Tell HN: Google drops blogspot.in, breaking hundreds of thousands of permalinks - <AUTHOR> When searched within India, Google's Blogspot points to username.blogspot.in as opposed to username.blogspot.com (also in search engines). Most permalinks users use to share are country specific which also reflect on Google Search.
Looks like blogspot.in was picked up by a non Google entity.

  Domain Name: blogspot.in
  Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN
  Registrar WHOIS Server:
  Registrar URL: www.domainming.com
  Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z
  Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z
  Domain Status: inactive http://www.icann.org/epp#inactive
 There is a ceritificate for the blogspot.in along with other blogspot.* domains. Would they end up revoking all the certificates if challenged?
https://crt.sh/?q=blogspot.in <comment><USER2> This is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging app idea I had: If you blog with a third party service, eventually your blog will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown, merger, or whatever happened in this instance (google forgot to renew a domain?). If you want to write seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea, or dont seem to care.

The idea is here: [http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/](http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/)

Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of the now-obsolete "Windows Live Writer"[1], where you could write everything on your Windows machine and "push" it to Sharepoint, Blogger, LiveWriter, Wordpress and much more. Ultimately, it got an open-source fork called "Open Live Writer"[2].

It sounds like a nice idea - a "Live Writer on steroids". Could be neat.

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

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

<comment><USER4> For anyone wanting to take it for a spin, openlivewriter.org seems to be down since at least May, but .com works, and is also maintained by the same people.

[https://openlivewriter.com/](https://openlivewriter.com/)

[https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/issues/911](https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/issues/911)

<comment><USER5> This is a Windows only app. Is there any similar app for Linux?

<comment><USER6> Might run on WINE.

<comment><USER7> Also since it's .net it may compile/run with the Mono natively on Linux/Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised no-one mentioned Mark Monitor[0] (no affiliation). A lot of big brand corporations use it to protect their intellectual property. Can you imagine, for example, someone getting their hands on `apple.com` or `icloud.com`. They could wreak havoc since a lot of iDevices use those two domains in order to function and you could pwn many devices if you were determined enough. I imagine MM solves the 10-year time window problem by ensuring the domain lives well on into the future. It's what they do.

[0] [https://www.markmonitor.com](https://www.markmonitor.com)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, and I checked a few whois history sites and the domain had been registered with Mark Monitor as the registrar. That's a _major_ mistake on their [MarkMonitor's] part.

Edit: clarified that I meant the error seems to be on MM's side.

<comment><USER10> What's the major mistake? I don't follow.

<comment><USER9> Companies hire MarkMonitor to safeguard their protected marks, which generally involves registering these marks under basically every TLD available. MarkMonitor themselves is an ICANN registrar so companies generally don't need to worry about renewals: MarkMonitor just handles it (how it actually gets billed back likely depends upon the contract).

So unless Google explicitly told MarkMonitor to release the domain, this seems like MarkMonitor dropped the ball.

<comment><USER11> Google doesn't use MarkMonitor as far as I know.

<comment><USER12> Despite having it's own generic registrar service, Google uses MarkMonitor for most of it's domains, for reasons people have already outlined.

<comment><USER11> TIL, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The original reason for the per-country domains was to allow Google to "continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law."

It arose around the question "Does a judge in country A have the ability to censor content in country B?". Google has long argued that a judge does not have this authority.

[https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711](https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711) [https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/31/2761454/google-blogger- au...](https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/31/2761454/google-blogger-automatic- redirect-censorship-cctld)

<comment><USER14> > Google has long argued that a judge does not have this authority.

Google, and anyone with a functioning brain stem.

Jurisdictions exist for a reason, and with a number of exceptions somewhere in the low single digits (and maybe zero), all jurisdictions end at the borders of a country.

<comment><USER15> Kind of. Countries have jurisdictions within them, such as states and there is the EU of course, and then countries make treaties with each other so there can be influence across countries.

<comment><USER16> Influence but not jurisdiction. Outside of crimes against humanity/universal jurisdiction, I cant think of a situation where a country A would have jurisdiction over an event that happens in another country B involving nobody of nationality A. Even in the EU there's a lot of guidelines and processes for figuring out which member country gets jurisdiction over cases.

<comment><USER17> _I cant think of a situation where a country A would have jurisdiction over an event that happens in another country B involving nobody of nationality A_

Trade sanctions. Banking regulations. It happens all the time.

<comment><USER16> Those still involve people of nationality A. The people importing/sending out funds to the bank etc.

<comment><USER17> Not necessarily.

Country A can put an embargo on certain products to Country B. When Country C sends those products to Country B, Country A refuses to do business with Country C, or fines it, or levies some other penalty.

<comment><USER16> Country A is still involved in their transactions with country C. The only way they are exercising any power is through their direct involvement in the trade network. This also isn't a legal court case with a crime and jurisdiction so it doesnt even really fit the idea of where crimes are evaluated in a court of law - international trade wars are not criminal law unless there are crimes against humanity involved, which I already put a disclaimer about as one of those crimes considered having universal jurisdiction. Though you still have to invade them to be able to prosecute people, in which case you extend your jurisdiction by turning the country into a territory as in ww2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honestly the whole notion of losing your domain if you accidentally don't pay is pretty silly. A domain in usage is obviously meant to continue, even if an organization misses a process to renew.

Far better would be that a domain is yours in perpetuity until you _explicitly_ cancel it. If you don't pay, you get bills, or it goes to collections, or the domain temporarily stops resolving or something... but you shouldn't _lose_ it. (If a person passes away, their estate figures out what to do with it.)

The notion that if you forget to pay, 60 days later it's gone (poof), just seems like a dumb policy in the first place.

And for those wondering how a business forgets to renew, it's pretty easy: the employee (A) in charge of managing renewals is let go, and so is their manager (B) at around the same time, so the manager (B) doesn't transfer responsibility from (A) to a new person, and _their_ manager (C) doesn't realize the original employee two levels down (A) never had their responsibility transferred, because that was B's job.

<comment><USER19> There is already something in place where if you forget to renew, the domain is place in holding for a specified amount of time before it is released.

domains are an asset just like anything else. personally i don't see why if you are a business, you don't register you domain for 10 years or more. just as a test i went to godaddy and looked at how much it costs to register a .com domain for 10 years... it was less than $100. honestly... if you are a business and it costs you $1000 to register you domain for 100 years, why wouldn't you do it.

<comment><USER18> First, you can't renew for more than 10 years.

Second, long-term renewals are precisely the scariest ones. It's actually tremendously difficult for a business to keep a process in place that happens once every 10 years. The employee who registered the domain (and their e-mail address) are probably _long_ gone. The responsibility has been passed along 5 different employees during that time, and the last one got fired and nobody knew they were the one in charge of renewals. And then you find out, suddenly you don't own the domain anymore!

This is the whole problem in a nutshell. Counter-intuitively, if it were a bill sent monthly, it would be much harder for people to forget about (and you could rely on USPS forwarding for changes of address).

<comment><USER20> You can set it up so you renew up to 10 full years (from the remaining 9) every year. That way you have 9 chances to fail before it becomes an issue.

Also for a fairly small organization you can have all the domains listed in one place with the renewal dates and review that every 6 months or year (to make sure all the new ones were added, the contacts are still all valid [hopefully you setup things like [domains]@[companyname].com or something but..., you have noted any that you no longer want or were transferred away...

<comment><USER21> I use namecheap and just use their auto renew feature. Do other registrars not have that option?

<comment><USER18> Auto renewal doesn't help here.

Credit cards expire, e-mails get deactivated, addresses change.

If you're not getting notices about your domain expiring in the first place, auto-renew isn't going to stay working after your credit card expires, which is only a couple years.

<comment><USER22> I use Namecheap, and I have deliberately _avoided_ their auto-renewal service because it doesn't offer me anything.

The key point is that a human needs to be involved in an audit process which occurs regularly. And so I renew all my domains once per year in December, a year in advance.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I could extend one year at a time, but keep a 1-2 year buffer (or larger) in case of dire emergency instead of a 0-1 year buffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just another reason to always, always claim your own domain. If you rely on someone else's domain, you have no control over it.

