How we should pay for newspapers - <AUTHOR> https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3616974.html <comment><USER2> _The problem being that I don 't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month_

Consider changing your habits. I felt this way before, too. Then I subscribed to the Washington Post and New York Times and weaned myself off news aggregators and CNN.COM, in favor of just scanning the front pages of both. I am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was before.

Something that was easy for me to miss before was that the _selection_ of stories on aggregator sites is itself a form of editorial control. The algorithmic aggregators do a pretty terrible job; the popular vote aggregators... yikes. If you want to read a couple of articles from a lot of different sources, you're going to need to pay _somebody_ to "design the menu" for you.

The major newspapers have spent the last century working on that problem, and I'm not sure anyone's really giving them a run for their money. Consider an NYT, WaPo, or WSJ subscription.

<comment><USER3> > I am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was > before.

Haven't you just traded one set of biases for another?

<comment><USER4> Every news source—even crowdsourced ones—has a bias. However, there are news organizations that strive to present the facts, as best as they understand them. Of course, they miss the mark—and their worldview inevitably bleeds in—but the top-shelf organizations do their best.

I subscribe to the NYT (the print edition—trying to figure out how to make news more accessible to my kids to stumble upon, and I like how it helps me focus on reading). As a Michigander, I definitely detect a progressive New England lense at times, but the quality of their journalism is generally superb.

<comment><USER5> _but the quality of their journalism is generally superb._

What's an example to you of an article on a hot-point issue where you think the quality of their journalism was superb? And how do you know the quality of their journalism in that article was superb?

I have noticed that on topics that I have independent knowledge of, particularly topics relating to race, sex, or politics, I often find their reporting to be slanted and misleading. They care more about selecting anecdotes and statistics to fit the narrative, rather than starting from the perspective of picking representative anecdotes and a full composite of statistics that give you the actual truth of the matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I absolutely agree with one caveat. I think it's important to be able to read an historical article even though you are no longer paying the subscription.

I think there's subtleties to the subscription model though. Will it really cover all newspapers, even the super expensive and rare ones? The aggregator will get to choose what you could read on its platform. Also, certain articles are likely to be of higher quality, so there should be a good way to "fairly" distribute the subscription that is beneficial for you and humanity.

I love Spotify. I think it does the subscription model really well, and I like how it does not restrict you. At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic, VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions. I refuse to use Netflix (and Amazon video) because of the pain it has caused. It's still not perfect because I want to play the songs using my own choice of music player.

There are two different services that I know of that might be of interest. The closest service that I have found is Blendle which charges a small amount per article rather than a subscription. The second is the basic attention token which, I think, could be used for this though it is much broader. I haven't tried either.

<comment><USER7> > _At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic, > VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions._

Netflix has to honour its contracts with media providers, who have been accustomed to regional contracts and blackout clauses for decades.

<comment><USER6> Yes, absolutely. However, regardless of the reasons, it when I run into an issue I feel annoyed and it makes me want to not bother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As somebody who has some insight into the inner thoughts of the revenue departments of newspapers, the suits running newspapers would rather die than accept Spotify for newspaper.

We were offering something like $0.20 per article. We ran a small scale test. The users loved it, it allowed the newspapers to monetize users that would otherwise not pay, it let you read the article without a bunch of ads loading slowing down the page. We thought this is great, we're making the digital newspaper experience better and making them more money, this is a wonderful success. They noticed that our product was loved too much by the user that they were cancelling their subscriptions in favor of it.

They would rather have that guaranteed $1/month from a subset of their users than rely the unpredictability of hoping the user reads 5 articles a month. And it wasn't just one newspaper, half the top newspapers 15 by circulation said the same thing. Throw in an aggregator service like Spotify on top so the newspapers can't even control the look and feel on top? The idea's dead in the water.

<comment><USER9> Mmmmm. Kind of. That insight is pretty accurate, in my experience (I work for PressReader, disclaimer) and what we're building is basically the Spotify for News. But for real.

It took some doing, and we definitely had resistance at first, but we have more than 7,000 newspapers and magazines now. And more every week.

Where we've really found success is taking the time to build strong relationships with the publishers. I totally get that they don't want a Spotify-like service to eat at their regular subscribers.

So - part of our benefit to them, is the way we let big brands buy access for their customers. That way, newspapers can reach hotel guests, airline passengers, people like that, that they couldn't before.

Whatever product you build, you have to consider BOTH the reader and the publishers.

<comment><USER8> It depends on the scale, really. When you only account for a small % of traffic, your impact to subscription revenue is also small, to the point where they can just bucket any cost or revenue loss under the marketing budget.

We still integrated with many of them (for years now at this point), with quarterly meetings with their senior management. They limit our integration to some small % of their traffic, undesirable articles, low flight risk users, or low loyalty users.

We're letting them control their revenue risks, and they're all just slow, risk-adverse, engineering resource limited, and enjoying the high Trump brought back to the press.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only thing I know about in this arena other than prior mentioned in the thread is Civil, a blockchain for journalism payments. I think it's super interesting. [https://joincivil.com/](https://joincivil.com/)

They're one of the blockchain projects coming out of Consensys.

</comment><comment><USER11> Google tried this model some years back (I forget the name). The problem ends up (as always) being around the money.

You need to sign up ~all the newspapers for it to be valuable for users (otherwise they're paying $20/mo for access to just a random subset of the news), but the more newspapers you sign up, the more you need to split the user's subscription fee between an increasingly large pool of newspapers.

In the post he writes that the papers should get their "fair share", but how do you compute that? If you do it based on pageviews you create an incentive for participants in the program to juice their pageviews, either through low- quality clickbait or technical means like splitting a single article into a multipart series. And so on.

</comment><comment><USER12> There should be an ecosystem like YouTube, but for long form text, where individual authors can have subscription relationships with subscribers.

<comment><USER9> That's super interesting. I think others are right, that's a lot like Medium.

But, what about when a reader doesn't really know which author they like. What if they just read the entertainment section of one newspaper, fun stories from some other magazine, and whatever's dominating the news cycle from that national paper somewhere else?

<comment><USER12> What happens on YouTube? People can look at the "home" page and see recommended articles. Also, sites like HN and reddit can link back to articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea of having a centralized exchange for buyers (readers) and sellers (writers). I would actually prefer it to be variable-fee rather than flat-fee, with buyers paying per article, and the exchange truly playing the role of an _exchange_, taking a commission per transaction.

There's still room for publishers, in the form of editing, curation, and financial support - say, funding a correspondent's trip to a war zone. I'd be fine with some of the price, ideally a transparent amount, going to publishers (or labels or guilds or whatever you want to call them).

The comparison with Spotify is interesting, because I would prefer Spotify to be this way too, and I say this as someone who uses Spotify very regularly. From my (admittedly non-firsthand) knowledge, Spotify has a kind of swap going on between listeners and artists/rights-holders where they take a fixed stream from listeners and pay variable streams to artists. (Although the variable leg is a percentage of the total fixed payments, so in aggregate Spotify pays a fixed leg and there's never a financial mismatch for them.)

At such small payment scales as "price of a song," I don't object to variation in payment being passed through to me. Spotify can take a cut for providing delivery and the app. If I feel like I'm spending too little or too much per month on music, I can scale my use, much like other expenditures in life. My inclination is to feel similarly about print media.

</comment><comment><USER14> Suuuuuuuuuure, although this will undoubtedly result in newspapers being paid _less_ , not more. Given the currently bleak situations for newspapers, I'd doubt this would work.

There's also the issue of unions that have been popping up since DNAInfo got shut down. I don't think they'd support a "Spotify" for news.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well there's Texture, a kind of cable package for magazines, bought by Apple last week. [0] If it works for magazines it could work for newspapers but the tricky part is that it has to be shared ownership and there are a _lot_ more newspapers than magazines.

[0][http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture- acquisiti...](http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture- acquisition-1202724105/)

<comment><USER16> Exactly this. For Spotify to succeed they only needed to get a handful of label conglomerates on board. It could be done, but getting all of the heavyweight newspapers just in the United States to sign up would be a herculean effort. There is consolidation in the industry (particularly among hyperlocals), but it's not as consolidated as major label music.

<comment><USER9> It is!

But Hercules lives! Sort of. PressReader (disclaimer, I work there) is doing exactly this. Think Texture, except way more content. We have more than 7,000 titles right now. About half are newspapers.

You're absolutely right about the US news brands, though. They've got some good things going on their own already. But, we're working at it. This month, we added Variety, Robb Report, and a bunch of Meredith titles (mostly newspapers).

I'm loving this thread, though, you guys. It shows there's a serious interest for what we've got going on at PressReader. Awesome, awesome.

<comment><USER16> Awesome! Best of luck to your team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We need Netflix for newspapers. $10 a month, gives you access to read hundreds of news articles.

<comment><USER18> There is Blendle, although I can't find a list of newspapers and magazines that they publish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think this is a great use case for blockchain and in-browser wallets. I imagine a not too distant future where Newspapers can add a bit of open source code that controls access to their content. If I want to read an article, I pay like 50c to unlock it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've called this model "microsubscription", on the idea that it combines features of micropayment and subscription. It's arguably bundling and it arguably isn't, so I'm going to go ahead with the cool name.

