Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/business/media/panama-papers-leak-signals-a-shift-in-mainstream-journalism.html <comment><USER2> I don't have many quibbles with the rest of the piece, but not sure what the "shift in mainstream journalism" referred to in the headline is. That journalists would break big stories using suspiciously obtained data and documents? They've been doing that well before Snowden and Assange became famous. What _would_ be a shift is if mainstream journalists _did_ go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that in any of their previous leak investigations...nor has any other mainstream organization done that with leaked information (e.g. Guardian with the Snowden documents). However, you do see a lot more news organizations putting up the data/documents that they legally obtained for public inspection...a recent example that was on todays' frontpage is BuzzFeed News's repos:

[https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews](https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews)

However, the "shift" that I _do_ see happening, that this article underplays, is the cooperation of dozens of news organizations to independently and securely investigate a big data/document dump, something made possible by today's technology and cloud hosting systems, and agreeing to an embargo date. This "distributed investigation" paradigm is very new in journalism, and I hope to see a lot more of it.

<comment><USER3> >What would be a shift is if mainstream journalists did go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that

This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material. The so called mass/mainstream media never seems to share links when reporting about new laws being passed or new studies being published.

<comment><USER4> It's not about shielding the public from access to their sources. It's about shielding their sources from the public (or from any interest groups who might wish to retaliate against the sources should they be named individuals).

Traditionally speaking, confidential sources were most often _people_ , and not always documents. Or they were people passing along documents. These people needed protection from those whose interests their leaks would disrupt. And thus, a strict code of confidentiality is often considered to be part of traditional journalistic ethics.

I'm not saying this is always upheld, everywhere. I'm not saying certain unscrupulous publishers won't hide behind or twist this code to their personal benefit. But the code exists, at least ostensibly, for a good reason.

<comment><USER5> Furthermore, there's the issue that some of the data could represent a compromise of a person or group's identity and/or financials.

Recklessly releasing data (according the mainstream media) could put (very important) people at risk...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The NYTimes was not "privileged" enough to have been a part of this new leak. To me this is them displaying their sour grapes. I also don't believe it was any accident they were not a part of the leaks. This is not the same paper that published the Watergate burglary.

<comment><USER2> The New York Times is quite literally not the paper that published the (main) Watergate story...Watergate came from the Washington Post. Maybe you're thinking of the Pentagon Papers?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States)

The NYT's public editor looked into the matter here:

[http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/why-no- big-...](http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/why-no-big-splash- for-panama-papers/)

> _I talked Tuesday afternoon with Marina Walker, the deputy director of the > International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who told me that her > organization's model – which she calls "radical sharing" – has not proved a > good fit for every news organization. In previous projects, she said, ICIJ > worked with, or tried to work with, other news organizations, including The > Times, and "it wasn't always a good fit."_

> _Part of that, she said, is the idea of sharing all material, not keeping > anything exclusive. Another part is agreeing to observe embargoes for when > material would be published._

<comment><USER6> You know, you're right... i completely messed that up. Though I think my original intent of the post is right. It's a shame HN doesn't let me go back, and edit my post to hide my shame :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm unconvinced by the main argument of the article - that the Panama Papers signal a shift (perhaps paradigmatic?) in mainstream journalism.

Yes, the PP leaks are different than Wikileaks, and yes, the ICIJ reporting/investigation is different than most other cases of investigative journalism, but one outlier doesn't a shift make.

Simultaneously, the article does bring up some thought-provoking points, like the need by journalists to consider how they may be strategically used by leakers of data for their own ends. But that's not really a new consideration for journalists, either.

Granted, the article's author is unlikely to have titled the piece, so perhaps the author would assert that the article wasn't trying to make the argument defined by the title. Yet, all in all, I found the article to be sometimes interesting but ultimately unpersuasive.

<comment><USER8> I really hope the name "PP leaks" does not catch on.

<comment><USER7> lol, good point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an aside, I'm surprised tax code simplification isn't a bigger issue in this current US presidential election. Apple and Google hold billions of dollars outside of the US in order to pay lower taxes. I would have thought more people would be looking for solutions to this common problem.

<comment><USER10> I don't see how the money held outside the US is connected to tax code simplification. If anything, taxing that money would make the tax code more complicated, not less complicated.

<comment><USER11> It might be complicated to tax that money, but if we simplified tax code there would be fewer complicated ways in which people can legally get the money offshore in the first place. Tax simplification is a prevention, not a cure.

<comment><USER12> It wouldn't help in the mentioned cases, though - the money was received offshore in the first, it didn't "go" there.

<comment><USER13> Is that true? I'm not an accountant, but I thought a lot of companies do things like give ownership of a technology to a foreign subsidiary and then have their US operation "license" that technology at high cost to move profits overseas as well. Maybe that loophole was closed though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe rather than a shift, it's a divergence. The Panama Papers represent classic journalistic values. It's what we want to expect: the truth uncovered. It's been a stark contrast to see news outlets blatantly ignore the Panama Papers, representing a very different set of values. Online discourse has provided a means for a growing portion of the population to see the difference and make their own choice.

<comment><USER15> While the Panama Papers have been leaking away, the MSM have either made no mention at all of the Unaoil bribery scandal, or have pushed it far away from the front page.

It's quite hard to find these stories without a direct link:

[http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor- was-t...](http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor-was-trusted- middleman-for-oil-firm-involved-in-bribes-inquiry)

[http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities- monaco-raid-oil-firm-unaoil-hq-corruption-investigation)

Maybe those classic journalistic values believe that allegations of the comprehensive corruption of the oil industry just isn't all that interesting as a story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The elephant in the room (for the past, I dunno, half century? century? something like that) is that in the 20th century the news media transitioned from being largely allied with the public at large and substantially working class folks to being entirely a part of the "establishment" and being dominated by elite, upper class perspectives. The media just does not do hard hitting investigative journalism any more, as a rule.

<comment><USER12> Really? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%80%93American_War)

I think they are just losing the veneer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This will be the most underwhelming leak unless the full leak database is released. Otherwise it just stinks of a political power play. I would argue that instead of signalling a shift in mainstream journalism it signals a shift in cyber warfare tactics/strategy.

</comment><comment><USER18> The greatest shift is the incredibly good opsec that the organizations and journalists keep. It is a wonder.

<comment><USER19> Against us ordinary people, yes. Against nation-state attackers I am not so sure. From which would you conclude that?

I am pretty underwhelmed by the disclosures so far. Aside from Cameron nobody powerful in the western world has been hit. The majority in political power are those opposed to US or EU interest.

<comment><USER18> Just wait. They are laying the trap now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's annoying the media has not even focused on the cyberattack element in all this. The theft and circulation of private legal data.

<comment><USER21> Protecting their source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> We allready sold out to the advertisement industry, the military sector and everyone with a double trigit bankaccount. So feed and caress us mighty invisible hand, or we shall bite you, for we know all your secrets? Journalism ala Mafia? That is the future? Can i have Wikileaks back please? I rather prefer people not in it for the gains.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you build if you would be a multi-billionare? - <AUTHOR>

What would you build to change the world if you would be a multi-billionare? Like Elon Musk trys spaceships, elektro car, Honda trys humanoid robots, arab sheikhs build super tall buildings. What would you do if you someday would have enough money? <comment><USER2> Attempt to make money very efficiently, in any way reasonably practical and moral, particularly ways which are hard to duplicate absent having a billion dollars in your back pocket.

Give it to someone who had demonstrated ability to turn money into positive charitable outcomes, in preference to giving it to the government or typical NGOs, who mostly have demonstrated ability to turn it into sinecures. Better yet, give it to many such someones in parallel, because portfolio theory exists.

