HipChat is now free for unlimited users - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/05/27/hipchat-is-now-free-for-unlimited-users/ <comment><USER2> People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian.

Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.

<comment><USER3> The beauty of Slack, IMO, is in the nice integrations with _everything I already use_. Does Hipchat/JIRA/Confluence do that? (I honestly don't know)

For a small team, there's no reason (for us at least) to move away from Trello, GitHub issues, etc.

<comment><USER4> HipChat has a nice API that allows us to shoot notifications from TribeHR, our Linux production boxes, code commits, Salesforce, etc. to our company-wide channels. It's a nice communication tool to use to keep the whole team on the same page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HipChat is probably under fire from Slack. That's why I think they are making this change, because I just made the transition a few weeks ago and Slack has been amazing. Once you go Slack, you never go back.

<comment><USER6> Would you mind linking to the competing service you mention, or perhaps a review of it? I've been advocating for Hipchat but haven't seen Slack yet.

<comment><USER7> [https://slack.com/](https://slack.com/)

We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).

<comment><USER8> Does it integrate with 3rd party chat clients like Adium or are you forced to have their tab/client open too?

<comment><USER9> You can connect to it using an IRC client, but you lose the ability to view history or make edits to posts

<comment><USER10> You also lose the ability to _mention_ other team members, which is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Slack surely is putting HipChat on its toes. Competition is really good.

I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room.

It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app.

One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect".

Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.

<comment><USER10> > The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room.

Which really means that you can force people into a room, and there's no way to say "leave this room and don't let anyone force me back into it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Be aware that Hipchat are now rolling out a new "feature" in which the account admin can read all private 1-to-1 chat: [http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions- ideas/sugg...](http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions- ideas/suggestions/2757784-ability-for-admins-to-view-search-and-export-1-1)

This could be a significant issue for some, both morally and legally.

If you are using / are going to use Hipchat with this enabled, at least make sure you are aware of any legalities you need to conform to because of this. E.g. gather consent from employees.

<comment><USER13> if said service is provided by the employer, they own the data/communications and have every right to monitor the service. same goes for work email: employers have access to this. it isn't illegal for them to access these communications done on a work account.

<comment><USER14> That depends heavily on local laws and you really can't make a blanket statement like that.

<comment><USER15> And laws be damned, it's often employee moral that takes a hit when employers snoop without consent, and that can be just as costly (if not more so) than a court case in many companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My company recently started using HipChat and I really like it. I expected to prefer IRC because of the standard, open protocol and the choice of clients, but the HipChat application works much more smoothly on my Linux desktop than any IRC client I've tried, and it's been adopted more widely across my organization than IRC ever was - making it much more useful, even if that really just comes down to marketing it to appear more accessible. It's working really well.

<comment><USER17> Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first.

Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.

<comment><USER19> HuBot and mmBot (a C#/.NET port) has an adapter for hipchat

<comment><USER20> And for Jabbr, which is a Jabber implementation on Signalr (a realtime thingy of .Net).

It's actually pretty neat, you can try it out on : [https://jabbr.net](https://jabbr.net) (+ it's opensource if you want to implement your own team chat )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> We switched to Flowdock and never looked back. The SNR advantages of the integrated conversation threads and "email-like" inbox model are amazing. I never knew what I was missing with IRC/hipchat.

<comment><USER22> Same here. We "inbox" everything from support, to social media shares, some analytics, as well as code pushes. Love the way Flowdock handles those items and lets you make reference to them while talking in the main thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reminder: [https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our- te...](https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-terms-of- service/) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524)

<comment><USER24> Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc ([http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098](http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098)) before the same happens here;

      In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring
      after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to
      make a request by emailing email@example.com. As stated
      in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must
      have consent from their affected users in order to obtain
      access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way
      that an entity would have the right to access employee
      communications is through the entity's employee policy.
      It is standard practice among businesses to state in their
      policies that the employer has the right to access
      communications occurring on workplace systems. You should
      speak with your employer if you have questions about their
      specific data access policies.

<comment><USER25> >The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy.

It's nice of you to drop into this thread, but it's exactly as bad people assumed.

If I was an employer and I didn't cover this sort of breach of privacy in my employee policy, and someone at Atlassian bothered to ask (I'm sure that Atlassian invests in lawyers to vet each submitted request), I'd just add the language to the policy document and fire it off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server, with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead.

And people used to pay for that?

<comment><USER27> We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.

<comment><USER28> I'm sorry, I don't speak marketing. Care to translate what you just said for us non-initiated?

<comment><USER29> Which words are you having trouble with? That's pretty straight forward, but I'm assuming you're wanting to know more about the across devices thing... This is actually one of my favorite features. Their system keeps track of where you're logged in from and whether you're active or idle on that platform, then if you are sent 1-1 messages or mentioned in a room it will find you, delivering to a computer client first, then push notifications, then email--which is really valuable for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I just recently compared Slack and Hipchat and Slack seems to be the more advanced of the two at this point.

The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't ever tell who is at there desk when we need them.

Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on your desktop and your mobile device.

</comment><comment><USER31> I tried to sign up. I really did.

First I entered in my own details but neglected my lastname... didn't say I had to. It's a single name field. It rejected my submission and zero'd out the fields. Strike one.

Then it asked for my team members names and email addresses. It had a skip button, that was nice. I added their emails and used again their first names... let them add their last name or preferred name. Again it failed and removed all the data I entered. Strike two.

Then I attempted to download the client. It wouldn't let me till I verified my account. It will let me send solicitation emails to team members... but not download a client. Ok. Odd. I downloaded the client to my mac entered credentials and after about 4 minutes it failed to launch with a debug window displayed. Strike three.

I did try.

</comment><comment><USER32> Last I tried HipChat, it was a terrible experience simply because I wanted to not run yet another application and instead use Adium. They do support XMPP but to get it working you have to do magic. After I did the magic, I had chat up and running but lo and behold: file transfers did not work. Thankfully, this is when our team decided the experiment was over. We went back to using IRC. What fundamental problem do these new chat protocols solve that are not already addressed by IRC and XMPP?

<comment> brown9-2 Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe.

Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old conversations.

<comment><USER33> Overnight is covered by leaving a client running, with logging. Offline is covered by using a BNC[0]. These solutions are years old, but perhaps less user-friendly than hipchat.

There are a plethora of IRC clients to choose from one various platforms, but there's only the one hipchat. IRC is also an open protocol.

So, hipchat's only real chance is trying to be the Apple of IRC--they must _nail_ UX and marketing to the tech-hapless to have a real chance.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_\(software\))

<comment><USER34> That's pseudo-persistence, and it's only as stable as the client or bouncer. HipChat and Slack provide actual, stateless history, so you can reboot, logout, sign in from a mobile device, whatever, and pick up where you left off, with notifications in the meanwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've found Video Chat to be pretty terrible. I find it weird to market that as the upsell. Most of the time, we give up with Hipchat Video and switch to a Google Hangout.

<comment><USER36> I think their video chat is or was recently in beta. I imagine their biggest upsell in their 'HipChat Plus' package is searchable history which is a pretty important feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My biggest issue with HipChat is the inability to run multiple organizations on the same client. The video and audio "premium" features are really a terrible idea as there's Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference, and similar for that and they are free and core businesses and Atlassian cannot and should not attempt to compete with those!

<comment><USER38> Have you tried [http://Kato.im](http://Kato.im) ? They're the only product which supports multiple organizations in the same client -- and it's done in a really powerful way that doesn't force you to switch between orgs. You could have one or four open and still communicate effectively.

<comment><USER39> Flowdock also supports multiple organizations in one client.

<comment><USER40> It's true (and great!), but you can't see two conversations from two different organizations at the same time - have to click.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack is the ability to have custom emoticons [https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons- everywh...](https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywhere). Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...

<comment><USER42> Slack lets you add custom emoji too: [https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504)

<comment><USER41> Oh cool, thanks I missed that update

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Just moved our team to slack as well. Has definitely been a better experience.

