What Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots - <AUTHOR> http://slacy.com/blog/2011/03/what-larry-page-really-needs-to-do-to-return-google-to-its-startup-roots/ <comment><USER2> Yup, all those things are good. I could recount the counter arguments but without the Google 'context' they wouldn't make a lot of sense to people on HN. And when you get right down to it, step way back and look hard, is the elephant in the room, the monkey in the wrench, the uninvited love child, is that the arguments not making sense outside of Google is a symptom of a more pernicious issue.

When you get to the point where the arguments against something don't make sense outside the context of the internal path you've chosen, you have to ask if maybe you've crossed into an area where you're very much in danger of group think.

I respect what they have been able to achieve, and I certainly respect the vision of data center sized computers. I also experienced first hand the kinds of weird rationalization that accompanies trying to mentally (or culturally) accommodate an externally forced invariant for which the original principles have ceased to be relevant.

The 'Google Scale' problem is one such invariant.

For a large part of its existence there was never enough infrastructure to support things, and if you looked at Google's financial disclosures they were spending a billion dollars a quarter on new infrastructure. An x86 class server costs about $5k, do the math.

When the Great Recession hit that expansion stopped but what was interesting was this: When Google had been growing, an App that was popular would develop a material footprint in the infrastructure, that imprint would cause additional pain if it wasn't designed to fit in with everything else. However, just buy growing so much infrastructure, Google had reached a point where some apps would never have a material impact on the total resources consumed, the infrastructure was just that big.

But the rules didn't change, you had to design to run on what constituted 'Google Scale' as defined in the present not by what it meant when that requirement was put in place.

So the difficulty of implementing the requirement scaled with the size of the infrastructure, but the kinds of products that were being conceived and deployed would never need that level of scale. Stalemate, and what was worse there wasn't anywhere inside the company to even have the conversation about whether or not the requirement still made sense. And _that_ was the root of a lot of problems and a lot of people have reflected that up the chain.

When I was there this blog posting might have been a long missive to the internal list for miscellaneous discussions, it would no doubt become a centi- thread (over a 100 responses) and detecting any change that it produced would be difficult at best (and positive change would never be credited to the person who pointed it out, only the people who changed would get any credit). And it's not that it wouldn't cause change, the social network inside worked through these issues with a plodding but deliberate slowness and sometimes those internal groups within groups might reach out to the original instigator, but more often not. But what the change _wouldn't_ feel like is "startup-y."

I suggested to Alan Eustace once that Google I/O was a really cool way of getting people on board with various API changes and understanding the direction folks were taking, how come we didn't have an internal version?

Lots of potential, lots of challenges. Fortunately lots of folks dedicated to working through the challenges to make things better and its always great to have Larry pounding his fist on the table to add some urgency to an already frenetic environment. Sometimes the table pounding though just made the organization look like one of those table top football games where the vibrating games board caused the game pieces to move, somewhat randomly, around the board :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds way more like "how to make Google a developer wonderland" than "how to make Google more startup like".

The author started at Google post-IPO. That's hardly "startup" time. In a startup it's not like resources are given out like candy and there's massive amounts of free-time for working on 20% projects.

It's true that there are less meetings at startups, but there are other things that typical hackers find unsavory: developers also have to do sales, sysadmin, customer support and generally be much more aware of where the money comes from.

The thing that makes a startup interesting is that the company _is_ the project. Frequent meetings aren't as necessary because the goals are usually easy to understand and fairly one dimensional, e.g. "We have one product and we need to increase the number people using it."

The way you'd make a big company more startup like would be to make teams far more autonomous and drastically increase the risk / reward gradients. Your product ships 6 months late? Your entire team is fired. You open up and sustain a new revenue channel that's paying big dividends? Everybody gets a $2 million bonus. Team leader disagrees with his boss? He can chose to do it his way, knowing he's risking his team's livelihoods.

I don't know if anybody's really crazy enough to try it in a large company.

<comment><USER4> What you're describing sounds exactly like Amazon, except for the $2 million bonuses.

<comment><USER5> I'll speculate that this is a problem with all large companies: the price of failure for the team involved is huge (unemployment?), but the benefit of success is small (continued employment and maybe a bonus). If the incentives are so structured, it's no surprise that you get risk-averse behavior.

<comment><USER6> Very few teams actually get laid off just because the product fails. The only time it's happened in Google's history was Google Radio Automation, where they brought on a bunch of people with very specific domain knowledge of the radio industry and then had nowhere to put them when they decided they weren't going to get involved with radio after all. Most of the time (assuming they don't quit), the team just gets absorbed into other products.

I assume things are similar in other large tech companies.

I'll posit that the real problem with big companies is the opposite: the price of failure is mild (you get reassigned to another team and get to do more cool stuff) and the benefits of success are also mild (you might get a promotion and an iPad or something). When your actions have little effect on the outcome, your actions tend to regress to the mean. In a startup, where failure means you starve and success means you never have to work again, you have a much bigger incentive to go the extra distance.

<comment><USER7> From an innovation standpoint, it might be interesting to go with the model of high benefits of success, low cost of failure. That relative skew is what has arguably made the US the leader in this field in the macro.

Startups given the market for engineers in particular actually only have a temporal starvation penalty. It's not like they can't get another job after they fail.

Doing this in a large company might lead to even more innovative products because startups are so under-resourced and governed by promises to investors that they risk becoming myopic and less agile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although I agree with some of your points, Google's cluster management system is years ahead of everyone else. It just makes so much more sense for that thing to exist given the wide heterogeneous workload at Google.

It is so much easier at Google to design something for scalability (which Google is mostly about) than at other companies, mostly thanks to the policies and infrastructures you criticized.

It is easy to just criticize without considering the implications of alternative policies.

For example, re: Switch to team-based distributed source control I've worked at a pretty large software company that does this. The problem is lots of teams are working on similar things and results in duplicated effort.

</comment><comment><USER9> Didn't even see this on HN. Here's the reply I left on your blog.

As someone who worked in the SRE and datacenter/cluster management teams during the same period you were there (2005-2010), I can confidently say that I agree with almost everything you've mentioned. If you think engineers on small projects have a hard time dealing with acquiring and managing cluster resources, try being on the team that has to resolve all of those requests. Because many of Google's core infrastructure pieces are so inflexible and frankly not designed to be used as they are, they end up dying a death of a thousand cuts. Systemic design flaws lead to telling most teams "no" when they asked for even 5 machines worth of resources.

At the end of the day, Google has maybe 5 products that generate 99% of the revenue and operate at huge scale. Should they devote most of their attention and money to these products? Absolutely. Should they do this at the expense of all the small projects? Not if Larry wants the company to act like a startup.

Ultimately the limiting factor to Google's agility will be its technology infrastructure, not its engineers.

<comment><USER10> _Ultimately the limiting factor to Google's agility will be its technology infrastructure, not its engineers._

Isn't that a contradiction? It's the engineers who build the infrastructure. As such I would expect them to be the bottleneck, just like in every other company that has an effectively unlimited hardware budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A discussion on Quora on the same topic [http://www.quora.com/Google-CEO- Change-2011/What-should-Larr...](http://www.quora.com/Google-CEO- Change-2011/What-should-Larry-Page-focus-on-now-that-he-is-CEO-of-Google)

Yishan Wong (previously FaceBook's Director of Engineering )'s suggestions there are interesting

e.g

 _" 1\. Fire a broad swath of people in the executive and management staff

I've talked to quite a few extremely talented and didn't-leave-because-they- were-incompetent Xooglers over the past year at Sunfire (and via other avenues), many of them key early employees. A recurring refrain that I hear is that Google has been taken over by overly-political managers who have laid waste to a formerly meritocratic organization where good ideas get turned into good products, and this has been deadly in two ways: (1) truly good talented people who keep their heads down and get things done are motivated to the leave the company and (2) the organization that remains becomes, by necessity, one that revolves around this internal politicking rather than productive endeavor and shipping products.

Identifying these people from above will be hard, because part of being politically skilled includes looking good to the people above you (and the more politically skilled they are, the better they look), so Larry should directly contact a thousand of the best ex-Googlers and ask them to anonymously name 5 people who are still at Google who should be fired, and using a histogram of the results, fire the top 100 names without letting those people "explain" their way out of it. Steve Jobs did something like this when he returned to Apple (except he just walked the halls firing anyone he thought sucked), and this is the data-driven equivalent: a thousand ex-Googlers is enough to even out any personal grudges, and the aggregate information is likely to be highly reliable about who has been climbing without regard for those below them or the good of the organization. " _

</comment><comment><USER12> _LCE & SRE "blockers". Having support for Launch Coordination & Site Reliability is great, but when these people say "you can't launch unless…" then you know they're being a hindrance, and not a help._

Isn't that the point? They are there to maintain a larger point of view from individual developers. Giving every person with their own agenda launch authority is disastrous (in a large organization): Of course _my_ project is important. _My_ project doesn't need review, _I_ wrote it.

