Google employees have enjoyed revolving door during Obama administration - <AUTHOR> http://watchdog.org/265844/google-obama-revolving-door/ <comment><USER3> I met some of the former Googlers working for the USDS. They seemed to be many pre-IPO SREs who decided that improving government was more important than being an LP at a VC fund. They were motivated by getting tens of millions of people healthcare, and along the way they encountered huge challenges - <USER2> figuring out how to reconcile VA and Pentagon records. Their passion was inspiring, and the work they do affects millions without much glamor.

If you think healthcare.gov was a mess, in the USA there are more branches of federal government, 50 state governments, and countless local governments whose technology is inadequate for serving its constituents.

Things like healthcare, visas, and electricity all rely on aging software projects. Yet, some of these systems don't have strong backups, are not automated, and may run on infrastructure like Windows XP. Some parts are ticking timebombs in terms of security and upkeep costs.

<comment><USER4> So I'm a software engineer in SF who would love to work on projects like you mentioned. Where do I look and what do I look for?

<comment><USER5> USDS is hiring! [https://www.usds.gov/join](https://www.usds.gov/join)

If you want to work remote from SF, check out 18F: [https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/](https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/)

<comment><USER6> It looks like 18F isn't hiring currently: [https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/open- positions/](https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/open-positions/)

 _We 're briefly pausing accepting new applications while we evolve how 18F plans for open roles._

<comment><USER7> You might also want to try becoming a Code For America fellow for a year working in cities:

[https://www.codeforamerica.org/do-something/work-with- us/fel...](https://www.codeforamerica.org/do-something/work-with- us/fellowship-application)

<comment><USER8> Looks interesting. Unfortunately they are not currently accepting applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > More than 250 people have moved from Google and related firms to the federal > government or vice versa since President Barack Obama took office.

Google has over 30,000 employees in Mountain View alone, and that's just a portion of its workforce. The term "Obama administration" in the headline is somewhat misleading considering that the above quote says it's surveyed from "the federal government," which is a _huge_ workforce regardless of where you draw the boundaries.

Statistically, is it really that anomalous that ~250 people flowed between the two in 8 years?

<comment><USER10> Some back of the envelope math:

50% of total staff are at Mountain View. Of 60k staff, maybe 20-25k are engineers. So in the US it's probably 10-15k engineers total.

In my experience, software engineer attrition is around 20% per year in firms with good employee satisfaction. That's 2-3k engineers excited to be tackling new opportunities each year. In 8 years: 16-24k employees.

Of course Google is a great place to work and they weren't as large 8 years ago, so let's guess 10-15k employees turned over. Of that, 250 is 2%.

The government says around 2700 people work for the executive [1]. That is 0.002% of the total workforce in the US.

Google could replace the entire executive with castaway engineers _every year_.

[1] [https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis- docu...](https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis- documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government- employment-since-1962/)

<comment><USER11> You're reading the table (egregiously) wrong. It says around 2.7 million people work for the executive branch of government. That is about 1.8% of the employed US workforce. 2700 doesn't pass the smell test, anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to see numbers for other companies. I would be surprised if large defense contractors like Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin didn't have way more than 250.

Also ... government has been notoriously bad about grokking software. They just couldn't manage large projects effectively at all, and they were completely getting fleeced by their usual contractors (witness the initial launch of healthcare.gov). So it's good that they're getting competent people to be in charge of things now, which I suppose naturally means they'd be getting people from the top tech companies in the world.

<comment><USER13> A lot of info at: [https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=I](https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=I)

<comment><USER14> Not really - it's just a pie chart by industry. It doesn't say anything about other companies.

If you search by organization you can get some numbers but it's not comprehensive. For example, it says that only 28 people (not hundreds) are profiled with "google", 30 with "microsoft" and 1 for "hewlett packard", etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Articles like this are a great example of why the so-called revolving door is a _good_ thing.

Government technology has been a disaster for quite some time. I think we can all agree that the best technologists aren't usually looking to accept a low- pay, low-prestige job in government.

So the Obama Administration has taken steps to try to improve government technology, primarily through USDS but also with direct White House hires. Of course many of the best technologists are employed at Google, so you'll see a lot of people coming from there. Especially since there are significant network effects in recruiting.

Naturally, the best technologists aren't typically interested in a long-term government career. So they shift back out after their "tour of duty." In fact, I believe 18F explicitly requires limited term contracts.

Despite good intentions (including willingness to take substantial pay cuts), people inevitably attack these attempts.

I wonder how much of the "Google Transparency Project" funding is coming from existing federal contractors. Perhaps they should be transparent about themselves for a start.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the Google Transparency Project needs some transparency: [http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/google-transparency- project/](http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/google-transparency-project/)

<comment><USER17> This article contains no data. Merely speculates or insinuates that if it's investigating Google, clearly it has to be part of some plot against them. I know it's hard to imagine, but sometimes people may just want to know what a giant evil international conglomerate is doing in backrooms with the most powerful people on the planet.

<comment><USER15> I think it's a little suspicious that they won't reveal who is funding them.

More importantly, I don't see any clear reason to target a specific company. There are lots of organizations like The Center for Responsive Politics which investigate lobbying and corruption without doing targeting a specific company with whatever they can find.

This organization clearly seems to have an axe to grind. For example, what is the point of naming and shaming programmers who dared to quit their cushy Google jobs to come work for USDS? [0] This is symptomatic of a hatchet job:

> suggests that many former Google employees working for USDS today may return > to their Google jobs tomorrow with inside knowledge and relationships that > could prove invaluable in securing large IT contracts for Google.

The notion that programmers are going to work for Google so they can secure IT contracts is ludicrous. I know people working for USDS—they definitely are not interested in making a career out of government consulting.

If this group cares so much about transparency, they should be transparent about who is funding them. I suspect it's several corporations which are even more corrupt than Google.

[0] [http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/us-digital- ser...](http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/us-digital-service)

<comment><USER17> It's hard to imagine big IT contracts isn't a part of it. Bear in mind, Google Cloud Platform is Google's big push these days, and they're currently in a distant third place. Now, with all those Google employees who are then also going back to Google after their USDS stint... how many of them do you think will recommend or even consider Azure or AWS when they recommend a cloud platform for the government project they're working on? Google Apps for Government is a thing too.

And at the end of the day, basically all Google wants is... all your data. Good way to accomplish that is getting your employees to write the software too.

<comment><USER15> It's really hard for me to imagine regular Google software engineers doing stints in government just to procure IT contracts. Do you really think that's how things work? It amazes me that people will look for corruption in anything. Is it really that implausible that people might not just feel a civic duty to help improve government?

For the record, 18F and USDS both seem to have pushed for multiple cloud solutions, including their own cloud.gov.

<comment><USER17> Many of these aren't "regular Google software engineers". Eric Schmidt is the former CEO and is on an advisory board at the DOD, while still chairman of the board for Google. Matt Cutts, USDS and still employed formally at Google as well, is one of the most public faces of the biggest and most profitable division Google has. If Google was a single color, I'm confident Matt Cutts would bleed it.

I'm not "looking for corruption in anything". I'm looking for corruption in one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington DC that has very close ties with our administration, and strangely, has managed to avoid any sort of legal action against them, despite the fact that almost every other first world power finds cause to do so.

The previous FTC Commissioner, who is tasked by our government to regulate companies like Google, was a former paid Google shill who fabricated pro- Google "studies". After being paid under the table by Google, and then squashing an FTC investigation against Google during his term there, he's now working for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a law firm who has a notable client... Google.

I'm not "looking for corruption in anything". It's just that it's incredibly implausible that Google does not have a corrupt relationship with the government.

<comment><USER15> You didn't answer my question about why you think Google software engineers would work for government just to sell Google products. Instead, you pointed to much higher-level and isolated cases. The vast majority of the 250+ Googlers working in government are likely mid-level employees without significant policy responsibility.

I gave a specific link to this "Transparency Project" targeting mid-level Google engineers. [0] You seem to think the people on this list are mercenaries working in government just to sell Google contracts.

Since you seem to be uninterested in having a conversation on this and instead have an axe to grind, I'll see myself out.

[0] [http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/us-digital- ser...](http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/us-digital-service)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "it's hard to know for sure how more than 250 people moving between Google > and the federal government since 2009 compares to other corporations, but > "it sounds like it's a very significant number.""

Considering we're talking about a time span of 7 years and Google has over 50,000 employees (took a rough average from the crazy range of source I saw) I'm surprised it's not _more_. The quote above seems to be someone guessing without any type of information to back up their assertions.

