Empathy and Failures of Democracies - <AUTHOR> https://mebassett.info/empathy-failures-democracy.html <comment><USER2> I would also note that empathy has shown to be weaponizable - i.e. you can use empathy to some people to justify oppression of others and dehumanize them. My observations in American politics today is that this is largely what the political debate has devolved into - you find some cause that sufficiently many people empathize with, you dress it up, and you use that to drive your agenda. I think it's no surprise that the causes that tend to be among the most partisan (and the most reliable when it comes to turning out supporters and votes) are basically moral panics, like abortion on the right, or guns on the left.

<comment><USER3> Good point. I guess the Palestinians fall under that category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Empathy, no. Being charitable in your appraisal of your opponent, yes. Meaning, don't assume off the bat that your opponent is malicious unless you have good reason to believe that. Also, acquaint yourself with the views of your opponent before dismissing them as stupid. Charity, not empathy, is the proper attitude. Empathy prioritizes feelings over truth and reason. This is dangerous, foolish, and wrong. Truths may be painful, and where appropriate, we should be charitable toward those in error and find the truth painful, but we should never sacrifice truth or prefer feelings over truth and reasoned arguments. We are also foolish to expect everyone competent and capable of reasoned argument. That is why we have authorities. Really, the authorities are at fault here because they have given the masses license to behave aggressively and boorishly when they should be discussing instead of peddling their latest tendentious sophistry and bullshit.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that, while there is one truth, there are many reactions to that truth. Understanding that your reaction might not be the only reasonable one is a function of empathy.

Couple that with the fact that the truth may not be apparent and the possibility that things about which you are certain may not be true, and humility and empathy begin to take a more central role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if anyone else relates to this. I feel like up until the last few years, my understanding of "empathy" was always very different than how it is often used now. Empathy was literally putting yourself in another person's shoes, understanding their emotional perspective. But the key there is that it was one person. Like, a friend, or a therapist to a client, etc. A relationship free of agenda.

Now I often see it as almost a corporate kind of buzzword, like with UI/UX people having "empathy" for their users (in order to understand "their" needs and make more money from them). Or people having "empathy" for populations for political reasons as a way to build political support for something. It seems more related to the language of branding and marketing now.

<comment><USER7> Yes, you're not alone. Oddly enough, it's been repurposed to mean something akin to value alignment or strategic cooperation. It used to mean thoughtful kindness, and this change seems to have suddenly happened in the last five years.

It's usage now makes me vaguely uncomfortable because it feels borderline sociopathic or manipulative.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, exactly. Which is particularly maddening because sociopathy is about the _absence_ of empathy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Art helps facilitate communication. You can communicate an entire, massive, powerful idea by just saying "1984." That's where the power lies. The thought experiment aspect is nice too but you can write any old book to push any old narrative if you think enough people will buy it. I think that's neither here nor there.

This analysis is uni-dimensional. There is nothing special about Democracy, per se, or even about standard political issues. We are highly political creates and you'll notice the very same patterns of calling the other side stupid or assuming they have an agenda with regards to basically anything. Though credit where credit is due, I think the subtext is saying "wait, are we in trouble?". That's not an entirely silly notion IMHO. History has shown things can progress and then go back the other way.

We might have left the tribes but tribalism never left us. We have upgraded ourselves a little bit, but there is a long way to go. There are many underlying problems with our cognition that paint a pretty bleak picture with regards to "can't we all just get along?", but all is not lost. Just as The Enlightenment moved people away from relying on Mysticism as a philosophy, there is an ongoing dialectic around these issues that has the chance to birth a new philosophy that can help elevate our thinking further.

In general just being aware of all our cognitive pitfalls, I think, will go a long way and there is also language that goes along with new ideas to help us communicate using new tools.

I'll list some books I've read/I'm reading on the journey to help me figure this out. Most of this paints a picture that says "we need to actively adopt a philosophy where we emphasize digging into the opponents side more, also, yes they likely are coming to faulty conclusions, but still give them the benefit of the doubt as it will strengthen your own thinking."

History (last 14,000 years):

      Why Nations Fail
      The Origins of Political Order
      Sapiens
      Guns, Germs & Steel

Psychology:

      Thinking Fast and Slow
      The Elephant In The Brain
      Predictably Irrational

Poltics:

      The Righteous Mind
      The Political Mind
      Chimpanzee Politics
      In Defense of Troublemakers
      A General Theory of Bureaucracy

Communications:

      Words That Work
      Shortcut
      Surfaces & Essences
      Metaphors We Live By
      On Controversy
      Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making

<comment><USER9> I'd suggest 'Plagues and Peoples' over 'Guns, Germs and Steel'

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the recommendation! Plagues have definitely had an important impact on the river of history.

Is there any particular reason to read Plagues and Peoples instead of Guns, Germs and Steel rather than in addition to?

<comment><USER10> GGS isn't super well respected by historians. Diamond ignores a bunch of conflicting data when presenting his grand theory. It also presupposes a lot about how cultures "win". It's not a bad book but if you aren't careful it is easy to take it to mean more than it does.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's my impression of it too. I included it because it's very well known and given a lot of people have read it, if it's the only book of that nature that they have read I want to understand what their mental models or their intuitions are regarding how this stuff works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People forget that it is a feature of democracy that we disagree loudly. Life would be boring otherwise :)

</comment><comment><USER12> > pre-war German and Japanese

In the November 1932 elections in Germany, the socialist and communists got 221 Reichstag seats to the Nazis 196. 10 of the KPD's seats gained since the July 1932 election were from the socialists - the Nazis helped radicalize German left workers. On February 20, 1933 the CEOs and board members of Germany's Fortune 500 equivalents pledged millions of Marks to the Nazi party, five months later the Vatican signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.

Nothing like that is happening now because there is zero threat from America's working class against the system. It has been losing power with each year, and even college educated professionals have been losing power for decades, something chronicled thirty years ago in "Fear of Falling". There is also no external threat of any historical significance. Fortune 500 boards have no desire to bankroll the efforts of people like Andrew Torba (Y-combinator funded Torba, who did gab.ai, and Paul Graham talks about the genetic intelligence superiority of certain races, but this is not big capital). Trump has been talking about pulling troops home, not about more Lebensraum.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Falling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Falling) -> "Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich" (sheesh, nowadays books come under the heading "Other", while music and video get their own headers?)

Thanks for the ref, and nice handle btw - these days very few people are allowed to understand that a monarch may be a better deal for them than a senate ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

\-- Winston Churchill

</comment><comment><USER15> If art is important to building empathy, our problems might stem from art's recent pivot to shock over beauty and virtue signaling over the cultivation of virtue.

<comment><USER16> I won't infer your own political views. I simply want to point out that the phrase "virtue signaling" has been appropriated by conservative factions as some sort of insult. It is used to imply that their liberal counterparts are in some way fraudulent or faking their stated concern for other people or groups of people. This sort of blanket painting of opposing viewpoints as disingenuous lies is exactly the type of thinking the posted article was speaking against.

<comment><USER17> Virtue signaling is by no means a specifically left-wing phenomenon. Consider, for example, copious displays of Christian faith, piety, and family values from divorced cheaters living according to the gospel of fuck-you-I-got-mine. It refers to any instance where the social status game around commitment to a belief / purging of unbelievers dwarfs actual commitment to it.

<comment><USER5> This is true.

And yet, many "copious displays of Christian faith, piety, and family values," even from some divorced cheaters, as well as the left-wing style, are actually genuine.

Very often, the introduction of the phrase "virtue signaling" comes off as a blanket dismissal of the other party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Whether its American Conservatives or UK Remainers

American liberals do exactly the same thing.

<comment><USER18> UK remainders are basically american liberals - I think the author put some work into showing both sides of the political spectrum to avoid accusations of bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hah! Well let's do an experiment. I'm going to give what I think is the point of view of your typical right winger and your typical centrist democrat, and then hopefully someone can educate me as to where I'm wrong. To be clear I'm going to go for the basic profile here. Nuance is for cowards.

Conservatives: I was born in 1948. When I was a young adult, everyone was ok and everything made sense. There was an order to things, everyone had a place. Our great enemy was communism; we had capitalism and were free, while our enemies were communists and lived under dictatorship. I was afraid of communism because communists almost blew up the world, plus we fought them in Vietnam. Communists are bad people and therefore their ideas are bad ideas. I suspect that all liberals are either explicitly communist or are being misled by communist appeals to emotionalism. What we need is a strong rational person who will take charge and root out the people who are getting out of place and ruining things for everyone else.

Centrist liberal: I was born in 1972. When I was a young adult, politics were civil and everyone was polite. I never really paid attention to politics because I thought it was boring. I like my job and I think my boss is a great guy. My favorite political figure was Martin Luther king, because he said that everyone should be nice and get along. I'm not racist, because I like Martin Luther king. I don't understand why everyone seems so angry these days. Technology is so amazing these days, it's just going faster and faster. I love buying new fancy things. I think that if we could just elect more democrats to congress, then everyone will be nice again and stop being so nasty to each other.

