Ask HN: Are there any incubators for nonprofit startups? - <AUTHOR> We are currently working on a education platform that is meant to operate in a nonprofit manner and would like to know if there are any incubators who can support us. <comment><USER2> What's the nonprofit? I think people would be interested if you'd like to share.

You should definitely apply to YC. Email firstname.lastname@example.com and we might be able to advise a bit. (Same offer for anyone. Just realize that the inbox is hell and it may take a long time to reply.)

<comment><USER3> What type of non-profits would you advise? And at what stage?

<comment><USER2> To be honest I don't know. I'm not involved in the decisions or thinking about that about YC, but I can connect with the people who are.

<comment><USER3> Mine is a moonshot non-profit in the edtech space. And it is at an ideation stage. Not sure if that will be acceptable. Would love to get some feedback and or mentoring though, if not funding.

<comment><USER4> If it's a moonshot, why do think it needs to be a non-profit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Several.

FastForward is probably the largest and furthest along in organizing around Tech Nonprofits specifically, with a pretty solid base of alumni success stories([https://www.ffwd.org/](https://www.ffwd.org/)).

I'd also look at Visible Connect, which is tech nonprofit focused. Full Circle Fund, if you're in the Bay Area. Since you mentioned you're in Education, you should also look at the Aspire Accelerator, which isn't exclusively tech nonprofit but includes many tech nonprofits.

You could also consider YC which has taken a few nonprofits.

</comment><comment><USER4> YC supports both edtech and nonprofit companies. I am the partner at YC who handles those two areas. Let me know if you have any specific questions. I helped start Imagine K12, which was an edtech incubator (that also worked with edu non-profits) that folded into the YC family back in 2016. There are other edtech and non-profit incubators: LearnLaunch is an edtech incubator based in Boston, Fast Forward is a tech non-profit incubator in SF.

</comment><comment><USER6> YC has had non-profits. I think Watsi was the first.

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Mozilla's got one.

[https://builders.mozilla.community/](https://builders.mozilla.community/)

</comment><comment><USER8> If it's about the supporting the open internet in particular, the NLnet Foundation comes to mind. [https://nlnet.nl/](https://nlnet.nl/)

</comment><comment><USER9> There's one called charity entrepreneurship</comment>


Young Elon Musk featured in documentary about millionaires (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSHUha9ABNY&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> The part where he goes "There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world!" is so unadulteratedly cheesy, nerdy and ALMOST cringe-inducing. It's kinda heartening to know that Musk used to be a little odd like that- it makes him a little more human in my eyes. And it's a little easier to get a sense of how he might've been mean, nasty or otherwise unlikeable at times.

He really would make a great movie villain, in the best way.</comment>


Microsoft Teams Down Worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://digistatement.com/microsoft-teams-down-not-working-for-many-users/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly they've been down for more than an hour but their own status pages report as healthy: [https://status.office365.com/](https://status.office365.com/)

<comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/Akileese/status/1224349659818348544](https://twitter.com/Akileese/status/1224349659818348544)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status/status/1224351597624537088](https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status/status/1224351597624537088)</comment>


DavidWalsh.Name Has Been Stolen - <AUTHOR> http://davidwalsh.name/domain-stolen

<comment><USER2> I like David Walsh, however I don't have much pity for him in this situation. His account was hacked, probably due to something he did (reused a password, had a password someone guessed, etc). If godaddy was hacked (like he tweeted and later redacted), they would have taken much bigger domains than his. It sucks, but it was his fault.

His site was put back up within hours, which is pretty fast for anything involving domains. The current holdup seems to be that the registrar is checking things out and confirming what happened before giving control back to him. This seems understandable; what if this were some elaborate social engineering scam?

Basically, he had his domain stolen, which sucks. All parties involved (none of which were at fault, and don't really owe him anything) acted quickly, but he spent 4 days bashing them on Twitter. He got his domain to point to his site quickly, and is now complaining because he doesn't "own" it (despite the registrar saying they're working on it).

<comment><USER3> CSS-Tricks.com, SohTanaka.com, and InstantShift were taken as well.

Yep, you're right. Our fault.

<comment><USER2> When I say "your fault", I don't mean you wrote down your password and mailed it to the "hackers". All the domains compromised seem to be related to a certain extent.

Your credentials were compromised by some means. Maybe you all signed up for the same site that was compromised? Or all went to the same website that installed some sort of malware on your computer? It's way more likely that you (unintentionally) were at fault. It's doubtful this is on GoDaddy.

Don't get me wrong, I love your site and have been reading for years. However, if someone really had hacked GoDaddy, they wouldn't waste time taking over blogs about MooTools. There are so many better targets they could have gone for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unbelievable! Spread the word. This needs to be fixed!!</comment>


Most Europeans believe their countries are more polarised than 10 years ago - open-source-ux http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43760959 <comment><AUTHOR> They are under concerted attack by Russia, that bankrolls nationalist/anti- immigration movements to strategically weaken intra EU relations (and intra NATO). [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/10...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/10/everything- we-know-so-far-about-russian-election-meddling-in-europe/) presents a decent summary.

<comment><USER2> Or there is a sizable portion of the European population who don't want mass immigration. It's not exactly a new phenomenon that tensions develop when heterogeneous groups of humans inhabit the same geographical area.

<comment> amiga-workbench I'm totally for migration, but at a level where we can adequately integrate the people we bring in.

I want to make sure everybody has the support they need and conversely I want the state to make sure the people coming in are acting in the best interests of the country.

Is this really such a far-right fringe position to have?

<comment><USER2> Seems pretty reasonable to me, but then I am also of the opinion that 0 immigration should be the starting point in discussions of immigration (rather than "as much as possible", which seems to have somehow become the default position).

<comment><USER3> I believe the perception that the immigration policy is "as much as possible" doesn't reflect reality. Many in the west feel it is the humane thing to offer immigrants in war torn ME an opportunity for a better life considering the selfish meddling the West has been involved in WRT ME policy for the last 100 years (think Sykes-Picot, which carved the ME up for UK/France ends).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement)

<comment><USER4> Countries that had nothing whatsoever to do with Sykes-Picot or the Middle East also feel compelled to import huge numbers of people, so that is not the most parsimonious explanation, unless you think e.g. contemporary Sweden & Norway are somehow responsible for the actions of the UK & France 100 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How much of it is "just perception" and not actually true?

The mainstream and social media can amplify negative sentiments, which propagate between people. This leads to a bad assessment of reality.

<comment><USER6> I'd say "almost all", and this is actually the place where perception _becomes_ the reality, for all practical purposes. Society being polarized, vs. everyone believing the society is polarized and acting accordingly, is equivalent in practice.

That's why I believe media people - both mainstream and social - are being dangerously irresponsible my sharing every possible polarizing bullshit to maximize ad clicks. And I mean "dangerously" as in "could cause significant loss of life at some point".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In regards to immigration issues, the best long term solution is to build up Middle Eastern nations as productive societies capable of providing a comfortable life for their citizens.

Consider the US's Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe post WW2. Western nations must partner in a concerted effort to build up Middle Eastern nations, rather than funding destructive and chaos inducing wars and revolutions.

<comment><USER8> They tried that in Iraq, and ran out of money a trillon dollars later without addressing any of the real problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> *according to a poll of 500-1000 people per country

<comment><USER10> Which is a huge sample size

<comment><USER6> Is it? Sounds pretty small to me.

