must be met!" Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya > seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about > the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward > crime.

<comment><USER6> That's really interesting, I'd love to read more about it.

Are there any articles you could recommend?

<comment><USER7> Here you go. There was one running earlier on HN. It's quite depressing.

[https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless- environment-c...](https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment- crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774)

<comment><USER6> Wow, thanks for the link! That was a great read.

I just wish there was an online platform where we could comment on articles like this and discuss with each other. Maybe someday!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >As a rule, the people who became commissars were the ones who couldn't find another job. They were not very smart but were very conceited, self important individuals, especially after they had been given a taste of power, and especially over other people. Those who were thinking about a career in the party system, who could speak loudly and authoritatively from a podium, and who curried favor with the boss, these people could climb the party ladder quickly, and high up.

This describes a pervasive problem with large bureaucracies, including universities and large corporations. The only difference is that corporations have a bigger incentive to try to prevent this because those corporations that are able to get better middle management will outperform those that are unable to.

</comment><comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 Well I've been employed by certain high tech multinationals whose obsession with certain MBA flavors of the decade metrics have reduced them to shadows of their former selves.

They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious what do you mean by "mba flavours of the decade metric"? Is that a common term?

<comment><USER10> It's not a common term but it is readily understandable to most people.

There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM).

Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than about the fads themselves.

Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've heard from my friends who were part of the first iteration of Green Peace that they would use the I Ching to search for whalers, once all of their other options were exhausted. They swear up and down that it worked for them and they found a lot of ships that way.

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of FDR burning fields of grain and killing herds of cattle to drive prices up even while people were starving. The high level goals are to 'improve' things but some serious bugs got introduced into the process that resulted in practically the opposite of intentions.

<comment><USER4> Source for this?

<comment><USER13> It's a matter of history. The Agriciultural Adjustment Act of 1933 limited the amount of wheat production in an effort to prop up prices. It was challenged by farmers and went to the supreme court as Wickard v Filburn. This established that the inter-state commerce clause can be used to regulate intra-state commerce, and since all farming affects commerce, thereby farming. [1][2]

The feds generally paid farmers more than their crops were worth on the market to destroy them, so they were destroyed, and this was most definitely happening at a time when there were food shortages in the US.

There is nothing as malicious as a politician on a mission. The US also poisoned tens of thousands of people during prohibition with denatured alcohol. [3]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act) [3] [https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told- story-o...](https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how- the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps it would be better to talk about the complete failure of planned economies[1] (centralized) VS the success of market economies[2](distributed). I guess you could do both systems under a totalitarian regime or a democratic regime.

Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined Soviet Union.

There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No one even knows what they're talking about.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model)

<comment><USER15> I tend to agree with you that we're past this point and market economies offer bountiful opportunities to perform minor tweaks with major outcomes and improved efficiency, if you're more left leaning that may mean systems like basic income. Even in many countries with socialized medicine, it's quite common to have hospitals operate as businesses, hiring doctors, performing research and marketing and just billing the government and insurance companies in some cases for the resulting healthcare provided in the end.

Then I go to reddit and find stuff like /r/latestagecapitalism on the frontpage where they... quite blatantly would rather have a soviet style system and wonder what went wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> OT: there must be a ton of science that gets lost, delayed, or duplicated purely due to language barriers.

</comment><comment><USER17> > The actual answer has a lot to say about the impossibility of rational > economic calculation under socialism (and also the lesser but still > important problem under capitalism of mispricing in the presence of > externalities and the difficulty of aligning private and social incentives.)

It's refreshing to hear such a frank statement of the problems with pure communism and pure capitalism in the same sentence.

<comment><USER18> I don't get why they call externalities a "lesser" problem or put it in parentheses except out of ideology. Sure you can point to horrific environmental crimes in communism, but what would you say the primary economic engine is that has led to widespread environmental destruction and the climate crisis?

