Could Get Millions to Turn Factory into Condos, Is Not Selling - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/nyregion/etna-tool-die-noho-real-estate.html <comment><USER2> But she is going to rent it out, eventually.

        > The shop closed two years ago. Since her father died,
        > the factory space is Ms. Galuppo's to use as she wishes,
        > but she is not rushing to rent it out. Before seeking a
        > new commercial tenant, she wants to find the right way
        > to dispose of all the old equipment, file cabinets and
        > other workplace detritus.

This person just wants to move on her own timeline. That's perfectly fine. The family must be pretty flush to be able to do that however.

What would be bad is allowing the space to disintegrate like what happens in many other cities.

<comment><USER3> Plus is not like Manhattan land is going to drop in value any time soon. That's like money in the bank...unless NY decides to make them a landmark site.

For all we know they are seeking partners by saying we don't want to sell. This article was probably pitched

<comment><USER4> The land prices in Manhattan have cooled down somewhat in the last couple of years. They are now at the 2015 level ([https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/new-york-city- land-p...](https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/new-york-city-land- prices/)), so actually down a bit if counting inflation.

<comment><USER5> Do the percent fluctuations really matter if the final amount is still an absurd amount to the seller?

<comment><USER6> Yes by waiting a few years the money will double.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 'Mr. Familia, now the super of 42-44 Bond, uses the shop for maintenance work. Mr. Liang simply likes to come by. "This is my second home," he said after a cup of tea at his desk. As for what he does now at the shop, Mr. Liang explained, "I take a look at machines."'

This reminds me of the Anthony Bourdain visit to the Congo. They visit a defunct train station, which even after twenty years has a small band of people coming in every day, trying to keep the trains and machines in good repair, waiting for when there's sufficient government to restart the service. People love their machines...

<comment><USER8> > People love their machines...

They do - and HN readers who manage technical people should remember it. Break that bond and detachment will ensue. For example, if you are scaling up and getting rid of snowflake servers with cute names and personal history, consider giving the admins something else to bond with.

<comment><USER9> It reminds me of how more than one watch company was able to restart its mechanical watch manufacturing after employees secretly preserved old equipment in their home or in long-forgotten attics and storerooms.

<comment><USER10> Would you have an article or the name of the company. It seems like it could be a good read!

<comment><USER9> One case is with Zenith and an employee Charles Vermot. [https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/charles-vermot-the-man- who...](https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/charles-vermot-the-man-who-saved- the-el-primero-and-possibly-zenith)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if she will ever end up regretting it? I feel like I've heard so many stories about people trying to hold on to stuff like this, but then either the government or other rich entities use the law and sketchy tactics to end up getting the building in the long run, by those other means. And then the person basically gets what they were trying to save stolen, and just regretting that they tried to hold on for a battle they would never win. They end up just losing out on making money from it instead of going down fighting and getting nothing. This may also be my cynical way of looking at it, though.

<comment><USER12> What "sketchy tactics" are you referring to? Aside from an eminent domain seizure -- and these are quite rare -- there really isn't anything they can do to just "get" your building.

<comment><USER13> OR they can raise property taxes or your appraisal to the point where the taxes aren't affordable. Then you have to sell on your terms to prevent a forced tax lien sell.

<comment><USER14> Appraisals aren't based on the theoretical value of a land at its most profitable use. They're based on the estimated market value of the land based on its _current_ use.

<comment><USER15> They are based on the current _condition_ , including current constraints on use (zoning, etc.) That isn't restricted to current use (if alternative use was worth more even given current condition, such that the highest paying offer were it sold would be a buyer planning to switch uses, that would be reflected in appraisal.)

<comment><USER14> It turns out we're both wrong at least with respect to the way NY appraises property. [https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/property/learn/howassess.htm](https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/property/learn/howassess.htm)

(This is very different from how CA appraises property, and doesn't take into account how counties appraise tangible business property.)

<comment><USER15> What I said is exactly a consequence of the market method (the first assessment method listed.)

<comment><USER14> Which applies to residential properties in NY, not industrial/commercial properties, which have a "comparable use" method most similar to what I originally said.

<comment><USER15> The page linked indicates neither that the market approach is used only for residential properties nor that a comparable use method is used for industrial/commercial properties (in fact, it explicitly says that a cost based approach is used for _some_ industrial properties.)

The closest thing to a comparable use method listed on the page is a rental- based method, for which the example given is residential.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but your claim is certainly not supported by the only authority cited in the thread.

<comment><USER14> Well, I am saying you are wrong, and quite specifically saying that the authority cited earlier says that the Cost Method (#2) based on comparable uses is used for industrial sites.

The Cost Method entails: \- assessor calculates the cost to replace a structure with a similar one using today's labor and material prices \- subtract depreciation \- add the market value of the land \- used to value industrial, special purpose and utility properties

This is not a rental-based method. #3 (Income-based) is a rental-based method, and is used for residential and commercial non-industrial (i.e., retail or office) sites.

The property mentioned in the NYT article is currently an industrial site and would be governed by method #2: replacing the current factory with a similar facility (i.e., comparable use) based on today's costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sometimes I just have to laugh / cringe reading HN.

The detailed analysis of how this woman who wants to hold on to a piece of sentimental property is actually mistaken, is destroying the neighborhood, is willfully naive for not exploiting her position to make as much money as possible, etc, etc is predictable but tiring.

Fears about about "cash being the sole nexus between human beings" seem pretty realized on HN. It's as if no one - or at the very least the VC crowd - accepts that anyone could be doing anything _other_ than living their life in pursuit of profit.

And if they are, they're ignorant, naive - even selfish - for not aligning their intent with a profit motive.

<comment><USER17> I feel like profits need a re-branding campaign. It's so easy to paint them as a negative, and even the most vocal capitalists will shrug and suggest they're something neutral.

Profits are a signal, and a powerful one at that. Outside of rent seeking, which I regard as fairly rare, profits signal that an entrepreneur is delivering value in excess of the costs to produce the value. Spread out over the size of a community, region, or nation, that's like magic!

Furthermore, they're not cold and unemotional, as is suggested here. Value almost always has an emotional component. The profitable condos that people want to build aren't going to be inhabited by automatons. They'll be inhabited by people - people who will date, get married, have children, people that will graduate from high school and college, people that will march in parades, protest in political movements, enjoy and create culture. To look at the value that companies want to create in this space like a shameless cash grabs ignores the very humanity that assigns that value in the first place.

Profits are not evil. They're a signal of efficient production of value, and value implies a benefit for humanity.

<comment><USER18> I feel like sweatshops need a re-branding campaign. It's so easy to paint them as a negative, and even the most vocal capitalists will shrug and suggest they're something neutral. Sweatshops are a tool, and a powerful one at that. As opposed to outright slavery, which I regard as fairly rare, sweatshops are used by entrepreneurs to deliver value in excess of the costs to produce the value. Spread out over the size of a community, region, or nation, that's like magic!

Furthermore, they're not cold and unemotional, as is suggested here. Value almost always has an emotional component. The profitable clothes that sweatshops produce aren't going to be worn by automatons. They'll be worn by people - people who will date, get married, have children, people that will graduate from high school and college, people that will march in parades, protest in political movements, enjoy and create culture. To look at the value that companies want to create in sweatshops like a shameless cash grab ignores the very humanity that assigns that value in the first place.

Sweatshops are not evil. They're a tool for efficient production of value, and value implies a benefit for humanity.

<comment><USER19> Yup!

Sweatshop (n.) Factory located in a country whose peasant farmers are so poor that I'd rather not think about them, and serving an export market.

<comment><USER20> People who work in sweatshops do so because the alternatives are worse. The sweatshops tend to disappear as the surrounding economy gets more prosperous, and people have more choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For some people money isn't that important or the end all of everything. So we get articles like this with "shocking" behaviors of people who "could be rich but don't do X." It's an interesting commentary on our society.

<comment><USER22> When you have too many people living in the past, you get the mess San Francisco is in with NIMBYs blocking market rate housing projects, declaring rundown laundromats as "historical landmarks" and fights over shadows.

<comment><USER23> Lol did they really declare a laundromat a landmark? I swear the tactics that certain people will do to get their way....

<comment><USER24> No, they didn't, after years of legal battles the plans to build on that site were finally approved. [https://hoodline.com/2018/09/plans-for-8-story- mission-devel...](https://hoodline.com/2018/09/plans-for-8-story-mission- development-move-forward-after-laundromat-s-appeal-defeated)

<comment><USER25> Both the laundromat and the new building they want to construct are pretty numb. When I look at the architecture of the early-to-mid 20th century I can't help but feel we've lost a lot.

These days economic architecture reigns, and probably for good reason. It's no longer affordable to have ornate brick-work or any kind of embellishment. Interiors are functional and efficient, we've done away with unnecessary mouldings and again dispensed with ornate detail in general.

I wonder how the economics of the property market used to bear the additional cost of all that extra work? Were people just more proud of what they made, or was labour just so incredibly cheap that making a building beautiful made little difference to the bottom line?

