The #1 reason your job sucks and how to fix it - <AUTHOR> http://johnplaceonline.com/stress-management/the-1-reason-your-job-sucks-and-how-to-fix-it/

<comment><USER2> Here's what I think:

People need to understand that when traveling through life--whether by car, aging, networking, degrees, promotions, dating)--it doesn't matter where you actually are. At all. It never has, and it never will. Those photos you took are pointless. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then people are worth a billion photos. A few photos a day just can't capture what you're thinking, the social context, the general mood, your thoughts and feelings, the state of the economy, foreign relations, what you just did 5 minutes prior, what you just ate, what your friends are up to off-camera, if the person next to you smells like they're drunk, the charge on your cell phone, your status with friends and family, etc.

Photos give the illusion of defining you at a point in time, but they are NOT a virtual machine or an environment like Squeak--they're just a screen shot-- and not what the person's doing, either, but what what's visible for that split second of time.

The big problem, then, is that people judge themselves by what they would look like if somebody were to take a photo of them, and not by where they're going. In fact, people are doing everything they can to impede where they're going-- buying anti-age cremes, spending money so they don't have to take the responsibility of saving it, which might otherwise make them feel older. So, people are always focusing on looking like they have never made any progress in their lives.

However, when traveling through life--whether by car, aging, networking, degrees, promotions, dating)--it doesn't matter where you actually are. At all. It never has, and it never will.

The only two things that matter are the direction and velocity. Therefore, you always have to make the best choices you can for your life, when buying things, socializing, and business. Look at what's stopping you, decide your options, and pick the best overall choice, and if you really can't see a better way, then do the option that is easier. Then move on. Life is better than any video game because you have infinite choices in infinite areas. The key is to hurry up and make a choice, and move on to the other 230 trillion choices you have.

If you know you like a shirt, and the fit and price range is good, but you can't decide between red and blue, pick one randomly and move on. Who cares what it will look like when somebody takes a photo of you?

</comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest rather than trying to find what you love, try first to learn to love what you do. Almost everyone has room to do their job better. The direction you should take your career will become more obvious after you do that. In my experience, these are the biggest obstacles to loving what you do:

\- Being pessimistic yourself.

\- Being surrounded by pessimistic people.

\- Working for pessimistic management.

\- Dealing with a poor physical work environment.

\- Forgetting to aggressively attempt hard problems.

Sometimes, you'll hit a wall. It can't ALL come from within (though some Bhuddists may disagree).

I unloaded trucks in a warehouse for a few months after college, and while it was rewarding to get stronger and satisfying to work very quickly, it was clear that there would be very little change approaching infinity, and I could not do this the rest of my life.

In my last job, I was beginning to notice a similar wall, but more importantly it was fairly clear that management both did not enjoy working with technology, and did not enjoy managing employees within the framework of the company. They did not enjoy dealing with bureaucracy, yet it was forced on them often. This resulted in consistently poor morale. Even when we thought morale was good, it was bad by the standards of the company I work fow now.

It happened so gradually that all of a sudden one day I noticed that the thought of going to work made me sick to me stomach. But I knew it wasn't the work, because just a month or so earlier I'd happily immersed myself in a project and learned a lot, and I'd been making consistent progress.

If you need inspiration, Paul Graham's essays are good, although the one I would recommend first is Fred Brooks "The Tar Pit" (part of _The Mythical Man- Month_ collection). In particular, in the section called "Joys of the Craft" he lists five reasons: The joy of making things, the pleasure of making them for other people, the fascination of the puzzle-like nature of the problems, the joy of always learning, and the delight of working in such a "tractible medium" that nevertheless produces real measurable results.

<comment><USER4> _learn to love...._ We do not love jobs, what we have is Passion for our apps. We do not want 2 b offered Jobs, we want to Create them. We do not want to work for Google, maybe they can buy our startup, but we will leave as soon as we can. We do not want to work with 100k other employees, we want to work with 100M users. We are artists. We create it. They enjoy it. That we love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article ties one's dreams to his job. To some extent it's a valid link because work is so much of our lives. But as far as I'm concerned a job is just a tool, a (rather painful) way to obtain freedom; the wealth I create while working allows me to do whatever I want in my free time (I'd rather have just the wealth than the job). I prefer clearly separating my work life and my _fun_ life instead of living for my job. The non-work part is much easier: if I want to become a robotics engineer for a month, I can buy parts and play with them until I get bored (and want to become a musician for a month). If I want to become a professional robotics engineer, it's a very different story! (I chose this example while thinking of Anybots: now that Trevor has the wealth, I'm pretty sure he's building robots for pure fun only; if he decided early, right after graduation, to start a career in robotics he would probably be designing boring industrial robots for some corporation).

<comment><USER6> "I prefer clearly separating my work life and my _fun_ life instead of living for my job"

That's likely because your job is not fun. If you were more invested in it (e.g., it fulfilled your dreams), you might feel differently.

Thinking that work doesn't have to be fun is what leads most people to dissatisfaction, IMO. I think the idea that your job should be a vehicle for fulfillment is a very important one. Time is scarce resource, and it is a shame that many people are willing to trade the bulk of their lives away helping someone else achieve his dreams rather than trying to achieve their own.

It occurs to me that the most liberating and frightening aspect of entrepreneurship is its lack of definition compared to traditional employment. Consider that a traditional employment relationship leaves the average employee little time for introspection, and it's easy to see that he's been trained to dream small and settle for the scraps of time he hasn't traded to his employer for a relatively small amount of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My job sucks because I am not the founder and owner of the business.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good advice for those of us striving for levels 3-5 (as the vast majority of ycnews readers probably are)...

Stop and imagine how pretentious such advice will be to those - the majority of the population - who are still trying to achieve level 1 and 2. "Follow your dreams" is great advice for those of us who aren't in immediate danger of starving; the worst that can happen if we fail at achieving our dreams will be that we have to settle for a job we find boring and unfulfilling - not a job that's low-paying or dangerous, and definitely not in danger of ending up on the streets.

Not disagreeing with the article, just a bit of perspective... I personally am grateful that I have the opportunity to aim for the top of the pyramid, but many people don't have the luxury to be picky about how they're putting food on the table.

</comment><comment><USER9> So he had to work for 6 years to realize he didn't like his work?

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's synonymous with what he said: that he didn't find his work fulfilling. That's a higher threshold. If you could get paid to play video games, you might like your job, but probably wouldn't find it fulfilling.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Linode upgrading and rebooting all Xen server instances one by one - <AUTHOR>

Full support note included below.
---
Hello,
Linode recently received several Xen Security Advisories (XSAs) that require us to perform updates to our host servers. In order to apply the updates, hosts and the Linodes running on them must be rebooted. The XSAs will be publicly released by the Xen project team on March 10th, therefore we must complete the updates before that date.
These updates are required to protect the security and safe operations of not only our infrastructure, but yours as well. We understand that a disruption with such limited notice is inconvenient, and we hope you understand that these measures are warranted due to the severity of the XSAs.
Your Linodes have been assigned a maintenance window in which a reboot will occur. These times are listed within the Linode Manager[1] in the timezone set in your user's My Profile[2]. Your schedule in UTC timezone is as follows:
/* List of linodes */
During the maintenance window Linode instances will be cleanly shut down while we perform the updates. Your Linode will be inaccessible during this time. A two-hour window is allocated, however the actual downtime can be much less. After the maintenance, each Linode will then be booted. See our Reboot Survival Guide[3] for tips and hints on configuring and testing that your Linode services boot properly after the maintenance.
Unfortunately, due the logistical demands of this effort, your assigned windows are not changeable and the host reboots are mandatory.
For general information, please see our status post: <http://status.linode.com/incidents/2dyvn29ds5mz>
Please let us know if there is anything we can do to assist.
[1] <https://manager.linode.com/linodes> [2] <https://manager.linode.com/profile> [3] <https://www.linode.com/docs/uptime/reboot-survival-guide>
-Linode <comment><USER2> Previous posting of their status update: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121432)</comment>


Scheduling made easy! - <AUTHOR> https://xoyondo.com <comment><AUTHOR> Xoyondo is an online scheduling tool which simplifies the task of finding a date for an event or meeting between a group of people. The initiator of a poll simply selects possible dates for the meeting and the participants choose when they have time. The best date for the meeting can then be easily determined. Xoyondo offers many features like automatic time zone conversion, anonymous polls or polls where only a limited number of participants is allowed. The tool is free! No registration required.</comment>


Deploy Meteor on Amazon EC2 (or your own server) - <AUTHOR> http://julien-c.fr/2012/10/meteor-amazon-ec2/

<comment><USER2>
      Install Meteor
        curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh

Why do people still insist on doing this? That script sudo installs a random .deb/.rpm from <https://d3sqy0vbqsdhku.cloudfront.net> \- are you going to notice if someone hacks the site and points to a slightly different url?

This is not much different from running random .exe files that you find on the internet...

<comment><USER3> And what alternative do you suggest? Spamming the download page with 100 different instruction links for each OS and version, where each download page just links to a tar.gz/deb/rpm that still can execute arbitrary code?