Although it must be said: even your own registered domain can be lost. Generally due to you not paying attention, but I believe it has also happened that a registrar fucked up and sold a customer's domain to someone else.

Maybe we need better regulation for this sort of thing. If you get a new phone subscription with a different phone provider, the phone providers are required (in the EU at least) to allow you to keep your phone number, because so many things are tied to it. The same is true for email addresses and websites. Breaking this can cause serious problems to people.

<comment><USER24> No, this is not the reason. You would have much more likely chance being kicked by the registrar/card not accepted/country ban/forgot password/domain hacked/forgetting to renew and myriad of other reason than medium/google forgetting to renew their domain. This event is extremely unlikely.

<comment><USER25> You can petition ICANN if you lost a domain that you paid for. As long as you are the rightful owner it will be returned to you. Keep a active credit card on file with your registrar and keep a credit with them as well. All the horror stories I see are cases where someone stops paying.

[https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp- en](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp-en)

<comment><USER14> > As long as you are the rightful owner it will be returned to you.

As long you _can prove_ you are the rightful owner. Sometimes that's much easier said than done, especially to a particular burden of proof they might require to pull the domain away from someone actively using it.

<comment><USER26> Was running a multi hour deploy. Only minor features, so low risk.

Everything broke with our biggest client.

After a massive scramble it turned out our clients certificate had expired, in middle of the deploy.

      So our system could no longer talk to them.

Whoops

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ask hn: how could this have happened? According to [https://www.domain.com/blog/2018/11/01/domain-name- expiratio...](https://www.domain.com/blog/2018/11/01/domain-name-expirations- what-you-need-to-know/), there's supposed to be a 30 + 30 days grace period following domain expiry, where the original registrant can claim the domain. Was blogspot.in really down for 60 days and nobody noticed?

<comment><USER28> Last crawl on Internet Archive, which used to hit blogspot.in almost daily, was May 21. [0]

Domain deletion processes vary per TLD. For .in it appears to be a 30 day grace period + 5 day hold period. [1]

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20200521111932/http://blogspot.i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200521111932/http://blogspot.in/)

[1] [https://www.registry.in/registrants- faq](https://www.registry.in/registrants-faq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablogspot.in](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablogspot.in)

480,000 results for me. All broken. Wow.

<comment><USER30> I see 4'720'000 results, even more WOW ;)

<comment><USER31> I now have "About 5,080,000 results (0.15 seconds)" (so more _and faster_ than previous results, lol); clearly our interest in this search term has attracted the attention of SEO bots ;P.

<comment><USER32> It's increasing?! I got the following:

> About 6,080,000 results (0.21 seconds)

<comment><USER33> > About 5,000,000 results (0.16 seconds)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Most likely they claim the domain back quickly? Yes?

But that's a massive mess up by Google. I know blogspot is not any at focus product for them but still it should hurt.

<comment><USER35> It is not a new phenomenon, I am still grouchy about how Deja was handled. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Apart from the massive list of broken bookmarks, am also wondering what is the risk of the new owners attempting some kind of phishing fraud on unsuspecting non-technical users?

Really surprised by Google dropping the ball like this...

<comment><USER37> But are we surprised?

<comment><USER38> Well, yes. Google usually makes an announcement before they shut domains off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The registrar "domainming"(domainming.com) of .in domains, is the biggest abuser of nixi policies. NIXI specifically says that registrars themselves cannot participate in dropcatching and selling, but the owner of domainming Mr. Salim, goes on with his business unperturbed. I am sure like how the Indian registrar mitsu was banned by NIXI for violation of policies, the same way I am certain that law will catch up with domainming.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why would an organization like Google ever even drop a domain? A 10 year domain registration is what - $150?

<comment><USER41> My bet is that it's a complicated mistake.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

<comment><USER42> I suppose I'll go start looking for other google domains that heavily impact internet users if they expire, and are close to expiration, and just pay the ~$100 to renew them for another 10 years and write the cost off as public service [1].

[1] [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000118/1443242.shtml](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000118/1443242.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's clearly no fail-safe (even moderately so) solution to this problem on the centralized internet. Yet more reason for Secure Scuttlebutt, Dat and IPFS to exist.

<comment><USER44> How specifically do those solve this issue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Counterexample:

AWS announced that they were going to disable links to files hosted on S3 that used a deprecated format. But after much outcry about how many links would be broken, they [1] back tracked.

[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=6776](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=6776)

[1] Should I be saying "we" now that I have been working for AWS for less than a month? I'm not use to being identified as an employee at BigTech.

<comment><USER44> AWS bare links are a cesspit and are increasingly blocked by firewalls. The sunset will occur one way or the other.

<comment><USER44> Acknowledged (post-Bezos acquisition) at the _Washington Post_ in 2014:

"Amazon is a hornet's nest of malware"

 _Of the 10 sites that pump out malware most frequently, four are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) — including the number one site, download- instantly.com, according to a threat report published Wednesday by the IT security firm Solutionary._

 _The report comes a week after we learned that hackers allegedly used Amazon 's cloud hosting solution as a platform for a botnet that scraped personal information from potentially millions of LinkedIn subscribers...._

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2014/01/16...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2014/01/16/amazon-is-a-hornets-nest-of-malware/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Someone in Google going to have a very hard day that's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER47> IPFS will fix this. Permanently and forever. Move to Web3. The Big Tech firms are providing the incentive towards Web3/IPFS apparently not just by their rampant political censorship but also by breaking links. Everything about Big Tech monopolies is just harmful to the web. People are fed up with it.

<comment><USER48> Is IPFS easy enough for normal people to use yet?

<comment><USER47> IPFS isn't really something end users work with directly.

Apps and platforms (like the one I'm building: [https://quanta.wiki](https://quanta.wiki)) use IPFS behind the scenes. The main characteristic the end user will need to know is that is _is_ IPFS and is therefore uncensorable, decentralized, and secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> And that's why you should own your own domain.

<comment><USER50> I don't know, I didn't pay for some time and now it's parked by a bot.

<comment><USER51> Man those domain squatter bot companies, they aren't even interested in selling the domain back in some cases. I don't understand the business model. Maybe they're buying google pagerank score.

<comment><USER52> ad income generated by traffic to page (either organic or typos) exceeds the cost of the domains. then scale to 10s of thousands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Use content addressing. There are still many rough edges to be worked through but IPFS and others don't get enough attention when stuff like this comes up on HN.

</comment><comment><USER54> I would probably use Switcheroo Redirector extension if I needed a quick fix, but I'll keep you posted with better solutions.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo- redirec...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo- redirector/cnmciclhnghalnpfhhleggldniplelbg?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER55> Thanks a lot! Yes, Open Live Writer sounds very similar to what I'd be making. To be honest I hadn't heard of it. [https://futuremirror.info](https://futuremirror.info)

</comment><comment><USER56> It doesn't seem like Google had forgotten to renew the domain, may be blogspot is next on line?[1]

[1][https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

<comment><USER57> Yeah going by [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/risky- blogspoti...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/risky-blogspotin- domain-for-sale-after-google-fails-to-renew-it/) it sounds like they had ample warning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Google doesn't use a service like Markmonitor or one of the dozens of other professional asset management companies to register their domains?

Huh.

</comment><comment><USER59> Google is slowly becoming the destroyer of the (old) internet. (See amp, removal of urls, etc) I'm fairly certain I don't like really the new internet, even if some of the url re-representations are reasonably nice.

<comment><USER60> Just remember Deja News.

</comment></comment><comment> contr-error dang, is this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769393) causing this post to erroneously show up in [https://news.ycombinator.com/ask](https://news.ycombinator.com/ask)?

<comment><USER61> Any submission that's not a link or Launch (reserved for YC companies) is put under the Ask banner, "Ask HN:" in the title is customary but not required, so no, it's not erroneous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> A great example of why domain owners need domain name insurance. Domain insurance protects the owner from the loss of the domain, from UDRPs, expiring domains, failed renewals, stolen domains, etc.

