Chinese military scaled back cyberthefts after indictments, U.S. officials say - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/following-us-indictments-chinese-military-scaled-back-hacks-on-american-industry/2015/11/30/fcdb097a-9450-11e5-b5e4-279b4501e8a6_story.html <comment><USER2> Honestly I don't trust the government on national security anymore. They waged a war wasting $1.7T of our wealth, they lied and continue to lie about snooping. I am not sure if US government is not helpless before Chinese aggression. When the source of information is only government and no third party to verify all the claims we better assume the government is simply lying.

<comment><USER3> [meta] This is truly getting absurd. The recent, but incessant downvoting of anyone who is skeptical of authority or the mouthpieces of the status quo. What is happening to HN?

For the purposes of this article in particular, attribution ranges from _extremely_ hard to impossible, but the downvoters are expecting the parent to swallow the government's statements at face value, without question? As if the USG possesses some sort of magical crystal ball for incident attribution?

<comment><USER4> I have no problem with an argument about why you shouldn't believe something. I _do_ have a problem with "vacuous skepticism"—a comment saying purely "this is doubtful and I remain skeptical" is the photonegative of a "this" or "me too" comment: a way to say "I [upvoted/downvoted] but I also want to say words to the same effect to call attention to myself, without adding anything to the discussion." It's an applause light; a magnet for upvotes from the same people who voted in a given direction on the story itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or did they? From the article ...

"For a period of time following the indictments, there was a very significant decrease" by the PLA, said a second U.S. official. "And today we are definitely not at the level that we were before the indictments."

...

The Unit 61398 hackers stopped their activity for a while, but other parts of the military continued their operations, and the Shanghai group eventually resumed using other tools, said an intelligence analyst at FireEye, which now owns Mandiant."

Sounds like they are just covering their tracks better. The most likely consequence, at best, would have been a Chinese Colonel was fired/reassigned and replaced with a newly promoted technocrat who has been told not to be caught.

Business as usual ...

<comment><USER6> Precisely. I can easily imagine the same story with the countries' roles flipped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Somewhat hypocritical for the USA to complain about hacking.

We know the resources/extent of NSA capabilities and so it is pretty certain their spying efforts dwarf anything China does. I mean we know they spied on the German chancellor and she is on our side!

<comment><USER8> It's not really the spying that bothers people. Nearly every country is constantly spying on every other country. What is different is that Chinese hacking goes beyond snooping for national security reasons in a few ways.

They actively engage in corporate espionage (in a massive way) to aid their homegrown companies and directly harm US companies. As far as we know, the NSA isn't stealing trade secrets from BMW and giving them to GM.

They directly attack civilians for hosting content they don't like, e.g., the recent DDoS attack on github.

<comment><USER9> > As far as we know, the NSA isn't stealing trade secrets from BMW and giving > them to GM.

After a 2-second Google search: "Snowden says NSA engages in industrial espionage" (from here [http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/26/us-security- snowde...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/26/us-security-snowden- germany-idUSBREA0P0DE20140126#3b7sfkh2fpd258fO.97))

<comment><USER8> Notice he said nothing about giving trade secrets to US companies. Of course spy agencies are spying on companies from other countries, but there is a big difference between spying and stealing trade secrets to give local companies a competitive advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Supposedly the PLA started scaling back cyber ops after the indictments of May 2014.

>"From what we see, the majority of the intrusions today are coming from sets that we believe are MSS or MSS contractors versus the PLA,"..."That's a shift that's been happening roughly in the last year and a half."

Last year and a half eh, so the _shift_ was coincidental with the indictments. I hope these U.S. officials aren't enamored with the potency of the indictments. It appears the PLA's scaling back is a political play to get more at the bargaining table.

Let's not start patting ourselves on the back too quickly.</comment>


The one position every startup needs- Secret Weapon #2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appsumo.com/the-position-every-startup-needs-secret-weapon-2/

<comment><USER2> What I loved about this article was the ending. By posting the sample job application it removes this article from a 'hey you should do it' to actionable direction on how you can do this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love to hear any comments or feedback about what you guys think.

<comment><USER4> nice work finding nick. Has he had an success yet?

<comment><USER3> The two biggest surprises to me so far:

1- About 80% of tests are producing results that don't show increase / decrease

2- Assuming things will work better is completely off. I was convinced my lightbox idea from the article was easier for the user but turned out it was annoying.

One thing is a balance of making things too annoying vs getting features that help us grow. An on going challenge of always trying to do right by our visitors and customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, back at my last company we added 1 outside the box feature to the site and it increased per page conversion 50%, this was after years of rigorous optimization. It's always interesting what lateral thinking can do.</comment>


Raining Frogs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/raining-frogs-372315b3cd2d#.8ote7j2qb <comment><USER2> Could you _please_ make a throwaway account for this shit? How can you be smart enough to write your own OS and yet dumb enough to not realize that the #1 impediment to Urbit's adoption is your political blogging?

I say this as a supporter, a star owner, someone who wants urbit to succeed: please stop giving ammunition to those whose job it is to farm pageviews by identifying right-wing bogeymen for the internet to hate. Honestly, I have nothing against you or your politics. (Nothing for them, either.) We've emailed, I think you're perfectly decent and that the slanders against you are slanderous. In a just world, people ( _especially_ HN commenters) would judge you by the product, not your blog. But in this world, shit like this post makes me think Urbit's best chance for widespread adoption is for some rando with a decent CS pedigree and blandly-inoffensive politics to hard-fork it.

/rant

<comment><USER3> He does it deliberately to scare away the normies. What other interpretation of this behaviour makes more sense?</comment></comment>


Liquidation Preferences with Examples - <AUTHOR> http://bretthard.in/2012/08/examples-of-liquidation-preferences/#.UCrBiWNU0RI

<comment><AUTHOR> I was having a hard time wrapping my head around liquidation preferences and how they work. I couldn't find a single page with examples of how they work, so I wrote up a reference for my own future use. I hope this helps some of you.</comment>


Show HN: Redux Preboiled – TypeScript-friendly Redux helpers, served à la carte - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/denisw/redux-preboiled <comment><USER2> I am not too well-versed in TypeScript, but it would be nice if I could verify at compile time that I am not mutating state in my reducers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author of Redux Preboiled here.

This is an interesting idea! However, it's currently a bit difficult to define a value as completely readonly in TypeScript. See this GitHub issue:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13923](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13923)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Would It Take to Create the 10,000 Year Clock Version of Evernote - <AUTHOR> A recent thread asked what would happen if Evernote disappeared. If there's an implied question, it's "What would a 10,000 Year Clock version of Evernote look like?"<p>Would it require physical media? Would it require self-replicating robotics to port and restore itself? <comment><USER2> The only currently running software that will be running in 100 years will be Win XP, IE 6, and the corporate apps that depend on them.

In 10,000 years, assuming we're still around and society and technology have progressed mostly continuously, I don't think the idea of a single piece of software will have survived. Except for your physical interaction with yourself and others, every aspect of your existence in society will be data, and the global system that moves it around. You won't need a "note taker," because everything you do for your entire life will be recorded, and available to you[1], corporations or their replacements, and governments or their replacements.

[1] And when I said "you" I supposed I also should have added "or our replacements."

<comment><AUTHOR> Not so much about the Evernote _software_ , more talking about the "personally archived content". It seems like some sort of nano-scribed physical medium, next-gen, non-magnetic storage medium.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Typist helper for programmers? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have experience working with a typist or junior programmer, so that you could code by dictation?<p>Outside of the benefits for coders with wrist injuries, I often find myself unmotivated when facing a lot of code changes that are relatively simple. <comment><USER2> If the code changes are relatively simple, shouldn't the junior programmer be able to do them without dictation?

And, if you have a large number of routine and repetitive code changes to make, doesn't that point to a bigger problem in your code in the first place?

Finally: wouldn't it be more productive to address your motivation problems head-on?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should clarify. After some more thought, what I really mean to ask is:

Would a senior and junior programmers' combined productivity be significantly higher if they were paired up instead of working separately?

Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that the senior programmer has 15+ years of experience and the junior has <1 year.

<comment><USER2> Well, without a doubt the junior programmer's productivity would improve by working closely with a senior programmer.

As for the senior programmer's productivity, that depends: if he is currently working near peak efficiency, having a junior programmer in his way will slow him down; if he is having motivational problems (as you implied in the earlier phrasing), having a junior programmer around may help him focus his attention, and achieve more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disregard the motivation problems, that's just bad phrasing.

