Whitehouse.gov petition to veto SOPA - <AUTHOR> https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/veto-sopa-bill-and-any-other-future-bills-threaten-diminish-free-flow-information/g3W1BscR <comment><USER2> I was on a conference call w/ Zoe Lofgren (CA congress woman who is on the Judiciary fighting the hell out of this bill) and a bunch of NYC tech companies last weekend and she said petitions are essentially ignored, and instead to make phone calls to your reps and directly into the capital.

This isn't to say don't sign this, but if you are really concerned, the absolute bottom line is phone calls. Anything you can do to funnel phone calls in is what counts.

Edit: Let me add this, which makes it absurdly easy: <http://fightforthefuture.org/>

<comment><USER3> If Congress can be bought, why not expose the people doing the buying, and their lobbyists, and exert pressure on them instead of writing or calling Congressmen who don't care?

<comment><USER4> They wouldn't be trying to buy this sort of legislation if they didn't think it was, in balance, in their commercial interests. They've likely already modelled the effect of any consumer backlash in their analysis, so why would they listen to you? They were expecting to lose you anyway.

<comment><USER3> By "people" I refer to the human beings who run the corporations, not the corporations themselves. I doubt very much that executives behind these moves at corporations have taken being held responsible _personally_ into account. In my opinion, they should be held accountable personally, not only by shareholders, but by society at large.

I believe that corporate executives act with impunity because society, as a whole, has come to consider corporations as people (beyond the legal fiction of Personhood). Executives hide behind this "personhood". Why should we stop at: "BigCo is doing something evil", when the individual board members and executives of BigCo are ultimately the ones who make the decisions?

Zuckerberg, and in an earlier era, Gates, are examples of two CEOs who are held personally liable in the court of public opinion for the misdeeds of their corporations. In my opinion, more of that would be healthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand this fascination with internet petitions. Hasn't it been demonstrated to the point of absurdity that our government does not care?

Before anyone claims "OH, so we should just do nothing instead????". Posting a dubious e-signature to an internet petition _does nothing_. There are people out in the streets sleeping in parks getting pepper sprayed and arrested because the government can't simply ignore it (unlike every single internet petition).

Filling out a whitehouse petition is like getting punched in the face by your boss then slipping a folded piece of paper into the complaint box he put in the break-room next to the donuts.

<comment><USER6> The fascination is with poisoning the well. A lot of people have the interest and energy to do _exactly one thing_ politically, and in this age of OWS and global uprising it's in the interests of the status quo to eliminate the effect of this low-hanging fruit. The people who create and post internet petitions are evil and/or stupid, without exception.

<comment><USER7> So you're saying that some online petitions are actually meant to diffuse dissent about the thing they're petitioning? That would be a stroke of evil genius if it's true. Doesn't strike me as being the case so much as their being driven by naive idealism, but in the case of the whitehouse one, it's at least conceivable. In the long run, it's probably just going to demonstrate to a lot of people that online petitions are mostly counterproductive.

<comment><USER8> Online petitions exist to harvest email addresses so they can hit you up for donations and volunteering during the campaign. They're an easy way for campaign staff to build a mailing list of people politically engaged enough to be worth spamming.

<comment><USER7> This is definitely one of the reasons for online petitions. I doubt that's why Whitehouse.gov exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time I've voted on a whitehouse.gov petition, I've gotten an email 6 months later saying why the petition will be completely ignored, answering none of the points the petition brought up.

The petition system is an ineffectual smokescreen.

<comment><USER10> Seems quite effective to me if it keeps the signers from taking any additional action for 6 months. Its likely doing exactly what those setting it intended.

<comment><USER9> Lack of communication and inaction are two very different things though. In the case of SOPA, they would pass the bill next week, then email petition singers 6 months after the fact on how anti-American the petition is. The petition in this hypothetical situation didn't delay anything, but prompted a communication at a later date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I expect that this petition will be just as effective as all the others.

<comment><USER12> Governmental e-petitions: ignoring the public more efficiently than ever before.

Actually now in britain we have it set up so whenever one of these gets 100,000 votes, it must be debated in parliament. One of the few useful or interesting things cameron has done. Of course they are quite rightly not bound to do anything more than debate it, and in the long run it will probably just be a more efficient way of shutting people up. "Look, we've debated it, we've given parliamentary time to your issue, what more do you want? This is a representative democracy you know!"

<comment><USER13> I think you're spreading FUD really. Have a look at current UK petitions which have passed the 100k votes:

fuel prices - <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/347> (small decrease implemented, plans for the future shared)

immigration - <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/19658> (basic plans shared, recently implemented changes listed, already heard some people having visa issues, so something is happening)

summer riots - <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/7337> (no direct actions, but response means pretty much "this is happening anyways", there's some more information about what the local authorities can do)

Hillsborough 1989 - <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/2199> (accepted, disclosure will happen)

financial education - <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/8903> (this one does look like a non-answer, but maybe they're really doing the reviews now)

private pensions - <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1535> (no response yet, only crossed the line recently)

While I'm not crazy about all the answers, there was some effect (or at least an explanation or a commitment to the original plan). They're quite far from "a more efficient way of shutting people up" the way it's presented in the comments here.

<comment><USER12> All that stuff is relatively non-controversial though, I don't consider the system to have been really tested until the people demand something the government really doesn't want to do.

When we get a million signatures against war in iran, or to unilaterally leave the EU or something, then we'll see what happens.

<comment><USER14> Uncontroversial to remove all Government benefits from those convicted of involvement in the Summer Riots?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What is SOPA and why should you care about it?

Short serious video: <http://youtu.be/1ngRPuXpCIw>

Long sarcastic video with a British accent: <http://youtu.be/JhwuXNv8fJM>

</comment><comment><USER15> Everyone is mentioning how petitions don't work, which I agree with.

(Sidenote: I think it is an extra step worse that the government put up a website for petitions, and still ignores their own system. Random petitions (e.g. "\signed" forum posts) are one thing, but this is more like toying with people.)

That said, I think this petition has something important that other whitehouse.gov petitions don't: in that, under SOPA, there is actually technically a possibility that the government would censor itself (via whitehouse.gov), which is pretty funny if you think about it.

Edit: I suppose I mean "funny" in a darker sense.

</comment><comment><USER16> I created an account in order to sign this, but when I try to sign in I get a 404 -- using Chrome. Anyone else get that?

<comment><USER17> I got it as well, in FF. Most of the time, these things get a one-strike-and- adios policy for me, but on this it seems important enough to try again later...

<comment><USER18> I just tried in Chrome and Firefox. Finally tried IE. Guess what? It worked. Sigh.

<comment><USER19> I saw the 404 the second time I tried to sign in. The first time worked -- seemingly -- but returning to the petition page gave me this riddle:

<http://imgur.com/Flzuk>

Notice the bar on the bottom showing I'm signed in. And the prompt to sign in before I can vote.

Can't seem to get past that no matter what I try. I'll try IE, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The WH petition system is to political activism what Twitter is to people's social commentary... effectively redirect everything to /dev/null and make them think they've made their voices heard (although I think that this particular one is quite clever).

</comment><comment><USER21> For all the discussion about worthless Internet petitions, it should be noted that the White House form is specifically set up to at least elicit a response if a certain threshold is reached. The threshold was originally 5,000 signatures but was raised to 25,000 after the White House responded to pleas for information about extraterrestrials. If they gave a response to that arguably silly request, it is reasonable to think they will at least respond to this one.

See [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45176460/ns/technology_and_scien...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45176460/ns/technology_and_science- space/t/white-house-theres-no-sign-et-or-ufo-cover-up/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm in Canada, and I've realized that SOPA would damage me too, since the domain would be removed from the DNS. People here are suggesting calling their representatives, but which one should I call? Would they even bother listening to someone, who ate the end of the day, is not going affect their chance of reelection? I'd still like to be able to do something since SOPA and Protect IP are quite horrible laws.

<comment><USER23> FWIW, when you call a Senator or Congressperson, they ask for your name and zip. Nothing else. You can theoretically grab any zipcode in their district off of Google and use it. Just saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I disagree, although I'll sign it. A petition should be created to not only stop SOPA but demand INTERNET FREEDOM laws. This will make it impossible to present any SOPA without repealing the law as there's a direct conflict.

Otherwise there'll be another attempt at SOPA after outrage fatigue. And there had been many before.

</comment><comment><USER25> Petitions don't work. The Founding Fathers knew that...

</comment><comment><USER26> Not a chance. Election is coming up and we're talking about 100s of millions of dollars of contributions from the entertainment industry. He'll sign it.

On the other hand, if he veto's maybe we can make up the difference. I'd be happy to contribute to a president who is a proven proponent of internet liberty. I just don't have the bankroll of the hollywood execs. Maybe some of the recent internet billionaires can fill in the gaps.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the tactic the petition used by even if they took the time to treat it seriously this is the only 2 outcomes...

1) The petition gets removed for containing infringing content

or worse...

2) The government moves towards removing imgur.com because it is doing the hosting of the infringing content

I know, I know its absurd, but who really believes that that link can bring down whitehouse.gov?

</comment><comment><USER28> I received another letter from the white house. I am going to say it now. whitehouse.gov is BS. It is complete and utter bs. You are lucky if an intern looks at it, probably just a pre-canned response to any media whatever. All these petitions say is "bla bla bla write me some bs"

We need a better methodology.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can't sign in or register in Chrome 15 ?

