Four Functions of Markets - <AUTHOR> https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7333.html <comment><USER2> Markets are fine - great even! I see two issues with the way they are used:

1\. they only work under certain (sometimes unrealistic) conditions and these necessary conditions are often ignored by proponents of market-solutions.

2\. They sometimes optimise for the wrong thing.

Externalities (e.g. environmental impact), monopolies, negotiation under assymetric information (e.g. salary negotiations) and other failure modes fall under #1. These are situations where absolutely free markets do not function correctly.</comment>


Silver Coins Lead to One of the Earliest Roman Sites in Yorkshire - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/silver-coins-lead-one-earliest-roman-sites-yorkshire-180970138/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I never heard of this term "detectologists… a blend between archaeologists and detectorists", but it makes sense.

There's such a hunger for understanding other cultures and our history. On a this-is-how-people-actually-lived gut level, versus the traditional here's-a- list-of-dates-to-memorize level:

 _" When you pick up that Roman coin out of the ground, after it's been there for 2,000 years, it still puts tingles up my spine that the last person to touch that coin was a Roman…"_

In fact, this hunger is so vast an entire industry of crack-pot theories sprung up to feed it. "Mysteries of the ancient Sumers", "This one weird trick the pyramid builders did"… it's a regular money machine.

But in between the hardcore (often impenetrable) mainstream experts and the cranks and money scams, there's a solid territory where amateurs want to do—and often do—good science. The guys who found these silver coins and reported them responsibly are probably in the same camp.

<comment><USER3> Now that you're familiar with the term...check out one of the better British television series in the last decade or so (my opinion = worth the paper this is not written on) which is based on a group of them:

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

<comment><USER4> Truly, the DMDC would be proud.</comment></comment></comment>


New Emacs maintainer - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg00118.html <comment><USER2> Nice to hear this from Mr. Wiegley:

> Actually, there were no compromises made. I found Richard to be an absolute > delight to talk with. We discussed the architectural history of Pompeii, > admired his reading library, his tea collection... :)

> I think many people misunderstand his devotion to freedom as being > unreasoning in his views -- as I had, not just a few month ago! On the > contrary: I proposed several Emacs-related ideas that I expected him to balk > at, only to find he happily considered everything, even suggesting further > improvements. At no point did I ever get the feeling that I was speaking to > a closed mind.

> I only wish I lived nearby so I could spend more time with him. He is truly > an amiable fellow. I have no worries about our ability to find a common path > in future, if issues that threaten his goals for software freedom arise.

</comment><comment><USER3> John Wiegley is the author of (completely awesome in my opinion) use-package for emacs [https://github.com/jwiegley/use- package](https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package)

<comment><USER4> He wrote ledger, which is also really cool. [http://www.ledger- cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/)

<comment><USER5> He's also very friendly and helpful on the ledger forum. Looks like an excellent choice for Emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks to rms for all of his work!

Emacs is still my favorite text editor when in a terminal window, which is most of the time. Maybe one day I'll really embrace vim also, but it's always been a struggle.

<comment><USER7> There was another maintainer between rms and John Wiegly: Stefan Monnier.

<comment><USER8> And, for completeness, Chong Yidong, how co-maintained together with Stefan for quite a while (and did a great job as well). I think both of them were quite a big part of the "emacs renaissance" of the last few years.

[http://emacs-fu.blogspot.fi/2009/08/interview-with-chong- yid...](http://emacs-fu.blogspot.fi/2009/08/interview-with-chong-yidong-and- stefan.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mr.Wiegley's emacs setup: [https://github.com/jwiegley/dot- emacs](https://github.com/jwiegley/dot-emacs)

<comment><USER10> It's pretty funny that it has three contributors listed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Best of luck to John!

I've been following the discussions on emacs-devel lately and he's been showing a lot of enthusiasm for what he has in front of him, and given John's previous endeavours (use-package, eshell) I really think emacs has found a worthy successor to Stefan Monnier.

</comment><comment><USER12> If look for John on Youtube you'll find some great demonstrations of Emacs that he did along with Sacha Chua. I find his enthusiasm infectious. Excited to see what directions Emacs takes in the next few years.

<comment><USER13> [http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/04/john-wiegley-on- organizing...](http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/04/john-wiegley-on-organizing- your-emacs-configuration-with-use-package/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What excites me most about the selection of John is that he's interested in bringing modern IDE features to Emacs without transforming it into Eclipse or Visual Studio. I think that he'll show us just what an excellent tool Emacs can be even in the 21st century!

</comment><comment><USER15> John seems like he is fit for the job. Hoping to see Emacs get even better with his stewardship.

(BTW John, guile-emacs would be great)

</comment><comment><USER16> It will be interesting to see if the controversial clang completion etc stuff will get now merged in. I think johnw previously was supportive towards that while RMS was strongly opposed.

<comment><USER17> That's a little different: the situation was that rms has denied GCC to provide the AST inspection features which Clang provides. This is to prevent non-free tools from using GCC's core. For the same reason, It is highly unlikely that Emacs core will ever build in support for Clang.

In the meantime, if you want great Clang integration, there's Rtags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> John did a great job building "ledger" too, the command-line accounting tool. Good guy!

</comment><comment><USER19> John Wiegley is totally awesome, this is awesome. I AM EXCITE!

<comment><USER20> Apart from his many superb technical contributions, I've always been fond of his poetry [http://johnwiegley.com/category/poems/](http://johnwiegley.com/category/poems/)

<comment><USER19> "I am the mystic sailor", indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know John W from the Chicago Haskell group. He's great. Nothing more to say really. Perfect choice for the role.

</comment><comment><USER22> I met John briefly at a Haskell hackathon a few years ago. I was impressed then, and ever since I keep seeing his name pop up (pipes, now emacs). Happy he's steering my IDE of choice!

</comment><comment><USER7> The interreGNUm is over! Hail the new maintainer!

As part of his first edict, a Code of Conduct may happen:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-11/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-11/msg00117.html)

He also hangs out in #emacs in Freenode (username: johnw), which makes him seem very approachable in my eyes.

<comment><USER23> > As part of his first edict, a Code of Conduct may happen

Given the silliness endemic to many Codes of Conduct lately, this had me worried until I read through the message. But he's really just talking about trying to focus emacs-devel@ on development, while moving tangential discussion to another list. (I guess tagging subjects "[OT]" or "[TAN]" would be a bit too retro.)

<comment><USER7> Codes of conduct are not silliness. Almost everywhere that I have seen them implemented, I have seen a better atmosphere over that community.

And while John may have phrased the need for a CoC as a matter of making sure things stay on topic, there are several people who are put off by the hostility of e-devel and would like it if people remained civil.

<comment><USER24> I'm curious, could you give a concrete example of a thing that a CoC has improved without simultaneously causing implicit pressure on people to remain silent about bad ideas in a project?

"Civility" is, IMO, the least important thing in a project. Firstly because it can't be objectively defined, since some people find being told things like "no", "this is a terrible idea", etc to be uncivil, secondly because it means that people stop calling stuff crap that is _actual_ crap.

I also think it's silliness. If someone is an utterly disagreeable jerk, they should be ignored, or perhaps approached privately about their behavior, and then ignored if they don't knock it off. I don't see the need for a rigid, legalistic framework that can be abused as a cudgel against dissenters.

This on the other hand sounds like less about "conduct" and more about dividing the lists into topically based groups, something that has zero abuse potential and is probably always a good idea.

<comment><USER7> You're sealioning a bit with your first request, but off the top of my head, Python and Pycon are two examples.

Also, codifying "be nice" isn't so impossible. It's the basis of all laws. And laws are not programming languages. They are all subjective and open to interpretation. This doesn't make them useless.

<comment><USER24> "Sealioning a bit"?

Did you _really_ just accuse me of bad faith for asking you for the most basic of discussion content? Asking someone to prove their stance is a negative, ever?

Is this a thing you'd accuse someone of in a face to face conversation?

Which, by the way, you did not do, which is why I asked for "concrete". A concrete example would be "This particular behavior in this particular community happened before the CoC was implemented, here's an example or two (link), the CoC addressed it in this way (link), and the negatve impacts you're worried about didn't manifest".

Just saying "Python and Pycon" doesn't even begin to provide enough context. The only Pycon example I can think of off the top of my head is the height of incivility: getting people fired for jokes.

<comment><USER7> The sealioning is because you are requesting me to provide you with an extensive example that will satisfy your stringent needs and seem unwilling to do your own research. A more charitable approach would be to go and try to find examples on your own, explain what you looked for, and could not find. Instead, you are (in your eyes very politely) asking me to catalogue a comprehensive example that satisfies all of your bullet points to the letter.

Yes, there was a much-publicised donglegate in Pycon 2013. But there was also a waiting line for the women's bathroom in Pycon 2015. Have you seen a waiting line for the women's bathroom at any other tech conference? And guess what, both Adria Richards and the man whose name I can't find quickly via a Google search were there at Pycon 2015 and the CoC was updated to indicate how to better handle incidents.

Overall, Python has done a great work in being a friendlier place, and its insistence upon the code of conduct has in all probability helped.

<comment><USER24> I've seen a waiting line at every bathroom for every conference I've ever attended. Waited in many of them too. One of the constants of the universe it seems - no matter how big the venue, there are never enough toilets.

