Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files - <AUTHOR> https://reclaimthenet.org/google-drive-takes-down-user-file-plandemic/ <comment><USER3> This might be the relevant section in the Terms of Service:

Public streaming Drive allows you to store, share, and stream video content, but should not be used as a replacement for a content distribution network. For large-scale public streaming, YouTube is a better fit. Drive will restrict usage when it appears that it's being used for large-scale public streaming. Repeated violations may result in additional action, including terminating your account or ability to use Drive.

[https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=63725...](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=637257739027213395-534836487&rd=1)

<comment><USER4> > Drive will restrict usage...

> ... including terminating your account or ability to use Drive.

I think that the controversial part is that the file was deleted. I'd find it surprising if some file from my Drive is just deleted instead of restricting public access or using another form of enforcing the policy.

<comment><USER5> Google has no obligation to be anyone's mouthpiece or loudspeaker, and we have no information on whether any files were deleted.

<comment><USER6> Next step will be, "Verizon has no obligation to be anyone's loudspeaker". No one is obliged to be anything to anyone if you put it that way, but then there's this thing called discrimination that goes counter to that - <USER2> expects a VERY GOOD reason to deny service to someone. "I have no obligation to sell to blacks", for example, does not stand. "I have no obligation to hosts anyone's word when I don't agree with that they say" stands? Perhaps we should get a list of all the things we are allowed to say and stop communicating through the internet altogether, as the list will have every information we will ever need to access.

<comment><USER7> Stopping the spread of harmful misinformation is a VERY GOOD reason to deny service to someone.

<comment><USER8> Who decides what is disinformation? A politburo in Google? Some high office in the USA?

I understand if they give a safebrowsing warning that the document contains potential misinformation, like for sites with potential malware. Blocking is not the right way to solve it. Censorship is always abused, in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see any evidence that Google applied a misinformation policy here. It could be that they simply don't want to pay for the bandwidth to serve video without any ads in it. It is a big file and a lot of people want it. That can get super expensive.

I don't know how big this file is, but let's say it's a 4GB DVD image. That ties up 1Gbps for 32 seconds, which means that with a 1Gbps link to your server, you can serve it to less than 3000 users a day. Even if you're getting budget residential ISP prices for your transfer, you're talking 1 cent per 10 copies of the video. At AWS prices, you're talking 36 cents for every copy of the video downloaded.

This sort of thing is why you either peer with an ISP at 10Gbps or more, charge money for file hosting, or use a p2p file sharing application.

Until I see some evidence that this is misinformation censorship (for example, Google removing a private file with a transcript of the video), I'm going to assume this is just limiting the impact on other users from a free user with a popular huge file. As HN always says, if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer.

<comment><USER10> On the other hand, they could support freedom of speech by not limiting access.

They _do_ block access, therefore suppressing freedom of speech.

Arguing with "they're just saving resources" is ridiculous, especially when considering Google's wealth.

<comment><USER11> Also, freedom of speech is not guaranteed on a privately owned platform... not sure why anyone expects that.

<comment> chroem- Windows 10 is a free subscription, and users don't necessarily own a license of their operating system. Under this precedent, what is to stop Microsoft from deleting problematic files off of users' computers? After all, it's a privately owned platform.

<comment><USER9> Windows 10 routinely deletes problematic files from peoples computers; it's called "Windows Defender". Most users are happy to let Microsoft delete malware. The reason that propaganda videos aren't detected as malware because none of these companies give a damn about what you're using your computer or your private storage for. It is a ton of extra work for them to run some censorship side business to specifically annoy conspiracy theorists. The reason that YouTube deletes propaganda videos is because nobody will advertise on them. They cost money to store and serve to viewers, but will never generate revenue. Some are so bad that they drive advertisers away from other videos. All this "censorship" is at the behest of advertisers, or fear of backlash from advertisers.

The thing with YouTube is that its greatest power is its greatest weakness. They let anyone in the world serve 4k or 8k videos to an infinite number of users. They find advertisers for your videos and automatically run their ads on your videos, so that you can get cash money from producing them. And, there is a recommendation engine so that viewers can discover your video and channel. With those advantages, come disadvantages -- the service as a whole is called YouTube, and so a bad video on your channel reflects poorly on other channels and the service as a whole. So they have guidelines to protect their success, at the cost of not making all the advantages available to you. That is why there are "guidelines". I am sure if you buy a Google Cloud account and pay for the transfer and storage of your content, and find your own advertisers to fund it, you can host as many conspiracy theory videos as you want and nobody will stop you. But I think you'll find that you make negative money on this proposition.

(Also, I personally paid $200 for Windows 10, so I'm not sure how people are getting it for free.)

<comment><USER12> If you had a previous version of Windows, the upgrading to Windows 10 was free.

Additionally, you can download Windows 10 and never activate it and all it will do is show a watermark indicating it is not activated.

You can always pay for Windows.

I think Windows 10 Pro is pay only.

<comment><USER13> Still just watermarked, in fact.

<comment><USER14> Hi there! It looks like you're shadowbanned, although I don't see the reason why. I vouched for this comment so people can see it, as it doesn't seem to be inherently harmful or against the guidelines. You should probably message Dang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Note that the article doesn't say explicitly whether Google deleted the video from drive, or simply disabled the public sharing of the video. If they only disabled sharing (like they would for spam, pirated materials etc.) this may be understandable.

<comment><USER16> This is a hugely important distinction. Can we please figure this out before we pick up the pitchforks?

<comment><USER17> The headline ("Google Drive takes down user's personal copy...") is suggestive of the file being entirely gone. There's a couple of paragraphs in the article that would seem to support this, but agree that it would be good to have it made very explicit.

<comment><USER18> Since Drive doesn't generally delete users' files for policy violations maybe the safer assumption is to assume that it wasn't deleted unless there's evidence that strongly suggests otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Similar news: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668267)

What I learned from that post is that as soon as you start share your file, it's no longer a private file and stricter guideline/requirement applies.

This is also indicated from the TOS:

> Files in your individual drive are private, until you decide to share them.

<comment><USER20> Yes, it turns out the the web is not, in fact, a giant virtual seastead unbothered by the norms and rules of society. If you distribute information via computer networks it will be subject to scrutiny to see if it is malware, copyrighted by someone else, exploitative, seditious, etc.

<comment><USER21> It's disingenuous to conflate Alphabet Corporation's political strategies with "the norms and rules of society".

<comment><USER22> It's disingenuous to conflate a private entities exercising their rights to "refuse a problematic client service" with infringement of the constitutionally protected free speech by a governmental entity.

<comment><USER23> Oh boy, another "private entities can do what they want" argument. What's the point in saying freedom of speech only applies in public places and protection from the government, and then turning around and handing over control of the biggest tool for sharing information (the Internet) to private companies? Sorry, but the "private companies can do what they want" argument is old and tired when it comes to censorship.

<comment><USER24> Anyone who doubts this argument should also take a look at the increasing role of private companies to circumvent your 4th Amendment protections on behalf of your government. A limited set of examples:

-License plate location databases -Cell location databases -Contact databases

The 4th may prevent your local PD from gathering all that data on every citizen, but it doesn't stop them from buying it from private companies that collect it. This is a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is crossing a very bad line, and is absolutely unacceptable.

My company of about 50 people on G-Suite will be canceling our subscription and moving to Office 365 within the next three months. We had discussed it in the past due to their history of flagrant disregard for the security and privacy standards we require, but this has galvanized the conversation and we're prioritizing it on the near-term now.

I'm sure we'll eventually discover that Microsoft has similar policies, and that there isn't any good option when it comes to putting sensitive data on another company's servers. Maybe we'll eventually need to self-host more system capabilities. But, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

<comment><USER26> The future is all about self hosting and/or peer to peer technology not controlled by a central authority.

<comment><USER27> Self hosting was 20 years ago. Who do you think is better at running a mail server, you or Google? Do you want to deal with spam complaints, security, OS upgrades, DMARC, SPF, etc? It's all a pain.

FYI I run my own mail servers as a hobby, but still have my main personal account on gmail.

<comment><USER28> _> Who do you think is better at running a mail server, you or Google?_

Neither. My hosting provider is better than either me or Google at that, and there are other companies providing email services who are better still.

What Google is "better" at with GMail is providing email whose suckage is just short of the level of suckage that would make it worth its users' while to give up having to just go to one place, their Google account, for everything in order to have email services that were bearable.

<comment><USER27> That's fine. The point was really, hosting it yourself vs someone experienced with all the nuances of email hosting. The fact is, it IS a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> From the article, it seems like they stopped public sharing of the video via Google Drive:

> In an article reporting on the takedown, The Washington Post's Silicon > Valley Correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin complains that after the coronavirus > documentary Plandemic was censored on social media, some YouTube clips were > telling users how to access "banned footage" from the documentary via Google > Drive.

> She then notes that after The Washington Post contacted Google, Google Drive > took down a file featuring the trailer for the Plandemic documentary.

<comment><USER30> So "journalists" are now colluding with platforms to censor information. Brave new world.