<comment><USER2> There's only three if you check the script out - Mac, .rpm and .deb. Is it really that hard to set up packages for three things? Depending on what's in there, it could also just be a node package.

<comment><USER3> Do you know what you're saying? _Three_ binary packages. Three different systems that you have to learn separately.

Have you ever made a .deb or .rpm, let alone a YUM or APT repository? The documentation is horrible. The .deb documentation mentions all kinds of abbreviations and obscure commands... fakeroot, autobuilder, pbuilder, dh_make, devscripts... good luck with that if you don't even use Debian as your primary OS. RPMs are _slightly_ easier though by much. And this is only about generating the .debs/.rpms themselves. Good luck learning all the complex packaging rules and dependency specification rules.

What if you don't have a Mac, do you have to fork over $1500+ to buy one just so you can create a .pkg?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for all your help with setting up Sidebar.io!

</comment><comment><USER5> Very smart post, thanks for sharing the AMI as well. What do you foresee the main applications of this to be in the future ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Real time collaborative Web apps (think Etherpad or Facebook) made 100x easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great, as long as your codebase does not become too diverse! :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice to have a AMI ready to try out meteor.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice post, thanks for sharing.</comment>


Google goes DARPA - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2014/08/14/google-goes-darpa/

<comment><USER2> Video of Regina Dugan and her team (Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP)), including Johnny Lee, at Google I/O 2014..

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV8JDSO1NS8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV8JDSO1NS8)</comment>


Confession of a so-called AI expert - <AUTHOR> https://huyenchip.com/2017/07/28/confession.html <comment><USER2> Well, I can understand why the author would come to this conclusion. A 3rd- year undergrad being called by companies and VCs for insight? I'm impressed by the author but disdainful of these solicitors. It reflects poorly on them. To me they seem like people who don't understand what's happening but are anxious not to miss out on a new wave of get-rich-quick schemes.

Like other commenters have mentioned, largely due to misbranding and sensational media hype. Fearmongering from people like Elon Musk hasn't helped. But the key impact of machine learning for me is to make better and more efficient decisions that are informed by data - and that is not going to go away.

<comment><USER3> >but disdainful of these solicitors. It reflects poorly on them. To me they seem like people who don't understand what's happening but are anxious not to miss out on a new wave of get-rich-quick schemes.

This is an odd point of view to have. While op may see this as pressure because of imposter syndrome, I would have DREAMED of an opportunity like this in college.

These entrepreneur may not quite understand what they're getting into, but make no mistake, they are very good at recognizing experts, both established and rising [although they do cast a wide net] and this kind of behavior drives life changing opportunities and make it substantially easier, in a difficult world, for the cream of the crop to be unlocked to exceptional success at an early age. And the rising tide helps all of us.

The smartest people in college are usually the ones who ate able to learn what they need to know outside of college on their own, once they have an income, and entrepreneurs unlock that potential.

<comment><USER2> I can see your point of view as well... I would've been pretty excited to have this opportunity also.

However call me idealistic, naive, whatever - I don't like the motivations of these solicitors, even though in a pragmatic sense their actions will have positive side-effects for us (the "rising tide" you mention).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No offense to the author. But serious question: why whenever articles like this come does everyone say "oh you're not a fraud at all!!". You know what, maybe she is a fraud. If she's being honest in this post she sounds a bit like one. She's crafted the perfect resume to attract attention about AI and it works. But she doesn't really know all that much.

Possible that she has severe imposter syndrome and she sounds above average. But maybe she really isn't as great as everyone thinks she is and she wants people to know that. And maybe people shouldn't pat her on the back and say "no dude you're great don't say that"

*disclaimer: basing this on blog comments and some comments here

<comment><USER5> Also, there's something I don't get: how does an undergrad ends up teaching a full blown course at Stanford? Especially considering she doesn't seem to be some kind of super genius, only a probably excellent student. I'm not trying to demotivate her, I actually think it's amazing that he/she is doing this, but how did this happen?

<comment><USER6> I have the same background as the author, but a few years older.

Stanford undergrads and grads alike can teach a course as long as they have (1) the necessary background, (2) passion and proficiency in the tech, and (3) motivation to teach and manage course overhead.

Being a "super genius" doesn't correlate with being informative and having intrinsic instructional value.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree with your last point, and I wish more university acknowledged this when deciding who teaches classes. My favourite CS course was taught by a first year MS student. For most universities though, letting an undergraduate teach a class is a no-no and it surprises me that Stanford, one of the most prestigious university in the world, would make an exception to that.

Edit: Commenter above clarified to me that the student is not teaching a full blown 3 unit course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Even though I'm one of the beneficiary of this AI craze, I can't help but > thinking this will burst.

I don't think it will. Level off - maybe.

I've started my work in Computer Vision with classical algorithms (SIFT features, geometry, correlation filters and things alike people were researching for decades). These really worked like garbage, it was a nightmare.

Then we jumped on DL bandwagon - and CV just clicked for me. Now I see it working, not perfectly, not at human level yet, but it works, it's better than everything else and it certainly brings value - not just in CV! Maybe there will be some expectations delayed or even ruined (AGI, fully self-driving cars, dunno), but the tech isn't going anywhere.

At it requires at least some experience and a specific mindset, slightly unusual for a generic programmer. So I don't see a problem with experts, courses, degrees and the like.

<comment><USER8> Pattern matching is the one thing DL is good for. Which is why it's a good match for CV. Calling DL AI in the first place was a mistake or at least over zealous marketing.

Playing go or chess or matching patterns are all things intelligent begins can do but that does not imply that doing those thing means you are intelligent.

<comment><USER9> One can argue that the parts of our brain that make us intelligent, the prefrontal cortex that is so much bigger than in "lesser" animals, is essentially an overgrown, glorified pattern matching engine. Pattern matching is the one thing our brains are good for - there's good reason to suppose that quite many intelligence-related tasks can be reduced to a form of pattern matching.

<comment><USER8> One could argue a lot of things. Humans once argued quite seriously that the human brain was composed of microscopic gears because that was the technology of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of my friends is in finance, and the other in biology, and judging by the way that they talk about it, they believe that AI is about to take over the world, and they believe there is a huge monolithic black box that can solve all the world's problems. So yes, there is a huge bubble. The question is how exactly will the bubble pop? Or will it pop?

<comment><USER11> We have seen many a bubbles in the past. The AI bubble will also burst eventually. I have a first hand experience of it in the ML/NLP world, and I can safely say it is about 30% works plus 70% hype.

Large amount of data has helped, so AI systems are better than before (with lots of training data), but that's pretty much it. It is not going to replace programming jobs, leave aside solving world problems.

<comment><USER12> Given that creating and improving AI is a programming job, once you've replaced programming jobs you've replaced everything else too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > It's a phenomenon that Richard Socher, the dishevelled 30-something (or > 20-something?) lecturer who just sold his company for several hundred > millions yet still biked to campus, mentioned in his class: "Companies keep > asking my students to drop out to work for them."

Why would anyone not continually bike for commuting purposes once they are wealthy? Biking is such a joy whether you're 7 or 70, rich, or poor.

<comment><USER14> Safety concerns?

<comment> semi-extrinsic Several studies have shown that the net health benefit of bicycling to/from work is large even when you account for accidents. Not hard to believe when you hear it _halves_ the risk of cardiovascular disease, which is the most common cause of death in the US.

E.g. these authors find the health improvement statistically increases your life expectancy by up to 14 months, while traffic accidents statistically reduce it by up to 9 days. That's a ratio of 47 to 1.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/)

<comment><USER14> I don't think people think in terms of life expectancy. Do you? Is a 1% chance of dying on your next ride and otherwise living 100 years equivalent to not riding your bike and living 99 years to you?

Edit regarding your comment: Oh, I see why you're confused. I didn't need to do the math because I was talking about a 1-time bike ride as an example to just get the point across -- it's already scary for 1 ride. But if you want the actual math for a lifetime, there's a ~1/5000 lifetime odds of dying in 1 year of biking. That's still pretty damn high. I don't know about you but I'd rather just give up on the 78th expected year of my life and lose the 0.1% chance of dying in the next 5 years.

<comment><USER15> That's distorting the numbers and a ridiculous question because the choice isn't based on the statistic, unless you are planning an economy.

<comment><USER14> It sounds like we're agreeing? I was also saying, just like you, that the choice is not based on the statistics. The parent one is the one that used the statistic to justify the choice of biking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I don't understand is how you get a gig teaching a course at Stanford while being an undergraduate student at Stanford. Is this some sort of special seminar course or something?

<comment><USER17> I didn't come off of this article feeling very impressed with Stanford's CS department. Someone with contextual knowledge please explain why I am wrong.

I've had my own calculus / discrete math / math for bio courses before but that was after several years as a doctoral student and TA at Georgia Tech. I can't imagine that there isn't a PhD candidate with more experience under their belt both teaching and using TensorFlow. The author even admits they volunteered to teach the course to stimulate learning the material themselves.

