Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/820595489/why-germanys-coronavirus-death-rate-is-far-lower-than-in-other-countries <comment><USER2> I think in the end the number I'll judge countries by is how low they held the death rate per population. A better number would be a population death rate weighted by demographics, but I don't think that'll be easy to construct.

Increasing the denominator by testing lots and lots of people is important only if testing lots and lots of people helps you prevent more people from dying. Germany is doing pretty well on this front compared to its European neighbors. But if you look at its absolute death rate graph it is headed up and to the right, like everywhere else. It'll be a little while before the dust settles and we can actually see whose public health policies were effective.

<comment><USER3> Croatia also does well. Croatia has both land and maritime borders (also ferries running back and forth) with Italy.

Croatia is ranked number one by Oxford for government responses to the epidemic: [https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research- projects/oxford-c...](https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research- projects/oxford-covid-19-government-response-tracker)

Note: HRV is Hrvatska which means Croatia in Croatian. It is the three letter ISO country code.

The Croatian government website on coronavirus is: [https://koronavirus.hr/en](https://koronavirus.hr/en)

There is an interesting interview by a Croatian epidemiologist here: [https://www.total-croatia-news.com/lifestyle/42484-igor- ruda...](https://www.total-croatia-news.com/lifestyle/42484-igor-rudan)

<comment><USER4> > Croatia is ranked number one by Oxford for government responses to the > epidemic: [https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research- > projects/oxford-c...](https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research- > projects/oxford-c..).

It's ranked as number one in stringency of response - they explicitly say it's not to be interpreted as a rating of the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country's response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know from italy for ex. if you are tested positive on Corona, no matter how you die (a tank drove over you twice) you will end up in the "death with Corona" spreadsheet. I don't know about other countrys does this handle. Also normaly, if very old people get sick (like my grandma died) they don't go to the emergency hospital. They might go to a hospital, but usually they don't try to save lives at all costs.

<comment><USER6> How many Corona positive people are dying of non-Coronavirus related issues? Is that number really that much to impact the total figures?

<comment><USER7> The age distribution is quite a signal that this is plausible. Then we have the Italian study that said only 1% had no other comorbidity. And then you have a few cases with enough details to go looking, usually the first death in a city/region or notable cases. As a random example this: [https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/first-l...](https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/first- lehigh-county-resident-to-die-from-the-coronavirus-was-80-official-says.html)

<comment><USER8> Yowza,

Fellow falls hits his head, dies from head trauma -- but because he had COVID, he "succumbed to the virus"

Good grief

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is an aspect that is missing in this article's analysis: what counts as a COVID-caused death.

In Italy, for example, all in-hospital deaths of COVID-positive patients are recorded as COVID deaths.

If you're 85 years old, with emphysema, heart disease, diabetes, and COVID, and you die of acute respiratory distress... did COVID kill you?

In Italy, it did, 100%

In New York, it is up to the doctor who declares you dead, but it probably did.

In Germany, it most likely didn't.

That is not to say that Germany isn't doing a good job -- they are. They are doing a lot of testing, isolating, and contact tracing. They are also going full-speed-ahead with the experimental hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin treatment, offering it everyone without contraindications, starting almost from the beginning of the outbreak.

Both of those things contribute to the low death rate.

They are also detecting a higher percentage of cases, which automatically lowers the apparent mortality (since every country detects most of the hospitalizations, more testing means finding more inherently non-lethal cases, meaning more detected recoveries)

<comment><USER7> In Germany too. Every death plus Positive sars-cov-2 test == death "from" corona

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worth noting this is from last week. What's Germany's rate now? Since Germany started testing extensively and early, and death is a lagging indicator, I wouldn't be surprised if this creeps up to the more expected ~1.5% we see in Korea or the Diamond Princess.

I check the worldometers numbers everyday, and already Germany is up about half a percent from when that article was written, but I'm not totally sure that site's numbers are trustworthy.

<comment><USER10> The latest I have is 1.08%. Johns Hopkins has it at 775 deaths on 71,808 cases. Their very low mortality rate has held throughout, and they currently have a very large number of recovered patients, implying it's holding through the progression (most countries with good mortality numbers lose that as the cases get worse; you can spot this delay by the very low recovery cases as a percentage).

So far among nations in Western Europe, 1.08% is extraordinary. France is at 6.6% at a similar point in recovered cases vs positive tests. And Germany is the second oldest nation at the median, behind Japan, among major nations. That mortality rate is a remarkable achievement so far.