<comment><USER30> Oddly enough, I browsed around to another page and was able to create an account from there.

You apparently just cannot create an account from that particular page.

For whatever reason account creation doesn't work from the 'Stop SOPA' petition page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every time I've tried logging in with an existing account to sign anything I've always gotten a 404 after.

</comment><comment><USER23> Guys, the link doesn't load properly if you have Ghostery enabled. I'm not sure what WH.gov is doing to load that petition from another domain via JS, but disabling Ghostery makes things work OK.

</comment><comment><USER32> Something shady going on with this petition? I logged in - first time every looking at it - and it says "You've already signed this petition."

???

</comment><comment><USER33> I didn't realize that anyone could create petitions on WhiteHouse.gov. Were it not for the casual writing style, I might have thought this was an official petition from the White House.

Neat. <https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions>

<comment><USER6> That's by design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 8k votes... that is just sad...

<comment><USER35> In a couple hours. On a Sunday.

<comment><USER36> on a law that is one step shy of banning the whole internet world-wide. since pretty much every site allows some user content and a single accusation will down that entire site, i'd hope for a better response than that.

edit: banning is too harsh. censored to the agreement of all corporate interests, all potential corporate interests and the interests of those rich and American enough to have influence

<comment><USER35> Well quit griping about the lack of involvement and go tell some people about it to help increase the number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Our government showed us many times that they don't give a shit about these petitions.</comment>


I'm sick of Chrome eating all my RAM - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/in/news/im-sick-of-chrome-eating-all-my-ram-its-time-for-me-to-ditch-it-for-firefox-or-even-edge <comment><USER2> I have an old, slow, 2006 laptop. Still works, use it as a media PC. At first, i went from IE -> chrome. It picked up 5 years of life. Recently thought i would have to finally decommision the box.

Installed firefox, runs like i did -5 years ago. Same websites, same tab consumption, more performance, no intermittant hangs, less ram consumption..

TDLR; install firefox if your having memory issues with chrome. all that tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your privacy!

<comment><USER3> I almost made the switch to chrome a few years ago when firefox was seeming slow... but never brought myself to it. At the office I've always used chrome because there was something weird about Firefox for some internal pages, and because I was stuck on some older version (I didn't have admin rights to my desktop when I first got hired and was stuck on the version the helpdesk would push). Today, I'm way happier with Firefox, and I'm glad I didn't make the switch at home. I'm currently in the process of trying Firefox again at work (now that I can install the latest version...), and will probably ditch chrome entirely. It hogs too many resources, and I don't really get any noticeable benefits from using it.

I also downloaded Firefox for Android recently to try it out... but I get the impression that chrome will always be king in the android space.

<comment><USER4> Try Firefox Preview. It's not feature rich but I've been very happy with it. It is simple and fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like the comments here reflect a weird mindset. ("Switch to Firefox!!" and "Firefox is just as bad!!").

I'd like to offer a different; probably controversial perspective:

Rendering is a difficult and complex problem to solve. I remember back when I was younger, rendering a PDF was quite CPU intensive and consumed a decent amount of ram (for the time), and that does just a tiny minute subset of what a modern browser can do (and, in fact, many can render pdfs too!).

Modern web browsers are the epitome of a product that has bloated to far beyond it's initial parameters, and it's absolutely amazing that they perform as well as they do. But I don't think the web should be used as an application delivery platform, having the features embedded in to be able to do that turns a modern web browser into a huge monolithic runtime, renderer and templating engine all churning together constantly. I mostly lament the availability of a general purpose language too, which makes it too easy for developers to grab and use it as soon as they have a minor problem, but that's not the real issue to be honest.

If you put your computer science hat on: imagine how you would implement a fully functional web browser from scratch. I'll bet good money it would require a lot of cpu time or a lot of memory (or, both).

<comment><USER6> At some point there was a critical mass of people believing Web Apps are super awesome. (Although I'm not sure if this was ever the majority ;))

Speaking of myself, I was always frustrated that on Linux apps/games were missing. The situation was even worse when I tried other Operating Systems. Web Apps seemed to be the ultimate solution for that.

But yes, RAM and CPU usage is insane. (For now the only solution is to buy computers with a lot of RAM and Swap space I think ;))

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I'm lucky enough to have a PC that boasts 32GB of the stuff. Now, that > amount of RAM is – to be honest – overkill for most things I use my PC for.

You should not care about how much ram chrome consume if you have 32gb, however i think you should switch to firefox if you care about your privacy and the future of the web.

<comment><USER4> You shouldn't _have_ to care but the reality is, if you use your systems and chrome eats 4GB+, then you do care. Chrome regularly consumes a major percentage of my available RAM and I have 32GB.

<comment><USER8> isnt that why you have ram? to use it?

<comment><USER4> Yes but not for google apps, slack and a browser full of bloat. I have all this RAM for the actual engineering I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Great Suspender extension [0] is a handy RAM saver for tabs you want to keep open but don't need to use right now.

Pair that with Tabs Outliner extension [1] as a kind of visual bookmarker for related groups of pages, and Chrome RAM is manageable again.

Another benefit of Tabs Outliner is desktop organizing a dump of all Chrome pages that were open on my phone's browser (via Chrome sync, then on desktop Chrome view History, other device, open all, organize in Tabs Outliner and close tree for later, then close all tabs in mobile Chrome to free up phone RAM)

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl?hl=en)

<comment><USER10> I prefer The Great Discarder [1]; saves more memory, and Chrome starts very quickly even with thousands (really) of tabs open. To put another way, Chrome becomes usable almost immediately, with much less time elapsed than needed to shut down.

Tabs Outliner looks interesting. Is this a replacement for the "vertical tabs" extension I've seen others rave about for Firefox?

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- discarde...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- discarder/jlipbpadkjcklpeiajndiijbeieicbdh)

<comment><USER11> It is like Tree Style Tabs but with better keyboard shortcuts, handles a tree of the entire browsing session and not just for a single window and it can act as a session manager where you can close entire (sub-)trees without losing their tree hierarchy. It also can (periodically) upload the tree to GDrive and allows you to restore the hierarchy on different devices.

The drawbacks are that some features are paid only, it is closed source and afaik, it doesn't even work on other Chrome-based browsers because it relies heavily on the Google account login.

<comment><USER10> Tabs Outliner looked interesting. Four things I noticed in a cursory tryout:

* I did not see a way to search tabs. * I like how the sidebar auto-updates based on the selected window, but it does not do so to the point of always making the current tab visible in the sidebar * The sidebar window interferes with CLUT,[1] my "Alt-Tab between tabs" extension of choice. * Most seriously, I notice a slight but perceptible slowdown when opening new tabs and moving between tabs.

Since tab-navigation speed is important, and I need to search for tabs much more often than an always-visible vertical list, I've gone back to Tab Manager Plus;[2] before that I used TooManyTabs.[3][https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for- ch...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for- chrome/amigcgbheognjmfkaieeeadojiibgbdp)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last- us...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last-used- tabs/cobieddmkhhnbeldhncnfcgcaccmehgn)

[2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager- plus-f...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-for- chro/cnkdjjdmfiffagllbiiilooaoofcoeff)

[3] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for- ch...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for- chrome/amigcgbheognjmfkaieeeadojiibgbdp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Plus, Microsoft's increasingly desperate pleas to stick with Edge that pop > up in Windows when you search for and download Chrome simply made me even > more determined to stay away.

I think the aversion to being forced/pressured to do something is pretty universal, and I'm wondering whether I'm wrong, or whether companies are going to realize it at some point. I think this also contributed to the failure of Google+: The harder Google tried to ram it down people's throats, the more repulsed people were by it.

Of course there is a benefit to advertising/pushing a product, but overdo it, and you might achieve the opposite: People not just disinterested, but actively hating your product, forever, just due to the way how they were pushed to use it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pro tip: you can use chrome extensions in Firefox! I am not sure if I used this but a little googling will light your path: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/346981/how- to...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/346981/how-to-install- any-chrome-extension-in-firefox/amp/)

Also: Tab wrangler is a great extension for Chrome (can be used on Firefox) to automatically close unused tabs with rules. May help some of the people that have memory issues with Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well maybe don't open hundreds of tabs in it since it's inefficient anyway? I have an MBP with 8Gb of RAM and I never experienced issues because of Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you're a tab hoarder, Chrome does seem to have gotten worse in the last year.

Usually the GPU process. Even if your tabs are all inactive, killed by something like Great Discarder, the GPU process continues to use a lot of RAM (2GB in my case, at times) and CPU.

I am not sure if it's a Mac-specific issue though.

<comment><USER16> Honest question to tab hoarders, why not use bookmarks? It saves bandwidth, system resources, makes you less prone to tracking and cross-site scripting, at the cost of some elevated organizational/management work and slightly less convenience?

<comment><USER17> Because bookmarks are a pain in the ass. I have 174 bookmarks for sites that I have only visited once and will never visit again and finding whatever I want takes minutes.

I literally cannot comprehend why anyone would use bookmarks when the friction is multiple orders of magnitude higher.