<comment><USER18> posted above but [https://registrar.stanford.edu/staff/student-initiated- cours...](https://registrar.stanford.edu/staff/student-initiated-courses-sics)

<comment><USER17> Thanks, this makes a lot more sense, my impression from the post was that this was a normal CS course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of Ferenc's reminder that 'deep learning is easy' \- '[http://www.inference.vc/deep-learning-is- easy/](http://www.inference.vc/deep-learning-is-easy/)

<comment><USER20> I am not sure he even understands complexity of DL itself. DL can be formulated as a non-linear optimization problem; that means it's one of the most difficult computational problems and the few types of topology we know are working with current "simple" non-linear optimizers are quite miraculous; I don't think anybody understands why these simple methods work so well when we restrict/structure the number of connections between layers and why fully- connected networks have such a terrible performance even if theoretically they should be able to handle everything better. So there is IMO a plenty of space for everyone to figure out their own niche with best performing algorithm in production and enable magical things in their apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I get similar impression from other side. I have met stanford phd having very poor math background. Yes it is true but unbelivable.

I think the problem is with higher education system not the hype.

Standford/cmu should make their degree more rigorous.

I am sure if cs231n include fisher vector in their course and some maths derivation in their assigment,the number of student would drop logarithmically :)

</comment><comment><USER22> The article is an interesting mix of imposter syndrome and bubble speculation. I guess a good question is: if you know you're in a bubble and you feel like an imposter, are you right?

<comment><USER23> Sort of tangential, but I felt this exact same way when I moved from being a post-doc in neuroscience to being a data scientist. The impostor syndrome was so strong it was painful. It has subsided now a bit because I know I'm able to bring value to my company - despite the fact that I know there are much more capable and qualified data scientists (by a large margin) out there, and despite the fact that by-and-large 'ML' and 'AI' is definitely a buzzword around here. But it really, really motivates me to strengthen where I'm lacking.

The funny thing is, it took me about a year to find this position after a good amount of rejections. About a year after I got my data scientist title, I've been contacted by recruiters from places I would have never expected to be contacted from (Amazon, Microsoft, FB, etc.). Did a few interviews, and realized during those interviews that I still have a _lot_ to learn.

For one of the interviews, they gave me a take home assignment where they literally duplicated a column in the feature matrix... I didn't catch it, and during the phone part of the interview I get asked 'do you know notice something interesting about those two feature distribution plots you have there?'

"Hrmm, no I don't. Oh, wait, they look pretty similar."

"They're exactly the same."

"... shit."

<comment><USER24> _they literally duplicated a column in the feature matrix_

This is called colinearity - you can check for it by comparing the rank of the matrix to its number of columns. In R qr(X)$rank. Good to add this to your EDA workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it really a bubble if it's producing real value?

The answer is yes. Bubbles are investment and financial entities, decoupled from the value the sector is producing, and a bubble burst can indeed destroy real value.

So AI being in a bubble says nothing about whether AI is valuable.

<comment><USER26> It's not really a bubble from the financial risk perspective if there isn't a way to "correct" or collapse it.

Machine Learning is a feature set inside an application inside a market. It's not an industry of it's own where massive swaths of an industry place their money or livelihoods, like e-commerce or derivatives.

So in that sense there isn't any bubble to burst. The majority of ML applications are happening INSIDE massive technology companies, not as stand alone companies. Even then, the stand alone companies have a product that they are selling that ML functions with. So SaaS with ML, or Image Captioning or Translation service etc...

<comment><USER27> Investing billions of dollars in companies and paying employees crazy salaries simply because their title contains the word "data", how is there no way to collapse that? One day the time comes to reap the reward and when the rewards are a lot smaller than expected funding will be withdrawn or at the very least scaled back.

<comment><USER28> Honestly? Data works. It makes companies billions of dollars. Machine learning and AI are getting increasingly good at parsing the data that already exists. It makes sense that companies, who have always made money on data, would invest in something that promises to make them even more money, and has demonstrated the ability to do just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _... a rigged system can't be sustainable ..._

is this even true?

aren't legacy admissions to Ivy League schools, the government protected status of Wall Street banks, generations of nepotism in Hollywood, Ticketmaster, the red-blue lock on politics, prosecution-protected city police officers, and Time Warner cable all dandy examples of sustainable rigged systems?

</comment><comment><USER30> _A French company, during our interview, told me that they ran hundreds of resumes through their algorithm and mine miraculously landed on top._

That's the problem - these AI companies... believe their own hype a bit too much.

</comment><comment><USER31> There is a difference between exaggeration, hype and wilful misleading and AI proponents have long crossed the line.

Now policy makers, and all sorts of busy bodies are contemplating solutions to the 'ai problem' which does not exist and will not exist for some time to come, if it comes.

Pattern matching and image recognition are valuable on their own but passing it off as AI makes a complete mockery of the word and scientific communication.

Engineers and scientists are supposed to be precise and even giving leeway for hype and excitement within the realm of what is possible.

</comment><comment><USER32> In any fast-growing field, the distribution of expertise is pyramid shaped, with a broad base of inexperienced folks, and comparably fewer senior people.

Outsiders calling on the expertise of relatively junior people is a seems to be a pretty natural consequence of this distribution, though maybe not to the extent described in this blog post.

</comment><comment><USER33> OT, but I can't resist:

> Like my friend Delenn said, [...]

I've wondered if Delenn would ever show up as a girl's name. I guess now is about when you'd expect to hear about the children of people who watched Babylon 5 as teenagers. Cool!

</comment><comment><USER34> No billionaire startup CEO, or anyone at the top of their field, was born knowing how to do it.

Just believe in yourself. It's the people who have the courage that'll end up as leaders. You've just got a taste of it.

</comment><comment><USER35> If anyone feels like this, I highly recommend reading the book Learned Optimism.

</comment><comment><USER36> Big Head!

</comment><comment><USER37> Boo hoo, she's going to be making $300k straight out of school, with a 10 minute commute and free food, while managing people twice her age.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is she having doubts brought on by the recent Google Manifesto perhaps:

[http://huyenchip.com/2017/08/09/sexism-in-silicon- valley.htm...](http://huyenchip.com/2017/08/09/sexism-in-silicon-valley.html)

posted earlier.</comment>


A Modern Web Application with Rails - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@coorasse/a-modern-web-application-with-rails-da3deb48014c <comment><USER2> I agree with the overall sentiment. After having worked on backbone, then angular and now react/vue apps I find that we often spend more time figuring out how to do things and futzing with the configuration and tests than we spend actually writing useful app code. Our approach after much hard earned experience mirrors somewhat what he is saying - 1. Rails monolith with Turbolinks. 2. sprinkle React components as needed. We have rarely needed to go beyond this and we find it much (much) more maintainable and stable after a year or two.</comment>


Regulate Facebook and Twitter? The Case Is Getting Stronger - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-14/regulating-facebook-twitter-and-instagram <comment><USER2> I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform.

I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms a) protect consumers' data b) don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally. But it might be easier to go the competition route.

<comment><USER3> > I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what > ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a > single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control.

I have come to the admittedly sad conclusion that you can't reside in the middle here. I mean, you can idealistically, but slope will slide to one side or the other in practice. At least at this time I think you can ask for government interference or not. I would like to think that you could trust each side to know its boundaries, as we see in other regulated industries, but time has shown either side cannot. Which side would you want to give an inch to, because a mile will be taken (or according to some doomsayers it already has)?

<comment><USER4> The US government has censored the broadcast media(tv, radio) since their formation. So we do have some fairly solid evidence that the US government has not wildly abused that power.

I'm not sure this has to be an all or nothing thing. We have some reasonable protections built into the Constitution and case law that back that up.

I understand your hesitation about having the government involved as there are plenty of examples of government influence on the media around the world. I share the same fears.

With that said, do we really have any real world proof that the US government in recent years has over stepped its boundaries in regards to media restrictions?

<comment><USER3> We don't all publish TV content. We can see from retransmission fees for over- the-air content to the decimation of business models like Aereo what happens when content is governed. I see the Aereo business model as very similar to what's happening w/ article 13 in the EU right now.

But in general I don't think you can compare broadcast mediums to bidirectional ones (e.g. words on the telephone or text on the internet).

<comment><USER5> That's not really driven by the government so much as the media companies.

<comment><USER6> Big media companies have weaponized the government to serve their interests, it makes sense that social media companies will do the same.

They'll write the rules together, make the barriers to entry even higher, and pat each other on the back.

Then it's on to the next moral panic, this one's been fixed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I posted previously when this topic came up ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079526)), it makes little sense to regulate these companies while there are still federal laws on the books actively encouraging the centralization of big tech. Quoting from that post:

Why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications?

The limits on third-party apps are legal, not technical. It is not technically challenging to build an application that collects Facebook credentials and then presents alternative views and features. It could, for example, finally be possible to see a time-ordered view of your friends' posts (Facebook doesn't allow this since it reduces engagement).

The development of such applications would serve as a threat and check on the market dominance of Facebook. A popular third-party application could consider adding its own features that Facebook does not have. It would also reduce Facebook's revenue.

What stops this? In the US, it is primarily the CFAA ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)). Once Facebook formally tells a company to stop accessing their servers, they are in violation of federal law if they continue to do so.

It seems premature to pursue legal action while we still have federal laws that encourage and cement the dominance of a single provider.