I'm wondering how well it would work for the senior programmer to explain a very small, 5-minute task to the junior, then work on something else while the junior guy finishes the task, then check the work, and repeat.

I'm more interested to hear if anyone has ever actually tried this, and if there were any surprises or if it didn't work, why didn't it work?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The sometimes precarious business models for Open Source software - <AUTHOR> http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precarious-partnership

<comment><USER2> Nice writeup. It's a tricky area, isn't it? Open source is great - I'd spend my days working with it exclusively if I could, but in the end, it's all about scarcity, and where it turns up when the central thing (the code) is by definition, not scarce:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62945>

<comment><AUTHOR> It is tricky, but it's also satisfying. Customers of Open Source based businesses demand a lot more, too, which is both a blessing and curse.

On the one hand, they feel more entitled, but they're likewise more willing to be involved in solving the problem because they have some ownership by being part of the "community". So our customers file bugs or post to the forum, just like users of the Open Source product do, rather than call us on the phone...the culture allows us to support it in the most efficient way rather than the traditional but horribly time inefficient way (the first time you find yourself describing that "slash" and "backslash" are different characters, and that "slash" is the one they want for paths on UNIX and Linux systems is the beginning of wisdom on how inefficient telephone is for support on a system administration product).

We're in agreement on how scarcity fits into the equation--people simply pay more if they can't get it any other way. When asked to put a fair price on the new Virtualmin Professional in the early days, for example, some of our FOSS users suggested unsustainably low pricing, a quarter or less what competitors were charging for less functionality. We ignored those folks, and took the advice of the people who were wanting to escape from the existing products in the field, and were willing to pay similar prices--they just wanted a better product. These days, nobody complains about the price. They're accustomed to paying for Virtualmin Professional now, and have begun to think of it as a separate product in its own right. It has acquired scarcity that it didn't have in the beginning when it was only theoretical and the OSS version was what they knew. ;-)</comment></comment>


What's next after climate change? - <AUTHOR> I'm quite curious of what would be the next big issue if all demands are met regarding climate change.<p>In an alternate universe where all climate change demands are met, what do you think their next issue would be? <comment><USER2> I have a hard time interpreting your question.

When you write "demands are met", does "demands" refer to the requirements of the Earth's ecosystems, or the requests of the people who want to prevent climate change - and if so, _which_ of the people?

It's looking like it will take a few hundred years to meet the ecosystem demands. I can't pretend to see that far in the future.

But, suppose we went back in time 20 years in an alternative reality where Al Gore and a Green Congress were able to push through major structural changes to remove the climate change threat.

We would still be looking at inequality of power both monetarily - Gates' wealth and that of a small number of other billionaires has given them a a horrendous and non-democratic ability to change the US educational system, and the overall result has been negative - and due to racism - we are still suffering from the effects of colonialism, slavery, and racial segregation and discrimination.

Thing is, I believe the inequality of power has helped lead to climate change, so if climate change is somehow fixed then perhaps those inequality issues must also have been addressed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Throwing off the totalitarian state that would be enforcing the demands.

</comment><comment><USER4> Peace.</comment>


Everyone's stealing jokes online. Why doesn't anyone care? - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/27/everyones-stealing-jokes-online-why-doesnt-anyone-care/ <comment><USER2> > The important thing isn't who created it, but who shared it—you!—allowing > readers to become purveyors of entertaining content to their friends. We're > all complicit now in the joke black market, each share an act of criminal > fencing.

This is pretty funny stuff. Imagine the beautiful world of the future, in which kids in playgrounds telling jokes to each other make sure to attribute each one to its original author... Or the dystopian alternative, in which nobody creates jokes because the legal and cultural protections of their intellectual property aren't great enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like an obvious situation to me - people have been repeating jokes to friends since long before social media, whether jokes they've seen at a live stand-up show or knock knock jokes from the playground/office. Why would it be any different now that we can tweet rather than just speak?

<comment><USER4> It would be a joke to prevent jokes from spreading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can't steal a joke - it isn't property. You can plagiarize it, or infringe copyright. But the first isn't a crime, and the second requires litigation to pursue. So nobody cares because generally, these alleged infringements are tiny pin pricks and not big sword stabs - the sharing of tiny throwaway bits of creative content without permission just doesn't hurt that much. Some people are getting rich off doing it on a large scale, but they probably aren't hurting any one person that much. I'm not saying it's right, but it's not so wrong that any individual is motivated to care.

<comment><USER6> > You can't steal a joke - it isn't property.

Steal has more meanings in English than just taking someone else's property without permission or legal right. Many more...it is quite a versatile word, as you can see below.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

steal |stēl|

verb (past stole |stōl| ; past participle stolen |ˈstōlən| )

1 [ with obj. ] take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle | [ no obj. ] : she was found guilty of stealing from her employers | (as adj. stolen) : stolen goods.

• dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying.

• take the opportunity to give or share (a kiss) when it is not expected or when people are not watching: he was allowed to steal a kiss in the darkness.

• (in various sports) gain (an advantage, a run, or possession of the ball) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent.

• Baseball (of a base runner) advance safely to (the next base) by running to it as the pitcher begins the delivery: Rickey stole third base.

2 [ no obj. ] move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously: he stole down to the kitchen | figurative : a delicious languor was stealing over her.

• [ with obj. ] direct (a look) quickly and unobtrusively: he stole a furtive glance at her.

noun [ in sing. ]

1 informal a bargain: for $5 it was a steal.

2 chiefly N. Amer. an act of stealing something: New York's biggest art steal.

• an idea taken from another work.

• Baseball an act of stealing a base.

PHRASES

steal someone blind see blind.

steal a march on gain an advantage over (someone), typically by acting before they do: stores that open on Sunday are stealing a march on their competitors.

steal someone's heart win someone's love.

steal the show attract the most attention and praise.

steal someone's thunder win praise for oneself by preempting someone else's attempt to impress.[from an exclamation by the English dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734), who invented a method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in an unsuccessful play. Shortly after his play came to the end of its brief run he heard his new thunder effects used at a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth, whereupon he is said to have exclaimed: "Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!"]

<comment><USER7> But clearly, people who take a stricter stance regarding "intellectual property" want to use the most common definition of "to steal", of taking someone's physical object away. A weasel word, or a little dishonest, since we are dealing with a completely different type of situation:

\- When someone copies your content, you keep it. A loss happens on an abstract level of potential lost profit etc. \- Someone else just might have had the same thought process as you and distilled some widely available piece of information into the same joke as the official joke author. Who owns it? \- The joke author has probably processed a vast amount of humor, and information in general and inevitably, unconsciously builds his joke on this foundation without being able to "attribute" anything.

I'd say if you have a good case you can do fine without using the s-word.

<comment><USER8> I generally come down on the side of copyright infringement is not theft - it's something different. If I copy the latest pop song, no one has been deprived of it.

However, in the case of plagiarism (and related forms of passing of another's work as mine...), there is something really akin to property theft: credit theft. If you take my words, and pass them off as your own, and get credit for them rather than me - well then it is pretty much the same thing as you taking my dollar: I am deprived of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is actually a mixed issue; reuse/remixing of content is essential to culture, especially an internet one. However, the attribution issue is a huge issue in its own right, and IMO a cultural one. Would we care if someone stole a few words? We definitely would if it was a full-blown parody. You do see people getting called out on it in places like reddit though, and even comedians in real life. In the end it depends how much value a group places on originality and properly sourcing information.

<comment><USER10> Yep, you're right.

As a writer, marketer, creator and consumer of content, I enjoy thinking about things like this. I've witnessed my work being plagiarized and edited before. I personally accept it as just the way reality is– some people are lazy about attribution, and other people like feeling talented and special when they diliberately share others' content without attribution or remixing.

The answer to "Why doesn't anyone care"\- it all boils down to incentive structures. "Parody accounts" can steal with impunity. "Casual randos" can steal with impunity.

\- If you're an artist, and faceless, nameless folks plagiarize your work, going after them actually makes you look insecure or clueless. (Metallica and Napster come to mind.)

\- If you get plagiarized by someone Bigger, Badder and More Powerful, then that's a news story in itself- you're the underdog, and everybody loves to root for the underdog.