</comment><comment><USER44> We moved from HipChat to Slack. HipChat desktop clients on OSX were crashing all the time. Most notably after waking up from a suspend. Slack is much more stable. The transition was pretty smooth.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm still with Slack. Can't make a webhook with HipChat, it shouldn't be hard this much.

</comment><comment><USER46> Do you guys worry about confidentiality with these services?

<comment><USER47> Yes. Every company I've worked for that had established (read not startups/not tiny) companies as customers could never use any thing like this due to contracts saying we won't be storing/transmitting their "stuff" on servers we do not control. [everyone hand waves email delivery but we can't use something like gmail].

These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".

<comment><USER48> They have a behind the firewall version of hipchat for security concious corp customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Dorian-Marie I think they should learn from Slack and make all the integrations at least as awesome as them, and also have some kind of more modern interface.

</comment><comment><USER49> HipChat is great, but I've found myself much more often on JabbR ([https://jabbr.net/](https://jabbr.net/)) to be honest. Might be because I am a sucker for SignalR.

JabbR is also free to use, you can have private team rooms if you so like and it integrates with a bunch of auth services.

</comment><comment><USER50> We use HipChat at work, and I use Slack for some other projects; both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC. But for those less technical it's a fantastic and easy to setup alternative. Pointless in an all-dev company, but anywhere else, priceless.

<comment><USER51> > both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of > IRC

I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way. HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a password. Ditto for the mobile apps.

I love IRC, but it's a very different thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I like HipChat but I really really wish it integrated with an irc client. I've spent hours trying to get a good experience with BitlBee and, well, it's anything but smooth. The single biggest thing they could do to help me and my coworkers out would be to allow our IRC clients to connect to the service. Other than that I love it.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder what the hosted pricing will be when it comes out of beta. At my work we will not even entertain something that cannot be hosted by us. Hipchat has saved 3 members of our 15 man team countless hours by integrating it into our workflow.

I if slack could be self hosted I would consider it but Hipchat has our support.

</comment><comment><USER54> Has anyone checked out Hall? It's chat, text, and file-sharing for teams. Free for teams for an unlimited time. But with the added bonus of being able to talk with ANYONE from ANY email address, instead of switching in and out of teams like on Slack. Try it out: hall.com

</comment><comment><USER55> We use a bunch of Atlassian products (Jira, Bitbucket, Tempo, Sourcetree, IDE Connector, Jira Agile, ) but while HipChat never caught on with us, Slack hit a home run.

That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it.

<comment><USER56> > That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we > will likely jump for whoever offers it.

Hangouts in G+?

<comment><USER57> We were using hangouts and google chat exclusively until we finally made the jump to HipChat. We still use hangouts for group video (morning scrum mostly), and hipchat for everything else.

Group video in hipchat would be a killer feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Is Slack cloud based? If so it's a big problem for a lot of compagnies, most of them don't want to host their chat service to an external provider, that's where Hipchat is very useful. You can host your own server in-house.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is awesome, we've been paying $100+/month for our company but never use video chat or screen share (nor did we want them) and have turned off history retention since day 1. Sounds like we can downgrade and pay nothing now.

</comment><comment><USER60> I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that.

I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.

[1]: [http://hackerchat.co/](http://hackerchat.co/)

</comment><comment><USER61> Maybe I haven't read enough about HipChat, but what is the advantage over google's chat? That you don't need a google account?

EDIT: ah, integration with other Atlassian products. got it.

</comment><comment><USER62> The biggest feature HipChat lacks is chat room sounds. That was my favorite feature of Campfire. Otherwise, HipChat is pretty cool, I guess.

I really miss chat sounds.

/sadtrombone

</comment><comment><USER63> Slack has a problem with retrieving deleted team URLs, seems like they have not covered all the test cases for the signup process..

</comment><comment><USER64> What would be best HipChat alternative for self-hosting? At my organization we are not allowed to use any external service.

<comment><USER65> HipChat Server

[https://www.hipchat.com/server](https://www.hipchat.com/server)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Two questions, if I may:

What are HipChat's advantages over other chat services?

What's a good, mainstream-ish, secure/encrypted chat service?

</comment><comment><USER67> The only reason my team prefers HipChat over Slack is because Slack doesn't have a Windows-client

</comment><comment><USER68> We just use Hangouts and everything integrated into Google Apps. What is the advantage here?

<comment><USER57> Hangouts are really annoying for persistent rooms that others can join and leave at will. We found we had lots of different combinations of people in different hangouts, and the conversations were really fragmented.

We use hangouts for group video, and hipchat for everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> We moved from Hipchat to Kato, mainly due to the bugs and frequent servers going offline.

</comment><comment><USER70> Hard to imagine that Google isn't going to weigh in soon with its own offering.

</comment><comment><USER71> this still doesn't fix the fact that there is no longer private 1 on 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524)

</comment><comment><USER72> That's great HipChat. Now can you do emoji autocomplete?

</comment><comment><USER73> It feels like they are pulling a amazon, ala diapers.com fiasco. *

Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that sector

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_book_how_jeff_bezos_went_thermonuclear_on_diapers_com.html)

<comment><USER74> It would seem that you don't know much about Atlassian, JIRA and Confluence is their core business, not HipChat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy.

On to the service itself:

I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a _different_ email address. Annoying and incredibly short- sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people.

Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.

<comment><USER76> The way we used it. There was a dev+qa channel and a dev+support channel with no one above tech leads in either group and it replaced Skype for a lot of work the devs did with support. Though we ultimately didn't use it beyond the trial period the key value driver for us was that a dev could step into an ongoing issue and get a of context very quickly even if they didn't have HipChat running. This means that as an IC you don't need to have the client running when you are "trying to think". That, along with the lack of management types in the communication flow meant that it was minimally distracting and mostly used as intended.

You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with remote QA and support teams.

<comment><USER77> With IRC, you need a bouncer (e.g. znc) to get the functionality of seeing history without having the client open (and technically the bouncer _is_ just the open client).</comment></comment></comment>


Journey of Mankind - Infographic across 150K years - <AUTHOR> http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also a downloadable film. Link is on the infographic.</comment>


Ubuntu 20.04 Shows Your OEM's Logo on the Boot Screen - <AUTHOR> https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/03/ubuntu-20-04-oem-boot-splash <comment><USER2> Here's a link to the FAQ on the subject [https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/20632.html](https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/20632.html)

It includes instructions to disable-

4) Getting rid of the vendor-logo/firmware-splash being shown while Fedora is booting?

If you don't want the firmware-splash to be used as background during boot, you can switch plymouth to the spinner theme, which is identical to the new bgrt theme, except that it does not use the firmware-splash as background, to do this execute the following command from a terminal: "sudo plymouth-set- default-theme -R spinner"

Note that the kernel will restore the vendor-logo early on at boot in case it got damaged by e.g. option ROM messages. If you are switching to the spinner theme you may also want to add "video=efifb:nobgrt" to your kernel commandline. See 7 below for how to edit the kernel commandline.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's cool. Fedora is doing it for some tim now and I really like it.

If you have ThinkPad you can customize that boot logo with whatever you want via bios update. Not sure about IdeaPads though.</comment>


Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/asking-members-to-support-its-journalism-no-prizes-no-swag-the-guardian-raises-more-reader-revenue-than-ad-dollars/ <comment><USER3> This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long- period subscribers keep you afloat. Somehow, when the respected newspapers moved to the web, they forgot that, and kept pumping ads like crazy. This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content - these two don't mix. Consequently, this eroded quality journalism, investigative, explanatory view of the world (and let's face it, TV could never replace that void, as they are solely relying on ads to survive). And then, a lot of bad things happened with peoples' opinions and understanding. I am glad many outlets are now seeing the correct path. The best news source in Poland nowadays is a wealthy, but niche, "Dziennik Gazeta Prawna" ("Daily Law Newspaper") with great, balanced content on serious issues - that relies mostly on subscribers. The best English periodical I have found is Foreign Affairs, also a very subscriber-focused outlet. Note that both of these seem to offer much better content in their paper issues than online.

<comment><USER4> Note that Guardian is successful, because of "supporters" and not >subscribers<. It's different than WSJ, where they lock the content, until you pay. The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one.

