The End Of Facebook and Free Software's Quiet Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisari/journal/dec5c92b2301f4a1c5f5cf7a43ea5db6

<comment><USER2> Walled gardens can last a long time. You could argue that if a walled garden lasts as long as a technology is relevant, before open source competitors can come in, the walled garden has 'won'. I'd argue in this sense, Windows won: it was never bested by Linux on the desktop, even though it is now largely irrelevant.

It could turn out that Facebook stays prosperous until the world shifts to the next big thing, but well before any open source alternative takes hold and dominates.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I'd argue in this sense, Windows won: it was never bested by Linux on the desktop, even though it is now largely irrelevant._

And what made it irrelevant? The web, a collection of open standards and protocols.

<comment><USER3> I'd say it's a bit early to call Windows irrelevant - certainly one look at Microsoft's bottom line would suggest that Windows is still very relevant.

In some ways, yes, the choice of operating system is now largely irrelevant - if you mainly use web based stuff. But then again, walk into any corporate office in the world and there is a massive, massive probability that the only operating system you will see on desktops is Windows.

<comment><USER4> And also a massive probability that everyone there is running Office, plus a bunch of internal applications written specifically for that office, which only work on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Diaspora had the money and popular backing, but it also looks as if they made some fairly unfortunate design decisions which meant that they couldn't run on ARM based servers (the "freedom box" concept).

<comment><USER6> I don't understand the appeal of those plug computers when you can get a VPS for ~$60/year.

<comment><USER5> Well speaking as a hardened recessionista the appeal is that I have all my data under my control, where I can easily back it up, am not subject to any whimsical "terms and conditions", and pay ~$0/year in hosting fees. From my point of view spending £80 on a plug computer was one of the best value purchases I've ever made.

<comment><USER7> _I have all my data under my control, where I can easily back it up, am not subject to any whimsical "terms and conditions", and pay ~$0/year in hosting fees._

How 90s.

<comment><USER8> And probably, how 2020s. The wheel turns.

<comment><USER9> That only matters to the people on the rim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I doubt if FOSS will even make a dent in Facebook, as the Free Software web2.0-apps-ecosystem is very different from that of FOSS desktop/server- software:

0) It is harder to raise money for FOSS, especially in the startup-phase (so if competing endeavors are closed, they will have the financial edge, which could be an important disadvantage if you're doing something innovative...).

A) If it is a centralized Affero GPLed app:

1) There is a barrier to installation on local/development machines (try getting your first time hesitant developer to install MySQL, ruby and a host of gems). A barrier that is smaller / nonexistent for desktop software, because to use it at all, you have to install it.

2) There is a barrier to updates, a fix somebody applied to his local copy still has to be checked and deployed to the server(s) before he even can use it (if it is a feature relying on his data on the production-server).

B) If it is a GPLed P2P web-app:

1) There are critical mass issues for updates of social functionality (how to get most people to to update? and how to coordinate different version). If updates are automated or even go through a package manager, you're back at A2.

2) The required architecture will be much more complicated compared to centralized apps with the same functionality (at least while the centralized app is small enough to run on one server / cluster).

Not that it is absolutely impossible, but I tried (option A, a forum/wiki-type app) and was, to say the least, not wildly successful :) (though we/I did get a decent app completed, and I'm doing fine otherwise) (could just be the things I was building, ymmv): <http://foundation.logilogi.org/>

Oh, and naturally, for social networks it is even harder, as there is an additional critical mass effect in the network itself (not useful as long as most of your friends are still hanging out on FB, and unlike us programmers / geeks, they generally don't care that much about code and FOSS-freedoms, and at best mildly about data-freedoms. They are mostly happy about not having to worry about software and updates at all...).

</comment><comment><USER11> IMHO, the rising of Facebook and Twitter is due to email spams defeated email user experience in 2000s. FB and Twitter provide a much higher signal to noise level than email for common users without knowing spam filters and all other craps.

So maybe the thing that replaces FB or Twitter is something that makes my communication with my family and friends better. What will that be, we will know when it rises.

<comment><USER12> Or, the consequences of privacy violations will defeat the social networking user experience in 2010s, and others are going to provide a platform that enables better communication with family and friends without reverting your privacy settings every other day and retroactively opening up all your data to everyone ;-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is how I have always felt. I think Facebook's best move is to be that "popular hub". Turn from evil to good. But, of course, they wont. Zuck likes money.

<comment><USER14> What makes you think Zuck likes money? I think he likes building a business, and I think his ideas about the future of social networking may involve a lot less privacy than you (or I) would like, but really the only significant thing he's done with his money so far is to give a lot of it away.

<comment><USER13> What's the point of trying to own all that information if not for money?

<comment><USER9> What's the point of owning money?

<comment><USER13> That, sir, I do not know.

<comment><USER9> Late reply, but from my perspective, money is a wealth object. (so are information, knowledge, personal network, name value, skills, and etceterum). wealth is about ability to change the world around you. Money's certianly easier to transfer around, as it is a medium of exchange, but information is the wealth of facebook. The money's just what it can easiest get in exchange. (it could ask for lumber, or any other commodity or service....)

That's a core point I try to raise in a lot of these discussions; that money isn't anything but something to exchange for -other- things.

The point of owning money is to exchange it for something...and outside of an equity market discussion, one shouldn't really look to have more than they need in the slimmest instance...but that becomes difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The difference is that Apache wasn't trying to copy the functionality of an extremely popular Microsoft product, they were innovating in a new space that wasn't on Microsoft's radar yet. Open distributed social networking is a great idea, but it will be a hard sell for a while I think, until it hits on some sweet area of functionality that aren't on Facebook's and Twitter's radar yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's how a lot of technological changes roll out.

The spectacle is long over by the time the war is done.

<comment><USER17> I'm trying to make sense of your statement. It seems to be a tautology. Did you mean the spectacle is long over before people are aware of what happened?

<comment><USER9> That's certainly the case in anything worth more than a soundbite of reflection. To attack the position of tautology directly, though, 'the war' isn't at all about public awareness, or awareness at all. Its about usage. So, people trying to break facebook get hyped. That's where we're sitting, or just behind where we're sitting. Then the environment changes, the war is won. The war is about, in this case, facebook being forced to play ball with open protocols...not about people becoming aware of that.

<comment><USER16> That's it in a nutshell.

The media and observers will make acute predictions about how everything will play out. And long after everyone has moved on the "war" continues and sometimes is eventually won. Though it is rare that the the prediction and the end result are the same.

I think Facebook will still be around long after the industry has shifted. Just as Live Journal is still around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I do not think, that Diaspora will be FB killer for the next, say 5 years. Most people does not really care about big privacy or other things, what Diaspora meant to find solution for. The idea is good, yeah, damn good. However one still need some skills in order to run his own diaspora server or you still need to trust somebody if you put your data on his diaspora server.

Of course the trust connection to your local Diaspora server admin is better then to some unknown very far away Californian FB admins, so this might be a benefit. But you would still need to find a "pub" provider and still would have to decide either you trust him or just go the easy way with FB, where all your friends are already ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> 'The end of', '<insert app/device> killer' and '* considered harmful' articles need better headlines and frankly strikes me as similar to the placard wielding 'end is nigh' crusties.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the context of the article, the use of "the end of" as a title was purposefully subversive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like the server can't take the load.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to get it back up, we just got a huge rush of traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> im a FSF loving anti-capitalist and that read as totally pie in the sky, wishful thinking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to explain why? The essay isn't a statement of inevitability, but instead outlining how the problem is being approached by free software players. It's why, Diaspora's brief place in the limelight aside, there has been no clear "heir to the throne" that has emerged out of free software's challenge to walled gardens, and why there most likely will never be one.

<comment><USER22> I believe they were being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Michael,

To claim that this project is The End of Facebook is really bold. I know, you need all the attention you can get but sometimes, it's better to take a step back and be realistic about.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may want to read the article a little more closely. I'm hardly declaring Appleseed a Facebook killer.

If anything, I'm debunking the way tech journalists are clamoring for "the end of Facebook."

<comment><USER23> Then you might also consider rewording your article's title to reflect the content more accurately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "SQLSTATE[HY000] [1040] Too many connections"

Cant you speak to rackspace to support you?

</comment><comment><USER25>
      SQLSTATE[08004] [1040] Too many connections

The 'revolution' is off to a great start...

<comment><AUTHOR> As a non-profit, volunteer, open source project, every donation helps, for obvious reasons.

PS, I'm doing my best to fix it, which may mean upgrading my VPS.

 _EDIT_ Back up (for now). I'll continue to monitor it.

 _EDIT2_ I'm resizing the VPS right now. Downtime estimate, approx 12 min.

 _EDIT3_ Done resizing, made some config changes. Hopefully it'll withstand things better now.

<comment><USER26> Just in case, the full text:

These journalists, they got it all wrong, I tell ya. They're waiting for a spectacle, where intrepid new entrepreneurs launch an insurgent website (bookface?) and the disaffected masses desert Facebook like rats on a sinking ship. The users are getting restless, that's for sure, but nobody is sure about the next step.

And so article after article, blog after blog, the tech press looks for their savior. Who will be the next Mark Zuckerburg? Who will build a new empire with an historic trillion dollar valuation? Who is the David willing to challenge Goliath in a pay-per-view televised match to the death?

