Four fired workers file charges against Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/03/google-is-no-longer-listening-four-fired-workers-file-charges-against-tech-giant <comment><USER3> _> At a public protest just days before her firing, Rivers told the 200 Googlers who rallied in opposition to her suspension that Google had wiped her personal phone when it suspended her, erasing many months of photographs_

Ouch. Presumably this would have been MDM?

I've never understood why phone makers make this possible for non-device- owners, as it seems like a gigantic foot-gun. To say nothing about the ethics involved.

<comment><USER4> This person chose to have their free phone from the company as their personal phone too. This is completely optional at Google, a really nice perk, and it's made very clear that anything under your work profile will be wiped if you leave.

They will not wipe your personal phone or your personal profile on your phone. This is completely avoidable and shouldn't come as a surprise.

<comment><USER5> It's not a perk, it's a liability. This was an option at pretty much every company I worked at and I never understood what moron would choose to put their personal data/life on a corporate device (or connect their personal device to the corporate network and its management policy) with typical policies dictating that not only can the device be remotely wiped, it can also be remotely snooped.

The only brief moment of this being acceptable was Samsung phones being able to have completely split personal/corporate profiles across 2 sims in a single phone and have 2 copies of each app, but that seems to have died.

If your employer is managing the device you're choosing to also use for personal data, it's 100% your fault and 0% surprise when it backfires on you.

If you work in tech and don't have a separate work phone+laptop and personal phone+laptop, you're either a founder or an idiot.

<comment><USER6> Over half of Google's workforce are contractors. Google does not provide a mobile device to contractors. The options for TVC's are to let Google control a personal device or take a significant productivity hit and opt-out of mobile email, chat, and docs.

<comment><USER7> That's a really crappy policy if I'm understanding it right - not provide a mobile device but insist on completely managing one if they choose to use it for company business? What a shitty way to treat people working for you.

<comment><USER8> How else could corporate IT possibly do it?

A contractor can deduct work expenses from income, a phone is just one item on a long list of things that will be deducted.

If there is corporate information on a device, it would be a breach of their fiduciary responsibility not to manage that device and have the ability to remotely wipe that data.

<comment><USER9> > If there is corporate information on a device, it would be a breach of their > fiduciary responsibility not to manage that device and have the ability to > remotely wipe that data.

I don't think, in a legal sense, that's true. It feels like it comes from the same mindset that corporations have a "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders to always put profits above all else; in fact, there's nothing in corporate law or financial regulations that requires that at all.

The IT department has responsibility for network and systems policies and company-owned equipment, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to have the ability to wipe data on that equipment or set policies that disallow personal devices on company networks at all. But they have no requirement -- and I would argue no business -- to wipe a _non-company device_ just because someone added a corporate email account to it.

Does that make it marginally more likely that someone could keep corporate email that they weren't supposed to? Sure. But there are other legal ways of handling that which aren't destructive to non-company property. No one would argue that a policy of "if you take physical work home, upon termination the company can set fire to your house to ensure all copies are destroyed" is enforceable.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure GDPR protection of "personal data" applies to _employees_ and not just _customers_.

If my personal calendar and work emails are being copied onto your device, you better believe the GDPR data protection regulations apply.

The house example is ridiculous. The point is if you commingle the data in ways such that the endpoint protection software no longer supports delineating the corporate data, then the user (employee/contractor) has opted into that situation with eyes wide open.

> _Computing devices need to be protected from loss or theft through mobile > device management capabilities, such as remote wipe and kill. A lost device > could be the weak link in the data protection chain, leading to a data > breach based on information stored on the device or accessible through still > active user credentials. Enforcing certain settings in order for a device to > connect to the network at all – such as local encryption, password > complexity, the presence and currency of security software, and the removal > of the local administrator account – will be an essential part of protecting > the organization within the GDPR framework._

[1] - [https://www.actiance.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP- GDPR-...](https://www.actiance.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-GDPR- Compliance-and-Its-Impact-on-Security-and-Data-Protection-Programs.pdf)

<comment><USER9> The house example is _exaggerated,_ but as I wrote in another reply: just as my personal physical property does not become company property if I am on their physical property, my personal data should not become company data if I am on their network.

> If you commingle the data in ways such that the endpoint protection software > no longer supports delineating the corporate data, then the user > (employee/contractor) has opted into that situation with eyes wide open.

You're assuming the user _has_ been given a clear understanding of the situation, and frankly, I think you're letting the IT department off the hook here. They need to either provide protection that can prevent "commingling" to their satisfaction, to grant a comparable level of trust to users with personal devices that they do in other aspects of conducting business (which was the real point of the example you didn't like), or just to ban personal devices.

<comment><USER8> > They need to either provide protection that can prevent "commingling" to > their satisfaction, to grant a comparable level of trust to users with > personal devices that they do in other aspects of conducting business (which > was the real point of the example you didn't like), or just to ban personal > devices.

DLP (data loss prevention) software should be present on any personal computing device that can store company data, which will be a requirement of their cyber-security insurance policy, a requirement of the various audits they surely undergo, and probably also a requirement of GDPR.

It's providing strictly more choice and flexibility to their employees and contractors to allow them to host company data on their personal device, the obvious trade-off being made when you install the DLP endpoint software on your phone and grant it permission to remote-wipe your device if necessary.

If the company _required_ their employees/contractors to use their personal device for company business, this would be an entirely different discussion. In California, the employer is required to reimburse employees for using their personally owned device for company business - i.e. required to pay for the cost of a phone and the service plan.

Employees _choose_ not to buy a second phone and get paid for their service plan on their personal phone for convenience, and to save themselves the cost of a personal plan. Some choices are not strictly good, but include pros and cons which are individual's responsibility to weigh.

I think it's a safe assumption that anyone choosing to install the DLP agent on their personal phone, particularly at a company like Google, does so fully informed of the _responsibilities_ that come with that decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a programmer, it's interesting to view organizational structure and culture through the lens of software design. Specifically, how Google's culture and organization is so radically different from Amazon's.

Amazon genuinely tries to embody the Unix philosophy. Two pizza teams that have ownership over their slice of the company, and get to decide how their team/org should operate. As a individual contributor at Amazon, there is zero expectation that you'll have unrestricted visibility into what other organizations are doing.

Google in contrast, breaks every rule in software design. There is no information hiding - everyone can see everything else. Decisions aren't made locally by the team in question - they are made centrally by people you will never see. Or by a mob of random employees who have made it their hobby to lobby against your plans. As a team manager, you cannot even decide which members of your team can check in changes into the (mono) repository - <USER2> have to get approval from someone who has been certified by the "readability team", and they have almost year-long waits to get certified.

Amazon is microservices and Google is the majestic monolith.

The Google approach works great at smaller sizes, but as the organization grows in size and complexity, I don't think the monolith approach can still work. I'd wager that is exactly the growing pains they are now going through.

</comment><comment><USER11> I figure others would be curious about Google's side of it. Who is right or wrong doesn't seem obvious to me. Apparently this is a memo about why these workers were fired[0]:

> We've seen a recent increase in information being shared outside the > company, including the names and details of our employees. Our teams are > committed to investigating these issues, and today we've dismissed four > employees for clear and repeated violations of our data security policies.

> There's been some misinformation circulating about this investigation, both > internally and externally. We want to be clear that none of these > individuals were fired for simply looking at documents or calendars during > the ordinary course of their work.

> To the contrary, our thorough investigation found the individuals were > involved in systematic searches for other employees' materials and work. > This includes searching for, accessing, and distributing business > information outside the scope of their jobs — repeating this conduct even > after they were met with and reminded about our data security policies. This > information, along with details of internal emails and inaccurate > descriptions about Googlers' work, was subsequently shared externally.

> In one case, among other information they accessed and copied, an individual > subscribed to the calendars of a wide range of employees outside of their > work group. The individual set up notifications so that they received emails > detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal > matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities — all > without those employees' knowledge or consent. When the affected Googlers > discovered this, many reported that they felt scared or unsafe, and > requested to work from another location. Screenshots of some of their > calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way > outside the company.

> We have always taken information security very seriously, and will not > tolerate efforts to intimidate Googlers or undermine their work, nor actions > that lead to the leak of sensitive business or customer information. This is > not how Google's open culture works or was ever intended to work. We expect > every member of our community to abide by our data security policies.

> Fortunately, these types of activities are rare. Thank you to everyone who > does the right thing every day — doing amazing work, while inspiring and > maintaining the trust of our users, partners, and each other.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-25/google- fi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-25/google-fires-four- employees-citing-data-security-violations)

<comment><USER12> As someone who worked at Google I'd like to clarify this corporate speak & I'm really disappointed as I thought Google had higher standards.

Google has traditionally embraced an open culture so accessing documents outside the scope of your job has traditionally been totally fine & is the stated reason why every full time employee is considered an insider for trading purposes, with legal restrictions imposed on when you can trade.

'm guessing from memory (& this would be from before my time so ex-Googlers with a better memory please remind me), but the data policy was introduced to deal with SREs looking at customer data they weren't supposed to, not about the work product of coworkers.