<comment><USER19> If that's even the case, it's mostly because the most efficient economic system is, in the long term, going to be the economic system that generates the most economic activity and hence the most externalities.

Climate change in particular was only discovered in the second half of the 20th century, while the root cause (the burning of fossil fuel hydrocarbons) was done inside developed economies of all stripes since at least the 18th century. The other environmental problems caused by 18th, 19th, and early 20th century industrialization have largely been addressed over time as they've been discovered, particularly in capitalist economies. In fact, the most popular proposals for addressing climate change are market-based controls on carbon emissions (either cap-and-trade or carbon taxing), which in other contexts have proven very effective. One of the best qualities of capitalism is the way that it can be applied to such ends via simple policies that merely apply incentives and use the mechanisms of the market rather than directly dictating command-and-control over economic activity.

Incidentally, another environmental catastrophe of communism was the disappearance of the Aral Sea, which was once larger than all but one of the Great Lakes. The Soviets started to intentionally redirect the sources of the Aral Sea into irrigation megaprojects in the 1960's and ended up destroying the entire ecosystem, in exchange for growing cotton in Uzbekistan.

<comment><USER7> You can also count Chernobyl, the Darvaza gas crater and I'm sure there are other idiotic soviet mistakes. They did not care much about people let alone the environment. Just look at China, another communist country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm confused by the seemingly interchangeable use of the words "socialism" and "communism" implied in this piece.

<comment><USER17> I saw something interesting the other day which pointed out that the meaning of "socialist" to America's political left, in 2019, is very different from its original meaning. Today people use it when talking about very basic social programs like public health care and regulated employment benefits. Because we're at a point now where even those fundamental protections are considered "extreme". Originally the word's meaning was much closer to that of "communist", which is probably the source of the miscommunication.

<comment><USER21> Democratic Socialism is the more communist one.

Social Democracy is the social programs one.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy)</comment></comment></comment>


TikTok famous: How the app is turning teenagers into celebrities - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/10/2/20891915/tiktok-famous-teenagers-haley-sharpe-yodeling-karen <comment><USER2> The fact that this app came out of China and not Silicon Valley, when it was halfway there with Vine before killing it, seriously makes me question the long-term sustainability of social/media apps from SV in the future. The era that gave us Youtube and Facebook is likely coming to a close.

<comment><USER3> What I feel is more interesting, is that TikTok did it with aggressive traditional Google and Facebook ads. This is directly at odds with the SV playbook for social media apps which relies mostly on viral and network effects boosted by growth hacks built directly into the product.

<comment><USER4> >TikTok did it with aggressive traditional Google and Facebook ads

weird everyone my age (20s) and younger know of tiktok through twitter/youtube

never new tiktok had ads on fb, weird for them to target boomers

<comment><USER5> FB and _boomers_?

Only makes me reinforce my belief that generation classifications are mostly bullshit.

<comment><USER6> Boomers are the only people I see using FB. Maybe a few millennials who are trapped so deep in social media addiction that they use it to supplement the 23 hours a day they spend on Instagram.

<comment><USER7> I'd say it's a gradient.

40+: Pretty much only Facebook

30-40: mainly Facebook, slight uptick in Instagram use

20-30: mix of Facebook and Instagram, some Snapchat

12-20: mix of Instagram and Snapchat, some very slight Facebook use

If you count WhatsApp as social media: universal with 90%+ penetration among all age groups

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I met a Punjabi gentleman in his 50s watching Tik Tok. Turns out there's a vibrant comedy scene in the Punjabi language on Tik Tok. It is huge in the South Asian community and is attracts a large variety of eyeballs.