For a New York minute, it seemed as though Diaspora* was the perfect narrative: Young college students with a dream, the attention of the press and the support of the internet. They had a story, they had the gumption, and they had momentum. All they needed was code.

And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub: This is not a story of startups and entrepreneurs. This is not a story about who will become the next ~363kg gorilla. This is not a tale of who will next be crowned king.

This is a story about… Wait for it… Server-side software implementations and open, documented protocols.

It's not easy to write an article about how there won't be another Facebook. It's more of a challenge to write an article about how Facebook will be brought down by an RPC or a REST API.

Facebook is a walled garden, and a walled garden is simply a proprietary system in a networked world. To understand how Facebook's story ends, you have to understand how free software succeeds against it's non-free competition. There has been some discussion about AOL and CompuServe as a historical precedence, but let's try another one: Microsoft.

In the before times, in the long, long ago, Microsoft was a juggernaut. IBM before them, but they had won the belt, and wore it loudly. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. They had all kinds of ideas about how you would use your computer to search for information, and connect to the world. Very few of their ideas, however, were open.

Around that same time, a handful of developers few had heard of, with no major institutional funding or backing, began work on the Apache web server software. It was free of charge, open source (sorry, Richard, free software), and it worked well. Microsoft tried to compete with IIS, but they had to play by the rules set forth by Apache, which was open protocols in an open web.

Many started hearing about the web, but who heard about Apache? Only those who needed to. It was a quiet revolution, with little attention from the mainstream tech press, and to this day, few users of the web know what Apache is. And yet, Apache served almost 67% of the busiest websites in the world.

Other examples are Joomla! and Drupal, two content management systems that power millions of website. Yet most users have no idea what they are. They don't have to. They displaced proprietary systems without a dot-com launch party. Another quiet revolution.

Social networking is following these templates. An open, free alternative being built today will quietly replace the walled gardens. Starting with niche communities, building up to institutions like schools and employers, and eventually someone will build a popular hub that gets some press and is touted as the next big thing, although by that point, the "next big thing" will mean something completely different.

At some point, Facebook will decide that they will have to play along, and connect into a decentralized, open social network. Many Facebook users will barely know this has happened, only that some of their friends on their network don't have an @facebook.com in their profile. Facebook won't ever die out, but they will have to operate in an eco-system as a player amongst many, respecting open standards, and supporting the open social web, even if they'd rather not.

And that's when we've won.</comment></comment></comment>


Natural Selection 2 - Pre-Sales Completely Changed Our Financial Picture - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25036

<comment><USER2> "As it turns out, 95 percent of preorders have been for the more expensive package, which Cleveland admits has "really surprised" the team."

I was one of those 95% and I think the primary reason for this is people _want_ to pay him for the original mod. I don't care if NS2 is terrible, in my mind I am paying him for NS1.

<comment><USER3> Man, I didn't even know it was available to pre-buy it.

I'll pledge them the time value of my $40.

<comment><USER2> They just released the first two screenshots. Looks amazing. [http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/10/ns_7th_anniver...](http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/10/ns_7th_anniversary_progress_and_first_ns2_screenshots)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be interesting to see other companies try to do things like this.

From [http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/10/ns_7th_anniver...](http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/10/ns_7th_anniversary_progress_and_first_ns2_screenshots)

"The great thing about the pre-orders is that they have allowed us to hire another programmer (although it took some time to find the right person) and he will help tremendously."

I think it's pretty cool when people know what the preorder money is going into. It allows them to feel like they have a hand in the development of the game. Very impressive stuff for such a small game studio.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am one of the many that pre-ordered the $40 version. Natural Selection 1 was so good, I wouldn't even mind if they are never even able to get NS2 out the door. I also find it very interesting that one third of their capital was raised this way.

</comment><comment> Tuna-Fish I think they also got something way more valuable than money from the preorders. Now they owe a game to 6000 rabid fans. Sure, they took angel funding before, but honestly, this is a lot more personal.</comment>


EE-K DM'ing your password is Never a good idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/12/ee-k-dming-your-password-is-never-good.html

<comment><USER2> It's encouraging to see the response from EE at the end of the post.

Edit: Wait. That tweet is from @MyEECare (<https://twitter.com/MyEECare>) not @EE, and the former has the same bio as the latter, except for the "Entirely fictional" at the end, so it looks like that's a spoof account, _not_ an official EE one.

</comment><comment><USER3> EE have a history of poor social media management as they have tweeted DMs publicly before. The last time they said they were putting process in place to stop it happening but it only needs one password. Besides which if somebody hacked the account the passwords could be harvested very easily!</comment>


Biodigital Human, a successor to Google body - <AUTHOR> http://www.biodigitalhuman.com

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also Zygote Body, which looks to be based on the original GB software (but shows an adult human, not a zygote - terrible name). I put the BD link in the title because it's a more advanced project and thus probably of greater interest to HN readers.

<http://www.zygotebody.com/></comment>


Bookmarklet Opens URLs In Any Of 53 Different Android Browsers - <AUTHOR> https://www.manymo.com/pages/blog/open-in-android-bookmarklet

<comment><USER2> The site says "no credit card required", but the TOS says:

Each user must register separately and must have an individual account. You must provide certain personally identifiable information during registration. Credit card or other payment information is also required.

<comment><AUTHOR> My fault. We dropped the credit card requirement but didn't change the TOS. I've just updated the TOS and removed the credit card language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great service, if you allowed us to save our installed apps for small service fee or something would be even better.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very useful tool, solid team.

</comment><comment><USER5> 53 LOL</comment>


The Future of Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html <comment><USER2> This is an article for people who don't know anything about AI (or, for that matter, CS in general). I was skeptical when it opened with the perfunctory Terminator reference, and it didn't fail to disappoint.

The MSM's conflation of actually existent AI (search, learning, etc.) with AGI is becoming a real pet peeve of mine.

<comment><USER3> I read technical/science articles in the NYTimes mostly out of curiosity about what the larger public thinks about these things and how all the complex research and work in technical and scientific fields gets distilled down and summarized for the mass public. I find it interesting to know what people outside of our bubble think. But, yeah, if you are reading this article seeking new information about AI, then this is a waste of time.

<comment><USER2> I should have been clearer. It's not an article for AI-ignorami simply because it doesn't have depth; it is actively misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article gives me the same feeling of when I watch movies with a horrible scientific plot (eg The Transformers). It's entertaining, but so off the mark.

I guess writing about the Multilayer Perceptron, Support/Relevance Vector Machines, and Markov Models isn't as sexy and probably wouldn't sell well...

Then again, I guess what they ARE writing doesn't sell well either...

</comment><comment><USER5> Artificial Intelligence, like controlled nuclear fusion, is always in the future. About 40 years in the future.

<comment><USER6> The difference is that no one claims they've produced strong AI, because, unlike cold fusion, it's too easy to test. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this was more a reason to talk about the singularity and Kurzweil etc.

I still think it's a very lopsided understanding of the future.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Actually I find every public mention of the singularity interesting. Especially the 4 lines about fai :)</comment>


Void Linux (musl) on the Huawei MateBook X Pro - <AUTHOR> https://bitcannon.net/post/huawei-matebook-x-pro-void-linux/ <comment><USER2> > musl appeals to me because I'm Australian and a sucker for an underdog it > has a clean code base, permissive licensing, and is not a GNU project.

Although this is as good a reason as any, especially if someone is (politically) biased against the GNU project, I fail to see how and why the x86_64-musl target appeals to the OP in the first place. It ships a standard GNU userland, it uses GCC and GNU {core,bin}utils to (cross)compile most packages and GNU bash is a standard requirement for the build toolchain. Without the above, Void cannot exist.

A core property of the Voidlinux / musl-libc combination that goes unmentioned, is that one can easily leverage xbps-src as a native cross compilation toolchain to seamlessly (no porting/patching) generate static binaries for foreign architectures. As an example, one can generate static binaries for GNU tar and _just_ use them on an android (bionic) device.

Finally, Void-linux ships with the xbps-uunshare utility as standard and allows a regular user to _launch_ an unprivileged container with any distribution (like debian, ubuntu, etc). This way, the OP can enjoy the full gamut of software available on those glibc systems without the need to install and/or dual boot Windows.

</comment><comment><USER3> > musl appeals to me because [...] is not a GNU project

I don't see the logic in this. There are tons of other GNU & GPL code on your machine.

<comment><USER4> Using Firefox on Windows appeals to me, even if Windows is closed source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can share similarly positive experience with the exact same model. I'm running Ubuntu 19.04 and everything pretty much worked out of the box, including nVidia drivers. The only thing I miss from the XPS 13 I used previously are automatic uefi/firmware updates.

I really wish this level of build quality and especially the 3:2 ratio would be available on more models. Occasionally switching back to 16:9 seems quite limiting now, especially on 13".

And while I agree the webcam is very unflattering, it's still perfectly usable if you aren't doing customer calls or anything like that where presentation is important.

<comment><USER6> I used to have a ThinkPad T42 with 1400x1050 14" display. That think was awesome for writing (both code and documents in OpenOffice Writer). I wish 4:3 displays got mainstream again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Matebook X Pro for 11 months (Windows) and so far I am super happy with the experience. I am never switching back to a 16:9 screen.

