Ask HN: Who are some unsung heroes in open source that need more support? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> All the wonderful people who package software for their distro!

We take for granted the ability to install anything via our package managers, but it's made possible by efforts of a vast number of contributors who often just like a piece of software and stepped up to allow everyone else to use it too. Too often they get zero recognition for their efforts.

I'm doubly grateful because I'm also an upstream maintainer who doesn't have to try to keep up with all the various packaging processes.

If you want to support them, the next time some software is unavailable or lagging behind in your distro, see what you can do to help!

<comment><USER3> I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but am I the only one who thinks of these people's efforts as a huge amount of wasted time? Why should _anyone_ have to package software aside from the developer who made it? Why should it have to be done for so many different package repositories and packaging formats? Why are people ok this?

<comment><USER4> Because the software is inconsistent (and thus buggy) in that regard. Also, barely any developer possesses the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to build their software for dozens of arcane architectures.

Packagers create the glue between the software (which is heterogeneous) and the distro (which is internally consistent). The world without this glue is a horrible mess and a huge waste of time; the old Slackware is a good example. It's thanks to the distro makers that you don't have to spend days collecting requirements and acquiring arcane knowledge just to install a piece of software.

So: yes, those people devote a huge amount of time - so the countless users around the world don't have to. The net time value is positive.

<comment><USER5> I think we need to distinguish between software that is used as a component in a larger system (e.g., the core OS for which is the core business of a distribution), and an application that is not part of the larger system (distribution) but merely runs on top of it. For putting together a distribution (with tightly integrated components) the traditional packaging philosophy is probably very well suited For add-on third-party software that is not an integral part of the distribution but merely wants to run on it, not so much.

An independent software author (e.g., Ultimaker or Prusa) just wants to reach all "Linux" users at once without dealing with different distribution's policies, and without needing to use the same version of e.g., Qt, that happens to be in a given distribution. And as a user of their software, I want their software on my "Linux" system in the same moment Windows and macOS users can have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paul Davis of the Ardour project. Ardour is probably one of the best digital audio workstations ever made. Sad thing is that Ardour is such niche software that it doesn't get as much monetary support as it should.

[https://ardour.org/](https://ardour.org/)

<comment><USER7> Wow. Am I missing something or is Ardour a more capable kind of Audacity?

<comment><USER8> It's light years beyond it, it's a full fledged digital audio workstation capable of high quality studio recordings and mixing. A good analogy would be Paint vs. Photoshop.

EDIT: Not to downplay Audacity which is also awesome, it's just not meant for the same use case.

<comment><USER7> Nice, and free. I think my podcasting friends may like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Consider supporting Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel. Henry decided to dedicate himself 100% to open-source earlier this year and is one of the main reasons Babel is such an indispensable (albeit invisible) tool. Henry welcomes contributions at [https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu/memberships](https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu/memberships)

<comment><USER10> Babel has some crazy throughput going through it to drive a massive percentage of the modern web. Wild to see how low the funding is.

<comment><USER11> seriously. its insane that some startups are raising VC money that 100% would not be able to exist without Babel being maintained. Some of that money should go to Babel but won't. How do we fix this so that Henry doesnt have to keep begging? It's really broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Start from the projects you are using. You might find that many of them are primarily one-man efforts and could use some support.

For example, we use verdaccio ([https://www.verdaccio.org/](https://www.verdaccio.org/)) as a private NPM server. IT was so mindblowingly simple to get a private server working that, when the opportunity presented itself, we felt compelled to donate: [https://opencollective.com/verdaccio](https://opencollective.com/verdaccio)

In this case, it seems that there was an older abandoned effort (sinopia) and the original developer Alex Kocharin ([https://github.com/rlidwka](https://github.com/rlidwka)) stopped. Juan Picado ([https://github.com/juanpicado](https://github.com/juanpicado)) picked up the mantle and given how NPM is moving fast and breaking things it's great to see someone is keeping up with the open source solution.

</comment><comment><USER13> The people building MicroManger (and ImageJ) - the (best/only/reasonable) open source software capable of driving most microscopes used in biology - and then processing that data. It's raw, it's complicated, and (non-technical, demanding, one-off) biologists are the end users. But piped through that software is most every piece of live/functional raw data used in all your cancer/genetics/genomics research. It's also a core to many other downstream, forked, or scripted sets of machine-control, and data-processing. It's a thankless job that literally drives humanity forward.

[https://micro-manager.org/wiki/Micro-Manager](https://micro- manager.org/wiki/Micro-Manager)

Nico Sturman used to be one of the project leads, but it's been a while since I've kept up with who runs it now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Urban from LibrePCB, who has been developing a free/libre EDA suite (for PCB design) mostly by himself for over 4 years now: [http://librepcb.org/](http://librepcb.org/) The first release will hopefully be out this year.

If you think a FOSS KiCAD "competitor" with a solid and well thought-out library design and good usability should be supported, then check out his Patreon page (or his BTC address). Or – of course – contribute code.

Here you can find a LibrePCB introduction video from this year's FOSDEM: [https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/)

 _(Edit: Punctuation)_

<comment><USER15> Interesting! I'm a KiCAD user but have never heard of this. Why doesn't Urban just contribute to KiCAD instead of maintaining a separate open source project?

Apologies if he mentions it in the video -- I'm at work.

<comment><USER16> >> Why doesn't Urban just contribute to KiCAD instead of maintaining a separate open source project?

Not every open source project is built the way a person thinks it should be. The only way to know if an alternate viewpoint is better is to build it and find out. Other times a person just wants to build it for themselves for their own reasons. Either way, variety can be a good thing. One day an alternative may just replace your favorite piece of software and then you might ask why the creator started from so far behind all those years ago...

There are probably as many reasons as there are developers.

<comment><USER15> Do you know anything about this project or is this just a generic diatribe?

I was hoping to hear about his opinions of the shortcomings of KiCAD and where LibrePCB improves on them. It would certainly help someone like me decide whether to fund him on Patreon or not, seeing as I've donated to CERN for KiCAD development.

Edit: I've found his reasons in his slides - [https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/atta...](https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/attachments/slides/2267/export/events/attachments/cad_librepcb/slides/2267/librepcb_slides.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As of a couple years ago development of ntp was largely performed by one Harlan Stenn. He (and the funding issues around ntp) made the news a while back, but the guy probably deserves even _more_ visibility, given the crucial nature of his work.

2015 article: [https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn- and...](https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-and-an- uncertain-future-readers-react/d/d-id/1319521)

<comment><USER18> Notoriety means infamy, or the state of being well known for something terrible. Did you mean a different word?

<comment><USER19> Really? I didn't know that,in Italian it a similar word translates into "famous". I wonder how many times I've used it incorrectly...

<comment><USER20> "Notorious" does mean "famous", but it carries the added implication of being famous for being bad. I suspect the meaning has changed over time, just like "awful" used to mean "awe-inspiring".

<comment><USER21> I think you mean awesome? Or have I been wrong all along?

<comment><USER20> "Awesome" _still_ carries a positive meaning. "Awful" changed from being a synonym for "wonderful" to a synonym for "terrible".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ornicar[0], author of lila[1], the chess server behind the greatest chess site of internet[2].

[0] [https://github.com/ornicar](https://github.com/ornicar) [1] [https://github.com/ornicar/lila/](https://github.com/ornicar/lila/) [2] [https://lichess.org/](https://lichess.org/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Jonathan Thomas over at Openshot Video Editor:

[https://www.openshot.org/](https://www.openshot.org/)

It's had its share of bugs, but the amount of work he has put into it over the years is pretty incredible. Most other video editors for Linux don't even come close, and it recaptures a lot of the lost glory of Windows Movie Maker before it was rewritten and made ugly.

<comment><USER24> Davinci Resolve blows everything else out of the water, and it's free. Available for Linux, Win, Mac.

