Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN? - <AUTHOR>

I know what I am going to say is borderline hubris in this web 2.0 world we live in, but bear with me.
A lot of problems this site faces are due to the large influx of new, anonymous users. So I was wondering, how would this website be different if there was a small (say $5/yr) subscription needed, at least for posting. For one thing, it would have less (active) users, but we know that the sweet spot for social news sites is when they have a relatively small amount of users. Also, these users would be easier to identify and perminently ban if necessary. Finally, these users would most likely be those who are more positive in their interaction with the community. I find it hard to imagine a troll paying.
There are of course negative side-effects, not least of which is the locking out (from posting) of hackers who may not have a paypal account/credit card. Also, some may feel a sense of entitlement, an expectation of service-level. On the plus side, if there is anything left after the transaction processing, it may go towards covering server costs and whatnot. Even if pg/YC was to make some money off of this, I doubt us raging capitalists would mind, given the value we get out of HN. It might also go some way towards proving (if successful of course) that users will pay for quality and that ad-supported/freeminum is not the only way.
So, do you think such an alternative-reality HN would be desirable? <comment><USER2> Of course I would pay $5/year for HN. I lose more money than that every time I compose a new comment. Time is money, after all.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea, though. I think it almost certainly isn't. It sends entirely the wrong message, it's a much bigger pain to implement than it's worth, it might work all too well at cutting the volume of submissions and comments (if you think a crowded HN is bad, fork HN -- the code is open source! -- put it up on your server, and see how exciting _that_ is)... and it won't work. You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year? I think you severely underestimate the entertainment value that a troll derives from trolling.

If, in fact, HN eventually declines to the Reddit level, the solution will be the same as ever: Some of us will head off into small invite-only groups (note that _invite-only_ is distinct from _for pay_ ), and the rest of us will migrate to a handful of other new social news sites which will thrive for a while until they succumb to the same problem, or to an entirely new problem, after which the cycle begins anew. As someone has said in the past, it's like restaurants, or music clubs. They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.

<comment><USER3> " _Time is money, after all._ "

A wise old man once told me: "Time is more important than money; I can always make back any money I lose, but time is gone forever."

<comment><USER4> I get your point, but how does the wise old man explain how to make back money without losing even more time?

<comment><USER5> The value of your time increases with time. Making back 1 hour's worth of your time in cash today will probably only take you a few minutes a 20 years' time. However, making back 1 hour's worth of your time in time is impossible.

<comment><USER6> Originally? The wise old man bought and sold mortgage backed securities with a triple-A rating. Now, he stands out in the street corner with a cup in his hand and a cute cardboard sign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No.

Basically, part of the value (most?) of HN is that there are other people here. Charging $5 would mean less content submitted and fewer comments. If the NYTimes or WSJ tries to charge, it doesn't significantly change the content of their sites since they're both created top-down by paid writers and editors.

When you're trying to monetize user-generated content, you can't try to do so in a way that will mean less user-generated content. This is the same problem that Facebook has - their value is that you have so many users and content from those users, but if they start charging they won't have so many users and people will find another site to replace Facebook with. Sure, one could make the argument that here a $5 fee could keep out some of the less desirable people, but it would also eliminate many of those who make the site desirable. It's not that the content doesn't have enough value to be worth $5 to me, it's that once you start charging money, the value of the content drops as many won't pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Metafilter has a one-time, $5 signup fee, plus restrictions on new users to post content:

<http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi>

Unfortunately, by raising the bar to participation, a lot of people who would be an asset to the community are prematurely excluded.

My suggestion for dealing with trolls and flames is applying a "three strikes" rule: If a new user's average comment rating drops below negative two, their account gets frozen for a set period of time. Or, you could apply some sort of "three strikes" rule (three comments -4 or below result in a freezing).

<comment><USER9> a lot of people who would be an _asshat_ to the community are prematurely excluded

FTFY.

The problem with staying free and censoring unpopular opinions is that sometimes those opinions turn out to be right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll give you one data point that you may want to consider:

When I was a high school student, it would have been difficult for me to participate in HN. $5/yr was a significant amount of money for me then ($5 = INR240). And I wasn't even poor.

Many people I know totally couldn't have afforded $5/yr when they were students. I am sure there are countries where US$5 is even more unthinkable.

<comment><USER11> Oh you aren't from the us, I got ya. That would be difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is what MeFi and Kevin Smith's forums do. I believe Smith donates the money to charity, but his aim is to keep the crap out.

I'd pay $5/yr for this. Hell, I'd pay $10 if it went to a tech charity.

<comment><USER13> I'm glad someone mentioned this. MeFi has done really well and certainly hasn't lost steam since requiring a paid account. If HN were to go in a paid direction I think the posts and comments should be available to anyone (a la MeFi).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nope.

I _just_ turned 18. I have no bank account, no credit card, no PayPal account, nothing. Charging for HN would mean asking me - and others like me - to leave. HN is a valuable website, and I don't want to lose it.

Here's an idea: make HN invite-only. Members get to invite others only when they reach a certain karma level (say, X). Once they reach level X, they get to invite 3 people. After that, they get to invite one more person per Y karma points, where Y < X. Moreover, inviting others would mean losing those Y points.

Diligence on the part of existing users would ensure only people who post insightful content get karma.

<comment><USER15> Invite-only would get rid of people like me, who come here to learn from those who are able to do, with hopes that one of these days I'll be able to do it myself. I lurk, yes, and only try to comment when I feel I can contribute to the discussion. But I certainly don't troll, or post witty one liners just to get my karma up. A pay site would at least allow me in, but I don't know anyone here, and no one here knows who I am, so I wouldn't know how to get an invite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes, because what Hacker News needs most right now is a bigger sense of entitlement among its users.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any idea how much billable time is lost/spent with a group of highly skilled hackers sitting around commenting? Millions of dollars? Tens of millions?

HN is a bunch of bits. Worth about as much as any other bunch of bits. Without the people's investment of time and effort in submitting and commenting the site is worthless.

<comment><USER2> I realize that I may have sparked this line of argument with my quip about the time I spend posting on HN. But the fact is that for every hour I lose here I might well save an hour somewhere else, because some person posts something about github, or Linode, or Dropbox, or some other tool that I might otherwise never have heard of and I get that much smarter.

Time spent socializing with smart people is very difficult to value in dollars, but it is certainly not valueless! If nothing else, it preserves one's sanity and morale. And these are very hard things to buy, indeed.

<comment><USER18> Seconded. I've spent a lot of time here over the last few weeks as I've slowly come to understand the culture (not that I _really_ understand it yet) but that is time well spent. I've seen several pointers I've already used, and come away enthused and eager to work.

I don't "spend" time here, I "invest" it. As I discover people with similar opinions and complementary skills, my network expands, and my "value" increases.

My time here is not wasted, even if my username isn't orange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Only if it would stop posts like this.

We're not in charge of HN, we can't set up a billing system; we can't make Paul's decisions for him and he asks for input when he wants it. As such, these musings are just killing time and taking up space on the front page where actual hacker news could be.

<comment><USER20> Meta-discussions were really the death of digg. Soon after come the "experiments."

<comment><USER21> Sorry, but I disagree. The death of digg is squarely at the hands of the trolls, spammers, and morons that flocked to the site like locusts.

<comment><USER20> Ok, I stand corrected. The meta-discussions were the _start_ of the death of digg.

<comment><USER18> No, you're confusing cause and effect. The arrival of the spammers and trolls led to the discussion of the long(er) timers over how to prevent it. The meta- discussion was the symptom, not the cause.

<comment><USER20> I don't think I am. There were meta-discussions very early on.

<comment><USER21> Kevin Rose was famous and pitched the site hard. The community started going downhill very early on.

<comment><USER20> Except that he didn't pitch the site hard at all for the first nine months (in fact he repeatedly denied being involved with it). And he wasn't all that famous (host of a dying show on a dying network). It was only after the VC money arrived that that started.

<comment><USER21> I'm obviously not going to argue with _you_ over the history of digg, of course you're intimately familiar with that, but I felt like I got there pretty early, and I only personally got a couple of month's worth out of it before I felt it was overrun.

And I didn't mean to imply that he was _actually_ famous, but he was certainly well-enough known among the target audience that having his name attached made a significant difference.

<comment><USER20> Actually I'd love to argue with you - my memory is not perfect, and I'd love to hear other people's perceptions. What point in time were those couple of months?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure this is not the answer. Metafilter does this, and I would not want the kind of culture they have there. What's prized there is _sounding_ clever, and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5 fee was partly responsible-- if people were more willing to pay $5 to hear themselves talk than to e.g. answer a question someone had asked.

<comment><USER23> Wow, that's rather harsh. You must had some really bad luck with Metafilter, or it must have had changed significantly since I frequented it more often.

I remember _Ask Metafilter_ as an excellent resource for questions on many topics with many thoughtful responses (especially from people that knew a lot about what was being asked [1], not just the internet-usual - "I'm clever so I think X is the answer").

Indeed, it was usually worth to start your search on some particular problem on Ask Metafilter before turning to more general Google search.

Metafilter also has much less transient feeling than HN. There is a strong culture of not repeating yourself, so people detect duplicates and link to previous instances of similar questions/answers.

This leads to answers have more "archival" feeling to them. You know that it's worth to spend a lot of time on your answer, because if anybody in the future will ask a similar question, there is a very high chance that somebody from the community will remember your answer and link to it.