99% of my tabs do not live longer than 10 minutes so why should I want to persist them in a messy non hierarchical list that is neither organized by context nor by time? If you somehow make bookmarks as frictionless as tabs by making the new tab button create a bookmark and then show that bookmark as a tree structure on the sidebar then it wouldn't be any meaningfully different from a tab other than the fact that it has to reload the entire page every time you switch bookmarks.

<comment><USER16> Granted, that is a different use case. I've seen tab hoarders fire up their browser, with the same 50 tabs open over and over again, and they usually only need one.

AFAIK, Firefox has countered this by only loading the tabs when you activate them after a cold start, so that's pretty much automated bookmarking.

I wouldn't know how to manage without bookmarks (well, yes, .url files actually, but that's another issue). I'm guessing I have a few hundred of them, and I find what I need easily, because you can organize them in folders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You're literally using a graphics rendering engine for a script someone wrote to handle how it displays the pictures on your screen. You should be lucky optimisation and operational benefits of web browsers have come as far as they have. Web interfaces are nothing more than a miracle, and you're complaining that the ad-hoc nature of putting up a website and having it render in a magic box is too poor quality for you because of RAM numbers. Great.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have never had this problem with Chrome on any computer, and I think that it may be due to my usage patterns compared to those who do suffer this issue.

How many extensions do the afflicted users have? What are they? (They are not all equal in terms of CPU or RAM usage.) How many tabs do the users have open, and what are on those tabs? (Simple pages surely use much less RAM than full browser applications.)

Lots of people complain about Chrome and Firefox RAM usage - I want to know why I never see the same issue(s).

</comment><comment><USER20> switch to firefox you will be surprised :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Switched to Firefox a month ago. It was worse.

Since then I became more thankful of Chrome(Chromium to be exact).

<comment><USER22> I've never seen Firefox consume more memory than Chrome. And Chrome chokes way too quickly on 100+ tabs where Firefox will work fine.

<comment><USER23> How can it "choke way too quickly with a 100+ tabs"??? Your brain will choke way before the browser with that much open.

<comment><USER17> Go on HN. Open 5 submissions you are interested in. Also don't forget to click on the comments link. Bang you now have 10 tabs and this is just the start of your browsing session. As you read those articles you will open more tabs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My CPU utilization jumps and maintains at around 25% when I got to techradar using Chromium with no extensions. I see the same kind of thing with Firefox with extensions.

But yeah, blame the browsers for the bloat, not the crappy web site you write for.

</comment><comment><USER25> Strange how organic content not contaminated by the AdBuddy company (twitter flooded with their sponsor links and almost no real content) doesn't even consider Brave as an option.

<comment><USER26> You mean the browser that replaces a website's ads with its own? Also it feels laggy compared to chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I believe that the blame here is mostly misattributed.

Caching (a good thing) and also the remote sites being bloated. I'm not sure if or should the browser be fixing that ?

<comment><USER28> And yet the problem doesn't seem to affect Safari or Firefox. So, people only visit bloated sites in Chrome?

<comment><USER29> No, but it sounds like Safari and FF are not caching as aggressively. After all, unused ram is wasted ram.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Chrome, without any extensions is not that bad. It's when you add all the extras to it that it starts to get more and more bloated.

</comment><comment><USER31> Morning routine: kill all Chrome processes bigger than 300MB (Mac)</comment>


A Story About Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://maggie-stiefvater.tumblr.com/post/166952028861/ive-decided-to-tell-you-guys-a-story-about <comment><USER2> I wonder how much of this is due to greedy publishers overpricing ebooks? I just looked up one of her books ("The Raven King"). Amazon has the paperback for $9.45 and the e-book for $11.99.

In what world does it make any sense for an ebook to cost _more_ than a physical book? The physical book needs to be printed, warehoused and delivered. The ebook just just bits in the cloud that cost cents to store and transmit to customers.

I do not personally think that this justifies piracy, but it might explain why some people feel justified in pirating books.

<comment><USER3> This is a cost-centric view of the price, when a value-centric view may be more useful. The ebook can be downloaded and taken everywhere without having to lug and lose an extra item in your bag. The ebook can be read on multiple devices seamlessly. The ebook can be retrieved from the seller in the event you lose it.

And the content is the same, you're paying for the same work. So you are paying $2 more for a ton of increased convenience.

You can rent physical DVDs from the library for free. Yet you pay for Netflix. Such a greedy publisher, enabling us to do things more easily.

<comment><USER2> To turn that around, one could argue the ebook has a lower value since it is easily pirated. It is competing with a version of itself that costs $0.00 and a few minutes of web searching.

<comment><USER3> I'm not trying to debate whether an ebook or a physical book is better or worse and I feel like most in this thread have willfully misinterpreted that. My point was that if you consider just the cost of a good, you are likely to run into "how can this possibly be fair" scenarios. But cost isn't the only thing that factors into price, whether you like the good or not.

Ebooks and physical books have different uses, different distribution, different benefits, different downsides. They aren't identical and it's not surprising or unfair that they're priced differently.

<comment><USER4> I understand how the "value argument" influences the initial price of a good, but once it is out in the market demand should be taken into account. If a product's supply is (practically) infinite and its demand is low, then the price should be low. Anything else smacks of poor business decision making or price fixing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I say with sadness that the Internet has nearly killed the prospect of making a living as an author, and no amount of passionate speech is going to change that fact.

No one should go into any of the following professions with any expectation of making money:

1) Writing of any kind (fiction, non-fiction, technical articles, journalism -- forget about it)

2) Digital art of any kind (see DeviantArt for millions of super-talented creations that haven't earned a cent)

3) Photography of any kind (see Shutterfly for millions of photos better than anything you ever took and yet no one will ever pay for)

4) Composing music or lyrics

It rather surprises me that software, a creative and digital medium like the above, is not futile and that you can still make a good living at it.

<comment><USER6> Photography is alive and well as a service rather than a thing. The days of buying a print are gone (or will be soon) but tons of people make a living doing portraits, weddings, events, headshots, etc.

It's a different model, but I suspect more money is made because taking pictures is hard. The pictures are free (ie, included) but it costs a lot to hire a photographer.

That's how software lives as a profession.

<comment><USER7> It is alive, but certainly not well. There are fewer making a living doing it and among those who are, most earn far less than they used to.

Source: my wife is a photographer and consequently I follow photographers more than I'd otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Funny my wife is a photographer too and I follow lots of photogs and see growth over the past year.

BLS [0] is forecasting -6% drop from 2016 to 2016, but 12% growth in self employed photographers.

So yeah, it's not doing so well in general. But it's gangbusters in her segment (all digital experience photography)

[0] [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and- communication/mobile/photo...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and- communication/mobile/photographers.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What the author didn't (and couldn't) include in their calculations is how many of those that bought the fourth book were hooked in the series BECAUSE they pirated the book(s).

How many sales would she have had if there were absolutely no copies available online for free for any of the books?

I admit, I pirated when I was young because I didn't have any money and many books weren't available in my country (or would only become available after some years). Now that I have money and I'm into reading, I spend a lot more on books than I would have if reading wasn't available to me.

<comment><USER9> If someone pirated book one and/or book two, what is the likelihood that they'll go out and buy book three? Keeping in mind that some % of people will have a conscience twinge or be earning much more than previously so will feel like they can afford the book rather than just go on over to their favorite site and download it.

<comment><USER10> A study was done on this question, and it found the effect of piracy on sales is negligible/immeasurably small: [https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret- copyright-infringement-s...](https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright- infringement-study/)

The study was done with public funds, but since publishers didn't like its findings, it was buried. So publishers are misusing public money to try and mislead people into supporting more restrictive copyright laws, and they're using lobbying and legalized bribes to get elected officials to pass those laws.

They use lies, deception, and bribery in a hostile attempt to reduce our freedom so they can increase their profits. So why the _hell_ should we respect their IP, when every cent they earn will be used against us?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there studies about how piracy affects different industries? I would imagine that books are different than movies or music. My reasoning:

Books take a lot of effort to get through. If you are going to read a book you're really going to invest time into it. (assumption: everyone that would actually purchase the book intends to read it)

Movies are just an hour or two. Not much time investment. Many times people will sit down to watch a movie they don't care much about just to kill time, or put it on in the background. Like someone might pirate a movie because they 1) can't find it playing in theaters around them (more common than you think) 2) friends told you not to waste your money 3) you're bored of the shit on Netflix and need some other background noise while you browse the internet.

Music is often used as background noise too, and I imagine this changes the psychological impact of piracy.

Also, I think I lot of people feel like the movie studios, record labels, and publishers are just over charging them. It's not hard to see, especially with the first two. A $20 movie (before popcorn) for an hour and a half of "ehh" and the studio made tens of millions of dollars in box office. Or knowing an artist gets chump per album sold (or worse when streaming). I would suspect people take this same notion to books. Especially when they see that an ebook is more expensive than the physical one. Most people interpret this as "well that's messed up". But I'd also imagine that book sales are hit harder than music and movies (at least to the artists).

<comment><USER12> It would also be interesting to see the impact of distribution platforms and media formats - one would imagine that more fragmented markets (e.g. HBO exclusive shows) have higher incidents of piracy, as consumers can then find all their interests in one centralized location, rather than a dozen different subscription services. DRM also presumably provides some increase - while it's (thankfully) dead for music, it seems alive and well for TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's impressive that people will suffer the agony of trying to read a book in PDF form for the sake of getting it for free.

