2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners - <AUTHOR> https://www.pulitzer.org/news/announcement-2020-pulitzer-prize-winners <comment><USER2> I haven't read most of the pieces awarded here, and I'm sure they're all excellent. That being said, I want to call your attention to the winner for "Feature Writing", and recommend you to read it. Taub's produced a heartbreaking, empathetic, and incredible piece, that tilted my perspective on the US government's handling of 9/11, and how the government and big (dis-)organizations work in general.

Given his source material, it would have been easy (and justified) to construct the narrative into a tirade against the CIA. Instead, Taub takes a rather empathetic and detached frame of reference, and the result is a monument to the human toll of ruthlessly-executed ignorance. None of the people (victims or perpetrators) seem to fully understand their absurd roles: their actions driven by jumpy supervisors and acquaintances, who in turn are driven by a mix of fear, ideology and separation from "ground".

And once the veil of ignorance is lifted, there are reputations and legacies to protect, bureaucratic boxes that "cannot" be unchecked. There's no undoing what's set in motion, because "undo" implies reflection and the admission of wrongdoing, which is something that we _really_ struggle with as a society.

It's a tragedy you see play out everywhere, and this is a particularly poignant and tragic case, beautifully presented. If it isn't a case study already, it ought to be one.

([https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos- da...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest- secret))

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your comment. I read the piece, and it was worth the time.

After so many words about their shared story, seeing that photo of Wood and Salahi together was quite arresting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least a couple of this year's winners have been previously discussed on HN:

via Seattle Times:

\- How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421612)

\- Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887177)

And via ProPublica:

\- Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094762)

\- Navy's flawed technology set the USS John McCain up for disaster: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844963)

Both were awarded the prize in National Reporting (it's not typical for 2 different projects to get the same award the same year): [https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by- category/209](https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/209)

</comment><comment><USER5> > Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, Mike Baker and Lewis Kamb of The Seattle > Times

Worth their weight in gold on the 737 Max story. Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER6> How could you design a fitness function for news to ensure that it was accurate?

Papers like The Financial Times have an obvious one: people are using these to inform themselves about business and investment. If FT was giving inaccurate data, it would have an obvious cost to the people who read it.

But for papers like the NYT, what is the incentive to accurately report the news? It seems like by inaccurately reporting things, they'll make more money. This is a problem. How would you fix it?

<comment><USER7> I get the impression that your question is merely to raise FUD about _The New York Times_ rather than to legitimately ask about quality control. I've downvoted you (as have others), but I'll go ahead and answer you in good faith all the same.

The way a publication can ensure its quality is to charge for it. That is, rather than relying mostly on advertising (which is per article), rely on subscriptions. The kind of audience that pays for news will appreciate higher- quality journalism. That audience also must stick around for the long haul.

That's why the best-regarded outlets tend to be newswires (AP, Reuters), business news (WSJ, Bloomberg), donation driven (NPR, PBS), and long-form stories (NYT, WP).

Indeed, a quick check of NYT's latest 10K shows that they got over $1B from subscriptions (and growing) with an additional $500M from advertising (and shrinking).

[https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007...](https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007169120000003/a201910-kq4project.htm#sB18F8EC551135FA3AE59A7C5B6E414F6)

<comment><USER6> Ahh, no? I just used the New York Times and an example because it is by far the most popular newspaper in the country. It's relevant to this post because they obviously won a bunch of awards, as the usually do.

News and quality of news has been a major part of my life since my first ever semi successful project, which was a news aggregator I started over a decade ago. One of the mechanisms we tried then (before reddit existed as far as I know) was a sortof economy where each poster got a certain amount of tokens to "spend" on submissions and comments, and you could earn more tokens when people "paid" you for your quality contributions.

Obviously it didn't work.

Since then I've tried computational linguistics approaches to this problem, which solves _a_ problem, but not the fitness checking one I'm talking about here.

And finally: my wife is a former political journalist, so obviously news and quality of news is a major topic in my life which I talk about, read about, and write about pretty regularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Glad to see smaller publications putting out good journalism and being recognized.

High quality reporting is, still, one of the most effective ways to speak truth to power. Unfortunately the internet has decimated smaller journals and local papers, so local issues might never get reported on. I wish that trend would reverse, but I have no idea how one would do that.

<comment><USER9> Pay for your news, get a subscription to a local paper, participate in your local political process if you can. We're all so focused on work and what's going on in Washington that we don't allow ourselves to reserve any time or energy to understand local politics, because they're "boring".

<comment><USER10> My local paper and in fact every paper in California mixes a smattering of worthwhile reporting into non-stop stupidity. Every morning the editors of the LA Times wake up and think of a new way to trash every one of my core beliefs, so it doesn't matter to me that the LA Times published one (1) worthwhile piece of art criticism in 2019. That's certainly not enough to make me overlook the fact that the LA Times has been running a large-scale real estate scam for over 100 years, considering that housing is the most important issue to me.

I subscribe to CalMatters and Berkeleyside and Boom California. Anyone who considers themselves a good local journalist needs to write for those outlets if they want my dollar. I'm not here to enrich the shareholders of legacy newspapers.

ETA: There actually is one good newspaper in California: the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Wouldn't want to miss mentioning America's last newspaper.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any evidence to back your LA Times real estate scam claim? Seems hard to believe that an organization that large would be able to pull off a conspiracy like that for 100 years without someone coming forward about it.

<comment><USER10> Can't tell if you are serious or not. The LAT was published by Harry Chandler, owner and developer of the San Fernando Valley and other areas. Chandler used the Times to boost migration to Los Angeles, to take over the Owens River, and to involve himself in many other affairs. For the entire 20th century the Times was Chandler's mouthpiece to remake southern California to serve the interest of his greed. This is all well-documented in dozens of books, many of which are wonderfully good reading. I recommend anything my Mark Arax or Marc Reisner, or this article from Boom: [https://boomcalifornia.com/2013/09/23/there-it-is-take- it/](https://boomcalifornia.com/2013/09/23/there-it-is-take-it/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I honestly don't know much about what it takes to win a Pulitzer.

But while scrolling down that page, I was crossing my fingers for APM's podcast In the Dark to win something.

The second season following the Curtis Flowers case is fascinating, infuriating, beautiful, harrowing, and culminates in a US Supreme Court case...