[1] As an example, here is Steven Wozniak paying $5 just to post one comment:

[http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I- rite#...](http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I-rite#728258)

Or Adam Savage looking for inspiration for the MythBusters episodes:

<http://ask.metafilter.com/55694/Old-west-Mythbusters>

[http://ask.metafilter.com/111253/Movies-where-someone- hangs-...](http://ask.metafilter.com/111253/Movies-where-someone-hangs-onto- the-hood-of-a-driving-car)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Something Awful Forums charges a $10 one-time fee (plus add-ons), and it doesn't seem to impede people from doing truly stupid things, as you can see with a simple glance at their Lepers Colony: <http://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php>

<comment><USER25> I'm surprised how the $10 barrier suddenly makes the quality of people and discussion on the forums much, much better. You can at least depend on everyone to use decent punctuation and spelling, among other things. Being able to lurk before signing up an account is a crucial part of this; otherwise people won't have any idea if you have quality content or not, and will default to not signing up.

I also like the fact that it's a one-time purchase; I don't have to worry about a yearly charge to a card that I feel like closing.

SA also gets a decent amount of cash by charging for things which are free on most forums; forum avatar, avatar title, searches, archives, private messaging, etc.. I wonder if this model could be applicable to a more minimalist site like HN, or any other non-forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> kuro5hin.org did more or less exactly this and it pretty much killed the site. Growth reversed, and the trolls and spammers turned out to be willing to pay. Personally I'm in favour of enforcing strong identity so that folks reputations follow them around.

That being said, it does seem to have worked for Something Awful.

<comment><USER27> Second that. I wouldn't like to use an overlong username though so I've shortened it a bit. And to put my money where my mouth is I've just added my full name and email address to the profile.

Reputation systems that are based on anonymity don't really work well in the long term, your 'net creds' don't translate in to 'street creds' and vice versa unless there is a one-on-one correspondence between the two.

Wikipedia has made some big goofs with this, allowing people to claim a reputation they could not back up in real life. There was the one guy that claimed to be an authority on religion if I recall it right that had just read through 'catholicism for dummies' or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Probably yes, but think of all the budding college & high school entrepreneurs that that would discourage.

$5/year is absolutely nothing now that I'm employed. But for a kid who doesn't hold the purse strings, it's much more than that. It's not really the money - most parents also have no trouble sparing $5/year. It's the hassle of convincing the parents that it's worth it, and not just a random time-waster.

Plus, as soon as the 'rents are paying for it, you lose the sense of "this is something I'm doing for _me_ , and it's my own identity and not my parents." For me, one of the reasons I got into computers was because my parents knew nothing about it, and I was overjoyed when I started getting jobs based on connections _I'd_ made online instead of ones my mom had setup for me.

<comment><USER10> Wow you nailed the story of my life with your last para.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Make it $5 per HOUR. That would be the perfect noprocrast.

<comment><USER30> I'm finding the ability to not override anymore is saving me a ton of time. Funny how when I could override it I would... Even though I set up the noprocrast parameters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> the problem is that a lot of people refuse to pay on principle. To many people it doesn't matter if its $.01 or $99, the whole process of paying is a barrier to them

<comment> cool-RR I have that principle, but I'd relax it for HN. I think it's because I'll know that I'm being charged for a good reason.

That, and there's no "cat in a bag" situation: I know exactly what I'm getting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My first thought was absolutely yes but then I began to wonder whether that would do anything for the quality of submissions. $5 isn't very much; why would that discourage low-value comments any more than high-value ones? I assume you mean that reading would still be free but you would have to have a paid account to post?

Counter-proposal: make it easier to tie someone's HN name to a real identity. Perhaps require email address confirmation and a waiting period for new accounts before allowing a first post?

On the high-ratio orange-username thing: neat idea but comment karma depends so much on how early in the life of the thread a comment is posted. Readers who check in less frequently and respond to longer threads are less likely to score high regardless of comment quality. (Also, I'm sad to not be orange.)

<comment><USER26> I think strong identity is going to be how this sort of thing is eventually settled. Email addresses is fine, but there are plenty of sites which provide a means of getting a throw-away address. Maybe mimicking how banks and governments handle it and requesting N out of M different kinds of identity might help?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [Since I can't update the post itself anymore, I'll write an update with a reply]

After the great discussion that has followed, a number of good modifications has been proposed that could significantly reduce grievances. The fee could be one-time, and proceeds donated to charity. Also, uers with a lot of karma could invite other users (in case they cannot register due to no cc/no paypal/underage etc.) This would probably require an area for users to request invites etc. but even the process would certainly make users more mindful of their posting. Additionally, the new users could be mentored by the one inducting them, further increasing culture preservation. Keep the thoughts coming.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find HN a mixed bag. Some things are very good, most things are so-so, somethings are really bad. Just like real life.

The simple act of registration is enough to keep me away from most sites. At least this one is good enough that I thought it worth registration. Add a charge? I don't think it would be worth it for me to continue with it. I can find what it gives me elsewhere.

Like it or not, the Internet is a jungle.

The good thing about a jungle is that its full of all kinds of living things. The bad thing about a jungle is that its full of all kinds of living things.

When you live in a jungle its eat or be eaten then you die no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER34> I might pay 5$ a week for HN as it i now, but I think you would lose a lot of users at 5$/year. At which point the site might not be worth 5$/year. If you want to make money off of a website the most proven method is to use advertising or to have a basic free site and then add a premium tier.

This means finding a feature that adds 5$ a year in value but is not needed for the rest of the site. Which is not as hard as you might assume. One obvious option for HN would be the ability to bookmark and follow users. Even a simple table with timestamps of last post, and the numbers of posts in the last hour, day, week, and lifetime might do it.

</comment><comment><USER27> No, and not because I can't afford it but because I think that any site that charges $5 for people to _contribute_ content is misunderstanding the beauty of the web.

Everybody can contribute, even those for who $5 would be a very large expense, and you'd be surprised how big a portion of the world that would be.

Some Indian, Latin American, Chinese or Russian hacker would - even if capable of paying - find themselves locked out because they can't pay by card, either because they don't have them or because the IPSP won't allow them to use it.

</comment><comment><USER35> No.

Hasn't experience over the past 10+ years answered this question been already?

1\. Audience shrinkage — less readers and posters would mean less garbage, but it would also denote less of everything, including quality…

2\. Less of an attraction even to one subscribed with the subtraction of public visibility (outside search engine scope).

3\. Already a tried and failed proposition — look at NY Times, WSJ, etc.…

The genie is out of the bottle and their really is no way to stuff it back in and cap it again…

<comment><USER36> Like others have been mentioning here, Metafilter has a fee like this, and from what I hear, it works really well for them. Thinking about it more, though, I can see how it would could really prevent new users from wanting to join. I'm not sure exactly what would happen. I'd be willing to support an experiment and try it, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Easily. I'd pay more depending on what kind of content is shown. If there was a way to block 37signals, joel's blog, and some others then I'd be up to $10/month ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> No. Building a critical mass of good users is hard enough without adding false friction.

If you're looking for a place to improve, I'd look at the way karma is used.

IMHO sites like HN should continue innovating with ways to better calculate and utilize karma. In most cases, it's done very badly, rewarding early commenters disproportionately, so that people with a lot of time on their hands get a bigger voice.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would definitely pay (whether $5 or $50 doesnt matter) a year but feel that paying just to post/comment would merely serve to limit the number of people committed to quality contribution without offering added value to the core community. Essentially you would have to pay to help other HN users. What if the stories remained public but viewing/participating in the discussion required membership (at a cost)?

</comment><comment><USER40> OP suggested using a fee to reduce trolling and somehow qualify users. It addresses the problem in a round-about way using economic incentives to filter "non-HN" users, or trolls. Inefficient.

In order to qualify site membership, why not require a non-monetary merit test? For example, one can only sign-up or comment/submit for a month if they can solve a simple computer problem appropriate to the site content, in this case maybe deciphering a simply double-encoded string (say, HTML entities + rot13 or base64 or something). If you only want only "hackers" on HN, make them "hack" their way in, like some kind of text CAPTCHA for computer geeks. I guess a math forum could make people solve an equation to comment, or a zoological forum could ask some taxonomy question or something.

If the real problem is that HN needs money for infrastructure in a depressed ad market, then call it what it is and do a voluntary fundraiser, ala Wikimedia or public radio. Those of us who value this site will pony up accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes. I'd probably pay double that.

I think that there is a huge difference between $0 and $ANY, in that it forces the the user to place a value on it. I think that the model to look to is MeFi, which has very high-quality comments, high-quality posts, and as others have stated, it seems to have more _memory_ than your average site. Old posts are frequently referenced and there is a strong culture of DRY (don't repeat yourself).

The main objection seems to be that the site will shed users that can't/won't pay. For those users that don't have credit cards or Pay Pal (I, for one, hate PP with all my heart) could there be other options to make payment more flexible? What else is out there if you don't want to limit yourself to payments of only those types?

But I do think the $5 barrier to entry will improve, or maintain, the quality. If you don't want to pay, sorry, but I like HN more than I like J. Random Bozo's troll.

</comment><comment><USER42> I love the community here at HN, but I don't want to discourage new users from joining this environment. I do believe that good moderation by long-term users will keep the environment stable, but eventually HN is likely to burn out like an old candle and charging any amount of money is just hurrying up the process that will lead to the end of HN.

