Tell HN: Gmail on Chrome eating battery - <AUTHOR> At some point over the past 4 months or so, my battery performance started to degrade from about 4 or 5 hours to about 2 or 2.5 hours. I figured it was just the realities of a 3.5 year old MBP Retina.
But I was debugging an application locally (on Ubuntu, I dual boot) for performance and I noticed that one of the Chrome processes was sitting at 150% CPU, after some testing I determined it was the Gmail tab on Chrome. Now, by keeping Gmail closed when I'm not using it, my battery lasts almost as long as it used to.
I know I'm not the only one that primarily works from coffee shops and libraries, plus I figure the Gmail team might be on here, so that's why I'm sharing.
Plugins installed: HTTPS Everywher, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger (turned off on gmail.com), Ember Inspector. <comment><USER2> Chrome has a profiler at chrome://profiler/ That might show where the problem is.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a similar problem, so I switched to thunderbird

</comment><comment><USER4> You can try using the basic HTML version..</comment>


Losing Your Job for Sexual Harassment Is Not a Violation of Due Process - <AUTHOR> https://rewire.news/article/2018/01/18/losing-job-sexual-harassment-not-violation-due-process/ <comment><USER2> I've noticed this argument a few times. It's based on the legal concept of due process. However, when non-lawyers use the term, they do so colloquially, and instead are discussing a much less formal thing. This is generally understood by most people, and it's mainly constitutional law experts who bring up the argument.

Like the trolley problem, outside of a limited group of aficionados, most people don't care about this kind of argument because it's excessively technical and irrelevant to what people care about.

</comment><comment><USER3> This author misses the distinction between the _legal_ concept of the due process (see: the 5th Amendment) and the _moral_ concept of due process. Violation of due process as a moral issue has nothing to do with whether or not it is the government judging / sanctioning you.

<comment><USER4> It's similar to the term "free speech". It has a constitutional meaning but people give it a colloquial meaning as well... which adds to confusion when you start talking about legal stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >...where anyone accused of sexual harassment can lose their job or place at school...

Well, that's not completely true. If you're a union worker, it can be harder for the school to rid itself of the problem employee. Same for many other members of strong unions.

That said, they have to have some process to ensure that unfounded malicious accusations don't both undermine (oh, I hate this phrase) legitimate problems and get innocent people fired, while also ensuring (sexual conduct) violators get their just desserts.

<comment><USER6> I once interned at a law firm which represented a public sector union. My takeaway is that unions want to get rid of problem employees as much as the employer.

That can make it awkward for a union representative at a disciplinary hearing who is counseling a troublesome employee. Sometimes the lawyer might tell the employee something like, "I can get you off this time but they're gunning for you, so you're better off resigning and taking severance." Which is true as far as it goes, but the lawyer and the union leader are actually thinking, "this guy is an asshole and we need to get rid of him without looking like we sold him down the river."

Long story short: when the employer and union have a good working relationship, a union has no trouble showing a problematic employee the door.

The real issue that I saw repeatedly is that employers will often try to unfairly fire employees, either to circumvent contract rules or because of incompetent or malicious supervisors. They'll even go so far as to concoct complaints out of thin air. In such a hostile environment, when a legitimately problematic employee is under review the union has to take extra care to ensure the legitimacy of the problem. Furthermore, it's more difficult organizationally (i.e. maintaining the trust of union members) to usher a bad employee out the door when N previous employees were screwed by the employer. (Because the details of misbehavior often need to remain private for legal or practical reasons, it's difficult for both employer and union to be transparent with rank-and-file about why an employee needed to go.)

The moral of the story is to maintain a good working relationship. It's ridiculous that employers can't always do that, but I think it speaks to systematic problems in continuity of leadership of large public and private employers. Every successive leader (CEO, Police Chief, whatever) spends a substantial amount of his time attempting to unwind transactions executed by the previous leader, rather than moving forward. That ultimately leads to inconsistent, unfair, and often egregiously improper management practices.

<comment><USER7> My ex-mother-in-law faced this exact problem. Really oppressive working conditions in a department of New York State government. When she was falsely brought up on shoddy work quality, which was really her bosses' inadequacies, the union wanted to have nothing to do with her and give her a minimal level of support. Greatly re-enforced the uselessness of unions. But they sure are happy to take employees money on a regular basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not just that this is illegal and immoral (which is the most important point) it's also that the perpetrator has sacrificed the interests of the corporation to his (or her) own appetites. Not something the law is going to shape itself to tolerate, or ought to.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any company can fire you without any reason in the US. The laws are not really on the employees side there.

<comment><USER2> Not all states are employment at-will. Also, even if you fire somebody for "any" reason ,if you don't document the process carefully, you expose yourself to legal action. There are a whole bunch of concerted protected activities that your employer can't fire you for.</comment></comment>


Bing Vs. Google Comparator - <AUTHOR> http://www.furia.com/code/bg/bg.cgi

<comment><USER2> It would be cool if I could get an objective answer which results I prefer. Just give me the union of serach results in arbitray order, I will rank them, not knowing which is which. hen over time it could give me an objective measure of my preferences.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not impressive... it's just a bunch of iframes. How about stripping the styles of the results, and displaying some kind of visual diff.

<comment><USER4> As a hack it might not be impressive, but I found it useful to see the presentation side by side. At the moment, I'd say Bing is definitely much cleaner and more pleasing. The speed seems about the same but it's hard to judge the results without lots of work. It's amusing, though, to see how closely Bing mimics Google especially in the first items of the header: web, images, video ... It would also be nice if I could just close one side or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> search for "dvcs comparison" (unquoted). bing returns many completely unrelated dvd/spam sites, while google is spot on. MS still have a lot of work to do.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google loads much faster for me.</comment>


How Maptia Built Their Startup on the Road - <AUTHOR> https://nomadlist.io/blog/maptia-digital-nomad-startup/

<comment><USER2> A traveling startup? What a superb idea! It does count as a perfect form of dog-fooding for this startup and I like how neatly the site fits in with telling stories while traveling. Nice execution.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't you need to be pretty wealthy to begin with to do this sort of thing?

<comment><USER4> Actually it can be far cheaper if you travel around Asia or South America

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Horrible choice of font. Couldn't read.</comment>


Ask HN: Tutorials on stock trading 101? - <AUTHOR>

I took the first step of buying stocks, but I have no idea what I am doing. Can you please share some resources that made you better? <comment><USER2> If you want some basic information this guide may help:

[http://www.thegutmangroup.com/books/WelcomeToTheStockMarket....](http://www.thegutmangroup.com/books/WelcomeToTheStockMarket.pdf)

A friend and I are currently revitalizing the website. It covers only the basic but is written in a fun,, non dry way!

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.morningstar.com/Cover/Classroom.html> is a set of free online classes from Morningstar. 172 classes, covering stocks, bonds, funds, etc.</comment>


Overtreatment of 'mild' hypertension is causing more harm than good, say experts - <AUTHOR> http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2014/09/overtreatment-mild-hypertension-causing-more-harm-good-say-experts

<comment><AUTHOR> The BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal) commentary article[1] referred to in the submission here is paywalled for me, but includes a helpful summary of current research findings. In relevant part,

"Diagnostic change—Recommendations for drug treatment have decreased from diastolic pressure of >115 mm Hg to ≥140/90 mm Hg. A new category, prehypertension (120/80-139/89 mm Hg), has also been introduced

"Rationale for change—Patients with even mildly raised blood pressure may have increased cardiovascular risk

"Leap of faith—Lowering threshold blood pressures will lead to increased diagnosis and treatment, which will decrease mortality

"Impact on prevalence—22% of adults worldwide have mild hypertension (systolic pressure 140-159 mm Hg) and 13.5% have a systolic pressure ≥160 mm Hg

"Evidence of overdiagnosis—Use of a uniform threshold (140 mm Hg) to mark hypertension risk ignores evidence that risk varies by individual and includes many people who will not benefit from drug treatment"

[1] [http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g5432](http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g5432)</comment>


Bug 344618 - Implement input type="range" - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344618

<comment><USER2> Misleading title. Flamebait.

Mozilla devs have limited resources and they decided to tackle developing a better DOM before adding new auxiliary features. How is this wrong?

The main comment says:

«On the DOM side, there is a major refactoring of the DOM based on WebIDL (bug 580070) going on. This will yield better conformance and I'm confident DOM performance, likely security too I would guess.

Meanwhile, I agree, no new feature (like this bug) is being worked on. That's unfortunate, but it's a matter of priority.»

They think that their efforts are better spent on DOM performance rather than form sliders. We argue about that, but one has to accept that, in presence of limited resources, one has to prioritise something.