<comment><USER23> Not open source. There's nothing wrong with that, except it's not what we're talking about here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> OpenBSD is heavily underfunded compared to what value they deliver. See [https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html](https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Jen Fong-Adwent, Jeff Lindsay, Dominic Tarr, James Halliday and Ben Lupton are the five I really admire and think their ideas don't get enough exposure (I realize they've all had successful projects but talking to them at length their ideas generally speaking are fantastic and should be encouraged).

[https://github.com/ednapiranha](https://github.com/ednapiranha) [https://github.com/progrium](https://github.com/progrium) [https://github.com/dominictarr](https://github.com/dominictarr)

[https://github.com/substack](https://github.com/substack) [https://github.com/balupton](https://github.com/balupton)

</comment><comment><USER27> With my OpenBSD developer hat on, hardware donations welcome here too: [https://www.openbsd.org/want.html](https://www.openbsd.org/want.html)

 _cough_ \-- I also very much like pizza: [https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html](https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html)

<comment><USER28> > cough-- I also very much like pizza: > [https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html](https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html)

But is it Pizza Pizza?

<comment><USER27> I'll eat Pizza from anywhere! Even Pizza Pizza.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Shay Banon - Founder of Elastic Search. He's been in the Open Source space for years building frameworks like Compass which influenced Red Hat to build Hibernate Search. He's done other work as well.

Ross Mason - Founder of Mule Soft. He built Mule which is Open Source and helped many companies better integrate services.

Joe Walnes - Joe is a beast. He's contributed and created many Open Source projects. websocketd, smoothie, xstream, webbit, and many more.

Rick Hightower - A very smart guy who use to blog about technology that helped many many people. He also created Boon a JSON parser, qbit, and many other frameworks. Because of all of his hard work, he was also made a Java Champion.

I could name so many more folks. Honestly, it's amazing not more people are acknowledged for their efforts.

</comment><comment><USER30> My partner Mike Schwartz founded Gluu because he was tired of recommending proprietary access management platforms like Siteminder and IBM Tivoli that were locked behind six figure licenses.

We're now a team of about 30 people with 10 years of development into the Gluu Server, a free open source software platform for SSO, 2FA, access management:

[https://gluu.org/docs/ce](https://gluu.org/docs/ce)

<comment><USER31> Ironically, the reason there are so many unsung heroes of open-source is precisely because their products are not "locked behind" expensive licenses.

It sounds though like this is, in fact, a commercial venture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Chet Ramey.

He is the maintainer of the GNU Bash shell and of the GNU Readline line- editing library.

* [https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/](https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/)

* [https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...](https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-week/chet-ramey-geek-of-the-week/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Jon Neal[0]

You can thank him for: normalize.css[1], sanitize.css, SVG4Everybody, HTML5 Shiv[4], and the yayQuery Podcast theme music[5]. And many more[6][7].

[0] [http://jonathantneal.github.io/](http://jonathantneal.github.io/) [1] [http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize- css/#overview](http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/#overview) [2] [https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css](https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css) [3] [https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody](https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody) [4] [https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at- no...](https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at-now) [5] [https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery](https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery) [6] [https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss- plugins/blob/maste...](https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss- plugins/blob/master/docs/authors.md) [7] [https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal](https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal)

<comment><USER34> The html5shiv was originally based on a discovery by [https://twitter.com/sjoerd_visscher](https://twitter.com/sjoerd_visscher) and represents a iterative process involving many developers, at least according to Paul Irish [https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the- html5-shiv...](https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the-html5-shiv/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Chris Hobbs / RX14 (major crystal language contributor) is 17 years old, is a genius, and is behind a lot of the recent work on the language including windows support, parallelism, and other things. You can follow him on GitHub or watch him work on crystal on twitch:

[https://github.com/rx14](https://github.com/rx14) | [https://www.twitch.tv/rx14](https://www.twitch.tv/rx14)

</comment><comment><USER36> Loïc Hoguin. The author of Cowboy web server. De facto standard web server in Erlang/Elixir. Foundation for Plug and Phoenix frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER37> Shotcut Video Editor: [https://shotcut.org/](https://shotcut.org/)

\- and -

Natron video compositing software: [https://natron.fr/](https://natron.fr/)

Both are great tools with a steady stream of updates.

</comment><comment><USER38> SparkleShare / Hylke Bons

An amazing self-hosted cross platform file syncing/sharing service. Being based on git allows for (somewhat) unlimited version history. Simple and elegant, really surprised more people don't know about it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ben Darnell of Tornado and Mike Bayer (aka zzzeek) of SQLAlchemy.

<comment><USER40> thanks! I was even going to post myself (SQLAlchemy). However our deepest areas of need are the most boring and soul crushing - documentation and bug triaging. Ideally someone else with full push / release access other than me. We get lots of great patches and pull requests but I'm the only one moving it all through. I'm probably not easy to work with (but I'm open to improvement!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Consider supporting George Nachman, creator of iTerm2 over at [https://www.patreon.com/gnachman](https://www.patreon.com/gnachman).

iTerm2 seems to be the favourite terminal of macOS users… at least those that spend a large amount of their time there (especially with its native tmux support).

</comment><comment><USER42> Joey Hess:

\- [https://liberapay.com/joeyh/](https://liberapay.com/joeyh/) \- [https://www.patreon.com/joeyh/overview](https://www.patreon.com/joeyh/overview)

(I support Joey on patreon, as I use git-annex quite a bit)

</comment><comment><USER43> Please support GNU Octave if you can.

<comment><USER44> I used to be a big fan of octave until I learned python + numpy + pandas dataframes. After that I did not have much need for octave.

<comment><USER45> There are a lot of engineers and financial quants using Matlab, and the Octave project makes a lot of that Matlab code usable without an expensive Matlab license.

<comment><USER31> I guess it's not clear to me why (at least in the 'first world') it's wrong for quants and engineers to pay something for the tools they use. (i have spent a fair amount of time contributing to open-source, so I've no problem with OS generally, but I also don't think their is anything wrong with the folks at Matlab getting paid for their efforts. Quants are sure as hell getting paid for theirs).

<comment><USER45> I agree that Matlab has a right to be paid for its product, but it is still nice to have a free alternative.

<comment><USER31> The better the free software, the greater the exploitation by other people making a bunch of money on it, while the devs work nights and weekends for nothing. I don't have a solution, but there it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> That dude that maintains jq. For those that haven't used it, it's like grep but for JSON (and about as fast).

</comment><comment><USER47> The ones that undeterred maintains software they haven't built themselves. For instance the maintainers of Mithril.js (pygy, tivac, isiahmeadows) is/has been doing great work for a long time, with nothing in return. There are many like them out there on other projects, I'm sure, who doesn't get the thanks that they deserve.

<comment><USER48> Don't sell yourself short porsager, you're apart of that finely tuned Mithril machine too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A guy called Alexey Tulinov maintains an excellent but very little known, light-weight unicode processing library called libnu. I really wish it had more recognition: [https://bitbucket.org/alekseyt/nunicode](https://bitbucket.org/alekseyt/nunicode)

<comment><USER8> Two other FOSS projects I like but are not super known:

* Calf: A small group of devs producing a set of high quality audio processing plugins. [https://calf-studio-gear.org/](https://calf-studio-gear.org/)

* Ardour - pretty well known I think, but only in the narrow cross-section of audio geeks and Linux geeks. [https://ardour.org/](https://ardour.org/)

 _

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Serge Rider - DBeaver - the best open source multi database accesa tool. [https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver](https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver) . Daily commits, almost a one man show!

<comment><USER50> That's an app I use daily. A couple of years back I tried to send him some money, as a way of showing appreciation for his work. He wasn't interested so I kind of assumed money wasn't an issue for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Araq and the other Nim core developers.

OpenBSD core developers.

</comment><comment><USER52> Gael Guennebaud. The Eigen library powers tons of numerical heavy code -- including Tensorflow -- but doesn't get much spotlight. Watching Eigen evolve under Gael's stewardship has been amazing.

</comment><comment><USER53> There's an NPM package started for this: [https://github.com/feross/thanks](https://github.com/feross/thanks)

</comment><comment><USER54> Terry A. Davis who is homeless at the moment.