How's my empathy? Am I close? I would love it if someone would give a similar treatment to the anarchist/socialist point of view, just so I can see what kinds of silly things people believe about me. Turnabout is fair play. Let me have it.

<comment><USER20> A bit off topic, but I am confused how anarchism and socialism can work together. Can you explain?

<comment><USER19> Socialism is a broad term that includes two main branches; state communism, which emphasizes a planned economy, and anarchism, which emphasizes fighting any kind of heirarchy including state power. In an anarchist world all decisions would be made on the local level wherever possible and businesses would be run democratically by their workers.

Anarchists see anarchism as the skill of organizing and working without having people simply follow orders, which if you think about your private life you probably do it all the time. But at work you do what you're told, which is in our view a gross assault on your personal integrity.

In the anarchist view if there is a large power differential between two people there is simply no way for them to deal fairly with one another. A legal system is just a band-aid. Hoping for nicer rulers is delusional. The solution is that nobody should have that kind of power in the first place. This extends to male power over women and white supremacy as well.

But it's still considered a branch of socialism, associated with the writings of Bakunin and Kropotkin.

<comment><USER8> How effective do you really think a democratically run business could be?

Such companies would be very limited in size and capacity to produce output.

If you had a hypothetical Anarchist country with an Anarchist economy where all the companies were run this way, they would all be outcompeted by the capatilist companies of other nations and the local economy would collapse.

<comment><USER19> Well that's just flat wrong. Here's an example of an association of worker collectives in Spain known as the Mondragon Corporation which employs 75000 people:

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

I mean in the age of feudalism I'm sure people thought the idea of electing their kings would have sounded equally bizarre.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are both touching on the question of "if capitalism is so great, why do firms exist?". You might find the work of Ronald Coase interesting in that regard (see [https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/09/07/the-man-who- sho...](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/09/07/the-man-who-showed-why- firms-exist)). The basic idea is that transaction costs for smaller decisions become too high, so it makes sense to have a figure with authority to make certain transaction decisions by fiat. I think Mondragon still has such authority figures, but it has a more "humanist" corporate structure, composed of co-ops, rather than the shareholder-directors-mgmt-and-workers structure in an american c-corp.

corporate structures do matter.

<comment><USER8> Pretty much. Essentially if you run a thought experiment through several permutations you can roughly compute that this is the case. I always find blowing things up to extremes usually makes certain things come into focus quite well. For example if the organisation has 100,000 people across a multiple geographic regions and then it is discovered that one of the bathrooms have run out of toilet paper, it's not really feasible to call a company all hands meeting to decide who should buy some more toilet paper, where they should buy it from, which brand it should be. If everyone is involved in every decision that pushes productivity to absolute zero the larger the firm grows, though it possibly works for extremely small cases.

By the same token flip the lever hard in the other direction. Imagine management never trusts any expert or IC to ever take a decision on their own. Things get produced but quality plunges abysmally.

There are many configurations things can be in, but from some basic thought experiments you can work out that there is likely a certain operational envelope with a handful of parameters that produce stable, workable results inside the operational envelope and either unstable or unworkable results outside of it.

Some other thought experiments you can try are imagine a world in which no one is trustworthy. Well, it's close to impossible to do business because you have to spend so long figuring out who to do business with that you can't do business with anyone. Imagine a world where nobody ever cheats you and always presents an accurate, trustworthy description of what transaction will take place. Business flies along because you can do away with a lot of overhead that goes in to accounting for that stuff. So it seems trust is an important parameter. Firms make sense from the perspective of having people available (you can trust you have resources to meet demand) and who you trust to be able to complete the work. If you have to go to market every time you can't necessarily guarantee the company you are doing business with will stay in business or keep you as a client or any number of things. So there's a trade- off being made there and there are certain inflection points where on choice stops making sense and another one starts.

Just thinking about it now it seems that the parameters include, but at not necessarily limited to:

      communication bandwidth/overhead
      trust
      alignment of incentives

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _Whether its American Conservatives or UK Remainers, much of the political > spectrum has an inability to consider the other side 's opinion_

I would caution the author against merely dismissing this behavior as a defect in their thinking. I suspect that some or most of the lack of empathy is intentional.

Aside: In my view, most people who espouse political views merely parrot bits and pieces of arguments that they have seen elsewhere, so I ignore these "non- thinkers" as I don't believe that they contribute much to the empathy or lack thereof in today's politics.

Back to my point: I think that apathy is often a strategic advantage, especially in politics. The ideological leaders of the groups know this and choose to employ narratives that paint their opponents as evil monsters rather than misled humans, as it makes their jobs significantly easier.

For example, being the political party who sets aside the traditions of the government to, for example, fast-track the nomination of a high-value judge by changing the rules, confers a great advantage to whoever is willing to cross the line first.

In today's democracies the winner of an election is mainly determined by who can stir up the most support from their large preexisting base of supporters. In this system the most attention grabbing rhetoric wins, and empathy just doesn't seem to get the kind of attention that vitriol does.

As for dealing with apathy in politics, I am skeptical of the idea that there is much to do other than remove the advantage that apathy provides, which itself seems very difficult. Promoting empathetic arts seems noble, but I doubt that it would even slow the current trend we see playing out on social media.</comment>


Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/science/natural-selection-may-help-account-for-dutch-height-advantage.html

<comment><USER2> See these bollards?

[http://www.road-care.co.uk/images/bollard1.jpg](http://www.road- care.co.uk/images/bollard1.jpg)

They're all over Amsterdam. Strong selection pressure establishing a minimum height for men wanting to father children there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was born in a community of mostly second- and third-generation-removed descendents of Dutch immigrants in the United States. As with most of my friends and classmates, my parents can trace all or almost all of their ancestors back to the Netherlands immediately before coming to the U.S.

Anecdotally, most of the men in my generation are nearly 6' or taller. I have heard the same said of men from several similar small, Dutch-immigrant communities, and those in surrounding towns and counties often remark about how tall the Dutch descendants in the community are (for example, in the context of high school sports). The women are taller, as well, than those in surrounding, mostly German-immigrant, communities.

I have paid a small amount of attention to studies like these. Because of the demographics of my community I've been somewhat skeptical of some of the suggested explanations. Particularly the diet reasoning struck me as odd since despite how closely the community identifies with the Netherlands, it is very much culturally American, with the attendant American diet.

I suspect that genetics really are a big part of the reason that Dutch people grow as tall as they do. The selection reasoning, though, makes some sense as well, though I don't know enough about bloodlines in my community (or the statistical height comparison to current Dutch people) to make much comment about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always wondered if the amount of milk and cheese we consume might be a factor. But I expect there's more countries where those things are popular in large amounts.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a Dutch young man of 6 feet and 3 inches tall. First of all, I don't believe the claim in the beginning of the article stating that the average height of Dutch men is above 6 feet. I remember reading an article a couple of years back saying the average height for Dutch men is about 5 feet and 11 inches. To me, that looks more like it, but my opinion and experience are not based on proper research, so who knows.

The comment with a reference to the famine in 1944 got my attention though. Can it be that the famine, as an extreme condition, quickly followed by a lot of prosperity (in contrast to Eastern European), caused this remarkable quality?

I once read a book saying that children whose mother didn't eat enough during pregnancy had the tendency to eat way more than children whose mother ate enough. Starting with scarcity of nutrition leads to buffering way too much later on.

\- Added FYI: My parents were born in 1949 and 1950. Their parents experienced the famine. Last but not least, I tend to be attracted to the taller women overhere.

<comment><USER4> I think the 6 feet is the average height of young Dutch men. Older generations are shorter, but the last generation to reach adulthood is really well over 180 cm in height.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great, this article's title suggests that they've discovered a selective pressure on the Dutch to be taller, but then says they have no idea what that selective pressure might be. At the very end of the article, even:

> Dr. Govindaraju said it was too early to speculate on why some populations > are evolving in different ways.

Wtf?

</comment><comment><USER7> It could simply be an outlier.

Given a group of populations of various size, small populations tend to fill the outlier positions. You see this with schools - almost all of the top ranking schools are tiny. As are the bottom. They all pretty much return to the mean over time.

<comment><USER8> Yea...no. The population of the Netherlands is 17 million. There is absolutely no way this is a statistical outlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I happen to be 2 m (6'6) tall and French-Irish. When I used to go out with a Scandinavian social club in California, we were always far taller than everyone else. More than 0.25 m difference in height makes for difficult conversation, so there's a tendency to only talk to other sized people. I also know a British guy that is 2.3 m tall and a Stanford chick whos 2.5 m (how does one get a date if you're ungainly tall?). Perhaps in a millennia, humans will be 4 m tall on average?

<comment><USER10> Let me get this straight - the "Stanford chick" you know is the tallest woman in history? (qv. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people#Women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people#Women))

<comment><USER11> He probably meant 2.05m (2 meters and 5 centimeters).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a shorter than average man often disillusioned reading hundreds of honest female online personals, what about sexual selection and cultural expectations of women in choosing a mate?