If it's a high-value domain (or if one that you just can't lose), then there other options, such as a registrar lock, or simply registering it for 100 years (i.e., Network Solutions), or even forever (Epik offers a forever domain registration). But that doesn't protect the domain owner from losing it via UDRP, lawsuit, Trademark issue, or having it stolen from them.

<comment><USER63> > or even forever

I highly doubt this is going to be the case. Even those 100 year registrations could easily bankrupt a company with a steep domain price hike or some inflation.

I mean, it's okay if one wants to be secure, but investing several thousand dollars in a company for a promise that's very likely going to be broken is - in my opinion - not a good strategy. Especially when you can invest the same money into a 10-year registration with yearly renewal (to stay at 10 years) and sufficient monitoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> To be honest I never got why Blogger bothered with a country specific domain when visiting a blog

This sounded like a problem waiting to happen

I understand onboarding your customers using a custom domain per country but not just switching (to the domain of the visitor, not of the blog even!)

<comment><USER65> Local domains get higher CTRs and hence rankings on Google.

Blogspot is an acquired Google property, hence they actually needed to care about SEO instead of just forcing their results up through rich snippets and widgets.

<comment><AUTHOR> source: [https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en](https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en)

but other country specific URLs current redirect to .com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> more like semipermalinks, amirite

</comment><comment><USER67> <sarcasm> People are easier to control if they don't talk. Average Joe should not have a say in anything, he should not have a voice at all. So you give him a bit of toilet paper to write his stuff on and toss it in the loo.

<comment><USER67> We see this dark pattern all over. How should one reason about it? A large part of the book burning is without intend. Or are we indoctrinated to support it?

IMHO everything that doesn't cost anything to preserve should be preserved.</comment></comment>


Notion Ink Adam hands-on [Video at bottom] - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-adam-hands-on-0969281/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. Just coming back from 2 days @ MacWorldExpo, the place has the hype of iPad - companies are selling iPad cases, but iPad not to be seen anywhere. I wish products like this come and make it big, and pose a serious challenge to iPad.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this has a bit more content and conceptual ideas that I found interesting.</comment>


Nextcloud introduces collaborative rich text editor - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-introduces-collaborative-rich-text-editor <comment><USER2> Nextcloud designer here, also working on Nextcloud Text. :)

Big thanks to ProseMirror [https://prosemirror.net](https://prosemirror.net) and tiptap [https://tiptap.scrumpy.io](https://tiptap.scrumpy.io) which we use as a base for the app!

And of course as always with Nextcloud, the Text app is open source and everyone is welcome to give feedback and contribute: [https://github.com/nextcloud/text](https://github.com/nextcloud/text)</comment>


Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations - <AUTHOR> https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/epic-tells-customers-it-will-stop-google-cloud-integrations-says-report <comment><USER3> Google is absolutely doing the right thing. Anything that can be done to enhance the efficacy of EMR software will help lead to better patient outcomes. As far as I can tell, Google is approaching the problem foremost from the perspective of "how can we make people healthier by making software more effective." Epic and Cerner are simply not doing that. Somewhere in the comments here someone mentioned that most EMR software is a billing system with record keeping attached. Although implementations vary between hospitals, the software is always purchased by administrators, typically with little input from doctors.

In most implementations, neither Cerner not Epic encourage structured data recording except for billing codes. This means that if a patient comes through the medical system frequently, doctors have to read pages and pages of unstructured text to get a sense of what's going on for the patient. The software is designed to be sold to administrators and, as currently designed is unquestionably leading to worse outcomes for patients.

Google has made a lot of mistakes. If they build something doctors truly want to use and that helps properly organize information, however, and if Google doesn't misuse the data/people aren't unreasonably paranoid about data misuse, it will be a godsend for the industry and it will save lives.

We haven't even begun to talk about the potential for machine learning and statistics to understand what treatments are most effective if data are structured properly. This is unquestionably an interesting and unique case where collecting massive amounts of data and handing in to a trusted, competent, creative, research-oriented authority could have incredible benefit for mankind. I don't trust Cerner or Epic with this mission for a second.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that Google has the most obvious conflict of interest of all cloud and AI providers when it comes to data use.

Many people simply don't believe anything Google says, and even those who do believe them to some degree know that others won't.

Google has become a reputational hazard in fields that deal with sensitive data such as healthcare.

Some decisions made by current management don't help at all. Instead of separating the advertising business from other activities like cloud and AI, they are moving in the exact opposite direction.

Why? I find this entirely baffling.

<comment><USER5> It's data ownership laws and adequate monitoring (including whistle blower laws with adequate rewards) and enforcement that is necessary. Replace "Google" with any unknown or known bad actor that can be taken over by a bad actor, and we return to the same problem.

<comment><USER4> At the end of the day you're right, but look at it from the perspective of a healthcare decision maker.

What if something questionable happens, even if it's legal, and you're found to have handed over patient data to Google, the largest ad targeting firm on the planet?

Pointing at legalities will not save your reputation or your job in the face of glaring misalignment of interests.

It's like letting your dog guard your employer's sausages after giving it state of the art training in self control.

<comment><USER5> I understand that monitoring and keeping people in check, and perhaps you're right that there should be a physical barrier between certain systems, however there's still nothing stopping bad actors from infiltrating in these systems. I personally think ads should be obliterated, as they're simply shallow and cheap methods of manipulating people; Presidential candidate Andrew Yang's plan is to tax ads higher in his VAT strategy than other things, progressively increase it over time, basically as a mechanism similar to a carbon tax countering pollution that's bad for us. Tesla spends no money on advertising, the word of mouth and media attention they get is all earned - meanwhile other vehicle manufacturers compete through emotional ads spend money which increases the cost of the vehicles, perpetuates the ad industrial complex, and to some degree limits people's depth of critical thinking for their buying decisions re: the emotional manipulation of ads bombarding them to build a good, relatable feeling, familiarizing them with specific products to make it feel like a safe, good choice.

<comment><USER4> I don't think ads should be obliterated. People will always try to influence other people and ads are just one way of doing that. In my opinion, there are far more nefarious, manipulative and intransparent ways of pursuing the same goal.

Also, ads are currently indispensible for privacy as weird as that may sound. There is currently no widespread, privacy preserving form of electronic payment, and I very much doubt that there will ever be one.

What we should do is regulate/restrict ad targeting and make sure that advertising is as transparent as possible.

But none of that has anything to do with Google's reputation issues and conflict of interest. Google should split off its ad business from all other activities. Otherwise they will always remain an advertising company and distrust in everything else they do will only grow.

<comment><USER5> How about an "ad system" that people actively engage with when they're wanting to discover vs. being bombarded everywhere - perhaps not understanding the implications of manipulation of ads have on them? At minimum it changes the user experience greatly.

<comment><USER4> We can always wish for things to be less annoying, but the difficult question is how to make it happen without causing more unintended consequences than intended ones.

You have to ask yourself what advertisers would do if you ban those in-your- face super annoying ads. Stop spending money on trying to influence our decisions? I don't think so.

<comment><USER5> Except other methods will certainly cost more, bringing their cost of products up, and so someone's products who are better and known as such through word of mouth will have a competitive advantage on price.

<comment><USER4> I'm not so sure about that. Ad spending has remained roughly the same as a share of GDP for over a century.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings- century-of-flat-line-growth)

I think transparency is more important than fighting annoyances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Googler, opinions are my own.

WSJ has had some good converge about parallel medical record stories that are going on right now too, as has CNBC:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/epic-systems-warns- customers...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/epic-systems-warns-customers-it- will-stop-supporting-google-cloud.html)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/paging-dr-google-how-the- tech-g...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/paging-dr-google-how-the-tech-giant- is-laying-claim-to-health-data-11578719700)

WSJ podcast about it: [https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-google-is- pushi...](https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-google-is-pushing-into- health-data/19d0dbe3-fe29-4c6d-a547-926df9a3ec89)

To quote the end of the WSJ article:

> Existing players in the health-care data market also fear that the tech > giant will gain too much power in their industry. Some hospital and > technology executives say they declined deals with Google lest it become a > future competitor.