<comment><USER31> Not collusion, not "journalists". I imagine it went something like this:

Journalist: Hey, can I get a comment on this video, "Plandemic", being distributed on Google Drive?

Google employee: No comment.

And then Google employee sends a message to another employee and says, "Hey, do we need to do something about this? It looks like that video we took down off YouTube for violating our ToS is being hosted elsewhere."

Is it collusion every time a journalist asks someone to comment on a thing happening, and that someone then responds in some way beyond just saying "Yep that's a thing!"

<comment><USER30> It's like sending a picture of your neighbor's garden to the police, "asking for clarification" about what is permitted.

You can do that, but at least call it what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, so you're saying a free of charge Google Drive way to share files isn't without restrictions? I'm shocked!

I really thought this misinformation video people found a loophole to not have to pay for what bandwidth actually costs. I really thought that Google had offered a free CDN for everyone, limitless, when they (and Amazon, and Microsoft, and Akamai) charge huge amounts for this as a cloud service.

Yeah, that was sarcasm.

Bandwidth costs actual money. What's next? They think they can build a Youtube competitor by storing and streaming all the videos from a collection of free Google Drive accounts? Or even a business Google Drive plan? Read the ToS, or better yet use common sense.

<comment><USER33> > I really thought this misinformation video people found a loophole to not > have to pay for what bandwidth actually costs. I really thought that Google > had offered a free CDN for everyone, limitless, when they (and Amazon, and > Microsoft, and Akamai) charge huge amounts for this as a cloud service.

> Yeah, that was sarcasm.

Maybe so, but I came across a streaming site (of questionable legality) that did exactly this. Loaded an iframe with what looked like a random domain (always two first names, like "PedroMaria.xyz"). Then the iframe made a bunch of XHRs to load chunks of movie data from Google Drive. It was really quite fascinating.

Aside, this is one of my favorite things about using uMatrix with aggressive defaults -- as you unbreak sites, you learn a lot about what services are commonly used to build websites.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I'm not surprised. Having worked for multiple service and content providers I would assume that abuse like this happens.

One notable case was when a deal to license a database fell through when the would-be client said "I've found a different free way to solve this".

Turns out that "different way" was to scrape our website in real time and present it to their clients as their own, without attribution or payment.

Abuse happens. Shoplifting happens. That doesn't mean that the shoplifter "found a loophole", nor that it's morally or legally right.

And it's not unfair if the selective enforcement is based on "bandwidth actually used" or "in addition to violating our policies you're also hurting the world" (or even "we just plain don't like you"). I.e. in the case above about scraping our data, we just dropped it. They weren't going to be our customer, clearly, and suing (they were in a different country too) or technically blocking them would not be worth the cost. And they didn't consume that many resources at our scale, so whatever.

But if that site had been a porn site or something then the cost of doing nothing would include potential PR issues of being associated with them[1].

So in short: This (CDN from article, and using google drive like this) is abuse. A proof of concept likely won't get shut down, but it's not something that'll work in the long run.

[1] I'm not against porn as such, but let's say our database was one of children's toys. That kind of company would understandably be hurt by apparently making deals with porn sites to show up there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The file was widely shared on Google Drive and linked to from a public twitter message— it was very much not a personal file. And the title literally was, "An Effective Treatment for Coronavirus" referring to hydroxychloroquine. Google's doing its part to purge pandemic misinformation and prevent harm. The authoring "doctor," as far as I can tell has never had postgraduate medical training and cannot practice medicine without supervision, is trying to achieve writing a document with a title like that I don't know.

<comment><USER35> The goalpost moving by people here on HN is quite entertaining to watch. Hydroxychloroquine was just bought in bulk by the UK in case it turns out to be a cure.

Apparently the only people who are allowed to have opinions these days are academics employed by governments?

<comment><USER34> To be clear, the UK is undergoing a clinical trial with hydroxychloroquine. Hopefully it works, but as of now it's not known if the harms outweigh the benefits.

<comment><USER35> There are trials yes. And, to be clear, they're also bulk buying it:

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/uk-to-test- hyd...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/uk-to-test- hydroxychloroqine-as-coronavirus-treatment)

I have no idea if this medicine will have any impact but at this point, I've seen so many people claim it's some sort of quack medicine/conspiracy/etc that it's important people realise that it's being taken seriously. As far as I can tell the moment Trump mentioned it a huge number of people decided it must, inherently, be wrong and have been wrongly attacking it ever since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's not entirely clear to me, but did Google delete the file from the user's personal, private drive, or did they delete public access to the file?

Because the former is unacceptable, but the latter is not as big a deal at all.

<comment><USER37> The trouble is where do they draw the line. Say I share a pamphlet about how Jesus reclaims humanity from the corruption of sin. If Google thinks all Christians are superstitious bumpkins, does that give them the right to remove my public share?

<comment><USER38> They have the right to stop hosting whatever they are hosting for any reason or no reason at all. What makes you think they can be forced to host your files?

<comment><USER37> The implicit idea that they are not a publisher. Now they are. They should lose their protections.

<comment><USER39> What protections do you believe platforms have that publishers do not?

Article 50 doesn't make a distinction between the two, if that's what you're thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> does anyone know who the people behind the reclaimthenet.org domain are? The headline seems intentionally misleading and the entire article is biased, as seems to be the case for most of the site, almost exlcusively focussing on censorship of fringe figures out of conspiracy and far-right political circles.

There is no reference to organisations, writers or editors anywhere on this site if I'm not missing anything.

<comment><USER41> If it's hard to find out who is funding a campaign, it's a pretty good bet it's malicious disinfo.

<comment><USER42> Or, they don't want to be doxxed and harassed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Oh wow, this is bad! Google went from my favorite geeky company in the 00s to something I would like to avoid now as much as I can. I guess next on their list will be refusing to host any encrypted content on their GDrive just in case it contains something the head honchos at 10E100 don't like... From a disruptor for the better, ending up as an enforcer of the conformity. I guess that's the fate of every winner.

</comment><comment><USER44> what does "take down" mean ? did they turn off public sharing or delete the file ?

Why anyone would trust a corporation with their only copy of anything is mystifying to me anyway.

<comment><USER45> Since they didn't say delete I'm guessing they stopped the public sharing but that isn't as rage inducing so the article stuck to using "take down" hoping people would interpret it as delete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is it really personal files if it's used as a file sharing service?

<comment><USER46> It definitely seems like the "share a Drive file" method was used to widely distribute a video that didn't comply with Google/YouTube's policies. And using Drive in that manner is, of course, also a violation of their policies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> _The Washington Post contacted Google, Google Drive took down a file featuring the trailer for the Plandemic documentary._

Why is the WaPo out there policing other people's content? That's as bad a Google taking it down.

<comment><USER22> Neither are bad. A private company can refuse service to a problematic customer violating their TOS. Google is under no obligation to provide free services to liars who are intent upon stirring up trouble.

Think of how many bars ban problematic ex-clientele.

The WaPo is acting in the public interest, for once in their miserable life.

These Plandemic fans are a public health menace, give them no quarter.

Oh, as to the troublemakers: knock it off at once. this is serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Google Drive is not meant as a mass distribution service for video. Do they let you use it as a back door streaming service?

</comment><comment><USER49> I cannot believe the bizarro world we've entered.

"the problems that social media companies face: the weaponization of their services to amplify dangerous content"

Wut?

<comment><USER50> Have you not been paying attention

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's not a personal file if you share it publicly.

No private business should be forced to use their resources to promote dangerous bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER51> It seems to me that if Google (and the other platforms) don't tackle this kind of thing, the state _somewhere_ will. It only takes one country to make distribution of this stuff illegal or close to it, and that will amount to an edge of self regulation for the tech giants. They don't want that, so they do something to prevent it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wouldn't be surprised if this results in a Streissand effect.

<comment><USER53> totally agree. This is like fuel for an alt-right fire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I understand that corporations are private entities and currently within their legal rights to remove content.

This means, if they so choose, they could remove speech they oppose form youtube, google search, and emails.

Why are most people comfortable with a reactionary approach to this problem, and waiting to see if they exercise this right in a disagreeable manner? Wouldn't it be better to develop a solution _before_ the need arises and legislate a clear limit?

</comment><comment><USER55> Censoring is a losing battle. Because it attacks a symptom.

The cure for ignorance is not trying to hide missinformation (that just empowers the spreaders, gives it credence (they wouldn't bother suppressing it if it weren't true), or drives it into dark places you can no longer detect how much of a problem it is).

The cure is to educate people and teach them critical thinking (both of which are expensive and honestly most governments/companies/people in power don't really want a free thinking populace (they want a populace that believes their propaganda)) and to spread the truth (not that effective on populace who lacks high level of education and critical thinking skills)

<comment><USER56> Most people dont have the capacity for critical thought on every area of ambiguity/complexity. Its too wide a thought surface, and we have too few hours in a day. So we have things like dictionaries in our minds, filled with information via lots of sources from childhood, tv, peers, etc. Human brains arent logical, they are mostly look up systems.