I'd love to see the numbers for other companies but this article is somewhat lackluster and seems to be trying to point to a possible conflict of interest

> Amey said he's not as concerned about programmers moving over – and quite a > few data engineers who worked on Obama's re-election campaign have ended up > in White House jobs – but top level executives changing jobs can raise "red > flags."

I can understand this a bit more. Not sure there is any direct evidence of conflicts of interest but like the investigation I could see it easily appearing so regardless of the truth. Hard to avoid though. After working in the government space they need lots of help.

</comment><comment><USER19> Matt Cutts, who was/is a semipublic Google employee wrote on Quora today about his work at USDS.

[https://www.quora.com/session/Matt- Cutts/1](https://www.quora.com/session/Matt-Cutts/1)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts)

<comment><USER17> It is crazy to me that Googlers no longer even "revolve the door" to shift back and forth to working for the government. Matt Cutts is merely 'on leave'. Similarly, Eric Schmidt is on a panel at the DoD while simultaneously still in his position at Google.

It's impossible for someone to make the best decisions for American citizens while they're simultaneously employed by a giant international corporation which is evading billions of dollars in taxes, causing the rest of us to have to pick up all the slack.

<comment><USER20> Recalling from what I was told when I went through the interview process at 18F (got to the point of the gigantic "dump your whole life in a massive form" bit, right after the OPM hack was news, and decided not to do that), the positions are legally time-limited: it's a two-year contract which can be renewed once. So maximum of four years in the job, and then you're out.

Also USDS is a bit more "do this mission" style job: basically you're being dropped into a federal agency to try to turn their tech story around. 18F is there to promote longer-term change in the model of how the federal government does technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it so hard to believe that one of the biggest tech companies in the country and the government wouldn't both respect success in the other's organizations?

<comment><USER22> Similar arguments are made when the close ties between the government and say Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants are discussed. There is a revolving door there too.

Even the most forgiving interpretation of the facts implies that Google and Goldman Sachs and other corporations have massive influence in government. There is no need to posit a conspiracy theory. It's just that the same people flow back and forth between the government and those corporations, and there are friendships as well as shared perspectives and ideals, all creating a close relationship that is highly beneficial to those corporations.

<comment><USER23> The most forgiving interpretation doesn't imply massive influence at all.

US gov't needs help regulating banks. Employees with experience in finance will likely have an easier time navigating things. Same argument for tech.

Is it really that shocking that you hire former finance people to regulate the finance industry? Experience in the domain means knowledge about how things work. It's the same argument as putting a technical person as PM for a technical project.

Of course, this doesn't work in the "regulation as punishment" mindset. But gov't regulators aren't looking to kill banks, they're looking to keep the economy healthy. Yes, that means working with banks to improve things (see regulators coordinating the purchase of failed banks by other ones).

Inversely, you are Goldman Sachs. You need help navigating regulation... a guy with regulation experience sounds good right?

Of course there are potential conflicts of interest to watch out for.

<comment><USER24> But regulation is supposed to provide an impartial set of rules that defines how people go about their buisness fairly.

One of the great criticisms of regulation is that incumbents with access to government can influence the rules to favour themselves and avoid competition. Having employees of particular large companies work as beaurocrats encourages this, especially if they return to those companies.

In it's early phase -- such as with these googlers in the US gov, the revolving door brings dynamism. But over time it brings stagnation because parties have an interest in making current practice the only thing allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "Google Transparency Project" [1] seems like a deliberately misleading name. They're not at all associated with Google yet they're going as far as using Google's logo in their logo. I wonder how legal that is, and if Google's comms team is aware of them.

[1] [http://googletransparencyproject.org/](http://googletransparencyproject.org/)

<comment><USER26> And a color scheme somewhat similar to Google's. Well, there's "Campaign for Accountability" logo in the header, however, it's probably still a bit too deceiving than it should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is "Google employee leaves Google and gets job in Executive Branch" a "revolving door"? Even when the job is technical not policy?

<comment><USER28> Most of the examples in the article are non-technical. High level advisory roles for policy advise.

<comment><USER29> I don't really understand why having people who know about technology advise in the creation of technology policy and strategy is a bad thing.

<comment><USER30> maybe because of how they use this 'force' to keep themself at the top or to make life better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> US News did a good report on this a few weeks ago: [http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google- is-...](http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the- worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated)

</comment><comment><USER13> ...just like thousands of people on every industry does: [https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=I](https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=I)

If you didn't want this to happen perhaps you should make it illegal?

<comment><USER32> And then there would be a bunch of unqualified and inexperienced people working for the government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google has a huge number of interactions with regulations. Whether or not there is a revolving door ought to be orthogonal to your opinion on whether or not Google is in the right on many of its legal positions.

Like many other companies, Google uses the Double Irish to minimize its tax bill. Assuming the law were updated to affect all Double Irish users equally (like to e.g. Facebook), do you think we should prevent such tax evasion? The answer seems to me obviously yes, regardless of your political persuasion. Clearly lobbying must have some impact on its favorable tax treatment.

In a manner of bundling similar to other tech companies, Google promoted Chrome on www.google.com. It seems reasonable to describe that promotion as using its dominance in the search market to become dominant in the browser market. Likewise, its complex deal with Android manufacturers results in Google Search (among other applications) being the default on their phones. The EU is in the process of sanctioning Google for the later. Supposing the spirit of anti-trust law were applied equally to application bundlers (like to e.g., Apple), do you think we should prevent such bundling from occurring? The answer to me seems to be yes: I think unbundling software makes the software ecosystem healthier and more innovative. Clearly lobbying in the U.S. must have some impact on its favorable anti-trust treatment versus the E.U.

Like few other funnels, Google monetizes content in ways that minimize the value to the producer. This could mean monetizing copyrighted material, like searches that lead to movie torrents or whole copies hosted on YouTube. Or its dominant place in search makes previously subscription-only newspapers have to go free on-the-web, because news cannot be copyrighted and anyone can read an NYTimes article and write a free (but plagiarized) destination for search results. How much value should go to producers, and to the extent that it extracts a rent from the transaction, should Google be the entity that transfers the value from the producer to the consumer? The answer to this question isn't obvious. But Google has won a complex set of legal victories, like the Google Books Search settlement lawsuit and lawsuits by newspaper publishers around the world. It's likely, though not as clear, that its extensive relationship with government (and for that matter, consumers) has earned it a favorable view of its rent extraction from producers.

The controversy ought not to be the revolving door. You would have to be a real blowhard to believe that Google doesn't receive favorable treatment from the government. Furthermore, you should be allowed to campaign against Google's favorable treatment without simultaneously campaigning against Apple, Facebook, and all of corporate America.

Instead, I think the controversy should be whether or not you actually think Google is in the right on these matters.

</comment><comment><USER34> I remember when Google had basically pledged to stay out of politics. Then the Government sued them. You see, when you've got that kind of money, politicians don't allow you not to bribe them.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is horrible where will all the GS guys go now?

</comment><comment><USER36> You don't get to be one of the largest corporations in the world without co- opting the government in your favor. This is exactly what ancaps are missing.

<comment><USER37> Ancaps really? I'm sure Google is co-opting with the government in some sense, but you obviously have to at that scale, but what kind of tin foil hat do you need to start believing ancaps are missing.

<comment><USER38> I believe cjrjfufjdvfhz is not saying that ancaps are involved in some sort of scheme but rather that anarcho-capitalist ideology is deficient in that it does not take this idea into account ("You don't get to be one of the largest corporations in the world without co-opting the government in your favor").

<comment><USER39> Not sure I understand. Is the goal to produce the world's largest company or to offer value to consumers as a whole? (com-pet-i-tive-ly and _fair_ ly?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder what the Google Transparency Project "poured" over the data?

</comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World)</comment>


Iran Loses Its Indispensable Man - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/iran-loses-qassem-soleimani-its-indispensable-man/604375/ <comment><USER2> The New Yorker's 2013 article, "The Shadow Commander", is excellent and very indepth, and still very relevant today for what Suleimani's death means:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow- com...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow-commander)

<comment><USER3> Also worth a read: [https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/quasim- soleimani...](https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/quasim-soleimani- death-who-was-iran-us-uk-relations-qasem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't more assassinations around the world (not just by the US government, but by all sorts of violent groups, at the nation-state level and below), since there's so much world-wide travel these days, and technology is so much more effective and advanced than it used to be.

Either security agencies are really good at preventing them, or the assassins are really incompetent or maybe not interested (which seems improbable).