...though what this has to do with people being jerks is unclear. Am I to understand the Pycon CoC addresses event coordination and venue selection? And there's a section in there about number of bathrooms? If so, now I definitely want a link, if not, I'm just grasping at straws admittedly, because I have no idea what your comment is supposed to be about otherwise.

But apparently, asking you to prove a statement is "sea lioning". Asking someone to uphold the most basic characteristic of discussion among intelligent people, the burden of proof, is now somehow seen as a thing to be avoided.

If we're going to talk about things on Hacker News, could they be please be done using the normal rules of debate/discussion instead of these bizzaro world ones?

<comment><USER7> The point of mentioning the women's line is that most tech conferences are not inviting enough to women for there to be enough women to form a queue. The actual proportion of female participants can be easily found online, I think.

<comment><USER25> There's the prior of the total number of women involved with the (respective) tech, though.

Of course it's a self-reinforcing cycle because the conferences being hostile is clearly one thing that'd keep them out.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Awesomo Python: A list of interesting open source projects in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lk-geimfari/awesomeo/blob/master/languages/PYTHON.md <comment><USER2> Jupyter[0] would be another one I find it very useful that is not on this list. Personally, it's the reason I use Python more than ever these days.

[0]: [http://jupyter.org](http://jupyter.org)

<comment><USER3> horrible website, I have no clue what the project does

is it a graph lib?

is it scientific computing?

I clicked on quick start and went to try it in browser, and it showed me list of files, and it says select file and action, I selected file, and found "duplicate" action, so what is it? a file browser?

<comment><USER4> Did you scroll down?

>The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning and much more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without a table of contents, it's hard to quickly see what is on the list.</comment>


U.S. Will Track Secret Buyers of Luxury Real Estate - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/us-will-track-secret-buyers-of-luxury-real-estate.html?_r=0&referer= <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895295)</comment>


Recommended Reading: ``Starting Forth'' and ``Thinking Forth'' by Leo Brodie - <AUTHOR> http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-06-15 <comment><USER2> I have original copies of these from back around 1982. Wonderful books and Brodie's a natural born teacher.</comment>


Google Can't Duck Mississippi Probe of Dangerous Web Content - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-09/google-can-t-dodge-mississippi-probe-of-dangerous-web-content <comment><USER2> What a joke. How could Google be liable?</comment>


Show HN: Publishd – Simple deal software - <AUTHOR> http://publishd.co <comment><USER2> This looks really interesting.

I'm not your target audience, but it took me a while to get what you meant by "deal". A quick example might go a long way here, or slightly different phrasing through the page (promotions?), or examples of why you're better than who else is in the area (I assume groupon?)

Also, please, _please_ remove smoothscroll. I find it very hard to navigate your site with scrolling as it all moves at a different speed to all my other browsing. I flick slightly to go down a bit on the page and end up in the footer.

<comment><USER3> The intro video shows people holding "G" and "LS" papers which stand for Groupon and LivingSocial, so yes this company is trying to offer a similar service, while trying to focus on more control over the publishing methods. It really does need a quick example on the homepage though, because STEP 1 - Build and STEP 2 - Publish are so overly generic I can't understand what this product even does. If it involves setting up a _% off_ using a web interface and then copy/pasting links to facebook, use an example or case study to get that point across. Unfortunately Groupon severely tainted this type of business so you have to be more transparent of what's involved if you want to be the good guy and provide a better service for sellers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Publishd currently enables businesses to build and sell branded deals, gifts and vouchers to their network across social media, web and email.

<comment><USER4> We added "Show HN" to the title since you appear to have made this project. That's the local convention for such posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get it. So I create deals and then hand the links out to people?

(P.S. Your name is highly incongruent with your service; I thought it was a service about self-publishing written works.)

<comment><USER6> Hi there. Im sorry you haven't grasped the concept - thats a failing on our part. We have just entered beta and so there are definitely a few things that need refining. I really appreciate the feedback however, and will take an action to review our messaging. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response! Hey, this is what betas are for!

I know that Groupon is on its way out, so maybe this is next! Good luck to you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The scrolling on that site is weird. I guess a mix of easing and speed being too strong.</comment>


Intel Processors Longtime Flawed - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/05/spoiler_intel_processor_flaw/ <comment><USER2> From the paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.00446.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.00446.pdf)

1.1 Our Contribution

We have discovered a novel microarchitectural leakage which reveals critical information about physical page mappings to user space processes. The leakage can be exploited by a limited set of instructions, which is visible in all Intel genera- tions starting from the 1st generation of Intel Core processors, independent of the OS and also works from within virtual ma- chines and sandboxed environments. In summary, this work:

1\. exposes a previously unknown microarchitectural leak- age stemming from the false dependency hazards during speculative load operations.

2\. proposes an attack, SPOILER, to efficiently exploit this leakage to speed up the reverse engineering of virtual-to- physical mappings by a factor of 256 from both native and JavaScript environments.

3\. demonstrates a novel eviction set search technique from JavaScript and compares its reliability and efficiency to existing approaches.

4\. achieves efficient DRAM row conflicts and the first double-sided Rowhammer attack with normal user-level privilege using the contiguous memory detection capa- bility of SPOILER.

5\. explores how SPOILER can track nearby load operations from a more privileged security domain right after a context switch.</comment>


Google to change its policy on mobile apps. Native apps to come. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/01/31/google-to-change-its-policy-on-mobile-apps-native-apps-to-come/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Interesting to hear this right around the same time that Facebook announces devoting more resources to HTML5 because of the challenges involved in deploying updates to several different native mobile apps.

<comment><USER3> If Facebook really wanted to "relieve" itself of the burden of maintaining native apps on everything from Blackberry to WinMo, they would open source the apps. Of course, this would require giving the public dev community access to internal Facebook/hidden APIs. There could be some really interesting apps if they weren't sandboxed into the restrictions of Facebook's public APIs. Giving more access cedes control and gives arms to spammers and hackers.

Since a vocal minority will cry foul and presumably rally support (create a Facebook fan page) if an existing native app like WinMo was dropped, it is a smart long-term strategy to converge to HTML5.

Google's strategy is to get more people using their apps, period. There must be an order of magnitude (or more) difference in how many people play Angry Birds instead of Google Mobile version 0.7.3.5675

<comment><USER4> Uh, can you give any references to "hidden" Facebook APIs?

Being in the process of currently developing a Facebook app, it seems to me the entire graph is exposed. The only question is permissions and Facebook's willingness to change APIs on a very regular basis (that is a dicey question but rather different).

But "hidden" APIs??

You can find an open source Facebook library here: <http://gitorious.org/qfacebook> as well as many other places for different languages.

<comment><USER5> There are most certainly hidden APIs, there are things that YouTube and Yelp are allowed to do, that you just can't do through any of the publicly documented APIs.

<comment><USER6> The Yelp case isnt a hidden Api. Its (seems) more of a preferred Api Key. You can do a view source on Yelp and get the facebook api URL Yelp runs to get your name and birthday. but its essentially restricted to the above two fields as I tried getting my other details through that URL by replacing the user_name field with say user_location and Api failed saying the apik key doesnt have permissions for that field.

BTW if all you want is to get some users name and birthday, you now have the Yelp apikey ( You did not hear that from me ;)

<comment><USER5> There are other calls they make completely behind the scenes that, as far as I can tell, _are_ completely secret. I don't use Yelp very often so I may be getting the terminology mixed up, but if you link your Yelp and FB accounts, and you "star" or "like" (or whatever they call it) something on yelp, it will automatically like it for you on Facebook _without_ sending any traffic between your computer and Facebook. They're obviously hitting Facebook from the server side, which would imply to me they're trying to keep the API call secret.

<comment><USER6> The way you do it would be to get the FB access_token in JavaScript, which is given to you once you authorize yelp. With this you can make an Api call to the api.facebook.com from any other computer. Its all public. Incase you provide offline_access, this access_token is _almost_ valid for life (almost as FB doesnt give a expiry time on paper)

<comment><USER5> I understand how the API works, but there is no publicly documented call for liking something for a user, whichh is what yelp and youtube are able to do.

<comment><USER5> Looks like my phone went a bit nuts trying to post this reply, didn't notice in time to delete them. Sorry for the spam!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> anyone else read the linked wsj article [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870355420457611...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703554204576112723686094898.html) and think this is just google hiring more native app developers? considering that google already has a bunch of native apps (wsj says 20), the whole "vs html5" thing seems a bit much.

the only interesting part seems to be the "autonomous but with google's resources" development model.

<comment><USER8> Google's Android NDK (Native Development Kit) had been mostly bare-bones libc (and utility libs) for writing optimized C code to be called from Java/JNI. But NDK Revision 5 (December 2010) includes new native APIs for application framework and system APIs that were previously only available to C code through JNI, such as window surfaces, event loops, and sensor data.

<http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The apps I use most on my N1 is gmail, maps, voice and talk. All native apps. I don't know what they are talking about Google "staying clear of native apps on mobile devices"?

</comment><comment><USER10> Google already has some great native apps (the google app and google voice for iPhone). They seem to only use native apps in cases where some functionality isn't available in the browser, e.g. push notifications or accelerometer control and speech to text.

<comment><USER11> agreed, but it seems that's going to change and native apps (even when the functionality is available in the browser) are on the way.