The best response to plagiarism, in my opinion, is to make more art. Some artists get very offended by this- they feel that they are entitled to all the attribution to all their work forever and ever. And that would be a beautiful world, I guess, and maybe discussions like these help to educate people. I also can imagine a world where- when you make a joke that's been made before (online), or you post an image that's been posted before, a sort of reverse Google / reverse image search will reveal to readers where the origin of the remix is.

For anybody who is curious about this sort of thing, I highly recommend the video Everything Is A Remix: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> At which point does a semantic snippet or invention become significant enough that it should be licensed? Two words? Three? A new word? This capturing of positive externalities is getting ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _" in politics and journalism, plagiarism remains a serious, even career- > killing charge. So why is it any different when it comes to jokes online"_

This is just a bad comparison.

The difference between the two cases is that the people stealing jokes online aren't _professional_ comedians. The correct comparison to the average person stealing a joke online is to a professional politician who ... steals a joke online. Telling jokes isn't in their job description so it's considered something they do in their spare time. And unless your hobby crosses a line and reflects poorly on your profession, no-one cares about your hobby.

However, if you're a comedian stealing jokes (online or off), the charge remains a very serious and career-damaging charge. True, no-one particularly cared about a random twitter parody account stealing jokes but that's because it's _also_ not a professional comedian's work. (Or at least not identifiable as such.) If that account were unmasked as the work of a professional comedian, we'd see a much different reaction.

As to the content mills and people reposting content without attribution -- that's its own problem, larger than jokes.

</comment><comment><USER13> I find it interesting that the only industry that seems to be totally fine with sharing is the restaurant/foodie business sharing recipes. I am sure there are some cases of people fighting over who plagiarized who but mostly it seems like free recipes online in abundance and cooking books still seem to thrive.

<comment><USER14> I would imagine Coca-cola would not be pleased if you took the recipe to their beverage and started making your own at home. Which is why it's not published anywhere and kept a closely guarded secret.

Some big companies still care greatly about their recipes.

<comment><USER13> Sure but I don't consider Coca-Cola to be part of that industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not too convinced about the urgency of the issue, even after reading the article.

Perhaps I'm just too jaded, but it's becoming increasingly more clear that the entire Internet is just a giant echo chamber. Everyone parrots everyone else.

That's not to say there aren't original ideas out there, but for every one new idea, it gets reblogged and retweeted and re-Buzzfeed-ed a million times.

<comment><USER16> I'm not too convinced about the urgency of the issue, especially after reading the article.

They are drawing an arbitrary line between sharing a joke without credit and plagiarism.

It might just be me, but when my friends tell me a joke I just expect it isn't theirs. Unless they explicitly tell me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am surprised the author avoids the two obvious counter-arguments completely. One, jokes are generally very short. 5 words, 10 words. This is not comparable to a song, or a book, or a movie. I'm not saying a lot of creative effort doesn't go into crafting of a joke, but its rare that a joke takes 4 months to create. That reduces the perceived value of a joke (time invested to create) to almost nothing. And lets be honest, most jokes are created in a few seconds.

Second, Twitter intentionally limits the size of a tweet. So the nature of the medium adds an incentive to chop off the name of the author or be forced to remove words or abbreviate. This makes the joke less funny.

</comment><comment><USER17> Comedians call these "street jokes." The problem is that social media is speeding up the plagiarism process. The good thing is you have a paper trail now.

A friend of mine that is a standup had a joke of his told by The Jokeman Jackie Martlin as a "street joke" and recently saw a poor version of it in a proper for the TV show "Cougar Town." It happens.

</comment><comment><USER18> A tweet isn't the same as stealing a comedians set and for most comedians ist the "way they tell them" that realy makes it funny - only Woody Allen would be able to realy do justice to say the "moose" sketch or the late Pete Cook the Judge sketch.

And the Full English sketch only works if its an Asian commic doing it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Repeating jokes without attribution has been the cultural norm for centuries. The whole notion of plagiarism and copyright and such are the recent inventions.

Thank good nobody cares, that just means that the intellectual property mafia hasn't indoctrinated us so much yet as to destroy any notion of a common culture.

<comment><USER20> > Thank good nobody cares

I don't know if this was a typo or intentional, but I like it very much as an unobtrusive and religion-neutral substitute for "Thank God". I will probably use it in future (maybe even without attribution :-) ).

<comment><USER21> "Thank goodness" is popular with the people who think "Thank God" is blasphemous.

<comment><USER22> Most people I know say thank goodness because god doesn't exist.

<comment><USER23> Oh good, another one of these discussions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This article's thesis seems somewhat questionable, given that none of the examples it cites are actually funny.

I think it is actually very difficult to steal a good joke. There are very few jokes I have heard told by a comedian that I would even consider retelling.

<comment><USER25> It depends on the comedian's material. There's a lot of Louis CK jokes that are standalone funny. You can read the joke in text, and it's funny.

Meanwhile, someone like Gabriel Inglesias is also very funny, but it's funny because of _how_ he tells it just as much as what he's actually saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Anyone in the UK here, Keith Chegwin has been doing this for years, what he does now, is steal someone's tweet joke and then block them on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER27> Stealing a comedians joke is similar to stealing a developers source. I'm surprised at some of the responses here.

<comment><USER28> So you have never shared a joke a work, got home and repeated the joke to friends or family?

People like to have a laugh. Most people repeating the joke are not claiming credit for creating it. They found it funny and shared it so others could find it funny to.

<comment><USER29> Twitter gives you an easy way to share the joke while retaining attribution - the retweet.

I agree that most of the people are just sharing the joke, but a sizable lump of them are trying to create some kind of online brand which they use to get money.

<comment><USER23> So if we legislate against those people, we also legislate against anyone who tells a joke online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think recipes are another example of something where it's considered acceptable to copy.

</comment><comment><USER31> Stealing jokes is not possible since no one owns them.

Someone's always cracked wise before you.

<comment><USER32> Indeed. It seems to me that we overlook independent invention far too often. Jokes seem especially prone to independent invention to me. Maybe others differ.

If we as a society turn copyright/patents/trademarks/"intellectual property" into the ownership of ideas (as opposed to a limited monopoly to increase the public domain, which is what Thomas Jefferson intended), then we need to seriously consider independent invention. It happens all the time. Consider the safety pin ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_pin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_pin)), nominally invented in 1849, but clear precusors exist from the Bronze age. If "Intellectual Property" exists, shouldn't we remunerate the heirs of the true Bronze Age inventors?

This is an ongoing problem: current US patent cases are very rarely about copying, and are mostly about independent invention: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1270160](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1270160) We're clearly depriving some "Intellectual Property" owners of their rights and remuneration! To Arms!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Always downvote reposts. OP's sexual preferense should also be questioned.</comment>


Y Combinator's Picurio Crowdsources Photo Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/21/y-combinators-picurio-crowdsources-photo-sharing/

<comment><USER2> Excuse my ignorance, since I'm not too knowledgeable about the photo sharing space, but why is YC funding so many of these sites (by so many, I mean two: Divvyshot and Picurio)? What's wrong with Flickr/Picasa/Facebook?

<comment><USER3> From <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>:

9\. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are "word sharing" apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It's less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.

<comment><USER4> Plus, a hypothetical investor might note that:

1) The technically hard problem in photo sharing, which is "Holy cow, terabytes of photos! Where do we put them?" is now largely solved by the cloud. That makes the technical risk of execution fairly low, but not so low that you're going to be able to clone a successful site in a weekend. (Exaggerating for effect.)

2) The main value add is in the software you write for the sharing site. This is really hard to duplicate, which spells "moat".

3) Photo sharing is a broad market B2C app and for whatever reasons Y Combinator seems to like those.

4) People demonstrably pay money for photo sharing, which since it has negligible marginal costs (see: cloud) means you are essentially building a "turn pennies into dollars" machine. Those get stupidly profitable at scale (amortize engineering cost over all paying accounts, sell your typical user < 2 GB of space for $X0 a year, pay Amazon S3 a few dollars to service that user, reinvest your 90% margins into customer acquisition, laugh all the way to the bank).

5) There is a built-in viral growth model, which greatly decreases COCA compared to, say, a non-viral web app, Netflix, etc. (I happily pay 30~50% of lifetime value for customers because it makes excellent sense with 95% margins. Photo sharing gets comparable margins but your customers charge you 0% of lifetime value to sign up their friends.)

6) There is built-in lock-in of users. Moving to the new shiny is going to be painful for most of them, so they won't. Plus the pain increases with how good of a customer they are, which means you only lose the pathological freebie seekers anyhow.