I don't know where that podcast sits on the spectrum of "pulp crime interest" to "genuine reporting" but IMO it's far, far on the side of "genuine reporting".

<comment><USER4> If I'm reading the Wikipedia page correctly [0], APM's latest season finished in 2018, although it did publish updates in early 2019. IIRC to be eligible for this year's Pulitzer (specifically the one in audio reporting, which didn't exist in 2019), the season would have had to been published in 2019.

That said, This American Life did win a Pulitzer in 2011, but it had ProPublica as a publishing partner, and I believe it was the first time a journalism Pulitzer went to a project that did not publish in print [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Dark_(podcast)#Season_2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Dark_\(podcast\)#Season_2_2)

[1] [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/announcements/pulitze...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/announcements/pulitzer- for-propublicas-wall-street-coverage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The 1619 project is at its core flawed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Critical_resp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Critical_response)

The American Revolution was simply not about protecting slavery. You can't say the birth of America was a racist endeavor - it's factually incorrect. This is historical revisionism.

<comment><USER13> A more correct way of summarising the link you provided is that _some historians contend_ the 1619 Project is at its core flawed, and it has been criticised by many prominent conservatives.

It's a subject of much debate both in and out of academic circles.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project- new-york-times-wilentz/605152/)

While this list contains everything that is positive and great about journalism, it also embraces what makes journalism reviled. The Pulitzer award going to the 1619 project despite it's mistruths further erodes people's willingness to trust the media to do their basic job - to tell the truth.

The NYT article embraces the conceit from the media that they are they experts - they need not listen to historians, but instead journalists can be the sole arbiter of truth.

The articles "overarching contention that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history" is simply a story that the journalist wants to tell. The journalist ignored the truth in order to tell that story risks kicking out the legs to a true evaluation of America's (and more generally the west's) troubled history with race.

To some, the 1619 project becomes incontrovertible truth, backed by the Pulitzer and the NYT, and anyone who disagrees with it are racist. To others the easily disproved assertions discredit not only this article, but all well- founded criticisms of race in America.

This is how we get two Americas. Every man is entitled to their opinion, but not their own set of facts. If we ignore facts in order to feed our biases, we will never be able to talk about the truly hard issues that we have to master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I felt that Greg Grandin's Myth of the Frontier was actually the second-best counter-narrative to the standard accounts of American relations with its neighbors published in 2019. The most interesting was How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to- hide-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire- daniel-immerwahr.html)

One of the more interesting sections for the Hacker News crowd is how technological advancements in World War II like artificial rubber and international standards allowed the US to cede the huge amount of land it directly controlled after the war (which is not to say that US influence completely disappeared in these places).

</comment><comment><USER16> The press gets a bad name a lot of the time, especially by those who are in positions of power and who are subject to the press, but the reality is that a lot of the press and many journalists do incredible work that shed light on various stories that might go unnoticed if it was not for journalism and the press. Obviously there are bad actors that degrade what the press does or stands and those actors usually are louder and get put in the spotlight but there are so many incredible journalists that really do uphold the intended role of the press; to inform, criticize, and stimulate debate. I'm glad that parts of the press, those who really do hold up journalistic integrity and care about their work/role, are recognized especially in the current state of the world where the press, even good actors, are often blamed or criticized for doing their job and are somehow framed as the "bad guy."

<comment><USER17> Seriously, so much this. You only realize how valuable good journalism is when you don't have it, as is unfortunately very common in most parts of the world.

Journalists play an extremely important role in keeping a check on power and as such are critical to the health of a democracy. The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far; without a good, unbiased press there is simply no way to have an honest conversation about the most important problems that a country faces and the different plans by which to address them (as is becoming very clear by the botched response to the Coronavirus pandemic).

<comment><USER18> > The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make > people a lot angrier than it has so far

It would make me a lot angrier if the most popular news outlets were indeed "good, unbiased press" and not spin doctors and propaganda distributors for [insert political machine].

<comment><USER19> Very much this. What most people consider "the press", the main stream media, has converted almost completely to infotainment, opinion, and propaganda for vested interests.

John Gruber (of Daring Fireball, Mardkown fame, etc.) coined the term "claim chowder" and started keeping a list of dubious tech reporting. I've been keeping a mental list myself and its almost painful how often a highly circulated story obviously will have a shelf life of weeks or days before being completely invalidated. As long as it makes it through the spin cycle, though, I suppose it doesn't matter to show runners, editors, and others pushing the narrative.

When news outlets run significantly fabricated stories (sometimes for months or years) and then run a genuine story how can they be believed? When news outlets never issue retractions, corrections, or apologies for misleading the public, how can they be trusted. When they actively attempt to remove or change content from their public archives in order to put themselves on the right side of history or direct the way history is being made, how can they be treated as protectors of freedom against tyranny. When they destroy the lives of who accidentally entered their crosshairs to sell ad space, how can they be considered good.

<comment><USER20> That's an insanely broad brush. The mainstream press includes the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, and NPR. Please explain how they fabricate narratives, how they destroy the lives of those who accidentally enter their crosshairs, and how they retroactively alter their archives to change history.

I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.

<comment><USER21> When was the last time you read a positive story on Putin in the NYtimes?

All those outlets are compromised expect maybe NPR. Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institutional narrative, it is on you you still consider the mainstream anything more than shadow of what they represented in the past.

<comment><USER17> Theres nothing positive about Putin because he is a murderous dictator. There's nothing positive about Kim Jong Un or Orban or MBS either. The NYTimes' journalistic integrity is not measured by positive coverage of dictators in fact if anything it's the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> fascinating fact: the pulitzer prize, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, is named after a newspaper publisher infamous for yellow journalism. by the end of his career, however, joseph pulitzer had reformed himself and started producing outstanding journalism.

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

<comment><USER23> Sort of like:

"The Enron Prize for good corporate accounting"

"The Benedict Arnold medial of Patriotism"

"The Lucrezia Borgia Best Cocktail award"

etc

<comment><USER24> or in 80 years time the prestigious Murdoch Award for excellence in journalism

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Each story was impactful, either at a local, national or global level. Congratulations to the winners. We need more courageous and thoughtful journalism.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ben Taub has been putting out some fantastic work, especially for someone so young. His article on Iraq's post ISIS policies was incredibly sad but very informative.