<comment><USER3> Just to be clear, that wasn't a Mozilla employee commenting, so they won't necessarily even have a good view of Mozilla's priorities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case anyone decides that they want to register for Bugzilla and comment on the bug itself about how they feel about priorities, please heed bz's comment and take the discussion to a more appropriate (and probably more responsive) area, like dev-planning[1] or dev-platform[2].

Bugs like this are meant to be mostly for technical discussion and aren't the most effective way of getting attention around this kind've issue.

[1] <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning>

[2] <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform>

<comment><USER5> Off topic: that "kind've" is interesting. It looks like a contraction, but it saves no space over the normal "kind of". Is that just a personal colloquialism of yours, or is it part of a regional thing, or...?

<comment><USER6> It is a grammatical error.

<comment><USER5> I've seen it used before, which is why I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt that it's possibly an evolutionary branch of the language. Being a grammatical error is the obvious answer, but not always the correct one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thinking about it, I don't think I've ever really had a reason to use a slider on a web form. It'd be nice to have, I suppose.

To me implying that "HTML5 isn't a priority for mozilla" because they haven't implemented a really marginal component is quite an exaggeration. I think using bug reports to try to create pressure on developers is in this weird grey area of stuff where it violates some sort of implicit social code of bug reporting. (In short: it's sort of a passive aggressive move)

Having an opinion on what should prioritized is fine, but it should be marketed as such, IE, make it a blog post or write an email or something instead.

<comment><USER8> _Thinking about it, I don't think I've ever really had a reason to use a slider on a web form._

I've been dying to have native sliders for ages. There are lots of user interfaces to be made that have nothing to do with databases, CRUD, or social networks. For example, sliders are particularly essential to audio/video/lighting control and media editing UIs.

Yesterday's thinking will only solve yesterday's problems.

<comment><USER7> Sure. But there's a way to say "this would be awesome to have, here's all the places I could use it" and ask politely versus "I'm going to make a public display of this on a popular news site in order to pressure you into what I want"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The title here really needs to be changed. No one in the linked report representing Mozilla says anything even close to that. The phrase "not a priority" doesn't even appear on that page, so putting it in quotes is a bit much!

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this bad? All browsers must have priorities. Is there a reason why input[type="range"] should be a priority over the stuff they're working on?

<comment><USER10> Mainly because it's high profile.

But also because it can't be used until it's been in browsers for a long long time. So you need to get it in there early.

There is a HUGE lag time from when it's implemented to when it's usable.

<comment><USER9> But that's true for all HTML5 features. I'm frankly glad that Mozilla has prioritized stuff like IndexedDB (not yet in Safari or Opera, Chrome using an outdated spec last I checked).

Unless there is a reason why input[type="range"] is more important than the stuff they are working on, I don't think we can really complain. Mozilla arguably has the fastest release cycle nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a bummer since sliders are such a fundamental control.

When people must create their own:

* Implementations are more often than not sub-par.

* Implementations are inconsistent (will clicking off the thumb snap to the mouse or act as an increment?).

* There is no platform-native look & feel control (which should matter for any FF phone device, as they should want all apps to use a single slider implementation).

</comment><comment><USER12> I've noticed this as well without having to go near their bugzilla for confirmation. It's not just the range control - it's pretty much everything.

This is one of the features that would stop me having to churn out literally acres of JavaScript validation and normalising forms across different browsers.

I mean even IE10 supports them now: <http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/Forms/default.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> While i agree that it probably doesn't matter what gets priority from dev prespective, i believe they should implement form stuff first because they are (probably) easier to implement than a whole API that interacts pages with OS. The devs who try out the simple to test input type range code are far more in number than people who try out APIs. So they take less time and have more users than apis.j cant see why they aren't higher in priority especially since all other major browsers have atleast some kind of implimentation of it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Range inputs are one of those things that seem obvious but in practice aren't that useful, in the grand scheme of things.</comment>


Structured Logging vs. Structuring Logs - <AUTHOR> https://www.zebrium.com/blog/structured-logging-vs-structuring-logs <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if this is pointing out the obvious, but the title is not a typo! We discuss an approach of using machine learning to automatically post-structure logs, rather than having to manually pre-structure them.</comment>


Germany Repatriating Gold From NY, Paris 'In Case Of A Currency Crisis' - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/01/16/germany-repatriating-gold-from-ny-paris-in-case-of-a-currency-crisis/

<comment><USER2> No good explanation. They only had so much gold in NYC because of the small but real threat of the Soviets invading. The only reason to bring it back is the tiny threat of it being stolen by the US or France.

 _and to have the ability to sell gold quickly If needed._

Eh, they can sell it while it's still in the vault. That's how it's always done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another reason is to make sure they get their gold back first, just in case there's a been a financial ponzi scheme in gold trading where paper instruments are not backed up by real assets.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-09/hsbc-sues-mf- global...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-09/hsbc-sues-mf-global- brokerage-over-stored-gold-silver-bars-1-.html)

"Five gold bars and 15 silver bars underlie eight Comex contracts between the brokerage and its client Jason Fane of Ithaca, New York, the unit of London- based HSBC said in a court filing yesterday. Both parties have asserted claims to the bars, creating difficulties for HSBC, which is storing them, the bank said. HSBC asked a judge to decide who the rightful owner is."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article asserts that this could be seen as a lack of confidence in the Euro but fails to explain why this should not be seen as a lack of confidence in the dollar or in America. After all, if the Euro broke down, the Germans might want to secure their holdings in France, and not just their holdings in the US.

<comment><USER4> If the Euro collapses, they want to be able to get other currencies with their gold. The gold in France is pretty useless for thet.

<comment><USER3> Let me make myself more clear. The article says that the Germans are planning on repatriating all the gold from France. But why is that a sign of distrust in the Euro, whereas bringing back gold from New York is not distrust in the dollar? Gold is gold, right?

For me the whole thing about being able to get foreign currency quickly sounds less credible. Even if the Euro collapsed and the gold were in Germany they could get American dollars quickly, should the situation arise.

Isn't is more a distrust in all the institutions and all the systems as such, in case one or more of the major currencies collapses?

<comment><USER5> Forbes skipped part of the original quote from the Deustche Bundesbank press release. The full quote is:

"With this new storage plan, the Bundesbank is focusing on the two primary functions of the gold reserves: to build trust and confidence domestically, and the ability to exchange gold for foreign currencies at gold trading centres abroad within a short space of time."

I read that as Germany strengthening domestic trust & confidence (via gold repatriation), at the expense of exchanging gold for foreign currencies: specifically, the US Dollar, since that's the only currency where gold reserves are being reduced (ie the amount of gold in Euro & Pound countries remains unchanged).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Performance without Compromise: React.js for TV UIs - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/03/performance-without-compromise.html <comment><USER2> I think MithrilJS has the best trade-offs. You get insane speed without insane complications.

I dread ever having to write ReactJS again as the entire setup is quite gross. The sliver of speed in ReactJS is not worth the bloat.

<comment><USER3> I hadn't seen MithrilJS before. It looks great. It makes me wonder what kind of voodoo I'd be capable of if I combined it with Nim[0].

[0]: [https://hookrace.net/blog/what-is-special-about- nim/#compile...](https://hookrace.net/blog/what-is-special-about-nim/#compile- to-javascript)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an user let me tell you what I think : React sucks. Watching this I'm asking myself about what I'm enduring today because of some js paradigms and developper happiness : my worst user experiences on the Internet today are on Facebook (Where I need 5-to 6 seconds to see my notifications) and Coursera (where I could wait a minute before a page is displayed after a click ) So my experiences with React are pretty negatives now. If anyone a has a posterchild to recommend me so I can reconsider this framework I'm open.

<comment><USER5> As another user and developer: Developers sometimes do a poor job, no matter what technologies they are using.

Neither of the services you mention I'm a big user of, so not sure what to say about those. But I do agree that a lot of services that are using React, are still slow. But the thing is, it's hardly Reacts fault. If they used Backbone or Angular, it would still suck.

I think the best examples of React is the sites where you don't really realize it's using React. It's like 3D graphics in movies. People never say "Oooh, those animations/vfx where so good", because if it's good, you don't notice it. However, if it's bad, it's very obvious.

For a list of some websites/apps that are using React, take a look here: [https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Sites-Using- React](https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Sites-Using-React)

Ps, if you try to use React as a framework, you're not gonna be able. React is just one part of the puzzle. Other than the view layer, you have to figure out the other pieces.

<comment><USER6> I find that a lot of Angular apps are pretty badly composed... The use of one better option doesn't fix when you don't understand when/how/why to apply a given paradigm or architecture.