(Also, given it's an on-line poll, I have some doubts about whether the sampled population is representative in any way.)

<comment><USER10> [http://www.dummies.com/education/math/statistics/how- sample-...](http://www.dummies.com/education/math/statistics/how-sample-size- affects-the-margin-of-error/)

<comment><USER6> I'm not a statistician, but I have this feeling that this applies primarily when you're testing for simple things from an uniform population - not for a complex factor which has more possible spurious correlations involved than the number of samples you're taking. So I wouldn't have 95% confidence in a result of a politics poll on 1000 people per country.

(Also, there's selection bias involved, including self-selection if the poll was voluntary. I generally don't trust voluntary opt-in polls much, as it's too easy to get bullshit results from them, and I don't often see people even realizing this.)

EDIT: the poll authors do claim that their results are representative of the nation in _some_ countries:

"16 of the 27 countries surveyed generate nationally representative samples in their countries (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and United States). Brazil, Chile, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey produce a national sample that is considered to represent a more affluent, connected population. These are still a vital social group to understand in these countries, representing an important and emerging middle class."

[https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/bbc-global-survey- wor...](https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/bbc-global-survey-world- divided)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A question for everyone: Would a delay in the open borders element have helped? For instances a gradual transition, with restrictions, gradually over several years moving towards full openeness?

<comment><USER12> Some restrictions pertaining to integration would help.

Being able to speak the language within your first year in a new country helps integration and lessens the us-vs-them feeling. Ideally people wouldn't mind hearing a different language, but unfortunately we're not that tolerant yet.

<comment><USER13> > Being able to speak the language within your first year in a new country > helps integration and lessens the us-vs-them feeling.

Not sure what you're talking about. I'm been to Italy and Germany many times and never felt unwelcome for not speaking their language.

<comment><USER14> Visiting, or living.... there's a different standard applied to guests than to neighbours.

<comment><USER13> If you're an Italian guy and we meet on the street and I don't speak Italian, how would you know if I'm visiting or living?

EDIT: Before you respond that "immigration policy etc etc", notice that the post I was responding to was talking about interations between individuals (using phrases like "ideally people wouldn't mind hearing a different language"), not policy.

<comment><USER15> I've found in different countries within the EU that attitudes change dramatically to foreigners once you go beyond the centres of major cities or tourist areas. This is true even in Ireland where the only language barrier is an accent.

Maybe this is what he means by the distinction of living/visiting?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox" - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 <comment><USER3> I was among the naysayers. I first met Drew at pg's house just before Dropbox did YC. I listened as he explained Dropbox, and I immediately thought of a dozen reasons why it would be very difficult and probably fail (I'd recently worked on something very similar for a month or so just to figure out whether it was a direction I wanted to go with my own company, so had some familiarity with the scale of the problem...I also knew the allure of the simple parts of the problem).

I don't recall a whole lot about the conversation; I thought Drew was smart, and he seemed to have a pretty good understanding of all the problems he was going to have to solve. But, I still had my doubts, and walked away assuming Dropbox would not be one of the success stories out of that upcoming YC batch. We see who from that conversation is now a billionaire (or will be in the coming years)...so, it seems I was wrong. Or, at least, overly pessimistic about Drew's understanding of the problems and his ability to resolve them.

I refer to this pretty frequently to try to remind myself not to be the naysayer in the room: [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be- right-90-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of- time-and-why-id.html)

<comment><USER4> And I'm an example of how you can be right and still wrong because you let "other plans" get in the way. I'm on that thread with my two cents: "I'm impressed."

However, Drew took me out to lunch about 10 months later. They'd just signed their Series A with Sequoia (although it wasn't public knowledge), and were looking to hire their first couple employees. Aston had just been hired the day before as employee #1; Drew was wondering if they could interest me in being employee #2.

At the time, I had my own startup that I was trying to get off the ground with a friend from college. I could tell Drew was wicked smart, and he was way more prepared and ready to bring a product to market than we were. But my immediate response was "I can't leave my cofounder, and I want to see where my startup ends up going." He was very understanding, and said "Yeah, if I were in your position - _when_ I was in your position [DropBox is Drew's second company] - I wouldn't give it up either." I couldn't help thinking, as I walked away, that maybe I'd just passed up the best opportunity I'd get in my life. They filled their positions with a couple MIT grads later that day.

A couple years later, after I'd moved out to the Bay Area and was working for Google, I saw Aston at Maker Faire, and mentioned that maybe I'd made a mistake in passing on DropBox. He said, "Naw, you made the decision that was right for you." And in hindsight, I think that's correct. I had 3 dreams coming out of college: one was founding a startup, another was inventing a programming language, and a third was learning how Google Search works. This way, I got to try my hand at all 3 of them. And I'm not sure DropBox would've succeeded the way they have if they'd hired me: they got some kickass early programmers instead, and I had some growing up to do before I was really ready to start something big.

<comment><USER5> Quite an interesting story. I guess I am a few years behind you, as in I just graduated a year back and get offers from startups which i accept/turn down. I often wonder how these startups would end up and where I would be relative to them. But I guess what makes the most sense here is the part that says "you made the decision that was right for you.". That kind of seems like the right line of thought.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, during that time period (07/08), I talked with about 10 startups about joining as a founder or early employee. DropBox is the only one still in business today. So I think that the Paul Buchheit post that Joe linked is pretty accurate: "How to be right 90% of the time: predict it'll fail." It's just that you only need one success.

I've had other reasons for staying at Google as long as I have, though, and I wouldn't necessarily consider it a failure.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Success is a little more complex to measure than being employed at DropBox or Google. And also varies from person to person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm reminded of this Quora post on the popularity of Dropbox:

"Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?

Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"

No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs."

[http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular- tha...](http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other- programs-with-similar-functionality)

<comment><USER7> To be fair, in retrospect everything seems obvious.

At the time I'm sure the Dropbox team had to make a bunch of hard decisions. For example, without knowing the success they would later have, it doesn't seem super obvious to have "one master sync folder" as opposed to being able to sync various folders around your computer (a la not-so-successful Live Mesh and perhaps other sync solutions)

<comment><USER8> So a good question would be, what other "obvious" thing are we not doing? And why aren't we doing them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Read the comments there. Now come back. This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with an idea I think is great, go to work, and talk to my buddies in firmware. The first thing almost all the time out of their mouth is basically "why don't use solution x, in addition to y, which will basically give you the same thing" where x and y are great technologies, but kind of hack to accomplish what you're doing. It kind of always kills my energy.

Giving advice is cheap, and deceptively easy to make sound wise. I've found when you want to bounce an idea, you need someone smart, who will tell you what you're missing... but also be open to new ideas. A lot of people lean on either side of that line. Engineers for some reason tend to lean on the pessimistic side.

<comment><USER10> >> 1\. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

This type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability to put oneself in the shoes of the layman. And yet these types of responses are all over the tech community. This disconnect is the exact reason someone like Steve Jobs is able to enter product categories very late but still blow away the competition.

<comment><USER11> Came here to post this. No, seriously, _exactly_ this. That was my favorite quote out of the entire comments!

FTP with curlftpfs and SVN/CVS isn't "trivial" to 99.9% of the population!

It's the same reason that sites like SlashDot were filled with all sorts of reasons why the iPad would never work. Why would you use that?!? You could do the same thing with ______.

Yes, you could. But you won't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.

