The Google Cemetery – A list of dead Google products and why they died - <AUTHOR> https://gcemetery.co/ <comment><USER2> Remember Google Code Search? That was a great feature of Google search. You could search for swear words in all the code available worldwide. In one (Sun Microsystems?) code there was a comment "The user is a wanker. He cannot remember his password." The old days were much more fun.

<comment><USER3> Don't remind me of how awful GitHub search is.

I guess code search is just too niche with no marketability to ever improve

<comment><USER4> GitHub search? Try nytimes.com search.

<comment><USER5> Try the search feature in many CMS systems. Those tend to really suck, with WordPress' being awkward enough that a whole ecosystem of plugins cropped up to replace it.

There's also at least one version of the OpenCart admin search which was designed so poorly that it didn't actually search based on whether the term was anywhere in the page title/content, but whether the title started with the search term (I think they'd screwed up the MySQL syntax). That was interesting.

Either way, search on a system not designed as a search engine is usually okay at best, absolutely terrible at worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know we bash Google for discontinuing services here a lot.

I definitely bemoaned the demise of Google Reader.

But if this list is complete, it's really not so bad, considering the size and age of Google.

<comment><USER7> I don't think this list is complete. Inbox is not here, and neither are the multitude of Android apps that Google kept rolling out and discontinuing (e.g. Allo).

<comment><USER8> But Inbox got integrated into Gmail.

<comment><USER9> Gmail doesn't have feature parity with Inbox. We're losing bundles among other things :(

<comment><USER10> I really miss reminders mired with emails. Ugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> re: Google Wave

"why dead? - Google Wave was discontinued because there just weren't enough active users. The IP was later transferred to Apache when the development was discontinued."

Kinda. But more accurately, there weren't enough active users because Google __completely__ botched the beta. In restricting the invites then prevented already establish groups for trying it. For example, if you have a group of 4 or 5 and not as many invites, it was no go.

Keep in mind, Wave was pre-Slack. The market was there. It was primed. It was waiting for something smart and collaborative. Yet Google did the one thing you don't want to do with a team-centric tool...intentionally leave out at least one team member.

<comment><USER12> I was extremely fond of Wave when it came out, but remember few people I knew shared that view. Now I am trying to think back to Wave and how it differed from Slack... wasn't it pretty similar?

<comment><USER13> I'm kinda shocked by the comments referring to Slack. Wave was very different from any other chat platform. You could edit everything, add different media elements to the document/channel and keep commenting everywhere on everything. Slack to me is really just another chat software. I see very little difference between it, campfire or Hipchat and honestly for the life of me don't understand why everyone transitioned from Campfire to Hipchat and now to Slack.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, although I use and enjoy Slack at work, I see it as a watered down version of IRC.

<comment><USER15> Why does slack feel watered down?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neat! Maybe you could add a line or two to describe what each product was? For example I'd never heard about Sidewiki, Google Jaiku or Google Catalogs. It seems fitting that a tombstone would mention not just the date of death but also a bit about who they were and what they did.

<comment><USER17> [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com) <\- Mini-obits galore.

<comment><USER18> This list annoys me. Reading it, some of those still exist, many we're just folded into other services, and a couple appear to have been 20% projects that were never Google's to kill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Even after 5+ years, I still miss Google Reader almost everyday. Just pure simplicity and tight community around sharing is yet to be matched IMO. Web has moved on and as someone commented here, it's walled garden everywhere now.

Thank you Google of yore for creating and running a great service for as long as you did!

<comment><USER20> I think you're misunderstanding why Google has been criticized wrt Reader. The problem was that Google first ruined the RSS ecosystem, then pulled out of it and tried to lead users elsewhere, leaving torched earth behind.

<comment><USER21> How did Google "ruin" the RSS ecosystem? Something like 95% of the sites I have interest in following have perfectly fine RSS feeds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about Google Sets? It was on their Labs page until about 2010. Sets let you type in some words, and then it would return additional words that fit with the previous words. Now there is a Google Sheets feature that does it, but I liked the idea of a stand alone page.

<comment><USER23> It no longer exists in sheets either. Definitely miss this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > In October 2018, Google announced that it was shutting down Google+ for > consumers, citing low user engagement and a software error.

I wouldn't characterize it as a "software error". It was a security vulnerability.[0]

[0] [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/project-s...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/project-strobe/)

<comment><USER25> I also don't know if it should be on the list since it hasn't shut down yet. There's a 10 month sunset period. By that same logic it should include Inbox, which it doesn't, because that's also in a sunset period.

EDIT: Also, only the consumer side is shutting down. G+ for G-Suite will still exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google Spaces lived for so short, it is not included in the list and so far nobody has mentioned it in the comments. It was a product that me and my friends have long thought of. I think if it were implemented in a way that focused on chat but not on shared links, it could have been a success. I still believe that niche future will find its way into a popular chat application.

<comment><USER17> [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com) <\- It's on the list. :) Only lived nine months. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oo..cool! I crowdsourced a lot of lesser known products over at [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com). I'll be pruning the list this weekend to combine/remove some of the phone/device additions that were added by others during Hacktoberfest.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looking at this list, it makes you realize that basing your business on a lesser Google product is a major business risk. Consider Spatial OS.[1] This is a new back end for persistent massively multiplayer games. It's a product from a Google "partner", funded by $500M of VC money. It's only available if you use Google's "cloud". Technically, it's impressive. It's being used for a few minor game titles right now.

So if you're a major game developer, should you use this for a long-running game? The Google connection adds business risk. It probably won't be a major moneymaker for Google, and there's a good chance they'll drop the offering in two or three years. Then what? It comes with Google-type terms and conditions, the usual "Google can do anything they want". Drop the product, raise the price, cut off your service because you're doing something that competes with some Google interest, that kind of thing.

[1] [https://improbable.io/games](https://improbable.io/games)

<comment><USER28> Spatial OS is not Google offering by any means. Google is simply huge investor in that company and those folks are using GCP as part of investment aggrement. It's a dumb move by them but it pays their bills for now.

But you are correct. Taking dependency on Google services like maps, offers, product search and other APIs have previously bankrupted few folks. Also, as a user I avoid buying stuff like movies, music, storage space, photo storage etc because it could just disappear tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How about Google Glass? In all fairness though, quite a few are only dead as standalone products but have merged into other offerings. Take Google Gears for example - offline storage, worker threads and other APIs for browsers, all of which is now part of regular Chrome.

<comment><USER30> Glass is still around and under active development, it just isn't a consumer product. It is in use by several enterprises, mostly factories and warehouses.

My read on it is that it was never intended to be a consumer project as soon as they launched it (which explains the lack of polish), but the high level of interest when it was announced convinced them to launch it as one just in case they had stumbled on the next big thing. When that failed to materialize, they dropped it back to a research and enterprise project as was initially intended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Aw I'm sad to not see my first Google product on the list: the old SOAP search API. 2002-2006 RIP. I wrote a bit about it when they shut it down: [http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html](http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Though not a _product_ per-se, Google Instant Search was a significant enough feature that I think it merits inclusion in the list.

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120)

</comment><comment><USER32> I hope the Data Liberation Front, while not exactly a "product", lives a long and prosper life for as long as Google hoards our data:

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

They were quite helpful in getting about a decade worth of gmail data out of there when I decided I didn't want to use gmail anymore.

<comment><USER33> It's required for GDPR so will stay around for a while.

(That's my personal guess at least, not related to that team)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Really amazing how many products were merged into Google+ and superceded. And then also how many products were sunsetted in favor of putting more development time into Google+.

And then Google+ was sunsetted and machine learning and other built in features are doing a better job of prospering than any other Google properties.

Google was always a nerd company. Creating social platforms was always an SMH move.

</comment><comment><USER35> Neat idea. What's the criteria? Just it seems to be missing Google Code. Had a look on Wikipedia and seems to be a lot missing from that too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services)

</comment><comment><USER36> I feel like there should be an honorable mention for Google Groups/Dejanews. I mean, I guess usenet search is still there, but it's a shadow of its former usefulness.

<comment><USER13> People keep mentioning Google Groups. I've been using it at everywhere workplace I can think of, since many years. Most internal mailing lists get set up via it. Did it use to do more?

<comment><USER37> Google Groups is horrendous. The mailing list interface works, which is fine.

However the web interface and search results are a true PITA. Waiting for the page to load just to jump to a random point in the page takes in the order of 5+ seconds on my system.

I remember the first iteration of groups was almost pure html and insanely fast. Like with most google products, it has been bloated to death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What about leaving flowers, like the one on the slate.com from 2013 [0][1] used to facilitate?

[0] [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does- exi...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does-exist-you- can-even-place-flowers-on-your-deceased-favourites/) [1] [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> I am still flamoxed by the decision to discontinue GTalk... The build Hangout and later Allo/Duo

Talk was lightweight, history backups and usable in every platform.