<comment><USER5> > The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one

Have any newspapers experimented with crowd-funding stories? This Niemanlabs report suggests none of the big names had as of Sept 2016 - [http://niemanreports.org/articles/crowdfunding-the- news/](http://niemanreports.org/articles/crowdfunding-the-news/) \- wonder if that's changed?

<comment><USER6> There are also "De Correspondent" [1] in the Netherlands, which inspired "Krautreporter" [2] in Germany and "Republik" [3] in Switzerland. Both De Correspondent and Republik set new records for crowd-funding in journalism, with the latter raising on the order of 3.5M USD. These projects used crowd- funding as initial funding though, and not for individual stories. Their ongoing financing is based on paid subscriptions.

[1] [https://decorrespondent.nl/](https://decorrespondent.nl/) [2] [https://krautreporter.de/](https://krautreporter.de/) [3] [https://www.republik.ch/](https://www.republik.ch/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A quick review of UK print media

1) The Times - Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece. Employs MP Michael Gove for £100k a year after he was sacked for being a backstabber.

2) The Mail - "The EU and immigrants want to kill your children and sleep with your sister and may even affect your house price". Billionaire owner too.

3) The Telegraph - "The Torygraph" former paper of the ruling classes, now mouth piece of two weird billionaire brothers who live in a castle on an island like particularly boring bond villains.

4) The Express - "Princes Diana wanted Brexit". Owned by billionaire Richard "not a pornographer" Desmond

5) The Sun - Rupert Murdoch's gutter mouthpiece

6) The News of the World - Rupert's other paper that had to close because they hacked the voice mail of a girl who was murdered, and therefore delayed the police investigation.

7) The Mirror - low grade leftism, but mostly celeb gossip

8) The Financial Times - Pretty good journalism and then pages of bond prices etc

9) The Independent. No longer in print. Billionaire Arab and Russian owners

edit: from comments there is a number 10

10) The i - a lower case Independent. Thinner, cheaper and still in print. This main use for the i seems to be to leave it on train seats when the Metro (a free paper they give out in railway stations) is just too cheap. The journalism seems OK. Owned by establishment media PLC

So if you didn't want Brexit, think immigration is helping demographics, think Princess Di should be laid to rest now and don't think the world is full of benefit scroungers, there is only the Guardian left.

edit: formatting and a sad inability to list numbers

<comment><USER8> Well, if we're doing quick parody headlines as stand-ins, it's actually impossible to out-Guardian the Guardian:

"I dread the day my daughter's poos get smaller" [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/dread-...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/dread- daughter-poos-smaller-girl-conform)

"Tea is a national disgrace"

"Robots are racist and sexist, just like the people who created them"

In any case, good on them for proving out this revenue model, hopefully it's sustainable and we see gigantic yellow-orange beg-boxes on more online media (seriously)

<comment><USER9> My favourite: "How ancient lentils reveal the origins of social inequality"

[https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/11/lentils- orig...](https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/11/lentils-origins-of- social-inequality)

<comment><USER10> But that one comes from the researchers themselves:

>The weakening of a strong communal ideology surrounding food production and storage increased the potential for dominant families to emerge, either through consistently greater success, or through force or unequal conditions of exchange. This in turn created the preconditions of specialisation and social inequality upon which urban life was founded in Mesopotamia.

(and that conjecture was based on lentils found by archaeologists)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. 'Member when The Guardian was one of the outlets boldly reporting the Snowden and Manning leaks? I member.

Right now on their front page I can read how democracy is being undermined "by not distinguishing between fact and opinion". And you know what? They're right on this front. But they categorically refuse to point the fingers at all guilty parties, and instead stick to the targets that are politically opportune and which they are ideologically opposed to.

e.g. I have yet to see any mainstream outlet bother to mention that Reddit's default news and political subs turned into pro-Hillary/anti-Trump mouthpieces in the months leading up to the US election, an effect that was presumably related to the millions her campaign pumped into Correct The Record, and which had a _huge_ effect in creating and calcifying the "right wing hate subreddits" they now hysterically complain about.

e.g. I don't see anyone talking anymore about how the US pwned European infrastructure and broke into politicians' accounts (including Merkel's). But when Russia is said to be _attempting_ this, it is presented as akin to cybernetic warfare. Well in that case, America has been fighting WW3 under our noses, and they are equally reprehensible for doing so. Otherwise, this is simply how the game is being played, and all is fair in love and war. Which one is it? Because "muh russia" isn't a consistent stance on this. The response appears to be for suspiciously many people to start posting complaints about "whataboutism", in a spontaneous attempt at misdirection away from the hypocrisy. How curious.

<comment><USER12> You and a friend go to a house on halloween and there's a bowl that says take one. You sheepishly take two, and your friend, after you, empties the entire bowl into his sack.

You ask of him, outraged, "How could you do such a malicious thing?!" and he responds, "Me?!?! what about you?!"

 _This_ is whataboutism, and yeah, you're guilty of it. Our right wing is at least two orders of magnitude more corrupt than our left wing. Pointing fingers at "all guilty parties" means pointing fingers almost exclusively at republicans.

<comment><USER13> Both sides perceive the outgroup as the source of all evil in the world. You could replace left/right and republican/democrat in your comment and there would be people on the other side who sincerely believe it as much as you do.

Neither claim is accurate.

<comment><USER14> For those curious, I'd recommend looking at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence) or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance).

Sometimes, right and wrong isn't always obvious. To know one from another may require effort and thought.

Often times, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and so we develop instincts that ensure we can take a step back and not immediately point fingers.

That's good; most of us don't think of ourselves as political idiots, where any dog whistle will make us jump through hoops, raging at some invisible enemy.

But there are times when the truth clearly falls much more on one side than the other. And in those times, saying "well I thought both parties were wrong, but it turns out that one was and is right" can be a rather scary prospect!

But I think it's better to be a little embarrassed than to run away from the world's problems.

<comment><USER13> We probably don't share the same values, and would not be able to reach consensus on the "right side."

This is an acceptable and unavoidable situation that technocrats need to learn to live with. People will want different outcomes, and will have different moral matrices. People on the left and right will each disagree with the other side's characterization of their politician's sins.

Edit: Just want to note that the parent comment was substantially edited in ways that might make this comment seem weird.

<comment><USER15> People on both sides pretty much share the same values; social issues are a big exception, but the crux of the disagreement between the right and left very often comes down to a disagreement about facts on the ground (e.g. lowering taxes on the rich creates jobs, net-neutrality harms customers and innovation, a minimally regulated market provides better and cheaper healthcare than single-payer, human behavior has no or negligible impact on climate etc)

<comment><USER16> >People on both sides pretty much share the same values

Sorry but I think you are significantly mistaken. To give two examples of statements that are common from each side. "Homosexuality is sinful" and "All white people are racist." The two sides are so far apart that when someone makes one of those statements they feel they are making an obvious non- controversial statement but it is offensive to the other side.*

This is because each side is so far apart they cannot even agree on what words mean. Combine this with the ease at which someone can become offended and it makes discussion almost impossible.

*I can either or both statements if requested.

<comment><USER15> As I already said: social issues are a big exception, but research shows that social issues are very low on the totem-pole relative to facts based issues. Additionally, I don't think either statement is very common, those examples illustrate extreme individuals that are motivated by hate rather than by a disagreement about particular _values_. Ironically, your example illustrates my point pretty well since the black community tends to vote for liberal politicians even though they share religious and traditional values with conservatives. The reason for this is a disagreement about which policies are effective not about values, and we saw this play out in the 2016 election when Trump specifically addressed black voters with promises of more jobs, better education, and lower crime rates in black communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That certainly highlights the importance of the right UX, but I wish they had invested in Patreon style features to allow support for specific authors.

I would pay £5/month to the Guardian and be happy for them to take a 30% administrative cut if they ring fenced the rest for writers I want to support.

The Scott Trust has failed to preserve a newspaper that is fiercely independent. Only experimenting with democratisation of commissioning and hiring is going to break it out of the nepotist trap it has fallen into.