</comment><comment><USER43> I flat-out refuse to use PayPal for anything. I am reluctant to use my credit card except for shopping sites that have a decent track record of security. A small site with a Comodo certificate won't get my business. If HN used Amazon for payment, then I would consider it since I already have CC info on file there, it's no additional risk to me. Like some others have said here, I don't think it would do much (if any) good for this site. It won't deter trolls, at least not dedicated trolls. I think moderation is the only way to keep this from degrading to Reddit, then Digg, and lastly 4chan. Delete posts that don't conform to this site's goals and TOS. Ban users that violate TOS more than 'x' times. I think this site is pretty good at self-policing itself already. The tone is much more business-like and adult than any of the other techie news/social sites that I frequent.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think in time we'll see communities based on membership where you do pay a fee, and then if you behave badly you'll get nuked and kicked out of the community. And it needn't be limited to one site. You could have a site goodcitizen.com and then people would have accounts with it, and their membership there would allow them to participate in blogs, etc.

The trick will be in who finds a good way to do the 'justice' system right. I've thought about this model quite a bit..

Another problem is payment systems. Part of the culture of the internet with payments is that you have to work with parties who have a business model based on bad faith. Google checkout seems to be changing that though, and now is the first time I've thought about the model since evaluating them.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would not pay because the content on HN isn't so specialized that I cannot find the community elsewhere. Furthermore, trolls are easily identified and ignored, like SPAM.

However if there were a subscription, I think you need to think about the value of this community. Charging just posters would unleash a backlash by the most active members of this community. Their thought would be, "why would I PAY to participate in a community when everyone else can obtain the value of my knowledge for FREE?" Using the email analogy again, if everyone who wanted to email me had to pay $5/year, I would probably receive no spam, but more importantly no emails at all -- not even from my mother who would just use a cheaper substitute (phone).

</comment><comment><USER46> $5 is not much of a barrier to entry for someone with an agenda, say troll or marketer.

<comment><USER47> But it sure cuts down on repeated spam if they have to find a new credit card and pay a new $5 every time they get booted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I pay $20-30 a month for LinkedIn and find HN at least as valuable. I would be willing to pay the same for the knowledge that's available in these forums and the ability to take part. I find it extremely thought provoking.

</comment><comment><USER49> No.

Sorry, let me elaborate. I do comment on HN, I generally don't post as much as I should. I find HN valuable but no more valuable than other community sites I frequent. If HN went to $5/yr I'd lose some of the discussion but ultimately I'd move on to a different community that didn't charge $5/yr. Whilst there are many on this site that probably would pay the $5/yr for this community with this amount of users, the community would lose a lot of people and the quality of the community would drop with the quantity (as in you're not just losing deadwood and trolls here).

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't agree with the idea, but if it was required, i would definitely pay this amount to stay in the community. I dont visit Digg anymore since i know HN! For me it's an evolutionary step.

HN means a lot to me.

</comment><comment><USER51> The content is what makes this site interesting. So I understand the concept but submit doing anything to discourage content is a bad business model. I am primarily a reader or "lurker", but am also an ANGEL investor and CEO of my own self funded start up.

So I would propose you develop a model that has a charge for reading that can be waived by posting credits. So announce 6 months from now it is $5 a yr but by being active you can reduce the charge. I realize lots of loop holes, but basically charge readers not content creators.

</comment><comment><USER52> It does work well for MetaFilter, but voting seems to work okay here. What exactly would you describe as "a lot of problems"? What problems need to be solved?

What if you could buy 5 whuffies (or whatever points on here are called) for $5, but could only post comments if your score remained above zero? Or maybe something in the stackoverflow type scheme, where the points are correlated with privileges?

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm reading this thread while drinking a latte that cost nearly $5. Yes, I would pay $5 for a year of HN... even if there were still trolls.

</comment><comment><USER54> Metafilter has a one-time $5 fee <http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi>

<comment><USER55> Metafilter has been very successful in preserving its user culture -- and it has a very particular community, with a sophisticated writing style, etc. It's easy to imagine that if they hadn't done the fee, the site could have degenerated into a digg-like mess.

I think Metafilter is a positive example of a small fee policy working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> If the charge served to reduce the chaff from unvetted commentators, then I'd have no problem with it. Depending on...

How smoothe (and trust-worthy) is the credit card payment process. If it makes registration/payment more of a hassle then the _time/trouble_ cost would personally be a barrier when the $5.00 would not. But that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER57> now hn has orange, why not extend it further? like belt-color levels

say a new user is of white belt and can't post after s/he of age one week (then automatically get yellow belt and can post 1 post / day max) ... higher levels can post more per day

and maybe a penalty function like temporarily giving 1 day noprocrast for trolling

</comment><comment><USER58> No, but I'd pay a $20 one-time fee. The reason for this is that I find recurring costs to be a hassle to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER59> Surprising to me to see how many would pay $5 per annum. Personally I believe in open communication!

"Stopping" anonymous users can be done with a little bit of design in the sign-up process.

If money is required adding some ads down the RHS of the screen would easily make that much ...

just my 2 cents...

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd pay ten dollars a year for HN if everyone else had to pay five dollars a year. :-)

In all seriousness, K5 provides a pretty good example of what happens when you do this:

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/9/10/13920/3664>

</comment><comment><USER61> I would pay if you find a way to avoid excluding people who are assets to this community, but don't want to or can't pay.

Maybe there could be a system of free trial that would extend to a free yearly subscription for people whose karma is high enough by the end of the trial period?

</comment><comment><USER62> No.

I would pretend that I was seriously considering it, and then would find something that was nearly as good and never come back.

cf. Salon.com (despite the fact that it went free years ago)

</comment><comment><USER63> Yes I would. While I recognize that a pay for access methodology won't cure all of the ills of the virtual world, like a padlock on a door, it will serve as a deterrent to casual ne'er do wells.

</comment><comment><USER64> A troll would totally pay to manipulate and pee in your sacred pond.

</comment><comment><USER65> No, I wouldn't pay for it. Shouldn't the trolling issue naturally work it self out over time? If anonymous users are the issue perhaps add some additional validation of identities?

</comment><comment><USER66> Yes. I would also pay to get more attention for my questions. Sort of like many game worlds, where you can earn points either by activity or by paying hard cash.

</comment><comment><USER67> Yes, definitely. Hacker News is worth more than $5/year to me with the amount of time I spend on it and it'd be worth it if it keeps users more reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER68> Isn't this the same thing that Metafilter does? How's it working out for them? I know I paid my $5 for them, but I haven't been back there in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'd pay. I left Digg because the signal to noise ratio got so bad that just felt it wasn't worth my time anymore.

</comment><comment><USER70> we need a reputation economy. currently karma isn't good for anything but stroking people's ego.

</comment><comment><USER71> I would be happy to pay (much more even), but I don't think it's necessary to help the community.

</comment><comment><USER72> How about a two tiered system, whereupon we maintain both and open and invite only board?

</comment><comment><USER73> How about a lottery where everyone pays, but where the winner gets loads of free karma?

</comment><comment><USER74> If it meant that this place doesn't go the way of reddit/digg/etc. then sure.

</comment><comment><USER75> No, but I might be willing to go through some kind of hazing ritual.

</comment><comment><USER76> Sure I will. Where do I send the money? California or Boston?

</comment><comment><USER77> Small $5 paypal button. Keep things simple. I'd click.

</comment><comment><USER78> have users with a certain reputation in and then charge a fee for new ones or just forbid commenting for users without reputation?!

</comment><comment><USER79> I would pay and I think it might be a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER80> Yes! HN is my main source of aggregated news.

</comment><comment><USER81> How about a karma floor for upmodding?

</comment><comment><USER82> 100%. It is my main source of news :)

</comment><comment><USER83> i never post here but have been reading isnce its inception and would gladly pay $20+ a year

</comment><comment><USER84> yes, if it was moderated by a editorial staff - not crowd rated. otherwise, no.

</comment><comment><USER85> Yes. I would pay $5 per year.

</comment><comment><USER86> I would gladly pay $5/year

</comment><comment><USER87> I'd pay $5/yr for HN.

</comment><comment><USER88> I would pay $5/month.

</comment><comment><USER89> Yes without a thought

<comment><USER90> I'll pay that and a little more without hesitating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Yes, unquestionably.

</comment><comment><USER92> No. I'm too cheap.

</comment><comment><USER93> Yes for sure

</comment><comment><USER94> I'd do it.

</comment><comment><USER95> Absolutely

</comment><comment><USER96> yes, I would pay $5/yr

</comment><comment><USER97> Yes

</comment><comment><USER98> No

</comment><comment><USER99> no.

</comment><comment><USER100> no

</comment><comment><USER101> I had to think about this for a while, but finally: no.

It worked for something awful but it pisses me off that if I have something valuable to contribute to a thread I have to cough up ten bucks. Just feels wrong. I'm doing the work right? Something awful still gets paid when someone reads my post and clicks on an ad. So, I have a negative feeling about something awful and never go there.

I might pay $5 for something that was truly value added for me, such as a secret list of "best of" content or something, or the ability to join a community of meta-moderators, or like that.

</comment><comment><USER102> A thousand people will pay, a hundred thousand won't.

HN will be an elitist forum of jerks in an echo chamber with fewer posts and two or three comments per post.

There goes the fun down the toilet.

</comment><comment><USER103> no, there are too many other free sources for articles like this

</comment><comment><USER104> google "clay shirky micropayments", kids.</comment>


What's up with Google's secret signed time "CheckGoogleSignedTime" - <AUTHOR> There are literally only 1-2 references to this - in a histogram xml - on the web when I search.<p>What is it? Where can I read more?<p>" <comment><USER2> This appears to be the metric that Chrome for Android uses to track how long it takes to verify code signing on downloaded APK's. Or possibly does, rather—open source Chromium doesn't reference the metric at all and it would take decompiling Chrome for Android to know for certain if it's used there or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look at the context. I think google is not trusting ntp or the client system time.