<comment><USER13> I think a far more insidious fact is that Dropbox fills in a gap left wide open by incompetent OS developers. Its the 21st Century - the OS should be providing such features inherently, without requiring a third party involvement. Maybe HN'ers, at that time, were somehow conscious of this fact, and thus declined to 'see the revolution' that was headed their way. Either way, since there was no other option, Dropbox was "revolutionary" enough to have gained a following.

<comment><USER14> Dropbox support several OSes though, which is still better than any one OS providing a similar capability natively. In general, the OS should just do what it NEEDS to do, and let applications fill out the rest.

<comment><USER13> The fact that there are multiple OS's out there means there is a battle going on. Dropbox serves a need that should be being defined by co-existing OS participants. But we see this everywhere in the Application space, so your point is valid, there is just an OS border, and an App border. I think what I'm trying to say is that border moves around a bit, and I'm cranky about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might want to use them.

After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using 100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files. Ok, fair enough, perhaps there are technical limitations meaning indexing >300k files is tough (very easy to get to that count if you're keeping open source codebases on DB), so I move files out of dropbox and clear its cache. After a week of constant 24/7 100% CPU usage and dropbox failing to update anything, I contact customer support and get sent copy + pasted boilerplate telling me to do what I've already done.

After more than one email to say 'I've done that, what next?' I get told it's due to symlinks in my dropbox folder. I have several in node_modules folders, and have never had a problem with them before, so I find this weird but remove all symlinks from my dropbox folder. No change after several days.

I try deleting files on the web interface - it refuses to do so for a folder with a large number of files in, and tells me to use the desktop interface (great...)

Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.)

At this point the customer support tells me how to delete my account if I'm not happy and they simply stop replying to my (polite) emails.

Googling around it appears this issue has existed for at least a year and a half, and yet there is very little mention of it (there's a bulletpoint hidden away on their website) nor does the interface warn you about it at any point. How hard would it be to at least add a notification like 'looks like you're adding a lot of files, please don't add too many more or I might stop working'.

I used to hold up dropbox as a great example of a YC company that was technically innovative and something of a hacker's company, but this experience has left me quite massively disappointed.

<comment><USER16> With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical Dropbox customer.

<comment><USER15> As I said, very easy to achieve as a developer (I hadn't done anything crazy), and the symlinks were working up to that point.

Even as a non-typical dropbox user (a developer, then), I think there should have been some kind of a warning a, some ability to recover from the situation b (I was left for nearly a month with a completely non-functional dropbox), and not suddenly getting dropped without warning by support c.

If I'd known up front that a deployment of not that unusual amounts of code (especially if you use git) would have led dropbox to irrecoverably fail for me, I wouldn't have used them in the first instance.

I don't think even as a 'non-typical' user the very poor, typically big co, experience I had was justified, esp. given that I am a member of the group of people who first started using dropbox.

<comment><USER17> I have a menu bar on one of my product pages that I still haven't aligned properly.

Priority is in the eye of the beholder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I loved this comment:

> 1\. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite > trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and > then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this > FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

 _Trivially_ use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite automatic syncing.

Why do Linux users often claim something is "trivial" and then go on to list obscure commands and software packages that have to be tied together in just the right way? To me that's "possible to do", not "trivial to do".

<comment><USER19> I suppose you have to come at it from the mindset of those actually using Linux. That is, if it already exists and can be glued together using open tools (as opposed to having to code it yourself), it is "trivial", since it has already been done before.

<comment><USER20> Intentionally or not, your comment seems to stereotype "those actually using Linux" as unable to appreciate the value of the time and effort saved by a prepackaged solution. While that certainly happens (and is more common in the Linux community than in many others) it is not universal. The popularity of Linux distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu among developers and IT people speaks to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Straight from Drew himeself:

       data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another
       option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing
       in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like
       what mozy does.)

It is sad to me that this never came to pass. I guess the desire to offer a web interface overrode the idea of encrypting the files before they left your computer. Not that you can't use your own encryption, but having it built in would have been great.

<comment><USER18> It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.

<comment><USER22> Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?

<comment><USER23> How exactly could you "transfer" files that way? You could just upload something to Dropbox and share your logon credentials and any form of dedup or DMCA won't help.

<comment><USER24> See the StakOverflow question for more details but the basics of it is that in order to optimize uploads the DB client calculates the hash of a file before uploading it and if the hash along with other attributes about the file like size etc... match then they assume it is the same. So you used to be able to trick the service into letting you download a file you never actually had if you knew the hash and other attributes.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit- dropbox-f...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-file- redundancy-check) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_\(software\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If there is any thread that might help comfort you about the pessimism sometimes found on HN, this is it.

<comment><USER26> It's also amusing that the top comment on this thread is a big rant about one specific customer service incident. Totally unrelated to the linked story, and as usual, not seeing the forest for the trees.

<comment><USER15> I strongly dislike the strain of negativity that seems to be typical of hn these days, but...

I don't think it's totally unrelated, as I always very much admired dropbox as a company and technically, and had the sense of them being something of a hacker's company (an hn thread in which the founder is replying to technical issues definitely gives one that impression), and I was very disappointed to have that experience. I rant here because they refuse to listen to me, I have tried to contact them a _lot_ privately but have been ignored.

I'm not the only one to have a similar experience - just a tree in the forest of developers who are likely to experience similar if they try to put open source projects in their dropbox.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps your use-case is not one they consider important. (As others have pointed out, 300,000 files is a lot for a synced drive.)

<comment><USER15> I don't want to belabour my points, so I'm deciding not to continue too much further in these discussions (I've come to find internet arguing is somewhat pointless regardless of the rights + wrongs of the issue at debate), however as I have repeatedly pointed out, it's very easy to hit a number like that if you store code in dropbox, esp. open source projects.

And like I've also pointed out repeatedly, fine don't consider my use-case important, but add a warning or at least don't drop supporting me because I'm too much effort, or if you are, say that's what you're doing.

If I had known dropbox wasn't suitable for developers (it having originated from yc with a technical discussion on that original thread suggests otherwise) - I wouldn't have used it in the first place.

I had used it as a developer for a long long time before hitting issues, then it become unrecoverable even after a _month_ of patiently trying to fix it, and new work files were getting overwritten by old ones throughout. That's not an acceptable failure mode, nor is then being ignored without warning by support (at least say 'sorry you're too much effort'.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think that if pg can't even tell for sure what's going to be successful and what's not, really how surprised can you be that the common HN commented couldn't tell what's going to be big.

If you're a startup and you're pretty sure there's a market for your product, people telling you their gut feeling really doesn't matter imo.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wasn't on HN at the time but I do remember being an early user of Dropbox, and I remember being totally blown away on first use.

So I looked into my email to see when I signed up, it was 14 months after this post. I also found a gtalk chat log with the friend that recommended it, and it looks like my memory is quite wrong, I was just as skeptical as much of the linked HN thread:

>the thing about 2gb dropbox

>is i carry 6gb on my keychain

>and 8gb on my phone

>and i don't exactly trust them with important data

>also my iphone has shared folders that look just like any other computer on my network

>the keychain is kind of a hassle though and i mostly don't use it, i should probably throw it away

</comment><comment><USER30> Here is my personal experience...

It is actually took place, later on when there was an announcement regarding Dropbox raising from Sequoia .

This was the first time I heard of Dropbox.

Those days building a product which did similar to what dropbox were doing, except that mine used any distributed version control it could find on a computer (I had it supporting git, mercurial and bazzar) and push to servers with SSH.