In terms of people's calendars I'm totally confused - it's super-easy to change sharing permissions even on a per event level. Sounds like it's a pretext - the reasonable approach would be A) Improve training about the available privacy settings B) Improve Google Calendar to make it easier to manage those privacy settings since I'm sure other workplaces have a similar problem.

So the calendar stalking is the bigger problem I think on the part of the fired employees but the "accessing documents outside the scope of their jobs" is total BS. The leaking "sensitive business or customer information" seems like pure FUD - seems like a lawyer-approved way to slander about what happened.

I'm really curious whose calendars were accessed "inappropriately" and who reported feeling threatened. Moreover just accessing a calendar is not something you're notified about so that would indicate this is either BS on Google's part or these people were doing a bit of active stalking on the side. Could come out that everyone is the asshole in this story but given how bad management/labor relations have gone under Sundar, I'd wager that Google is definitely engaging in really shady shit on their own here.

<comment><USER13> Earlier this year Google e-mailed all employees and noted that accessing docs outside the scope of your job responsibility is forbidden and a fire-able offense. I think this policy change marked the end of the open culture you speak of.

Whether this was a legitimate policy change or a change simply made to find reasons to fire activists, I don't know. But, it was made clear many months ago that digging around to access docs outside your spec could result in a firing.

<comment><USER14> > _Whether this was a legitimate policy change or a change simply made to find > reasons to fire activists, I don 't know._

From the outside it seems like a very legitimate policy change. If my co- workers are stalking my calendar to find meetings they politically disagree with so they can pressure me and/or leak it to the press, well that's super creepy. I think this is a perfect example of why "full transparency" can actually be conducive to a toxic working environment.

Even if it wasn't formally against the rules the intent behind that type of stalking should get anyone who engages in it fired. It's literally harassment. I think Google's change in policy is for the best here as it codifies common sense.

<comment><USER15> As an aside, can you explain what a meeting someone might "politically disagree with" is, and how you could have such a meeting without bringing politics into the workplaces?

More on topic, I'll note that nowhere did anyone use the word "politics" except you.

<comment><USER14> From the article:

> _Rivers had said she was being targeted for protesting against U.S. Customs > and Border Protection, which is testing a Google cloud product. Berland was > active in protests against YouTube for its handling of hate speech > policies._

As others have stated in this thread, they were apparently policing people's meetings around these topics. If you don't like your company's legal clients, quit. Do not stalk your co-workers, harass them and leak info about them to the press.

<comment><USER15> That's not correct. Rivers wasn't fired for anything related to calenders or meetings.

None of the four employees in question have been accused of leaking anything to the press.

Google's statement insinuates many things that aren't actually true.

<comment><USER14> > _Google 's statement insinuates many things that aren't actually true._

Do you have any sources that back that statement up? Google's accusations are very explicit about what these people were doing:

> _To the contrary, our thorough investigation found the individuals were > involved in systematic searches for other employees' materials and work. > This includes searching for, accessing, and distributing business > information outside the scope of their jobs — repeating this conduct even > after they were met with and reminded about our data security policies. This > information, along with details of internal emails and inaccurate > descriptions about Googlers' work, was subsequently shared externally._

<comment><USER16> Read carefully.

The leaking was not explicitly blamed on the people that were fired.

<comment><USER14> Yes it is, from the Google statement:

> _We want to be clear that none of these individuals were fired for simply > looking at documents or calendars during the ordinary course of their work._

> _To the contrary, our thorough investigation found the individuals were > involved in systematic searches for other employees' materials and work > [...] This information, along with details of internal emails and inaccurate > descriptions about Googlers' work, was subsequently shared externally._

<comment><USER15> The passive voice of "was subsequently shared externally" does not apply to the object of the earlier sentence ("these individuals"). If the individuals were actually the leakers, Google could have used a more direct and natural wording, like

"These individuals subsequently leaked some of this material."

But the statement doesn't use this very natural wording, it uses a strange, highly passive, construction. One is left to wonder why. To be fair, you're not the only person who fell for this trick, I know a lot of very smart people who didn't notice this until it was pointed out, but it _is_ a trick.

Edit: replying to your other comment, You're asking me to prove a negative, that these individuals didn't leak anything. Why should I do that when they haven't even been explicitly accused of having leaked something? No one, not the employees, and not google, as claimed they leaked anything. Google claimed that some stuff was leaked. This is true. And yes, its hard to read Google's statement and come to that conclusion. That's _intentional_ it was worded the way it was very carefully. That's the point. They're being duplicitous.

<comment><USER14> I'm not asking you to prove a negative though, I'm asking if you have any proof that what Google says is untrue since you say that it is. Using a passive voice doesn't mean that it's untrue, I actually find the Google wording to be more natural than your version.

Is there anything beyond the semantics of the Google statement that makes you feel that it's false?

<comment><USER15> > I'm asking if you have any proof that what Google says is untrue since you > say that it is

To be clear, I believe that everything Google has actually stated is factual. You're just drawing wrong conclusions from partial information. So in one sense, no, because Google hasn't _lied_. I don't have any proof that I could share. But yes, I have strong reasons to believe the things I'm stating.

As an aside, are you a native English speaker? There's some very interesting cultural aspects when assigning blame. In American English, its the norm to assign blame directly "John leaked the documents.", whereas in other cultures/languages, a passive structure is more common "John had the documents. The documents were leaked." This would be a common and correct way of blaming John for leaking something in some cultures, but in English it isn't.

Presumably Google and its lawyers are primarily English speakers.

<comment><USER14> I am a native English speaker, I just find the original statement to be more natural and less forced.

Out of curiosity if you think that the statement is true, but constructed in a way that hides information, what do you think actually happened? If I understand your position it looks something like this:

1\. The four people mentioned setup watches on people's calendars, went looking for information on people... the targets of their searches weren't part of their every day work life.

2\. They shared that information with _someone_ (no one knows who) but not the press or externally.

3\. The people who had the information shared with them _then_ leaked it externally.

4\. Google found out and fired the original four people from step 1 and wrote a memo deliberately masking step 2.

It's possible the above is accurate (please let me know if I got your position incorrect), but I don't think the wording of Google's announcement alone is enough to prove that. I'm apt to take it at its face value, especially because step 1 is by far the worst part in my mind and that doesn't seem to be in doubt.

That's why I'm curious if you have some inside knowledge or something (your bio says you work at Google).

<comment><USER17> Note that you set up a watch of someones calendar just by looking it up, so it is very easy to accidentally watch a lot of calendars. I wouldn't read too much into that statement.

<comment><USER14> Maybe so, but the Google statement does say that the employees in question did all of this in a systematic way that was outside the scope of their job responsibilities. I'd actually like to know a lot more about step 1, I suspect it holds the key to figuring out what's going on.

<comment><USER17> I feel like they got very little, since they focused so much effort demonizing this calendar watching. I can understand when they say that you shouldn't share photographs of others calendars or harass them over calendars, but I don't see why viewing others calendars is a bad thing itself. It is kinda like looking at their code or commits, you can see what they do and how they work, it is very useful if you intend to transfer or just wonder how other teams are doing things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This should be interesting.

Maybe they're both guilty of wrongdoing. In the end it'll likely be difficult for them to prevail over Google.

Plus, as many people have said over and over, leave your politics at home, despite this "bring your whole self to work". It just opens you up to more scrutiny. Of course google is to blame for fostering this attitude. I'm sure they regret their initial idealism and realize you simply cannot mould people into your vision any more than a few societies have tried and failed at raising the perfect citizen.

To be clear, there is a right to unionize. There isn't a right to politicize work and bring your personal politics into the work realm.

I don't want to hear your take on 1A, 2A, reproductive rights, medical rights, whatever, at work unless it's a conversation we volunteer to enjoin in.

<comment><USER19> Life is political. "Leave your politics at home" has been a driver of injustice and war crimes for ages. "I don't think we should murder Jews" was political speech and verboden in the Reich.

Work is the most significant part of our lives in terms of how much time it requires. It's a give and take - you can ask for concessions from your employer just as they can ask for concessions from you. It's not just "accept everyone and everything exactly as it was before", that's ludicrous.

And unionizing has been made political by corporations - it's simply a smart and legally protected right to improve workers' negotiation power in the face of huge corporations.

Hiring women and racial minorities at all, and then to particular positions, was a political issue for a long time. It still is, in many places and companies in the world (hiring a woman or minority to positions could get you killed). The idea that politics and people and corporations are not intimately intertwined is a reflection of privilege.

<comment><USER18> Sure life is political. We can have protests, vote for candidates, engage in civil disobedience and all that.

What I don't want is anyone making it a point to bring their personal politics to work. We have other forums for that.

Don't politicize every part of our existence. I wanna go to work and provide some productivity to my employer. If I don't like their politics I can vote at the ballot box, donate to causes, volunteer etc. I don't need to bring my POVs to work. You may not like mine, I may not like yours. We don't need this kind of confrontation at work.

Unionization is political but it's on a different plane. It's worker vs employer rather than potentially worker vs worker.

Do we really want to approach a time when one group of workers takes one side, another takes another side and they protest against each other and cause disruption to the vast majority who have no interest in getting personally involved?