Continue maximizing on my comparative advantage in wealth generation as opposed to being comparatively ineffective but personally involved with charity, for the purpose of impressing people in cocktail conversation. Charity is, like heart surgery for my children, something I value highly enough to leave to very expensive dedicated professionals.

<comment><USER3> > Better yet, give it to many such someones in parallel, because portfolio > theory exists.

This is a bit of a controversial topic among many people I know--not settled by any means--but portfolio theory doesn't really say what you think it does here. In particular, portfolio theory suggests diversification because it reduces variance, generally at the cost of some (small) amount of return. _Since your utility from money is concave_, variance reduction improves expected utility.

Your utility from lives saved in the third world is (or should be), I think, linear. (Perhaps even convex, though that's a much more complicated argument.) While if I were a doctor, the 100th life I saved would seem a lot less interesting than the first, I don't think it has any less moral impact. Conclusion: variance reduction has little to no value, and if you think charity X is (in expected value) any measurable amount more efficient at $goal than Y, you should reallocate all donations from Y to X up to the limit of what X can efficiently spend.

<comment><USER4> Just to back you up, the idea that risk aversion is not applicable to charitable giving and that you should optimally give to only one charity is fairly uncontroversial amongst the Effective Altruism movement, and has been talked about since before that movement had a name:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/1997/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/1997/01/giving_your_all.html)

<comment><USER5> It's an interesting article, but I'm not sure I buy it. Boiled down, it sounds like the author is arguing for philanthropists to have only one cause. But maybe I care equally about helping this generation with hunger and future generations with saving the rainforest. I get that I could help hunger more by redirecting my rainforest money, but why is it logically the case that I should?

Also, I find it interesting that the article discusses multiple causes, but not multiple organizations within one cause. There are hundreds if not thousands of organizations focused on cancer - to which do I give my donation? Only one?

<comment><USER4> > But maybe I care equally about helping this generation with hunger and > future generations with saving the rainforest.

This is exactly the "delusion of grandeur" being argued against in the article, though:

"[people donate] as if they were thinking, "OK, I think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see what I can do about cancer."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A modular, standardized system for building houses where you buy X external walls, Y internal walls, window type A, skylight C, flooring sections, etc .... Walls would be come wired for electricity with snap together connections, roof sections with pre-wired solar panels. Allow people to order parts and put together their own home, or do so with friends like an old fashioned barn raising.

Tornado damaged your house? Order those parts again, disconnect the damaged ones, snap in the new stuff. Baby on the way? Disconnect an external wall, add a few more panels and you've another room, no need to move. Use recyclable materials (melt down one of the 'airplane graveyards' and use the steel and aluminum for a start).

The goals would be to reduce the waste involved in constructing houses as well as achieve economies of scale through mass production that would allow buying a home to be no more of a commitment than buying a car. No more 30 year mortgages, no more being 'house poor'.

Young and just starting out in life? Buy enough for just a kitchen, bath, and bedroom ... add more as you can afford it.

Open the standard for wall, floor, roof, etc... connections so vendors can offer 'after-market' parts for your home if you want something special or more individualized.

<comment><USER7> I like this answer, because you have put some thought into this. I would add to your idea these things: a) all components are "man-portable", so that they can be put together by people without the use of cranes or heavy lifting equipment (this is a big deal in construction), b) have external mounting points so that they can be attached firmly to a building skeleton, allowing for building out a skyscraper using only manpower once the skeleton and elevators have been put up.

I will say that here in the South, we have a similar product which is located in "trailer parks". It is worth looking at the failures of the existing trailer parks when looking at ways to make cheaper housing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd try to fund a network of after-school/summer activity centers for the west and south sides of Chicago.

<comment><USER9> Great idea. You could start smaller though. I particularly like Blackstone Bicycle Works & The Chicago Jesuit Academy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd buy up two chunks of radio spectrum (from the FCC), one medium range and one long range ("to the horizon"). I'd then set out some ground rules (e.g. digital only, packet header uIDs are registered/allocated centrally, your app must be able to ignore other user's incoming traffic, some broad rate limit, etc).

Then I'd licence the two channels to "anyone" who wanted access at fairly inexpensive rates (e.g. free for development, few cents for production, small fines if you exceed the rate limit). Then I'd let people use this spectrum for more or less whatever they want.

Want me make an inter-car communications system? Want to make a "smart-home" system? Want to control your Christmas tree lights from a wireless switch? Licence my spectrum.

The current lack of freely usable spectrum is a huge bottleneck to lots of innovation. You often see WiFi get abused since it is the closest thing we have to a "use for anything" spectrum, BlueTooth and NFC both have too many inherent limitations.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think I'd throw more money at those initiatives where they grow meat in labs. Factory farming is a horror, and cattle do tremendous amounts of damage to land all over the world.

Veganism is part of a solution to end animal abuse, but it's currently too hard of a cultural adjustment for people. We need a better, commercially viable solution.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would fund research into self-reproducing robots. I would then launch them into space where I would use them to mine the asteroid belt, shooting materials back towards earth where they would trapped in earth's orbit and safely dropped into the atmosphere. I would use the profits for philanthropic causes.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would build a new city. Not some attempt at utopia, but a fresh start in a remote but desirable destination. The town would be seeded with a university and focused on outdoor recreation, startup (and self-employment) culture, and diversity. Basic employment would include the university, but also tourism and startup incubators. Non-basic would initially include something like a brew- pub and grocery store. Basic amenities would include subsidized internet, alternative energy grants, public transportation to outdoor recreation and nearest major airport. The planning of the city would be based on Traditional Neighborhood Design and include a large buffer zone to prevent sprawl.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd actually be doing exactly what I'm doing now, though admittedly I'd change out the ramen for a more well balanced diet. We're bootstrapping, but if I was a billionaire I'd be dogfooding :)

Let me explain...

We discovered investing your money in social causes is incredibly difficult, so we're building out the Giving Graph to make it easier to be the Bill Gates of whatever your main social cause is. You shouldn't need to recreate the infrastructure of the Gates Foundation to be as effective a donor.

[http://kyn.me](http://kyn.me)

[disclosure - I'm the founder of Kyn]

</comment><comment><USER15> I believe the biggest opportunity for human progress is the development of some kind of affordable, portable & clean energy system. From 'energy' you can get most everything else you need. People could pull water form the air in dry regions. Grow food indoors where the environment is not supportive. Power computers and mobiles for education and information distribution. Run bug zappers in malaria prone regions. It really does seem the foundation to further progress for much of the developed world. I believe once we have this we will see progress on the scale of the industrial revolution.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would try to buy enough land to start building cities or compounds in various places.

Ultra efficient, lots of solar power and initially strong infrastructure, health care. I'd fail a time or two and might not be able to do everything at once, but i*d surely try. Living there would cost a portion of income, but included would be internet and housing and electricity and health care and things like that. Possibly healthy food if I can figure that out.

Yeah, definitely a dream :)

</comment><comment><USER17> A game company that offered experiences for mobile that rival those found on console and PC. I don't mean in terms of graphical fidelity or gameplay length, but in richness of how stories are told or really taxing a player mentally to solve a puzzle. Right now the most famous games for mobile are ones like Angry Birds, Clash of Clans, etc. which I find pretty sad personally when the equivalent on other platforms are games like Deus Ex or the Zelda series.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd get in touch with Givewell, and make sure that adequate funding goes to the charities that are very important but too small for me to research myself.

If you have billions of dollars, you can try funding one really big thing, which might fail - or you can fund a thousand smaller things, some of which will fail and some of which will succeed. The latter is usually better for the world.