After discovering the EPUB/MOBI formats and the joy of having text dynamically scale on my phone/tablet, it's very difficult to go back trying to read an extensive document in PDF. On anything but a PC it just feels archaic.

<comment><USER14> EPUB/MOBI is good for prose.

On the other hand, as of today, technical documents, scientific articles, anything with nontrivial illustrations/typesetting has to be displayed in PDF to avoid unexpected results. Maybe we'll see changes in this regard, facilitated by the emerging interactive jupyter-like document formats, but PDF is here to stay for a while.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but if you've got an ebook reader(which usually means 6-7 inch screen size) you don't want to use PDF unless it's absolutely necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Archive.today link to avoid tumblr's "consent" page, which blocks NoScript and is generally annoying:

[http://archive.fo/0T6Nb](http://archive.fo/0T6Nb)

More on topic, please do pay for creative (and technical!) work that you get for free (legally or otherwise), if you enjoy it.

<comment><USER17> Funnily I found that the article reads perfectly fine on Firefox Mobile with NoScript -- I didn't even notice that it was on Tumblr until reading the comments.

<comment><USER18> That's probably because you're not in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems to me like a story about viral marketing rather than about piracy.

For my experience from the time where I spent more time on leisure sites and fandom sites, it's pretty likely we would organize a scavenger hunt and had a lot of discussions if we encounter a fake ebook with the characteristics described. That certainly would look like a viral marketing campaing.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this is more a story about the publisher; it wasn't piracy that decided to cut the print, it was the publisher.

However, the problem with "piracy doesn't hurt sales" is that it is only true when you provide a service just as good as the pirates.

If buying your book on amazon is a hassle, moreso than downloading a PDF on a forum, then people will pirate it. Amazon requires you to search the book, put it in your basket, go to checkout, pay, then download it on your kindle and read. The forum download requires you to download it and put it on your kindle. Maybe it is time for a Netflix for Books, especially with more digital books being sold.

That my assertion holds water is I think proven by piracy being on the rise again, now that streaming services have more exclusives, making it harder and more expensive to get the shows legitimately.

<comment><USER21> I have no idea how to get a random PDF onto my kindle. Getting a _book_ there is easy though.

You can find and buy one on the device itself, or find and buy one on Amazon and it'll magically show up on the device. It literally is just clicking a single button.

I can't even imagine a way you could remove any steps from the process if you were designing it from scratch.

<comment><USER22>
      >> no idea how to get a random PDF onto my kindle.

Amazon gives you an email address; just attach the file to an email.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email](https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find it hilarious that they have https working properly, but visiting this URL with https redirects back to http

</comment><comment> content-maker Disclaimer: I made some passive money selling software and I've been damaged by piracy (so much that I had to stop selling). I was lucky enough to be my own publisher, though.

I still think that piracy should be legal, while breaking a contract and redistributing should be punished. This shouldn't happen automatically (like the copyright infringement letters in Germany) or handled by taxes (like the hard disk tax in some European countries), it needs to be handled in court, as a breach of contract. The fact that this is not the default and that your government/ISP is selling your data so easily, really points out how this is just lobbying from the media corporations and the umpteenth case of corruption of the government.

What if justice is too slow? Complain about your inefficient public courts and push for a private, faster system.

If you look at this from a wider perspective, people able to make money passively work once and gains for months or years to come. It depends on the type of good you're producing - but it can be wildly profitable or put you on a diet.

Given you're profiting from selling one thing to many, it should be your problem enforcing and/or suing people sharing your work. You have one-to-many benefits, you get one-to-many costs.

Will piracy kill some content and push the market in a different direction? Most likely, but that's what people want. You can see it in software with SaaS, in movies with Netflix, in music with Spotify.

I know it sucks to be in the spot of penniless painters, but it's how society evolved. You need to evolve yourself.

</comment><comment><USER21> Authors need to frame the conversation better: It's a contract. You don't get to read my book unless you pay me money.

It doesn't matter that the author still has a copy or whether you think you're "stealing". None of that matters. You can do whatever you like, so long as you give money to the author before you consume their thing. That's the deal, take it or leave it.

Frame the transaction that way, and at least you won't get so many people who think they haven't done anything wrong.

<comment><USER24> So if I go to my local library and check out a copy of the book (that my taxes paid for, presumably) I'm stealing from the author?

I pirate most of my ebooks because they're typically poorly made ports of the physical books. When I truly enjoy reading a book, I order a physical copy and add it to my shelf, so the physical copy becomes a) a conversation piece in my home 2) a decoration 3) available for my next read. But because I do most of my reading on the subway or while travelling, I still lean toward using my Kindle most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> All I ask is that an ebook be included with the physical copy. I don't want to haul the physical copy around, but I do want to support authors.

I've been using the library lately anyways. I'm so far behind on books that I've wanted to read that there's no real reason to follow new releases, so the library typically has what I want.

</comment><comment><USER26> Could t agree more, save for one point; include the kindle/ereader version with the print copy.

It's the only reason I would ever consider downloading a PDF of a book. I buy it and love it, only I can't take it with me on top of the 1000 other things in my bag. So now I'm looking for a pdf..

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a great experiment, and shows the value of getting solid data to back up a theory.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Before you continue, an update from us

> Tumblr is now part of the Oath family. Please review Tumblr's updated Terms > of Service and European Privacy Policy. Due to EU data protection laws, we > (Oath), our vendors and our partners need your consent to set cookies on > your device to use your search, location and browsing data to understand > your interests and personalise and measure ads on our products. Oath will > also provide personalised ads to you on our partners' products. Scroll down > to review some privacy updates and set your preferences.

> Tip: Log in to your account to avoid repeating this across your devices.

Damn. Oath are unmitigated evil. And that BS does not satisfy GDPR. Needing to track for personalized ads is _not_ a valid business purpose.

Anyone have a reachable link?

Edit: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L4D4AN...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L4D4ANYBLNgJ:maggie- stiefvater.tumblr.com/post/166952028861/ive-decided-to-tell-you-guys-a-story- about+&cd=6&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de)

<comment><USER9> Right click -> Open in private window

<comment><USER18> Thanks, but that doesn't work for me. And anyway, I always use private windows. I'm pretty sure that it's just my German IP address that's triggering it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> People seem to be missing the fact the book was ONLY available as a pirate copy, this leaves fans with hard options.

This seems like step one of issues to solve, don't pre-release ebooks.

<comment><USER29> Agreed. If you have fans, they will do whatever they can to read it as soon as possible. Example: people lining up at book stores for midnight releases of Harry Potter novels.

I imagine if the e-arc was leaked after the release date (after the vast majority of people bought an ebook copy), then the e-arc would have had a negligable affect on sales.

</comment></comment><comment> thraway-burnout There's no such thing as piracy. If your business model doesn't work in a post-physical-scarcity world, you need to change your business model.

<comment> thraway-burnout Peeps, downvoting is easy. Anyone has counter-arguments?

<comment><USER30> > There's no such thing as piracy.

There's no counter-argument because you have no argument at all, just a brazenly re-defined term.

A rational discussion requires shared language. You've thrown that out the door right at the start.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Daily Grooves, keep-it-simple music discovery - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygrooves.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, OP and creator here.

Motivation for this small app grew up as I became frustrated of reading music blogs in my RSS reader. I just want a stream of fresh music and bands to discover, but instead of that, Reader-ish experiences put me in front of series of individual articles where text took over music's throne, and where actually listening to music requires constant clicking and fumbling with players.

Then I discovered [http://hypem.com](http://hypem.com) , which is great but didn't feel right either (to my eyes: maybe too much categorization, bubbling me too much into what I already like, and a bit on the heavy side), so I built my own dumbed-down version, which doesn't try to be smart, is limited to throwing up one YouTube playlist per day, and embraces randomness (well, within the limits set by the sources choice).

I'm extremely pleased with the results, measured by the dozens of artists I've already discovered in a few weeks of usage. Because instead of being scared of 100+ unread items in my 'Music' Google Reader folder, I now just open DG and discover what chance decided would come next.

I'm posting it here hoping it will also be useful to a few HNers :)

\- Feedback welcome.

\- For the braves who will peek at the code: beware, this is my first GAE app, and my second Python program altogether. So please don't throw too much pointy stuff at my ugly code, but gentle suggestions and patches are very welcome.</comment>


Wirecard offices searched as prosecutors probe management board - <AUTHOR> https://www-ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/content/049d7f17-a99c-465d-8062-5e07fd9315b1 <comment><USER2> There goes one of Germany's few unicorns. They had around 6, depending on who you asked.

Meanwhile the US has around 230. 0.7 unicorns per million people in the US, versus 0.07 per million in Germany.

Why does Germany have more than an order of magnitude fewer? Not to mention that German startups are generally quite lame - their biggest unicorn is Auto1, which is literally just used cars.

<comment><USER2> That said, I guess there are some wealthier countries doing even worse than Germany, like Italy (their sole unicorn was just 100% fraud.) Still, Germany surprises me.

<comment><USER3> Well, not that I want to defend German start-ups, really I don't. But WeWork is just office space, so...

Point being, a lot unicorns are just VC pushed marketing machines. And I have no idea why Auto1 even exists...