<comment><USER11> That also may be case of better testing and by that, more widespread. Many countries playing catch up, well they all are and may well be case that many countries with high death rates also have many untested people who had what they thought was mild cold and in some countries those mild cold's would of been tested.

So it is one of those things when we won't be able to compare until down the line, and able to compare like for like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is because other countries are understating infection counts because of poor testing.

Wikipedia has a very interesting table with testing stats: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stats)

Many countries or regions have extremely high positive test ratios, for example Lombardy is at 37% positive, France at 20% while Germany is at 7.4% and South Korea at 2.4%.

If Lombardy tested more people they would find many many more cases and their reported death rate would decrease.

The fact that areas with high infection counts like New York and Northern Italy are reporting high positive test ratios is terrifying. It means that they are doing _worse_ than the numbers indicate and they're limited by testing capacity.

</comment><comment><USER7> The media should stop calling this death rate or corona deaths. These deaths are not (all) _from_ the virus, rather occurred in people who died and had a positive test. These things can be (and I assume are) vastly different.

Just as a thought experiment: The same metric would give herpes a 100% death rate.

<comment><USER13> Influenza _related_ death rates are estimated after the fact from several sources of data and are about 25x higher than official influenza confirmed deaths. Everybody talks about the number of influenza related deaths as the real death rate. the chance is coronavirus _related_ deaths are also higher, not lower, than the official count.

<comment><USER7> How is that possible if every death is counted as corona death? Besides a missing test of course.

<comment><USER13> There are plenty of missing tests. Testing is limited almost everywhere. Due to the testing that is in place I don't expect the same ratio, but also, not all countries count all tested deaths as corona deaths, only a few do as far as I understand.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. From what I make of this all we do not have strong enough data to really say this is as bad as we make it. We'll see in a month or two I guess when we can conclusively look at the total mortality.

<comment><USER13> I agree we don't know yet, it could be worse or better. But I think it will take a year or two to know based on how long it takes to do a post mortem on an influenza season. Certainly failure to quarantine would be devastating so whatever the final numbers are is irrelevant. We already have overwhelmed health systems around the world, and the fatality rate would be a whole different level if that was more widespread.

<comment><USER7> I can't follow along with that. We're in peace times.. banning people from going out of their home is something I would not have believed possible until russian tanks are at the gates of Berlin again, or the day of reckoning is coming after all.

The mortality is not increased [1], the number of acute respiratory illnesses is not increased [2]. German hospitals are not overwhelmed, indeed we gave away hundreds of respirators and treat a large number of patients from neighboring countries right now.

There are single cases of overwhelmed medical systems, but those are few and in places where this has happened before [3] and frankly those places have not been in great shape before.

I can't see the justification for these draconian measures with so little evidence. What I do see however is a perverse dynamic between sensationalist media and power hungry politicians. It's infuriating how critics are defamed by newspapers [4] and even high-profile experts ignored [5]. The economic and social downfall from these measures will be insurmountable I fear and dwarf any risk now or even in the foreseeable future from sars-cov-2.

[1] [https://www.euromomo.eu/](https://www.euromomo.eu/) [2] [https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s56f...](https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s56fbd84d0e131e9b/image/i2dc7965015368c97/version/1585168811/image.png) [3] [https://milano.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/18_gennaio_10/mil...](https://milano.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/18_gennaio_10/milano- terapie-intensive-collasso-l-influenza-gia-48-malati-gravi-molte-operazioni- rinviate-c9dc43a6-f5d1-11e7-9b06-fe054c3be5b2.shtml) [4] [https://www.welt.de/gesundheit/article206667595/Wolfgang- Wod...](https://www.welt.de/gesundheit/article206667595/Wolfgang-Wodarg-Warum- dieser-Mann-die-Fakten-ignorieren-will.html) [5] [https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the- making-a...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as- the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable- data/)

<comment><USER13> I would not be surprised if fatalities overall remain flat due to lowered activity. That doesn't mean they would not explode without them. Germany is an outlier, not the norm as basically all statistics we have at this point indicate. I agree that Germany needs a different course of action than other countries, but I don't think that is widely applicable.

Milan was not overwhelmed by influenza, that is just an Italian title, which is full of energy/exaggeration as usual. The article talks of 48 _cases_ , which is a far cry from the 40,000+ they have in that region now.

Frankly, anybody peddling that a crushing blow to the world economy is conspiracy to get a little more funding for one sector should be discredited whoever they are. That is ludicrous. There is far to much avarice in too many competing sectors, just for starters. And scientists are not that cutthroat as a group.