Histogram: Android.StrictMode.CheckGooglePlayServicesTime recorded 15 samples, mean = 4.5 (flags = 0x1) 0 ... 2 </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>O (4 = 26.7%) {0.0%} 3 </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>O (6 = 40.0%) {26.7%} 4 </comment><comment></comment><comment>O (1 = 6.7%) {66.7%} 5 </comment><comment></comment><comment>O (1 = 6.7%) {73.3%} 6 ... 8 </comment><comment></comment><comment>O (2 = 13.3%) {80.0%} 10 ... 14 ----O (1 = 6.7%) {93.3%} 17 ...

Histogram: Android.StrictMode.CheckGoogleSignedTime recorded 1 samples, mean = 256.0 (flags = 0x1) 0 ... 226 </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>O (1 = 100.0%) {0.0%} 268 ...

</comment><comment><USER3> Something to do with shiny new database of Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> The database that assumes people access google from multiple different time frames?</comment></comment>


Some rabbis just lifted an 800-year-old dietary rule - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/04/22/some-rabbis-just-lifted-an-800-year-old-dietary-rule-that-may-rock-your-passover-world/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_2_na <comment><USER2> Sorry, I'm going to be dismissive about the whole thing. "Arbitrary and wacky dietary restriction slightly less wacky" is what this comes down to. I do not understand why people in 2016--2016!!!--adhere to these restrictions to begin with. To think that the Creator of the Universe would be some out put-out or offended that you ate some rice is weird.

I was raised as a catholic (but am no longer). The "no meat on Fridays" (at first always and then only during lent...oh yeah, and "fish" isn't "meat" for this purpose) has nothing compared to the Jewish dietary laws, but I don't have a lot of contact with observant Jews where I live. When I ask catholics around here why they still do the "no meat" thing, I don't really get responses that I think would resonate with anyone not already on board. It seems that most do it for tradition sake and I have a hard time getting on board with something like that. (And few others will say something like "the pope says not to, so that's good enough for me.")

<comment><USER3> I never got the fish isn't meat thing either I guess meat means land animals and fish is from the sea. A man was crucified 2,000 years ago so you can't eat a hamburger...why? Sacrifice maybe I could accept that but why just meat and not abstain from all food.

At least the Jews made some attempt at giving a reason as to why you can eat certain food and not just "because".

It's interesting how Jews, Christians (Catholic only?) and Muslims all have a somewhat related dietary restriction philosophy. It's not surprising seeing how all developed in the same region the Levant area where the local cultures must have had similar customs before all the religions developed. Catholicism is so close to Judaism I can understand the relation but Islam only developed over 500 years later after Christianity maybe a remnant of their former Jewish and Christian practice?

<comment><USER4> > It's interesting how Jews, Christians (Catholic only?) and Muslims all have > a somewhat related dietary restriction philosophy. It's not surprising > seeing how all developed in the same region the Levant area where the local > cultures must have had similar customs before all the religions developed. > Catholicism is so close to Judaism I can understand the relation but Islam > only developed over 500 years later after Christianity maybe a remnant of > their former Jewish and Christian practice?

Islam has roots in Judaism, so it should not be surprising that they have similar dietary philosophy as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a non-story. As the article explains, Sephardi Jews (even Orthodox ones) have been eating kitniyot on Passover forever. The Ashkenazi position was that it's forbidden, but there has never been consensus about this.

Happy Passover!

<comment><USER6> Very true --- and "the rabbis with the Conservative movement" are really a small minority compared to the Orthodox strands (Modern Orthodox, Haredi, Religious-Zionist, etc.)</comment></comment>


Don't Touch Ya Face - <AUTHOR> https://www.donttouchyaface.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool project, but what got me to comment was the really stellar FAQ on the landing page.

I think it's really hard to strike capture the tone of software in written descriptions of those pieces of software. Coding projects that are programmed in an experimental and light-hearted way can end up being spoken about in somber tones that lose that sense of fun and playfulness.

<comment><USER3> I got a _much-needed_ laugh out of it.

Especially:

> My dude, I can barely make a website, much less a mini NSA.

<comment><USER4> > For the love of God, please listen to doctors/The CDC/Goop product > descriptions before me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This immediately reminded me of the joke about a tourist talking with an old Australian bushman. The original rambles on a bit, but the shorter version is the tourist asks if he knows any bushman remedies for chapped lips.

"What you do, mate," replies the bushman, "Is lift up your horses tail, and kiss him straight on the bum."

"And that fixes your chapped lips?!" exclaims the tourist.

"No," replied the bushman, "But it stops you licking them."

<comment><USER6> This joke is so effective that just reading it makes me stop wanting to lick my lips!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The URL of the actual app is terrifying. I was certain the site had been hijacked when it redirected to the most suspicious looking URL imaginable at the domain "drv.tw": [https://lzdmsmujepoc2xlgp13srg- on.drv.tw/Don%27tTouchYaFace/...](https://lzdmsmujepoc2xlgp13srg- on.drv.tw/Don%27tTouchYaFace/www.DontTouchYaFace.com.html) (HN shortens this, but I think the real kicker is the '.com.html' at the end)

<comment><USER8> From the 3rd question of the FAQ:

> Why does it open in a new tab with a different URL?

> Setting up websites is hard and I got frustrated and you're not paying > anything, so...

<comment><USER7> I have no idea why someone would go through all this trouble when you can just drag and drop a folder onto Netlify or Zeit.

<comment><USER9> Because setting up websites is hard and they got frustrated.

<comment><USER10> And we're not paying anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I looked up your code because you don't know how to hide it and have made my > own cloned app for some reason. Nobody liked you in high school, I'm sorry > you had to find out this way.

I really felt this.

<comment><USER12> I think a disproportionately large percentage of us did, you're in good company.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Don't be absurd. I knew nobody liked me in HS _long_ before reading this;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We made this a week ago! [https://donottouchyourface.com](https://donottouchyourface.com)

<comment><USER14> I guess we all had the same idea. My wife and I built [https://www.donttouchface.com](https://www.donttouchface.com)

<comment><USER15> Congrats, you've made the least annoying one so far!

A simple beep is all we need, people. Also it seems more accurate than the others few linked here it seems, the face part is more narrowly detected, the other two went off whenever my hand was in the frame at all for some reason. This one only beeps when I actually put my hand on my face. (Not to be super critical of toy projects)

<comment><USER13> We tried a lot of different strategies in—

pre-made models

hand and face detection separately

training the algo yourself

and it felt like the last one was the strongest (which is what we released). The one we built is as strong as the training you give it—it shouldn't be going off if your hand is at all in the frame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Being on the spectrum of ADHD, I'm pretty certain that it's going to be absolutely impossible for me to stop touching my and suspect that small nervous habits of this sort just aren't going to be worked out of a significant portion of the population even if I could stop myself somehow.

I'm fortunate I can work remotely. Social distancing is a thousand times easier for me than stopping nervous habits, include touching my face. I suspect such actions are on the interface between conscious control and reflex actions.

I suppose the authorities should still keep telling us to stop doing but I think planners should pretty much assume this is not a barrier that's going to stop the disease.

<comment><USER17> As a fellow person with ADHD, I naturally socially distance myself!

<comment><USER18> _Some_ people may call this the apocalypse. My GAD calls it a pleasure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nevi-me This is interesting, but I have a serious question to ask;

Does it work on black people's faces? I can have a hand on my face but it would still predict otherwise, it seems like I have to go out of my way to obstruct my face for it to pick it up, and even that with a lot of false negatives.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have addressed this issue with a simple hardware innovation: the Facespoon.

Find a clean object with a well-defined handle. Use the non-handle end of the object to touch/scratch/adjust/manipulate your face. Clean the object regularly.

Working from home, I've designated a kitchen cooking spoon on my desk for this dedicated task. Plastic appears to better than wood, as it is more-readily cleaned and does not absorb facial oils.

<comment><USER20> > Plastic appears to better than wood //

Do your own due diligence on this one, but a few years ago I think it was reported that, surprisingly, wooden chopping boards are better than plastic ones (which had been assumed to be better as they're less absorbent, etc.) and actually combat bacteria.

Given Covid19 is reported to - unusually for a virus - last up to a week [check a proper source!] or so on hard surfaces then maybe in this situation wood might also be better???

>"A study by the Food Research Institute in Wisconsin (Ak et al. 1994a and b) compared wooden and plastic boards and came to the surprising result that wood possesses substantially better hygienic characteristics than plastic. After contaminating different cutting boards with bacteria, significantly fewer viable bacteria could regularly be recovered from wooden boards than from plastic boards. These results were confirmed by Gehrig et al. (2000) in a recent study investigating hygienic aspects of wooden and plastic boards regarding the risk of food contamination. Previous studies assumed that the detected reduction in bacterial numbers on the wood surfaces is caused by an antibacterial effect of wood based on several physical and chemical properties of wood. The porous structure and hygroscopic characteristics of wood could remove the water needed by the bacteria for their vital functions and multiplication and thus kill them (Kampelmacher et al. 1971, Schulz 1995). In addition, substances present in wood (e.g. polyphenoles) could be responsible for an antibacterial effect (Willaman 1955, Biswas et al. 1981, Laks and McKaig 1988, Field et al. 1989, Schra¨gle and Mu¨ller 1990, Scalbert 1991, Mu¨ller et al. 1995)"

>from DOI 10.1007/s00107-002-0300-6, "Wooden boards affecting the survival of bacteria?"