<comment><USER8> > It could, for example, finally be possible to see a time-ordered view of > your friends' posts (Facebook doesn't allow this since it reduces > engagement).

Am I missing something? This has always been a feature on Facebook right? I might be crazy but I thought that this was the only way I've been using FB for years. They call it "Most Recent" News Feed, isn't that the same as "time- ordered"? I'm quite sure they more than "allow it", they spend significant money on supporting it.

> It seems premature to pursue legal action while we still have federal laws > that encourage and cement the dominance of a single provider.

Why? The laws are generally meant for different things (protecting trademark/quality of service/etc issues, vs. destabilization of society by having too much direct influence.

We can - and must - do more than 1 thing at at time, it's not premature to take action on Thing A while Thing B is still in-progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I honestly feel the opposite is true -- that the case was reasonably strong in the past and it's gotten steadily weaker.

Go back 5-8 years ago, and I might have felt like Facebook and Twitter were unstoppable monopolies. Nowadays I feel reasonably confident that post- millennial generations are going to widely abandon Facebook. And I feel reasonably confident that as Mastadon matures, it will take an increasingly large amount of market share from Twitter.

Mastadon in particular is surprising to me, because I did not think it was going to work. And sure, it's still minuscule right now, but I'm willing to bet that usage is going to steadily trend upwards. Right now, you kind of need to care a lot to switch to Mastadon, but there exists a tipping point where the user base becomes big enough that for certain communities it makes sense to just switch en-mass.

I think people underestimate how hard it is to get a small-to-medium number of users to switch off of a network, and overestimate how hard it is to get _everyone_ to switch off of a network.

I guess I'm willing to bet that the fake news/foreign bots panic will last longer than those platforms, but I also can't think of how regulation is ever going to fix that. Maybe in Europe, but in America 1st Amendment protections are going to get in the way. Facebook has _more_ power to ban hate speech and bots right now than it would if it were a public utility.

<comment><USER10> > Nowadays I feel reasonably confident that post-millennial generations are > going to widely abandon Facebook.

You are probably forgetting Instagram and WhatsApp which completely dominate the respective market. There is literally no competition for Facebook at all.

<comment><USER9> That is a very good point.

I'm not sure I agree that those apps are untouchable, but I would agree that Facebook as a company is in a much stronger position than Facebook as an individual product, and the company is probably a long ways from going away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm disappointed that Bloomberg published an article that points out all of the problems with unregulated social media but doesn't purpose specific regulations that could be helpful for most of the problems they point out.

What can the goverment do to help prevent foreign interference with domestic elections via social media? If Facebook is a natural monopoly what regulations would make it's use more fair? They suggest a user's bill of rights, but only one item that would fit in it. A bill of rights naturally would include multiple items. To make matters worse the ToS lets users know how their data might be used which is the only item suggested for the user's bill of rights.

All companies in the United States are subject to a barrage of regulations. In my opinion some are good and some aren't. Purposing more regulations without the details of what those regulations are is like a blank check.

<comment><USER12> The thing is that deciding how to regulate social media is extremely difficult. So someone arguing for such regulation can't begin by saying what they want. They have to take a broad "it should be regulated" "look how terrible, can't we DO SOMETHING??" sort of approach. Then argue regulation isn't bad by looking at different examples.

Only once there's a huge ground swell can specific proposals be laid down.

But all this is makes it sound like a giant power grab. And yes, that's what I'd call it. Not because all regulation is bad but because this particular thing is far outside the purview of the Federal Government.

<comment><USER13> I think I'd start with forcing advertising transparency on any social network (and probably search engines too -- actually, make that any site with advertising).

And then force any company paying for political advertising to list every single one of their donors publicly. Chuck an unlimited personal liability clause in there for the company directors, so they can't just wind the company up to avoid any fines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The president of the US uses Twitter to make statements to the public, and so do a lot of other officials.

So the argument that it's a purely private platform is getting harder to make than just the Facebook use-case where "all my friends use it", which you could also say about iPhones, or Coca-Cola. Should a private company be allowed to ban you from what's becoming a de-facto platform for interacting with officials?

But the article lazily likes to pretend that this problem could be solved within the borders of the US with proposed FCC regulation. That still leaves the most interesting problem, which is how are we going to square the free and open Internet with the interests of nation states and their individual citizens.

There's complaints about Russian election interference. But right now US- sponsored election interference is happening in Venezuela via Twitter. What's to be done about cases like those? Is Venezuela's only recourse going to be to ban Twitter?

<comment><USER15> > But right now US-sponsored election interference is happening in Venezuela > via Twitter.

Do you have a source for that?

<comment><USER16> Not sure on his source or argument but my guess would be accounts advocating for Maduro to be displaced by Guaido. If you look at it from that POV, you will clearly see how Twitter is playing a vital part in an US-backed coup against the Venezuelan people because currently, Maduro still has support from some of his allies and from his own military. [1] These are mucky waters to wonder through.

1: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-aid- id...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-aid- idUSKCN1Q325K)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The downside with this is the "regulatory moat". If this hypothetical regulation becomes hard to meet, then only a few companies are able to comply with it and it inadvertently reinforces their position.

What I would like to see is a requirement for platforms to be open, so they can't take data and networks of people hostage by locking things down. An analog is portability of healthcare data: one hospital or EMR vendor can't lock up data for themselves, they must make it open to others (though they still drag their feet and don't always make it convenient).

<comment><USER18> This tends to be the bargain for natural monopolies. You're limited by regulation but you basically cease to have competition (like.. Comcast).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I get uncomfortable with this line of thought. I would much rather let the market produce alternatives products when companies do things customers object to.

The best thing about the internet is that it is so easy for another product to spring up to serve a new need or compete with ensconced businesses.

Regulations increase cost of business and dissuades other companies from competing.

<comment><USER20> It's surprising to see how much many posters on HN want more government regulation over a tech company.

It's about how so many are in favor of "taxing the rich", not realizing that to Middle America with an average household income of $70K, if you make over six figures, you are "the rich".

And from the political skew of HN, I wonder how many actually trust _this_ government with more power?

<comment><USER21> The problem is, right now _Facebook and Twitter_ have significant power. And the question is whether or not you trust the government, but which you trust _more_ : A company with a slogan of "move fast and break things", or a bureaucracy purpose-built to move very slowly and purposefully.

<comment><USER22> It's not just a bureaucracy built to move slowly and purposefully, it's one that we all, by design, have a say in operating.

Don't like how Facebook runs its data collection on you whether you have an account or not? Tough. There's no, and will never be, a town hall for Facebook.

Don't like how the county runs its health services departments? Well, you can show up at county council meetings, you can get involved politically, you can vote, etc.

Fundamental difference.

<comment><USER20> Theoretically, yes.

But if you live in a larger state like California, you have much less say in the federal government on a per capita basis than someone who lives in Rhode Island between the Senste (2 senators per state regardless of population) and the electoral college, not to mention gerrymandering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would prefer that tech companies come up with solutions to these problems and therefore not require law to try to solve them. And yet, I think regulations are often a sign that an industry had conflicts and just kept avoiding the issues, so people got tired of waiting.

I personally am tired of watching Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others give the impression that they didn't know fake accounts were being used to manipulate the actions of individuals--either to hate someone, vote against someone, send money, download a virus--as this seems to be the storied history of spam. I'm tired of interacting with someone who appears real but may be fabricated to trick me into doing something. This problem is not slowing down, as the This Person Does Not Exist site showed us the other day here.

I yearn for the tech company that creates a platform where I interact with people who are verified to be who they say they are. Please, tech companies, let people verify their accounts. Let the overall verified users on your platform increase. Please do something before regulators step in so that they don't believe they have to.

<comment><USER24> How do you verify a user in the age of identity theft, across all nations on the platform?

And how do you stop retaliation against non-popular options, like homosexuality in particular countries?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As someone who doesn't use Facebook, Twitter, or their subsidiaries, the debate is kinda laughable. Sure break them up for antitrust. Write privacy regulation. But regulating the content shared there? If you don't like it, it's so easy to opt out, and it feels great. People write like these are utilities necessary for a good life, which sounds crazy from the outside.

</comment><comment><USER26> Trusting any government to regulate massively-powerful information clearing houses is a mistake, because they will inevitably, eventually, and maybe even (best case) unintentionally abuse it for their own ends, as history has demonstrated.

Trusting those clearing houses to regulate themselves is a mistake, because they have already abused their power for their own ends (profit).

We should never _trust_ any organisation to work against its own interests or those of its members. They must all be required to be utterly transparent in relevant actions and reasoning behind those actions.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think it might become necessary to create an antitrust class for effective media monopolies like twitter and facebook, as well as financial institutions (paypal, mastercard, etc) that includes provisions for aknowledging and preserving first amendment rights.

While nobody likes speech that they don't agree with, or feel is vitriolic against one's own ideology, it's exactly that speech which needs to be protected. PC outrage is maximizing online censorship in ways that should send chills down anyone's spine.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps something along the lines of, "Any company with more than 5 (or 10?) million monthly users in the system," as a baseline for provisions regarding protected speech. I don't like censorship in general, but can respect those that would want to build smaller communities with proactive moderation vs the likes of twitter/facebook etc with very little effective moderation in practice.