<comment><USER26> I think physical presence was more important to a company's "brand" in the past. Those were marketing dollars that are now spent on website theming / sophisticated animations / well-polished apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So hundreds of people who could live in those condos will instead have to commute from further out, or pay more for an alternative apartment, or not be able to pursue their New York dreams at all. Why is that something we romanticise?

<comment><USER28> So she should be forced to abandon a working factory for someone else so use the space? Is your house bigger than you _absolutely_ need? Do you have a garden? Would you like to be forced to give it up so multiple smaller living units could be built?

It is hers, she can choose to maintain it for its current use if she wishes, unless it is causing harm. There is a grey area here with derelict sites, as that is a waste of space and often they can be dangerous, but that does not appear to be the case here.

<comment><USER27> FWIW it sounds like it's not even a working factory any more.

A rich person has every right to burn a pile of money or spend it on some extravagant luxury, but we still consider it distasteful when they do. Particularly when that pile of money is unearned, which seems to be the case here - it's only an accident of birth, and an accident of factory location, that means the factory is now on such valuable land.

In my ideal world there would be a land value tax so that people paid a fair rate to the rest of society for the land they were taking up, rather than the lottery of buying land once and owning it forever.

<comment><USER28> _> FWIW it sounds like it's not even a working factory any more._

In that case it falls into the derelict site grey area and genuinely wasteful, not providing any real worth even to the current owner's whims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > In contrast to these cool glass and granite residences, 42-44 Bond is a > tawny brick loft building. Its arched windows represent a classic feature of > the late 19th century Renaissance Revival style. Some would say it could use > an update.

I think it looks great, but could use a clean-up instead of an update.

[https://email@example.com,-73.9929773,3a,60y,19...](https://email@example.com,-73.9929773,3a,60y,19.29h,114.45t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sKnRw28QoxxlFx1KSjBrtlw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)

<comment><USER30> Agreed! I wish it were still possible to build buildings that looked like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, and here I was thinking that this headline format was finally dead.

</comment><comment><USER32> Reading the article about what is inside...

Why not turn the whole thing into a museum? So people in the future, in the age of 3D printers, will know how things were made before them...

<comment><USER33> Because running a museum requires a constant input of money and there are already many measuems that house manufacturing equipment.

She's probably contacted museums already and they've probably either told her that none of the equipment she has is of historical significance or that they'd love it but they don't really have a budget for acquiring stuff. There is somewhat of a surplus of old machine shop (basically what this business was) equipment. People retire, sell most of their stuff to other shops or individuals and keep a few of their most versatile machines for themselves (and their kids then sell or scrap them). Stuff doesn't usually get scrapped until it's a) totally clapped out or b) inherited by someone wealthy enough that they're not gonna bother selling old machines for a grand or two and would rather just call a scrapper to clean everything out. Also, the larger size machines that most production shops like this aren't worth much because the market is basically limited to other shops and a few industrious individuals and other shops already have equipment (and if they don't they're rarely buying old stuff).

<comment><USER34> Do industrial themed apartments, have a mini museum up front with a couple of the cooler machines and measuring tools. If she needs to keep machining to satisfy her fathers wishes save a couple 1000 sq/ft and buy a few modern CNC machines that can do the job of the existing antiques.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Old factories are a charming feature of many New England towns as well. I used to work out of a converted factory office in my hometown. Every few years the owners of the property say that they're going to redevelop it into housing, but they haven't yet. If you're interested in checking out the inside of one, the Noble and Cooley drum factory[1] in Granville Massachusetts offers tours.

1: [http://www.ncchp.org/](http://www.ncchp.org/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like she is planning on renting to a commercial tenant.

<comment><USER37> She should. It's probably not against her father's will to use (part of) it for good purposes. As said above, it would turn into costly ruins otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> When Anchor Steam Beer sold to Sapporo during the beer slump they were good enough to look after their landmark Potrero Hill brewery building to make sure it wasn't converted into yet more San Francisco yuppie hutches. [https://www.brewbound.com/news/keith-greggor-explains- sold-a...](https://www.brewbound.com/news/keith-greggor-explains-sold-anchor- brewing-company). 'San Francisco's commercial real estate has been on fire for years, and we have been in Potrero Hill since the late 1970s. The property is worth a lot of money. Their goal is to preserve Potrero Hill and enhance it. They think it is a jewel within the brewing industry. It was not an option for us to have someone buy the brewery, stick it in the desert and then turn the building into condos. That would have destroyed Anchor's legacy.' The Japanese seem to take US heritage more seriously than the locals...

</comment><comment><USER39> She can get millions without selling. She could walk into any bank and get a $10M line of credit the same day from this property. This could be arranged in 24 hours or less.

</comment><comment><USER40> I had to laugh when I saw the Bridgeport mill in Manhattan. One of the craziest things I've ever seen is Autodesk's facility on a pier in SF ([https://www.autodesk.com/pier-9](https://www.autodesk.com/pier-9)). They have a room with floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall glass looking onto the bay bridge with an absolutely clean Bridgeport mill. That says "$$$" like nothing else.

<comment><USER25> Fill me in, why is a Bridgeport mill in Manhattan amusing? Honest question - all I know is it's a piece of nice looking machinery.

<comment><USER40> because nearly all heavy industry has moved out of manhattan. maybe amusing is not the right word- there is no english word for the feeling of nostalgia you get when looking at an incongruous historical artifact of high quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Lease it?

Also, modern building techniques could probably make it feasible to erect a high-rise that straddles the original factory without displacing it (maybe carve out a small area for an entrance/small lobby depending on how much of the lot the existing building takes up).

Though having to avoid damaging or obstructing an existing structure might make construction extra-challenging and add to the expense.

<comment><USER42> I thought people owned the first 500 feet of airspace above their property. Also that's a very expensive solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Perhaps TheShop.build, the successor to TechShop, might be interested. They want a NYC location. They can use those good Bridgeport mills.

<comment><USER44> How I wish they had a NYC location. I've been ruminating over a product a could really use this to make some parts. NYC resistor unfortunately is not equipped enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Really misleading headline. It will gentrify like everyone else, the factory has already been closed for two years! Jeeeez!

</comment><comment><USER46> And she'll get even more millions if she waits. She can also develop apartments, collect rent, and maintain ownership. And she can wait as long as she wants to do either.

EDIT: of course she needs to pay property taxes but that's her choice isn't it

<comment><USER47> > And she'll get even more millions if she waits.

Probably, but maybe not. 2008 happened; something like it could happen again.

<comment><USER46> I bought 15 houses in 2009. Still own them. Have collected more in rents than I paid for the houses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Was the title of this changed to remove pronouns? Bizarre choice.

</comment><comment><USER49> she will sell or lease it in 2 years

<comment><USER50> Lease, yeah. The article makes it pretty clear that she probably will lease it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is why we need a land value tax. If she wants to hold onto that property, she should have to pay out the nose.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you don't like NIMBYism, you certainly shouldn't be supporting this.

</comment><comment><USER53> If she really isn't in it for the money and wants to honor the building and area's working class history, she'd develop it into affordable/low income housing.

</comment><comment><USER54> I admire her perseverance and wanting to preserve blue collar work, but why not sell at a premium and then move to a more affordable area and improve her factory with the added capital, maybe expand (jobs and capacity) and modernize her tooling to produce even better tools?

<comment><USER55> The factory has been closed for two years according to the article. I wouldn't modernize that shop, bridgeports are workhorses. Tools like that aren't made anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> She should just ship the machines over to China as that country seems better able to appreciate the art of manufacturing.

<comment><USER56> Ha ha, downvotes! I'm no more enamored of my observation than are thou, but sometimes the truth stings.</comment></comment>


Rclone: rsync for cloud storage - <AUTHOR> http://rclone.org <comment><USER2> Looks really good. I am pleased more projects are adding Google Cloud Drive support now. What I really want to do is:

\- create documents on my Mac which autosync to Cloud Drive in encrypted format (this should tick that box)

\- be able to access said documents on any device including iOS, which transparently handles the encryption

The use case is I now scan all my documents into PDF format, but keeping them secure and accessing them on iOS seem to be almost mutually exclusive.

I looked at some other solutions for this which had their own iOS app and security mechanism (Boxcryptor mainly) and I didn't like it - I just didn't feel in control. And I got nervous about what happens if Boxcryptor goes under; I don't want to rely on them keeping their app up-to-date to read my documents.

I know Apple will never allow it but wouldn't it be nice to be able to mount your own network drive which all apps could access.

<comment><USER3> Apple's iCloud Drive has a decent web interface for the non-Apple subset of "any device", and otherwise seems to offer what you want. Curious if you had other reasons it doesn't meet your needs.

<comment><USER4> Apple either has or has realtime access to your encryption keys for iCloud Drive.

<comment><USER5> I thought Google Drive did as well, is that not the case?