<comment><USER5> I imagine the president receives a list of potential targets on a regular basis and for whatever reason, this one resonated this time. They had his location - probably a rare intelligence coup - and Trump was advised that it was now or never if he wanted to make a huge statement following the rocket attacks earlier in the week.

I would imagine that the intelligence agencies frequently know where targets are, but only rarely carry out a strike.

<comment><USER6> His location is not the issue. He traveled nearly openly because to kill him would be a demand for open war.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the things about the Middle East is that politics and diplomacy are intensely personal. It is less about the office and more about the person. Suleimani spent decades cultivating all sorts of relationships throughout the region and that will be sorely missed by Iran.

<comment><USER8> Agreed - the obvious (and yet neglected) pertinent point is what type of relationships were these that he cultivated?

Were his associates doing "his will" because they feared him (glad he's dead) or because they agreed (wish to avenge this)?

Or if as multiple reports indicate he was actually the "2nd most important Iranian" \- let's flip it and pretend he's the USA's "Mike Pence".

Now even the most ardent Trump Supporter I suspect doesn't give a toss about the wellbeing of "Mike Pence" \- maybe there'd be a week of mourning in the lobby industry if he popped his clogs, but we'd get over it.

However if the Iranians had assassinated him (and posted pictures showing them doing it), I can see maybe a sizable proportion of both sides might consider a response to be appropriate.

So - "They've just assassinated our VP - what response do we think is commensurate?

<comment><USER6> Its quite reasonable to postulate that more americans and iraqis will die in the next year because of this action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When the retaliation comes, more Americans are going to need 'dem' electric cars. In any case, Souleimans' value was not only military. He was a formidable politician as well. His achievements far outstripped that of the US agents. One example :

 _... the crucial deal that brought the Iraqi government together was made not by them but by Suleimani. In the months before, according to several Iraqi and Western officials, Suleimani invited senior Shiite and Kurdish leaders to meet with him in Tehran and Qom, and extracted from them a promise to support Maliki, his preferred candidate. The deal had a complex array of enticements. Maliki and Assad disliked each other; Suleimani brought them together by forging an agreement to build a lucrative oil pipeline from Iraq to the Syrian border. In order to bring the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in line, Suleimani agreed to place his men in the Iraqi service ministries.

Most remarkable, according to the Iraqi and Western officials, were the two conditions that Suleimani imposed on the Iraqis. The first was that Jalal Talabani, a longtime friend of the Iranian regime, become President. The second was that Maliki and his coalition partners insist that all American troops leave the country. "Suleimani said: no Americans," the former Iraqi leader told me. "A ten-year relationship, down the drain."

Iraqi officials told me that, at the time of Jeffrey's announcement, the Americans knew that Suleimani had pushed them out of the country but were too embarrassed to admit it in public. "We were laughing at the Americans," the former Iraqi leader told me, growing angry as he recalled the situation. "Fuck it! Fuck it!" he said. "Suleimani completely outmaneuvered them, and in public they were congratulating themselves for putting the government together."_

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow- com...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow-commander)

<comment><USER10> The US produces more oil

<comment><USER11> It's a world market. US as a producer sells oil both domestically and abroad. US as a consumer consumes both domestic oil and foreign oil. In 2018, it worked out to about 9.9 million barrels/day of foreign oil being imported, and 7.6 million barrels/day of US oil being exported.

If something disrupts production of some major world exporter X, causing the world market price to rise or causing shortages on the world market, US domestically sees that too.

<comment><USER12> So does Iran - if the price of oil goes up they pay more domestically as well. As it happens they subsidize the price of energy internally but that brings more problems then it solves.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ion Browser – Lightweight and Fast Android Browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xedtech/ionbrowser <comment><USER2> Is this just another WebView based browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Actually I was Learning How These Things actually work.</comment></comment>


Buying headphones in 2018 is going to be a fragmented mess – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/18/16903516/headphones-wireless-analog-jack-future-ces-2018 <comment><USER2> Whilst the wireless gold-rush to a new standard that can be patented for royalties will always prevail for a while. Bluetooth for many work fine.

For me wireless headphones are great, but I prefer models that also offer the option to also plug in a cable (3.5mm), anything else is always accomodated connection wise via and adapter fromthat standard.

Real crux issue with wireless headphones for me is battery life and not just how long they last from a full charge, but more so the lifetime of that battery, that degrades over time with the headphones outliving the battery and as such adds a premature end of life to the headphones.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is so sad. We had one standard that was simple, cheap, worked well enough, and ubiquitous. Now we have like, 5, all mutually incompatible and with all kinds of glitches and issues that come with complicated hw/sw stacks.

Progress!</comment>


Ekrem Imamoğlu defeats AKP (Erdogan's party) in Istanbul mayoral election - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/23/erdogan-faces-scrutiny-once-more-as-istanbul-goes-back-to-the-polls <comment><USER2> This is an undervalued piece of news. We need to get rid of the remaining autocracies of this world.</comment>


The Fantasyland Code of Professionalism is an abuser's fantasy - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/46791.html <comment><USER2> What's most interesting is that the folks running LC were told by at least a few parties they needed to tighten up their CoC so as to protect people from abuse, if they wanted to avoid further issues.

Their response was to codify the unrelated "I'm protecting religious interests" response from last year and offer it directly in the CoC (note: there was never a complaint about religious interests or even conservatism levied to LC, it was protesting a speaker notorious for promoting racist ideologies).

What's most stunning is the gag clause you agree to. What conference in the history of open tech conferences has decided to ban all conversation or reporting a about the goings on internally?

It's not just a CoC in defense of abuse and invites dangerous situations, but it then goes on to stifle free speech about the proceedings on the grounds that it is protecting free speech!

</comment><comment><USER3> I mean, did you see what happened last year? By the end of it, the LambaConf organizers had gone beyond incoherent blog posts and had graduated to defending their actions with diagrams that could've come straight from the Time Cube website. An equally incoherent CoC from them this time around isn't surprising.

</comment><comment><USER4> This post just got nuked, it was at #4 or so and now is not findable in any of the first six pages of results.

<comment><USER5> It is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags.</comment></comment>


Iris: fastest go web framework - <AUTHOR> http://kataras.github.io/iris/ <comment><USER2> It's the fastest go framework!! it says that you the server is optimizing itself at the runtime, if you use more than one core it uses other router, if you have domains in your router it uses other router mechanism if you use cache it uses other router. It is real I am using this framework 1 week for a site with million requests it operates faster than httprouter and gin and others I tried before

</comment><comment><USER3> Do they have a document talking about what they did to achieve those speeds?

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if a framework that uses fasthttp instead of net/http can be even more performant.</comment>


In Defense of Inclusionism (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism <comment><USER2> I am the Ta bu shi da yu who was noted in this article, and I am indeed the person who created the [citation needed] tag. I don't think the issue is deletionism, it's instead one of a total lack of respect for other editors.

Regrettably, I probably inadvertently helped with this culture as I _also_ started the Administrators' notice board. Never have I seen such a cesspool of controversy, beaurocracy, wiki-lawyering and frankly power hungry people. I suffer from bouts of depression, so have left and returned a few times (actually I was made admin three times), but the last time (and believe me, the _very_ last time) I tried to contribute I noticed the complete and utter lack of civility in the place. In a naive attempt to address this I tried to propose a policy where civility would be encouraged and incivility would be discouraged.

One of the key opponents, a user called Giano, went on the attack and I left the site - especially after I was told via email from Brad Fitzpatrick that I was unwelcome on Wikipedia.

I thought to myself: "I spent 2 years researching and writing about the USA PATRIOT Act for this?!?" [1]

And I left and never came back.

But, hey, if you want to see the discouragement that an average user sees - checkout my old user page. Even though it is a user page that very clearly says I have "retired" (more like sacked) there is wall to wall templates telling me I have committed a copyright violation (like hell!), or that images or articles will be deleted, etc. [2]

Further to this: deletionism is a massive problem. If you don't believe me, look at the GNAA article - there were 17 different attempts to delete it! [3] Of course, Jimbo Wales supported the deletion for fairly spurious reasons in 2006. [4] I await the day that my article Exploding Whales is deleted.

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

Note that I did this because of the following article:

[http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#10981190...](http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#1098119066)

2\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tbsdy_lives](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tbsdy_lives)

3\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Amer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America)

4\. [https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-November...](https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-November/057193.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Among the people dedicated enough to become moderators in any online community, there seems to be a large subset that is very rule-focused, exclusionist and in general difficult to reason with. It's not just Wikipedia, basically the same thing happened at StackOverflow, where all the interesting questions have been deleted, and also in several smaller online communities I used to participate in. Given enough time, those people invariably take over and destroy the community.