Flattr are doing it, Google Contributor was doing it drifted away. Readability used to do it. In fact, so many people have thought of this model that I have kinda lost track.

Google Subscriber splits the middle. It's not _really_ a walled garden, but Google's reach and interpenetration of the open internet is so total that it feels and behaves very much like one.

I was granted a patent last year on a technical aspect: how to (1) log the visits, (2) let visitors through a paywall, (3) without revealing their identity to the publisher. This is easy (but potentially expensive) if you have a walled garden (Netflix, Spotify, Texture). It's more difficult if you don't.

If you want to contact me about it, use firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd sign up for "Spotify for newspapers".

<comment><USER9> Try PressReader, my friend. Shoot me a DM on Twitter (@jordanpowpow) and I'll get you started with some free access.

If you like it, awesome. If not, that's cool.

It's unlimited newspapers AND magazines. 7,000 of them. You can create 'playlists' and set auto downloads.

And every time you read something, the publisher gets paid a royalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the business model of cable TV providers.

</comment><comment><USER22> How we should pay for the telegraph and the pony express?

</comment><comment><USER23> This is exactly what medium is doing.

<comment><USER9> Err...not really.</comment></comment>


Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/amazon-cracks-open-the-kindle/?src=twt&twt=nytimesbits <comment><AUTHOR> I think between the Kindle, Nook (it runs android), and the Apple Tablet, we're going to see some of the next great publishing companies emerge along with the really smart dinosaurs evolve. "Print Content" will no longer just be words on a page, but something interactive that belongs in the 21st century. _What if your books/newspapers/magazines were hybrids of software+traditional writing?_ That thought kind of gives me the chills... in a good way.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and this combined with Amazon's new royalty scheme:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-amazon-fires- to...](http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-amazon-fires-torpedo-at- book-industry-launches-70-kindle-royalty-option-2010-1)

Will create really big changes in the publishing industry.

I just hope that people outside the U.S. won't have to wait years to benefit from these changes (because of legalities).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "We've heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle"

So, why didn't they do nothing for two years?

One week before Apple supposedly will announce the iTablet, Amazon creates a press release saying a limited beta of the Kindle SDK will start _next month_!

If you are the market leader, why would you wait two years for yours competitors? Doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER4> I get the impression that most product teams at Amazon contain about 5 people.

I love Amazon, btw, I just think they keep the teams lean and do amazing things.

<comment><USER5> "If a project team can eat more than two pizzas, it's too large." -- Werner Vogels Amazon CTO

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I'm reading it, they're going to charge 15 cents per megabyte to deliver the _app itself_ to the device. That cost will be deducted from the app price, and the remainder is what will be split 70/30 with developers. They cap over- the-air delivery at 10 meg. Anything over that is downloaded to user's computer, then to kindle via usb. Cumbersome.

So you could have up to $1.50 of the app price deducted for delivery fees.

Probably not going to settle in on a 99 cent price point...

<comment><USER7> Definitely cumbersome, but you'd be hard pressed to find a 99c iPhone app that's 10MB. With the simplicity of typical apps and platform restrictions (black & white!), a lot will fit in the first 1MB.

<comment><USER8> Right now two of the top ten paid iPhone apps are both $0.99 and over 10MB. I'm of the impression that this is quite common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone venture some guesses as to what types of apps will be created? That screen seems like a terribly limiting factor for apps...

<comment><USER10> Plenty of apps don't need rapid refresh, or particularly fancy graphics. Weather apps, stock tickers, crossword puzzles, Sudoku, choose-your-own- adventure type games (even something like the old Adventure), a note taker, shopping list, fitness tracker... Combine these with the Kindle's wireless cellular link, add a little imagination, and I feel it has potential.

<comment><USER7> Considering developers will pay for app downloads themselves, it seems likely that only wifi access will be available. That's going to limit a lot of the kinds of apps that are popular on the iPhone. Why even install a wifi-only weather app when you can use the (experimental) web browser that always works?

<comment><USER11> I don't think Kindles have wifi...

I would guess amazon would only allow non-networked apps

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone make a PDF reader for the Kindle? It would display PDF's somewhat sanely and it would allow bookmarking and annotations.

<comment><USER13> Besides the one Amazon ships in the latest firmware versions ? ( [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200324680) )

The manuals ( [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200317150) ) seem to say you can bookmark PDF pages, but do not mention clippings or annotations, which are allowed for the mobi/azw default format.

<comment><USER12> Yes, besides that one. It seems to completely barf on most PDFs especially multi column ones.

I don't recall the bookmarking working. And annoations and clippings are definately not there.

<comment><USER13> Well, I was looking at the DX manual - I confess I'm waiting to lay my mitts on one, which should be landing in my corner of Europe today.

If you're talking of the 6" e-ink screen (I have one of the Hanlin ones, branded BeBook), I do not think there's a good way of reading PDFs "printed" to Letter/A4 on them. (Thus the DX.)

(Short, of course, of intelligently reflowing the PDF to a smaller page size - which currently seems to be an opportunity ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't have a Kindle yet, so I wonder what the connectivity is like? I think you can't just surf the web with a Kindle, so web applications are out?

This news makes me dither between excitement and desperation. Yet another completely different mobile platform to support? Fragmentation is really becoming a problem, web apps seemed like the only hope for a solution... In any case, I suppose it makes sense to wait for the iPad, perhaps we'll think completely different about mobile internet after that.

<comment><USER15> It has a basic web browser, but for international customers it seems most sites are restricted -- I can only browse Wikipedia (it uses the mobile version, <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/> )

I suspect the deals they've had to do with however many 3G provider companies mean more expensive bandwidth outside of US.

I'm not sure about Kindle as an app platform; it feels a little too sluggish when the screen needs to be updated. Good enough for going to a new book page, but interactive applications may be difficult (e.g. just moving the cursor around faster leaves a visible trail). Maybe a new generation of the device with faster screen updates (some kind of dual e-ink/OLED screen?) and better keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great news. I've been hoping for an SDK ever since I got a Kindle DX as a birthday present.

</comment><comment><USER17> I _really_ wish that thing had a touchscreen. No pointing device, no scroll wheel, and poor cursor update speed will make the interactions people are used to now impossible.

It shuts down its radio all the time right? I assume push notifications are impossible?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm excited to see what come of this. Although most of my 'connected' needs are filled by my iPhone, having a comparable substitute on the big, battery- sipping, easy-on-the-eyes screen seems like a good idea.

Now if only they would come down in price just a bit...

<comment><USER19> Last I checked they had it refurbished for ~400

<comment><USER18> Oops. I meant to reference the Kindle's price. I already have an iPhone.

<comment><USER19> Yeah I got that. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/B0015TCML0/?tag=kwab-...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/B0015TCML0/?tag=kwab-20&condition=refurbished)

Maybe they'll restock soon.

<comment><USER18> Ouch. I would probably only want the 6" version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I haven't seen answered is can I develop my own apps for my own Kindle for free? A big factor for me losing interest in iPhone development is having to pay 99$ a year to make apps for myself, that expire in a year.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what language/API it uses? Java or C++ are probably safe guesses.

<comment><USER22> I believe Java is out- it uses a ARM11 CPU running Linux, and I am not aware of a commonly available Java for ARM CPU's...?

C/C++ would be seem like a good guess (and my personal preference), but on the other hand it might allow lower-level access than they are prepared to give.

In reality, anything that compiles on Linux on the ARM processor could be game- python, ruby, c/c++, perl... but, _that_ kind of access is probably just a pipe dream.

<comment><USER21> > I am not aware of a commonly available Java for ARM CPU'

What do you think J2ME runs on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hope this results in a renaissance for interactive fiction (text adventure games).

</comment><comment><USER24> Hopefully it's better-documented than Amazon FPS Subscriptions. :P

</comment><comment><USER25> If the opening up doesn't include an API that allows me to transfer kindle book files onto my Linux box in a portable, DRM-free format, then for me at least it is worthless and Amazon can throw their kindle on a bonfire.</comment>


The dark side of the new theories of success - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2251699/pagenum/all/ <comment><USER3> > _If acquiring disciplined habits and learning to defer gratification end up > influencing genes—if, as he rather wildly speculates, "a twelve-year-old kid > could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by > studying harder now"—that would seem to multiply the Matthew Effect, for ill > as well as good._

i don't think "activating" genes means they become more heritable.

<comment><USER4> Smacks a bit of Lamarckism doesn't it?

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism

<comment><USER5> That's true, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Epigenetics is a pretty hot topic these couple of years. Straight from Wikipedia:

As reported in MIT's Technology Review in February 2009, "The effects of an animal's environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring ... The findings provide support for a 200-year-old theory of evolution that has been largely dismissed: Lamarckian evolution, which states that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring."