It was all automatic, built with python, and monitored FS for changes. Supported any number of directories, etc.

So I felt I have this great prototype which I considered starting working on this full-time, till that morning when I read the TC article and I realized it simply been done, and by people who now have $6M in their pocket to make it even more awesome.

Given the effort and dreams I built upon my own version, I remembered how I could not use dropbox for quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER31> Honestly, I still think the idea of dropbox is ludicrous. There are many ways to share files, and sending them to a third party to host for you is the worst one of them all. Aside from the few people that really need to multiply their bandwith by many orders of magnitude, a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine. Besides, dropbox was just yet another iteration of online file hosting (I'm pretty sure rapidshare and megaupload predated dropbox by years), so if file sharing was going to blow up, it would have already, right?

And therein lies the true genius of dropbox. The technology itself had already been done to death; the key was to convince a critical mass of people that this was the solution to their problems. Or even better, convince them of a problem they didn't realize they had. Yet again we see that many times success comes down to the better marketer than truly game-changing technology.

(to be completely fair, their syncing mechanism was the best up until then, plus their add-free freemium model was likely the missing key to success in this space)

<comment><USER4> "a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own..."

I think that's the part you're missing. What fraction of the general population can set up a file-sharing server? What fraction of the population even _owns_ a server? What fraction of the population even _knows what a server is_?

DropBox faced this objection over and over again from the investors they pitched, and Drew's answer was variations on "But how many of them have made it easy enough for your grandma to use?" _That_ was the killer innovation - making filesharing so easy to use that you didn't need to set up anything, just install DropBox and drag your files to a folder. And that's been the killer innovation for many startups - Apple, Google, Amazon, Intuit, etc. all let you do things that many other companies have let you do before, but they made it so easy that even the average Joe can do it.

<comment><USER31> That's the thing though, how many "grandmas and grandpas" really need a file sharing service for blobs of data? There already exists "better" solutions to share common file types: flickr/picasa for images, youtube for video, email for word documents, etc. The vast majority of people simply don't need an arbitrary file hosting service. Somehow they've managed to convince people they do.

On the other hand, if you give something away for free that seems to have value, people will flock to it regardless of need. I'm curious if dropbox is actually profitable. I know of many people who use dropbox that I wouldn't have thought would even have heard of it. But not a single one of them pays for it. Perhaps what we're attributing to success is simply a company being sustained by the VC bubble. Even in the face of the "success" of dropbox I don't see the service in its current incarnation being self-sustainable.

<comment><USER32> Grandmas and grandpas is a bit extreme. Just about anyone I know uses Dropbox nowadays because it's just simpler than the alternative. I even use it to share files w/ my wife when we're in the same house. I have a SMB share that I use for some things but when I have to send my wife some pictures I just put them in our shared Dropbox. It's easier and she can access it later on her phone too even. Convenience is a very important factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught up in the details.

I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.

<comment><USER34> People posting those sort of comments have nothing to give, except for their opinion. Keep getting stuff done, don't let them get you down :)

<comment><USER35> They give valuable feedback, how is that bad?

<comment><USER36> That's the point - not all feedback is valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA.

I was a happy paying Dropbox customer since 2008 but downgraded my account to the free tier a few months ago. I no longer consider Dropbox trustworthy for anything except (1) trivial files and (2) files encrypted client-side before they're put into Dropbox.

Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases that only recently did I resolve:

\- 1Password Sync. Dropbox is no longer necessary here since 1Password natively supports iCloud sync across Mac and iOS.

\- Arbitrary file-sharing between Mac and iOS. Dropbox is no longer necessary here ever since I've been running BTSync[0], which has worked flawlessly in my experience.

It might be time to cancel Dropbox entirely.

[0] [http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html)

<comment><USER38> I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.

<comment><USER39> I think he's saying that he's replacing his free-tier use with other alternatives. In this case, he doesn't care that it's not safe from the NSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Internet archive link to the demo/screencast: [https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html)

<comment><USER41> And here is his YC application: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html)

You have to watch his Dropbox video and read his YC application to really appreciate how articulate, succinct and fluid Drew communicates.

<comment><USER42> Really awesome read, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is a perfect example of why you should ignore the naysayers and "experts" on HN when you first pitch your idea or product. Also, a great example of why the best startup ideas look initially like bad ideas ([http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html))

<comment><USER44> Let's be fair though, there's a survivor bias here. It's probably more dangerous to blunder on and simply tune out any criticism.

If you look at the top rated comment on that thread it is certainly a valid criticism, namely that corporate computers are often locked down and won't allow installation of third party software without getting sign off from IT. In the case of dropbox that managed to sidestep this by mainly targeting smaller businesses and individuals and also have the fall-back of letting users access their files over the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating."

<comment><USER46> This one was awesome :)

<comment><USER47> Is it income-generating though?

<comment><USER45> Income? yes. Profit? I'm pretty sure, but I'm not that invested in caring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I remember being sceptical at the time (lots of people were). The consensus here on HN seemed to be that Dropbox was trying to solve a problem Microsoft had already tried to solve a million times (file-sync) and the fact that Microsoft had never been able to sell it and get a decent user-base for their service was proof that this wasn't something people actually wanted.

Funny how a _good enough_ implementation and good marketing managed to turn that around.

I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it.

<comment> mkr-hn > _I don 't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember > not buying into it._

It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems.

<comment><USER49> > I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have > clients for other operating systems.

I don't understand your point. If you only use Windows what is holding you back from using SkyDrive? (Except that it is US hosted and you must assume all that data is public, but Dropbox is no different there.)

<comment><USER44> Because you might want to share files with somebody who isn't using Windows or you might want the ability to switch platforms yourself in the future without worrying about having to migrate all of your stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I love this flashback, thanks for sharing. Between being a reminder that group thinking isn't the best thinking, no matter the quality of the group - <USER2> encouraging me to get out there - fail and be criticized. . . Great.

<comment><USER51> Group thinking is not bad, as long as we're defining group : (small) set of people with lot of common characteristics, goals (if applicable). The opposite of the "mass" which usually is a large set of people whom highest common denominator is to be human.

The question is whether HN can be considered a group or a small mass =)

Plus you have to keep in mind the average pov will be biased in a different way than let's say marketing101.net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's people who try everything that is new and enjoy innovation, and there's people who tend to be skeptical at first. The first kind is busy trying out the software while the others are busy expressing their negativity on a website.

And there's of course those who find it a big shame, that Dropbox and other cloud services have become completely unusable thanks to the host country's government.

</comment><comment><USER53> The top two comments are critical (though not mean).

The first comment is pretty interesting.

 _' My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.'_

He's more or less correct. 'Like a USB' is a bad analogy. Dropbox only replaces some of a USB's use cases and does lot of things that a USB doesn't. OTOH, he's wrong because there is no other 3 word sentence that could have done a better job. 'Like a USB' is probably the best starting point even if it only gets across 25% of the message because 25% is better than nothing. 25% (assuming it's the right 25%) might get the user to install it. Then they might get to know the backup, file sharing/sending, versioning, or whatever subset of functions they use.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm still not using Dropbox. I absolutely detest the idea that I'm relying on a 3rd party for a feature that I consider should be built into every modern Operating System. At the point when OS vendors relinquished to the Web 2.0 Cult their responsibilities for such features as easy filesharing, the world lost something.

Absolutely, its great that people can share files this way. But absolutely, its terrible that it requires fragments of an OS feature to be distributed among multiple, external, unreliable entities.