7) Historically, the above factors have encouraged investors and buyers to throw stupid amounts of money at photo sharing sites, which is ultimately what YCombinator wants to see.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the very informative reply. I wish I could upvote twice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some feedback and thoughts on Picurio after playing with it for a bit 1) Sweet interface, looks very iPhoto-like

2) I like the fact that the interface is built with Objective-J/cappacino, it feels more "native" than flash, which is what a lot of similar apps use

3) At the same time, the interface can be "broken" sometimes in that it doesn't react like you expect it to, for example, modal dialogs don't close when you press the "escape" key and the alert dialog ( after registering ) don't close after pressing the enter key.

4) Right click doesn't work.. would be nice to have a context menu to do various operations.

5) Shouldn't the loader only allow image files? I tried to upload a .pdf and it seemed to work (progress bar showed up..etc ) but afterwards it doesn't show up in my library.

6) I don't know about the whole "room" concept, I mean.. whats wrong with albums??

7) Although the cappacino based interface is super awesome, I could also see this limiting what this app can do, I mean, if its done in flash, you could do all kinds of cool stuff like the rest of the functions in iPhoto..etc

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. We love Cappuccino too.

On 3), 4), 5), and 7) we definitely want to sand the rough edges. We have a "launch early, launch often" mindset though so erred on the side of getting something out.

On 6), rooms take a bit of getting used to but we think turn out more useful than simple albums. It gives a group of people a common URL to return to multiple times for different events and you can say things like "I put the photos in our room, go look for them there."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm one of the co-founders and happy to answer any questions. I hope you'll give the site a try.

<comment><USER7> It'd be interesting to know what the effects of the TC coverage are like. Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't touch TC with a long pole after the Twitter "incident". And so I'm curious if the quality of their referrals is worth associating the company and the product with them.

<comment><USER8> I'd like to see the breakdown of account sign ups they get from this coverage.

<comment><USER9> They'll get a lot of signups but having them as regular users is another matter.

<comment><USER8> yeah thats why I'd like to see the breakdown, to see how many end up as paid users

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the interface, pretty easy to navigate.

You should add a way to search the picture titles.

Regarding payments, whats stopping users from making a fake account to extend the life of the free room? 2 weeks is long enough to make it worth doing

<comment><USER6> Nothing preventing it at the moment. Go nuts. :)

In seriousness, if we find it's a problem we'd tackle it then. We tried to prevent premature optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> picurio means that i might actually upload and manage photos off my camera. i'm incredibly lazy about this stuff. congrats to jonathan, laura, and michael!

</comment><comment><USER11> It looks great, but obviously I haven't been able to play with it yet.

Out of interest, is it built on Cappuccino? That'd be very YC-meta!

</comment><comment><USER12> Why create a new 'room' methaphor? How is the traditional 'album' one insufficient?

<comment><USER6> We want people to upload all the pics, not just some. Albums are typically for only the "good ones."

Example: we had several wedding beta rooms. There were multiple albums for rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and after-party. The group collaboratively chose the best photos from each part of the wedding to put into the albums. This isn't possible with other "group album" type sites.</comment></comment>


Researchers Find Herpes Viruses in Brains Marked by Alzheimer's Disease - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/621908340/researchers-find-herpes-viruses-in-brains-marked-by-alzheimers-disease <comment><USER3> As someone who gets cold sores this worries me. I know when I am super stressed because a cold sore will begin to appear on my lip. It's always there but stress allows it to replicate, all parts of my immune system are not able to cope during stressful events. I hope this doesn't mean I'm at risk for Alzheimer's disease.

At least it's now known when people sleep it clears out beta-amyloid proteins in their brains. Not a cure but at least it's good to know sleep helps flush out the bad stuff.

[https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may- flus...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out- toxins-during-sleep)

<comment><USER4> I don't know your situation, but if you don't already, you should get an RX for Valtrex or some other anti-viral. You can usually take it _before_ the cold sore appears if you can tell it's about to (swelling, stress, etc...) – and it can and often entirely suppresses the external appearance for most people.

<comment><USER3> Thats's interesting but I'm referring to a cold sore not the genital or other types.

As annoying as it is I can live with it I was just worried it was the type that raised the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

<comment><USER5> > _Thats 's interesting but I'm referring to a cold sore not the genital or > other types._

"Cold sores" is just another word for oral HSV-1 or more rarely oral HSV-2. While HSV-2 is commonly referred to as genital herpes due to its historical preference for that site, the truth is that both viruses can readily infect both oral and genital sites. Genital HSV-1 for example is very prevalent:

 _" With respect to genital HSV-1 infection, 140 million people aged 15-49-years were estimated to have genital HSV-1 infection worldwide in 2012, but prevalence varied substantially by region. Most genital HSV-1 infections are estimated to occur in the Americas, Europe and Western Pacific, where HSV-1 continues to be acquired well into adulthood"_ [0]

In other words, the dichotomy between cold sores and genital herpes is largely pointless; it's the same virus. Oral can transmit to genital and vice/versa. Why one is heavily stigmatized and the other not is simply puzzling.

[0] [http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes- simpl...](http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes-simplex- virus)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The study referenced in the article says they found HHV-6 in normal brains _but_ there was "increased HHV-6A and HHV-7 in brains of subjects with Alzheimer's disease" [1]. So I would say that is surprising and worth noting.

[1] [https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30421-5](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273\(18\)30421-5)

<comment><USER7> It may be worth noting but it also could very easily be a mistake of identifying an effect as a cause. Once the body is unhealthy all kinds of organisms use that opportunity to stake a claim.

<comment><USER8> Great point. Healthy people (or any other life form) do not suddenly get sick and die. I think this is a major issue with the entire system of Western medicine. Instead of focussing on healthy diet, lifestyle, exercise, managing stress, the system just wants to identify certain 'germs' and give pills that are supposed to kill those 'germs'...

As I understand it, licensed physicians in the US, even after like 12 years of higher education, never even study nutrition...what could possibly be more fundamental to human health than the food you eat??

Refreshing to see a comment like jacquesm made here.

<comment><USER9> > I think this is a major issue with the entire system of Western medicine

As opposed to magic like Chinese medicine? Animal Spirits? Shaman? What exactly are you comparing to?

Western medicine, for all its serious flaws, has done more to increase life expectancy and save lives than any other system. By many orders of magnitude.

> Healthy people (or any other life form) do not suddenly get sick and die

Demonstrably false, all throughout human history. In some societies people simply reused children's names and didn't mourn the way we do because it was an absolute certainty that at least a few of your children would die young.

People have been suddenly dropping dead from cancer, flu, random infections, et al for all of human history. In my mother's youth every summer random kids came down with polio. They woke up one morning saying "momma I can't move my legs" and that was the end of their dreams.

Animals also drop dead. Why do you think there are so many animal rituals designed to avoid actual combat? Why do you think males of species that fight each other chest pound, yell, stomp, leap, or otherwise put on these displays? Because one injury can mean death. Even a scrape can easily get infected. Such displays are designed to avoid this scenario as often as possible.

> Instead of focussing on healthy diet, lifestyle, exercise, managing stress,

Western medicine does focus on these things. They aren't magic cures any more than pills are... but peddlers of woo and unscientific nonsense often like to pretend diet can cure every disease, so I'd urge caution lest someone think you're one of those people.

<comment><USER10> Hey there, you needn't be so belligerent on this topic; it's a topic where everyone cares about the right things - i.e., keeping people alive and well for longer.

Through my own health challenges that have extended back 10+ years, I've avidly used both conventional medicine and natural/complementary treatments (acupuncture, naturopathy, emotion-based therapies, therapeutic breathing exercises), and through extensive experience I know better than most that both have their place and both serve very different functions.

Nobody doubts that modern medical innovations like antibiotics, complex surgery and many other western medical approaches have done tremendous good in terms of curing previously incurable illnesses and extending lives.

But on the matter of "people have been suddenly dropping dead from cancer, flu, random infections, et al for all of human history", it's uncontroversial that people's propensity to contract these illnesses and die from them is heavily influenced by their underlying state of health, i.e., factors like organ function, immune system fortitude, inflammation, hormone and neurotransmitter levels, nutrient intake/absorption and emotional state - <USER2> of which interact in vastly complex ways.