Reddit sort of avoids this because it's so easy to create new subreddits that people can vote with their feet if a moderator is behaving unreasonably. Maybe a similar solution could work for Wikipedia, having sub-Wikipedias with different rules. But that would require the current powers to admit that there's a problem, which is unlikely to happen.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that what Wikia is for?

No single website can reasonably hope to cater to everyone's interests but luckily the web makes it very easy to create alternatives.

<comment><USER5> Wikia is not a satisfactory alternative to Wikipedia, at least in terms of ethical status of the host (Wikia is a company and there are ads on Wikia wikis), in terms of internal consistency, and in terms of content licensing and of availability of dumps.

<comment><USER4> There are open source wiki platforms so wikia is not the only option.

<comment><USER5> The problem is not the license of the software. I think Wikia also uses MediaWiki which is free software.

For the other points that I mentioned, I'm not sure I know many wiki hosts which are free as in free beer, run by a nonprofit, sustainable through donations, show no ads, have their content under a free license and dump it in a way comparable to [http://dumps.wikimedia.org/](http://dumps.wikimedia.org/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In recent years (say, the past 4-6), imo inclusionists have actually more or less won on the "notability" question. Nowadays "verifiability" tends to trump it: if you can write a _well-referenced_ article, this is taken as _ipso facto_ proof of its notability also. I tend to write articles almost exclusively on obscure subjects, but with solid references, and my articles as a result don't get deleted. The trouble comes more when it's difficult to cite good sources. But if it's difficult to cite good sources, the whole Wikipedia model, which is dependent on citing good sources, breaks down: even if an article were allowed, there'd be nothing suitable to put in it. There are definitely articles I thought of writing but didn't, because I couldn't find good sources on the subject.

In some cases I think the real fix is outside Wikipedia: if "the literature" (books, magazines, newspapers, journals, other encyclopedias, etc.) have not yet covered a subject, the first order of business is to fix that gap. But I don't think Wikipedia is the right place to go about fixing it. IMO Wikipedia makes most sense with somewhat limited ambition: to summarize the existing literature, with references. That's already a pretty large endeavor, especially when you include summarizing the existing literature globally and multilingually. When the existing literature itself is lacking, I think that should also be fixed, but not by Wikipedia.

Once the problem is fixed in "the literature", it's then much easier to fix it in Wikipedia. For example I sometimes look at the MIT Press new-books list, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy new-articles list, and write at least short new Wikipedia articles on subjects that they cover which Wikipedia doesn't yet cover. For me at least, that "source-first" subject selection tends to be the most relaxing way to write on Wikipedia: instead of picking a subject you want to cover and then finding sources, find good sources and ask, "what do these cover that Wikipedia doesn't?". That way of working has a good impedance match to Wikipedia's goal of being a sources-cited summary of the existing literature.

I wrote something more long-winded on that subject a bit ago: [http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I mostly quit contributing because of the deletionists, but I have some recollection about one of the "alienated" communities the article mentions. For a while there was a concerted attempt by multiple webcomic authors to insert references to their webcomic in seemingly as many articles as possible. So you would get edits for example to the ISS: "$CRAPPY_WEBCOMIC mentioned the International Space Station on January 8, 2007 when $WEBCOMIC_CHARACTER bought a telescope and $IRRELEVANT_TEXT". While I didn't care that much if every webcomic got an article, they were basically using Wikipedia as advertising and would get into fights when you tried to make it not advertising. After a while you start identifying "problem communities" and start treating those contributions less charitably.

</comment><comment><USER8> I used to edit things at WikiPedia now and then. Mostly grammar fixes, formatting fixes, errors in tables, etc. I haven't done it in a long time, as I felt kinda overwhelmed with the bureaucracy of the thing. I don't really have a problem with CAPTCHA (I run it on my own sites), or with the anti-spam measures (I use a bunch of anti-spam tools on my sites, and they occasionally trip up legitimate users). I understand those things, and hate spam more than most. I'm _always_ OK with knocking out spam.

But, the people making the decisions are occasionally just ornery. I seem to recall trying to straighten out some errors about Open Source stuff I work on, and having it reverted and moved around, sometimes in ways that simply made things confusing (removing pages and redirecting to related but different projects), etc. It's been years, but it was frustrating, and I just kinda gave up. I don't have an interest in territorial battles.

I might give it another shot some time. I've switched our documentation wiki for Webmin to MediaWiki a few weeks ago, so I'm back up to speed on MediaWiki markup, so that's less of a barrier for me these days (never was a huge barrier, except for a few of the special stuff, like info boxes and automatically updating stuff). I'd be interested to see if these complaints have been taken to heart by folks involved...it's a drum that's been beaten for some time by a variety of long-time contributors.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a pity that it came to this. Wikipedia is one of the great achievements of the web community. Is there a way to recover all the deleted pages and to review them according to a newew policy, then fork wikipedia and revive those pages? It may be hard to get independent contributions to such a fork but you could do a periodical 'git rebase' to keep it current.

<comment><USER10> Yup, over here: [http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page](http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page)

<comment><USER11> Amazing how valid looking the few pages I got by just hitting random page link.

I never realized things had got so bad on wikipedia.

<comment><USER12> It's a really good exercise to hit Random Pages 10 times.

I tried it and mostly got vanity pages for people who did something, but didn't seem _too_ important.

One I got is about the mayor from 1995 to 2001 of a Texas town of 75,000 people. I suppose it has some value to the people who lived in that town or need to research about it... but I can sympathize with the problem of trying to decide what is useful and what is not.

Another one is an article on the Tigress character in Kung-Fu Panda. I mean, sure, it was information, but the extent of its vitality to human knowledge and literature?

Another one is a 7th round hockey player from Canada...

I mean, should Wikipedia really keep track of all athletes, all mayors, and all characters in all movies?

I think it's a better idea to keep track of more permanent stuff and let fans of these athletes, mayors and cartoon characters make websites about them.

<comment><USER13> Why delete the Texas mayor article? I just don't see the point. Is Wikipedia low on disk space?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I didn't see mentioned the possibility that the number of topics is finite, and therefore the number of new pages created per day must slow down someday. We live in a world were the main assumption is that everything is infinite, but that's possibly wrong.

<comment><USER15> That's a reasonable first guess, but it seems very unlikely to be true. Wikipedias in other languages do not all asymptote at the same sizes, print encyclopedias span quite a range of sizes, the superset of specialist encyclopedias would be _much_ larger than even the famous ones like Encyclopedia Britannica, and comparisons of the overlap of the English WP with foreign-language WPs suggests WP could easily be several times larger than it is ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test) ); and Wikia keeps expanding on specialist topics (not just fiction-related wikias). Finally, I used to subscribe to the paper New York Times and read or skim every article in every section for a while out of curiosity; I could have easily spent my entire editing career doing nothing but updating WP based on each day's issue - even though you might think that as one of the most prestigious English newspapers, the English WP would have a mortal lock on coverage of stuff which appear in the NYT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The new Deletionpedia[1] (kindly linked in another comment in this thread) doesn't operate the same way as the old (now non-functional) Deletionpedia,[2] which showed just how much cruft has been inserted into Wikipedia over the years. A better glimpse of current practice in inserting advertising spam cruft into user-edited wikis is offered by browsing random pages on the speedy deletion wiki of Wikia,[3] which will show how much sheer unpaid advertising goes on when people think they can get away with it.

The weekly list of the 5,000 most viewed pages on Wikipedia[4] (which includes one page that I improved from a frequently edit-warred stub to a stable good article by adding dozens of references to reliable sources to it) shows what users are often looking for on Wikipedia. Some topics are seasonal, and others are perennial. Many Wikipedians could best help the world by fixing one of the perennial highly viewed articles until it is a good article or a featured article.

Basis of knowledge: I have been a Wikipedian since 2010. I have seen a lot of readers get burned by articles edited on the principle of "Wikipedia is the encyclopedia where anyone can make stuff up.™" Articles become better and edit wars are reduced when people come to the project with reliable sources[5] to build an encyclopedia.[6]

[1] [http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page](http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page)

[2] [http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php](http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php)

[3] [http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Speedy_deletion_Wiki](http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Speedy_deletion_Wiki)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources)

[6] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_encyclopedia)

<comment><USER15> > Articles become better and edit wars are reduced when people come to the > project with reliable sources[5] to build an encyclopedia.[6]

'a group is its own worst enemy'. If you only started in 2010, then the disaster is just the status quo to you.