Some things that bother me:

      - touchpad rattle (can be fixed [1])
      - keyboard backlight has a timer and turns off after some seconds of inactivity, there is no mode to leave backlight always on while laptop is awake
      - cooling of the charging circuit is poor and if you have some CPU load *and* charge the laptop at the same time, the fan will ramp up

These are small things that could be fixed in the next iteration, I hope they do fix them.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r67b1ZOZNVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r67b1ZOZNVg)

<comment><USER8> The two last points are also true on the XPS and precision line from dell.

If those are the largest issues then this really is a glowing recommendation by all accounts.

<comment><USER9> Why?! How do we still tolerate companies with decades worth of experience to still sell us products with poorly designed cooling on their premium line devices?

If it would be some cheap discount supermarket laptop I would understand it, but XPS is Dell's flagship and makes them some fine margins.

<comment><USER8> Personally I'm not horrified that a charging circuit gets hot when it's under the highest possible load, given that the cooling solution in place (the fan) detects it and ramps up.

To my mind that's just the cooling solution working as intended.

<comment><USER7> I have no hand-on experience but on paper the newer Matebook 13 [1] seems like it has a better cooling solution with two fans and two cooling heat sinks. I think the Matebook X Pro series could be improved in this direction as well. Also Matebook 13 seems like a great machine for the price tag, if only there was a 16GB ram version...

[1] [https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-13/](https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-13/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is amazing and so on-brand. I can't stand Windows 10 interface, and this bundled together actually does look like a slick combo. I know I can install linux on virtually any laptop including a used Thinkpad, but let me put it out there: there's something special about the tiny bezel and a tiling windows manager. The look of awesomewm status bar near the tiny strip of black glass is enamouring.

I can't think now of switching my 15" macbook pro I'm using for work for anything non macos due to mobile dev requirements, but perhaps in another life this is the choice I'll make.

</comment><comment><USER11> The only problem with buying a chinese laptop is that I would be afraid any non-trivial propriety code I write for a company would be stolen by the chinese to make their own product. I am not saying Dell is any better, they have an extremely close relationship with the US intelligence agencies but atleast I know they won't steal my code _for competitive advantage_.

It looks like great hardware neither the less and with apple being so arrogant these days with its keyboard and its warfare against the repair community it looks like an enticing option.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have an AVITA Clarus that I purchased on clearance a few months ago. It's been a great machine for what it is, and is very well supported in Manjaro (an Arch derivative).

I paid ~$175 for it, and it's approximately on par with the MacBook Air I had a couple of years ago. Stats are email@example.com, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, integrated graphics. It's good enough for back-end web development provided I offload the "heavy" stuff to a hosted platform somewhere - which is generally how I develop anyhow, as I often do so from an iPad Pro LTE.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if this gets mostly upvoted because of the notebook or because of Void Linux. For me, mostly the notebook (Huawei MateBook X Pro) looks interesting, as I'm a MacBook Pro (Mid 2014) user, and I'm slowly looking for a good modern replacement (and I'm obviously not happy with the current MacBook Pros). As my future notebook would be non-Apple, I would want to install Linux, and want good Linux support, and otherwise a high hardware quality.

I like that this Huawei MateBook has an all aluminium unibody. (How much other notebooks are there? Maybe not necessarily unibody, but I like a solid body out of aluminium.)

A touch screen is also a nice addition.

His choice of Linux distribution is maybe a bit strange. I would probably go with Ubuntu or so, and hope to have even better support. E.g. I would want to use software like CLion, PyCharm, Steam, etc just out of the box.

Also, I would want to make use of the NVIDIA card. This is also nice for CUDA development. I wonder (I would hope) that this works fine with a more standard Linux distribution.

I wonder how the long-term usage quality is. My MacBook Pro 2014 works still mostly fine now (2019), and even the original battery gives me still about 3-4h of usage.

<comment><USER14> System 76 claims to offer an aluminum alloy laptop with Nvidia and Linux

[https://system76.com/laptops/oryx](https://system76.com/laptops/oryx)

but the quality is reportedly bad (flaky hardware, too-fast power drain, reflash bios to toggle discrete graphics (!), slow support) [https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/review-system76-oryx- pr...](https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/review-system76-oryx-pro)

<comment><USER15> > reflash bios to toggle discrete graphics

Really? My understanding was that the RTX series of GPUs support toggling discrete graphics on the fly if you use beta/dev versions of the drivers and X. Even if you don't, the worst case scenario should be having to reboot to enable or disable your graphics card, right?

<comment><USER16> If so, that's a step backwards - on my MX150 system, both nouveau and the proprietary driver can turn the card off (indeed, that's about all nouveau can do, and it does it by default).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "and is not a GNU project."

This is the first time I have seen actively avoiding GNU. Is this common? Reasons political?

<comment><USER18> Lots of people avoid GNU and go for licensing closer to bsd/mit if they want more freedom, or apache if they're worried about patents. There are also lots of companies avoiding gnu just in case it would theoretically force them to open-source something they want to keep private.

<comment><USER19> > Lots of people avoid GNU and go for licensing closer to bsd/mit if they want > more freedom

is it fair today in this case that means freedom for the manufacturer/developer, not the user, which is the purpose of the gnu license?

<comment><USER20> > _is it fair today in this case that means freedom for the manufacturer > /developer, not the user, which is the purpose of the gnu license?_

Well, the people who care about licenses are mostly geeks on the developer side. So they would naturally care for the freedom of the developer too, not just the user.

From the user side, a benefit is that a rich company can use a library/tool etc in BSD/MIT and

1) make a proprietary product based on it

2) give back to the library/tool help maintain them

whereas many companies wouldn't touch the library/tool if it was GPL, as they couldn't create their own proprietary stuff on it.

This means

1) more software being made based on open source codebases (even if they are proprietary, more software being available is better for users than less),

2) more involvement by big companies to help grow/fix/add features to the FOSS version of the lib/tool (e.g. consider LLVM's growth),

<comment><USER21> As a developer who prefers to use MIT/BSD-licensed codebases, my preference is because I want to license the code I'm writing as MIT/BSD, and I don't want to expend mental effort figuring out if I'm using GPL dependencies, includes, etc in a way that impacts my ability to MIT/BSD my own code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I run Ubuntu 19.04 on the same laptop, it's excellent. I wish the fingerprint reader worked and that Google would fix the chrome issues in Ubuntu but other than that it screams.

</comment><comment><USER23> Macbook Pros are standard at my work, like a lot of companies, but I'm going to push to get the first non-Macbooks. Almost entirely for Linux support.

The Archlinux wiki for Macbooks hasn't been updated since 2015 (AFAIK) and even back then it was a bit rocky.

From experience it's a necessity to have a laptop with Linux in mind instead of tacking it on. It shouldn't require any sort of hacking to get working.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have been running manjaro Linux on my matebook x pro for like 6 months or so. But because of work had to switched back to windows. Do wonder now that Huawei is shipping their Matebook x pro with a linux distro(deepin) in China , maybe they will release/fix the finger print button.

</comment><comment><USER25> > "Given my laptop use was now more casual and for when travelling I > wanted...3K 3000×2000 HiDPI touchscreen display, Intel Core i7-8550U CPU (4 > core, 8 thread), 16Gb RAM, 512Gb NVMe SSD, NVIDIA GeForce MX150 graphics"

I would love to hear what you use for serious work is specced like. :)

<comment><USER26> Well, if you do fairly normal web development nowadays, that includes running a couple of local services (database, backend) and containers, iOS / Android simulator, VS Code, webpack dev server running, Chrome, db management tool, Slack on top of that etc - U-series processor is hardly adequate, and 16GB RAM is not enough to avoid some level of swapping...Just running Docker empty, with no containers, takes 3-4 GB on OS X...

Which is crazy, and I don't know how we managed to get to this, but it's the reality...Electron and Java being the worst culprits - 1GB RAM just to have a project open in VS Code and 1GB for Studio 3T just to be open and connected to local MongoDB...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there any reason why you did not submit a PR for the package templates you created?

</comment><comment><USER28> A 3:2 Laptop! How is the video performance on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great. No complaints so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Pre-compiled binaries are a sin. What a shame!</comment>


Show HN: Instant search of 200K+ SVG logos from 100 sources - <AUTHOR> https://logosear.ch/search.html <comment><AUTHOR> I often need to find logos and was not impressed by the existing logo search engines, so, in classic bikeshed mode, I built my own. Because it makes total sense to try to compete with Google. And Wikipedia. And countless others (some of which I list on the alternatives page).

Why is mine better?

      - just logos
      - instant results
      - only SVGs
      - hyperlinked directly to the source
      - no right-click hijacking (or other dark patterns)
      - totally awesome domain name

It is open source (AGPLv3), so you can see the tools I use and how it works (and criticize my code). The sources have their own licenses, so be sure to check there before using.

It is still a work in progress and there are some glitches (I mean, who would use a percent sign in a file name? And I'd love to try to fix the Wikipedia redirected images if I could only find the source...), but I want to see if people find it useful.

So let me know what you think! And I'm always looking for more sources!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for building this! I actually obsess about having high quality logos for companies in the pitchbooks I write, so have built a personal collection over time... it's not big, but it has the companies I care about.