It's not a damning dismissal of Western medicine to say that it doesn't do so much to focus on these factors that are further upstream; it's too busy dealing with people who are acutely unwell or at risk of mortality.

Of course when you visit a general physician for a checkup they'll tell you to avoid smoking, to not consume too much alcohol or junk food and to eat plenty of vegetables.

But if you really want to go deep into understanding and optimising your underlying health - which I needed to do, due to having impairments that conventional medicine couldn't help with - less conventional approaches can be highly beneficial.

And for what it's worth, I do know a lot about the placebo effect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> "We mapped out the social network, if you will, of which genes the viruses are friends with and who they're talking to inside the brain," Dudley says. In essence, he says, they wanted to know: "If the viruses are tweeting, who's tweeting back?"

Finally, a relatable metaphor for millennials like me!

</comment><comment><USER12> > They also found that these Alzheimer's risk genes seem to make a person's > brain more vulnerable to infection with the two herpes viruses.

If that is the case, people predisposed for Alzheimer will naturally have more herpes virus in the brain - does not seem like viruses are anywhere near the root cause of Alzheimer's.

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone noted (vedtopkar) these are "HHV-6 and HHV-7, which cause roseola". Note that it's an incredibly common infection in babies.

There's also another study investigating association between HHV-6 and measles virus serology and brain antibody in autism:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9756729](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9756729)

Reading these studies makes me think an ineffective blood-brain barrier or a brain-specific defence might trigger common viruses to present a wider family of brain-related diseases.

We also know there is literature on encephalitis caused by both HHV-6 and measles. I'm speculating that even in a micro, benign form, this condition is enough the shake brain structure.

We should probably investigate a more complex but more generic model of brain diseases.

<comment><USER14> > measles virus serology

Potentially topical oddball thing I learned while looking up something on measles. About 1 in 10000 people[1] that contact measles go on to develop subacute sclerosing panencephalitis[2] 6 to 15 years later. While results in brain deterioration and death.

[1] Might be 10X higher.

[2] Obligatory Wikipedia link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencepha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It always struck me as odd how accepting everyone was of the inevitability and benign-ness of chickenpox. Even though we know the virus is still present after the rash, it seemed strange to me how it was assumed no less visible effects were occurring.

HPV is another which I found odd how little importance was placed on preventing its spread growing up. Even today we're still selective about the immunization of people against this virus, knowing it's responsible for most occurrences of cervical cancer.

I suspect we'll almost certainly learn something less obvious about herpes of comparable importance to HPVs role in cervical cancer.

<comment><USER5> > _It always struck me as odd how accepting everyone was of the inevitability > and benign-ness of chickenpox._

Funny enough, genital Varicella Zoster (chicken pox) is a thing. Somewhat rare since most people already contract the virus at a different site during childhood, but it happens. It even presents very similar to a normal HSV-1/2 genital infection since it is also a herpesvirus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is not surprising. At least one study [1] showed 85% of people's brains are PCR-positive for at least HHV-6. It is also important to keep in mind that herpesviruses have evolved with us (and many other species) and in some ways are considered part of our normal flora. They may also play an important role in the proper development of our immune system.

The data in this paper is suggestive (and complicated!!), but there is no convincing mechanism for the virus having anything to do with the development of Alzheimers. The real virology here will be very hard.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11285567](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11285567)

<comment><USER17> Likewise, detectable RNA/DNA does not mean there's virus (virions).

An unusual example, but it's common to have Ebola virus RNA in semen (a fluid from another immuno-privileged site) with no detectable virus for months after primary infection. ([https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1511410](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1511410) among others.) Similar patterns exist for lots of other viruses.

<comment><USER8> So why don't they try to isolate the virus itself instead of looking for RNA/DNA? Too expensive? Or impossible perhaps?

<comment><USER17> Realistically, probably because they're not virologists. Looking for nucleic acids is easy/commonplace. Virus culture, electron microscopy and immunoassays are more specialized techniques.

<comment><USER8> If they aren't virologists, maybe they should leave this kind of research to those that are? The headline says "Researchers Find Herpes Viruses" ...but they didn't (or cannot?) find them? Then, umm...why does it say that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stuff like this always reminds me of:

[https://helix.northwestern.edu/blog/2010/02/when-science- goe...](https://helix.northwestern.edu/blog/2010/02/when-science-goes-wrong)

I'm guessing they are being as careful as they can in regards to selection bias.

</comment><comment><USER19> People with Alzheimer's seem to have more things in their brain that shouldn't be there than normal. Past findings include types of immune cells that shouldn't be there, various yeast, other types of virus etc. It's not clear if all those are there due to the blood-brain barrier loosing structural integrity, or those cause Alzheimer's in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER20> Scientists have engineered a version of Herpes virus that can kill cancer cells

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

</comment><comment><USER21> Offtopic: after declining GDPR consents I was redirected to text only version of the page:

[https://text.npr.org/](https://text.npr.org/)

<comment><USER22> Same here. Personally, I kind of prefer the text only version. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Text only version [https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=621908340](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=621908340)

<comment><USER24> Oh, my god. Is there a browser extension or a third party website or anything out there that does this for all websites? I haven't had much luck, but that's partially because some sites have chosen to make themselves unusable without javascript enabled.

NPR, thank you for this subdomain <3

<comment><USER25> Safari's "Reader Mode" also does this.

<comment><USER26> You can also automatically enable "Reader Mode" for a single domain or all domains by pressing the reader mode button for like 2 seconds. Which is something I just recently discovered. I like this feature a lot on my iPhone. It can also be automatically enabled on macOS in the same way.

<comment><USER27> Thanks, this is useful to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of a line from one of Eddie Murphy's comedy routines back in the 80s: "Herpes is like luggage; you keep that s--t forever."</comment>


Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions - <AUTHOR> https://pen.org/local-news/ <comment><USER2> I live in a fairly large Florida city. There is no investigative reporting and zero coverage of local politics anymore. The local news covers sports, entertainment, weather, syndicated national stories and that's it. In other words, only the stuff that makes them money.

I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment.

The week before an election there is no information at all on the people running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that.

What's the word for government by random chance?

<comment><USER3> There's a _lot_ of local corruption. Before, keeping it hush-hush meant capturing the local paper(s). Now? Increasingly you don't even need to do that. As long as the state AG or whoever doesn't take an interest (and some of them seem to intentionally avoid doing so) you're fine.

Talking counties, schools, and towns outside even mid-sized cities, here.

I am worried this, and other developments, will mean the gradual end of the US as a relatively low-corruption state.

<comment><USER4> Can you think of any examples from the recent past of small local newspapers doing investigative journalism of that kind? I certainly can't. Low circulation means low advertising revenue, which means low budget for journalism, which means low quality journalism. Any local newspapers that I know of basically just print what comes out of the PR mill of local companies and local government.

<comment><USER5> In MA we have the Turtleboy blog which is basically the only way to get news that doesn't bend over backwards to stay on the "correct" (where correct is defined on Beacon Hill) side of issues involving government. He has a right bias on certain social issues but it's easy enough to tune out and he does a good job delineating facts and his opinions.

<comment><USER4> The question was about investigative journalism, which is the kind of journalism where you actually expend resources to dig out facts that the public needs to know and otherwise wouldn't know about. What you describe sounds more like putting a "spin" on facts that are already in the media that's off-the-map. In this context off-the-map may mean a genius operating at a level far above us all. Or it may just mean crazy. The former is a possibility, but the latter is always more likely. And those are a dime a dozen, not a rare journalistic treasure.

<comment><USER6> This outlet has broken stories about state police corruption that have later been picked up by more mainstream publications. It is definitely an outlet that occasionally 'digs out facts that the public needs to know' that are not being otherwise revealed.

[https://turtleboysports.com/state-trooper-leigha-genduso- adm...](https://turtleboysports.com/state-trooper-leigha-genduso-admitted- drug-dealer-perjurer-and-tax-evader-friends-with-former-msp-colonel-marion- mcgovern-dated-lt-colonel-prior-to-being-hired/)

[https://turtleboysports.com/corrupt-douchebag-joe-early- agre...](https://turtleboysports.com/corrupt-douchebag-joe-early-agrees-to- pay-5000-to-state-trooper-who-he-ordered-to-cover-up-junkie-slugpump-alli- bibauds-felatio-offering-arrest-report/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a fan of government-funded media. I think I'd like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate from the state.

Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback.

The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem.

I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform.

Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. The church is not comparable to the media. We need innovative ways to equitably pay for our economy of attention. Ideally a way that would create a market incentive for producing local news that people read. I think the revenue sharing tax on Google/Facebook is pretty fair and clear.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. North Korea has newspapers. North Korea has media. Are its citizens well-informed? Of course not. The media is literally owned by the government. And in that case, you get pure propaganda. The reason for separation of church and state is that religion and politics are both powerful forces that influence people. If one entity controls both, it inevitably causes a loss of liberty. The press has the power to shape narratives and influence massive amounts of people based on how they frame a story. That is powerful, and it needs to be treated as a power that should remain separate from the government. There should always be competing narratives in a free country. Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity.

<comment><USER8> I totally agree! And I believe that markets can be created through governmental platforms. Just as governments might have created cash (which could have been private) and physical market places (which can also be private), I believe the government can support a platform for a diverse market of news media. Without a free market, monopolistic forces dominate. The market for news is not so free, if the attention platforms are owned by private individuals that don't share profits with the content driving their eyeballs. We don't disagree. I just believe that government involvement and free markets aren't opposites but mutual enablers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I gave up local TV news years ago when I realized it was focused on "murder of the day" and other FUD. We even called one Channel Fear instead of Four.

We're lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.

<comment><USER10> What's 'next door'?

<comment><USER11> A place for Concerned Citizens to alert the neighborhood about petty HOA violations and kids playing outdoors. Although I hear they're about to introduce a feature in which the local police department will be able to deliver their PR releases directly to your news feed. Also a good place to report stray cats as lost pets.

It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a month is probably not doing anyone any favors.

<comment><USER12> The ability of local agencies to just post to your feed has been a feature of Nextdoor for years. They can also close their posts to discussion, which is pretty irritating.

<comment><USER11> Looks like the feature was just rolled out. It was to reset my opt-out settings for nextdoor emails so that I can now receive "Emergency Alerts" with the first such instance being a road 45 minutes away being closed because it rained.

It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e. could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?

<comment><USER12> Nextdoor is bad because your neighbors are bad people, and it only takes a few to wreck it. Somewhere on your block lives a life-long racist, a chemtrail crackpot, and an insufferable busybody. Normally these people hide but for some reason they think Nextdoor is their safe space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll probably get down voted into Oblivion, but the least we, the well paid tech workers, could do is pay some of that to support journalism we like.

I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.

<comment><USER14> Honestly a lot of the work of local newspapers are picked up by our local television stations.

Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down.

I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news station helped us get the news to them quicker.

The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.

<comment><USER15> > The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes > and laid down.

There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia will take off their clothes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undres...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undressing)

<comment><USER14> Wow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my opinion the best book on this topic which should be required reading for pretty much everyone is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0]. The book is nowhere near as sensationalist as the title implies.

While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable.

I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1].

Relevant to the article:

"And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985."

He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and understanding of the justice system.

[0]: [https://www.flatearthnews.net/](https://www.flatearthnews.net/) [1]: [https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat- earth...](https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I find my local PBS member station to not only be of high quality, it also has a refreshing take on news that doesn't depend on fearmongering or thinly- veiled advertisements being floated as human interest pieces.

<comment><USER18> Which PBS are you watching because the PBS I've watched were just as biased and agenda pushing as for-profit privately funded news companies. To be fair, I haven't watched PBS in close to a decade and the nyc metro area PBS might be an outlier, but I find it hard to believe things have gotten better since the start of the decade. The same goes for NPR - I used to be a tote carrying member.

<comment><USER19> McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (later just Jim Lehrer), and the Nightly Business Report were decent news programs, don't remember a lot of bias, but I haven't watched in a long while though.

<comment><USER20> There is no such thing as covering news without bias. Even the selection of which stories to cover is inherently political. I don't terribly mind PBS but the idea that people sometimes float of unbiased media doesn't even make sense to me.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the content is even tempered and well reasoned.

If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?

<comment><USER20> I would call PBS's bias center to center-left, along with the nytimes, huffpost, the guardian, most late night shows, and most slate writers. It sounds like you are describing the wall street journal, bloomberg, the economist, the washington post. It's pretty difficult to go further right without bumping into fox news, breitbart, the drudge report, the blaze, rush limbaugh, etc.

For actual left bias, see: the baffler, the intercept, jacobin, mother jones, counterpunch, the nation, and oddly teen vogue. If PBS is left, those are surely falling off the spectrum.

Finally podcasts cater across the spectrum. I can't help with specific examples here, but you can certainly find anyone from anarchists and communists to democratic socialists to liberals to libertarians to blatant far right wing shit (monarchism?, "racial realists", "trumpists").

<comment><USER22> You must be reading a different Bloomberg than I am.

<comment><USER20> What kind of economic critique do you have about Bloomberg?

<comment><USER22> I don't have any critique about Bloomberg, just your characterization of it as right wing.

I can't remember ever seeing a "right-wing" viewpoint in Bloomberg's opinion pages. As far as I can tell the only op-eds they publish are pro-gun control, anti-income inequality or just generally anti-Trump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Losing the news is a threat to democracy or great news if you want to bring back rule by the minority. Why? Voters need to be well informed but are increasingly getting less and less alternative sources and eventually none. Some new age media possibilities I had been thinking of:

1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power. They will keep the elected politicians in check and can do local journalism. Otherwise those politicians who may get up to 50% of the vote, will stop working for those potential voters by going back to their lives.

2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal blogs/columns/newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because, the government will forever host it vs losing information when the company/individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is simply getting username/password from local government with ID.

Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat!

Both of the points require that the government recognise that some information is better than nothing and an essential need if there is have democracy. To do otherwise, is to let evil continue under the veil (Corruption, abuse, etc). Those who would be against 'information needs to be free and widely available', you guessed it, evil.

<comment><USER24> >1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power.

I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by leftover votes?

<comment><USER23> Essentially, second place in same constituencies.

The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.

<comment><USER24> Ok thanks, I know that generally as Ranked Preference Voting and the more specific proposal of IRV Instant Runoff Voting

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant- runoff_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting)

Do you have any more info about this type of voting? I would always be interested in reading more analysis of this topic.

<comment><USER23> There's no second place winner for IRV, FPTP, etc. That's where my proposal comes in as a stop gap measure to cover lack of representation while increasing journalism potential.

For better proportional representation, here's this topic: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Craigslist, who ate local newspapers' breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose founder purports to care about journalism, can set up regional reporting funds in every Craigslist market.

A drop in the bucket of Craigslist's revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.

</comment><comment><USER26> The end of the article mentions "newer, digitally focused outlets" as one possible solution, and lists three of them. They could have further elaborated that all three examples are nonprofits. Imo that's one of the possible futures of local news.

Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: [https://inn.org/members/](https://inn.org/members/)

<comment><USER27> In some of the state articles linked they complain about how small the digital outlets are. I think that's the question: did more people read the print versions of "in-depth news" than the digital versions now?

It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article is very relevant: [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study- when-local-news...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local- newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/)

It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.

</comment><comment><USER29> Google and Facebook have had serious implications on democracy, not only for allowing direct lies to spread like wildfire, but they also pulled the rug on all local news by outcompeting them on ad sales. It's beyond me why not regulators have stepped in...

</comment><comment><USER30> Local news is more available now than previously.

There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee minutes, etc.

More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of little interest.

<comment><USER31> However, those new channels are not the incumbent, over employed, over advertised, legacy organizations who feel they have a right to a perpetually successful business model and that having a 90s era website in 2020 or saying "learn to code" is some kind of hate crime. Just hand over your money forever and they'll stop complaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I used to work in media in the early 2000s. Some newspapers still do pretty good journalism. TV stations though are all but gutted. General managers and publishers used to be able to stay afloat purely on national advertising. But when cable tv targeted insertion and then internet that money dried up fast and local media companies then had to turn to local businesses.

Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.

<comment><USER33> somewhat involved somehow with the newsmedia for a good portion of my life, regional papers in my country are doing absolutely fine, metro paper are on the verge of seppuku chaising eyeballs

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I could make the argument that this article makes it clear that Apple's move in 2003 to set a price of $0.99 per track for recorded music was an act of cultural salvation, [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches- the-...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes- Music-Store/).

<comment><USER35> Please do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I guess I'm lucky enough to have multiple local newspapers that cover city government, local businesses, local events, local schools, local issues, etc..

Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.