<comment><USER16> _' a group is its own worst enemy'._

Well, yes a group that whines continually about what Wikipedia doesn't host without putting up its own online encyclopedia showing what could be hosted under different editorial policies is indeed the worst enemy of its own arguments for having different editorial policies in an online encyclopedia. Show, don't tell.

By the way, a search engine search on the Clay Shirky quotation you shared without attribution[1] suggests by its top search result that the problem of spam in online communities is ongoing. Jeff Atwood recommends Shirky's article "Communities, Audiences, and Scale" from 6 April 2002 as a follow-up to the article where Shirky introduced the phrase you quoted. As Shirky notes, "Though it is tempting to think that we can somehow do away with the effects of mass media with new technology, the difficulty of reaching millions or even tens of thousands of people one community at a time is as much about human wiring as it is about network wiring. No matter how community minded a media outlet is, needing to reach a large group of people creates asymmetry and disconnection among that group -- turns them into an audience, in other words -- and there is no easy technological fix for that problem."

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q="a+group+is+its+own+worst+en...](https://www.google.com/search?q="a+group+is+its+own+worst+enemy")

[2] [http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html](http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html)

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure how your long comment about whining addresses either point I made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you support inclusionism, please consider joining the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians - [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Inclusionist_W...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Inclusionist_Wikipedians)

</comment><comment><USER18> That is one nice thing about the Internet - Right To Leave.

If Wikipedia is being rude and alienating users, then people will leave. Eventually something else will come along and take their place.

</comment><comment><USER19> Summary: Wikipedia keeps deleting my anime cruft. Waah!

Of course Wikipedia editorship is declining. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Encyclopedias, over time, move to maintenance mode, which requires far less work than original creation.

There's also a growing self-promotion problem. Self-promotion used to be mostly from garage bands. Now, it's businessmen. There are at least four rich ex-cons with paid Wikipedia editors. Businesses trying to make some big legal mess disappear are the worst. Magnetix and Banc De Binary were huge headaches. Volunteers have to push back against that, or Wikipedia becomes PR Newswire.

<comment><USER20> >There's also a growing self-promotion problem.

The entire Internet is going this way. I overestimated its inherent resistance to gaming/doctoring.

For example, product reviews are increasingly unreliable. Even on platforms that require purchase, like Amazon. Meanwhile specialist sites like tomshardware and anandtech seem overwhelmed.

<comment><USER19> I know, I know. I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" on that subject back in 2011.

[http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf](http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf)

Spamming social to get higher search rankings is easy, cheap, and hurts both search and social, as blogs, forums, and discussions fill up with promotional crap no one wants to read. I work on web spam and bogus ad detection, which means I'm painfully aware of the ocean of promotional crap out there. I'd like to see Wikipedia not go that way.</comment></comment></comment>


How the Black Death changed art - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/06/black-death-plague-pandemic-art-imagination-hisham-matar <comment><USER2> People might find this Durer talk interesting [1].

Apparently Durer made a still-unresolved conjecture about polyhedra.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gw_SgnlSdk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gw_SgnlSdk)

<comment><USER3> Note: The article is neither about Dürer nor about the same times, and even less about polyhedra:

The article is about 1348 Black Death effect on Siena, Italy.

"The speed of the Black Death was so staggering that in just over a year it had conquered the known medieval world, reducing the population of each country by an average of 45%." (the author should have just said "halving the population of each country").

"The Sienese, like their medieval European Christian counterparts, suffered under the conviction that all diseases came from God. They took the Black Death as proof of their guilt."

"The church encouraged such supernatural explanations. Many priests refused to bless the infected on the grounds that they were receiving God's punishment. Most of the believers devoted themselves to prayer and penitential practices, repairing churches and setting up religious houses. The papacy became more powerful. Ideas and the very structure of people's values shifted."

Dürer lived 1471 - 1528, more than century later, and, AFAIK never in Siena.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Trying to find Pain Points for business - <AUTHOR>

Basically I am looking for pain points and crappy processes. If you have a job and do something or if you are a business owner and have something that sucks, what is it?<p>If I could wave a magical wand and build it, what would it be and how would it solve the problem. Thanks! <comment><USER2> OK, a few observations:

1\. Not sure HN is the best place to ask this. Yes, there are plenty of start ups here and entrepreneurs, however, they are all busy just like you finding ideas

2\. Go where business owners hang out who don't necessary have the tech skills in house to solve their problems.

3\. Start smoking cigars

I pick up a cigar every now and then and head over to any nicer establishment with a good bar, good scotch, atmosphere and where people mingle.

1\. The people I meet at cigar places are typically business owners...and not in tech. They own manufacturing businesses, finance, retail and other low tech brick and mortar type businesses who have a need for tech but typically none in house.

2\. Cigar smokers love talking to other cigar smokers, even when you are a complete stranger. Also, smoking a cigar takes 1 - 2 hours...so you got them pinned. Start the conversation soft, casual...just like dating. Then start finding out more about them, what they do. Ask some simple questions about their field and let them explain as if they are pure genius. Start talking about their business...and now you start narrowing down on problems, issues.

I do this all the time. It's amazing what you can learn...and they'll love to tell you about it because they are having a good time smoking cigars, sipping scotch and hiding from the wife.

I just recently spoke to a small retail owner who has a chain of consignment stores with a number of POS systems. Buying a POS system isn't a problem, it's doing the financial reporting and consolidating data from multiple locations. He had been looking for quite some time and couldn't find anything good that actually could understand that data came from multiple locations, rather than multiple POSs inside the same store. He also had a huge number of different SKUs since no item coming in is the same as any other in a consignment store. Who knew...I would have thought this was a solved problem. It's a totally un- sexy space but I really think this is where you'll find you best ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love this idea - will try! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I maintain a tiny project that is called the freeware index and Instead of using a website I simply created a subreddit

reddit.com/r/freewareindex

I started it a few years ago with zero web design knowledge and have learned a bunch.

basically I am a computer tech and it was a pain in the ass to keep up with all the good software that I used so I solved it by building the freeware index.

at this moment there are 2 ways to get the entire index and one of them is via a Google spreadsheet. I recently discovered Google script and wanted to use it to expand the spreadsheet. with Google script I wanted to create a linkable row or sheet instead of the entire spreadsheet. Or somehow separate each sheet into a neat page on the blogger site I put up tariqghrayyib.blogspot.com.

the only reason as to why its so small is because I have restarted the project at least 4 times from scratch and this is the farthest I have gone so far simply because I made the subreddit where I can get more exposure.

if anyone knows Google script and can help that would be beyond awesome

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting use-case. For keeping all of these sites and up to date I don't have anything directly making it 100% perfect, but take a look at [http://www.wibki.com/](http://www.wibki.com/) or [https://kippt.com/](https://kippt.com/) as a way to store/share the content.

Thanks for the submission!

<comment><USER3> wibki looks awesome thanks for replying

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You may be interested in the technique Amy Hoy recommends in her 30x500 app development course, called a "sales safari." See her blog (unicornfree.com) for details, but the basic idea is to find out where people in a given niche/business hang out, and then lurk there, documenting what you see. Common watering holes are usually places people complain about things and commiserate, and paint points are likely to come up there.

This works better than _asking_ people what their pain points are. For heaven's sake, if you want to know what someone really thinks, asking them is often the worst approach to take!

</comment><comment><USER5> If they could answer your question, they probably already fixed it. You need to figure out the solution for them. You probably also need to figure out the pain point.

<comment><USER6> Heh.. If OP had asked this question a year ago, I might have given him a few good answers. Now I went ahead and implemented it, and the app should be out pretty soon. So yeah, if you ask techies what pain points they have, they probably are implementing the solution already.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tips for flying with a guitar? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be flying from New York to San Francisco tomorrow and would like to bring my guitar. Does anyone have any experience with this?
It's an acoustic guitar with a hard plastic case. I'm on a direct flight on a 757. What are my odds of being able to carry it on? I'm flying Delta, who has an explicit policy allowing guitars to be carried on, but they say that there are exceptions made (http://www.delta.com/traveling_checkin/baggage/special_baggage/musical_instruments/index.jsp)
Lastly, it's about a $300 guitar, but it was a Christmas gift so it is meaningful to me. Would it be safer to ship it insured with fedex or something?
I know this isn't tech related, but (a) I feel like there's probably a decent amount of musicians on here and (b) the best answer probably falls under the category of hacking a non-tech system :) <comment><USER2> Take it in-cabin if you can -- call the airline to make sure you can do this. And even if they say you can, be sure to take the strings off the guitar and ship them separately. Some security people consider them weapons so if you're transferring and need to go through security at a different airport that can cause problems.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Delta guitar policy clickable: [http://www.delta.com/traveling_checkin/baggage/special_bagga...](http://www.delta.com/traveling_checkin/baggage/special_baggage/musical_instruments/index.jsp)</comment>


JSON RPC is looking for a new maintainer - <AUTHOR> http://json-rpc.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested to see what someone could do with this, if they pushed the idea a little harder. I'm also just curious what people who've used JSON for REST services a lot think of this. Is it just a fancy way of describing what people are already doing with JSON? Or is there real value in this standard for making communication with JSON over a network easier?