Any startups would love to have Talk

<comment><USER40> Yeah, talk was kind of on its way to being the next AIM. Then, BLAM, metaphorical bullet between the eyes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's missing some services like Google Offers a Groupon competitor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Offers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Offers)

and Google Reader ... from the top of my head, and some enterprise products if I am not mistaken

</comment><comment><USER42> GSA is missing: Google Search Appliance. It was a server you could host on the company's premises that would index content on your network. It got discontinued, not sure why.

Maybe the list only includes B2C products.

<comment><USER43> I have zero knowledge of GSA specifically, but corporate intranet search is generally hard, other vendors were already in the space, and the heuristics and ML that make Google search work as well as it does don't work as well with less training data and pages without links and anchor text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Google Map Maker: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker)

</comment><comment><USER45> Mentioned a couple of times but it's still raw that Inbox has been canned too. Also the Googlers I know use it and Gmail is some ways back although it has been improved. It's been the best thing to happen to email forever, IMO, and I'll really miss it!

<comment><USER46> God yes, I will miss Inbox hard. I have started trying out Spark, and it's sort of ok but there's really nothing out there with such a tight focus as Inbox. Gmail on the web is just awful, and perhaps that was one of Inbox's greatest strengths - it was fast and bloat-free where Gmail is decidedly not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> For companies that continue to innovate, product failures and deprecations are only to be expected. It's not unlike startups that fail for all sorts of reasons?

I'd be more worried if Google tried to do everything. We're human and finite, after all.

</comment><comment><USER48> I miss surprisingly few of those, notebook and picasa basically. Could have missed Reader but it was replaced by the theoldreader almost overnight thanks to advices here (I wasn't a community user but a solo one so I did not miss the features that may not have been replicated).

I think the bigger issue is the features google removed or modified from some of its products; like my biggest miss is true verbatim search.

<comment><USER49> Of all the things Google has killed, I really miss Notebook. It was nimble and lightweight, while Docs is bloated and drags my old machine down (not to mention my crappy internet connection).

Around 2001, Google had a nifty toll free phone service, kind of like 411, but better. You it was an early voice recognition system that would even connect your call to the business you were trying to find. I think it was called Jupiter, but a cursory search doesn't turn up anything. I miss that too.

<comment><USER50> Goog-411 was awesome in the days before smartphones.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Let's not forget [http://google.com/bsd](http://google.com/bsd) and [http://google.com/linux](http://google.com/linux)

Search engines for BSD and Linux topics in the earliest days of Google. These were very popular with the Slashdot crowd, which was probably responsible for the initial succsss of Google.

<comment><USER52> That brings back some memories

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Crazy idea: instead of shutting them down, they should have sold them off to companies who could run and grow them. Maybe not for $Bs but for $Ms.

<comment><USER54> The problem, as I understand it from talking to Google employees, is twofold:

1) Many of these products rely on internal infrastructure and/or hosting that isn't readily available outside of Google. (They're basically built on a sort of internal Google "cloud" that has access to code not available outside Google.)

2) It would cost more money than the product reasonably makes to both move the product off the Google infrastructure/codebase AND find a team willing to continue to develop it.

Remember, most of these products didn't really make any money; they were internal projects that released externally and had fan clubs.

<comment><USER53> Interesting, thanks for explaining.

Not sure, but there seems to be a bit of a contradiction between your point 2) and the last sentence of your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Google bought Bitium slightly more than a year ago. Exactly a year after the acquisition they notified they were discontinuing service for us - it sounds like it was a straight acquihire and shutdown for their identity platform.

Migrating our whole corp password management to a new platform right during the busy time of year has been a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER56> A somethingawful YOSPOS person had a similar idea years ago and made [https://didgoogleshutdown.com/](https://didgoogleshutdown.com/)

(unfortunately it hasn't updated in a while and said SA poster may not have had the best insight into google product lifetimes)

</comment><comment><USER57> Google Wave is the one that stands out on that list for me. It was such a fantastic and ambitious idea, but the execution was so buggy that it was basically unusable.

<comment><USER58> As I understand it, also the multi-user features in Google Docs, Sheets were salvaged from Wave? If this is the case, there's a pretty big part of the codebase actually living on...

<comment><USER59> Google docs had multi-user features before Wave. Back when it was called writely.com even. Some features scattered out onto other Google products though (like hangouts).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> There area still many more Google products which are effectively buried alive down the level and levels of menus.

I find it puzzling and ironic how difficult it is to find a Google product. They should have a Google product search somewhere in the apps menu in the browser.

Also, next to zero marketing.

</comment><comment><USER61> GWT is, if not dead, at least in a deliberately induced coma. And unlike some of the other items it wasn't a consumer product, it was a heavily evangelized framework that companies and developers invested in and then were left high and dry.

<comment><USER62> GWT users are doing ok. Yeah development is slow compared to when they had a bazillion engineers working on it during the Wave era... on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added. In the mean time, standard browser changes like source maps have really helped over the old days of browser plugins.

GWT is a web presentation technology that has (so far) had a 12-year run. That's like a million dog years. Backbone is 8 years old, Ember is 6 years old, Angular1 was a flash in the pan... jQuery is the same age as GWT, but it's waning as well.

I really don't think GWT devs have much to complain about. React developers should be so lucky in another ten years. Frontend technologies just don't have much shelf life.

<comment><USER61> > on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added.

People wrote stuff on top of each one of those "overengineered crap" pivots.

It's nice that a transpiler still sort-of exists but that's of little use to people that built out products on the platform. And of course the back-compat story has always been terrible because google.

Also it's was a java framework pitched at java developers. Swing is still supported and applets were fully supported (not hived off to some moribund open source foundation) for more than twenty years.

<comment><USER62> That overengineered crap still works? I mean, it was never a necessary part of gwt. There are a bunch of crappy react patterns you could use and we don't blame the core libray. Personally I think redux is overdue for a reckoning.

I was doing gwt development in the wave era. I saw all the crazy new mvvpvmvwhatever stuff and just avoided it. App worked great.

I don't use gwt today but I keep an eye on it every now and then. The transpiler is waaaaaay better now than it was in the wave era. The only thing missing is a modern widget framework.

I don't expect gwt to make a major comeback, but it wouldn't surprise me too much of it did. It (still) does a few things far better than the current crop of JS frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Can't help but think how many services were stopped in order to build those features in G+ which eventually failed as well. At least we got Google Photos out of it which seems to be a great app. Hope it lives long enough.

</comment><comment><USER64> Tango should definitely be on this list.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_\(platform\))

<comment><USER65> PowerMeter too

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> To me embracing and extinguishing the wonderful Dejanews, then when everyone is accustomed to use Google to search for Usenet posts, removing the discussion search filter from Google search engine counts just like a milestone in the planned destruction of Usenet. That move to me looks a lot worse than axing G+ and other services I don't miss at all, because Usenet has been here long before Google and is not one of their products.

</comment><comment><USER67> Nice. These tombstones need a "more" button where links, discussion, lessons learned and a proper obituary can be found. Worth noting that the brand (and ethical vision) have also died and been reborn.

Last thing: it would also be interesting to see if the death rate is increasing or declining over time: a higher death rate indicates a healthy org still experimenting.

<comment><USER68> At least a sentence or two explaining what the service even was. I vaguely remember most of these, but there are many that don't ring any bells at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Google Wave died because it was a nice hipster idea that never came close to meeting the basic requirements for a corporate office, which was its primary audience. While Google completely failed to realize why this was an obvious and immediate failure Atlassian didn't miss a beat and took all of that marketshare.

</comment><comment><USER70> Missing from the list are the many, many competing products & services Google bought and then promptly shut down.

<comment><USER17> [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com) <\- Meebo, Sparrow, Grand Central, Writely, and many more. :(

<comment><USER71> Oh Sparrow. The only email client I ever really loved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> The Google Products Wikipedia page is also a great resource for this as well as a history of the missions, founders, acquisitions etc.

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

</comment><comment><USER73> I wonder why sustainance engineering is so hard. We have managed to bring down devops almost exponentially in terms of headcount per server. We have also managed to bring down the cost of storage, hosting etc. The only thing I would have to worry about is patching code for constant stream of security vulnerabilities and upgrading to new framework/platforms after LTS expires. Is this the only driving factor for these shutdowns (generally speaking for all companies)? This could be a good business opportunity for a startup that comes around and can say "ok, we will take care of your app, keep upgrading and patching as needed for a small fee.". More importantly we need better development methodology that has infinite sustainance as native as everything test cases.

</comment><comment><USER74> You should not be worry registering googlecementery.com. You not defaming company you merely stating facts. You would be protected under 1A. and you most likely be indexed by google and bing. So if someone is searching for "google dead projects" it would be easier to find. Just my 2c.