</comment><comment><USER19> Invest in think tank that will work on figuring out a model of governance/society that will ensure no one goes hungry, no one lacks healthcare, everyone has access to education/learning material in their chosen field, there is little or no income inequality - maybe a society that does away with money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 1\. A Space Travel. Would pay Roskosmos or NASA for a travel. 2\. Build a whole new industry - Flying cars. I know, I know it's very complex story, but I would invest a billion on this! 3\. Build a competitor to SpaceX and make it even better. 4\. Find a Foundation to help people those need help, like Bill Gates does. 5\. There are more... but for now I'll keep them for myself.

<comment><USER20> >I know it's very complex story, but I would invest a billion on this!

Just for perspective, GM spends something like 7 billion USD a year on R&D. I'm not saying you can't make progress with a billion dollars on the problem, but a billion is not a gargantuan sum when it comes to things like cars. Tesla already spends a few hundred million per year on R&D for a much less ambitious problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1) I would fight with government and fix bad driving and road accidents in India and China. India is the current world accident capital.

2) Build a quora like website where anonymous government employees explain about various happenings in the govt and politicans minds. Eventually, I would make it a real time corruption alert machine.

</comment><comment><USER22> I believe Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin is the only reasonable answer to this question. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Chip that assembled carbohydrate molecules. Make fuel, lubricants, food out of electricity. From thin air. Change the world, circumvent expensive and fragile economies of farming, drilling, refining and shipping.

</comment><comment><USER24> Attempt other models of education - alternatives to universities - so I could still hang out with younger folks, teaching and learning.

Or flee from my country to a place with Amazon Prime.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would pour billions into desalination R&D to chase an efficient, non- polluting and economical solution to providing clean water to the world.

</comment><comment><USER23> Modular safe city - and install around the world in troubled areas to give people an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER26> An encyclopedia of pollenating insects, with repositories of all the research about those insects.

</comment><comment><USER27> A bot making company to abolish all jobs and probably myself.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd want to go check out the polar glacier on the moon.

</comment><comment><USER29> Money fort.

</comment><comment><USER30> Map the ocean floor.

</comment><comment><USER31> Atlantis</comment>


Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/21/20924697/google-unionization-switzerland-zurich-syndicom-zooglers <comment><USER2> Call me a cynic, but Europe isn't the USA.

There are a lot of countries in EU which have, IMO, better work culture and fairness of negotiation as the guiding philosophies behind the work.

If Google did this in the USA, it wouldn't be seen as much. However, they have strong laws against this in EU, and this incident would not portray Google in favorable light, IMO.

I also feel that it is high time engineers realized that fairness in work is something we'd all love to have, and historically, skilled people have kept unions to ensure that they don't get screwed over.

I believe that at the end of the day, if you need fairness in negotiation, you need to have a way to express it, especially if it isn't supply driven.

<comment><USER3> I'd vote for everyone who has a reasonable plan of more scrutiny towards 40 hour work weeks.

This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?

<comment><USER4> _> but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow_

Nope, that's just in the USA, us in Europe not at all.

And I'm not even comparing EU salaries vs US salaries just tech salaries/property prices ratios for each location.

You're not overpaid, it's us that are severely underpaid in comparison.

<comment><USER5> The lower salaries are probably due to the lack of VC funding, which in turn is rooted in a lack of really successful European tech companies.

If you work for a European company, chances are it won't grow and be successful to the same extent as an American one, and therefore your work has less value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Better workplace protection for whistleblowers and protection from sexism and company retaliation seems like a good thing for google. There have been a stream of these court cases. I think this is actually something that would also benefit google - they seem to constantly struggle with this. I think google is no worse than other tech companies and based on my time there I think the company is well intentioned. They are just so large, a little more structure could help them.

Of course, union members with workplace protections don't usually get stock grants, free food, and a free gym. Google needs to address these problems themselves, but of course it's so hard for big companies not to just try to stop unions.

Instead of stopping unions, work on those workplace protections. Stop hiding problems and paying off executives with tons of sexual harassment claims to go away.

<comment><USER7> It always seemed "funny" how come executives with more wealth than some cities get to become sexual aggressors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To those reading the article from America: whatever is mentioned here about Europe or unions, please note that Switzerland is a planet on its own in Europe,with completely different mentality,laws and is hardly comparable with any other country. Also, the entire tech sector in there is more of a high end because of the costs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Remember when Google, Apple, and "dozens more" stole billions of dollars in wage theft from their own devs?

[https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon- valle...](https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most- celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/)

[https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles- wage...](https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing- cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/)

<comment><USER10> The illegal conspiracy here was real, but "wage theft" has a specific, different meaning.

<comment><USER9> You're right, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm by no means familiar with labor law, but are companies (in Switzerland or the US) required to actively support unionization? It seems like it would be one thing to actively oppose unionization, and another thing to require the organizers to provide their own meeting rooms, space, etc. Looking at the article, it seems like this is the latter.

<comment><USER12> Can only answer for Germany, but yes, here the employer is required to provide for the initial meeting where the first employee committee (Betriebsrat) is elected. This includes rooms, paper etc but in particular informing all employees about the initiative as well as freeing people up during their paid work time so they can attend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been thinking lately that we, as people working in the tech industry, especially in places like London, NY, SF, are in a unique position to self organize in a way no other group of workers is.

We are fortunate enough to live in a period that our skills are extremely sought for, we tend to work and specialize in code bases or technologies specific to a company, but we at any time we can take these skills and move away.~

The atmosphere and the general consensus in most companies tends to be that "no one is irreplaceable" which is true but it doesn't seem to take into account the cost to replace someone: You will need to find the right person, which means that some engineers' time will be spent on interviews, either phone ones or face to face, and not delivering "value" for the company; once you find the right person, you will then need to spend at least an extra month where that person is getting up to speed with "how things work" (paired with another person probably, even more time spent not delivering "value"), plus some more time for that person to actually become productive, and eventually after a few months, get in the position of the person that left.

Now, think in your immediate team, what is your bus factor? How many people would need to leave before it's going to be unsustainable for the feature/project/company to continue?

The usual counter-argument is that "it's easy to leave if you're young, but when you have family, you have to think more than just yourself" and I can totally sympathize with this. But as I said in the beginning, especially if you work for in one of the big hubs, and/or in one of the FAANGs, you could probably be in a new place within a week's time.

We don't need to "unionize" in the traditional term. The companies don't even have to "acknowledge" a union. As long as we keep in mind how fortunate we are to working in tech now, and we are determined to just walk away from places that we are not happy at, they will come to us.

<comment><USER14> Until you compare your salary and expenses to that of someone who was working blue collar 40 years ago.

My dad made enough to support a family of four as an appliance repair man. He got a new car every so often, built a shop and had a home mostly paid for and we went on vacations. Going to the doctor wasnt a big deal and no one worried about being bankrupt from a hospital stay/

I am supporting a family of four and we get by. My car is 18 years old with 260k miles on it and I am hoping to get another 3-4 years out of it so the kids finish college. (community college, I am not rich and cannot afford anything else). The family is one major medical incident away from bankruptcy and I have good insurance

You tell me how good you have it and I will reply that is because you dont know how good it could be.

<comment><USER15> This is very true, most people i talk to do not realise labour's share of income has been declining for 50 years straight.

Here is a link by no other than the IMF: [https://blogs.imf.org/2017/04/12/drivers-of-declining- labor-...](https://blogs.imf.org/2017/04/12/drivers-of-declining-labor-share- of-income/)

<comment><USER14> I am not in blue collar :)

I make 6 figures a year in IT and cant keep up with what he made fixing washers

<comment><USER16> How can you be one medical emergency away? My max out of pocket is 7k, that covers pretty much any emergency. I already met this year and all procedures are free.