<comment><USER21> The presumptive mechanism (dehydration due to the hygroscopic action of wood) may not apply consistently to viruses.

Viruses have a lipid outer layer, but no metabolism of their own. Sometimes dehydration will break the capsule, sometimes it won't.

Soap is usually quite effective due to saponification physically destroying the virus's capsule, fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome. Does anyone have a tutorial they recommend for building something like this (preferably in Python)?

[https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com](https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com) is awesome and it looks super easy to use - but any tutorials if you wanted to learn it the harder way via OpenCV or Darknet?

I found this tutorial from fast.ai but haven't been able to check it out yet: [https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=1](https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=1)

</comment><comment><USER23> With all the talk about not touching your face, I fear that sometimes this is overemphasized for Corona virus. It is a virus with a viral envelope, and viruses with viral envelopes are especially unstable outside of the human body. Keeping your distance to people, not staying long in rooms where droplets may floating in the air carrying virus is just as important if not more.

Also, after washing your hands with soap, viral counts should be so low that there isn't a danger of infecting yourself anymore, so the situation where you sit at your laptop isn't especially dangerous IF YOU WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE USING IT (and possibly wiping the keyboard down with a wrung-out cloth that was soaked in soap water).

<comment><USER24> None of that is well-established. It might be right, but there hasn't been time to do the science. Certainly facial contact is a known vector for many viruses, including other coronavirus genera.

This is a crisis. We have to work things via defense in depth and hope that it is enough. So we wash our hands, isolate, wear masks where available, and _we don 't touch our face_.

Please don't try to finesse a pandemic just to seem smart on the internet. No one knows whether you're right or not.

Seriously, just don't touch your face.

<comment><USER25> If you want to actually stop the spread of airborne diseases you should wear a full face respirator. The expensive models are extremely comfortable and can be worn indefinitely.

Here's hoping they become acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure you just made more people touch their face...

</comment><comment><USER27> Dr. Michael Osterholm was on Joe Rogan's podcast explaining in detail how this virus spreads [1]

\- Washing hands and not touching face is inconclusive but it makes sense to keep up the hygiene. That's not the primary means of how this virus spreads.

\- Virus primarily spreads via airborne means, simply by breathing (not even coughing or sneezing) is enough. It stays suspended in air (you can imagine the negligible weight of a 0.1um particle compared to the fluid mechanical forces from circulating air).

\- N95 masks (contrarily to the popular myth) are the most effective means of stopping the spread. Shortage of masks for hospital workers is an orthogonal issue.

I urge everyone of you to watch this interview and to be more informed.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw)

</comment><comment><USER28> Don't breathe either: The research, which was carried out by scientists from the National Institutes of Health, Princeton University and UCLA, suggests it's possible for the virus to spread through the air as well as through the touching of contaminated surfaces.

"Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days," researchers wrote in the study's abstract.

[https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/03/11/Coronavirus- can-...](https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/03/11/Coronavirus-can-live-in- air-for-3-hours-on-surfaces-for-2-3-days/8121583963038/)

<comment><USER29> Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota said as much on JRE yesterday.[1]

Obviously touching your face won't decrease your chances of catching coronavirus (or any other disease), but the reason this strain is wrecking so much havoc is because of how transmissible it is, especially through simple breathing. The implication being, if you get it on your hands, you've almost certainly already breathed it in.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Done with [https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/train/image](https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/train/image) I bet. Love this thing. You can make your own 'Don't Touch Ya Face' in a few minutes!

</comment><comment><USER31> With the pandemic of working from home, maybe we need an app to help us stop touching, eh, _other_ bits of our anatomy?

</comment><comment><USER32> Great idea. Also, after people become trained to change their behavior when hearing that Ralph "I'm in danger", start playing it periodically when people are on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The world will be a better place.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's another idea:

Start wearing a bracelet or something else to give yourself a little reminder when you are reaching for your face. I have no idea whether bracelets themselves are germ traps, of course.

<comment><USER34> Here you go: [https://immutouch.com/](https://immutouch.com/)

<comment><USER33> Honestly, all I need is a string.

<comment><USER20> Elastic band?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Also, wash your hands.

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-10/how-south-east- asia-i...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-10/how-south-east-asia-is- using-pop-songs-to-combat-coronavirus/12038228)

</comment><comment><USER36> This is cool but the downside of having a dell xps is that the camera is basically always looking at my hands :D... works fine if I'm not using the keyboard :)... or if I got up and actually went to my desk and that sort of thing..

<comment><USER37> Yeah we need a nosecam model

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A bit tangential, but I have a mild concern that the focus on hand / face transmission which is undoubtably valid may be encouraging people to overlook the fact that covid-19 is _highly_ transmissable without any contact through air / droplets. Many cases have been documented where people were infected without contact. To avoid infection, you need to avoid being in close proximity, especially in enclosed environments, with large numbers of people.

<comment><USER39> The guidelines talk about 1-2 meters distance and 15 minutes of presence in the same space. This makes public transport and venues big transmission vectors for that reason. Someone who sneezes unprotected will no doubt widen that area by a factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My wife and I built something similar. Take a look: [https://www.DontTouchFace.com](https://www.DontTouchFace.com)

</comment><comment><USER40> It's easy to trick by just having your hand anywhere in front of your face, even a foot away. Is this something current image classifier architecture could address with more data? It seems like it'd be hard to tell whether a hand is large and on a face, or small and far away from the face unless there is some sort of depth estimation going on (based on cues like shadows).

<comment><USER41> Is this a problem? Do you find yourself waving at your webcam much?

<comment><USER42> I find that my hand goes between my webcam and my face reasonably often.

It's still a brilliant idea and I love it, regardless of its limitations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Maybe someone said in the comments somewhere, but it kind of makes me chuckle to sit here testing it by... well... touching my damn face.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've touched my face while testing the app way more than I would have if I weren't aware of the app at all.

<comment><USER45> I'd say a big part of that is just you're more aware that your doing it. I bet the total count is similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> didn't even work on my machine but upvoted for FAQ

<comment><USER47> Give it a minute or two, after you press start. Also, try a different browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> See also [http://donttouchyourface.net/](http://donttouchyourface.net/) from a few days ago. This could actually be an interesting case study in different implementations of the same tool.

</comment><comment><USER49> I love it. I built something similar a few days ago.

[https://twitter.com/andrew_n_carr/status/1237413723658055680...](https://twitter.com/andrew_n_carr/status/1237413723658055680?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER50> >please listen to Goop product descriptions before me.

LOL - the FAQ is worth the price of admission

</comment><comment><USER51> How about this solution: If your face itches or something, use the _back_ of your hand to rub it? Or some other part of your body that you can be confident isn't used to touch anything potentially contaminated.

<comment><USER52> Problem with this is I'm now using the back of my hand or other parts of my body to open doors, press elevator buttons etc...

<comment><USER51> Partition your body: some parts used for some things, others for other things. Use an elbow or knee to push buttons, use the long sleeve of a jacket as a mini-glove if you need to grasp a handle. Or wear gloves that you take off once you're inside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> For those looking for an app that works while you use other apps: [https://foundationlabs.io/face-no-touchy](https://foundationlabs.io/face-no- touchy)

</comment><comment><USER54> Hey Y'all, I wrote something similar yesterday using Tensorflow.js [https://face-palm.netlify.com/](https://face-palm.netlify.com/)

</comment><comment><USER55> The FAQs are amazing haha

</comment><comment><USER53> My app works while you use other apps [https://foundationlabs.io/face-no- touchy](https://foundationlabs.io/face-no-touchy)

</comment><comment><USER56> This also seems really useful for people trying to stop biting their nails and other habits. Any chance you'd share the code?

</comment><comment><USER57> I touched my face many times from many different positions to test it out. Mostly it didn't detect it. But fun times.

</comment><comment><USER58> the funny thing is: this website made me touch my face wayyyy more than I would have otherwise today.

</comment><comment><USER59> Is it just me or does opening this site in another tab on Firefox not run the warnings?

</comment><comment><USER60> Have you considered open sourcing this so it can be ported to other platforms?

</comment><comment><USER61> Now do it for bad posture plz

<comment><USER62> Take a look at [https://github.com/z1lc/HeadUp2](https://github.com/z1lc/HeadUp2) \-- it's basic but it works OK

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> The app fails to even ask for camera permission in Firefox, and simply dies.

<comment><USER42> It worked for me. Could you have it set to Never Ask? (I'm using Firefox Nightly on Mac OS.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Not bad. Confuses the trim on my robe for a hand. Pretty funny overall.

</comment><comment><USER65> Like it!

Maybe train people not to touch their face and in higher risk situations (think public transit with lots of touching or bigger group events) add a mask as another layer of protection and a reminder.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is blocked by my employer's OpenDNS profile as a security threat. I'd chalk it up to a false positive but I've not seen that happen in years. Be careful.

</comment><comment><USER67> Security warning page for the certificate?

</comment><comment><USER68> How is this supposed to work? Most people have carved their webcams out of their laptop and put tape over the hole :)

</comment><comment><USER69> too slow. told me like 1 minute later after i touched the face if at all...

</comment><comment><USER70> Great man!! Love the FAQ

</comment><comment><USER71> thanks for the laugh man. needed it today

</comment><comment><USER72> Or I Breaka Ya Face

And if Ya Cougha ina Public,

I Beata Ya to Deatha ina Alley.