<comment><USER54> Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage?

Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?

<comment><USER31> I think the point is that your computer connected to the internet is your cloud storage. There's no reason why that functionality needs to be farmed off to a third party.

<comment><USER55> A cloud requires at least 2 computers to be online at the same time. This is not the common case for people.

<comment><USER13> Only because the feature is not in the OS. Were it actually in the OS, people would leave their computers on in order to share things. It makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The comments here are a clear proof why founders should take feedback from different sub-set of users. For example, HN audience is build up of programmers, their feedback alone is not what founders should focus on. Dropbox is used by almost everyone I know because of the convenience it provides and the problem it solves. Most of the what commenters here are saying is not something layman users care about; they don't have any technical skills or time to learn to build their own custom sync-systems.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how many people that initially thought/said that they wouldn't need/want/use Dropbox are actually using it now. Would be particularly interesting to know what reasons convinced people who didn't believe it would work to end up using it themselves. Particularly, would be cool to know if it was due to lack of understanding of the product, lack of a clear enough pitch, or something else that established the wrong expectations.

<comment><USER58> When first shown it by a friend, I didn't want to use it because I was ideologically only using open source stuff, and servers I have control over. I carried on using Unison and some dodgy shell scripts.

Some years later, I got a free 60Gb Dropbox account with a new Samsung phone. It seemed a good way to sync my music and photos, and to let me access text files on the phone.

I'd meanwhile got fed up with my hand made scripts, and tried a few other commercial backup solutions, and got fed up with them all. So Dropbox seemed not a bad part to a backup strategy to use from my desktop as well.

I think this year's privacy news on the Internet has shown my original view was correct. And Drew has shown that a mature, usable, cross-platform syncing client is nevertheless something I use!

<comment><USER57> And therein lies a fascinating fact about Dropbox. Drew made the tradeoff between convenience and security/ownership one that convenience won out, particularly for a lot of people that from the outset were not expecting it. I think Dropbox's adoption in the smartphone world has been one of the most ingenious partnerships. I had pretty much the same experience in that I really only started looking at Dropbox as a serious solution to me when my Samsung phone shipped with a free account (+ I got a whole lotta free space through my university finishing high in the space race).

I'm not a daily linux user myself, so what particularly interests me is what Dropbox's adoption rate is like in the linux world. This seems to me to be the toughest nut to crack, since most linux users are power users in the sense that they're savvy enough to setup their own Unison/rsync etc. system.

My conclusion after thinking about Dropbox more is that it's a testament to the fact that to the majority of people convenience wins out over most other things (so long as the execution is bang on).

<comment><USER59> As a linux user (though I wouldn't consider myself a power user) I shopped around for a long time to find a cross-platform cloud backup solution.

After poking at a lot of the other options out there, Dropbox ended up being The One. The ease of use, lack of (unnecessary) IU (I'm looking at you, SpiderOak), and general un-buggyness after some time of trying out the free account sold me on it.

Since I started paying for Dropbox, I have become concerned about privacy and have encrypted my more sensitive data with Encfs. There have been some other companies started in the last year or so that I'm considering (Copy looks nice, and I want to see what appears based on [http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)).

Roll-your-own backup systems are cool and all, but I've got shit to do that's not file management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Maybe the most remarkable thing is how short the comment thread is -- but I suspect that is more an artefact of how much smaller the hn community was back then, than anything else.

Interesting how dropbox managed to succeed in an area with so many competitors.

Finally, I still think it's complete crap _for me_. But I also see how it's a great packaging and reselling of s3 -- and I'm certainly not surprised it took of (Not saying I necessarily would've bet on dropbox in 2007 -- but the sorry state of webdav in in windows left the market open for anything that offered user-friendly, secure cloud storage, and dropbox ticked (the most commercially important) two of those boxes.

edit: Ok, complete crap is too strong -- but it's a product I have extremely limited use for. While it is easy to migrate away from in the sense that it just stores files, it's not Free software (important for me for anything I use to store my files) and it has no privacy and questionable security (although dropbox+encfs patches up some of that). Still surprising that people didn't seem to see the commercial value -- I absolutely see that (much as I see how people would pay for google apps even if I never would).

</comment><comment><USER61> Thank you for posting this. Having launched my own landing page yesterday (as Drew did in 2007), I thought that I should explain the positive feedback I left for Drew on Hacker News in 2007.

Launch posts were full of naysayers, even back in 2007 when Hacker News was called Startup News. I had done my own startup for 3.5 years at the time, so I wanted to give members of Hacker News useful, insightful, and positive feedback about their project.

The link was a landing page with a video about "throwing away your USB drive."

In my Hacker News comment, I proposed a list of ways to replace "throw away your USB drive" with a non-technical metaphor that people of all ages could understand (a personal secretary who automatically makes duplicates of anything you create for safekeeping, stored the way you want and accessible from anywhere.)

I've observed that newer Dropbox videos started to incorporate my feedback more and more. It's really been awesome to see Drew and the rest of the guys kick butt!

</comment><comment><USER62> Interesting that someone calls this a good competitor to "GDrive", even though google drive was unveiled several years later.

Also interesting is the link to Aaron Swartz's blog, where he describes the need for something similar. [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup)

<comment><USER63> IIRC, at the time there were a bunch of third-party solutions offering 'GDrive' by storing files in Gmail with custom labels through IMAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I was reading Drew Houston's YC application: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html) and notices something strange: There is Google Drive's favicon on [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com) <link rel="shortcut icon" href="[http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico">](http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico">)

Edit: Screenshot [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/edit)

</comment><comment><USER65> Sharp criticism from know-it-alls is often a sign that an idea is good. It's amazing to me how, even though this is common knowledge, good ideas continue to polarize. I'd hate for you guys to convince everyone to be so nice that we skew this long-trusted signal :)

<comment><USER66> Have you any examples of bad ideas that received less sharp criticism? I think it's more that HN looks at every idea critically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> There were so many naysayers. I didn't know HN existed then.

</comment><comment><USER68> So many people today are still harping on the security aspect (Not ~ _free_ ~ software, you don't own the servers).

How does that matter at all when selling to a large consumer base? How many customers of dropbox know what those words mean?

Like so many commercial offerings you could built it from source and get some hacky scripts going on your own but 99% of the world isn't going to do that.

<comment><USER69> Regarding specifically the "free software" statement, It's a holy war. One where I'm on the side of the religious zealots, for once. The special extra fanatical wingeing about big software like DropBox not being free comes from seeing the founders as smart people who have a base ripe for promoting your (my) view (that free software is just plain _better_ for the world), and if they just saw it _our_ way, maybe things would start to change. So we complain. Well, _I_ try not to outright complain, because I know that's a shitty way to get what you want and that my views are ultimately tangential to their cause, but you get the idea...

<comment><USER68> Thats fine and I understand the advantages to open source.

But if you're in the business of selling software (especially to end users and not b2b) like many people here claim to be, that isn't a valid concern or argument against a business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also there is a whole thread regarding its YC Application [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503) \- which sadly, the link itself is no longer available (404).

I assume many would be happy to read it though.

<comment><USER70> Here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdr...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> The secret to success: Trust in yourself, nobody else is going to trust in you.

<comment><USER72> Another secret to success: have good parenting, DNA, education, friends, and an interest in creating things of value (as opposed to the other million things you can do with your time)

<comment><USER73> Those things are harder to control, so generally less worth thinking about.