Edit: Softbank invested in Auto1 as well. I start to see a pattern here...

<comment><USER2> Oh, I'm in total agreement - a lot of unicorns are just "normal companies" with VC cash behind them. But a lot of unicorns actually do something really cool. SpaceX, DJI, Ginkgo Bioworks, etc. Then there are a bunch that started great but went off course, like Vice and Reddit...

But Germany really perplexes me.

For the first five decades of the prize's existence, Germany literally had the majority (!) of the world's Nobel laureates. Germans invented the computer, modern telecommunication, the x-ray, the printing press... they discovered everything from testosterone to continental drift to nuclear fission!

It's not like innovation stopped since WW2 either (which I see people say occasionally) - just since the 80s they've discovered six (!) elements, created the first genetically modified animal, the SIM card, SMS, MP3, the scanning tunneling microscope...

They have money, they have an educated population - but in this new world of startups they don't seem to be getting anywhere. Why?

<comment><USER4> Recent example: a young guy did his PhD, invented couple cool algorithms in video processing area and got Million Euro grant to commercialize the project. The algorithms were cool, but the clients the PhD guy targeted didn't care about price at all. The guy spent all the money and failed.

Inventing is one thing, commercializing invention - totally different. Population doing inventions has no clue how to make business even with money. Regarding funding, it's just not there. What is seed stage in Germany, is series A or even B in USA. If founder can bootstrap until series B size, he probably will not take money from outside anymore.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a link for this story? Sounds interesting. With h.265, VP9, VC1 etc it seems there's demand for better video codecs.

<comment><USER4> No link, only local stories in Munich. That wasn't about video codecs, but rather SLAM. They were my direct competition. The clients were not interested in saving couple €, they need stability long term for their installations. I have same problem, so I need to do this part differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fun fact: Wirecard is one of the 30 companies included in the DAX, Germany's large cap index.

<comment><USER7> Why is this downvoted? It appears to be true[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAX#Components](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAX#Components)

<comment><USER8> I'd guess because it's already mentioned in the article

<comment><USER9> Well, I never heard of Dax before and knowing (thanks to the parent comment) that it is formed by only 30 firms adds context to the "prestigious" in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't that the bank N26 used before they got their own license?

<comment><USER11> Also Monzo

[https://monzo.com/blog/2018/01/18/future-of- prepaid](https://monzo.com/blog/2018/01/18/future-of-prepaid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whats up with this strange URL/domain?

<comment><USER13> Seems to be using a university proxy to get around FT's usual paywall. I had not seen this method before, am somewhat surprised the university proxy doesn't require some kind of SSO/auth. (if it's indeed working the way I surmise.)

<comment><AUTHOR> To quote from a comment I made in response to a similar query the other day: _I 've an FT subscription and often post articles, but I try to do a search and find an alternate link - quite a bit of FT content is syndicated fairly quickly to non-paywalled sites. A few days ago, an FT article that I'd posted and then searched for showed up with the OCLC domain [1]. I've been trying to figure out how it all works, but have failed. If you try to hit "baldwinlib.idm.oclc.org", you get a login page._

[1] That was referring to:

[https://www-ft-com.baldwinlib.idm.oclc.org/](https://www-ft- com.baldwinlib.idm.oclc.org/)

\- it turned up when I'd searched in DDG for an FT article's headline.

Then, maybe yesterday or the day before, a similar search turned up an FT article via:

[https://www-ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/](https://www-ft- com.ezproxy.babson.edu/)

Anyhow, it seems to offend some people if links are posted to paywalled sites, and it seems to offend others if one posts a paywalled link and then adds a non-paywalled link in comments. I have, therefore, been experimenting with posting the non-paywalled links via these resources if a search doesn't turn up a syndicated copy of the original article.

I suspect that the university-linked resource sites referenced here will probably close these loopholes pretty sharpish.

If any moderators see this, I would be happy to learn of any HN party line, or preference, about this behaviour. (Guidance welcomed by comment or by email. Thanks.)

<comment><USER8> Not a mod, but afaik the policy is to always submit the canonical source and share workaround links in the comments (e.g. the FAQ explicitly say that submitting links to paywalled content is fine, as is asking for and sharing workarounds in comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I had read that and abided by it until I noticed that every time I added a comment with a workaround link (rather than to a syndicated copy), the comment would be downvoted - often repeatedly so that it could no longer be seen.

<comment><USER14> Agree that the official source link is the link to post, which you appear to understand - yet then claim to violate due to the reasoning you described. Once the blocks happen, all the links you posted will be broken, please stop doing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> A valid point, and thank you for saying please.

<comment><USER14> No problem, agree with your intent, but appears you understand it more likely than not will result in problems. Thanks!

PS - While it unclear in this situation, other issues with proxies & mini-URLs is that they might easily be used to mine IPs, set cookies, launch attacks, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i'm not familiar with it, so just googled and that is a year ago for example [https://www.ft.com/content/d51a012e-1d6f-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87...](https://www.ft.com/content/d51a012e-1d6f-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87c65)

"But the account of what happened, in a preliminary report on the investigation by one of Asia's most eminent legal firms, indicated it was part of a pattern of book-padding across Wirecard's Asian operations over several years. Documents seen by the Financial Times show two senior executives in the Munich head office had at least some awareness of the round-tripping scheme: Thorsten Holten and Stephan von Erffa, respectively the company's head of treasury and head of accounting."

</comment><comment><USER16> Please help me. Maybe this is the right place to ask regarding this: How can I send money to a debit or credit card?

Yes. I do not want to charge the card, not reimburse a charge, no, I want to send money to a credit card or debit card. I need this as a solution for a business.

It can't be so hard. If you ever got your VAT/Sales tax reimbursed in Europe (e.g. via this service provider: [https://www.globalblue.com/](https://www.globalblue.com/) ) you know what I mean. It does not require you to have bought the goods with a credit card. They just send you the credit to your card that your provide.

How can I do this?

<comment><USER17> TabaPay is an option, as is Stripe.

<comment><USER16> I will look into TabaPay. I contacted stripe and assumed that they would not even reply. They did reply and were very kind but ...We don't offer the functionality to send money to cards the way some other providers do. ...

<comment><USER18> It sounds like you're looking for an OCT provider. Finix is an option you can pursue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Payoneer issues pre-paid MasterCard plastic via Wirecard (the UK branch), if I'm not mistaken.

</comment><comment><USER20> This headline does not come as a surprise to me, given my one interaction with Wirecard.

About a year ago, I had a bad experience with Verizon FIOS so I cancelled my subscription with them. I was owed a refund and Verizon delivered my refund to me on a Wirecard debit card. They claimed it was cheaper to issue a plastic card than to refund me directly to my card or issue a paper check. I find this claim extremely hard to believe. A pre-paid debit card is certainly NOT easier for the customer than a check. There are strong business cases for prepaid debit cards, but this was not one of them.

More likely, by issuing the refund via debit card, Wirecard and Verizon are able to extract every last possible penny by way of debit card fees and people who simply didn't bother to get their money off the debit card, by virtue of the friction they created for the customer with the debit card.

Pretty scummy if you ask me.

<comment><USER21> >More likely, by issuing the refund via debit card, Wirecard and Verizon are able to extract every last possible penny by way of debit card fees and people who simply didn't bother to get their money off the debit card, by virtue of the friction they created for the customer with the debit card.

In my experience you don't get charged fees if you try to spend the money normally (eg. at a store). There's still the problem of spending every last cent on the card, but supermarkets and gas stations generally allow charging an arbitrary amount to a debit/credit card. I think they even have a free option to transfer the balance to your bank via ACH.

<comment><USER20> So, to add insult to injury, they require that I provide them with my bank account number and my routing number just to get my refund that could have been simply credited back to the credit card I used to pay them originally or issued via a paper check.

Just what the world needs. More plastic. Because it's "cheaper", and sharing more sensitive information, because they are sooooo trustworthy.</comment></comment></comment>


Hospitals are a weak spot in U.S. cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/hospitals-cybersecurity-medical-information-hacking-076cb826-fc69-4ba6-b3fd-57ce19ab00c6.html <comment><USER2> Healthcare CIO here. This is true. Healthcare is still using paper fax. It has a 30 year old data interchange format that no one really supports because it's more profitable to lock in customers to your EMR. Healthcare is HORRIBLE about upgrading anything, at changing processes, and technological progress in general. Healthcare is VERY backwards from a tech standpoint.

Another problem is that EVERYTHING is custom, we use very, very few off the shelf solutions. Need an EMR? Let's build it in MUMPS, a 51 year old language that originated on the PDP7 and call it a state of the art system like Epic or GE Healthcare. Don't like the terminal interface? Let's slap a GUI on the front that still interacts via TTY on the back end. SQL? Nah. C, C++, or any more modern language with more robust features and way more programmers? Nope.

Now, there are some EMRs and other healthcare-centric apps that are better written, but they're also terrible. Healthcare is a relatively small market, you'll never sell a million units of your app, so you charge out the wazoo for it, get a few health systems on it, and allow they to go crazy with customization to help lock them in. And then you try to add on modern security features on to a system that's been growing for 50 years and it's a nightmare. It's INCREDIBLY common for nurses and doctors to need to have administrator access on their Windows desktops for various apps.