<comment><USER9> Can confirm. Source: am Punjabi; wonderful stuff, pretty much the only social media I consume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> ... and making these "celebrities" kowtow to Chinese censors.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed- how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing) [2] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20883993/tiktok- censorshi...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20883993/tiktok-censorship- china-bytedance-politics)

<comment><USER11> Or kowtow to American censors [1][2]. [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[2][https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/9jjpph/re...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/9jjpph/reddit_censorship_is_slowly_killing_the_site/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TikTok is definitely ushering in the next wave of social. Admittedly I'm old and therefore I am not on it, but I still find a lot of the videos that get re-posted pretty consumable and entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how sustainable an app that mostly targets preteens and high schoolers is, though. I realize everyone thinks of the next wave of consumers but will they continue using TikTok? It sounds like a big part of the appeal is that each next wave wants something other than what that the older boring people are using.

<comment><USER14> In short, very sustainable[1]. Look at Snap. Growing pains, sure, but it's undeniable that it became a social media staple.

[1] Not TikTok though, see my other comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> TikTok has been aggressively advertising on Snap and Insta for years now. It's very obviously a non-sustainable business model. The whole _point_ of viral growth is that you don't need advertising. I'm sure there's going to be a massively profitable "MySpace for gen-Z or Vine 2.0" coming out soon (does anyone want to build it?), but TikTok ain't it.

<comment><USER15> Maybe unsustainable in the traditional sense, but if they can negotiate contracts with the talent on their platform, that may be a different avenue for profitability.

I mean look at the success of Lil Nas X. Highly successful TikTok talent.

<comment><USER14> I'd argue that Lil Nas X had success in _spite_ of TikTok, not because of it. His single was amazing -- just fantastic content all around. 180+ million hits on YouTube doesn't lie. He would've blown up regardless of platform.

<comment><USER16> Music video seems to have a massive increase in view numbers over any other kind of video category. I question how valid the view numbers are! There must be a lot of computers/tv's left on playing music in burger kings or airports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I realized many of my comments are relevant, recent New Yorker articles. So, to stay consistent:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/how-tiktok- hol...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/how-tiktok-holds-our- attention)

</comment><comment><USER18> TikTok is fun because it is not political (yet).

The few political TikToks I have seen get destroyed in the comments.

<comment><USER19> TikTok banned political advertising[1]! Definitely the right move given their targeted audience and shows the company's focus on keeping in that way.

1) [https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/tiktok-explains-its-ban- on...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/tiktok-explains-its-ban-on-political- advertising/)

<comment><USER18> Wow that's very interesting. Thank you for linking that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Non-sustainable business model or no, it is _the_ thing right now. I found this snippet interesting from the article "When an elderly woman went missing, these four 'junior detectives' sprang into action and saved the day"

"Logan said the group of friends were excited and happy to have found the woman safe.

"We had a party in my tree house eating goldfish and watching TikToks to celebrate," said Makenna."

</comment><comment><USER21> How much was vox paid for this pr piece, I wonder?

Also I wonder how much bloomberg is paid for posting news related videos using tiktok.

It is a new type of marketing I guess.

<comment><USER22> Tik Tok is incredible at marketing. We've never seen anything quite at this level. Originally they were posting videos all over Reddit but eventually those submissions got blocked. They also paid a bunch of meme channels on YouTube to start posting Tik Tok compilation videos, which reach millions of views.

<comment><USER23> Do you know anything about the legality of TikTok paying "influencers" to upload copies of user-created content, without TikTok or the influencers paying the users anything (as in the YouTube compilation example)? I would have figured users own the copyright to their content, other than the music in it, and that something like that could be considered copyright infringement if their entire clip is being uploaded and monetized by someone else without any consent or compensation. (TikTok videos are short, so compilations are composed of a large number of full videos, rather than snippets of videos.)

I also believe those YouTubers are often making additional money from the compilation videos with sponsorships and affiliate links, in addition to what TikTok pays them.

Is it just a matter of TikTok hoping most small-time creators will see it as free publicity and/or figuring they probably don't have any legal knowledge or resources, or even awareness their content is being monetized by others? Or have the users signed away all revenue-earning potential due to the music licensing, or something?

If the latter's the case, it seems unfair that random YouTubers can monetize the content a TikTok user created while the user gets nothing from it, and while the user can't even monetize their own content themselves.