Also, similar provisions ensuring that policies against classes of speech are used regardless of backing ideology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Everyone now knows that foreign governments, most notably Russia, have been > using social media aggressively to promote their interests.

And if _anyone_ is going to be using social media to manipulate public opinion in the US, it should be the _US_ government, goddamnit!

<comment><USER29> Maybe, yeah. I'm not a cultural relativist: Democracies are better than dictatorships; freedom of expression is better than repression; pluralism is better than chauvinism.

Every major technology platform in the West exists as result of small-l liberal enlightenment values. Maybe I wouldn't name the current United States as my ideal champion for those values, but I don't have any problem with the general suggestion that Western tech companies should be promoting liberal values around the world.

<comment><USER30> If a single corporation can control the primary means of communication and only allows "corporate-sanctioned" messages, then we will no longer be a democracy in any meaningful sense.

Yes, maybe that is alarmist, after all they are only concerned about corporate influence, but this isn't the first time in Facebook history where you could just accuse someone of being a bot to shut them up if you don't like what they say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _" If federal officials are going to regulate social media, they should be independent of the president."_

You're in luck, the legislature (where regulations are supposed to come from) is a whole separate branch from the President. Any time you've got the executive branch handling it, the President is in charge of it.

<comment><USER32> Except that the legislature writes general polices and defers to the executive to work out the specifics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> That sounds like a minefield. How do you regulate a service where two people from different countries can interact? Which countriy's law should be followed when a person from country Y posts on a feed from country X? What if the laws contradict eachother?

Multinationals had to deal with multiple regulations before, but most time that was solved by using the visitor's residency, but that might not be so clear cut when we are talking about social networks.

<comment><USER34> A good example to watch is with the ramifications of the GDPR playing out in the EU. I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual wording and effects of the GDPR, but it does provide a test-bed of sorts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > If federal officials are going to regulate social media, they should be > independent of the president. The simplest course would be to give new > authority to the FCC rather than to a whole new agency, though the latter > option also deserves consideration.

I was just thinking I hadn't seen a picture of Ajit Pai's ridiculous coffee mug for like 15 minutes now.

<comment><USER21> His coffee mug (or something equally ridiculous), would not be out of place in a Silicon Valley office of any kind. Is his coffee mug your objection, or do you dislike the man (and his political views), and hence, ridicule everything about him as an ad hominem sort of attack?

I find this very irritating, and we see it also with Donald Trump, where it suddenly becomes okay to body shame someone, make suggestive comments about their relationship with their wife or children, or attack them in other ways unrelated to their politics, because of their politics. I wouldn't say I'm a fan of either individual by any means, but I think we should aim to do much better, especially here on HN. Can we talk about a corporate-owned bureaucrat and an incompetent president as a corporate-owned bureaucrat and an incompetent president?

<comment><USER35> I apologize for Reese shaming. I think there's a difference between body shaming and making light of someone's obviously deliberately chosen self image.

<comment><USER36> In context of the criticisms of these people (and more importantly, the interests they represent) that actually matter, they are functionally the same, silly distractions. Ocdtrekkie didn't equate bringing up that cup with body shaming, they simply mentioned that as another result of what I would call the same inability to be serious, even about fires that are still raging, causing suffering, and for which we have no answer and no plan. It's like some kind of pressure release valve I guess, and IMO that pressure needs to find a better route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think regulating Google is more important. Sure social media has a lot of noise, but Search is actual reality. Google's potential to shape worldview and commerce based on search result would have much greater impact from regulation.

Imagine a single company selling 90% of all tv ads in the country? Or a single company selling 90% of all the ads in newspapers.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would go much further. Break up Twitter into a bunch of Mastodon instances. Break up Facebook into a bunch of Diaspora instances. The internet should be open. Imagine if email or HTTP was proprietary like Facebook and Twitter are. This is a nightmare and we should end it.

<comment><USER35> > Imagine if email or HTTP was proprietary like Facebook and Twitter are. This > is a nightmare and we should end it.

Email is a means of communication, twitter is a platform. Anyone is free to implement a 140 character messaging service, the only problem is that these particular social media platforms have gotten monstrous. I don't like them, but the comparison between HTTP and Facebook doesn't seem right.

<comment><USER38> What is classified as a "means of communication" or a "public utility" and what is "a platform" is itself language that is a consequence of political conditions. If HTTP or email were proprietary and owned by a single entity, they would refer to their ownership of it as "a platform" just as Facebook and Twitter do now. There is no technical reason these services cannot be reduced to mere "means of communication" or a "public utility" by means of breaking them up into separate services that are forced to federate with each other over a common protocol, e.g. Mastodon/Diaspora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I hope the future is one where you can pack up your social profile and move it to another service provider, or host it yourself. All without any of your contacts, friends and associates knowing or caring which service provider or host your profile is on.

Just like telcos are now. Keep your phone number and move to another provider.

In other words, running with the grain of how the open web works best, rather than against it. Until that happens, I will never join FB or any other walled junkyard.

</comment><comment><USER40> Decentralized social networks are a thing, and will become a much bigger thing, fueled by the catalyst of the aforementioned monarchs of social media taking things way too far.

</comment><comment><USER41> Allowing the government to regulate Facebook and Twitter is opening a door for the government to claim it has the legal right to regulate anything on the Internet. While Facebook and Twitter indeed might be used for nefarious things, dissidents and social activists depend on the unruly nature of the Internet for a lot of their operation. You can have both or none.

</comment><comment><USER42> Regulate content, no. Break up de-facto monopolies, yes. Facebook should be forced to sell off Snapchat, Instagram, and WhatsApp, for starters.

<comment><USER43> Not agreeing or disagreeing, but I don't think Snapchat is owned by Facebook.

<comment><USER42> Right; Facebook tried, but failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I thought this was going to be an article about corporate taxes (or lack thereof).

So now we're going to introduce the perilous hand of federal invention, and it's not to make gigantic companies pay their fair share, but to stifle speech?

</comment><comment><USER45> There are serious consumer protection issues that need to be addressed. Laws establish individuals rights and individual freedoms. We need some good well- written laws by people who know what they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't understand how Twitter and Facebook can simultaneously be accused of Monopoly. They're competitors in the same market

</comment><comment><USER47> I struggle with this concept. One of my problems with these platforms is that de-platforming someone can be argued to be a violation of free speech (there are valid counter arguments as well). I don't know how to solve that because I think that no one forces news papers to accept articles from people they think are crazy.

Can we separate the "data storage" at this scale from the message delivery. Where de-platforming someone doesn't mean losing your hosting of the videos but instead pushes you to a fringe "subscription and recommendation" tool?

This is a massive hand waiving over simplification so please correct gross assumptions I'm making here.

Youtube has services that could be broken into separate "categories" if you would. Platform to post videos. Platform to subscribe to videos. Platform for recommendations of videos. Platform with "top" videos as watched by everyone.

Then you've got Google Search which doesn't control the data but caches it and it has a database of the inter-relationships between sites and you and can recommend sites to you. Up until they started customizing data to a user I'd say there was only one issue here. But now that they customize, you actually have two sets of data in search. Your data. The Internet's interconnected relationships.

I don't know how you break this data apart in a reasonable way. I mean Google did create all of it or buy a platform and expand it in the case of YouTube. They deserve to be rewarded for their innovation (obviously my opinion) but we need an equal ability to compete.

I am obviously concerned when you can be "de-platformed" for a TOS violation and silenced. Especially when some of these platforms are so ubiquitous that being de-platformed from them all could completely silence an individual. But at the same time a company should have the right to choose who their customers are if there aren't fair regulations that address this.

So it's complicated and I think this sort of thing deserves a lot of conversation. I still think action isn't appropriate because if we did have twitter owned by the government we'd also need to keep free speech on there. It'd have to get a court order for data to come down as libel or something similar.

<comment><USER48> _I don 't know how to solve that because I think that no one forces newspapers to accept articles from people they think are crazy._

I don't think this is tangential... I don't think this necessarily resolves to a perfectly fundamental principle, in a philosophically loophole-free way. Maybe a newspaper isn't a good analogy.

Here's one example. A large portion of elected officials around the world communicates with (and mostly to) their electorate mostly on social media. It is how they get elected, argue positions, etc. The argument (I'm not sure I agree, but I think there's an argument) is that twitter, fb, etc have crossed some sort of the threshold where there is a lot at stake.

<comment><USER47> This is a good point. I think some people treat facebook and twitter as their main news source which is why I drew that correlation.

The twitter blast out by politicians is a new thing, that hasn't really existed before from what I can see. It's common to try to draw a parallel to something that arleady exists (like I did). I think you're right that my example was a miss.

<comment><USER48> Cheers bargl.

I don't think it is a clear miss. The way we think of law, and right-and-wrong generally, tends to be principled. Rules and laws as embodiments of abstract principles that are consistently true.

That's what the analogy does is check for inconsistencies. That's what lawyers do, argue by analogy. High judges can invalidate laws if they create inconsistencies.

But... the laws aren't really abstract truths. They tend to be point solutions to specific problems.