<comment><USER27> Incredibly prolific, especially given his how well-received his track record has been. Takes some serious guts to take a year off from Princeton to _self- fund a trip to Syria during the middle of a war_ to learn how to be a war correspondent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What does "Moved into contention by the Board" mean in the context of these awards?

<comment><USER29> I believe these are cases where the publication itself didn't nominate the piece or author for consideration as typically happens, but the board decided to consider it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The subject of one winning story (Governor Bevin) apparently knew that his pardons were Pulitzer-worthy before:

[https://twitter.com/joesonka/status/1257389461429784583?s=19](https://twitter.com/joesonka/status/1257389461429784583?s=19)

<comment><USER31> I don't understand what Bevin means by this. Is he being sarcastic?

<comment><USER32> He was hoping to sway the story away from what he already knew was being written. He made the phone call to Sonka unscheduled and had never called before. In fact, it was a surprise because most of Sonka's work was not complimentary. Having the governor who was against news media (Trumpian) give a friendly call was very strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That Epstein cartoon is brilliant given that no one still seems to know what happened - [https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/barry-blitt-contributor- new...](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/barry-blitt-contributor-new-yorker)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is it possible to win Pulitzer Prize with just 1 submission - (e.g. amateur submission in 1 of the categories)? Or does one require a track record of some sort for the year?

<comment><USER4> Putting aside the likely bias towards established organizations (big and small), most winners in the journalism article categories submit a series of articles, because practically speaking, several small articles often lead up to the big investigation (e.g. Watergate) [0]; or, one big investigation leads to a series of followups, including coverage about the impact and consequences from the story, e.g. Snowden files [1].

That said, there are one-shot amateur Pulitzer winners, most notably in the photography categories. The Pulitzer winning photo of the Kent State massacre was taken by a photojournalism student [2]. And one of the most famous early Pulitzer photos was taken by a non-journalism amateur: 24-year-old Arnold Hardy in 1947 [3].

I think the contemporary category where you will find the most examples of single-article winners will be Feature Writing, but I'm not aware of any amateurs who have won it: [https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by- category/211](https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/211)

[0] [https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington- post](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post)

[1] [https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington- post-1](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post-1)

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

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

<comment><USER34> I appreciate the time spent you have spent putting together a nice response -- thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The 1619 Project was such an awful bit of journalism. Totally not surprised it won a Pulitzer.

<comment><USER36> I don't understand the usage of awful here. Are you using it to suggest the journalism is good and deserving of recognition (confusing) or that the Pulitzer is an award for bad journalism?

<comment><USER37> I believe that illiilliiililil is expressing a somewhat complex set of opinions:

1) They genuinely don't like the 1619 project.

2) They understand that the Pulitzer is supposed to be an award for good journalism.

3) They believe that journalism about some subjects is more likely to win a Pulitzer without being the best by illiilliiililil's standards. You could compare it to the concept of an "Oscar bait" movie: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_bait](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_bait)

I'm not sure I agree with this criticism - I think exploring tough subjects can lead to great work that is especially deserving of praise.

<comment><USER38> _On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies' independence of Britain "in order to ensure slavery would continue." This is not true_

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to- th...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the- historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone know why Barry Blitt's recognition is now under contention?

[https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/barry-blitt-contributor- new...](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/barry-blitt-contributor-new-yorker)

<comment><USER40> _Contention_ here means as a contender for the prize. See the second meaning here: [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/contention](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/contention)

 _Moved by the board_ means that the board nominated it; not submitted by the author / publisher.

<comment><USER39> Got it.. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Two specific points of note:

\- This is the first year the audio reporting category is being awarded; This American Life seems like a perfect inaugural winner.

\- Colson Whitehead (Fiction) also won in the same category in 2017.

</comment><comment><USER42> The ligatures, for example in "metafictional", are broken on this site for me (they appear in the wrong font)

</comment><comment><USER43> Should anyone be proud of a Pulitzer considering they gave one out to the New York Times for covering up genocide in the USSR? [1]

It would seem to me that the Pulitzer Prize is ethically bankrupt considering who you share this 'prestige' with.

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

<comment><USER44> This happened ninety years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> One day a chicken will finally win, which will be a pullet surprise...

But seriously, congratulations to the winners!

</comment><comment><USER46> The Pulitzer Prize was created by the founder of yellow journalism ( AKA 1800s fake news ) - Joseph Pulitzer. Is this a prize that journalists or journalism should be supporting? It would be a like a physics award created by a flat earther.

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

But I guess congratulations are in order.</comment>


Morgellons: A hidden epidemic or mass hysteria? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/07/morgellons-mysterious-illness <comment><USER2> It is a mental health disease that spreads via the internet. Discuss.</comment>


Google gets its cloud together - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.csc.com/2016/09/30/google-gets-its-cloud-together/ <comment><USER2> Them hiring Diane Greene and her team is the best thing they have ever done for that group. They are finally getting their ducks in a row to compete.

<comment><USER3> Which is rather ironic given what a complete and utter failure VMWare's attempt at a public cloud was. That's not even commenting on vcloud director...

<comment><USER4> Diane wasn't there anymore ;).</comment></comment></comment>


Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers?src=longreads

<comment><USER2> How dangerous are all these "modifications"?</comment>


Ask HN: Worked for linode? - <AUTHOR> Please share your experience <comment><USER2> Yes.

Don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why?</comment></comment>


Is AP Run By Idiots? - <AUTHOR> http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10002794/is-ap-run-by-idiots/ <comment><USER2> It's hard to come up with a plausible alternative to the "idiot" theory.

I suppose that, given that the only way the AP is likely to survive is by government fiat, this could be a perverse form of lobbying. It's a publicity stunt.

Step A: Try to demonstrate that all the headlines on the web were originally written by you.

Step B: Argue that this makes your organization indispensable -- when you go out of business, trains and buses will stop running, the sun will stand still in the sky, cancer will never be cured.

Step C: To draw attention to your argument: Scream, shout, jump on chairs, sue everyone in sight. When none of this works: Decry the lawlessness of society, demand protection.

Step D: ???

Step E: Government action!