</comment><comment><USER37> Personally I suspect that counterintuitively more centralization may be a good antidote to the awareness issues.

Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process.

Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult.

Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sinclair group owns and controls the majority of local news markets. They're a terrible org and have mandatory editorial guidelines their stations must follow.

</comment><comment><USER39> We changed the URL from [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news- disappear-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-disappear- pen-america.html), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER4> In other areas, such as search engines, the rise of the filter bubble has been pointed out as a force of evil. Why should we lament the downfall of the geographical filter bubble in print media (and their modern online offshoots)?

<comment><USER40> Because some news has limited geographical relevance. Are you going to regularly read about things like city council meetings about a controversial local development projects some small city in the NYT?

Hell no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The local news isn't an intrinsically valuable product, that's why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are _paying_ to get a message in front of you (advertisers).

All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.

Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people _can_ adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.

So what's the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn't very compelling in most places, and that's probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.

<comment><USER42> This strikes me as conspicuously focused on market value.

The market will only find a solution if it is _profitable_ to find one.

I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.

<comment><USER41> The market is nothing more than a resource allocation methodology for exchanging resources, goods and services for other resources, goods and services.

The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don't, they'll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.

<comment><USER42> This just begs the question.

People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.

<comment><USER41> Where exactly are you drawing the distinction between the social and market value?

The local news is just another type of information, and if you don't spend your money on it, you're at least spending your time. Near as I can tell, the people who are concerned about the loss of local news are concerning themselves with how people are choosing to not spend their time. The people most concerned with this are the people whose jobs are on the line or lost because of how people weren't spending their time and/or money, and due to the nature of their jobs, are or have been in the position to complain in a very vocal and visible manner.

<comment><USER42> Sorry for the slow response. Came down with a cold and haven't felt very lucid.

I'm just talking about positive externalities: anywhere the social value created by producing + consuming local news exceeds the social cost of producing + consuming it.

It seems like you're focused more on the consumption side (i.e., pearl- clutching over whether people spend their time/money consuming local news, or whatever they spend time/money on instead). I wouldn't say that the consumption side is irrelevant, but I'm more concerned about the production side. For example:

The social value of reporting out a local corruption scandal isn't _necessarily_ linked to the market value of the associated column-inches. The lion's share of the social value comes from rooting out the corruption.

Try flipping it around. If a news outlet had enough metrics on past scandal coverage to know that breaking it won't increase profits, should they make a shrewd decision to accept payment from one or more participants in the scandal to bury the story, save the time on reporting it out, and run a wire piece in its place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I searched the thread and couldn't find DNAinfo. Did anybody else use it? I thought it was good while it lasted.

What are the chances of reviving something like it?

</comment><comment><USER44> Please subscribe and pay for news both local and national. Our democracy builds on journalists reporting and screening those elected into power.

</comment><comment><USER45> The whole news model is becoming strange. At the beginning journalism shifted from offline to online, and then because lack of solid business model and high competition, they began with paywalls which hurt the UX and also the site owners

</comment><comment><USER46> Local news was always low quality. Now you have options for how to spend your time and money. It is no surprise you don't give them your time or your money. They have problem and solution reversed.

</comment><comment><USER47> "Lack of people buying newspapers bad" reports newspaper.

I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious.

If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more centralized.</comment>


Venteo – a new picture sharing app. WHAT DO YOU THINK? - <AUTHOR> http://wwww.venteo.co

<comment><USER2> Due to the fact that the site only links to the iTunes App Store, I can't even see what the app does. I have an apple device but I'm at work and don't have iTunes on my work pc.

I'd recommend some sort of description on the site.

Side note, that logo is sick. Good job on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Getsaf,

Agreed, we are busy adding the new page about the app now which will also include the email. Just made the site quick but quickly realized we need to tell people what the hell it does! Thanks so much for the like on the logo, took many nights to come up with something we loved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks very cool and a nice app! Good Luck with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, great to hear the support. My email is email@example.com if you ever have any ideas/feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stop screaming!

</comment><comment><USER5> Android?

<comment><USER6> Is iOS the new IE?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by IE?</comment></comment></comment>


How to be happy: Stop being positive and just cultivate neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/991849/stop-being-positive-and-just-cultivate-neutrality-for-existential-cool/ <comment><USER2> Cultivating neutrality is one thing, and has value, but "stop being positive"? No thanks.</comment>


What I wish I knew before becoming a code-free programmer - <AUTHOR> https://airdev.co/post/6-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-becoming-a-code-free-programmer-1524018292858x527538231573998900 <comment><USER2> Found the google cache! [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:odBrx_J...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:odBrx_JiISYJ:https://airdev.co/post/6-things- i-wish-i-knew-before-becoming-a-code-free- programmer-1524018292858x527538231573998900&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting.

Given the level of knowledge the author now has of the underlying data structure and algorithmic thinking, I suspect that learning a "real" programming language would only be a small leap and would open up a ton of capabilities for them.

That's pretty much been my experience with visual SQL query builders as well - by the time someone is able to use it efficiently, they are not only a small step from just writing the code, but they'll end up being many times faster if they did. That said, I think visual development definitely has a place; it's great for visualizing the relationships between things and reducing complexity. Once that's done, optimizations and sometimes the actual implementation of the blocks you're connecting is best done in traditional code.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I don't have much traditional programming experience myself, but have found that Bubble has help me "speak the same language" as those who program with code. Perhaps there is an interesting place for tools like Bubble to be a middle-ground for those learning the principles behind coding.

Why is it you think that someone like the author would be able to code many times faster than they could develop software visually through Bubble?

<comment><USER3> > Why is it you think that someone like the author would be able to code many > times faster than they could develop software visually through Bubble?

Thinking about how things go together is the hard part of writing software. Every time I've ever used a visual interface to show that, I've had to spend additional time to "translate" what I'm building into what's actually happening on the layer underneath. The abstraction is too leaky to be of use to me.

It's possible that there is a visual language out there that's not so leaky, but I've not seen it. Granted I've not used Bubble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From _What Can 't I Build?_, this isn't "code-free programming", rather it's code-free web app building. It's still very powerful but not the same thing as coding.

      "That said, there are some limits to what the core language can do. Bubble's language is comparable in power to spreadsheet formulas: you can do a lot, but anything requiring recursive or looping operations on data (such as, for instance, writing a custom machine-learning algorithm) would be difficult."

[https://bubble.is/faq](https://bubble.is/faq)

</comment><comment> mark-r My experience with code-free is that it's write-only. I had the misfortune of trying to support a database import to BI that was done in a visual platform, whose name I have thankfully forgotten. Trying to trace a single field to see how it was derived was nearly impossible, because you couldn't work backwards - and the instructions for this were kept in a blob that you had no visibility into.

Code really is the best representation of a coding problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> How long would it take to write Bubble in Bubble?

<comment><USER6> I also like to add an additional challenge -- Can you use Bubble to create a program that generates solutions to the triangular-shaped golf tee game that sits on tables at Cracker Barrel? What about a program that plays chess or go?

<comment><AUTHOR> Have to admit, I've never been to Cracker Barrel.

But for chess or go, you can certainly create a solid interface for two real players to play the game on Bubble. To build in a "computer player" would probably be difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can't open the page either. I guess that happens to code free programming

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha Ha. We were getting a traffic spike through this, which caused the issue. But Bubble has this feature where you can add more "units" to your overall app capacity to handle increased traffic, which we did. Enjoy!

<comment><USER8> I have no paranoid browser settings (i.e. JS still is enabled), only an ad blocker, and yet all I get is

> _Your browser was unable to load some necessary resources, contact your IT > network administrator and ask him or her to allow access to_

         dhtiece9044ep.cloudfront.net
         dd7tel2830j4w.cloudfront.net/
         d1muf25xaso8hp.cloudfront.net

Even from sites with ad blocker blocker have I ever seen such a failure to even load the page at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for flagging

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great tips. I love Bubble. I think they are onto something good.

<comment><AUTHOR> We love Bubble too. Certainly believe that visual programming is the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're not coding, you're a user. No matter how "technical" your task is.

<comment><USER11> I think that's a broad over simplification. You're a "user" of your compiler or interpreter. Is it the act of typing that makes it programming? We've had a definition and model for computation since Turing that is largely universal, so as long as the language and rules that you are following is Turing complete, I think it could be argued that using that language is by definition programming.