I'm fighting with this daily... :-( (passively looking for a new job because of it, frustrated)</comment></comment></comment>


Gay Marriage Legalized by Top U.S. Court in Landmark Ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-26/gay-marriage-legalized-nationwide-by-u-s-supreme-court-ibdovxv1

<comment><AUTHOR> Same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a historic ruling that caps the biggest civil rights transformation in a half-century.</comment>


Why Online Education is Mostly a Fantasy - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/25/why-online-education-is-mostly-a-fantasy/?utm_source=feedly

<comment><USER2> There is a widespread misconception that online education is just inherently inferior to learning in a real classroom. The Department of Education did a huge meta-analysis and found this was not the case - in face online education is a little better than face to face. Blended and hybrid learning was better than either online or face to face alone. [http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based- practic...](http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based- practices/finalreport.pdf)

We're talking about actual learning, not how well we liked the learning (the two are inversely correlated). An online video for example you can pause, rewind, fast forward, compared to a face to face lecture in which the speaker is likely going too fast or too slow for many.

That said, are there certain types of topics or certain types of students which are better taught face to face? Sure. Remedial courses require much more learner support, and really one-on-one tutoring. Other courses are inherently social or inherently difficult to teach online. Are you going to hire a pilot or a firefighter that only trained online? Of course not, but I would hire a pilot or firefighter who had hundreds of hours of practice with difficult scenarios in a simulator over one who had only learned in a face to face context.

<comment><USER3> Actually, Khan Academy is outperforming face-to-face remedial math only.

What KA is doing and Coursera isn't, is diagnosing student progress and misunderstandings by utilizing a tree of knowledge. KA is actually testing students and pointing to where they should go next.

It's trivial to test for example foreign word spelling in software: Just ask the student to type a word and see if it's right.

Peter Norvig recently talked about using Udacity's massive data on students to predict what misunderstandings students have about programming, much like a face-to-face teacher might do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I mostly disagree. If you pay close attention to the field of online education one cannot help but notice that the most serious players are not attempting to replace traditional schools and universities. They point out that paying through the nose for the accreditation is a bubble ripe for being pricked by technological disruption, but they still cherish and recommend traditional universities.

The most value these courses provide is ongoing education, mostly in topics one did not or could not study while in school. A programmer might learn economics, an MBA might learn biology or programming, a biologist might dive deeper into physics.

For me these courses are a type of curiosity-driven entertainment rather than learning particular skills or knowledge I might need...</comment>


Show HN: LED Me Know: LED Notifications for Tests Using Node and Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://blog.johnnycopperstone.me/led-me-know/ <comment><USER2> In the early days of Socialcast, I built what I called the "pinging wall" which was a bunch of RGB leds inside of ping pong balls and mounted on the wall, each employee had their own ball. Using the arduino ethernet shield, the arduino would poll our internal deployment of our own software, basically an internal company newstream and the pinging wall would indicate whether varying levels of red, yellow and green to indicate whether you had messages or @mentions and be green when you were active on the activity stream.

</comment><comment><USER3> So whatever happened to the blink(1) Kickstarter that was doing the same thing? Does anyone have one?

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the- usb-r...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the-usb-rgb-led)

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing, that's actually what I wanted. Didn't know that existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> next steps: use an arduino nano with an HC-06 bluetooth dongle to remove that cable. Also, another step might be using an ESP8266 and make a webserver out of it (maybe some links to get you started here: [http://embeddednodejs.com/chapters.html](http://embeddednodejs.com/chapters.html) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, not a bad idea. I'd love to have it connected to loads of other things, like CI builds, err logs potentially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have LIFX bulbs in my home office. This has inspired me to try something a little more dramatic.

</comment><comment><USER4> nice btw!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to store time series data in a relational database? - <AUTHOR>

We are currently having a write heavy load with about a half a million records being added every day. This could grow in future ,  so having one record for every minute with an index would slow down the writes.
Is it ok to have one record per hour with sixty columns for each minute ?
Or is it better to use a non relational database ? <comment><USER2> > Is it ok to have one record per hour with sixty columns for each minute ?

No. That's wasteful and makes many types of queries very hard to write.

A good way of storing the data is only storing change events. So for example, each time a stock ticker changes you store a new row with the timestamp and the new value for the stock. This achieves very high level of "compression" since most stocks values doesn't change every minute. But it depends on what kind of data you have.

<comment><USER3> > since most stocks values doesn't change every minute.

Are you serious? Stock data changes every second and sometimes earlier than that.

<comment><USER2> No, most stock prices doesn't change that frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't. Use an industrial historian.

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

[http://software.schneider- electric.com/products/wonderware/p...](http://software.schneider- electric.com/products/wonderware/production-information-management/historian/)

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Your index wouldn't be clustered, is it? For a regular index, insert is O(log n). For a clustered index, insert is O(n).

You can also bulk insert records, rather than 1 at a time.

We have 2k operations per second on our aws rds.

<comment><USER6> Definitely agree re bulk inserting, say every 1 minute or 1 hour or whatever.

I was paying around recently with Amazon's Kinesis for this, but if you don't want the vendor lock-in you could easily roll your own system that bundles up events and stores a bunch at once.

<comment><USER5> If you do

open database connection

do one insert

close database connection

That adds up fast.

At work, I've been very disappointed in the performance of their Amazon RDS. They had unexplained master/slave replication issues.

You also can put a memcached in front of the database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're storing time series data as events, then it's essentially a log and a relational database would seem to be better suited a secondary structure for batch analysis. I found this article useful for understanding logs and the possibilities for their use:

[https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log- wha...](https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every- software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying)

</comment><comment><USER8> You've mentioned a few things about your write side (but didn't specify the critically important what you want to store, and what resolution your time series needs? You hinted at it only needs minute resolution?)

Further, you didnt mention at all your read requirements. Without that any recommendation you could possibly get would be useless.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're storing floats at one minute resolution . We could have thousands of writes a second at peak load . Reads are not that heavy for now .

<comment><USER8> The read volume is much less important than the _kinds_ of queries you want to run on the data set. But from the sounds of it you do not have a SQL problem, the data doesn't have/need varying query styles/indexes, it probably degrades in importance quickly over time, and it isn't interrelated. Use one of the umpteenth time series databases that were written for this problem.

That said, any decently tuned RDBMS/sql app can easily handle thousands of writes a second, especially if you are just dumping them into giant buckets of resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Use a NoSQL database like Cassandra. For your use case you can easily do time series. Cassandra is optimized for write heavy workloads.

<comment><USER10> Look at Khronus, it relies on Cassandra and Akka Cluster: [https://github.com/despegar/khronus](https://github.com/despegar/khronus)</comment></comment>


Not new news, but tbh if you have tiktiok, just get rid of it – videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/comment/fmuko1m <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638129)

</comment><comment><USER3> Suggested title: reverse engineering TikTok to see how much data it collects.

At what point do Google and Apple consider banning the app? To be honest I'm surprised (and disappointed) that an iOS app that does that much spying was approved, especially the clipboard thing. That shouldn't have passed app review IMO.

<comment><USER4> Apple risks damage to their brand by not allowing it. It's the same reason why they politely ask Uber and Facebook to fix serious bugs in their apps, rather than removing them with no comment, as they've proven to do with small iOS devs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These seem like standard things any analytics tracker (including GA) tracks, check out amiunique [1] for a set of things that can be tracked using your favorite secure browser.

Yet, the rest of the content on Tiktok is very low threat. No chat, no personal health forums, no private photos. It's mostly a consumption platform with very little input from the users besides those listed in the linked thread (I don't find that data particularly scary vs what we've accepted as normal in the internet).

What's scary about tiktok is how addictive it is and how it is very much engineered and optimized to be so. Some in the new world are fine with this, I am not.

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

<comment><USER6> From the comment:

"For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is. It's like comparing a cup of water to the ocean - they just don't compare."

<comment><USER5> Sure, very shady. My point is, I'd be much more concerned about a WeChat that has your conversations, transaction history, etc than a non-topical video feed (e.g unlike YouTube people don't really look for STD/mental-health videos on tiktok, and things that reveal a lot about a user).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I looked through the comments to see if someone could provide me steps or evidence of what they did than just telling me about what they found. I have no doubt tiktok is nefarious but most of the things are done by other players with some security problems mixed in.

On remote security problems, check this recent facebook SDK issue - [https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios- sdk/issues/1374](https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1374)

I think snapchat also tries to detect whether you are trying to snoop in. There are many "privacy" focused app who employ those techniques. Not that I trust tiktok to do it for privacy reasons but they are not alone.