> "We could never pin down Google on what their true business model was," says > a Cerner executive involved in the discussions.

<comment><USER7> Oracle has done the same in the last 25 years. Company I worked for used Oracle database for an enterprise system.

Oracle over the years, acquired some of our competitors.

Then every time customers would need to renew database licenses with Oracle, Oracle's sales reps would try to sell them the competing enterprise systems that they had acquired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Epic is a cash cow private company. Sutter Health in the Bay Area paid $1B for its EHR. Epic stays quiet to protect its walled gardens; deeply integrated into hospital infrastructure. No doubt Google is a threat to them.

Here's an old article I found that references this juicy revenue opportunity (the rest have been cleared by Epic, so the story goes): [https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/setback-sutter- after-1...](https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/setback-sutter-after-1b-ehr- system%20crashes)

<comment><USER9> I talked to a doctor at Stanford and he mentioned to me one reason why the main Stanford Health and Stanford Children's Health have separate patient portals (not unified) that you have to create separate logins for is because of the huge amount Epic wanted to charge to merge them. (They both run separate Epic instances as far as I can tell)

<comment><USER10> How are leeches like this tolerated? The sooner they are driven out of business, the better.

<comment><USER11> They're not entirely tolerated fortunately. The US government has been taking action to tear down EHR walled gardens via the Cures Act[1] which is manifesting in public access APIs called FHIR.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act)

<comment><USER12> FHIR is nice but doesn't completely reduce the complexity of integrating the underlying data itself considering the mess that is HL7 and mess that occurred with v3.

The situation is sort of like moving from SOAP+XML Schemas to REST/JSON. Easier to develop, but the underlying data structures are still extremely complicated and tricky to get right.

This is especially true when dealing with ancient systems written in niche languages/database hybrids (MUMPS comes to mind): [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS)

<comment><USER13> Do you feel OMOP helps to resolve this?

<comment><USER12> YES! If only people in healthcare IT would adopt things in years rather than decades...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a head-in-the-sand move by US companies (not just Cerner and Epic, but the hospital system CIOs). If they really think Google is going after healthcare data, they should keep in mind Google is already working with NHS and has a little thing called the Billion Users project focused on India. The British and Indian populations have the same health problems Americans do. Proportions might change, but the content is qualitatively the same.

Also, I wonder if AWS is pushing their heads into the sand. Particularly now that Cerner committed to AWS but DoD gave Jedi to Azure (Defense Health and VA are migrating their medical records to Cerner). AWS may be pressuring a customer (Epic) to squeeze _their_ customers. Which absolutely sounds like something I'd expect from Amazon.

<comment><USER15> Your AWS conspiracy theory is bizarre.

<comment><USER16> Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're hoping for more thoughtful conversation here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Epic is ruthless and takes competition out by any means necessary. They are a dinosaur that avoided competition for decades, and Google is a massive thread. This is good news because they are scared, and Google has an infinite runaway to take them out. Epic should have worked tirelessly to innovate and improve US healthcare, but instead chose to stay still and to profit. They won't be for long.

<comment><USER18> Is Google going to try to compete in the EHR space? I don't think of them as an enterprise software company - at least not in the same way as an Oracle or MSFT. My impression of their strategy/focus is that they are trying to sell cloud compute and ML services?

<comment><USER17> I feel like Google is an everything company. Traditionally EHR has been done via enterprise and connections, but it doesn't mean google can't change it. In fact, they could open a network of Google hospitals, and run their own software on them, or buy a big chain. Much like Amazon got WholeFoods, Google can get into the game if they choose to, and at the end of the day, if they want to grow, they will have to find more avenues to expand to.

<comment><USER19> > _In fact, they could open a network of Google hospitals, and run their own > software on them, or buy a big chain. Much like Amazon got WholeFoods,_

I'm a fan of Google, but what's with people thinking Silicon Valley companies can easily "get into" everything? What business is Google in that leads you to believe they could run hospitals? They couldn't even design a decent social network, which is their _wheelhouse_. At least Amazon was selling groceries before they bought Whole Foods.

<comment><USER20> I thought they designed a perfectly serviceable social network. As a product I thought it worked better than Facebook. It wasn't enough better to beat the network effect of the latter, however, and medical records keeping would likely be an even tougher nut to crack. How are you going to convince a hospital that just spent $10M on an epic install to switch to your version, even if it is 15% better?

<comment><USER21> By undercutting the hell out of Epic (at least to start) is what I would expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't think this has anything to do with competition (if anything Google is competing with Amazon and Microsoft here, not Epic). The article muddies the waters somewhat, but all the quotes are telling a story that says (not untruthfully) they're dropping it due to its outsized maintenance burden in relation to the proportion of their clients who use it.

<comment><USER23> There might be some fear of competition. Google is offering healthcare solutions some of which seem to be angled at "owning" the healthcare data. I'm only vaguely familiar with Epic's offerings but a lot of these solutions that Google offers seem to encroach in that territory:

[https://cloud.google.com/solutions/healthcare-life- sciences/](https://cloud.google.com/solutions/healthcare-life-sciences/)

[https://cloud.google.com/solutions/modernize-legacy- apps/](https://cloud.google.com/solutions/modernize-legacy-apps/)

[https://cloud.google.com/healthcare/](https://cloud.google.com/healthcare/)

<comment><USER24> Google is now building an EHR as direct competition to Epic. It's definitely related to this move. Fwiw I welcome Google's entrance to this market because Epic's EHR and business practices are equally aweful.

<comment><USER25> Do you mean that Epic's EHR and business practices are equally awful to each other, or to Google's EHR and business practices (is Google's EHR in the state that its awfulness can be proclaimed?)

<comment><USER24> Epic's is significantly worse than Google's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I didn't really understand what this meant until the very end of the actual MSNBC article. At least I think I get it now.

"We've historically seen hospital systems make these decisions independently of their medical record provider," said Aneesh Chopra, the president of health-technology company CareJourney and the former chief technology officer of the United States. "It will be interesting to see if Epic's thumb on the scale moves cloud market share."

So apparently if I'm a hospital I can run the Epic systems anywhere, or at least store my records anywhere, well, at least at AWS or Azure, and apparently not Google now.

<comment><USER27> Sure, but:

> That report notes that "insufficient interest" from Epic customers in Google > is behind the decision to focus efforts instead with those cloud > competitors.

It seems like if you run Epic Systems at Google, you were in a minority that is apparently not worth supporting. This seems less like Epic putting their thumb on the scale, and more like their customers putting their thumb on the scale.

<comment><USER28> I have only limited experience in the healthcare space when it comes to cloud selection, but I can tell you that every single healthcare company I work with uses Azure.

They don't do it because it may or may not be right for their needs. They pick Azure because somewhere along the line the mid- and upper-level managers, including director-level IT people, have been made to believe that anything other than Windows is insecure and not suitable for HIPAA.

If I even mention the word "Linux" or "AWS" to them they immediately curl up in a little ball mentally and treat me like I'm some kind of evil script kiddie, or magical wizard. It's truly baffling the responses I get from people who are supposed to be in charge of these things.

I don't know these people outside of boardroom presentations, so I don't know how they got this way. My best guess is that it's either Microsoft salesmen, industry conferences, or simply what they're comfortable with and anything else is not worth risking their jobs.

<comment><USER29> >They pick Azure because somewhere along the line the mid- and upper-level managers, including director-level IT people, have been made to believe that anything other than Windows is insecure and not suitable for HIPAA.

I'd argue it's less because of a belief that a non-Windows environment is inherently insecure and more that Microsoft very aggressively promotes their products as being compliant with regulations like HIPAA.

This isn't limited to PaaS. For example, I think that Teams will likely gain a foothold in healthcare environments over Slack because MS markets Teams as explicitly HIPAA compliant. (Slack explicitly is not).