This was shown to happen in humans and does make intuitive sense - <USER2> machines are more efficient than Moore machines!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > They also skirt the question of whether producing the requisite 10,000-hour > grinds may prove to be as inegalitarian and hypercompetitive as the > emergence of geniuses ever was.

It's a little scary that the author just assumes that being inegalitarian is a bad thing. Excellence is inegalitarian by definition.

<comment><USER7> Excellence most certainly is not inegalitarian by definition. Excellence is about living up to YOUR full potential, not about doing it better than any other person.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - Top Ten Dishes - <AUTHOR>

Hello! Recently launched http://www.toptendishes.com/ and wanted to engage your feedback. Our goal is to organize, categorize and rank dishes in NYC (and eventually other cities) to simplify the dish discovery process.  Trying to make it easier for people to find out where to eat based on their cravings.
Note:  Some things we are changing this week: --instead of "The Top Ten Lists" it will read "User Picks".
--the URLs of the Expert Pages will be different
Thanks for your time!
Cheers, Rishi <comment><USER2> Not enough time for a thorough perusal, but some quick observations:

1) is the flash for the city name really necessary?

2) the pages could really benefit from a more uniform grid. There's no decent vertical alignment.

3) If I click on any picture in a search, I'm taken to the cheeseburger page.

4) The URLs would probably better if the order was reversed, and maybe even with slashes instead of hypens (i.e. all-Gnocchi-Manhattan-new-york -> /new- york/manhattan/gnocchi/all)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Re #3, what do you mean by "in a search".

<comment><USER2> Apparently it's gotten that far that I consider any kind of navigation a "search". I meant if you click on any kind of food, and on the result page click on the image of the dish. The Url seems to be correct (e.g. "[http://www.toptendishes.com/Samosa~Banjara~-manhattan-new- yo...](http://www.toptendishes.com/Samosa~Banjara~-manhattan-new-york)), but the page displayed is "Home > Top Ten Best Burgers (Beef) in Manhattan, New York > Cheeseburger".

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahhh ok -- fixed! Thanks again for that feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://www.toptendishes.com></comment>


A new free-software forge: sr.ht - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/775963/3cd82e9cbda2f293/ <comment><USER2> > eventually one will need to sign up for a plan, which range from $2 to $10 > per month, to stay on the hosted service

Torn: at least I can hope/assume that advertisers aren't the real customers, but it's infinitely more than free/gratis.

> The build and CI component, builds.sr.ht, is what DeVault calls "the > flagship product from sr.ht".

Hmm, that's a compelling addition.

I can't help thinking that this is ~12-24 months late for striking at a critical marketplace. CPython's moved to github. LLVM's nearly migrated there (for a while now). Rust-lang has been on github for a very long time. Gitlab seems to work well, with an integrated build feature. Github private repos are free now.

But, hey, it's AGPL and you don't even need to use the hosted version. It will probably be better than Gerritt/Buildbot/Jenkins/Travis/etc. Sounds like it might be better than Savannah or Launchpad, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458908)</comment>


Looking for a new name for my open source project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/posix4e/elephantpump <comment><USER2> "elephantpump - Takes a logical decoding stream from postgresql and outputs it in a pluggable and safe way"

I like this name as-is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of course maybe it's fine!</comment>


How does your startup find early adopters? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering what strategies you guys use to find early adopters. How does the process usually go for you? <comment><USER2> It's pretty important to really narrow down who your target users are. For example, just saying "teenagers between the ages of 13-18" can still be pretty broad.

If you can narrow down even further to something like "teenagers between the ages of 13-18 who play the piano" then you can figure out a distribution channel where you can find these individuals. In this example, maybe contacting local piano tutors or local music stores may help you reach your target audience.

Even if your product brings some value universally, see if you can figure out the tiniest sub-group possible that benefits the most from your product.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great question. On our last project we mostly got feedback from close friends (one even did a usability study as a class project!) and attempted to get feedback via random posts on the internet.

We've been working on something new recently and are nearing the point of finding early adopters to take feedback and iterate. While we have some people lined up, I'd love to hear what others do.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback guys. Currently I am working at getting feedback at possible early adopters for my product and at this point sometimes it's just easier to get feedback by just asking :) There's nothing wrong with this method either. Also hansy I completely agree with you

</comment><comment><USER4> We are relying entirely on engagement analytics at this point, focused mostly on social media and organic search - and then facilitating outreach to get feedback from users.</comment>


Baddges.com - Please help us get noticed. - <AUTHOR> http://baddges.com/beta/?cid=yc

<comment><USER2> What are your thoughts on Mozilla's <http://openbadges.org> and have you considered integrating with them in some way?

A single unified badges project would be very useful for online education as a form of showcasing accumulated knowledge and credentials.</comment>


"Silence is for the weak" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/ <comment><USER2> [Disclaimer: I'm cofounders with OP]

One other thing to note is that office space, while expensive, is much cheaper than your developers. You can easily get 10-20% more productivity with a better working environment.

Also, that "collaboration" that people value? None of that is getting written down. Circle's team is already half remote, so placing a strong emphasis on 'library voices' means more communication happens over hipchat and email. More things get written down, and the remote employees are able to collaborate more, and there's a written record of "oh yeah, on Friday 2013/01/03, Paul and Allen thought it was a good idea to try X.

<comment><USER3> Is it true that Microsoft is doing two devs per office these days? I just thought back on all the places I sat at Microsoft and out of 9 different offices (ok, two were cubicles), I never shared once. They do make you move around a lot, obviously.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was only in one building (maybe building 39, probably 6 years ago) and every office I saw had 2 people. My bad! I'm also generalizing about Google - I only saw building 43.

<comment><USER4> Classic Microsoft in its high-productivity period was strictly private offices for everyone, solid doors and almost all with outside windows, soundproofed so each office could have its own music without requiring headphones, with deskspace and network connections in each office for several computers and seating for at least three people in each office so that people could work together privately when they wanted to. If that standard has been eroded in recent years, then we might understand why MS is now relatively unproductive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> " _It's not like the industry is not aware of the problem. Peopleware–the bible of managing engineering teams–discussed this over a decade ago._ "

 _Peopleware_ was first published in 1987, almost _three_ decades ago.[1] It's amazing how poorly our industry learns from the lessons of its past.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams#Editions)

</comment><comment><USER6> _Sometimes management prioritizes the open plan aesthetic above enabling concentration. One office had hardwood floors which allowed every conversation to bounce around the entire floor: the suggestion of carpeting was rejected because it would ruin the look of the office. In another, management felt different teams–working on completely separate projects–could collaborate if they overheard each others' conversations. They even planned to pipe in music to raise the decibel level high enough so that it would instigate conversation between distracted teams!_

This is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anecdotal Devil's Advocate:

The most productive I've _ever_ been in a job was when I shared an open office totaling around 500 square feet with 7 other devs. There was always something blasting on the TV in that office. There were always people discussing/arguing about one aspect of our software or another. Jenkins would blare a Lo Pan sound clip[0] on build success/failure. And yet, with all this, I put out the _best_ work of my career (both in terms of speed and quality).

I'm not sure why, but it probably has something to do with the atmosphere that was _less_ like a business and _more_ like a place I'd like to go hang out during the days. It didn't feel like work, which was oddly conducive to getting things done. And if someone needed to concentrate and couldn't with the noise, they could toss headphones on and drown out the nonsense (which most of us did very, very rarely) or take a conference room.

Oh, and the private office I had a few years prior to this (incidentally about the same square footage as the 8 man office) had the opposite effect on me. Not great quality, no passion for the job, super quick burnout. For whatever that's worth.

So what I'm saying is: If you need silence, cool. Seek it out. Do whatever it takes to be the most productive you can[1]. But not everyone wants to live in a sound vacuum, and some people thrive in the environments that are the polar opposite of what you think is ideal. Some of us like collaborative spaces and occasional distractions they bring :)

[0] [http://www.realmofdarkness.net/pc/sb/movies/lopan](http://www.realmofdarkness.net/pc/sb/movies/lopan) Our build failure was "Now this really pisses me off to no end!"

[1] How do I make things bold here? Because that's supposed to be bold. In <blink> tags. font-size: 3em.

<comment><USER8> I guess the moral to take here is "people have different working styles, and should seek out the conditions they need to do the best work they can in their environment."

I do some of my better work with symphonic metal[1] blasting in my ears, but I wouldn't impose that on anyone else. For one thing, it's an acquired taste.

[1] - See e.g. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjIlHWBAVo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjIlHWBAVo)

<comment><USER9> after experimenting with many different pandora stations, i've found that trance music is awesome for programming. anything with lyrics or irregular beats (like dubstep) is particularly distracting, even though outside of work i like listening to pretty much anything.

this is often why when people ask me, "what music do you listen to?" my answer is always, "for what?"

<comment><USER10> Indeed! I tend to play the more minimal techno (that is so popular here in the Berlin club scene). Sometimes even some Prodigy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> All the jobs I've had since college have had an open workspace. Of those, 3 stand out as particularly pertinent to this topic.