Presumably both groups would have this "right" though be their opinions different.

<comment><USER20> > What I don't want is anyone making it a point to bring their personal > politics to work. We have other forums for that.

The American life has been completely subsumed into corporate culture. These other forums have either been rendered useless through an impossible-to- navigate political system that swallows any real momentum, been disbanded due to the nature of work requiring communities to fragment and move, or are facades for community like you see in Reddit or HN--posting isn't politics, people.

I have the same inclination with you that I don't want to hear other people's personal politics at work (likely for different reasons), but it's unavoidable when every company attempts to become your family. I don't really know what to do about it, but I don't think it's as easy as HN believes it to be.

<comment><USER21> In the 'old days', the maxim was to leave your politics with your club. The gathering of like minded people used to be more common. Political parties, were actual goups of people who regularly met to discuss and push their ideas. Likewise, hundreds of other semi-formal groups pervaded the cities and towns. There was local and personal dialouge that could not take place at work, nor was it felt proper. The online happening changed that all. People felt like they could be part of more than one group, but still clung close tribal assosiation with it, even though their influence was no longer present. And here we are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _clear and repeated violations of our data security policies_

Who's data did they access? What data was accessed? How was that data used?

Google knows they're in a bind, because if a few SJWs accessed internal Google data in a "bad way" (as viewed outside the Bay Area monoculture) then that's going to be a really bad look, maybe even worse than a hacker.

<comment><USER23> Why is this comment down voted? The three questions here are SUPER relevant to how Google operates. Everyone I know at Google says "The easiest way to get fired is to access user data in a non-permitted way."

If they just subscribed to public calendars, it doesn't sound like such a big deal (after all... the data is public). But if they used an internal API or used their position to elevate their privilege, that's a big deal.

<comment><USER24> My understanding is that these employees were looking through people's calendars and documents to figure out who was negotiating for Google with outfits like the Border Patrol, so they could pressure these people to stop and so they could let outside press know the status of any discussions.

So say Alice who is a Search Engine Data Analyst finds that Daryl over in Corporate Finance has a meeting "CBP update Washington". Alice reasons that CBP is US Customs & Border Patrol who she believes are inhumane and Google shoudn't work wit them - and she pulls up all Daryl's other meetings and sets an alert to tell her if Daryl books any other meetings with the word CBP in. Alice gets fired.

The problem for this current plan is that sure it looks like Alice is being fired for _snooping on corporate plans_ which historically wasn't against Google's rules but is also not a legally protected activity. Sure, she was snooping on those plans for the same reason she was organizing (to stop Google working with CBP), but that doesn't make her fired for organizing.

The most senior person I knew properly at Google left citing this sort of ethical problem as one reason, they felt that working on products that might be used by people who had beliefs they disagreed with was unacceptable. Weirdly they left to work for... a famous AAA video games vendor that specifically brought them on to add obviously unethical monetisation features to future games which prey on people with gambling addiction and other problems. We have agreed to disagree on whether this is outright hypocrisy.

<comment><USER25> > We have agreed to disagree on whether this is outright hypocrisy.

At the very least the game company doesn't have the power of the state to force their shitty loot box gambling on people where CBP et al do. That is CBP /will/ use the tools Company X develops on anyone and the video game you can not buy. They may be ruining a game you want to play but no one is forced to play the Gashapon MTX Slot machine games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Over and above the policy that a Corporation has over your phone (personal or otherwise) when you access their stuff, nobody talks about the potential liability that can open up to your personal device during an e-discovery process.

You could potentially have to hand your personal device over to lawyers where they can then put your personal device through an e-discovery process should your employer be sued .

People need to really think hard before they relinquish that kind of control of a device that you own.

<comment><USER27> I have a policy of never allowing a MDM policy on my phone. I use the web portals for calendaring, email. Notifications for calendar events are usually parlayed into SMS notifications.

There's also questions about "IP" law here. If you're developing interesting software at home, having separate hardware for that work is going to be critical for the legal analysis to get funding, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> " The firings were announced less than a week after the New York Times revealed that Google had hired an anti-union consulting firm."

Those at Google who undermine the power of labor to organize are evil people.

</comment><comment><USER29> Google is facing a scaling problem. Scaling is not just limited to business functions such as marketing activities, but it's also about managing their employees as the number of staffs required will keep on increasing which surely would introduce a host of brand new problems.

Google's management is having a hard time in dealing with this aspect, evidently by the scaling back of their weekly town halls, internally categorized as "TGIF meetings", mostly known by the public as those quick fire chat Q&A sessions with management. The recent cancellations of many Google products and services were probably an indirect result of this too, it was also an attempt of scaling back. Its huge size must have exceeded the current limitations of their operation structure, unless some of its core policies and missions must be altered significantly. A few of these changes may have already been carried out, the hiring of an anti-union organization and the installing of internal web browser monitoring tool.

This begs the question though, when you have something that got scaled up to such an enormous size which inevitably would accompany with more unique and challenging chaotic scenarios, what are the possible approaches to resolve these situations in a harmony and effective way? The solutions are not easy and these problems are becoming increasingly common in our modern world. The same issues that were once very simple have upgraded themselves to become much more difficult to deal with and with many added layers of complexity.

I attended a recent startup event in Vietnam in which Mr. Nguyen Thanh Nam, chairman of Endeavor Vietnam, told the story of his personal experience in facing a similar challenge in managing a large number of people. The numbers were probably not at the same crazy level at Google's but the effective solution for him in the end was to go and live in some rural villages for a while where thousands of people manage to participate daily in a very large but well-behaved community and all in harmony.

The challenge facing with an increase of diversity is alignment. The greatest benefit of diversity is new innovations, but only if its chaotic nature can be managed by correct alignment. Without this anchoring element, things will quickly spiral out of control. To effectively aligning a massive group of people, this anchoring element must be based on basic core values or principles that naturally DO NOT or RARELY CHANGE over time. There won't be any consistent alignment if those values change too often or just cannot be applied effectively for long enough. I believe Google might be approaching it incorrectly. Some of the methods reported by the media seem very similar to censoring. That is not alignment, that is the equivalent of putting a dome structure over everyone. It would slowly create an environment that inhibits creativity limiting people's abilities. It's certainly an alternative method but just not a preferred one.

Correct alignment is a much better and more efficient method for the long game. Talents and technical skills can all change very quickly in modern time, what binds people together are the common mindsets and personality attributes that are always considered good under any environments and withstanding any degrees of change. This alignment is applied even to the management themselves, and not just to the engineers whom they manage, it is actually more critical at the top level. What is the Google's personna? There should be a mechanism in place for the management to detect when they are deviating too much from the anchoring alignment as well. What we are seeing at Google is probably an early sign of this deviation, or perhaps the values being used in aligning everyone together just do not have as much longevity?

</comment><comment><USER30> While everyone in this thread are arguing about using your corporate phone for personal or your personal phone for corporate I'm just sitting here thinking:

"I wish I had a job where a corporate phone was a thing, but I certainly wouldn't give my employer access to my personal device, that's what the one they provide in this situation is for".

</comment><comment><USER31> _" The fired workers said that they plan to continue their activism"_

Some people apparently forgot why they come to work.

<comment><USER32> Why do they come to work? Why do you come to work? Is it something like "I shut up and sit down for money" or something else? Are there activists who earn money?

<comment><USER31> I think that work places should be a neutral ground for everyone to do what they were hired for - free of any personal ideologies or politics. If you think, that work is is for activism of your personal beliefs, you clearly got it all wrong my friend. Yes - you go to work for money for what you do. Nothing more, nothing less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _Google had wiped her personal phone when it suspended her_

Everyone take note: BYOD isn't for _your_ benefit.

<comment><USER34> Google offers two versions of this wipe. The whole phone, and only employer data. Wonder if they did the whole phone on accident, malice, or they are trying to say they "wiped" the phone but only removed employer data.

<comment><USER35> That only works on Android, if you have an iPhone, you always give your phone over to the employer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> They are making it sound as if Google deleted the device because it was documenting the transformation. Whatever. Serves you for having your personal data on a company's phone.</comment>


Kickstarter darling Pebble shut down after being bought for $40m - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/08/kickstarter-pebble-shut-down <comment><USER2> The deal, according to a report from Bloomberg, values the smartwatch startup at less than $40m. If true, that is a massive drop from earlier reported acquisition attempts. Techcruch says Pebble was first offered $740m by watchmaker Citizen in 2015, and then $70m by Intel in early 2016. Pebble's chief executive, Eric Migicovsky, reportedly refused both offers.

... OUCH</comment>


Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee? - <AUTHOR> I have (what I think to be) a pretty good idea for a website. I also have a full-time job that I'm very happy with.
I'm thinking of launching my idea on Heroku, and the monthly fees would run around $300 a month. Mind you, this is with two dynos, two workers, and the "production" level of a few add-ons (Redis, Postgres, etc).
My problem is that I have no interest in charging money or providing an additional tier of features for people who would pay money. I want to try launching my idea, see if it's useful, then scale the site/add-ons to match those needs. I'd also like to open-source the whole site. But what happens if (a very large, hypothetical if) it does turn out to be more useful than I expected?
The only way I can think of breaking even is by asking for donations. Is donationware in the Internet age a viable option? Has anyone done it successfully? <comment><USER2> 1\. Heroku is expensive. Odds are you can get the exact same virtual/hardware specs with a cheap VPS from Digital Ocean or Linode or any of various other providers. It'll require a tiny bit more setup and configuration on your part, but it'll save you money. You could also consider shopping around lowendbox.com and lowendtalk.com to find the best current deals.