Things like that buy them a lot of mindshare when it comes time to choose a PaaS provider.

<comment><USER30> "Director-level IT" healthcare person here. We use AWS but are evaluating Azure because of the way Microsoft includes VDI in the form of Windows 10 Multi-Session licenses available only with Azure+Windows Virtual Desktop. Classic Microsoft bundle approach.

Oh, and Slack _is_ available with HIPAA compliance — [https://slack.com/help/articles/360020685594-slack-and- hipaa](https://slack.com/help/articles/360020685594-slack-and-hipaa)

Also, as someone who actively shops for SaaS offerings for healthcare users, I can say that AWS and Azure are some of the very, very few organizations who offer anything with HIPAA compliance that isn't locked away at the most expensive "contact us for pricing" tier. It's so annoying. Never a chance to try a service with a low cost/stakes pilot/prototype because they hit you with the full sales pitch and highest price points. Being able to dip our proverbial toe into AWS with a low time/dollar commitment was a huge win.

<comment><USER31> Side note: interesting point on trying services with low cost/stakes pilot/prototype. How would you expect to try things out? Would it be similar to online demos that many other SaaS companies employ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google is doing the right thing.

EPIC is a perfect example of the walled garden ecosystem that extracts every last drop from its clients and keeps anyone trying to innovate out. Healthcare tech could use the competition to drive down costs related to medical record management and exchange.

<comment><USER33> Absolutely. | Also EPIC is spectacularly unfit for purpose.

Total garbage software that essentially functions as a billing tool.

<comment><USER34> How is it "garbage software"?

<comment><USER35> It's a billing system with clinical related functionality tacked on. It's pretty frustrating to use from the perspective of a "boots on the ground" user.

<comment><USER34> That's a pretty pessimistic and quite frankly not accurate assessment of the software. They have a ton of clinical functionality, and that's what the majority of the dev/design spends their time on at their users group meeting, among other places. You might not like it, but many do.

<comment><USER35> My clinical experience with Epic is limited to emergency care, but I've yet to meet a clinical user that "likes" Epic.

<comment><USER34> I'm not really sure what to say to that, since you seem to be implying that no one likes it, which is pretty patently false.

A lot of it does depend on the organization you're working with, as some are more dysfunctional than others when it comes to setting up best practices and build for their physicians. Others actually listen to their clinical users and tailor the system for them.

<comment><USER35> I'm not saying no one likes it, I'm saying none of the several dozen providers and nurses I know (between two different hospitals in the area using Epic) like it.

I also don't disagree with the fact that some of the issues arise from the implementation requirements. But at some point, it's still the system's fault if it allows its users to be burdened like that. It shouldn't take clicking across three different pages and who knows how many modals to triage one patient in an emergency room. It's silly that I've had to learn which order to provide my transfer of care report so the nurse doesn't have to keep clicking back and forth between different pages...

<comment><USER34> I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the system can somehow overcome poor implementation; guardrails can only do so much. At the end of the day you can set up almost any piece of software in a way that hinders rather than helps a user. At some point the organization needs to take some responsibility for that.

At any rate, this all started with a glib "garbage software" comment, so I suppose I should happy that you acknowledge that the implementation requirements set by the organization have at least something to do with overall user satisfaction.

<comment><USER36> > I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the system can somehow overcome > poor implementation

If very large amounts of 'implementation' have to be done _on top_ of the software, then that's also a sign of bad design. It should be handling more of the implementation and making it more streamlined.

<comment><USER37> You've just described Jira, or really any other heavily customisable tool that can fit multiple complex workflows.

<comment><USER14> Having used a dozen EMR systems and Jira, I'd say Jira is much better at its job than most EMRs are at theirs. In fact, now that you mention it: you could easily model each patient as an epic, assignments to various people on various teams (ICU, pharmacy, lab, etc), to-do/in-progress/done. Holy cricky, you may have just cracked the EMR nut.

<comment><USER38> Just make sure you don't move the epic to "Done" status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At Sutter, every machine is Windows and runs Epic integrated. Epic is much more than EHR. It's a hospital layer sitting ontop of Windows. Naturally, it integrates with Active Directory and I can see why Google would have little dominance.

Saying that, I wonder if Epic has a plan to go after smaller players who might be using Google Apps and fears google's dominance.

</comment><comment><USER39> There seems to be major disengenuousness on behalf of EPIC and Cerner, and some ignorance on behalf of WSJ.

GCP != Google Health, at least for the purposes of patient privacy. If you hold the encryption keys, google can't do anything, or am I wrong in that assumption?

It is fine, and expected, to rule out GCP for storing your own records for competitive reasons (e.g. choosing them would make future Google Health integrations easier). It is also expected, if not quite fine, to try to actively prevent your customers from using GCP.

Cerner seemed happy to play a few rounds of golf with Eric Schmidt regarding using GCP, presumably to try to glean insight into Google Health, while EPIC flat out refused a meeting. Cerner then helpfully provided a misleading quote to the WSJ to help spread FUD.

</comment><comment><USER40> everyone has conspiracy theories about what is "really going on here", this is to stamp out a competitive threat in google, or whatever, but I do think this story probably is just that hospitals (and "traditional enterprises" broadly) are not using GCP for their cloud infrastructure and are instead going with AWS or Azure.

<comment><USER41> I still don't see why they have to be tied to a single provider. Seems like a major weakness of large customers in this space, that they're unwilling to demand standards or protect themselves from exploitation in this way. Obviously there will be new APIs for services which are not yet a commodity, but there are some highly standardized offerings from every major "cloud" vendor which should be configurable in roughly the same way; many of them even have similar limitations, like AWS and Azure (last I tried) not having the option to expose their VPSes directly over IPv6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Epic being concerned about a giant gaining too much power? That's cute.

<comment><USER43> Which of the two has a trillion dollar market cap with monopoly like market share in multiple business to consumer product sectors?

There's nothing novel about what Epic or any other B2B enterprise software company does (for the most part), other than total addressable market (and profits) being far smaller than the B2C FAANG giants - the market caps reflect this as well.

<comment><USER44> Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all trillion dollar companies operating in multiple sectors. Why is Google special in this regard?

<comment><USER43> Right. And while Epic does the heavy lifting of crafting software to support healthcare provider workflows, integrating dissimilar systems (PACS, etc.), and storing all that data, the companies you mentioned feel they can create value by attempting to automate diagnosis and potentially offer some integration point for genetic counseling.

<comment><USER14> As a physician forced to use Epic, I'm not sure "crafted" is the word I'd use to describe their software. It's more like they addressed the spec from the C suite in a way that was equivalent to punching health care providers in the face. They take Dad's money, and use it to pay thugs to beat up his kids.

<comment><USER45> Serious q: are the other systems any better? Have you tried them? Have you compared notes with physicians using them?

(I'm new to the field and genuinely curious... I haven't heard anybody saying anything nice about any of them...)

<comment><USER46> I have not used all of them, but every one of them I've touched is hot garbage. Like much enterprise software, the people who decide to buy it are not the people that use it. It would seem, from the outside looking in, that the majority of the effort goes into maximizing billing in the byzantine world of US insurance rather than the work of actually making people well.

What concerns me most about the larger players in the field is their dedication to minimizing interoperability to lock people into their software.

<comment><USER47> > Like much enterprise software, the people who decide to buy it are not the > people that use it.

Hard agree. There's also an incentive for hospital systems to "hold onto" patient data, which is not great.

<comment><USER35> In many cases those "incentives" are legal requirements.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, for clinical laboratories, for example, data retention requirements can stretch back 10 years. And yes, the inspectors will inspect that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > _" This is not us mining somebody's records to sell ads, to learn from it, > to do machine learning, to develop products. We developed this on de- > identified data."_

"De-identified data" _is_ "somebody's records".