I think you misinterpret the last link you posted. He does not advocate for doing nothing, but for quickly gathering data and changing our tactics as new information comes in, since there are risks both in quarantine and in not quarantining. I think everyone agrees with this and it is actually what all countries are doing. Even Italy is reevaluating their quarantine measures weekly, etc.

I do agree with you that the economic risk is enormous, and I am unconvinced that my business will exist when I can work again. But at the same time there is nothing to say what we did in the face of illness before this quarantine was human or correct. I think we are too callous about "normal" annual deaths from other causes and if anything comes from this massive effort, I hope it is an awareness of these other causes of death and funding and concrete action going towards them. It's no conspiracy to recognize that investing in better health of the population by effective, concrete steps to guarantee and promote diet, exercise, _etc_ would be a worthwhile item to invest far more resources to than we currently do.

<comment><USER7> > I would not be surprised if fatalities overall remain flat

What would be enough evidence in a month or two that you would agree that this was fantastically overblown? I fear that even after this is over, the numbers will be be same same but still misrepresented by everyone to say that it was all necessary.

<comment><USER13> I doubt that would be possible in that time frame. But I would need to see evidence of basic herd immunity or a massive chunk of herd immunity (50% population including representative percentage of the elderly) with low death rates, including in areas where medical systems were overwhelmed. Otherwise an effective preventative quarantine will always on face value look like an exaggeration, since the goal is to avoid something before it happens. But looking at New York and Milan, etc, I think that option is fast becoming a fantasy if it is not one already.

Solidarity and group effort are important parts of what it means to be human.

<comment><USER7> That is a very high bar to prove and therefore a very low bar to implement these harsh measures. The measures themselves are inhuman too.

I think we both weight our rights, the medical risk and economic danger differently but I can see your reasoning.

<comment><USER13> Maybe we should be infecting under 40s with a very low dose of the virus so they have an ever higher probability of getting just a little sick, and jump start the herd immunity process. It would be a form of vaccine-lite and allow a lot of people to get back to a normal life sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article could have mentioned this as well:

 _German researchers want to send out hundreds of thousands of coronavirus- antibody tests over the coming weeks, Der Spiegel reported.

People who test positive for the antibodies could be given an "immunity certificate" that would allow them to leave their coronavirus lockdown early.

Other countries, including the United Kingdom, are planning mass testing to ease lockdowns._

[https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-germany- covid-19...](https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-germany- covid-19-immunity-certificates-testing-social-distancing-lockdown-2020-3)

</comment><comment><USER15> So much contradictory information through this epedemic.

CNN just ran an article highly critical of decentralized approaches. (They were advocating top-down, unified actions on a country-wide basis.)

Here, NPR tells us Germany is doing well because the regions are able to act autonomously.

Hard for us armchair quarterbacks.

<comment><USER16> The "decentralized approach" thing wrt Germany is something I've seen mentioned several times in English media (I assume Drosten said it in a press conference). I don't know how it is in other countries, but it seems to me this is only great in comparison to the US problems of broken centralization, and only regarding the testing. There are several demands of higher centralization in Germany when it comes to information: reporting of cases, information about hospital beds, and distribution of patients based on those.

<comment><USER17> I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the decentralised model.

A lot of states, not just the US have highly unequal public infrastructure. France being one of the bigger examples, but the UK too.

There's a very basic Hayekian argument about the problems of concentrating so much knowledge and capacity in the capital alone. It simply impedes flow of information, it creates distrust and simply put dysfunction.

People in the anglosphere don't just ask these questions about Germany when it comes to healthcare, they also often ask them when they see regions like the Rustbelt or North England and compare it to the German Mittelstand. In many ways the centralised model is broken.

<comment><USER16> > I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in > remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the > decentralised model.

Is it better? I really don't know, all I heard about this are the complaints about rural areas being underserved by doctors, especially GPs

<comment><USER17> They're sometimes maybe not quite up to the standards you'd find in a urban university clinic, but compared to other places I've been it's quite astonishing how high quality the care is even in small remote hospitals. The demographics are increasingly affecting the number of physicians though, that much is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> a) Not the death rate. It's just 'deaths/tested' which is something else.

b) I don't see how the decentralized system entails more testing. Canada is decentralized and has more testing by the US, but it's because the respective authorities 'just did it'. The logic of 'some labs blocking others' makes no sense. If S. Korea wanted to do 'the most testing' it might be in their self- interest to 'centrally plan' thereby ensuring that it's also pointed in the right direction.

c) Canada has 1/3 the per-capita cases of Germany.