<comment><USER18> I would agree with the concept of only supporting the writers that you like. I used to like the Guardian because they had good journalism. However, the opinion pieces are absolutely atrocious and detract the quality of the paper.

For example, there was an article in my google now articles recommended from the guardian that was "Milo Yiannopolous has huge support in Australia, men must call him out."

<comment><USER19> That opinion piece is titled " _If_ Milo Yiannopoulos has huge support in Australia, men must call him out".

I wasn't aware of the article before your post, but now that I've read it, I don't see anything controversial (much less "atrocious") in it. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER20> Some men feel weirdly threatened by the possibility of a world where their less than stellar behaviour towards women might be called out. Every comment like the one you're replying to is the same "I loved X until they lost all credibility and became biased by Y" where Y = calling out shitty MRA/Alt-right activist figures.

<comment><USER18> Nice try at attempting to slander my character or political stances: but no dice for you. This isn't about my own personal stances. It's about the publication and if you can call it news.

I'm really not sure where the MRA or comments on women came from in my original comment.

The Guardian (And the BBC) used to my main source for international news, and cultural trends until about 2012ish. That's when they started heavily featuring columnists that put out articles similar to the one that I mentioned. I wrote a letter to an editor with a concern, it got ignored. I stopped taking them seriously (as a whole) and reading as a primary source.

<comment><USER20> "This isn't about my own personal stances."

I'm not trying to 'slander' your character. Your complaint with the Guardian was literally about an article calling out Milo, a controversial bigot who, as was recently revealed by BuzzFeed, fraternises with Nazis for his own gain. This is a pattern I've seen recur among angry MRA/alt-right types - <USER2> they got sick of news source because of something related to feminism.

If you're not MRA/alt-right then I'm sorry, but I'd suggest picking your examples more carefully.

I'm not sure why the editor owed you a reply either. You're free to not read it. It can't have meant that much to you as you didn't seem to fight it all that hard.

<comment><USER21> Which specific nazis did Milo fraternise with? The Daily Stormer hates him, and he's married to a black man.

Or are you using 'fraternises' as 'contacted'? Milo is a journalist, they contact people. The Guardian also contacts nazis. It doesn't mean they are nazis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can't be happier with this! Proof that people are willing to pay for quality.

In The Netherlands we just got news that public service television etc sees an unexpected drop of income through ads (they're 60 mln euros short on budget in 2019). The quality of the online public news service is declining (clickbait titles for instance). Hopefully The Guardian sets an example!

<comment> GuB-42 Quality? If the Guardian is considered quality journalism, the others are probably not worth the paper they are not printed on.

Most links to the guardian I see are opinion pieces clearly made with a certain audience in mind. It is an echo chamber: people pay to read what they want to read.

Does quality journalism exist at all? The only exception seems to be technical subjects, like science and engineering. And that's because there is a huge amount of effort being made to avoid bias at every level. And even that tends to be thrown out of the window as soon as it hits a popular journal.

Where are the journals where fact are analyzed from several point of views. Take net neutrality for instance, where are the articles that really talks about the pros and cons? My opinion is that net neutrality is a good thing, I don't need a paper telling me what I am already convinced of. No, I want a paper to first explain me what net neutrality really is, and what are the drawbacks and how it compares to the positive aspects. It may not change my mind but at least I will be more informed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think that most media outlets make a wrong assumption about online content. They think that everybody wants content that's free above all else, so they swamp their content with ads.

But I think it's more that people want diversity. I'll happily support news outlets financially, but at $300/yr for Globe&Mail and $260/yr for NYTimes, etc, the cost is just ridiculous.

I WANT to support good journalism, but I want to pay a set price and have it be divided by my actual consumption. If I subscribe to two newspapers my consumption doesn't double, so I don't want to pay double.

The salable entity in the internet era shouldn't be a subscription to a newspaper, it should be an article.

<comment><USER24> > The salable entity in the internet era shouldn't be a subscription to a > newspaper, it should be an article.

I think this is spot-on. My guess is that a browser based micropayment solution/ecosystem will emerge (a la Brave and its Basic Attention Token).

<comment><USER23> > My guess is that a browser based micropayment solution/ecosystem will emerge

I think so too, I think it's just a question of outlets realizing that the lost profits from cannibalizing their subscription sales does not compare to the income from allowing consumers to buy pieces of your publication.

<comment><USER25> It was tried in the past. There were attempts to get newspapers to unite behind single group subscription schemes. The newspapers themselves rejected it. Problem is if a third party collects your income for you, you're not really independent anymore. Also, they don't want to receive pennies because someone read a single article they wrote, they want long term subscribers. Finally it requires them to all adopt paywalls which they didn't want to do back then (maybe these days it'd be different).

I wish I could remember the name of the scheme I'm thinking of.

<comment><USER26> Project Alesia was the internal name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I sometimes feel like there isn't much alternative to The Guardian - on the other hand the opinion pieces are often wearisome and at times the whole thing starts to feel like a parody of itself. It is as if, in becoming "worthy" of "support" it has to crank itself up to an insane degree...just as sugary drinks become more sugary over time to retain their core drinkers.

This is especially noticeable when ludicrous lifestyle pieces sit cheek-by- jowl with slightly overwrought culture wars content. I can't find an example today so I'll make one up:

\- Is enjoying the movie Chinatown an act of molestation?

\- Why Colombian hemp chocolate makes for the best edible luggage

I mean I both think Polanski should be in jail and that Colombia tourism should be encouraged...but this stuff isn't news.

<comment><USER28> What about the recent editorial condemning Taylor Swift: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/the- gu...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/the-guardian- view-on-taylor-swift-an-envoy-for-trumps-values)

<comment><USER29> Notice also, no byline, and no comments allowed. The Guardian often panders to culture war outrage bait then hides behind taking responsibility or criticism with tricks like this, and the fact that an occasional decent article exists.

Why again does this failing rag deserve support, and why is this obvious propaganda upvoted to the top of HN?

<comment><USER30> Comments are only allowed on the blog-like "comment is free" posts, which presumably they don't consider editorials part of despite them now obviously being part of the same platform technically (hence the /commentisfree/ URLs).

This isn't something specific to this editorial; it is the general rule the website works by.

(As an aside, I'd much rather Comment is Free just died, because so much of what the Guardian gets lambasted over is content posted there—and its explicit point is less editorial control over the contents. If people don't want what gets posted with less direct editorial control over content, just don't give it to them.)

<comment><USER29> No idea what their arbitrary rules are, but I noticed a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album linked at the top of this article did have comments enabled. Both of these are obviously opinions, so I'm not sure what the difference is, besides the fact that one article (GP) was way more likely to receive backlash in the comments than the other.

<comment><USER30> Weird. It certainly used to be the case no "newspaper" article had comments enabled, but that definitely does. So yeah, OK, I don't understand when commenting is enabled any more.

I mean, at least the old "newspaper" platform v. "blog" platform distinction made sense—there were many more differences (editorial control being a major one) than just commenting.

<comment><USER31> For a while they had comments on almost everything, then they realised that the majority of comments were opposed to their viewpoint, and even ridiculed them. So they shut most of it down

That's not to say the readership wasn't with them - that's a lot harder to quantify - but thencommenters largely weren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I pay them because it's the only news source I actually trust.

Their live updating event pages are really great too.

They don't always get it right with tech articles (they pissed off Pinboard a while back — they fixed it eventually) but still a great source of international news.

<comment><USER33> Their journalism generally is very good, certainly better than the majority of British newspapers and tabloids. Their opinion articles, however, range from decent to atrocious - I tend to ignore the 'Comment is Free' section now, unless I'm familiar with a piece's author.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does members having a tracker free access ? Because it seems fair that if you pay you are not in the "if it's free you're the product" anymore.

It's important to move to this model.

<comment><USER35> Well, how do you get tracker free if you are already logged in. Tracking user action on its own is not a sin as business should know what customers are interested in. Selling the data to 3rd parties (and organizing the entire operation to support) is the dirty gray area.

<comment><USER36> Third party scripts is what everyone is talking about, yeah.