<comment><USER57> > Most people don't have the capacity for critical thought on every area of > ambiguity/complexity.

I'd change that to "most people haven't been taught to think critically". It's clear that the average person has the mental capacity, genetic variations in intelligence aren't that large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Do the same rules apply to google cloud storage... or really any google cloud resource?

<comment><USER59> Last I checked anything under GSuite has very different rules than consumer Gmail accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I did not expect to see platform censorship accelerate at this rate. It always seems to be government and media dictating the terms of the censorship as well, which should be very concerning.

<comment><USER61> > It always seems to be government and media dictating the terms of the > censorship as well, which should be very concerning.

I'm not incredibly shocked. This is on some levels history repeating itself. Media has historically been 'self-regulating', if only because they want to avoid having regulations imposed on them.

However, this also has the not-unintentional side effect of those self regulating bodies also acting as gatekeepers.

Another parallel to draw: When the Hays code was challenged due to 1FA, the MPAA created the 'rating' system, in which movies have their content rated on by an unknown group of people impose their moral code, and remember before the age of the internet, you -had- to hit certain ratings to have any hope of a decent number of people seeing your movie. Any Adults-only rating would result in the overwhelming majority of theaters refusing to show the film.

Sure, you could still release it somewhere else.

Sound familiar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Anti-Google article -> Brave ad -> Eye roll.

</comment><comment><USER63> In a slightly parallel universe, it's going to be quite hilarious if all of the decentralised technologies are going to end up being developed by the types of anti-vaxxers, holocaust deniers, neo-nazis because they were the only ones needing them (and not the illusory political dissidents). So in the end it's going to have a positive impact.

Here's a supporting example: Snowden didn't need any of this tech to share it with us. Paedophiles and drug dealers use Tor.

I am not being entirely serious.

<comment><USER30> It's not that simple. In the west it's the "alt right" or similar that needs to bypass censorship. But in China, it's pro-democracy people.

Even inside a country, it changes. Dissenters 50 years ago are not the same ones as today. The left protested globalization 20 years ago; today it's the right.

My point is: we should let all ideas out there and not fight to censor the other side. Fight ideas with arguments and evidence, not censorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Then they aren't really

 _your_

personal files, are they?

</comment><comment><USER65> Nobody's stopping them from signing up for AWS and throwing the vid into an S3 bucket or whatever, nor are they prevented from buying internet access from a company that offers static IPs and serving the file from an old PC in someone's closet.

<comment><USER66> Until AWS and that ISP apply the same policy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This headline is very misleading. They didn't delete the file from the user's Google Drive - they disabled public sharing for the file.

<comment><USER68> Ok, we've swapped out the article title for its subtitle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Looks like they are flexing all the work done for Project Dragonfly. Waste not, want not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. There could be a new free-speech AI project for time-based "declassification" of previously censored material, to inform public study of censorship technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is gross and unethical but we should let them continue digging their own grave.

<comment><USER60> I don't think they are digging their own grave unfortunately. The majority of people seem to be Ok with this, and the majority will continue to use these platforms. I still use these platforms even though I hate what they are doing. We really do need some alternatives...

<comment><USER71> There are alternatives, but they don't have a free tier.

<comment><USER72> Regarding the sharing of controversial video content, isn't Bitchute pretty much a free alternative?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Further proof that when you upload a file to Google Drive, you don't own that file, they do

<comment><USER74> You use the platform, you abide by the contract. My only concern is that contract violations (or even gray area violations) are not always predictable by the customer because the legalese in the ToS is so vague.

You are overloading the term "own" and your use of "that file" is ambiguous. You "own" (in many senses) the local copy of the uploaded file. You only lease the space and hosting for the remote copy, assuming you pay your bill and abide by the contract. My coworker overflowed his Google Drive quota and learned that lesson the hard way.

<comment><USER18> > My coworker overflowed his Google Drive quota and learned that lesson the > hard way.

This sounds a lot more sinister than "my coworker had to delete some files to go back under his quota".

<comment><USER74> He lost many MBs of files. He had a local filesystem directory synced with GDrive. He _moved_ (didn't copy) lots of files into the directory and ended up losing all copies of some of the files (we still aren't sure how it picks which subset to keep). It was basically a few weeks of work because he didn't understand the implications of the change (and because he didn't have drive backups).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This seems apropos:

[https://shop.fsf.org/stickers/there-no-cloud-sticker- pack](https://shop.fsf.org/stickers/there-no-cloud-sticker-pack)

</comment><comment><USER22> Good. A private entity (corp) exercises it's right to free speech.

Google is under no obligation to provide services for anyone it deems troublesome.

Would you question a bartender or bar staff for refusing entry to a problematic client?</comment>


Cuil - <AUTHOR> http://www.cuil.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but it seems more skewed to Internet newbies, or people wishing to browse broader topics.

As a programmer who uses google daily, I tend to search for very specific terms and I scan the first few pages of results very quickly, and Google's layout makes that easy. But I also never click on any ads. So perhaps my opinion does not count :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> it's down right now... i guess they weren't expecting anybody to test it out

<comment><AUTHOR> It's back up, I kind of the like the UI with more data displayed on the page</comment></comment>


Silver makes antibiotics thousands of times more effective - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/silver-makes-antibiotics-thousands-of-times-more-effective-1.13232 <comment><USER2> Any sort of improvement over current antibiotics would be a godsend as the idea of antibiotic-resistance "superbugs" is arguably a ticking timebomb that presents an existential threat to modern society.

Right now the most common antibiotics we have (eg penicillin + synthetic derivatives) use a B-lactam ring to disrupt cell wall production. Now we start to see bacteria that are resistant to this attack, eg MRSA (Methicillin- resistant staphylococcus aureus), that in worst-case scenarios make even simple surgical procedures life-threatening.

Then we bring in the big guns, things like Vancomycin that disrupt cell wall production using different methods. But then we start to see Vancomycin- resistant microorganisms. So governments limit Vancomycin use so as to not give bacteria the opportunity to evolve and develop resistance. Thus drug manufacturers are unwilling to research new antibiotics because they can't make a profit off of restricted-access antibiotics.

So it's largely a game of cat and mouse that could very well result in a deadly worldwide epidemic. New ways of looking at the problem such as the one described in the article could, without even being hyperbolic, save billions of lives.

<comment><USER3> Antibiotic resistance is definitely not an existential threat. Most people do not catch any bacterial diseases that would be fatal if untreated before their reproductive years.

That doesn't mean it's a good situation, but existential threat is greatly overstating the problem. People would have to have an extra baby, MAYBE.

<comment><USER4> I would agree. Humans survived up all the way up until the point antibiotics were discovered, so why wouldn't they survive if all antibiotics suddenly became ineffective?

Sure you'd see average life expectancy drop dramatically, but I don't think you'd see humans die out as a species.

<comment><USER5> The number of people each person comes into contact with daily has increased dramatically. Basically the R0 of most diseases is much higher:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infectious_disease)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ahhh yeah, colloidal silver is making a comeback!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternative_medicine)

<comment><USER7> From your link:

"Colloidal silver preparations primarily deliver inactive metallic silver, rather than the active microbicidal silver ion."

From TFA:

"Collins and his team found that silver — in the form of dissolved ions — attacks bacterial cells"

<comment><USER8> Obviously, it's the colloidal silver version of homeopathy! I just hope the authors of the article haven't lulled themselves into thinking that they've just invented a silver bullet for infections.

<comment><USER9> The idea of homeopathy tries to make the solutions "stronger" by dissolving them with water. It's the main process behind it - the point where you're pretty much left with just water.

Nothing like that is claimed here. This idea is based on how ions of silver interact with cells which was also described. You may not agree with the article, but comparing it to homeopathy is just silly.

<comment><USER10> > [...] by dissolving them with water.

I thought they mostly used sugar or alcohol (depending on substance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ; but unfortunately silver also kills people.

PS: yet another [http://xkcd.com/1217/](http://xkcd.com/1217/)

<comment><USER12> There are many people who are allergic to penicillin. That does not make it any less useful to the rest of the population.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin_drug_reaction](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin_drug_reaction)

<comment><USER13> > There are many people who are allergic to penicillin. That does not make it > any less useful to the rest of the population.

There are tons of delicious foods that you can't buy in any restaurant or store no matter how much you're willing to pay, because a small percentage of people are allergic or whatever. So the entire population gets essentially zero use out of them even though they could be useful to the vast majority of people. (In fact, restaurants/stores/farmers markets only carry only a small percentage of the total foods out there.) Similarly a ride at an amusement park that is safe for the vast majority of people is a ride that no one is going to be allowed to go on.

Medicine is just a special case because doctors generally won't lose their license for killing the occasional patient, whereas, say, a restaurateur probably would.

<comment><USER14> Peanuts are fatal to some people, yet we eat them all the time. Here's a counter-example to your first claim. Another one is Fugu fish, which I personally ate at a restaurant, and which are known to be deadly if not prepared correctly.

Rollercoaster is dangerous to anyone with weak skeleton, and can likely induce heart attack as can a horror movie. Here's a counter-example to your other claim.