<comment><USER75> Can you elaborate

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Oh man, I forgot about Google 411. I loved that and used it all the time before I had a smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER77> Some of these I don't remember, and a couple I actually thought I was still using. :)

The Dodgeball saga seems like a good case study: [https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google- dodgeb...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google-dodgeball- foursquare/)

It's as if Google is simply too big to realize what a good idea is and support it.

Ads made Google one of the most profitable companies in the world basically overnight. No one's passion project will ever look good against that measuring stick.

</comment><comment><USER78> What about Google Goggles?

<comment><USER79> Which one? The photo app that read QR codes and such, or the Gmail Labs feature which asked you math questions before letting you send mail?

<comment><USER78> I only know the old android app

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Google Talk is my all time favourite. The UI is cleaner and it just worked everytime.

Picasso is also a good photo viewer when I was using Windows. It's a shame really.

</comment><comment><USER81> The upcoming destruction of inbox will be enough to get me off of gmail. I keep on having google PR people tell me that GMail has all those features. I try gmail everymonth and everymonth I'm back on inbox in less than a day. I created [https://t.co/gyeQCX7lnU](https://t.co/gyeQCX7lnU) but it seems no one else really cares about the stuff Id o.

<comment><USER82> I'd be more likely to sign the petition on change.org, for what it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> It's unfortunate they made the free edition of sketchup only a web app from now on. At least you can still get older desktop versions.

<comment><USER84> SketchUp isn't a Google property anymore. They sold it to Trimble in 2012.

<comment><USER83> Wow, never knew that after using it for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> It would be nice if this were orderable by "what year it was released"/"what year it was shuttered", naeemnur. Would also be good to link to the official "shut down" notice, which presumably you had to consult to get the date right, so having a link that people can follow to start their own web trawl would be quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER86> I still use Picasa to tag photos with face recognition. Haven't found anything even remotely better. I hoped for some advancements with the current ML hype.

For hints I would be thankful. Requirements: Must work offline, must store face information in the picture (XMP). Must work with ~1 TB of pictures. Digikam unfortunately sucks. Bad face recognotion and bad UI.

</comment><comment><USER87> The list is missing Froogle

</comment><comment><USER88> About Google Reader:. "Google announced they were discontinuing Google Reader, stating the product had a loyal but declining following, and they wanted to focus on fewer products".

I cannot believe it's true. My understanding is with a news aggregator like it Google cannot control the news feed like it does with Google news.

<comment><USER89> That's not the reason. Vic Gundotra, the mastermind/moron behind Google+ would not tolerate any other Google properties with social features. Since you could share feeds and articles on Reader, and because it had followers and comments and whatnot, it had to be sacrificed on the altar of Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I would also add to the list radio ads [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/technology/companies/13go...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/technology/companies/13google.html)

</comment><comment><USER91> And now in act of insanity they plan to shutter Inbox . :-(

Please sign this guy's petition if you don't want it to happen.

[https://www.change.org/p/google-google-don-t-kill- inbox](https://www.change.org/p/google-google-don-t-kill-inbox)

</comment><comment><USER73> Is url shortner dead for real? That would be disaster! So many links on web will turn dead. When I use URL shortner, there is an implicit trust that thing will exist for very very long time. It's cheap to run, it's useful for analytics. Why this should ever be killed?

<comment><USER92> Yeah, he's totally wrong on that one.

>After March 30, 2019, all links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

Source: [https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning- goog...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url- shortener.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Goo.gl was deprecated in March.

Not that the world was wanting for yet another url-shortener.

</comment><comment><USER94> The cement tiles around Building 17 at Microsoft are actually like a physical graveyard. So many dead products! The 90's CD-ROM multimedia era generated a lot of dead-end franchises.

</comment><comment><USER95> Aardvark was the coolest Q&A system ever, it's loss is a real tragedy, it's infuriating how Google bought it just to close it. Also Google+ was the best social network ever.

</comment><comment><USER96> Would be cool if it also explained what some of these services were.

</comment><comment><USER97> I don't see Songza on the list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza)

I miss that service.

<comment><USER17> Nice! Thank you for sharing. I'm going to add that to [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Ironic there's an option to share the article on Google Plus.

<comment><USER99> It's not dead yet. They're gonna pull the plug next August.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> I'd like to hear what the "lessons learned" were for each of these. And how did these dead products help shape future products that were perhaps more successful.

</comment><comment><USER101> There are still links named "Picasa" on Google Maps...

</comment><comment><USER102> If this is your site; the reasons only come up when clicking the rather small images, though it looks like clicking anywhere in the "cards" should do this. (On mobile).

<comment><USER34> I'm seeing it a little differently. Clicking anywhere in the card works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Would be nice to have a brief description of what each of these dead projects actually was. I only vaguely remember Aardvark. I've never heard of Dodgeball.

</comment><comment><USER27> Then there are zombies, like Google Voice and Google Fiber. They're not dead, but they're in maintenance mode, not being improved or extended.

<comment><USER104> from my experience, Google Voice has worked just fine the way it is for many years and it doesn't necessary need shiny new features. Would be sad if they discontinued it

<comment><USER27> There was supposed to be a Google Voice API. Never happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> I don't think it's fair to include products that were rebranded and had their data moved over to the new service e.g Picasa and Urchin

</comment><comment><USER106> Still waiting on the day Google is going to discontinue Google.

Used to love the company and what the people there stood for. Crazy how things have changed.

</comment><comment><USER107> I really loved Google Wave back in 2009/10\. Used it to collab on a college project and we thought it was buggy but pretty useful.

</comment><comment><USER108> I would like to see a similar list for Apple. I think Apple's list would be shorter, because Apple releases fewer products.

<comment><USER21> Depends if you include individual hardware lines - remember Apple has been around for 20+ years longer than Google. If you include each individual product, Apple discontinued far more products before Google was even founded than are on the entire Google list (which is admittedly incomplete): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._products)

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Google+ is listed as the first item... but it's still around...

It was only discontinued for consumers. It's still part of paid G Suite, it just focuses on sharing posts and topics _within_ a company now -- something it's actually pretty good at. [1]

I wouldn't call it a "dead Google product" by any means.

[1] [https://gsuite.google.com/products/googleplus/](https://gsuite.google.com/products/googleplus/)

<comment> your-nanny I still get g+ feeds. so when is it being discontinued for consumers?

<comment><USER110> August, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Was Diane Greene's Bebop which Google acquired for $380M in 2016, ever productized? or is it still work-in-progress?

<comment><USER60> Seems like it's become Google Hire [https://hire.google.com/](https://hire.google.com/) .

</comment></comment><comment> your-nanny i wish this site gave a brief summary of each product in addition to info on its demise. don't know many of them

</comment><comment><USER112> I liked iGoogle. I thought it was kind of cool. It would've been a great "new tab" page in Chrome tbh

</comment><comment><USER104> Would also like to see a list of Google services currently on life support; not yet dead, but struggling to survive

</comment><comment><USER113> Has it seriously been half a decade since Google Reader died? That's one of those "wow time flies" moments for me.

</comment><comment><USER114> Slightly (un)related, at Google X they seem to have an interesting way to select what projects they pursue and which not: Whenever they get an idea about a project, they try to kill the idea as fast as possible. Astro Teller talked about this in an interview with Adam Savage: [https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414](https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414)

</comment><comment><USER115> What annoys me the most is that they have the right ideas (Waves, Helpouts), but they lack conviction. The most ridicoulous example is when they introduced wireless charging, then removed it, and then added it back when Apple finally added it themselves.

They also sometimes lack imaginations, namely cancelling Reader instead of morphing it into some sort of G+. That plus AMP would have given FB a run for their money.

<comment><USER11> Reader __\+ YouTube __\+ Wave === (possible) FB Killer.

Maybe it's because their goto is analytics and "how can monetize this?" instead of "what do users want? what do they need?"

 __Both of these had a sizable user-base that would have been leveraged, as opposed to G+ starting from zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Don't know if it's dead now. It wasn't when Google sold it nine years ago — Radio Automation.

</comment><comment><USER117> Now we need one showing all the products killed as soon as the startups that made them were acquired.

</comment><comment><USER118> I love how many products got shutdown and moved into Google+, then google+ got shut down....

</comment><comment><USER119> I still miss google desktop. The Windows search indexer has never been particularly good.

<comment><USER120> FWIW I ended up reading a HN recommendation for the void tools search called "Search Everything" and on an NTFS-formatted drive it is blink-of-an-eye fast.

It goes on every computer along with 7z and Zhorn Caffeine

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Didn't Google at one point published or planned to create a CRM solution?

</comment><comment><USER122> I might be just tired but I didn't see google finance stock screener in there

</comment><comment><USER123> an archive of all the dead code of failed commercial products would be interesting. Both to study the implementation itself, but also to see the version history. Lots to learn / reuse I suppose!