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

[http://www.templeos.org/](http://www.templeos.org/)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu- uIA55UI47_cXg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg)

</comment><comment><USER55> Sébastien Doeraene (srd) and David Barri (japgolly).

Former built almost all of ScalaJS and the latter built ScalaJS-React.

It's inspired a lot of KotlinJS as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> Definitely the DB Browser for SQLite team (sqlitebrowser.org). :)

We recently created a Patron account, if that helps:

[https://www.patreon.com/db4s](https://www.patreon.com/db4s)

</comment><comment><USER57> RIBS2 (Robust Infrastructure for Backend Systems, ver. 2) [https://github.com/Adaptv/ribs2](https://github.com/Adaptv/ribs2)

Great framework to build highly scalable, low latency service (developer friendly). It would be great some detailed tutorials and documentation about its internals.

</comment><comment><USER16> Jonathan Westhues, author of Solvespace. There are a number of hard things to implement in that code and he did them all initially. Others have been making good contributions too, but it could use more developers. I've been digging in the code myself but have not made a pull request yet. We shall see...

</comment><comment><USER58> Anyone who makes sure stuff compiles and runs on Windows.

<comment><USER59> Is there anyone at Microsoft that you would like to especially single out? (-:

<comment><USER58> I actually wasn't thinking about Microsoft in particular when I wrote this.

Git for Windows, Audacity, Python are all good examples where people have put in a _lot_ of work.

On the Microsoft side, whoever's porting OpenSSH is pretty awesome, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Fabrice Bellard.. He is already popular a bit... But most don't know about him....

</comment><comment><USER61> openmhealth.org - we're build an open data standard for mobile health data.

</comment><comment><USER62> PSA: nominating yourself in threads like this is pretty tactless.

<comment><USER31> Calling people tactless after they've worked their asses off building something they give to strangers for free is more tactless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> [https://github.com/wajahatkarim3](https://github.com/wajahatkarim3)

<comment><USER64> Who is he?

<comment><USER65> he call himself Wantrepreneur, [https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap- Android](https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap-Android)</comment></comment></comment>


As Amazon Ramps Up Furniture and Appliance Business, Home Depot Is Sweating - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/as-amazon-ramps-up-furniture-and-appliance-business-ho-1821552569 <comment><USER2> From the comments:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-makes-major-push-into- fu...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-makes-major-push-into- furniture-1494581401)</comment>


Lemonade Stand for Pandemic Times – A Mask Stand - <AUTHOR> http://wearamaskplease.com <comment><USER2> Love the idea of teaching kids skills relevant in today's world, instead of just doing projects for the project sake.</comment>


The limitations of gradient descent as a principle of brain function - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11851 <comment><USER2> The "money" quote is right here,

> Steepest descent or gradient descent depends on a choice of ruler (or > Riemannian metric) for the parameter space of interest. The Euclidean metric > is rarely a natural choice, especially for spaces with dimensions that carry > different physical units, such as the example shown here.

But I think this, to many ML researchers or biophysicists, is true by what I lovingly call the NSH[0]. The argument posed (in a slightly anthropomorphized way) goes as follows:

-

We have some function, f, which we want to minimize/maximize: usually f will be the negative log of some probability distribution, or whatever. Now, hey, look, this function could be anything that's differentiable, all we know is that the minimum of this function is _really_ useful.

But, what happens if we replace this function by another function, g, whose minimum at x is the same, but g(x + ∆) ≈ g(x) for ∆ being fairly large, then we run into a problem! Minimizing g (which is, admittedly, an unnatural representation of f) is bad because it's really hard for us to distinguish points around x from x itself (which is the point we want) using only the gradient information, since it's very close to zero. In other words, while the function g preserves many of the same properties as f (in fact, the only one we care about, the minimum), the trajectory of gradient descent on g is going to be mostly pretty dumb as compared to what it could be for f.

In the case that f _is_ the negative log-likelihood of some empirical distribution, then the Fisher information turns out to be a natural choice for the curvature of the distribution (see Information Geometry, if you're interested in this idea) and running what is essentially a Newton method on f will yield similar trajectories to running it on g, which is what we want.

-

The paper makes no particularly strong argument that is of note, except that, yes, of course, "the brain" doesn't actually "run" gradient descent _as stated on paper_ , which apparently is an assumption some neuroscience models make use of to make predictions. This is... not really a claim anyone is arguing for, as far as I know (the paper has citations [12,13], but taking a quick peek, only 12 mentions this idea directly, but even there invokes the "natural gradient" argument that the authors here propose, and only mentions, in passing, that this mechanism is "biologically plausible").

\---

[0] More specifically, the No-Shit Hypothesis.

<comment><USER3> I liked this quote to give a feeling why the euclidian metric for the gradient might be wrong.

[https://hips.seas.harvard.edu/blog/2013/01/25/the-natural- gr...](https://hips.seas.harvard.edu/blog/2013/01/25/the-natural-gradient/)

"As a concrete example, imagine two people standing on two different mountain tops. If one of the people is Superman (or anybody else who can fly) then the distance they would fly directly to the other person is the Euclidean distance (in R^3). If both people were normal and needed to walk on the surface of the Earth the Riemannian metric tensor tells us what this distance is from the Euclidean distance. Don't take this illustration too seriously since technically all of this needs to take place in a differential patch (a small rectangle whose side lengths go to 0)."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Noted that the example they use from Rui Costa et al. 2017 (a great paper btw recommended reading) is not any kind of machine learning result, it is a fitting of data from previous experiments showing pre- and post-synaptic changes during short term LTP experiments. So i 'm not sure what the authors are rambling on about here.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really can't believe anyone argues that brains can just be gradient descent. It's like people have never heard of a fitness valley or a sparsely connected graph region.

<comment><USER6> I hear the converse (neural networks can't be like brains because they do use gradient descent) argued quite a lot.

<comment><USER5> That is also weird. Brains may use gradient descent but that can't be the only way they learn. Gradient descent alone is almost completely incapable of escaping a local maximum.

<comment><USER7> Can't you run gradient descent on a higher level of abstraction and escape the local minima? People routinely get stuck thinking in a certain way, even when an observer looking at the problem from afar can tell that they are stuck.

<comment><USER5> You can if you know what the higher level abstraction is. That kind of thing doesn't work when your learning algorithm doesn't have a programmer / mathematician to babysit it who knows more than it does.

... unless God is sitting there hacking our brains' code in real time to kick us out of local maxima. "Damn it... they're stuck on the mind/body dichotomy again... let me see what happens if I bolt a dimension reduction transform on there and then run another gradient descent on top. Shit now they're worshipping cheese... undo, undo, undo..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't see a PDF here, I'm shown a 46 byte file to download.

<comment><USER9> The previous version has a PDF[0] but you're right, the current version shows none.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.11851v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.11851v1.pdf)

<comment><USER10> The paper was withdrawn with v2

Comments: We were asked by an author of a criticized paper to withdraw the submisison in order to allow them to respond to our criticism in private

<comment><USER11> Is that commonly done? I would guess this means the withdrawn paper contains an egregious error. Does anyone know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr ordinary gradient descent is sensitive to the parametrization of the problem but natural gradient is not. This is an important fact (and one that is fairly well-known within the ML community), but it is not totally clear to me why it should be particularly relevant to neuroscience.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it only the _trajectory_ that is sensitive to the parametrization? Afaik, the location of the minimas do not depend on it.

<comment><USER12> Yep, the minima are in the same locations. However, if the problem has multiple minima, then the parametrization can affect which minimum gradient descent actually reaches.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Fonts Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://fonts.google.com/analytics <comment><USER3> I was part of the team that founded this, about 10 years ago if memory serves. I'm still loosely involved, though no longer at Google. Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original launch, and we're now in the process of launching it as a variable font, with both width and weight axes. I'm also getting funding from them for Rust-based font tools.

Feel free to AMA, though no guarantees I'll have good answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I currently work on it as well, so happy to pitch in.