I was about to leave IT in general when a healthcare gig landed on me, and I'm glad it did. I find it very refreshing to be in an industry where it's so far behind that there are mountains of problems to tackle, even if half of them are so stupid it makes me want to cry.

<comment><USER3> People need to stop hating on fax. Hospitals still use fax because it is a much more punishable crime to tap phone lines which requires physical access, as opposed to a server that could be infected from a hacker halfway across the world.

<comment><USER4> Fax is odd, it was a fantastic thing when it first came about, and it has some desirable properties.

\- It's direct point to point communication (over a network)

\- The transport network is dedicated and not open to anyone and covered by quite strong laws in many countries

\- It's easy to see the history of communications

\- It's easy to see if the other end successfully received something

\- It's relatively standardized and ubiquitous ( in health )

Email would be the closest thing, but it doesn't have all the advantages, and the extra add ons that would make it better (like encryption, delivery receipt, digital signatures) are not standardized and/or ubiquitous ( and often hotly argued about )

So fax is the lowest common denominator, that, if it was proposed today, would not be accepted for many of its disadvantages, but it's now hard to find a way to replace it.

<comment><USER5> \- It's easy to see if the other end successfully received something

I think this is a biggie. It means your workflow doesn't need to include going back later and checking to see if your document was received, and then trying to send it some different way. You don't have to guess which way the recipient is capable of receiving a message.

It's the original e-mail. ;-)

<comment><USER6> Except seeing it was digitally received is often quite insufficient to seeing it was received by a human it was intended for. All too often in dealing with healthcare and gov't orgs our faxes get lost with no way of identifying where they went. Presumably it is a mismanaged shared fax inbox where individuals are not actually being alerted to their messages...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's really tough. You have a function which is viewed purely as a cost center; you have a totally porous environment where you're required to admit tons of minimally-verified people into confidential spaces; staff and affiliates need different levels of access from all over the world; there are critical availability demands where temporary denial of service for security reasons is unacceptable; device development is optimized for safety and fault tolerance as opposed to security which isn't ever really tested for; patients need to be able to submit tons of data in myriad forms; there are few central clearing houses for transmitting data so people are all calling each other with minimal validation; etc

<comment><USER8> Oh, and you're ultimately sourcing truth from people who are minimally trained on (and have minimal time for training on) the system.

Because they've spent the last couple decades focused on medical training.

<comment><USER9> And patients that lie / dirty input.

Sure, use cousin x's coverage. Nobody will freak out when your blood type doesn't match the records...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems that hospitals are overly focused on bullshit security frameworks and box-checking, i.e., HITRUST, which in my experience results in many dollars going to consultants with essentially zero tangible improvement in information security. Worse yet, the false sense of security within these hospitals due to having a HITRUST audit report with a bunch of meaninglessness check marks prevents them from actually doing the work of securing information properly. Have worked in health-tech for a number of years.

<comment><USER11> Cyber security standards are in place to make the process easier to understand for the non-technical executives, who approve the budgets.

Without the standards the executives don't know who they should believe, and invariably they believe the guy who sounds and acts like themselves, which means he knows as much about cyber security as the executives.

If you know what you are doing regarding cyber security, AND you are doing all the right things, HITRUST compliance is a cinch.

If you don't know what you are doing regarding cyber security, HITRUST at least gives you a fighting chance. But then that's the rub, if you don't know what you are doing why are you running cyber security.

<comment><USER12> I think they are intended to be helpful, but they are adopted as CYA that have the side benefit of improving security.

<comment><USER13> > _that have the side benefit of improving security_

Sometimes. Other times they have the side effect of worsening security, as line employees have to deal with bullshit "security" rules and invent undocumented, untracked workarounds just to be able to do their jobs at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work in health tech (full stack insurance), and sit next to security and IT, so this is a frequent topic of conversation for us. :)

For some context, this is one of our favorite websites/datasets: [https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf](https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf).

It is a structured archive of all reported health data breaches, major or minor, over the last 15 years or so, as reported by the breached entities. They're required to report breaches as part of HIPPA compliance, or something related to it.

It's a fascinating quilt of stories, with patches for phishing, accidental email attachments forwarded, and rogue admins. Fun reading. You can also load it into sqlite and find some interesting results (leakiest companies, states with most breaches reported, etc).

Hospitals might be a weak spot, but at least their weaknesses are ruthlessly well documented! As opposed to, say, financial infrastructure which IME is a similar horror show of monkey patched sftp servers.

Solving this collective technical debt is a massive coordination problem. It'll be interesting to see if we ever get there. My suspicion is that the changes will be driven by monopolistic insurers, if ever, since that's where all the money comes from (if you go to doctor at hospital X, your coinsurance will be Y instead of Z, because doing business with X is more/less risky due to their documented data practices). But it's just a suspicion, this kind of thing might not be solved in our lifetimes.

</comment><comment><USER15> The central IT function in a US hospital also usually has little organizational power and funding. Admissions, radiology, etc, buy whatever hardware and software they want, and the underfunded IT department has to figure it out.

<comment><USER16> This may vary by hospital, but in general many hospital IT staff tend not to be very good with computers, from my experience. Many are more focused on business/bureaucracy, or maybe they're just unskilled. I don't mean to attack their character, but instead to make the point that some very unqualified people are in charge of very important systems.

(Edit: My first job was hospital IT for a few months, and my boss was actually a pretty skilled programmer with a good grasp on security. So there are definitely exceptions.)

I imagine not many hospitals hire security talent either, or that they do much security beyond the "change your password" email every 6 months. Oh, and doctors/nurses/etc tend to ignore those emails.

<comment><USER17> Agreed with this. IT in hospitals is perpetually underfunded and basically a playground for creatures of corporate politics. Between administrative staff who think their medical credentials qualify them to micromanage IT decisions and perpetually under-funded departments I'm actually shocked that their systems aren't regularly crippled or destroyed by malicious entities.

Don't assume your medical data is secure. Systems that conform to HIPAA regulations are just one part of their computing infrastructure, and it's trivial to maliciously access a huge surface area outside of those specific pieces of hardware and software--and once a malicious actor has that access, it's not too hard to cross the gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Recently saw an ad for an IT support position at a hospital. The list of potential hazards in the work environment listed in the ad likely scares off many who have plenty of other employment opportunities. And most hospitals can't jack up the pay to compensate so attracting good talent is going to be a problem.

<comment><USER19> > And most hospitals can't jack up the pay to compensate

I find that hard to believe in an age of $100 saline bags, $20,000 childbirths, and 15-minute-long $500 specialist visits.

<comment><USER20> Earlier in my career I interviewed for a health IT job that was basically a director level position. The pay ended up being less than I was making as a government employee for a smaller scoped job. The government gig was probably less than an intern makes at a FAANG.

In medicine, doctors are king. Everyone else is a peon.

<comment><USER21> Doctors don't feel like they are kings--while they make very good money there are massive amounts of red tape, filling out Epic...

It's the bureaucrats who are kings.

<comment><USER22> My doctor friends confirm. They would rather spend their time on patient care but have to make a lot more time for the paperwork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Sky is blue, news at 11:00"...

Of course hospitals are a security weak spot: They're full of sensitive patient health data shared over computer systems whose users and procurers are not very security-literate, and often absent-minded about such issues due to the grinding, stressful work.

</comment><comment><USER24> waiting rooms are a gaping hole. nobody seems to see a problem with blabbing out your final 4 and first,last name when thier at a desk in a room full of whoever walked in and sat down.

un protected desktops are another issue, there is a tide of duties and an attacker can pattern the staff and get a good idea when they will have time to do an inside job of some sort.

<comment><USER9> As with most environments, there's a lot of trust based in a hospital running successfully.

At least they have their own on-site security that's experienced in taking people down.

I continue to believe the real threats are actual insiders and remote attacks.

Dunno how far someone will get with a USB key versus sending everyone a plausible email.

<comment><USER25> You plug in the USB key, then you pull out the USB key.

The physical security layer at alot of hospitals is almost entirely absent, sadly.

<comment><USER26> USB keys are blocked mostly these days. There are other huge vulnerabilities if you have physical access and are motivated.

<comment><USER27> From experience in plenty of industries, your statement is incorrect. Most places suck at security and blocking removable storage, but likewise suck at far more important controls (eg application whitelisting) for it to really mitigate much in the first place

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems the biggest reason they're a weak spot is that the data they store make them a target. Retailers are also weak on security -- really, I wouldn't trust any company that wasn't a specialist in the space, i.e. finance and tech -- but most entities don't know so much about their clientele. Retailers don't need to keep as much info as they do (aside from profit motives), but hospitals probably do, so I can see this being a vulnerability that's never closed.

<comment><USER17> The data they have are sensitive, but that's just the reason they're a target. They're a weak spot because of poor security practices, which is due to poorly managed IT organizations, which is due largely to the egos of administrative management and poor funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So are vet hospitals. At this very moment there's a chance you'll walk into one that has fallen back to paper records and billing due to a continent wide ransom ware attack.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/dnd7aq/ransomware_atta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/dnd7aq/ransomware_attack_against_national_veterinary)

From that thread: Avimark is an old style load the EXE from a share program with a flat file structure for the data. Most clinics are not in a domain, just workgroup, and the share is read/write access for Everyone. So, yeah.