<comment><USER2> Is json-rpc considered RESTful? At first glance it seems like no, since it encodes the method within the request body instead of using HTTP methods.

<comment><USER3> Anything that includes the three letters "RPC" is not inherently _not_ RESTful.

This is because you are making Calls to Remote Procedures rather than Transferring States of REpresentations [of resources].

I, of course, rearranged the acronyms RPC and REST for the sake of English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Random question, which isn't clear from the spec: can arguments be arbitrarily "deep" JSON objects (i.e. arrays and objects) or are they limited to primitives (strings, numbers, booleans, null)?

(obviously you could just pass a JSON serialized string, but that's not what I'm asking)

<comment><AUTHOR> They can be arbitrarily deep. Otherwise they couldn't claim to be supporting JSON objects as parameters.

Of course, anyone could just do a REST request using a wrapper object with the name of the procedure and an id. Then you'd have implemented a JSON-based RPC mechanism yourself! So it's pretty trivial. This mainly exists to get the idea out and implementations in various scripting languages, methinks.

One thing that might be cool: Perhaps an URL could map to an object, and making an rpc call on that URL could call a function on that object.

<comment><USER2> "Perhaps an URL could map to an object, and making an rpc call on that URL could call a function on that object."

That seems to be what this article is advocating: [http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2009/01/29/some-rpc-with-your- js...](http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2009/01/29/some-rpc-with-your- jsonreststore/)</comment></comment></comment>


Fountain Drinks - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fountain-drinks/ <comment><USER2> Finally I get to dispense this random piece of information I researched when I wondered why there were so many water fountains in US buildings but not in european buildings!

The law requires at least 1 fountain per 1000 capacity (usually 1-100), with no more than 50% substituted by bottled water. I wonder how UCF got around this for their stadium.

If you ever wonder why water fountains aren't in bathrooms, I found this gem:

410.2 Prohibited location. Drinking fountains, water coolers and bottled water dispensers shall not be installed in public restrooms.

<comment><USER3> [http://i.imgur.com/WDgxl7H.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/WDgxl7H.jpg) looks really suspicious -- wonder what country it's located in

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really fantastic show, if you're just finding it. Started out as a five-minute slot on NPR, but now often runs 30-40 minutes as a podcast. I just finished listening to the back catalog yesterday, and I heartily recommend it.

(It's crazy how interesting it is to listen to a radio show about design, oftentimes _visual_ design... and not feel like you're missing out on something. A real testament to the sound design, I think.)

</comment><comment><USER5> While visiting London today, I stopped by the location of the pump from Snow's Cholera map:

[https://email@example.com,-0.1366315,3a,75y,...](https://email@example.com,-0.1366315,3a,75y,189.49h,75.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sYuG6zRfL8xHbyVSwH3Q_8g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

There's a pub there named after John Snow, but the area seems otherwise unremarkable.

His contributions are discussed in the first episode of How We Got to Now, which is a pretty good documentary available on Netflix:

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

<comment><USER6> > but the area seems otherwise unremarkable

You should have continued to look around, you were in soho. There are so many great pubs, restaurants, coffee places within a few streets of the John Snow - it's one of my favourite areas of London to wander around in and try new places.

If you're talking unremarkable in terms of history, I'll defer to your judgement on that because I'm no expert! Certainly it's no modern glass-and- concrete jungle in soho though - the architecture's very interesting, Victorian in places, and I know for sure there's at least plenty of post-war historical sites of interest around those streets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who grew up in italy, I was always puzzled that the simple "nasone"[0] design is not used more commonly abroad, at least in open areas.

I.e. water goes down instead of up and the sink is level to the ground, so it's easy to fill a bottle or bucket with it. The pipe has a hole on top if you want to drink from it more easily, as by obstructing the bottom the water sprinkles up as in the US drinking fountains. They do not prevent the "kissing" of the pipe though.

I guess it might be related to the availability of water, which Rome and most of Italy have plenty of.

[0] [https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasone#/media/File:Nasona_a_vi...](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasone#/media/File:Nasona_a_via_annia_faustina_1.JPG) [1] [https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasone](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasone) italian, sorry

<comment><USER8> I've seen several of this kind of fountains in France and Spain, so maybe it spreaded at least in Europa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> the simple B&W photo of drinking fountains in the Jim Crow South is particularly striking.

<comment><USER10> I had the same reaction to the South photo.

I often wonder how much of what I see today as "normal" will be perceived as horrible / offensive / wrong in 50 years time.

Gay marriage is an obvious one, (Australian) treatment of refugees, anything else?

<comment><USER11> "Gay marriage is an obvious one, (Australian) treatment of refugees, anything else?"

I'm pretty sure gay marriage will be seen as just as normal and wholesome in 50 years as it is today or even more so. Though there will be fewer gay people if the theory that homosexuality is genetic proves out unless we have a boom in surrogacy.

The German and EU treatment of supposed refugees will be seen as a tragic moment, probably. Australia's current policy will be the one that any rich liberal nations that persist in being rich and liberal in fifty years will have chosen. Look at the UN population projections. It's clear that indiscriminate migration will overwhelm nations with lower than sustainable birth rates. Those that import many millions of people from backwards nations with extra high birth rates will see their founding populations reduced to tiny minorities and their countries newly backwards.

Prohibition is the obvious choice.

<comment><USER12> > _Though there will be fewer gay people if the theory that homosexuality is > genetic proves out unless we have a boom in surrogacy._

Or unless homosexuality correlates with some combination of genetic traits carried by heterosexuals --- if that turned out to be the case, then we'd expect gay people to continue to be born from time to time, due purely to the mix-and-match reproduction of heterosexuals, even if no gay person ever had children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here in Hamilton Ontario we had a distinct variation on the "hygenic fountain", the Shorty Green (named after a local NHL player 100 years ago).

It was a cup-sized continuously-overflowing cauldron that would flow into a surrounding catch-basin. I assume it was quite inefficient since it was always flowing, and didn't seem hygenic. They were still around when I was a kid in the '80s, and I remember loving how freezing cold and voluminously-flowing the water was.

<comment><USER14> There's something similar here in Portland - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Bubbler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Bubbler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first water fountain I've seen anywhere here in Mexico was just installed last year. It's in Chapultepec Park on the walk up to the Castle. The water comes out very cold. Outside that one, even airports and public offices don't have any.

It's quite a contrast to the USA. Bottled water, on the other hand, is very cheap in Mexico compared to El Norte.

So some modern nations have never adopted the water fountain fad. It's too bad -- they're pretty nice.

</comment><comment><USER15> The greatest water fountain in the US has to be the Lithia Water fountains in Ashland, Oregon.

It's an experience you will never forget!

[https://www.google.com/search?q=lithia+water+fountain+ashlan...](https://www.google.com/search?q=lithia+water+fountain+ashland&tbm=isch)

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

</comment><comment><USER16> The city of Saratoga New York has old-style fountains: [http://www.saratoga.com/waters-of-saratoga/](http://www.saratoga.com/waters- of-saratoga/)

Notice in the map of cholera deaths that there is a brewery, but with no deaths. Supposedly this is because the workers were free to drink the product.

<comment><USER17> A simpler explanation for that is that people with cholera do not go to work. I looked up the event and the Wikipedia article on it [0] made mention of a monastery in addition to the brewery that went untouched by the outbreak. Unfortunately I could not find it on the outbreak map [1], nor do I have access to the source material. This is similar to how children outside of the Broad Street area who attended school near Broad Street were not recorded as having died at the school but instead in their homes.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak#John_Snow_investigation)

[1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Snow- cho...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Snow-cholera- map-1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_D._Cogswell#Philanthropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_D._Cogswell#Philanthropy)

</comment><comment><USER19> Herpes dispensers. That's all I see.

<comment><USER20> I was going to down-vote you, then I saw the wonderful caption: "A so-called Sanitary Drinking Fountain" with the kid's face right in the mix.