2\. Optimize your application so that you won't need to scale via upgrading or adding new hardware for a long time. Be mindful of your database queries, cache things in the application itself, and use a caching web server like nginx as well. Only upgrade or scale to multiple servers if you've optimized everything as best you could at all the software layers and yet you're still experiencing more traffic load than you can deal with.

I've run medium-traffic sites and applications off of $5 and $10/month VPSs by following those 2 steps, with consistently good and stable performance and latency. My guess is that if you order a cheap VPS from the start and do everything else right, you'll find that it'll scale just fine for years and you won't ever need to leave it.

3\. Have a donation banner and if it fits okay with your application, place ads.

<comment><USER3> This is the approach I would take too, but I'm not sure I would recommend it.

The downside to Linode, Digital Ocean, et al is that you'll have to spend more of your time doing sysadmin work. If you're not already an experienced sysadmin, figuring out how to get the pieces playing nice with eachother can easily take up more than $300/month of your time.

And, once you're done with the setup, you're still not done: you have to stay on top of log files, watch for abuse, keep software up-to-date.

And and, if you've never done this before, you won't know what you don't know. (Pop quiz: you've never done sysadmin work before, what's the correct way to configure sshd? Bonus points: if you use MySQL, what's the first command you should run right after package installation, that nobody runs?)

I like sysadmin work, I consider it to be an important part of my software stack. But I'd be reluctant to tell anybody else that they should spend their time on it, too.

<comment><USER4> You can get around some of these issues if you use a control panel like cpanel. (Although as you get further from the old-school LAMP stack the complexity starts to return.) Regardless, in the early stages, when you're just trying to determine whether there's a market for your product, there's a fairly low bar for system administration. As long as it works, it's probably good enough. Even security (beyond the most blatant things) can probably wait until you've got some revenue, since it's very unlikely you'll be subjected to a targeted attack before anyone has even heard of you.

<comment><USER3> cpanel has a loooooong history of security issues. It's probably the single most vulnerable part of any hosting company's infrastructure. ISPConfig is probably better, but it too has had some issues ([http://www.exploit- db.com/exploits/29322/](http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/29322/)).

There's a fairly low bar for system administration for "just getting it to work", but a really long upward curve from there to "properly managed". For example, backups (which typically require some special handling for Postgres and MySQL). Also, if you store any user data at all, you're kind of obligated to make sure it's safe. You kinda want to have automated DB backups and data safety even if you're using Heroku, but doing your own sysadmin might add to the effort required to get it all working right.

You're right for the most part that you're not likely to see much in the way of targeted attacks, but be careful not to discount the number of automated attack systems that are out there now. Within a minute or two of bringing a server online, I begin to see hits for spam, ssh, and root password attempts from around the world. It's sort of amazing really. None of these are likely to go very far on a default install, but if for example you decide to set up an MTA so that your application can send you (or your users) email notifications, it's easy to goof up a sendmail config and end up with an accidental open relay.

Maybe another way to put this is, Heroku charges that much because they provide that much value to people who don't want to deal with this stuff. _I_ prefer to deal with this stuff myself, but a lot of other people don't, and I can't say they're wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> $300 per month? You can finance and colocate big server for that price, as one of my customers does. $300 could also be used to rent 5-10 real servers in different countries, to run your own cloud with GeoIP and Linux containers. An other customer is running a shoutcast cluster of 6 hosts, two in US, 1 in Canada, two in Europe, and one in Korea for half that price. AWS traffic for such a shoutcast cluster would be several thousand $ per week.

Drop the stupid cloud. It costs to much. Rewrite your site to use only free software. Get a cheap Xen site. E.g. my own small server cost only €4 per month, offering 100mbit flat. Unfortunate my provider does no longer offer this contract, but there are other affordable hosts. Just take care, that you do not sign at a Virtuozzo/OpenVZ, or some cookie cutter provider who cripples performance like rackspace.

If unsure what Xen provider is good, get a real iron at Hetzner spot market for about €20-25, install a minimal Debian on with Linux containers, and run your site within a container. A real iron will likely provide more processing power then your site needs. So you can cross finance the host, by running applications you wrote for customer.

And always unbundle DNS contract from hosting contract, so you can switch fast, in case your hosting provider sucks.

<comment><USER6> > $300 per month? You can finance and colocate big server for that price

In the immortal words of Han Solo, "Yeah, but who's going to sysadmin it, kid? You?"

(I agree with you, however.)

<comment><USER7> maybe I have just been lucky but I am running a site on a dedicated Linux server for 3 years without any significant issues. There have been zero security issues. The only downtimes were caused by me. It requires maybe 2 hours of maintenance per month. It is also running on bleeding edge packages. Of course I invested some days into the initial setup but that is fun if it's your hobby.

<comment><USER6> If you need $300/mo worth of Heroku hosting, chances are good that you aren't doing something that's going to be terribly hands-off. Systems administration isn't _hard_ , but it is involved - there's a lot of learning ramp-up that has to go into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> \- Look for a cheaper host for your MVP. Worry about scaling later. OpenShift has free options.

\- Ads

\- Referral programs (Amazon, eBay)

\- Paid support, rather than extra features

\- Collect statistics/analytics, sell them to other companies (a la bit.ly)

\- Superficial upgrades, like a little badge against their username to show they're a gold/donating member

</comment><comment><USER9> Checkout AWS's Elastic Beanstalk. Full DevOps built in. I have an app setup to use a new cheap t2.micro server and skips the load balancer (but I can add one at any time). Performance is pretty good and best of all, it only runs me around $13/m.

<comment><USER10> We use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and couldn't be happier. We compared the performance of quite a few clouds and EB has incredible speeds over the competition even for paid plans. They just lowered our prices too from their old t1.micros to t2.micros about 50% and we have 4 EB applications so that really made a difference and we combine the CloudFront CDN to leverage even more caching where we can and have a scalable solution for very little cost. Data reliability is also a very important concern so we use AWS RDS with MySQL for our primary data store and Elasticache with Redis.

If AWS lowers the pricing of the entry level EC2 instances that Elastic Beanstalk uses a bit more, I plan on moving all my side projects as it just doesn't make any sense to manage any servers or pay $20/app when I get more flexibility with AWS (ssh to find logs, tight integration between AWS services, etc). The other thing I wish they had was the ability to use a EC2 instance for more than 1 application as we don't really need 4 separate apps, but it's just mostly for cost reasons as a bootstrapped startup.

One thing we don't use, but want to down the road is using AWS CloudSearch unfortunately and currently just use a file based search, but if they lower the entry level pricing (currently more than our entire AWS spend) or we can afford it we plan on using them to manage search.

<comment><USER11> As far as multiple apps per VM, have you taken a look at OpsWorks? It seems to be aiming to be as automatic as Elastic Beanstalk, but significantly more flexible (at the expense of up-front configuration effort).

It certainly is unfortunate that CloudSearch doesn't scale down smaller, I had to skip it for the same reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey, if I read that well the guy asks for advice on how he can get some money, not how he can spend less money. ;)

<comment><USER7> but it seems reasonable to teach him about lowering his costs so he need to get less money, right?

<comment><USER3> Nobody has taught anything about lowering costs so far; all of the suggestions have been for trading more time for money. Since he's already got a full time job, I doubt this is the advice he was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > But what happens if (a very large, hypothetical if) it does turn out to be > more useful than I expected?

This is what you might call 'a good problem to have.' Either the site is sufficiently useful to people that you can charge them money (even if you don't want to...call it "donations" if it feels better), or it isn't.

The odds of you making donations viable is minimal. You're far more likely to make the idea breakeven or profitable by charging real money for it (preferably some amount of money greater than $3/month).

This topic has been worked over repeatedly over the past few years on HN. Try searching for past threads that involve cperciva, patio11, and tptacek for an idea.

</comment><comment><USER14> Have you considered using a [kimsufi]([http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/](http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/)). It's basically a cheap dedicated server. You can get a decent configuration for a less than $10/month.

You will need to admin it yourself but this depends more on the size of your website, I don't think you should worry about it so early, especially given the fact that you're not sure if you website is actually going to take off.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sandstorm (on the front page right now) has an interesting take on this issue: [https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web- ap...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require- federated-hosting.html) I don't know if their approach would apply to your idea, though.

</comment><comment><USER16> I had a small website - a content aggregation - on which I put Google AdWords on. This was about 5 years ago and it's still going. It generates anywhere between 50-100 per month. Not much, but has been enough to support all of my other side projects.

Do you really need to start with $300/month fee? Can you start small(er)?