<comment><USER24> I would not be surprised if the ToS permitted their behaviour. "Any content you give us, we can use freely in- and outside the platform" kind of deal is going to go past people easily. I think we would have seen people chasing Tiktok already if this wasn't the case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drag and drop so simple it hurts - <AUTHOR> http://bevacqua.github.io/dragula

<comment><USER2> Looks nice, you should post it on Qudos.io too

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think you know how HN works.

You can't just post links to your site and post spammy comments :-/</comment></comment>


Projectium.Network – A networking platform for promoting your projects - <AUTHOR> https://alpha.projectium.network/ <comment><USER2> Looks like register form isn't working. Trying to enter my location but it's always erased.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback! We'll take a look in how to solve it ASAP</comment></comment>


Italian banking is the next shoe to drop - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/07/italian-banking-next-shoe-drop.html <comment><USER2> How did Iceland recover from it's banking crisis?

\</comment><comment>---

Iceland's rapid return to health hinged on a series of measures that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman later referred to as "doing an Iceland." Krugman, an admirer of Iceland's dramatic comeback, has recommended a similar policy cocktail for other nations in crisis. The rules are as follows: Allow your ailing banks to collapse; devalue your currency if you have one of your own; introduce capital controls; and try to avoid paying back foreign debts.

That may sound like an extremely self-serving recipe -- and it was. Whereas billions of public money was pumped into the banking system in Ireland so that financial institutions could pay back their creditors, Icelanders voted against this route in two separate referenda. They couldn't see why they should pay for the greed of foreign investors who followed the Siren song of high interest rates to the island nation.

Jónsson only shakes his head wearily when asked if he has a guilty conscience. He claims to have been one of the few who warned of the currency bubble long before it burst. Now, he is excited about the country's new opportunities, which are remarkably similar to the ones it has always had. "A hard-working populace. A healthy democracy. A high level of education. Tourism. Natural resources, such as wind, hydro-power and geothermal energy. And fisheries. What would we be without the fisheries?"

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/financial- recover...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/financial-recovery-of- iceland-a-case-worth-studying-a-942387.html)

<comment><USER3> I think the major difference is that Iceland had its own currency and flexibility with regards to how it managed its banks. Italy, on the other hand is bound by the Euro and the EU banking regulations. This seems like it will not end well.

<comment><USER4> Luckey for Italy the President of the ECB is Mario Draghi, former governor of the Bank of Italy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It really is. The new EU laws prohibit bail-outs with tax money. First the bond holders and savers have to pay. But in Italy that's the Italian public. You know, the people doing the _voting_. No change the Italian government will accept that. The Italians will want to hand out support-loans and guarantees. and that brings us to yet another EU law (the 2006 banking rules) that will be ignored because if the Italian banks fail, so will Deutsche Bank from Germany. The other important rule, the one regarding the Stability & Growth Pact(1), is ignored by almost all EU countries. (1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_and_Growth_Pact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_and_Growth_Pact)

<comment><USER5> How will the failure of Italian banks take down Deutche Bank? Does it hold too much stock or bonds in Italian banks?

<comment><USER4> Yes, they're all connected through taking up each other's debt. See this 3 minutes video (both rather funny and sad really). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnuAh3esdpE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnuAh3esdpE)</comment></comment></comment>


Privacy-friendly alternatives to Google - <AUTHOR> https://tapmydata.com/how-to-quit-google/ <comment><USER2> For chat, consider setting up your own Murmur server [1] and use Mumble to do voice and text chat. It is not has happy-clicky as Discord, but the sound quality is great and you can have thousands of people on a tiny VM. It is very easy to deploy. It looks like people have created ansible playbooks for this too. [2]

[1] - [https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page)

[2] - [https://github.com/systemli/ansible-role- mumble](https://github.com/systemli/ansible-role-mumble)

P.S. use their 1.3 RC version. It is very stable and much better than 1.2.