<comment><USER6> No. Google Drive data is encrypted when being transferred, but not at rest.

My guess is that Google does not like encryption as it prevents de-duplication between users.

For end-to-end Google Drive encryption you'll an app like BoxCrypter or SyncDocs.

<comment><USER4> Based on what I have read about Google's internal services, I don't believe your assertion to be true.

<comment><USER7> The fact that Google can offer fulltext search of documents implies they cannot be encrypted, because Google can read them.

<comment><USER8> That depends on what you mean by encryption. The data can still be stored in encrypted files where Google has the key(s).

[https://cloud.google.com/security/encryption-at- rest/#encryp...](https://cloud.google.com/security/encryption-at- rest/#encryption_of_data_at_rest)

<comment><USER7> By some definition, accessing gmail over TLS counts as "in-flight encryption" too.

Encrypting when the organization has the keys is only effective when accessing the ciphertext is easier than accessing the key material.

I'd prefer a solution where Google could only store encrypted blobs with no access to my keys and all decryption happens on the client device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, it appears that binary diffs are not supported.

This is a really important aspect for many workflows dealing with large files (like TrueCrypt containers). Contrary to what is stated by the rclone developer [1], at least Dropbox supports binary diffs [2].

This should be looked into, at least for Dropbox.

[1] [http://rclone.org/faq/#why-doesn-t-rclone-support-partial- tr...](http://rclone.org/faq/#why-doesn-t-rclone-support-partial-transfers- binary-diffs-like-rsync)

[2] [https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/8](https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/8)

<comment><USER10> For the curious, the rsync algorithm is, at its core, ridiculously small[0] and involves rolling checksums. I just keep wondering why nobody (but Dropbox) bothers to implement it.

[0]: [https://github.com/lloeki/rsync/blob/master/rsync.py](https://github.com/lloeki/rsync/blob/master/rsync.py)

<comment><USER11> I believe gdrive allows you to store file properties:

[https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/properties](https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/properties)

I wonder if you could add hashes and checksums to files in this way? The trick would be adding the server-side app service manage these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW: tarsnap is also rsync for cloud storage and Colin (guy who founded and runs tarsnap) also has won a putnam award for his work in mathematics and crypto.

[http://www.tarsnap.com/](http://www.tarsnap.com/)

<comment><USER13> _> > Colin (guy who founded and runs tarsnap) also has won a putnam award for his work in mathematics and crypto._

Colin won the Putnam as an undergraduate student. The Putnam award is not a mathematics research award like the Fields Medal or the Abel Prize. It's a mathematics competition. As such, Colin didn't win the award for any particular work.

It's still quite impressive though. I would say Colin's work developing scrypt has more applicability to cryptography than his Putnam award.

<comment><USER12> Sorry you're entirely right. I just can't get over how unbelievably amazing this is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079)

One of the best comebacks in HN history.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the reference. Interesting to see Drew Houston popping in because he was just starting getdropbox.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This fills a real need for me. It does nearly everything I want.

Aside from the program itself, your documentation is really good, and special +1 for documenting the crypto thoroughly (and another +1 for using NaCl's building blocks in a safe way).

As a related point, I recently bought a Chromebook (still unopened), which pushes you heavily towards storing your files in Google Drive. It makes me uneasy to store certain things unencrypted, so I'll investigate writing a compatible implementation for ChromeOS.

</comment><comment><USER16> Rclone is great. I wrote an integration to use it with git-annex ([https://github.com/DanielDent/git-annex-remote- rclone](https://github.com/DanielDent/git-annex-remote-rclone)).

Some of the supported providers (e.g. Amazon Cloud Drive) have a reputation for days-long service outages. Some users of Amazon Cloud Drive have even reported files going missing on occasion.

But the great thing with git-annex is you can have your data on multiple clouds (in addition to being on your own equipment), so partial or complete loss of a cloud provider does not need to result in availability or durability issues.

<comment><USER17> Does the git-annex integration run over SSH ?

I'm trying to find a recipe for Rclone to connect to rsync.net since it won't work over the usual path (rsync over SSH) ... but we do support git-annex so ...

Rclone+gitannex, over SSH, to rsync.net ? Want a free account to try it ?

<comment><USER16> I'd be happy to give it a try. I suspect rclone is the wrong tool for the job, but I haven't looked closely at the rsync.net service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool program.

s3s3mirror [0] is another tool for copying data between S3 buckets or the local filesystem. full disclosure: I am the author.

At the time I wrote it, I only needed to work with AWS, and needed something very fast to copy huge amounts of data. It works like a champ, but I do think about what it would take to make it cloud-independent; it wouldn't be easy to maintain the performance that's for sure.

[0] [https://github.com/cobbzilla/s3s3mirror](https://github.com/cobbzilla/s3s3mirror)

<comment><USER19> For s3 and local filesystem, couldn't you also install aws-cli and do a sync b/w the 2 ? I do that for my stuff. Any reason you wrote this and not use aws- cli ?

<comment><USER18> from the readme:

"I started with "s3cmd sync" but found that with buckets containing many thousands of objects, it was incredibly slow to start and consumed massive amounts of memory. So I designed s3s3mirror to start copying immediately with an intelligently chosen "chunk size" and to operate in a highly-threaded, streaming fashion, so memory requirements are much lower.

Running with 100 threads, I found the gating factor to be how fast I could list items from the source bucket (!?!) Which makes me wonder if there is any way to do this faster. I'm sure there must be, but this is pretty damn fast."

<comment><USER20> This approach works well enough for relatively small amounts of objects. Once you start getting in to the millions (and significantly higher) then it begins to break down. Every "sync" operation has to start from scratch, comparing source and target (possibly through an index) on a file by file basis. There are definitely faster ways of doing it that scale to much larger object counts, but then they have their own drawbacks.

It's a shame the S3 Api doesn't let you order by modified date, or this would be trivial to do efficiently.

<comment><USER18> I'm curious if you can share how to synchronize N files without doing at least N comparisons.

the main innovations in s3s3mirror are (1) understanding this & going for massive parallelism to speed things up and (2) where possible, comparing etag/metadata instead of all bytes.

so far, it has scaled pretty well, i know of no faster tool to synchronize buckets with millions of objects.

<comment><USER20> Sorry, I should have perhaps put a disclaimer in my original comment. I work for a company called StorReduce and built our replication feature* (an intelligent, continuous "sync" effectively). We currently have a patent pending for our method, so I'm not sure if I can offer any real insight unfortunately.

I haven't looked at your project, but based on what you've said I agree the way you're doing it is conceptually as fast as it can be (massively parallel and leveraging metadata) whilst being a general purpose tool that "just works" and has no external dependencies or constraints.

* [http://storreduce.com/blog/replication/](http://storreduce.com/blog/replication/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How does this compare to duplicity ( [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) ) ?

<comment><USER22> rsclone operates like a limited rsync between different cloud providers (and local filesystem too), so either copy files or mirror two directories; duplicity does incremental backups.

<comment><USER23> I read in duplicity's man page that "In order to determine which files have been deleted, and to calculate diffs for changed files, duplicity needs to process information about previous sessions. It stores this information in the form of tarfiles where each entry's data contains the signature (as produced by rdiff) of the file instead of the file's contents."

Where are these tarfiles stored? The cloud?

BTW rclone checks size/timestamp and/or checksum to determine what to upload, the same way rsync does. So you don't have incremental "snapshots" the way duplicity does.

<comment><USER24> yes, and these tarfiles are in an entirely difficult format, have to be pruned, are the source of many mysterious bugs, and I've even had to write a "synthetic backup" script of my own to automatically turn a large list of "incremental" backups into a "full" backup every night. duplicity has been doing the thing I need but I spent weeks writing tools around it. Even though duplicity is written in Python, it invents a lot of its own Python installation idioms and also is not organized to provide a usable API, so scripting for it pretty much means you have to exec it.

"encrypted rsync to S3" is all I ever wanted in the first place so very much hoping this can replace it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks awesome. I've made several attempts at something that could write encrypted files with obfuscated file names to several backends but never ended up with something I was happy with.

I'll definitely give this a try.

Edit: One feature I would like would be to split files into n chunks to obfuscate the length of files (assuming it wasn't obvious which chunks go together to make up a file), so instead of a 1:1 relationship there was a 1:n for large files. I suspect this is a lot more work though...

<comment><USER26> You may be interested in CryFS: [https://www.cryfs.org/](https://www.cryfs.org/) \-- it splits files in order to obfuscate sizes and directory layout.

<comment><USER25> Thanks! I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks promising, but I'm not sure about the crypto-part. Can someone give some notes about the security of NaCl Secretbox using Poly1305 as authenticator and XSalsa20 for encryption?

Is it justified to assume that this is adequate crypto as long as the nonces are choosen correctly (= as random as possible) and the keysize is bigger than 128bit (rclone uses 256bit key derived from user password)?

Documentation of the crypto part can be found here: [http://rclone.org/crypt/](http://rclone.org/crypt/)

EDIT: added constraint regarding keysize.