Social media has created new realities that just didn't exist in as meaningful a firm before.

Personally, I'm happy that proprietary social media platforms just get replaced by open platforms a la WWW or email. There's no real reason to have a multi billion dollar company behind twitter, text messaging and such.

That'd make the choice between bureaucratic or monopolistic control moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Suppose Facebook or Twitter were incorporated as a non-US company. Would the US gov still be able to regulate them?

<comment><USER50> Can Europe regulate google?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> How about Google? Force them to give us a search engine for 50$ a month and Android for 100$ a piece?

<comment><USER52> How do you force someone to sell you a product they don't sell?

<comment><USER51> What they sell should not be saleable?

<comment><USER52> What do you mean? Are you suggesting we force Google to offer a paid version?

"Law number XXXX: Google must offer a paid version of its search engine to end users".

<comment><USER24> Why not law YYYY, you cannot own the search engine, video distribution platform _and_ ad platform at the same time. The ad platform must be spun off as a separate non-colluding entity.

<comment><USER52> "non-colluding entity"

Colluding? What the heck are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's an opinion piece, not a news article, keep that in mind.

</comment><comment><USER53> How exactly could they be regulated?

<comment><USER54> With a law.

Perhaps one saying that they cannot ban or block anybody or their content, except for content already deemed illegal by a governing body or upon receipt of a court order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The case is getting stronger for a balkanization of the Internet.

I don't want the US or the UK to censorship my Internet, any more than I want China.

It's bad enough that nudes are being censored due to US companies pushing the US conservative Christian values on the rest of the world, while violence gets a free pass.

Also do you really think that the fake news promoting Trump or Brexit would get censored? That would be so extremely naive.

</comment><comment><USER56> Yes.</comment>


Show HN: Help with Covid - <AUTHOR> https://helpwithcovid.com/projects <comment><AUTHOR> This project was started by Sam Altman to organize volunteers to support projects or ideas intending to provide Covid relief</comment>


Doctors hail world first as woman's advanced breast cancer is eradicated - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/04/doctors-hail-world-first-as-womans-advanced-breast-cancer-is-eradicated <comment><USER2> The paper published in Nature is paywalled past the first page, but is available in full on scihub using DOI 10.1038/s41591-018-0040-8. NCI press release is at [1] and links to clinical trial info at [2].

[1] [https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press- releases/2018/immun...](https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press- releases/2018/immunotherapy-targets-breast-cancer-case-report)

[2] [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01174121](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01174121)

<comment><USER3> cheers! DOIs really should be a required part the title here (if available)...

<comment><USER4> sci-hub support title searches

<comment><USER3> yes, but that's not really the point -- is it? The usage of an applicable DOI is unambiguous and places much less load on scihub.

<comment><USER4> just passing the information, sometimes you don't even have a doi, and sci-hub might find the paper

that said I don't want to crash sci-hub so use with care

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Articles related to immunotherapy and TILs/CAR-T cell have been appearing in the mainstream media for the past five years. And each one of them has hailed one or two miracle cures.

For patients (as well as their immediate caregivers) who are dealing with advanced/metastatic breast cancer, these articles tend to do more harm than good. The reason is because for an informed patient who is vulnerable, such pieces tend to strongly start influencing treatment decisions.

My sister completed her journey with advanced breast cancer in April. And she was on immunotherapy for 8 months. She was also evaluated for TIL based treatment at MSKCC.

An earlier extremely similar article had strongly influenced our decision making. Now we realise that information such as this influences families a lot. I really feel the tone and underlying theme of the article should not be to convey it as a revolution. There is a reason why certain thresholds of success are built into clinical trials. Articles such as these should be written by guest oncologist and not journalist, as they tend to overemphasize the optimism and underplay the risks.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's interesting about this approach (TIL expansion) relative to other leading cellular immunotherapy approaches (CAR-T/NK and TCR) is that it doesn't rely on gene editing. Long term, I think genetically "programmable" cellular immunotherapies are more likely to win (e.g. because they can be programmed to overcome tumor immune suppression), but it's impressive that a durable response is achieved here with clonally expanded TILs.

There is a great review on progress in cell based immunotherapies here: [https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(17)30064-8](https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674\(17\)30064-8)

<comment><USER7> Thanks! That is an excellent and relatively modern review article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, imagine going from "You have 3 years to live" to "You have no more cancer." What a miracle.

<comment><USER9> My Mom was diagnosed with two kinds of stage III lymphoma just after Christmas last year. She started chemo a few months ago. Three treatments in, all of the tumors were no longer visible in a PET scan.

I'm still trying to emotionally accept that the nightmare is over. It seems almost too easy, like it's just setting us up to let us down. It can come back, of course. But she's in remission now and totally done with treatment.

Whenever I think of oncologists, I always imagine how much it must suck to tell people they have cancer every day. I'd never really considered the other side of that. To get to tell someone you have completely cured them of a disease that would surely have killed them. It must be an incredible feeling, like beating Death at his own game.

<comment><USER10> I imagine the joy is tempered by the lack of 100% confidence. "Your cancer is gone...but we really can't say that it won't reappear, because we can't say if ALL the cells are gone, they are just too few for our technology to see. So go forth and be joyous and I definitely won't be nervous that this all turns out to be false hope that results in you back here again, feeling doubly betrayed".

<comment><USER11> This is true of _any_ cancer treatment. You're never cured of cancer. You just go into remission. The 5 year mark has historically been the point when complete remission is deemed a cure, but that doesn't mean recurrence is impossible.

<comment><USER12> Even then, don't oncologists highly recommend an annual screening for the rest of your life?

<comment><USER11> Periodically, I think. I don't know how often. Unfortunately, everybody I know who has had cancer is no longer around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dr. Rosenberg has been investigating CAR-T and other immunotherapies for decades (originally at the national cancer institute, more recently at the university of pennsylvania). I believe he (and his collaborators) will be on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Medicine eventually.

</comment><comment><USER14> For people interested in immunotherapy more broadly, the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting is currently underway. Originally just a medical society meeting for oncologists it has become sort of the oscars of biotech in recent years as immunotherapy has gained steam

You can check out abstracts on the ASCO website as well as follow biotech news outlets like Endpoints News, Stat news to get highlights. Also twitter is a good source of info: follow people like brad loncar, the above mentioned news sites as a start

</comment><comment><USER15> People tell me that research in Autism has yielded few fruits or treatments to improve quality of life for those severely affected. They feel betrayed perhaps because the complexity of the causes and phenotyping of autism has turned out to be much more complex than realized 15 years ago.

I bring this up because people felt the same way about cancer. For decades and decades, there were glimmers of false hope, claims that a cure for cancer was just a few years away, surely solved in the next decade, and time after time they were proven wrong. People felt betrayed perhaps because the complexity of cancer made the problem so very difficult to solve. And YET: Here we are. Real, tangible progress.

The hard problems take huge efforts over many years, but we are solving them. If we put the effort and funding and time into understanding autism, other neurodevelopmental disorders, depression, longetivity, and so on, we will prevail.

</comment><comment><USER16> This sounds amazing. I know this is just one case, but can someone with more knowledge confirm that this is as game-changing as it seems?

<comment><USER17> It is a spectacular proof of concept, but it's not exactly game-changing in any way that will revolutionize cancer care around the world in the near future. This was incredibly labor- and capital-intensive procedure that involved extracting tumor material, sequencing its genes, determining which main mutations appear in the material, finding immune cells that attack that specific mutation, replicating those immune cells, and then injecting them into the patient. Since most cancers carry unique or nearly-unique mutations, this treatment would need to be tailor-made for every single patient, meaning its use would only be limited to those with a lot of resources.

<comment><USER18> Gene-sequencing costs just keep getting cheaper and cheaper.[0] If this result is replicated, there will be strong incentives to streamline and automate other steps in the process as well.

[https://www.genome.gov/images/content/costpermb_2017.jpg](https://www.genome.gov/images/content/costpermb_2017.jpg)

<comment><USER14> Gene sequencing is a small part of the costs. The first approved car-t cell therapies are priced at ~$500k, took hundreds of millions to develop and cost over $30k per batch to make at scale. These more personalized approaches that are still unoptimized in terms of manufacturing process might cost $60k plus per batch

The manufacturing process is logistically and technically very difficult. You are engineering live cells, an extremely complex and delicate "process". Things that shouldn't affect product quality for simpler drugs like proteins end up totally changing the biologic function of the product

There's been effort to automate this but it's been difficult. Innovation here would be incredibly valuable

<comment><USER19> Out of curiosity why is engineering live cells at scale impossible? Is it because there is a huge probability that things will go wrong? Is it logistically and technically more difficult than manufacturing say a microprocessor?

Almost everything we do these days is automated to some degree at some point. Is it mostly a question of large sums of capital to develop the tooling necessary?

<comment><USER14> I don't think it's impossible, it's just really hard. I have no experience with microprocessor manufacturing so can't really speak to that. I also dont have experience in the lab but have provided operations / admin support to cell therapy manufacturing processes

Part of the challenge is just that live cells are complex living things. They interact with their environment in difficult to predict ways. You can only measure so many cell characteristics at a time, certainly not enough to get a full picture of everything that's going on, which makes in-process quality testing very difficult. A manufacturer we worked with said "process is product", which means we dont know how to measure product quality that well so we have to basically reinvent the process every time it changes. I think getting the right tooling to measure quality would help but that would require some really breakthrough innovation.