Why should I trust zimperium with their automated reports without an explanation of what they are checking. The link to report ask me about my phone number, email, name, and what not. Seems ironic.

I stopped reading through the other link which points to nowhere now (someone put a gdrive link in the comments). Why censor the code or is that just dummy code to make it spicy?

I would avoid tiktok like I did before but don't blind yourself about other popular non chinese apps.

I am also curious about the reason for adding a way to unzip and execute binaries.

<comment><USER8> Backdoors are "bad security practices rather than looking malicious"?

> There's also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for > the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said > binary.

That sure looks malicious to me.

EDIT: Ditto for the active evasion.

> For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and > Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that > TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly > whats being sent

<comment><USER7> Yeah that one seems _bad_. Although isn't android cracking down on the functionality?

I thought that was the reason why Termux wouldn't work anymore.

[https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and- An...](https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-Android-10)

I can't say anything about the second statement without knowing op's background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remote telemetry configuration and collecting basically everything they can about the device isn't anything new really. I think mobile apps (especially on Android) have been doing that since the beginning of time.

What's surprising for me is the claim that the behavior of the app changes if it detects someone is inspecting it. This seems a bit handwavey to me and would like a more detailed explanation if anyone has one.

At this point, I think for me the bars for me are:

Don't upload content that I haven't explicitly posted to your servers. This can come in various forms:

\- Assuming you gave an app access to your album because you wanted to post something from there. How do you know it's not simply uploading all your photos and videos silently in the background?

\- Microphone data: Again you let an app record some video and thereby give mic access to it, a malicious actor can then snoop in and listen to your conversation whenever they want.

These criticisms apply to both iOS and Android although iOS is a little better in terms of how background services work. Don't do mobile-dev as a profession, so I'd appreciate it if anyone could correct me if the OS does enforce some sort of protections here.

<comment><USER10> How many of us developers would take a principled stand when tasked with implementing features such as these and how many would silently comply?

I know I've folded unknowingly, adding all sorts of extra tracking including behaviour tracking to my startup's web app and looking back now I believe it's one of the reasons we ultimately failed because we broke trust with our users.

<comment><USER11> >How many of us developers would take a principled stand when tasked with implementing features such as these and how many would silently comply?

Protip: comply to your manager and when it's rolled out give an anonymous tip to privacy watchdogs.

<comment><USER10> Woa. Dude games without frontiers. That's some next level shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The youtube video says "Video unavailable"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJlopewioK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJlopewioK4)

</comment><comment><USER13> The app is also extremely good at avoiding censorship, which I find highly ironic for a product made in China. I once tried to block TikTok at the DNS level, and I realized that if you block any of their DNS names, the app will start using encrypted DNS over HTTPS via 184.108.40.206 to circumvent your efforts.

</comment><comment><USER14> it is scarry that most users don't have any clue of what app collects and why it matter. I feel like we are in the dark age of Internet when only few knows how it work and 95% of the population trust them because they don't how it works.

<comment><USER15> Exactly this. Even in this site, there are tons of questions from tech savvy individuals who don't understand the data business. The data is farmed and sold to influence your purchase decisions, political preferences, dieting habits, etc. It is also used by third parties to take decisions around the risk on providing you with insurance, your credit worthiness and even legal arguments.

Stop giving away your data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How different is tiktok compared facebook or any American social networking app/company?

Is it just a decision of whether I want to give my data to the American government or the Chinese government?

<comment><USER11> >Is it just a decision of whether I want to give my data to the American government or the Chinese government?

iOS dev here. Facebook does the same with their SDK which is included in basically every iOS app. Google does the same with the Firebase SDK which is also included in every app. There are also tons of other SaaS companies offering their own plug-and-play analytics SDKs, of which marketing managers are eager to shove down the engineers throats as many as possible. It's not uncommon for a single app to host 6-7 different analytics SDKs from various vendors. And this is on iOS, the supposedly "privacy conscious" platform. On Android it's total Wild West...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the old days you spent more time reverse engineering an app before you make a post or write an article.

</comment><comment><USER18> [deleted]

<comment><USER8> Interesting, I had the opposite reaction: isn't it sad that a post with genuinely insightful information and discussion momentum has to be prefixed with "not new news" to head off the inevitable cloud of detractors who argue that a lack of novelty implies that a subject isn't worth attention / discussion / action?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> At this point, what are the odds that the Chinese government _isn 't_ involved in tiktok?

<comment><USER20> It would be absurd if they weren't. The party is involved in every big corp. It would be incompetence to not be involved.

<comment><USER10> The very same thing that is viewed as a strength ie oversight of everyone and everything is also a weakness in its own right --

Classical example of "do you have the power to let go of power?"</comment></comment></comment>


European Commission tells carriers to hand over mobile data in coronavirus fight - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.eu/article/european-commission-mobile-phone-data-thierry-breton-coronavirus-covid19/ <comment><USER2> As the article says at the end, since this data is anonymized, it is only useful to see how people moved in general before shelter-in-place was implemented. You have to go full tracking on an individualized level to be really useful after that, like South Korea did/does. I wonder if this is the next step in the US and Europe. The next level after that is then requiring you carry a phone with the tracking app (or just set this up with the phone carriers behind the scenes) when you are outside your home. First as a temporary measure for this outbreak, of course, but always extended when it is about to expire, like the Patriot act. The potential for another outbreak will always be with us.

I personally would not like to live in such a country, but who knows if people would care enough to prevent it from happening.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have this paranoid feeling that officials will now use this pandemic as a shield to attack on privacy on all fronts. Just right now there are few more posts on HN about the same (one more about EU, and another about Toronto). Fight against pandemic now can be used as an excuse to implement whatever measures they could not get through in normal times. And normalize it and later forget to stop doing it.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly what is going to happen.

In our country they implemented a web page, where you can snitch on people who you suspect to be infected.

So as it turns out, it seems that if you put enough pressure (fictional or real) on a group of people, they will submit themselves to draconian rule for the benefit of the collective and at the same time feel good about themselves because they work for the common good. Sound familiar??

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is targeting carriers then the only way around it is to not carry a mobile surveillance device anymore.

Based on past incidents by 3-letter agencies using it to stalk ex-lovers[1], nobody should want this kind of surveillance at all.

[1][https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance- watchdog...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog- idUSBRE98Q14G20130927)</comment>


Ela Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://elalang.net/ <comment><USER2> Interesting -- a .NET dynamic functional language with lots of inspiration from Haskell, but strict-by-default with explicit (but succinct) laziness, like Alice ML.

</comment><comment><USER3> Too bad it is Windows-only.

<comment><USER4> "Ela runs on .NET and Mono and supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS and many other environments"

[http://elalang.net/about.aspx](http://elalang.net/about.aspx)

<comment><USER2> The language, etc., is .NET 2.0+/Mono 2.6+ and doesn't require Windows, but the IDE is .NET 4.0+, Windows-only (per the readme on the Ela Platform 2014.1 download).

<comment><USER5> > .NET 2.0+/Mono 2.6+ ... but the IDE is .NET 4.0+

This is a perfect example why the naysayers were right when the Linux community talked about accepting Mono as default into the Linux mainstream. Fortunately Mono was rejected and remained as an option.

<comment><USER2> Then again, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595905)

<comment><USER5> Let's talk about that in 2016.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Instagram Hacked Early Growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.adambreckler.com/4-ways-instagram-hacked-early-growth

<comment><USER2> Since when is _being fast_ considered hacking growth? I think some of the "hacks" here are really just facets of a strong product and user experience.

Instagram's user experience is/was great--it lets people feel like they're doing something significant and artistic in only a few seconds. I think that's the most important aspect behind Instagram's growth.

Is a strong product a "hack?"

</comment><comment><USER3> This dogshit should never have been posted. 1, 2, and 4 are not hacks at all. 1 and 2 are simply copying twitter. And cross network posting???

Even 3 is arguable as it's just uploading the photo before capturing the meta. YouTube has been doing that since I can even remember.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is really stretching the meaning of 'hack'

Since when is following good convention, and doing what you're supposed to do considered a hack?

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't dilute a potent term, please!

</comment><comment><USER6> Growth Hacking is apparently a secret word used to Hack Hacker News. Are there other secret words we have not yet discovered?</comment>


It's here Caddy 2 is ready for production - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/tag/v2.0.0 <comment><USER2> Already posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070567)</comment>


Ask HN: Great examples of web app Video tours - <AUTHOR>

Video tours are very important conversion drivers. Can we compile a list of great ones and some salient points to observe when making one? <comment> barry-cotter Anki, an online spaced repitition flashcard based learning app <http://ichi2.net/anki/screencast1.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> im sorry but i dont see anything remarkable about that screencast.</comment></comment>


Google Is Funding Its Own 6.6bn Adblocking Shakedown - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/google-losing-billions-adblock-devils-deal/

<comment><USER2> An _interesting_ choice of sample data:

"For a site that serves 10 million page views per day, with three ads per page, sold at a rate of $5 CPM, this could translate into daily losses of about $20,000."