<comment><USER28> > Can someone give some notes about the security of NaCl Secretbox using > Poly1305 as authenticator and XSalsa20 for encryption?

(Speaking as an unqualified outsider) Both Poly1305 and Salsa20 are creations of Daniel Bernstein / djb, who seems about as highly respected as you can be in the crypto community. And NaCl, the library they use that implements them (also by djb), is often highly recommended as a 'good' crypto library to use.

That said, it does go against the usual advice not to trust code from people who make their own encryption rather than using existing standards, but maybe this is the exception?

There was an article recently with some good commentary about how uneasy some people feel with how much of modern crypto being used in production is coming from relatively few people, including djb, but I can't seem to find it now...

Older column by Aaron Swartz on djb: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb)

Relevant tptacek comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705165) (no idea if this is still valid)

<comment><USER15> Great summary. The ' _don 't roll your own crypto_' argument is mostly just shorthand to ' _defer to the opinion of experts, use ready-made constructs when possible, and if not, then exercise caution when hooking crypto primitives together in unproven ways_ '. djb is without a doubt a crypto expert and his NaCl library provides sane defaults and good interfaces for implementing crypto in your application.

The other relevant tptacek post is 'Cryptographic Right Answers' [1], which suggests using the NaCl default for encrypting (ie. Secretbox [2][3]), so the rclone author is deferring entirely to NaCl for crypto, as it's recommended.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad](https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad)

[2] [https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox)

[3] [https://nacl.cr.yp.to/secretbox.html](https://nacl.cr.yp.to/secretbox.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Neat. I wrote my own hacky little Python app to upload to dropbox, but they recently broke that with changes to the dropbox python library. I hadn't bothered to fix it :)

I'll check this out instead - thanks for sharing OP.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you use Amazon Prime, you also get unlimited AWS cloud drive storage for photos. rclone works well backing up all your photos to Prime.

</comment><comment><USER17> Will this work with any remote host over SSH ? All of the example targets (S3, google cloud, etc.) are things that you _can 't_ rsync to.

That is, can you point it at rsync.net (or your own server that is only running ssh) ?

If the author is here, please email us (firstname.lastname@example.com) if you'd like a free account to test with.

<comment><USER31> > Will this work with any remote host over SSH ?

No. Quoting from notes.txt [0],

      Ideas

        * support
            * rsync over ssh

[0] [https://github.com/ncw/rclone/blob/master/notes.txt#L25](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/blob/master/notes.txt#L25)

<comment><USER17> Yes, I suppose rsync might be a good protocol for "rsync for cloud storage" to support.

That's a good feature request.

<comment><USER32> It exists to give you rsync to things that aren't rsync. If you want to rsync to things that are rsync, use rsync.

I don't understand the snark.

<comment><USER33> I think the parent meant to say that this could be an all-in-one solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone know if rclone preserves Linux File Permissions regardless of the cloud storage?

It's not in the feature list and my guess is that this would be hard to implement if you can't take assumptions of the underlying file system.

<comment><USER22> No, it doesn't. Only timestamps on files are preserved.

It could store that information as metadata, like it does with the timestamps; and then restore if supported by the destination file system when copying/syncing files back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure that syncing to cloud is really the best for most personal users, at least not anymore. If you have multiple devices and use SyncThing / etc to sync between them, you're protected against device loss and damage without having to put your personal files on a server controlled by someone other than yourself.

I was about to install it anyway, but I saw that it doesn't have bi- directional sync. If 3 people at work shared a google drive folder and they all tried to sync to it, it sounds like whoever synced last would always win and it could potentially delete / alter some file.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have this running on a Raspberry Pi and it's working 24/7, uploading media files from my NAS to my Amazon Cloud Drive.

I use Kodi on a separate pi to stream the content from Amazon, thereby freeing up space on my NAS.

<comment><USER36> Which Kodi add-on do you use to play content from Amazon Cloud Drive?

<comment><USER35> This guy has 2 plugins - you need to download the test/beta one - it supports ACD. The others support the other cloud services except ACD.

[https://github.com/ddurdle/Amazon-Cloud-Drive-for- KODI](https://github.com/ddurdle/Amazon-Cloud-Drive-for-KODI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone else work mainly with Linux but use Google Drive?

95% of stuff I work with is Linux but that last 5% is done in Windows for work. I use Google Drive but the lack of syncing is really annoying. I also have a NAS that runs Linux that I would love to use to sync my GDrive/Amazon Drive to.

I've been brainstorming ideas including but not limiting to seeing if I could use W10 IOT for the RPi and install Drive on there (Pretty sure its impossible).

It boggles my mind there isn't a elegant solution to this that doesn't require me to pay for a service.

<comment><USER38> instead of thinking of a solution that is cross platform and works on your walled-garden devices, you want to bring a walled-garden solution to your other platforms?

<comment><USER37> Im open to anything but would prefer to integrate with what I have. Do you have an alternative?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Worth mentioning Google Cloud Platform supports copying/syncing buckets from S3.

[https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/770804483798421504](https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/770804483798421504) [https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/create-manage- tran...](https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/create-manage-transfer- console)

<comment><USER40> I'm considering using this google service to backup an s3 bucket to google cloud.

Does anyone have experience for how fast this transfers and is there any info about how efficient the service is in terms of API calls? With a bucket with millions of objects, needless extra calls to List or Get can really add up to a ton of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Has anyone had success with Amazon Drive? 60 USD for unlimited storage or just 12 USD unlimited storage using stenography is hard to beat. If it works better for backup than Backblaze or Crashplans terrible clients and horrid performance it would be a good alternative.

<comment><USER42> It works but it'll unpredictably throttle you if you utilize it too heavily (I'm talking writing at least hundreds of gigabytes).

If you don't abuse it it works great.

<comment><USER41> When you sell "Securely store all of your photos, videos, files and documents" in a world where drives holding multiple TB of files has been available for low prices for years, then using hundreds of GB certainly isn't abuse in my book.

Are we talking temporary throttling after having transferred hundreds of GB in a short time span (hours? days? do you know how fast they allow you to upload?) or throttling more or less forever once you store just hundredes of GB?

<comment><USER42> > Are we talking temporary throttling after having transferred hundreds of GB > in a short time span (hours? days? do you know how fast they allow you to > upload?) or throttling more or less forever once you store just hundredes of > GB?

The former, from the people I've heard who run into it. These people are generally uploading tens of terabytes however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have been using this successfully with Google Cloud Storage and our own internal Swift object store.

For the latter, it uploads much faster than the shell scripts I had been using, and it has similar utility as an "rsync for the cloud".

<comment><USER44> I'm looking at GCS syncing solutions right now - was there a specific point that made you choose this tool over gsutil's builtin rsync feature?

<comment><USER43> I was using rclone with Swift first, so it was a natural choice.

If I was only using GCS, I might default to a Google supplied utility, but I have not compared the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I genuinely don't understand the use case for this since, for example, Dropbox already just syncs the changes you make to a file and not the whole file, automatically and does so bidirectionally, which this tool does not. So, if anyone can help state more clearly what this is adding over and above the features that the various cloud storage vendors already provide I would benefit from the explanation.

<comment><USER15> Arguably the most distinguishing benefit is transparent en-/decryption of the contents of your sync-set, such that the cloud copy is always encrypted by your key that's only available at your endpoints --- this is unrelated to being encrypted with a vendor-controlled key.

EDIT: Also, most 'official' cloud drive clients place a folder into your homedir, like ~/Google Drive or ~/OneDrive or ~/Box Sync. Only files placed into these folders get synced up and down. This client allows arbitrary local paths to be synced up or down.

<comment><USER45> Thanks for the comment and the edit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It would be interesting to set this up on FreeNAS. Developers should look into providing this as a plugin to FreeNAS users.

<comment><USER47> I second that as well. The plugin/jail system in FreeNAS 9 is pretty terrible though. Hopefully the Docker system in FreeNAS 10 will make it easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have used it with a cheap VPS (Ovh. I will test it soon with Scaleway) and it worked fine transferring data between Google Drive and Amazon drive. ;) ps: I did not tested it with encrypted files as it is a few weeks ago option. pps: see also reddit datahoader board for examples. ;)

<comment><USER49> Have you played with Online's bucket service, C14 [0]? They seem to have the lowest pricing on the market.

[0] [https://www.online.net/fr/c14](https://www.online.net/fr/c14)

<comment><USER50> While not priced per GB used, hubic.com is the cheapest storage I know at 50€ per year for 10TB in the biggest package. Uses the Openstack Swift API.

Edit: "unlimited" Services are even cheaper on paper of course, but i don't really trust those.

<comment><USER48> Hubic by OVH has problems right now see their official message in their Hubic board. ps:never tried c14

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Does rclone support multi-threaded/multi-processing in a similar way to how gsutil support it via the -m option? As a clarification I'm referring to an equivalent to "gsutil -m rsync ..."