<comment><USER10> Well, what this means is that they expect the bump they get from being listed in the app store over using web apps to be pretty significant (which I believe it will be too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For apps that don't need special access to hardware and that can therefore be written as web apps, whether a web app or native one would be better depends solely on execution. On my iPod Touch there are 4 big examples of things I prefer as web apps just because the available native ones aren't as good: Gmail, Google Reader, Facebook and Hacker News. (Well, Gmail doesn't count maybe: I mostly use the built-in mail app, but find the web app much much better for searching and about equally good for normal use.)

I guess Google itself might make a better Google Reader native client than the web app, but currently all of the 3rd party native clients have some annoying minor problem: some don't have zoom for images, some don't have a "Like" function, some don't display TeX formulas in wordpress math blogs properly, one bizarrely turns the entire text of arXiv feeds into a link; none of the native apps works perfectly on my feeds.

As for Facebook, the native app is not bad but it's noticeably slower than the web app and only let's you like status updates not comments on them. I mainly use the web app but do have the native app to upload photos on occasion (on my previous, camera-less iPod I only used the web app).

Hacker News native apps probably suffer from a lack of API, so maybe it's not fair to mention them, but if one worked properly I'd probably use it. I used to use Michael Grinich's app (I hope I'm remembering his name correctly), but recently it won't let me comment. That together with it being much slower than either actual HN or iHackerNews, made me go web.

</comment><comment><USER13> As much as I'm a proponent of HTML5, the bottom line is that much of the functionality Google might want to provide is not going to be available at the browser/javascript layer.

Another reason Google has shunned Apple native apps in particular is because of Apple's clear reluctance to accept them given Google's dominant position (case-in-point: Google Voice). If Eric Schmidt is being lined up to become Apple's next CEO then it would be a smart move for Google to pre-empt a more favorable Apple era towards Google

<comment><USER14> >If Eric Schmidt is being lined up to become Apple's next CEO

Why on earth do people keep expecting this? Apple's success comes from their fantastic design sense and their leading support. Schmidt gets a bad grade in both those areas. Apple has other people already in the company that could do a better job than Schmidt.

<comment><USER13> I agree, which is why it would make more sense to leave the visionary stuff to folks like Jony Ive and have Eric Schmidt run the company. (Ive is hardly a CEO type)

Schmidt's job at Google was to provide "adult supervision" to Larry and Sergey, and keep on top of the executive functions of a publicly listed company.

There is no reason to assume he wouldn't do a good job at that with Apple, leaving folks like Jony to be visionaries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally.

Sticking with HTML5 for most stuff was a good idea in theory. It uses less resources (and they already have tons of people that can do JS and HTML), promotes HTML5, means they don't have to deal with Apple's BS, etc.

But the apps were awful (at least as of May, when I switched from iPhone to Android). They felt unnative, had annoying UX at times, and generally sucked. Plus there's a lot of APIs that webapps don't have access to.

The one issue for Google is that those shitty apps might have convinced some people to switch to Android, where the Google apps are perfect. It definitely was a factor in my switch.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've had an integrated google search app for my Nokia E71 for more than 1 year.

<http://www.google.com/mobile/nokia-s60/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone have any thoughts on the "Many small apps including games" bit of this article?

Sounds like Mr. Page may have started taking steps to encourage more entrepreneurial spirit in Google. Can you imagine how fun some of those projects will be?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a good step forward. It was a mystery to me why they weren't deploying native apps across all platforms; mobile web just doesn't give you the same feel and functionality.

</comment><comment><USER19> optimize for the user

</comment><comment><USER20> At least...</comment>


Widespread outages reported by US telecom, likely not a DDoS - <AUTHOR> https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/t-mobiles-us-network-goes-down-impacting-verizon-att-and-other-carriers/ <comment><USER2> Previous conversation here with some good links; [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23532560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23532560)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Wasn't seeing it on the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's been a while since we've had a big Internet or telephony outage. Things are getting much better but we should expect occasional problems and glitches like this.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Get a List of NYTimes Articles by Most Commented? - <AUTHOR> This is for a research project.<p>Just need the headlines for now -- not even the links (from the last 1-2yrs) <comment><USER2> their api does seem to have exposed comments in past. you could probably check with the team to see if they are willing to let you use it fir research project

[https://developer.nytimes.com/](https://developer.nytimes.com/)</comment>


AngularJS 1.3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2014/10/angularjs-130-superluminal-nudge.html

<comment><USER3> I feel Angular is better than almost everything out there but still not quite right. It seems way too complex for what it does, and the syntax looks like somebody vomited all over your code. Does two-way databinding have to be so awkward? Angular does help you in writing maintainable code (which is vital for JavaScript - dealing with large JS codebases is hard), but it also ties you to a technology which is probably transitional. I have high hopes for 2.0, and I hope they work out these issues.

<comment><USER4> Have you seen React.js ([http://facebook.github.io/react/](http://facebook.github.io/react/)) and Mithril ([http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/))? They're supposedly smaller, faster, and easier than Angular, and does roughly the same things, as far as I've read. And they support server side rendering. At least React does.

<comment><USER5> React is just for presentation though (the V in MVC)

<comment><USER6> But React + Flux is an alternative to MVC.

Still early days for Flux, but the principles are sound and I hope it offers a viable alternative to all these framework that rely mainly on variants of the MVC pattern.

<comment><USER7> Flux seem so overcomplicated I can't believe what I'm seeing.

<comment><USER8> I think Flux is probably very simple, it's just been presented very, very poorly.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any good tutorial that presents in a better way?

<comment><USER8> I agree with andwaal that reflux is the simplest way so far that I've seen. I think what is really lacking is a demonstration application which isn't just "hello world" or the standard todo app rewritten in React. I just don't find that helpful.

For another overview, see this article:

[http://blog.andrewray.me/reactjs-for-stupid- people/](http://blog.andrewray.me/reactjs-for-stupid-people/)

Please don't take offence at the title, I didn't write it :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice!

Angular is described by its creator as a better browser. That's why it gets so much heat. Because you actually have to hook into a app lifecycle you dont control.

And you know what ? that's great,because it means there is only one way to skin a cat and when you have to work with a huge team,it's time saving as there is no architectural debate. That's frankly why I like big and opinionated frameworks such as Angular.

It's basically the framework's way or the highway,code becomes predictable and you only need to know how the frameworks works to understand other's people code. You know there will be no DOM manipulation in controllers. You know that the view layer will communicate with other layers through services.You know that developpers will have to use promises. And you know you'll be forced to write testable code that makes heavy use of dependency injection.

<comment><USER10>
        >That's frankly why I like big and opinionated frameworks such as Angular.

That's weird that you say that Angular is opinionated, or maybe it's not.

When I first started hearing about Angular, the story was that Angular was very opinionated compared to Backbone which made you figure everything out on your own.

Then as Ember gelled Angular became the un-opinionated framework that left the developers to their own devices compared to the very opinionated "Ember way".

I guess every framework is what you want it to be, or what you don't.

<comment><USER11> Ember makes strong opinions about the backend webservices as well as the front end. I don't think Angular does that.

<comment><USER12> Ember Data is opinionated about the backend, Ember itself isn't. You can use Ember without Ember Data, as is the case with Discourse, one of the largest Ember apps out there.

[http://eviltrout.com/2013/03/23/ember-without- data.html](http://eviltrout.com/2013/03/23/ember-without-data.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > One-time bindings – by prefixing an expression with "::", it will only be > interpolated once, and then no longer watched.

Does anyone else find the DSL(s) in Angular to be maddening?

<comment><USER14> If Angular wasn't endorsed by Google would it be as popular as it is?

<comment><USER15> After working for some time on angular project, I got a conspiracy theory: Google bought this company and threw angularjs to masses so they get all excited and spin wheels reimplementing stuff already done elsewhere, while Google will keep building products :)

I am joking of course, but each joke always have part of truth in it..

<comment><USER16> Minus the fact that AngularJS was developed as a Google internal project / by a Googler / for a Google service (their support / help pages iirc), after they struggled for months building it.

<comment><USER15> from looking on angular internal code, i still feel they struggle with it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They also released AngularDart 1.0 a few days ago:

[http://blog.angulardart.org/2014/10/angulardart-10-has- lande...](http://blog.angulardart.org/2014/10/angulardart-10-has-landed.html)

<comment><USER18> How does AngularDart compare to AngularJS, on a feature level?

Does it have all or most of the features from the new 1.3 release?

<comment><USER19> The´re a bit different. Actaully the AngularDart has features that 1.3 don't have, like the new router, and I'm sure there is something in 1.3 that don't exist in AngularDart. But AngularDart seems to be the more "advanced" one.

<comment><USER20> Does using AngularDart means you can code with types and get decent auto- completion ? I know it can compile to regular JS, but does it _really_ works well with non-chrome browser ?

<comment><USER21> It works just fine with a non-Chromium-based browser. You need to include the shadow DOM script though, since AngularDart depends on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Shameless plug for my open-source project Angular Classy. Recently pre- released a beta for 1.0, of course it's fully tested and compatible AngularJS 1.3.

[http://davej.github.io/angular- classy/beta.html](http://davej.github.io/angular-classy/beta.html)

Feedback is always appreciated.

<comment><USER23> Could include a short description with your shameless plug?

<comment><USER24> ...or at least a description on your actual web page? All I see there is a change log and example.

<comment><USER25> Parent linked the beta, take out beta from the URL. Looks like a pretty decent project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Small sidenote. Whilst I understand that the Angular team feel obliged to use Blogger, can people please not use the Blogger dynamic views. No content without JavaScript. Why doesn't Google come up with their own standard Google Blogger template for their project teams anyway?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't like Angular. Everybody likes it but I don't.