<comment><USER13> As a fellow short guy this definitely an issue I face too. In a way you have to appreciate the honesty of these women who make completely categorical statements that they will not consider anyone below their own height, or even anyone below the average male height (so roughly 50% of males) or sometimes even setting their minimum heights well above the male average. Height is simply a major factor of male attractiveness, the problem is that unlike other factors it's not communicated well beforehand and comes as a shock to some men when they realise just how important it is in the dating market.

The other issue is that sometimes the exlusion statement is phrased in a nasty or blunt way that wouldn't be socially acceptable at all if it were a man talking about a factor of female attractiveness. I am sure there are males out there who make nasty and blunt comments in their profiles, but I am also sure there are fewer of them and they get ruled out for saying such things even by women to whom the statement doesn't apply.

Finally it's even worse that on many sites the statement ruling men under X height out comes at the end of the profile! So you might see how much you have in common with someone and start thinking about a cool date to go on and then get to the end of the profile to find out you never had a chance to begin with.

I would suspect this factor plays a part, but is almost certainly behind better nutrition, in the general increases in heights across the board through the baby boom and sexual revolution in Western countries. But you'd need to explain why it was particularly strong in the Netherlands for it to explain their above average height increases.

<comment><USER8> For what it's worth I think the importance put on height is primarily a US phenomenon. That's not to say that it's unimportant elsewhere, but not as exceptionally important as in the US. It's one of the factors among many.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not only in US. We've had the phrase 'three highs' (三高) in Japan, about height, income, and education, though people openly express this are getting downplayed these days. Not sure how it matters in the dating market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have wondered if epigenetic effects ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_epigenetic_observations)) from the 1944 Dutch famine ([https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dutch_famine_of_1944](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dutch_famine_of_1944)) could have resulted in a substantial positive impact on Dutch height for several generations following the famine.

It seems likely that eastern Europeans suffered much more extreme privations than the Dutch did in this time period, but maybe they also saw a similar effect, it's just less noticeable because those populations were a couple of inches shorter on average anyway. The notable thing about the Dutch is not that recent generations are taller than their forebears -- that's probably true for most all European populations. The really notable thing is that they're also taller than other northwestern populations like the Danes.

The natural selection argument is probably a better and certainly a simpler explanation, though.

<comment><USER15> What makes this such a popular area of research is not that they are taller, but that they overtook everybody else in no time:

 _" In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of European descent in North America were far taller than those in Europe and were the tallest in the world. [...] In the late nineteenth century, the Netherlands was a land renowned for its short population"_ ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_huma...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_height))

150-ish years, 6-7 generations.

<comment><USER14> So one question is, if you normalize nutrition, what's the intrinsic height difference between populations? You are correct that the speed at which the Dutch have overtaken other nearby populations is kind of surprising. A nutrition differential could make that much difference, but it seems like general nutrition shouldn't differ much at all between the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, etc. Another possibility is just the the Dutch are genetically a little bit taller on average if you normalize nutrition. But it doesn't seem like Dutch genetics should differ that much from the surrounding populations either. Could natural selection have made that much difference in Dutch genetics in just a few generations, and recent (post Industrial Revolution) generations at that?

<comment><USER16> I don't think it's a matter of natural selection:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A Dutch friend tells me it's all the hormones Dutch farmers use. Anybody know if that's the case?

<comment><USER18> Sounds like a monkey sandwich story to me.

<comment><USER19> I have never heard of a monkey sandwich story but I would really like to hear one.

<comment><USER15> [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=nl&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnl.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBroodjeaapverhaal) (Google hasn't figured out yet when to translate an idiomatic term literally yet. That makes for a funny translation. See for example the subscript of the first photo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any other possible reason for such a thing?

<comment><USER21> Possibly diet. Obviously it's anecdotal but all of the Dutch people I know consume far more dairy products than those from the UK.

Edit: Turns out the Dutch are the third biggest consumers of milk per capita in the world[0], looking at the list of "tallest" countries on wikipedia[1], there seems to be a great deal of overlap at the top of the two lists. I wonder if a secondary factor could also be related to vitamin D exposure, but I couldn't find a data source for that.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_consumption_per_capita)

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Average_height_around...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Average_height_around_the_world)

<comment><USER22> Over 2,000 years ago Julius Caesar described the people that lived where The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany are today.

> _They do not live much on corn, but subsist for the most part on milk and > flesh, and are much [engaged] in hunting; which circumstance must, by the > nature of their food, and by their daily exercise and the freedom of their > life (for having from boyhood been accustomed to no employment, or > discipline, they do nothing at all contrary to their inclination), both > promote their strength and render them men of vast stature of body._

[http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.4.4.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.4.4.html)

<comment><USER23> Call me stupid but I thought corn was native to the Americas. I guess something is getting lost in translation.

<comment><USER22> Also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Startup's Secret Weapon - <AUTHOR> http://davidcancel.com/startup-secret-weapon/ <comment><USER2> Nice work David. Customer service is a HUGE differentiator. I have recently been on the receiving end of Customer Wow from Performable, so you walk the talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment! We owe you a t-shirt. Let us know where to send it to and what size you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for sharing David. We will be putting this into practice at chefsurfing.com</comment>


Ask HN: Why French auto manufacturers are not present on U.S. market? - <AUTHOR> I have just read about PEUGEOT 208, a nice-looking city car that has recently been awarded the title 2020 European Car of the Year. In addition to combustion engine versions (gas and diesel), the manufacturer also offers a fully electric version (e-208) with a range of 217 miles and relatively fast charging (0%-80% charging time of 30 min.). With this in mind, I'm curious about your thoughts on why major French auto manufacturers (Peugeot, Renault, Citroen) are not present on U.S. market (though this Quora thread sheds some light: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Renault-Citroen-Peugeot-and-Dacia-not-sold-in-the-USA). <comment><USER2> French cars are too quirky for the US market. French car manufacturers have a market that is both small enough and large enough to try out experiments that would fail elsewhere, and innovation that is deemed too costly for the US mass market: Fluid suspension - 1960s; sliding doors on cars - 1990s; avant-gard styling: all down through the many decades.

Many French cars are iconic: The Citroen 2CV [https://www.erclassics.com/media/catalog/product/cache/2/ima...](https://www.erclassics.com/media/catalog/product/cache/2/image/700x/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/c/i/citroen-2cv-1957-c0985-037.jpg), The Citroen Parisienne DS [https://encrypted- tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSnLQ...](https://encrypted- tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSnLQ5QHMABoGiYugMX6MO_kWRYzq21xGrhBK0AKMATJlY8rgSS) and the Citroen C4 with those strange door panels [https://c4.wallpaperflare.com/wallpaper/340/990/475/women- si...](https://c4.wallpaperflare.com/wallpaper/340/990/475/women-sitting- sneakers-car-wallpaper-preview.jpg)

I spent many years travelling in France, my preference was for a Citroen DS3 with its distinctive 'reverse shark fin' behind the driver's window :) [https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys- images/Guardian/Pix/pict...](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys- images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/10/8/1286530215195/Citroen- DS3-006.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6dc2f346b034e74dc2710afceef48992)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Very interesting perspective and facts - thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. This is exactly the kind of difference in comment quality and details that make HN a much more preferred venue for knowledge sharing than Quora for me (despite myself have been quite active there a while ago - <rant> I feel that, since then, Quora platform's content quality has significantly deteriorated </rant>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What about those quora answers fails to satisfy your curiosity?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to hear thoughts by HN community. Some people here might have different perspectives and/or additional details compared to those presented on Quora.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pitikapp – Monitor your computer from a mobile device - <AUTHOR> https://www.pitikapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't find a good application to monitor my PC from my tablet (not working, not good looking, too complicated, ...), so I went for the simplest solution: I made my own!

The goal was to have something simple to use and that the user can customize as much as possible.

The server requires a Windows computer and the client can run on iOS and Android.</comment>


Swiftype for Mobile: Full-text search for iOS and mobile Web - <AUTHOR> http://swiftype.com/mobile <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really proud of this release. I'm happy to answer any questions about it.

If anyone has any doubts about how hard Geoffrey Grosenbach or Ryan Bates work on their screencasts, put them to rest. Those things take _forever_ to make!

<comment><USER2> Yep, never underestimate how long a quality screencast takes. It's totally worth it since many developers and customers want to see what it looks like before trying it. And especially for platforms, describing in words is sometimes too abstract.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe Ryan Bates has said 1 hour per minute. If anything, that's an understatement. Maybe it gets easier as you do more (this is my second screencast).

<comment><USER2> 1 hour per minute is a pretty good estimate. It does get easier. It's all about preparation and setting up an efficient workflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am confused about the swiftype value proposition? What does it offer over simply installing elastic search (et al.) and pushing json documents. Making a mobile/web search front-end isn't very difficult using json results+mustache templates etc.

I was unable to find on the swifttype website what the advantage of using the product. I did like the drag/drop result ranking though, that's pretty neat.