Some things I thought I'd share from that experience:

* The hardest thing is knowing which logo is actually the most recent and therefore correct. Searching logosear.ch for, say, IBM, yields countless logos that are virtually identical, as well as some of their products (which is fine) but also many old logos like this[0], which I don't think is what your user would want to find 9 out of 10 times (i.e. as a user, if I'm looking for a niche / ancient logo, I don't mind doing the research on my own and understand it will take a while. But when I want "the right logo", I'll consider visiting a specialized logo search engine to get the right result and get it _fast_ )

* In my experience, The best sources for finding the company logo in SVG format are:

\- company website header (hit or miss as SVG adoption at first was slow, but it's increasingly good for S&P 500 type companies and tech-savvy firms... anything outside of that venn diagram is pretty bad)

\- Wikipedia page either in English or in the language matching the company's headquarter (i.e. better luck with German companies in de.wikipedia.org)

\- For large companies where both of the above fail, I search for "company name filetype:pdf" and look for vector logos embedded into those files, then use Adobe Acrobat to extract them in a very manual and ugly process by deleting unnecessary pages / content and cropping, and then visiting cloudconvert.com to generate a SVG (hey, it works...)

* One final comment is PowerPoint doesn't take SVG files, so I always have to convert them to .emf or .wmf before dropping them in, so maybe you should consider exporting your SVG file in other formats too, though probably not limited to just those two

––––––––––

0\. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Logo_1956_1972.s...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Logo_1956_1972.svg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you be willing to share your collection of high-quality logos with the community? I can index any github or gitlab repo with logos.

A lot of the current sources are people's personal collections that they have shared.

This is actually how I started: I made my personal collection into a website ([https://www.vectorlogo.zone/](https://www.vectorlogo.zone/)). My collection is more curated, definitely in terms of size/layout, and hopefully more current, but curation is a lot of work, and not what I'm trying to do on LogoSear.ch.

I do have an SVG to PNG converting working on VLZ. I think there are open SVG to EMF/WMF libraries, so I could add that as well, but I would need some help testing it since I'm not a big PowerPoint user. Would you be willing to help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is so good. I'm currently working on about 100 pages worth of content for our website and adding attribution+integrations to our partners we work with. The headache I'm having just Google'ing their SVG logos is about 2-3 minutes per logo. So about 15 minutes per page just looking for logos. So far, the last 5-6 I could remember were all included.

What's the source for these images? ie. None of our competitors have their SVG logos indexed.

<comment><AUTHOR> The images all link to their source. The complete list of sources is [https://logosear.ch/sources/index.html](https://logosear.ch/sources/index.html)

<comment><USER4> I'm glad to see you're pulling from the CNCF landscape, where we have 1,400 individual curated SVGs. There are another few thousand across the other Linux Foundation landscapes referenced at [https://landscapes.dev/](https://landscapes.dev/).

(Up-to-date list is [https://github.com/cncf/landscapeapp/blob/master/landscapes....](https://github.com/cncf/landscapeapp/blob/master/landscapes.yml) .)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll add them right away!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I searched for Twitter - [https://logosear.ch/search.html?q=twitter](https://logosear.ch/search.html?q=twitter) Literally none of those are Twitter's actual logo. They're all subtly wrong (dimensions, color, aspect ratio, etc). In a few cases they're _wildly_ off. If I can't trust this as a source I'd still have to look up the real one. Maybe it's less of a problem for smaller companies whose logos won't get cloned as much, but if I put any of those Twitter logos in a presentation of a website I don't think I'd impress anyone.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nicely done!

I've spot-checked few logos that I need at the moment, and most of them are already there. However, I've noticed that there is no IndieHackers logo in the database.

I wonder if it is possible to come up with the tool where you would enter the Home Page Url and the tool would then output an SVG file of round or square shape that could be used as an SVG icon to represent links to that site (from my site).

The tool could try to detect the logo image on the home page of the target site, vectorize and normalize it into square or circle. Or it could try to locate a Favicon in SVG format, if present. Or, if nothing else works, it could fall into some default case when the SVG icon would be created from the most dominant color (of the target site) and 1 or 2 letters of the site name.

Do you guys know of any such tool? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few sites that do this, though none with SVGs. Search for "logo api" finds ClearBit and RiteKit, among others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a somewhat related topic: is anyone aware of an algorithm that would let people find related/similar symbols? On the symbology sub-reddit the most common question is "what is this symbol" and it would be very helpful to provide a kind of search engine.

<comment><USER8> Unicode symbol search: [http://shapecatcher.com/](http://shapecatcher.com/)

LaTeX symbol search: [http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a Sketch plugin[1] to search and insert SVG logos.

[1] [https://github.com/soulchild/sketch-logo- fetcher](https://github.com/soulchild/sketch-logo-fetcher)

</comment><comment><USER4> While collecting over a thousand SVGs for [https://landscape.cncf.io](https://landscape.cncf.io), I found that the SVGs often needed cropping and other optimization. So (with a colleague) I wrote and open sourced svg-autocrop, and made it available at [https://autocrop.cncf.io](https://autocrop.cncf.io).

Try it out for optimizing your SVGs.

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks like a super-useful tool! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote this extension to easily copy SVG's with right-click.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/svg-2-clipboard/pa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/svg-2-clipboard/pacmblooebolmbakblffejfmhmnojece)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow. That's pretty cool! Bummer that nothing comes up when you search for logosear.?ch ;-).

<comment><AUTHOR> Recursion detected! Stack overflow. Core dumped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice! I've needed something like this several times.

Two suggestions:

1\. Almost gave up on waiting for it to load... thought the blank white page meant it was broken or getting the HN-hug-of-death. Maybe add a loading indicator?

2\. There are "No matches for 'Logosear.ch'"

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hosting on Google Cloud Run, and I turned up the max instances, so this is a good test. It seems to be handling it okay (though not perfectly) at the moment...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great, getting logos off sites is so tedious. What about the legality of using the logos (for example, to use AWS logos for certain purposes, you have to be a partner). Is that an issue for you to host the logos?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the beauty of a search engine: I'm _not_ hosting the logos. They are all hot-linked from the original source. Any takedown requests need to be sent to the source, not to me.

And github, gitlab and wikipedia all allow hotlinking.

The sources (each images is hyperlinked to its source) have their own licenses: the Wikipedia detail pages go into gory detail. The git repos hopefully have a LICENSE file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One neat side use for this is if you want to check if a company name is taken and how good is their logo.

</comment><comment><USER15> Logointern.com works pretty well too

</comment><comment><USER16> Woah nice this works without JS, I wasn't expecting that !

</comment><comment><USER17> That's pretty useful!

I'm surprised you could get the domain.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really fast! Nicely done.</comment>


Show HN: Advertising-Free Search-Engine - <AUTHOR> https://deusu.org/ <comment><USER4> I searched for "History of aviation" (no quotes) and got

1) History in the HeadlinesThe Secrets of Ancient Roman Concret

2) Watch History Topics Videos Online - History.com

3) Ohio — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts

as my top three results. It's an ambitious problem to tackle, but it has to be able to give me better relevance for me to consider using it.

EDIT: For a comparison, I ran the same query on Google:

1) History of aviation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2) History of Flight - <USER2>

3) history of flight | aviation | Encyclopedia Britannica

<comment><AUTHOR> Please keep in mind that this is running on _one_ server. Google has what? Several hundred thousand servers?

Yes, it needs to get better. But it's a good start, I think.

<comment><USER4> In no way do I intend to discourage your efforts. I was offering an example in which your search engine seems unable to identify the context that I had in mind.

What are some of your plans for search engine improvement? Ad-free aside, why should I fund your project? DuckDuckGo seems to offer itself up as a great alternative to Google and I have enjoyed its clean UI immensely for several months now. What is my incentive to help drive your project?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's open-source: [https://github.com/MichaelSchoebel/OpenAcoon](https://github.com/MichaelSchoebel/OpenAcoon)

This is currently written in Pascal. I'm in the process of rewriting it JavaScript/Node.js. First part for the rewrite is the ranking. That should be done in about a week or two.

<comment><USER5> Pascal! Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while.

You should write a blog post about how you write a search engine in Pascal. That would at least reach top spot on HN!

<comment><AUTHOR> Given that I'm in the process of rewriting it in JavaScript I'm not sure about that... On the other hand it's probably worth a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think relevance is the thing to work on. I did a search in a space I know a lot about and the majority of first page results were domains for sale. The company I have an interest in, which is the first result for certain keywords on Google and Bing, wasn't to be found anywhere in the first 4 pages on here. It would be interesting to hear a bit more about your plans for moving this forward.

I have a few questions it would be great to hear about either here or in a follow-up blog post:

* Is your reimplementation in JS a translation of your current from Pascal or a redevelopment?

* Why have you decided to move from Pascal to JS rather than spending the effort improving the current implementation?

* What lessons have you learned from your current implementation that you are attempting to overcome with your new version in JS?

<comment><AUTHOR> The rewrite in JavaScript will be mixture of porting and redesign. Some parts of the Pascal-sources are relatively new and can almost be translated as is. But the older the Pascal-source is, the more a redesign is a better idea.

The old parts of the sources are in VERY bad shape. This project started more than 15 years ago on a much, MUCH smaller scale (about 2 million pages compared to 320 million now). Some design-choices simply aren't valid anymore. Also the use of JS has the advantage that it will make the project attractive to a lot more programmers than staying with Pascal could achieve.

The current implementation keeps the search-index as one big thing. I will split that up into many smaller pieces. That way it can run multi-threaded or even on multiple servers. Currently queries are running single-threaded.