I'd also argue that a game like cargo-bot (which is effectively a game-ified assembly language) is very much programming, even though you do nothing but drag some boxes around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> statusCode 400 message "Operation timed out -- app too busy"

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be fixed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice article!

</comment><comment><USER14> interesting

</comment><comment><USER15> Still not clear to me what "code-free programming" means. Wix with some plugins?

The website says you're looking at paying $100k+ if you want "fully custom responsive design". Seems designed to prey on people who don't understand tech...</comment>


The value of time, or not - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2012/7/18/value-of-time

<comment><USER2> I'm curious as to whether this general trend is a new one or if I'm just getting old:

1) user creates semi-controversial post (see: PHP sucks, nosql sucks, node sucks, semi-colons suck, time-is-money, ideas are worth nothing etc)

2) debated ad-nauseum with good points on both sides

3) within 24 hours, blog posts turn up which say almost the opposite of whatever was said in a) PHP works for me, time is worth nothing, nodejs/mysql is webscale, ideas are everything.

I can't help but feel that - much like this comment - it doesn't add much that hasn't already been said better elsewhere and is purely for linkbait purposes.

<comment><USER3> It does seem like that is happening more lately. I'm sure the original post inspired the present author as soon as they read it, but it does take a little while to put together a blog post, vs a reply on HN.

What I personally don't like so much is the blog posts that seem to be targeting HN. I'm not sure why it bothers me...I guess it just seems cloistered and almost incestuous.

I'm also not a fan of blog posts critiquing other blog posts. The blow-by-blow he-said/she-said format doesn't appeal to me at all. It seems to me the author in this case could have formulated his opinion into a post that didn't rely someone else's post at all.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it took about half an hour from the point where I finished reading Jack's post to when I posted this up.

Swombat.com started partly as a place to aggregate my commentary on articles that I think worthy of extra attention and comments.

Worth noting that I didn't submit this to HN. Others did, and they upvoted it, so clearly some people are disagreeing with your view. If you don't like it, just read something else and don't upvote.

As for formulating it without mentioning Jack's article, sure, I could have done that, but that would have been dishonest and lame, since the article was indeed inspired by Jack's writings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The laptop example used by Jack and echoed here is fair, but the most realistic one I can think of, as a bona fide non-rockstar and non-founder, is in-flight WiFi.

Prices have gone down quite a bit over the past year, but I remember being locked in an inner struggle with myself to spend $50 for two hours of WiFi.

The first line of thinking is: well, can I generate $50 in those two hours if I have WiFi? Chances are, yeah, you can -- but will you? I don't know if you've ever tried to get work done on an airplane, but I'm miserable at it; its cramped, loud, and just generally unpleasant. I might end up staring at a blank terminal for two hours.

But lets say we decide that we're going to be uber-productive and we'd spend those two hours coding away diligently. We value our productivity here at $50/hour, so buy spending $50 on wifi we gain $100 of productivity. The next question is: how productive would we be without wifi? Economic decisions aren't made in a vaccuum: a programmer can do an awful lot without WiFi -- and its up to your heuristics to decide if the bump in productivity is worth the $50.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting counterpoint to the original time post; it's better to think about the amount of energy and focus you're putting into something, because in the end these resources are much more finite and variable than time.

Time is a known quantity, and at any one time you know how much time you or your employees have available (more or less). You can burn through energy and focus at very different rates depending on how you spend it. It's also not as measurable as time, which is why people like to just equate time to effort/focus, and then just measure effort based on time spent.

In reality, some people are better at spending their effort in short sharp bursts over a longer period of time, while other people prefer to spend it all once until a task is done or they run out of energy, and there's all sorts of people in between. This also highlights the importance of taking time to recharge, and making sure you have a reasonably balanced life.

I think this is the big reason for the success of some implementations of hammock driven development and paid company holidays in increasing the value generated by employees. In the end it's important not only to consider time spent, but also to consider productivity. A focus purely on time spent is what gives us 40-hour work weeks chained to a desk. Because logically the more time you spend at your desk, the more work you'll get done, right? We all know the fallacy of this type of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER7> As Greg Brown sang, "time ain't money when all you got is time."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-xWWFNJFJQ>

</comment><comment><USER8> The opportunity cost of wages not earned is not the proper tool with which to measure the amount of benefit your time provides to yourself and other humans.</comment>


FoodSpotting founder on finding cofounder, marketing & female entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://asable.com/2010/05/asable-com-interview-of-alexa-andrzejewski-founder-of-foodspotting/

<comment><USER2> Oh no, I had better give magicbeef.com a makeover and get on the stick here. I came up with the idea over a few coronas. Execution makes all the difference though, does it not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, execution is the key. Btw, I checked the site but don't get what magicbeef is about...</comment></comment>


Japanese Girl Sensation: Virtual Boyfriends (Webkare) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/20/webkare-a-girls-only-combination-of-social-network-and-dating-game-from-japan/

<comment><USER2> I'm really curious why this is cast as a "Japanese girls are lonely". My girlfriend also watches those horrible Asian romance dramas and (jokes notwithstanding) I'm pretty sure the reason is more to fulfill her sappiness quota and not to cure her deep aching loneliness.

I think its more notable for its interesting game mechanic and the utterly evil method they have for getting high page counts per user. (I mean, it seems that the company just implied you advance in the game by looking at pages you wouldn't have looked at normally. Devious!)

<comment><USER3> _...to fulfill her sappiness quota and not to cure her deep aching loneliness_

Just like boys who play counterstrike do it to fulfill their violence quota? Give me a break.

<comment><USER4> So boys who play counterstrike do it, instead, because they really want to kill people?

<comment><USER5> Depends if it's monday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok it's not only in the west the programmers are focused on bullshit...

<comment><USER7> _"... Ok it's not only in the west the programmers are focused on bullshit ..."_

Making things that people want?

<comment><USER8> People simply wanting it doesn't make it important or useful in objective terms. Diggers, for example, _really_ keep up with the service, even though a) almost all of the stories are a waste of time and b) almost all of the commenters are hilariously misinformed, to put it politely.

<comment><USER9> By that standard, any kind of entertainment is worthless.

<comment><USER8> No, I don't think so. I think there is entertainment, like reading a good book, or listening to good music, that is worth something because it ... helps you in some way, and entertainment like digg, which is just a complete time sink.

This essay by Neal Stephenson puts it into words better than I can: <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html>

<comment><USER10> What's a good book? Harry Potter? Shakespear? What's good music? Beethoven? T-Pain?

More importantly - who is the judge? The government? You? If so, then are you allowed to decide what is 'good' for others? Are they allowed to decide what is 'good' for you?

You see what I mean? There is no absolute when it comes to entertainment. There is no good or bad. There is just stuff that entertains, and stuff that does not.

<comment><USER7> _"... What's a good book? Harry Potter? Shakespear? What's good music? Beethoven? T-Pain? ..."_

        Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
        Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
        Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
        And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
        The Sonnets, 18.

        http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/wssnt10.txt

Shakespeare not "Shakespear".

<comment><USER10> Shakespeare can hardly be classified as entertainment anymore. The english is just too old and too difficult for most people to read to be anymore than a chore.

Harry Potter is REAL present-day entertainment, and anyone who wants to get into the industry has to understand that.

<comment><USER7> _"... The english is just too old and too difficult for most people to read to be anymore than a chore ..."_

Good point.

Now if we are talking say _"The A-Team"_ I'd agree. Bodie, Doyle, Tiger and jewelry man, Mr-T. I can see how some might spell Mr. Tee, Mr T or even Mr. Tea if you're a Brit. But meddling with the spelling of the greatest, most recognised writer in the history of English literature?

 _"... Harry Potter is REAL present-day entertainment, and anyone who wants to get into the industry has to understand that ..."_

I agree J.K. Rawlings, is a modern master of story telling. But I can name plenty of classic literature novels that have gone straight to mass visual media bypassing their literary cousins. Behind each great bit of entertainment is a great script. A lot of these scripts are based on classic lit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So girls are getting virtual boyfriends now? Great. My chances were bad enough already.

</comment><comment><USER12> 3 of the boys look like girls... True to the tradition.

</comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't sound very "girls only" to me...

</comment><comment><USER14> Only in Japan...

<comment><USER15> The Japanese seem more ready than most to project human feelings onto cartoon characters. Thus the popularity of cartoons focused at young adults in Japan, as well as the phenomenon of cartoon pornography.</comment></comment>