The smartest members of the music industry (but not, alas, the influential ones) have said for years that the realistic way forward is a blanket licensing scheme: Each of us gets the right to download and play whatever we want, and in return we're legally obligated to pay an annual fee to some ASCAP-like organization that divides the money up among music publishers. Now, I like this idea, but the obvious downside is: Who is a music publisher, and how do we figure out how to divide the money? You've got to come up with some kind of ground rules. There's going to be a lot of people working the refs. Perhaps the AP has concluded that such a scheme is their only hope and is trying to make sure they're positioned to argue that the ground rules should favor them.

Or, you know, there's the idiot theory. Still might be the best one, really. Occam's Razor and all that.

The thing which really makes AP sound like a mental patient is all this raving about the "wrapper" technology that will magically track down uses of their content on the web. But I'm not necessarily convinced they they really believe in the Easter Bunny, phlogiston, or digital watermarks for _plain text_. Perhaps this talk about magical "wrappers" is just a face-saving attempt to say "we will find you if you quote our material" _without_ having to say "...and we will use Google to do it, of course, just like everyone else does. Of course, our publicly-stated belief is that Google is an unethical leech and that they should be paying us money every time they return a search containing some of our writing. But of course _we_ won't be paying anyone _else_ for the writing that _we_ find using Google, because we're special and besides we don't have any money."

Actually, that explanation still sounds like the raving of a mental patient. It all keeps coming back to the idiot theory.

<comment><USER3> _"Each of us gets the right to download and play whatever we want, and in return we're legally obligated to pay an annual fee to some ASCAP-like organization that divides the money up among music publishers. Now, I like this idea, but the obvious downside is: Who is a music publisher, and how do we figure out how to divide the money?"_

I don't like this idea at all. Why should I, as a non-artist, have to find a way to provide a work product or service that people are willing to pay me for and artists are allowed to create stuff that no one is willing to pay for? Or artists are allowed to create something which can not be marketed and an income stream can naturally be built around? If no one is willing (or able) to pay for your service, there is no market for it. And without a market, there's no way to determine which is the "good art" and which is the "bad art" and which artists should be encouraged and which should stop making art and get jobs flipping burgers. The very fact that it is massively gamable (as we've seen in other industries), as you point out, is reason enough, for me, to avoid even attempting it.

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind that systems like this have been working for years. Composers get paid royalties via ASCAP and BMI, for example.

And I believe all the schemes, both existing and proposed, divvy up the money based on the number of times certain compositions are played. Artists can't compose unlistenable music and then claim a check. It's a game, but it's not _entirely_ unlike a market.

The fact that it might be gamable doesn't seem like much of a scandal. What's our gold standard here? An imaginary fairyland? The existing, supposedly free market for music is not merely gamable... it's been corrupt since it was invented. Just try to get your tune on the radio without paying bribes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines."

Wow, what a truly epic misunderstanding of what search engines do.

The thinking goes: Google is just a business built out of keywords. They come up with the best keywords, and we fork over cash to them for that. AP has got some slick headlines which are even better than keywords, because they have _more words._ Also, we produce them, not steal them from other people like Google, which must be an even better business!

I also have to say, the whole rights-managed link framework sounds like the biggest pie-in-the-sky project I've ever heard. Some consultant really sold them on something that is going to be quite lucrative (for the consultant obviously).

<comment><USER5> The thing is, there already is a Google for news. It's called Google News.

...and it _already pays AP_ license fees to use their content. What, exactly, do they thing this new program is going to accomplish?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a move of desperation. Papers sign multi-year, mutli-thousand (or hundred thousand, depending on the paper's size) contracts to use AP content, and many of them have been considering canceling their contracts to save money.

[http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/star-tribune-ditches- ap-o...](http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/star-tribune-ditches-ap-others- expected-to-follow.html)

The AP has to do something or will find itself completely irrelevant. While they produce graphics and quite a bit of the foreign news published in this country, most domestic stories come from their member papers. Fewer member papers = less value for members = death spiral for AP.

They have to do something to add value for their member papers. Leading the charge to an industry-wide pay wall actually makes some sense, as they are in the unique position to unify the 1,400 papers that belong to the organization.

That's not to say it will work. Technologically, it seems retarded on its face. Economically, I have no idea how they'll enforce it. But suing users has kept the music industry in business - for now at least - so who knows, maybe suing aggregators and bloggers will keep the AP in business.

RIAA - Meet the Associated Press.

</comment><comment><USER7> The author concluded: "I think it would make sense for bloggers right now to start posting AP headlines and links along with a small amount of discussion on each, to keep it all within fair use, after all."

However, why not simply avoid AP? If they want to be outside the interlinked web, just let them go there. Don't link to them. Consequently, the search engines also shouldn't link to them. If they want to be in an empty room - just leave them there.

It won't take long and they'll _beg_ to become noticed. In a few years, maybe they'll turn the corner, maybe they'll sink into insignificance. Who cares?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because these decisions are made in pieces by a society, not by a few idealists in binary. That's just like saying, "Why not stop listening to ASCAP music?" It's almost impossible to avoid AP content at the moment and will remain so for the near future. And that's the problem with behemoths in many cases -- they're not nearly as sensitive to market pressures and so often end up being idiotic while society changes around them.

<comment><USER7> "It's almost impossible to avoid AP content at the moment"

I don't see any problem for a blogger to stop linking to AP. Not wanting to be linked to is a very stupid wish, so instead of trying to "educate" AP it's much simpler and more appropriate to fullfill their wish.

<comment><USER8> The problem isn't with getting some individuals to act on this. The problem is getting society as a whole to do so. This is a general problem with trying to incite a boycott of something that has very widespread usage: the dent you can make is often too small to be noticed, because society is too hard to organize.

<comment><USER7> It wan't meant as a boycott.

I just think that the author's recommendation for bloggers is ill-advised. It would be better to ignore AP rather than to pay extra attention to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The microformat the AP are talking about is described in a little more detail on the AP Labs Wiki:

<http://labs.ap.org/wiki/hNews>

<comment><USER5> Seems rather pointless. How does this microformat describing rights stop me from copy/pasting an article onto my blog?

But I suppose I should be happy they didn't decide that I need to install a Silverlight player to read their articles.