<comment><USER4> Does Google use this to fingerprint and track users across different websites?

<comment> open-source-ux The Google Font FAQ includes the question: _What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?_

> "...your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any > credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that > are authenticated, such as Gmail."

>"Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure."

[https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...](https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users)

<comment><USER5> So a lot of fluff and no actual reply. Users can be tracked without cookies being sent, while "access to the data is kept secure". Call me a cynic, but I lost my trust in google a long time ago.

<comment><USER6> "Users can be tracked without cookies being sent"

How? Stylesheets can't use fingerprinting or Flash cookies or anything like that, only scripts can.

<comment><USER7> Stylesheets can fingerprint with the help of a server to track what resources get loaded or skipped, and a few clever media size queries etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In anticipation of "ugh, designers are ruining the web custom fonts", I'm glad that variable fonts are starting to percolate out.

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and- ux...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and- ux/typography/variable-fonts)

Less overall file size, less HTTP requests. Combine that with preloading and font-display, we're getting to the point where webfonts aren't a giant bandwidth suck.

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing- content-efficiency/webfont-optimization)

(More room for ad tracking scripts instead!)

<comment><USER9> Oh wow, what's old is new again.

I remember when Adobe launched Multiple Master fonts [1] in 1992 (same concept)... and then killed them in 1999 because not enough people were using them.

I'll be fascinated to see if there's actually demand for it this time around. I personally have had tons of times I've wanted a semibold where none existed, or something halfway between regular and condensed.

But I'm not convinced they're going to save bandwidth for most sites. After all, they incorporate two sets of font outlines along each dimension instead of one, right? And you rarely see a webpage that uses _three_ variations of a font along a _single_ dimension (e.g. sans-serif regular, semibold and bold). A "third" font and beyond is more often a different style (italics) or typeface (serif) entirely. So I don't see the savings in most cases...

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

<comment><USER10> As I understand it, Type 1 multiple master was simply superseded by OpenType variable fonts back in the 90s, which is all that Google link is describing. As a user it was a relief to have, afaict, all of the features of Type 1 with all of the convenience of TrueType.

<comment><USER10> Huh, I'm wrong. Apparently variable fonts were added to OpenType only recently: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_fonts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_fonts)

(I think the features I was thinking of were ligatures and lowercase numbers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, if you used Google Cloud CDN to serve up that data, it would cost you more than $1 Billion USD.

<comment><USER12> Got a source for that, or did you just make it up? Doing some very quick estimation I can't see it being more than $40-60 million, and that is using retail pricing.

<comment><USER13> I'm getting ~$130 million with these assumptions:

* each font load is 170 KB (I downloaded Roboto and that's the file size of one weight)

* 36.3 trillion font loads (per the source)

* 36.3 trillion * 170 KB/font load = ~6171 PB [0]

Plug 6171 PB into the GCP calculator [0] with all egress via GCP Cloud CDN to N. America and the bill comes out to just shy of $130 million.

OP is off by an order of magnitude by my napkin math, but it's closer than I was expecting.

[0]: [https://www.google.com/search?q=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB...](https://www.google.com/search?q=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB&oq=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB)

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=f75c7bdd-4c4...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=f75c7bdd-4c48-4179-9d63-5c67c6c63ed1)

<comment><USER12> I assumed 22 kb (compressed) font size. That's the average of the top 10 on their list. (Roboto is 35kb uncompressed for me, not 170kb).

<comment><USER3> 35kb sounds like the basic (mostly latin-1) subset. The size will vary a fair amount depending on which subset is selected, etc. In any case, fonts will almost always be served compressed, with WOFF2 being the vast majority of requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Get the raw JSON stats & font info with below links. Use httpie for color/formatted results (replace curl with http):

      curl https://fonts.google.com/metadata/stats
      curl https://fonts.google.com/metadata/fonts

</comment><comment><USER15> It looks like its lumping Android in with desktop linux. Since they are differentiating platforms by the user agent that seems like an easy thing to fix?

<comment><USER16> The OS table has entry for X11 with maybe 2-3% shaer; I'd bet that's desktop Linux.

<comment><USER17> That's an impressive figure. Macintosh (desktop Mac?) is slightly less than double the X11 figure.

[https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share](https://gs.statcounter.com/os- market-share) has Linux usage at just under 1%.

<comment><USER18> Lots of "browse the web from this phone box" and "the departures board in the train station that shows a webpage" will be Linux.

I bet many of them use Google Fonts, and with them auto-refreshing every 5 seconds all day long, they might get seriously overcounted.

<comment><USER16> I doubt that the fonts get reloaded when the page is refreshed. According to other posts in this thread, the cache TTL is 24 hours.

<comment><USER18> Most of these boards use kill -9 to restart the browser every half hour or so, and likely nuke the cache each time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The way google tracks fonts is so annoying. It took me furever to track down this bug: [https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2345](https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2345)

Basically, one out of a thousand requests delivers a broken font that breaks document.fonts.load().

</comment><comment><USER20> Why are people still bothering with Google fonts? They were useful when font formats hadn't been standardized, and you needed WOFF, TTF, and SVG for some Apple products. Now, WOFF works everywhere, and you can offer WOFF2, which is compressed more. So why not just put the fonts on your own site and avoid a side trip to Google?

<comment><USER21> Google Fonts is free. Buying a licence to use a font on the web can be expensive.

Also, Google Fonts does more than just delivering a font to the browser - <USER2> text= and font subset features can reduce the download size a lot, which you couldn't do if you were serving the Woff2 yourself on a dynamic site (eg you didn't know what characters were needed before the page rendered on the server or client).

Lastly,for common fonts like Roboto and Open Sans, there's a non-zero chance it'll already be in the user's cache. That's a win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The operating system stats are interesting.

Looks like Macs have roughly a 17% share of the windows + mac total requests. The overall market share per wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors)) is something like 7% for Apple.

Fonts are probably used by most "normal" computer users in some way so I wonder where that difference comes from

\- windows breaks faster and must be replaced more often, increasing the number of sold windows systems per year

\- windows users use computers differently? Must be a pretty big thing to cause such a difference

\- more windows systems not connected to the internet?

I kinda doubt that the typical enterprise windows setup with strict firewall rules etc. will have a meaningful impact on web fonts and IE 6+ seems to support google fonts ([https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_su...](https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_supported))

Any ideas?

<comment><USER23> The stats are interesting but do not warrant such a condescending/misrepresentative view; they could easily be twisted around, for example, to say

\- Macos has broken browsers and doesn't cache, resulting in multiple font downloads per website browsing session.

\- Macos use computers differently? Do they refresh the page multiple times racking up a download count?

The first odd thing about the stats is Linux's share; with a 2% market share it's racked up 10T downloads. A major part of that is Android based browsers, but a decent part of that will be Linux desktop users, developers, automation tests and so on. Overall we should expect users' browsing habits playing a part; there may be a large shift towards mobile/tablet web consumption and reduced desktop web consumption causing a stats skew.

<comment><USER24> Any time CI hits a site with these fonts integrated an ephemeral session (no cache) probably has to download them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised that Linux is the most popular client for this.

<comment><USER26> That's probably because Android isn't listed separately.

<comment><USER27> Interestingly iPhone and iPad are listed separately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How to track everyone, everywhere.

<comment><USER29> Pretty much. Provide a basic service to the Internet and get the benefit of sucking-in all that usage data. Here's to hoping we somehow figure out how to use something in the future without handing over our data at the same time. And don't tell me "we did this to ourselves because we didn't want to pay for it with money, so we pay for it with privacy", you pay companies and they still do this. It's just too tempting for companies to miss it. We need regulatory protections for individuals' rights over corporations' rights and it needs strength behind to be enforced.

Answers? Oh, I don't have them, I am just pointing out the problem.

<comment><USER30> decentraleyes plugin, although I wish there was an easy way to add local sources

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can someone provide insight into _why_ Google is hosting fonts for free?