My wife had a brain surgery few years ago and our insurance company paid around 150k and we paid max OOP and not a cent more.

<comment><USER14> Example : My brother recently fell off a roof and broke his back. Paralyzed now from the waist down. Can't work. Insurance is now gone because he cant work to pay premiums. That first year was great... insurance covered everything. Now... his long term care will end up being medicare disability which means he loses everything he owns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > In the email, Google said it was canceling the meeting because the company > prefers to only host events on the topic organized in partnership with > Google's site leadership team.

So this was a meeting organized solely by employees, using company property, on the company campus, on a workday, with the only speakers allowed being the union reps?

I'm not surprised management would try to cancel that, it sounds like a pro- union propaganda party at Google's expense.

<comment><USER18> I don't know about Switzerland, but most European countries have laws that explicitly require companies to permit unions to operate on company property.

Many countries even mandate that stewards (union representatives) must be allowed to spend part of their working time on union work.

<comment><USER19> Unions in Switzerland are not very common compared to France or Germany.

<comment><USER20> More than half of Swiss workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements. That's much higher than in the US at least; not sure about France/Germany.

<comment><USER21> Are the mechanics the same in Europe and the US?

For example, in Italy most people have a contract which follows the collective agreement obtained by the unions for that specific sector (i.e. commerce, textile worker, metal worker etc) even if people are not part of any union. If you are a member of the Union you may get some extra legal help or such, but not a different contract.

From what US people say it seems instead that members of a union live in a separate world.

<comment><USER22> > From what US people say it seems instead that members of a union live in a > separate world.

Not really. Because of the way labor laws work in the US, the unions seek exclusive representation over members within a bargaining unit, which means that _all_ employees within the bargaining unit are members of the union as soon as 51% of the bargaining unit votes in favor of the union. That precludes the possibility of employees having the choice between two different unions to represent them (or none at all), which is common in most European countries.

It's pretty rare to have union and non-union members working _in the same role_ (as opposed to at the same company, or at the same jobsite but under different employers), and even less common to have two people in the same role represented by two different unions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google has become such a garbage company to be honest. Is anything they do nowadays good and honest?

I think Google heavily needs to be split up.

<comment><USER24> Having worked at many large companies, I can honestly say that Google was the best behaved company of all of them, by far.

I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees, and they're given a lot of latitude to speak their mind. When something bad happens, _everybody_ hears about it because the employees are the ones shouting it loudest from the rooftops.

Their track record isn't perfect, and Dragonfly particularly strikes a chord with me. But other companies do worse, and you're just much less likely to hear about it.

<comment><USER23> > I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of > "activist" type employees

Yes, I believe also this is the case. This is also in my opinion the biggest issue with Google nowadays and what makes it extra garbage. They seem to be caught again and again to use their large size to surpress and censor people and companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a SWE at Google, and as much as I love unions, I'm not sure it makes sense for the software industry.

Further, the larger tech companies already have a concept of "levels" to ensure some sense of pay equality, we already get better benefits than you can get anywhere else in the states.

Realistically, what more will unions accomplish at a place like Google?

I'd love 6 weeks of paid vacation as much as anyone. I don't see us getting that. I'd love to make twice as much money. I don't see that happening. I'd love for promotions and hiring to be more fair / better, but I don't see how this accomplishes that (nor do I know anyway to improve it).

<comment><USER26> > I'd love 6 weeks of paid vacation as much as anyone. I don't see us getting > that. I'd love to make twice as much money. I don't see that happening. I'd > love for promotions and hiring to be more fair / better, but I don't see how > this accomplishes that (nor do I know anyway to improve it).

Not at Google so I can't comment about them directly.

Also very neutral on unions, so don't take this comment as my preference.

6 weeks may seem hard to get, but many companies offer only 2 weeks, and 3 weeks seems the norm. 4 weeks seems doable with a union (although it may not be necessary - more and more companies are offering 4 weeks).

Non-compete clauses are something unions can help with (I know they're not allowed in CA, but lots of other states allow them).

The amount of time or how often one is on-call can be something unions can help with.

Conditions for severance can be something unions can help with.

On the flip side, unions can also make things a lot worse. YMMV.

<comment><USER8> I'm in the UK. Currently have 25 days of paid holidays + 8 bank holidays. I believe this is a bare minimum one needs in order to maintain straight head and not go mad. I appreciate that's not something most people get across the pond, however I do see absolutely zero reasons,why this couldn't be the case over there as well. However,many heads had to roll and tons of blood was spilled in most European countries for these things to become a norm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Meanwhile, in other offices, Google employees have been posting memes in solidarity with their Zurich colleagues, criticizing management for trying to control the talk about unionization.

memes?

</comment><comment><USER28> Wouldn't unions at Google be bad. If unions imposed rules guaranteeing seniority benefits/tenure rules that would make it harder for younger workers.

I am a fan of unions for blue collar work but unions/labor orgs for higher pay organizations seem to be bad because they prevent foreign workers from entering and they make it harder for young people.

<comment> daniel-cussen The NBA and NFL are unionized and they don't make it harder for younger workers.

<comment><USER29> In both the NBA and NFL, younger players are subject to the draft and there are caps on rookie contracts, and in the NFL young players only get restricted free agency. Similar restrictions and caps for younger, less-experienced players also exist in organized baseball.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I imagine Google is what It is today because of their workers, not managers or enforcing "drinking of the Kool Aid", so to speak ¯\\(°_o)/¯</comment>


Rethinking Low Completion Rates in MOOCs - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/rethinking-low-completion-rates-in-moocs/55211?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

<comment><USER2> Completion rates is a pretty poor measure of what I think we really care about the most: educational uptake and learning.

On a side note, I'm a little disappointed in ed-tech. I was hoping for a revolution in pedagogical approaches. But it seems we are still working on it! Bring on the brain-plug learning a la Neuromancer, et al.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is a low completion rate causing concern? I never completed the machine learning course by Andrew Ng - my schedule didn't always wind up aligning with the times allotted for homework, and to be honest, there was some laziness mixed in there later on as well. I still got a lot out of the course - I've unexpectedly found myself having to do a lot of machine learning work at my new job, and the stuff I was exposed to in the Coursera course has helped to orient me.

A couple comments on that page stood out for me - one, that even with a low completion rate, more people completed a single online electronics course at MITx than have ever done so in person in the entire history of MIT. Second, the comment likening MOOCs to books - even if I don't finish a book, I still get value from reading it.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's kinda funny somebody takes this numbers so seriously. My completion rate must be something about zero, but it would be nonsense to say _I 'm not learning_. I hardly ever follow the course "in the real time", which means even if I do all my homework it almost never is full-score (most of the time even doesn't count as completed at all: for example on "archived" courses on edx) and by no means I do _all my homework_. In fact, right now I can remember at least 2 courses which are extremely hight in my personal "amount of practical knowledge gained from it" toplist, for which I completed exactly zero homeworks and never even watched video on the coursera, because it was easier for me to get it from torrents. For courses with programming it often is downloading assignments, but never submitting them. Why? For various reasons. Sometimes I want to try to do something in other language than suggested one. Sometimes I can think of something more interesting or practical or challenging to do, based on topic I just learned. And if it is the case it actually means I just gained much _more_ from the material than if the best I could do would be just completing what is expected from me. Sometimes, of course, it's the opposite: the material is to easy or just silly for I would care completing assignments or even watching all the videos. And, yes, sometimes (rarely, though) the homework seems to be too hard and time consuming than I'm ready to be doing. Sometimes all I do on the course is using forums, sometimes I never even open the forums once. Sometimes all I get from the course is accidentally getting myself interested in some another topic, very slightly related to the course itself, and I'll be investigating on this topic reading various stuff for a very long time after that. In short, I never even tried to be "completing courses" on MOOC, I just tried to learn what I'm interested in _maybe_ using the course material, maybe not, doing things on my own pace, deciding what I should spend time on by myself, and my observable online behavior hardly tells anything about how much I actually invested in learning something.