Also, for all the PR put behind the patient, Epic (and likely Cerner too) focus all their bizdev efforts on what the hospital and HMO administrators want, because they're the ones that sign the checks. Back when I worked there, they threw huge stacks of employees at customizing every installation, and significant developer effort at making broad customization possible. If patient care were the primary issue, every Epic implementation would be identical at the keyboard shortcut level. Hospital admins would have had to backdoor their customizations in by forcing their physicians and nurses to demand them as features. But instead, I saw page after page of customizations, inserting arbitrary administrator-created workflows on the staff via the software.

</comment><comment><USER49> Has it become "nobody got fired for using AWS"?

<comment><USER42> In healthcare, absolutely. And it was only a few years ago that it was "on- prem" instead of "AWS".

<comment><USER50> on-prem still is, in a lot of the space. But it's changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Major part of Google Health team came from Deep Mind. We have a lot of doctors and people used to work for NHS. Our goal to help doctors, nurses in their work, save patients lives and revolutionise the industry. We are complient with privicy regulations and see huge potential in what we do. Majority of negative comments are driven by fear of Google selling data for targeted adds but in all our agreements with trust we clearly state our goals and practices. I'd rather people concentrate on positive side and huge potentials in front of us instead of FUD.

</comment><comment><USER52> To be fair if anyone is going to take on Epic its big tech. What is really needed is legislation to protect your data. This area seems ready for disruption.

</comment><comment><USER53> Doesn't bode well for Google's cloud ambitions, but squares with what the marketplace looks like (clients absolutely hungry for those with Azure experience and AWS to a lesser extent). Azure is unpleasant to work with, but the deals are apparently being made (mostly outside of tech centric firms). Kudos to MS' sales teams.

<comment><USER54> ^^^ spot on. My thought while reading the article was how poor Google's sales and customer support culture is across the entire company that has led to non- tech firms picking solutions with Azure and AWS who invest heavily on the support side.

<comment><USER55> I was operating a fairly large AWS operation, and had the idea to at least check with G Cloud if they were interested (usually you get a boatload of free credits to startups).

After 3 emails spread over several months I eventually got a note saying I should expect to talk with my Google Cloud salesguy, but it can only happen over a Hangout. And not any hangout - they sent a cheap ass Android "netbook" that I had to physically go to the post office to get, that the Hangout call was supposed to happen through.

I did get it from the post office, noted that it took minutes to start up, then gave it away and never heard from GC again.

<comment><USER56> That's so strange. Does anyone know why they'd want to chat using special hardware?

<comment><USER14> Because he's l33tman, man. l33t.

<comment><USER55> Haha exactly!

No, I'm sure they could have accepted any Hangouts call or being coerced into accepting a phonecall as well.

But truthfully what they wrote in the sendout was like I described - <USER2> outlined the procedure to go get the netbook and use it and at no point did they suggest a physical phone number to call or similar. I went along with it as far as I did just because I was kind of baffled by the suggested procedure :)

I assume it was part of some marketing scheme to try to market Hangouts and/or Chromebooks (or whatever it was) at the same time as GCP, but it just confused the sale and added unnecessary pain-points. The AWS guys just send an email and let me call them by a normal phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Might want to specify which Epic. I was left wondering in what way Fortnite was connected to Google Cloud integrations.

<comment><USER58> Did you read the article? It begins with "Electronic health record giant Epic Systems..."

<comment><USER59> From the guidelines:

' Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." '

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Used to intern at Epic in 2015. I asked my manager why they weren't on cloud. He said our customer data is too critical to be stored in cloud. Interesting how things have change in a very short time

</comment><comment><USER61> So no running MUMPS code on Google Cloud then?

<comment><USER14> Actually, VMWare supports OpenVMS and VMWare runs in GCP, so MUMPS should be good to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Before I read the article I was guessing that it had to do with the leaked memo regarding Google cloud growth targets and the popular conclusion that they'll be shutting it down or pivoting that LoB in 2023.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260)

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't blame them - from my understanding there are certain Google Cloud services that have glaring security holes/are legitimately HIPAA violations.

<comment><USER64> It's amazing to me how social media is used to spread FUD against some companies. Please provide sources.

<comment><USER63> It's amazing to me how social media is used by employees to shill certain corporations.

[https://www.managedcaremag.com/dailynews/20191113/hhs- invest...](https://www.managedcaremag.com/dailynews/20191113/hhs- investigating-google-ascensions-project-nightingale-hipaa-violations)

[https://healthitsecurity.com/news/google-uchicago- medicine-s...](https://healthitsecurity.com/news/google-uchicago-medicine- sued-for-sharing-identifiable-patient-data)

I've heard there are a couple Google Ventures - backed healthcare startups that have questionable HIPAA-compliance as well, directly from clients that have worked with them. They're not necessarily holes in GCP itself but rather in integrations with certain services.

<comment><USER65> Neither of those are Google cloud related

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Smart choice, considering the shutdown of GCE in 2023.

<comment><USER67> Are you being sarcastic?

<comment><USER66> No. [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants- to-b...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top- two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html)

The dementi was overspecific. "We did not discuss this in 2018". Which could mean they discussed it in 2019 or 2017.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> GCP seems culturally a terrible fit for anything compliance-related. Azure and AWS both offer high-compliance regions (Azure Government / AWS GovCloud) that are absolutely necessary for many industries (medical, defense, etc). Slightly salty about this as I am currently migrating a legacy Firebase app because Google doesn't care...

<comment><USER69> Government Cloud seems to revolve around "access controls" to the cloud instances. I skimmed over one of specifications ("FedRAMP") and most of the requirements seem like the standard requirements for any type of multi-tenant system (eg, user login expiry).

Doesn't seem like it offers anything different from the "non-government" packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> > "We could never pin down Google on what their true business model was," says > a Cerner executive involved in the discussions.

Imagine being that insecure in what you do. What were they looking for? A non- compete from Google? Innovate or die.

<comment><USER65> Especially when Amazon is making moves into insurance and pharmacy spaces

<comment><USER71> The difference is Amazon won't use confidential AWS data to drive their other verticals.

Google's very business model is selling their users to their customers.

<comment><USER72> Google states unequivocally in its Cloud privacy documentation:

      3. Know that customer data is not used for advertising.

      You own your data. Google Cloud does not process your data for advertising purposes.

[https://cloud.google.com/security/privacy/](https://cloud.google.com/security/privacy/)

<comment><USER73> But they may process it for non-advertising purposes? That feels... flimsy

<comment><USER72> That page links to [https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing- terms](https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms), which has a lot more detail.

I believe usage for ads is highlighted on the non-legalese privacy page because it's a common question/concern, but the terms specify that data can only be processed as requested by the customer (IANAL, but that's my read and understanding as a Googler who works on Cloud infrastructure).

<comment><USER14> I would go further and say you're crazy if you think a Google engineer is going to run code on your data without a requirement in a signed and funded agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Does anyone know, if Epic implemented parallelized Vulkan renderer in their engine, or they dropped the whole parallelization effort and enabling Vulkan for high end features? If anyone is using it for development, please comment.

Epic "archived" their TODO item on Trello: [https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and- linux](https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux)

<comment><USER75> Epic is not Epic

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_Store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_Store)

<comment><USER74> Oh, thanks for clarifying, I confused them with different Epic indeed.

<comment><USER76> You're not alone, I went down a few comment threads in here being more and more surprised that Epic games has such a strong foothold in the health market already. Whoops, guess it pays off to actually read the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Case for Slow Programming - <AUTHOR> https://ventrellathing.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/the-case-for-slow-programming/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683827)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I am new to Y and didn't know it was referenced and commented before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This old thing? I'm sure I've seen it somewhere on HN before.</comment>


How to Tell If Your CEO Is Clueless - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/10/our-team-is-tot.html <comment><USER2> It's just a giant thundering herd in the valley. Sure would have been nice to hear exactly _one_ of the so-called intelligentsia saying things were going to be bad 9 months ago.

Not that it isn't true, because if enough people controlling enough money believe it to be true, it'll be true.

<comment><USER3> Well, pmarca predicted "nuclear winter" in April and people thought he was nuts. Not quite 9 months ago though:

"We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don't need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it's good to be conservative with these things."