Another challenge is shelf life. You need to get these cells to patients quickly once they leave the lab, often requiring climate controlled air shipment if the patient is far from the lab. And you dont want to build too many labs, as transferring a process from one lab to another is very expensive and fickle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That is really cool. Anybody who is better versed in the subject matter have any intuitions about how much effort it would take to replicate? And perhaps whether a streamlined process would be possible to make this available for all?

<comment><USER14> There has been a ton of investment in the area of identifying tumor mutations and re-engineering patients own cells to fight the tumors. This is called "autologous cell therapy". Autologous meaning using a patients own cells and cell therapy meaning cells rather than small molecules or large molecules like proteins are the "ingredients" of the drug

The 1980s saw the introduction of proteins as therapies using genetically engineered organisms to make drugs. Previously drugs were either extracted and purified from natural sources of chemically synthesized. Only small molecules could be synthesized, not proteins, so the ability to make therapeutic proteins -- much larger and more complex than traditional small molecule drugs -- enabled a new class of drugs and companies like Genentech and Amgen

Cell therapies potentially represent another massive leap in ability to treat disease. There are a few genetically engineered cell therapies approved today, kymriah and yescarta. They are engineered to attack cells that express a molecule called CD19. This molecules is found mostly on B cells in the blood. So naturally these drugs are used for B cell lymphomas

It has proven difficult to make these cell therapies work in other cancers, especially solid tumors. Solid tumors are more difficult for immune cells to penetrate (denser and surrounded by a complex mass of fibroblasts, blood vessels and immune cells called the tumor micro environment), they have more defenses against immune attack, and they have fewer good molecules to target -- while CD19 is pretty specific to B cells and thus a good target, most solid tumor targets are either expressed on healthy tissue (so targeting these targets would attack healthy cells as well) or are not consistently expressed across cancers

The approach in this article represents an effort to solve the latter problem. There has been a lot of investment in this space by VCs and to a lesser extent pharma. There are basically two approaches, each with a set of delivery options:

Neoantigen targeted therapies: these aim to find novel tumor mutations and target them with drugs. The advantage here is that you'd have mutations specific to a tumor. The disadvantage is that you'd have to tailor each therapynto each patient which would be insanely expensive. There are many efforts to find shared neoantigens that could be used to treat a variety of patients, from what I've heard this isn't going super well. Neon therapeutics, gritstone oncology, moderna and several others are active here

Another approach is targeting "wild type" antigens (i.e. Not mutants) that are specific to cancer and not other tissues. Advantage is that you'd need less customized therapies. Some common shared tumor antigens people are focused on are NY-Eso-1, mage-A4 (or a3 or a1, don't recall). Several companies are in the clinic here but still not clear if the approach works. Aduro, immune design, biontech, moderna, neon, gritstone, 3t biosciences and others are involved

Delivery options are most commonly autologous cell therapy but this is super expensive and it is very hard to get consistent product. The manufacturing process itself contributes a ton of variability. Even using a different brand of the same type of flask can lead to a final product with vastly different biological function. Basically you draw cells from a patient, ship them to a lab, process them and ship them back. Nobody really knows if this process can scale to anything beyond just a few super rare cancers into something like say diabetes. Also the approved drugs to date have had major side effects which would prevent their use in any but the most devastating disease

Another approach is off the shelf allogeneic cell therapy. Here you just make cells that work in any patient. Immunogenicity is a potential concern

Others are using bacteria, viruses or non viral vectors to deliver mRNA encoding for the antigens to dendritic cells, which are cells that tell T cells which antigens to attack. Biontech is a leader here. This is sort of a "bounce shot" approach. If it works it would be amazing but it is very technically challenging and I don't really know if the exact details of the mechanism are that well understood. There are many clinical studies ongoing so well know soon

Overall this is a really promising development because solid tumors are just really tough. There will be a lot more to see in this field the next few years

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thought for all those who couldn't live long enough to get there.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know what type of breast cancer was treated? My mother recently passed away from Metastatic Inflammatory Breast Cancer and I wonder if this treatment could have helped her.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well done to all the smart people involved in making this happen, you're all making such a positive impact on human society, go you!

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome! This is great news for women everywhere.

<comment><USER24> Good news for everyone really. Men can also get breast cancer, and immunotherapy treatment is applicable to many other cancer types.

<comment><USER25> And also it's good news for everybody even if men were not at all subject to the advancement personally.

<comment><USER24> > even if men were not at all subject to the advancement personally

That seems like an impossible hypothetical, really. People will always have relatives and friends of all sexes so there's no way to stop people of one sex from benefiting from the health of the others.

<comment><USER26> I thought that was the point of the parent's comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> now comes the time for the pricing

<comment><USER13> It's already known what the expected pricing for CAR-T therapy will be, considering the first of these therapies was approved last year for pediatric leukemia (KYMRIAH/tisagenlecleucel). Expect around $475,000.

<comment><USER24> Considering that surgery can cost close to that and isn't a full cure, CAR-T is not that expensive relatively speaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >"I had resigned my job and was planning on dying. I had a bucket-list of things I needed to do before the end, like going to the Grand Canyon," she added. "Now, I have gone back to normal everyday life."

I find this sad. For one brief, glorious moment she was alive, going to fulfil her bucket list and live her life to the fullest.

The therapy, while groundbreaking, didn't make her immortal, she's still going to die as are we all. But going back to her 'normal everyday life' instead of fulfilling her dreams she may as well have just died anyway.</comment>


Coupon Grandmaster Scores $1658.53 of Stuff for $19.99 - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/2010/12/coupon-grandmaster-scores-165853-of-stuff-for-1999-donates-all-to-charity.html

<comment><USER2> I must be the only guy that gets almost no discount, harump</comment>


Google Labs - Books Ngram Viewer - <AUTHOR> http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=hacker%2C+entrepreneur%2C+startup&year_start=1920&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 <comment><USER2> This was submitted earlier, and already has a great deal of discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013346></comment>


The Maddening Struggling to Make Robo-Cars Safe, and Prove It - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjayojAuaLfAhUWJDQIHcPgBJ0QzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fzoox-self-driving-cars-safety%2F&psig=AOvVaw08bjTss5SfhLQcryaPJ_26&ust=1544984391690963 <comment><USER2> Please don't use redirection links to shroud the actual destination.</comment>


The Opinionated Guide to React - <AUTHOR> https://opinionatedreact.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> As someone new to React (~6 months full time) I'm keen to start reading this book soon and see how far off I've been in terms of coming up with best practices for myself. Like anything labelled "opinionated", I may disagree with some things, but anything I can read to make my code better, I will :)</comment>


HotBot - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot <comment><USER2> hotbot used to be backed by inktomi. fun fact: inktomi was the first search engine to use "shared-nothing clustering" (what everyone calls server farms nowadays) to power it's back end. it was a cluster of sparc machines.</comment>


This new Twitter account hunts for bots that push political opinions - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1110481/this-new-twitter-account-hunts-for-bots-that-push-political-opinions/ <comment><USER2> Good intentions, but frankly not going to do anything. Twitter has a reputation for not deleting accounts, especially not when reported by bots.</comment>


Show HN: HN Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnstore.co/ <comment><USER3> Neat! I'm surprised to see no affiliate links. Seems like an obvious way to cover expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! I'm newbie here. Is it OK to use affiliate links on projects like this?

<comment><USER4> As others have said, totally ok. Everyone should have a chance to make some money from a project like this.

Shameless plug: check out <http://viglink.com> to get it done. Sign up, one piece of JS, everything gets automatically affiliated. CEO is a major HN addict (and friend, in the interest of disclosure).

<comment><USER5> Neat idea. Though FAQ links on viglink.com do not seem to work (atleast in Chrome). <http://www.viglink.com/faq> <http://www.viglink.com/support/faq>

<comment><USER6> Thanks for bringing that up. It's fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a lot of other HN-ish sites. Usually with post like this everybody mentions t hem. Here's a top-level comment to put them under.

Shameless plug for my own site: <http://hn-books.com>

On mine, if you pick a book, say "Four Steps To The Epiphany", you get a review, a video, and about half-way down in a tabbed box called "the buzz", an up-to-date synopsis of what hackers think about the book from all the major sites. [http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Four-Steps-To-The- Epiphany...](http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Four-Steps-To-The-Epiphany.htm)

Bunch of other sites with similar (and sometimes better) features. I wanted to collect a list, but never got around to it.

<comment><USER8> The "questions" widget is broken. For example, on the Four Steps page there are three links, all ending in 404 like this one: [http://hn- books.com/v1Main.htm#Q=1&Q2=1](http://hn-books.com/v1Main.htm#Q=1&Q2=1)

<comment><USER7> I'll be danged. They sure don't do they?

The whole website is static, a templating engine which runs in f# on mono generates it. I haven't rebuilt the side in, gosh, a year? Two?