Do you have any examples that support your claims?

<comment><USER13> > Peanuts are fatal to some people, yet we eat them all the time.

Peanuts are banned from most schools.

> Another one is Fugu fish, which I personally ate at a restaurant, and which > are known to be deadly if not prepared correctly.

That applies to most foods, e.g. tomatoes, rhubarb, etc.

When is the last time you had chicken-of-the-woods in a restaurant though? Oh wait, never. Because 90% of people find them delicious, but the other 10% cyanose and then start projectile vomiting and shitting themselves. Of course on your own that's not a big deal because you just bioassay it on yourself first, but in a restaurant that doesn't work.

<comment><USER14> >Peanuts are banned from most schools.

Well, that's a far cry from _you can 't buy in any restaurant or store no matter how much you're willing to pay_.

So, we have established there are foods that are dangerous and can be had at a restaurant (raw fish, raw meat, peanuts, fugu), and there could be some foods that are dangerous and cannot be had at a restaurant (chicken-of-the-woods).

That's much less dramatic now, is it not?

<comment><USER13> I wasn't claiming that there are no potentially dangerous foods that you can buy at restaurants, only that there are many potentially dangerous foods that you can't buy at restaurants.

<comment><USER15> What are some more examples that are not mushrooms? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER13> I'm more familiar with mushrooms than plants. But are a ton of plants that aren't served for various reasons. In terms of plants that aren't served specifically because they have a high likelihood of causing bad reactions, I'm not sure -- milkweed and certain species of fiddleheads might be good examples. There are lots of different reasons for why certain foods aren't commercially available, and often it's just completely arbitrary. E.g. the reason you can't buy coca tea is that Obama doesn't recognize religions different from Christianity as being valid. (His administration specifically lobbied the UN not to let South Americans use it for religious purposes.)

<comment><USER13> @foobarbazqux

There are other animal-based ones that aren't really health related. E.g. restaurants aren't allowed to serve meat that's not FDA inspected, but the FDA only inspects a small variety of meats. There was a restaurant in SF that was serving cricket tacos and they got shut down because of this:

[http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/grasshopper-tacos- ba.html](http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/grasshopper-tacos-ba.html)

<comment><USER15> So yeah, the FDA caters to big industry, and the meat coming out of feedlots is scarier than your typical roadkill, but this is pretty well-known.

My understanding is that although there are a ton of regulations restricting the sale of food, the health reasons cited are generally dubious, rather than genuine. The chicken-of-the-woods thing is obviously genuine, and I'd believe the same for a lot of different mushrooms. I've purchased about 20 species of wild fungi and I'm basically content with that variety. Raw milk / cheese I would say was a dubious health reason.

Side note: if a reply link isn't there, you just need to wait a bit longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I read this interesting submission and the comments to date while I thought about this issue. I see the HN participant posting this story is new here, making his first article submission.

Some of the comments surprised me, as they seem to assume that antibiotics as a category of substances are only a few decades old. In fact, many of the first antibiotics in clinical use were "natural" substances, namely mycotoxins secreted by fungi in an endless chemical warfare arms race for living in a world full of bacteria. The reason that antibiotics are useful for human medicine is that fungi are much more biochemically similar to animals (like us) than bacteria are, being our comparatively near evolutionary cousins as fellow eukaryotes, and as such they are naturally selected to produce antibacterial mycotoxins that may be highly effective against broad groups of bacteria while being largely harmless to most animal tissues. But as the article notes, and as we would expect from evolution by natural selection, various strains of bacteria have been selected by differential survival to be more or less resistant to current antiobiotics.

Silver as an adjuvant for antibiotics may have some clinical usefulness. The research reported in the article here is laboratory rather than clinical research. There are many more steps to take before knowing whether or not this is a useful approach for human medicine, including carefully controlled clinical trials of safety and effectiveness. The reporter who wrote this news brief was careful to interview another scientist who warns that silver is toxic to human tissues as well as too bacteria, so dosage will be a crucial issue.

The obligatory link for any discussion of a preliminary research finding like this article is the essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

[http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html](http://norvig.com/experiment- design.html)

Check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission. Here we still need to wait for actual human clinical trials to know if the addition of silver to antibiotic treatments will have adequate safety and effectiveness.

AFTER EDIT: I'm going to an appointment for my children, so I'll be away from the discussion for a while. I'm not sure what the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on this comment means so far, as replies haven't explained yet what other readers think about this comment.

<comment><USER17> "Adjuvant"! _[C17: from Latin adjuvāns, present participle of adjuvāre, from juvāre to help]_ Cheers for a new scrabble word for the armory, _tokenadult_! The fungi point is a good one, well done for bringing it up. Ditto interpretive guidelines. The breadth of your knowledge is, as always, impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Although the title here closely matches the article title, it seems overstated/optimistic. The actual line in the article is "when boosted with a small amount of silver these drugs could kill between 10 and 1,000 times as many bacteria." That's a big range. Of course, this still could end up being quite useful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Granted, including "could" in the title would have been less misleading, given they indeed mention a "10x to 1000x" range. But I think readers should focus more on the outstanding scientific progress than on the slightly-overselling title.

Notably, the effect on bacteria membranes, and the ability to make antibiotics-resistant bacterias vulnerable to silver-buffed antibiotics.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of this funny story: [http://www.today.com/id/32774116/ns/today- today_news/t/blue-...](http://www.today.com/id/32774116/ns/today- today_news/t/blue-man-still-man-different-color/)

<comment><USER20> I really liked his quote:

      (TODAY anchor Matt) Lauer asked him if being on TODAY
      helped bring him out of his shell.

      "I didn't have much choice. I couldn't find the cave I was
      looking for," Karason said with his characteristic
      self-deprecating humor.

That will resonate with any introverts who have found themselves in a role that requires speaking in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if copper would also work. Copper is just as toxic to bacteria, but is more "bio-active" in the body.

This can be both good and bad: Good in that the body can actually remove the copper from the body (unlike silver which stays there permanently). And bad in that copper may be more toxic (don't know).

<comment><USER22> Copper can be problematic in high doses, but usually only when proper copper/zinc ratios are not maintained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If all the articles saying we're close to making something 1000x more effective, faster, better etc. were true I would probably be writing this comment while driving a solar powered flying car to my home on a moon base.

Really wish it was true.

</comment><comment><USER24> One important point that seems to be missed is that they really want to isolate what mechanism is causing the effect rather than planning to dose everyone with silver.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a natural selection factor it will lead to flourishing microbal cultures which are 1000x times more deadly than current cocci.

</comment><comment><USER26> Silver as adjunct treatment for infection sounds promising. I'm curious how this will turn out in the future.

</comment><comment><USER27> So does this mean there is some truth to the "magic healing power" of silver water?

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the sound of overdosing on silver and permanently turning blue / grey

</comment><comment><USER28> you know what else makes antibiotics more effective? bleach. this paper is ridiculous. figure 4: no tested amount of silver nitrate is noncytotoxic. end of story.

<comment><USER21> So don't use silver nitrate. Elemental silver has low toxicity, they should be able to find some salt with also low toxicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> ... in a petri dish.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm looking forward to tiny nanotech robots that can be deployed on search and destroy missions.

</comment><comment><USER31> Have fun with the biotics which will grow resistant after a while!

<comment><USER32> Antibiotics are a recent human invention, so it isn't surprising that resistance to them is still increasing. Silver, on the other hand, has been present in the environment since before bacteria evolved. If there was an accessible pathway to silver resistance, it would have been found in several billion years.

<comment><USER33> The genes for penicillin resistance predate the use of penicillin as an antibiotic. Perhaps there are genes which confer silver resistance which will be increasingly expressed as silver is used as a treatment.

<comment><USER9> That sounds interesting, but have you got a link to that paper/explanation? With the mutations happening all the time it seems to me like the question "can you step twice into the same river?" is close to what applies in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Attention all vampires: They are on to us!

</comment><comment><USER35> Be honest - who here for a second thought this meant that Nate Silver had improved the effectiveness of antibiotics?</comment>


Show HN: Tulipan – a cryptocurrency portfolio balance management tool - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I created Tulipan (née Tulips) as webappification of an excel sheet that I used to update my cryptocurrency portfolio balances.

I have used Tulipan for over a year now and find it perfect for my own requirement but have not really managed to get many others to use it. Maybe there are issues discouraging others.

<comment><AUTHOR> The front page is perhaps not clear enough as a landing page.

I tried Google Adwords but my whole account suspended immediately for still unknown reasons.

I tried Microsofts Bing ads but that was just an expensive experience with no conversion.

I might try Coinmarketcap ads but worried it is very expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> linkage?

<comment><AUTHOR> (:facepalm) [https://www.tulipan.io](https://www.tulipan.io)

I'd better resubmit it, as I can't edit it anymore.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: When would you use cloud based hosting and when dedicated hosting? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I my opinion you choose cloud if you have a high variance of user activity. Need 30 servers at day and 1 at night? Then Cloud is correct for you. Always need 4 servers? Then dedicated servers are probably best. Need servers with great ping and are in Europe and not England? Then use dedicated servers in the country where you are at or most of your customers are. But the best is a mixed setup if you can do that. Rent the number of servers you always need (3 for example) and for spikes start up the cloud with one or two more servers if you really need them for an hour.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I'd ever buy a physical server and plug it into the wall unless there was a regulatory requirement or I was going to be a cloud hosting provider.