</comment><comment><USER17> It surprises me how many replies try to solve a side problem instead of what the OP asks for. The OP doesn't seem a computer illiterate, so no need to educate him on anything.

IMO, he asks: "How does one scale a free web application, money-wise?". For example, "How did they scale Tumblr? [1]".

That's a real mystery for me too. I know they were funded by some big names [2], but that kind of financial support here in Europe is not even a dream.

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr- architectur...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr- architecture-15-billion-page-views-a-month-and-harder.html) [2] [http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tumblr](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tumblr)

<comment><USER2> That's because in all likelihood OP was asking the completely wrong question. He has no application yet and no user base, so it's a waste of time to consider these kinds of things when you're trying to create your own application or business.

But of course, if you grow at such a scale where you're getting a lot of users despite investing little money into the product, odds are many venture capitalists and incubators will be interested in you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Try the cheapest server from Hetzner ([http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40)) with their fees even an expensive hobby turns out pretty affordable.

<comment><USER19> I use hetzner for a side project, but I used their server auction. It doesn't have setup fees like their regular plans. [https://robot.your- server.de/order/market/sortcol/price/sort...](https://robot.your- server.de/order/market/sortcol/price/sorttype/down)

So far it has been pain free and I recommend the service for someone looking for something more powerful and with more ram than the $40 digitalocean server. DO is the better deal up until around 40-60$ in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is no way you can know exactly that two workers and two dynos are right. Just start off with Heroku. Maybe even pay for a worker or an extra dyno. Remember you can run multiple instances on a single dyno with eg. unicorn. Once your idea takes off you can deploy using the other posters' suggestions. By that time I thoroughly recommend Cloud 66. [https://www.cloud66.com/](https://www.cloud66.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> As others in this thread have pointed out, $300/month is a ridiculous amount of money to pay. Get a small Linode or something for a tenth the price.

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't over optimize too early. Maybe it would be just okay if you run everything on a $40 linode node.

</comment><comment><USER23> As to your first question: Advertising.

As to how you can reduce costs: Get VPSs and a free CDN or two, and engineer your website to be heavily cache reliant, resistant to intense backend load, and easily horizontally scalable. If you do it right, $50 a month will get you more than enough performance and most of your bandwidth and load-balancing will be free (the CDN).

As to donationware: Sure, if people are seriously invested in your product or community. But that might take time.

Coming from a sysadmin: Don't let people intimidate you out of doing it yourself. If you can successfully set up Tor, you can set up the infrastructure for a large website. It's not that much of a learning curve because there's a billion tutorials out there that'll show you how to set up different tools to work together.

</comment><comment><USER24> _The only way I can think of breaking even is by asking for donations. Is donationware in the Internet age a viable option? Has anyone done it successfully?_

Dwarf Fortress is supported solely by donations: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorf_fortress](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorf_fortress)

Metafilter, a web community, recently had a funding crisis and has managed to handily cover it with donations (in a scenario where the owner did not so much ask for donations as got told "Shut up and take our money").

Though, that's a community, not an app. The principle is the same though: If enough people want it and value it, yes, it is possible to get donations. But, first, you need people wanting it.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER25> If it is the sort of thing that attracts eyeballs, especially eyeballs of a niche market, then Sponsorship / advertising is probably a good way to cover costs. I've seen other suggestions for using adsense. You can make some money from it, but approaching one or two big advertisers directly is way easier. You will make more money and offering exclusive coverage on your site for the cost of your servers a month is a true bargain for them.

Also, there's a saying that I think is appropriate to mention here: "If you aren't paying, then you're probably the product". Facebook is a very good example of that.

I also agree with other comments that you can probably reduce your server costs if you hunt around.

</comment><comment><USER26> What about a kickstarter for $3000 or so? Enough money to run the site for 10 months and see if there is enough interest to keep it going. Not so much money that it's impossible to raise from small donations over the course of a month either.

<comment><USER27> Has that worked for any largeish webapps at all?

I'm especially curious as I would like to do something like this for searchcode. The costs aren't too high but since it has no revenue stream it would help keep things going even if my personal costs suddenly went up and something had to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sign up for BizSpark and you can get free hosting for 3 years in a cloud environment.

<comment><USER29> You get a $150 monthly credit for microsoft azure a month. While that is not anything to scoff at - a VM with 1 vCPU core & 1.75 GB ram is $45 / month.

Growing beyond $150 a month would be quite easy, even with a small user base, and at that point you are paying _a lot_ for what you are getting.

My point is just make you fully evaluate long term consequences of locking yourself into a closed source ecosystem with very expensive servers (Azure and AWS are both guilty here.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Surprised no one has mentioned App Engine. Their free tier will take you a long way.

<comment><USER31> Second that, if i'm not mistaking, there is a guy running his 4000 $ monthly biz running on the free tier... Can't remember which biz or where i saw it though.

It was just API calls if i'm not mistaking and he wrote a post where he slimmed his app so it could fit in the free tier again.

Anyone has an idea?

<comment><USER32> I think it was this guy. [http://blog.initlabs.com/post/16359268329/how-i- reduced-goog...](http://blog.initlabs.com/post/16359268329/how-i-reduced- google-app-engine-costs-by-75) The project he wrote about seems to have changed direction though.

<comment><USER31> Could be, but then he had to alter his theme, because i don't recognize it.

But then again, the post is from 2 years ago :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you host on AWS, I can give you two $100 credit codes to get started with.

<comment><USER34> If unclaimed by OP, could I have them, or one of them? I'm just looking into starting an AWS project, which will similarly cost me money in return for as yet unknown rewards. The idea is to create ad-hoc render farms from multiple EC2 instances, so development costs could end up being non-trivial.

<comment><USER33> For sure. Please drop me at note at tejas83 at gmail dot com. All the best for your project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Advertising. But not Googleads or whatever.

Depending on if your audience is niche enough for this, approach people directly and ask for a block sum. This works especially well for local sites where you can just walk into local shops and up to local business people at events and ask directly.

And as others have said, reduce costs, host elsewhere really cheap and only scale up IF needed. Because you probably need to actually build up an audience before you can do this.

</comment><comment><USER36> Have you considered VPS? There are quite a lot of hosts these days that are reasonably priced - Digital Ocean and Linode come to mind first. Initial setup is usually all about trying new things and testing and starting small may be more cost-effective at least in the short term.

Depending on how efficiently you create the site and its functionality, you may be able to get away with minimal resources.

Edit: Ah, meowface beat me to it! :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> I use vpscheap.net for my side projects. They are very good. They have unmetered bandwidth plans that start as low as a couple bucks a month. I use the 10 dollar/month plan, and it's 1gig ram, unmetered on a 50mbit/s link, quad core, 100 GB ssd. You can do quite a lot with that.

Only thing I don't like is that I can't get a clean install. They seem to have one Ubuntu image, and it's not really minimal, so I have to do some cleaning when I start a new instance. Other than that, it's pretty great.

You could run a cluster of 30 of those for your Heroku budget, and I have no doubt that would be an insane amount of overkill. If you were absolutely sure you were going to get killed with traffic, I would spin up a small one of these as a load balancer and put it in front of two web/app servers and do one more for database. That's still just around 35 bucks a month. And you should be able to get that from donations.

</comment><comment><USER38> Depending on what niche the website is in and how much traffic you get, you can potentially make decent money with the right affiliate program.

You can also upsell consulting services (again, depending on the niche).

</comment><comment><USER39> How far could you get with the free tier on OpenShift?

</comment><comment><USER40> google appengine free tier, aws free 1yr, nephoscale free 1yr, appfog?

vpsdime?

or if only lamp, perhaps 000webhost.com?

</comment><comment><USER41> Have you considered AdSense?

<comment><USER21> You need traffic in the hundreds of thousands of visitors to earn $300/month with AdSense.

<comment><USER42> You (probably) need traffic in the hundreds of thousands to justify the $300/month infrastructure spend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Honestly, even for funded startups scale is generally the last thing one should worry about... it's the single best problem to have.

If you're doing it because you love it just do it, wikipedia exists on donations. Worst comes to worst you decide you can't afford hosting anymore, and you either limit traffic, or shut it down and paste a link to the code. It's not like you owe anyone anything for having provided them a free service for years.</comment>


Mobile app marketing, it's all about getting creative - <AUTHOR> http://parikshit-joshi.com/technology/mobile-app-marketing-creative/ <comment><USER2> The screenshot thingy was awesome! I wish it had more such examples.</comment>


Handling System Failures During Payment Communication - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/09/handling-system-failures-during-payment-communication/ <comment><USER2> Well, I guess to some degree this is a result of payment processors being incompetent, but really, the idea of "detecting an abnormal state" is idiotic. You shouldn't build distributed system for the unproblematic case and then bolt on corrective measures to make it work through failures--you should build it exclusively for the failure case, and the unproblematic case will just work, with the benefit of fewer special-case code paths and generally lower complexity.

You don't build a payment transaction mechanism that assumes that TCP connections cannot break and then bolt on recovery mechanisms that try to fix things up if they do anyway--you build a transaction mechanism that simply assumes that the TCP connection will break every time. If it doesn't, great, you get better performance, but that's it.