At Job 1, a consulting company, we had an agreed upon culture of noise. We had music playing loudly most of the time and about 30 developers collaborating on different client projects. High vaulted ceilings definitely contributed to noise. It was definitely chaotic, but we managed to remain productive regardless.

At Job 2, my current job (also consulting), we have talked at great length about keeping things quiet and respecting each other's concentration. We have side-rooms if we need to collaborate, and use them frequently. We use chat to ask each other questions rather than tapping on the shoulder (most of the time). I feel extremely productive there (even more so than job 1) and while offices might make tapping on the shoulder even less common, I feel a sense of camaraderie there that I don't think I'd get if I was isolated with a closed door.

Job 3 was by far the worst. It was a similar open space for the entire product team. However, we never had much discussion about communication style or noise, we just always said we don't like being interrupted. Looking back on it, I think productivity was easier at jobs 1 & 2 because we had all agreed on our culture, so we could find ways to work around it. Job 3 was hard because we never knew what to expect. One day it could be quiet and easy to concentrate, but the next it could be noisy and impossible to work in.

The lesson for me is that honesty and openness is most important. If people speak up when they are having a hard time concentrating, then everyone can work together to try to improve the situation. This assumes of course the team respects each other enough to compromise; but if they don't you probably have bigger problems.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great article overall, but it seems to be a bit dismissive of music for productivity. It appears[1] the answer is a bit more nuanced: music is great for getting "in the zone" where you are mostly using existing knowledge to create something new. However, when you are really focusing on learning something new and difficult, silence is best.

Anecdotally this seems to match up with my experiences coding. Sometimes I'm more or less just churning out code, and music is great. If theres an ops crisis, or I'm trying out something new, music can hurt rather than help.

Edit, forgot the article: [1] [https://medium.com/what-i-learned- today/be3172896a0f](https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/be3172896a0f)

<comment><USER13> Looks like you left your reference out by accident. Mind sharing?

<comment><USER12> I did! Actually, it later got pasted into some code where I meant to paste something else.

[https://medium.com/what-i-learned- today/be3172896a0f](https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/be3172896a0f)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd be interested in seeing studies that look at this sort of thing for a variety of different software types. My completely-unsupported-by-evidence hunch is that different lengths and types of software project do better or worse in silent environments (although I also suspect that the largest variance is from personal preference).

By way of personal anecdote, when I'm working in the games industry, coding teams tend to be very small and very cross disciplined, and the smaller the teams the more frequently code changes touch other devs because you're often changing several systems across the engine throughout the day. In this environment myself (and co-workers - I did ask :) find non-silent, "noisy" environments work well. Incidental conversations and cursing are actually quite good ways to add interesting fluff to the games as they are being created, and cursing is a damn good barometer indicating that some of the APIs for my code is rubbish to work with.

Conversely, I've worked on more traditional things where I'm deeply involved in a rabbit hole of my own burrowing, and in those cases less noise does seem to help. In those cases I'm general solving very narrow and specific problems, and the APIs I'm offering to other devs (if there are APIs) are far more formally defined.

However, I'm likely biased. Unless it's a very specific and very hard problem I'm trying to solve, I like some level of background noise to keep the useless parts of my brain occupied while the code bits do their stuff. The more boiler plate the code, the louder I like the noise so that parts of my mind don't get bored and drift off into more interesting thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER15> "My favorite example of this sort of insanity is the office in which each time any developer deployed to production, the speaker system automatically played 6 seconds of their favorite song across the entire office. You could actually watch productivity go out the window as dozens of developers fell out of the zone."

And yet, it's a developers dream to set something like that up. Or a nerf gun that fires when you deploy. Hah!

Very self-harming...

</comment><comment><USER16> finally someone gets it? amazing! If I was a functional language guy I'd apply.

<comment><USER17> Many software shops "get this", and it is a recurring discussion in this field. There just isn't much to say about the offices that are designed right, however, so you just don't hear about them.

And it's worth noting that there are competing forces at play in the design of offices, and choices aren't always made with productivity as the primary concern.

Many software shops are desperate to mirror the popular notion of how these places operate: loud, boisterous bullpen type arrangements, whiteboards all over with various contrived things on them, street lights flashing the current iteration progress, desks littered with crazy toys and blimps and toy guns, and various nerdly hijinx. It is, in every way, cargo culting, putting the image of how it should work against the actual of how it works.

It _looks_ like what many outsiders think a software shop should look like, all those geniuses doing their genius thing.

Impress investors. Impress potential hires. To the latter most will say "oh no! That wouldn't impress me", but the truth is that real work in this field occurs in the most boring looking way possible, so we all like to imagine that a vibrant office will be an amazing new experience. But in the end we're still wrangling code all day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Noise can have a positive effect on creativity and cognition... [http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048)

I for one am in favour of less intense scrutiny on measurable productivity and concentration for a diverse startup. I think you want to place your engineers in a quiet zone that is fine but to promote a blanket strategy of shhh zoning the office. sounds like a prescription for some bad interpersonal conflicts down the line.

</comment><comment><USER19> Truth is there are really two distinct types of developers. I've seen guys who needed music loud and almost the more distractions the better. You wonder how they get anything done at all yet they're amazingly productive.

I had one developer who worked for me who stated that he needed music to distract part of his brain so the other half could code.

I am the exact opposite, if there is any noise at all my productivity goes to hell. Companies either need to offer people a choice or recruit for their particular cultural fit.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great article ! It's too bad so many companies have open space rooms for developers. Noise just creates a vicious circle : we're less concentrated, working slower, have to work longer hours, get tired and so on. The worst is when people in the same room aren't even working on the same project. I think having at least separated rooms for each team working on a single task would greatly improve developers' productivity.

</comment><comment><USER21> We at Sococo have the best of both worlds. We're mostly in physical isolation (working at different offices or from home offices). Then we share virtual spaces where we can meet, talk, form spontaneous groups. If you're heads-down then just take your headset off, minimize the team app and work. Folks can see this; courtesy demands they send a chat to ask for your attention.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love silence when I'm developing. I can start to get really frustrated with (most) background noise.

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh, the irony. You're being weak if you don't speak up and demand silence.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, I'm currently working at a startup where the Sonos is booming, did a short survey over here and everyone thinks they are more productive with the music on.

</comment><comment><USER25> Given this, the hype about coworking spaces strikes me as particularly misguided.</comment>


Some Churches Are Still Packing in Crowds - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-29/some-megachurches-pack-in-crowds-amid-covid-19-warning-flares <comment><USER2> I've been seeing this plotline for awhile, and the notion that this is normal is pure fiction. They are outliers; feel free to call them out for their irresponsibility, but absolutely do not use them to make any kind of generalization.

>Some megachurches have opted out of in-person services and turned to live streaming entirely.

Correction: Just about every church that I've heard about has gone online. Certainly possible that less-affected states are a week or two behind the curve, but most understand the weight of this and are acting accordingly.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, "most" is not sufficient here. In South Korea the majority of cases were spread through a small handful of church gatherings. Consequently I have come to think that media coverage such as this post is a net benefit to society, although it is undisputable that they cast many innocent people in a bad light.

<comment><USER4> It's definitely a problem from a public health perspective, and that's why there should be legal measures to stop such large gatherings.

However, these types of articles are often used to cast aspersions on _all_ Christians. That was essential the point of the parent comment. Why single out megachurches? You could find plenty of similar examples in the business, social and government realm of large groups continuing to meet.

<comment><USER5> For me the word mega in front of churches made me more concerned. Just because the crowds are so large.

The media's dislike for anything Christian makes this a two quadrant story.. possible three if the mega churches are in a red state.

<comment><USER6> > The media's dislike for anything Christian

Wait, what?

<comment><USER7> The phrase "the Media's stance" refers to the media as a whole, the average of all media. By definition the average will be between the least and the greatest, which means by definition the Media's stance on a topic will always be too P-slanted for Q-ists and too Q-slanted for P-ists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is quite a gamble from what I can gather. If the infected congregation of 500 hopes to seek medical attention, they will not find it. Central has no hospitals, however Baton Rouge (the next nearest city) has a few. Tony is hoping that if his cavalier defiance of what he perceives to be a political agenda pays off, he will be able to avoid what his congregants have not: unemployment. He is rolling the dice to get blood from a stone.

Tony's gamble is dangerous and calculated, as is evidenced by his strategic use of busses to block media coverage. If a massive outbreak in Central occurs, his congregation will not be forgotten. People will remember Tony and his flock long after the federal governments attempts to "flatten the curve." They will remember flooded hospitals and associate any decline in regional medical care with him and his attendees. Whats worse, Tonys name will be on the lips and hearts of anyone in or around Baton Rouge who cannot get care, or who has watcehd a loved one perish to this disease.

At worst, Attendees will be shunned from employment, outed on social media, and ostracized from their community. Tonys quick attempt to turn some cash in a recession will ultimately send him out of the city on a rail as other faith based communities out him as nothing more than a huckster, not a leader. Tony might even see a few civil suits for his efforts.

Then there are the people who lose family, parents, or children. They wont think twice about torching the busses he hid behind. he'll stay in their memory long after the collection plate is passed this sunday.