It feels like 2004 all over again. SOAP! SOAP! XML! GWT! ColdFusion!!!!1onene!!!1

I also don't like working with Google toolchain, because for a company full of smartest dudes on the planet it certainly seems like these dudes don't care about their customers.

Below is a list of reasons why I dislike Angular.

1\. GAE documentation sucks, GoLang documentation sucks and indeed Angular documentation sucks.

2\. By using Angular you are throwing away the toolchain we have been honing and making better for the last fifteen years.

3\. Debugging - If I have learned anything from the XML dark ages it is that you do not want to program in a language that is not debuggable. And yet, here comes Google and does it again!

4\. Overloading semantics. I hate Angular for just going and reinventing so many of the words and context we use in this trade.

5\. Angular is not free! I would not use Angular for the same reason I would not use Java. I would hate to tie my future to this uber monstrous corporation's whims.

Thinking about Angular I realized (yet again!) that Google has jumped the shark. It is no longer pragmatic and cheeky startup of fifteen years ago. Nowadays it is more akin IBM and Microsoft of old.

Edit: Basically to me Angular is another stab at the softcoding - <USER2> Angular is the app and your code is softcoded definitions of behaviors. And as such it will eventually fail for the same reasons all the similar projects have done so before. Some of which are listed above.

<comment><USER27> Err..

1\. I admit Angular documentation sucks, but that's not atypical in any open source. It's getting way better btw, and there are tons of resources from 3rd party.

2\. Which toolchain are you referring to? If we're talking Web/JavaScript (where Angular is for), I can say the toolchain e.g. Grunt is quite recent.

3\. I somewhat agree with this. We can use e.g. Chrome Dev tools and Batarang (Angular Chrome plugin), but definitely there's room for improvements.

5\. Care to elaborate your definition of free? Even for Java, I can say a significant ecosystem for Java is open source. Sure, some Enterprise prefer Java Enterprise Edition, but many are satisfied with Spring and other open source Java-based solutions.

<comment><USER26> 2\. Templates and existing JavaScript code - i.e. Bootstrap, jQuery, templating languages and other existing app components. With Backbone you can easily use any JavaScript library - because it itself is just JavaScript. I really don't like how angular forces everything to have a ng-something derivative.

5\. Angular is not free because it is this monolyth that only the sage men within the temple of G can comprehend. The sages give you an incantation for a ritual and you, the believer use it. If it is not yet, then its core is going to become an indecipherable mess - built to serve the temple of G. Google is building it for itself and as usual doesn't really care about anything but its own objectives. Whatever they may be - a user might find itself in the same situation that i.e. Silverlight users found themselves after MS decided that Silverlight was not a good idea at all.

<comment><USER16> 2\. Nothing's stopping anyone from using 3rd party libraries within an AngularJS application - using React for the view layer, for example. Angular encourages the use to separate concerns (mainly DOM manipulation) via directives, instead of mixing that logic into other parts of your application (like vanilla JS, jQuery and Backbone tend to do).

5\. You're wrong, and your argument is invalid. It's open source, legible, modular and fully comprehensible if anyone bothers to dive into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > And as we announced back in December, AngularJS 1.3.0 no longer supports > IE8. This allowed us to make improvements and performance enhancements that > otherwise would not be possible.

It is possible, see how rivetsjs did that years ago. But it is still a very nice thing to drop IE8.

<comment><USER29> If Microsoft no longer supports IE8, why should web developers?

<comment><USER30> Because it makes up 10 percent of the user base in my country.

<comment><USER31> And as long as we insist on catering to them, they won't be compelled to install a modern browser.

<comment><USER30> You're preaching to the choir, but try convincing my boss and the company that owns our agency; it's too large a user-base to ignore, and we do some stuff for the government so we don't have much of a choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Excited to see the bind once expression introduce.

<comment><USER22> Yes, this is a big deal for performance!

Having to run through 1000s of watchers in a digest cycle is not unusual with a typical Angular site and oftentimes most of those watchers are redundant.

<comment><USER33> Are there any benchmark results available? They mention it increased speed, by a lot, but don't give any numbers -- instead point to a code repo where you can run your own. This is great, but I want an "at a glance" numbers on a variety of platforms so I can verify their claim and then take it to my boss to push through an upgrade. An "executive summary" if you will.

<comment><USER34> If you read the post you'll see a link to benchmark scores

<comment><USER35> there are no results there, just the code to run. I also looked for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The full list of new features, bug fixes and breaking changes is in this epic changelog: [https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CHANGELOG....](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

I trawled through it a couple weeks back and wrote up some of the most interesting new features: [https://speakerdeck.com/niallsmart/angular-1-dot-3-whats- new](https://speakerdeck.com/niallsmart/angular-1-dot-3-whats-new)

</comment><comment><USER37> Looking forward to start playing around with 1.3 soon - got lots of bug fixing to do around the Angular ecosystem I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER38> Exciting to see, Angular JS is what is allowing my small team to create some pretty complex backend :)

<comment><USER39> just curious but how is Angular helping on the _backend_?

<comment><USER40> He probably means that it allows him to focus on the backend by making the frontend easy to develop.

<comment><USER38> This, sorry for the lack of clarification.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dot-con job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2002198103_dotcon1main06.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is fascinating investigative journalism by the Seattle Times on InfoSpace and stock market fraud. It epitomizes everything that was wrong with the dot- com bubble. The manipulation of information on the value of the website/product/company is horrifying.

Check out the rest of the series: [http://seattletimes.com/news/business/infospace/](http://seattletimes.com/news/business/infospace/)</comment>


Introducing DBCSS Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.intelliverb.com/DBCSS.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> DBCSS (Database Customizable Search Solution) turns any database or data warehouse into a search repository; it lets you build a search engine out of your own data on your own rules.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the difference between the "new iPad" & the "iPad with Retina"? - <AUTHOR>

What is the difference between the "new iPad" (iPad 3) and the "iPad with Retina display" (iPad 4 - that went on sale today)?
I thought the 3rd generation one had retina? What are the main differences between the two? I'm looking at getting one but slightly confused. Also, if I were to get a case, would a case for the "iPad 3", work for the "iPad 4"? <comment><USER2> The "iPad 3" did have a retina display; the one that went on sale today is the successor to that version.

Differences that I can remember off the top of my head include a faster processor, better global LTE support, an improved front-facing camera, and the use of Apple's new Lightning connector instead of the older 30-pin connector.

These differences are all internal, so the same cases should work for both models.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, okay! Thanks so much for the info! :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Distributed dmesg at Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/fbkutils <comment><USER2> I'm a bit curious, what is the advantage of using netconsd over a centralized syslog server?

<comment><AUTHOR> Scalability mostly: netconsd can handle several gbps of netconsole spew, standard syslog servers choke and start dropping messages way before that.</comment></comment>


Apple, Google and Microsoft to face off for 'digital living room' - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/22/apple_google_and_microsoft_to_face_off_for_digital_living_room.html <comment><USER2> Aren't we, as intelligent observers of technology, sick of the thoughtless "company x vs company y" throwaway articles yet?

Steve Jobs has been very clear that he believes the TV industry as it exists today is incapable of supporting real innovation. This is why the Apple TV is referred to as a "hobby". They do not see themselves as competing with Google or Microsoft in this space because they are not trying to solve the same problem.

It's all spelled out very clearly by Steve himself right here. It's a great clip.

[http://video.allthingsd.com/video/d8-steve-jobs-on- televisio...](http://video.allthingsd.com/video/d8-steve-jobs-on- television/FF922002-FA63-4B68-A326-EA12EC800612)</comment>


How to Pick a Meditation App - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/14/how-to-pick-a-meditation-app/?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I've been meditating for over 2 years now and can tell you you definitely do not need to pay for an app to do it.

 _" One of the more challenging problems in learning to meditate is remembering to do it."_

I do it every night before going to sleep. That's not hard to remember, plus it clears your mind for a deeper sleep. You can go to bed at your normal time as well, as the meditation can be considered as part of your sleep schedule. It definitely won't (and hasn't for me) detract from your sleep.

Just start by focusing on the tip of your nose and controlling your breathing. Then when you are ready, allow your body to take over the breathing while you watch. Then also allow it to take over the monologue in your head and you listen. Eventually you become an observer of all your thoughts and senses, and so become free of them.

<comment><USER3> > Just start by focusing on the tip of your nose and controlling your > breathing. Then when you are ready, allow your body to take over the > breathing while you watch. Then also allow it to take over the monologue in > your head and you listen. Eventually you become an observer of all your > thoughts and senses, and so become free of them.

Except it's a lot easier said than done. I've personally enjoyed my Headspace subscription. I have no qualms with paying for it, and feel it has been more effective than all of the material I've ever read on meditation that I've looked at. But YMMV.

<comment><USER4> Each session of the trial seemed to contain essentially the same instructions. Is there anything more to it?

<comment><USER5> 2 years on subscription (though I meditate without Headspace more). There're many techniques and ideas in different Headspace courses that were quite useful for me and I added them into my meditation practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quick plug - made a free app with no ads or IAP -

[https://itunes.apple.com/app/tiny- calm/id1039698577?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/app/tiny- calm/id1039698577?mt=8)

Has simple reminders, quick access widget, tracking and encouragement - basically all the features I wanted in a meditation app but I couldn't find for free on the appstore.