Another shortcoming is that building an index involves several manual steps. I want to automate that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I searched for my name and none of the first ten results was about me, or about any of the other people called "Dan Beale". But nicely it didn't return a bunch of filth based on my other surname, "Cocks", so that was nice.

It's a shame that a couple of replies or so harshly negative. Perhaps this submission would have been better received if it had been a blog post about how you created you engine; how it works; problems you have with it; and so on.

Search is not --despite the Google behemoth-- a solved problem so there's still space for creative thinking.

EG the search on a manufacturer's website is often hopeless. You emd up with a list of 8,000 widgets and need to iust scroll through them page by page. Amazon search is bafflingly poor. Ebay search has some sub-optimalities. (People can list "case for mp3 player £1.99" and "mp3 player £35" in the same listing, so a search and sort by price will sort by the cheaper case price.

</comment><comment><USER8> It reminds me of a similar open search engine with good search results: [http://www.gigablast.com](http://www.gigablast.com), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152839)

Ten years ago, the EU sponsored Exalead to become a Google competitor. Nowadays the company is owned by Dassault Systèmes (3D CAD Catia): [https://www.exalead.com/search/](https://www.exalead.com/search/) , [http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Quaero-Erster- Vorlaeu...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Quaero-Erster-Vorlaeufer- der-europaeischen-Suchmaschine-110725.html)

Other mentioned DuckDuckGo, but one has to differ. DDG uses the Yahoo search API, and Yahoo itself uses the Bing search from Microsoft. DDG parses the query string and tries to add some snips from Wikipedia/Yelp/etc. There are only 4 big search engines left: Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidoo. There are some minor ones like Gigablast, Exalead and now Deusu. And there are meta search engines like DDG and Yahoo.

@Deusu dev: Good luck with the refactoring from Pascal to JavaScript, sounds like a good idea! Do you use a page-rank or how else do you score?

<comment><AUTHOR> No pagerank. But I use backlink-counts and Alexa.com data. Also position of keywords in url, title and snippet. Length of url and number of elements in the url are also a part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Query: that movie where jim carrey plays dad to three black men

DeuSu: [https://deusu.org/query?q=that+movie+where+jim+carrey+plays+...](https://deusu.org/query?q=that+movie+where+jim+carrey+plays+dad+to+three+black+men)

Google: [https://www.google.co.in/search?q=that+movie+where+jim+carre...](https://www.google.co.in/search?q=that+movie+where+jim+carrey+plays+dad+to+three+black+men)

For me queries like these is why Google wins. NB: Duckduckgo and Bing seem to do fine on this query as well. Bing does better than Google[0] when you omit phrases like 'three' or half-spell phrases like 'carrey' as 'car'. Surprising since it has often been the case that Google is better at returning/ranking results for most of programming related queries I try on daily basis [1].

[0] Probably, because Google takes into account the fact that the user ignored the type-ahead suggestion (car -> carrey) for a reason and omits all 'jim carrey' related results from the list.

[1] [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AmIReallyADeveloperOrJustAGood...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AmIReallyADeveloperOrJustAGoodGoogler.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER10> A user-supported search engine has promise. A telco, a handset maker, or a country could do an ad-free search engine. Cuil had about 30 people, and eventually got a half-decent search engine. It's surprising that Apple doesn't have their own search engine. Their negative experience with the map business may have scared them.

The economics of search are strange. Search has negative market value - <USER3> paid about $100M/year to be the default on Firefox, and Google still pays to be on iPhones. It's like the ad channels on cable. The Jewelry Channel pays to be carried; the NFL gets paid to be carried. Google is in the Jewelry Channel position.

As compute power increases, the cost of doing search goes down. But that hasn't been reflected in the "selling price" of search, which is expressed as ad density. Google is a high-margin business because of that. That makes them vulnerable.

DuckDuckGo and Blekko, although tiny, are quite profitable. Even InfoSeek and Ask apparently still make money. There's room at the bottom.

<comment><USER11> Even InfoSeek and Ask apparently still make money

> Ask is more of an 'ads search engine', and they make mainly because of their > arbitrage model

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I searched for "XPS 13" and I got several pages in German.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have the suspicion that Google user tracking is not just for better advertising. Their original page rank algorithm is a random walk on the web graph, every user similarly performs some walk on this graph, in principle it should be possible to use that walk to improve the relevance ranking. This is just one example, there are many others how user interaction could be used as feedback into the search engine.

<comment><USER14> It does reduce your view of what's out there to some extent, giving seemingly undue bias to certain services or opinions.

<comment><USER15> Google does indeed use my data in order to personalize search results. I remember being impressed to see that for a query that could have several different meanings, the search engine gave me results centered on my engineering field, which was what I was looking for. I am not that convinced that it blindfolds you to some services or opinions though. So far I have only seen differences in understanding the context of the query, which I don't see as an 'undue bias' but an added value (especially if you read the anecdote about the 'history of aviation' query in this thread).

Some other thoughts on the bubble : [http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/the- preference-bubble](http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/the-preference-bubble) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I searched for nothing but got suggestions for things I've searched for on Google this week. Since, for some, tracking is just as big a concern as ads, can you explain why and how that is happening? Does DeuSu now know those things or anything else about me even if that data is anonymized? If so, will that data be sold?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is probably your browser keeping track of what you entered into input- fields that are named "q" for "query".

And no, this data does NOT get transmitted. So DeuSu does not know about what you searched-for on Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I searched for "fedex refunds". On Google you get what you expect on the first page: some links to Fedex's site, and a list of Fedex shipping auditors. On Deusu.org, the first non-Fedex page is Cosco, and not a single shipping auditor. The rest of the links are just as irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER18> Needs some work to improve both relevance and ranking algorithms. For example:

I'm watching the movie JFK, so I tried a search for Jack Ruby.

I found a teacher named Jack Ruby's videos, the Ruby Fortune online casino, the bar Ruby Tuesday, and a lot of other irrelevant results.

Nothing about the famous Jack Ruby in the first four pages.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder where the raw crawler data is coming from? Current events-related stuff is months (years?) out of date. For example it seems to think Tony Abbott is still the Australian opposition leader.

Did you snarf an old database from another search engine? Just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main crawl is several months old. There is a separate news-crawler which checks a few dozen news sites every 10 minutes or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I believe we will probably eventually transition to some kind of distributed peer-to-peer semantic-ish system rather than having a giant company crawl plain text pages and control the vast majority of global advertising and quite a bit of its data.

<comment><USER21> Seems to be the premise of [http://www.majestic12.co.uk/](http://www.majestic12.co.uk/) \- looks like it might be failing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I applaud the effort, but the search results quality is really poor. It's basically an Altavista style laundry list of anything remotely relevant in no particular order.

That said, do you do your own crawling or do you source results from someone?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do the crawling myself. There are currently about 320 million pages in the search-index.

<comment><USER8> How many GB of data are 320 million (HTML) pages? How long does it take to refresh the index (with a single crawler on a 1GB/s connection)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The completed index takes up 337gb.

The incoming data to the crawler... not so sure... something on the order of 10-20tb. I didn't really measure this. And I don't keep all the data. There is no "cache" function.

On a 1gbit/s connection it takes about a week to crawl and generate the index.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Searched for my company, and the meta information is years old. Tried a few other searches, and the results weren't even related. Sorry, but for me it's not even close to worth switching for.

</comment><comment><USER24> [https://deusu.org/query?q=deusu](https://deusu.org/query?q=deusu)

Does not manage to return deusu as the first result, or in any of the results for that matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> And why should it? You don't need DeuSu to find itself. You are _already_ on the site. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Searched 'Google' got:

[http://www.google.com/chromeframe/?redirect=true](http://www.google.com/chromeframe/?redirect=true)

As first result

</comment><comment><USER25> Tried searching for "BYU" and "UW" and got everything except the universities' main websites. Do you just not crawl .edu addresses?

</comment><comment><USER26> Why reimplement a Search Engine from scratch instead of contributing to lucene/solr/elastic search? did you add something new?

<comment><AUTHOR> I started writing the software a LONG time ago. As far as I know Solr/Elastic Search didn't exist back then.

Query logs are preserved, but they do NOT contain the IP-adress of the user. So all I know is that _someone_ of the billions of Internet users searched for something embarrassing. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Advertising free means it would not be able to support itself if it does not show value instantaneously. No value proposition here.

</comment><comment><USER28> I searched for my game (Orange Season) and the first result was Vladimir Putin

</comment><comment><USER29> I appreciate such work that people are working hard on, but how can this last long? Google was started with Ad-free too. The search will need money to run anyway. Have you figured out a better idea to get money without Ads?

<comment><USER30> Perhaps you would know the answer to that if you had actually visited the link before commenting about it.</comment></comment>


REWiki - A game reverse-engineering documentation project - <AUTHOR> http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/wiki/Main_Page

<comment><AUTHOR> Some other good game RE resources:

XentaxWiki <http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/Game_File_Format_Central> \- Documentation of game file formats

DOS Game Modding Wiki <http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Main_Page> \- A lot of information on old DOS games, specifically the ones by Apogee</comment>


Paul Graham donates to flexport.org for healthcare worker protective gear in SF - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1241036939907624961 <comment><USER2> Someone I know was recently collecting money to buy masks for a distressed hospital directly from a factory in China. When asked why the hospital doesn't just buy the masks themselves, they said this:

"They absolutely should. But hospitals don't buy from individual factories in China, they buy supplies from catalogues from approved vendors. In the meantime, we can help protect the workers with a short-term donation. Also from what I hear, China has been slowing down "official" export of medical supplies. What I'm doing is placing a private order via DHL that should go through faster."