I haven't been able to find anything in the documentation mentioning this

</comment><comment><USER52> I know it. :) I use i to off-site my asymmetrically encrypted backup (created with [https://github.com/dpc/rdedup](https://github.com/dpc/rdedup) ) to Backblaze B2 .

</comment><comment><USER53> Will this work with two different s3 buckets (2 different regions)?

<comment><USER54> I believe they address this in the FAQ:

[http://rclone.org/faq/](http://rclone.org/faq/)

<comment><USER53> Sorry. I couldn't find. Since it effectively downloads the file and uploads again i guess it should work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Been backing my music up to Google Drive with this in a cronjob for past year.

Works a treat.... highly reccomended!

<comment><USER56> Does uploading music to Google Drive work as an ingress point for Play Music (and it's 50k free song storage)?

Their uploader is... something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I use this to regularly back up to Google Drive, once you link it up, it's seamless!

</comment><comment><USER58> use this in production since one year, installed on a synology nas to backup on ovh storage. please get the github version as the download on the website is quite different

<comment><USER31> > please get the github version as the download on the website is quite > different

Both the website and github seem to feature the same release (v1.33 as of now):

[http://rclone.org/downloads/](http://rclone.org/downloads/)

[https://github.com/ncw/rclone/releases/latest](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/releases/latest)

<comment><USER58> glad to know, as I used for a long time a really limited version :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER60> No softlayer?

</comment><comment><USER61> Another thumbs-up. I've been using it to mirror to Amazon Cloud Photos (now called Amazon Drive I think) and it's rock solid.</comment>


Why free speech matters on campus - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-speech-matters-on-campus-1463093280 <comment><USER2> Archive link that doesn't require sign-in: [http://archive.is/XxkBv](http://archive.is/XxkBv)

It's interesting that the article only talks about the threat to free speech on campuses by "safe spaces" and completely ignores the ongoing censorship of students/faculty members that are critical of Israel: [https://theintercept.com/2016/02/16/greatest-threat-to- free-...](https://theintercept.com/2016/02/16/greatest-threat-to-free-speech- in-the-west-criminalizing-activism-against-israeli-occupation/) (third section talks about campuses)</comment>


The AOL Time-Warner merger 20 years later - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aol-time-warner-merger-20-years-later-randall-boe <comment><USER2> tl;dr Randal Roe, a lawyer who helped define the merger for AOL's side. This is predominantly a comparison of internet (companies) then and now, with some emotional color of the deal itself. He does, though, outline why he thinks AOL initiated and regretted the merger: it hoped to improve advertising of aquired content through the aquired streams, but found it had bought a conglomerate rather than a unified Company. Pretty quick to read: 6 paragraphs.</comment>


WeAreData - London - <AUTHOR> http://wearedata.watchdogs.com/start.php?locale=en-EN&city=london <comment><USER2> Amazing visualization. I just checked my area near Shoreditch High Street and I learned things I never knew. The CCTV is especially interesting.

It would be great to mix in average rental prices, hashtag clouds, or crimes from the police site as they are happening.

<comment><USER3> Here's an API of UK property rental (and sales) prices as well as actual properties

[http://www.nestoria.co.uk/help/api](http://www.nestoria.co.uk/help/api)

enjoy

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a brilliant marketing method for this game. I don't think it could have been more perfectly timed (in history).

<comment><USER5> If only Ubisoft didn't have a major password theft scandal on their hands losing unencrypted passwords.

<comment><USER6> Uh, what? They were hashed and salted, from everywhere I've read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would love to see them do Chicago as it's the "setting"[1] for the game and the city has great data sharing[2].

1\. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYgXvgS6Ww](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYgXvgS6Ww) 2\. [https://data.cityofchicago.org/](https://data.cityofchicago.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Fascinating. I find it especially interesting to see the results of gentrification. As someone who watched a million Nathan Barleys take over Shoreditch in the mid to late 00's until the artists left, it is absolutely amazing to see the average salary of Tower Hamlets is now £3400.

Where did all those poor people go?

<comment><USER9> I left when they turned up as well and I'm no artist. There was a reasonable tech community around there before it went all trendy as most of us found it pretty cheap and convenient whilst raping the corporations around E1/Docklands as hard as we could on contract work (TBH they deserved it :)

Poor people are still there, stacked up on top of each other in the estates around the top of City Road and around the focal point of Shoreditch.

It's still like Islington (where I was born into abject poverty without even the prospect of an orange lined fluffy anorak or dunlops) in the 1970's around the back of Shoreditch. Total deprivation, but people are getting by somehow, without an iPhone or a power-job. Good luck to them but fuck the hipsters to hell.

<comment><USER10> _...the hipsters to hell._

Back in ~2009, living on the southern periphery in Whitechapel, we came up with the idea to call 'em _ditchies_.

There's a decent old-school pub left with some serious artists (aged and incoming) directly opposite the East London Mosque. It's run by an alcoholic former schoolteacher who reckoned it was better public service running a bar (apparently, for artists). Good place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can imagine a similar thing with a lot more data sources and reliable data to be very impressive and scary at the same time.

If you had access also to phone data, with position etc. it would be the ultimate stalking tool...

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, I just get a black screen (Chrome, Ubuntu). Any idea what might be missing?

<comment><USER13> Its running on Flash.

<comment><USER14> It is? Does the flash based experience differ from the version I'm seeing on my iPad?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is quite nifty. I'm not usually into games or gorilla marketing but I'm going to keep an eye out for this.

<comment><USER16> Guerilla marketing ;).

"Gorilla marketing" certainly conjures up a nice image though.

I personally like it more than normal marketing simply for variety: it forces marketers to be more creative and to try new things, which is never a bad thing. Certainly better than their standard approach of shoving their logo into my face enough times to imprint it into my brain.

<comment><USER15> Haha - whoops!

<comment><USER17> Kind of prefer Gorilla to Guerrilla :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What a great way to visualize data from many sources at once. (Is it only me or does the number of public toilets seem way too low for the population?)

<comment><USER19> It's missing a lot of public toilets and, in any event, McDonalds toilets are free and all over the place :-)

<comment><USER18> Good point ... perhaps the marked public toilets are those maintained by the government?

<comment><USER20> McDonald's toilets aren't "public", you're supposed to cough up for a cheeseburger. It's just that nobody checks.

<comment><USER21> I did once visit a McDonalds in Romania where they required a pin number to enter the toilets, that was given out with purchases. However, standing by the door and waiting for someone to walk out worked quite well too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Shame about the dark and dingy colour scheme...</comment>


Accelerating DevOps with GitHub and Azure - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/accelerating-devops-with-github-and-azure/ <comment><AUTHOR> Key points:

\- GitHub support for Azure Active Directory \- Sign in to Azure and Azure DevOps with your GitHub account (this is a nice way to win over those without a Microsoft account) \- Pipelines integration with Kubernetes

Also:

\- Simplified licensing model \- YAML-defined CI/CD (Azure DevOps has actually had this for a while now, so not sure why it's getting "announced" here)</comment>


How to Set Up a Windows 10 Machine for Linux Development with WSL - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0PPcUUtHlw&feature=emb_title <comment><AUTHOR> Watch Scott Hanselman helping out a guy setting up a Windows/WSL/VsCode development environment. During the process they go through a lot of subtle things related to Windows, terminal, WSL and vscode. Quite impressing.</comment>


Systemd for Administrators – Container Integration - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.net/blog/systemd-for-administrators-part-xxi.html

<comment><USER2> This sort of thing is why containers without a full OS underneath are probably the wave of the future. You don't need, or want, 95% of the stuff that typically runs in the background on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is systemd now able to work within user namespaces?

</comment><comment><USER4> Solaris introduced zones (like containers in linux world) like in 2003. zonectl, zonecfg, etc are some tools used in the solaris world to manage themm.

<comment><USER5> Silimarly, FreeBSD has had 'jails' for a _long_ time as well, and NetBSD has more recently come out with 'rump kernels' to fill the minimal OS role.

<comment><USER6> Rump kernels are something quite different from containers or jails. They provide just enough of the kernel interface to a kernel device or filesystem driver to allow that driver to be linked in with other code to form a user- space process. If this sounds a lot like FUSE to you, you're onto something: NetBSD's user-space filesystem layer, puffs, is based on rump architecture, and there are at least two FUSE API wrappers for puffs.

Where it gets interesting is when application code is linked together with all the rump kernel code the application needs, forming a unikernel. See Antti Kantee, "An Internet-Ready OS From Scratch in a Week", [http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/an_internet_ready_os_from](http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/an_internet_ready_os_from)</comment></comment></comment>


Options for Saving Yahoo Groups Content - <AUTHOR> https://researchbuzz.me/2019/10/17/your-options-for-saving-yahoo-groups-content/ <comment><USER2> I wrote up some instructions on using YahooGroups-Archiver and dealing with the kinds of failures I've seen with it: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/archiving- yahoo-groups](https://www.jefftk.com/p/archiving-yahoo-groups)

<comment><USER3> > They're not that wasy to read, because it doesn't do any kind of quote > folding, but we can always do that later.