So this attitude of "You see these low completion rates?! Not like in _real_ universities at all!" is just silly. Because, yeah, right, MOOC aren't like "real" (old-fashion) universities: it's entirely different and ultimately much better thing. It's about _learning_ , not about _completing courses_ , even if creators of these courses don't think so. Test scores and graduating rates are notoriously bad measure even for "real life" universities, and thousand times more so for MOOC.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the low completion rates of MOOCs are, while not necessarily a _good_ thing, also not a bad thing, and basically _symptomatic_ of a good thing. In terms of committed costs, MOOCs for the most part are more like textbooks than traditional college classes, even on an a-la-carte menu as one might have available through a community college or extension program. The cash cost is fairly low, the effort expended in enrolling is low, and the time/effort cost is just the time and effort expended directly in online course activities, not driving to a fixed class location at a fixed time that forces giving up other activities with time conflicts (you still have to give up other activities, but you are more flexible as to which ones), etc.

So they are cheap to experiment with and don't have a lot of sunk costs that people feel they need to justify that stops people from abandoning them if once they get in they expectations aren't met, circumstances change, etc.

So there's a lot lower risk, and people can try a _lot_ more to find what they are looking for. I've finished maybe a third to a half of the MOOCs I've enrolled in, and I certainly wouldn't do that with college classes -- but that doesn't mean that I'm less well served with MOOCs -- the cost of college classes is high enough that I wouldn't _take_ most of the MOOCs I've _completed_ \-- much less all those I've taken and often still gotten something out of without completing -- as traditional classes, because the risk of something with a higher priority in my life changing so I couldn't complete them, combined with the cost that goes into a traditional college class, would be too high.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just recently launched a startup trying to take on this challenge of low completion rates in MOOCs: www.madrassa.co (you can read more in the about section concerning this insane dropout rate of MOOCs)</comment>


McCLIM progress report #1 - <AUTHOR> https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/posts/Progress-report-1.html <comment><USER2> McCLIM still living? That's very surprising and very, very cool.

Pity that it didn't get more active when there was the phase of the "Young Lispers" a few years back. I fear this project will continue to suffer from missing mindshare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, we're slowly moving forward and attract new users. I'm from this wave of "young lispers" myself :)</comment></comment>


A thoroughly modern particle system (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/ <comment><USER2> Author of this article is also the creator of new vfx system Notch: [https://www.notch.one/](https://www.notch.one/)

Besides that he's a legendary member of demogroup Fairlight as noted below. One of my favourite people to talk to at demoscene events :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is old, but it is still an incredibly good writeup of how one can achieve beautiful and impressive GPU particle effects. I loved the demo when it was released and I have watched it again and again over the years. It has a mesmerizing quality to it.

<comment><USER4> What demo are you talking about? I don't see any links to something like that within the article itself.

<comment><USER5> Demo is called Blunderbuss, by Fairlight: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53950](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53950)

Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCpYH8yDK8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCpYH8yDK8g)

<comment><USER4> Awesome, thanks for the links!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A flaw in this technique is that you only get particles from things on screen. If you want particles to fall from off screen down or float up into view, you have to compensate with a traditional CPU particle emitter.</comment>


Statement by a quarantined nurse from a northern California Kaiser facility [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/NU-Quarantine-RN-press-conf-statement.pdf <comment><USER2> If the world had taken this seriously a month ago we wouldn't be in this situation.

If the world took it seriously today, we wouldn't be as fucked as we're going to be a month from now.

Front-line personnel must always be first priority, because they deserve that, and because everyone else needs them.

<comment><USER3> If we took it seriously, what would we have done differently? Do you think there are specific actions that we could have done, and what would the different outcome be?

<comment><USER4> "The CDC shunned WHO test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn't work as expected." [https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus- covid-19-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus- covid-19-test)

The CDC could have adoopted the WHO guidelines for testing at the start. It's reasonable to assume that if they had, the US would now have a much greater testing capacity.

<comment><USER3> What, specifically, do you think more testing will do? Think through the implications, for example, if we test an enormous number of people and they are positive, do we quarantine them? We don't actually have the health infrastructure to do that (nor the political will to run large-scale quarantines).

(personally, I think the CDC is a lot wiser than WHO about what to do in the US, and making decisions during a rapidly expanding epidemiological situation isn't just trivial "test more people").

<comment><USER4> >What, specifically, do you think more testing will do?

The CDC & other testing authorities have been systematically denying requests by doctors and other health professionals, to test people who are at meaningful risk of Covid-19 infection. Indications are this is due to a lack of testing capacity.

There are numerous news reports of CDC refusing testing. It seems odd that anyone is missing them.

Here are some examples of what I'm referring to [https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/N...](https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/NU- Quarantine-RN-press-conf-statement.pdf)

[https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-man-denied- coronavi...](https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-man-denied-coronavirus- test-japan-trip-fever-cough-2020-3)

[https://news.yahoo.com/us-patient-coronavirus-unknown- origin...](https://news.yahoo.com/us-patient-coronavirus-unknown-origin- denied-test-days-223535154.html)

Here's a case where doctors kept pushing back against CDC refusals. Eventually the woman tested positive. [https://www.ajc.com/news/breaking-news/breaking- floyd-county...](https://www.ajc.com/news/breaking-news/breaking-floyd-county- hospital-reports-preliminary-case-coronavirus/jdJ51FpSCJGJk4gibQEg6M/amp.html)

If these aren't enough examples of CDC's ongoing testing problems, there are plenty of others - all there for the searching.

<comment><USER3> Do you believe that more testing will limit the spread of disease? Please, explain in detail why, while also considering the risks associatd with large- scale testing.

(I'm an ex-biologist with a fair amount of experience in this area; I think most people who are demanding tests assume that having a bunch of tests will limit the spread. it's entirely unclear that's the case)

<comment><USER4> >Do you believe that more testing will limit the spread of disease?

While the US is looking forward to an explosion in cases, South Korea is looking forward to containment. One factor is that SK tests at 700 times the rate of the US. re: [https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing- covid-19...](https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing- covid-19-tests-per-capita-chart-us-behind-2020-3)

> Please, explain in detail why, while also considering the risks associatd > with large-scale testing.

No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Video version here:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/NNUBonnie/status/1235663306246860...](https://mobile.twitter.com/NNUBonnie/status/1235663306246860800)

</comment><comment><USER5> Health professionals are subject to triage just like ordinary patients? In a pandemic most people will be a long way out on the tail.

</comment><comment><USER6> The CDC needs to clean house.

</comment><comment><USER7> Waiting in line. Priority subject to unaccountable officials. Yup, sounds like government run healthcare.

<comment><USER8> you're right! lets just let the free market decide! /s

in reality though these are private institutions run with private money. how can you blame the government when it seems they have little interest in acknowledging there is a problem in the first case.

<comment><USER7> I didn't realize that the county and state health officials, as well as the CDC were private institutions. My bad.</comment></comment></comment>


OSM-ready data sets, thanks to Esri, Map With AI partnership - <AUTHOR> https://tech.fb.com/osm-ready-data-sets/ <comment><USER2> Regardless of what Facebook or ESRI says, in order to import data into OSM, you must follow the Import Guidelines ( [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines) ). Which includes wider OSM community consultation. If you ignore these rules, your data is likely to be deleted.</comment>


Server-Sent Events: The simplest realtime browser spec - <AUTHOR> https://segment.io/blog/2014-04-03-server-sent-events-the-simplest-realtime-browser-spec/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this basically what we did some 10 years ago with a hidden, slowly loading iframe? It was widely known and used then, I suppose the technique became less important and forgotten with AJAX arrival and is now being rediscovered.