<comment><USER9> A congregation of 500 is not a "megachurch", >10,000 is.

<comment><USER10> 550 attending in a single session is pretty big, and the week before was double. Over 10,000 in a single sitting is a high bar to set.

<comment><USER9> Hence "MEGA church". There are several in the Atlanta area. One is actually 12 campuses, seating ~2,500 each, typically with a live pastor at one being telecast to the others on life-size projections (effect of virtual presence is pretty convincing). Others hold thousands at one sitting with multiple services.

550 is "normal" in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >"The virus, we believe, is politically motivated. We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says."

A virus with a political inclination / motivation. That's a new one.

<comment><USER12> I live in a religious county in Iowa, and while all the churches have stopped meeting, some people have expressed concerns that the forbidding of congregation is a violation of religious freedom. Nobody is violating it though.

<comment><USER13> > some people have expressed concerns that the forbidding of congregation is a > violation of religious freedom.

There's an old saying that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I think that applies here.

Yes, if the government--at any level--was forbidding people from meeting for religious reasons for an indefinite period simply "just because," that would be a violation of our freedoms and something to be gravely concerned about.

Restrictions on religion not based on the religious belief itself have been allowed since the founding of our republic. You can't have a religion where a "sincerely-held belief" is that one parishioner in attendance gets murdered. Or that smashing in people's front doors is a sign of holiness. Religious buildings, while exempt from property tax, must still comply with building, electrical, plumbing, and life safety codes.

In this situation, given that it is content-neutral-- _all_ gatherings of size are prohibited--and time-limited and in the furtherance of a major social interest (inhibiting the spread of a brand new virus), I think it withstands Constitutional scrutiny.

<comment><USER10> I think what doesn't make sense to me is the fact that assembly is required for democracy to work, and the people have to accept their loss of assembly with an accelerated pace of facts before there's any time to digest.

The people must simply trust that forfeiting a necessary aspect of democratic health will be correct in hindsight.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, we have the rest of the world to look at as an example of it being necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The only thing these pastors who are keeping churches open is money. To ignore every health professional out there right now means they don't care about their flock at all.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, I doubt this is true. Conservative churches have largely become a proxy for conservative politics, and a lot of conservative media still questions the methods and motives of the coronavirus response.

Imagine people that are so deeply convinced that the media is lying to them and this is a plot to undermine his agenda. That narrative absolutely exists and there are many out there who believe it.

<comment><USER17> This is severe bias on your part in my opinion.

Conservatives are just as concerned as liberals about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of people dying. The only difference is they tend to have confidence that the government will be able to handle the response effort.

<comment><USER18> What about the Lt Governor who said that his grandma would Gladly die for America as it were. Playing down the level of current and coming deaths and passing off the loss of those who ultimately do die as necessary for the continuing prosperity of the remainder is the mainstream conservative position.

<comment><USER17> Some people are morons. That doesn't change based on whether they are conservative or liberal.

The majority of my news comes from NPR (IPR locally here in Iowa). The main people that comment on their Facebook page are clearly liberal and clearly also some of the biggest idiots you've ever met.

Being in a position of leadership also doesn't automatically mean you're not a moron.

What I know is that the Republican President and also the Republican Governor of Iowa are taking this very seriously.

Also I highly recommend people actually watch the press briefings because what I've found is that any time I actually listen to what Trump says, he makes a hell of a lot more sense than whatever clip the media generally chooses to play out of context.

<comment><USER19> Ok, now you're just trolling us. I watch Trump's press conferences. The word salad is still word salad. He clearly has no idea how to handle this and is incapable of taking responsibility or decisive action.

<comment><USER17> I am 100% not trolling. I find those briefings to be very informative.

<comment><USER20> "It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear"

Informative?

"There's a theory that, in April, when it gets warm, historically, that has been able to kill the virus,"

Informative?

"when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."

I could go on. And on, and on. But I doubt it will make any difference, whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.

Good God. The times we live in.

Like, what does this sentence even mean? He probably doesn't even know himself. The vague couplings we make between our political identity and just, random subjects, have transcended the subconscious and become an acceptable thing to just... profess. As-is.

<comment><USER22> This behaviour is not particularly new really. For example, there are all sorts of people who believe the Iraq war was started based on less than entirely truthful pretenses.

Some people have very active imaginations, but that's just one of the things that makes life so interesting!

<comment><USER23> I mean, there's a difference between "gulf war 2.0 was dodgy" (which is fairly well documented at this point) and claiming that a pandemic is 'politically motivated'. What does the latter even mean? That the virus is itself fraudulent? That the virus is an artificial creation? That the virus is sentient and spends a lot of time on twitter? I can't think of any reasonable interpretation of that.

<comment><USER22> There are both similarities and differences.

I'm not quite sure which part of my comment you object to? Is what I said above false?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The good news is that these are outliers; this is not typical behavior for any size church, mega or otherwise.

<comment><USER25> Generally speaking, biblical churches (And their people) must:

1) obey the rulers and authorities (insomuch as it does not cause issue with any other command) and

2) love their neighbor. E.g. by not knowingly engaging in activity which might cause someone to fall ill

3) not flaunt freedom. While we have every _right_ to meet, we are not disobeying if we do not.

<comment><USER26> Hebrews 10:24-25 would indicate that the people should meet together. Depending on how literally their church interprets this, it could mean they don't consider things like virtual meetings enough.

<comment><USER27> If it doesn't specifically prohibit "virtual meetings", because they couldn't imagine the technology, then it seems to me it doesn't _literally_ forbid them.

I [virtually] never understand how other people use "literal"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This headline is technically right, which is the best kind.

More seriously, the article could find 3 megachurches that are still open. Pretty much all churches are shut down, except ones that are live streaming services. For something so unenforceable to be so widely adopted "Not many megachurches packing in crowds" seems like a more appropriate headline.

</comment><comment><USER29> The headline says "megachurches," but the article says "More than 550 parishioners attended, about half as many as the week before, pastor Tony Spell told a local news reporter."

1100 parishioners is megachurch now? Last I heard you needed at least 2k / week to qualify [0]

[0] [http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/definition.html](http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/definition.html)

<comment><USER23> If there were 1100 last week, when everyone sensible was already self- isolating where feasible, then presumably normal attendance is much higher than that.

<comment><USER30> It was 1800 people 7 days ago

[https://www.brproud.com/health/coronavirus/central-church- ho...](https://www.brproud.com/health/coronavirus/central-church- hosts-1800-people-amid-covid-19-outbreak/)

Quote just for fun:

> Spell told BRPROUD that he believes covid-19 can be cured through "the > healing hand of Jesus." When asked what would happen should one of his > parishioners test positive for the coronavirus, Spell referred to a passage > from the Bible. "If that is our command, they shall lay hands on the sick > and they shall recover."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Incredible.

We had a very similar situation in Poland - our local branch of the catholic church was reluctant to enforce social distancing in their temples.

Eventually they caved, but who knows how many additional infections/deaths this will cause in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sad behavior by modern snake oil peddlers.

</comment><comment><USER33> Your right to swing your fist ends at my face. We need to start handing out fines to those who willfully put other lives in danger. I recall reading that in the Spanish Flu pandemic, police in San Francisco fined those in public not wearing masks. Enjoy your freedoms, just not at my peril.

</comment><comment><USER34> "It's not a concern," he said. "The virus, we believe, is politically motivated. We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says."

<comment><USER35> _"I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God."_

Martin Luther, 1527 after a plague wrecked his hometown of Wittenberg

<comment><USER27> I don't consider myself a Christian, but this is exactly what I consider appropriate in a situation like this.

The language of "tempting God" is weird though. I mean, I know it's a phrase used all the time, but it's still just weird because it makes me stop and say just what sort of personality does God have anyway?

<comment><USER36> The word tempt in various Biblical passages when talking about tempting God use definitions #4 and 5 as listed at [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tempt?s=t](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tempt?s=t)

A summary of how theologians interpret the word is found here (just did a quick Google search), and the explanation matches with what I wrote above. [https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias- almanacs...](https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs- transcripts-and-maps/tempting-god)

So I don't think the words "tempting God" mean what you think they mean (presuming you thought it used definitions #1, 2, or 3).

<comment><USER27> I heard a rumor that when the Bible uses the word, it wasn't actually English, modern or archaic, in the original.

Looks like it might be πειράζω.

Edit: and Luther apparently used the word Versuchung, which I'm not sure how to interpret because everybody seems to translate it as temptation in the sense of seduction, even though the biblical word should be testing or proving...

<comment><USER36> Yeah Biblical etymology and comparison with original languages is its own rabbit hole. See definition of word day in Genesis chapter 1 and how many conservative American churches don't do a very deep dive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow, this is like a drug dealer lacing their services with fentanyl. In all seriousness I'm making the comparison because in both cases the sanctity of life is being violated in favour of arrogant self-interests.