Good example: MetaFilter does not show Google Ads to logged-in members.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As much as I enjoy the quality of journalism from them, claims of The Guardian struggling, or being without sin (in the context of throwing stones around tax avoidance, especially post-Panama & Paradise papers, and at the risk of being labelled a whatbouter) should be considered in context.

That context is that they've got some pretty serious claims of tax avoidance in their not-too-distant past.

The Spectator ran a story [1] the middle of last year on the subject, though they've clearly got some fiscal & political views that could best be described as orthogonal to the Guardian.

The Independent ran their own story a few years earlier [2] that went into a bit more detail on the somewhat regrettable ratio of profits to domestic tax paid.

[1] [https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/will-the-guardian- now-...](https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/will-the-guardian-now- investigate-its-own-tax-arrangements/)

[2] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/guardian- med...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/guardian-media-firm- makes-186m-but-pays-only-200000-tax-8675818.html)

<comment><USER19> The Guardian responded to various such claims over the years in quite a bit of detail [1].

A choice quote:

> The Guardian's current position on tax is not immensely complicated, not > least because it is not making any profits. When GMG makes taxable profits, > it does of course pay full corporation tax. It is officially regarded by > HMRC as "low risk".

> When we did our series on tax avoidance in 2008, we commissioned Richard > Murphy, the scourge of tax dodgers the world over, to cast his eye over > GMG's accounts.

> This is what he wrote:

> "Now let's be clear: what this shows is that on trading, the effective rate > of tax was 46%. If goodwill were added back to profit the rate would be > about 21%, a rate that is low largely because much of the profit came from > the disposal of assets. If that were adjusted for then [year ended 30 March > 2008], the rate would be above the statutory rate. There is nothing abnormal > to comment on as a result.

> The low charge is on the exceptional part sale of the Auto Trader group. No > complicated planning was needed to produce a low tax-charge: the government > allows for tax to be deferred in this case if funds are reinvested.

> The Guardian did reinvest the funds. That's not artificial, offshore, or > complex. Indeed, it is tax compliant: the company is doing what the > government wants, and for which it provides a relief. So let's stop the > nonsense about low tax rates now: it's just wrong."

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/...](https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/blogpost)

<comment><USER37> Indeed, it's a tricky area.

With Panama / Paradise papers as well, most players are acting just within the letter of the law, though arguably not the intent, or at least the spirit, and outside observers (typically those without access to the expertise necessary to construct their financial affairs with such tax-minimising efficiency) are going to be frustrated by the brazen appearance of unfairness.

As I noted, Spectator and other publications are going to be strongly partisan around any review of the Guardian's affairs.

OTOH, articles published by the Guardian, about the Guardian, asserting the Guardian has done nothing wrong, are going to struggle to appear impartial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would be happy to support The Guardian etc. But this persona does not have credit/debit cards. So I have no way to pay them. I do support GnuPG and Riseup, however, because they accept Bitcoin.

<comment><USER39> The digital equivalent of a postal money order would be nice to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have been on the Guardian support pages for at least a dozen times and I'd love to contribute but I don't find they make it easy.

There's a subscription for 14,99€/month ([https://subscribe.theguardian.com/p/DBQ80F?edition=int](https://subscribe.theguardian.com/p/DBQ80F?edition=int)) then there's the premium app which is also called subscription ([https://www.theguardian.com/info/2013/aug/12/1](https://www.theguardian.com/info/2013/aug/12/1)) for 2,49 or so and then there's the Support thing ([https://membership.theguardian.com/eu/supporter](https://membership.theguardian.com/eu/supporter)) for 4,99€/month. Some of these seem to include the other options...but I'm not sure. So I've just always given up. In addition Guardian Weekly doesn't seem to have a digital only version?

I've really tried. And I've also tried contacting their support but instead of answering my question they've canceled my subscription to Guardian Weekly. That was when I've just given up.

<comment><USER41> In the UK we are given the option for a one-off contribution. It's quite an oversight if they're not offering that outside of the UK.

[https://support.theguardian.com/uk](https://support.theguardian.com/uk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It is important to remember that The Guardian is overtly and proudly a paper of the Left. I signed up and started paying in late November of 2016 only because Trump had won the Presidency. If Trump had not won the Presidency, I doubt I would have ever given my money to The Guardian.

It has been reported elsewhere that the ACLU and Planned Parenthood had very good years, in terms of fundraising. All of this is the anti-Trump effect. The success of The Guardian fits into that pattern.

</comment><comment><USER43> Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recently wrote about the crisis in online journalism and its ad-based model.

[http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital- media-c...](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-crash- but-no-one-will-say-it)

Basically, advertisers are asking/paying for more video content, but readers/viewers don't actually want it, which is a disaster waiting to happen.

Also, the market is flooded with VC-backed publications (Buzzfeed, Axios, ...) dumping free content on readers in an attempt to achieve scale, and those publications are also failing to hit their targets.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeed-ipo-stymied-as- reve...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeed-ipo-stymied-as-revenue- misses-target-dj.html)

It's hard to compete against free...

</comment><comment><USER44> LOL @ the type of journalism The Guardian promotes... I'd rather burn money than support a publication that published articles to support my country's corrupt politicians. God forbid law enforcement investigate them. The Guardian always has their back.

<comment><USER45> What country is this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm one of these new subscribers (from Viet Nam) that this campaign appeals to. The offer was too good to ignore ($1 for first 6 weeks, $4 each week after for the Guardian Weekly). There's a bit of adjustment from my side because stories and writings in the print edition are different from my usually top- HN, popular-Twitter articles, but I've grown to it. Local expats in my place have no idea of this free int'l delivery, so for a long time they have been paying local importers/newstands a heft ton of money for these papers.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'd gladly pay for a publication that wasn't cranking out clickbait, outrage pieces and catering to their advertisers and their need to be associated with only politically correct partners.

<comment><USER48> Similarly, I'd pay for a publication that brought me news I was interested in and covered both sides of every debate, instead of obviously catering to one side or the other constantly. They'd have to cover each side well, obviously.

<comment><USER49> This is the problem with modern media IMO, each side presents their own side to their viewers in a logical matter-of-fact way (almost dismissively, though, of finer details) but only picks the most egregiously bad logic / moral failings of the other side to show to their supporters. So each side thinks the other is crazy because they only see the ~1-5% of the other side that gets paraded around for their idiocy. Even which pieces each side chooses to cover are completely different: it's almost like they're not even reporting on events occurring simultaneously much of the time.

I only trust a very small number of publishers these days, such as the Atlantic and the Economist. Everything else is some sort of curated echo chamber

<comment><USER50> I think even The Economist can be one-sided. They don't seem to be able to write about the leader of the Labour Party here without comparing him to Hugo Chavez. Not that I count myself pro-Corbyn, or even party-political. But it does seem one-sided in that respect at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> relevant [https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking](https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking)

</comment><comment><USER52> I have a twisted idea to appeal to people's sense of charity:

Each person that subscribes, sponsors "no ads" visit for a random stranger. The cookie could last for a day.

<comment><USER53> That's just subscriber sharing links. Lots of papers do this. There's a bit of a 'free-trial' mixed in there but the important bit is giving subscribers the ability to share links guilt-free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Thought I'd mention yours.org [1] which has multiple ways of monetizing content. With micropayments it's much more feasible to support this type of model. See their FAQ for more info [2].

[1] [https://www.yours.org/](https://www.yours.org/)

[2] [https://www.yours.org/faq/](https://www.yours.org/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Part of getting people to pay you is - how easy it is to pay. One of the things I think are exciting is that projects like MetaMask basically integrate cryptocurrencies into your browser, making transaction very easy, safe (as safe as crypto at least) and anonymous, no matter if the entities participating in the transaction are in Yemen or London.

</comment><comment><USER56> Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian - I'm sorry, is this a joke? Buzzfeed (yes, that Buzzfeed... well when they're not making one of their retarded videos and actually do some investigative journalism) has higher journalistic value than The Guardian.