Anytime an advertisement company decides to do something for free, my cynicism goes on high alert. I am genuinely curious though - what's the business model? Are they collecting massive amounts of data while offering fonts?

<comment><USER32> The reason I self-host fonts (that I paid for) on my personal website is that I don't want third party tracking via fonts on my website. It's all first party and I want to keep it that way. So there is your answer: It's an easy way to track websites via another vector other than Google Analytics, which many people block or which is not installed everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know whether this service generates any revenue for Google? I can't see selling fonts data as something desirable by 3rd party companies but maybe that's just me?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.

<comment><USER26> Their FAQ says that they don't (currently) use cookies, but it also includes the sentence "Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure", so they could still do some IP-based analytics.

More importantly though, it gives Google accurate insight into web traffic (many users block Google Analytics, but almost everyone loads web fonts), and it allows them to crawl websites more easily – before web fonts, many websites used pre-rendered PNGs to show web-unsafe fonts, which made crawling impossible.

Google has poured a lot of money into this, the fonts are free and open source, and the users aren't the product. Overall, I think it's a rare win-win story in this age of dystopian adtech.

<comment><USER34> > Google has poured a lot of money into this

Why, though? Not charity, I'd assume. The only other answers I can come up with are pretty damn nefarious.

<comment><USER3> I can speak to this a little, in terms of pitches we made to management to get resources for our little project. None of this is authoritative.

1\. A _lot_ of text was rendered into PNGs, and that made the web less searchable, as well as less accessible, slower to load, and less mobile- friendly. All 4 of these factors do have economic impact at Google scale.

2\. Fonts were one of the few features that Flash had that HTML5 was lacking, and we wanted to accelerate that transition. Again, mobile was one of the major driving factors.

3\. For a while, we were organizationally funded under Google Docs. Again, fonts were one of the major missing features compared with Microsoft Office, so filling that gap was strategic. Here, our open source approach really paid off, otherwise dealing with proprietary font licensing in the context of documents that can be shared and copied would have been nightmarish.

4\. To the extent that you are able to make the case that fonts make ads better (or advertisers happier), getting modest amounts of funding ceases to be a problem. To be clear, when I was on the team this was more of a glimmer of future abundant resources than day-to-day reality.

Lastly, while "charity" isn't exactly the right word, the motivations of the people working on the team are/were basically that we love fonts and want to make the Internet better. At Google scale, we were able to sell the project using basically a combination of the above arguments.

Never once when I was on the team were we asked to implement any form of individual user tracking, nor did I hear a suggestion of such a thing. All our work on collecting analytics was to improve performance and quantify our impact. I have no reason to believe things have changed on that front since I was directly involved.

<comment><USER35> Are you the Raph who built Advogato?

I loved that site.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Yes, I've had quite a varied career so far :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How much data traffic could google save if it would just bundle all fonts with chrome?

<comment><USER37> how much space would packing all those fonts take up?

<comment><USER38> With some extra metadata, about 428MB.

[https://github.com/google/fonts](https://github.com/google/fonts)

Since the browser hands font rendering off to the operating system, however, the most pertinent browser-specific adjustment would be updating the (configurable) defaults (Serif, Sans-serif, etc...) for each supported platform - Georgia instead of Times for a default, for example.

<comment><USER39> You bundle the top 10 most popular fonts and save about half the traffic: counter is ticking about 20M per minute or 201B per week, top 10 fonts were used 136B times this week, Chrome is about 3/4 of users. Bundling would save (136/201)*(3/4) = about 1/2\. However, Google would lose about half of their tracking events so I'm sure they've already thought of this and figured the data is worth more than the traffic expenses.

<comment><USER37> that to me is the real reason behind this service. it might not make money, but the statistics and insight they get are worth way more than money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Might be a bit of a dumb question. But when I load google.com and look at the requests. It has fonts.google.com says 200 and 'from memory cache' is that actually sending a request in any way to Google? Or is that actually handled locally? Most of the time I am getting this, so not seeming to make actual requests to them the majority of the time. Is it actually hitting their servers for these tracking stats, or is something like that not even making it to these stats?

<comment><USER41> It depends on the cache control headers sent by the original asset. If you want to make sure you don't hit the CDN, install the Decentraleyes browser extension.

<comment><USER3> At the time I was there, we aggressively set the cache control headers to minimize the number of requests. Among other things, the font binaries were all versioned and served so each URL was immutable forever. (There's some subtlety around this, it's a 2 stage process with CSS first then the font binaries, and the CSS was generally served with 24 hour expiration).

One motivation was sharing the cache among all sites that linked the fonts, which at the time I think was a big win, but as has been mentioned elsewhere, this is going away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'd like to view web pages as the authors intend them, but I also don't want to send details logging to google on every page I visit.

Is there a way to somehow proxy a subset of popular fonts locally rather than block the CDN entirely?

<comment><USER43> I think this should be added to the Decentraleyes extension ([https://decentraleyes.org](https://decentraleyes.org)) which does this for popular JS frameworks. There is already an issue for this: [https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387](https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387)

<comment><USER44> I love Decentraleyes but how would they redistribute most web fonts without running afoul of their licenses?

<comment><USER45> Download batches on initial extension load, and periodically thereafter, and cache them locally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Cool. I'm curious about how they counted it. Do they have opted-out setting?

<comment><USER18> Number of hits on the web server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What is GSA? A little searching hasn't brought up anything I could see being a browser.

The closest I could find was Google Search Appliance but I wouldn't think that is applicable to these stats.

<comment><USER48> Google Search App. The app called "Google" on Android and iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Amazing! And a great link to add to the resume of those designers!

</comment><comment><USER50> The top OS for the year is - Linux (15.3T) and i dont know how to interpret this.. Is this due to the web server?

<comment><USER51> The vast majority of those clients are probably Android

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> In my "humble" oppinion only three most significant (decimal) digts count if you are looking at growth.

</comment><comment><USER53> Yeah, 36 trillion requests slowing down the loading of websites. Way, unnecessarily, overused.

<comment><USER54> If google embedded the top fonts in the browser this wouldn't be an issue. I don't understand why the font selection in browsers is so limited.

<comment><USER55> Practically there's no difference between a browser that lazily downloads builtin fonts, and a global URL for a font file across websites with an extremely long TTL. And you don't want the browsers to be even more bloated than they already are!

<comment><USER56> > font file across websites with an extremely long TTL.

Caches are no longer shared across domains because doing so leads to privacy leaks: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going- away](https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-away)

<comment><USER57> -

<comment><USER58> The parent comment's point is that this cache is partitioned by frame origin (which the link details).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> It's long past time for p2p networks to make this number meaningless / unknowable!

</comment><comment><USER60> Anyone know what's up with "Slabo 27px"? Looks like its recent usage is much lower than other fonts with similar totals (it's at 800m views in the last 7 days while the fonts above and below it are all ~4b). Also the only font I haven't heard of in the top 20, though maybe I just happened to miss it every time.

</comment><comment><USER61> Lobster is the new Comic Sans.

</comment><comment><USER62> So much wasted bandwidth

</comment><comment><USER63> Well, I have disabled web fonts on my computer when I initially configured it.

</comment><comment><USER37> it should link to the font so we can see them

<comment><USER37> Granted my own wish :)

[https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity](https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> [ctrl]+[home] keyboard shortcut doesn't work on this page in FireFox. I had some trouble with [ctrl]+[end]. It's quite disappointing to see basic webpage/document functionality broken on a site claiming to improve the web experience. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned web user.

<comment><USER18> Highlighting text and scrolling is broken too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: API to count social sharing - <AUTHOR>

We're looking at ways to track how much our articles (on a content site) are shared. Are there any API's out there that provide sharing counts? <comment><USER2> You're probably best off writing your own software so you can diagnose issues as they arise.. but I had people use <http://sharedcount.com/documentation.php> at my employer before we wrote our own processes to do it for us</comment>


A new contract highlights the difference between "new" and "old" space - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/the-us-military-is-still-paying-a-spacex-competitor-for-rocket-upgrades/ <comment><USER2> ELC contract mentioned ($800M a year just to maintain capability) expires in 2019 and probability of its extension is exactly zero. So at least part of the problem will go away.