</comment><comment><USER124> It's missing Google Inbox which I'm going to miss just as much as Reader

</comment><comment><USER125> Does DuckDuckGo have the scope to revive some of these and get an edge?

</comment><comment><USER126> The site is not reachable for me. Here is a mirror.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery.co)

</comment><comment><USER127> I'm worried that Google Voice will join this list sometime soon

<comment><USER93> Noooooo!

I hope not anyway. They injected some time into in the last year or so. I'd be curious to know the number of users; it's still free to get a number afaict.

It's probably their least profitable service, I suppose. Maybe they'll start (!) listening in on conversations and figure out a way to make money there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> If the Cemetery contained zombies it might have housed the old Google News [*]

[https://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en](https://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER129> Alternate (likely open) domain name: googlotha (pun on Golgotha).

<comment><USER130> How about `googolgotha`?

Feels easier to pronounce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> Cause of death would be nice instead of 'why dead?'

</comment><comment><USER132> Don't forget Google X (the original one)!

</comment><comment><USER68> Gmail is about due to be put on this list. They have made the web UI unusable for no good reason, and driven me back to an old-school desktop mail client.

<comment><USER133> I can't use the new web UI for my life. The HTMl view is great though and loads very fast.

<comment><USER134> What HTML view?? How do I access it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> What percentage are messaging apps?

<comment><USER136> It's weird that for a company to desperate to enter the messaging app market, they have yet to just clone iMessage. There's a ton of people who have come to depend on iOS, simply because of iMessage.

The best they've been able to come up with is some weird half-backed Android Messages or SMS Connect, it's not really clear. It's weird that they don't just take the ideas from iMessage and run with it.

<comment><USER135> I think it is because Apple had to twist AT&Ts arm to the breaking point to make iMessage work that way and then each carrier they added they had to force the issue again. Verizon turned them down because Apple wasn't going to let them install crap and charge 10¢ (Or whatever) per iMessage in addition to SMS.

Google would have to convince all their hardware partners to do that carrier arm-twisting themselves and most those companies don't have any leverage to do it even if they wanted.

<comment><USER136> Interesting, I did not know that. Out side the US market I think not supporting iMessage would be suicide for the carriers. If iMessage wasn't supported by one carrier, people would just switch. Maybe it helps that most carriers here have had unlimited SMS for a fix low fee for almost ten years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> How can we suggest new items?

</comment><comment><USER138> You could safely add Freebase (by Metaweb) to the list of things Google killed.

</comment><comment><USER139> Google App inventor? (guess it's still around, got transferred to MIT).

</comment><comment><USER140> I miss igoogle...

</comment><comment><USER141> Google Inbox?

<comment><USER142> March 2019. So it's in palliative care and has a DNR.

I like Inbox still. I was using gmail like i was using inbox before the product existed.

Oh well, when you live on the edge, sometimes you get cut. _guitar riff_

<comment><USER143> There's still time. I recently forced myself to switch back to GMail, but it's not the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER144> Google is a search engine. That's it.

</comment><comment><USER145> \+ Panoramio

</comment><comment><USER40> Wave solved problems I encountered in commercial (large scale corporations) work.

It could prevent "submarining" of communication into email chains and instant messaging conversations inaccessible to those not addressed or cc-ed, also preventing the time-burning, frustrating, and often incomplete "email dive" someone would have to perform to find and forward all these emails to e.g. a new team member or another interested party (new manager, legal, possibly even a third party).

Add people to the project/communications' access list(s), and they not only gained participation (without eveyone having to remember to add them to the list of addressees on new emails) but also access to the historical record.

It enabled team-level permissions for both on-boarding and off-boarding of new parties: New team members, etc -- like above. Note the off-boarding facility, in that; short of termination, if someone left a project, you (normal PM or dev lead or whatever roll) could take them off the access lists for the shared communications and you could all go your separate ways with a clean, definable and documented break.

And a bunch of stuff that's long since left my immediately accessible, conscious memory.

(Alternatives I saw did not compare. E.g. "project documentation skeletons" expanded from Lotus Notes templates, that left ginormous subtrees of "forms" that were often very sparsely, if at all, completed -- said completion being entirely, manually dependent upon the individual doing the work. Finding any bit of information in those was a giant PIA; who knows into which form they entered it, if at all, and even when they did, it was surrounded by tons of boilerplate that made it disappear into that "haystack".)

BUT...

They let front end development hang this very Javascript-heavy UI on it that bogged down "normal" machines, making the end-user experience rather miserable. That "lag" (to be generous in description), combined with a healthy dose of "mystery meat" UI.

People hated that. And they stayed away. (If you could even talk them into giving the beta a try... once they had access to the beta...)

Maybe it ran fine on internal "Core++" or whatever, ueber-motherboard and maxed RAM Google machines with local hops to the server. But no-one inside seemed to give it a good hard run in the "real world". Or to worry about said performance problems, if they did.

Well, I never got invested in it, other than hope and poking at it a bit once someone gave me access. But I continued to think, for a good long while, that the end result was a shame.

P.S. This is just my personal, outsider perspective. Maybe I have some things wrong. But it's the impression I ended up with.

</comment><comment><USER146> google+ still breathing.

</comment><comment><USER147> I don't miss any of these.

</comment><comment><USER148> RIP Inbox

</comment><comment><USER149> Orkut's story had a strange footnote. It was dominated by Brazilian Portuguese speakers, making other users feel less welcome. That was a tough problem.

</comment><comment><USER150> This is why I use AWS.</comment>


Biography of a Face - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/patrick-hardison-face-transplant.html <comment><USER2> Incredible story. What a world we live in where something like this is even possible.</comment>


Catching bugs early with static analysis - <AUTHOR> https://madewithlove.be/how-to-catch-bugs-early-with-static-analysis-using-psal-phan-or-phpstan/ <comment><USER2> PHPStan is a great tool. In addition to PHPStan, I also use phpnsc (name space checker) to check for missing use statements, php-cs-fixer (code style fixer) to ensure the code adheres to my code style, phpcpd (copy paste detector) to detect duplicate code, and phpmd (mess detector) to find potential problems in the code. These are all set up in my CI pipeline so that my app will fail to build if any of these 5 tools detect a problem. It has saved me from deploying buggy code several times.

<comment><USER3> Great advice and thank you for sharing! Do you have a Dockerfile or CI config/recipe that you could share?

<comment><USER2> Here's the bash script I use to do the code validation. It's called from within my Dockerfile.

[https://gist.github.com/phpdave11/412893f8366cab0afa85e81a7a...](https://gist.github.com/phpdave11/412893f8366cab0afa85e81a7a66bd72#file- validate-code-sh)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very helpful in the JS world, but I am afraid there is not standalone standard for static checks in JS.

There is typescript, but that's an entire new language to just partially cover the type checks.

<comment><USER5> If you compile your code with TypeScript and set allowJs=true, you'll get a lot of checking for free with no changes at all to your existing JS code. TS will catch things like dead code, missing return statements, type mismatches and so on for free.

<comment><USER4> It will be nice if the use case of TS only being used as a static checker be supported better, but then there will be no point in TS as a language

<comment><USER6> If that's the use case you have, then Facebook's Flow is a better fit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Neo4j 2.0 GA - Graphs for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.neo4j.org/2013/12/neo4j-20-ga-graphs-for-everyone.html

<comment><USER2> I'm really excited about this release, particularly because of the new labels and uniqueness constraints functionality. I'm using Neo4J as the back end for my own startup, and I switched to 2.0 a little while ago for development. It required some rethinking to eliminate hacks that I had to get around the lack of label-like functionality. Big win!

</comment><comment><USER3> I am assuming the labels are used as a heuristic for traversing the graph. What kind of speed increases in graph traversal are available w/ labels vs w/o labels?

<comment><USER4> They are used to attache indexes and constraints on them in order to speed up traversals. They themselves have very little logic right now, more will follow in terms of query optimisation etc..</comment></comment>


The Julia Language Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://nextjournal.com/sdanisch/the-julia-challenge <comment><USER2> If I understand the helper code part correctly, libraries are banned? That makes the challenge quite pointless, as it doesn't even pretend to be equivalent to "real world" usage. All it can show is the julia language has it by default... but not whether the language's design actually leads to something more clean, readable and sufficiently fast than what would "normally" be done in other languages.

It doesn't really matter if python doesnt have as powerful an array syntax as julia, if I can pull in numpy (a standard, battle-tested library) and produce equivalent (and good) code.

But if I pull in numpy, and _still_ can't produce code as nice as julia (because of whatever limitations of python as a language), then there's an argument to be made for switching to julia.

But going purely off what the language gives by its initial installation... its just an arbitrary limitation to give the question one answer.