<comment><USER3> Mumble is pretty crummy for text chat from my experience. I still use it for voice on a fairly frequent basis, but having very ephemeral text logs (on client restart), and a lack of pinging users makes it a huge pain to use for text.

I would happily still use IRC however.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I prefer IRC too. I ended up shutting down all my IRC servers. Most folks moved to Discord/Slack and it just wasn't worth the effort to maintain them for my use case.

I only suggest murmur / mumble because they are super east to set up.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried Synapse/Matrix?

<comment><USER2> A coworker suggested matrix, but I have been fine with murmur/mumble for my use cases. If a lot of people needed text chat, I would crank up the ol' IRC daemons and put TheLounge in front of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how this always pops-up and how I always reply with these 2 links:

\- [https://prism-break.org/](https://prism-break.org/)

\- [https://droid-break.info/](https://droid-break.info/)

<comment><USER6> Privacytools is another one worth mentioning

[https://www.privacytools.io/](https://www.privacytools.io/)

[https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io](https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io)

<comment><USER7> Seconded, it's a great resource. Just started with Joplin because of actually

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How are these alternatives "privacy-friendly"? I'm pretty sure Opera, Vimeo and many others are monetized and include advertising. Also, why does something like Google Authenticator need a "privacy-friendly" alternative when it doesn't even need Internet connectivity to work? Don't get me wrong, we should put down Google products, but are the ones listed here really any better for privacy and security?

<comment><USER9> Yet Google Authenticator requests full network access. An alternative like AndOTP doesn't.

<comment><USER10> Presumably for [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/2653433?visit_id=...](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/2653433?visit_id=636964758437289416-2889926197&p=timesync&rd=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please consider adding rsync.net as a privacy friendly[1] alternative to gdrive, etc.

We just added the 'rclone'[2] binary executable to our (very strictly limited) environment which basically allows you to send/recv to and from _any cloud service_.

So, not just a good alternative to google drive (et. al) but a very useful "cloud storage swiss army knife" in general.

[1] [https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt](https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt) [2] [https://rclone.org/](https://rclone.org/)

<comment><USER12> I've said it before and I'll say it again: I _love_ the idea of rsync.net but the pricing just cripples it. $40/TBmo up to 10TB, $30/TBmo up to 100TB or $20/TBmo beyond that. And you have to buy the storage up front and pay for it even if you don't use it.

To put this in perspective, I can get a Hetzner SX62 dedicated server for $72 USD/month. This comes with 4x10TB HDDs which I can put into RAID5, giving me 30TB usable storage. It also comes with an unlimited gigabit pipe, RAM and a CPU. In total, this costs $2.4/TBmo.

If I want duplication in multiple countries (which isn't included in rsync.net's base price?), I can buy a second one, increasing my costs to a horrendous $4.8/TBmo, still a quarter of the cheapest price I can get at rsync.net.

I get the "I don't want to manage the hardware" argument but 4x (arguably 8x) is way too high a cost for me.

I'm aware of the Attic/Borg plan and I really like the idea but it's only close to competitive at the highest 100TB+ pricing ($5/TBmo).

<comment><USER11> Your points are very well taken and appreciated.

Two things:

First, we are going to continue to slowly decrease the price per gigabyte, as we have these past 14 years - and as always, existing customers just get grants, or gifts, of extra space so that their price per GB always drops to match our current pricing for new customers.

Second, just to clarify: "And you have to buy the storage up front and pay for it even if you don't use it." \- please note that:

We can increase the size of your filesystem at any time, with no downtime involved - so there is no need to overbuy in anticipation of future usage.

Further, you are granted a +10% grace at all times, so you always have some room to grow.

Finally, the system automatically emails you as you get close to your limit, so there is never an unexpected filling of space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 Privacy-friendly?

These are just alternatives to Google. Some are privacy-oriented, but others are just not Google. They may, in fact, be worse than Google.

That's not a bad list. Even if the alternatives are not "private", not putting all your eggs in one basket may be a good idea.