<comment><USER10> > I suppose I should be happy they didn't decide that I need to install a > Silverlight player to read their articles.

Maybe that idea just hasn't occurred to them yet. After all, we're all gagging for their news, so much so that we're not only willing to pay for it, we're happy to install special software (which only runs on Windows, naturally) to view it!

My prediction: AP will waste about $50 million on this, then quietly forget the whole idea. The idiot responsible for it won't get sacked, they'll get a big bonus and pension.

<comment><USER6> You forgot to mention all the foreign bureaus that will get closed and the reporters and photographers who will get laid off without benefits or severance...

[http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/commentary- transitio...](http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/commentary-transitional- pay-101-in.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I see moves like this, I think about a wonderful small, white, fluffy dog my girlfriend had. After a while, I sort of co-adopted him as my dog, and I'd walk him to a big fenced schoolyard every night before bed so he could do his business.

Now, I could run around with him and have a nice time and play and exercise. But if I let him off his leash, it'd be HELL trying to get him back on. He'd go pat-pat-pat-VROOOOOMMMMMMMM past me when I'd try to grab him. It'd take like forever.

So it is industries like newspapers. The dog is off the leash. Pandora's Box is opened. Horses are escaped from barn. The time to try something like this was a long time ago, proactively, with lots of value-add.

Trying to force people to pay for something they've been getting free, with no new add-value, and new restrictions and inconveniences, when there's alternative sources... well, it ain't gonna work. Pat-pat-pat-VROOOOMMM. "Dog! Come back here. RIGHT NOW! I mean it! I mean it! Come back! ... Seriously! It's cold, I'm sick of being out here! ... Right now! ... I mean it!"

<comment><USER12> "Dog! I will sue you."

I think someone at the AP had drinks with someone at the RIAA and they decided the best idea would be to leap off a bridge, together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To quote John Gruber,

 _They have no idea what they're talking about. Seriously, look at this gibberish [<http://www.ap.org/media/images/APnewsregistry.jpg>]. Someone just sold the Associated Press a bag of magic beans._

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that graphic is a great example of the ability to turn any crap idea into a flashy graphic. The stage that is missing on this flowchart is "and a miracle occurs", although putting the word "container" and "beacon" in quotes kind of says that. Magic beans indeed.

I keep seeing this meme pop up though:

 _"Format protects content everywhere and enables RSS syndication, enhanced search, mobile apps and pay content models"_

The only thing it _potentially_ "enables" is "pay content models", Big Media always throws in the other "benefits" as if those things don't currently exist ("finally, RSS syndication will be ENABLED by this!") or don't currently work.

RIAA tried this one too: if only we can sprinkle this magic pixie dust over our dying industry, all these things that we already have will be provided to us. I at first had typed that as "magic pixel dust", which is a good name for DRM.

And this appears as a technical solution, but then the usage of iconography like a gavel for "enforcement" reveals that they either know this is an unworkable solution and they need expanded legal support, or they think that using this needs to be legally mandated, neither of which will actually work in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't this imply news aggregators like HN would have to pay to post links?

<comment><USER5> According to the AP, yes.

But not really. Linking to an article to discuss it is not copyright infringement. And therefore they would have no legal right to tell you what to do.

I suppose they could have all their licensees check Referrer headers and reject hits for unapproved sources, if they were serious about this... but I can't imagine why anyone would go along with that. And it doesn't change the fact that posting content on the Internet and asking people not to link to it, will never really be a good plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a pretty good story to be told here, combined with the Death of Popular Music and the RIAA.

In both cases, it looks like people stopped taking any risks. The music industry (at least the Popular Music Industry) started putting out more and more formulaic garbage, b/c it was low risk. The AP stopped doing journalism and moved to a press-release transcription agency. Eventually both started dying. They started looking around for _external_ causes, and found The Internet.

Now they're trying to undo the effects of internet in hopes that they'll return to where they were before. Of course, what they have to do is realize that where they were before was due to their risk-taking predecessors' legacies, and where they are now are the results of their own cowardly actions.

What they should do is fire themselves and admit that they're cowardly losers.

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess I'm going to go a little bit activist here, but this story makes me think that strategically, now is a good time for people who believe more things should be in the public domain. As media companies and publishers do what they can to hang on to the last grasps of industries which are passing them by, they may start to do things which seem pretty ridiculous, as is seen here. Out of this ridculousness may come a little bit more open-mindedness on the part of the general public toward content belonging in the public domain.

<comment><USER16> The woolly mammoth jerks again, is what I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is an excellent opportunity for someone to create a start up around. The AP is basically just a news aggregation service and a monopoly. How many organizations just get their news off of the AP and don't actually sponsor any of their own.

A small company could have liberal reuse policies and use the APs lack of foresight against them. Pay contributors for their content based on its popularity.

<comment><USER5> They're not a monopoly, there are several other big wire services and dozens of smaller ones. They're just one of the best.

<comment><USER17> They're the only one you ever hear about.

<comment><USER5> Reuters and AFP would be the other two big ones.

AP is just the biggest and the best for US news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "hNews can be thought of as inheriting from hAtom, since parsers and tools that do not understand the hNews extensions can still parse the hAtom content."

So in other words if you dont use their parser then you wont get any of their restrictions. Are they going to FORCE us to use the parser they decide?

</comment><comment><USER19> So you AP and this guy together: [http://gawker.com/5305503/lets-screw-up-the- entire-internet-...](http://gawker.com/5305503/lets-screw-up-the-entire- internet-to-save-newspapers)

and what do you get?

</comment><comment><USER20> That so many people are calling them idiots means they may be on to something.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone actually understand how this microformat & "tracking beacon" are supposed to work? Is it an image bug in the source?

</comment><comment><USER21> Can news (information) be monopolised?

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes

</comment><comment><USER23> "I make my living as a writer, editor, and photographer, and realize that everyone creating content needs an income. "

LOL. Hence, the entire legal system needs to be horrifically twisted to meet these people's 'needs'.