<comment><AUTHOR> For developers, we have an API (<http://swiftype.com/documentation/quickstart>) that is not much different than setting up Solr or ElasticSearch. However, you no longer need to manage the search servers. We handle reliablity and scaling. On top of that, we offer client libraries (like SwiftypeTouch), search analytics, and a management dashboard (think: you write the search, the business people take over managing the results).

For less technical users, we have a web crawler with automates the creation of search engines. Combined with our crawler controls and meta tags (<http://swiftype.com/documentation/meta_tags>) you can build a really powerful site search engine with little effort.

<comment><USER3> thanks for the information. Speaking as someone who has worked in the search industry for many years I am surprised to see this. For me, setting up an ES server on AWS and pushing content directly into it seems pretty trivial, but I get the business analytics, dashboard etc.

The meta tags seems like a reinvention of og?

<comment><USER4> We have been using Swiftype at SupportBee for searching the help docs - <https://supportbee.com/helps>. We still use ES for core application search (tickets etc) but for things like help documentation, site search etc it's hard to beat Swiftype's setup time and ease of use. The analytics is pretty useful too. Disclaimer: Swiftype is our customer as well but we used them for many months before they found out about us and signed up :)

<comment><USER5> 404, guess that was <https://supportbee.com/help>

funny though that it shows 0 results for "supportbee"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw "Swiftype" and my brain thought "Swiftkey" + "Swype"...two things that I wish would someday come to iOS.

<comment><USER7> I too thought immediately of Swiftkey, and wondered if Swiftype will have branding and/or trademark issues.

OT, but Swiftkey is actually working on a swype-like input called Flow. <http://www.swiftkey.net/flow/></comment></comment>


John McAfee explains how to uninstall McAfee [video] - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/19/john-mcafee-nsfw-video/

<comment><USER2> "The lab tech advises us to backup our systems before starting the uninstall. Meanwhile McAfee has a lap dance and makes jokes about bath salts, a drug that it was suggested that he was both taking and producing."</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to clean up a penalised domain name? - <AUTHOR>

There's a domain name I'd like to buy for a project of mine, but it's currently being used to host porn ads and doesn't show up in google search for "exactdomain.com".
So I'm pretty sure it's flagged as spam.
My question is, is this domain still worth buying?
Will the transfer of ownership and usage "clean up" it's history?
The webapp I'd like to migrate to it currently has a couple of years of trading history, has nothing to do with porn and is very non-spammy. The last thing I want to do is hurt it's google SERP positions.
The reason I want the new domain is because our current one is not very memorable, and is difficult to type, and the new domain is an exact match for our product name. <comment><USER2> Disavow dirty links or spammy links (heck all of them) submit for reinclusion. Then wait. If approved switch to new domain :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Would be a good question to cross post on Inbound.org - some pretty knowledgable SEOs hang out there...</comment>


Irc in bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sdegutis/irc.sh

<comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, how many hackernews folks still IRC? I do, and IRC periodically gets in the news (usually through chatlogs posted from hackers, LulzSec, etc.), but what do y'all use?

<comment><USER3> I have never been able to "get" IRC. I've tried to like it a number of times, but it always ends up as nothing but a distraction.

My experience: start a client, join a channel, and watch it go. Meanwhile, try to get work done. I'm either watching IRC in case something interesting goes by (and then not working), or I'm working and then miss whatever was interesting on IRC. Or I try to do both and accomplish neither.

To me, IRC feels exactly like those twitter update widgets that people put on their blogs. I usually end up opening a terminal window and putting it over the widget, otherwise it distracts me like a "look at me!" advertisement.

I get much better value and results from googling; someone has always had whatever problem I'm trying to solve, and if I can't figure it out on my own, I can usually find a thread where someone else has.

I'm not complaining, and I'm not saying IRC has no value (to others). I sometimes wonder if I'm doing it wrong, but I think IRC, among many other things, is just not for me.

<comment><USER4> In certain help channels, for complicated questions, you would be amazed with the quality of the responses you get from people just hanging out in channel. Being able to paste code and work with someone in real time to troubleshoot bugs has saved my bacon probably hundreds of times by now. Great examples of this are #jquery, #postgresql and #perl on freenode.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I've run in to a lot of obnoxious, self- righteous, and close minded people on #perl, both on freenode and efnet.

I've had excellent experiences with the rest of the technical channels I've tried on freenode, however.

As far as non-technical chat goes, I prefer undernet. Efnet has slowly moved to the bottom of my list as it seems to be an asshole magnet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote an IRC client in ash a while back: [http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- hacks/2008-Febru...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- hacks/2008-February/000480.html)

It supports a more traditional IRC UI, where you can say "yes" on your current channel just by typing "yes" and hitting return, but its output is not formatted nicely. It's about half as much code.

</comment><comment><USER7> I had started doing something similar, but in C, and with no daemons or additional sockets (ie. the program outputs what happens on the channels on stdout, and says what arrives on stdin). It works fine enough for me to use it on trusted channels to write easy bots, show off some programs or whatever, but it's not finished, clean, robust or secure.

See <https://gitorious.org/irctk/irctk/blobs/master/README> for some examples, and <https://gitorious.org/irctk> for the actual program (but you probably don't want to use it yet).

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder about the <> never saw such a redirection for bash before. Is this a Mac trick? What should I RTFM?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a bash thing... <http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/io-redirection.html>

<comment><USER9> Actually it's an sh thing: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_07_07)

<comment><AUTHOR> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had the same idea a few years ago but decided not to go through with it because of the sheer uselessness. Looks like i made the right choice.

</comment><comment><USER11> Similiar to Simple IRC Client from suckless: <http://tools.suckless.org/sic>

<comment><USER12> Seems closer to ii (<http://tools.suckless.org/ii/>) in that they both create FIFOs for communication.

<comment><USER13> ii is great, with a single line of bash I had each line piped to festival - audio based IRC!

<comment><USER14> and in a single line of bash I had nagios alerts piped into IRC. I'm amazed I never knew about ii until a few weeks ago. It's amazingly useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This makes no sense at all. I'd rather use telnet.

</comment><comment><USER16> heh, we have a shell script that acts as a bot in our channel. it's an ugly mess :)</comment>


Facebook releases "portal" home assistant device - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/8/17928554/facebook-portal-announced-camera-price-video-chat <comment><USER2> I can't say I'm too thrilled with the idea of having a Facebook-powered camera in my house.</comment>


Google Maps Is Directing Women Seeking Abortions to Pro-Life Clinics - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywap9b/google-maps-is-still-directing-women-seeking-abortions-to-pro-life-clinics-and-a-memorial-for-the-unborn <comment><AUTHOR> This adds useful context about the size of the actual problem: [https://twitter.com/KateRoseBee/status/1169999577660850176](https://twitter.com/KateRoseBee/status/1169999577660850176)</comment>


StackMob now supports secondary indexes - <AUTHOR> http://www.stackmob.com/2011/09/announcing-secondary-indexes-2/

<comment><USER2> Maybe someone from StackMod would chime in on their experience with Riak...

<comment><AUTHOR> StackMob isn't using Riak at the moment. Still building out features that use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can anybody share experiences on using StackMob?

<comment><USER4> Their platform is pretty sweet I'd say. I've been using StackMob for the last two months and am almost ready to submit my app to the App Store. With StackMob I was able to build my data model in a few minutes and they automatically created a secure REST API. Would have taken me a few weeks if I didn't use them.</comment></comment>


Hacking Behavior: Going Beyond Growth Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://kyrobeshay.com/post/28897827463/hacking-behavior-the-behavior-potential <comment><USER2> First of all, fantastic post. This really highlights an increasing problem in which product developers are focused more on product usage analytics than they are each user's personal experience with the product.

I think there is another way of looking at your Phase 2 though. Your goal is to make your product so good that you can't imagine using anything else. If your product is really that good, I'm not sure that consistent reinforcement is actually necessary. Rather, your product should be so good that users stop using it consciously.

I think one of the best examples of this is Google's search engine. The product itself is so good, and has proved itself so consistently over the years, that most people don't think of using anything else for search. In fact, most people don't think of "searching" at all. I can't count the number of times that I end up on a Google search results page, not realizing that I had gone through the mental thought process of "I need to search for something. I'm going to go to Google, execute a search query, and find what I'm looking for in the results."

Going from thought to results without any significant reinforcements from the product (other than it simply being a great product) is in my opinion, the true sign of a user experience done right.

<comment><USER3> It's drivel, Users are worth whatever money you can extract from them. You can make a million a month from 100 thousand of them or 100 million of them, it's just a question of your monetization strategy. If your product needs someone to change their behavior over time then that's a bad thing. Mitigation strategy's include such things as focusing on when people are most open to change, new job, new home, new baby etc.

PS: You can actually learn a lot from how Banks operate as people move more often than they change banks. Keep the costs hidden, and the barriers to change obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Make your productive addictive . . . '

Please, don't.

I want you to solve my problem, not create another one. I want to visit your website once, or perhaps twice, and never have to visit it again, because you've solved a real-life problem that led me to your site in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great post. Growth hacking I believe includes behavior hacking, both ultimately leading to creating a strong scalable sales funnel. In essence every startup out there has to be good at creating a solid pitch (pre-sell), then building a solid product (feedback/refine) and then incentivizing users (hacking behavior) to convert. Rewarding users may involve some level of gamification built into the product.