</comment><comment><USER19> NPR did better reporting on this phenomenon than German media, well done!

<comment><USER16> They did? There was literally nothing in there that hasn't been said several times and the structure of this pretty short article was "1\. Official data and official analysis; 2. A single anecdote as counterpoint; 3. Meaningless official opinion on the anecdote that's meaningless as it's nothing but a single anecdote". I like NPR, but highlighting this as "better reporting"?

<comment><USER19> So far I only read the Welt interview with the 2nd German expert who is on site. The famous one, who dominates the media, is only sitting in his lab in Berlin and looks at the numbers. He always talks about fantastic the testing goes, but only in this article you'll see why.

Whilst on site you see nothing much, as you won't get tested if you cannot prove contact and risk or symptoms. Only symptoms will not get you tested, even in Germany. Only Korea is able to do that. So anecdotes are appreciated.

Maybe manifacturing and PCR sequencer availability and how these tests are now prepared automatically should have been mentioned also. But nobody went that far. Only the recent Atlantic article on Quest touches that a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If theres a silver lining to this pandemic hopefully it will make people realize the importance of having competent leaders and institutions.

<comment><USER11> Hypothetical question - If you had to pick a leader from anybody in the World, from the entire history of humanity to lead in such a situation - who would you pick and why?

<comment><USER21> Eisenhower. He steered us through the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen, and was wary of his own power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> testing, testing, testing

</comment><comment><USER23> Germany's numbers are as accurate as china's.</comment>


Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2952-a/papers/perspective.pdf <comment><USER2> You may be interested in another paper[1] by Sompolinsky and Zohar describing block-trees rather than block-chains as a better structural approach.

1: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thank you so much for this. I work in this field and have been telling my coworkers that a tree or graph would make more sense. This is what i needed. Thank you

Do you know if anyone is working to implement something like this?

<comment><USER4> [https://archain.org](https://archain.org) and their "Blockweave" construction sounds similar. Here is a recent talk from Code Mesh on what they're building: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YO3zyQvL3Yg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YO3zyQvL3Yg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I appreciate the effort in writing this readable paper, but I do find the analogies in the first few sections to be quite strained.

Here's an example:

> Alice decides it is time to blockchain her supply chain. She rents some > cloud storage to hold the ledger, and installs internet-enabled temperature > sensors in each frozen yogurt container. She is concerned that sensors are > not always reliable (and that Bob may have tampered with some), so she wires > the sensors to conduct a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol, which > uses several rounds of voting to ensure that temperature readings cannot be > distorted by a small number of of faulty or corrupted sensors.

Now, since all frozen yogurt containers pass from Carol to Bob to Alice, doesn't Bob at some point in time have access to _all_ the frozen yogurt containers and their temperature sensors? Then Bob can easily corrupt _all_ of them, rendering this scheme useless. He can, for example, replace all of the sensors by malicious sensors that report wrong temperatures when they are in Bob's truck.

Is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER6> All of the censors vote on if they have been tampered with. They will leave a record of their votes on the blockchain as Bob tampers with them in real time.

<comment> vertex-four So Bob tampers with them all to record "everything's fine" all the time. What now?

<comment><USER6> Finally! He can melt all the ice-cream and destroy his customer.

No, Bob's misconduct would potentially be provable in court based on the trustless data ledgers in the blockchain.

Really, this example just shows one way how developers could use blockchain technology to develop applications that utilize trustless data.

Imagine this same technology applied to the transfer of human organs, rather than easily replaceable ice cream.

Challenge yourself to think of other scenarios in business where trustless data might make a difference.

Maybe you'll have a valuable idea in this wide open space.

<comment><USER7> I've heard many scenarios like "transfer of human organs" as a scenario for blockchain, but I'm skeptical that blockchain solves problems in the tangible world all that easily. It is my perception that blockchain is great for trustless information assets, but not great for trustless tangible assets.

Blockchain can't stop a human from stealing an organ and replacing it with a different organ. Even tracking shipping containers, which was high profile a few years ago, only requires a human to make a mistake in loading a boat to throw off the database.

In tangible-world-to-information-storage scenarios, the hard part is not the information, but the guarantee that information matches the real world. In my view, the claim that blockchain solves for a trustless tangible world is naive.

<comment><USER6> It's hard to imagine a solution to these problems because we are so far away from highly functional examples of this tech in action in the "real" world.