<comment><USER7> Could you elaborate a little on how you built the app? There have been lots of small apps like this that I could build quickly in my preferred environment, but I have no idea how to get started on iOS. Any resources you can recommend?

<comment><USER6> Sure - it's a fun project.

It was my first app and released it after 2 months of learning to code. Mostly learned from reading Apple's swift book, taking a $10 udemy course (there are a bunch out there) and lots of stackoverflow when I got stuck.

I blogged about the process from hello world here - [http://tinyhappysteps.com/](http://tinyhappysteps.com/)

<comment><USER8> Any plans for an Android version?

<comment><USER6> I've started learning Android so hopefully cant get something out in a couple months, maybe sooner if it's less painful

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Insight Meditation Center has a ton of introductory talks and guided meditations available for free: [http://audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/](http://audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/) for example.

All you need is a timer which is already built in to most phones; if you want a slightly better timer that has a soothing chime, use [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.xipa.medigo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.xipa.medigong&hl=en) which is also free (and has no ads, social networking features or other annoying stuff).

</comment><comment><USER10> This kind of content seems more appropriate for WebMD or WikiHow than the NYT website.

There's no discussion of any substance here, it's pure filler. Differences in meditation technique and course format between apps find no mention, and there's no evidence provided showing that any of these apps is an effective aid to meditation. Most considerations on the list are applicable to an app focused on just about any positive habit people might want to incorporate into their daily lives.

<comment><USER11>
      How to Pick a Meditation App (well.blogs.nytimes.com)
      13 points by delambo 1 hour ago
      user: delambo
      about: My real-name HN handle. Web developer at The New York Times. @delambro

I think I get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The whole concept of a meditation app strikes me as kind of contradictory.

</comment><comment><USER13> Speaking as a guy who has been meditating for a couple decades, the whole concept of meditation apps seems stupid.

<comment><USER5> It's strange that after a couple decades of meditation you call obviously helpful things "stupid".

Please be mindful, everybody has their own ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Youtubbing for "mindfulness meditation" yields multiple results.

I haven't looked into any of those yet but was wondering if HN would recommend them.

What I've been doing on and off is to play a calming "meditation tune", sit down on a pillow, try to get into lotus (eventually shifting to a simple sitting when it becomes uncomfortable), and flush thoughts out. So far I haven't reached the stage of focusing on breathing, so many things rushing through my mind lately.

</comment><comment><USER15> The undistracted state of the mind is the meditation. (Gampopa)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've used the Calm app for the introduction course to learn about how to meditate and start with guidance, then I continued on my own. Paying 10$ monthly for sitting still is hilarious. IMHO the quantity of these kind of apps, guides and whatnot simply offer a paradox of choice, which is ironic, since the user wants to relax, not obsess if he bought the right app, subscription and/or meditation technique.

I now use Enso app [1] just to alert the 15 min duration, it's free on the App Store (optional purchases for different alert bells).

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/enso-meditation-timer- bell/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/enso-meditation-timer- bell/id840637879?mt=8)

<comment><USER2> Personally I just used to use the built in timer with my phone and do 30min sessions. But these days I have far more success with just sitting without a timer. I recommend doing it at night where you can do this unbounded by anything.</comment></comment>


Virtual-Reality Goggles Come with a Hitch: Real Reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/enjoy-bumping-into-furniture-and-commuters-try-virtual-reality-goggles-1487862274?mod=e2tw <comment><USER2> Do you believe, Virtual reality can replace real world?</comment>


15 years later: on the physics of high-rise building collapses (Twin Towers) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016474p21.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The DOI for people (like me) that care: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epn/2016402](http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epn/2016402)</comment>


Found: A plane wreck that could solve a 50-year-old mystery - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-46624382 <comment><USER2> "I don't think he was this drunk guy who couldn't fly. In fact I don't think he could have been that drunk to fly for as long as he managed to."

Mechanics have been known to get in and take off in planes before. But they can't land them. Knowing how the controls work and the mechanics of flight is good enough to get into the air, as the airplane will take off pretty much by itself. But landing is a whole 'nother story.

Once you're in the air, you're a dead man.

There was one in Seattle a few months ago.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes you survive, like Taffy Holden:

[http://www.historicracer.com/aviation/accidental-fighter- pil...](http://www.historicracer.com/aviation/accidental-fighter-pilot/)

Not drunk, and not just a mechanic, but still!

<comment><USER4> > First I should explain that I was a qualified pilot, even although I was an > R.A.F. Engineer Branch officer.

That for sure helped a bit...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1969 Hansard: [https://api.parliament.uk/historic- hansard/commons/1969/jun/...](https://api.parliament.uk/historic- hansard/commons/1969/jun/12/united-states-aircraft-unauthorised)

</comment><comment><USER6> Granted that it's new years eve and I haven't exactly avoided alcohol but that conversation between the pilot and his wife was hard to listen to.

</comment><comment><USER7> I found the use of oral evidence from fishermen and dredger crews to narrow possible search areas interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool story. Now I bet that if indeed was shot down we'll never hear that. Either they will stop their investigation or it will become part of a secret for another 50 years</comment>


How to Live Without Google - <AUTHOR> https://spreadprivacy.com/how-to-remove-google/ <comment><USER2> I really don't see switching to iOS an improvement. Not only is it insanely expensive, it's not even necessary. Android can be used without Google very easily. You can even get one of the hundreds of chinese phones that don't have any Google software whatsoever. Try using an iPhone without an Apple account.

<comment><USER3> What do you recommend instead?

<comment><USER4> LineageOS [https://www.lineageos.org/](https://www.lineageos.org/) \+ F-Droid [https://f-droid.org/](https://f-droid.org/)

<comment><USER5> LineageOS's security story is _appalling_ though.

[https://cve.lineageos.org/kernels](https://cve.lineageos.org/kernels) is their tracker for CVEs in non-deprecated kernels they ship in officially supported devices: no kernel they ship has 100% of CVEs patched, and both mean and median are about 49% of CVEs patched. And this is before we start even considering the firmware blobs that are shipped that haven't had security updates in years.

<comment><USER6> Plus, you have to execute non-reproducible binaries in order to install LinageOS on your phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried most of that a few months ago. The problems, as many others pointed out, is that instead of being eaten by one monster, you're being nibbled at by a few.

Stuff that worked:

\- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

\- reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.

Partial success:

\- search -> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more "fuzzy" searches, or ones where I'm looking for German content. Which happens often enough, as I've had wikipedia/imdb shortcuts for ages and so don't need to google that only to click on the first link popping up.

\- maps -> Bing/OpenStreetMap: I'm mostly a desktop user when it comes to maps, and find myself using the !bm tag in DDG more and more. Directions are good and it zooms faster on my Linux desktop. Mobile situation ain't that great.

Failed:

\- mobile -> LineageOs: I got my old Nexus 4 and put LineageOs on it. But it's hard to get by just with F-Droid apps alone. As a compromise, I'm using a cheap iPhone 5c for most stuff these days. I'm seriously considering ditching smartphones altogether and lugging my Sony reader, Sansa Fuze and an old Nokia flip phone around again...

<comment><USER8> > \- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web > interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

I've heard good things about fastmail, but is there a provider that hosts _open source_ calendar software? I think I'd slightly prefer that.

<comment><USER9> I use mailbox.org, they use a customized Open-Xchange. Not sure if it is the open source community edition, though.

<comment><USER10> I use mailbox too. It is privacy minded email/caldav host with great price and nice ui.

I am not sure if they use any proprietary software though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Android -> iOS

this one surprised me to say the least. It's like jumping from the dragon's mouth into the lion's pit. Both are not good options for privacy, you have no knowledge of what Apple collects and what it does with your data either and it basically requires you to have an iTunes account. At least on Android you can install other app stores like Freedroid which are not linked to any major vendor.

<comment><USER12> There is no single good phone option for privacy minded people in the U.S. at the moment, but Apple has definitely shown themselves to be the lesser of two privacy evils.

At least Apple stood up to the FBI when they wanted an encryption backdoor.

<comment><USER13> > At least Apple stood up to the FBI when they wanted an encryption backdoor.

They also gave the FBI the last iCloud backup of the phone (a month before the attack happened), so it's not like they haven't cooperated with the FBI at all in that case. It's just that it wasn't enough to the FBI, and that's where Apple drew the line.

<comment><USER14> If they have the data, and can supply the data in readable form, they may be legally obligated to provide it. Not much else you can do at that moment, if you're Tim Cook trying to stay out of prison.

Apple _is_ clearly working toward securing that data so they _can 't_ supply it in readable form. Hard to reconcile that with excellent usability & UX, but they're solidly heading that way. Encrypting that iCloud backup such that it [mathematically] cannot be used without the Secure Enclave is surely coming. To wit: "here's all the data we have, only the defendant can unlock it, and no we're not building backdoors in."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To live without google is not hard. But the question is not about can or cannot, it is about will or will not. It is about will you deliberately choose less ideal products simply out of an idea. It is about how much, really, do you buy into that idea. Essentially, it is a crusade, honorable but hardly workable.

Don't just to avoid google for the pure idea's sake, try truly see and understand the factors that google controls or limits or annoys you. If you don't have any, then don't bother. But if you notice it, you'll desire the otherwise freedom. When you desire the freedom, you'll find the small inconvenience worthwhile.