<comment><USER72> That's a pretty good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> FWIW, Dropbox actually DID replace my USB drive (99% of the times at least).

<comment><USER75> Dropbox doesn't replace USB drives for me. I still use them for sneakernet. Installing the newest version of Ubuntu or OS X. Copying a 2GB file to another computer because downloading it again, even over local wifi, would take too long.

What Dropbox replaced for me is the 'My Documents' folder. It allows me to access my files on my work PC, my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, or anyone else's computer that has an internet connection.

<comment><USER76> There certainly are USB use cases which Dropbox flat-out doesn't account for.

At one point during the setup of my new gaming PC, I somehow hosed things to the point where I _couldn 't install Windows_ (motherboard BIOS update, maybe?). I was getting driver detection failures during the install process, my peripherals (keyboard + mouse) wouldn't work, no NIC functionality, my CD drive was unusable. I ran out to Walmart at 1AM to buy a 16GB USB drive/16GB SD card, tethered my phone (my only functional computer at the time) to my PC, downloaded the required ISO to my phone's new SD card, moved the ISO to a USB via a live instance of Ubuntu running off of another USB, and installed Windows via USB (and things magically worked from there).

Dropbox is fantastic, but USBs aren't dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Why would you want to keep your data "in the cloud", if the government uses the argument that as long as your data is on a 3rd party's servers, then it's not yours?

</comment><comment><USER78> The comments given on HN back then were so much more constructive! I think I started reading HN about a year after this.

</comment><comment><USER79> This is really inspiring, for the most part; dont let HN comments stump your aspirations.

</comment><comment><USER70> "What tools will you use to build your product? Python (top to bottom.)"

Yes.

</comment><comment><USER80> the fact that the their top-post is negative make the history soo cool!!</comment>


End of roaming charges in EU by 15 June 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-193_en.htm <comment><USER2> Data costs per GB still sound extremely expensive.

It's in line with what they've been doing previously:

[https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/apr/30/end-bill- shock...](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/apr/30/end-bill-shock-eu- mobile-roaming-charges-slashed-phone)

One good thing in my country (Uruguay) is a very good 4G network with the cheapest per GB costs in the Americas.</comment>


Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-07-insect-apocalypse-german-bug-watchers.html <comment><USER3> I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action that I could take to improve the situation. If the public should act, give them something actionable: Calling their local council, joining an organization, not cutting your lawn, whatever.

As anyone's who's been trained in crowd control during emergencies knows, you don't just sound alarm without at the same time telling people what to do. Journalists should take at least some kind of the same responsibility. Otherwise, people will either panic or stop listening.

<comment><USER4> Just because you can report a problem doesn't mean you have a solution. That doesn't mean the problem is not worth reporting.

I haven't seen panic. People can't stop listening since they haven't even started. Most people don't know about this, don't care, or can't see the big picture.

But repeating works.

We know it works, because that's how TV ads work.

So I'm all OK with repeating that again, and again.

People getting tired of it ? Meh, they still watch TV after the 1876th coca cola ad. And then they go buy soda.

I'll take the chance of repeating a wholesome message.

<comment><USER5> It's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way things are and gets ahead because of it?

What we need is a mass awakening. We need everyone to care at the same time to see anything change.

We won't act unless we have role models acting before our very eyes. We won't act untile there is a problem directly in front of us. Until that time you may count on the status quo continuuing.

<comment><USER6> > _It 's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I > stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way > things are and gets ahead because of it?_

Through the magic of principles? Life should not be about getting ahead, but about doing what's right.

<comment><USER7> What is right? How can a person know? I don't think that principles are much more than oral tradition. And many of us don't have that in the modern world.

<comment><USER6> > _What is right? How can a person know?_

We watch, we experience, we learn, we read, we ask around, we interact.

Same as with any other thing. If I stole your wallet you'd immediately knew it wasn't right, wouldn't you?

> _I don 't think that principles are much more than oral tradition._

Well, I don't think oral tradition is not a good basis to base principles on. It implies historical experience, communal values, the test of time, and so on.

It might not be perfect, but then again, it need not be.

<comment><USER7> I would know it was theft. I would assume it was right relative to the goals of the thief, albeit not myself, or the statutory codes. Right is a measure of social validation, or ideological compliance. (Both of which are transmitted via oral tradition)

I agree that oral tradition is not a good basis to base principles on, lol. Welcome to my world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The German parliament had two interesting votes last week:

(1) Recoginze the ongoing climate catastrophe - propose measure to counter act [1]

(2) Stop using coal power stations [2]

You can guess how the ruling parties voted. It makes me furious in the light of recent devastating news (No permafrost in Candian arctic, melting Greenland ice, hottest June in Germany since record keeping, Anchorage seeing unprecedented temperatures...)

===

[1] [https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...](https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimmung?id=613)

[2] [https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...](https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimmung?id=612)

<comment><USER9> What alarms me even more is that the insect apocalypse is MORE urgent than climate change.

<comment><USER10> And almost infinitely easier to stop. All we need to do is ban a relatively small number of insecticides and insect populations will rebound in a very small number of years.

<comment><USER11> You should probably write up your findings so you can gather a lot of research money and fame. /S

If only things were that simple...

I am not sure if pesticide usage has increased in Western Europe since the early ninetees. But I am certain that agriculture has been de-intensified as a whole in the former GDR. And it's not an insect paradise here...

<comment><USER12> In France in 2010, they signed some "green pact" promising to reduce the quantity of pesticides by 30% before 2020. Reality check: pesticide use grew by nearly 20% since this "pact".

<comment><USER8> They play us like violins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anybody can do a little bit to help insects. It ranges from planting a pot of some flowers, to building an insect hotel, to switching to a more natural lawn or talking to your city council to replace parts of the lawns in parks with more insect friendly meadows.

However, I don't see how I as consumer can choose agricultural products that are friendlier to insects. Organic agriculture also uses pesticides and monocultures. Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea, but other than that how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

<comment><USER14> > Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea

Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat field.

<comment><USER15> You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly sized wheat field.

Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers, bushes, hedges and trees.

Imagine that.

<comment><USER16> You can't, because "man cannot live off bread alone". Wheat lacks many basic nutrients that meat contains. Calories are not fungible - you can live off meat essentially indefinitely (especially if you eat the organ meat), but you'll rapidly a nasty case of iron deficiency and scurvy if you try to live off wheat.

I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency. It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable levels of nutrient density will _always_ take more energy that just building up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a "conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised livestock.

<comment><USER15> I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of my reply.

The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on.

If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non- vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

Thanks for your reply!

Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.

<comment><USER17> >> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

<comment><USER15> > If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that > they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating > as much beef as they please.

Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes.

> [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by > throwing them scraps.

Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that.

You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop.

> At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, > rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays.

That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?

<comment><USER17> I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on.

We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect).

All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying.

Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency.

I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?

<comment><USER15> The comment about ancestry was mainly intended for perspective.

For most of humanities time on earth, we didn't have the luxury to throw away perfectly fine food. We'd eat offal and insects and everything that came our way just to get by. People nowadays tend to forget that.

I quite enjoy snails, although usually with french-style herbal sauce. I also like eating insects, although (I mentioned that before) they are much to expensive.

And they'll have to get cheaper if we want to feed any significant number of people with healthy protein. Because, let's be clear about that, we're not going to do that with beef or mutton or pig. There's not enough land to go around for that, if we want to keep any semblance of an intact ecosystem. Anywhere on earth.