365,000 page views per year (and a $5 CPM) is impressive to say the least.</comment>


The Crossrail project is one of the world's most ambitious engineering feats - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150602-crossrail-the-monster-tunnelling-under-london-streets?

<comment><USER2> One of current cohort going through the Techstars Barclays Accelerator in London managed to get the Crossrail project as a customer: [http://basestone.io/](http://basestone.io/)</comment>


Consumers are switching to water as they avoid sugary beverages - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/09/06/water-water-everywhere-except-the-bottom-line/ <comment><USER2> Good news. Now they should switch to tap water and it'll also be a win for the environment.

(To anticipate answers: Yes, I know, in the US water often contains large amounts of chlorine and doesn't taste that good. And in poorer countries tap water is often undrinkable. But there's no good reason to buy bottled water if your water supply is reasonable, which is true for large parts of europe at least.)

<comment><USER3> I recently moved to San Diego from New York, the tap water here is unbearable to drink, it tasted horrible, like you are drinking mold, filters don't help that much, still tastes horrible. I won't drink that, never mind giving it to my kids

<comment><USER4> This is really and truly sad that USA can't provide drinkable water.

<comment><USER5> "Drinkable" and "Tastes like the water tasted where I grew up" are very different things. There is not one flavor of water any more than there is one shade of white. There's no evidence that the water OP refers to is actually not drinkable.

<comment><USER3> To be exact - It smells like water from a swamp. Hard to satisfy your thirst by drinking that nasty smell

<comment><USER6> If your water is literally smelly than it is either something wrong with your pipes or psychosomatic. I can't imagine that the entire city of San Diego is distributing water that has an odor. I have never had this problem in San Diego. I would suggest calling the city if this is truly a problem.

<comment><USER7> Smell is not an indication of danger.

Municipal water in Florida often has the smell of sulfur, due to the presence of sulfur -- and if I'm remembering correctly, a relative who works at the state equivalent of the EPA told me that it's common in coastal areas due to byproducts of bacteria in the water table. But it's completely harmless.

I can only speak for Florida, though.

<comment><USER8> I like drinking tap water back home in Orlando. The smell/taste is different but, well, it reminds me of home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Low margin? My wife switched to La Croix which seems to be the new popular water drink around here. It's easily 3x the price of Coke.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Apart from signalling that you have too much money and don't give a crap about the environment, why would anyone drinking just water buy bottled water every day instead of a Camelbak or Nalgene or Bobble bottle once a decade, and then drink tap water? Or even a Bkr if you're very fashion conscious? Is US water quality really that bad?

Edit: and if you _need_ sparkling water, why not get a Sodastream or equivalent?

<comment><USER10> La Croix is sparkling water with very subtle natural flavoring.

As for Sodastream, I've seen lots of folks say that they did the math and found that it wasn't any cheaper in the long run -- or was just barely so -- once you take the cost of the CO2 into account. There are still environmental reasons to get a Sodastream, of course. But if it's not any cheaper and requires learning to use a new contraption and making sure you don't run out of CO2, I think it's easy to see why many people just continue to buy the cans. Plus a Sodastream is a much larger up-front investment, and what if you end up not even liking the flavors?

For what it's worth, La Croix is roughly the same price as name-brand soda like Coke where I live.

<comment><USER11> It's much more convenient though. Hauling liquids isn't fun, even though I live just a block from a grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The soda companies will be just fine. They've been preparing for this for decades. Who do you think _owns_ the bottled water companies?

Hint: Dasani is owned by the Coca-Cola Company. Aquafina is owned by PepsiCo. They're only at risk if people inexplicably stop drinking regular bottled water and subsist solely upon San Pellegrino or other sparkling varieties.

<comment><USER13> FWIW: The article did address this. It claims that bottled water sales are low margin. Therefore, not equivalent to soda sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Restaurants have to be mad about this.

<comment><USER15> Most nicer restaurants will offer you bottled water if you ask for water. Sometimes they won't even offer tap and you have to specifically request it, and the waiter will roll their eyes at you. (I've only seen that once, but still)

<comment><USER14> It would have to be a pretty fancy place in the US to offer fancy water, that they charge for by the bottle. But most of your places will give you water for free, and the waiter will roll his/her eyes because at $2.50 a person, a table of four that only gets water just knocked $10 off their bill and 2-3 dollars off the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I fail to see the problem with this.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the article is implying there is one for anyone but soda makers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Water itself is a good trend. The bottle, not so much.

For me anyway, if I drink _from_ the bottle then I feel odd afterwards — as if I got a dose of something I shouldn't have. Fortunately, pouring the water into a glass solves the problem.

I try to avoid bottled water anyway. Part of it is the principle of the thing: I used to get water for free when I was 12 and these days it averages $3 or $4? To hell with those companies, they know it's a ridiculous scam and people just pay it.

I would say most of the time I drink filtered water from my fridge, occasionally from the tap and rarely from water bottles. If I do have bottled water, it is only after searching in vain for a simple drinking fountain.

</comment><comment><USER18> How is water lower margin than a sugar drink that has ingredients and is partly water? At my corner bodega they charge $2 for a 20oz Dasani (which is the same price as a comparably sized gatorade).

<comment><USER19> FYI, Coke's Dasani, and PepsiCo's AquaFina are _both_ just tap water.

<comment><USER20> They both use reverse osmosis to filter the water, they could be locally bottled and end up tasting quite different than the tap water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a water distiller which I fill up with tap water and it takes 6 hours to produce a gallon by evaporating the water that then goes through a filter.

Cost me around $200 and I get to see the remaining contents from the tap water at the bottom of the distiller. I believe it uses 20 cents of energy to produce a gallon. It's cheaper than bottled water and more environmentally friendly (no plastic).

Some will say, I miss out on minerals from the water but I believe that my diet covers them.

</comment><comment><USER22> The trouble with bottled water is that the minerals are often filtered out. Water is the only way we get certain needed minerals.

</comment><comment><USER23> BTW your kids should be drinking tap water unless you fluoridate their teeth some other way. Or, I suppose, unless you think fluoridating teeth is a bad idea...

</comment><comment><USER24> Good for the producers. Fancy bottled water is much more expensive than Soda so they can make more money on a product that's easier to produce.

</comment><comment><USER25> Even if water ends up being turned into a market good, what with bottling; does this affect the water service as a public good at all?

</comment><comment><USER26> Tip for the frugal: if you go to catering wholesalers you can pick up bottled water still or sparkling for 0.10c - 0.20c each.

It's a good way to reduce a waistline.</comment>


Uber Elevate: On-Demand Urban Air Transportation - <AUTHOR> http://uber.com/elevate <comment><USER2> "VTOL would be cool. The only hard part is all of it!" \- Uber</comment>


Facebook's new looping profile video - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/30/facebook-profile-gif/ <comment><USER2> FTW</comment>


Winer decides to turn off blog comments - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/noComment.html This is the post that put him over the edge:<p>http://scripting.com/images/2012/02/19/somePeopleAreVeryVeryDim.gif <comment><USER2> I'm frankly not surprised-- Winer has complained in the past about comments. From the perspective of someone who often disagrees with him, I've never really understood why he had them in the first place, as he simply does not tolerate alternative views well.

<comment><USER3> The reason it took so long is probably that people who do not tolerate alternative views well do not usually like to think of themselves as people who do not tolerate alternative views well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comments are often worthless, and the reason comments are worthless is because there's no identity invested in them. When sites like HN and Reddit work (which isn't all the time), it's because there's a community of identities which are invested in the comments. When a site like HN or Reddit grows too much, though, most of those identities disappear.

Publishing your own blog post as a rebuttal, or emailing the author, are generally worth more, not only because of the identity involved but because there's a barrier of entry you won't bother crossing unless you're sure you have something to say.

<comment><USER5> I agree with this.

A lot of it is people using your space to say random things that have little to do with the blog post they're responding to.

At one point I realized that's just another form of spam.

Why not post your screed in your own space? Because you have readers and I don't. Oh. Thanks soooo much. :-)

</comment></comment><comment> g-garron I was thinking about doing the same thing, but then I've decided to keep them open, but just for 15 days after the publication date of the post. That way it is easier to moderate, and I can still have some valuable comments from the real followers of my blog. Just my two cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your strategy makes sense. He's also deleted all the comments today that were based on this story here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912>

<comment><USER5> The comments are still there, I just changed my site template so they're no longer part of the rendering. If you have an account on Disqus you'll find your comments are just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Scripting News has gone the way of Daring Fireball. It was bound to happen.