So I'm assuming your comment is circa 1950.</comment></comment>


Bees are essential to the almond industry, and billions are dying in the process - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe <comment><USER2> Seems the problem is pesticide use, not necessarily almond cultivation. Perhaps I am splitting hairs, but there are few good protein sources available today and tree nuts are plentiful in my region. It is hard to imagine that those cow farms in the central valley and elsewhere are any more moral or sustainable.

<comment><USER3> I think the issue with almonds is that by growing them in massive monoculture you create bee deserts for the majority of the year when the almonds aren't flowering. Once the flowers disappear, any remaining bees will starve until the next year. So this criticism could be leveled essentially against almost any large scale monoculture crop.

I'd be interested to know why almonds (and avocados) are usually highlighted here. Are other flowering crops typically grown in more diverse environments?

<comment><USER4> Which other crops rely on bee pollination? Soy? Corn? Fruits?

<comment><USER5> A lot: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinat...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated_by_bees)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One might wonder when looking at the almond monoculture, which looks like some kind of apocalypse, whether there isn't an alternative. How about seeding wild flowers between the rows, for instance, so bees can actually live there?

In Europe it has become common to seed a headland around crops that is bug friendly, for one example. There are financial incentives for this in the subsidy too.

<comment><USER7> its not just wild flowers..

fro bees to sruvive winter its

vetch mustard goldenrod alfa

that will supply the full spring to fall diet for bees

I put it in my father's garden every year as farmers have killed all that by the roadside

<comment><USER8> Is there a typo in "vetch mustard goldenrod alfa"?

Googling it brings up this thread and your comment as the top hit...

<comment><USER9> It's a (poorly formatted) list of plants that bloom at different times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bees are not essential to the almond industry in general, but to the US almond industry in particular because US is focusing on almond varieties that are not the best nor auto-compatible (so they need bees to pollinate), but have the economic advantage of having a very good ratio between the weight of shell over the seed inside. This is good to get the maximum earning, but is bad both for human health because the thin shell allows for the almonds to be more easily contaminated, and for bees because of what the article says.

<comment><USER11> in other words, CA could not have chosen a worst crop to grow (I heard that it also requires a lot of water to grow, something that CA is short on)

<comment><USER10> Oh I forgot to mention water! Actually almonds can grow almost without any water at all, this is how we do it in Sicily, but certain varieties will yield 2x product if you use water. Hence in CA usually water is used, but with systems to use as little as possible.

<comment><USER12> It makes me irrationally angry how often things could be done sustainably but of course aren't because there's no strong enough incentive to care about negative externalities.

<comment><USER13> California growing 80% of the worlds almond a isn't sustainable. It used California water and it's the depleting the nutrients in the soil.

<comment><USER14> And they transport almond milk in cartons all over that is worse. The packaging and the space it takes for transport and the protocol for liquid transporting and the carbon foot print of pasteurization and so much more are entirely unnecessary because almond milk is so easy to make from a powder/almond meal.

But consumers are used to pouring it from a carton. Consumer education is so essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Almonds use way too much water and they shouldn't be grown in California. Over a gallon of water is needed to grow 1 almond.

[https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it- re...](https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-really-take- grow-almonds-paesta-podcast-series-episode-43)

<comment><USER16> Why is the water "wasted"? It doesn't go away like burning fuel or become irreversibly contaminated in the process.

<comment><USER17> >19%: The Great Water-Power Wake-Up Call

>A few years back, number crunchers at the California Energy Commission tried to add up how much electrical power (and other forms of energy) goes into using water in California. The bottom line number they came up with: 19%. That is, nearly a fifth of all the power generated in California — as well as huge quantities of natural gas and diesel fuel consumed in the state — goes into water-related uses.

[http://ww2.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/06/10/19-percent- calif...](http://ww2.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/06/10/19-percent-californias- great-water-power-wake-up-call/)

Irrigation is a CO2 emitter - especially when water is transported all the way from the Colorado River to California farms.

<comment><USER4> Is that a lot? I can't imagine a better use for power than sustaining the basic necessity of life.

<comment><USER18> The basic necessity of life: "almonds".

<comment><USER19> The 19% figure refers to just almonds?

<comment><USER18> No, it was a tongue in cheek comment, but the majority of that figure is used for high value cash crops, not for basic necessities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article fails to mention an of the viruses that are carried by the Varroa mite. The problem in not only the mites physically attacking the bees, but the proliferation of a suite of viruses they carry. One that is particularly harmful is the 'Deformed wing virus' (DWV) [0].

Luckily there are some promising developments on this front. Research efforts led by Paul Stamets [1] have developed an extract derived from mushrooms that, when fed to the bee colonies, have been shown to drastically reduce DWV and Lake Sinai virus.[2]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus) [1] [https://fungi.com/pages/bees](https://fungi.com/pages/bees) [2] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8)

</comment><comment><USER21> There is nothing coherent about the article.

Ok, lets make an almond tree that doesn't need bee's.

Now we'll have less bee keepers, since they will lose the work they are doing, and less bees.

Tomorrows article will be about bee collapses and how that matters.

Nothing in the article points to the almond process that's killing bees. It implies other activities in California are responsible perhaps we need to look there.

If they are trying to make a claim a bees life matters, then why does it matter over a grasshopper that's also killed by the pesticides?

<comment><USER22> They buried it

 _Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans. (The maker, Bayer- owned Monsanto, denies the cancer link when people use Roundup at the prescribed dosage. So far this year three US courts have found in favour of glyphosate users who developed forms of lymphoma; thousands more cases are pending.)_

 _On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America's second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness._

<comment><USER23> Glyphosate has been shown to be lethal to bees? Weird, since it targets an enzyme that only appears in non-animals.

Maybe they meant it's lethal to bees if you drop the bottle on one.

<comment><USER22> Unintended consequences can happen. Looks like it's an active debate.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Glyphosate+bees&t=fpas&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Glyphosate+bees&t=fpas&ia=web)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> North Dakota (the top honey producing state in the USA) has a special section of its website for honey bees[1] and has a document called "NORTH DAKOTA POLLINATOR PLAN"[2] that might give some perspective from the beekeeper and state side.

1) [https://www.nd.gov/ndda/plant-industries/apiary-honey- bees](https://www.nd.gov/ndda/plant-industries/apiary-honey-bees)

2) [https://www.nd.gov/ndda/sites/default/files/legacy/resource/...](https://www.nd.gov/ndda/sites/default/files/legacy/resource/ND%20Pollinator%20Plan%202016.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> Easy fix is to switch to Hemp or Oat Milk. I find them more interesting and I imagine hemp milk isn't much of an issue for bees.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm definitely going to The Bad Place when I die, with all that almond milk I drink.

</comment><comment><USER27> The honey bee is the Western honey bee. Although some call to it the European honey bee, it is not a "bad import from Europe".

This bee originated from Africa or Asia, before it got domesticated.

</comment><comment><USER28> Word around Cali is that almonds are basically a way to export fresh water to China in a subsidized, condensed format.

Something to think about in an arid region.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hope we are learning that substituting fake things for real things often have catastrophic effects. If fake meat becomes popular, this will get much worse. Food production is complex. Substituting one thing for another may seem like a good idea on the surface, but it ignores second order effects.

</comment><comment><USER30> Obsession is an interesting way to characterize one of the great alternatives to cow's milk for people who cannot consume dairy or refuse to support the torture of cows for their milk. The livelihood of bees or climate change? The duality of man.

<comment><USER31> Growing almonds in California is pretty unethical. Have you tried oat milk?

<comment><USER32> Oat milk? Shouldn't that be oat juice?

Oats aren't animals that produce milk for their offspring.

<comment><USER33> it's a marketing thing... you wouldn't understand.

<comment><USER34> In most of Europe, you cannot call plant-based drinks milk, as that's a misleading name, as pointed out... they have to call it what it is, e.g. "almond drink", "soy drink" etc..

<comment><USER35> Are you sure? I'm fairly sure that was just a US FDA thing – "milk" has been used to describe sap and juices in Europe for many, many years – iirc that's where the word "lettuce" comes from.

<comment><USER32> "the word "milk" is a protected denomination reserved only for mammary secretions. (This stipulation is found in the EU's Single CMO Regulation)" \- [http://www.ensa-eu.org/eu-legislation/food-labeling/](http://www.ensa- eu.org/eu-legislation/food-labeling/)

<comment><USER36> I've just bought some wheat, rice and almond milk in Prague, CZ. The thing is that this rule applies only if it's not known that it is a metaphor - e.g. there is a "rum drink" that is not a rum and it used to be called "tuzemsky rum" (local rum), now it's "tuzemak" (abbreviation of the first word); similar situations was with different kinds of fruit jams. At the same time, almond milk... well, everyone knows almond tree is not a cow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> From my perspective over here in Malmö, Sweden it's sort of funny how americans have obsessed with Almond milk. The memes, the taunts and so on.