Feeding the whole planet with beef or mutton or pig would mean to strip down every last acre of forest and turn it into pasture or giant monocultures for feeding livestock. And that's not how ecosystems work.

All in all, I don't actually think that we see things that differently.

Have fun!

Edit: Ah, yes. The Revolution bit was a reference/joke with regards to "The Rich". ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just know : my mom has a garden and in winter she used to feed the birds. Since 2 or 3 years the birds are not stopping eating this food when spring comes - my mom now feeds the birds all year. At the same time insect have become noticeably fewer

<comment><USER4> Your comment and this article are the first I noticed mentioning the birds as a second indicator. It means the cascade has started. Somewhere else, it's probably already acting as well: the soil, the plants, or stuff we don't know about.

<comment><USER19> I noticed last year and this year again when i drove ~800 km to a vacation. 10-20 years ago i had to wipe loads of sticky insect parts of my windshield. Not necessary anymore. I'd guess back then my windshield whould have caught ~200 bugs/hour and now it's more like ~10. So my highly subjective statistic says: insects are fucked and maybe so are we.

<comment><USER20> Maybe your modern car windshield glass is less sticky. Maybe your modern car aerodynamics is better and insects just fly around.

The problem may or may not exist, but your subjective statistic tells nothing.

<comment><USER21> There's plenty of proof it's true if you bothered to look. Here's but one example:

[https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/why-are- fire...](https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/why-are-fireflies- disappearing)

[https://www.firefly.org/why-are-fireflies- disappearing.html](https://www.firefly.org/why-are-fireflies- disappearing.html)

Something which I've also anecdotally noticed long before I researched it to confirm it's not my imagination. You can see it in action at my cousin's farm. Their prairie is a hive of activity and lights at night. The neighboring soy farm is dead.

<comment><USER20> As I said, it might be true. I personally believe it's true.

But the argument about windshield proves nothing.

<comment><USER4> If I say "don't open the door, there is a dangerous thing behind it, I saw it". Will you open the door or trust anecdotal evidence ?

The thing is, we need balance between facebook mum faith and requesting studies, numbers and white papers for every single little opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's crazy how disconnected from nature we have become to not notice in our everyday life an extinction event happening at this very moment.

<comment><USER23> Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

It's like when you have to do your homework but postpone it until the very last moment. Your profs tell you to work, your parents too, even your friends, and you know deep down that you're wrong, but you don't give a shit until you get the grade and think "if only I ...".

First world countries won't wake up until it gets bad (famines, war and mass immigration bad), until then it's just insects, birds and slightly warmer climate, surely people have bigger problems in their daily lives ...

[https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution- ebd60d5acd4...](https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-ebd60d5acd43)

<comment><USER24> > Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if > some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

I live in London. The stars are still clearly visible here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This one scares me. No one seems to be doing anything about it, and the results could be massive.

</comment><comment><USER26> In 1958 Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be killed, as part of the famous Four Pests Campaign (Chinese: 除四害), because they ate too much grain. This caused one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Without birds, the population of insects grew massively and ate most of the plants, grains making one of the one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

<comment><USER11> So... We should kill sparrows?

<comment><USER26> Maybe we should control the predators of the insect species who are struggling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My large, extended family, notes this every year when we go to our family reunions in Northern Ontario: each year, our cars have fewer bugs than the previous year.

We've had the family reunion the same July weekend for 45 years now and our cars and trucks used to be just plastered with insects. Now there may be none at all.

</comment><comment><USER28> The older I get, the more guilty I feel of even squashing an ant in my home -- they are living forms like us and we should be treating them with respect and give them space to thrive as well. And if this means setting up protected reserves for insects and to ban certain types of chemicals then so be it.

<comment><USER29> If it's an argentine ant and you're not in that part of the world, you should eradicate with prejudice as they're an invasive species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing? We used to go out of our way to kill insects in past decades, presumably because we'd prefer them dead. Now they are dying off and I'm not sure why I should be unhappy about this.

What are the bad consequences of this?

<comment><USER31> Because these insects are eaten by other animals which are eaten by other animals which are...

You get the point. The food chain can collapse and some animals are doing good things for the environment.

<comment><USER32> Insects also are primary processors of rotting biomass. Without them we will soon find that corpses last longer.

They are also the primary source of crop pollination. Without them much of our food won't be pollinated and reproduce well.

We need them.

<comment><USER33> That's an interesting point.

Does that mean that projected times of death based on decomposition (As seen on the pseudo scientific scenes in CSI) could actually be drifting over time due to less decomposition agents?

Is their any data to back this hypothesis?

<comment><USER34> Anyone that tells you a time of death beyond about 20 hours is lying. And the estimates below that are usually based on processes that haven't changed (loss of body heat, chemical changes in blood, and bacterial processes in the gut).

<comment><USER33> So CSI was actually a lie! On a serious note, TIL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not to sound overly optimistic, but I can imagine that a trend like this is less difficult to reverse than, say, climate change.

The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.

As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales than the climate.)

<comment><USER36> You are so right. Insects are mass breeders, and it's common for the numbers of any given species to veer wildly from year to year. We may or may not be seeing a serious setback for insects in general, but given a chance, they will bounce back within a few short generations. And so will their predators, albeit over a longer stretch of time. For what it's worth, nature seems remarkably unperturbed up here a little north of Germany. Some counts up, some counts down. Two years ago, we had mice everywhere, this year hardly any. But then a recent infestation of butterflies, and the bats are doing extraordinarily well this summer, as are the spiders apparently - <USER2> indicative of any extreme dearth of insects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The intriguing aspect is: This phenomenon is indeed observable everywhere (windshields) yet there is no obvious reason. Pesticide use should have gone down across all of Germany in the last 30 years. So should have general pollution. Warmer weather should actually help insects. Large natural reserves have been created (e.g., former military training grounds, depopulated areas in rural Germany).

So either this is caused by an as of now unknown agent, or we see some form of delayed effect.

<comment><USER37> > unknown agent

The only thing that comes to my mind besides the climate change is the increased EMF/RF radiation levels.

<comment><USER38> Wouldn't it be easy to find location correlates if this was the case? Strong EMF/RF radiation is rather spatially confined. If it was affecting insects, we should expect negative results in sparsely populated areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm doing everything I can in my own yard: growing vegetables without pesticides/herbicides, growing wildflowers/natural fauna in the majority of our gardens, etc.

And I'm growing sympathy for insects in my children! My daughter is obsessed with ants and we're getting into my childhood hobby of farming ants.

Etymology is almost as cool as mycology. I love insects, arachnids, and all of our crawly little friends!

</comment><comment><USER40> I thought it was ironic that an advertisement for exterminators came up in the middle of the article. Another triumph for add algos ;)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is also easily observed by anyone old enough who drives in the suburbs or rural areas, and it really jumped out at me a decade or more ago.

When's the last time you had to clean your windshield of a bunch of dead bugs (or a few large ones)? I remember when every gas fill up also meant using both the mesh sponge side and the squeegee side of a windshield washer, and you knew which gas stations kept those buckets filled and had good squeegees. How long since you used one of those to clean off a filthy windshield, or since you noticed if a gas station has good ones?

On a somewhat related note, how long since you had to do the same for bird droppings? And when you're parking at night or walking back to your car, do you have any issues with walking through the huge clouds of bugs around the lights or are there no longer any such clouds?