Noteworthy is the lack of Microsoft products in that list. Sure Microsoft isn't known for being the champion of privacy, but neither are Dropbox and Slack.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been looking for an alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc for a while and I've seen these couple of suggestions come up a few times. Each time I look at them, I find their websites to be incomprehensible to what their product actually _is_. The worst of them is Coda. Looking at their landing page, I have NO idea what Coda is or does. None of the other alternatives seem to do what I want easily. I want to type in a URL, edit a spreadsheet, and close my browser. I'm sure one of these alternatives does exactly that, but it isn't obvious from their home pages that that is the case.

Classic startup landing page design where they forget to explain what their product is to potential users/clients.

<comment><USER14> I never heard of Coda before so went to their landing page ([https://coda.io](https://coda.io)) to see if it could really be as bad as you say it is.

The copy on the website is generally marketing heavy with things like "Coda is a new doc that grows with your ideas" but things like "Coda is a new canvas that blends tables and text together" makes sense to me, imagining that it's like a document that also have tables, that you can do computations on (so like Excel). The example videos/GIFs seems to show the functionality and when I reached the end, I feel like at least have a slight idea what it's about.

Wouldn't be enough to compare it with other services, but I definitely have "some idea" of what Coda is.

Am I alone in understanding this from looking at the website, without any prior experience?

I do know some other examples that could fit into the "Classic startup landing page design where they forget to explain what their product is to potential users/clients" ending of your comment, but I don't think Coda missed the mark on explaining what they do.

<comment><USER13> > I feel like at least have a slight idea what it's about.

But is a slight idea enough to make a purchase decision? I deduced that it's some sort of application that combines a table and text. But that could look and function 100 different ways. There's 4 or 5 animated gifs all doing something completely different, and none of those is typing text into something that looks like a spreadsheet. So I'm left wondering, does it have a spreadsheet capability? Without digging further or watching product tour videos, I have no idea.

<comment><USER14> As I said: "Wouldn't be enough to compare it with other services"

I was mainly replying to the "I have NO idea what Coda is or does".

> does it have a spreadsheet capability?

The first GIF ([https://cdn.coda.io/assets/21b38f7b35ac/img/welcome/doc/tabl...](https://cdn.coda.io/assets/21b38f7b35ac/img/welcome/doc/tables.webp)) shows a spreadsheet, as far as I understand that tiny demo.

I agree with you that it could be better, but so many other startups do a lot worse that looking down on someone that is not perfect, hurts the cause of "fixing shitty landing pages" rather than helps.

<comment><USER13> That first gif is a todo list, which is NOT a spreadsheet.

> I agree with you that it could be better, but so many other startups do a > lot worse that looking down on someone that is not perfect, hurts the cause > of "fixing shitty landing pages" rather than helps.

So you agree that it sucks, but it isn't the worst landing page, so it gets a pass? I'm not on some crusade to fix shitty landing pages. I'm actively looking for a replacement for an application I use in my day-to-day life. The onus is on Coda to explain to me clearly and in 3s if their application meets those needs. I'm simply pointing out that their landing page has failed to do that FOR ME.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me the biggest problem is Youtube. The other solutions are not in the same level of quality/quantity. DuckDuckGo feels way better as a product to me (using sometimes the bang to use google in privacy mode). And ProtonMail is good enough.

<comment><USER16> If it's any help, NewPipe [0] is a FOSS YouTube client for Android which doesn't require an account, doesn't require Google Play Services, and doesn't (!) display ads.

Yes, it has subscription support and you can import/export that list to keep it backed up.

It also has a TON of features, like PiP, background play (for video and audio), downloading, and much, much more.

Ivory [1] might be the closest iOS equivalent, and Motionbox [2] and FreeTube [3] the closest desktop equivalents.