Physical servers are a pain and there are too many options in the cloud to go down that path at this point.

<comment><USER4> You don't buy a physical server when you buy "dedicated". Dedicated means you rent a bare metal machine, not a virtualized one. It means you don't share it with anybody else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My strategy: Have a bare minimum of servers (darn things are ridiculously cheap anyway) hosted somewhere reliable near where I live. Any NEW stuff goes into the cloud. So if I decide I need to service European customers I might rent an EC2 VM in Dublin,Ireland from Amazon and test it out. If that does well I _may_ buy physical servers depending on economics. Any burst traffic would also be handled by virtual servers.

If you do the math, CPU in the cloud is just not cheap. Storage in the cloud may seem cheap, but that's only because enterprise storage is so expensive relatively speaking. If you're willing to put some time into it you can get 80-90% of "enterprise" functionality from your cheapo storage as well,thereby beating Amazon's economics.

But cloud is easy to provision and good for folks that don't want to deal with operating systems, networking, security, grumpy middle-aged sysadmins (that'd be me) etc etc.

<comment><USER5> The OP's question got me thinking about the expense/cost breakdown. I had calculated this earlier but figured I'd share the numbers in case its of any help.

For my project, I bought a new server ~3 years ago which I used for development and hosted from home for my prototypes etc. I paid around 1K for it.

I'm finally ready, so I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 vs. hosting. Two months ago I also bought a switch(new) and a server off Craigslist: total cost $550.

My provider has a bandwidth cap, like most. Making certain assumptions about the amount of b/w each user is going to consume etc, I believe I can support 3M users/month off my provider for a little more than $200/mo before I am upgraded to the next b/w tier.

For the same amount of CPU/bandwidth etc, making the same assumptions about users I'd pay ~$1K/mo on Amazon EC2. But I'd be able to support around 100K users/mo. Yes I know this is a huge number but its less than 3M.

Which is why I'm not going the cloud route. Plus in the worst case I can sell or donate my servers for a tax write-off.

I'd love to hear from others as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most cloud hosting is a scam. It will never compare to the dedicated deals. You should only get cloud if you expect crazy traffic spikes and need to scale quickly. Cloud is easier to manage though, so you might save on the sysadmin costs.</comment>


Cops can force your finger on a suspect's phone to see if it unlocks, says judge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/24/judge_forced_fingertoiphone_unlock/ <comment><USER2> As much as we joke about "sovereign citizen" mumbo-jumbo, the difference between physical and mental keys is a real magical distinction, legally speaking.</comment>


My Travel Habits - <AUTHOR> https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2019/11/25/my-travel-habits/ <comment><USER2> I`m going on a holiday soon and this tips are very useful for me ;)</comment>


Sourcehut's Year in Alpha - <AUTHOR> https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-11-15-sourcehut-1-year-alpha/ <comment><USER2> I've been following this project a little bit and am very impressed with the tenacity of its author. I'm a quite happy GitHub user, but I do want this project to move forward and succeed so I'll be looking into moving over at least some of my private company repos, and I signed up for the $100 / year subscription.

I couldn't find a way to add company details however, which is a crucial detail when expensing this sort of thing. Turns out you can add these details when you download invoices, in a freeform textbox. So if anyone's thinking of signing up and billing their company, make sure to add relevant details in this box before downloading your invoice! It'd be nice if you could just save this with the account so that when this eventually renews I can just be emailed an invoice with the relevant details added. Another nice to have would be the ability to assign a separate billing e-mail address.

Anyway, looking forward to making good use of this!

<comment><USER3> Likewise here -- the company I'm at uses github, but I'm moving my personal / side projects to SourceHut. I've really enjoyed the limited time I've spent using it to date, especially the clean interface.

<comment><USER4> Me too! I started using it after the Gitlab thing recently and I'm loving it so far. I haven't moved everything over yet, but am slowly getting there. I do miss some flashy features every so often, but I like what is there way more than I miss what isn't, so I'm pretty happy overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most impressive thing about this for me is that Drew managed to work on this for 2 years privately and actually get it out there. I'm lucky if I can maintain concentration on a side-project for more than 2 weeks. To then have it pass the first year mark of being a public alpha is a great achievement, and it's an impressive service.

<comment><USER6> The guy has a tremendous amount of patience. Good work drew =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sidenote,

I've been focusing on a lofty personal project for some problems I'm solving in my life, and hope to aid in solving for others. My project is primarily focused on self-hosting, but I would like to offer hosting for those who do not want to host.

Sourcehut is my inspiration for how to handle a FOSS + Hosted project. The financial reporting, UI design, approach to development, all of it is stellar.

I don't currently use Sourcehut but it is a huge inspiration to me on how I want to run my own non-profit aspirations. Thank you Drew. Really.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been a sourcehut user for about half a year now and I have to say that it has been a breath of fresh air for me. I have used GitHub and GitLab for years, and detest working with either. I know that both companies have a lot of smart people behind them, but both GitHub and GitLab are horrendously slow to use on my internet connection and packed to the brim with what I could consider anti-features. With sourcehut I finally have a code hosting solution that lets me focus on being productive.

<comment><USER9> Interesting - as much as I like sourcehut, my only complaint is that it's noticeably slower than GitHub for me. It's not terrible, by any means, but I've noticed it a few times when I push to both.

My guess is that I'm closer to a GitHub datacenter (or AWS region?) because they have an office here in Boulder.

<comment><USER10> Try again; Sourcehut just updated their pull/push logic to make it significantly faster.

<comment><USER11> How recent was this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yesterday.

<comment><USER12> First push and first pull have been slow here too (first pull was ~19s), but now I'm getting reasonable timings (~2s)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's gotta warm up the cache. Glad it's working well now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love how snappy everything is. Sadly, I spend a not-insignificant portion of my day waiting for Jira/Confluence to load. If this could replace that, I'd really be so much happier.

Two suggestions I've got, just from a few minutes of browsing around:

1\. I'd like to see more screenshots/videos of features on the main page. Sure I can explore around, but I'd prefer to just have it all laid out for me. I thought the kind of content in the blog post would fit well on the sourcehut.org page.

2\. On the subdomains, clicking "sourcehut" brings me back to the subdomain page. I'd prefer if clicking "sourcehut" brought me to sourcehut.org, and clicking the subdomain part brought me to the main subdomain page (so clicking "git" would bring me to [https://git.sr.ht/](https://git.sr.ht/)). Just my opinion of course, but it was a tad frustrating that once you click into a subdomain, there's nothing to click to bring you back to sourcehut.org.

Great work! Looking forward to seeing this develop even more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm amused that the example screenshot for lists.sr.ht is an email thread from qemu-devel, because we had to ask the person who'd been gatewaying that list to sr.ht to stop doing so: sr.ht bounces HTML email where qemu-devel does not, so people posting to qemu-devel were getting complaining emails from sr.ht and getting confused by them. A "no HTML" policy is fine if the list is hosted directly there, but it doesn't really work if the sr.ht "list" has just been subscribed to some other mailing list hosted elsewhere...

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah, sorry about that. I'd been working on first-class support for mirrored mailing lists, but this guy just set this up on his own. I found it because I was poking through the database for interesting patchsets to demo the UI with. Didn't realize until later that it was causing you guys headaches. Hope that all's well now.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it wasn't a big deal at all; just struck me funny that that was the example you ended up with. It might be interesting to see how qemu-devel looks if/when you do get mirrored-mailing-list support. At the moment we use patchew for that sort of 'web view of patches': [https://patchew.org/QEMU/](https://patchew.org/QEMU/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h One angle that I'm not sure sourcehut even _intends_ to address but am curious how to idiomatically handle: artifacts. Right now I can (and do) host code in (git|hg).sr.ht and make sure that it compiles with builds.sr.ht, but there isn't an artifacts.sr.ht (and I understand not _intending_ there to be, unless you charge by use and maybe not even then), but it would be nice if I could have the full CI/CD pipeline on sourcehut, including building and publishing final packages. So is the right way to do this to post artifacts to a third- party store (ex. S3) and just stick required authentication in using the secrets support in builds.sr.ht?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually planned to be supported soon. I recently provisioned a 64TB NAS for the purpose of object storage. It'll support things like release binaries, builds.sr.ht artifacts & build caches, a github pages-esque feature, etc. I just need to figure out how the heck Ceph works.

<comment><USER15> Another way of doing it is to run minio federation , might be a worthy alternative to Ceph, which has a reputation of hard to run product.