ULA being 2x more expensive (but not 3x+ as now, with the ELC annual payments removed), for its much higher reliability, given the enormous cost of the government payloads, sounds like a fair deal.

Early cancellation of ELC was under serious discussion in mid-2016 and it would have most certainly been done already if not Amos-6 accident which raised serious concerns about SpaceX's quality culture.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: ULA just got a $28M government contract to upgrade rocket avionics within two years for work that has already been completed and flown.</comment>


Serverless Express - <AUTHOR> https://www.serverless.com/blog/serverless-express-apis-aws-lambda-http-api/ <comment><USER2> Is the dev build streaming from cloud watch? That is a cool feature.</comment>


Hotfire test completed ahead of milestone Falcon 9 launch Thursday - <AUTHOR> https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/03/27/hotfire-test-completed-ahead-of-milestone-falcon-9-launch-thursday/ <comment><AUTHOR> This launch is SpaceX's first reuse of a booster.</comment>


The Seed Investment Patterns of Billion Dollar Startups - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/seed-follow-ons <comment><USER2> I think you would need to include companies with < $500M values to be able to answer the question:

> But is the seed strategy working for startups and VCs?

The data presented here appears to have a selection bias since you've only selected companies that resulted in $500M+ valuations.

So, I don't think you can draw this conclusion from the data presented here:

> But on the whole, investing in seeds seems to pay off handsomely for VCs

I do agree that investing in seed pays off if you have a big winner!

> particularly if the seed investing program lands a big winner

Aside from that potential fallacy, I find the data and other questions here interesting.</comment>


Is Covid-19 a Geopolitical Game-Changer? - <AUTHOR> https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/covid-19-geopolitical-game-changer <comment><USER2> [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52104978](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52104978) i think this analysis on the possible long term effects of this crisis is more usefull. They say that the perceived risk of ordering parts from east asia is now much higher and that they will likely prefer local producers because of that perceived risk. (don't know if that is practical, as things nowadays are much more specialized)

<comment><USER3> Covid won't do much to supply chains.

China's decisions regarding intellectual property and trade secrets (IP), however, haven't changed and are the reason my (large) employer has stopped sending anything sensitive there. We still sell to China but any IP entering the country is assumed as forfeit.

Other countries are becoming more competitive even outside of IP considerations.

I think we'll see more and more "the Chinese economy" and "the US Et al economy" but mainly divided by IP. Covid will be a minor blip on that scene.

<comment><USER4> It's easy to see that a lot of countries will be rethinking their supply chains. Especially everything concerning the medical industry.

<comment><USER5> yeah but its also easy to see capitalism deciding that the super cheap near slave labor in china make those products much cheaper, why buy local when it can be gotten for half the price +- 2 days delivery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Comparative advantage was an often used debate point by Australian politicians. Unfortunately, only recently have studies on this topic started to mention that some countries exploit what is essentially slave labour, and that they have little regard for environmental consequences. I believe these studies strongly influence our public servants so it's unfortunate that such important points have not being raised sooner by academics.

Higher worker costs, along with other reasons, means the Australian manufacturing industry could not compete in the international market. With import tariffs being steadily reduced since the 70s (from roughly 35% in 1970 to below 5% in 2016), the local industry could not compete against international competitors in the local markets either. Without these protections, all of our car manufacturers have shut down, for example.

So, we're in a situation where the majority of our local manufacturing industry has evaporated. We are dependent on the industries of other countries.

This is only made possible by our abundance of in-demand and conveniently- located raw materials. Our exports are mostly oil (33%), unprocessed ores (29%) and uncut gems (7%) (other types of industries don't come close, with meat next at 4%). This has supported our dollar and given us fifty years of paradise.

Clearly, this is not sustainable. Should our goods stop selling, our exporters will be in trouble, our dollar will drop, and our importers (everyone!) will be in trouble.

It shouldn't be necessary, but I hope a silver lining of this recent crisis is that it provokes our politicians into fixing this absurd situation. I do not want to be dependent on the slave-driven & environmentally-damaging industries of other countries.

<comment> blaser-waffle Replace ore with oil, but otherwise the same story in Canada.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure how this will affect the current strategic balance. It's safe to say that China will recover faster, but they are so export-dependent that their economy will still be crippled by global lower demand.

However, I think this also shows that large-scale government intervention in the economy is necessary in the current world. Ostensibly free-market economies aren't free anyway, as the Fed continues to show.

<comment><USER8> > However, I think this also shows that large-scale government intervention in > the economy is necessary in the current world.

Mostly as a result of large-scale government action. Don't forget that the majority of the economic 'damage' from the coronavirus is from the shutdown, not from the virus itself. If lockdowns were determined on an individual / localized basis, the outcome might have been different.

<comment><USER9> > If lockdowns were determined on an individual / localized basis, the outcome > might have been different.

And medical systems would suffer from a horrific tragedy of the commons

<comment><USER10> You don't know that. As California chose to suggest staying at home (it's _basically voluntary_ not even enforced particularly aggressively except for a handful of corner cases) earlier than the rest of the country, proving that decentralized authority can lead to better outcomes.

Imagine if California chose to defer to federal authority; a huge chunk of 40 million people would have been put at higher risk.

<comment><USER11> We do know that, however, as we keep seeing it.

The reason no one can find toilet paper is not because there isn't enough, it's because the public either went nuts mimicking Asian buying (they don't produce TP, they did have a shortage), went nuts overbuying due to the resulting apparent shortage, or went evil trying to take advantage of everyone else by reselling and price gouging.

The same thing is happening with food now. Bread yeast that used to go for ~ $8 to $14 a box, can be found now only from resellers trying to charge upwards of $70 for it.

In Massachusetts, early action on shelter-at-home, before the order went out, seems to have helped, as it has in California. But in Southern states the common thinking is that this is something that just happens to someone else. It's just the flu. What's horrific about that is that even if New York, for example, succeeds, it could come back anyway because of these folks.

They'll know it's denial when reality kills them in the middle of their opinion-touting.

<comment><USER12> _But in Southern states the common thinking is that this is something that just happens to someone else._

If one is in a rural environment, this view is understandable. Not seeing one's neighbors (outside of now cancelled gatherings) may well be the norm.

 _It 's just the flu. What's horrific about that is that even if New York, for example, succeeds, it could come back anyway because of these folks._

If there is an unlucky mutation and a 2nd go around, the likelihood of that is driven by population. It's the population centers like New York which would most likely produce this.

 _They 'll know it's denial when reality kills them in the middle of their opinion-touting._

That's often how a free society works. People are free to make decisions, good and bad, and others can then learn from their mistakes. We must be willing to convince, not coerce, when we can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only thing we know is something big happened and it's probably going to have some effect. That's it. It's not like we don't have examples from history to look at. Even with the clarity of hind site can you say what the effect of the AIDS crisis was? Polio? Spanish flu? No we can't. Would things have been different if they hadn't happened other than a lot of people wouldn't be dead? Sure, but how would they have been different? Not so sure. I don't think it's even worth speculating other than knowing that whatever you come up with is probably going to be wrong.

<comment><USER14> I think it's possible to know more than just "there's going to be an effect" from history. 1st order effects (i.e. this happened because of this) are usually quite obvious and observable. For instance, are we going to see remote work becoming more mainstream because of this? I think that is almost a certainty at this point.

In simple systems, 1st order effects are dominant.

However you're right that in complex systems like geopolitics, the dominant effects are not 1st order, but higher order (2nd, 3rd, 4th order) and those are hard to isolate -- all the effects are mixed. Also, we can't measure the counterfactuals ("what would have happened if...") because they didn't happen! Of course, historians and writers will try to fill in the gaps with their theories and invariably they're going to be wrong to various degrees and still make the NYT Best Seller list.

That notwithstanding, we can still learn something (albeit limited) from the 1st order effects that are observable -- it's not all or nothing.