Nobody I know drinks almond milk. We drink oat milk. The best manufacturer of oat replacement products for dairy is from this region of Sweden, Oatly. They make oat drinks, creams and ice cream.

Personally at 35 I've stopped drinking milk altogether because it's a drink for juveniles. So I only use oat milk replacement in cooking.

</comment><comment><USER38> Of course billions of bees are dying every year, because 99.9% of bees don't live longer than six months.

<comment><USER9> I suspect that is not what this article is considering. Bees are usually able to sustain their populations, "dying" in this context implies "and not being replaced with new brood".

<comment><USER38> > ..."dying" in this context implies "and not being replaced with new brood".

No it doesn't. The bees that pollinate almonds are bred by beekeepers and sent out for this exact purpose. They will be replaced as long as the demand for their service remains.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it does. The article is explicitly about colonies dying at an unexpectedly high rate.

> By October, 150 of Arp's hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his > inventory in just a few months.

> Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing > their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the > decline.

> This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies...

> In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% > of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp's > bees started dying in greater numbers.

> First, he experienced a nearly 100% loss of his hives from an infestation of > tracheal mites.

<comment><USER38> > Yeah, it does.

It doesn't. These losses will be replaced by the keepers.

> In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% > of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp's > bees started dying in greater numbers.

If this guy has been losing 5-10% of his colonies for forty years, how is he still in businesses? The bees/colonies get _replaced_ , of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This article doesn't seem to care all that much about accuracy. They just care about being dramatic.

For example: "glyphosate ... has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans"

Neither clause is true.

I don't feel like doing a line by line of the rest, but this is a garbage article.

<comment><USER40> [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-017-0689-0](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-017-0689-0)

Glyphosate/RoundUp etc has been shown to have high toxicity for bees and many other animals including humans.

It _was_ considered safe, new data and better science has changed that stance. The article isn't garbage.

<comment><USER41> Supporting this. I grew up with this stuff and while the ones I know would always use protective gear it _was_ considered safe and the protection was used just to be really sure it seemed.

Today the situation is a lot more nuanced.

...and as I write this I think I could feel the smell of roundup or another herbicide, so yeah I've been exposed it :-/</comment></comment></comment>


APIGUM - Connect your service to popular cloud apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.apigum.com <comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a wonderful SAAS application and wish you were able to quickly connect it to many other popular apps? I found myself in the same spot and was looking for something flexible that would allow me to write flexible code without complex installations. I went into sites like Zapier but they don't offer API so I couldn't white label these integrations for my customers. Eventually, I decided I'll just build one.

APIGUM is a flexible engine for building integrations through JavaScript. You can build your own recipes where a recipe is a simple piece of code that maps triggers and actions to move data from one cloud app to another.

We'd be happy to partner with great SAAS applications through creative business models. Please contact me if you have any questions and we'll pick it up from there. Josh</comment>


Ask HN: Any Boilerplate app with Components? - <AUTHOR> Are there any projects that let you start with boilerplate app code and just check boxes to add additional functionality?
For example, if I start with a react project, I could choose to automatically add in authentication support either through open source or from an online service.
Yes it's not long to wire this up, but there are 50 more features an app might need.  It could be the difference between a couple minutes and a couple of days of work. <comment><USER2> From what I've read, deciding to make a tool to deal with that sort of feeling is more or less how Ruby on Rails came to be written.</comment>


Should Employees Be Fired For Using Their Job-Provided Laptops To Look Up Porn? - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/02/11/should-employees-be-fired-for-using-their-job-provided-laptops-to-look-up-porn/

<comment><USER2> For stupidity, if nothing else. I trust everyone here knows that employers regularly install tracking software. And I also trust that you wont do it to your own employees.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only if the guys have big 1970's moustaches.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Google search different on mobile Firefox compared to Chrome? - <AUTHOR> For instance the Images tab is quite degraded and different in Firefox (Can't swipe picture), I also noticed that some widget apps like soccer matches are degraded. try typing "Barcelona matches" in both browsers and notice how degraded the matches widget is in Firefox compared to chrome (For instance the matches are clickable in Chrome but not in Firefox). There are other examples that I can't remember right now, I am sure of it.
I also noticed that AMP isn't available in Firefox, though I am not a fan of AMP, I still find it weird that it's not available, considering Google's motives behind AMP, which is to improve user experience, allegedly.
Isn't this a bit anti competitive and alarming? <comment><USER2> Because there are multiple evidences for years that Google purposefully degrades the user experience for people not using Google Chrome in order to entice them to switch. Happens mostly for Firefox but it also happens for Chromium (basically, almost all non Chrome browsers)

Check how long it takes for Gmail to load on Firefox to have a sneak peek on how the UX is degaraded.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you change the User Agent to Chrome you can see that it works pretty well on Firefox actually.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Google has been doing this for years, they serve a degraded version of YouTube as well.

Get an add-on to change your user-agent to latest chrome

<comment><USER5> But then it looks like everyone is using chrome in marketshare reports...

<comment><USER6> You only need to do so for Google sites. Maybe an enhancement on Firefox Containers that only do this for Google sites.

<comment><USER7> There's an addon that does exactly this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on- goo...](https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-google- android/)

<comment><USER8> This addon works but it caused me to see a lot more captcha puzzles. My recaptcha v3 score changes from 0.1 to 0.9 depending on whether the extension is enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Duckduckgo.com has a consistent experience in both browsers :) that's what I use on FF mobile.

</comment><comment><USER10> Almost certainly because Firefox Mobile's share is too low for them to test on, which would mean it's safer to serve a stripped down results page that is guaranteed to work on any browser than to risk breaking search entirely for those users with shiny features. The fix is to encourage everybody else to use Firefox Mobile too and use an extension in the meantime like I do.

</comment><comment><USER11> Relevant bug report: "google.com - Firefox Android doesn't receive the tier1 sent to Chrome Android" [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444)

</comment><comment><USER12> You can use [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google- search...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search- fixer/) to work around this.

</comment><comment><USER13> >AMP isn't available on mobile firefox >it's Google's fault somehow

Is this just begging for karma? There isn't even version or OS info. How is anyone going to actually discuss this other than just arguing blindly?

<comment><AUTHOR> I created a new account to post this, so I have no interest in Karma.

It was just something that I noticed when I switched from mobile Chrome to Firefox. You don't have to discuss this blindly, just pull your phone and test for yourself, it'll only take you 2 seconds.

My phone has Android 8.0, Firefox Mobile 68.0

<comment><USER14> I think his point is that Firefox should integrate with AMP. Now I'm not sure if Google puts obstacles in place to make this harder, but wasn't AMP recently open sourced?

<comment><USER15> AMP is built on Google's CDN, and the standard is controlled by Google for Google's own self interests.

It being "open source" or not kind of misses the bigger picture. If Google had any interest in AMP being a web standard they would have sent the spec out, and helped fund a neutral org to run it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does it compare if you use startpage.com (a privacy proxy for google search)?

</comment><comment><USER17> Wouldn't Mozilla have to build out AMP support in FF itself...?

<comment><USER18> AMP doesn't require web browser support. It's just a JS library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Isn't this a bit anti competitive and alarming?

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by laziness.

(Variation on Hanlon's razor)

<comment><USER20> Well according to st3fan, "If you change the User Agent to Chrome you can see that it works pretty well on Firefox actually." That means that they removed features on firefox on purpuse right? Or does that just mean they implemented their feature "for chrome only", checking the user agent to make sure it works on chrome only?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489237)

<comment><USER21> Oftentimes a team at Google doesn't have the QA resources to test configuration X. In that case to avoid a potentially bad experience, feature Y is often gated to tested configs and and disabled for X, leaving X with the old experience since it _had been tested_ on X.

Why does QA test only Chrome? Well if there is only enough QA time to test one browser, imagine having to be the guy to explain to the higher ups why it wasn't chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it surprising that an organization the size of Google doesn't have the resources to test key features in such a notable browser.

Though I just searched and it seems Firefox has a shockingly low market share in mobile: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers)

Perhaps that's why it's not given the attention it needs, how unfortunate.

<comment><USER22> Bingo, Firefox mobile has << 1% of the mobile browser user base. It's hard to justify the resources to test every change and feature to ensure a good user experience for such a small number of users.

<comment><USER19> And the reason for this is probably that Chrome comes bundled with Android.

<comment><USER23> Agreed, and this is likely the entire reason for Android to exist: more searches</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>