The idea that somehow the uncertainty whether your request was received and processed by the other party is created a certain amount of time after you have sent the request is just confused. The uncertainty starts the very moment the request leaves your machine, and it lasts until you receive an acknowledgement. As long as the uncertainty lasts, you keep retransmitting, in order to guarantee that the uncertainty gets resolved at some point. In order to avoid that retransmissions cause repeated side effects, you assign a unique ID to the transaction so that the recipient can avoid applying duplicates.

<comment><USER3> > As long as the uncertainty lasts, you keep retransmitting,

That works fine if your payment gateway processor supports idempotent transactions[0][1][2]. Not all processors do. So your only recourse as a merchant is, in the event of uncertainty, to query the processor via whatever API they provide to see if your transaction was successfully transmitted to and persisted in their system, and discover the outcome..

[0]: [https://dev.mca.sh/retrying.html](https://dev.mca.sh/retrying.html)

[1]: [https://stripe.com/docs/api#idempotent_requests](https://stripe.com/docs/api#idempotent_requests)

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

<comment><USER2> 1\. Yeah, hence "Well, I guess to some degree this is a result of payment processors being incompetent [...]".

2\. That is actually not a solution. As your communication channel is asynchronous and unordered, there are no ordering guarantees on the delivery of the transaction request and any subsequently sent status queries, thus this approach has a race condition. Also, chances are that such broken systems don't even give you any useful visibility guarantees on "received" transactions, so even if you pretend that IP is synchronous if you wait long enough chances are you'll still have race conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is one of the value-added features of using services like Stripe, right? Just as we have moved from dedicated box hosting to the cloud, we trust payment gateways like Stripe to properly authorize and capture payment.

I think the authorize and capture model adequately solves most of the issues (wait for authorization code, then capture payment). However, how do you guarantee payment capture even after having an auth? Does Stripe guarantee the card processor receives the capture request before returning a success code to the API client? If, for example, your initial call to the Stripe API for capture fails, can you safely run the capture call again with the original authorization to avoid a double charge? If I understand correctly, you cannot capture more than authorized?

You want to make sure you charge the customer once, not zero, or more than once. I think that's where the difficulty in writing credit card payment code lies.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see any if this not being easily solved by the traditional model of using authorize and capture with external payment processors.

It's been a while since I've worked on such a system, so I suppose it's possible newer processors implement things differently. However, that model was solid because you always knew the state of the charge in your system and finding the state in the processor's system was pretty easy too (in the case of communication errors).

Also, authorize can be run multiple times. Sure, you may place a hold on some extra amount in the customer's account, but it falls off after a few days (and I believe you could release it too, if a different authorize transaction was captured).

This seems like an overly conlmplex solution to a problem that's been solved for years.

Edit: fixed typo.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice strategy post.

I was hoping for some numbers as well, like how many "unknown" transaction- state they get per unit time, /or /day or anything like that. Even some % figure would have been insightful.</comment>


Quantum Computing for the very Curious - <AUTHOR> https://quantum.country/qcvc <comment><USER2> This was discussed just two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23561018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23561018)

</comment><comment><USER3> While I definitely appreciate the existence of pretty and accessible books like this, I wonder how effective spaced repetition is. If the end goal is testing the rate of retaining information then I definitely agree that spaced repetition is great.

However, my take is that people that have mastered subjects are the ones that can create stuff with that information so I believe the goal of "education" should be to graduate people to creators as soon as possible. Instead of flashcards why not graduate people to messing around with a quantum simulator. I'm not even sure how important memory is these days.

As far as I'm concerned some of the best educators out today are the Zachtronics and the Factorio devs. I hope more people follow in their footsteps.

<comment><USER4> quantum.country is actually a study in the effectiveness of spaced repetition. Andy and Michael have documented the results from Quantum Country here — [https://numinous.productions/ttft/](https://numinous.productions/ttft/)

<comment><USER4> Andy goes into even deeper detail of the need of having Executable Books in order to enable learning — [https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z2UKZTkAbLUKR85d92gqB7ahoxcS...](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z2UKZTkAbLUKR85d92gqB7ahoxcS2tpB2ah2?stackedNotes=z244xx3kMf1v8UnkZKUwQBAwBsHLpUgN4YhsG)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Authors explain background and motivation for spaced repetition and mnemonic media in this extensive article. May be helpful if you're seriously getting into this.

[https://numinous.productions/ttft/](https://numinous.productions/ttft/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Came in for the content, stayed for the article's format, which is quite something. Interactive, and using spaced repetition as a built-in. You can tell a lot of work has gone into this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article uses spaced-repetition. I haven't seen that in an article before.

<comment><USER4> Nicky Case also does it in the most delightful way — [https://ncase.me/remember/](https://ncase.me/remember/)</comment></comment>


Finding a hacker for a low budget. - <AUTHOR>

I got trouble finding a programmer for a small startup. At first i only need someone at a fixed price basis but somewhat later i want to hire someone fulltime. Remote work only.
I searched for 2 month on freelancing sites like odesk, vworker etc. but didnt find someone who seems to be suitable for the job. At the other hand if i look at sites like here everyone seems to only work for $100/hr+.
Does anyone maybe know some sites where i can find some students who are eager to work for a reasonable price? <comment><USER2> I found <http://ebackers.com/> through HN awhile back. I've used it for a couple small items. It doesn't look like the flood of low quality overseas programmers have found it yet (not saying all overseas programmers are low quality). Contact me if you're looking for a Python programmer.

</comment><comment><USER3> These kinds of topics crop up pretty often here, maybe you can start by looking at the ideas there. Eg. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293542>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but these kind of topics are mostly about some designer looking for a hacker as a cofounder. Thats not the case here. We want to pay for a hacker but we cant afford to pay someone 100$/h, but we dont wanna hire someone from a freelancer site who cant even speak english either.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, from my (freleancing) perspective it's a mirror image. Either a race to the bottom on odesk, or "payable in equity, ninja rockstar you take one for the team and are 40h/w on location needed". I could use a site that has reasonable remote contract offers (btw if you're looking for a Python contractor, contact me, see my profile for the details).</comment></comment></comment>


A remake of the very first website - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html?

<comment><USER2> It's kind of impressive that any modern browser will still accept and render these pages perfectly fine...

<comment><USER3> If you look at the source, you shouldn't be surprised. It uses a very small subset of what is present now in html.

It also made me discover that view source was removed from Safari 6 (Without enabling the Developer menu) :(

<comment><USER4> it's not the oldest website... symbolics.com is

this i guess maybe be a replication of the first page published .. or something like that.

could anyone please confirm?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't there at this time (I'm only 23) but I believe symbolics.com was the first dot-com domain name, not the first website.

<comment><USER5> Yep, DNS, along with email, usenet, ftp, gopher, and many other internet services were long-established before "the web" was created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/H...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Helping.html)

Still not a bad list.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lots and lots of observations. Just a few:

The list of who's involved is sorted alphabetically by last name. TBL is third on this list. Humility. [http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/P...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/People.html)

"Resource discovery" is identified as a problem. And a possible solution is proposed: _By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know because there isn't yet an indexer which runs over the web directly._ Now, if there was only some money in that ...

 _In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches._

TBL's first hypertext work was in 1980. Good ideas take time to come to fruition (there was also much parallel work on similar concepts). [http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/F...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/KeepingTrack.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I would probably have read this page for the first time in January/February 1993 when I was writing my first html page.

Too bad there are so many broken links now.

</comment><comment><USER9> Has someone ever tried to compile/port the first web browser [1] on a modern OS X machine?

[1] <http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/>

<comment><USER10> Heh. Nice idea. It uses the old NextStep AppKit classes (rather than OpenStep, which Cocoa descends from) so you'd have to reimplement them, possibly as wappers around the modern AppKit api. It might also depend on some older features of the objective-c runtime, which would need to be worked around.

Could be a nice 'just for fun' sort of project though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/P...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/People.html)

The work at CERN is differentiated when it is performed by westerners or by people from the eastern side:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264>

</comment><comment><USER12> Note the use of the NEXTID tag, which was already listed as "historical reasons only" in HTML 2.</comment>


Cuomo Authorizes Illegal Seizure and Redistribution of Ventilators - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html <comment><USER2> The actual subhead is, "Governor Cuomo is issuing an executive order letting the state seize and redistribute ventilators from hospitals and companies." Maybe it's been changed since this was posted.</comment>


A Plain Text Primer - <AUTHOR> http://bettermess.com/a-plain-text-primer/

<comment><USER2> I was hoping that the author would address the issues with plain text and Unicode. He didn't even act like there are portability issues when you want to save in Unicode, but the editor may or may not support it.</comment>


Station squabble - <AUTHOR> https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/wpy/community/peoples-choice/2019/21/station-squabble.html <comment><USER2> As a hobbyist wildlife photographer I really like this picture. It gives hope to those of us who can't easily access exotic locations and animals that it is possible to take award-winning shots in a local environment.