If it's true, this could help explain how PG's donation would create an incremental benefit rather than just increasing the demand/prices on the limited supply.

<comment><USER3> Yes. The root of the problem is that the hospitals' supply chain is brittle, and broke under the stress. One hopes it will get redesigned to be more robust. But in the meantime Flexport can get PPE now, and now is when it's needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm highly skeptical of the claim that it will pay for _all_ of SF health workers PPE needs. How many masks and gowns does $1 million buy? How long will the supplies last at the exponential growth we're seeing?

That being said, pg is amazing person for donating and an inspiration to many.

<comment><USER5> Before the outbreak, N-95 masks used to cost 58 cents. So if it was spent on masks only, around 1.7 million masks at those prices. I don't know how many health workers SF has, but at a population of 800k and a US average of 2.6 physicians per 1000 people I'd guess it's hundreds of masks per worker.

I don't know about the costs or the currently available supply though, or what the real price increases should be due to a pinched supply chain, and I haven't been able to find any data - would appreciate pointers.

<comment><USER6> I think this could be useful to ramp up production if nothing else. But your estimate is extremely optimistic with current prices way past 58 cents.

You also need 3 masks per shift for all heathcare workers including receptionists and janitors at risk. In the worst case that may include volunteers to help cover temporary wards setup like those for the 1918 flu pandemic.

Really though this is a situation where money is not the problem.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, like I said I don't know what the current available supply is, which IIUC is the more limiting factor. I also don't know what the current prices are, and I don't know which part of it are production costs and which part is just profiteering.

And even if it's hundreds of masks per worker, I'm sure it won't last through this thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whoa the outright pessimism in this thread is horrific. The guy literally donated $1m to try help a certain aspect of the crisis. What did you do? Did you do anything at all to help? Think about your own actions in the face of this pandemic before criticising others.

<comment><USER8> I hate to break it to you man but you don't need to be Mother Teresa to critique other peoples contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Virtue is what you do in silence

<comment><USER10> A bit of signalling in a crisis might pressure other wealthy people to do the same. So it might have value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The American healthcare system seems really broken. Requiring private donations to function instead of the state paying just sounds bonkers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Of course we should thank @paulg for this, but it also highlights the need to tax fairly so that the State can adequately provide for the health of all of its people.

<comment><USER13> California has some of the highest taxes of any state; I don't think the issue is that they are not taxing "fairly" as you put it.

In any case, the people of California do not seem to be getting very much for their tax money throughout all of the recent disasters there.

Is your comment saying that they need to be taxed more by California? Less?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't the problem right now not money, but lack of supply?

The US gov is ready to pay for 500 mil respirators, but has nowhere to buy from.

<comment><USER15> The donation above was to the charitable arm of a logistics company. Supply chain disruption is a big issue.

For regular PPE, there does exist supply abroad. The issue is quickly getting it where it needs to go.

(N95 has the biggest supply constraints, but I imagine this is helping with surgical masks, gloves, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lol a million? How can that possibly be enough? Every other hospital has way more than that in their rainy day fund / bank credit line.

This is not to belittle PG (other rich people please follow!), but seriously this can't be meaningful.

<comment><USER17> Some hospitals are already reporting that they wont have money for salaries and such in few weeks.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure hospitals can arrange credit. It's one of the industries that will _not_ be in a recession.

And again, nothing to belittle PG, but $1M is nothing.

<comment><USER18> Patients are starting to skip visits to GP's and specialists for new and existing conditions bc of fear of catching covid.

Elective procedures are postponed indefinitely. Procedures contribute a hefty chunk of revenue in healthcare.

I'd be careful being absolutist with that comment. The cash flow of many hospitals is going to get strained at the very least in the near future if they aren't billing for a large chunk of their services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fuck yes to paul graham. Funding America's best amid this crisis.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't see how this helps. The problem is not the fact US states cannot afford to buy protective gear, the issue is there is no gear to buy. Even so, if it was about money, San Francisco would be one of the least likely places to not be able to afford protective gear given the concentration of wealth there. There is a serious shortage right now and the only thing that will fix it is increased production. It just so happens this virus has spread to 188 countries and territories, all wanting protective gear as well.

<comment><USER21> Seriously, all I see here is Paul Graham providing money for a logistics company to outbid other states for supplies. They need to provide more information to show otherwise.

We need people making links earlier in the supply chain to increase production, not funding a shipping company.</comment></comment>


TeamViewer may have been hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamviewer.com/en/company/press/statement-on-potential-teamviewer-hackers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Tho they don't admit anything there is something going on: [https://www.reddit.com/r/teamviewer/comments/4jr9qn/hacked_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/teamviewer/comments/4jr9qn/hacked_trough_teamviewer_1800_spent_on_paypal/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/4kovel/psa_for_those_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/4kovel/psa_for_those_of_us_using_teamviewer_to_manage/) [http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/jon- martinda...](http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/jon- martindale/teamviewer-hackers-are-stealing-hundreds-from-users/)

Please (at least) use 2FA when using TeamViewr!</comment>


Bill Gates on Flying Cars, the Malaria Epidemic, and Article-Writing Robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/qa_gates/

<comment><USER2> Wow, already responding to the flying cars vs. 140 chars comment.

I especially liked the bit on his current expertise:

> Gates: We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or > we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging. > Seriously, we have two communities that don't intersect with each other.

For me, one of the things I didn't realize is how steep the side effects for anti-malarials can be, or how short a time frame you can take them without destroying organs. I sort of took it for granted that we had solutions that allowed us to travel the planet, that it was just a "well, poor people don't have access to our awesome first world drugs."

It's... not like that.

I sometimes wondered as a sci fi loving kid what would happen if we were on multiple planets, could diseases and adaptations evolve so quickly that travel between human communities would be basically fatal?

The harrowing reality? We're right on the edge of that very situation. We'll get that on this planet if we don't get our act together.

<comment><USER3> I traveled to Bolivia and Haiti for an extended time. I took malaria pills for a few weeks then stopped, because the pills only work on certain strains of Malaria. So even if you TAKE the pills you can still get it.

The side effects suck, talk about weird dreams, feeling bad, and just other nastyness. I honestly don't remember what they all were but I know I stopped taking the pills because of that. They are also very expensive.

Malaria is a huge problem in Haiti and Bolivia some of the nuns I was staying with had it more than once. I was always more afraid of dengue than malaria, but that is because that was the bug going around locally.

I'm no expert on Malaria and I don't know why it isn't a bigger problem in the states, but I can tell you that the meds are difficult to take for an extended period of time and (granted I never got malaria) the pros of taking the meds did not outweigh the cons when I could still possibly get malaria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sad that people did not care too much about this post. Living amidst all the tech craziness it is easy to get caught up in the hype. Take some time to introspect about the world we live in, look at the big picture and things that really matter.</comment>


The Black Hole sent a generation of sci-fi fans to hell - <AUTHOR> http://www.avclub.com/article/black-hole-sent-generation-sci-fi-fans-hell-207341

<comment><USER4> Well, no, it didn't.

It might have sent a fraction of a generation of younger space opera fans to hell, but the only place it sent sci-fi fans was mild depression at having wasted their money on it.

I was 14. I think I'd discovered Asimov and Moorcock already, and Clark - <USER2> sure - but I already knew the difference between real sci-fi, pop sci-fi, and space opera (even though I don't think I knew that term until an Epic with a "Sgt Rock Opera" segment a year or two later).

Anyone old enough to have grokked that difference was hugely disappointed - <USER3> we were with most sci-fi films - and probably went back to watching Space 1999 reruns. So there were a few years worth of you scarred, but less than a generation.

</comment><comment><USER5> A lovely review. It also helps strengthen my understanding of why "The Black Hole" sprang to mind when I watched the Dr. Who episodes 'The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit'</comment>


Investigators have found the [leaked iPhone] finder - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/27/investigators

<comment><AUTHOR> So much for the "Apple doesn't really care about this, and it may even be a planted phone" story.</comment>


Show HN: My first webapp, a simple, very simple notepad. - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92126558/projects/ntpd/notepad.html

<comment><USER3> Simple and nice. As a suggestion, when saving to .txt through the save button, the new lines are ignored. You could look into that and add them to the output instead of having one long string in the .txt file.

</comment><comment><USER4> Useful. Congrats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER5> Maybe a button as an alternate for ctrl+/? Doesn't seem to work with a non-US (Norwegian) keyboard layout? (Iceweasel/Firefixo 23.0 Debian Wheezy - <USER2> also noscript and vimperator -- which can make keyboard navigation tricky).