The only problem with this is c10k - you have to have _something_ writing to the socket and this "something" was basically a process in most cases. It's a great fit for async things like Node or Twisted/Tornado, though. And for Erlang.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the umbrella term for this HTTP server push is Comet[1], and it's been around in various forms for years. But standardizing this in the form of server-sent events is a very Good Thing, especially with support baked into modern browsers.

Also, unlike WebSockets it's also easy to add SSE support for mobile clients. I've implemented a SSE client class in just over 100 lines of Java, and it's similarly easy to do this with NSURLConnection/NSURLSession on iOS. The W3 standard provides an implementation section that reads like pseudocode.[2]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29)

[2]: [http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/#event-stream- interpreta...](http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/#event-stream- interpretation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I particularly love how you can get Server-Sent Events out of a CouchDB database changes feed. This is such a powerful and extremely easy way of sending real-time updates to a web client.

<comment><USER5> That sounds really neat. Do you have any links to resources or blog posts explaining how you hooked the two together? Does CouchDB support that out of the box?

<comment> vertex-four Just did a bit of research, and while it doesn't seem to be documented in the guide, simply appending ?feed=eventsource to the changes URL should get you the event source URL in CouchDB >1.3.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SSE is great. We wrote about it in quite a bit of detail a while back.

[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/01/09/building-the-new-ajax- mai...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/01/09/building-the-new-ajax-mail-ui- part-1-instant-notifications-of-new-emails-via-eventsourceserver-sent-events/)

There's a couple of annoying caveats

1\. The "retry" nature of the connection isn't quite as reliable as suggested. See the blog post above for more details

2\. NAT timeouts. Make sure you have some sort of "ping" either at application or TCP level.

[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/05/28/push-events-nat-tcp- conne...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/05/28/push-events-nat-tcp-connection- timeouts-and-device-sleep/) [http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/06/28/http-keep- alive-connectio...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/06/28/http-keep-alive- connection-timeouts/)

3\. Each SSE connection is regarded as a regular site connection. So if people open up 6 tabs to your site, you might suddenly find your site is unresponsive to users because every available connection is used by an SSE connection. You might need to implement some inter-tab communication system instead.

[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab- communication-u...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab- communication-using-local-storage/)

</comment><comment><USER7> It is a really nice things, except IE doesn't implement them so yeah, kind of useless.

It would be nice to say screw IE users but not everyone can do that.

<comment><USER8> SSE is listed as "under construction" on the IE roadmap: [http://status.modern.ie/serversenteventseventsource](http://status.modern.ie/serversenteventseventsource)

<comment><USER9> "Under consideration" actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice post, and interesting timing, just published a post on how to do SSE with Java: [http://eranmedan.com/server-side-events-sse-in- java](http://eranmedan.com/server-side-events-sse-in-java) and... I must admit the Node.js version is clearly more concise and elegant :) but still this is one of the simplest ways to do server side "push", if only IE supported it... though you can always use a polyfill: [https://github.com/Yaffle/EventSource/](https://github.com/Yaffle/EventSource/)

(though that polifill didn't work for me for that example, but I didn't spend much time trying to figure out why)

<comment><USER11> Yeah I love how dirt simple SSE is. WebSockets tend to be the go-to choice for realtime push, but many applications don't really need a bidirectional socket. SSE for server->client and XHR for client->server interactions is good enough for typical REST apps.

Also, (plug alert) SSE is pretty easy to throw together using [https://fanout.io/](https://fanout.io/) and its HTTP streaming data transport, if you want to save yourself from having to set up any new server stuff.

<comment><USER5> It is not immediately obvious to me what fanout.io does from your homepage. Could you add an example?

Clients register to listen with the fanout.io CDN, then my app pushes something to the CDN, and fanout.io handles pushing it to all of my end clients?

Can I determine which subset of users receive the message, or is it "all or nothing"? Are clients able to listen on a specific topic/name?

I'd love to get more info, but I didn't see any higher level explanation and don't have time to dive into docs right now.

<comment><USER11> Yes, Fanout works as a publish-subscribe service. Clients listen on channels (topics), and you publish messages to channels which Fanout then delivers to the right clients.

In the case of HTTP streaming, Fanout acts like a reverse proxy in front of your web server. Incoming requests are relayed to your server, and you can control Fanout's behavior depending on how you reply. For example, you can reply with a "hold" instruction saying to bind the incoming request to streaming channel C. The transaction between Fanout and your server is now complete, while the connection between the client and Fanout remains open. You can then send messages to this client by publishing on channel C.

The process is explained in more detail on this post about our open source reference implementation: [http://blog.fanout.io/2013/04/09/an-http-reverse- proxy-for-r...](http://blog.fanout.io/2013/04/09/an-http-reverse-proxy-for- realtime/)

Implementing something like SSE is just a matter of responding with a stream subscribe with initial response of Content-Type: text/event-stream, and then publishing event chunks using SSE formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Cubed Surely chunked encoding would work more reliably for sending chunks of data from the server? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding)

<comment><USER12> It's one of the sad facts of life that when you design a popular protocol like HTTP/1.1 so that it _can_ do something, but don't actually _do_ anything with it, many implementers drop it.

Many HTTP servers will not allow you to specify precisely where you break chunks; I would expect that the significant majority of slightly higher level interfaces will not allow you to do that, rather handling buffering themselves.

Many HTTP clients will not allow you to read chunks precisely.

And as for the "event" paramter—well, such things are taken care of in RFC 2616 with chunk extensions; it would end up being

        <length of data in hex> ";event=" event-name CRLF data CRLF

e.g. you would replace the following chunk-encoded data (the first and last lines are artefacts of the chunked transfer encoding):

        1d␍␊
        event: poke␍␊
        data: "hey!"␍␊
        ␍␊
        ␍␊

with the following:

        6;event=poke␍␊
        "hey!"␍␊
        ␍␊

Unfortunately, chunk extensions have never really been used, so I dare say they assessed that technique and decided that it was simply going to require too much work. And so we're left with a new protocol on top of HTTP _reimplementing precisely what HTTP already did_ , but which people forgot about, possibly for performance reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Server-Sent Events rock; love what these guys have done with the live debugger - it's been -massive- help debugging our events (which go through segment)!

</comment><comment><USER14> FYI not compatible with any version of IE. Source: [http://caniuse.com/eventsource](http://caniuse.com/eventsource)

<comment><USER15> That was mentioned in the article, and some polyfills were given.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Honestly, much easier and more reliable via PubNub.com or such.

<comment><USER5> I have not used either service. What makes PubNub.com easier and/or more reliable?

<comment><USER16> Because they fail over several different protocols transparent to you.

And much more effective than DIY. API's are much nicer than old school.

<comment><USER16> Dear HN, why the downvote?