<comment><USER16> I thought ceph had a reputation of easy to run, at least compared to it's rivals in the distributed storage space. (gluster, lustre, et al)

<comment><USER17> Sure, but when you're running a service you kind of want to know what you're running. I'm sure Drew is able to figure out the beginning rather easy, but you kind of want to be able to see pitfalls and common misconfigurations etc. It takes a bit of tinkering :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sourcehut needs a graphical history view (akin to gitk or git log --graph; not sure what the mercurial equivalent is, definitely NOT ANYTHING LIKE that "network graph" github has) to be feature complete. I'd contribute but I have more free money than free time; is there some kind of bounty program?

<comment><USER19> Bitbucket's version of this is still my favourite. I love that it's just right there in the all commits view:

[https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/commits/all](https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/commits/all)

Vs Github and GitLab where you have to go to a special separate network/graph page to see it, eg:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitter/sidecar/-/network/devel...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitter/sidecar/-/network/develop)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, Bitbucket's view is just gitk on the web, which is exactly how I like it.

<comment><USER20> Wow, really beautiful! I wonder how do they do these graphs...

<comment><USER21> Here is one exploration of commit graph drawing: [https://pvigier.github.io/2019/05/06/commit-graph-drawing- al...](https://pvigier.github.io/2019/05/06/commit-graph-drawing- algorithms.html)

discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21079643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21079643)

<comment><USER18> That repository maintainer should've octopus merged those commits in the example...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been trialing src.ht off-and-on for the past year and it's been a joy to see its steady progress from "git hosting I don't hate" towards something more full-featured. Sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon for liking simple orthogonal tools, since they are often unpolished and user-hostile, but sourcehut is doing a lot to make something more polished and user-friendly without losing the essence of what I like about these tools.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a new GitLab product manager, I was glad to see among the Updates that dispatch.sr.ht can now build GitLab commits. And we are looking at the mentioned GitLab bug ([https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/issues/16491](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/16491)) to assess efforts to resolve; and unblock the ability to run build.sr.ht for GitLab merge requests.

</comment><comment><USER24> I read the landing page, but I'm still not quite sure what the product is. Is it a GitLab competitor? That's what it seems to be seeing as it supports hosted git repositories, CI, code review, etc.

I'm not sure what "Composable Unix-style mini-services" means.

<comment><AUTHOR> The mini-services part refers to the fact that each high-level feature - git & hg repos, CI, bug trackers, etc - is implemented as its own standalone web application. The composable part is that you can freely use them in concert with each other to whatever extent is appropriate for your project. Consider that on GitHub, GitLab, etc, one project == one git repo == one bug tracker == one path for merge requests == one wiki == etc. SourceHut's upstream codebase, on the contrary, has several git repos, one mailing list, several CI configs, N bugtrackers where N != nrepos, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are there any plans to have a web interface for "git by email" contributions? I think it's really cool to keep contribution decentralised, but it's also nice to have a record on the web of the review process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this is planned and in-progress. You can now prepare patchsets on the web for submission via email (check out the video near the top of TA), and code review threads are parsed and shown on the web as well (see the screenshot under the video). The plan is to keep improving this so that you can perform code reviews on the web, which become emails under the covers, which will make for a decentralized, email-based code review system which you can interact with on the web in a fashion similar to GitHub or GitLab PRs/MRs.

<comment><USER26> One of the things stopping me from using sourcehut is that people I've partnered with recently for projects are intimidated by the email system. I haven't gotten a chance to try that flow yet because of that

I use it for a few solo projects though

<comment><USER27> For what it's worth, you probably don't want to be working with people who are intimidated by email.

<comment><USER28> It's not people intimidated by email. It's people intimidated by configuring their system to programmatically send email.

Residential ISPs, for example, usually block smtp ports. You can send via gmail, but that still requires some fiddly configuration. And at least the way I figured out how to do it, it involves a cleartext password sitting on my filesystem, which I'm not too happy about. (It's a password limited to sending email as me, but that's kind of a big deal.)

I would much prefer to push patches to people's projects via my revision control system. It's ok with me if that requires some sort of push-only account.

<comment><USER29> > And at least the way I figured out how to do it, it involves a cleartext > password sitting on my filesystem

git credential allows for programs to query it for credentials based on the server you're connecting to and store it for a configurable period of time in memory. So you don't have to store your password in the config file. You would enter it on the command line when you invoke git send-email and if you run the same command within the configured time period, you won't have to re-enter your password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Setup builds.sr.ht for ci on a university project (unfortunately we have to use github for the source hosting). It has been an absolute delight to work with and for everyone on my to work with!

</comment><comment><USER31> Happy birthday Sourcehut!

I'm curious about the builds API. I'm currently writing a terminal client that, given a git repository, will list recent builds across multiple CI providers, give access to build logs, etc. I'm interested in integrating with Sourcehut.

Most CI providers have a REST API that allows listing the builds related to a repository. The API reference for builds.sr.ht [1] does not list such a functionality, however the website offers it (e.g. [2]). Did I miss something, or is this not possible via the API? Are there plans to add this feature?

[1] [https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/api.md](https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/api.md)

[2] [https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht](https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like there's no "list jobs" endpoint, seems to have been an oversight. Can you file a ticket?

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht)

<comment><USER31> Sure, done: [https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/251](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/251)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I couldn't find any place to send in the issues with SourceHut. I like the UI, but can't use web-site at all, if i go anywhere outside of my profile it brings in - register or log-in button and link and if I click log-in it says:

> Error logging in > Error occured retrieving account info. Try again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you reach out to email@example.com? This sounds like your account confirmation email was never acted upon.

<comment><USER32> You were right! What a rapid response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It would be nice also to show the languages the repository is written in, like in GitHub. Also, I hope to see more Go code and less Python. Certainly it will reduce the servers load and less runtime surprises.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Maybe the generic way to do that is supporting tags on repos? So a repo could be tagged "lang:python3 lang:c license:gpl2+ license:mit" (that's: repo contains Python 3 and C code, dual-licensed under GPL2+ and MIT) or something. Granted, that would _probably_ be manually-tagged, not GitHub's automatic guessing approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm excited for names.sr.ht! Relatedly, a long time ago on an early lobste.rs post [1] about sourcehut, it was mentioned that it'd be sweet to point one's own domain at sourcehut to be able to host your stuff under your own domain. It'd be extra cool if this worked with mailing lists too. Drew, any chances something like this might come along with names.sr.ht?

[1] [https://lobste.rs/s/z0sqez/sr_ht_sircmpwn_s_github_alternati...](https://lobste.rs/s/z0sqez/sr_ht_sircmpwn_s_github_alternative)

<comment><AUTHOR> Possibly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> SourceHut is a really inspiring project.

</comment><comment><USER36> The first 4 and last 2 screenshots on homepage are blurry on a retina iPhone, but the one in between them is sharp. Some resolution issue?</comment>


"It's no exaggeration to say UK rejection of Apple API will cost lives" - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/28/apple-api/ <comment><USER2> Well, if the data isn't sent to a central location, then how would Palantir access it?</comment>


Thoughts About Datomic - <AUTHOR> http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/19310504456/thoughts-about-datomic

<comment><USER2> Rich Hickey's response (first comment) is the most interesting part of this</comment>


Ask HN: Today is the 300th day of 2017; what have you accomplished? - <AUTHOR> Have you stuck to any new years resolutions? Have you been committed to one thing every day in 2017? What have the 300 days brought you so far and what is left in the next 65 days? <comment><USER2> Learned a lot of new things in last 300 days, I am happy with learning and hope it will help me with future directions</comment>


Huawei Is an Asset, Not a Threat - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-is-an-asset-not-a-threat-11558390913 <comment><USER2> The assertion is not that Huawei isn't an asset. Huawei is definitely an asset. No one disagrees with that. The assertion is that Huawei is a _Communist_ asset used to enprison their citizens and steal data from freedom loving countries.

<comment><USER3> Is there proof that any of what you said is true? The Huawei people I know are all working super hard to create high-quality products for consumers and enterprises. This, as far as I know, is a good thing for our world.

<comment><USER2> Who do you work for?

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/20/18508915/cia-huawei- china...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/20/18508915/cia-huawei-china- security-agencies-funds-report)

<comment><USER3> The information in the article is vague. It could be just them selling equipment to the government or it could be security related. US tech companies also routinely work with spy agencies if that's something.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the- details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bedbugs are giving Airbnb users headaches and itchy bites - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/features/bed-bugs-are-giving-airbnb-users-headaches-and-itchy-bites/ <comment><USER2> Amazon (via third-party sellers), Uber, and Airbnb all have a similar thread: work around govt regulations in exchange for a lower price and wider selection.

With Uber, some of the regulations weren't really working for consumers. Taxis are terrible. And, though I dislike Uber as a company, they've done a surprisingly good job of providing the regulations and safeguards required to make their service as good and safe as taxis (perhaps more so in my city).

But Amazon and Airbnb make us forego some really vital, useful safety measures, e.g. requiring hotels to be responsible for keeping a room safe (with fire extinguishers, fire escapes, privacy, etc.) An individual Airbnb owner isn't afraid of your bed bug lawsuits, but Marriott is afraid for you to even tell someone about it. Which one is going to fix the problem sooner.