Poe's law disclaimer: ;-P

<comment><USER72> HN: the anti-matter doppelgängers of comedians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I love myself, I want you to love me....

</comment><comment><USER74> Unrelated to the content of the page, I'm really starting to hate the push for SSL everywhere.

This website has misconfigured certs and because of that my browser blocks it. Chrome is corp IT-managed and has no opt-out, whereas Firefox lets me accept the certs, but it's ultimately been blocked by our DNS/firewall for the same reason.

I really hate SSL. The majority of informational sites do not need it. I understand that it doesn't protect my privacy, but it doesn't frankly matter that I'm accessing an informational page about Coronavirus. If people are willing to give up their privacy to adtech platforms like Google and Facebook, the information about what websites you read is already out there.

I feel like Google has just created a deeper moat by pushing for SSL.

People complain about Kubernetes, but that's infra for large orgs that you shouldn't opt into unless you need it. SSL is being forced on the small guys who can't handle the complexity nor automation. It's not fair.

<comment><USER75> What are you talking about? It's using TLS 1.3 and is signed by the GlobalSign root CA! It's using the most compatible RSA 2048 crypto, and all the parameters look valid.

Maybe you are a victim of a man-in-the-middle attack _right now_ and the "stupid warnings" you're blithely clicking through are _informing you of this_.

<comment><USER35> For me, GlobalSign lack of / failing to get GlobalSign _intermediate_ certs pops up surprisingly often.

<comment><USER75> That's typically a proxy problem. The intermediate certificates are automatically downloaded by all decent X.509 clients such as Windows, Firefox, or Chrome.

However, if the proxy is occasionally dropping requests or replacing them with one of those stupid "log on to the proxy here" pages, then the chain discovery will fail randomly and you'll get these issues.

It's also common in environments where the security trolls have blocked HTTP (as in, TCP port 80) because they think it's "insecure", but this just causes X.509 issues like this because it uses _only_ HTTP and never HTTPS for CRLs, OCSP, and intermediate CA certificate downloads.

<comment><USER35> Thanks, that's great info.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Design is not Horsepoop - <AUTHOR> http://bokardo.com/archives/design-is-not-horsepoop/

<comment><USER2> That's not design, that's product management.

<comment><USER3> Well as you've pointed out, the line is being blurred these days. The best designers are those who can push the vision of the product as well as make it look good. I find that product managers often lose vision of whats important for the customer and get caught up in what the developers are worried about.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: "We got permission" has become meaningless; Can we invent a better term? - <AUTHOR> The word "permission" is construed very loosely by some internet companies, with regards to what is considered "consent" to collect personal data.
Because of this extremely broad usage, I assert that the word "permission" no longer has any meaningful use in this context.
I suggest a new term that encapsulates a strict definition. The rules are:
* The request for permission(s) should stand alone, consuming all the visible screen area, without any other distracting content.
* All of the data to be collected must be described in detail.
* All anticipated uses for the data must be described in detail, including any sharing of the data both within the company and to other companies.
* The user must answer yes or no before continuing. If the user does not respond or somehow closes the modal, the assumption is that the answer was NO.
* The permission granted is ALWAYS time limited to a maximum of 90 days, and must then be renewed.
* The user can easily revoke the permission at any time.
* A one-click link to revoke permissions must be provided to the user when permissions are granted.
* When attempting to renew a permission, lack of a response from the user is understood as a revocation of permissions.
If consent is acquired according to these rules, let's call this Continuous Affirmative Consent, or CAC for short.
When a company says that "users opted in via Continuous Affirmative Consent", it gives a strong signal that users were not deceived, and that they genuinely did grant their fully informed consent to share their data, and that they have the power to revoke that consent at any time.
Can we do something like this? If enough companies support a standardized form of explicit & renewable consent, it could create positive pressure for even the worst offenders to improve their behavior, or even commit to using the standard. <comment><AUTHOR> A couple additions to the proposed standard that would be worthwhile --

* Certification is done by some non-profit industry group that has no ties to or influence from the advertising/data industry.

* No "dark patterns" or deception of any kind is allowed in the permission workflow.</comment>


The Sellers' Market for Startup Investing will Restart in ~12 Months - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.org/2008/10/27/the-sellers%E2%80%99-market-for-startup-investing-will-restart-in-12-months/

<comment><USER2> Any prediction (and especially a prediction involving financial markets) with this time scale should be completely ignored. Please read The Black Swan for more information.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hard to take market timing predictions seriously from someone who makes predictions based on things like "6 months from Republican convention".</comment>


Return the position of the string's with python - <AUTHOR> http://codingdirectional.info/2018/03/20/return-the-position-of-the-strings-characters-from-the-character-list-with-python/ <comment><USER2> That solution has a complexity problem. It's technically a constant-time overhead (since there's a fixed number of letters in the alphabet, so the complexity is O(26N)->O(N)), but it still seems like an oversight.

'not in alphabetlist' when run on a Python list is an O(N) operation: [https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity](https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity). You want a constant-time-search data structure, such as a set or dict.

'alpbabetlist.index(ch)' is another O(N) operation. 'index' searches the whole list.

Additionally (this is a lesser concern), appending to 'letterpos' repeatedly (as in 'letterpos += some_string') can be extremely inefficient on memory. Efficient string concatenation in Python has a number of approaches ([http://codingdirectional.info/2018/03/20/return-the- position...](http://codingdirectional.info/2018/03/20/return-the-position-of- the-strings-characters-from-the-character-list-with-python/)), but storing a list and concatting its contents together at the end of the function would be a good start.</comment>


GNU Radio first steps: a FM receiver - <AUTHOR> http://www.abclinuxu.cz/blog/jenda/2019/11/gnu-radio-first-steps-a-fm-receiver <comment><USER2> "You need a radio to play with GNU Radio" is the most common misconception. There would be more fun if you have one, but GNU Radio itself doesn't require a radio. It's actually a general-propose signal processing and simulation tool, and a lot of things can be done without hardware.

For example, you can simulate different modulation techniques and observe them in time and frequency domain, or you can simulate an amplifier and change its the input level on an interactive GUI control panel you programmed to understand how an overdriven/saturated amplifier produces intermodulation distortion, or experimenting with different transmitter/receiver architecture (superheterodyne, direct conversion, etc).

Traditionally, these experiments can only be done in a lab with a scope and a spectrum analyzer. But now it's all possible on your desktop.

<comment><USER3> That is a good point that you don't need a radio but I work extensively with GNU Radio and I would do all of those experiments using MATLAB / Octave. GNU Radio is very much the wrong tool for that job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I made an SSB receiver in GRC, that was educational. SSB doesn't have a carrier so you have to provide your own (GRC has a block that can generate a sine wave of a given frequency). The ability to probe the graph anywhere makes learning easier in a way that physical building wouldn't be.

Ironically i was doing a bit more on my little RTL SDR web view tonight: [https://github.com/craigjperry2/websdr](https://github.com/craigjperry2/websdr)

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone have good suggestions for playing around with SDR on OSX? I tried installing GNU Radio a couple of years ago with homebrew and it was quite a mess.

<comment><USER6> I got one last week and have had good luck with [CubicSDR]([https://cubicsdr.com/](https://cubicsdr.com/)) which is brew installable, as well as decoding APRS packets from the command line using rtl_fm and multimon-ng

I'm hoping to figure out how to decode satellite pictures in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll plug the scanner I wrote. It's not a normal scanner, in that it allows parallel demodulation and recording of FM and air-band AM:

[https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon](https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon)

</comment><comment><USER8> An FM receiver is the first thing in every GRC tutorial. I just wish there was something useful that one can receive with one of these standard $15 RTL-SDR receivers that isn't super complicated or FM radio.

<comment><USER9> There are all sorts of interesting and useful things you can do with them: monitor/troubleshoot various AM devices around the house (weather stations, garage door openers etc), tune in to a number of amateur radio bands (there's surprising amount of traffic on them), receive NOAA weather broadcasts, aircraft broadcasts, debug DIY projects (433MHz transmitters etc.)... there's a _lot_ of stuff being broadcast in the frequencies that these dongles can receive. You just need a decent antenna[1] and to explore the spectrum around you a bit.

Granted, the absolute most common cases are out of reach with the cheap dongles due to frequency, bandwidth and encryption issues (i.e. ATSC, Wifi, Bluetooth) So they're not going to be terribly interesting to the average consumer but they are very handy little devices for hackers with any interest in RF.

[1] The default antennas they ship are _not_ useful over a wide range of frequencies and/or for weak signals

<comment><USER10> The 433Mhz band is quite interesting - key fobs, garage door openers, and other cheap and cheerful "wireless" technologies often work on this band. Part of the fun is finding out what! Tune your SDR and go hunting...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The rise of internet radio has made it pretty difficult to obtain a really good FM tuner these days regardless of the price.

In fact, I'm not aware of anything with real diversity reception-- at most they're limited to crossfading two tuners, and even that is mostly a car radio feature.

I wonder if anyone has been working on an open source state of the art SDR broadcast FM receiver.

A good receiver would have denoising of the stereo signal, filters to eliminate HD radio interference, PLL/matched demod of the stereo signal, and support diversity reception using constant modulus algorithm or similar.

<comment><USER12> It's a damn shame the Icom IC-9700 doesn't support out of band RX

<comment><USER11> Or WFM :)

IC-9700 is an impressive looking radio.