<comment><USER24> That's really not what he was saying though, was it?</comment></comment>


Top Python libraries of 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://tryolabs.com/blog/2016/12/20/top-10-python-libraries-of-2016/ <comment><USER2> _" According to the Sanic author's benchmark, uvloop could power this beast to handle more than 33k requests/s which is just insane (and faster than node.js)."_

I keep looking for excuses to focus on Python instead of Go and claims like this one make me happy. However, when I check the benchmarks I get confused:

[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=p...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=ph&test=fortune&b=2&s=1&l=4ft3pb)

Of course this looks amazing:

[https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python- networking/](https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python-networking/)

But, even if in the request/second area Python might be doing great now, won't there be problem down the line with the GIL? That is, isn't async/await an island of good performance?

<comment><USER3> > won't there be problem down the line with the GIL?

If you want _parallelism_ in _pure_ Python code, you don't use multiple threads.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're on Jython or the parallelism is for I/O.

<comment><USER3> I/O isn't pure code.

<comment><USER4> That's certainly one way to interpret "pure Python" but many people use that phrase to describe code that is using only builtins and standard library as opposed to community-supplied C extensions.

<comment><USER3> I honestly disagree, but I do recognize how one could see it that way.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's a bit of a leaky abstraction since many modules in the standard library are implemented in C. And the interpreter itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> spaCy going from AGPL to MIT was exciting to me but I see that actually happened in late 2015 [https://github.com/explosion/spaCy](https://github.com/explosion/spaCy)

<comment><USER6> I love Spacy, and recently discovered Textacy: "higher-level NLP built on Spacy"[1].

It's pretty good.

[1] [https://github.com/chartbeat-labs/textacy](https://github.com/chartbeat- labs/textacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using sanic+uvloop+aiozmq (current public draft: [https://github.com/rcarmo/newsfeed- corpus](https://github.com/rcarmo/newsfeed-corpus)) and am quite pleased with this setup for building fast (for Python) asynchronous apps.

The async/await thing is still a bit half-baked (I can't wait for 3.6 to arrive with more bits, including async generators), but I can see myself using this more and more -- just don't expect Go-like performance from this setup for anything but simple processing, since Python is still slow (and 3.x all the more so until PyPy 3 becomes a reality).

As to the rest of the libraries mentioned, I can't really fault the selection. I'm still using Python largely because of the ecosystem and sane deployment options, so I'm always happy to find new, decent libraries.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am wondering why python community focus seems to be shifting away from gevent and towards the asyncio framework.

Am I the only one who finds the programming style of using async/await inferior to that of gevent?

<comment><USER9> You're not the only one. I too am fond of the implicit context switching that we can have with gevent.

<comment><USER10> "Explicit is better than implicit", you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice list! I did not know about hug. Here's hoping I can remember it next time I need a basic API.

Is that an issue for anyone else -- that you can't remember all these libraries exist when you need them?

I guess that what awesome-{python, PHP, golang, etc} are for, right?

<comment><USER5> I don't get a lot out of those awesome lists. Not enough is done to filter them...what would greatly help is to arrange the list as a table, with Github stars, number of issues, committers, and weeks since last update.

I'm teaching a Python class in winter and put down all the libraries I could think of that I might need (on top of Anaconda 4.x)...probably will serialize this later: [https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/9e5082ac6a80590bfe1541952f...](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/9e5082ac6a80590bfe1541952fcf5212)

Planning to use AWS significantly this quarter, so awscli and boto3 are at the top of my list.

<comment><USER12> There are a bunch of apps who can manage your github stars (i can't remember which one i use, something like "night sky" maybe? Am on mobile). I periodically review and tag them so they're easy to find when i start a new project. Then I check my Pinboard.

I wish someone would make an app that merged Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, Pinboard and similar dev-oriented collections.

<comment><USER12> Late edit: the app I use is Astral: [https://astralapp.com/](https://astralapp.com/)

Pretty good for a non-native app ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's telling that at least three of these are python 3 only.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks, quite a lot of libraries I wasn't aware of (probably coz I haven't needed them yet! I still prefer perl for quite-n-dirty scripts, but one of these days I should try to do the same with python instead).

Anybody want to volunteer to start a resource page for python, kind of like this one for elasticsearch? [https://github.com/dzharii/awesome- elasticsearch](https://github.com/dzharii/awesome-elasticsearch)

<comment><USER15> Like this? [https://github.com/vinta/awesome- python](https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> hug is great fun to work with, and with just a little abuse works great for a normal website frontend too - but provides you with a canonical endpoint list, and decent typing.

<comment><USER17> hug (like Falcon) has way lot of "magic". It seems to be a trend (at least in python webdev world). I have mixed feelings about this.

Hug appears to be one of those things that is great when all you're doing is very simple but quickly turn into morass of fighting the opinions and magic of framework when doing anything "real".

Also (good) CLI is so different than HTTP that I see only sadness in mashing them into same interface. like having to repeat large amounts of boilerplate decorators to get it to do what you need. The chaining seems it would help with boilerplate at least.

Still, I hope I'm wrong. I want to have a hug. Falcon's lack of validation and documentation means it solves only about 10% of the problem.

<comment><USER18> Is that really a trend? I remember web2py getting a lot of flack because of the amount of magic it used.

<comment><USER19> Feels more like a pendulum. I remember one of the big pre-1.0 branches of Django was called "removing-the-magic".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bokeh and Sanic+uvloop is pretty interesting.</comment>


Show HN: Routerless - <AUTHOR> http://22.214.171.124:3000 <comment><USER2> Can someone please ELI5 what I'm supposed to be seeing? I just opened this page and saw a bunch of buzzwords. What is this? What is this for? Why is it hosted on an IP address?

<comment><USER3> It appears to be a uri route handling library for node.js

Why the word "routerless" is in the title is a mystery to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a joke from stupid buzzwords - kind of "serverless". You don't define routes with pro-router - you just use a store which serializes to url.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think I see what this is for, despite the unilluminating site. Storing state in the URL is a good idea - it lets your users bookmark and share links to your application's state.

I have a couple of questions though:

When I have done this in the past, I have used the url fragment to store the state, i.e.: [https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing](https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing) . This works even with static sites because the browser doesn't send the fragment (everything past the # symbol) to the server.

By encoding state in the path of the URL, you require server support. I guess the flip side of that is that your site can continue to work without js support.

I notice that your demo and docs don't mention anything about manipulating the browser's history to allow the user to move to previous states using the back button. That can be a pretty useful thing to provide.