<comment><USER13> Compare with the Zuck stating: "move fast and break things" and "you won't be fired for bringing down the site."

<comment><USER14> There is a better chance that people are using Google products (like Mail and Docs) for tad more critical stuff than Facebook. So the comparison may not be completely correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some of those ideas are right on the money, but this is pretty hard to read if you didn't actually work there.

> Make it very clear that good, small ideas matter.

This is a problem everywhere big, and I agree one million percent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry for all the Googlisms, but I really wanted to target a Google audience.

<comment><USER15> Yeah. I did, so I got it. (I was technically a SWE but I mostly did product stuff. A bit of it went over my head.)

I also worked at Yahoo, so I can compare what you said to "big internet companies" as well. The dedicated hardware thing can be a nightmare. Using open source stuff internally can be a nightmare too.

Where did you go after Google?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree with nearly everything you had to say except for your bit about interviewing. At a properly functional startup people spend A LOT of time thinking about recruiting. You seem to want to reduce that load at google.

Rather than reducing the load Google needs to better connect the work of doing good recruiting to to individual/team success. The total disconnect between who does the interviewing and what team a hire ends up working on is the big problem, not the total amount of time/effort being devoted to recruiting.

-harryh, googler from 2004-2009

<comment><AUTHOR> Really good point. Mostly, I was amazed at the amount of time devoted to doing "manager-ish" things like writing up perf feedback, snippets, and also the laborious interview task.

Part of my frustration there was seeing myself doing 2+ interviews per week for most of my career, and my colleagues and coworkers doing 1/month or less. This isn't right. I also saw internal recruiters who had "favorites" who were googlers that were more laxed in their feedback and would more likely lead to a hire. This is wrong.

Interviewing and hiring is really, really important! But, I think that Google's distributed system actually bogs down everyone instead of doing the fast & easy thing.

How would a 3 person company hire their 4th and 5th people? Google needs to do that, at scale.

<comment><USER6> Having interviewed at several 3-person companies - the good ones have _everyone_ in the company interview the candidate, then everyone reports back to the CEO and a single "no hire" nixes the candidate. That obviously won't scale to Google's size, nor should it. In an early-stage startup, it's crucial that everyone be able to work well with everyone else. In a 25,000 person company, not so much.

<comment><USER17> Actually, Larry Page does review every single Google hire, according to a recent article in Wired; <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/all/1>

"One way Page tries to keep his finger on Google's pulse is his insistence on signing off on every new hire—so far he's vetted well over 30,000. For every candidate, he is given a compressed version of the lengthy packet created by the company's hiring council, generated by custom software that allows Page to quickly scan the salient data. He gets a set every week and usually returns them with his approvals—or in some cases bounces—in three or four days. "It helps me to know what's really going on," he says"

<comment><USER6> He didn't review mine, because he was out of town for Thanksgiving at the time and I had another offer that was getting antsy. OTOH, it took like 3 VPs to sign off on it in his absence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even without working for Google, I can fully appreciate most of the issues and proposed solutions. Like in any big company, only the people "deep in the trenches" even see these issues, worry about them, and worry why management is so clueless that they don't even see the issue.

However, the key is to understand that these are simply superficial manifestations of a bigger issue: as the company grows in size, communication requirements grow exponentially, and even a slight mismatch in the talents of people will lead to serious issues. I don't think any of the recommendations will work at the scale of 20,000 engineers that Google has.

Take open source software for instance. For a 10 person start up, it works beautifully. Now try convincing 10 other startups to adopt exactly the same set of software, and you'll have a never ending religious war on hand. But you cannot also let everyone to pick their own solution, for then the 10 different groups cannot integrate with each other.

Far too many people keep complaining (I complain where I work for as well :), but the solution is not easy. By far the best approach is for people to realize that there is a need for a company to grow so much, and not anymore. However, human nature will not permit that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good quote: "Engineers at Google spend huge amounts of their time being forced to prematurely optimize their backend and frontend infrastructure."

The root of all evil. At Google. That's ironic.

Another great quote: "Amazon EC2 is a better ecosystem for fast iteration and innovation than Google's internal borg system."

<comment><USER6> The irony: #22 on this list, which just made HN a few days ago:

[http://searchengineland.com/25-things-i-hate-about-google- re...](http://searchengineland.com/25-things-i-hate-about-google- revisited-5-years-later-67969)

The reason he puts it as "LOVE" is directly because products aren't allowed to launch unless they can prove they have sufficient capacity. And AFAIK the policy was put in place because of a few high profile failures where a popular service launched and then keeled over from high demand.

I don't necessarily think it's the right trade-off, but it's important to note that it _is_ a trade-off, and other people absolutely love the effects of something that I find rather annoying as an engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> With all this talk about Amazon, I'd love to hear if Amazon actually has the same problems, and AWS is just a customer-facing product that you can't actually use internally.

<comment><USER20> AFAIK, the concept and core tools behind AWS _built_ for internal use in Amazon, making them available was a serendipitous byproduct. Their strong "you build it, you run it" manifesto would ease some of the problems that OP has pointed out, e.g. correcting other people's code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think that having "The Google-way" is certainly valuable to Google (and engineers). Because there are only a few ways to do things you can build something and then hand it off to another time (SRE) for day-to-day operations. It also makes security and machine management much easier to deal.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just pointing out the flip-side.

Maybe Google should have a separate network with separate virtualized machines and no "Google stuff" for new medium-sized projects. Test whether they get traction there and then port them into "the Google-way" later.

Or maybe "the Google-way" just needs to be fixed up to make it easier. For example you could use AppEngine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed 100% on making dual infrastructure. Google Search and other high- reliability products need to stay on time-tested infrastructure.

Making a "wild-west" of infrastructure (a-la an in-house EC2) would really be the right way to go. And, as you said, put small & medium sized stuff there, and make porting over a moderate but not impossible task.

With respect to AppEngine, it's often stated as some kind of panacea solution for scalability for small applications. But, as a web application developer, I see AppEngine as "Googleisms on the outside". And by this, I mean that AppEngine is also a walled garden. Can you access a MongoDB instance from AppEngine? What about memcached for caching? Solr for document indexing and search? These are all things that are easy to do in a dedicated machine environment and greatly benefit small projects, but are impossible via anything Google builds.

<comment><USER22> AppEngine offers memcached support baked in.

[https://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/using...](https://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/usingmemcache.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What was fascinating for me was how much of this is applicable to Microsoft too (in some cases, scarily so). I guess every large tech company has similar dynamics, even when Google has tried really, really hard to be different.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's interesting that the author wants to use stuff like Hadoop/Cassandra, products that are clones of Google's older gen. systems, and are certainly inferior. (Just download the latest Hadoop/Hbase, kill -9, and it all goes to hell with data loss.)

</comment><comment><USER25> This changed my view of Google, I thought they kinda aced on those points, being smart & pragmatic, and that that was what made them the place where the smartest folks on the industry wanted to work.

</comment><comment><USER26> This post is so spot-on, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets pulled. NDA violation galore.

<comment><USER27> I'm unable to access it now, at 7:10 PM Pacific time. Luckily, if I just prepend the URL of this Google-critical blog post with "cache:" in Google Chrome, it pulls up a copy on Google's cache.

<comment><USER6> The site just hangs for me, so I'm guessing it got linked from somewhere else and is getting overloaded, not being killed for NDA. I'd think it would 404 if it was specifically pulled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google is pretty much dead and it doesn't even know it. They have produced nothing but high profile flops for some time now and all indications are that pangerank is no longer reliable, they have stemmed e tide a bit with blacklisting but I am pretty sure they are approaching search the wrong way. As the web matures they should focus on ferreting out quality sites, not just boiling the ocean and indexing everything there is to index. A "like button" based search is going to eat their lunch, the question is who is going to get there first.

<comment> T-hawk > A "like button" based search is going to eat their lunch

Only until the content farms build bots capable of liking each other. It's an eternal arms race. Google figures out a property that quality content has (links from other sites, URL matching keywords, "like button" clicks), and it's useful for a while until the content farms figure it out and morph their content to match those rules.

</comment></comment><comment> space-monkey There seems to be a steady stream of these from ex-Googlers, which is frankly what I'd expect from a company of that size. What I'd be interested to know is what percentage of SWE's are leaving each year, and of course how do the people that are left feel about the company. The ones that I've heard from have a range of opinions from It's Ok to It's Great, but those are of course anecdotes.

Also, "behaviors that lead to success" are not necessarily the same as "behaviors of the successful". Lots of folks have effectively won the lottery.

</comment><comment><USER29> I disagree with almost everything except the startup incubator, reducing the endless meetings, and getting started with hardware. Google has these things for a reason, and they have been more reliable than twitter, facebook, etc. and their technology actually works. So what if they restrict their engineers into using their own systems? They put reliability and dependability for their users first, and that's why we have all come to trust google's infrastructure, privacy, etc. way more than facebook. Would you put your corporate email on facebook?