More specifically, in a world where everyone carries a camera (in a phone form factor), this show two things that you can do make your shots stand out from the crowd:

\- have the patience to wait for interesting behaviours

\- get a different angle from everyone else - don't stand, but kneel or lie down

The third thing, also shown here, is investment in kit that lets you totally control the shot. Kit here means a responsive camera, and decent glass (the lens)

<comment><USER3> This guy apparently spent 5 nights in a row down on the platform waiting for the right photo (I imagine taking many photos over the 5 nights until he got this). It really shows how important patience is in getting the right shot.

<comment><USER4> From everything I've read 99% of wildlife photography is waiting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I've seen the movie [https://youtu.be/e9dZQelULDk](https://youtu.be/e9dZQelULDk)

<comment><USER6> So sad, so beautifully animated

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As heard on Morning Edition [1] today in the US.

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/805128845/photographer-of- mic...](https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/805128845/photographer-of-mice- fighting-in-london-subway-wins-photo-content)

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like the photo and understand it's a people's choice award, but it in no way represents wildlife.

It's more fiction than fact. It's like getting a split second photo of a famous person just at the right moment when their face doesn't truly portray them.

Anthropomorphizing animals is the bane of scientists. People like David Attenborough love to do this. It's it's why most environmentalist don't even understand what an environment is.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rats fight all the time in subways all over. The blocky shadow of the lower mouse seems awkward in the still photo.

</comment><comment><USER9> My sister's cat is a mouser and at some point he learned how to catch them w/o killing them. He likes to bring them inside and let them loose to run around under the furniture.

Anyway, one day he caught a little gopher, and man was that thing _pissed_. They were facing off and I still remember how impressive and silly it looked when the gopher stood up and _roared_ at the cat. It was super high-pitched but unmistakably a roar. The cat blinked! (But only for a moment. The gopher was really small. She got the lil guy away from the cat and put it back outside. But at one point it was under her bed doing the "E.T. among the stuffed animals" routine with the junk under there. Oh look! That's not a wadded-up sock that's the gopher!)</comment>


Evolution of the English Alphabet - <AUTHOR> https://usefulcharts.com/blogs/charts/evolution-of-the-english-alphabet <comment><USER2> This may be a (passable) evolution of the Latin alphabet, but it is not the English evolution. Missing are runes, and the lost letters eth, thorn, and yogh, which were still in use alongside the Latin alphabet as late as the 16th century.

<comment><USER3> The author addresses this very point, highlighting that the chart is simplified from a more detailed work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This may seem like a silly question, but does anyone know why the alphabet seems to flip from 500 bce (ancient Latin) to 1 ce (Roman)?

<comment> def- Same question came up on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/8am0si/e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/8am0si/evolution_of_the_english_alphabet/dwzqvk6/)

> Linguist here! In those ancient languages, there was no standard writing > direction or standardized spelling conventions. In fact the Greeks often > wrote in either direction alternating in a method called "boustrophedon" > which means "ox-turning." You get to the end of the line and then write > backwards to the other side of the page; it's actually much better for > reading.

Answer by sandscript

<comment><USER5> "boustrophedon" sounds extremely useful. Too bad that practice didn't remain. I always find my eyes loose track of where the next row starts, especially with small text and/or wide screens/paper.

<comment><USER6> The fastest way to go rasterize fixed sized tiles on LRB was boustrophedon—only requires ~9 registers, and takes 3c per 16 samples, amortized.

<comment><USER7> LRB?

<comment><USER6> Larrabee; an old Intel part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I misremembering, but I thought in Jared Diamond's GGS, the claim was made (and fairly well substantiated IIRC) that although writing was invented independently in several places around the planet, the (concept of an) alphabet was only invented once, and basically was propagated outwards.

It's an appealing idea, not least because it seems so bizarre.

<comment><USER9> I think in the sense of characters representing consonants and vowels specifically, but there are several phonetic alphabets — Japanese and Korean off the top of my head.

<comment><USER10> I think you mean "syllabic".

Korean is almost phonetic but it's very recent (1443-1444) and it's influenced by the Latin alphabet family (should I call it Phoenician). It's not a direct copy, but it's not an independent invention.

The Japanese language is mostly logographic, but they have two second class syllabic alternatives for students, kids and weird words. They have no traditional phonetic system.

If I can add a personal anecdote, I speak Spanish that is a very regular phonetic language like German. When my daughter was learning to read we have to teach her all the combinations of each consonant, for example "ma, me, mi, mo, mu" and then "la, le, li, lo, lu", and then ... after a few letter we imagined that she would pick the regularity and then with a single example like "ba" she would complete the sequence but no, we had to tell her the whole sequence "ba, be, bi, bo, bu".

This is similar to the system used in schools, so I guess it's necessary to hear all the syllabic combinations in spite when you are grow up you my think they are easy to interpolate.

And remember that Spanish is like German, you have a straightforward relation between the written form and how you say it. [There are minor pronunciation details, as in any language, for example we sometimes drop some unnecessary letters.]

<comment><USER11> >you have a straightforward relation between the written form and how you say it

This is one of the things I love about Spanish. I've heard people say that English is easier to read than Spanish. I don't know what those people are smoking, but I think it would be too strong for me ;-) Seriously, how would anyone know how to pronounce words like "enough" without hearing them first?

<comment><USER12> When I lived in Germany so many people asked me what the secret was to English pronunciation. How could you tell from the spelling how a word is pronounced? I told them to do what I was taught to do when I come across an unfamiliar word - check a dictionary. They were hoping for a different answer.

(It's also the answer to "yes/no" questions. Answer in a sentence, don't just say "yes" or "no". There's rules about how English speakers use them "yes" and "no" and when we use full sentences, but if you're asking me, the answer is just "always say 'i do' or 'she won't' or whatever", because it's 100% guaranteed to be clear and unambiguous. It's also easier to remember in the heat of the moment despite the complexity. If you want to be really good, you can practise "no, I don't", but leave "yes, I do".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FWIW, in French the name of the letter "y" is "i grec", or "Greek i".

<comment><USER14> Similar in Polish, but for some reason, in Slavic languages from the Balkans it is "Ipsilon".

<comment><USER15> In English at least, the corresponding Greek letter is normally spelled "upsilon", which is obviously similar. The "psilon" in both "upsilon" and "epsilon" meant somethign like "simple" in Greek. So these letters were the "simple u" and "simple e". (Similarly with "omicron" and "omega", you can probably guess what size of "o" those were. :) Not sure if there are other cool facts about the Greek letters, for example those ending with "eta".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to know the story behind "I" and "Z" swapping places.

<comment><USER11> It's not an I. You can actually see the evolution of the "real" I right there on the chart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What about diacritics used in English, aren't they part of the "English alphabet" too?

The New Yorker is (in)famous for coöperate, naïve, reëlect, etc.

Some people spell French loan words the French way, e.g. café, resumé, etc.

French/German/Spanish/etc proper names commonly keep their diacritics in English texts. Many people see Gödel as more correct (even in English) than Goedel.

In New Zealand English, Māori loan words commonly keep the macron. Certainly if you look at New Zealand government web sites you will see that happening.

But if English contains just as many diacritics as French/German/Māori/etc (albeit with rarer and less consistent usage) is there really a distinct "English alphabet"? Or just one Latin alphabet shared by many languages? (I know the page author attempts to address this objection, but I'm not satisfied with the response.)

</comment><comment><USER18> What happened to þ?

<comment><USER19> It entered the alphabet from runes and then exited the alphabet with the invention of printing, because there weren't typefaces for it. So it appeared and disappeared between the last two stages in the graphic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is super cool, but I wish there were more explanations about what happened!

It's interesting how the Q gets turned upside down and rounded out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would be cooler if it took it all the way back through Hieratic and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

</comment><comment><USER21> That's the reason why their is no "proper" English; English is constantly evolving.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that the ancient alphabet starts off as "A B C D E F Z H"

<comment><USER12> Yes, and they made a mistake in it. Z and Y don't come from the Latin forms. The letters entirely died off and they reborrowed them from the contemporary Greek forms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> TLDR: [https://i.imgur.com/4WtybUs.gif](https://i.imgur.com/4WtybUs.gif)</comment>


Smelly std::pair and std::tuple - <AUTHOR> https://arne-mertz.de/2017/03/smelly-pair-tuple/ <comment><USER2> I think Python's "named tuple" is an interesting middle approach. It allows a somewhat-descriptive collection of data fields that has the benefits of a class without requiring quite as much effort to create. Therefore, a Python named tuple has some immediately-obvious benefits (unlike the C++ std::tuple<>, whose benefits are FAR less clear).

Off the top of my head, the main value in tuple<> would be to greatly simplify the effort of implementing certain operators in a class, such as less-than.</comment>


The JSR-133 Cookbook for Compiler Writers - <AUTHOR> http://g.oswego.edu/dl/jmm/cookbook.html <comment><USER3> This post shows a problem with YC. It's very technical, and frankly - <USER2> content. But generates exactly zero discussion here.

Why? Where are all the memory-barriers discussing hackers? Where are all the JVM implementators? Where are all the low-level concurrency geeks? Memory model experts?

Clearly not here. Sigh.

<comment><USER4> You might enjoy a place with more lobsters.