The article claims that it proves the point ... "This can be unfair since Julia has lots of functionality for array algorithms built in, but also illustrates the point" ... but assuming good intentions, I'm not sure what point that is? At best, you might be comparing APL languages to one another, but nothing broader than that.

<comment><USER3> The way I have experienced it (with Javascript, Perl, Python and Matlab) is that many casual users give up whenever you mention packaging. Any language that lets people go very far without involving external modules will get significant usage from amateur programmers.

<comment><USER2> Hell, so do I; I absolutely hate learning new package ecosystems & infrastructure (but I absolutely do not have interest in learning a language without a decent package infrastructure). Probably a bigger blocker for me than learning the language itself!

But it's not clear to me that this "challenge" is intended to say that array operations are easy, for a _newcomer_ to the language. As I understood it, it's an argument for Julia being better in the _long run_ , for the code that requires "developer effort, performance and extensibility"; that is, elements of the language beyond the first few days of using it, for packages larger than what would be written by "amateur programmers"

If depicting usage for the amateur was the main point of the article, it totally went over my head

<comment><AUTHOR> >If depicting usage for the amateur was the main point of the article

You understood that right, it is not :) That's why I wrote, that I'd probably need years to create the same implementation in any other language.

I do think it does have a widespread implication for the ecosystem though, and therefore at some point will also be relevant to newcomers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who has used both languages extensively over the last 6 years (Julia for grad school research and Python for my work as a data scientist), I'm always surprised at how quickly people rush to defend Python. "Yes, you can do that in Python too using such-and-such library or with this hack..." Don't get me wrong — the numerous Python libraries are impressive, but at the end of the day, for me personally the experience of using Julia is just far more pleasant than using Python. It seems as though I'm always fighting _against_ Python to accomplish something, whereas with Julia it feels like the language just gets out of the way and lets me do what I want.

<comment><USER5> Yes, so much this. I want to be able to write simple idiomatic code without having an insanely large (10x-1000x) overhead. That just doesn't happen in Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is something that puts me off about all these languages that want to show off their own strengths by pointing at other languages weaknesses. X in Y is another such pattern, who cares what 'X' is written in, the question is does it perform well, does it serve a need and is it maintainable and secure if it is network facing or otherwise employed in a situation that would require the program to be locked down properly.

Setting up an artificial challenge with rules that favor 'your' language up front is a great way to get the result that you want, but not a great way to learn. Each language has its strengths and its weaknesses, but none of those strengths and weaknesses matter all that much from the point of view of an end user until they have a direct impact on the quality of that which is produced. And programmers have shown time and again they can write crappy code in just about any language (and good code too...) with the language features having a much smaller impact on the outcome than the quality of the people writing the code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I must admit, that I find your sentiment very understandable! It is an egoistic challenge, after all. For me the problems I describe are highly relevant, and I'm very curious about any solution that isn't written in Julia. And I do think, that those challenges are also highly relevant for a large part of the scientific computing community. So whatever language excels at those should get proper recognition;) And I do believe, that if you can implement a hard problem efficiently with little effort and not that much code and still have it composable, that it will very quickly influence the quality and user experience for the end user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Use Python + Numba, Python + C, Swift, Cython, Go, Lua-Jit, Rust, D - > surprise us!

I'm familiar with Python scientific ecosystems and currently learning Julia and Rust. As far as I see it, these languages likely do not compete well with Julia on _all_ three categories --- "developer effort, performance and extensibility" for the problem you picked, because none of them was designed for native array arithmetic with broadcasting in the first place (except Numba maybe).

The current dominance of Python in scientific computing is rather a beneficent coincidence, because most people were pretty fed up with C++ and legacy Fortran back then, and efforts to improve tools of the trade tended to converge on Python. Fast forward 18 years after Python was born, Julia came to light and it was _designed_ to do numerical tasks fast and elegantly and to avoid some pitfalls of "scripting languages". Does the success of Julia in these tasks signify the incompetence of Python? I don't think so. It served well what it was designed for. And if you tell me Julia is the right track of the history, you'd have to wait for it to happen. (Don't get me wrong, I like the Julia language and use it for a side project. I just don't see bashing other languages to prove that Julia is the one language to rule them all would be fruitful.)

On the other hand, I'd say you forget to count in Fortran 2008! For broadcasting with multithreading, Fortran + OpenMP works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the point is to be able demonstrate the ability to implement high- level abstractions, in a very composable way, that doesn't cost on performance.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who sees a big PR push for Julia? Up until a few weeks ago I'd never heard of it. Not I see it all over, frequently touted as the "one language to rule them all."

<comment><USER10> It hit 1.0 about a month ago. Its always been a pretty exciting language, but it was hard to seriously use it without stability for an ecosystem to build around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So the actual challenge is to provide a means, in your language of choice, to write an arbitrary expression like:

        user_defined(x) + y + z

Which may mix matrices ( _x_ ), vectors ( _y_ ), scalars ( _z_ ), and _user_defined_ or built-in (+) functions applied elementwise; has automatic extension of dimensions; and must operate in a single pass, performing only one traversal.

This problem statement is rather tailored to Julia's way of doing things—I don't believe any other language can really "succeed" as a result, and not because Julia is any _better_ (nor worse).

In Haskell I might simply rely on laziness and rewrite rules for fusion, or reach for a package like repa¹ or folds², depending on the actual problem at hand. There wouldn't need to _be_ a library providing this "broadcast" functionality, because it can be expressed already with other composable tools.

If you work with the language and type system, there are lots of tools available for giving the compiler enough information about the structure of your code to guarantee good performance, abstracted behind a reasonable API. You might end up writing something more explicit, like:

        zipWith3 (+) (userDefined <$> x) (extend y) (extend z)

        -- With MonadComprehensions + ParallelListComp
        [ userDefined a + b + c
        | a <- x | b <- extend y | c <- extend z
        ]

But I'd be perfectly happy with that, since it uses abstractions like functors and monads that I already understand. I probably _wouldn't_ reach for the direct equivalent of this Julia solution, which would be to write some Template Haskell macro that rewrites an expression to insert dimensional conversions ("extend" in the pseudocode above) and fusion of operations—that approach feels too brittle and difficult to extend, and not because of any deficiency in the language.

¹ [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/repa](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/repa)

² [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/folds](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/folds)

<comment><AUTHOR> >There wouldn't need to be a library providing this "broadcast" functionality

Actually, your sample "solution" is (was?) also a much used pattern in Julia - especially before we had such a powerful broadcast implementation.

So in Julia there is no need either, since it is already implemented much better in Base. I think you're overlooking the actual point of my challenge: it's not that we need a broadcast package, but that a lot of other scientific libraries will need to use similar patterns, to write new packages with new algorithms!

The point is also, that I can go into the Julia repository, and without a lot of time & effort, can improve the current implementation of our broadcast - because it is not that much code and pretty easy to follow.

So, an equivalent in your example would be, if you can quickly implement something like repa or folds in a similar minimal example like my Julia implementation.

If you don't like the details of my challenge, feel free to make a minimal folds implementation from scratch, and show me that the result is fast and composable ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> >Actually, your sample "solution" is (was?) also a much used pattern in Julia - especially before we had such a powerful broadcast implementation.

To add some more historical facts to this: before broadcast, we mostly used maps & zips in Julia. Which is not very elegant if you want to write down your math. Even with broadcast, some math nuts still complain that it isn't close enough to the actual math :D So consider, that those people are Julia's user base ;)

And then, someone pretty much implemented broadcast in their freetime and added it as a PR to the Julia language. This is how the language grows, and a large part of that is possible, because it takes relatively little time to come up with a performant implementation of such a difficult problem.

And now we have broadcasting in the language, and maps + zips are indeed less idiomatic... Because anyone who started using the new broadcast immediately thought it was an improvement to "the old ways".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems very finely tuned to the Julia language (i.e. relying heavily on meta-programming). It's not clear to me that strong support for meta- programming is actually that necessary for every day use cases.

I'd be curious to see what kinds of implementations someone could come up with in CUDA using templates, though. It could easily blow the Julia performance out of the water.

<comment><USER12> How could it blow the Julia performance out of the water? Julia is just manipulating the generated LLVM IR, and LLVM generates the .ptx. If C++ and Julia are both using LLVM for this compilation, you'll get to pretty much the same place.

And this is tuned towards package development, specifically generic package development. This is quite a hot topic in scientific computing. The challenge isn't for people who use packages, it's for people who develop packages and are looking to make them generally useful (i.e. not just single project).

<comment><USER5> You can certainly use a GPU package for Julia with macros for generating ptx code. That's not what the OP did though. He merely optimized for using SIMD, which provides Julia a distinct advantage over other languages with strong metaprogramming, such as C++. But if you care enough about performance that you focus on the performance benefits of SIMD over ordinary execution, you probably should be using the GPU instead. By using CUDA (not C++) as the language, one can get far faster performance right out of the box.