Doesn't seem to work in chromium (Chromium 29.0.1547.57 Debian 7.1) either, with Norwegian keyboard layout.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on the #menu, will soon add a redesigned menu that will contain more buttons with some more features...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> really nice well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)</comment></comment>


Productivity Hacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/productivity-hacks.html

<comment><USER2> This is a link to someone's take on someone else's blog post. The original post is here: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/01/12/productivity-h...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/01/12/productivity- hacks/#more-1736)</comment>


Hamburg city bans Nespresso capsules - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.handelszeitung.ch%2Funternehmen%2Fhamburg-verbietet-den-beamten-nespresso-kaffee-972105&edit-text= <comment><USER2> Hamburg city bans (city employees from buying) Nespresso capsules (with city money)

Presumably they are buying them because they have Nespresso machines, so what are they going to do with those?</comment>


Got Windows Phone 7? Microsoft's Tracking You Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/got_windows_phone_7_microsofts_tracking_you_too.php <comment><USER2> Not according to this (at least not the same way), [http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/04/windows- phone-...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/04/windows-phone-7-no- on-device-location-tracking-online-another-matter.ars):

"In contrast with iOS and Android, Microsoft says that its Windows Phone OS doesn't create any persistent on-phone record of where you've been. That's not to say that the company doesn't collect the information at all—but the large location caches found on handsets with competing operating systems aren't found on Microsoft-powered phones."</comment>


Prostitution in the Byzantine Holy Land (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://mybyzantine.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/brothels-baths-and-babes-prostitution-in-the-byzantine-holy-land/

<comment><USER2> The parts about Theodora are suspect, as there's only one source for them: the Secret History, which was clearly written by a disgruntled former palace insider. Furthermore, the style of writing and the accusations made are typical of smear campaigns of the time.

Given what we know of high-end prostitution of the time, a good chunk of the things described in that account don't make a lot of sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> It should be (1996) as the main article is from then.</comment>


The Google Assistant is going global - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-going-global/ <comment><USER2> I really hope Google Assistant succeeds. I am totally embedded in the Android/Gmail/GSuite ecosystem. I want it to succeed. I need it to succeed.

However so far Google voice assistant hasn't worked great for me. Most of the time it gets it wrong. It is really frustrating while driving. I am a native English speaker, albeit Australian.

I've made this comment before - it is astounding that Google have banked their entire reputation on people getting a positive experience through saying "Ok Google".

Amazon have Alexa. Apple have Siri. Microsoft have Cortana. If any of those become a negative experience overall, they can just invent a new AI with a new name.

But at the moment, saying "Ok Google" ends with me having an experience of frustration or disappointment. This is a big risk with your brand?!

You can breakup with Siri and stay with Apple. It's going to take an amazing Google Assistant to over come the hundreds of wasted voice experiences I have suffered thus far.

Good luck, Google.

<comment><USER3> > I am totally embedded in the Android/Gmail/GSuite ecosystem. I want it to > succeed. I need it to succeed.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find this kind of statement concerning? Google literally controls all of your data and you're forced to rely on them for services.

<comment><USER4> People should ask themselves what would happen to them if Google (or Facebook or Microsoft or Apple) flagged their account for any reason, be it believing they're a bot, not liking the content they post, etc. and permanently closed their account.

How would they recover their access to their other accounts? Do they have backups of the information they rely on? What is the burden or cost of this risk?

<comment><USER5> I did ask myself and I have a plan for each of those things. Except for FB, because I don't give a damn.

Basically the plan is to own your domain name, and build things around email that can be moved to any provider.

<comment><USER6> What do you do for the email address that fundamentally controls the domain registration?

There's also a high danger in a loop there, where your own domain supplies the email address that controls the domain.

And if you don't go with that approach, what email provider do you then trust to provide that external validation point for the domain.

I don't see how you can escape the risk.

<comment><USER7> Why is there danger in the loop, exactly? I've never needed access to email to sign into my registrar (AWS) and change DNS records.

<comment><USER8> Get on a VPN and try to log from there... It'll ask you to verify your login by sending you a code via email (because it detected your login from a different country and classify it as "unusual activity".

<comment><USER7> I've logged onto AWS from many different countries around the world and have never seen this. Maybe because I have 2FA enabled anyways?

<comment><USER8> Could because you have 2FA, or could because you have been login from different countries right from the start (hence considered "usual"). Another case where I have seen AWS login ask for verification is when email bounces, which is exactly the case discussed here.

One thing you can do for DNS and your host provider for your mail server is use a separate gmail account that forwards to your normal domain. It's unlikely that you'd lose both your DNS / mail server AND access to that independent gmail account.

I wish service provider for essential services allowed more than one email. A work around is to setup up more than one "root" account, each setup with a different email provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Currently on Android in order to use assistant at all I have to allow Google to record everywhere I go, every app I launch on my phone, and every web search I make on any logged in device. This is way more of my privacy I'm than I'm willing to give up. So until Google allows me to use assistant with some or all of these turned off, even if it reduces its effectiveness, Google assistant is turned off on all my devices.

<comment><USER10> 100% agree, it's unacceptable that it requires so many privileges when they're positioning it as a key UI for the whole Android experience.

I think the dev community will start looking at hard forks as the new 'true' path rather than Nexus/Pixel if they continue down this path. It's already prevented me from buying the new pixel, what's the point of having the latest vanilla Android if it's going to spy on you anyway

The best way to let them know is to open the Google app, open the menu and choose 'Send Feedback'

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Finally. I'm Polish and I've always felt that my language / location has been treated as a second class citizen since ever. Only way for me to use Google Assistant was either by switching to all English or by using some gutted version when I'm speaking Polish.

</comment><comment><USER12> "We're also making the Assistant multilingual later this year, so families or individuals that speak more than one language can speak naturally to the Assistant."

As a French Canadian who changes languages multiple times a day and who refers to things in both languages constantly, this is really great.

</comment><comment><USER13> Having a multilingual assistant is gonna be so useful, happy to see that feature coming this year.

The only thing I still miss to use the assistant all day long is offline routines. I put my phone on flight mode before going to bed and having the possibility to say "OK Google, wake up" to enable Wi-Fi and have the Google assistant telling me about the emails I've received during the night would be great.

</comment><comment><USER14> While this is great, as a french Google Home owner, Google Assistant is way more powerful in English than in French. The gap is so big and I haven't seen it improve in the last year...

For instance, multi-user as yet to come to non-English languages, and it's been out for almost a year.

<comment><USER15> While not exactly what you're asking for, they do mention in the article Multilingual support. So you'll be able to use it in both French and English.

This may solve some problems you're speaking of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm glad they've gone for global availability, but I'm still not a fan in my own personal sense for using this. I cannot entirely rationalise my non-latent hostility, I just know experientially I don't want an assistant active on any device I own, or have deployed near me. (I have had it turned on, I did not like the experience of accidental engagement, or sweeping its sound-captures when I tested what it had found)

Ubiquitously on, sound-tasting devices do not fill me with glee.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was going to troll and ask would it support Gaeilge but since it still thinks "Turn the volume down" in a Belfast accent means turn it up max, I doubt it :)

Not to mention getting it to play Malfeitor by Watain on Spotify...

I actually bought my Google Home in Belfast and brought it to Dublin because they're still to get in the Republic of Ireland. Yet it seems to find the southern accent easier and any location based stuff I've used it for here works fine.

Still feels like magic sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER18> 'ensure "Ok Google" and "Hey Google" work when the screen is off, and build other custom integrations.'

No comment

<comment><USER19> That's IMO a necessary feature if you buy into the entire concept of voice interfaces. When I have my phone in my hands (so that I can turn the screen on), I have much better interfaces available than voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> ...and there's no easy way to get rid of the damn thing.

Some of us really don't want voice controls and always on microphones.

<comment><USER21> Really easy to configure it to only listen when you start it by holding the home button in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Finally it will be nice to have Google Assistant in Hindi on Google Home.

<comment><USER23> It will feel weird though :) I have never interacted with any computer/phone in Hindi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given how well __cough __the assistant has been able to cope with accents in English (it hasn 't very well at all) it will be interesting to see how well this works in practice.

<comment><USER25> What do accents have to do with foreign language recognition?

<comment><USER26> Also, most languages have a wide diversity of accents. Spanish, for instance, has 18 dialects just in Spain (plus the latin american ones).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 As a multilingual person who speaks two languages on a daily basis, being able to interact through the language of my choice seamlessly is something I'm really looking forward to.

</comment><comment><USER27> Curious to see if they remember Portuguese is also spoken in Europe, Africa and Asia, and isn't quite the same as in Brazil.

<comment><USER28> The search and advertising teams know that. The voice folk... Not that much, from my experience with their APIs over the past year.

This is actually quite a significant problem across the board, since Brazilian Portuguese keeps drifting apart in both formal and informal vocabulary and grammar. They pretty much walked all over the language accords of the past couple of decades (both academic and governmental), and some of the more strait-laced linguists in the Continent wanted to classify it as a creole (partly to annoy their counterparts in Brazil).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will there ever be Chinese support?

<comment><USER30> Google isn't neglecting the Chinese. Chinese is just brutal for literally everything. It's hard for humans, it's hard for machines, it's hard for humans designing for machines for use by humans. It's hard to read, write, hear, speak, represent.

Voice UX for English, where linguists and AI and money are being thrown, is still very much in its infancy. Let's give them a little time.

<comment><USER31> I suspect this is less about difficulty and more about markets. Simply put, my guess is that there is a decent reliance on google services which are banned in China.

<comment><USER30> That may deprioritize it, but it is still the third most spoken language in the US[1]. Yes, it is less important than many European languages, but it will still be important even if you completely ignore China.