</comment><comment> blubb-fish I totally second the basic idea here. I also try to avoid abusive monopolists where I can. I never order at Amazon, I deleted my FB account, I switched from GMail to FastMail and try to use DDG instead of Google.

Having said that - the problem with Google is that it provides really useful services and it is really difficult to actually argue that Google is bad. They are doing lots of good stuff. They "abused" their monopoly to push SSL/HTTPS, they recklessly improve web advertisement and so on.

Still FB is measurably bad for people's wellbeing, Amazon is treating their workers badly and their customer service gets shittier with every year. Google is just too big. And too much power in one hand is never beneficial in the long run.

Just saying.

PS: deepl.com is actually better than Google Translate for several languages - so you can start with that and even benefit :)

<comment><USER16> > the problem with Google is that it provides really useful services and it is > really difficult to actually argue that Google is bad. They are doing lots > of good stuff

That's how i feel about Amazon.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I have so far settled for trying competitors from time to time and trying to keep up to date with amazon and google's overreaches so I can switch when they do overstep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately, Firefox for example does precious little to impede Google. Everything from search to "safebrowsing" to geolocating to their own forums runs through Google servers. The quote that "Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites" must be a huge underestimate, at least for the top few thousands of websites; it would be surprising if more than 10 of the top 1000 websites did not call some Google server on page load, and most will use 5 or 10 Google services. Here in Canada, it's a very rare government website that does not use Google services (American government sites are actually a little better in this regard). My public library's website (bibliocommons) sends every book I look up to Google.

Efforts like deleting browser cookies, while certainly a good policy, are probably futile in light of all the ways that Google can track and identify browsers; ip address, stored data, fingerprinting (see: panopticlick), canvas fingerprinting, identification through network card timing, etc.

During the past few years, Google has been making a concerted attempt to make website functionality dependent on interaction with Google services: ampproject, googletagservices and googleapis (e.g. jquery) all freqently break websites when browsers block these Google services.

For years now Google has been getting a free pass from governments, the media, and most egregiously, developers, who should know better (nobody else knows what 'HTTP' and 'packet' mean!). This is not to say that Google is evil; they're just a unbelievably huge and powerful corporation that is not accountable to anyone, and knows more about most people in the world than they know about themselves, by most measures, and is rapidly developing technology that will be able to make automated, qualitative judgments of people based on this knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been using DDG for about 2 years now and have rarely needed to resort to a google search in this time. A few of the cases for google were funnily were when I was trying to lookup someone and get their email address.

I do full-stack programming: java, Node.js react, angular, redux for my day job and dabble in a bit of C++ outside of work as well.

<comment><USER20> ... and in cases where DDG fails, you can fall back to [https://www.startpage.com/](https://www.startpage.com/) which shows Googles results but strips Googles tracking.

<comment><USER21> Interesting.

Looks like DDG has a bang for it, too: [https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=startpage](https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=startpage)

<comment><USER13> DDG has a bang for a lot of things, because it's trivial to implement them (they just redirect you to <page.com>/<something>?q=<your_search_term_here), and trivial to make a suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The one thing keeping me on Google is Google Voice. I have yet to find another solution that allows calling and SMS in/out on desktop and mobile all from the same number.

What I need is simple, a single VOIP number linked to:

\- Calling/SMS on the desktop (Windows/Linux) and on the phone

\- Shared contacts and call/sms history on all devices

\- When I call out/text on any device, show the VOIP number in caller ID not the device number

\- When I receive a call, ring all devices

I don't need any fancy handoff from device to device, or IM integration, or anything else. Just ring all my damn devices and let me pick up one. Ideally it would have an API that allows IM clients to integrate with it as a protocol, but hell, at this point I'd go for a black box app if it could do what I want.

Is there an app for that? I'm not sure its even possible on iPhone unless you're iMessage, but of course that doesn't work if your desktop is non-Apple.

Seems like it would be fairly simple. Tempted to build something out myself, but that's a lot of ongoing support.

Twilio -- that'd make a great showcase app and it's something I'd personally pay for. Any chance you guys might pick that up?

<comment><USER23> I'd happily pay for an alternative to GV, too, especially since Google has shown little interest in GV and has a tendency to shut down services in which they've lost interest (RIP, Google Reader). Better support for MMS would be nice, too.

<comment><USER24> There's Line2: [https://www.line2.com/page/google-voice- alternative](https://www.line2.com/page/google-voice-alternative)

<comment><USER22> That looks very promising! Any experiences with it?

<comment><USER24> I don't, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Disappointed this list doesn't include Matrix/Riot as an alternative to Hangouts/Allo. Also there are many Google Drive alternatives including Syncthing (p2p), Dropbox, Nextcloud/Owncloud (selfhosted), Sugarsync, SpiderOak, etc.

<comment><USER11> Disappointed it does not mention people should NOT be using Chromebooks either. It's become quite prevalent these days.

<comment><USER26> If you're buying a Chromebook because of the low price point, there is a way out.

Many (not all) of them can be reflashed with a ROM that allows for a mainstream Linux distro to be installed. [https://johnlewis.ie/custom- chromebook-firmware/rom-download...](https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook- firmware/rom-download/)

<comment><USER27> What about the chroot/Crouton route?

<comment><USER26> Crouton leaves ChromeOS in place and running, so I assumed it was out of place for this discussion. I don't know how much the chroot does to mitigate that. I assume, for example, it's still Google's kernel in place?

<comment><USER27> Yes, it's still using the same kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Most of these are fine replacements, but some are not, and that's the reason I, and I imagine many more people, stay with google. google maps is great. apple maps is much worse with searching, and shops etc, especially outside the US. openstreetmap is very cool and I use it every now and then, and I wish it becomes the standard online map, but it needs more care or something, I don't know.

<comment><USER29> For car navigation I use HERE WeGo (traffic info), never looked back. On foot/bike openstreetmap is the best.

<comment><USER30> Which android app do you use for OpenStreet map?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In my experience once you leave Android living without google is a lot easier then it sounds.

<comment> phoe-krk And go for which OS on mobile? On iOS, you fall into Apple's hands, Windows Mobile is dead, and other OSes are relatively non-existent.

<comment><USER32> Purism's Librem 5 [1] looks like a very nice mobile phone alternative. It's highly privacy minded, at least.

[1] - [https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

<comment><USER13> ...and they're still crowdfunding it and don't expect the deliveries before 2019.

Presumably, the question "go for which OS on mobile" refers to _now_ , so Librem's definitely not an answer to the question above, even though it's a marvelous goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm trying to minimize my interaction with google, but I still use google maps and google translate. Unfortunately Open Street Maps is nearly impossible to use. And I didn't find any alternatives to translate at all

<comment><USER34> What problems do you find with OSM?

I am a map-data contributor and am somewhat blinkered as a result. What's missing or clunky from the perspective of general users?

<comment><USER33> The main problem I faced with OSM is search. When I enter the name of the street it takes me to the random city which has the street with the same name. Google limits search results to the city I'm currently in

<comment><USER18> Oops, yes, same problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I live fine without FB, Twitter etc..

But I can't find any good replacement for Google services unfortunately.

Tried Duck Duck Go for a full month, but the returned results weren't as accurate as Google, I missed some of functionalities the search automatically gives to you. I could switch to bing, although I don't know if that would make a huge difference, privacy wise.

<comment><USER36> When was the last time you used DDG? It used to be worse but it's roughly on par now.

<comment><USER37> Not the OP, but I try it every year or so and always give up after a few weeks. I've been using DDG again for about a week or so, and the results are still about as bad as I remember. It's fine for really common searches such as finding a company's website that I don't remember the domain name for or getting quick info about popular places or things, but anything even slightly obscure (like "how do I do x with y?") is almost always useless. I very quickly get into the habit of adding "!g" to the majority of my searches.

That said, I'm going to try to keep using DDG this time. Although most of my "important" searches are still going to Google, at least they're not seeing absolutely everything I search for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There are a crapload of alternatives, switching in a meaningful way is hard:

1) You have to give up convenience (and/or money), nowadays the alternatives have caught up to where this is kinda the only point of difference but you still have to give up something more tangible than your digital privacy and some data you didn't even know existed.

2) You have to convince other people to use whatever messaging app you've switched to. My social bubble pretty much only uses Facebook for that, nobody is changing any time soon and I'm the only one even thinking about it.

I'm like a week into my goal of a month without google and ideally owning as much . I have firefox, a non-gmail email account, Syncthing in place of google drive (luckily I don't need the documents part of it), and LineageOS with FDroid and no google play services (and 3-4x the battery life). What I don't have is p2p calendar/contacts sync, which is pretty annoying.

<comment><USER39> I really really miss times when google talk, facebook messenger and a bunch of other lesser known chat apps used xmpp! For p2p syncing you may want to have a look at [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/) \- however, you must use apps that allow plain text export - and they are surprisingly hard to find!

<comment><USER38> I do use syncthing, but like you say there are hardly any apps which can use it.