It sounds like what they SHOULD do is streamline and document the system for their engineers better. There should be an internal project started to make their developers HAPPIER and more productive. For example, you have an idea for a new project? Here's the actionable checklist. Need to launch? Please make sure all of these are checked, then you can launch. Treat your developers like you treat your users.

As for capturing people into an incubator before they leave the company? I like that idea. Except of course, one has to wonder how much this will incentivize people to quit google, just to get more autonomy and a better deal :P Not to mention, that once acquired by google, the startups' technologies are just rewritten to live in the Google ecosystem, so this seems like a waste of money... except for possibly the IP licensing costs.

</comment><comment><USER30> Site is down for me. Here is cached page: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://slacy.com/blog/2011/03/what- larry-page-really-needs-to-do-to-return-google-to-its-startup-roots/&strip=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry about that. Not sure what happened, attempting to bring it back up now.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, my site has gone down under load or for some other reason. I'm trying my best to get it back up ASAP.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's back up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really wish Larry read news.ycombinator.com.

</comment><comment><USER32> _"I think it's a great idea, and it needs to be made effective. 1 day per week isn't reasonable (you can't get enough done in just one day and it's hard to carry momentum). 1 week per month would be great, but doesn't do justice to your "main" project. Something needs to budge here, and engineers need to be encouraged to take large amounts of time exploring new ideas and new directions."_

What about ~2 months per year? Like a mini-sabbatical.

<comment><USER33> A pity if you have your great idea if you're nowhere near your sabbatical. Momentum lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Site doesn't seem to be responding. Google cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t0H7qG2...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t0H7qG2VgskJ:slacy.com/blog/2011/03/what- larry-page-really-needs-to-do-to-return-google-to-its-startup- roots/&hl=en&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER35> The author joined Google in 2005 (i.e. post-IPO) yet knows what Google was like as a startup?

</comment><comment><USER25> Typos: s/Put and end/Put an end/, s/Okut/Orkut

BTW, can someone explain the first point, "Compiling & fixing other people's code" ? The "world" here refers to other teams inside Google or external libraries?

<comment><USER2> "Compiling & fixing other people's code?"

Google's internal code management system won't let you check in code that fails pre-checkin tests. This is generally a 'best practice' sort of approach. The challenge is however if you modify a library, and in the process of modifying it you change a side effect, and other code's unit tests fail because they depended on the side effect, you have some choices:

1) You can go fix their code so that they don't have the dependency and then check-in (this can be laborious because they have to approve your changes to their code)

2) You can re-introduce the side effect so that their code continues to work.

3) You can try to get them to change their code (very hard since they probably have bunch of other things going on that don't depend on you)

4) You can create a new library (or routine in the library) that has the semantics you want and deprecate the older version.

While this was extremely painful for folks who were working lower down in the system it was not as big an issue for folks on the upper levels. And in a perverse way it motivated good interface design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What do you think about the reputation problem, in particular?

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I think Google should break itself up. It needs to treat it's search & ads business totally differently than it treats it's other "startup- ish" properties. These can/should be launched under different branding, or, like a startup, each could be launched under it's own discrete branding.

I'm not sure it really matters if a site is "developed by Googlers". Why do the users care? If Google is playing farovitism with results, then it's probably important to disclose that, but otherwise, just let startups be startups.

<comment><USER37> > _I'm not sure it really matters if a site is "developed by Googlers". Why do > the users care?_

brand matters a lot, especially when trusting a web app with private data is concerned.

more than that there's brand loyalty. i realize this is an extreme example, but i don't use dropbox because it's the kind of internet-feature i want under my google account, not somewhere else. i literally don't want any company other than google to succeed in that space.

<comment><USER38> GDrive is the Duke Nukem Forever of online backup and file syncing, except it hasn't even been announced.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SN 1006 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006 <comment><USER2> > While SN 1006 did not appear to have such significant effects, a signal of > its eruption can be found in nitrate deposits in Antarctic ice.

Not heard about this, are there any other signs from supernova we have detected on Earth?

<comment><USER3> While it's not an exact parallel, core collapse supernovas unleash large amounts of neutrinos. These are detectable on Earth even before the light from the supernova explosion reaches us. This was the case with SN 1987a, where about 2-3 hours before the visible light reached Earth, neutrinos from the event were detected [0].

In the intervening years, we've actually build a "network" of neutrino observatories that cooperate and share event data, called SNEWS (SuperNova Early Warning System) [1], that will (hopefully) give us a little warning before the next major supernova event.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A#Neutrino_emissions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A#Neutrino_emissions)

[1] [http://snews.bnl.gov/](http://snews.bnl.gov/)

<comment><USER4> How come the neutrinos can reach us before the light does? I thought that neutrinos traveled at the speed of light?

Sorry if this is a stupid question.

<comment><USER5> This is answered here: [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90708/neutrinos-a...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90708/neutrinos- arrived-before-the-photons-supernova)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first thought was "I wonder what it looks like". It looks like this: [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/tapestr...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/tapestry.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> The article mentions that the event was possibly recorded in the form of petroglyphs[1]. I think that's a fascinating idea, and it reminded me of Dr. Anthony Peratt's[2] research on the recording of prehistoric auroral events, also in the form of petroglyphs[3].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006#cite_note- napetro-5](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006#cite_note-napetro-5)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Peratt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Peratt)

[3] [http://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003c...](http://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003clr.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> IIRC, Carl Sagan's Cosmos has a scene of this event from the monks' perspective.

<comment><USER9> There's a mention of SN 1054: [http://youtu.be/FBzZ- DPHd3Y?t=38m26s](http://youtu.be/FBzZ-DPHd3Y?t=38m26s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The Chinese astrologer Zhou Keming

In the midst of all this wonderful astrology I couldn't help but laugh. Didn't know that Keming was an actual name, brilliant.</comment>


Ask HN: Mental Benefits of Programming? - <AUTHOR> Are there any studies that coding has similar mental benefits as learning music or verbal  languages? <comment><USER2> If anything I feel my mental health degraded the more time I spent programming. It's the opposite when I play the piano. Is anybody feeling the same?</comment>


App Suey Is Trying to Acquire Its Way to 1% of the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/18/app-suey-is-buying-up-mobile-small-businesses-with-goal-of-owning-1-of-apps-on-itunes/

<comment><AUTHOR> Notable commment: ""An app developer earning $5,000 bucks a month as an example might be thrilled to get a check for 50K"

Assuming a small app developer doesn't have many expenses, this amounts to a 1-2x ebitda price. Seems like a bad deal.</comment>


Stephen Fry meets Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1976935,00.html

<comment><USER2> Notable quote:

 _"Will you perhaps leave Apple on this high, a fitting end to your career here?" "I don't think of my life as a career," he says. "I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career — it's a life!"_

</comment><comment><USER3> Worth reading for the anecdotes and Stephen's wonderful writing style alone, but here's a key point I sometimes need reminding of (apologies for the long quote):

 _What Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human and emotional. Apple's success has been founded on consumer products that address this side of us: their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke._

 _If you are immune to that kind of thing, or you think it somehow weak, pretentious, artsy-fartsy or unbusinesslike, then there are enough functional objects in the market for you. But you might consider this: from the starting point of delight, detail, finish, polish and design come not, it seems, shallow high-end toys for the affluent but increasingly products that are ... well, awesomely functional._

<comment><USER4> Interesting, I thought that was perhaps the weakest paragraph in the otherwise excellent article (I was amazed at how good a writer Fry has become.)

I don't think it's about a profound, human and emotional bond with an iPad or any electronic device. It should be like the bond you have with a good book: it should allow for perfect _immersion_.

When immersed in a book time flies by, you don't even remember flipping pages or finishing chapters... there's a direct stream of consciousness from the book to your brain. I think _that_ is what a good computing device should also offer, and every time your computer gets in the way that bubble bursts and you're violently thrown back into reality.

It takes a lot of computer experience before you can deftly sidestep every error message the computer throws at you, so you can continue on your work without missing a beat. We (programmers/enthusiasts) have been able to do that for ages, but most people don't even know it's even _possible_ to work with a computer without getting frustrated.

Immersion is the name of the game, and the iPad might just get that right.

<comment><USER5> I'm not kidding here when I say I do believe you've hit upon the profound, central truth of the iPad.

It's not about the fact that it's a tablet. It could have been any form factor, even been a desktop computer with a mouse; the tablet form factor just helps it in this central regard: It's about abstracting every last thing, to the best of its designers' and engineers' abilities, away from your task at hand. The goal is nothing short doing things with all the help of a computer and none of the hindrance.

<comment><USER6> Well, I'm skeptical whether one can abstract form away so much...