Amazon and Airbnb seemingly don't believe that bad sellers will harm their own brand that much, so they don't do much to stop these things. I don't think Airbnb could afford to. How can you prevent Airbnb owners from installing spy cams?

I personally have sampled the Silicon Valley way of doing things, and I've gone back to big-brand hotels and online shopping at Target/Best Buy. The prices aren't that different, and I have a lot more guarantees of quality, as well as a _lot_ more recourse if something goes wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> They mention bedbugs, but those are only ONE thing that people can contract by staying at shared places such as these.

<comment><USER4> No need to worry the place will be professionally cleaned and sanitized between guests /s

<comment><USER5> For what AirBnB hosts charge for a "cleaning fee" I would sure hope so. (Yes, I know you were being sarcastic, but ffs, a $50 "cleaning fee"?)</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding self-supervised/contrastive learning w Bootstrap Your Own Latent - <AUTHOR> https://untitled-ai.github.io/understanding-self-supervised-contrastive-learning.html <comment><AUTHOR> blog post demystifying @DeepMind's new BYOL approach and giving an overview of self-supervised methods</comment>


Chrome's on-by-default ad blocker – the one that doesn't block 99% of ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/09/chrome_ad_blocker/ <comment><USER2> Google marketing trying to spread FUD about "ad blocking".

This is a malicious ads blocker, which should be a default feature of it's browser. It's not an ad blocking extension at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I'm for blocking malicious ads, I'm not huge on the idea of one of the biggest advertising companies deciding what ads get blocked in the world's most popular browser.</comment>


Read this before you buy the new iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122645-read-this-before-you-buy-the-new-ipad

<comment><USER2> Waste of a click. There's a reason Apple is just calling it the new iPad. It's just the new iPad - better screen, better camera, faster. "Read this before you buy the new iPad" sounds like a warning to me. I expected to hear some expose equal to that of Antennagate. Instead, I get an article talking about how this is just an upgrade to the iPad. Seriously? You just used up your one "read this before" for the year, extremetech.com.

<comment><USER3> what's bizarre about the article is that they're admitting that it is better than the iPad, they're just upset that it's not SO MUCH MORE AWESOMELY BETTER.

And that's supposed to give me pause? If I go out and get one of these, it is in fact specifically to have an iPad with a better screen, camera, and battery.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like the stock market.. "Microsoft's earnings only increased by 1% yoy!! Stock is tanking!!"

Turns out they still made a billion in profits.

* not real numbers, just for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sure, it's evolutionary, not revolutionary. Who cares? What's wrong with it being an incrementally better version of an existing product? Does every product release have to utterly blow away everything in the history of computing in order to be worthwhile?

Personally, I'm not going to buy one because of the caché of owning something amazingly innovative, I'm going to buy one because I think it will be useful. I don't own an iPad yet because I was waiting for one with the retina display, and I know a few other people who've done the same. Seems to me Apple gauged the market pretty well with this release.

<comment><USER6> There's nothing wrong with incremental upgrades until you remember that Apple markets nearly everything they sell as 'revolutionary' (or 'resolutionary' in this case) and act as if now that they are using a technology (4G, quad core, high-res) it is finally cool.

<comment><USER7> Is the resolution not revolutionary? I don't think you can seriously argue with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sloppy linkbait.

I'm not an Apple fan boy but when he complains that the performance of GLBenchmark is the same:

> The most likely reason for this is that apps must be written to take full > advantage of all four GPU cores, much in the same way that only a handful of > apps make full use of Tegra 2 and 3

He seems to forget that theres four times the number of pixels on the screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point actually. Normally in benchmarks, though, the same resolution is used across the board.

I don't know how this applies to tablets, though. I suspect the iPad 3 would be upscaling to 2048x1536, but not actually rendering four times as many polygons (or whatever).

<comment><USER8> GLBenchMark does run at the screen resolution unless you run the offscreen test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think we can't even being to imagine how f'ing difficult it must have been to get the ipad 3's screen resolution to work.

Up until now screens with this pixel density were not available at this size at all, so even just getting the screens produced must have been a challenge.

And four times the pixels also means that a lot more computation power will be needed to actually make use of them.

Of course, with more computing power, there's the issue of both heat and especially battery life.

In my opinion it's amazing that Apple managed to squeeze nearly double the capacity of the old ipad's battery into a new battery which is only 50g heavier than the old one.

Considering that battery life still is about the same than in the old iPad, I really think that doubling the capacity was surely needed or we'd all be pissed about poor battery life.

Yeah. It's "just" a screen update, but a huge amount of work must have gone into making this happen.

Remember last year when everybody wanted the bigger display, but "all" we got was a faster CPU? People were equally pissed back then.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article completely misses the point of why people buy iPads. Nobody buys an iPad because of the specs, or the innovation, or how many graphics cores it has. People buy iPads because they are awesome little computers that are easy to consume content on and because they are affordable.

</comment><comment><USER11> Click bait title with absolutely no new information or insight. Not sure why it was upvoted so high on HN.

The crowd that reads HN already knows the specs of the new iPad and is capable of judging whether or not they're worth the outlay.

</comment><comment><USER12> Unsurprising. Apparently, the author doesn't realize that Apple only upends entire industries every decade or so.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish they had added the original iPad to the chart. As an original iPad owner (and one that really enjoys the device), the new iPad looks pretty enticing.

Saying, "it's just an iPad 2 with a better screen" sounds pretty great to me.

<comment><USER6> $500 great? Considering that not all developers and content will even take advantage of the screen?

<comment><USER14> It's safe to say that most developers will take advantage of the screen resolution. Just not three days after it's released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you distill it down part by part, one can always say it's not 'revolutionary' – but you gotta look at the whole sum. (Btw, how often does a same product 'revolutionize' itself? It'd be a new/different product?)

*Not saying iPad 3 is or isn't revolutionary, but the author isn't giving enough credit and isn't looking at the bigger picture.

</comment><comment><USER16> _When you inevitably unbox your new iPad, though, just remember that Apple has done little more than cram a bunch of bits inside a slick tablet chassis; bits that, except for the display, aren't very exciting at all._

I feel this statement makes little sense since the display is the thing you're going to be interacting with the most.

</comment><comment><USER17> it might not be amazing, but Apple is the first manufacture to put the screen into a real product. That is an accomplishment by itself. How long will it take android tabs to come out with similar screens? It's interesting that samsung is the manufacture of the screen, yet it's on an apple product, instead of samsung tablets!</comment>


Experiments with CouchDB Map/Reduce Views (i.canhazthread.com) - <AUTHOR> http://mclov.in/2009/08/31/an-explanation-of-the-couchdb-view-powering-icanhazthreadcoms-homepage.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify before-hand, i.canhazthread.com is a clone of a.tinythread.com to demo CouchDB's capabilities for a talk I was giving at a dev conference called #geekcampsg at Singapore.</comment>


Vegetarians at the gate - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-19/the-vegetarians-at-the-gate <comment><USER2> Vegetarians !== Vegans .. the initial introduction conflates the two, which helped to lose my interest early on.

<comment><USER3> Well, to be fair, historically "Vegan" is kind of a new term. Vegetarian was vegan before, but nowadays we say "Vegetarian" but we mean specifically lacto- ovo vegetarians (i.e. still consuming eggs and milk).

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's true, I was vegetarian all through the 80s, and vegans existed then.</comment></comment></comment>


How 20 popular websites looked when they launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular-websites-looked-when-they-launched.html <comment><USER2> Previously submitted and now dead.</comment>


EasyOpenCL – The easiest way to get started with GPU programming - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Gladdy/EasyOpenCL

<comment><USER3> There's actually quite a few of these kind of libraries floating around, although I'm not sure how many are still actively supported.

Thrust: [http://thrust.github.io/](http://thrust.github.io/)

VexCL: [http://ddemidov.github.io/vexcl/](http://ddemidov.github.io/vexcl/)

Boost.Compute: [http://boostorg.github.io/compute/](http://boostorg.github.io/compute/)

The author of VexCL provided a comparison of them two years ago: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154179/differences- betw...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154179/differences-between- vexcl-thrust-and-boost-compute)

<comment><USER4> There is another library authored by me and some colleagues. It is called Aura: [https://github.com/sschaetz/aura](https://github.com/sschaetz/aura)

I blogged about these kinds of libraries here (overview): [http://www.soa- world.de/echelon/2014/04/c-accelerator-librar...](http://www.soa- world.de/echelon/2014/04/c-accelerator-libraries.html)

A new addition is welcome as we still have not found the perfect API for accelerator programming. EasyOpenCL seems very simple and easy to use but I feel like it is very restricted.

For getting started with OpenCL development these days I would recommend PyOpenCL. Since everything is in Python, data can be generated easily, results can be plotted using well known Python tools which simplified debugging. Kernels developed in PyOpenCL can directly be copied to other APIs (raw OpenCL C API or some of the other C/C++ wrappers) and reused in production code.

<comment><USER5> I think the problem with (most of?) these libraries is that they don't solve the fundamental problem, which is: the OpenCL API is awful to work with. Various strategies have been attempted, mainly involving some form of "wrap the C API in less verbose C++!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the license on this? There doesn't seem to be anything about that in their Github repo.