</comment><comment><USER57> Guardian is too opinionated to say that this is a good thing. Its contributors are more often "feeding their bubble" rather than supporting independent journalism. You can see that their quality has gone _down_ rather than up during this time.

</comment><comment><USER58> Will this be the future of online publishing? This is Medium's entire business model.

</comment><comment><USER59> People within the "journalism" ecosystem can support itself with creative and different financial remedies. They strongly believe in their cause and benefit to humanity.

I would focus fundraising efforts to parties that economically rely on a free or paid press.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've been told that the paper newspaper has better content than the website.

<comment><USER61> People always overplay the comment sections when they complain about the Guardian. In the physical paper comment makes up a handful of pages, but online because comment is free (to borrow a phrase) it can expand massively, and ad nauseam. They are silly, but the comment sections are also incidental to the rest of the newspaper.

I hope that being supported by subscriptions also means that they can dial back the sensationalism. I want to support papers which aren't screaming in my face all the time, and which support a better society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> One problem is that a big part of their ad revenue is going overseas.

The reason that most news sites can't run their own ads is that Google and co. are so incredibly good at tracking us, providing more value per ad.

</comment><comment><USER63> I have reached the point where I think that if a respectable news organization went subscription-only (i.e. no ads, no clickbait, no free content at all), I'd jump on board. I want to be the customer.

</comment><comment><USER64> The way I see it this model can only work for mediums with international readership. Say for example you have a newspaper in a small country with 10M people. Let's assume 5% of general population reads a newspaper and you have 5 major ones. That's roughly 100k readers per newspaper. Now how many of those could you convince to subscribe? Even if we assume an optimistic 10% that could hardly keep a newspaper afloat. You need readership in the millions to make this model viable, or a more loyal audience like the one Germans or Japanese have.

<comment><USER65> > You need readership in the millions to make this model viable

Not necessarily; for primarily online publications, operating costs rise roughly linearly with readership. I operate a donor-supported publication with a much smaller readership than the Guardian, yet we have stayed afloat for years via donations because our costs are much lower. It's a model that can work for practically any size of publication.

<comment><USER66> Your publication cost are roughly linear; your content creation costs are more or less constant with an increase in number of readers. I would assume that your content creation costs are vastly lower than the Guardian's which is why you can get away with fewer readers. You wouldn't be able to produce content like the Guardian on your budget, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Funny enough, the linked site praises the Guardian's approach then hits me with a popup to subscribe to their newsletter...

</comment><comment><USER68> Imagine if browser vendors added some form of online payment directly into the browser (like , i don't know , bitcoin).

<comment><USER69> Try to convince every website owner ever to accept the same payment methods.

Both Brave and Flattr are attempting the same, both have little to no success for that simple reason.

<comment><USER68> To be fair those are not major browsers. Firefox would be an obvious experimental vehicle, and the choice of bitcoin would be the least objectionable payment method (of the alternatives).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'd love to be able to microdonate to individual pieces of content on not just The Guardian but across the web.

<comment><USER71> have you seen Flattr? Sounds like exactly that

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Anyone knwos about more successful examples of this business model?

</comment><comment><USER73> `

</comment><comment><USER74> The physcology behind this is more political than business, the guardian is a lefty newspaper and is getting political support

<comment><USER75> While this comment is down-voted, it is not necessarily wrong. As an Indian, I was so exasperated after Americans voted a criminal as the President that I subscribed to multiple organizations which are considered left-wing by American conservatives or libertarians. These include regular fees to NY Times, Propublica and Guardian with occasional donations to various organizations in the United States.

<comment><USER76> NYT and The Guardian are not "left-wing". They are establishment liberal and have supported every major war the US has been involved in. They regularly slander anti-establishment and left-wing intellectuals[1][2] and for the most part hate or ignore people like Corbyn and Sanders.

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary- of...](https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of-julian- assanges-interview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam- chomsky-guardian-personality)

<comment><USER77> The Guardian is 'centre-left' and the most left wing (it's the only one that is left of centre) broadsheet newspaper in the UK [0].

I don't think your comment about hating Corbyn is that correct either. There clearly were some negative articles about him and there was a columnist who was attacking Corbyn but who has since apologised [1].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom#Broadsheet_and_former_broadsheet_newspapers)

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/10/jeremy...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/10/jeremy- corbyn-general-election--labour-rewrites-rules)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I thought the begging letter was shown just because I had an ad blocker on. The site works well for the ad blocking crowd, maybe they make it so deliberately, so at least they can send you the begging message.

<comment><USER19> > begging letter

> begging message

I keep seeing this in many online spaces and for the life of me, I just can't understand how asking for money in exchange for value (journalism in this case) is considered begging.

Seriously, this [1] is their ask, can you (or anyone else) show me exactly which part of it is begging?

[1] [http://www.niemanlab.org/images/guardian-membership- ask.jpg](http://www.niemanlab.org/images/guardian-membership-ask.jpg)

<comment><USER79> It's not so much the message as its persistence, timing and size. It shows up every time and takes up half the screen. It would also be nice if the reader was given some time to read actual content before being blasted with the message again. Feels like one of those many many sites that immediately ask you to fill out a feedback form before you've even browsed anything. If it's not a beg, it's most certainly a nag.

<comment><USER19> > its persistence, timing and size.

> It would also be nice if the reader was given some time to read actual > content before being blasted with the message again.

What do you mean ? It's an _inline_ box that always appears _after_ the article. It's not a popup, it doesn't hinder navigation, it doesn't even have position:fixed so you can just scroll by it if you want. I don't think they could be nicer about it if they tried.

<comment><USER79> You're mistaken. There are two separate messages - a popover that appears at the bottom of the screen every time you browse a page (whether it be the front page, an article, etc.) AND the more innocuous inline text at the end of every article that you mention.

<comment><USER19> Ah, sorry. I never saw such a popover. Probably due to adblock.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Helping a stranger, and why you should understand NP-complete - <AUTHOR> http://lifebeyondfife.com/helping/ <comment><USER3> > NP-complete is essentially shorthand for belonging to a class of problems > that are computationally very hard

It's totally correct, but it always bothers me a little to see people talk about NP in those terms; much, much more difficult problems are known. Recreational wikipedia reading taught me a while ago the the regexp equivalence problem ("do these two given regular expressions define the same language?") is EXPSPACE-complete, where EXPSPACE contains all the problems that:

\- Require additional space bounded above by an exponential function in the input.

\- May require an unbounded (though obviously finite) amount of time.

That second point is a doozy, and the problem so accessible that I'm fairly sure many people have independently come up with it and wished for a solution. That's not going to happen, though; a solution would be good for much more than just deciding whether two regexps are equivalent. Any NP-complete problem is utterly trivial by comparison.

<comment><USER4> >> NP-complete is essentially shorthand for belonging to a class of problems that are computationally very hard

That is actually incorrect, and is a common and serious misunderstanding of beginners. NP-complete problems are not hard to solve (e.g. via brute force). They are however very hard to solve _efficiently_ (i.e. in polynomial time).

<comment><USER5> I think "computationally very hard" means exactly what you say NP-complete problems are ("very hard to solve efficiently"). Typically when one talks about the computational difficulty of an algorithm, they are talking about the computational resources it takes, not the amount a human has to think to come up with the algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Think of NP-complete problems as if they were a brick wall like the red plot in the above graph. Understanding the theory behind the NP-complete complexity class means recognising intractable problems in your code – it's like having a bomb sniffer dog when walking through a minefield._

Very helpful analogy - hadn't thought of it like that. Now I'll know whether the seemingly intractable problems in my code are only temporarily intractable due to my incompetence, or actually intractable for grander reasons :)

</comment><comment><USER7> There're few other things you can do to possibly speed up the second code snippet, by reducing dimensionality:

1) recognize q1 * q2 = 2^p1 * 2^p2 = 2^(p1 + p2), so instead of iterating over q1 then q2, iterate over p = p1 + p2

2) memorize some of the combinations; e.g. if you iterate over p, r1 & r2, then you know that all you're trying to find is two integers f1 & f2 that are equal to output * r1 * r2 * 2^p / input; so before you start solving the problem, calculate table T:

      for (int f1 = 1; f1 <= 256; ++f1)
        for (int f2 = 1; f2 <= 256; ++f2)
          T[f1 * f2] = f1

now you can check whether integer pair (f1,f2) exists, you can just check whether T[output * r1 * f2 * 2^p / input] is non-zero. Also, output * r1 * r2 * 2^p has to be divisible by input, so after you iterate over p & r1, you can iterate only over r2's being multiples of input / gcd(input, output * r1 * 2^p)

There could be possibly some more tricks found.