If, _just supposing_ , an item which seems amazingly functional and compliant after five minutes gives you a headache, a sore write _and_ pain in the lower back after twenty minutes ... then would there still be _none of the hindrance_?

<comment><USER7> There's a few reviews out now, and in most of them the iPad never seemed to leave the reviewers side. I think in the BoingBoing review (but I'm not going back to re-read it) the review (can't remember her name) claimed to have been using the iPad for 12 hours straight.

I don't recall reading a review where the reviewer complained about the problems you've stated here

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker's Guide that humankind has yet devised."

I find this pretty touching, when I first read the hitchhikers guide I remember the excitement of owning a guide, while I doubt I will get an ipad, if I do, it will certainly have a "dont panic" cover

<comment><USER9> And... here you go: <http://mantia.me/wallpaper/dont-panic/> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the one of the most telling nuggets in that piece is from designer Jonathan Ive:

"For us, it is all about refining and refining until it seems like there's nothing between the user and the content they are interacting with"

Also, as someone with experience in quantitative marketing, the following quote made a lot of sense as well. In my opinion, quantitative marketing and analytics are great tools, and as we've seen in both sports and business, people use them do have an advantage. Again, however, in my opinion these tools are too reactionary and don't leave as much room for creative thought.

"It's not for us to predict what others will do," Ive says. "We have to concentrate on what we think is right and offer it up."

You gotta give it to jobs, that Ive guy is obviously incredibly bright and Jobs takes credit for finding him too.

</comment><comment><USER11> As something of a Fry fanboy I get the sense that the Time sub-editors did some serious work on that article. Much of the tone remains but the progress and overall rhythm of the piece seem off-kilter from what I'd expect.

</comment><comment><USER12> _"I have met five British Prime Ministers, two American Presidents, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson and the Queen. My hour with Steve Jobs certainly made me more nervous than any of those encounters."_

<comment><USER13> I can't remember where, but I remember reading one piece where the person said making eye contact with Steve Jobs was like looking directly into the sun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kind of a frightening photo of Jobs with that story, too.</comment>


Show HN: Free For All Chat - <AUTHOR> http://yell.longren.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Create account, create room, invite people, do whatever.

S3 isn't enabled, so files won't stick.</comment>


CPython destroys decade old software with inept threats - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KyleSanderson/SteamWorks/pull/29 <comment><USER2> Taking out distutils from CPython seems unnecessary. It is rarely updated anyway and is required to build Python itself.

Why should people be forced to download an external package? Distutils _still_ just works, despite assertions from the packaging crowd, most of whom have no clue about C extensions or compilers. The people who wrote distutils did.</comment>


Writing Clean Code in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zedr/clean-code-python <comment><USER2> Is this yours ? Why is this worthy of attention?

The reason I ask is because this is 1 millionth time I've seen this type of post.

Ive seen so many infact im discouraged to even bother viewing.

WHY is this git repo better than others ?

Because SOLID ? ...</comment>


Save $9, Here Are The TechCrunch Staff's Email Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/14/please-dont-spam-us/ <comment><USER2> "Well, unless AOL messes up my email inbox again:" I thought that was a joke at first, but apparently they are owned by AOL.

Are techcrunch employees required to use AOL Desktop? It looks the same as it did in 1998 [http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/](http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/)

AOL badly needs to rebrand themselves. It seems like the company has changed and is very profitable in recent years.

They could offer, "the greatest thing in the world, by AOL", but it's not a company I would ever do business with, I don't have a logical reason for this.

Fun fact: "at one point, half of the CDs manufactured worldwide had AOL logos on them" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL) [http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol- discs-90s/](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/)

<comment><USER3> I love the requirements, 266MHz processor, 1gb ram recommended. That processor speed makes me think it hasn't been updated really in nearly 20 years.

<comment><USER4> If it were 20 years old I wouldn't expect to see the 1gb RAM recommendation. How much did a gig of RAM cost 20 years ago? I'm guessing about as much as a used Volkswagen :)

<comment><USER5> Try two new Volkswagens fully loaded. A quick search says it would cost about $28k, which is $45k today adjusted for inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In other words, TC does not approve charging money for providing a set of useful email addresses (even if it's wrapped in a neat Bootstrap/Stripe gift box) and regards it as good old _shady pro spammers_. It leads to young startups sending mass emails and giving headache to everybody on their path. They prefer to share their email addresses with you openly and free of charge.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Why is this on ProductHunt?

<comment><USER7> "No subscription. No automatic renewal."

As if...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is descending further down towards the bottom of the barrel to leech on more publicly available, easily harvested and/or less scarce items to sell at a markup a rising startup trend? It seems building novel value into a product is becoming less important to a segment of the startup industry. We now have selling of public parking spots, dinner reservations, and now email addresses. And while this model isn't new, there appears to be a popular reemergence of it.

<comment><USER9> I think it's that we just enjoy the spectacle of companies that seem like terrible ideas or based around an ethically questionable action. Nobody gets excited about "tech startup grows revenue to $100k on niche, hard to understand product and delays investor round to avoid dilution"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TC doesn't seem opposed to PressFarm's success as a business. From the comments (Tsotsis is an editor at TC):

        Wouter Smet : ...with this post you just gifted Press Farm, apparently a super tiny company/web site, the exposure and traffic startups can only dream about....
        Alexia Tsotsis : Oh, yeah, you're right, we totally didn't think of that angle. Oops!

<comment><USER6> I don't see how you might conclude that "TC doesn't seem opposed to PressFarm's success as a business" based on that one line of comment.

I read Alexia's response as "We considered the possibility that this post will give PressFarm a much unwanted exposure, and yet we went ahead and published it anyway, just to save you the ice creams money."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is just an email list? A more compelling product would connect a particular journalist with every story they've ever written, across all publications he/she's ever worked at. Then you could search articles by topic, type of product covered, sentiment towards particular vertical...etc and reach out only to the journalist that seem to have an interest in whatever story you're pitching.

<comment><USER12> "Seems like a lot of effort when you can just spam the whole list."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you set up gmail filters correctly, there's really no reason why you shouldn't make your email address readily available.

</comment><comment><USER14> Most email addresses of these guys are easily inferred. Some even have them in their Twitter bio like Anthony Ha. Not a big deal.

<comment><USER15> It's like stuffing envelopes. If you have to do 3 or 10 inefficiency doesn't matter that much. If you have to do 100 or 500 or 5000 all that extra time to guess name@ or name.last@ or nlast@ or n.last@ etc. is a big time waste. Paving to have the right address (even if some aren't correct because they've changed) is worth paying for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If they are willing to do that, then I guess the age of email spam has passed.

<comment><USER17> Most TechCrunch writers gave their email freely if you asked. This list is the inevitable conclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> does someone want to make a more comprehensive list?

<comment><USER17> That list is a list of all the authors at TechCrunch. I would not recommend e-mailing the administrative staff.

<comment><USER19> Maybe he means other sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Plain text? Isn't TC worried about spam?

<comment><USER21> They most likely have very good spam filters already in place. They are receiving "tips" already constantly.

<comment><USER22> tips are supposed to go to email@example.com but when I was there it was a total firehose you had to filter out into a folder and wade through all at once. You'd probably be okay emailing a writer directly if you have a good reason to think they rather than someone else should be receiving your pitch.

<comment><USER23> Word. I'll note for others that impressing a journo involves not looking up their most recent clips and figuring our how your topic is like those too, but rather understanding the needs of that particular writer in their particular beat and trying to add value for her while extracting some value of your own as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: See a Satellite Tonight. No Telescope Required - <AUTHOR> https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ <comment><USER3> For whoever built this app: I was checking HN in bed. I clicked your app and noticed the ISS would be passing overhead in less than a minute. My reaction was to immediately jump up, yell at my kids to run with me outside. We didn't know where to look, but then I figured out how to load the streetview and saw that it would be closer to the horizon and BOOM. We finally saw it zooming across the night sky, everybody started to cheer and yell. It was the most amazing thing we've done all week :).

<comment><USER4> Same with me. ISS will cross me in few mins.(Edit: changed the exact minutes)

Edit:Saw it. I wanted to take a photo or video but the street light and overexposed the photo. How do I take a reasonably good photo of ISS?

<comment><USER5> I don't know about the iss specifically, but was stunned that taking a handheld photo with my huawei mate p20 pro - I could capture bright city lights, the aurora _and_ a few bright stars shining through the aurora - <USER2> the same frame.

I'd be hard pressed to manage the same with my (old) dslr.

<comment><USER6> Pics or it didn't happen. That's an impressive amount of dynamic range you are talking about.

<comment><USER5> Yes. It's a combination of high iso with relatively low noise, and some enforced heavy handed post-processing in the camera app. And perhaps multiple exposures, I suspect. The pictures aren't "great" \- but considering it's just "point and shoot" \- I found it pretty impressive.

Let me see if I can't upload a couple of examples.