I am excited to see how this new interest in Growth Hacking is allowing a lot of in-depth thinking around combining marketing and coding to create dramatically better results.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is all well and good, but how you gonna get all those users whose behavior you want to hack? That's the hard part. If you don't have a way to get those guinea pigs, everything else doesn't matter.

<comment><USER7> It's talked about in the post - that's the domain of growth hacking and there is plenty of resources for that out there (see patio11 to start). The area of retention (which is one way you could look at this 'behaviour hacking') is one that is often ignored and one could say it's even more important than acquisition.

Great post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Love the post, I'm not sure if the title fits, but it absolutely fits the situation I'm facing, and the introduction to the Transtheoretical model is really appreciated.

Is anyone else building a product that converts people when you tell them about it, solves a real problem, but they aren't actively searching for because they don't know a solution is technologically possible?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is the worst analogy I have ever read. I am convinced the author either did not understand the models to which he/she provided links, or worse, did not even read the words on the Wikipedia pages themselves.

To wit, none of the commenters here touched on this analogy.

F-, would not use this analogy evar.</comment>


Can small/medium sized businesses realistically compete with big brands online? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2016/03/18/vantage-points-how-can-local-businesses-fight-national-competitors/ <comment><AUTHOR> This article brings up a point I really hadn't considered until recently. Local marketing is the way to go, but are the local mom 'n pops really equipped to deal with the nuances and intricacies of ad tech?

Anyone know of any family businesses that have successfully embraced local advertising online?</comment>


Ask YC: Things to do in Cambridge, MA - <AUTHOR>

I just moved to Cambridge and classes don't start for a while. So, any suggestions on interesting groups to join, places to go, or people to meet?<p>Just catching up on my reading (a pre-req for a project I'm working on) doesn't seem like taking full advantage of my limited down-time in one of the greatest cities in the world. <comment><USER2> 1\. Do NOT miss WebInno Boston. Next meeting is July 15th, 2008, so you came at a good time. Literally hundreds of web/mobile entrepreneurs, angels, VCs (it's lead by VC David Beisel of Venrock) and other enthusiasts. <http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/>

2\. Also, hang out at OpenCoffee Boston every Wednesday at 8:30 AM for coffee with tech entrepreneurs. <http://boston.going.com/event-122245;OpenCoffee_Club>

3\. Consider Boston Entrepreneur Meetup at Exemplar. Good place to learn about general entrepreneurship from both tech and non-tech entrepreneurs. <http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/674/>

4\. Xconomy is the single best source of information that I have found for Cambridge news and events wrt tech and etc. Keep an eye out at <http://xconomy.com/>

5\. Keep an eye out at myEventGuru - <http://boston.myeventguru.com/index.php> \- for networking events and meetups.

6\. Going.com (awesome startup in Boston, a person from the team sometimes comes to networking events) and Upcoming.org are always great resources.

7\. MarksGuide.com is a guide for Boston networking events. <http://www.marksguide.com/>

8\. General hacking areas include the cafes - DanGrover from here likes Diesel Cafe. Good hacking environment. They also have WiBuddy which allows you to connect with other people inside the cafe.

9\. Keep an eye out on Hacker News for events such as DevHouse Boston, and the one I'm organizing, Facebook Developer Garage Boston 2.

Welcome to Cambridge, it's nice to see you here, and I hope you have a good time.

Sources: side dish presenter at WebInno Boston November. Used to be regular at Boston Entrepreneur Network (JayNeely also.) Information from crusade searching for Boston/Cambridge networking events :)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, huge fan of Diesel. I code a lot there.

And Randall Munroe apparently goes there a lot, because he started an IRC channel for Diesel folks!

<comment><USER4> Speaking of Randy: <http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Boston>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "in one of the greatest cities in the world." -- Calm down. It will get boring within the year. Not near the league of many other cities. When I think greatest cities of the world, I think of NYC, London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Shangai, Bejing, Seul, Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin.... you get the point.

Boston is about two-three noches down.

1369 coffee is always full with semi-hipsters over educated types, and you can hear intersting conversations

Check out Davis sq. in Somerville, and especially Diesel Cafe. You see hackers there working with their laptops once and a while. The problem is that people are unfriendly, and if you just randomly start talking to somebody with their laptop open, they might snub you. Unfortunately it is not California. In here if you randomly start talking to somebody, they will talk kindly back to you, in the "who knows, something might come out" away. Over there they will talk back to you in the way "Why the frick you talking to me. Do I know you?". Big difference.

Finale-s in Harvard sq. has some really good desserts!

Harvard Cooop is my favorite bookstore ever. It has a certain "air", very inspiring place (like: you should be smarter, and try harder, kind of inspiration).

But here is my favorite activity while I lived there: Learn how to Sail in the charles river. In the boston's side of Charles river, at the beginning of the esplanade, there is the community Boat House. You pay something like 120$ per year, and you learn how to sail (all lessons are free), and you can go there and get a boat (you will start with small sail boats), or canoe out anytime you want. It is actually really fun, if you have the patience to learn. Since it is not even a real lake, and winds are not that strong, it is very easy to learn. And if you get good at it, it would be a great activity for a second date. Worth every penny.

<comment><USER6> I lived in California for 13 years and in Cambridge for 4. My impression is that people are of uniform unfriendliness in the two areas.

I do agree with the recommendation of Davis Square. The Somerville Theater, which is in Davis, is pretty sweet.

<comment><USER7> My initial reaction to the grandparent post was offense, but then I thought about it.

I live in Boston, and I have to say it is _much_ unfriendlier than new york, where I grew up. I am sad for california if what you say is true (although that was not my experience _at all_ when I spent time there).

Even when I visit NYC I don't feel that people are so hurried, pushy, and selfish as boston. When you penetrate the shell, and aren't in traffic, a line, or on the T, Boston folks can be friendly. Sadly, my very pregnant wife frequently is left standing on the T in boston--often no one offers her, or the 80 year old who happens to be on board, a seat.

<comment><USER8> Really? I've grown up in NYC as well, and I've found thats its much easier to be friendly in Boston than in NYC, but that might just be a consequence of the fact that when I'm hanging out in boston, its generally over in the MIT area, which is certainly a very unique culture, combined with that fact that being in one's 20s in boston certainly very different from being in Boston and not being in one's 20s.

<comment><USER7> To clarify--I grew up in central new york and was a vistor to NYC, so you are more qualified to comment re:NYC. I just meant that NYC had had a reputation in that regard, and my personal experience in Boston was worse comparatively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some places I like, mostly in the Central Square and Harvard area.

Best view: Find a way to get in the John Hancock building, go to one of the corners of the floor and lean against the glass. You'll get a 210°+ panorama.

Food:

Indian - any of the dozen places on Mass Ave is good.

\- Indian Food and Spices (80 River Street) is an excellent one-man operation

\- Desi Dharba (on Mass Ave and Main) and Indian Pavilion (Central Square) both have very good buffets in the $8 range.

Mexican:

\- Felipe's is great for take out. Mount Auburn Street, next to the 7-11.

\- Border Cafe is an extra delicious sit down places yet prices are really low.

Japanese:

\- Wagamama - great fusion food

Don't know any good sushi places, though.

After 12pm:

\- Falafel Palace on Western Ave and Mass Ave (sometimes open till 3)

\- IHOP on Brattle Street, Harvard

Bars:

\- Om Bar near Harvard

\- Grafton Street is one of the typical Harvard hangouts

\- John Harvard Pub make their own beer

\- So does the Cambridge Brewing Company on Kendall Square

\- The Estate next to the Boston Common. Not a very good club but all the house/dance DJs go there. Tiesto's coming next week.

\- Middle East and 2 others next to it on Central Square always have live music.

\- The Enormous Room (above Central Kitchen on Central Square) is a nice club/bar with great music, one of the few places that stays open after 2pm.

Parks & Walking:

Not much in the park area unfortunately. Best bet is to go to the far west parts or to go to the Charles River park by following Main St or Mass Ave until you cross the river.

Cambridgeport (what's north of Mass Ave, east of Harvard) is quite nice for a quick walk to clear your head. People on the street say hi. The area around the YC house is also cool.

Check out the markings on the pavement of the Harvard Bridge (it actually leads to MIT). Details here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot>

NB: When you go to Kendall be careful as there are two places about 10 minutes away which are both called Kendall Square. One is the real Kendall with the namesake Red Line stop and the Marriott, the other one is an office park north of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Both The Tasty and The Greenhouse have closed. Go to Pinocchio's Pizza and and Charlies Kitchen before they too are replaced with useless mallstores!!

There are a lot of good ice cream places including Herrell's, Emack and Bolio's, JP Licks, Toscanini's. Conduct a long term comparative study.

Coolidge Corner Theatre is a great place to watch movies.