I can create an endpoint to bulk import/process content to FWD:Everyone if there is enough interest. It's sort of the opposite of an archival product, where it's designed to aggressively reformat content to improve readability.

E.g. here is a comparison between a thread in Gmail and a thread that's been formatted with our tech:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAXsHiqQm1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAXsHiqQm1E)

[https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/Imac8ycyQe26vDZd8pEkMg](https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/Imac8ycyQe26vDZd8pEkMg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> looks like the Archive Team is on it: [https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups](https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups)

<comment><USER5> I had experience working with ArchiveTeam on the G+ shutdown.

1\. They're _AMAZING_.

2\. They're _not_ superhuman.

3\. Major archival projects take time to prepare, set up, and execute.

4\. Only public content is even potentially accessible. Much can get lost.

AT did a stellar job with G+, it's still a far cry from the access that was provided when Google hosted the content.

 _Google actively and by all appearances deliberately thwarted and frustrated archival efforts._ This was a tremendous disappointment. It's quite likely Yahoo will do similarly.

If you want _your own_ control over archives, you're going to want to use / run tools directly yourself.

TL;DR: AT is a huge benefit, but it's not a total solution.

<comment><USER6> Just a question regarding comment format

Shouldn't the _TL;DR:_ message be at the top of the comment, thereby not having to read the entire comment (since its too long :-)) to get the summary statement

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the one I've been using to good effect: [https://github.com/IgnoredAmbience/yahoo-group- archiver](https://github.com/IgnoredAmbience/yahoo-group-archiver)

no Mongo database required, just plain old .eml files

You do need to pull some cookie values out for the authentication to work, and the Readme is pretty sparse, but it does work.

<comment><USER8> _oops, edit_ , Actually, I used this one: [https://github.com/philpem/yahoo- group-archiver](https://github.com/philpem/yahoo-group-archiver)

Yup. I've used this one successfully with messages, message attachments, files, and photos. It works.

That said, on yahoo's side, lots of message attachments the message meta-data claim exists don't actually exist anymore because yahoo has lost or deleted them. Same with some of the photos. But _all_ the messages and _all_ the files are always there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm about seven months out of having gone through a similar process with Google+. What I'd contributed specifically was in trying to create some structure and process for people and organisations hoping to migrate _both_ content _and_ communities from G+. Success was mixed, but it was, I think, better for what we'd managed to do.

A large part of that was setting up informational resources with an eye for future migrations to use, learn from, and adapt these. In particular:

[https://social.antefriguserat.de](https://social.antefriguserat.de) is a wiki focused (principally) on the G+ migration, but with some generalisable principles. Please feel welcome to visit and add to it. (I'm the principle editor/admin.)

One of the huge wins we had was a third-party end-user tool for data export. I'm checking to see if there's a similar Yahoo Groups product.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus](https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus) is the "Google Plus Exodus" but wink-wink "public liberation exodus" subreddit for discussion. I've already posted several items on the Yahoo Groups shutdown. Again, for an out-of-band regrouping channel, it's an option for Yahoo Groups users.

I also need to follow up with EFF and some other groups I'd talked to briefly about the issue of migration off public web services.

</comment><comment><USER9> A number of years ago, I downloaded several Groups I cared about using something like PG Offline (though I don't remember if that's exactly what I used) that gave me an sqlite file. I ended up converting it into MySQL and building a terrible viewer "app" with PHP that just navigated up and down the messages.

I never totally understood what happened to some of my old Yahoo Groups though. Several disappeared completely, and some despite being completely inactive, persisted for years upon years.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the reasoning for _not_ working with the internet archive or similar organizations when shutting down a service like Yahoo Groups? It seems that it would be much more efficient to work with them on sharing a cleaned DB dump instead of having multiple groups put lots of unnecessary load on their servers.

Given that they need exporters for individual data anyhow to be GDPR compliant, it shouldn't be a huge project to tune them slightly.

<comment><USER4> the cynic in me says: why risk legal issues, however small they may or may not be, when doing literally nothing sidesteps that issue? if only 1 user thinks of suing you, legal gets involved, maybe even external attorneys. also, who will pay for possibly hundreds of man-hours of work cleaning up the data?

<comment><USER10> As for cleaning up the data: I don't think that's a large task. Whatever is published now has either been cleaned or is just as problematic from a legal standpoint (possibly more so because it's shared publicly, not shared with a contractually obligated third party).

You're probably right though regarding "not doing anything isn't doing something wrong". But still, saving lots of computing resources, get good PR and friendly news coverage, that has to be worth something.

<comment><USER11> To a first approximation, there's no PR or friendly news coverage. 99.999% of even the tech world doesn't care. Meanwhile, the effort involved is no one's day job. Someone is far more likely to hear "Why are you wasting your time on this?" than "attaboy!"

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the perspective, that makes sense to me. I tend to assume that having somebody work on stuff like that is a rounding error for even the smallest department at Yahoo, but as you point out everybody has to justify how they're spending their time to somebody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> is there a tool to migrate yahoo groups email conversations to GNU Mailman so that I can search old conversations?

<comment><USER13> Or maybe create a usenet newsgroup in the alt hierarchy and post the messages there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Serious: What are you guys saving?

<comment><USER15> [http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/concatenative/](http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/concatenative/)

... oh, it seems it's already gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We should require websites to freeze and archive public content instead of deleting it. We already require media published in nearly every other format to be submitted to Library of Congress, and we should extend those protections to our internet heritage.

<comment><USER11> >We already require media published in nearly every other format to be submitted to Library of Congress

No. We do not. Registering your copyright provides some advantages if you ever want to sue for copyright infringement. But there is absolutely no requirement to submit materials to the LoC.

<comment><USER16> [https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/index.html](https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/index.html)

> All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States > are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law

You own copyright over works whether you register them or not. To the best of my understanding that means that you are always required to deposit works when you publish them, whether or not you register your copyright. But IANAL, so I could be way off.

EDIT: Here's a real citation[0]

> What is the difference between mandatory deposit and copyright registration?

> ... Optional registration fulfills mandatory deposit requirements.

So you definitely are required to deposit a copy with LoC whenever you publish/distribute in the US

[0] [https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html](https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html)

<comment><USER11> Interesting. I've never heard of that.

So I stand corrected. (Sort of.) Apparently it's a very old provision. [1] It doesn't really make much sense in today's world. Read literally, almost anything you create--including online--must be sent to the LoC.

So, yes, it is a law on the books and maybe mainstream publishers comply with it. But But pretty much no one else does AFAIK.

[1] [http://articles.ibpa-online.org/article/need-know- copyright-...](http://articles.ibpa-online.org/article/need-know-copyright- mandatory-deposit/)

<comment><USER16> Not necessarily, because it can be debated whether posting something on the internet really counts as publishing, and whether most internet content is original enough to be eligible for protection. A good example of people who are probably violating this law would be webcomic artists.

But I do think the world would be a better place if we added new legislation to require platforms to submit archives of their public content. Perhaps LoC should also be funded to scrape the web to capture smaller sites.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paul's Fight for His Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.gofundme.com/ztmqc8

<comment><AUTHOR> I normally would not post an off topic, but the disease itself is amazing and so deadly, I am sure it could spark some discussion, especially about viral injections and such as new treatments. Paul is a great guy and even the smallest donation would uplift his spirits.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges with managing a remote-first career? - <AUTHOR> We all know the challenges of being a remote-first employee (communication, over-working, lack of work/life balance), but what are the biggest challenges with building/managing your career? <comment><USER2> One of the biggest challenges IMO is being able to articulate what work you are doing and what the impact was (yes, this is the same as in-office working). Conversations don't "just happen" remotely, you need to be diligent about creating your own buzz.

Whether that's making a few sentence Slack messages to your team company when you hit milestones, sending out quality email summaries along with a presentation you made, you need to be really deliberate.

</comment><comment><USER3> When people work in the office, their 'professional community' is mostly in the office. Switching to remote, people need to find an alternative community that they can be part of, learn & share that continues to support their career growth</comment>


Why are countries creating public random number generators? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/why-are-countries-creating-public-random-number-generators <comment><USER2> Bitcoin block hashes would be a decent source of randomness.

<comment><USER3> I think you mean "might be".

There's a passage on the subject in Knuth volume 2. Even Knuth needs to test and debug his code, no matter what how good he thought the results "would be". And his conclusion: Use a mathematical foundation for a PRNG, nothing else will do.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. The passage is from near the beginning of Volume 2 (Chapter 3), where he says how he came up with something that seemed like it should be "super random", tried it, and found that it was not. It ends with:

> The moral of this story is that random numbers should not be generated with > a method chosen at random. Some theory should be used.

and the rest of the chapter proceeds to give some relevant theory.</comment></comment></comment>


67 Signals hasn't changed a thing - <AUTHOR> http://67signals.com/ <comment><USER2> "Making simple software and charging heaps because we are hip and edgy..."