There's OwnCloud (or *DAV servers) but I think it's a bit silly requiring a server to host data which I'm only going to sync over 5 devices tops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have a question, is it really possible to get out of Gmail? I may switch to Fastmail or other alternatives, but all the people I know only use Gmail, so my all my emails will still be present on Google's Servers. Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER41> This is more or less the case, an article about someone who bothered to count is here, though it's a few years dated now (2014): [https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email- be...](https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it- has-all-of-yours)

Also, bear in mind while reading the rest of this comment, that Google _claims_ it no longer scans Gmail account content for ad targeting purposes: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-gmail/google- to-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-gmail/google-to-stop- scanning-gmail-for-creating-targeted-ads-idUSKBN19E2C7)

The big question is, if you don't have a Google account attached to that mail, can Google still profile you with it? Does Google relate all of the emails people across their products get from you? If you aren't logged into a Google account when browsing, does it help them target you with ads? Can the government get a portion of your email by requesting Google give them a copy of all emails from your non-Gmail account to Google servers? These are probably the key questions on how much of an issue this is.

I also think there's probably a significant benefit from Google not having access to information in your email that wouldn't come from Gmail users. For example, if you don't have Gmail, Google can't know what you bought on Amazon or who you're friends with on Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I got rid of both my Iphone and Android. Moved over to a couple of inexpensive Windows 10 mobile phones, and have not looked back. Lack of apps? Edge, for all other cases, write your own. It's not hard to port apps, or to write your own for remote apis. Never thought I would ever support Windows. Given how many times I've wanted BG taken out for how bad it was. But I must admit, the Windows lifestyle is pretty nice. Share all my devices on one account, and it may not be up to par with Apple Lifestyle, but it's pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER43> I like DDG, but I find in general that there are two main problems:

1\. It's still much slower than google. 2\. The results are still sometimes lacking.

I could probably live with the slowness if the results were more consistently high quality. For example, just the other day I was searching for some specific error message in DDG and it returned 1 (irrelevant) result. Google returned hundreds of good results. In that case it seemed to me that google had indexed a lot of IRC archives and mailing list archives that DDG had not.

<comment><USER21> I think DDG must be improving. I used to multiple times a day finish a DDG search by adding "!g" to my terms to see if Google was better. Now it's maybe once a week, maybe even less.

<comment><USER44> I agree. For pretty much anything I do I'm using it without another thought. Even the error messages are coming back well (but I am probably searching simple error messages and not edge-case stuff). Also, hobby (sailing) and around-the-house stuff is coming up great.

I still don't understand their business model though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have switched most of my phn usage to laptop. Populate the host file with any number of decent blacklists available on github. Install noscript in Firefox and use it in private mode. With zeal docs and kiwix a lot of time I spent online has also reduced. And oh yes all news sites have been blocked as they are total waste of my time. I check the reddit most read articles about once or twice a week and that's about it. It's not hard to keep things private if you want too.

</comment><comment><USER46> these are mostly bad advices. google to vimeo, google to apple. move from one unfree proprietary service to another..

archive.org for video-upload instead of youtube/vimeo is an option. searx instead of google search. for smartphone you have to dig deeper ;)

</comment><comment><USER47> If you're looking for another reason to live without Google, look into their demonetization of youtube videos on political lines. This includes the thoughtful Dave Rubin who recently had most of his videos demonetized.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=q4D0TBPd3JU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=q4D0TBPd3JU)

</comment><comment><USER48> This is just a big product placement from DuckDuckGo, which should be hosted on their website instead of "spreadprivacy".

</comment><comment><USER49> Sounds like this is just to spite Google. Moving from one beast (google) to another (apple) seems unreasonable.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting that the article offers no alternatives to Google Photos. I know there are options, but they all seem to be far behind in terms of features. Plus, migrating all of my photos out of Google Photos would be pain.

<comment><USER50> > migrating all of my photos out of Google Photos would be pain

You can export them (incl. meta data) through the regular Google Takeout. From there you just have to upload them again to your new, preferred cloud provider.

<comment><USER27> I've tried Google Takeout, but I have several hundred gigs of photos, so uploading them elsewhere will be a pain. Plus, wherever I do upload them will be lacking many of the features from Google Photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I moved away from Chrome and Firefox since both Google and Mozilla have unapologetically fired employees for thought crimes. Apple's posturing hardly seems better. (I imagine this will resonate more with some than others, so please note that I'm only adding this to explain why Firefox and safari weren't options for me). I tried Brave, but it was too buggy. Finally, I switched to Opera which seems to rival Chrome in most regards while feeling more polished and blocking ads by default.

<comment><USER52> I use Vivaldi, it is awesome.

<comment><USER51> I've not heard of that; I'll check it out. Are you being downvoted as well? I assume people _really_ hate Opera. ;)

<comment><USER53> If they're being downvoted, it's likely because Vivaldi is closed source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This list is mediocre. You want people to switch and recommend a paid service? Good luck! For e-mail, outlook.com is a much better alternative. It has a modern interface and spam filtering works reasonably well. Yes, you get tracked by MS instead of another company, but at least you can use your e-mail account without worrying about payments. (Yes, I've used FastMail and I think it's great.)

</comment><comment><USER55> Nextcloud should be on there, you can run it from your basement, it syncs contacts, calendar and files (like drive), it even has a mail client which can turn your cheap imap provider into nice webmail. Not to mention that it can replace Google docs as well using [https://www.collaboraoffice.com/nl/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/nl/)

</comment><comment><USER56> This should be warning to all people. Specially when company dump people with different political opinions out.

Delete accounts from people who do not fit they template ?

Ask yourself, is it "Evil" behaviour?

Facebook, Google, Twitter all same CIA orchestrated company model.

Please listen CIA whistleblowers, they will tell you what these companies are doing with you and your information.

Listen Alex Jones, they have talked this now 10 years !

</comment><comment> wu-ikkyu For anyone who still wants to use google search, but doesn't want their searches tied to their identity, check out GoogleSharing (originally developed by Moxie)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/googlesharing...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/googlesharing/)

</comment><comment><USER57> Nope, Google Search is not the easiest. DuckDuckGo is not even close to Google Search by any means. Last time I tried to switch I did not even last a week. Maybe, instead of writing such articles you guys should hire some additional engineers to make your search results better.

iOS is not an option for people preferring privacy. Cyanogen without Google Packages is.

<comment><USER58> It's really pretty true. It's very hard for me to adapt to DDG style of searching. A comment I said recently highlights one specific area:

      Those who use DDG, do you miss dates in results? Having a date present definitely helps me think about the results:

      https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order

      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order

      This isn't a case where I _know_ I only want 2017 results, and so I do the syntax to filter it down automatically.
      I want all results, but I want to be aware of the timeline of whatever I'm going to click.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> None of this addresses the main problem: all of Google's apps are so well integrated that I'm locked in.

My Google Calendar appointments appear on my Google Maps the day they're occurring. When I get a flight confirmation in GMail it's added to my Google Calendar.

That doesn't work with Fastmail and Open Street Maps.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've found here maps to be far superior to apple maps. Apple Maps are still awful (I once wanted to go about 5 blocks from home, walking, and the app decided that the destination was cross the atlantic. Lots of things alike).

DDG works great, and fastmail is fabulous. their UI/UX is years ahead of Gmail's!

<comment><USER61> I've had nothing but trouble with Here maps (now HERE WeGo), in the eastern USA at least. Its UI/UX is sadly far behind GMaps. I would love an alternative...

<comment><USER60> Yeah, each app varies a lot depending on where you live. HERE works fine in Argentina, but Apple maps will constantly send you to other continents (even if clicking on a contact's address that already has a preview of the map only a few miles away).

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to others in other regions.

As for GMaps, I find their UX/UI awful and too complex. They really need to go back to the old-school google that did simple things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think quoting Resilio as an alternative to Google Drive is completely wrong. You just handle your own important data to another company. Why should you do that? For these purposes you should set up a self-hosted solution such as ownCloud or one of its clones. Otherwise your data only changes hands.

<comment><USER37> Resilio Sync is peer-to-peer, so if you believe their marketing copy, you're not handing your data over to anyone -- it only syncs between your authorized devices. Since Sync is proprietary software, it's a valid concern that Resilio could be making copies of your data without your knowledge.

I use Resilio myself, but I'd rather use free software for this sort of thing. Syncthing looks great aside from the lack of iOS support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> For a Google Maps alternative on mobile, Maps.me works better than anything I've found, including Google Maps. Its offline support is great, it takes up very little space, and you can even load mapped out itineraries via KML (though you might have to pay for that).

</comment><comment><USER63> I guess I can't recommended everyone my setup since it's pretty time consuming, but I started hosting most google services I use myself.

I don't really see a huge difference in using Apple or Google in the end.

I used to just have a Nextcloud setup, which already lets you sync files/contacts/calendar and with additional apps even rss feeds extremely easily. [https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/)

But always sending my stuff across the entire Internet seemed rather unnecessary when my server is in the same Network.

So now I've switched to Syncthing, which worjs pretty much lije Resilio Sync But to be fair the experience of using syncthing is still far from comparable to nextcloud or gdrive. As soon as you want to share single files you end up having to write regex based ignore files and you can't just give someone a link to something. [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net)

Then for contacts/calendar I use radicale a tiny python script. [http://radicale.org/](http://radicale.org/)

For rss feeds I've decided to use selfoss [https://selfoss.aditu.de/](https://selfoss.aditu.de/)

A small raspberry pi seems so far good enough for that. For messenging I use Matrix/Riot but hosting that on my rpi is probably too much. Riot allows to use jitsi video conference widgets now aswell. [https://riot.im](https://riot.im) [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)

I'd also check out yunohost that should allow you to host these things as one click apps and has a complete ldap setup built in. [https://yunohost.org/](https://yunohost.org/)

Also interesting is searx, which describes itself as a privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine. You could easily host this yourself or use one of the many instances. [https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/](https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)

I personally settled for android with lineageos without gapps. I think that android open source apps have come along way and with fdroid they are just as convenient to use (arguably even better than) gstore. And you could still always install yalp, which allows you to download the apk from the gstore without the need of an account, or even with your account to get previously bought apps and update them. I still use YouTube, but I sync my channel subscriptions over rss feeds and use newpipe on android to watch videos (it even has a picture in picture or play audio in background mode) or on my pc with mpv/youtube-dl (shift - t makes a video stay on top)

Getting to this pointed definitely took time and you need to be somewhat tech savvy. In the end I still have to rely on nonfree apps like whatsapp since matrix still has no real bridge and probably never will due to the walled in nature of WhatsApp for better or worse.