I've not hung out with them for years and I've heard it's changed quite a bit but consider going to a MITERS party [1]. It used to be more about conceptual art. I think it's now more about technology. Either way though you can't go wrong if you click with the people.

Boston is a great beer town. If you like beer go to some of the Beer Advocate beerfests. One is coming up very soon [2].

[1] <http://miters.mit.edu/node/5>

[2] <http://beeradvocate.com/acbf/>

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the few things I miss about the Cambridge area is the quality and variety of the bookstores. I recommend MacIntyre and Moore for technical used books; Quantuum and SoftPro for new stuff; and Victor Hugo books on Newbury St. for more general stuff.

<http://www.mcintyreandmoore.com/> <http://www.quantumbooks.com/>

While looking for links, I discovered that Victor Hugo books and SoftPro are probably gone now. As I look at the shelf of books I choose to place within arm reach of where I code, probably half came from SoftPro and a goodly armful from Victor Hugo.

If the internet didn't offer a way to buy used editions from anywhere in the nation, I'd have to make a yearly pilgrimage back to Cambridge with a buying list. Thank god for that.

<comment><USER12> Victor Hugo closed years ago, and Quantum is no longer in the Cambridge location. Sad, they were some of my favorite book stores too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. GET A MAP. Boston's roads are paved cowpaths and the city is a huge Celtic knot. Yes, Boston was designed by cows.

2\. On Fridays and Saturdays, go to Haymarket (Haymarket stop on the Orange Line) if you want to save a ton of money on food but live very, very well. I could write a whole article about Haymarket, but the short of it is that it's a superb open air market with fresh produce, fish, meats and cheeses. I recently walked away with 24 pints of organic strawberries for $6.

3\. The best place for a game of chess is in Harvard Square at the Au Bon Pain courtyard (Harvard Square on the Red Line). I did write an article about it, so search for my name if you want to. Keep in mind that there are always more players than there are boards to play with, so bring a board unless you like to watch.

4\. The Esplanade along the Charles River is gorgeous in the summer and is great for biking, running, rollerblading and people watching. It's also a good place for free concerts during the summer.

5\. The best thrift stores are Boomerangs in Jamaica Plain and Savers on Route 9. I've found Armani shirts for $5.

6\. The Museum of Fine Arts (Ruggles stop on the Orange Line), or the MFA as locals call it, has free admittance on Wednesdays.

7\. The greenest, most socially responsible bank you'll find in Boston is Wainwright Bank. I haven't been to their newest branch, but I heard it uses natural light and things like the counters and flooring are made of cornstalk and bamboo.

8\. There is a Trader Joe's that's accessible by the T (Hynes Convention Center on the Green Line) but it's a dry store thanks to the Massachusetts' law that prohibits them from selling alcohol at more than 3 locations in the state. The Trader Joe's on Memorial Drive in Cambridge is the best location. For whatever reason, the lines are shorter and the staff seems happier.

9\. I know you're already in school, but one of the greatest resources in Boston is the Independent Activities Period at MIT (Kendall/MIT stop on the Red Line) every January and February. I have great memories of a 20 hour course I took with Tim Berners-Lee.

10\. If you have a dog, you are required to go to Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain. It's the city's largest greenspace and it was designed by the same Frank Law Olmstead who later designed Central Park in New York. It's also home to the Franklin Park Zoo, where a gorilla actually escaped a few years ago and was seen waiting at a bus stop.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, #5 should say "Route 1" and #10 should say "Frederick Law Olmstead."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'll avoid the "Boston stinks because ... " part and just tell you about a few things that rock here.

1\. If you're old enough to sit in a bar (you are, but for others reading this), go to Chez Henri (<http://www.chezhenri.com/>). Get a cubano (they go great with a Manhattan btw). I've been to Miami (never Cuba though) and never had one as good as the bar menu one at Chez Henri. If you don't eat meat, get the veggie one, still amazing, but not quite as.

2\. The Kendall and Brattle Theatres. Awesome REAL movie theatres. Great for dates or just getting away from the next, big sequel of crap.

3\. Getting gifts for the folks back home? For some you just have to get Harvard / MIT clothing (it's just a fact), but for those who are a bit cooler, or not parents, grandparents - go to Joi de Vivre on Mass Ave just south of Porter (<http://www.joiedevivre.net/>). A store where you, as a grown up, will actually want to play with stuff.

4\. Get some rockin pizza at Cambidge1. I haven't been to the new one by Fenway, but the one in Havard Square rocks hard. The lines during weekend prime time don't though - so you've been warned. Their pizza is way better than their website (<http://cambridge1.us/>).

5\. Those ten books in your queue not enough? Challenge yourself by reading something in another language. Schoenhofs is an amazing resource.

And then pretty much everything everyone else said. Have fun. Cambridge is a great place to be in the Summer (Winter, not so much ...)

<comment><USER15> cambridge1 is great. tech trivia: one of the co-owners of cambridge1 started android and now is VP of Mobile at Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Find a great book at Lorem Ipsum Books outside of Inman Square. <http://www.loremipsumbooks.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a great place - and under a mile from my apartment. Thanks, I'll probably check it out this weekend.

Although, I already have a queue of about 10 books to get to ... A visit there will likely just make me feel more guilty for not reading enough ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you have the ability to travel, I recommend heading down to Foxwoods (about 2 hour drive) around 11pm on Friday or Saturday. Most people are enebriated by then, and the Texas Hold'em tables are like an ATM.

EDIT: Sorry, I assumed that you were over 21. Don't bother going if you are only 18,

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm 22, but I don't have a car ;-) Thanks anyways though.

<comment><USER12> Well then you should get a Zipcar account: <http://www.zipcar.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The MIT Museum is pretty sweet. There are a bunch of Arthur Ganson's insane kinetic sculptures and some old robots. It's $7.50 for adults, but I think there is a student discount, free if you're an MIT student. Open 10-5 every day.

<comment><USER18> free on Sunday mornings

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> checkout MIT CSAIL

<http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php>

just walk in and ask someone to show you around. they got some pretty cool stuff going on

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? If I just come by, they'll let me look around? I don't go to MIT ...

<comment><USER19> yeah. what I did is that I emailed some professors or phds and asked them if they or someone I knew could show me around. just tell them you're a student and interested in what they are doing. they certainly like to show you their stuff. just pick the areas from the website above that interest you and email the folks, most of them are very open.

<comment><USER20> If you can bring a pretty woman with you, it works even better. My wife and I visited the MIT campus a few years back, and she attracted more attention to us than I would have alone. She knows next to nothing about technology, but it didn't matter. Note, I'm not trying to knock MIT girls, just giving you a tip to get into some labs. Also, MIT folks are very nice and open, not elitist at all, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sorry to hijack the thread - but I think that this is pretty appropriate nonetheless. I just recently moved to Cambridge/Boston, MA as well. Would someone enlighten me, as to what might be some great software/web companies in the area that a young CS grad should consider and apply to? I feel a little bit lost here, as there are certainly lots of tech companies in Boston but I only saw a few walking in downtown and Kendall Square.

<comment><USER22> Hey cowmoo, our startup ( www.hubspot.com ) is hiring now. We're VC funded, have a great crew, located in Kendall Square, and we're looking for someone with data mining expertise. Shoot me an email if you're interested - pfitzsimmons a-t hubspot d-t com Would love to chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I suggest a scorpion bowl at the Hong Kong if you're young but legal, and like people watching.

John Harvard's is good for microbrews, relaxed atmosphere.

Memorial Drive is closed on sundays and is nice to walk, roller-blade, jog, watch pretty girls, etc.

Harvard Square: Graton St. (dinner), The Greenhouse (brunch)

Also, in Harvard Sqare: Hot chocolate/Candy/Dessert/dates at L.A. Burdicks

If you're new to town, the duck tour and freedom trail are good.

The MFA is good if you're solo, or otherwise, and I _highly_ recommend the museum of science.

<comment><USER6> s/Graton/Grafton/

Also, the Greenhouse went out of business a few months ago (though it was good while it lasted). Maybe try Daedalus on Mount Auburn Street. It's relatively expensive, but good.

<comment><USER7> Wife suggested greenhouse... Note: we haven't lived there in a bit, so ymmv.

The correction is appreciated! Grafton|Graton was a typo but the edit link has expired, so my perfectionist tendencies will be left wanting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A few things:

1\. Many have rightly noted that Davis Square in Somerville is a cool place to hang, yet no one has mentioned its crown jewel: Redbones. Do you people really live here?

2\. For excellent pizza, check out Emma's on Hampshire near Kendall Square.

3\. Flat Top Johnny's near the Kendall Square Cinema is an OK place to play pool and have a beer. But watch out: their computer keeps track of how much you drink and you will get cut off if it thinks you have had too many too soon. Infernal Machines!

4\. Games People Play on Mass Ave.

</comment><comment><USER24> Cambridge Brewing Company. Go get a growler of their pale ale. Yum.

</comment><comment><USER25> go to the Cambridge Common on mass ave between Harvard and Porter sq. 24 brews on tap and some of the best food around. (I recommend the English Burger).