<comment><USER5> Fragments are worse than described here. Fragments are incompatible with redirects. Not only does the browser not send them, but any server-side redirects will either require active-JS redirects to capture and redirect the fragment, or strip the fragment as inappropriate/pointless, or if you're very lucky, maintain it somehow through the redirect. Do not use fragments for any critical function without vetting your entire workflow and all servers and useragents in your request/response path.

<comment><USER4> What you say is absolutely true, and I agree. But I also subscribe to the URLs-are-user-interface school of thought and think that implementing redirects to change your UI requires careful thought. I'll admit that sometimes it is unavoidable as applications change over time.

Maintaining state in the path, query parameters, or fragment are all techniques that can work, but each comes with disadvantages.

I wonder if anyone has been mad enough to maintain state in subdomains:

[https://accnumber18573.color- yellow.example.com/](https://accnumber18573.color-yellow.example.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> finally, XSS As A Service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one :) You decide what you keep in url. Use case of google map when you're scrolling a map and you want to share a location with your friend is not vulnerable, right? Now it's easier

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think I like the idea, but the docs are a major puzzle. This is a library for mapping URLs to data (or function calls? not sure) without a _single_ URL in the docs. There is also a demo, which shows that it works, but not _how_ it works (no source code displayed except if i want to dig down in the entire site's source code).

@madmaniak, add some examples, please :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for kind words and sorry for being so enigmatic.

Step 1: Attach pro-router

Step 2: R.init(root: 'helloworld')

Step 3:

R.write('foo', 'bar')

# url changes from '/' to '/helloworld/foo/bar'

R.param('foo') # => 'bar'

Please ask me any use case you'd like to solve. I'll try to explain more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> All I see initially is a white screen. Then realized I had to scroll down (and oddly to the right!) in order to see any content. Clicking on "DEMO" leads to the same thing (scroll right for actual content) but with super large text and oddly-placed elements. Still not quite sure what this is about, but it looks like a neat art project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously I failed with preparing a proper flexbox css. I had one day to make this website. I'll polish things too look well.

If you can ignore the layout you'll find neat art project for frontend routing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't you have a domain? And you can setup cloudflare for free..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for recommendation. I've linked it to my domain [http://router.maniak.pro:3000](http://router.maniak.pro:3000) right now. I'll change the port to standard http soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You should try and make the page a bit smaller. This is what I see on my Macbook Air: [http://imgur.com/a/Mi3lb](http://imgur.com/a/Mi3lb)

I tried scrolling to the left thinking there was more content, but that was it. It looked better on Chrome when I set the size to be 80%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'll improve it

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Treat url as a store. Serialize to url and deserialize to objects.

<comment><USER11> I can't think of too many instances in which I would use this personally, but seems very useful for things like saving web game state.

<comment><AUTHOR> Game is a complex thing and it would handle it perfectly. Believe me it handles really well also simple cases. For me it's not a first iteration on the idea of routing automation. It gives you freedom and is really handy. Even if you never thought defining routes is a problem. I hope you'll give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is pattern matching "stubborn"? Seems like the perfect application of a pattern matcher.

</comment><comment><USER13> How is this different than building a single page app with say, react router + redux?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use anything with this router (redux too). I agree react router is a nice tool - but in a classic paradigm. The difference is - you don't define routes. If you create a component and it needs a data you just ask the url store for it. Or if you need to persist some data you just write to the store. It creates nice urls - always a name and a value. Additionally you have setters which will handle a serialization of your object to nice string. And of course getters which will wrap your data into a custom object - so it's not a string.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Probably want to remove "goddamn"

</comment><comment><USER15> lol, what?

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/](https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/)

<comment><USER17> This is just a static site with a zero.

<comment><USER16> Yes, this is the crux of the joke :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tiny lib with a website that pulls 1.1 MB of JS.

<comment><USER19> I went to the website and got a white screen. Is the JS required?

<comment><USER13> Well, let's see... It's 2017, so yes.

<comment><USER20> That makes no sense

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Just 67 lines of code and less than 900 bytes while minified and gzipped.

If this is 67 lines of code with zero dependencies, why do I need it as a dependency?

Regarding CDN implementation, why would anyone add an HTTP request to the page for 900 bytes?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Please explain me what you'd like to know. Router is one layer of SPA / PWA so you need it if you want to make one. It's framework independent and I'd not like too add more dependencies to your project for such a small thing - even if it's powerful.

2\. If you want to check it out quickly with minimal effort, play in your browser js console - it's there.</comment></comment>


How Apple evolved and eliminated the home button over a decade - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/15/apple-iphone-home-button-evolution-elimination/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised to read that using the sleep button and home button combination to take screenshots was only introduced with iOS 2 (iPhone OS 2, actually, in the nomenclature of the era): I seem to remember it presaging that, but maybe I'm mistaken.

Personally I shall not miss the home button, as I abhor it's mechanical nature and have wanted it gone since forever. That said, I'm not very enthused by the iPhone X either, on account of the utter loss of TouchID. I always considered building fingerprint recognition into a screen to be tantamount to science- fiction, but I also kept hoping Apple would find a way of pulling it off well before the feature weaved its way into the rumour mill. Oh well... I suppose it'll be the hallmark feature of iPhone X+1.</comment>


3D/VR Tours just went open source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/livetourlab/live-tour-lab <comment><AUTHOR> Amazing companies like Matterport and YouVisit has popularised "3D Tours" / "VR Tours". I felt it was time for a free open source alternative, that allows adding _code_ into the VR tour, hence the word "Live" in LiveTourLab. It is ambitious to take on a billion dollar industry as a dev, but with the power of open source, I know it can be done. If you like it, please contribute or support by starring the repo. Cheers // Anders, main developer

</comment><comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, you are right. I tried now but it becomes marked as a duplicate of this post.

<comment><USER2> I suggest contact the moderators using the |contact| link at the bottom of the page.</comment></comment></comment>


Google wreaks havoc on our company's calendars: lost data and security breaches - <AUTHOR> http://www.elezea.com/2012/12/google-calendar-lost-data-security-breach/

<comment><USER2> This sounds like a severe technical problem that has to be analyzed and fixed by real experts. I doubt that these kind of people do night and weekend shifts. And unless the problem is widespread, I don't think they're calling those experts in from their weekends for a single incident.