<comment><USER7> Has Daring Fireball ever had blog comments? I don't think it has. Neither, from what I can tell, has Kottke.

<comment><USER8> Kottke used to occasionally open up posts to comments but hasn't done it in a long time.

<http://kottke.org/plus/misc/opencomments.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess he figures people will just discuss the articles on sites like this, and he'll no longer have to worry about doing the moderation work. Lazy, but it could work.

</comment><comment><USER10> The amusing thing about this is that Dave Winer used to be quite vocal about comments being one of the defining criteria of what makes a blog. I guess his thinking on this has evolved. Sad to hear that he will be shutting down opposing viewpoints on his site.

<comment><USER5> You have me confused with someone else. I often said quite the opposite.

<comment><USER10> Dave: weren't you arguing, back in the early days of blogging, that a blog without comments available did not fit the definition of what a blog is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Agree with this. The best is to have once-a-week or something moderated Open Forum type post and solicit comment there on all or any given topic. We were living in the world of sanity in the days of editorial page with letters to editor, but blogging brought that model upside down. In the long run and collectively, the comments have not really helped other than where they are specifically appropriate (like link sharing sites like HN/Reddit etc).

</comment><comment><USER12> Since the only time I have ever commented on his blog was to make a correction or help him out, I guess I've just been saved some work.

<comment><USER5> Those are useful comments, and I wish there was a way to just limit it to that. In any case, thanks for your offering of corrections and help. I still have an email address for that kind of stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> sadly, if comments were open, I'd point him out he may want to hide the email of the guy who annoyed him.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the comment that put him over the edge apparently:

[http://scripting.com/images/2012/02/19/somePeopleAreVeryVery...](http://scripting.com/images/2012/02/19/somePeopleAreVeryVeryDim.gif)

<comment><USER5> Actually, that comment came in as I was turning off comments. It just verified that I was making the right decision.</comment></comment>


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on what it means to be "an African writer" - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/01/shut-and-write <comment><USER2> This is a beautiful (and very true) passage:

"Among Nigerians, complaining about our problems is an art form. Most conversations quickly become a litany of complaints – about government corruption, no light, no water, etc. But if a foreigner were to say the same things, to recite the same litany of complaints, Nigerians would become defensive, sometimes angrily so.

"I have always been curious about this brand of defensiveness – which I myself often exhibit, by the way. It seems to me that we have it because we assume that the complaining Nigerian is aware that Nigeria is not only about its problems, is aware of the human complexity, knows of the intelligence and ingenuity of people, knows how they cry and laugh, knows what motivates them and what they aspire to and what they find meaningful. And we suspect that the foreigner does not know these other stories about us and so we worry about being defined solely by what we do not have and by what we are not. And so our defensiveness emerges."

<comment><USER3> This is true of many kinds of people (e.g. New Yorkers, Parisiens, text editor/programming language aficionados, etc.) They complain about whatever it is they hold dear, but take umbrage when outsiders do so.

I hate to use a NNT-popularized phrase, but it's partly because outsiders don't have "skin in the game", and their complaints don't come from a place of shared adversity and knowledge, but from a place of unearned superiority and ignorance.

In most areas in life, you have to earn the right to complain.

<comment><USER4> NNT?

<comment><USER5> Nassim Nicholas Taleb

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It is to be scrutinised for the right kind of African representation. You > are required to perform the rituals. You are required to bow to the > expectations of citizenship.

I totally get this. I wanted to write a book which centered around my life in high school. One thing that worries me is that even though Africa is a diverse place, there's an expectation that "African literature" should be written in a particular way on particular subjects and experiences. I doubt coming from an upper class family attending a fancy private school counts as such.

<comment><USER7> Maybe you could write the African version of "Crazy Rich Asians"?

<comment><USER6> Lol, that would actually make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Highly recommend her work! I've read Americanah and loved it. My partner read Half of a Yellow Sun and also really enjoyed it.

</comment><comment><USER9> _" It is difficult in the West to talk about the connections between creating and citizenship because of the general ideas placed around art, that it is a thing apart, that an artist by creating suddenly becomes a citizen of an imaginary and apolitical land of other artists. There are people in the West who use the term "political" almost as a pejorative in reference to a work of literature. (I emphasise the West because in parts of the world called developing, art is often not seen as automatically separate from politics.)"_

This is quite poignant and on the nose in my experience. I'm a dark science fiction author and this has been my understanding of the situation in my field also. With the Sad/Rabid puppies, Gamergate, Racefail, etc. its always been a large discussion that politics should stay out of art, or that art should be apolitical, or that politics in art is pandering/bad.

I feel that the selection of politics in art is actually quite specific- 1984, Farenheit 451, Ayn Rand's works are political with esteem. But works in a distinctly diverse voice are often chagrined for it- the new star wars stuff, the new star trek stuff (even when the old star trek stuff, which is also quite diverse, is well regarded). I've seen criticism that these are 'too political', but I've yet to see someone complaining that 1984 is too political of a scifi piece, or that Brave New World is shoving too much politics in its scifi. But I may just not be adequately read on criticisms of those works- I only have so much attention and I've found the loudest voices are of the most recent works of our time.

So I agree that in the West, describing fiction as political is sometimes used in a pejorative manner, even though several well-regarded works are very political. It's just certain politics are broadly considered 'too far' and hyperfocused on identity in a negative sense. I don't understand this phenomenon myself, actually, but her observance is also my observance here as a Western writer.

But her later writing, about not only writing politically, but also being viewed in a political light are also true to me. Even as one does not write with a political agenda, the writing will be interpreted in a political lens and then you the author will be held responsible. This contrast between that which is viewed politically and that which is written politically is a core of significant amounts of chagrin within the field of science fiction writing.

The final paragraph, before the quote, encompasses so much that I relate to. (I still respect that, as an American author, I could never fully relate to her experiences as a Nigerian author. I respect that her experiences are her own. Merely that I relate to aspects of it.)

 _" That question "Are you an African Writer?" is one I have been asked many times, and there are times when I have answered "Yes", a yes that reflected my ambivalence but also my anxiety not to be misunderstood. I belong, was what my "Yes" said, I belong. But that "Yes" often came with a whisper: "But you must let me belong on my own terms, on multiple terms, for that is the essence of art.""_

<comment><USER10> I think that the issue isn't that people don't want politics out of their art entirely. It's that people seek a balance, and right now, the balance is atrociously tilted in favor of politics. It is a very common mistake across a wide range of fields to mistake an imbalance and a desire to move back towards balance as a desire to move right past that balance and keep going, made by both people desiring the move and those fighting it. But I think this is a balance problem, not a "get it all out" problem.

Of course, it's also scrambled by the way the Internet amplifies every outlier voice, and you can get yelled at simultaneously for having too much politics and not enough. And we've got a good group of folk running around and projecting politics everywhere, and screaming at you if you resist them.

You'd get tired of even your favorite food if everyone you knew was literally sticking it in your mouth at what felt like every available opportunity. And even if it's a very healthy food and desirable in every other way, you're not going to enjoy it.

While I'm not sure I call myself "an anime fan", I've found myself going there a lot more lately, because either A: the Japanese culture right now is a lot more willing to just _tell a story_ and not provide me with the "correct" interpretation, complete with social pressure and serious threats of ostrichization if I don't agree with it or B: I'm oblivious to the politics because I lack the context or C: I can see them but I haven't been rubbed raw by constant exposure to the issue, or I have no particular reason to care (e.g., a series clearly tackling the political issue of Japanese government censorship, but it's pretty easy for me to be fairly detached from the politics).

<comment><USER9> Regarding anime, I think anime has its fair share of constant politicking. In fact, I recall several important anime being discussed in political discourse in japan- especially among the depiction of homosexual relationships/homosexuality as an identity and how sexualised depictions of young girls can be. I myself am not japanese, but I am aware of this discourse occuring among people I know who are far more expertise on the subject than I am. I encourage looking into this matter if you are curious.

I think that the balance is quite confused- as I stated before, the most well- lauded works are almost all highly political, especially in science fiction. My confusion is that there is a claim there is too much politics in a field whose foundational works are all political works. This makes me believe that it is not that it is political, but that political views around certain narratives are less acceptable than other political views, and are considered "too far". The actual lines are quite fuzzy and filled with nuance, similar to the essayist's experiences with being an "African writer".