Every time I see things such as these I think: 20-something, doesn't understand money ($20/month seems "too much"), doesn't understand business, not much sense of humor either, mostly pissed about other being succesful...

The kind of people who write M$ with a dollar sign.

<comment><USER3> Why are you bragging about making a bunch of uninformed, knee-jerk assumptions about someone you know nothing about? And why is this trash the top comment? Whether or not $20/month is too much does not depend on whether you have $20 to spend or not, it depends on the value you get from that $20. Products with very little value, and which have $0 alternatives that provide more value are not worth $20.

<comment><USER2> > _Why are you bragging about making a bunch of uninformed, knee-jerk > assumptions about someone you know nothing about?_

You mean I'm in the bad making assumptions about a person making "a bunch of uninformed, knee-jerk assumptions" for other people in the form of a mean "parody" site?

Besides, who told you I "know nothing about" that person? I know what he wrote, and I know the tone he used. And I also have a pretty good sense of the kind of handle he'd use if he were to comment on HN.

> _And why is this trash the top comment?_

Because people agree and voted for it to be. It's social news site in case you don't know.

> _Whether or not $20 /month is too much does not depend on whether you have > $20 to spend or not, it depends on the value you get from that $20. Products > with very little value, and which have $0 alternatives that provide more > value are not worth $20._

The value of something doesn't depend on what you say, it depends on what the market is willing to pay for it. Since they have a 10+ year, multi-million business with millions of customers, based on charging what they charge, I'd say the argument is pretty much settled.

If it _feels_ like it ain't worth that much to you, you can use something else. I missed the part when using their service was mandatory. Or do you do parody sites for every "too expensive for me" product you find?

<comment><USER3> Why do you think responding to "you are making a bunch of uninformed assumptions" with more uninformed assumptions is productive? Protip: some of us saw this site when it was made 2 years ago. Some of us are even aware of the context of 37signals founders being abusive on twitter that the site was created in response to. That does not mean we are all the people who made the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is too mean and angry to be a good parody. This one is better: [http://friedisms.tumblr.com/page/4](http://friedisms.tumblr.com/page/4) (the one about monkeys is still my favorite).

<comment><USER5> Depends on your definition of parody. I think it fits Swiftian parody just fine.

<comment><USER2> Swiftian parody is not just mean. Actually, with some exceptions (like the "modest proposal"), it's not mean at all.

And, most important of all, to fit Swiftian parody it would have to be Swiftian-level good. This is subreddit level humor....

<comment><USER4> I was about to say the same thing, but I haven't read _A Modest Proposal_ since high school, so I poked around Wikipedia a bit and had lots of fun reading about the kinds of satire.

There's Juvenalian, which "addresses social evil through ridicule" and includes works like _1984_ , _American Psycho_ , _Family Guy_ , _A Modest Proposal_ , and, I guess, this 67signals thing.

Then there's Horatian, which "playfully criticizes some social vice through gentle, mild, and light-hearted humour" and is a lot of Twain, _The Simpsons_ , _Dr. Strangelove_ , and the Friedisms thing I linked to.

Hard to say what the social evil is that the folks who wrote 67signals say they're fighting against. Possibly success. Possibly some angry comments DHH made when a startup took their code: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/31/this-site- mocks-37-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/31/this-site- mocks-37-signals-after-it-attacked-a-yc-startup-for-stealing-code/)

(Anyway, apologies for the tangent--I went to a liberal arts school and there's a dusty corner of my brain that still likes this stuff.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your company has the stance of being opinionated and you have at least 3 instances of people investing the time to create an attempt at satire about you... you must have done _something_ right!

</comment><comment><USER7> That's not funny or educational or even interesting. It looks like jealousy or unfounded hate. I can't really think of anything 37signals has done to warrant this. They make good products and treat both their employees and customers well. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> >They make good products

Do they? That isn't my experience.

>treat […] their […] customers well

Do they? That isn't my experience.

<comment><USER2> Isn't it? You don't seem to previde any specifics.

Plus, whether it's your experience or not is irrelevant. The general consensus is that they do both. You won't find many people in the industry believing otherwise, not many unsatisfied customers in their forums.

<comment><USER3> >The general consensus is that they do both

Your claim is just as baseless as the one you are responding to, which was pointing out how baseless the original claim "they make good software" was.

>not many unsatisfied customers in their forums.

They heavily censor their forums. I know lots of former customers of theirs who were more than just unsatisfied with them.

<comment><USER2> > _Your claim is just as baseless as the one you are responding to, which was > pointing out how baseless the original claim "they make good software" was._

Judging from the fact that their service has good reviews in major media and millions of users, it doesn't sound anywhere near as baseless.

> _They heavily censor their forums._

Any examples? Surely those mythical people know how to save a screenshot, right?

<comment><USER3> >Judging from the fact that their service has good reviews in major media and millions of users

They have no reviews in major media. They have both good and bad reviews in minor media. The "millions of users" claim is not supported at all.

>Any examples? Surely those mythical people know how to save a screenshot, right?

Yes, I happen to collect screenshots of things that are well known every time anyone talks to me about anything just in case some random redditard wants proof that the sky is blue.

<comment><USER2> > _They have no reviews in major media. They have both good and bad reviews in > minor media._

Well, I don't think PC Magazine, for one, is a "minor media" in the IT industry. Or that being called "best" in your category is a "bad review".

> _The "millions of users" claim is not supported at all._

Supported by whom? You mean you don't believe the user numbers they give? Being able to support a 10+ year old company, with 40+ employess, expensive Chicago offices etc, I'd say the "millions of users" claim is just about right. Heck, just a product of Basecamp, Ruby of Rails has had millions of users. Oh, and this Jeff Bezos guy investing in them? I think he knows one thing or two, too.

> _random redditard_

OK, this is HN. You can now go back into the woodwork.

<comment><USER9> >>random redditard

>OK, this is HN.

I believe that was his/her point. I'm clearly not the first person to have noticed that your contributions are few and far between, with much garbage taking up that in between. Your posts would be welcomed on reddit, here they serve only to drag HN down.

<comment><USER2> Excuse me, I maintained a serious responce in this thread, against some immature kid defending a "satire" submission that wouldn't even have made even reddit. And which, besides dragging 37 Signals in the mud, with FUD and unsubstanciated claims, he also wents on to call people names.

You somehow think this is acceptable, but find my contributions "garbage"? Last time I checked, my "garbage" contribution was the top thread in this post, whereas the "satire" shouldn't even be posted in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Neither has 73 Prime Numbers. We believe our technology will stand the test of time. [http://73primenumbers.com/](http://73primenumbers.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This inspired me to check whether 69signals exists. Yes, it does, and amazingly it's not a porn site.

</comment><comment><USER12> Context for those that were as out of the loop as I was:

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/31/this-site- mocks-37-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/31/this-site- mocks-37-signals-after-it-attacked-a-yc-startup-for-stealing-code/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Embarrassingly dumb. Especially considering the fact that they changed their name today: [http://37signals.com/](http://37signals.com/).

<comment><USER14> It's dated nearly two years ago. What was that about "embarassingly dumb?"

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/31/this-site- mocks-37-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/31/this-site- mocks-37-signals-after-it-attacked-a-yc-startup-for-stealing-code/)

<comment><USER15> I personally think it was embarrassingly dumb _before_ the name change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the story behind the name '37signals'? I understand '42floors' since they are in real estate, but some of these names are just ridiculous.

<comment><USER17> ever have trouble recalling or typing either of those two?

basically they're branding two digits + a common word. why not.

Personally, I prefer to brand things that make slightly more sense, but to each their own. it works just as well as branding an "io" at the end of something.

it's just about repeating it a few times, until it can be recalled, and once it can it's quick to get to.

<comment><USER18> I forget what exact number it is all the time. "32 signals? 39 signals?"

<comment><USER17> fair enough. if you Google does Google get you the right one - obviously.

so it still works though. I wonder if they have a general trademark claim against thirtysomething-signals :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Speaking of 37signals. I am looking for a good PM and CRM software. Either a piece of software that does both, or two separate that integrate nicely. Any suggestions?

We are a Web company that handles projects including Web, Film, Photography and design.

We might be developing one in house if we can't find one that meets our needs.

<comment><USER20> Have you taken a look at ActiveCollab [0]? I have a friend who's in a similar space who swears by it... looking to get my environment to move to it as well.

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

<comment><USER19> This might be exactly what I'm looking for. looks really great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is hilarious people! I'm sure the founders are laughing. It's just good humor c'mon....

</comment><comment><USER22> Such edgy. Much satire. Wow.

<comment><USER23> Please, stop talking in memes.

<comment><USER24> U mad bro?

<comment><USER23> Not in the slightest :) Troll on, friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I liked the part where I closed the tab, thus saving my eyes and computer from more stupidity.

<comment><USER26> This comment was almost as funny as the site!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is awesome. I love the links.