<comment><USER3> If it can happen once, it can happen again. Calling in those experts on the weekend is _exactly_ the thing you should do if you're Google. Pay them double if you need to. But you need to catch this sort of thing before it escalates, not least for the PR damage it can cause.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure Google employs several people on call

Hopefully they can help solve this problem or at least raise the (SNAFU) alarm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a database migration [by Google that is] or dump/reimport that hasn't preserved the original primary/foreign keys and so items are now owned by other people. Oh the joys of referential integrity.

The ownership of things seems to have been kept within your company but not so for individual items in the calendar which could mean that random other people are seeing your calendar entries appearing in their calendars.

"Oops" is the operative word from Google.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are all of your employees using two-factor authentication? Are you 100% that this could not have happened via a normal security breach via a number of your employees' accounts?

GMail accounts get hacked regularly, often due to users using the same password for different services, or just getting keylogged somewhere.

I'm very curious too see how this pans out. Good luck with the recovery!

<comment><USER7> It's not possible to move calendars around in this way. Plus it doesn't make sense to do something like this as a hack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're having a different issue on our companies' shared calendar -- all of our events are duplicated. Apparently Google know about it but there doesn't seem to be any fixes happening.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've used Google's services from both an end-user at a company who uses Google Apps, and from a IT/Infrastructure Manager who moved his company to Google Apps.

For 95% of businesses who don't do a lot of intensive activities (be it scheduling, emailing, or anything else), google apps works fine.

If you're in that 5% who push the limits of your email/calendaring setup, then Google Apps (and their lackluster support) aren't the choice to make.

We had a support issue where the CEO couldn't send email to the company-wide mailing alias -- every time he did so, it was marked as 'bulk' email, and rejected. Google's support was non-existent (read this support page -- did that help? No? That's all I can do). Fast forward to a few weeks later, when users would randomly get non-delivery notifications when sending email internally. Google mentioned that they couldn't see the notifications come from their servers.

Another option was when a trial ran out, they'll lock EVERYONE out of email, calendars, and everything else until the trial is cancelled, or, until they pay. If an admin unknowingly signs up for something that will cost him a few extra bucks/user/month, and then forgets to update a credit card, every user in the organization will be locked out, and they can't call support (because you can't get a phone pin when you are locked out of a domain like that).

If you want minimal hassles, then Google Apps works great for small places (up to 20 users). Then, it's probably wise, from both a business risk and a infrastructure standpoint to just start running your own.

</comment><comment><USER10> Obviously having something like this happen sucks. If nothing else, you should be able to have a specified timetable for updates (every 4 hours, for example), even if it's just "we're still analyzing this issue" or "we are evaluating potential solutions".

That said, when you're dealing with a cloud-based application, fixing a problem like this is not going to be easy. First they need a clear enough understanding of how this happened to prevent it from happening again. Next you have to start coming up with scripts to correct the issue. After that you have to test the scripts to make sure you don't make things worse. Finally you can update production.

Most likely the support team has engaged an operations team and probably some developers as well. But even if they've been working through the weekend, there's no guarantee that they'll have a solution yet.

Or maybe Google doesn't have the necessary people on call over the weekend so nothing has actually been done. I can't say.

</comment><comment><USER11> I sync everything with the cloud and have a local backup which allows me to rollback any change to any file. So in the event that the cloud goes rogue I can just disconnect and restore from backup. But also, in the event that my office gets burnt down, I can still access all my data from the cloud. I personally would never have a system where the only point of access to mission critical data is through 'the cloud'.

</comment><comment><USER12> You failed to perform due diligence before deciding to rely on this service. I wrote about this kind of thing over a year ago: <http://lee- phillips.org/gcaldisaster/> If you just Google (hah!) "calendar privacy" today my article, and a few other relevant warnings, are on the first page.

</comment><comment><USER13> Remember, according to Derek Sivers, everything is your fault.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe they tested Google Spanner on Elezea's bit of data?

</comment><comment><USER15> So it's being dealt with then. Not sure when wording an attention seeking post and submitting it to HN became standard operating procedure in these situations. Patience remains a virtue when this stuff happens.

<comment><USER16> That's a really easy decision for _you_ to make when it's not your business that's being held hostage.

Personally, If I can't run something on my LAN, I don't want it. So, I love hearing about these issues; I'd like to someday see developers moving away from SAAS for every little function.

<comment><USER17> "That's a really easy decision for you to make when it's not your business that's being held hostage. Personally, If I can't run something on my LAN, I don't want it. So, I love hearing about these issues; I'd like to someday see developers moving away from SAAS for every little function."

My former employer at a small business used to say the same thing, and gleefully pointed out when gmail went down for 3 hours 2 years ago, screaming about how dangerous it is to rely on an external entity for these services. The outcome: we had our own servers for our email, and experienced DAYS of unplanned outages a year, not counting the planned outages due to migrations. On top of that, he had to pay the salaries of sys admins who could have been devoting their skills to stuff that our business actually got paid for.

The justifications for insourcing IT vs. using a SaaS pretty much align with the justifications for keeping cash in a safe in your house vs. using a bank. Sure, they are there, but they all are much, much less likely than the scenarios which will make you wish you weren't handling it yourself (local server failures, local internet failure due to ice storm, hurricane, software update, idiot sys admin) or in the case of money in a safe(house fire, robbery, flood). My company had very competent sys admins, but I'll never forget losing email for 3 business days due to an ice storm 3 states away where the other office was hosting the servers. Then we decided to purchase servers in our other office to prevent this, and then we hired more people to run them. It was fucking stupid, and all due to a stupid mental paradigm of "If i'm not in direct control then it's not being done right." We had less uptime, less security, and a much higher operating cost. That's a high price to pay for illogical, emotionally based paranoia.

<comment><USER16> I'm not saying that running your own servers is _always_ easier, nor is my stance one of emotional based paranoia.

I'm saying that "private cloud" products that you host yourself _could_ be just as easy to setup and use as cloud-based products if developers wanted to build those products. Instead they want to nickel-and-dime everyone for every business function while retaining absolute control over access to the product. SAAS can absolutely be more expensive in the long run.

(EDIT: Coincidentally, gmail is down again today.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't thrust the cloud...</comment>