<comment><USER13> They aren't obvious and observable other than your defining 1st order effects that way. Remote work becoming more mainstream because of this isn't a certainty at this point. It took a pandemic to get employers to allow it in a large way, why would you assume that once that is gone you're going to keep it? For all you know there will be a backlash and there will be less remote work than before. Did you think you're going to come out of this with more leverage with your employer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is Covid-19 a Geopolitical Game-Changer? I hope and pray that this is the case. This may be the best time for us to make a change in the way the world works. Our lives have been disrupted, and we need to strive to make lasting changes for the greater good.

The internet, and our world is over-commercialized. The pandemic causing an economic re-evaluation which may be the best opportunity we have to re- evaluate our position. If not, and you think the advertiser/marketer/retail market was invasive before... you aint seen nothing yet. They will need to try every trick in the book x10 - repeatedly, at lighting speed - and invent new tactics to boot. I know, this type of talk makes it seem like the Max Headroom blipverts are the future.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk)

</comment><comment><USER16> What a complete rubbish article. Apparently the three possibilities as an outcome are; 1) Nothing changes, 2) "China's rise is confirmed" (does this even mean anything?) and .... 3) Biden is elected. I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that these three choices do not span the space of possibilities, or even the space of large probabilistic mass for the possibilities, but they may span the space of the acceptable outcomes to the clown who wrote it.

Let me propose an alternative 3 possibilities that presently seem more likely:

1) Autarky is recognized as not so bad after all, at least in strategic resources

2) International institutions continue to not matter much in a crisis

3) Someone is elected (I could be wrong about this)

<comment><USER4> It's a good question whether the Covid-19 crisis is good or bad for Trump.

You might say Biden benefits because Trump looks so incompetent. But his voters knew that already. Most of them vote for him because of a singular issue in which they have the minority view: abortion, extreme gun rights and white superiority. To these voters, nothing else matters, even if they were totally aware of Trump's incompetency and corruption. I even think many pretend to not notice that, because they don't want to admit how important their single-issue is to them.

In my opinion, Covid-19 will be good for Trump because that is his only chance to get the voter depression he needs to win against an overwhelmingly more popular candidate, according to all the polls.

<comment><USER17> Do you know Trump voters? Your depiction of them seems extremely bigoted and does not reflect the reality I've experienced living in an overwhelming Republican state. Trump's approval rating has been increasing and his disapproval rating decreasing over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, so your read on the situation does not seem to match reality.

While I agree that the handling could be better, I don't think Trump looks that incompetent, especially when compared to other countries' leaders (most of Europe is doing about as badly as the US) and organizations like the CDC (masks don't work), the WHO (closing borders is racist), and the government of New York (encouraging people to go to the movies and restaurants in March).

I think your view of Trump is preventing you from getting an accurate read on reality. FYI I'm not a Republican and did not vote for Trump.

<comment><USER18> > approval rating has been increasing

FWIW, that is not holding true. He got an uptick in approval of 2-3% early on, but it has been slipping a bit since then, trending slowly back towards where it was previously. About 45% approval, about 50% disapproval, so he's still underwater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm. I would not be so certain for a Chinese rise-up after covid19. If you had asked this question three months ago, no one would have doubted that China was on track to be the dominant world power, given that the Trump presidency trades American dominance for little to no gain (e.g. leaving Paris Accords, retreating out of Iraq/Afghanistan/Kurdistan, while at the same time cozying up with dictators and autocrats like North Korea or Saudi-Arabia), while at the same time China exploits the reduction of Western help in both Africa (where China now provides investment aid / work without the strings that are usually attached to Western aid, like rules of democracy) and Europe itself (where Italy, Greece, Spain and other countries, e.g. Croatia or Serbia, turn to China for financial / logistical assistance as the EU is unwilling to help out thanks to Germany/Austria/Netherlands opposing). Also, China abuses that influence regularly to tune down criticism of e.g. the Muslim Gulags or the Tibet situation, because a trade blockade or stop to supply money is an effective threat that China can make as many countries depend on cheap Chinese labor or money by now.

Now with Covid19 however? Many people and many corporations are effectively forced to diversify their supply chains (Apple most famously) or to re- nationalize critical production like ventilators or even mass goods such as masks, gloves and overalls for medical staff; at the same time consumers in most if not all nations will face a _massive_ lack of spending power on goods that are not essential to their survival. Both of this will drastically reduce the dependence of Western (and other) nations on China, and if Corona FINALLY forces Germany and the Netherlands to drop their blockade of Eurobonds then also China won't be needed as financer for poor-er EU countries.

On the other side, I would also not bet on the US to rise to fill the void they themselves have left and China will leave, especially if Trump gets reelected (his approval ratings are on record highs for whatever reason). I'd rather expect a further deterioration of international institutions such as the UN and even EU as states will resort to more nationalism and a decent load of chaos in one or two years when there will be vaccinations available and global travel will begin to flow again...

<comment><USER4> Even before Covid-19 I thought China would soon be hitting some form of glass ceiling. Partly because of things like a virus that gets a head start on an authoritarian, corruption-riddled government. If they had their sh*t together, they would have enforced their ban on "exotic" meat already and the whole episode might never even have started at all. And they also can't get a grip on the African Swine Fever, for similar reasons, which also hampers economic growth. Then there was the Sanlu milk powder scandal. Similar things echo around modern Chinese history. Dishonesty can win in the short run, but it hurts long-term.

Lack of openness means corruption, corruption means volatility, volatility limits growth. Yes, they achieved a lot of great things for their people. But without an open and much more honest society they will reach a ceiling. And then there is the threat of some kind of "Economic World War" when the rest of the world has had enough of Human rights violations of Third Reich proportion (Falun Gong, Uighurs, etc) and their unfair trade practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The consensus is Covid-19 is a naturally occurring rather than engineered virus. Everyone outside of a very small number of radical conspiracy theorists understand this.

But here's a dark thought. China has just showed the West if there ever _is_ a biowar, who will likely win.

<comment><USER21> "The only way to win is not to play."

China certainly did not win. The best they could be thought to have done is "lose less badly". Even that is questionable, depending on how much you believe their statistics.

<comment><USER20> Did they close their whole country to control the spread? Are they mostly open now? Did they have the same rate of infections and deaths (even if they fudge numbers some)?

Look, I dislike CCP as much as anyone but I think we need to look at reality so we can be prepared.

<comment><USER21> > Did they close their whole country to control the spread?

Yes, they did... eventually. You certainly could make a case that they did it far too late (though that could also be said of other countries).

> Are they mostly open now?

Maybe? They say they are. Other people have questioned that claim.

> Did they have the same rate of infections and deaths (even if they fudge > numbers some)?

Hard telling, if they fudge the numbers. There are _huge_ discrepancies between the official numbers and what other people try to estimate by indirect means (cremation urns, for example). Depending on who you believe, their death toll may be horrific.

Mind you, I'm not saying that these other claims are correct. I'm saying that we don't know that the official claims are correct, and if they're wrong, we don't know how far off they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > the election of Mr. Biden to the White House is not impossible

As nice and warm and fuzzy it may be to believe that the Democrats regaining the White House would solve/help these issues, I doubt there'd be much of a difference. There weren't exactly huge top-down changes between Bush, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama.

<comment><USER19> > There weren't exactly huge top-down changes between Bush, Clinton, Bush 2, > and Obama.

But at least neither of the four essentially _tanked_ US international relations with allies like Trump did, by essentially dismantling American influence everywhere from the UN to long-time allies such as Europe, South Korea or the Kurds.

Another four years with Trump and the once "leader of the free world" will be no leader any more.

<comment><USER23> Why is it so important to you that the "free world" follow the United States and by extension, one particular political party inside the United States. Why can't the "free world" be free and not need to check in with the United States for permission on everything? Is it really that important for the United States, and one particular political party inside the United States, to have control over the "free world"?

<comment><USER19> > Is it really that important for the United States, and one particular > political party inside the United States, to have control over the "free > world"?