<comment><USER8> Another way to reduce the number of loops:

              for (int q2 = 1; q2 <= 256; q2 <<= 1)
                if (output * r1 * r2 * q1 * q2 == input * f1 * f2)

This doesn't need a loop. Set q2 directly and test if it is a power of 2.

         n2 = input * f1 * f2;
         d2 = output * r1 * r2 * q1;
         q2 = n2/d2;
         if (__builtin_popcount(q2) == 1 && q2 * d2 == n2) {

... taking advantage of the fact that calculating the Hamming weight of q2 doesn't need a loop.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_weight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_weight)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is one case where the original title would be significantly better than the title given:

        Helping a stranger (and why you
        should understand NP-complete)

<comment><AUTHOR> I ummed and ahhed over it. Really it's two posts, one about helping someone out and another about NP-complete problems in the wild. Thought I'd go with the Hacker News angle for Hacker News (hopefully to encourage / keep up the helping).

<comment><USER10> Well, for me the _Hacker_ News angle would have been the part about NP- complete problems ;-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _You have to be knowledgeable about a domain that can't easily be simplified by series of web searches, and more importantly, there has to be a suggestion that someone might be seeking that clarification._

You won't believe how difficult is to offer help if you are not a professional programmer of some sort (in HN and outside HN). Even for open source projects. Even if you try to provide insights on your "professional" job that, in theory, is full of "startup potential" (finance, like we are still using MS Access and messy spreadsheets).

</comment><comment><USER12> > They can tell you that the most efficient algorithm for ordering > (randomised) data is Quicksort, which has a Big-O notation of O(nlogn)

I know this is nitpicky, but quicksort is, worst-case, O(n^2), meaning a large number of comparison based sorting algorithms are faster than it. Its in the average case that Quicksort wins.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I said "(randomised)". The worst case occurs when the list to be sorted is already ordered and you select the head of the list as the pivot point.

Even though other algorithms such as Mergesort also have O(nlogn), Quicksort is normally the preferred implementation because it's relatively easy to do in-place and generally is the most efficient[1] of all the sorting algorithms.

[1]Not my field of expertise though, happy to be told I'm wrong.

<comment><USER12> You're definitely not wrong, its generally the fastest. Efficient is a bit of a loaded worded in these contexts, and I feel as though when discussiing algorithms, unless otherwise specified, the assumption is you're discussing _worst-case_ efficiency (because while worst case isn't always the most useful metric, is usually the most easily defined and derived one). And randomizing data doesn't necessarily guarantee that you won't still land on a worst-case starting order (as is the nature of randomness). As I said though, that is an entirely nitpicky point.

<comment><USER13> >And randomizing data doesn't necessarily guarantee that you won't still land on a worst-case starting order (as is the nature of randomness).

This is the beauty of randomized analysis in the worst-cases. The worst-case occurs if and only if the random generator spits out a sorted list. If all permutations are equally likely, a list of n elements has probability 1/n! of coming out sorted = O(n^2).

Even in practice, this is very pessimisstic as it only occurs with a probability of 1/n! and is therefore extremely rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is actually a number theory problem. You want to have

        input * A = output * B         (1)

where

        A = f1 * f2                    (2)
        B = r1 * r2 * q1 * q2          (3)

where q1, q2 are powers of two.

Any good elementary number theory book will tell you that the smallest solution to (1) is to let M = lcm(input, output) and set A = M / input, B = M / output. Given the further constraint that A <= 2^16, you can compute offline a 2^16 element lookup table which gives values of f1, f2 in the desired ranges for each possible value of A. You can re-use the same table to go from your B value to r1, r2 if you first pull out as many powers of two as you can and put them in q1, q2.

</comment><comment><USER15> The first point of your definition of NP-completeness is backwards - <USER2> problem in NP must be reducible to the problem, not the other way round. The paragraph following the definition has it backwards, too.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great post, I really enjoyed it. I wish there were more people with your skill set in my realm of expertise...it is amazing how many problems could be solved if they can be identified, classified, and attacked methodically like you just showed (instead of loosey-goosey hand-cobbled code). I can think of a few huge problems (big $$$) in my org that could be optimized really well if we had more people that could understand and apply constraint programming.

<comment><USER17> You might want to check out Zimpl. It's a language to make it real simple to formulate mixed linear programming problem. (Mixed here means integer and continuous.)</comment></comment>


Paul Krugman's Infuriating Post About The iPhone 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-on-the-iphone-5-2012-9

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what Krugman's calculation would be without buying into the "broken windows" theory. Though I'm no economist, a 0.5% GDP boost from a single version of a product from a single company seems crazy.</comment>


Ask HN: Name for "photos and video" section -- not "multimedia" - <AUTHOR>

A section on our homepage features news photos and news video.
Under the subheading of "Photos," there are five thumbnails of recent photos.
Below that, under the subheading of "Video," there are five thumbnails of recent videos.
I need to come up with a headline that encompasses both of those, without merely repeating "Photos and Video."
"Multimedia" has already been ruled out.
Suggestions? <comment><USER2> Phovide or Phoveo or some other mashup? Images (indicates moving or still)? Media (ditto)? Camera or In Camera or On Camera? Through the Lens?

<comment><AUTHOR> Project manager likes "On Camera"! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Call it "News" Call it what the content is, not what format your content is in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the whole site is news, so it would need to be more specific than that.

<comment><USER3> Context is everything! Glad you found a name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pictures: Moving and Otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER5> Visuals</comment>


The effect of temperature on people's cognitive performance - happy-go-lucky https://www.npr.org/2019/05/26/727108363/how-office-temperature-affects-cognitive-performance <comment><AUTHOR> Be always wary of these "studies" aka surveys conducted on campus students. In this specific one, the "study" was done on ~500 German students. The conclusion was,

 _As the temp went up, women did better on math and verbal tasks, and men did worse, " Chang says. "And the increase for women in math and verbal tasks was much larger and more pronounced than the decrease in performance of men._</comment>


The world's smallest ultrasound detector - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/629622124808749056/smallest-ultrasound-detector <comment> java-man "the silicon waveguide-etalon detector, or SWED. Instead of recording voltage from piezoelectric crystals, SWED monitors changes in light intensity propagating through the miniaturized photonic circuits."

this is a rather clever idea.</comment>


Video lectures of mathematics courses available online for free - <AUTHOR> http://mathoverflow.net/questions/54430/video-lectures-of-mathematics-courses-available-online-for-free <comment><USER2> Instead of just watching lectures, I'd suggest taking one of the many available math courses:

Coursera (23 courses) [https://www.coursera.org/courses?orderby=upcoming&lngs=en&ca...](https://www.coursera.org/courses?orderby=upcoming&lngs=en&cats=math)

Udacity (5 courses) [https://www.udacity.com/courses](https://www.udacity.com/courses)

edX (10 courses) [https://www.edx.org/course- list/allschools/math/allcourses](https://www.edx.org/course- list/allschools/math/allcourses)

<comment><USER3> These aren't really swappable, though. The Coursera/Udacity/edX courses max out around courses appropriate for freshmen, whereas those linked from math overflow range from freshman year to graduate math courses.

<comment><USER2> I wonder if Coursera/Udacity/edX will catch up. I can't imagine there is much demand for graduate level math courses on those sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For more recreational math, I tend to watch Numberphile: [https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile](https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile)

There's also a more-recently launched Computerphile, which has some interesting vids, as well: [https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile](https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile)

</comment><comment><USER5> A general point: learning higher mathematics is still quite difficult today, in part because there is a chasm between how easy it is for a computer to give feedback when a student learns programming vs. how difficult it is for a computer to give feedback when a student learns math. (In particular the proof-checking part) Sadly, there is little incentive for anyone to develop innovative teaching methods for, say, potential theory in the complex plane or group representations in probability and statistics because these are not considered "useful" beyond the academic realm and industry niches...