<http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/04/ning-news-serie.html>

<comment><USER2> I stand corrected. And by someone whose writings I do (mostly) respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's amazing how Guy just recycles the same crap endlessly for decades.

</comment><comment><USER5> "All you have to do is listen to your CEO talk to people for a week and determine if she uses these lines."

Little sexist there. Why does a sucky CEO have to be female?

<comment><USER6> I wonder if the correct approach is to use "she" when talking about positive things so people don't think you assume all CEOs are male, and use "he" when talking about negatives so people don't complain you think all bad CEOs are female.

<comment><USER5> The correct approach is to just use "he" like people have been doing since the language was invented.</comment></comment></comment>


Alan Turing Chosen to Feature on New £50 Bank Note - <AUTHOR> https://digit.fyi/alan-turing-chosen-to-feature-on-new-50-bank-note/ <comment><USER2> 180 comments from 4 hours ago in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20439425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20439425)</comment>


Locast – non-profit using a legal loophole to stream live TV for free - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locast <comment><AUTHOR> Bumped into this recently and thought it was extremely interesting.

They have real antennas in each city, and are just streaming from those antennas to consumers over the internet. As the link mentions, it was previously tried by a commercial company that shut down after lawsuits. They're running as a non-profit which appears to be a legal loophole. There's an ongoing lawsuit, so it may end up being ruled out.</comment>


Show HN: A simple GUI app to make Linux touchpad gestures easier - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures <comment><USER2> I was hoping to see MacOS style three-finger drag being available through this. Unfortunately, it will technically most certainly not be possible to augment it this way, and the maintainer of libinput considers three-finger drag as a luxury that will introduce unnecessary overhead and complexity.

Three-finger drag is IMO one of the most helpful usability features of MacOS, and I miss it dearly every day since I bought my XPS 13.

Edit: ... which is not the fault of the developer of this tool. Good job, I like the spirit and think this is incredibly useful and powerful.

The tool could further make configuration of the most common use cases simpler IMO. Not every user is keen or able to enter the specific commands.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm also on an XPS 13, and also an ex-Mac user who misses the trackpad stuff, so I know how you feel. Not only knowing commands but especially playing with dbus is unfortunately something for _very_ advanced users only, so my idea was to build some sort of "DB" for common dbus commands that act on DEs, say, to open Budgie Desktop's notifications menu, plus an assisted GUI configuration that generates commands for keyboard shortcuts (xdotool or something), workspace actions (move, add...) and an "Open app" selection dialog. That's gonna take a long while though :(

<comment><USER3> > so my idea was to build some sort of "DB" for common dbus commands that act > on DEs

This is great, where is the information you currently have and how can I contribute? I find that DB to be pretty important for this tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've created something temporary here, feel free to add anything :)

[https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures/wikis/desktop- specific-c...](https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures/wikis/desktop-specific- commands)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. However the biggest limitation (which is no fault of this app) is that the gestures simply trigger commands upon their completion, with no intermediate feedback. What would it take to implement animations that follow gestures in progress like how macOS's change workspace animation continuously tracks one's fingers during the swipe?

<comment><USER5> I haven't tried it yet myself but it seems that in GNOME 3 there is an animation for the workspace touchpad gesture.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/9hsw0p/nice_touchpad...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/9hsw0p/nice_touchpad_gestures_improvement_in_gnome_330/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't aware of this, thanks for reporting! I wonder why they didn't put this in their official 3.30 changelog, it's quite a big change. I seriously doubt this will be exposed through dbus or anyhow customizable, but it's a huge step forward anyway.

[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome- shell/commit/ebe6f59d7e...](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome- shell/commit/ebe6f59d7e3c3b520b5d52ddf39be6a64ec3f80b)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haven't tried this yet (am away). But it looks like just what I have been looking for, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome! As it's still quite new, you'll need to install it manually in most distros given that it's only present in Solus official repos ATM, and Flatpak/Snap sandboxing would probably not allow even its most basic usage. If some Arch user managed to add it to the AUR that'd likely help, now the install process has to be done from terminal which, though common with Linux software and just a copy-paste from the Gitlab page, isn't exactly what a "newbie" would love.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure about FlatPaks, but at least Snaps have a "classic" confinement mode which removes all restrictions: [https://docs.snapcraft.io/reference/confinement](https://docs.snapcraft.io/reference/confinement)

(Also: a Snap would be great!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to hear, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can you explain a little bit more about this? This allows me to add arbitrary gestures (within the confines of swipe/pinch, 2/3/4 fingers etc) that trigger command line commands?

Does it work with all touchpads?

What are some commands I might be interested in configuring?

<comment><AUTHOR> > This allows me to add arbitrary gestures (within the confines of > swipe/pinch, 2/3/4 fingers etc) that trigger command line commands?

Exactly.

> Does it work with all touchpads?

All libinput-supported touchpads (see: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput)). There's more on this on the GitHub page for libinput-gestures, the CLI tool Gestures is based on: [https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput- gestures](https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures)

> What are some commands I might be interested in configuring?

I'm personally using it to replicate (more or less successfully) the macOS gestures I missed when switching to Linux. For example: \- swipe left/right to switch workspace \- swipe down to trigger the Budgie Desktop run dialog \- swipe left/right to open and close notifications \- pinch in/out to zoom in or out (mapping it to the Ctrl/ +- shortcuts) This (5-second) video gives some very basic examples: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfJ59kTcJjM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfJ59kTcJjM)

Direct keyboard shortcuts aren't unfortunately available in Wayland ATM, given its design limitations for security reasons. Workarounds will come (virtual keyboard drivers perhaps?), but there's nothing like that AFAIK. Luckily, apart from zoom, I was able to do basically anything in Wayland too playing with wmctrl and dbus-send

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER9> Do most laptops that people currently get to run Linux, like the Dell XPS or the Thinkpad X1 have a touchpad that support multi-finger-gestures that could be configured with this? If I ever were to switch from a MacBook to a Linux machine, I'd definitely be very interested in having the equivalent of BetterTouchTool for custom gestures in applications (assuming the hardware supports it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Every modern touchpad supports it AFAIK, not sure about the cheap Chinese ones but I got it working on 6/6 of my tested hardware (a Macbook Pro 2013 (?), an old Macbook 2009 white, my XPS 13 2018, an ASUS with a somewhat bad supported "ELAN" touchpad, a Dell XPS 15 2017 and a Lenovo Thinkpad)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! That's good to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This may have been a lot easier using Jupyter widgets. Or Bokeh. Or Kivy.

In the future I hope we will get some kind of usable Python runtime for Webassembly, implementing or interfacing to something like React or vuejs.

But currently that kind of runtime would be a rather big download...

<comment><USER3> what (would have been easier?)

<comment><USER10> Making a simple GUI which updates dynamically. Either in the browser through jupyter widgets and/or Bokeh plotting, or everywhere else through kivy.

<comment><USER3> I like Kivy. Jupyter is nice. But ... why would you ever use either for an app a goal of which is to feel native to the GNOME environment, that doesn't need to be cross-platform or do any 'dynamic updating' and _does_ need access to system APIs?

???

At first I thought you were a bot making up weird tangentially-related coments through markov chaining or something, after having found your twitter page (good jokes!) I think you have some prety weird ideas or are trolling. Right tool for the job and such.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)30041-8/fulltext <comment><AUTHOR> From the findings:

High intake of sodium, low intake of whole grains and low intake of fruits were the leading dietary risk factors for deaths and DALYs globally and in many countries.

<comment><USER2> I highly doubt all of those. Probably confounded with general junk food consumption.

<comment><USER3> Read the fine article and behold.</comment></comment></comment>


Wish Hacker News had a way to place bets on stories - <AUTHOR> It would be cool if Hacker News had a way for users to bet on which stories will go the front page<p>To prevent abuse, such betting would be restricted  old accounts with maybe  >1000 karma . Each member gets a fixed number of tokens each week/month/day etc to place bets <comment><USER2> You place a bet when you comment.