<comment><USER10> I wasn't clear. It isn't that anime never has politics. It is that there is anime that isn't political, and quite a lot of it. (I mean, you can always read something in, but if there is a such thing as "not political", there are many animes that are this.) In the west, the latter is becoming rare. At least, in the mainstream. If I may anthropomorphize a bit, the dominant political narrative in the West for the past ~60 years is sensing it's own growing weakness and facing significant challenges for the first time in several decades, and it has responded by cranking up the volume. If you are not precisely in lockstep with it, the volume is quite deafening and it's hardly a wonder that it's turning a lot of people off.

I would also distinguish "political" from "philosophical". A _lot_ of anime is _philosophical_. That's not what's bothering people. Ghost in the Shell musing about what it means to be human and what the line between human and machine will someday be isn't telling me which candidate I need to vote for or else I'll be cast into the outer social darkness where there is much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and deplatforming.

<comment><USER9> Ghost in the shell is a direct exploration into the ramifications of sentiment after nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. This is a really political event and it explores the ramifications of this political event. It's steeped in politics, and even explores the gender identity of being an android.

Also, for what I've experienced in the west, I am not seeing what you are seeing- the " telling me which candidate I need to vote for or else I'll be cast into the outer social darkness where there is much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and deplatforming". I'm unsure where Star Wars has done this, or, say, that weird female-cast remake of Ghostbusters? These were fairly mainstream works from what I understand, but they weren't about voting or who to vote for. Their politics, from what I understand, was entirely about who was casted and the choices in casting them, not about candidates.

I'm really confused now. I don't understand where you're discerning politics from philosophy. An anime about exploring the ramifications of the nuclear bomb and the human identity including gender of androids is philosophical, but the dominant western media is about candidate voting- of which I don't know any mainstream western media directly saying who to vote for?

<comment><USER10> I take it you are mainstream politically for silicon valley? You won't see the colored tint of the politics of the media culture if you're already wearing spectacles of the same tint. New Ghostbusters absolutely has opinions about what you should believe and who you should vote for. Hollywood is drenched in it nowadays. It can't hardly produce anything without it. Recent Star Wars was full of it too, yes.

I'm not sure why you think Ghost in the Shell was about the nuclear bombing. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone take that angle on it before, and I've read some stuff about it. It's primarily about technology, most of which doesn't exist yet. And if it differs, it is that it doesn't necessarly _take a stand_ and tell you what to believe, like Hollywood does so much today. I guess that's my primary line-draw on philosophy vs. politics. I see so much less "cartoonish buffoon with obvious badthink vs. righteous, all-virtue rightthinker" in anime.

If you don't believe me, you can easily put it to the test, if you're on social media. Just try posting that you'd like to see some bit of media that reaches across the aisle and treats a Trump voter with some degree of respect, in the interests of human brotherhood. Warning: You may lose friends if you do this. I've posted this challenge three or four times to people before now, and nobody's reported trying it, because on some level... you know.

<comment><USER9> _I take it you are mainstream politically for silicon valley?_

I'm not, actually. I don't live in silicon valley, and have no idea what the mainstream of silicon valley is in terms of politics.

Also, I think you may be approaching this with a lot more assumptions than is reasonable to be made here. You've made assumptions about me and my position, and instead of diverting to social media I would like to bring it back to the inherent politicality of western media and how it's distinctly more overt and telling people how to vote?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how many co-founders should I opt for? - mck-

I'm about to build a startup and I need to decide how many people I want in my team as co-founders. It'll be at a startupweekend event <comment><AUTHOR> I organised Startup Weekend Glasgow. At a Startup Weekend whilst the teams reflect a typical startup in skill set there are usually more bodies in the teams.

Most teams at Startup Weekend Glasgow were 5+ people where as in my experience a typical startup is made up of 2/3 founders.

<comment> mck- Why is there a discrepancy? Isn't the goal to build a startup that'll last? If most startups have 2/3 founders, does that mean that is an effective size?

<comment><AUTHOR> In my eyes the point of a Startup Weekend is to learn, network and experiment. If you create something that lasts then great.

The reason for the change in size is time. At Startup Weekend you have 54 hours. 2/3 person team means everyone still owns a reasonable amount of the company and should give a good mix of skills.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is going on with Brazil? - <AUTHOR> They look like they don't belong on the field. <comment><USER2> This post is not a good fit for Hacker News. Please re-read the site guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thought they'd be bad against Germany without Neymar. Didn't think they were THIS much of a one-man team.

</comment><comment><USER4> The main problem is too many defenders who seem more comfortable attacking than defending.

They haven't played too well throughout the tournament, and they came across a German team with accurate passing and clinical finishing.

They simply couldn't maintain their nerve and their discipline after the first goal.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How many goals does Germany need to score before they call the game?

<comment><USER5> 10 please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do games like this grab the interest of the haters out there who say there's not enough scoring?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Best joke would be if Neuer runs forward and scores a goal.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there any "moneyball" style analysis on the teams?</comment>


Netlify CDN Outage - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlifystatus.com/incidents/2hn44zlbyh6h <comment><USER2> Netlify is describing the outage as being the result of some kind of attack:

"We're currently suffering an attack that's affecting our Free and Self-Serve CDN. Enterprise is currently unaffected. We are working on mitigating the effects and will update with more information as it becomes available."

</comment><comment><USER3> I understand the growing pains Netlify must be going through. They have created a great product, and are becoming very popular. I'd love to see the Enterprise version (or any paid version) segregated out from the free sites so we can get more reliable uptime.

The build pipeline was down for several hours a few days ago, now a CDN outage makes things much worse, as it's taken down all our sites.

I'm sure they will resolve things quickly, in the meantime our clients will start asking about other failover options.

<comment><USER4> According to their overall status page, they already do run two separate CDNs for normal and enterprise customers: [https://www.netlifystatus.com/](https://www.netlifystatus.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It'd be really cool to see a writeup of what is going on at Netlify.

<comment><USER6> They are tweeting about it, and I'd expect a post mortem as they have been transparent in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So I wasn't going crazy haha - just today we migrated our site to Netlify from Heroku and the second I wanted to demo it my boss the COO, it was failing and not loading.

It wasn't just netlify though. I also was having trouble loading random websites like aptible, youtube, imgur.

</comment><comment><USER8> This affects us too. We were able to migrate to zeit now in ~30 mins.

<comment><USER9> Will you migrate back to Netlify when Zeit will suffer a similar downtime?

<comment><USER8> We're definitely staying on Netlify after this outage is done. We pay for some of their enterprise features, e.g. audit logs. We just need our sites up right now and zeit was a fast, temporary alternative

<comment><USER9> Do your DNS records have a short TTL to enable such a quick switch from one provider to another?

<comment><USER8> Fortunately (or non-optimally), our DNS TTLs were 300s (Route 53 default) so our sites were not fully accessible off Zeit for ~5 mins. This wasn't too bad given that our sites were completely inaccessible from Netlify.

One day when we're bigger, we'll extend those TTLs

<comment><USER9> Short TTLs are bad, but I confess using them in some small scale projects in anticipation of this kind of worst case scenario :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My site is back up. (1:13 EST)

EDIT: intermittent issues now. Sometimes nothing loads, sometimes everything, sometimes SSL issue, sometimes HTML but no CSS or JS load. (1:22 EST)

</comment><comment><USER10> Their CDN hostname, `cdn.netlify.com`, resolves to a DigitalOcean node, so it seems like they are rolling their own instead of delegating to a third party.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yup, Stream's blog is down as well. Thought it was WPEngine at first, but turns out it's netlify.

</comment><comment><USER12> Huh, loaded HN because it seems YouTube videos are down for me. I wonder if it's related.

<comment><USER6> Another comment claimed that Netlify rents servers from other providers, so this could be the case.

FWIW Youtube is fine for me right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> insane coincidence but literally the minute i started my first project ever on netlify just to play with it, i deployed it and nothing was loading; i kept googling and thinking it was my fault and then it clicked to check their status page and alas.

<comment><USER14> So it was YOU who took down the network then

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> netlify.com appears to be affected as well.

Curious if this is a software issue or a host issue. I believe netlify rents a lot of its infrastructure from other providers, such as Digital Ocean.

<comment><USER15> At any sort of scale (which I have to imagine netlify is running at), this will be a software issue since hosts are designed to fail.