Thus, a much fairer comparison, if we care so much about performance that non- SIMD execution is a non-starter, would be CUDA vs. Julia targeting the GPU.

Note that I absolutely love Julia because I find it far easier to write than a language like C++, but idiomatic Julia code still has low overhead, unlike, say, Python, which introduces orders of magnitude of overhead compared to low level languages, and you have to move away from simple idiomatic code to achieve reasonable performance. However, I find it unreasonable to focus on SIMD performance - the performance gain over non-vectorized code isn't that big, and if you do want to eek out that much extra performance, you should focus on using the GPU.

<comment><USER12> >But if you care enough about performance that you focus on the performance benefits of SIMD over ordinary execution, you probably should be using the GPU instead.

That's not true. There's a lot of heavily serial algorithms which do not always work well on the GPU unless they are of a very large size, larger than most applications. This happens a lot in optimization and differential equations, two of the pillars of scientific computing.

>Thus, a much fairer comparison, if we care so much about performance that non-SIMD execution is a non-starter, would be CUDA vs. Julia targeting the GPU.

Tim already wrote that article where it shows how Julia code generation can be faster in some instances for GPUs. [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/gpu-computing- julia-programming-...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/gpu-computing-julia- programming-language/)

>but idiomatic Julia code still has low overhead

Where?

<comment><USER5> >That's not true. There's a lot of heavily serial algorithms which do not always work well on the GPU unless they are of a very large size, larger than most applications. This happens a lot in optimization and differential equations, two of the pillars of scientific computing.

And those situations tend to get a very minimal speedup from SIMD.

>Tim already wrote that article where it shows how Julia code generation can be faster in some instances for GPUs. [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/gpu- computing-julia-programming-...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/gpu-computing- julia-programming-..).

Yes, that's great, and would have made for an interesting challenge, rather than focusing on SIMD instead of serial or GPU performance.

>Where?

I didn't word it well, but I meant to say that Julia doesn't have much overhead compared to C/C++, unlike Python (what overhead it does have comes from garbage collection).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So...impossible challenge then?

<comment><USER14> Looks like it. Section 4.1 eliminates lower level languages on code size, and 4.2 eliminates higher level languages on performance. The challenge in C form would be:

Create a better string copy way:

      while (*d++ = *s++);

<comment><AUTHOR> as i said, if it makes sense, i'd totally allow using external libraries! maybe i should make that clearer since quite a few people get hung up on that

<comment><USER14> A few of us perceive it as unrealistic, because it's too restrictive. C/C++ are general programming languages and I feel I am flat out eliminated before even starting. So if you didn't target the general programming languages, who did you want to target with the challenge?

Also, heck, it's a challenge, we all want in, please make it so :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense. I will try to update the article! Feel free to use whatever library that helps you to compose your program nicely. It would be nice though, if those libraries were in a set of standard libraries ;) If you need to implement all helpers yourself, my point "in Julia, you can just sit down and start implementing a pretty difficult problem" would become a bit watered down... First of all, Julia is also pretty multi-purpose - and secondly, if you put it to the extreme, you could just write a DSL that you parse in C++ that is perfectly tailored to the problem, and consider the challenge as won :P

<comment><USER14> Yes but, then we can draw some scientific conclusion.

If I can outperform Julia by 50% in C++, but I have to write 10x code. I won't bother with C++.

If you manage to have that in the end, that's a very valuable promotional information.

For one of my master courses, I had to write 200 lines in python. C++ solution would have been in the thousands. My colleague solved it in 10 R lines. R is on my list now :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Even Tensorflow and Google have acknowledged this, and are trying to rewrite > Tensorflow in one language, namely, Swift!

Come on.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the point?

<comment><USER16> The point is not to compare oneself to famous people or groups to score cheap authority points.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok fair enough - maybe this is just my bad english, let me know if you have a better way to phrase it.

I do think, that it is quite showing, that google + tensorflow don't believe in the mix of python + c/c++. I've been working quite closely on the challenges that faces machine learning libraries at the moment, and I can totally see where they're coming from when they're unhappy with the current solution and want to rewrite it in swift. How should I express this in a better way?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adobe Flash 0-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) - <AUTHOR> https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsa18-01.html <comment><USER2> Per the article it says that Chrome is affected as well. What mitigations does the sandboxing of Chrome provide against something like this? I'd assume the remote command execution (RCE) is limited to the sandbox, but what specifically does that limit?

Even if the sandboxed process can't read or write to disk, with the recent Intel CPU issues it would have full access to anything in memory right?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a 0-day, cross-platform and full-system compromise vulnerability. This is pretty bad.

"A critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) exists in Adobe Flash Player 126.96.36.199 and earlier versions. Successful exploitation could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system."</comment>


How to Properly Quote a Client - <AUTHOR> http://devgrow.com/how-to-properly-quote-a-client/

<comment><USER2> I'm a little curious about a point glossed over in this (decent) writeup: what are these situations where one's hourly rate would vary wildly enough to be a major factor? I can see negotiating scope, creating a project price where one might not be as proficient as the resulting price would reward ($100/hr turning into $20/hr), lots of googletime, etc., but since I figure there's no tying these figures to rules of thumb since each situation is different.

Going into it with a fixed rate not left for negotiation unless and until the potential customer asks for it (I've found mentioning it early helps) can greatly simplify one's approach to creating a quote.

"It's all over but the shouting"</comment>


Is Working In Conversion Rate Optimisation A Long Term Career Opportunity? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Yes, particularly if that is just one thing in your larger toolbox of "things which provably make businesses large amounts of money." (It also is one of the metaabilities like programming which can often make your other skills more valuable. For example, CRO makes email better, it makes PPC better, it makes SEO better, etc etc.)

If you have a particular concern about it, feel free to ask.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a wide range of skillset across marketing and development so am thinking there should be no reason why CRO is not something that is going to be around for years to come!</comment></comment>


Monitoring Linux Processes Using Prometheus and Grafana - <AUTHOR> http://devconnected.com/monitoring-linux-processes-using-prometheus-and-grafana/ <comment><USER2> Using bash and push gateway to go against the pull design of Prometheus? Why not just use Telegraf (daemon in go that use few resources) that already have a push design, to send the metrics to InfluxDB and then do the dashboards in Grafana? Or the same setup, but with Telegraf emulating being a Prometheus exporter.

Besides that, Telegraf have builtin how to gather a lot of metrics, that can give a better insight of what is happening in your server and all its components. And Grafana have ready to download a lot of nice dashboards to display that information.

Also, if you want to practice how to send your own and very particular metrics with shell script, InfluxDB's line protocol is very simple and you can just use curl to send them with shell scripts.</comment>


Yes, You Can Haz PDF - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/yes-you-can-haz-pdf/ <comment><USER2> College students should rejoice. It was so frustrating trying to find peer reviewed work stuck behind a paywall (yes I know colleges pay for them, but good lord! The UI of those sites!)</comment>


A body cam hacker schooled the Seattle police - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/the-body-cam-hacker-who-schooled-the-police-c046ff7f6f13

<comment><USER2> I hate this headline, but enjoyed the story.</comment>


The Cherokee want a representative in Congress, taking up a 200-year-old promise - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/25/politics/cherokee-nation-congressional-delegate-treaty/ <comment><USER3> >Some organizations could mount legal challenges to the Cherokee Nation's push for a delegate, Rosser added, potentially arguing that the move gives citizens of the tribe more representation in Congress than non-indigenous US citizens.

This is going to prevent the representative from being seated. This is why tribes opposed the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 [1] in the first place; they were afraid that giving all Indians citizenship would fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with the US government.

The Cherokee can't have it both ways. They can't have American citizenship—and, thus, representation in Congress in Oklahoma or elsewhere— _and_ an extra delegate of their own. Such exists in New Zealand, but that's explicitly provided for by law, and it's controversial; the New Zealand First Party,[2] which a few years ago held all seven Maori seats,[3] has a policy of wanting to abolish said seats, and no longer runs candidates for them.

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

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

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

<comment><USER4> It can be done. In New Zealand, our indigenous population (Māori) has New Zealand citizenship, and has an opt-in seperate electoral roll which has 7 seats of the 120 seat parliament [1]. Māori citizens have the choice whether to vote on the "General roll" or the "Māori roll".

This acts to ensure indigenous people always have a voice in parliament, and is seen as fulfillment of the treaty obligations on which this country is founded. This -combined with "mixed member proportional" style voting largely prevents any attempts at racist gerrymandering.

In practice, while the number of seats may not be large, MMP governments frequently are made from coalitions between parties, meaning that both our two largest parties are interested in contesting either the seats themselves or securing an alliance with whichever smaller party might win them, meaning the presence of these seats does translate into actual policy concessions to our indigenous people.

I should note here that at the time of its historical origin in 1867, the seperate Māori roll was compulsory for Māori, and was intended as a way to disenfranchise Māori by proportionally reducing their influence.