Ante up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm betting that this post has a 50% chance of making it to the front page.

<comment><USER4> Of course, either it does, or it doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Much more fun would be a Bitcoin based bookmaker

</comment><comment><USER6> You really need to get outside more. :-D</comment>


Naive Bayes classifier - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier

<comment><USER2> I recently did a project with naive bayesian classification, and it was a blast. If you haven't gotten your feet wet with artificial intelligence yet, I recommend document classification as a starting point.

O'Reilly's "Collective Intelligence" has a great chapter on this, with at least one improvement over the stuff I culled from the rest of the web. Paul Graham has a post somewhere about spam filters that shows how the big kids build it.

For the kids in the front row, try changing your old classifiers to 4-step markov chains. If you're asking "why would I do that?", you're in the wrong classroom :)</comment>


Ask HN: How to win friends – 70 years later - <AUTHOR>

How to win friends and influence people is 70 years old now. Shouldn't there be some updates on this topic meanwhile? Have any other books on the topic been released that are highly popular? <comment><USER2> > How to win friends and influence people is 70 years old now.

Actually, it's 78 years old (2014-1936 = 78).

In any case, the book has been revised significantly. If you buy a new copy today, then you're not getting the 1936 text. Wikipedia[1] indicates that the most recent major update was in 1981.

> Have any other books on the topic been released that are highly popular?

That seems likely, although I doubt that any single book has had anything like the popularity of HtWFaIP (if only because HtWFaIP was published in a time when bookstore shelves were _not_ overflowing with self-help books).

I'd be interested in an answer to this question, too.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Make sure you get a copy from the 1930s! Everything else has been edited from the original text.

On another note, get a copy! I read it and was surprised a book nearly 80 years old is still highly relevant. It was actually pleasing to read the way people "spoke in books" back then as to today's book.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think much better question is, which self-improvement books do HN recommend? I haven't read a lot of them but I'm planning on reading 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

</comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone actually read this book? Is it effective?

<comment><USER6> I've read it and didn't care for it.

The entire book boils down to basically listening to people instead of waiting for your turn to talk. Carnegie gets this point across using a bunch of questionable anecdotal stories. He then linked this trait to success which is the prime motive for people to buy the book.

It reminds me a lot of 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' in that it falsifies stories as 'evidence' to reinforce what a reader already believes.</comment></comment>


CL Filtered Functions - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/051441c69343d066#

<comment><USER2> In his stack example, why doesn't the normal method need a filter? Does the execution of methods which match a filter take precedence over unfiltered methods?

<comment><USER3> I would expect that, as with generic functions, the dispatching favors the most specific method. Therefore, methods with filters would indeed take precedence over unfiltered methods.</comment></comment>


What problems are caused by using binary floating-point? - <AUTHOR> http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decifaq1.html#inexact

<comment><USER2> Use Decimal calculations for anything you want to be accurate. The overhead is minimal compared to the problems with accounting errors. For scientific calculations, bumping up the precision will usually solve your problems.</comment>


People voluntarily leaving jobs at highest rate since 2009 downturn - <AUTHOR> http://www.jsonline.com/business/people-voluntarily-leaving-jobs-at-highest-rate-since-2009-downturn-b99303175z1-265866551.html <comment><USER2> The article assumes this is because of a greater sense of security in the labor market, but they ignore the other possibility - nastier jobs that promise less for the future.

<comment><USER3> ...or the liberating effect of knowing you'll have healthcare coverage wherever you go? (Chill with the downvotes, it's just a hypothesis.)

<comment><USER4> That's a very good point. I didn't really support Obamacare when it passed, but if helps separates health insurance from employment it's probably a net positive.

<comment><USER5> As a non-American, can you explain why you would not support Obamacare?

<comment><USER4> 2 reasons.

Constitutional: If the government can force you to buy something from a private company there's not really much left that it can't do. In fact this was the argument the Supreme Court made when it refuted that governments argument that the Affordable Care Act was justified by the commerce clause-- that such a broad interpretation of the commerce clause would essentially grant the federal government unlimited power. However, the justification that the Supreme Court actually went with, that the ACA was basically just a tax, is a bit ridiculous because it has almost all of the same problems.

Basically the difference according to the supreme court is that congress doesn't have the authority to make it illegal not to buy health insurance. They can't throw you in jail for not buying health insurance. But they can tax you for not paying health insurance and throw you in jail for refusing to pay the tax. The end result is pretty similar.

Practical: This has more to do with the Affordable Care Act after the Supreme Court made some alterations, rather than the bill that was passed. The subsidies provided by the ACA are only for people making an income above some multiple X of the poverty line, and below some multiple Y. People with very low incomes were supposed to be covered by an expansion of medicaid, but the Supreme Court ruled that congress can't force states to expand medicaid. So in more than half the states people making just above a certain threshold get essentially free healthcare, while people making below it get nothing. In these states the ACA has done almost nothing to help the very poorest.

I would have honestly supported a single payer system and a universal (but progressive) tax instead of this public private hybrid with punitive taxes.

However, i think removing the ability for insurance companies to charge based on preexisting conditions, and the supplements provided for most middle class people will go a long way towards decoupling employment and health insurance. I generally support anything that will increase personal autonomy and allowing more people to work for themselves is a great way to do that.

<comment><USER6> I do not understand your second reason.

> So in more than half the states people making just above a certain threshold > get essentially free healthcare, while people making below it get nothing. > In these states ACA has done almost nothing to help the very poorest.

The ACA, by itself, has done everything it could have to help the poorest, within the options that would actually pass the US congress (2009-2010). The Supreme Court said the ACA could not force the states to take the (federally funded) Medicaid expansion, so the state governments used that choice as a political party loyalty test. The state governments chose to refuse preallocated federal money, to help the poor, to show their loyalty for the next election cycle.

I too would have preferred a single payer system, but the ACA is what passed and the state governments have made their choice.

<comment><USER4> >The Supreme Court said the ACA could not force the states to take the (federally funded) Medicaid expansion

The medicaid expansion is only fully federally funded for the first 3 years. It goes down to 90% by 2020 (Edit: I originally wrote 2014), and could very easily be pushed below that later on--Republican governors used that as an excuse not to expand.

I think they could have passed a bill that either allowed people making below the poverty level to use the exchanges with subsidies or they could have fully funded the medicaid expansion. I really don't think adding a small fractional increase in total cost would have killed the bill.

<comment><USER6> > It goes down to 90% by 2014, and could very easily be pushed below that > later on--Republican governors used that as an excuse not to expand.

It is phased down to 90% by 2020, and, in its current form, doesn't fall below that. The phasing just starts in 2014.

<comment><USER4> Sorry that was a typo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> By itself, quit rate is a meaningless statistic.

They should lump it into two groups.

1\. People who quit and find a new job within 1-2 months.

2\. People who quit and don't find a new job within 1-2 months.

Then, you can find out what % of people are quitting because they found a better job. It's even better if you can split (1) up into people who quit for a higher-paying job.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this adjusted to account for people who age out of the workforce? Presumably, as baby boomers reach retirement age, more people will exit the workforce than enter it, even in good times.

EDIT: Yes, this is among working-age people. But still, I'd assume early retirement would increase the numbers as baby boomers get older.

<comment><USER9>
        >Presumably, as baby boomers reach retirement age, more people will exit the workforce than enter it, even in good times

That maybe offset by boomers working past traditional retirement age as pensions go broke, they live longer meaning nest eggs need to go further, and retirement accounts make up lost ground from the '08 recession.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A .2% yoy change is a sign of growing confidence lol..

<comment><USER11> It's a 10% shift in the rate (and nearly 50% higher than the low point), so yes, it is significant.</comment></comment>


Facebook is down - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/

<comment><USER2> Not for me (India) This says otherwise <http://isup.me/facebook.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Down in the US. <http://www.isup.me/facebook.com> confirms

</comment><comment><USER4> No longer for me in Israel

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems to be up again.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not for me in the UK</comment>