Ed: Any easy image hosting sites that work on mobile and allow selective whitelisting of exif data? I might want to strip time/GPS, but keep/present exposure information.. All without having to go via a desktop image program.

<comment><USER7> [https://imgur.com/upload](https://imgur.com/upload) is the fastest to make it accessible but it doesn't allow selective whitelisting.

<comment><USER5> Ah oh well. The motives and information already on hn probably correlate well enough anyway, so:

[https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=10SO7r98DwjkMRj7H2uhK...](https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=10SO7r98DwjkMRj7H2uhKBB1rw1oXGmjt)

I guess you'll have to download to see exif info.

Ed: i guess a photo sharing site that both values exif (exposure etc) and privacy (allow whitelisting) might be a nice side project..

<comment><USER7> These photos are amazing!

I think Flickr gives you what you want. But you do have to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> HA! I've never seen the ISS before. Went out to the front of the house to watch with my kid. Lo and behold, a light appears right where the site said it would, following the trajectory. I start recording. Watching it, I start to notice blinking colored lights and comment that I didn't think we'd be able to see blinking lights. They start getting clearer (you already know where this is going), I start to get suspicious and stop recording. It's moving pretty fast so we follow it to the backyard at which point we're both pretty sure we can hear it. I'm already positive what we just watched was a plane but, just as it fades away, I look just a little higher up and see a much smaller white, non-blikning dot moving almost just as fast. So we watched that. Instead of losing it over the horizon of our fence, it sort of fades out of view in the middle of the sky, which I've never witnessed, and was damn cool to see, but exactly what I would expect to see watching a space station and not a plane :)

Went back and watched the short video I did shoot and, even at low quality, the ISS was visible right above the plane the entire time, we just didn't notice. What are the chances a close, but not so close to be immediately obvious (which happens a lot here), plane would be flying almost the same trajectory as the ISS the first time I try to view it?

</comment><comment><USER9> At first I was going to wonder what the benefit of this above something like www.heavens-above.com is, and then I went all the way through. The real benefit is, I think, the use of a street view visualization to show where the satellites are going to be in the sky.

I would suggest that it might make sense to emphasize that technology over the globe-with-satellite view, as it's a much better trick to pull off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The problem is street view is expensive. I would love to load it at startup but I would run out my free Maps API quota more quickly. (That may happen anyway if this gets popular.) I'm hoping that this way people who aren't that interested bounce before loading street view so that the quota is reserved for people who are really interested.

<comment><USER10> Google should just buy this from you and make it part of google maps for free :)

<comment><USER11> No, because Google would then risk shut it down.

What he should do is, ask for free « open-source » credits, for the glory of science. That's something Google would get behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What an incredibly creative idea.

On the home page I thought, yeah sure but how am I gonna know _exactly_ where to look _exactly_ when and _how long_ do I have...

...and then the first result was the ISS moving in real-time laid over my street view, and all my questions were perfectly answered. I mean, I know what _building_ to look above down to the second!

So just -- super-kudos, one of the cleverest things I've seen in a while.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great execution, a breath of fresh air that you don't ask to 'sign up', 'enter email', etc. and just provide the value right away to be experienced.

<comment><USER14> Site doesnt work unless you give it location access.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should fall back to IP geolocation, but you really need to know at least a general location to get accurate times.

<comment><USER15> what is the default using when I'm using my desktop? My Wifi SSID and creepy pre-sharing to databases that I did inadvertently?

<comment><AUTHOR> The default is the HTML geolocation API, as implemented by your web browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The street-view feature is very impressive, and very useful, especially when combined with the schedule. Thank you for building this.

<comment><USER17> Yes! Looks like the ISS is passing over me in 30 minutes and I know exactly where to look now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another excellent site for live-tracking of satellites is [https://www.n2yo.com](https://www.n2yo.com) which seems to have a pretty exhaustive database of satellites of all kinds. I've used it to track the ISS' position when they were transmitting SSTV images[0] and I was able to pick up those images with my handheld VHF radio[1]!

The site gives 10-day estimates of the satellites' passes (for example the ISS at [2]), but I found its estimation of visibility to be a bit inaccurate for radio reception. Maybe that was more due to my radio antenna positioning though - not sure! Still, it's super useful to give you an idea of possible schedule for upcoming passes, in case you want to plan for it!

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow- scan_television](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television)

[1] [https://twitter.com/amatecha/status/1157891660648370176](https://twitter.com/amatecha/status/1157891660648370176)

[2] [https://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=25544](https://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=25544)

<comment><USER19> These sites are all highly likely to be using something known as TLEs (two line element files) or "keps", which come from NORAD, based on radar observations, for their positional data.

[https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/tle- fmt.php](https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/tle-fmt.php)

[https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/](https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/)

Anything using these TLEs should be identical.

For radio reception, if the problem wasn't pointing calibration, I suspect it was polarisation. There is ~3dB difference between 0 and 45 degrees, but ~25dB difference between 0 and 90 degrees. Therefore either use circularly polarised antennas (e.g. [https://www.wimo.com/xquad- antennas_e.html](https://www.wimo.com/xquad-antennas_e.html)) so you're never more than 45 degrees out, or if it's hand-held, simply twist the antenna for maximum signal strength. The polarisation will vary through the pass.

For some really crappy satellite positioning / radio software that everyone uses because no-one's written a better one yet, check out satpc32.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Others have already said that the street view integration is amazing but I just want to say that I think it's actually better than most of the live sattelite augmented reality apps I've used, which just never seem to work for me and even after looking at them for ten minutes I still can't tell what's going on. It's really awesome

</comment><comment><USER21> This is very cool application of technology. I have always wanted to see the ISS but did not know where to look in the sky. The Google Street View integration tells me exactly where to look.

<comment><USER22> [https://issdetector.com](https://issdetector.com) (ISS is free, not sure about the other objects) does that and you can set up an alarm.

You can point your phone at the sky and see the exact path, visibility conditions etc but wow that Google Street integration by OP makes ISS Detector feel almost outdated.

Especially important in a city where a lot of times buildings will make the sighting impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just saw the ISS!

This was posted a few hours ago and told me exactly where and when to look and sure enough, there it was.

Thanks!

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I lucked out, it was only 10 minutes away when I opened the site. Really cool! Thanks OP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just happened to stumble upon this an hour ago and was able to catch the ISS passing over Boston shortly later! The street view integration is magic and made the ISS a piece of cake to find.

This is such a clever app, and the street view integration is very slick! I did notice that the button to notify me when other objects will be passing overhead didn't do anything (iOS safari)... would love to sign up for notifications when there are more sightings to be had.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you were able to see the ISS! Thanks for the bug report. I just found out that the reason for this is that Safari does not support the standard Web Push API. [https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=push- api](https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=push-api)

Maybe they'll implement it eventually. Until then I guess I'll hide the notification button in Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is excellent! Perfect execution. Street View even has a night filter applied.

We'll include it in The Orbital Index ([https://orbitalindex.com](https://orbitalindex.com)) next week.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm guessing its not a coincidence you chose the day the ISS passes over the middle of the continental US to post this?

<comment><USER28> It is visible for a couple weeks every couple months. Could just be coincidence (though kudos for good marketing if it's planned!). I am wondering though if there's a prioritization for visibility going on, like `maximumBy (comparing brightness) (filter isInLOS allSatellites)` or if there's some prioritization by known-ness. I suspect ISS would score high in both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love the Street view integration, as people have already said.

However, I plugged in an address that I know will be accurate when put into Google Maps, but it put me at the generic center of my zip code. That is still close enough to figure things out, but I'm curious why an address would work on Maps, but not this site?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using a free geocoding service instead of Google Maps, to preserve my free quota for Street View. If you load it on your phone you'll get GPS location instead of geocoding which should work better.

<comment><USER30> Can confirm -- I checked it out on my phone and the street view location is 10 meters away from where I currently stand (Davis Sq, Somerville, MA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't work for me. All I see in Firefox (on desktop) is a blurry earth animation which you can zoom but which does nothing. There are some errors in the console and that's about it. There might be some text or something in the lower left corner but that is blurry too.

<comment><AUTHOR> There should be a Firefox location permission prompt, which you can allow or decline to continue. If not, perhaps an extension is blocking the geolocation API?

<comment><USER31> Geolocation requests are blocked via Firefox privacy settings. There is no hint on the page that it is required.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not required. Perhaps Firefox's implementation of privacy blocking breaks the behavior of the API, which has a standard way of denying location information. Or maybe you're also blocking the IP geolocation service that I use as a fallback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just following up, I tested in Firefox with strict privacy settings and location disabled, and it works for me with the IP geolocation fallback. If IP geolocation fails I have a further fallback to enter your street address. So something else must be broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can you see satellites if you live in a city?

<comment><USER33> The Moon and ISS are pretty easy to see almost everywhere.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, now I want a notification when the ISS will pass in front of the Moon from my location.