If any enterprising hackers happen to read this comment, please know that there is a small but devoted community of amateur mathematicians who would be overjoyed at the opportunity to spend some of their free time learning esoteric branches of higher math with help from the computer, if only the right tools were available...

</comment><comment><USER6> my list of free Linear algebra PDF's, the ones from UC-Davis, UCLA Brown and BYU are well done

[http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~anne/linear_algebra/](http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~anne/linear_algebra/)

[http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~linear/linear.pdf](http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~linear/linear.pdf)

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs485/2006sp/LinAlg_Comple...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs485/2006sp/LinAlg_Complete.pdf) (Dawkins notes that were recently pulled off lamar.edu site, gentle intro like Anton's)

[http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/](http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/)

[http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~vandenbe/103/reader.pdf](http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~vandenbe/103/reader.pdf)

[http://www.math.brown.edu/%7Etreil/papers/LADW/LADW.pdf](http://www.math.brown.edu/%7Etreil/papers/LADW/LADW.pdf)

[https://math.byu.edu/~klkuttle/Linearalgebra.pdf](https://math.byu.edu/~klkuttle/Linearalgebra.pdf)

______________

also the 2 books that a lot of physics students use, Boas and Arfken et al (Links below are for older editions; buy one if they suit your needs)

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/65695685/Mary-L-Boas- Mathematical-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/65695685/Mary-L-Boas-Mathematical- Methods-in-the-Physical-Sciences)

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/84183760/Arfken-G-B-Weber-H-J- Math...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/84183760/Arfken-G-B-Weber-H-J-Mathematical- Methods-for-Physicists-6ed-Elsevier-AP-s)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone else taking Coursera's currently running Linear Algebra with Python course? I'd never studied linear algebra much before, so its hard for me to evaluate it.

<comment><USER8> I have been taking it. So far I've found it pretty good (I took linear algebra many years ago in college and didn't remember most of it), even though I don't really like the amount of reinventing-the-wheel (e.g. writing your own vector class) involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been working on a startup idea for exactly this purpose. Something that is much better than posting bunch of links on various places, bookmarks and emails. Announcing CoLearnr - A platform where topics can be socially curated, discussed and collaboratively learnt. Very happy to share the dev site since have not launched the main site yet.

[http://dev.colearnr.com/finance](http://dev.colearnr.com/finance)

I researched MOOCs as part of my thesis and found that the platform they use and their business model is not so great! Is online learning as simple as watching video heads with a bulk standard discussion forum? Very happy to share some of my findings from the research.

\- Online learning platform should be built for learners and not IT administrators. This is where moodles, blackboards all suck! \- Online learning should be engaging and distraction-free. We can learn a bit from social networks, how they show all the content inline and make it engaging and addictive. \- Online learning should make it easy to link knowledge and build conceptual maps. For example, based on the topic you learnt, the platform should show the other topics that you could learn so that you can generalise (broad knowledge) or specialise. \- Online learning should suit modern time- constrained learners. For example, typically all these platforms offer just one way of visualising a topic which was originally decided by the curator or the IT administrator. But learners need various views. Won't disclose a lot on this, but for example, a view showing only recently added materials, a view showing only the items to read etc could be intriguing.

Please feel free to take a look at my effort and let me know your thoughts.

tl;dr CoLearnr - a platform for collaborative learning

</comment><comment><USER10> dbpokorny, your comment is [dead], might want to email the admins about that.

<comment><USER11> That's weird. He has that dead comment, then a live comment 5 days ago, and then several comments before that which are all dead.

Wouldn't a hell ban kill all comments from some point forward?

<comment><USER12> No, once you get over I think it's 500 karma, you can upvote (and downvote) dead comments, so if he got two upvotes on any of his comments they would automatically stop being dead, I think.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that's how it works; I don't think I have any special dead comment powers. Dead is dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://classroom.tv/site/search/math](http://classroom.tv/site/search/math)

</comment><comment><USER15> openculture.com also has a huge list (725 courses according to their title) of free online courses in a variety of subjects.

[http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses](http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses)</comment>


11 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting My First Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/02/14/11-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-starting-my-first-startup/

<comment><USER2> Some good stuff in there but on principle I wont' up-vote it because of the forced attempts to get me to opt in. Four or five!

</comment><comment><USER3> I quit your site after two consicutive popup ads.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer : This is not my site. I only got one pop-up. Apologies for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some are obvious, some are really worth a deeper consideration. I liked the one about questioning the advice.</comment>


NSA Analyst LinkedIn profile - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jason-miller/39/741/a49 Summary<p>+Experienced SIGINT Geospatial-Metadata Analyst/Intelligence Analyst/Linguist<p>+Skilled in the use of several Intelligence tools and resources: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA<p>+ Deployed to use SIGINT to provide Force Protection to American and allied personnel<p>+Acted as primary liaison for NSA during daily teleconferences with other government partners, exchanging ideas and information to maintain complete and up-to-date situational awareness<p>+Translated foreign language materials from Somali and French into English and made targeted briefings to strategic leadership regarding regional security matters<p>+Used a variety of tools and data to provide advanced threat warnings to American civilian, government, and military personnel<p>+Compiled supplemental threat summaries for specific topical meetings of senior leadership, providing them with a fuller global terrorism situational awareness<p>+Prepared topic-specific, detailed presentations for senior leadership using Powerpoint, Word, ZapGrab, ARCMap, and SIGNAV<p>+Routinely wrote articles for CT today, considered a "must-read" by Agency senior leadership and NSA representatives at other organizations.<p>+Collaborated with partners worldwide to enable efficient, real-time support in a 24/7 shift environment<p>+Have worked in both foreign and domestic environments and managed to facilitate smooth exchanges between foreign partners that allowed for maximum efficiency of both parties<p>+Repeatedly called upon to train new employees in a variety of positions<p>+Improved the quality and immediate usefulness of office reporting, directly resulting in an increase of 15% in requests for this product.<p>+Able to filter vast amounts of data and reports to identify key information critical to ongoing projects <comment><USER2> His profile looks a lot like he copied/pasted his OPR/EPR (performance report) bullets. The big thing to remember here is that OPR/EPR bullets have to make even small things sound like big things so everything is punched up to make it look good. This is what happens when promotions in a bureaucracy are decided by a few pieces of paper in a file. He's not really a super spy- probably just a regular dude doing his job.

</comment><comment><USER3> From his title, "Analyst at 20755", 20755 appears to be the zip code for a US army base, which is the headquarters of the NSA.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_George_G._Meade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_George_G._Meade)

</comment><comment><USER4> So have we identified all of the intelligence tools helpfully listed in his profile? I wonder what WEBCANDID means.

<comment><USER5> Feels like a scriptkid resume...</comment></comment>


Do you know this docker hosting platform based in Switzerland? - <AUTHOR> https://wwww.hidora.com <comment><USER2> Please use a proper title when submitting your website, no need for a question.

The URL (wwww.hidora.com) is wrong, [https://www.hidora.com/](https://www.hidora.com/) works.</comment>


Austin, Indiana: The HIV Capital of Small-Town America - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/austin-indiana-hiv-america-syndemics <comment><USER2> At one a depressing and terrifying view of what a systemic cascade failure looks like. Economic failure -> social breakdown -> healthcare breakdown -> addiction -> bad hygiene practice -> epidemic.

Among the reasons you want to treat elements such as living wages, employment, housing, and healthcare as public goods or social objectives. Also why criminalising health-related activities and behaviors tends to be counterproductive.

<comment><USER3> As a gay man who survived the first and second waves of the HIV epidemic, I found my hands shaking as I read the article. It's insane that this can even happen in America today.

<comment><USER2> Hugs, man.

What people refuse to learn is maddening.</comment></comment></comment>