Edit: expanded and mobile corrections

<comment><USER42> i love in tokyo, and when i graduated school in 2011, i used to get bitten every summer like mad by mosquitos, you could see bugs everywhere in the spring and summer

for probably the past 5 years i haven't been bit once, rarely see a mosquito or other bugs... something very strange has has happened in the past 10 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is there no pattern at all to the locations where the greatest decrease happened? If it's pesticides then the traps nearest an active field of crops will show the greatest decrease. It doesn't sound like they're finding that. If it was road deaths then it would be near the roads. If it's temperature then you would expect to see decreases in hot years, increases in cold years. If crawling insects are affected differently than flying ones, that tells you something. If it's everywhere at once with no pattern whatsoever, well thats just _baffling_. It would have to do with the composition of the air or maybe the solar cycle or something else that affects everywhere at once.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm surprised to read no one seems to know what to do about this. There's a simple thing you can do and that is buying organic produce. Sure, it still uses some pesticides but not all and a lot less (at least in Europe, not sure about the US).

</comment><comment><USER45> Off topic, but capitalizing words in titles in English really bothers me. Every word in the title are nouns, but some are here ment to be verbs. In German for example, only the nouns would have been capitalized, making the title much easier to read.

<comment><USER46> It's the standard (albeit inconsistent and undefined) for headlines, though.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > "Since 1982, the traps we manufacture ourselves have been standardised and > controlled, all of the same size and the same material, and they are > collected at the same rate in 63 locations that are still identical," > explains Sorg.

Do I believe that something, likely humans, is doing damage to nature? Yes.

However, give the above, I have to ask: couldn't the argument be made that collecting less samples is natural selection at work? That is, the insects that aren't trapped - for whatever reason - will pass those traits on and so on. The survivors breed more survivers. Those that are trapped and die, well so does their DNA.

<comment><USER48> That doesn't really pass scrutiny. It's not like they are mass collecting insects and it's not like someone else is using insect traps to mass trap insects. As such there is practically no evolutionary pressure to adapt to not being caught in insect traps.

Insect traps are a rare sight for any one insect.

<comment><USER47> I'm don't follow.

Let's take bug species Foo. We have two Foos. One has DNA trait Y the other DNA trait Z. Zs are more prone to be trapped. Ys are less.

Over time Zs die off. And Ys prevail. Therefore, over time the traps will capture less Foos.

You're (falsely?) thinking in terms of traditional evolution. But natural selection is not the same thing. I'm suggesting that - at least in theory - natural selection can be used to explain why they are catching less insects.

<comment><USER49> I read this as a direct attack, although the parent's argument is clear.

Let's say you trap 2 in 10k insects, which sounds high. If 50% of those insects had a slight evolutionary advantage against traps (which sounds a lot), that the two that did get caught didn't possess.

Great, they now have a 0.02% evolutionary advantage.

My point is: I assumed a lot of things, yet came up with a tiny advantage. I don't think (didn't compute) this is going to do much difference in the short term (although long term, it _could_ have a bigger effect). So yeah, as in your argument, Zs die of, but very slowly, and there might be other greater pressures fighting against this.

Assuming the rates of my post, I'd be curious to see how much time it would take to achieve a meaningful difference in terms of population. (These catch rates are very high, and insects tend to reproduce quickly, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't much).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> "Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades."

This is almost certainly false. The paper released earlier this year only looked at other studies which reported insect populations in decline, a methodology certain to find a problem.

</comment><comment><USER51> in my country right next to germany, within 'protected' natural areas, insect life declined by as much as 85%. If you have a garden which is friendly to insects you get swarmed as there are literally no other places to go.

people need to be aware of this and stop just paving their gardens. create a nice home for some bugs :-) it will be good for your children and their children. So no excuse not to put some flowers outside and keep at least a few insects fed and happy.

</comment><comment><USER52> This worries me _way_ more than warming itself.

</comment><comment><USER53> Brain dump:

Reading V. Smil's "Energy and Civilization a History" has made me realize that the Applied Ecology (Permaculture) epoch would be a fundamentally new form of civilization.

Cf. Hemenway's lecture: "Permaculture can save Humanity and the Earth but not Civilization"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo) It's about an hour. Here are some notes I took:

He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.

He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activites, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.

        Five culture types based on food getting technology:
            Foraging
            Hunter-gatherer
            Agricultural (cities)
                Pastoral (Animal herding)
                Industrial

Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."

(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...

Holmgrin's scenarios:

\- Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)

\- Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.

\- Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.

\- "Atlantis" \- i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.

"Peak Wood" \- no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.

Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.

The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects. [https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway- vid...](https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway-video.html)

\- - - -

OMG: Obvious ways that we are out of whack with Nature:

Glass windows kill millions of birds.

Windshields kill billions of insects.

Rain brings out earthworms that then die on the sidewalk.

Asphalt covers n% of the Earth and vulcanized rubber particles are continously emitted into the ecosystem.

Plastic collecting in the Oceanic Gyres and beaches of the world, as well and in the bellies of animals, and coating and fusing with rock.

Gas-burning, noise- and air-polluting leaf blowers that are inherently wasteful (each item is typically blown about 2~5 times before arriving at resting point. Compare to vacuum cleaner.)

In fact, all the pollution.

Lawns are everywhere. Intrinsically wasteful, deliberately stunted and impoverished ecosystems, massive applications of chemicals.

Agriculture. Literally counter-productive: untouched ecosystems are orders of magnitude more productive. Doing nothing is more productive than farming.

We wear shoes that insulate us from contact with the Earth (lit. grounding). We do this because we have poured concrete all over everything.

Where the meat comes from...

And so on.

\- - - -

Part Yay: Humans are Nature's turbo-chargers!

We can increase the productivity of natural system by an order of magnitude again over baseline untouched ecosystems. (Example: WPA built miles of massive swales across the western states, and years later (with no maintainence) there are plants and animals there where before there was desert. TODO: look this up.)

(Cf. Yeoman's Keyline techniques. Draw water out onto ridges to gte more use out of rainfall. [http://www.keyline.com.au/](http://www.keyline.com.au/) )

Broadly speaking we can corrugate terrain and systems to get more surface area and interaction and create more niches and therefore more life. Recall that life exists in the thermodynamic flow from the Sun (and yes, the oceanic heat vents) to ultimately the rest of the sky, and that we are nowhere near the physical limiting factors. It's relatively easy to add niches to an existing garden. Especially if you're able to make modifications! I have a whole DVD about Permaculture water harvesting where they bring in a backhoe to dig out a new little lake and some canals! A one-time expenditure of fossil fuel to make a vast change in the water/energy flows of a local system to ultimately increase the ecological robustness and yield makes sense. And in theory, locally grow alcohol fuel could be used to power land-shaping machines.

There is also a possibility to use Bucky Fuller-style Tensgresity (or merely geodesic) structures to create "3D" gardens.

With Permaculture techniques you can revitalize salty desert in a few years ("Greening the Desert" Geoff Lawton) and there is plenty of desert. All of the necessary factors are themselves organic and therefore capable of geometric increase. We could green the deserts from Southern CA to Texas and accomodate several hundred million people in an ecologically (climate proof!) way.

</comment><comment><USER54> "He and an army of volunteers have over the years gathered as many as 80 million insects that are now floating in countless ethanol bottles."

Ah, that's where the insects went!

</comment><comment><USER55> who would have thought that ichthyology could be so sexy?? :3

</comment><comment><USER56> Dang it you guys, I posted this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865)) _yesterday_. Things are getting so bad so rapidly...</comment>