<comment><USER7> I really don't know why you were downvoted - as this is a somewhat important question.

Thought - by the github TOS you at least get to fork the repo [1].

[1] [https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of- service/#f-...](https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of- service/#f-copyright-and-content-ownership)

<comment><USER8> I find that it's easier to submit a PR than ask on HN. Usually omitting a license is an unintentional error.

<comment><USER7> Why would you submit a PR - wouldn't you just create an issue (you don't want to select a license for their project)? In either case - my experiences with PRs have been really negative (and I'm not surprised).

<comment><USER8> Meh, they just need a push in the right direction. If they didn't care to post a license in the first place they might not care which one I pick for them. But you're right, in this case they took the PR as an opportunity to select a license but decided not to take the one I suggested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems to be a library to make it really easy to invoke a single GPU kernel on some input buffers that are copied from CPU (an std::vector). Unfortunately, most practical GPGPU tasks aren't like that.

The latency of getting data from the CPU to the GPU and back is bad enough that for a small quantity of data (low megabytes), it's better just to compute it on the CPU. More practical tasks usually involve several kernel invocations, and keeping the data at the GPU is essential for any kind of decent performance.

But there are cases where executing a single kernel over some buffers would be useful (especially in early development or prototyping). In those cases, I'd like to write ZERO host-side code and use a CLI or GUI tool to run the code. So what I'd like to see is something like:

        $ cl-cli --kernel=frobnicate.cl --input0=foos.bin --input1=bars.bin --output0=bazs.bin

Does such a tool exist already?

It would be even better if this would allow building proper pipelines of multi-kernel programs by defining the inputs and outputs to kernels using a directed acyclic graph.

I do not intend to dishearten you, OP, but think about this when you consider future direction to take with your project.

<comment><AUTHOR> The framework allows for partial data updates - for instance for a 3D renderer it suffices the push the new position to the GPU whilst the vertex data remains in GPU memory. If you invoke the kernel function again it will not recompile the kernel nor reupload the vertex data.

The DAG idea sounds fun to build and very useful - I have some spare time anyway so I'll see what I can whip up. As for the command line interface - <USER2> too sounds pretty useful and it should only be a bit of parsing as all the OpenCL related code as been written already, but ufo-launch already performs pretty much the same function so it's not very high on my todo list.

<comment><USER9> > The framework allows for partial data updates

Good! Additionally, it would be useful to memory map buffers and allow using raw pointers in addition to std::vectors. But more importantly, it would be necessary to use the output of one kernel as the input of another kernel invocation.

Anyway, build it to suit _your_ use case primarily. Happy hacking!

<comment><USER5> Sorry to keep plugging my stuff, but you might be interested in this ... [https://github.com/Polytonic/Chlorine](https://github.com/Polytonic/Chlorine)

No raw pointers, but you can use C arrays (was that what you meant by raw pointers?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote something similar a while back ([https://github.com/Polytonic/Chlorine](https://github.com/Polytonic/Chlorine)). Always good to see more attention paid to OpenCL though!

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems nice! I would use this to avoid all the OpenCL bloat code. However, there's an inconvenient: why restrict the vector sizes to be all the same? I see that it is used to set the workgroup size. I think that giving the possibility to pass arrays of whatever size and allowing the client to set the workgroup size wouldn't add much complexity to the code nor to the API.

Apart from that, really nice work, the code is well written and commented, it's a joy reading things like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I still have some plans to auto-derive the optimal work/global/local group sizes, however, that still takes some work.

Therefore, I just implemented the most basic straightforward alternative (which is indeed rather restrictive at the moment) as a temporary solution.

<comment><USER10> That's great! IIRC, OpenCL can calculate automatically the local workgroup sizes so you only have to provide the global size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> CUDA is probably the way to go, since especially if you're having to use a gpu, might as well get one of the new nvidia gpu's

<comment><AUTHOR> CUDA has a nice toolchain, but the point of this is to remove all of the low- level stuff. For performance (even on NVIDIA cards) it doesn't really matter whether you use CUDA or OpenCL [1] + OpenCL runs everywhere as a bonus.

[1] [http://pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/pubs/papers/icpp2011a.pdf](http://pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/pubs/papers/icpp2011a.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Added bonus: OpenCL runs on multicore processors, so you don't even need a GPU (though performance is obviosuly lower).

<comment><USER13> Not a whole lot lower though, only in the 10-100x lower range from what I've experimented with (couple generations old card vs couple generations old i7 with a straight up "process some floats" test[0]). Certainly enough to test your kernels against.

[0]: [https://github.com/krrishnarraj/clpeak](https://github.com/krrishnarraj/clpeak)

<comment><USER12> Good work, specially on keeping the results from various platforms!

<comment><USER13> Not mine! Just the tool I used</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: App for appreciating the people you love - <AUTHOR> http://outpour.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Wanted to share our entry in The Happiness Apps Challenge ([http://happinessapps.challengepost.com/submissions/30737-out...](http://happinessapps.challengepost.com/submissions/30737-outpour- go-find-the-beauty-in-people-and-tell-them)).

We too rarely tell people we love them, but people should know that we do. Trying to make the world a happier and more loving place!</comment>


Don't call it a comeback (working remotely) - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/remote-work/

<comment><USER2> Those dudes over at Modern Tribe have been making a virtue of this for years. <http://tri.be>

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't heard of Modern Tribe before. I like the concept. It's clear that the remote work paradigm can work for small companies. What we need are more examples from large companies (like HP and IBM) to show that it can be done.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One thing that's been mentioned quite a bit: working from home has a lot of challenges (kids, distractions, no social involvement).

However Remote Work doesn't necessarily mean "you must work from home". In a progressive company, I think it means: "work wherever you do your best work."

<comment><USER3> This is fairly key. Alot of people think in a home-centric fashion when you mention remote work and mis the crux of remote work, that you are in fact working remotely with regards to the (main) office/hq/etc.</comment></comment>


Death spiral for cars. By 2030, you probably won't own one - <AUTHOR> https://reneweconomy.com.au/death-spiral-for-cars-by-2030-you-probably-wont-own-one-93626/ <comment><USER2> False

[http://www.newgeography.com/content/005610-d-j-vu-and- dilemm...](http://www.newgeography.com/content/005610-d-j-vu-and-dilemma- planners)</comment>


How Culture Molds Habits of Thought (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds-habits-of-thought.html <comment><USER2> Being that this article is 18 years old, I am quite curious the current thoughts of the researchers, and to learn of any continued work in this area. Fascinating area of research. [http://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu/PatriciaCheng.html](http://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu/PatriciaCheng.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The thing about an experiment like this is I don't know how you'd distinguish between "ways of thinking" and "styles of communication" here:

 _" Asked to describe what they saw, the Japanese subjects were much more likely to begin by setting the scene, saying for example, ''There was a lake or pond'' or ''The bottom was rocky,'' or ''The water was green.'' Americans, in contrast, tended to begin their descriptions with the largest fish, making statements like ''There was what looked like a trout swimming to the right.''"_

The article talks about artibution errors, where a series of movements gets ("wrongly" or "rightly") translated into a belief about intentions. I'd say it would be more useful to talk of "attribution incompleteness" \- how one speaks of a given scene needs the context of many scenes.

So maybe, in my interpretation, both Easterners and Westerners inherently have to have the context of a large (and different) culture to speak of something as simple as a film about a fish. But that's my interpretation of the experiment and researchers gave their interpretation of the experiment and I'd say such openness to interpretation probably makes any conclusion fairly debatable.

Just generally, psychology experiments have quality of doing a high school physics experiment except where the laws of physics are entirely unknown and generally vary from place to place in an unknown fashion. In an ordinary physics experiment, you can eliminate all but one or two variables and use your test to find these. Here, you have a multitude of variables and can't really eliminate any of them so you more or less pretend you can and thus add to a stock of debate and unreproducible results.

<comment><USER4> How is how you communicate not related to how you think?

<comment><USER5> People adjust the way they talk to audience and some study how they shoud communicate.

The way I communicate is heavily influenced by what I consider correct way to communicate. If you have me describe the scene, I may attempt to mimic the way last book I read described similar scene.

<comment><USER4> Do you consciously think about what the correct way to communicate is before you communicate something in an informal setting? If so I'd imagine you're an outlier. For most people I would assume they don't think about this at all and do whatever feels most natural.

<comment><USER5> Yes I do, especially when the situation is new or weird in some way. Altrought often it happens after and I use different phrasing next time similar situation happens (e.g. I thing offline about how I told things and what happened after). I don't think I am outlier, because most people talk differently in front of different groups and also because I am more impulsive then most.

In context of study as described in article, I would think about way I talk in advance. If asked to analyze situation, I would do some social situation guess to determine whether to talk about relationships, tech, whether use experience or go strictly by text. How I want to look like and which part of me I want to hide/keep secret would be a factor.

The "feels natural" part is influenced by your previous experiences too, naturally.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>