Serving static content is crazy easy for computers, my guess is a bad configuration got pushed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bad publicity is still publicity, right?</comment>


"How old is the shepherd?" – The problem that shook school mathematics - <AUTHOR> https://mystudentvoices.com/how-old-is-the-shepherd-the-problem-that-shook-school-mathematics-ad89b565fff#.5x3ke7lml <comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting observation that also applies to other (non- mathematical) problems. Our minds try to find answers even if there is no data to deduce it. Thus, we come up with (un-)logical explanation and get the result that looks "about right" to us, but of course has nothing to do with the reality.</comment>


Is heroku great? Maybe - <AUTHOR>

Ok, managing a platform is not easy, I can imagine. But try to put yourself in my shoes.
Me: My users receive mails which go into the spam. Heroku: There might by an issue, I'll pass it to the team
Me: I can't migrate my db. Import does not work. Heroku: There might be an issue with pgbackups. Will pass it to the team
Ok, I did not pay anything so far, but this attitude does not lead me to think "I am willing to pay those guys to host my app".
Have you had a similar experience? <comment><USER2> I'm having one right now. I've been trying to deploy a Rails app for the past 3 days. It's ready to go live, I've setup the landing page and signup forms, now I just need to test connections. I finally reached my personal EOL and contacted support yesterday but I haven't heard anything back yet. We will see.</comment>


In Memoriam René Sommer - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/In+Memoriam+Ren%C3%A9+Sommer <comment><USER2> Jacques, I never took you for a story-teller but that was humane and very touching. May Mr. Sommer rest in blissful peace, my thoughts and positive energies go to his friends and family.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to do the man justice, only a personal meeting would have done that.

This is the best I could do to revive a sense of the sort of person he was.

I've met a lot of people over the last 15 years, very few have made such a lasting impression based on so little actual contact. As someone else already touched on in this thread he must have left a trail behind him of such events and I don't doubt it for one second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll never look at my Logitech mice the same way again. Thanks for sharing such a nice story.

</comment><comment><USER4> Extrapolating from this little story, René Sommer probably touched many souls along his life's journey. This, in my opinion is as important as his contributions to the computer mouse. Thanks for the nice story. Rest in peace René.

</comment><comment><USER5> Glance at my mouse and, yes, its a Logitech. Thank you for this story.

</comment><comment><USER6> I tip my little blue wireless Logitech mouse to Rene, and to you Jacques. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER7> We often get so immersed in detail that we tend to forget that it's _not_ about the ones and zeros. It's all about other people. Thanks for the reminder, Jacques. RIP Rene.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is just a beautiful obituary. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER9> A well told story about great people. And also a refreshing break to have people who know about Engelbart rather than trying to locate all UI design on a certain infinite loop in Cupertino.

</comment><comment><USER10> that's a wonderful story!

</comment><comment><USER11> Quite a guy.</comment>


How To Share Google Reader Stories to Google Plus - <AUTHOR> http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_share_google_reader_stories_to_google_plus.php <comment><AUTHOR> There should be an easier way to do this.</comment>


Google, Amazon, MS have paid AdBlock Plus to allow their ads to pass through - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/02/google_amazon_taboola_microsoft_adplock_plus_unblock

<comment><USER2> This seems to be growing:

Adblock Edge - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock- edge/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/)

The strangest thing is that I've seen ABP advertising for job openings here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> If true, any suggestions on alternatives that work just as well as this (used) to?

<comment><USER4> Afaict, there is a single checkbox to click ('Allow some non-intrusive advertising') to not see white listed ads. I do not see ads from Google, MS, etc. when it is unselected.

<comment><USER5> I have the box checked and I recently started seeing Youtube ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i've recently found µBlock to be a great alternative [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)</comment>


After Paris Attacks, Proposed French Law Would Block Tor and Forbid Free Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/after-paris-attacks-proposed-french-law-would-block-tor-and-forbid-free-wi-fi <comment><USER2> Given that these particular terrorists didn't appear to use Tor, what's the point? Or are the French doing something proactive, instead of just reacting like the USA's TSA?

More likely, this is just the French "Intelligence Community" pushing for something they've wanted for a while, but haven't had a good excuse.

<comment><USER3> > _Or are the French doing something proactive, instead of just reacting like > the USA 's TSA?_

Why is it that you're giving the French the benefit of the doubt here, framing their actions as being "proactive" rather than reactionary? Who says it _isn 't_ reactionary? If you were an executive officer or politician in charge of the nation's security apparatus, and it became clear that a massive security disaster happened not only your watch, but planned in the open on places like Facebook, prioritizing the legislative agenda towards Tor and encryption is a _reactionary_ tactic to cover your own ass. To see it otherwise may be a bit naive about how human organizations work.

<comment><USER2> Well, clearly intrusive, dragnet surveillance didn't help the French snoops to find the Paris attackers - apparently they communicated in the clear. So, if they're really going to ban usage of Tor and other things, they might, possibly, have some otherworldly explanation that makes it "proactive in a Dilbert sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in the "intelligence services know not to waste a good opportunity to expand their powers" camp.

I'm not as sanguine as I used to be about Internet freedom. I can now imagine the great firewall spreading to all nations, spurred by these events and the publics general disinterest.

Can you imagine how different the world might be in 20 years?

<comment><USER5> Like you said, this is very much on the lines of the US/UK govt claiming encryption as the culprit for everything. There would have been a push for this anyway, irrespective of whether the Paris attacks had happened or not.

The implementation would likely be forced at ISP level, blocking known Tor nodes. But then, Tor is larger than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good luck blocking Tor...</comment>


Ask HN: Sorry for a silly question about a port speed - <AUTHOR> Just wondering if 2 Gbps Port Speed (VPS Hosting) is enough for streaming 30min. mp3 audio for about 10 - 15 permanent visitors of a website. And how many it makes (2 Gbps) in Mbps ?<p>Thank you so much. <comment><USER2> MP3 audio is usually encoded at rates in the hundreds of kilobits per second (topping out at about 320 kbps). You can get pretty good audio quality at 128 kbps, and adequate voice mono quality at 64 kbps. Thus, 64 to 320 thousand bits per second per stream depending on desired quality.

2 Gbps is 2 billion bits per second. (Thus, 2000 Mbps). Even if you lost half of the available port bandwidth to link overhead, etc., you could host somewhere between three thousand and fifteen thousand simultaneous MP3 streams with that much bandwidth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'm really gratefull to you, Sir.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Forget to precise, tracks are about 192 kbit/s (medium quality)</comment>


Paul Goodman: Compulsory Miseducation (1964) [pdf] - vezzy-fnord http://arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/goodman.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> _> In the tender grades, the schools are a baby-sitting service during a period of collapse of the old-type family and during a time of extreme urbanization and urban mobility. In the junior and senior high-school grades, they are an arm of the police, providing cops and concentration camps paid for in the budget under the heading 'Board of Education'. The educational role is, by and large, to provide -- at public and parents' expense -- apprentice- training for corporations, government and the teaching profession itself, and also to train the young, as New York's Commissioner of Education has said (in the Morley case), 'to handle constructively their problems of adjustment to authority'._

 _> These are a few speculations of one mind. My purpose is to get people at least to begin to think in another direction, to look for an organization of education less wasteful of human resources and social wealth than what we have. In reconstructing the present system, the right principles seem to me to be the following: To make it easier for youngsters to gravitate to what suits them, and to provide many points of quitting and return. To cut down the loss of student hours in parroting and forgetting, and the loss of teacher hours in talking to the deaf. To engage more directly in the work of society, and to have useful products to show instead of stacks of examination papers. To begin to decide what should be automated and what must not be automated, and to educate for a decent society in the foreseeable future._

</comment><comment><USER2> For all interested in alternative approaches to education, I recommend A. S. Neill "Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing" (1960), especially chapter 1 (about the Summerhill school itself). The schools started in 1920s, and sadly, we made no progress in that direction in the last century.

Link: [https://trisquel.info/files/summerhill- english_1.pdf](https://trisquel.info/files/summerhill-english_1.pdf)</comment>


Top Posts of 2013, Stats, and Snoo Year's Resolutions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2013/12/top-posts-of-2013-stats-and-snoo-years.html

<comment><USER2> That is a lot of page views and a long average visit time. I make that a cumulate of about 20k years of time spent on reddit this last year... That's a lot of down time if I've got that right. Edit:screwed the 1st try, maybe second is better.</comment>


Without a Vaccine, Researchers Say, Herd Immunity May Never Be Achieved - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/24/894148860/without-a-vaccine-researchers-say-herd-immunity-may-never-be-achieved <comment><USER2> Do we _need_ herd immunity? Note, I'm in favor of vaccination, but I don't understand why the press keeps on ignoring other pharmacological interventions that can potentially "downgrade" this disease to something far more manageable.

Instead, the press keeps on talking about the "miracle vaccine" which will come eventually.

No comment on the section on immunity. Sloppy reporting at best.</comment>