There is also the Lizard Lounge in the basement of the same building with great live music

</comment><comment><USER26> redLine</comment>


Many YouTube channels promoting adult content disguised as Kids drawing videos - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Abhas9/status/1212445044902219776 <comment><AUTHOR> For the English speaking audience: All the videos with `Hindi` thumbnail have some very disturbing audio (taboo adult stories)</comment>


Maps of race and ethnicity in US cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624812674967/with/4981415821/ <comment><USER2> In my hometown of Milwaukee, I was able to tell which color was which race without looking at the key.</comment>


Tesla's Stock Keeps Going Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-07/tesla-s-stock-keeps-going-up <comment><USER2> Tesla's price seems crazy, but it's not. In the coming few years the market for ev's is going to skyrocket, and the market for ice's is going to start to collapse.

There are several reasons this will happen. For one, global climate change will continue to get worse, so governments are going to keep pushing harder promoting ev's. Secondly, the number of available public charging stations is going to continue to go up. Thirdly people will become more familiar with ev's and realize a lot the ideas about them they have been fed by ice promoters are false.

Finally there is cost. Ev's are already cheaper in overall operating expense. In the next few years falling battery prices will start to make them as cheap in sticker price.

So there is a technological revolution coming. In the last year or so many of the legacy auto manufacturers have realize this, and have gone into high gear working on ev's. A flood of new models is coming onto the market.

The problem is demand is going to outrun production for many years, partly due to battery shortages, and so the companies like Tesla that have lots of ev production place are going to prosper, and those that don't are going to go out of business.

Beyond that, Tesla is also in solar and energy storage, and it is about to get into li-ion cell production. Now there is no way to be sure how things are going to go, but Tesla is clearly one of the companies to bet on.

<comment><USER3> Toyota is a vastly superior manufacturer in every conceivable manner. Why do you think Tesla will be able to take on the rest of the industry with inferior manufacturing?

Even if what you say about EVs is true, Toyota will be able to manufacture them faster, safer and cheaper. As will some other manufacturers.

I also don't see how being in a commodity race-to-the-bottom industry like batteries and solar will help them.

<comment><USER2> History shows again and again that where there is a major technological transformation in an industry, some or all of the incumbents fail to make the change, and some of the major powers afterwards are new companies.

Also, Tesla is getting pretty good at manufacturing, and steadily getting better. It is turning out many more cars than it did a few years ago, and has good profit margins. It has also learned to build factories and get them into production much faster than any of the old companies can.

And no, it is not a commodity race-to-the-bottom when the technology is continually improving at a rapid pace. Someday it will be, but that is decades from now.

So instead of trying to figure out why Toyota will clobber Tesla, you should be trying to guess which companies today are doing a good job of positioning themselves for the big change, and which are not. Among the old companies, VW is doing a great job, Toyota is so far so-so.

You know, that sort of "we are the biggest so we can't fail" mentality is the key reason companies fail to make big technology transitions.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: EggFinder – We Qualify AWS Tooling for You - <AUTHOR> https://cloudegg.net/eggfinder/ <comment><USER2> Can you resubmit the tool when it's launched? Right now it's a landing page asking for email address with nothing to try. [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


New in Chrome 70 - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/10/nic70 <comment><USER2> HackerNews is starting to become less and less useful for reading tech news as of late. I come here to read stuff that's interesting in tech/science/etc, because the signal-to-noise was great.

The vast majority of comments on this article are complaining about a single thing: a bluetooth API behind permissions check, and then spilling over into political arguments about what the Web should be (documents only!) and hyperbole (e.g. "i'll be bombarded by permission requests" \-- lots of Web APIs can ask for permissions already like the Mic and Webcam, why isn't there an epidemic of permission spam from those, but you expect BT?)

For example, if I hadn't read the link in detail, I wouldn't have even known about the Web Authentication API extension ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authent...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authentication_API)) to the Credential Management API. Improving authentication on the Web should be an interesting topic for HN, but no one even mentioned it.

The ship has sailed, we're 20+ years into this open ecosystem of ephemeral, mobile code execution, with Web Assembly poised to take it even further. We're not going back to documents-only, so either we improve the Web, it's security, performance, and capability, or we freeze in place, and hand our lives over to the App Stores of the world (the security world of native-platforms with side- load app capability isn't very impressive at this point)

<comment><USER3> > The vast majority of comments on this article are complaining about a single > thing: a bluetooth API behind permissions check,

A HackerNews staffer wrote, some time ago:

> We've reverted the title from "Chrome 70 supports Web Bluetooth on Windows > 10", which breaks the guidelines by editorializing.

So that's your proximate cause. Somebody editorialized the article and the initial responses are to that editorialized title.

<comment><USER2> Good point, and an excellent justification for the no-editorializing-policy! They should link that policy to this thread to show what happens to S/N when people editorialize for clickbait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The other day I was scrolling past a panoramic picture on Facebook. I happened to jostle my phone, and was surprised to find I could look around the picture by tilting my phone.

When the fsck did this become a feature? Why did nothing ask me if I was ok giving Facebook access to my hardware? How do I turn it off? Who thought this was a good idea!?

These same questions apply to Bluetooth. Already, such a terrible standard when it comes to privacy. And now, random websites can grab control of my radios? With JavaScript? Nothing wrong can happen with this, for sure!

FFS. This is like the battery api. Too much time spent on "can we", too little time spent on "should we".

<comment><USER5> The Web Bluetooth API asks you for permission every time. Like every new web standard like it. It's still something many users will blindly click through but at least there's that.

At least this doesn't seem to be a priority feature for Mozilla yet. MDN doesn't even have proper docs for it. So I'm a bit thankful for that, for now.

As for Facebook and the accelerometer, I'm presuming you're on Android, so you can definitely blame Google for that.

<comment><USER6> > It's still something many users will blindly click through but at least > there's that.

Malicious sites can trick you into accepting too:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/9p3172/yeah_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/9p3172/yeah_no_thanks/)

<comment><USER7> That "allow notifications" popup is _way_ too small... instead, it should pop up in the middle of the screen, have big bold letters, and gray out the website in the background. Then wevsites would be much more careful about asking you about it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great, another feature that is probably useful for <1% of websites but will likely be used for anti-user functionality like tracking and surveillance more than that.

Maybe I'm just old, but I find this trend of exposing more to the outside over the network quite disturbing, and it's also becoming rare for me to be joyful about a new version of software instead of "what did they break or bloat this time"... the Web was far more pleasant when it was about hyperlinked documents and not this cloud-computing-inspired frenzy.

<comment><USER9> _the Web was far more pleasant when it was about hyperlinked documents and not this cloud-computing-inspired frenzy_

It was also a lot less useful though, as it was mostly about consumption. All of the creating happened elsewhere. People made things on their computer in other apps and then published them to the web. Now though, the web platform is shifting towards being a creative place in itself. People can make and share things entirely within a browser. I'd think that's a _significant_ positive change.

<comment><USER10> I would disagree that the web was more about consumption.

There where more personal pages because html was simple and there was little reason for large businesses to build pages around consumption or write html for you. Older browsers even had edit modes and would use the http PUT method to send updated versions of the document.

The original intention of the web was a sort of global wiki, not this tool to connect you to some coorperate service.

<comment><USER9> _There where more personal pages..._

Than Instagram accounts? YouTube channels? Facebook pages? Twitter profiles? No. There's far more now.

The landscape has changed and things look very different, but those things _are_ personal pages where people publish what they want to say. The only thing that's changed is that the platforms people publish to have far less scope for personalisation.

I'd definitely agree that those pages are worse than homepages we had in the 90s as far as a personal voice is concerned. They're mostly boring, homogeneous things that only very close friends of the owner want to read (and even then...). Nonetheless though, they _are_ homepages.

<comment><USER11> I'd argue that things like "likes" have created an environment where people generally publish what they think other people would want them to say (e.g. things that will be "rewarded" with internet points), rather than what they actually want to say.

<comment><USER9> That's just 'better' metrics. Back in the day we had hit counters and server logs, and some of us tweaked our content to drive them up. There were early forms of SEO, clickbait, content marketing ("content is king" was something every web person knew). The desire for recognition was there at the start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So many I'll informed comments on top of this submission. First, the web Bluetooth API requires a permission. It's useful for more fully featured PWAs. Even though I personally think the browser shouldn't have become an app platform, that's the world we live in now. The best cross platform solution is the one most platforms support and today this is the browser.

<comment><USER13> >First, the web Bluetooth API requires a permission.

ActiveX also required a permission...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mac has supported beginner friendly ways of sshing into let's say a Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth[0]. I would love to see a progressive really any app for Windows like this.

[0]: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/headless-raspberry-pi- conf...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/headless-raspberry-pi- configuration-over-bluetooth/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Aside - It also lets you install progressive web apps onto the desktop. Has anyone built PWAs, and if so, why? Do they work cross-platform/mobile well?

<comment><USER16> Installing as app works great for our PWA: [https://editor.construct.net/](https://editor.construct.net/)

> Has anyone built PWAs, and if so, why? Do they work cross-platform/mobile > well?