<comment><USER17> Didn't downvote, but that capability can be had without relying on an external service, and not really DIY since there are libraries (eg socket.io).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


React Talks Q3: the latest meetup recordings with descriptions - <AUTHOR> http://meetupfeed.com/react-talks-meetups-july-august-september-react-talks-digest-q3-2017/ <comment><AUTHOR> USA ReactNYC (New York, NY) The Road to Router v4 (44:34) Easy Server Side Rendering with GraphQL (18:38) Formik: Forms in React without tears (25:06) Storybook: a Visual Testing Environment for React (19:59) Getting started with GraphQL and React (28:30) Augmenting Reality with ARKit and React Viro (20:59) React Chicago (Chicago, IL) MobX (37:45) Automatic React SPA Delivery (21:24) React.js + Vim (29:52) Storybook for Prototyping and Testing of React Components (28:03) React Minneapolis (Minneapolis, MN) React Router v4 and animating transitions (53:35) Validate This, That and the Other Thing (44:32) ReactJS Austin (Austin, TX) Big Testing in React (37:43) ReactJS Portland (Portland, OR) Learn You Recompose (48:18) Prototype to Production (20:29) Phoenix ReactJS (Phoenix, AZ) Never Write Another HoC (51:07) Making Reactjs real time with WebSockets (39:17) Wentworth Computer Science Society (Boston, MA) Basics of ReactJS (45:43) UK React.London Mixing ReasonML into your React apps (37:10) CSS in React: Spoilt for choice (16:05) Lightweight GraphQL (26:52) Migrating from Angular to React: A tale from the trenches (39:21) The Curious Case of Monorepos (26:58) Building a real-time Q&A app using GraphQL (30:02) Germany ReactJS Munich PostgraphQL – Creating a Relay compatible GraphQL server without a line of coding (48:52) Embedding Microservice UIs (48:49) Austria React Vienna React ing htmlFor="empathy" (37:31) Gatsby 1.0! Build blazing fast static websites with React (and Markdown, GraphQL, WordPress & Friends) (36:54)</comment>


Digg Redesign Tanks- Traffic Down 26% (Updated With New Reddit Stats).  - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digg_redesign_tanks_traffic_down_26.php

<comment><USER2> You know what? Everyone is giving Kevin Rose shit for this redesign, but kudos to him for having the balls to take the risk to not rest on his laurels and try to improve. We'd all be lucky to be in his shoes to have that opportunity to take such a risk.

The reality is, some business decisions are bad. But you really don't know until you try them. i.e. you get nowhere without taking risk.

<comment><USER3> but he took the risk, then immediately left the company. He tried but didn't stay to take actions/accept the problems.

(Disclaimer: I'm assuming Rose left, and wasn't ousted out)

<comment><USER4> When he took over, right from the beginning he said this was temp till they find a suitable replacement. About a week before the v4 went public, it was announced that he would be stepping down as they found someone to replace him. After the v4 was released he stepped down as he promised he will do all these time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My usage of Digg is actually up recently. The front page stories have rarely been interesting since Digg went mainstream a few years ago.

Digg 4 is actually useful because it's like twitter without the chatter. The only annoying thing now is that they keep logging me out every couple days.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd suggest that much of the decline in traffic was due to the demise of the DiggBar, so it was fake traffic anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, RRW updated with actual stats from Reddit. which isn't a fair comparison.

If Hitwise's Reddit stats are wrong, then their Digg stats are probably wrong too. So you can't compare Hitwise Digg stats with Reddit real stats.

<comment><USER8> Hitwise and Reddit both reported the same trend. It just happened that the reality was about ten times better for Reddit than Hitwise reported.

Given that Digg didn't immediately chime in and say "hay u guyz, it was only a 2% drop," who knows? It may be Digg's reality is even worse than reported, and Hitwise remains conservative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote about this here <http://newslily.com/blogs/103> ...

To paraphrase, digg can still be saved.

1) The layout is freaking _horrible_. Yes, it's very CSSy, but you're not getting very much content (at least not stuff you really care about) without scrolling. Compare this to HN, or Reddit where it is just a list of stories. This is much, _much_ meatier. Compare "Foreign Affairs" magazine with a free college-town newspaper or something like that. The former is all content, the latter is _some_ content, and a ton of adverts.

2) A lot of the stories that were making it on digg were blogspammy nonsense, for the most part. It was lots of top 10 lists, 7 reasons why list, thinly veiled excuses to feature half-naked women, etc.

The problem was that is there _is_ a market for people who want both 1 and 2, but these people mostly don't want to have to _work_ to find this stuff. Digg v4 means that they have to do more than they are willing to (this is all subconscious) in order to get what they want.

 _This_ is the problem with digg v4. There were people who were _tolerating_ both cases because of the few good stories that did make it through, but digg took these away and showed them nothing but top 10 lists until they find people to follow. Bad move.

If Kevin (or whoever is steering the ship now) wants to save it, they need _Kevin_ to get on the air and publicly say that he screwed up (even if it wasn't him), is sorry, and that they're going to go back to what they had before.

Honestly though, it might be too late. A lot of digg refugees have found reddit, or HN, both of which are _hugely_ superior websites in terms of both content and function.

Mostly, digg needs to admit they were wrong, take it back, and play some heavy PR.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree with #2. Digg is being run by spammers and desperate guys who will upvote pics of any decent looking women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I dislike it when graphs are used to mislead like this. Take a look at the first graph, its baseline is .008%, not 0% like the rest.

It is already a huge drop, you don't need to try to lie to dramatize it more!

</comment><comment><USER12> Something is a bit fishy over at Digg..

At this moment none of the stories in top news have more than 100 diggs - except for one: The ad shown to me has 233 diggs..

Digg users sure must love those ads...

</comment><comment><USER8> Not at all surprising. My personal relationship with Digg was entirely destroyed by the redesign.

It basically went like this:

"Huh. My RSS feeds don't work anymore... Oh. Digg's redesign is out. Hmm... looks like I have to do a bunch of chores before Digg becomes useful to me again." -click-

And I haven't been back.

You have to be on drugs to think you can pull the rug out from under your users that way and actually keep them.

Evolving product is hard. Yes, sometimes you're going to have to cut features, re-imagine functionality or reconfigure the user experience. This creates a little grumpiness at first. If you stay true to the original mission of your product, users will deal with it because it's in the furtherance of getting to something great, and they care about that.

But: You've only got so much elasticity to work with in terms of your users being good sports in these transitions. You can't make a name for yourself selling turkey sandwiches and then "upgrade" to exclusively serving roast pork. There may be a union between the turkey people and the pork guys but a decent chunk are going to drop you and find the next-best turkey sandwich cart.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wouldnt point this out if it wasn't so apropos, but...

This is basically the same story I submitted last night, but posted by a user with higher karma and on the front page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722777>

Oh, the irony. =)

<comment><USER14> I think timing is more of a factor in this than karma... There are some times of the day when new stories are less likely to be voted up.

The only time when karma does play a role is for stories submitted by people that are in the top ten and are well known... But that's a minority

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do not believe Digg succeeded in their redesign, but I am thankful to them for trying. I greatly support Digg for being an ever-evolving platform.

</comment><comment><USER16> I genuinely interpreted this headline as that the Digg community had redesigned tanks to clear road traffic. The article was interesting but not nearly as interesting as I was expecting.</comment>


Erlang is at long last getting the break it deserves. - <AUTHOR> http://scaleordie.com/2008/05/17/erlang-is-at-long-last-getting-the-break-it-deserves/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's got some visibility. The question is: will they be able to run with it? Erlang does some stuff really well, and other things not so well. Will it remain the right tool for a specific job, or something people also use for a variety of tasks? Despite knowing and liking Erlang, my guess is that the first is likelier to occur:

<http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/09/22/erlang>

<comment><USER3> Erlang is great for writing high-availability, low latency server-based applications -- including web applications.

What people will use it for is up to their imagination. Wings3d (<http://www.wings3d.com/>) is a good example of using Erlang outside of its "intended" domain.

Don't forget that when Java came out, it was only "good" for writing applets...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've not tried it yet, but we have to do a particular distributed crawler app for something and it's been recommended to look at it. For me if a language is amazing at something then it would be prudent to focus on that. I often use more than one language in my projects - the best language for the particular job.

<comment><USER5> Erlang is best for software that works like telco switches, i.e., you have the need to route thousands of messages in real-time.