Oh one last thing, if you really need to track your websites's users behavior I would check out Piwik. I persobally don't have trouble with analytics and definitely understand that there is often no way around it. But I think as long as you are the only one I have to trust with that data I can accept that. Everything else gets blocked with umatrix/ublock [https://piwik.org/](https://piwik.org/)

<comment><USER64> I think that must be a typo? [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net)

<comment><USER63> Yep thanks, I fixed it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The key is ensuring that choice exists. It's easy to jump on the 'Must have Apple!' or the latest Google Nexus. We create the very monster we complain about when it gets TOO popular. This is very much inline with Southpark and Walmart...

</comment><comment><USER11> > Ghost (paid)

This is inaccurate as this is not the only option. You can still download the source and run an instance on your own server.

[https://docs.ghost.org/docs/hosting](https://docs.ghost.org/docs/hosting)

<comment><USER65> I think the point was that you can have completely free WordPress (hosted on wordpress.com), compared to Ghost, which costs money either for your own hosting or for hosted Ghost.

<comment><USER66> Running Ghost on your own system doesn't cost a cent, eg through [https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost](https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I have a G Suite account mainly to have email addresses across different domains using the routing google provides. Is this possible with Fastmail too? If not, is there any other service out there that would provide this?

</comment><comment><USER68> The article leads with "Google trackers" but there's no mention of how to block Google's tracking services... I get it's somewhat outside the scope of the article but seems relevant.

<comment> GCU-Empiricist Do you have a good article to share for this, or is it generally infeasible?

<comment><USER11> First step would be to block Google Analytics using an ad blocker.

<comment><USER69> I don't want to directly block ads, only tracking, so I use ghostery instead of an ad-blocker. Most ads are also blocked, but it is because the sites chose to use ad networks that also track me, not because I am trying to take away their way of making money

<comment><USER11> You can block Google Analytics using NoScript. Which is not an adblocker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> in china, google services have been blocked by the gfw for some time now, after a few months of requiring vpn just to access gmail and websites, i decided to switch to other products, for example, outlook.com for email. in china, life is fine without google, i use baidu maps, youku/iqiyi video, outlook.com for email, i'm already using an iphone so the lack of a play store is irrelevant. i imagine this would be worse for places where there aren't local solutions where google is the best or only solution for things like maps.

</comment><comment><USER71> I am in the process of replacing Google services that could badly affect me if Google chooses to ban my account. Like Gmail and Google drive. Maps and such still can be used without an account.

<comment><USER72> Don't forget to update all those places you did a social auth "Sign in with Google!" For me personally, that include Stack Overflow with 7+ years of history.

That's one of the things that concerns me about losing my Google or Twitter accounts.

<comment><USER73> You can have multiple social logins on SO (including any arbitrary OpenID provider), so you can be very safe on that site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> There's a much cleaner solution. Just live in China and don't use a VPN. Unless you stay in an expat bubble, you likely won't even _hear_ about Google very often.

</comment><comment><USER33> BTW can Chromium count as an alternative to Chrome? I know it's still google, but it's open source and lacks some google api integrations

<comment><USER63> You maybe want to checkout ungoogled-chromium [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled- chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Google are too political to be trusted. Sad they couldn't take the high road that they pretend to take.

</comment><comment><USER64> I had never heard of Resilio Sync before today, looks pretty neat. Anyone have experience with it?

<comment><USER76> I've used it, and it works. However I ran into an issue where I couldn't use it at my parents' house so I ultimately switched to Syncthing. The biggest differences are Syncthing isn't built directly on top of bittorrent, and opensource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> You want to know how to truly live without google?

Build and run your own systems. That is the only way.

</comment><comment><USER52> What about if you're a site owner and want analytics but not from Google?

<comment><USER78> Piwik seems to work OK for me.

<comment><USER65> I'll second Piwik. It's not difficult to set up and offers feature parity for the most important things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> it would be sufficient for me, if there was a firebase replacement, but it seems push messages are only possible via firebase

</comment><comment><USER80> Any good alternative for Google Docs?

<comment><USER81> I use Zoho for that.

<comment><USER82> Zoho is a pain to use

<comment><USER81> Can you explain that in more detail? I quite like it, and it takes less resources than GDocs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> new title - replace one brand with another brand. This article seems more like a blog post of just personal preferences.

</comment><comment><USER84> but I don't want too.

I was using and supporting Google with Maps since the beginning I contribute to Google Maps with Local Partners.

I contributed to Google Maps by creating 3D Building with Sketch up. I will not spit on my own soup.

It's almost always a win-win, that I can't get with any other service (Facebook, apple) on Internet, I still believe in a good way with Google, they made so many thing freely for us, like Books research, Google Ngram Viewer, Google Analytics, etc. Almost everything are free, ok there's some targeting, etc that could be bad but the product produced by Google had real impact on the day to day life. Like no one BIG company product did. (Facebook, twitter, didn't change the world for me.)

Please Google, I want a job in your company. I can do anything.

PS: Why I'm downvoted? Apple fanboy argue a little please I know you don't have brain. Too easy to go down, never go up

<comment><USER85> I always tell my children "...there is nothing free on the internet."

<comment><USER84> yeah Wikipedia is not free... Linux is not free. My comment are free.

I still can't compare Facebook to Google about targeting, ads, or other things that people tell about Google. Facebook give you what? Google always fight for giving product utility. Like Google Maps, they had the balls to change the world. Google earth / Google moon someone? someone us it? yeah but spit on your soup.

<comment><USER86> Nothing is free in the world. Wikipedia is living of donations, same for most of linux distros.

Google and Facebook are living thanks to the nice value of your data and also thanks to your free contributions.

Yes, you contributed to Google Maps for free, you did get nothing for the time you spent on it, nobody know that you did this work, you get no acknowledgement except maybe an email for which the only goal is to make you do more free work.

All visitors coming to Google Maps are thanking Google for the work you've done. And after all this free hard work, you are still paying for the use of their product with your data.

<comment><USER84> All the users that have contributed freely, but it's not free.

I contributed and in the return I get free access to the product or advantage. I don't pay. My data worth nothing.

People who think that by paying google to get the pub get a return of money is them who is wrong. Google uses schema but all the people who pay for advertising are those who pay for the service. Not me, not people who participate for free. It is like a concert if people participate voluntarily and the concert is free it is free, even if he knows your name, your schedules. This is unnecessary data.

It's free = you are the product is with Facebook not Google.

<comment><USER87> Your data is priceless to Google, because it allows them to serve their true customers, the advertisers.

You are the product with both Facebook and Google.

I find it bizarre that you can't see this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> > Google Chrome -> Safari (free), Firefox (free)

No.

<comment><USER89> Safari is so much better than chrome. Especially when using a MacBook if you want more than 1.5hrs of battery life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I can live without Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. But I can't live without Google. That is the reality.</comment>


Archaeologist discovers rare items under the floor of Oxburgh Hall - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/oxburgh-hall/news/archaeologist-discovers-rare-items-under-the-floor-of-oxburgh-hall <comment><USER2> "Anna Forest the National Trust curator who is overseeing the work, said it was the first time anybody had searched under the floorboard in centuries."

Having lived my whole life in the US, that's an incredible sentence to read.

<comment><USER3> There's an old joke that in the US they think 100 years is a long time, and in Europe they think 100 years is a long way.

It's not at all uncommon to find people living in 300+ year old buildings -- buildings that are older than the country I live in. They're not historic monuments, but just structures built to last. (A combination of survivorship bias and a lack of engineering knowledge: if you don't have the expertise to optimize your structure, you have to over-build it or it will fall down.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_hole)

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that the conditions under the floorboards were ideal for keeping the materials well conserved. I wonder whether we (I mean, our archaelogists) can estimate how many of our current objects disposed as "hidden remains" will be in good condition in 500 years.

Are people in 500 years going to find a 2000's flip-phone in good condition in a basement?

<comment><USER6> There are likely empty cigarette packages and beer cans inside the walls of many contemporary buildings. Gut rehabs of older homes often turn up interesting artifacts behind the plaster walls and in older buildings it wasn't uncommon to use newspapers and old clothing for insulation material. Our landfills will likely be the primary archaeological sites though. My dad often complains when my mom throws things out claiming that the archaeologists of the future will lose access which I often rebut by pointing out that she's merely sending it to the central archaeological repository.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the various American houses with walls full of used razor blades: [https://isarchitecture.com/seen-around-town-mid-century- blad...](https://isarchitecture.com/seen-around-town-mid-century-blade-bank- slot/)

<comment><USER6> We had a medicine cabinet with slots for dropping in razor blades in our house growing up. I don't think my dad disposed of used razor blades in it though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>