I think amateur VHF/UHF/SHF SDR are really a long way from what state of the art should be in those bands, but are most just porting HF SDR to a new set of bands.

VHF+ SDR should be all about beam forming, broad band modes (spread spectrum), digital, etc. There is so much more spectrum available (esp in 23cm), and its so much easier to put up multiple antennas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just in case: [https://epxx.co/artigos/pythonfm_en.html](https://epxx.co/artigos/pythonfm_en.html)

<comment><USER14> Is that your site? If so, please consider changing the "B612"/"B612 Mono" font to something else. The parenthesis in it look far too much like square brackets (at least as rendered by Firefox on Windows 10 with subpixel AA enabled on a standard DPI LCD monitor). In particular the default font makes the quoted Python code in the linked AM Modulation article almost unreadable (it took me a solid minute to realize you were _calling_ math.sin/math.cos instead of trying to index them for some reason).

<comment><USER13> I really like the B612 font, while I agree the bracket^Wparentheses are strange. Any font suggestions?

<comment><USER14> I don't have a particular suggestion. I used the Developer Tools to disable the CSS font directives, so maybe just have an option to switch to a stylesheet that doesn't specify specific fonts?

Also, thanks for your articles. I find them very well-written. I'm reading through the one on impedance right now and it's a very clear explanation of a concept that that can be somewhat confusing.

<comment><USER15> > maybe just have an option to switch to a stylesheet that doesn't specify > specific fonts

Can't your user agent do that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> holy FUCK

GNU Radio has such horrible documentation I can never get right. I tried decoding APRS with GNU Radio but I gave up because there's like approximately 0 documentation on what the GFSK decode block does.

I can't believe I advocated for this project. Learning GNU Radio generally requires talking to a guru to pass the information via oral history.

</comment><comment><USER17> My phone has radio but no television reception. Is there some legality reason why phones don't have tv tuners?

<comment><USER18> Maybe actually. In some jurisdictions this would require a license from the government to do the reception. The UK is like this with their tv licenses for the BBC and similar. I can't imagine theyre the only ones like this. And then there's possibly compression technologies that might need to be licensed from the mpeg group, etc.

<comment><USER12> You'd also want a much better antenna than what you could fit in a phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very welcome. I've been wanting to play with GNU Radio for a while but I didn't quite know where to start.

<comment><USER20> Michael Ossmann's video series is another great resource:

[https://www.greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/](https://www.greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/)</comment></comment>


Dropbox.com down - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it's actually dropboxstatic.com - which is returning a 403 to all requests.</comment>


What's on your Wish-List this year? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to please the parents with a good Christmas list and having trouble. Happily, most of what I love is free! I'd like to hear what other folks are asking for so I can steal your ideas.
<comment><USER2> New Tool DVD that comes out in December

Sushi making kit (I spend way too much eating out)

Some nice comfy headphones for the cube at work

XFX 8800GT

Dell WFP-2407HC 24" Monitor

Obviously the $270 vid card and $600 monitor aren't coming to me gift wrapped... more accepting cash donations towards those than asking for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. The tool DVD is something I didn't know about. Do you have any more details on it? toolshed.down.net didn't have the announcement somewhere I could see it.

<comment><USER2> It was originally announced when they released 10,000 Days, but somehow got delayed until now (like 18 months), so the news on toolshed is quite old.

Here is the amazon link... [http://www.amazon.com/Vicarious- Tool/dp/B000Y1ZXU2/ref=pd_bb...](http://www.amazon.com/Vicarious- Tool/dp/B000Y1ZXU2/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1196440393&sr=1-1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My list so far: -Lost Season 1 DVD Set

</comment><comment><USER3> nintendo wii?</comment>


Show HN: WebGL 3D racing game for the new year - <AUTHOR> http://2015.ozconseil.com/

<comment><USER2> I love the minimalism and flow of the controls, very well made!</comment>


Germany's Vanishing Monasteries - <AUTHOR> https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/vanishing-monasteries-in-germany-the-last-of-the-monks-a-1287265.html#ref=rss <comment><USER2> Great article, but I think it misses one key aspect of why monasteries are dying out: the lack of lively church communities which used to encourage dedicated people to join the monastic life. Monasteries don't exist in a vacuum, they have an intricate interdependency with normal parishes of families and, more generally, people "in the world." It should not really be the responsibility of monastics to do public relations to get people to choose this kind of life. A good example is the abbot from the article, he grew up a parish, was an altar server, etc., that made it possible for him to even conceive of this kind of life style--something that is just too big of a chasm for most non-church people nowadays.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't it the case that a lot of second sons became monks because they weren't going to inherit the family title/land/business/farm, and they had to find some way to survive? For the upper classes, monasteries were replaced by militaries, when second sons could go off and have adventures, and perhaps win a fortune of their own. For everyone else, the advent of wage economies did the job.

<comment><USER2> There were and are many reasons why people became monastics. But to think that the only reasons were inheritance and property laws shows that someone only knows about monasticism from the perspective of modern medieval histories, which tend to present it this way. Not to deny that these reasons existed and made many consider monastic life as an option, but it can't be the whole story.

Think about it, monastic life _really_ was and is monastic. It included many hours of prayers and other contemplative practices (and other minor inconveniences like celibacy). Yes, there was great variance in different orders, but many people (if not most) chose this life because they were true believers. The only way to prepare them for this life was that the church as a whole was universally present so that monasticism became just one option between many different ones within the church, albeit a quite intense one.

<comment><USER4> I agree that many people chose to become monks "because they were true believers", but I know two facts that show that religious belief was not the only factor for living in a monastery.

First, monks were not the only men to live and work in monasteries. There were many "sub-ranks" (for instance "frère convers" in French, someone that shared most of their life without taking the religious vow) as well as external workers (for centuries, many monasteries had vast domains where monks ruled over peasants, at various degrees).

Then, becoming a monk was a social ascension for many. This was still true a few decades ago. My peasant grand-mother had ten children over twenty years, and the only ones who did not stop their studies early, were the three boys who wanted to become priests. The will to study and to change their way of life was a strong incentive. Times changed, and they all found other ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Concent of Saunt Leibniz.

We can try turning old monasteries into concents à la Neal Stephenson's Anathem. People can go for a year in a unarian math to just study. Maybe a four consecutive years in such a math get equivalent recognition to a university degree. Whether it is the traditional monastic discipline or the Cartasian discipline, the required basic infrastructure is probably similar. Jeejahs stay outside, of course.

Particularly determined professors can populate a decennarian, maybe even a centenarian. Also, isn't there only about 9 years before our scheduled visit by the Icosahedron?

<comment><USER6> My thoughts exactly! I don't have a whole lot of patience for prayer, but near-infinite time for mathing it up sounds amazing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recently I was in India and certain circumstances connected me with a facility for the elderly run by an order of Catholic Nuns. I visited them quite a few times and while inside those closed gates there was this sense of reverence, peace, and shall I say holiness in many ways truly tangible. And when they bid me goodbye at the main gates, even as we stood there chatting a little while, the town or village people walking by outside the gates would smile and one of the sisters would call out to ask something about them. These sisters were involved with this outside world, and knew them and their needs so intimately! Yes, there is so much to understand about these areas of life us software engineering types seldom think about, it seems.

<comment><USER8> By being social you mean?

I also know my neighbors and I'm friendly with them.

<comment><USER7> more than that, I'd say. The young auto-rikshaw man on my way to the bus station from those gates was telling me about his kidney disease and how those sisters helped raise the substantial money for a transplant ...

<comment><USER8> That's called community and we as a society should try to create that without religion.

Also such stories exists

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For all those in this thread talking about monasteries without having ever been in one, please try the experience. If there's an Orthodox monastery near you, try seeing if you can stay for a few days. They generally aren't rich by any stretch of the imagination, but even staying for a few days and following the lifestyle will give you insight into why the monastic life is a valuable and valid choice in our increasingly chaotic and bombastic society.

The peace you feel when in one and the sinking feeling going back into "the world" are both experiences everyone should have.

<comment><USER10> Actually it seems to be a growing industry: monasteries are opening up their rooms to paying guests.

We stayed in one in Italy recently, south of Napoli. It was like a very, very quiet hotel with a peaceful garden and a resident cat. I'd have happily stayed longer. I was also in one last year in Belgium, it was part of a larger church establishment but the location was so central it was like staying in a nice hotel. Again - quiet. Both were without luxuries of a 4 star hotel but very well appointed and with excellent breakfasts, and locations.

<comment><USER11> Monasteries have always opened their rooms to guests. Its part of the rule of Benedict to offer hospitality, including food.

<comment><USER4> You seem to have missed an important word in the grand poster's story: monasteries are opening up their rooms to _paying_ guests. Sanctus Benedictus never set any rule about renting rooms and selling breakfasts.

By the way, monasteries existed long before the Benedict order, and other orders existed in parallel. Some monasteries did not welcome visitors, especially women and couples.

<comment><USER12> > especially women and couples.

You're making this seem misogynistic, but indeed, typically female monasteries were not (and are still not) open to men.

You're not wrong I was incomplete in my previous statement. Monasteries would often try to render assistance to the exceptionally needy, but have historically operated as regular inns only for those who could stay within the convent walls. This was basically restricted by sex. Even today, if you're going to do a retreat at a monastery, couples typically would have to stay away from the cloister (many monasteries - but not all - offering retreats typically have a separate house for these individuals, a short distance from the main cloister). Only single men would be permitted into a male monastery (behind the cloister for the night) and single women to a female one.