</comment><comment><USER38> Keyword: _some_

I think they should still open for people that have the virus and need prayer or counseling or to support anyone that lost their job,etc... (With distancing and other precautions). But even if you believe you can't get the virus, unbelievers are supposed to be very welcome in Churches so it is reckless to endanger them. I guarantee you most Churches that are lead by people that actually believe in their proclaimed faith agree with what I said (or they are stricter). Even Joel Osteen isn't holding in person services last I heard.

</comment><comment><USER39> Reckless / public endangerment? Arrest the church leaders.

</comment><comment><USER5> A church in the town of Central Lo, had 550 people at mass. Lebanon Ohio has a church with 3500 members (no numbers on how many showed up).

These aren't really mega churches. Based on the information provided they are not saying thousands of people are showing up. The headline is false. What it should say is three small to medium sized churches don't believe they should stop live mass.

</comment><comment><USER40> If they want to go be with their god, who am I to deny them? They're gonna see him sooner than they thought if they keep at it. I'll just do my best to stay far away from them.

<comment><USER41> The problem is that these people are going to be taking up precious space in your hospital's ER and ICU units.

Remember, younger people aren't as affected by this as older people. So these dumb churchgoers (who I believe tend to be younger, if these are megachurches) will be catching it, then spreading it to their older relatives, who will then be flooding the hospitals.

<comment><USER42> And they will infect people who have nothing to do with those churches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Clearly, the leaders of these types of churches have incontrovertible records for caring about people. /s of course.

<comment><USER44> Certainly this one: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of- faith/wp/2018/05...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of- faith/wp/2018/05/29/a-televangelist-wants-his-followers-to-pay- for-a-54-million-private-jet-its-his-fourth-plane/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can this be the beginning of the always-virtual megachurch?

<comment><USER46> Don't we already have that considering how many people watch the services on TV thru the religious channels.

<comment><USER45> I think computers add an unexplored dimension for interaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> As an Spanish without too much knowledge of the religious reality in the US, what is a mega church?

</comment><comment><USER48> This reminds me of the parable of the drowning man and the helicopter.

[https://truthbook.com/stories/funny-god/the-drowning- man](https://truthbook.com/stories/funny-god/the-drowning-man)

The congregation may say "God will protect us". And he did, by having Donald Trump and everybody in power telling them not to congregate.

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 A big part of this, I can speak for my church, is that we believe in a God, and thus God has control over plagues and disease. Therefore, it is logical to believe that we should offer more sacrifice and honor to God in these difficult times instead of less, in the hope that the long-term effects of the disease be reduced should it be God's will.

We still take natural precautions, such as maintaining social distancing, as we believe that it is not ours to tempt God. As it says in the Bible story, Satan tempted the Lord to throw himself off of a building because scripture said the angels would catch him. Christ responded that it was also written in scripture that you should not tempt God. This week, to take natural precautions without denying the sacredness of the Mass, we actually filled the parking lot and celebrated Holy Mass with everyone watching from their vehicles. This way, viewers could participate in the Latin Mass with minimal risk of exposure.

We obviously do not enjoy this method of worship. But, when it comes to ensuring the safety of the people while still trying to give honor and sacrifice, it's a compromise that's better than nothing.

It's kind of like Lord of The Rings, a little bit. Frodo was called to do everything possible until the very end of the journey, whereupon Eru Illuvitar, the creator of Middle-Earth, intervened to cause Gollum to slip at the last moment. God expects us to give our all, and intervenes only when we've done everything we could have done. This is to allow those who fought against evil to attain glory, and those who fought for evil to attain humiliation.

Which is more humiliating for evil? Being instantly defeated by an omnipresent, all-powerful God, or having been resisted and fought against by comparatively weak human beings who gave their all in resistance?

<comment><USER49> I just thought of a joke, "Only Catholic churches should be considered 'essential services' during the quarantine, since Protestants don't need it to know God."

I thank you for your comment, that you seem to be sincere in expressing your beliefs. I cannot help but express my absolute astonishment that this level of "proving your love by risking your life" exists in educated society.

I also have never heard of Church described in terms of "honor and sacrifice" in a positive manner. I have never known that church was seen as so mandatory by a Christian faith that you should risk your life to go, excepting human oppression.

<comment><USER50> For what it's worth, some (most?) Catholic diocese in the U.S. are not having services and the usual requirement to attend is not in effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is the crisis being used as a bully stick against religion?

</comment><comment><USER52> We need a couple of Indian cops in the US: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jOQEGBM72s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jOQEGBM72s)</comment>


Small steps leading to a small step for a man ... - <AUTHOR>

Series of articles on the BBC tech pages ... links in the comment below. <comment><AUTHOR> The 'flight of the Spider' : <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7939365.stm>

Rendezvous around the Moon : <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8056443.stm>

There are more to come, but I'll let others add them if they find this interesting.</comment>


Linux Server Hardening Using Idempotency with Ansible: Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.linux.com/blog/linux-server-hardening-using-idempotency-ansible-part-1 <comment><USER2> I don't know how I feel about Ansible as a means to idempotency.

I used to create ro filesystems for embedded systems and then move /var and /tmp to a tmpfs ... Imaging "just" running ansible every hour on it seems like a total shitshow by comparison.</comment>


Inform 7: An adventure game programming system based on natural language - <AUTHOR> http://www.inform-fiction.org/

<comment><USER2> I thought Hypercard was excessive in its pursuit of an English-like programming language, but this puts it to shame. Impressive and terrifying, and no doubt filled with gotchas for people willing to pretend that it is English -- e.g.:

<http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/doc25.html>

(On the other hand, is this the opposite of a write-only programming language?)</comment>


HIV returns in two patients after bone marrow transplant - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/07/health/hiv-patients/index.html

<comment><USER2> This isn't all that surprising given that they did not receive special bone marrow, but it is very sad for these patients.

<speculation>Even in the Berlin patient, it is likely that there is some reservoir of HIV+ cells, but because his transplanted bone marrow lacks the CCR5 receptor, that reservoir cannot expand, so he appears cured (and, for all purposes, is).</speculation>

<comment><USER3> well then it seems the faulty assumption is that the HIV virus in his body only can attach to the CCR5 receptor, when what is likely is that some nonzero pool of virus has mutated to attach to another receptor altogether or have slightly less affinity to CCR5 but a hybrid affinity with another receptor.

These virii will then have the capability of hiding in a different cell type from immune cells, and come back later.

<comment><USER2> I think there is some confusion. The Berlin patient, the one who was transplanted with CCR5-negative donor stem cells, is still cured. Therefore, none of that explanation is needed.

<comment><USER3> thanks carbocation. Strangely enough, I remember you from the chembark days. You should check out what I'm doing (see profile).

<comment><USER2> Awesome; I see [http://www.indysci.org/projectmarilyn/](http://www.indysci.org/projectmarilyn/) from your profile. Looks like your fundraising starts tomorrow? I hope everything goes well. What you're embarking on has probably not been tried before and will be very interesting, so please keep us posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "If you have an underlying neoplasm (tumor) like these patients had, then > the risk outweighs the benefit," he said. "However, if you are doing well on > ARVs and you merely want to get off antiretroviral therapy, then the risk > seems greater than the benefit."

Is this a typo or am I misreading it?

<comment><USER2> It's a typo or a misstatement. He meant to say that if you have cancer and HIV, then the benefits of BMT outweigh the risks (purely due to cancer).

If you have just HIV, then the risks of BMT outweigh the benefits (because of high near-term mortality).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very disappointing to see.

I often see people wondering why HIV has evaded both a vaccine and cure for so long, despite the amount of attention and money it has received.

The HIV virus is remarkably fragile and (relatively) difficult to transmit. However, it mutates incredibly quickly compared to other viruses - an HIV+ patient may have multiple strains of the virus in their body at any one time, requiring the infamous "cocktail" of drugs as no single drug will be effective.

Vaccinations have been (so far) ineffective because they attempt to vaccinate against a rapidly moving target.

Hepatitis B, on the other hand, is a much more easily-transmitted virus, and yet we have been able to develop a reasonably effective vaccine against it[0]. For a while, it used to be standard practice to vaccinate all young children against Hepatitis B; I'm not sure if it still is.

Unfortunately, Hepatitis C, which kills more people in the US than HIV/AIDS[1], is arguably even worse - it is also much easier to transmit than HIV, but we don't have a vaccine against it either. Furthermore, because most of the public campaigns advocating safe sex and clean needles use HIV-specific language, many people aren't aware that it is such a huge threat. Like HIV, it is asymptomatic for several years, so as many as _75%_ of people infected with Hepatitis C don't even know it[2]:

Epidemiologically (not politically) Hepatitis C today is similar to the state of HIV in the 80s and 90s[3]. We have some medications to treat it, but they're not very effective - living with Hepatitis C is oftentimes _worse_ than living with HIV.

[0] As with all vaccines, it is imperfect, which is why coverage across the general population is the best approach to eradication or containment.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_C#Epidemiology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_C#Epidemiology).