Looks like I had some bad data. Thanks for the heads-up.

Note that you can still use the "AnswerQuestions" page to create your own book lists and share them. So, for instance, if I wanted to give you my top 3 books for smart people, I could link like this: [http://www.hn- books.com#B0=29&B1=161&B2=133&BC=3...](http://www.hn- books.com#B0=29&B1=161&B2=133&BC=3&E0=1&EC=1&FC=0&QC=0&Name=Daniel)

So the home page is working. Must be something else.

Thanks again.

<comment><USER8> Anytime :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice execution. I really like it. Especially that you decided to do both "all time", and "Recent mentions"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm... Well I don't have a book but I did launch a premium 15x25 square-less wall calendar. It's at it's lowest price $6.99 since calendar buying season is over and I'm overstocked by 200. So it's quite a good deal considering similar calendars are $15 at Staples, OfficeMax, & OfficeDepot.

[https://dayonepp.com/products-page/product- category/calendar...](https://dayonepp.com/products-page/product- category/calendar-with-shipping-correctly-calculated/)

<comment><USER10> OoooH. I thought the HN store was a collection of products / books that HN members have MADE or WRITTEN. I didn't realize it was just a curated list. Nevermind about my calendar then.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _products / books that HN members have MADE or WRITTEN_

That's a great idea for a service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks great, I like how plain and simple it is.

It would be interesting to include some other data, like top wikipedia links etc.

Also the right hand column can sometimes feel a bit disconnected from the left when there is a long line of text in the left column.

Maybe some shading across both columns under the header text would help?

Keep iterating!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! I'm very bad at design so I kept UI as minimal as possible. But I will try to iterate on it. I like your idea about shading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If it is OK, could you please describe at a high-level on the de-duplication involved in mapping the following 3 links to a single book - a) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836633> b) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1527084> c) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1718951> because the amazon links contained in the HN comment links are all very different but still point to the same book - "Javascript: The Good Parts".

<comment><AUTHOR> I extract ASIN (Amazon ID) from URL and then use Amazon API to get so called "parent ASIN" (to acount for different editions like paperback, ebook etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One quick plug: the Hacker News Sidebar under Chrome WebStore hasn't been updated since 2011 and doesn't work any more. My fork of it is more up to date:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- sideba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- sidebar/ngljhffenbmdjobakjplnlbfkeabbpma)

It's useful if you want to know that there's a comment thread for any given website that you are browsing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good idea.

I'd be interested in the same for web apps / web services.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sweet! I wonder if there's a way to gauge public opinion on these links - <USER2> of the apps obviously has some awful reviews on iTunes (Vapor). It'd help keep people away from apps that are doing malicious things like stealing contacts and uploading them to their servers.

A link to where the item was mentioned would be cool too, in addition to popping up the mention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! "# mentions" is actually a trigger for pop-up that has a list of links to stories/comments item was mentioned in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would be great if you could also add links to audible, I'm always looking for hacker recommended audiobooks

</comment><comment><USER17> This is fantastic. One thought - once you have some data on the top 20 (say over 3 months) you could keep track of items that regularly come up in HN discussions. Show them as popular or regularly mentioned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! Now I use number of mentions, aggregated points, number of users and their aggregated karma to build lists of top items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think your email address points to the wrong domain? s/com/co

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn, thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is actually a good idea you should also add filters (like "Only books from paul Graham on Amazon") and a search box.

And for the UI... well hackernews style I guess.

<comment><USER20> Careful with copying the livery of hackernews as it may contribute to a successful claim for passing off or similar trademark-y infringement claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Off-topic, but I just wanted to let you know that I use another one of your sites (Lessmeme.com) everyday and I think I'm in love with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks, this is very encouraging!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an index of all the links to Amazon/iTunes/Google Play/Chrome WebStore on HN (submissions and comments). You can click "# mentions" to see relevant HN stories/comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Neat idea. I was looking for book recommendations here on HN just yesterday.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, tpsc! Another great source for book recommendations is "Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012" thread <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4966230>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great site. Add tweet/fb share buttons to help others find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestion! I have a tweet button but it's only on "# mentions" pop-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Watch out, if it gains traction, it will be gamed.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be nice. :)

I take into account points and karma of users to build list of top items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So clean and well made! Thumbs up

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for your kind words! I'm not a designer so this is almost vanilla Twitter Bootstrap and all the kudos should go to them.</comment></comment>


Unix Directory Structure for Projects - <AUTHOR> Has anybody tried using unix directory layout for their own builds/projects? More from abstract standpoint. <comment><USER2> Not sure what you mean with your question.

Perhaps something along the lines of data in the "root" directory, with DLLs in a "lib" directory and various executables in a "bin" directory, along with a "doc" directory for locating the documentation, and a "src" directory for the project source codes?

Or have I missed your point completely?

I tend to put the source code files in the "root" directory of a project with auxiliary directories under that for various things like data, documentation, etc.

My finished projects are installed into the standard directories: executables in one of the $PATH "bin"s (usually /usr/local/bin), shared libs in one of the standard "lib" directories (mainly /usr/lib). The data gets put into a dedicated directory: somewhere in /home if it's data that is short-term or it gets put somewhere on the "archive" filesystem if it's stuff that's "write once and keep for ever".

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what I meant! By any chance have you had experience using BSD jails under the same context?

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid not. But it sounds very similar to Apple's policy to put all files for a project in one sub-directory tree. Put that under the /Applications directory.Then to uninstall the app, you merely have to delete the whole project directory-tree.

I am not conversant with OSX but the DMG format sounds similar to what you are thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's bad practice (or at least shady) to distribute software that modifies /var for example...

A honeypot server with navigable filesystem fits what you're talking about perhaps, as does a game where logging in makes you create a user which is your character which is an RPG managed by bash scripts and the filesystem and various chroots are the "world" and in game you can level up and unlock passive auras which take the form of system daemons and gaining access to a new script is a spell...</comment>


Sugar Industry Manipulated Research About Health Effects, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493801090/sugar-industry-manipulated-research-about-health-effects-study-finds <comment><USER2> Previous Discussion : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733)</comment>


How can/should I sell my website? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I wish I had a better recommendation than flippa since it's completely full of worthless things for sale. I am constantly looking for projects to buy and would love to have a better place to look than what I've found so far.

Anyway, drop me an email with any information you can provide and I may make an offer. If you're hesitant to reveal the actual site, that makes it really tough, but with some traffic and income numbers and information about the niche, I can tell you if I'm interested enough to learn more or not.

<comment><USER3> I have a question for you in a separate Ask HN post :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3738729>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is your website, or what problems do you work on and what solutions have you developed?

</comment><comment><USER5> Flippa is a good option if you're looking to sell your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure if the 6 digit buyers are checking the listings.

<comment><USER6> You need to provide a little more information for anyone to be of any real help to you.

Are you just trying to sell a domain? A blog? ecommerce site? Saas? Does it make money or is it a hobby site that someone could throw together in an afternoon?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not tryimg to sell here so I didnt put any about the site.

The site was my hobby but became more like the real deal and I dont have the time to spare anymore. It still generates some money but it can be very strong and useful for the right company/person ho has budget or time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates stumps for the death of the Keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/05/14/bill-gates-takes-on-keyboards-and-the-cloud/

<comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion the keyboard will become the interface of the power user while the average person uses the new tools. I just dont see a hacker not using a keyboard in the next 10 years imagine having to say a string into a microphone instead of typing it</comment>


Introducing the bra that is meant to be taken off - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-10366730-247.html

<comment><USER2> I tried to post this too - I think it's hilarious.. surprised no one else has commented on this :)</comment>


Please Read this spam. - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/APd296442662004d998b15f6f550b631f4.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There's actually a business idea in here.

Find a way to monetize for ISP's all the mail that they normally bounce of which a percentage is actually sent by a real person trying to reach a real person.</comment>


Ask HN: Windows 7 Support Extension? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone heard of any discussion of Microsoft resuming and extending security patches for Windows 7 due to CV19?  I know of many individuals and businesses who were in the process of upgrading to Windows 10 early this year but have since put these on hold. While it was probably fairly low risk to run unsupported Windows 7 into February or early March we are reaching the point were it would be unwise to continue without patches. The shutdown has made it difficult to resume the upgrading to Windows 10 so perhaps Microsoft should resume patching temporarily. <comment><USER2> Nothing official yet, but there was this yesterday:

Windows by the numbers: Windows 7 holds fast as pandemic upends everything [https://www.computerworld.com/article/3199373/windows-by- the...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3199373/windows-by-the-numbers- windows-7-holds-fast-as-pandemic-upends-everything.html)

" _As Windows 10 moved nary a whit, Windows 7 actually grew its share during March. ... Microsoft might be pressed by customers, including its very important commercial, enterprise-sized customers, to restore security updates to Windows 7 for, perhaps, the duration of the pandemic._ "

Barring such intervention, it is still very easy for small businesses (with even a single computer!) to enroll in Windows 7 Extended Security Updates:

[https://tinyapps.org/blog/202001220700_windows_7_esu_smb.htm...](https://tinyapps.org/blog/202001220700_windows_7_esu_smb.html)</comment>