[0]. [https://newpipe.schabi.org/](https://newpipe.schabi.org/)

[1]. [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivory-video- player/id129434748...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivory-video- player/id1294347486)

[2]. [http://omega.gg/MotionBox/](http://omega.gg/MotionBox/)

[3]. [https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube](https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube)

<comment><USER17> I love NewPipe, it works fantastically.

I am nervous that Google will find a way to kill it if it gets big enough. It's not exactly an alternative to YouTube, it's more of a band-aid.

<comment><USER18> Due to YT constantly changing video decryption functionality, ~4-5 times a year it breaks for multiple days. I fully expect it to be suddenly broken in a year or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For chat, what about [https://keybase.io](https://keybase.io) ?

</comment><comment><USER20> As a replacement for Google images, Wikimedia Commons is pretty good[0]. I made a image search site backed by Wikimedia Commons data with a UI more like Google Images[1].

[0] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) [1] [https://canweimage.com](https://canweimage.com)

</comment><comment><USER21> For anyone looking for more info on the Brave browser i did a quick writeup about it: [https://www.tkjef.com/blog/what-is-brave- browser/](https://www.tkjef.com/blog/what-is-brave-browser/)

Was a diehard Vivaldi user, but Brave's performance has won me over.

</comment><comment><USER22> Second Leaflet. When Google Maps dropped support for loading GPX files from external websites (a handy way to share tracks ), I was forced to find my own solution. I found Leaflet and a few hours later I was up and running with topo maps and GPX tracks overlayed on my own webserver.

</comment><comment><USER23> What's missing from the list is Android and Google Play, the number one spy device in my house.

As far as I know there is only iOS and Android forks. Android forks are an option if your phone supports it, but living without Google Play (Services) limits your app choices a lot.

Windows Phone and Blackberry sadly gave up the battle. Others like Ubuntu phone and Firefox OS never really materialised.

As far as Google Play alternatives go, there is the Amazon store and F-droid, but good luck finding even the most basic Android apps on either.

Honestly, I'd settle for a dumbphone with WhatsApp(extremely widely used here) and a browser. Almost feels like we're coming full-circle to the first iPhone with very few native apps and powerful web app capabilities.

<comment><USER7> Cross your fingers for the librem phone

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like a mix of alternatives picked from some site and collated here without verification.

Some may not exist/work — checked some random links and found privateemail throwing an error on registration and bravos having some statement about working on something new, with the old one unavailable.

I'm also not sure if Discord, Slack, etc., really count as private alternatives (well, there are people who diss Telegram on privacy).

<comment><USER25> Same with Notion. If you read their privacy policy, data is not stored encrypted at rest, so I wouldn't view them as privacy-friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://alternativeto.net/](https://alternativeto.net/) not all results will be privacy focused.

some other alternatives

Browser waterfox and other forks

search yacy

email self hosted various vps serves

sheets/docs own/next cloud. libre/open office

video hooktube invidius

adwords a-ads

dns opennic

drive sia ipfs storj...

hangouts keybase bitmessage tox

images pixeldrain(sia)

<comment><USER27> Don't host your own email. Unless you don't want anyone to be able receive your emails.

<comment><USER28> I just started hosting my own email and haven't had trouble emailing Gmail, though I have limited testing. I have SPF, dkim and dmarc all set up, would that help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you own a telephone you are stuffed, google will get you. Your friends have you in their contacts - that's it. You are done for.

</comment><comment><USER30> no Excel as an alternative to google sheets? aww.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best knowledge base / help center product for small startups - <AUTHOR> I want to have something similar to this https://help.descript.com/en/
Of course, there's Intercom, Zendesk, and many other companies providing such product. But they all bundle together a lot of tools that I don't need, thus their products are a bit pricey for a small startup.
Ideally, there's a knowledge base / help center SaaS under $20/month, and it supports custom domain (e.g., help.mycompany.com) and looks similar to https://help.descript.com/en/ :) <comment><USER2> I have been thinking of building something like this for a while as a side project (already run another business but realized helpdesks are a pain). If I build it, will you pay say $19/Month for it ?</comment>