[2] [http://m.cdc.gov/en/VitalSigns/hepatitis-c](http://m.cdc.gov/en/VitalSigns/hepatitis-c)

[3] At least outside the US - the US was one of the last countries to approve HIV antiretrovirals, which incidentally is the topic of a movie currently in theatres: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Buyers_Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Buyers_Club)

<comment><USER6> > an HIV+ patient may have multiple strains of the virus in their body at any > one time

It's even crazier - an infected person has enough virus, and it mutates readily enough, that somewhere in their body is a single viral particle with each single point mutation variant. Every variant is in every person.

Another important point is that its latent phase is just so dormant - and for so long (relative to other viruses). We have pretty effective drugs to kill those viruses that are not latent. But there are always survivors. In fact there are a number of therapies that do nothing but try to _force_ the virus to become active, so that the other therapies can (reliably) kill it. And even then, there's some that stay latent ready to stochastically turn on at some point.

<comment><USER7> This is because HIV is a brilliantly designed virus (of course it evolved, it's not designed. I don't know a better way to say this though). It's a third-generation retrovirus, meaning it defeats internal cell safeguards in a very clever way, meaning that if one cell of a few types comes into contact with ~10 virus particles, you effectively have AIDS. For the flu we're talking hundreds of cells needing to be in contact with thousands of virus particles.

It evades being a target for vaccination by using internal body networks to transmit itself as opposed to the blood. The immune system inside our bodies has a sort of chemical protocol for one cell to exchange data with another. One cell approaches another, presents a specific molecule, and the cells link, exchange something (we don't know what, or why, or how for that matter), and the HIV virus slips along.

This means HIV looks at the immune system from behind all the detection mechanisms. You can look at immune cells as a mine : they have lots of traps on the outside. Trigger one of them and a massive army of huge, very angry, and very dangerous cells will overwhelm whatever triggered it ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ) _), and a large part of things nearby that didn 't trigger it too, usually. So where does HIV hide ? Simple : on the inside of the mine, transmitting itself to other mines when through the mechanic that comes by to repair the mine and doublecheck things every now and then.

There's other virii doing this, however they don't generally hide in the immune system. But for example Bof has the same tactic. It hides on the inside of cells, then every 3-4 months or so, one of the virus particles suddenly starts multiplying and makes it's host cell explode. The virus particles immediately get slaughtered by the immune system, but not before spreading the infection.

HIV is also mutating on purpose. Part of it's DNA (yes, the virus itself has RNA, however it's a direct analog. The virus, when in operation, consists of DNA though) is dedicated to mutate. It's got a long list of mutation instructions targeting specific parts of it's DNA, generally the ones referring to the virus mantle, but there are others. Effectively it contains instructions to copy it's RNA, then change the values at position x,y,z by random values from a specific range.

And HIV generally gets things right. It doesn't ever multiply fast enough to really set of alarm bells in the immune system. It avoids entering the blood stream except to spread from one human to the next(which is why even with regular sexual contact with an HIV positive individual, it takes ~6 months to get infected), and waits just long enough for the immune system to calm down before trying it again. It does this while still spreading fast enough to very slowly increase the number of infected people.

There are a number of countries on this planet, mostly in Africa and the middle east, where HIV has gone from being endemic to worse than that. In several places it is a matter of time until 100% of the population will be infected.

It is a very, very interesting virus.

A piece of good news is that, over time (but quite fast given that this is evolution we're talking about), HIV is becoming less lethal. This is exactly because it's infecting a significant fraction of living humans (without killing them). HIV is hardly the first virus to infect 100% of the human population, and there are some indications that other such viruses were somewhat similar. It also means that the evolutionary selection criteria for HIV will match those of the human race before long, and it should at some point mutate into a beneficial influence on the human race. The only way for HIV to spread it's genes will soon be to make more humans. At that point, it's no longer a virus but a part of humans, not much different from say, your liver, and it will find some function to fulfill. And again, it's hardly the first time this is happening to the human race, and it won't be the last.

_ yes this is not actually showing the cell type HIV attacks. However as far as I know there is no known video of the correct cell type actually doing something. Plus it's a very cool video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article contains more information while (thankfully) being significantly shorter:

[http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=5&elementId=156...](http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=5&elementId=15623)

It highlights what the difference between the treatment of the Berlin patient and the treatment of the two Boston patients was.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it isn't entirely a physical disease.

<comment><USER10> Every disease has a physical, etiological agent.</comment></comment>


Mac OS X's Hidden Single-Application Mode - <AUTHOR> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10624

<comment><USER2> Multiple tiling windows is an idea long past it's prime and I've never been keen on Apple's particular take on this model.

Quite often I find that bringing Finder to the front covers the whole screen with the 16 or so Finder windows that I forgot that I had open and which bear no relation to the task I am currently trying to perform. A single window finder with a history and a way to split into two or four tiles might be better.

Of course the tricky thing is making this work for naive users as well as power users. This isn't an easy problem but naive users struggle massively with the current model too and that's not especially optimal for power users either.

<comment><USER3> It almost sounds like you're wishing for an Apple version of the ratpoison window manager, which was my primary working environment until recently:

<http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/>

Of course, that was in gnu/linux, but copying the style would be easy.

<comment><USER4> At work, I run ratpoison on my Mac. About the only programs I use are xterm and firefox, and they can both run under X11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish there were a non-overlapping window manager like XMonad that I could use with OS X. Spending time arranging windows feels wasteful.

</comment><comment><USER6> A quick and easy way to get similar functionality is to use the "Hide Others" option when you right click on the active window in the Dock (hold the Option key to get it) Of course it only hides other applications -- not windows of the same application.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another way is to hold down option when switching app by clicking another app's window or dock icon.

This will hide the current app and all its windows, and it's already enabled by default on os x.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you like this option, you will probably like Isolator: <http://willmore.eu/software/isolator/>

By default, it puts the focus on the current app by blurring whatever is behind it. It's pretty customizable and can do things like hiding all other apps automatically, putting a backdrop, etc. The blur effect might work better than just hiding for some people.

One other nice thing is that it lives in the menu bar and can be called with a keyboard shortcut. So, it doesn't have to be 'on' at all times.

edit: this or other utilities and shortcuts mentioned in the comments of the article itself

</comment><comment><USER9> I personally love Cmd+Opt+H, especially when I'm working with Interface Builder.

</comment><comment><USER10> Pretty nifty. Really does make it less cluttered. I usually have a bunch of browser windows open each with like 10 tabs, email app, terminal, skype, komodo, IM, itunes, ... list goes on.

</comment><comment><USER11> It kinda reminds me of how my Amiga used to work. You used to be able to drag full-screens by their title bar up and down and switch between them using an icon at the top right.

</comment><comment><USER12> As noted in OP comments, cmd+opt click on dock icon hides others.</comment>


We're thinking about organizational culture all wrong - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/01/were-thinking-about-organizational-culture-all-wrong <comment><USER2> Culture is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Companies with the "no asshole rule" have it backwards and are likely full of assholes, starting at the top.

<comment><USER3> > Culture is descriptive, not descriptive.

This seems to either be a typo, or clever in a way that I don't understand.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Culture can be, but should not be thought of as shared values. The more accurate way to think of it is shared delusions. Their is nothing in "values" that is actually truth, just emotional feelings about it. Shared emotions can be replaced arbitrarily and you have a different culture but reality does not change. That's a delusion, and to use culture correctly in an organization you must recognize that what you are trying to manipulate is just a delusion. Deal with it as delusions and then effective techniques can be learned and implemented.

</comment><comment><USER5> We live in an age were our understanding of 'culture' is as mature as medieval understanding of biology.

Until social science matures, we will be stuck arguing about the balance of the humours.

</comment><comment> andrew-lucker I like the flora and fauna picture at the top. To summarize the article: culture is like an ecosystem, not a hammer.</comment>


Ask HN: Micronaut vs. Quarkus - <AUTHOR> Needless to say, I have Googled but I am seeking first-hand experience of HNers of using one of these framework in production. I played with these frameworks in some toy projects and I personally find Micronaut somewhat easier to use, perhaps, because I find Micronaut has better documentation <comment><USER2> I evaluated both of these for a "serverless" function, that ended up becoming a traditional Spring Boot microservice instead.

However, here are some of my impressions, in no particular order:

1\. Micronaut comes from the team behind Grails, which is built on top of Spring. It is clearly designed to be as familiar as possible for developers with Spring experience.

2\. Quarkus comes from the developers behind JBoss (or Wildfly, whatever). It is clearly designed to be as familiar as possible for developers with Java EE experience.

3\. If you have experience with neither Spring nor Java EE, then the Micronaut documentation will probably be easier to follow. The Quarkus documentation assumes that you already know a lot about CDI and other Java EE standards, and it mostly focuses on how Quarkus differs from those specs. Their documentation SUCKS at presenting the framework to a fresh audience without all that baggage.

4\. On the other hand, Quarkus actually delivers on the size and resources hype. I was able to follow the docs with no issue, to use a multi-stage Docker build to make a native executable without GraalVM even being installed (I did have some issues with Gradle, they are clearly Maven-first). Startup is near- instant, even if you AREN'T using GraalVM, and resource use is low.