<comment><USER30> It's worse than that thread reveals. NVA was hit by a ransomware attack in May. They're now in a _second_ attack that began in late October (ongoing). The latest one was described by CIO Joe Leggio as a "coordinated and sophisticated" attack in an internal email. He said it was designed to breach the NVA system specifically and that the attackers had three separate entry points. Only _this week_ did NVA deploy endpoint security software to every computer in their 500+ veterinary practices.

Note: Avimark itself is not at fault here. The Avimark issue that the practices are having is related to NVA not having a solid DR plan with working backups. Part of the problem there is that because of Avimark's architecture, most practices have an on-prem server that each workstation RDPs into for using Avimark. Because this equates to 500 or so Avimark SQL Server instances spread around the United States, it's perhaps not surprising that NVA's unsophisticated IT department did not have working backups for each instance.

<comment><USER31> This sounds ideal for a SaaS. Why is each practice messing around with an IT dept and SQL and DR when it could be hosted and managed at low cost for all them at once?

<comment><USER30> The industry has been really slow to move to SaaS. Avimark's primary competitor has a strong SaaS offering with Idexx Neo [0], but NVA requires the practices they buy to switch to Avimark.

[0] [https://www.idexx.com/en/veterinary/software- services/neo/](https://www.idexx.com/en/veterinary/software-services/neo/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I feel like _Mr. Robot_ may have highlighted this fact (along with others) to the general population rather effectively.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6gG-6Co_v4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6gG-6Co_v4)

</comment><comment><USER33> Given the state of cybersecurity right now, is there any organization or domain AT ALL which is strong and model-worthy when it comes to cybersecurity?

<comment><USER34> Big tech. Google, especially.

<comment><USER35> To be honest, Google is the last company I want handling my health data. If you don't check the right boxes, it could end up being "anonymized", and sold off.

<comment><USER36> Google is very good at precisely controlling what happens to the data. You never hear about some huge leak where 1B google accounts had their whole data taken.

<comment><USER37> There _have_ been two reported Google breaches, both small.

[https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/databreach/list?field_sb24_or...](https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/databreach/list?field_sb24_org_name_value=google&field_sb24_breach_date_value%5Bmin%5D%5Bdate%5D=&field_sb24_breach_date_value%5Bmax%5D%5Bdate%5D=)

Curiously, the "data breach" for which Google+ was supposedly shut down ... is not listed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Everything in US is targetable. The main problem is that say the power/health/<fundamental infrastructure> are all managed by 1000 different companies who are all at different wavelength as far as OPSEC.

</comment><comment><USER39> For those interested, I wrote a primer on M aka MUMPS at [https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/m/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/m/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Possibly in one part because I see people on freelancer marketplaces making software for hospitals, with job budgets of a couple hundred bucks. I'm ok with freelancers in general, but I feel that integrating code from disparate small jobs while keeping security in mind isn't gonna be so simple.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm an IT guy; I cringe almost every time I interact with the healthcare system.

I could pile on; all I want for now is encrypted and signed email with my doctors. I have an S/MIME certificate; can't see why the IT staff at the hospitals I deal with can't make sure my doctors have the same.

<comment><USER2> Because doctors are spoiled children. Were rolling out keyfobs for 2FA for our e-prescribe solution, but I'm keeping the fobs because I KNOW the docs will forget them/lose them. Docs only get soft-tokens on their phones because they never forget their phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> A different hospital/security thread from a couple days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21483337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21483337)

</comment><comment><USER43> How do they store their data? Why don't they use private clouds?

-Duple? [https://www.duple.io/en/](https://www.duple.io/en/)

-Nextcloud? [https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/)

<comment><USER26> IBM,Cerner,Dell</comment></comment>


Dell releases updated XPS-13 Developer Edition in wide variety of configs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/dell-releases-updated-xps-13-developer-edition-in-wide-variety-of-configs/

<comment><USER2> Ubuntu's announcment: [https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/04/09/designed-for- develope...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/04/09/designed-for-developers- dell-launches-two-new-ubuntu-based-systems/)

Developers Blog: [http://bartongeorge.net/2015/04/09/4th-gen-dell- xps-13-devel...](http://bartongeorge.net/2015/04/09/4th-gen-dell- xps-13-developer-edition-available/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This :

" Interestingly, the blog post also includes details on testing that the company has done with various other Linux distros on the XPS-13, including Fedora and Debian. [...] this time around Dell has provided quick run-downs on how to get the XPS-13 working with a few alternate distros—including recommendations for kernel choices and BIOS revisions to load. "

I'm really happy Dell decided to continue down this route. They make good hardware (I love my XPS12) and their Linux support is slowly becomming best- in-class.</comment>


Ask HN: Has this been done yet? - <AUTHOR>

A site where people can report a restaurant where they suspect they got food poisoning ... and if enough people report the same place in a given time frame, they all get notified, so they can pursue a claim against the place as a group.  (Site could make money by, say, offering lawyer referrals.) <comment><USER2> It might work. However, you will have to worry about false alarms/people not telling the truth. In addition to this, we always don't know where we got food poisoning.

This could lead to a situation where you, the site owner, are sued. This is probably why most people don't start a site like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps this is something that may be mined from the Twitter firehose (which may be easier than marketing a new site).

Let's be generous and say:

      Two mentions in the firehose would be sufficient for a correlation
      8% of people twitter
      25% of twitterers would tweet that they were food poisoned AND name the restaurant
      25% of the patrons got food poisioning

Any restaurant with at least (2 / 0.08 / 0.25 / 0.25) 400 patrons for the given time period would trip the alarm.

Those are pretty generous numbers though, with the figure jumping quite significantly as they're tweaked. A 25% poisoning rate for a reasonably-sized restaurant would probably hit the news beyond Twitter anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> How would you prevent a restaurant from reporting all of their competitors?

What happens when a restaurant subpoenas you for the personal details of someone who posted a derogatory report?

I find kmort's suggestion interesting - using Twitter (i.e., data that is already public) could be a smart move, as you would then be simply displaying the data rather than compiling/publishing it yourself - this could reduce your legal liability when (not if!) a restaurant wishes to defend themselves against a report.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my experience, restaurants do not have a sense of humour about this kind of thing. One site I ran had several legal threats over user reviews even vaguely implying they fell ill. Other threats came over reviews they felt inaccurate.

A health scare can easily destroy a business like this so I'd be very very wary!

</comment><comment><USER6> The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has links to each state's Department of Health [1]. They will follow up on reports of food poisoning and take necessary action.

[1] <http://www.foodsafety.gov/about/state/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> You could extend that concept to patents <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792087> and a lot of other areas. I'm not sure how common is restaurant poisoning (never experienced it), you may want try to fit this idea in other industries.</comment>


Ask HN: Market Rate in SF - <AUTHOR>

Just a quick question : if you hear "market rate for an entry-level software engineer" in the SF Bay Area, what do you think in terms of salary? <comment><USER2> I'd imagine $90k would be considered.

</comment><comment><USER3> I concur with cs44. 80-90k is entry level, leaning towards 90k on that range.</comment>


The Emperor's Old Clothes (1980) - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-emperors-old-clothes <comment><USER2> This is really funny, but it's a bit of a time investment and the early sections don't really hint at the awesomeness to come.

The most emotionally gripping anecdote for me, in short form: they got really cocky and promised the moon (a new operating system that would be a programmer's dream); then scopes crept, and deadlines slipped; as they tried to understand better why they were totally sucking, they realized that nobody had solved the actually-hard problem that they needed to and everyone just assumed it would be OK; even after significant optimization work they were two orders of magnitude slower than their competition. Clients had waited for years for this thing, bought hardware for it, and now they were being told "look, we're cancelling this project, we just can't do this well enough."

Hoare expresses his then-disbelief that he wasn't fired for the massive failure, especially given his then-belief that MIT was going to succeed doing its variant of the same thing (Multics -- insert notes of irony). Then,

> At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a > general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised > that he had even heard of me. "You know what wen wrong?" he shouted -- he > always shouted -- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do > not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch > with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole > of a modern software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system?

> I realized later that he was absolutely right, he had diagnosed the cause of > the problem, and he had planted the seed of its later solution.

After a grueling meeting of "what the @#$% just went wrong and how the @#$% do we fix it?" he describes the reorganization, and it's remarkably anticipatory of something like Agile. He establishes small teams who visit clients directly and figure out what they need; he discards clients' huge-project requests in favor of incremental improvements; those teams then have to convince him personally that this feature is important/useful and not too hard to implement; finally they work on the feature.

It's very much describing a management style which provides some sort of quality-control and pushback, but does not micromanage or mistrust. And it's got a sort of fractal structure: Hoare is only able to succeed because his own supervisors did not destroy him for his failure but trusted him to learn; his system is to act as a filter for the requests hitting his programmers, but he still trusts them to write awesome software if they have a strong sense of direction.

<comment><USER3> > his then-belief that MIT was going to succeed doing its variant of the same > thing (Multics -- insert notes of irony)

And yet Multics did in fact succeed, delivering an operating system that was used throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, with the final installation shut down in 2000. Unix history has, I believe, tended to exaggerate the early challenges to the extent where people now simply believe "Multics was a failure".