Chat, IM, SMS, message queues, etc. are all well-suited for Erlang. Tasks that involves lots of I/O and parsing, not so much.

<comment><USER6> So you're suggesting that IM, Chat, SMS and message queues aren't about Parsing and I/O?

Erlang has weaknesses, but certainly those are not it. Basically, Erlang excells at writing servers. Take a look at YAWS (<http://yaws.hyber.org/>) for a web server written in Erlang that can actually outperform more traditional web servers in very realistic scenarios.

If I had to name a weakness or two of erlang offhand:

1\. Integrating foreign code with Erlang is very different from traditional FFI and requires some initial legwork (libraries like Erlectricity <http://github.com/KirinDave/erlectricity/tree/master> , for example).

2\. String manipulation. Erlang doesn't have a real string type. Its string libraries and core string type assume using linked lists for strings, which is spectacularly inefficient. However, there is a movement and a proposal to change the string type to Erlang binaries and provide an alternative string library. Hopefully that will address the problem.

Other than that, it's a reasonably fast and rock-solid implementation of an FP language with a mountain of solid IPC library code integrated at the language level.

<comment><USER3> Representing strings as lists can be very efficient depends on what you're trying to do. Incidentally, Haskell does the same thing.

I think the "Erlang sucks for strings" argument is overblown, and it's rarely if ever backed by real world experience and/or data. Erlang is fine for most string handling tasks you'll find in a typical (web) application.

<comment><USER6> My personal experience has had erlang very poor at handling and manipulating large strings. By poor, let me be clear: slow and spending far too much memory.

We have to be honest identifying our tool's weaknesses, Yariv, even if we like them. EEP-009 (<http://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0009.html>) and EEP-010 (<http://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0010.html>) are extremely important for the continued growth and adoption of Erlang.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious -- what kind of string processing tasks did you try to use it for? Did you compare its performance to other languages? Also, did you try to use binaries?

Erlang may not be optimal for applications that do _heavy_ string processing, but the significance of that statement is overblown. Take typical webapps for example. What kind of string processing do they do? Very light stuff. They spend of their cycles slurping binary data from the database and sending it down a socket. Erlang is excellent for this usage. They occasionally take form inputs from a user, in which case they do some simple processing to ensure the input is properly escaped. Erlang handles that just fine.

Most of the "Erlang sucks for strings" arguments remind me of the "Ruby/Java is slow" arguments. They're sort-of true, but they just don't matter for most applications.

<comment><USER6> Why not contact me personally if you'd like more details via Twitter or AIM (this name). The short story: An attempt at a distributed web crawler showed that Erlang's default string type was not suitable for large strings.

Please don't confuse this sentiment with any anti-erlangism or any assertion that Erlang isn't fantastic. I just want to be realistic, and I'd love to have faster string processing to make faster routing code for Fuzed (<http://github.com/KirinDave/fuzed/tree/master>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Erlang may be getting the "recognition" it deserves, but... the "break" it deserves? Really?

Come on guys, give Erlang a break.

<comment><USER8> Also... "deserves" ?

Erlang deserves nothing. Its just another language - one which I happen to think has filthy syntax, and will probably never use for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was like 'scale ordie.com', what a strange sounding site. Ohhh, scale-or- die.com.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Facebook chat is a heavy erlang user

Heavy? They must be going by Facebook's user base, not amount of code (the system is a hybrid of multiple languages) or even actual usage (they just launched it, I doubt everyone has switched over from IM yet, if they ever will).</comment>


Elixir v1.5 released - <AUTHOR> https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2017/07/25/elixir-v1-5-0-released/ <comment><AUTHOR> This links to the proper release announcement.

Previous discussion from the github link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14846359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14846359)

</comment><comment><USER2> Does anyone actually use Elixir? If so: What makes it the right decision?

<comment><USER3> yes, and it's awesome, but you should go to the other comment explaining where the proper announcement discussion actually is</comment></comment>


Adobe Air surpasses 100 Million installations - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/29/adobe-air-is-flying-100-million-installations-accounted-for/

<comment><USER2> I still hate Air. Here's why:

Of all the companies, do we really want Adobe to be the gate keeper of yet another format? Isn't PDF and Flash enough?

Air encourages bad User Interfaces. One UI across multiple platforms leads to horrible, non-standard interfaces on _all_ platforms.

<comment><USER3> Yet another format? They are just churning out yet another app on the same flash format, that's been installed on almost over 98% of desktops all over the world! So what's wrong? And if you have used some specific apps like eBay Desktop on Air, it rocks, esp if you are a power eBay user. Air is a good thing, I just hope that they learn from their PDF/Acrobat mistakes and do not let Air/Flash go down that path!

<comment><USER2> erm, Air apps require Adobe Air -- not Adobe Flash.

<comment><USER4> erm, Air apps are basically flash apps with a slightly more powerful api and framework to run them offline.

<comment><USER3> Yea, I think Air definitely brings a value addition on an already existing web platform. To use the APIs, and create an app that can work with your site in an online/offline mode, and still present a compelling interface, there isn't a whole lot of choice I see...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's not a web app it's a desktop app.

You are creating a pseudo problem. You mother wouldn't even know it was an air app most probably.

I don't know what makes you think that those two paradigmes shouldn't merge. Nothing at all dictates that that shouldn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER5> Firefox is at 800 million, but I'd say at least 40 of those were me!

</comment><comment><USER6> I've never really used any app that runs on Air. What are the killer apps for this platform? There must be something big if they've got 100 million installations.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> pclark, well you will have a hard time finding a framework that is more fitted for online/offline services, that actually allows you to create a proper UX and design experience and that is so easy to get going with. No other crossbrowser frameworks work as well as this IMHO

<comment><USER2> for a bloody good reason -- it shouldn't be done.

The solution? Web Apps + Google Gears. Then it'll run on any OS, even iPhones -- and can be offline. You have the added ability of creating a "nice" UI that users will expect - if my mother was to open an Adobe Air, she'd be confused as hell. Its neither a web app, nor a native app.

Don't make web apps look like desktop apps

Always make desktop apps look like their native OS. If you can't do this, just make a freaking web app.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to have to disagree, an AIR application is no less a native application than a java program. There is no need for a network connection for it to run.

<comment><USER7> So what's the point of AIR? Why do we need it.

<comment><AUTHOR> For many different reasons a few of them being, that it's easy and yet powerful and let you create powerful professional apps with any degree of usability and UX you require.

It allows for you to blur the line between of and online in a much more smooth way.

<comment><USER2> and we've seen what adobe things "smooth" is from when Fireworks/Photoshop "smoothens" text.

Not at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> don't know what they did to you but apparently you seem pissed at them for some reason. It's just software mate.

You are welcome to find alternatives and no google has nothing even close to this. No one really has when you look at it from a holistic point of view, which I would normally recommend.

<comment><USER8> The holistic view is exactly why Adobe Air is bad.

It's not standard and it limits accessibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> So does Firefox plugins, I don't see anyone leeching out against that. It's a weird puritan view.

Flash is as standard as you can get and air is just an extension off that allowing you to do more stuff off line.

<comment><USER8> Flash is not as standard as you can get.

The web standards are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Flash is neither of those. The specification is not controlled by a governing body. It is controlled by _one_ company.

Talking about Firefox plugins is straw man, has nothing to do with this conversation and I don't know any websites that require a Firefox plugin to work correctly. If they exist, I don't use them.

<comment><AUTHOR> saying that flash is not a de facto standard is surely missing the big picture on this. Sorry but what would you call the standard for showing video if not flash? What would you call the standard for doing animation or another other sort of rich manipulation.

Just because it's not open does not mean that it's not a standard.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>