<comment><USER28> I didn't even notice them until I read your comment.

That's pretty hilarious and I love the Trello link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Loved the "Clarity is kinfuhgjno"

</comment><comment><USER30> Some good humor here! Enjoyed it.</comment>


WeWork Shows How a Company with $1.8B in Revenue Can Lose $1.9B - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2019/03/25/how-can-a-company-with-1-8-billion-in-revenue-lose-1-9-billion-wework-shows-how/ <comment><USER2> Party like it's 1999, dude.</comment>


Potted plants do not improve indoor air quality - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0175-9 <comment><USER2> I don't have full access to the article, but it would seem as though the headline has been editorialized. CADR and air quality are not exactly the same thing, the latter being somewhat ill-defined.

A better title is probably "potted plants do not make good air filters", but I guess that doesn't sound as exciting.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the abstract, this is a meta study. It recognizes that potted plants do improve indoor air quality, but the amount is extremely insignificant. The paper notes that it rather see studies focus on other areas that indoor plants might be actually beneficial at like reducing VOCs and providing basic bio- filtration instead of cleaning air in general.

<comment><USER4> They do remove VOCs, but you basically need to be living in an indoor jungle with 10-1000 plants per square metre.

Back in the 80's I remember visiting the home of the town mayor that had a lounge room sized atrium overflowing with ferns in the centre of the house (basically an indoor greenhouse) that could be accessed from each room. Doesn't sound like that will do as much as you might hope for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So these findings contradict Kamal Meattle and the NASA Air Study?

[https://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air/up- next)

<comment><USER6> Have you read that NASA study? It involves air being run through an activated carbon filter, and the plants using that carbon filter as its growing medium. From the paper:

> This air filter design combines plants with an activated carbon filter as > shown in Figure 1. The rationale for this design, which evolved from > wastewater treatment studies, is based on moving large volumes of > contaminated air through an activated carbon bed where smoke, organic > chemicals, pathogenic microorganisms (if present), and possibly radon are > absorbed by the carbon filter. Plant roots and their associated > microorganisms then destroy the pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and the > organic chemicals, eventually converting all of these air pollutants into > new plant tissue.

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199300...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930073077.pdf)

This isn't how most people setup their house plants.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for this. I wasn't aware of the filter. I had heard of which plants were most beneficial for the compound they remove and that Kamal recommended growing the plants hydroponically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More studies on the topic with microscopic images: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624768/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624768/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Somebody better tell this guy! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWvH9NF- lyc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWvH9NF-lyc)

<comment><USER9> Kamal Meattle's primary result was demonstrating increased blood oxygen levels in occupants of buildings with large numbers of plants. This is consistent with the results of the study finding pollutants not filtered from the air. Additionally it is worth noting that achieving that result required not only large numbers of plants, but extensive care for the plants. The requirement that the plants be frequently cleaned of dust to keep their pores open may also be involved with the results. In any case, all these studies agrees that large numbers of plants are required to generate detectable results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Crap! I totally misread the title. Thought it said Pot Plants do not improve indoor air quality. Never mind...

<comment><USER11> Oh, I see what you mean! In the UK, "potted" plants are actually called pot plants more often than not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like the soil's mold and microbes would be detrimental too.</comment>


Cognitive biases - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5974468/the-most-common-cognitive-biases-that-prevent-you-from-being-rational

<comment><USER3> I can't upvote this as much as it deserves. The comments posted before this one point out the delicate issue in learning about biases in human thinking: it's a lot easier to notice the other guy's biases than my own. I'm glad that quite a few Hacker News participants like to share articles about systematic flaws in human thinking. Over time, with practice, that can help us disagree

<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

more constructively in comment threads here, and avoid the "worst argument in the world"

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ee7/cleaning_up_the_worst_argument_e...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ee7/cleaning_up_the_worst_argument_essay/)

as we argue with one another.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is an alphabetical list of cognitive biases. There seem to be more than 170, including a 'Google effect'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

.

Daniel Kahneman (prominent psychologist, 2002 Nobel in Economics) helped develop "reference class forecasting" to avoid poor project management decisions on novel or unusual projects.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting>

</comment><comment><USER5> I must say I have mixed feelings about these biases.

One thing I've noticed is that they are used as counter-arguments. "OH, you're saying that because you're biased." Could we say that some people are biased toward seeing biases everywhere?

Even if you've rationalized an opinion of yours in its entirety, as deep as it's humanely and currently possible, you can still be subject to, say, "wishful thinking".

Say you hold a belief about something that is not yet verified to be true of false. It's a belief. It's not knowledge because you can't justify its truth value yet. A skeptic philosopher might hold that you will never justify it entirely. But that's a different story.

However, some people will just trow a "bias" at you for the simple reason they think you wish it to be true, not that you believe and think it to be true.

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowsky's comment that "I've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don't like."

<comment><USER7> Well if people can use these biases against the things they don't like - <USER2> the things they don't like aren't backed up with data, or they aren't reasoned correctly or they are argued fallaciously. Having a deep knowledge of cognitive biases, logical fallacies and the improper use of statistics destroys the vast majority of hypotheses that are stated on a daily basis.

This is not because we don't like these things. No, it's because most people are full of shit.

See if you can see all examples of biases, fallacious arguments and poor reasoning in my above rant!

I've used a fair few. But only because I know all of them. Knowledge allows me to see through people whilst making myself opaque to others. Yes this can be abused. However this is only true to the extent that most things are already bullshit - using these techniques can only change what bullshit people believe.

However these techniques don't effect what is true or not - they merely help find it.

<comment><USER8> The problem Eliezer tried to highlight is that sloppy thinkers and/or people with no desire to understand the truth of a given matter will tend to look carefully for biases in arguments they don't like, while not applying the same scrutiny to the arguments supporting their position. To some extent, it's problem common to all of us - we tend to be more sceptical about things we don't agree with than with the ones we like. But some people exhibit this very strongly and they will surely hurt themselves more, the more ammunition they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I highly recommend checking out the articles on <http://lesswrong.com/>, which is a whole online community devoted to understanding and overcoming cognitive biases.

</comment><comment><USER10> I highly recommend this book for anybody interested in this

[https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence- analysis/)

</comment><comment><USER11> If you like this stuff, I can't recommend Thinking Fast and Slow enough

<comment><USER12> I came here to say this. Look at my comment stream and you'll see me post the Amazon link probably once a month, haha!

</comment></comment><comment> B-Con I believe that knowledge of cognitive biases is useful for identifying flaws in one's own thinking, but I can't say I've seen it used very productively in argument. Especially for the type who is more of the "learn it and sling it" fact-thrower with more knowledge than understanding. It becomes harder to talk to those people because they're convinced they have your psyche all figured out, no matter what logic you employ.

<comment><USER13> This reeks of survivorship and hindsight bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a shame to see the driving/flying statistic trotted out again. My absolute chance of dying in a car crash as opposed to a plane crash is irrelevant when deciding which to take - as an individual I'm far more likely to die of drowning than of acid burns, but I'd still rather go swimming in plain old H2O. Neglecting the base rate is itself a common probabilistic fallacy.

In fact the relative risk of flying versus driving depends significantly on the way you choose to assess risk: chance of death per journey, per mile, or per hour. Further, a straightforward mortality assessment does not factor in the risk of nonlethal but debilitating injury. Like all good questions, it's not as simple as it first appears.

</comment><comment><USER6> The best book on cognitive biases that I have read is Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland.

</comment><comment><USER15> There are many good Wikipedia pages on this. Start with the lists and drill down to pages for individual items: <https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+bias+fallacy>

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know, choosing the middle option seems like a good thing - get the best possible product for the least possible amount of money...

</comment><comment><USER17> Do these biases give us any cognitive advantages ? We wouldnt have evolved them unless they gave us some evolutionary benefits.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely. For example, the ingroup bias allows a group of related individuals to benefit at the expense of those with whom they are less likely to share genetic material; and the observation bias allows our brain to focus on information that is more likely to be of interest - if I tell you tigers have stripes, you're likely to notice more stripes and maybe spot more tigers.

In general, though, fallacies like this arise because the brain prefers rules that are simple and quick to apply - they may not be optimal in terms of the solution obtained, but they are effective heuristics once cost and time are factored in. It's better to spot a hidden tiger quickly but occasionally get it wrong, than to be the world's greatest tiger spotter given half an hour to think about it. Most probabilistic and decision-making fallacies fall into this bracket - the middle-choice fallacy is actually a pretty good heuristic (as another poster pointed out)- but there are edge cases where it can trick us if we don't think over our decisions rationally when we have the time and freedom to.</comment></comment>


Advanced tech earplugs designed for optimal listening - <AUTHOR> http://getdubs.com/

<comment><USER2> These seem interesting for those of us heading into middle age - where lots of background noise can be irritating when you are trying to concentrate on a conversation or the television. $25 seems a bargain too, I'll be getting a pair to try for sure.</comment>