Re the paying stuff. As far as I'm aware (and I've researched a few monasteries in my area and know several monks), the payment is a suggested donation, not a requirement. Of course, that's my own anecdata. I would be interested in knowing if there is a monastery charging for the actual stay, because typically they're not supposed to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The village I live in has a "Kloster", with nuns making up about 15% of our population. The article is accurate in that the number of practicing nuns is sinking and certainly not sustainable.

Here they have diversified in a number of directions. There is a school, an old folks home, and a hotel. The picturesque location, combined with the historic buildings makes all these quite competitive, and successful. I'd go so far as to say the church here is thriving despite the declining popularity of dedicating your life to it.

<comment><USER14> Keep in mind that in Germany these "church operated" services are heavily subsidised by the German state via regular taxes (not the "church tax" registered church members pay directly to their church via the tax office). In some cases this can be as much as 100% of the operating costs and salaries (although the business is operated in accordance with church labor laws rather than secular laws, allowing e.g. certain forms of discrimination and removing certain protections).

Maintaining churches, monasteries and church operated services is almost never about finances.

<comment><USER15> This description is a bit misleading:

\- School: Germany mostly has public schools. If you have operated a private school for a few years, you can apply for subsidy. You will receive roughly the amount per pupil that would otherwise be needed to fund the pupil's place at a public school. So this is more or less a zero-sum game for the state. All schools have to obey public school regulations (e.g., on curriculum and exams) regardless who operates them.

\- Elderly home: there is no direct subsidy by the state. Germany has established a mandatory insurance ("Pflegeversicherung", nursing care insurance). This insurance will pay for nursing care, regardless who operates the elderly home.

\- Hotel: no subsidy by the state at all.

Summarized, there exists no special deal by the state for church operated services, with respect to funding/subsidy.

<comment><USER4> From Wikidepia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Germany)

About 70% of church revenues come from church tax (Kirchensteuer). This is about €9.2 billion (in 2010).

<comment><USER15> This is correct, but also needs to be put into context. You only pay church tax if you are member of one of the churches eligible to collect taxes via the German state tax system. Non-Members don't pay church taxes. So there is again no subsidy involved (except that churces save administration costs because they can use the public tax collection system for free).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there any possible modern approach to a traditional catholic monastery? I think, they are dying out, because of their rigid traditions which rarely make sense in our modern world anymore. The idea of a monastery is to dedicate yourself completely to introspection and philosophy, and serving the monastery with its inhabitants, no matter what religion or philosophy. Why are they having so much trouble to keep up with changes? They just accept the changes without adapting? Why?

<comment><USER17> We could try science / engineering monasteries as described by Neal Stephenson in Anathem?

<comment><USER18> this is what the 'univerity' is or was intended to be, at its base.

there is a reason universities have 'faculties' (e.g. 'faculties' of the 'body of knowledge') and that key persons are called 'deans'

<comment><USER17> They would be somewhat different to a modern university. In the monastery, you don't get paid, you just get free accommodation and food (and presumably electricity, computer and Internet access, in the tech version). The monastery would perhaps also attempt to be self-sufficient as far as possible, by making its own food and electricity, perhaps taking in materials for recycling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As membership declines, just wondering what happens to all the cash the Churches are sitting on, from property, to art, to chuch tax collections. Going to be interesting to see what the next (younger) gen of church leaders do with it...maybe they need an innovation center to modernize the useful aspects of religion.

<comment><USER20> But will the membership decline continue in the long-run?

Within the Catholic church, there is a traditionalist/conservative minority, who are growing basically through having a high birth rate – rejecting contraception and pre-marital sex, they tend to marry young and have lots of kids. Not all of those kids will follow in their parents' footsteps, but the majority of them probably will. Though these conservatives/traditionalists are a minority now, as the decades pass by their numbers will grow and grow, and may eventually grow to the point of no longer being a minority within Catholicism[1], but instead becoming the new majority. At that point, the decline may rebound into a new period of growth.

[1] a minority in wealthy countries like Germany. Leaving Catholicism in places like Africa out of the discussion, because the situation there is very different

<comment><USER21> Europe has entire countries where pretty much 100% of the population were extremist Catholic zealots with huge families by modern standards just a couple of hundred years ago.

Today those countries have some of the lowest birth rates in Europe, e.g. Spain and Italy[1] pretty much trail the pack. The data suggests that your hypothesis is false.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union)

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure the idea that "100% of the population were extremist Catholic zealots" is really true. Rodney Stark [1] argues that people overestimate the religiosity in past decades and centuries. The genuinely devout have never been the majority. The difference is, that even if the average person back then wasn't hugely interested in religion, there was strong social pressure to give the appearance of caring about it. Nowadays, that social pressure is gone, in many countries, and people who are disinterested in religion are free to be honest about their disinterest.

And should big families in Catholic-majority countries 100-200 years ago be attributed to Catholicism? Well, other countries, with completely different religious beliefs (e.g. Muslim-majority countries, India, China) also had big families. Most people back then, whatever their religion was, had big families due to primitive contraceptive technology, high infant mortality, economic value of child labour, less years spent in education, lack of educational and career opportunities for women, etc. Nowadays, there is a correlation between religiosity and family size, but that link is historically novel; for most of human history, the devout and the non-devout had big families alike.

[1] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3711936](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3711936)

<comment><USER22> > Most people back then, whatever their religion was, had big families due to > primitive contraceptive technology, high infant mortality, economic value of > child labour, less years spent in education, lack of educational and career > opportunities for women, etc.

It's interesting that religion has remained relevant for many whose lives today match what you describe. This isn't to blame religion for those problems, but it doubtless plays a role as both cause and effect, especially when the state is unable or unwilling to provide an adequate level of life security for the populace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would love to see old monasteries turned into various kinds of retreats. The idea of spending a week or a month with no electronics, all my meals prepared, and quiet time to just read, study and think sounds fantastic.

<comment><USER24> Don't retreats like that already exist. Why does it have to be an old monastery. And anyway I thought the whole point of a monastery was that everybody helped out with the cooking, gardening, chores etc. not that you had servants waiting on you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Religious orders in Germany are disappearing because so few people want to > dedicate their entire lives to God anymore

Is there anything weird about this? Entire life is a pretty hefty price to pay, what needs to be changed is religion itself, if it wants to find more new believers to keep itself from disappearing.

<comment><USER26> I honestly think the acceptance of homosexuality in the mainstream is having a huge influence. A hundred years ago when society would tell you that what you want to do is wrong - and you might even believe it yourself - then choosing a life as a priest or monk was a serious alternative. - You would have a way to paradise and nobody would question you not marrying.

It is of course complete conjecture, although more and more info is coming out on the "homosexual lobby" in the Vatican.

<comment><USER27> Absolutely. And I consider it a general principle, not limited to homosexuality at all: in preindividualistic times (pretty much coincides with preindustrial), if you were in any way unfit for the path laid out for you by birth, the monastery might be an option. Simple rules and low expectations (industrial armies often fill a similar role during peacetime). Getting into good terms with your imaginary friend would be mostly a rationalisation/excuse for bailing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The just have to stell themselves better.

Living in a monasteries is strongly coupled with a long and healthy life.

Most nuns look at least 10 years younger than they are.

</comment><comment><USER29> 30 years might be enough to become a popular retreat from technology. They just need proper online marketing.

<comment><USER30> > 30 years might be enough to become a popular retreat from technology. They > just need proper online marketing.

Was the contradiction between these two sentences an actually intended stylistic device ("retreat from technology" vs. "proper online marketing")?

<comment><USER31> The stylistic device in question is known commonly as a "joke".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thanks God ! /s

</comment><comment><USER33> Mosques are thriving.

<comment><USER34> And this is bad how?

I live in a German population center with many many mosques and it affects me in exactly zero ways. I know _no one_ who regularly visits a mosque, let alone trying to convince others to join.

We have religious freedom in our constitution. Aside from some stupidly minor exceptions, Germans aren't somehow converting to Islam. They are leaving religion _in general_.

<comment><USER33> Do you know how little boys, from age 3, are disciplined even in moderate mosques (specifically, Palestinian) in Germany? That was enough reason for me.

Glad you are not affected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I guess it's difficult to manage church finances when it doesn't control government(s) anymore.

</comment><comment><USER36> All over the Netherlands and Germany, and Austria, old churches are being converted into homeless shelters and co-working spaces .. and clubs.

I think this should be applied to the cloisters, too. I look at some of these 800 year old buildings and marvel at what they could provide, in terms of startup-hub scene.</comment>


Habit Tracker Guide: Why and How to Track Your Habits - <AUTHOR> https://jamesclear.com/habit-tracker <comment><USER2> I would wonder where this database would be kept, and under what sort of security? clearly this would be a holy grail, for unsavory types.</comment>


There are 7 billion people in the world and only 70 matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2011/11/02/the-worlds-most-powerful-people/?partner=asia_newsletter

<comment><USER2> You could equally read it as "There are 7 billion people in the world and these are the 70 people most dependant on them for their power, wealth and security."

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course, if you took away the other 6,999,999,930 away, the 70 that "matter" would find life infinitely harder. So perhaps we aren't as pointless the title suggests.

</comment><comment><USER4> When I saw the title I thought it was about social networks: there are 7bn people in this world and you only care about 70 of them. I imagine that could be equally true.

</comment><comment><USER5> Forbes is pretty silly. Those people have much less power than they think. The #1 ranked person has a good chance of losing his job in a year.</comment>