<comment><USER5> Even though I mostly lurk here, I find the invite-only nature of lobste.rs very off-putting. I'm not sure why.

<comment><USER6> I'm rarely fond of exclusionary policies. And look at the results: although the signal/noise ratio might be higher over there, there are hardly any comments. On the front page, I count 17 of 25 posts with zero comments. Plus, there's so much content overlap with HN (and certain subreddits) that I see myself getting very little value out of chasing down an invitation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Down goes Heroku! - <AUTHOR>

Heroku.com itself is down right now, and a flurry of other apps. Wasn't just me: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/heroku.com <comment><USER2> Yes <https://status.heroku.com/incident/276></comment>


Robinhood stock broker money in account is missing - <AUTHOR>

I have been using Robinhood for about a week now and its been a great experience, I loved it, however all of a sudden today everything went wrong. I noticed that there was money missing from my account. I looked at my total transfer history and the amount of stocks i own, I bought one share of a single company earlier in the week, proving that some of my money had disappeared. I have emailed Robinhood and they have not yet responded to me. Also before I found out about the money missing i had been trying to acquire more stock. Every time i made an attempt to buy it would give me an error that my account can only close positions. This doesn't make any sense, I have more than enough money to buy the stock I attempted to buy with excess funds left over. I don't know nor understand what Robinhood is doing. There was no notice or reason why any of this happened I just didn't know what to do. <comment><USER2> I highly doubt HN is the right venue for this. Maybe you should contact the local equivalent of the SEC?

Are you taking into account that markets are closed right now?

</comment><comment><USER3> Could it be that they do some sort of pre-auth when you try to make a trade? If so, those take a couple days or so to get credited back to your account.</comment>


Why the Convergent Desktop Is So Important to Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux.com/news/embedded-mobile/mobile-linux/787839-why-the-convergent-desktop-is-so-important-to-linux

<comment><USER2> This is an awful idea. Having a mobile phone power desktop applications with its current specs is a no go.</comment>


My Corona Helper: connecting healthy helpers to the most vulnerable - <AUTHOR> We created http://mycoronahelper.com/ because we saw too may elderly people out grocery shopping. Posting it here to spread the word so that we get more helpers and more people in need signed up - so that it can help more people. Thanks for helping! <comment><USER2> They by as very suspicious ... I was originally asked to connect with them and they got weird once I asked I mentioned legality and that we were talking about a very serious and life threatening virus ..

Food for thought

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not true. I think you are the same guy who posted another similar link on facebook, claimed it is government supported, and it turned out to be false, so you deleted your post. Additionally, you kept asking us to not run this platform without going through the bureaucracy of getting gov approval. Gov approval for what? People are dying by the day, and we are at war with this virus.

For everyone else - we have no vested interest in doing this. Please feel free to signup and share if you think this is going to help people.</comment></comment>


Steve Ballmer on Microsoft, his Twitter investment, and sports tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-talks-microsoft-twitter-clippers-2016-2 <comment><USER2> >> "No, I'll make a bigger contribution in this phase of my life by being able to pick and choose, not being so manic, having time to step back, a little more time for what I'll call discernment rather than just activity."

The last, and most telling quote in the article, in my estimation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really dig the idea of what he's doing in analyzing the role of government. Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum I'd say most people, at least here in the US, would agree that the government is pretty inefficient. While obviously governments are different than companies in some very fundamental ways I'd think something like a dashboard for government would be both really cool and useful. Despite being a democracy we're not very transparent. There has to be so many ways we can aggregate data in a useful manner both for public use and information and to help officials make better more representative decisions. As an aside I'd also love to see more people pursuing politics with a tech background.

<comment><USER4> I do agree with your view that government in USA is pretty inefficient. Another problem with US government is that it is simply too large and has immense resources to waste on needless things.

I don't remember who said it but the quote was "when government officials have to pick between two work they chose the least productive one (because it is easier)". I am a libertarian and I see that a lot of people make fun of Bernie Sander's free college but go to think of it US government has spend around $15B on war on drugs and around $74B on running prions a lot of this money can indeed go in into supporting education if it can not be returned to tax payers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> On Twitter:

> I look at that and say, "Hey, that's an exciting thing to get behind!" > Because they can improve that product.

I'm starting to wonder how they could improve the product. People that don't use it, seem to think it should be Facebook Jr. People that do use it generally are happy with it the way it is.

I'm in the latter group and have a hard time thinking of ways that it can be greatly improved. If it were up to me, I'd go the platform route and re-open the API and commit to keeping it open.

How has Twitter improved over the past, say, 3 years? I wish Ballmer had said more about it.

<comment><USER6> RT'ing and quoting work better. That's about it.

Things Twitter _could_ be doing, besides your excellent suggestion of reopening the API:

-Self-deleting tweets, for the Snapchat kids.

-Better threading on conversations. Anything more than 2 people and it's a mess.

-Thumbnails for any URL. Right now if you plop the URL of an image in, it just shows as a line of text.

-Twitter is often used as RSS, so why not have a Google Reader-type viewer?

-More transparency on bans and deverification.

-Fix search. Sometimes its performance is embarrassing.

<comment><USER5> Those are all good ideas.

The expiring tweets suggestion is an interesting one. I wouldn't have thought of that because frankly I don't _get_ Snapchat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a better interview here: [http://www.somethingawful.com/comedy- goldmine/steve-ballmer-...](http://www.somethingawful.com/comedy- goldmine/steve-ballmer-questions/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like Ballmer, fascinating guy. He cares.

<comment><USER9> I normally stand back, emotionally unaffected by executives and their pursuits. But that "Developers, Developers, Developers" video of Ballmer and the all the pointing and laughing makes me feel very sad. I get pangs every time I watch it :s. So to your comment, yes it's clear he cares

<comment><USER10> He was also extremely successful in some respects, ie he tripled Microsoft's turnover and doubled profits while clearing up the anti-trust mess _and_ operating under the supervision of the US DoJ for a decade.

He also started all the things that are happening now, including Azure, Office 365, Surface, and apps on iOS and Android. Yes, even putting stuff into open source.

You could also write a long list of things Ballmer got wrong. However, that's true of all tech CEOs, including the various CEOs of IBM, HP, Dell and Sun, among others.

<comment><USER11> Agree, in business it's enough to be right some of the time:

[http://bytepawn.com/heisengames- business.html](http://bytepawn.com/heisengames-business.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Confessions of a Terrible Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kickin-the-darkness.com/2007/09/confessions-of-terrible-programmer.html

<comment><USER2> This submission will probably never see the light of day now that it is buried at least 160 days deep, but I really enjoyed reading it</comment>


Airbnb Law Enforcement Transparency Report - <AUTHOR> http://transparency.airbnb.com/ <comment><USER2> > (in the case of certain types of national security-related requests in the > United States like national security letters) from publicly acknowledging > receiving it, such as in a transparency report like this one. (To date, we > have not received a national security letter or other similar request that > would limit our ability to disclose it here)

They have included a warrant canary

<comment><USER3> I like that they've done this. Are there examples of companies that have done this and users or the media noticed when they removed it?

<comment><USER4> Reddit did.

[https://m.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ct1kz/reddit_dele...](https://m.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ct1kz/reddit_deletes_surveillance_warrant_canary_in/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the report, they call the ratio of "Requests For Which At Least Some User Data Was Disclosed" to the "Total Requests" the "Compliance Rate". In this report it's 43.6% which implies that Airbnb is "out of compliance" with 56.4% of requests.

I wouldn't call that ratio the compliance rate because it a rejected request may be very justified from the standpoint of the business / customers privacy. "Disclosure ratio" seems like a more apt term.

<comment><USER6> If you interpret "compliance" as the noun form of the verb "to comply", it makes more sense. Compliant behavior, that is, "compliance", is not always positive.

<comment><USER5> I suppose it depends on what legal weight there is around the request. Depending on the legal situation, if a company is "out of compliance" they may be fined etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have no idea what to do with or how to feel about this information. I'm sure plenty here will sooo... someone care to draw some conclusions?

<comment><USER8> Well, for starters, it sure looks like France has some problems.

Or it's the same group/people/individual hitting the same place again and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm kinda intrigued why there are `74` affected accounts (higher than any other country) for a single submission in India.

<comment><USER10> Probably something of the form "all persons that have stayed at $property during $time"?

</comment></comment><comment> dan-silver Is there a formal requirement for an emergency request?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a helpful report. I'm always curious to know the number of requests, at least to the right order of magnitude.</comment>


Your data on Google. - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/goodtoknow/data-on-google

<comment><USER2> I think at some point people need to assess the value that they personally place on their data. Google simplifying their privacy policy and data collection practices are primarily aimed to coincide with the recent ui redesigns across all their products. In short, its a slow transformation of a company and with it, the web.

The era of being blissfully unaware of how your data is being used is ending. Google has anticipated and recognizes this, and is therefore reacting accordingly while providing additional value to users.

</comment><comment><USER3> used to be safe...</comment>


The Slack Chat That Changed Astronomy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/neutron-star-slack/543147/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This was very disappointing.

Was really hoping for one giant chat that astronomers from around the world were just sharing what they were learning at an instant... </comment>