Edit: Of course [http://i2.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/t...](http://i2.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/thumb.jpeg?resize=950%2C582)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I got lucky and clicked on this and less than a minute later there was an ISS transit, and I ran outside and saw it!

</comment><comment><USER35> Same here, saw the post, tested it and saw ISS was passing over my house in a few minutes, called my wife to go outside look for it. At first we saw a (possible) satellite, we thought it was too little to be ISS and the trajectory wasn't correct as displayed on the site. Then it just disappeared and when we're heading back inside, we saw the actual ISS, brighter, 2 to 3 times bigger, disappearing near the same spot as the satellite. It was about 2 minutes late and about 10 (land) meters to the right if compared with the projection in google street view, but still impressed by the precision.

Great job with this. Wife enjoyed and it piqued her interest on ISS! Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER36> That was cool.

A kind of similar thing I'd like to see is something for geosynchronous satellites that tells you now, and at future times of your choosing, where they are relative to the visible constellations at your location.

That could make finding a good spot for a satellite dish a lot easier. Pick a time at night, find out what constellation the satellite will be in then, and later all you have to do is go out at that time and find a spot where you can see the right part of that constellation.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is cool if you don't have time, but if you just look at the sky at night for a while in a dark enough area, you'll see a satellite.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love Sky Map Android app, would love seeing satellites and planes like this there. Are there any available out there? Sky Map AR basically.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is so cool! Using streetview really matters for some reason, it made it totally obvious where the thing was going to appear. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER40> It sounds great, but needs WebGL. So not for me.

I wonder if it _really_ needed WegGL. Sigh.

Edit: With WebGL enabled, sites can fingerprint _VMs_. So multiple Debian- family VMs on the same host will have the same fingerprint. VMs with different virtual graphics stacks do have different fingerprints, however. Or Debian- family VMs on different host machines. That's why no WebGL for me.

</comment><comment><USER41> Kudos! Very nicely done. It would be nice to have an easy way to see more details about the satellite. For example, I see that tonight I can see CZ-2C R/B, though without a search I do not quite know anything more about the satellite.

Also like the night mode in the street view. Does that come with the Google Maps API or something you had to build?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, I'd like to add some info about the satellites. I made the "night mode" for Street View with an SVG filter applied to the street view canvas with CSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "This browser doesn't support the API's required to use the firebase SDK. (messaging/unsupported-browser)."

:(

Firefox, macOS

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, old version maybe? I can't reproduce this on Firefox 68 or 69 on macOS.

<comment><USER42> Firefox 69, macOS 10.14.6

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. Perhaps an installed extension? Anyway, I catch this error now so it shouldn't interrupt your use of the site (except that notifications won't work).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Perfect use for tech—bravo!

Can you do this with airplanes too? Might be fun to "see" where they're from/going.

</comment><comment><USER44> Tonight I saw what I thought are three different satellites. Then I went to your website, however I was not able to look back in the past. I modified system time back two hours to learn about what I saw. So there: a feature proposal: a possibility to look back to learn what one has watched.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is such a great example of building products that serve the need of the customer - nails it with zero ambiguity. Please blog about how you did it, software stack, your thought process and be it a reminder that deep thoughtful approach towards a problem can deliver exceptional results.

</comment><comment><USER46> That street view simulation is.... epic. Some of the sweetest dev I've seen this year.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is great! Just wanted to ask did you miss out Iridium flares due to API quota but then found out on HA that the next one is in 10 days for my location (northern Serbia). They were much more frequent last time I checked (10 years ago)

<comment><USER48> The new generation of Iridium satellites don't flare. All of the next-gen satellites were launched over the past couple years, and the older generation is being phased out (and deorbited) as the new ones come online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is ingenious! Love the use of Google Street View.

Reminds me of a small project I put together which offered a reverse perspective of the ISS: [http://www.loworbit.co/](http://www.loworbit.co/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Are the hours in my local TimeZone, in GMT or in the timezone of the developer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Local time as determined by your browser settings.

<comment><USER51> I'd recommend showing this + the time zone (e.g. "browser local time, UTC+2"). My guess was that it's the local time of the location entered, which can matter when telling someone "hey, you'll be able to see a cool satellite looking out your northward window at 9 pm!". If you're worried about keeping a clean look, at least add a tooltip.

(I've also been trained to distrust any time that doesn't specify a time zone, because I've seen sites that default to some random US timezone, use your local time, use UTC, ...)

<comment><USER52> > I've also been trained to distrust any time that doesn't specify a time zone

My pet peeve is status pages that only show times in some US timezone. I'm supposed to know what the conversion from that timezone to my timezone is, and then the timezone to my servers (which are in UTC)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Wow...I basically never let webpages use my location, but I did for this one, and it landed about 200 feet from my apartment. That's crazy accurate! How can an IP be linked to a geolocation that closely?

<comment><USER54> Are you using Chrome? It's probably not geo IP.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, geo ip doesn't need permission to work (modulo privacy), that will all be done server side.

<comment><USER53> Okay, so then how does a website know my location to 200 feet?

<comment><USER56> If you grant location access there is a fast/low accuracy response, and the site can request a slow/high accuracy response which would be your exact GPS location, potentially down to the meter.

[https://www.andygup.net/how-accurate-is-html5-geolocation- re...](https://www.andygup.net/how-accurate-is-html5-geolocation-really- part-2-mobile-web/)

<comment><USER53> I'm on a desktop though - no GPS/wifi.

<comment> why-oh-why If you're using Chrome, Google knows your location through your phone (and Google Maps, if you're on an iPhone)

If you're on mac and have an iPhone, same thing is happening across the whole OS.

Available WiFis, even if you're not connected to one, will be used by your OS to provide location as well.

This uses the basic Geolocation API, you can look up how your computer figures out its location for more detailed info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Awesome, my dad is gonna love this. I've been using the "ISS detector" app. it has a compass that when you line it up with your phone, it points to the object you're trying to track.

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there a site which lists all known satellites in orbit and their trajectories?

Upon sitting on a roof some weeks ago in Texas, I thought I spotted at least 5 or 6+ within 30 minutes. Is this probable?

<comment><USER52> Heavens Above will give you a list of all satellites passing overhead. If you go to "Daily predictions of brighter satellites" it will give a big list of satellites that should be visible from your location. The lower the magnitude, the brighter it will be.

In a city you obviously aren't going to see much because of light pollution (although the ISS is one of the brightest objects, so it should be visible in most cities). If you go to the middle of nowhere, and give your eyes time to adjust to the darkness (around 30 mins), you will see satellites basically all the time and may even see the milky way (it looks like the pictures, but black and white as our eyes can't pick up enough light to detect the colour).

[https://heavens-above.com/](https://heavens-above.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is really cool! Love the street view visualization! I have a request though. To save time searching for the satellite is there anyway you could provide info to what it is as well?

</comment><comment><USER60> I used to wonder what those small pricks of light were, that would travel accross the night sky. Then someone told me they were satellites, and my whole UFO dream was busted. :)

</comment><comment><USER61> This is amazing. LOVE how you did the Street View integration!

</comment><comment><USER62> :-(

Entering my address and hitting GO does nothing...

But I love the idea. However it showed me the times and the satellite but I can't click on the satellite and see what it does :-(

(I'm in Santa Rosa on an iPad)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that. What generation iPad and version of iOS? I've only tested on the latest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Awesome service! However notifications don't seem to work in Safari. It says "Notifications not allowed" in spite of me having set it to allowed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I'm using FCM for notifications, maybe it behaves differently in Safari. I'll take a look later. Thanks for the report.

<comment><AUTHOR> Turns out Safari doesn't support the standard way of doing push notifications. [https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=push-api](https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=push- api)

Until they do, I'll hide the notifications button in Safari.

<comment><USER63> Thanks for looking into it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I click on "See where it will appear in the sky", the view just clears an nothing happens. I see black stuff. Nothing on it. In any browser.

</comment><comment><USER65> Thank you for sharing this. My wife and I got to see the ISS fly across the sky, and we knew exactly where and when to look. I really appreciate it!

</comment><comment><USER66> You can use Stellarium for that as well: [https://stellarium.org](https://stellarium.org)

</comment><comment><USER67> Wow this is fantastic. Just saw it streaming across the sky evening in oakland it is possible to see it with all the light pollution!

</comment><comment><USER68> This is such a cool app, whoever built it, how did you map the trajectory on Google Street View with animation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm using the same library that displays the 3D globe view, CesiumJS. I feed it the camera parameters from the Street View API and from that it can calculate the coordinates of the satellite on screen. I take those coordinates and use the 2D canvas API to draw the satellite dot and label. The 2D canvas is overlaid on top of Street View with some basic CSS.

<comment><USER68> very nice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Watched the ISS pass overhead with my family in our backyard last night. Thank you for creating this!

</comment><comment><USER70> Awesome! I will try to use this soon.

</comment><comment><USER71> Wow! Great work!