(As a German) I _massively_ prefer a global system led by the US (or for what it's worth also the EU if we could get our fucking act together...) and a common basic value set (liberal democracy, rule of law, universal human rights) than nationalist chaos (like what the EU is sadly heading towards) or, worse, authoritarian/illiberal surveillance state systems like what China is exporting.

As for the "one political party" I hope that the current administration has disintegrated this party so hard that the USA _will_ get someone sane as president again who fixes the issues that are no longer avoidable and that the Republican Party goes down forever (many have already left the ship / been forced out by Tea Party and now QAnon types). Obviously I'd prefer Sanders but even _Biden_ would do IMO.

<comment><USER24> I am not sure I like the idea of a global system led by a country that has been at war ever since world war 2 (arguable the cold war was not a war but that is debatable).

The is a good reason why the US spend more on their military then the rest of the world combined. They are at war. Same reason why their surveillance operations operate indiscriminately against anyone they can target. They are at war. Countries in peace time operate very differently from countries in war time, and the behavior of the US is one of a country in war.

EU could be better but it was original designed to create a single market in order to improve production and decrease the risk of war within EU. In order to apply that model globally you would need to make a global single market, and that concept has a lot of problems since you then need a single common standard for all production of products, services and goods, and it need to be uniformly enforced.

Neither seems such as good entity to put our hopes on for a common basic value set in regard to liberal democracy, rule of law, and universal human rights. It should also be noted that the US do not agree to the EU definition of universal human rights, something that was quite talked about during bush and obama era when officials argued in favor of torture as a interrogation method.

As a non-US citizen, I would like to see the US elect someone who want to end their constant wars. Trump was almost such candidate with his "american first" slogans, even if the chance of that actually happening was slim. Sanders is a new chance, as he want to redirect military funding into social safety nets and health care. Biden however, similar to clinton, has been part of the government that increased funding to the military and in his public statements there is nothing to imply that under their rule there will be finally peace time.

<comment><USER19> > As a non-US citizen, I would like to see the US elect someone who want to > end their constant wars.

But who and what follows after the US drop out and retreat? Just look at Kurdistan: the Kurds are being all but eradicated by Erdogan and Assad. Afghanistan is going to fall back to the Taliban Islamists. Iraq? Steering towards collapse. Libya is essentially fucked beyond repair. China is free to do whatever they want, same for Russia.

Human rights are only words on a paper when there is no one to back them against those who openly crap on said paper. I agree the EU should be stepping up to the voids that the US leaves, but unfortunately a chaotic power transfer is chaotic and will result in suffering and death.

<comment><USER24> As Sweden took in a lot of refugees from the middle east I actually hear a lot of their own views on the subject. As long as the rest of the world are infusing the area with money in exchange for oil the wars there will continue.

There exist a good reason why nations stopped allowing money going to blood diamonds. Inequality fuels conflict and oil money has a long and proven history of increasing inequality. Cutting off the money river would do more to stabilizing the region than any number of more military bases, bombs, drones and invasions could ever achieve. Yes, china and Russia would jump in in order to attempt seizing that oil in the absent of US interest, and in order to prevent them we would need to make it worthless for them to do so. Just like with money laundering we would have the new problem of oil laundering.

If we look at EU for inspiration, the peace inspired treaty that created it was primarily focused on steel. Steel production was expensive, required a lot of workers and energy, and involved a complex chain of inter-dependent markets. Nation measured themselves in their ability to create steel. The iron miners however did not get massively rich. Nor did the coal miners. EU managed to connect the sources for iron, coal, and nuclear energy, and in large this was the revolution in Europe for equality. The lower the friction of that market the more interconnected the involved countries became. As we now move away from a world focused on steel that union has seen increased instability. Just now in corona times people are arguing if countries of more successful management strategies will bail out those that is currently failing. We don't really feel it like we used to do if one country in EU drop in equality.

The US tactic of using bombs and invasions in order to create equality did also not work in the middle east. It might had worked in a steel focused era such as that after the second world war. Similar the EU tactic might had worked in the middle east if the oil market would behave more similar to that of steel. Right now however I doubt either will create the equality needed for peace. The most promising strategy would be to just leave them alone and make sure that the oil is never going to be worth wasting blood over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Short answer: Yes.

Before the pandemic I thought Trump has a very little chance to get reelected, and he needed a bigger miracle than last time. That "miracle" might be this pandemic. His support increased slightly, the pandemic might impact voter turnout and the Republicans might find ways of using the pandemic to further increase voter suppression. Four more years under Trump will depress American influence further.

I also feared that bad international actors would strike before the election, maybe more than one at a time, recognizing the US is at its weakest point in decades and can only get stronger with a president that can actually read. Examples would be Putin gobbling up territory in eastern Europe, North Korea testing a nuclear bomb or even poking South Korea militarily, Iran reaching the nuclear breakout or Israel launching a unilateral assault to stop it. Now, that might not happen, because all those countries have their hands full...

<comment><USER25> Democrats have failed to field a candidate that is viable, which is Trump's biggest advantage. Biden has been missing in action for weeks at this point. My personal feeling is all the other candidates dropped out too soon.

<comment><USER26> Sanders is still in, and still has 42% of allocated delegates, with more than half of delegates still unallocated. There's still a viable candidate in the race.

<comment><USER21> Sanders probably isn't a viable candidate. He can't beat Biden head-to-head (he got almost all his delegates when there were many candidates still in the race). And even if he did, I don't think he can beat Trump.

On the other hand, I don't think Biden can, either. (Or at least I didn't before Covid 19, which hasn't shown Trump to be the pinnacle of competent leadership.) Is the cupboard really that bare at the Democratic Party, that these candidates are the best they have?

<comment><USER4> All of these candidates were better than Trump, by any objective measure like polls, IQ, eloquency, politics, grasp of domestic and international issues.

Biden and Sanders had been pulling crowds just as large as Trump had been.

The only path to victory for Trump is a really low voter turnout. Biden is beating him in polls, by a much larger margin than Clinton did. Even in "battleground" states. Covid-19 is the only factor on the horizon that could lead to the kind of voter turnout that Trump needs to win. Otherwise, again from polling and the mid-term elections, you can expect a record voter turnout, especially on the democratic side.

<comment><USER18> Trump has a rock solid base, so he only needs to convince a few swing voters to jump on board. He could start pretending to be presidential (having someone else write the speeches, and refusing to do any talking that isn't on a teleprompter would be enough) and his approval ratings would shoot into the stratosphere because expectations have been set so low up until now.

It is not a good idea to underestimate him. He defies expectations, over and over, while doing things every day that would be the end of any other person's political career.

<comment><USER4> The base is not enough. He needs more independents to vote for him than last time. And according to most polls, he just doesn't have them.

You think he can act more presidential? No, he physically can't. He can barely read. Reading a teleprompter is torture for him. He messes up about one sentence in three (being generous) and takes pauses. He sounds like a hostage reading a manuscript. He constitutionally can't tell the truth, and that is evident from his long public life and has been even more densely proven through his presidency. He really doesn't have the skills to even "act" presidential or fake empathy.

He also is mentally incapable of not being in the spotlight. He is hijacking the Covid-19 press briefings, turning them into campaign speeches. Lying both about Covid-19 and about other issues like his Facebook popularity, his impeachment or whatever else he is obsessed about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> An elite globalist thinks that more globalism is the answer to issues caused by globalism.

OK.</comment>


New iPhone? No thanks. These older-model 5S owners don't need or want one - <AUTHOR> https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/09/09/5-s-holdouts-say-who-needs-a-new-shiny-iphone/2268000001/ <comment><USER2> Did Apple not buy advertising from the USA Today recently? :-)

There is a growing "digital detox" movement where people are trying to either stop using smart phones or switch to the oldest (and cheapest) phones that will allow them to get their work done (2FA apps required for work). I've specifically heard that the iPhone 5 and 5s are among the favorite models of these "would rather be using feature phones" crowd because they are the oldest iPhone models that support LTE/4G.</comment>