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

<comment><USER8> What does Chinese mean here? One of the main Chinese language? Or all Chinese languages?

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

<comment><USER30> I was ignoring that for simplicity. Presumably Mandarin, unless otherwise specified, but who knows. My Chinese is pretty rusty, but Cantonese and other dialects were always unintelligible to me even when I could speak decently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do we have any data on the size of this market? I've never found any assistant to be useful and haven't heard anyone else ever say they used one. This still feels like a massive dead-end to me.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is the potential Echo killer. Let's see if it works out for them.

</comment><comment><USER34> How long before I can say "Alexa ask Google to..." :P</comment>


Marijuana testing of job applicants is barred by NYC - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/nyregion/marijuana-drug-testing-nyc.html <comment><USER2> "I believe private businesses should have the power to determine their own hiring practices"

In that case I want to have the power to determine my own job acceptance practices. I want my hiring manager to take a drug test too. After all, I don't wanna end up working for a drug edict.

The asymmetry of employer/employee relationship is just astonishing.

<comment><USER3> That's not _really_ asymmetrical, in the same way that e.g. wage information is. You can refuse to take their test (and not be hired) the same way they can refuse to take your test (and you refuse to work for them).

That being said, I believe that weed usage not being comparable to alcohol usage outside of the workplace doesn't make sense. I think it only makes sense to test for harder drugs e.g. opiates and amphetamines.

<comment><USER4> > I think it only makes sense to test for harder drugs e.g. opiates and > amphetamines.

Why? Why is it any of my employer's business what I do outside of work?

<comment><USER3> Same reason I don't let crack addicts into my house. They're going to steal from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm one of tech leads for a company that doesn't really deal with anything that sensitive but routinely drug tests, I'm convinced it's just a way to get rid of employees they don't want. I have failed the drug tests 5 out of 5 times with substances significantly more frowned upon than cannabis and have yet to receive anything more than a chuckle when being handed the results while at the same time I've seen multiple others fired on their first offence. Go figure.

<comment><USER6> Not from the U.S (assuming you are) and don't know how it's employed exactly, but don't most states there already have at-will employment where they can get rid of people for no/very little reason anyway?

<comment><USER7> They can get rid of people for _any_ reason, not for _no_ reason.

In real life things are even more complex: in case of a bitter divorce an employer will have some trouble trying to convince a judge that they fired a programmer because he didn't like classical music. And then programmer's attorney will present his version of events with some racial twist added...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is drug testing common in the US? Here in the UK, outside of certain fields, I've never heard of it and would laugh if I were asked to.

<comment><USER9> Depends on the industry and the class of job. In software and white collar work in general it's almost unheard of. Go farther down the class scale and it becomes very common.

<comment><USER10> In every bank job I started in NYC I had to take a drug test before I started. Anecdotal... But white collar jobs still do it.

I'm also pretty sure most government jobs require it periodically.

<comment><USER11> I've never heard of a finance industry job that required repeated drug testing. Only at first hire time.

That also makes it kind of obvious that someone is getting ready to jump ship if they stop smoking marijuana for a couple weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Few days back a lady reported on reddit that she stored clear pee in an off brand 5 hour energy bottle and put it her vagina before interview for maintaining temperature[1]. It apparently got struck and medical intervention was needed.

I guess she must have got the idea from people who have been successful earlier with such attempts, so perhaps the test security at jobs aren't fool- proof.

[1]:[https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/bbbzpt/tifu_by_puttin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/bbbzpt/tifu_by_putting_a_5_hour_energy_in_my_vagina/)

<comment><USER13> Piss tests for women are utterly demeaning. In a perfect world we'd throw all the people involved in prison.

<comment><USER14> Are you implying it's less demeaning when it happens to men? If so, what's your reasoning?

<comment><USER15> If I had to take a guess I'd say they have harder time aiming, relatively easy for a male to piss into a small pot, a woman is probably going to end up pissing all over her hand. Fun.

<comment><USER16> That's not actually how it works. It's perfectly possible for a woman to pee into those little cups without making a mess (I'm a woman and I've done it plenty of times at the doctors office).

Speaking of which, peeing into a cup for true medical purposes is not more demeaning to women than to men (except when doctors won't believe you when you assure them that it would be a medical miracle for you to be pregnant, and they make you take a pregnancy test anyway, wtf). Drug tests are demeaning, period, but gender has nothing to do with it.

For those who aren't too squeamish: the female urethra does not spray like a shower head just because it's recessed. It runs like a faucet. We may not be able to easily control the direction of the flow, but it's easy enough to locate the opening and determine the direction by peeing a bit and stopping, and then place the cup to catch the flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The drug test is pretty flawed since the fat solubility of THC metabolites makes it stay in your body exponentially longer than harder drugs. Not sure why downvotes, its a fact google it.

<comment> maze-le I don't know about THC, but I've been tested positively for Amphetamine before and didn't take it or any medication that is a structural derivate of it. This is a problem that is not very well known, even doctors rarely know how unreliable drug tests can be. Amphetamine-derivates for example have one of the highest percentage of false positives: ~15% -- a lot of molecules in your body have a structural similiarity with the metabolites of the substance.

If you are ever tested positively for an Amphetamine-like substance, and you know you didn't take it -- you should insist on a second test right there on the spot.

<comment><USER18> People test positive for all sorts of amphetamines because the test is a joke, overly broad, and unreliable to boot as you pointed out. Anyone who has asthma-related medication is a lock to fail, especially if they take pills like Bronkaid.

<comment><USER19> Is it because of the ephedrine in the bronkaid that causes the test failures?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is sensible. As long as the safety sensitive professions are exempt from the ban (as they are in this proposal,) this is good policy.

<comment><USER21> The problem is differentiating current intoxication/high, which is obviously bad in most jobs from someone who had a joint Saturday night two weeks ago, which has no impact on there work.

<comment><USER22> There are some situations where even being high _at work_ isn't really a problem, as long as you aren't _too high._

Almost every retail job on earth, for example. I wouldn't care if my cashier was high as long as they can function.

<comment><USER23> I've gotten some great, productive work done while pretty up there. For me, it removes inertia and I just get straight into my work and stay in it until I've gotten enough done for the day. It was my secret weapon during finals week when I had to crank out term papers for classes I wasn't especially interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> According to this article [https://www.ncsm.nl/english/health/pass-urine-drug- test](https://www.ncsm.nl/english/health/pass-urine-drug-test) , marijuana can be detected in your urine usually for 30-45 days. To speed up one's detoxing process, one should drink a lot of green tea and just be active.

</comment><comment><USER25> Should cannabis use should be treated any differently by societies or governments than alcohol use? I'm struggling to come up with any exceptions.

<comment><USER26> It has secondhand smoke problems (like tobacco) which alcohol does not

<comment><USER27> THC has many more delivery methods than smoking leaf.

Edibles. Tinctures. Vapes. Salves.

Your argument isn't very informed.

<comment><USER28> A vape still produces vapor though which can be absorbed by strangers.

Also smoking leaf is the most common method by far

<comment> saiya-jin Only because thats usually how you end up with it in countries where its illegal. Common Joe doesn't have the skills and equipment to turn it to something non-harmful for consumption. I am amazed how quickly in US the oil vaping industry had developed, and how good the products are compared to old school consumption.

Compared to Netherland where this is cca legal for many years, and you can still only buy plants or cakes (which isn't ideal for quite a few reasons, ie hard to get right dosage first time). In fact, oil vaping cartridges are illegal there (no sense whatsoever, you can buy hashish which can be very potent).

I can guarantee you, tons of people who don't smoke cigarettes vastly prefer consumption with 0 carcinogens from burning the plant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This sounds like both a good and a bad thing. Of course if you're going to be operating heavy machinery, or something where lives are at risk, you should not be on any drugs. But if you're sitting as an office worker, or cashier at Diane Reed, I think drug testing is a waste of time

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there any general legislation relating to arbitrary restriction/intrusion/inquisitiveness of people's personal life?

For a random example, can employees be required to share their workout schedule, or fitbit data?

Is drug testing specifically legal?

<comment><USER31> You can reduce the employer paid portion of health insurance premiums and then have the health insurance company reimburse the employees that share their health data, and then the employer reimburse the health insurance company for these rebates.

In my experience, you already get $20 to $40 per month for going to the gym a certain number of times or doing a certain number of steps per month.

<comment><USER30> That would be a workaround though, no? Ie, you're sharing this with an insurance company, not an employer.

What law(s) would this workaround be working around? Ie, would it be illegal to make sharing this data (regardless of insurance) a condition of employment. I don't mean specific that are covered by other laws (discrimination, medical privacy), just an arbitrary thing an employer might want to know/control about an employee's personal life.

<comment><USER31> Presumably, employers aren't experts at knowing what results in lower healthcare costs, plus it would avoid health data from being shared with another entity unnecessarily. It would also be better PR since health insurance needs your health data anyway, so nothing is changing other than people paying less for being healthier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm kind of curious, is it common for software engineers in the East coast get drug tested? I'm a MechE and I almost always get tested.

<comment><USER33> I am a software engineer Massachusetts and I was tested when I interned at Intel in Hudson, MA, perhaps because I would be going to their factory on occasion. Never anywhere else, including at a defense company.

As an intern I wasn't really in a place to turn down a test, but letting a company examine my bodily fluids is pretty insane.</comment></comment>