The next thing that would be useful is an AR integration. I'd prefer that over google street view.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this is really great! The street view feature is a revelation man. Excellent project!

<comment><USER10> You need to add og:image to this site so facebook sharing is more effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! og:image is there, is it not working for you? It's nothing fancy, just a screenshot of the site.

<comment><USER10> huh - it didn't popup for me when I pasted the link to facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Amazing app. Really sad it doesn't work in Firefox (mobile) though :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that it doesn't work for you. It does work for me but it is very slow unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Really great! Too bad there isn't Street View available everywhere :(

</comment><comment><USER74> This was a reminder to try to contact the ISS using amateur radio.

</comment><comment><USER75> This is great. Even displays the cloud cover forecast. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER76> I just saw the ISS with my kids (3 and 6). They were so excited.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER77> That integration with street-view is awesome!!

</comment><comment><USER78> I saw the ISS last night. This app is great!

</comment><comment><USER79> This is great. I am gonna try it today

</comment><comment><USER80> there's a great app called iss spotter that will tell you how to see the space station

</comment><comment><USER81> Kudos. An amazing app! Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER82> Is the time in local timezone ?

</comment><comment><USER83> Nice.. really well done!

</comment><comment><USER84> Also check out Sky Guide[0].

It's an iOS app that (among many other awesome things) tracks 250+ satellites - and can send a notification before they pass over your location[1].

[0] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky- guide/id576588894](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-guide/id576588894)

[1] [https://www.fifthstarlabs.com/support#satellites](https://www.fifthstarlabs.com/support#satellites)

</comment><comment><USER85> Cool concept but the implementation is terrible. Just give me a button to input my own location. Not to mention the dot on the globe is about 3,000 miles from the street view it gives me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is likely to happen if you decline location permission and the IP geolocation fallback is inaccurate. If you try on your phone it should get an accurate GPS location. Adding a way to manually override the location by specifying latitude and longitude is on my to-do list.</comment></comment>


Palmer Luckey: YouTube has deleted every comment I ever made about Wumao (五毛) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/palmerluckey/status/1265077232176775168 <comment><USER2> Isn't "wumao" used a lot more than the rather old-fashioned anti-PRC/anti-CCP slur that's been discussed previously? I've even seen it crop up at HN a few times. I wonder what's up with this stuff - YT seems to be taking a rather weird route towards harmonizing their comment section.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but there's a big difference in that "communist bandit" is considered a slur and wumao is a widely accepted term. Maybe Google could say the former is considered offensive but there's no defense for the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> NB: confirmed that any comment I make with 五毛 is immediately deleted. Crazy.</comment>


Uber Eats removes delivery fee for Black-owned restaurants - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/UberEats/status/1268643816292020224 <comment><USER3> All: I think it's time to note that semantic arguments about the word "racism" are always the same and always turn nasty in the same way. That makes them off-topic here, as are canned arguments in general: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22canned%20arguments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment). They keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places, and that's the opposite of what HN is for. Curious conversation means exchanging _new_ information.

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

<comment><USER4> I respect your need to moderate discussions.

But there's an effort to redefine racism to include any policy that acknowledges race, as opposed to the normal definition that holds a policy is racist if it promotes the superiority of one race over another.

Semantic arguments are bad when they obscure and distract from the central point. But they are good when the distinction at issue is important to the issue at hand. In this case, the distinction is critical. In a world where widespread racism exists, but policies are not allowed to acknowledge race, then policy cannot address racism, thus it continues.

> ...keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places...

 _Sigh_

Leaves me with so little hope. I guess we get to go around and around again on all this.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, and not to pick on you, but this is part of the going around in circles. People have been making the exact same points for literally decades. Combine that repetition with the superficiality and hair-triggerness of internet discussion, and we get a recipe for tedious flamewar, which is definitely off topic here.

It's part of the general principle about canned arguments. Intellectual curiosity is all about diffs, and the diff between threads with canned arguments and threads without them is significant. The latter are much better.

<comment><USER5> > Intellectual curiosity is all about diffs, and the diff between threads with > canned arguments and threads without them is significant.

Setting aside the context for this discussion: I really love your way of putting this. I've always looked at a lot of things that way - <USER2> reading non-fiction books. I read a lot, so I usually only take a way a few key points from a book - but it's those diffs to how I viewed the world before that are the important part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Setting aside the obvious PR opportunism, how would something like this actually work? Does Uber currently collect data on the race of the people who own restaurants they deliver from? Is data like this publicly available somehow? Is this data something they're going to start collecting to facilitate this feature? Does that sound like data it would be good for Uber to have?

Knowing what we know about Uber this all seems highly problematic.

<comment><USER7> I wonder how this will work from a legal point of view. This is a blatant, obvious example of racism, they aren't even attempting to be subtle about it.

<comment><USER8> It's effectively affirmative action, and there's a long history of legal apologia for it.

In the final analysis, the law is interpreted by humans, and if a class of violation (like racism) is popular enough, the system finds a way to excuse it with hand-waving.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't defending such lawsuits still cost a lot of money though, even if you end up winning?

<comment><USER8> Maybe, assuming that the lawsuits didn't get dismissed. Small companies don't have that much legal clout, and large companies are even more subject to the whims of the mob (through PR) as the justice system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, this is somewhat meaningful in that they do something that actually costs something. But the principle is wrong.

And, will they do this for other minorities when they suffer discrimination at the hands of the state? How about poor people?

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

</comment><comment><USER10> While a wonderful gesture, something about this feels a bit... tangential to the real issue to me in a way that's distracting. Am I off base here? It feels like it's leaning toward opportunistic.

<comment><USER11> How is that a wonderful gesture?

This is a corporate PR stunt that has nothing to do with anything and that perpetuates racial discrimination.

This is awful.

<comment><USER12> Our political establishment has no interest in ending racism; each "side" benefits from dividing Americans into identity-based groups and pitting them against other Americans on wedge issues. The hypocritical irony now is of promoting these identity-based groups for the purposes of some vague "justice" when doing so will necessarily widen the divides and propagate hatred further. It's a cynical distraction from the reality that the actual institutionalized racism predominantly occurs under the watchful leadership of the same politicians decrying it, and then you have hangers on like Uber trying to seize an issue for their own profit. It's as transparently self-serving as all the companies changing their logo avatars to rainbows for "Pride Month" a year ago, once it was politically risk-free to do so.

As one party to an interracial gay marriage I say "no thanks."

<comment><USER13> Hear hear. Racism and other forms of idpol have been critical tools of the political establishment in oppressing the working classes throughout American history (see 1700s Virginia Slave Codes for an early example).

While bashing "bad" racism is politically correct, bashing "good" racism is almost universally seen as taboo. Hence racism is immortal in America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is interesting to see the responses here as opposed to this thread where pointing out that a company having diversity targets means they are explicitly not hiring based on performance (not just measuring who they have hired based on demographics of who has applied, and not mentioning race at all) ends up with multiple people agreeing that I'm a 'racist bad person'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433335)

Reverse racism is a dull, simplistic and naive, and implementing it at the business level is illegal and likely unhelpful on a systemic level, not to mention that people don't spend their money based on the demographics of the company who made a product. Race also isn't the only protected class, no one seems to be mentioning women, people closer to retirement age or veterans.

I would be more impressed if uber set up offices in poorer areas regardless of demographics or lobbied for schools to have more uniform funding regardless of their neighborhood. Maybe they could have small business courses at their offices or teach people about car maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I don't understand how come ideas like this are generated and even passed by the management?

<comment><USER16> Management just doesn't have any particular skill at not generating flagrantly illegal ideas. I once saw a guy announce in a company-wide email that he was leading an initiative to help the recruiting team bucket incoming applications by gender. I strongly suspect that whoever approved this program is currently being yelled at by their legal department.

<comment><USER17> I don't expect managers to know the law, I do expect them to check with those that do.

<comment><USER16> And responsible managers do. Unfortunately, many others conceptualize legal as a department to help them fight the law rather than a department to help them follow it.

<comment><USER18> I don't think their move here is illegal. I think it's ill-advised, bad PR, will backfire and probably predatory on the group they are ostensibly trying to help. (Maybe even without them even understanding why.)

That all said, I was almost going to downvote your comment, but it made remember how much Uber actually has made a business model out of breaking the law in every country they are active in. Move fast and break things became move fast and break the law.

<comment><USER19> > I don't think their move here is illegal.

This _seems_ illegal to me, but I really don't know. What are the laws surrounding race-based company promotions/discounts?

<comment><USER17> Here's the Unruh Act which applies in California:

 _All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How is this not illegal given the Civil rights act of 64? This seems like a clear violation.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do companies find out personal details like race about who runs a business (and actually do it accurately)?

Can they also find out things like religion or ethnicity?

Whether it's corporate data collection or users checking a box, it seems like a good intention that is primed for manipulation - which I guess some companies might gloss over as long as it benefits them.