5\. I never got as far with Micronaut in building native executables. And while the startup speed and resource use is lower than a Spring app, it isn't DRAMATICALLY lower. Quite frankly, I think they're in a "mushy middle" position. Not compelling enough to migrate away from Spring... but if you really DO need to go lighter than Spring, then there are better options.

It a nutshell, I might use Quarkus if I wanted to use Java to write a serverless function (or other such constrained context). For general microservices, I'd just continue to use Spring Boot, and wait for their next release or two to steal most of these innovations anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never heard of Quarkus or used Micronaut. I did once survey available smaller/newer frameworks and considered Micronaut to be larger than my use cases.

Just reading the Quarkus docs now, I see they're using Hibernate. That was the one big problem I had working with Spring/Boot and I would personally avoid it although I don't have recommended replacement. My problem with JPA+Hibernate was that it was being clever (e.g. delaying operations, caching query templates) as well has creating different forms SQL vs JPQL with different limitations and gotchas.

You already like Micronaut and its docs. If not using Hibernate I'd say go for it. When I looked at it, it seemed like a more modern Spring.

<comment><USER4> Hibernate is optional. I'm using Quarkus with JDBI without any issues, works flawlessly.

<comment><USER3> That's cool. Do you mean jdbi from dropwizard or jdbc template?

<comment><USER4> [https://jdbi.org/](https://jdbi.org/)

You just create a wrapper for the handle (initialized) and inject it wherever you need.

<comment><USER3> Yes, great stuff. I made a query library[0] that uses JDBI as it seemed to have the right amount of scope. This came about from my frustration having used Spring/JPQL/Hibernate.

[0] [https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql](https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Russia Asked ISPs to Block 13.5M Amazon IP Addresses to Silence One App - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/russia-asked-isps-to-block-13-5-million-amazon-ip-addresses-to-silence-one-app-180331/ <comment><USER2> Every time there is a terrorist attack politicians preach more surveillance, and that apps etc are problematic. Maybe in the future "the terrorists" will be the good guys. If you haven't already - watch the movie Brazil (1985)

</comment><comment> zupa-hu the title is misleading, to block and to prepare to block are totally different things

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if Russian ISPs will ever get tired of putting up with Putin's demands... Probably not, huh.

<comment><USER4> They _are_ tired, in the same sense as inmates are tired of being in prison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Burn the house if you can't kill the rat.</comment>


Show HN: Airship, a modern and secure CMS written in PHP 7 (1st Beta) - <AUTHOR> https://paragonie.com/project/airship <comment><USER2> Looking at this. Love the security first perspective. My first negative thought is dump the engineering terminology. I think that will help in getting people to adopt this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely take that into consideration when writing future pieces about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please, get a clue from WordPress' success - it's terrible from a technological point of view, but it has a beautiful UI and decent UX. With your looks, you won't have much success - I guarantee you. Look at Pagekit [0], Ghost [1], and the likes!

[0]: [https://pagekit.com/](https://pagekit.com/)

[1]: [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback, but we're holding off on making it look prettier until we've finished with the technical heavy lifting. (Front-end design is not my strong suit.)

<comment><USER3> You're sending the wrong message since day 1. It's 2016, making things pretty is by default - there is a bunch of free icons, a bunch of default themes that make a site look decently without any effort. By not using those you also look like yet another wheel reinventor. It's an honest feedback, I wish you luck, not before you want to make people invest time in your technical merits, you need not to push them away with the looks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Announcement blog post: [https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/03/introducing-cms- airship-s...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/03/introducing-cms-airship- secure-content-management-system-for-modern-web)

Github: [https://github.com/paragonie/airship](https://github.com/paragonie/airship)

Any early feedback would be greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER4> License.txt contains a GPL license, while composer.json says MIT.

Worth of notice, one of the keywords in composer.json is "self-updating".

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Copy-paste mistake. Thanks for letting me know.

The way self-updating works is: I use one of the bundled tools to create and distribute an update pack. Each site (once per hour, in the default config) will ping for any updates and, after verifying the Ed25519 signature with our public key, apply them.</comment></comment>


Doctor Who: Aberdeen researchers reveal 'average' face of Time Lord - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-25466389

<comment><USER2> i sure hope that they don't start casting doctors that only look like this average face, as suggested in this article.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you backup your email? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious if anyone out there uses any method of backing up their email. I'm sure most people, especially on gmail or other hosted providers, just simply move the emails that they wish to preserve into some other folder or just never delete them from the inbox. But, do any of you make an effort to back them up using other methods?
I'm interested because I've been working on a weekend project that does email storage. I'm curious what the interest in something like this might be. And, if you are one of those people that just never delete email that you want to preserve, what things might persuade you to use another method of backing them up?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I use pop3 to download all my email from Gmail (and Google Apps) to my local disk. Then I tar it, gpg it, and send off to S3.

<comment><USER3> I use a similar method - I take my Gmail & download it about once per month with Mail.app using Pop3. I just leave it local though, I'm fairly confident in both Googles servers & my local disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My email address was disabled by my ex-employer, which was then accessed (possibly by changing the password?) and my details were then tampered with. Example: I had about 5 domain names in a Namecheap account, the ex-employer then did the 'forgot password'. It happened for a few other services. But the worst was seeing parts of my medical files leaked on some IRC server.

Now I'm not quite sure what to do in regards to email. The whole ordeal made me quite sick in the stomach. I have my (new email) settings set so that all emails are deleted after request (on the server) - it's probably a crap way but I didn't know any other option. So I'd expect anything that backs up my email to be -hardcore- on security...

It did make me realise how much malicious damage that can be done if someone gets access to your email, and the importance of keeping work / personal emails separate. :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch! Well, that's some good information for me to digest. It's clear that security is the major issue here. I'm looking into PGP and how to effectively do it for individual users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not backup in the true sense of the word, but i do keep duplicate copies. I have a domain account and a gmail account and i keep them in sync.

I'd like to also have a local copy(which would be backuped along with the rest of my data), but i have yet to do that.

A bit paranoid, but I've dealt with data loss before. It wasn't pretty.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have lots of different mail accounts, some backed up, some not. Anything important in an email I save on Evernote. Anything sensitive in an email I save locally, or encrypt with either Password Gorilla (which I really need to migrate from) or PGP Desktop.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes - I have e-mail from my main account fwd'd to Gmail and a Rule set up to Archive it immediately and add a Tag.

So I get a backup plus an easily accessible way to access it from the outside.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there anything in particular about your method that you wish were easier, better or different? Is there anything that does not exist, or does exist that you feel shouldn't have to?

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hosted delivery box > exim local box > outlook on windows > pst saved on raid6 box with 7day snapshot, 4week snapshot and 6month snapshot > crashplan net backup with versioning

</comment><comment><USER9> I trust Google to keep my e-mail safe!

</comment><comment><USER10> backup from Google about once a month, this then is included in my normal system backup regime which verges on the slightly paranoid!</comment>


OneSwarm: Privacy preserving P2P - <AUTHOR> http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ <comment><USER2> One of their papers, about how easy it is to implicate an innocent host in a BitTorrent exchange, was kind of interesting. They managed to get DMCA takedown notices for their printers...</comment>


How to deal with drift in Terraform after manual changes to your infra? - <AUTHOR> https://cloudskiff.com/manage-drift-manual-changes-terraform/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi sharing here a post on how to deal with drift in Terraform after manual changes to your infra [https://bit.ly/36GQYQC](https://bit.ly/36GQYQC)</comment>


How early in a startup should founders decide equity distributions? - <AUTHOR>

I am involved in a startup with another guy. Right now, things are are pretty unofficial - we are just prototyping and getting something out there. Very very initial stages. But we both know that if our thing catches on, we are going to stick to it. At this stage, is it smart to bring up equity distributions among us? If not, when is the right time? Also, is it smart to have a 50-50, or a more unbalanced distribution? <comment><USER2> I really like the approach suggested by chris dixon: <http://www.cdixon.org/?p=164></comment>


Financial Times 404 Page - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/comment/cohttp://lumnists/christophercaldwell <comment><USER2> It took me a few seconds of staring at the page to understand why this is trending.

The top of the page looks like a generic, bland 404 page.

Hopefully you continue further down, because the real interesting and fun part starts after the section header "Why wasn't this page found? We asked some leading economists..."

</comment><comment><USER3> "Trickle-down High taxes on content publishers prevented them hiring the person who would have written this page."

That's an interesting take on the term.

</comment><comment><USER4> While the page itself is a fun joke, I must admit I've learned something from it.

Accidental learning for today I guess, Ha!

</comment><comment><USER5> paywall backed by one econ theory

Efficient Markets Hypothesis If you had paid enough for the page, it would have appeared.</comment>


The difference between simplicity and minimalism - <AUTHOR> http://charliebroadway.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-difference-between-simplicity-and.html

<comment><USER2> It's a lot like coding... YAGNI and KISS are the first things i teach new coders. Otherwise the burden they carry gets heavier and heavier as they add new languages or technologies to their arsenal. You wouldn't believe how many people lack this very simplistic understanding!</comment>