Works cross platform great. Construct 3 is a sophisticated productivity app, although it works on mobile devices it's not the ideal environment to get lots of stuff done with it.

Coming from a Windows native app, main advantage in developing a PWA is that it allows easy cross platform support (Chromebooks especially good for educational markets) and much more agility in developing compared to say a native app.

<comment><USER15> Very cool. Do you happen to have any links to read about getting started? Any specific technologies (frameworks/libraries/etc) that helped out? Any lessons learned?

<comment><USER16> My brother (and co-founder) actually develops the product with 2 other full time engineers, I'm not involved in the product development directly.

It was all built from the ground up though. I think we were well ahead of the curve when it was started to be developed 3-4 years ago.

Mentioned in another comment yesterday that we decided against using third party UI because we were worried about bloat, third party dependencies and general responsiveness. Whole app is usable in ~1mb of network load (less than lots of big-corp homepages) and we get comments from users saying after using it for a while they forget they are in the browser which is great and a strong indicator we've hit the mark.

If we were to start again today, we'd still roll our own UI.

My brothers blog is very good and often technical and goes into a lot of interesting web tech stuff relating to Construct 3 and PWA's: [https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys- blog-2?orderID=1](https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2?orderID=1)

There are a whole raft of benefits of PWA's, probably too many to list especially coming from our native predecessor Construct 2. Auto updating users to latest versions, no download/installation which helps significantly with converting users into just trying the product, faster load times than our native Windows predecessor, easier distribution etc etc.

Cross platform support is an incredible competitive advantage in some markets such as education where Chromebooks are common and competition is sparse/non- existent. It even runs on Raspberry Pi's and we're confident we're future proofed for new devices.

Making your PWA fully functional online is tricky but doable and I believe particular care needs to be taken here from the beginning. Retroactively implementing offline support would be difficult.

It's also important to not get too fancy and building it for offline use helps you avoid these traps. We've seen some PWA's record every user interaction within the PWA which appears to be the basis of some features such as undo - this brings in a huge raft of complexities.

A few shortcomings, but the gaps are being bridged slowly but surely. For example copying images to clipboard: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The greatest threat to the web is those that want to turn it into an "app platform" instead of a hypermedia system. Sadly the battle has probably been lost.

<comment><USER18> HN commenters have such a strange cognitive dissonance on this issue.

On one hand, there's this consistent theme of web Luddism - a lament for the simplicity of when the web was for documents, rather than apps.

On the other hand, there's this rage against increasing control of distribution channels by tech giants like Apple. The whole point of the web as app platform is to circumvent that.

<comment><USER19> Those are not incompatible sentiments.

You can think centralized distribution is a problem and still think the modern web is a bad solution to that problem.

A problem is that the web is being used for both applications and documents. I don't mind if an application I explicitly launched as an application asks to make Bluetooth connections, but I would mind if a blog post did that.

I think there's a lot of value in web applications, but I really don't like how it interferes with the non-application web.

<comment><USER20> > I don't mind if an application I explicitly launched as an application asks > to make Bluetooth connections

The security model for a desktop-installable 'app' is a superset of a webpage. Or at least it was in Firefox OS, where additional permissions were required for accessing the filesystem or hardware APIs. In this way they were not available to websites to hijack the in-browser sandbox; the system web browser was itself a 'browser app' with a restricted set of permissions.

(I presume it's similar in Chrome OS, while this blog post is in the context of 'appifying' Windows desktop outside the browser.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Making "Hold ⌘Q to Quit" the default on Mac is such a user-hostile change. There is no reason to deviate from the platform default that literally every other Mac app uses.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Users can now install Desktop Progressive Web Apps on Windows & Linux!

This is great, but hopefully Safari(especially on iOS) will follow suit and support PWAs. I recently wrote a PWA but changed it to use Cordova because Safari on iOS doesn't support "Add to Desktop" for PWAs. If it does, I definitely couldn't figure it out when running the latest iOS.

One thing I'd like to see Google do is allow PWAs to be listed in the Play store. A lot of apps are already web views, and a PWA could be much more practical, especially if they provide some APIs to fill the gap between web and native.

EDIT: Nah, I take that back. Fuck the Play store. I hope people can become comfortable with downloading PWAs directly. One of the things that held me back from releasing a PWA is the people I tested it with weren't comfortable downloading an app from a "random" website, which is pretty ridiculous seeing how easy it is to release horseshit software on the Play store.

<comment> jf- It definitely does. If it's not appearing something is wrong. A common cause is some asset being delivered over http rather than https.

Actually, it should allow you to add ordinary websites to the desktop, but doesn't display them full screen. Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but did you just not scroll right on the menu in safari? I couldn't find it the first time I went to add a site to desktop either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most of this thread seems to be people upset that this exists. Do people not realize can control javascript permissions?

<comment><USER24> They're rightly concerned that it will be used like notification permissions: just one more thing you need to cancel when you use a site. Yes you need to consent, but even being asked is audacious.

<comment><USER25> Notification permissions are widely (mis)used because many sites already have a legitimate use-case for that permission; keeping users updated on new articles posted on the site.

It's not at all clear that a similar widely applicable use-case exists for Bluetooth.

<comment><USER26> This is just plain boring to be honest, I don't want to be notified when a new article is released, I'd rather manually check a RSS app when I want to read such news instead of receiving a notification while I'm working. To each its own I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Being able to use Bluetooth REPL for microcontrollers running MicroPython is somewhat cool, but also rises serious security concerns, if such a device is used for IoT.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm sure nothing terrible will happen by exposing Bluetooth to the world of skeezy javascript malware.

</comment><comment><USER29> What is the realistic everyday use case for this?

<comment><USER6> Pairing your phone with your pc for realtime inputs w/o going through internet.

For example [https://www.airconsole.com/](https://www.airconsole.com/) turns your phone into a gamepad for multiplayer browser games. But I think they are using web sockets or webrtc right now which is kind of silly when everyone is in the same room looking at the same browser.

<comment><USER30> Airconsole is awesome and it's a very innovative idea. This will really help them to reduce the data usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how much of this is directly related to Google's game streaming ambitions. Chrome, the browser, is pretty much it's own os at this point

<comment><USER32> Gotta say though, the OSification of browsers has been the greatest thing to happen for Linux compatibility. We can talk about efficiency and purity and integration and things but hot damn a decade ago I would have never thought I would be able to run so many apps without any sort of friction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know of something like a search engine for PWAs? I'm kind of intrigued by the new desktop PWA functionality described, but I don't know how to find out which sites I can desktopify. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder what the next layer is gonna be after web browsers have completely taken over all operating system functions.

<comment><USER35> Web workers and service workers are already a new layer of tightened sandboxing on top of the JavaScript sandbox whose volume of sand is soon approximating Sahara.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wait... Windows 10 allows applications to control radios...

So couldn't you go past some site doing a driveby, Chrome get's control of the Bluetooth radio and then the site can just go Bluesnarfing against nearby devices?

Or say have an extension in Chrome that gets control of the radio and you can use the control of the radio and go sniffing for data like I don't know messages or health data sent between phones and smartwatches?

</comment><comment><USER37> A pity that the classic RFCOMM interface is not supported (at least how I read it).

</comment><comment><USER38> about://config (ok, _chrome_ ://config) is gone

Nothing Bluetooth is in chrome://flags

Google search results are their usual, these days, jumble of largely uselessness.

In the context of a relatively quick search and results skimming, this result is dated 2015 but still seems to be pertinent. It is also the link that is cited in the OP's linked announcement.

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/07/interact-w...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/07/interact- with-ble-devices-on-the-web)

In particular, where it says:

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/07/interact-w...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/07/interact- with-ble-devices-on-the-web#dev_tips)

 _A "Bluetooth Internals" page is available in Chrome at chrome://bluetooth- internals so that you can inspect everything about nearby Bluetooth devices: status, services, characteristics, and descriptors._

Checking the system I'm on, I'm not hooked up to any Bluetooth devices. I see the Status panel shown in the article, although it's not titled. Nothing else. There are two left-side tab-ish controls that let me switch between "Adapter" and "Devices". Devices shows the headset I was using the other week. It also has a button to "Scan".

Nowhere, a browser-level control to turn this off.

This is _not acceptable_.

Google et al. are not going to stop. So, we are going to have to rewrite support for these stacks, and/or reconfigure how we run their apps and under what permissions, to cut them off.

OS development (on "free" OS's, at least) is going to have to start assuming that applications the user actually wants and needs to run, can be and are at the same time at least partially hostile.

Or, we just put up with this situation and being relegated to "cattle". I was just at a dairy farm the other week, and they now tag _both_ ears -- so they don't even potentially have to take a step to identify the cow.

This system uses Ubuntu 16.04, so supposedly control of this subsystem is more limited than on e.g. Windows 10. But there's no way I'm "relying" on that, all the more so going forward in time.

</comment><comment><USER39> We've reverted the title from "Chrome 70 supports Web Bluetooth on Windows 10", which breaks the guidelines by editorializing.</comment>