</comment><comment><USER22> If anyone is interested, here's an interview with a human rights lawyer Robert Barnes, a man that has litigated wrongful death cases against police, and supreme court cases.

Very pertinent, internal take on the courts, BLM, Antifa, police, Covid, and current cases before the supreme court.

[https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4021](https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4021)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm Black and I am very uneasy about this move. I can't figure out why. I think I would be more comfortable if they had some type of "economic empowerment Zone" that just happened to cover majority/minority communities. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would just feel better to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> How do they know whether a restaurant is "black-owned"?

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't get how this solves anything, regardless of the legal or racist accusations already discussed.

The aim is to surface black-owned restaurants. But the solution is to remove the delivery for those restaurants. Do they have a filter for restaurants with no delivery fee? Are they also tagging the restaurants to make it obvious which are in this scheme?

Secondly, how do you determine which restaurants qualify? Is it just applied to independent businesses or is it something larger chains can game as well? It seems full of holes at the foundation.

The whole thing screams of a marketing department that think they should do _something_ to make it look like they're supporting protests but put in the tiniest amount of effort they could manage.

</comment><comment><USER26> What if a white person is one of the shareholder of a restaurant run by blacks? /s

</comment><comment><USER27> Actually Seems like predatory pricing targeting this one group to make these businesses unfairly dependent on Uber Eats in a monopoly grab

<comment><USER28> A version of this is used in india to reduce wages. When you divide people into two big groups and compensate one - you create unequal net wage - and if there is not enough employment, one group hogs all the jobs while others have to significantly reduce their wages to compete.

This is just capitalism in action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What constitutes as "black"?

</comment><comment><USER30> is it even legal to have explicitly race-based policies like this? could a company do the same thing for other race groups?

<comment><USER31> Expect class action suits to follow. What if you are losing business as a restaurant because your competitors get free delivery?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is disgusting virtue-signaling from an awful company.

If Uber really wanted to help the Black community (and other minorities) how about actually treating their delivery drivers (a lot of which come from low- class backgrounds and part of minorities) fairly with decent wages and benefits?

How about a fair, transparent fee structure? As others have pointed out, the delivery fee is just _one_ of many fees, the rest of which are conveniently hidden from the user and passed onto the restaurants which have no choice but to pay them because Uber Eats is one of a handful of delivery services and they're all equally scummy.

How about decent customer service that plays fair when things go wrong instead of fobbing the customer off and hope they don't do a chargeback? (not many people do which is why they get away with it)

<comment><USER32> I recommend all users of Uber eats and co read some of the large subreddits for gig economy and uber eats workers on reddit. It's pretty telling just how awful these companies are... and though it's still relatively new these announcements for affirmative action are leading to a lot of pushback that some would identify as hurting the cause rather then helping it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I respect what they're going for here, but an explicitly race-based discount seems very illegal.

<comment><USER33> I don't respect what they're going for here since what they're actually doing is trying to put a shine on their decrepit corporate image by virtue signalling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How is this supporting the current situation, when this is a literal example of racism?

People don't need or DESERVE special treatment, be it negative or positive, people deserve to be treated as equal.

I don't understand why is it so hard to fathom?

<comment><USER35> The definition of racism is not treating a race different from others. Racism is a belief that one race is better or worse than others, and the politics that arise from that belief. Recognizing that a group has been treated unfairly and compensating for it is not racism.

<comment><USER36> Strictly speaking racism is the view that different races of human even exist.

<comment><USER37> Yay! I am a racist then. And you go tell the black guys they do not exist.

<comment><USER35> I think the point Scarblac was trying to make is that by the biological definition of race, there is only one human race, and all human belong to it. We have historically said that Black people, White people, Asian people, whatever, belong to different races, but that's not accurate and it is that error that lets racist ideas (in the discriminatory sense) to exist. Those "race" categorizations have no basis in biology and have shown to be flexible over time. A hundred years a go, an Irish person would not have been considered white, and a Spanish person might have. Today the Irish man is white, and the Spaniard might be called a Latin.

I think it's better to say that race exists, but it's a cultural construct, not a biological reality. It's clear that in the USA the largest part of people with black or dark brown skin color have a shared history and culture that comes from the capture of native African population. They clearly have something in common, and they exist as a group. The term "race" is problematic, but it's the best one we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> After "fight fire with fire", through awful virtue signalling comes "fight racism with racism".

Nice move, Uber!

<comment><USER39> I know it's just an expression, but that has always bugged me. Fighting fire with fire is a legitimate firefighting technique (controlled burns.) Red Adair even fought fire with explosions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Perfect. Now racists can know exactly which businesses to avoid buying from, thus hurting their businesses.

</comment><comment><USER41> how is that not consider 'racist'?

</comment><comment><USER42> As many others have said:

1\. At least in the US, this is quite blatantly illegal. Uber Eats is not stupid, they know this. Whether you take the charitable view (Uber knows this but they wish to push back against historical and systemic racism) or the uncharitable view (this is a bare virtue signaling ploy), Uber Eats is betting they what they get from doing this is worth more than eventually having to stop or get sued.

2\. Personally, as someone who strongly supports the BLM movement, I find this beyond stupid. It doesn't solve the problem at hand, and it just plays into the further division of society that the right wing has played so masterfully into fomenting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Comments here show a lot of people don't really know what racism is.

Now is an important time to learn, so please read.

Racism if the belief that race is the basis for determining that one group of people is _superior_ to another group.

Specifically, it is NOT acknowledging that their are differences in the circumstances and opportunities people have based on race. Nor, _necessarily_ , treating people differently based on acknowledging those differences.

Regarding Uber Eats... this policy isn't racist simply because it treats black-owned restaurants differently.

Lesson over. The rest is just my opinion.

Uber eats' policy it is divisive. It's also tone-deaf (how does this help black people in their struggle to be treated like everyone else?). And —- I can't know for sure from the information I have —- but I suspect racism lead to this poorly conceived policy, because of how divisive it is and how condescending it feels.

<comment><USER8> While narrowly correct, this barely rises above the level of pedantry. As I'm sure you're aware, racism is in common use as a short form for "racial discrimination", of which this is uncontroversially an example. Unless you object to white nationalist separatists being called racists, on grounds that wanting a separate white homeland doesn't require any belief in racial superiority? (Or the more mundane form, people who want their neighborhoods to be their own race and oppose race-mixing)

This isn't the fact-check "lesson" you think it is; it just pedantic apologia for racial discrimination that shows your own narrow understanding of the situation more than anything else.

<comment><USER4> Wow.

No surprise racism is as strong and prevalent as ever.

You will continue to be mystified and confused about why people are as upset as they are if you refuse to understand what the issue actually is.

Let's just start with the first thing: the idea that white nationalists separatists do not view white people as superior is nonsensical on its face.

> This isn't the fact-check "lesson" you think it is; it just pedantic > apologia for racial discrimination that shows your own narrow understanding > of the situation more than anything else.

I am sad you see it this way. We've got a long way to go. Just try to open up your mind a little. I feel you have the potential or you would not have even responded.

<comment><USER8> > No surprise racism is as strong and prevalent as ever

Funny, I feel the same way about your comment. The regressive, dehumanizing impulse most people have to squash everyone into "black guy" or "Asian woman" instead of "full human being whose life can't be reductively captured by their skin color or genitals" is at the root of both old-fashioned racism and the newfangled form you're so enthusiastic about.

> the idea that white nationalists separatists do not view white people as > superior is nonsensical on its face.

I'd imagine the overlap is significant with white supremacists, yes. But racial-/ethnonationalists of every race and ethnicity exist, and they're not all supremacists. There's a memeplex out there that races shouldn't mix that's decoupled from any notion of superiority: for anyone not rightly ensconced in their bubble it's not very difficult to come across this in the wild in, eg, the black community. I'm assuming you don't think that every African-American or Japanese or Indian or Arab or Burundian racial essentialist also thinks that they happen to be the master race? If not, it seems absurd to conclude that whites are the one race for whom this belief exists but _never_ among people who doesn't also believe in racial supremacy.

(For what it's worth, I'm pretty opposed to racial separatism, but I'm not ignorant enough to think that it's the same thing as white supremacy. There's a difference between modern Japan and the Third Reich's views on race)

<comment><USER4> > newfangled form you're so enthusiastic about

I am not redefining racism. Just look it up. Superiority based on race. Merriam-Webster:

: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

I'm not going to post a link. Just type racism into your favorite search engine. You've got to decide if you want to learn or not.

> I'm assuming you don't think that every African-American or Japanese or > Indian or Arab or Burundian racial essentialist also thinks that they happen > to be the master race?

Yes, people who are not white can be racist.

> There's a difference between modern Japan and the Third Reich's views on > race)

Absolutely. It's not like Nazi Germany owned a patent on racism. It could, and does, exist in Japan.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>