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

<comment><USER5> I always thought the Māori electorate was a way to give Māori voting rights while acknowledging that they didn't have the same concept of land ownership as the colonists. At the time voting was tied to land ownership. The Māori electorate is tied to race and not land ownership like the general electorate was.

<comment><USER4> For reference, the Māori seats were created in 1867 during the period where much Māori land was confiscated by govt, provoking wars, and the property ownership requirement for voting in the general roll (basically for "white" people, which in NZ are now referred to as "Pakehā") was scrapped a little over a decade later in 1879; while for almost the next century Māori were forced to participate on only the Māori roll, determining only handful of available seats -effectively forcing them into underrepresentation - <USER2> 1976.

If we were to say the intent was to "give Māori voting rights", I think it could be far more fairly characterized as "give Māori some voting rights but systematically ensure that this counts for substantially less than their non- Māori peers".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope this happens. Native Americans have unique challenges. A thing I ran across on twitter: Native Americans were being de facto disenfranchised because they couldn't use a PO Box as an address for purposes of voter registration and the reservations they were on only had PO Boxes as addresses for the residents.

I am guessing that this wasn't conscious and intentional. I'm not suggesting some conspiracy theory to purposely disenfranchise them. But the sorts of issues Indigenous peoples face are not faced by most other Americans and they at least need a voice to begin educating the powers that be about ways in which their reality is overlooked and how this negatively impacts them.

<comment><USER7> This varies by state, but note that, in North Dakota, for example, the 911 coordinator can have an address assigned in a quick process: [https://vip.sos.nd.gov/pdfs/Portals/VotingInformationforTrib...](https://vip.sos.nd.gov/pdfs/Portals/VotingInformationforTribalMembers.pdf). Voting in places that lack infrastructure people tend to take for granted (fixed addresses) definitely poses challenges that state officials must address. I suspect at least with larger reservations, progress could be made by delegating more control over voting and polling places to tribal governments.

At the same time (as reflected in the comments below), people unfairly deride any sort of voter identification requirement as a conscious attempt at disenfranchisement, when in reality U.S. states have some of the laxest voter identification requirements in the world: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws). I voted recently in Maryland, and I was actually quite shocked and a little perturbed how little verification was performed at the polling site. (I didn't have to show ID, just wrote down my address. Anyone could've pretended to be me.)

<comment><USER6> I was homeless for a few years. I'm abundantly familiar with how lacking the usual assumed default living arrangements can negatively impact one's life.

I'm also quite clear that most of it was not some intentional effort to make my life unnecessarily harder. I certainly ran into genuine prejudice and discrimination, but most problems I wrestled with incidentally happened to be more challenging because my life didn't neatly fit standard assumptions.

I've generally found it helpful in life to _not assume malice_ where ignorance/obliviousness are sufficient explanations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like this just for the fact of having people in Congress that aren't either Democrat or Republican.

<comment><USER9> [ed. I stand corrected. Article says they have an Obama-administration official lined up.]

Odds are the Cherokee would appoint a de facto Republican. They're largely conservative and entrepreneurial Oklahomans. The Cherokee Nation runs a bunch of gambling, energy, and defense contracting businesses.

It's beyond amusing to me that Elizabeth Warren tried to claim in to the Cherokee; that tribe had almost no inclination to overlook her stretching.

<comment><USER10> A lot of minority people have quite conservative values, but vote Democratic because they perceive Republicans as the party that hates them because of their race.

If the GOP could get a half believable message out there that they're actually, really and honestly, a conservative patriotic free market party for all races and religions, I think they could completely dominate US elections for decades.

But, much like the Democrats, they just can't help being really bad at seeming decent and competent.

<comment><USER11> You're not counting the votes they would lose if they tacked away from explicit racial animus. It's more than a few.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We owe voting rights and statehood to the native nations we colonized during the past three centuries.

<comment><USER13> Why? Why does a conquering group owe the people they conquered anything at all?

<comment><USER14> Because we recognize that we were evil and want to make amends.

<comment><USER13> I wasn't evil. Were you? Human history is littered with blood and conquest. Trying to settle the score seems pointless; we should instead (I propose) recognize that we are all individuals without historical guilt and work together to build a better future.

<comment><USER4> Ideas don't exist in a vacuum; they emerge from concrete relations of production and power. They serve or hinder the interests of people and groups.

'Wiping the slate clean' is a noble path to peace when both sides have done something wrong; it is a far less noble idea when the injustice was severely one-sided, instead it can actually make the injustice _worse_.

Suppose someone had -unprovoked- attacked you violently and and taken your home and possessions, and then moved his family into what used to be your home. Then suppose his family, still living in that house and intending to continue doing so, suddenly proposed 'wiping the slate clean'. Would you be right in suspecting their proposal of 'wiping the slate clean' to be in this case completely self-serving?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For comparison: I live in Poland. Here legislative power is called "Sejm" and deputies are selected in elections (as usual in typical European country). However, there are two places in Sejm, for German minorities deputies. There are barely few thousand Germans living in Poland but in location surrounding Opole city. These people have two representatives in our Sejm.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. I never knew about the non-voting representatives before.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would if you lived in Washington, D.C. Due to its unique status as a "Federal district" ceded to the government by Maryland and Virginia, the only Congressional representation the 700,000 residents of D.C. get is a single non-voting delegate: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia%27s_at- la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia%27s_at- large_congressional_district)

(Despite this, they are of course taxed the same as everyone else, creating a weird modern-day case of "taxation without representation": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation#District_of_Columbia))

<comment><USER17> >Due to its unique status as a "Federal district" ceded to the government by Maryland and Virginia,

It should be noted that Virginia's portion was given back -- retrocession -- in 1847. This is why one option that comes up for providing voting rights is to give the non-federal government portions of DC back to Maryland. This would keep the Federal District separate from any state; but, residents of what is currently DC would have voting representation.

What was Virgina's contribution is Arlington County, VA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am in favor. Also, small part Cherokee.

<comment><USER19> Do you know your blood quota? They tend to be really unhappy with people who claim ancestry without being on the tribal rolls.

<comment><USER20> quantum, blood quantum.

<comment><USER19> The folks around me say quota. I think it might have slipped into slang. I'll check my letter to see what it says in the morning.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Misfits Are the Best for Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://getliner.com/FhWF9?hacker=true <comment><USER2> Not exactly a comment on the article, rather my own findings on the same subject:

\- There is research that shows that the most successful teams are those with the greatest intellectual diversity, assuming there is an unhindered exchange of information between team members. If team members feel inhibited from sharing ideas, or critiquing the ideas of others, diversity doesn't improve outcomes.

\- There is also evidence that challenging problems in a field are more likely to be solved by people from outside the field. This seems to be driven by the fact that each field has particular problem solving techniques, and problems that are difficult to solve using a given set of techniques may yield more readily to techniques from other fields.

</comment><comment><USER3> Back in the days recruiters of big corps would search for anomalies in resumes, because people with such anomalies were considered more creative or innovative.

Today they simply create anomalies themselves.

They put people into one team, that wouldn't join forces on their own.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is ridiculous?

<comment><USER5> I know.

This could be so unfair.

How would companies using common hiring practices compete against carefully selected misfits without a level playing field to begin with?</comment></comment>


Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0181301 <comment><USER3> Clickbaity title.

Original: Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats

Anyway,it's not like the article seems like being a particularly good one, while it cites the concept that meat fed to pets is (largely) not suitable for human consumption, doesn't take into account the actual related impact and vaguely talks of post-processing the non-suitable parts.

The IMHO terrible part is this one:

>And much pet food probably is already edible and serves as a potential source of protein as a food of last resort; there are reports, both official and unofficial, of impoverished Americans eating pet food as a necessary supplement to their diet [55–57, 58, 59]. At any rate, the trend toward premium pet food with more animal products that Americans would recognize as edible indicates that pets are eating animal products that could also be eaten by humans and that there is direct competition with the human food system for ingredients in some of these products [10].

TL;DR: Your cat and/or dog is probably too fat, and you should somehow feel bad about it.

<comment><USER4> > meat fed to pets is (largely) not suitable for human consumption

30% unsuitable for human consumption? This choosiness is a just one more sign of affluence and one of the habits we have to get rid of if we want to improve our ecological footprint.

Go to a rural village in a developing country and you will see them using 95% easily.

This is just

<comment><USER5> The choosiness is also culture-dependent.

I have eaten pig feet, pig stomach, shark fin, unidentifiable organs and very bony meat at somewhat upscale restaurants in China. I'm sure there are some foods that are seen as basically inedible in China, but those do not necessarily coincide with Western tastes.

A lot of this is probably influenced by perceptions of "poor-people food" (like lobster) instead of being based in human nutritional needs. My Chinese friend was surprised when I remarked on the great taste of grilled pig liver, since it was the least expensive of the dishes he had me try out.