<comment><USER2> I mean, I agree, it's not a total failure--but I'm sure people in this community can appreciate the feeling of "dammit I failed at this stupid problem, these other people are kicking ass at it and I just suck" when hindsight says "actually, that was a really hard problem!"

It's well worth remembering that one-in-three is a really good batting average and one-in-four is MLB average. Actually that's why I like baseball as a sport in general; it's not usually as exciting as other sports but when you play it and you swing and the ump calls "STRIKE ONE," you have to swallow any disappointment and pick up that bat and get ready again: because that next pitch is coming, a new opportunity.</comment></comment></comment>


Tools used by influential developers and designers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/128048074e9f

<comment><USER3>
      > Popular hardware:
      > Keyboard, less than 50%
      > iPhone 4, 60%
      > Apple's incredibly overpriced cinema display, 75%

      > Popular softeare:
      > Chrome, only web browser listed, roughly in line with winxp
      > winxp + win7 more than mac osx, yet most people using a mac?
      > google-reader more than mail ?

There is something incredibly wrong with the data used by this article.

<comment><USER4> Hey, I am the author of the post. Here are some clarifications:

\- None of the values are the %. They are the actual number of people that said they use that ware. About 70 people said they use iphone 4 and about 40 people said they use the apple keyboard.

\- "keyboard" is a slug used for the Apple Keyboard. Half the people that were interviewed wanted to explicitly mention that they use that keyboard.

\- No one provided the interviewees with a set of names to tick if they used that hardware or software. In that case you'd have a comprehensive set of user-wares from which you could get the accurate info. I'd detest such an interview. I can not imagine why all of these people wouldn't.

\- What we have is a free form text where in the interviewee says whatever he's allowed to. When he says he uses a Mac, there is no reason why he'd also say he uses osx. - That would be redundant.

\- If people are asked what they like to consume, no one mentions water or cereals or vegetables, even though everyone has it. What is mentioned is the particular dish or a cuisine that they actually want you to know that makes them feel better. Likewise here, google reader actually helps a lot of these people and they want to share it with the readers.

\- It is much more what people like themselves to be associated with. Seth Godin has written a lot about it. People say Google reader much more than mail because they want to be associated with using it. "mail" here, btw is the slug to the actual Apple-Mail client.

Hope it helps set a perspective on how this should be read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just a list of basically interchangeable hardware/software products. How much does it matter that certain demographics prefer macbook pro to macbook air or sublime to emacs?

The PG quote is talking about things like the WWW or bitmap displays, stuff that is fundamentally different technology, not just measuring the popularity of laptop brands.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am not sure what to make of that list

* It mostly lists generic software (Google-docs?) * It's extremely MAC centric

<comment><USER7> Dunno what anyone else thinks...... Its just that describing google-docs as software jarred with me. I guess I see google-docs as a "website" or a "service", not "software", as such.

Why?

Not actually sure. I think I see software as something I buy and install on a local machine. But my, possibly incorrect, gut reaction is that services on websites are not "software".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I call sampling bias, if only because very few of the 'influential' developers I know use a Macintosh. I guess that the sample only includes 'hip' independents. Most people in a corporate setting do not choose their workstation. Then, anyone who hosts anything has a heavy dose of his Linux distribution of choice in the mix. Not defining 'influential' doesn't help with the site's credibility.

<comment><USER9> By the number of times you quote adjectives in your comment it's clear you have some sort of reflexive disdain for the whole concept. However I challenge you to define "influential" in any more objective way than what The Setup does. They interview a pretty diverse set of individuals, but of course they are all somewhat Internet famous for some public work they've done. I think it's pretty safe definition to say that people in the corporate world who don't choose their own workstation and are not publicly known are not as influential as interviewees on The Setup regardless of how smart, talented or accomplished they are.

If you don't like the content of The Setup then don't read it, but this is a simple statistical analysis of something which exists and many people value in its own right. You can take it or leave it, but please don't set up a strawman about how it's not statistically valid when in fact there is no way any such endeavour could be.

<comment><USER10> " _please don 't set up a strawman about how it's not statistically valid when in fact there is no way any such endeavour could be._"

So you agree that it's not statistically valid. Therefore it's not a strawman argument.

<comment><USER9> Do you know what a strawman argument is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Almost everyone uses a Mac. Where? I, actually, don't know anybody who uses > mac.

<comment><USER12> It depends on which developer groups they used. It seems certain web languages attract people who use Macs, where this data probably came from.

<comment><USER13> It also includes designers which in my experience are almost 100% mac users. So that will sway the stats more in that direction as well.

What is weird to me, is under Software we see Windows 7 and even Windows XP but we don't see any form of linux.

<comment><USER14> and we see a lot of people using Macs but running Windows on them.

<comment><USER15> I used to see that a lot in China 5 years ago when mac hardware was becoming popular. Then about 3 years something happened: they stopped installing pirated XP on mac hardware and rather were already used to OS X because of their iPhones/iPads. Quite strange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The statistics of this article are quite wrong. Only 2 people using vim? I've read multiple dozen articles of people using vim on thesetup.

<comment><USER4> The analysis is entirely available here: [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/becomingGuru...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/becomingGuru/usesthis_analysis/master/analysis4.ipynb)

Perhaps there are other slugs "gvim" and the like, which also have a 2 each users.

I will verify this and let you know. Meanwhile pointing to any 3 vim users would help me debug this.

<comment><USER16> John Resig: [http://john.resig.usesthis.com/](http://john.resig.usesthis.com/)

Matt Might: [http://matt.might.usesthis.com/](http://matt.might.usesthis.com/)

Selena Deckelmann: [http://selena.deckelmann.usesthis.com/](http://selena.deckelmann.usesthis.com/)

Robert Love: [http://robert.love.usesthis.com/](http://robert.love.usesthis.com/)

Zed Shaw: [http://zed.shaw.usesthis.com/](http://zed.shaw.usesthis.com/)

Benjamin Mako Hill: [http://benjamin.mako.hill.usesthis.com/](http://benjamin.mako.hill.usesthis.com/)

Greg Koah-Hartman: [http://greg.kh.usesthis.com/](http://greg.kh.usesthis.com/)

Brent Simmons: [http://brent.simmons.usesthis.com/](http://brent.simmons.usesthis.com/)

Chad Fowler: [http://chad.fowler.usesthis.com/](http://chad.fowler.usesthis.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Notepad++ is more popular than both vim and emacs. I don't believe this.

<comment><USER18> It's not particularly surprising when you think about it. Users of stenography keyboards are far more "productive" than users of QWERTY keyboards. But everyone knows how to use the latter at some level of competence, while the latter requires extensive training in specific skills. And really, do you need to be able to type 200 WPM?

In the same sense, vi or emacs might make you more productive in the limited sense of typing code, but only after you've taken the non-trivial amount of time required to obtain a level of proficiency with them. And even then, being able to type and edit code more quickly than someone using a more traditional text editor is only a small fraction of what constitutes performance for a developer or designer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Model M keyboard only at 5%? That sounds surprisingly small. Though open offices might explain that.

<comment><USER4> Thats actually 5 people of the interviewed-analysed 373. (And not 5%)

<comment><USER15> Harsh then. I can't imagine programming without my Model M. It also let's my office mates know I'm working...hehe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am the author of the post and happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER13> Was Linux represented in your test group?

Was k-mcgrady right that all the different distros made none of them make the top 10 list?

With the people I know and work with Linux seems to be the most popular option for programming so I am curious as to what your statistics show, and why Linux doesn't appear.

<comment><USER4> \- I did not create a test group. I did a statistical analysis of all the interviews on The Setup: [http://usesthis.com/](http://usesthis.com/)

\- Among this group, the number of people who were tagged linux was about a fourth: [https://github.com/becomingGuru/usesthis_analysis/blob/maste...](https://github.com/becomingGuru/usesthis_analysis/blob/master/categories.png) I did not do a distro distribution. That is good feedback. I will find out.

Since designers hardly use linux, and since half the people are developers, it may be safe to assume half the developers interviewed by The Setup use Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> oh... hardware and software we "should" use according to some trends? Apple? Google? what happened to Hacker culture?

<comment><USER4> "When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world." - <USER2>

I am saying you should rather already be using this now, than doing it later, given you'd be doing it anyway. (from PG, above.)

<comment><USER20> I think you're incorrect to say that. You're recommendation makes no sense. You're saying 'hackers' should do what a mixed bag of 'developers' and 'designers' are doing now, because it's inevitable they will be anyway in ten years time, because 'PG' said so.

Picture it, self proclaimed 'hackers' all aping each other. All uniform, non distinct from the general population. What would then make them predictors of the future? There would be absolutely nothing unique about what they were doing.

I'm right in assuming at least half of these are designers and not developers. It's particularly doubtful that 'hackers' are going to swarm on to apple hardware over the next ten years given the mac tax and apple's propensity to lock it down.

<comment><USER4> The "should" use was meant for the general populace, those that adopt something, after the tipping point in a bell curve, to give a sneak peak into what hackers use today. - Not to hackers, who can themselves choose what they want and who form the initial part of the bell curve.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Patients able to breathe thanks to hacked Decathlon's snorkeling masks - <AUTHOR> https://dgiluz.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/its-working/ <comment><USER2> Fantastic! Looking through the material linked by the blog post I found this instruction video for how to build one of those: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Csqdxkrfw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Csqdxkrfw)</comment>