<comment><USER6> > A lot of this is probably influenced by perceptions of "poor-people food" > (like lobster)

Since when is lobster considered a "poor-people food"? That is the exact impression I get when it's the most expensive entree on most menus.

<comment><USER7> It was until the mid-19th century.

 _Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts, and the Canadian Maritimes. It has been suggested servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week, however there is no evidence for this. Lobster was also commonly served in prisons, much to the displeasure of inmates. American lobster was initially deemed worthy only of being used as fertilizer or fish bait, and until well into the 20th century, it was not viewed as more than a low-priced canned staple food._ [0]

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

<comment><USER8> Oysters too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having worked in a meat processing plant, I can assure you that no humans would want to eat anything that goes into "rendering" for use in pet food.

I'm not talking about offal, tripe, small goods, etc., all of which have markets for human consumption. Some of those items are high margin, too.

There are markets somewhere in the world for just about every last bit of an animal. The only stuff that goes into pet food is stuff that has been contaminated or that has no higher margin use in other applications. Basically, pets get the waste.

Fun fact -- The highest margin product in a beef house is fetal calf blood. It typically goes for about $400/liter and can sometimes spike up to $1000/liter.

<comment><USER10> Interesting fact, thank you. I didn't know anything about the use of animal blood in medicine. Good to know we can find uses for most things to reduce waste.

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

<comment><USER11> it's not about reducing waste it's about reclaiming every possible revenue stream but the net effect is the same so...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article says 30% of what humans consume, so I think that means 30/130 = 23% of "all" meat products. (Where "all" is human plus pets.)

</comment><comment><USER13> For the environmentally conscious couple, a dog or cat is an excellent replacement for the exceptionally wasteful human baby. From that perspective, re-directing your baby instincts into a dog instead of another human is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.

<comment><USER14> A vegan kid seems like a preferable replacement.

<comment><USER15> Except kids can't be raised on a vegan diet, particularly young kids.

<comment><USER14> Yes they can: "regarded as appropriate for all stages of the life by the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics"(in the context of veganism).

source - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism)

<comment><USER16> I've seen kids on a vegan diet and they aren't nearly as healthy or strong as kids who eat a non-vegan diet.

<comment><USER14> Well I'm convinced, too bad we wasted all that money on science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My dogs eat a lot of animal protein, but from what I can tell it's not anything anyone might really want to eat. That or the products leverage old waste or by-products.

For example, fish skin leftover from processing sea food. Cow esophagus. Pizzle. Or the little bits of meat and connective tissue left on a carcass after butchering ground up into a 'stew' along with vegetables that didn't pass muster for human consumption.

I also give my dogs ribs and knuckles, though it's not always easy to find bones at the grocer any more. Most people just want boneless, bloodless shrink-wrapped steaks, whether that's beef, chicken or pork.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm sure most pets wouldn't be able to survive on their own, so its pretty obvious that we are putting an inflated strain on the food chain by providing meals for them.

I wonder if there are a lot more carnivores than would otherwise naturally exist (with pets included), or if there is a similar number of carnivores but less diversity (e.g. an ecosystem that would have housed other carnivores is now hosting pigs and cows).

I never would have thought I would see "pets" as environmental argument but its a no brainer.

<comment><USER19> There were about 30 million bison in North America before we hunted them near extinction. Bison, especially young ones, are prey to wolves and bears. Bison weight about 1.5x cows.

There are about 100 million cows, and if about 30% of those feed pets the numbers come out similar.

There are also pigs and chickens, and depleted river fish/wild fowl populations.

Wolves/bears are heavier so the same mass of prey supports a smaller population. Still, I think we'd be in the same order of magnitude.

Edit: actually I might be an order of magnitude off, depending on the length of life. If cows live a year before slaughter, vs bison living 10 years. No idea what the real numbers are.

<comment><USER20> Meat cattle are usually slaughtered at 3 years, which is the sweet spot of quality and quantity of meat. There are also many calves which are slaughtered around 4 months for things like veal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like a perfect application for lab grown meat.

<comment><USER22> That's a great idea. Humans have refined tastes, we're going to criticize meat for not being marbled enough, or for tasting a bit "off", or for not being quite up to par. We will purposefully reject cuts like chuck when offered the option of a strip steak instead.

Dogs wouldn't. They'd eat the strip steak and then eat the chuck and then chase down a mole, dig it out of the ground, and eat it whole. They don't have refined tastes and they are able to eat a much wider variety of meat than humans so their tastebuds didn't evolve to say "this tastes a little off, must be poison", so they'll eat almost anything.

Housecats might be a bit pickier about fresh meant but if it's processed into food, again they're not going to care. And by the time the majority of pets are eating lab grown food, who knows? Maybe the science will have advanced enough that it's palatable to humans as well.

<comment><USER23> That would be an interesting way to fund and scale production capacity for that lab grown meat too. Some stuff is just hard to figure out until you try doing it at scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My dogs get human grade food. None of this 'maybe good enough for people' stuff. They get real meat and vegetables that are in a recognizable form. They also don't get table scraps. This means my dogs aren't eating dodgy Chinese proteins, and also aren't fat (you may have noticed but most of the food we eat here in the US is terrible for us).

<comment><USER25> My dogs eat only raw meat. Cooked meat can remove important nutrients like vitamin C from the meat that dogs rely on. I also supplement my dogs with 150 mg/day of magnesium glycinate. I shudder when I see these prematurely aging dogs at the park, thanks to neglectful owners only feeding them scraps.

<comment><USER26> Like most mammals, dogs are able to synthesize vitamin C.

Humans and guinea pigs lost the ability to mutations.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145266/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145266/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is exactly the type of debate that makes conservatives question climate change alarmism and shuts down the economic debate. The question should always be: to what extent is it cheaper and easier for humanity to reduce carbon emissions?

The motivation behind this research could be construed as: increasing your carbon footprint by owning a pet is immoral. This is crazy. It is not morally wrong to use the materials of the earth to improve human happiness. If you can afford pet food you should be able to have a pet. If your city can want a nature preserve, it should be able to have one.

Is anyone surprised that having another mammal in your home increases your carbon footprint? Should we restrict babies to one per family? Should we not use more of the earth's resources than we used as of 2017 years after the death of Christ? Is this all a political satire?

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a large part of the reason we went with rabbits for our house pets. That and the horrifying breeding situation going on with dogs right now.

<comment><USER29> Another cool and more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional pets are worms. I purchased a worm farm recently for our garden and I've fell in love with the little things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Article makes many implausible assumptions and the conclusion is too radical for at least the amount of effort thats been put into bringing this article together.

It's obvious that the author hates dogs and cats and thus wants to reduce their numbers. Ad hominem might have been your best friend right here - <USER2> conclusion is agenda-based and doesnt follow directly from the paper, so either ignore it or make it so that Osin never has access to any publishing facility ever again. And dont forget to wash your hands after reading his research.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's a documentary on Netflix called _Pet Fooled_ [1] which covers how dogs and cats, are fed now and the effects a modern, processed diet can have on them.

I've watched it, enjoyed it, and felt I learned from it. I don't necessarily endorse its conclusions, but anyone reading this who has pets may enjoy it.

[1]: [https://www.netflix.com/title/80164393](https://www.netflix.com/title/80164393)

</comment><comment><USER32> "Americans are the largest pet owners in the world"

-1 No need to bring Americans' weight into it!

</comment><comment><USER33> the crap that is put into the most of the dog/cat food may be 30% by weight, yet it isn't a 30% of "all meat products" \- because it isn't "meat product", it is "by product" like hoofs, beaks, bones, some internal organs nonconsumable by humans , etc... which at best would be processed into chicken/cattle food (and which doesn't make for good chicken/cattle food) or would be just thrown away.

</comment><comment><USER34> Right. The 30% that humans don't want to eat.

</comment><comment><USER35> So the big question is, why do some many keep dogs? Is it mostly loneliness? If so, should we build towns that makes people less lonely?

<comment> aaron-lebo Dogs are great companions, they've been bred to be that way for thousands of years, they're not going to be engineered away.

<comment><USER36> That's a primarily Western concept. In India, dogs are usually raised mostly as guard dogs and pet dogs are a recent "western-imported" concept. In the Middle East, dogs are considered unclean and haraam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In my view, we produce enough food, that it would be considered toxic if we were forced to consume all of it. Any identifiable chemical in our food, that caused as much disease as the food itself causes, would be banned. To find consumers for the food that we do produce, it has to be formulated by scientists and psychologists to override our natural satiety responses. Some of the surplus has to be converted into fuel and burned, at an overall net energy cost.

So, in this perspective, subsidizing corn farming and drilling for natural gas, to feed cattle, in order to maintain dogs, doesn't seem any more absurd than the food system in general.</comment>