That said, engineers live to solve problems in better, smarter ways.

I personally believe it is naive to bet against innovation in this sphere, but we both shall see if we are so fortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > a ledger is just an indelible, append-only log of transactions that take > place between various parties.

Readers should decide either the above statement is true and ethereum is not a blockchain by that definition[0] or blockchain is just an abstract buzzword. Technology wise, git is as powerful as a blockchain at being an append-only log without the most important ingredient - proof-of work.

2\. There is a whole section on private blockchains

Can you write one program using a private blockchain(for eg use ibm's hyperledger) that can't be written using git? Private blockchains, premined coins, colored tokens, assets etc all of them.

3\. Regarding smart contracts, can you show me one use of turing completeness in a blockchain? If yes, ethereum is not turing complete practically cause gas.

4\. How does one determine the gas price of an opcode in a network? How does ethereum do it? (i think only people understanding need of proof-of-work will understand this)

5\. W.r.t the layers of OSI model, the need for smart contract is trivial. Show me one smart contract you can do 'in' a blockchain and I will tell you how to do it 'on' bitcoin.

[0][https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how- does-a...](https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how-does-a-hard- fork-rollback-transactions)

<comment><USER9> From [0] - "The transactions were not rolled back. The ETH amounts were just transferred automatically at 1,920,000 ."

So a transaction did take place "between various parties", nothing previous to block 1920000 was changed, and the transfer is there for all to see.

<comment><USER10> No amount of wordplay and denial will alter the fact that the DAO fork was a de-facto rollback.

<comment><USER11> There's a fundamental difference: a rollback reverses _everybody 's_ transactions, the DAO fork left unrelated transactions alone.

Bitcoin had an actual five-hour rollback in its early days, when someone figured out an exploit and awarded themselves over a billion coins.

<comment><USER12> That's incorrect. There was never a rollback in Bitcoin. You may be referring to the leveldb bug that caused a fork, or Gavin and Satoshi's discovery of the billion coins bug, which was fixed by a software update, but none of these involved a rollback.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking of the billion coins bug. I did some searching and it appears you're mostly correct; the errant transaction was removed, along with subsequent transactions that descended from it, but unrelated transactions were left in place.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9557](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9557)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since it's a draft I'll point out two typos. In 4.1 "if fills" should be "it fills". In 4.3 "1000 to 10" should be "1000 to 100".

<comment><USER14> Also, it's "deus absconditus" not "abscondidus" in 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems an appropriate place to dump a thought I had while explaining the failures of all existing blockchains to a layman.

1) The problems with merkle trees & co. aren't the computational complexity, they are the space complexity. 1a) I can screw a current blockchain for all eternity by buying some token and then burning by keys. No one will ever know and they will have to keep track of those dead tokens until the heat death of the universe. 2) To solve space complexity you need a time tax. I propose 1 year, because it is convenient. 3) Any tokens (or fractions of a token) [0] that have not moved for more than a year (rolling) are returned to the common pot. (sort of a non-usage tax)

This means that you can limit the space complexity of the whole chain as a function of the number of transactions per 'tax interval.' This, or maybe a similar approach could make the space complexity problem tractable for normal users. (The blithe acceptance of a 1-2Tb (or is it 3 now?) space requirement for the full blockchain by members of the community is so wildly out of touch with reality it is laughable)

0\. There are a number of other 'units' that could be considered for tax- interval retirement, such as the wallet. The nice thing about taxing fractions of tokens is that the network can set the rate of the tax for investing over the long term based on the cost of a single transaction fee. The day before a fraction of a token would be dumped back into the pool the owner would just have to send the token to another wallet they control and pay the relevant transaction fee.

<comment><USER16> It seems that in any real world blockchain, the space growth from actual transactions will be much larger than the space wasted on inactive wallets.

And the notion of a secure financial system where if you don't move your money for a year your whole account is confiscated seems rather unappealing!

One thing I really want to be able to do with a blockchain system is to put my wallet in cold storage—like, in a safe. I don't want some arbitrary rule that I need to mark my calendar every year to retrieve all my keys from cold storage and do a meaningless transaction!

<comment><USER17> > my calendar every year to retrieve all my keys from cold storage and do a > meaningless transaction

No, you don't need to retrieve your keys each year. Before storage, create N transactions moving all your coins to the next derived address. Sign all your transactions at once. Then put it in the safe.

Store the transactions unencrypted on your computer. Send one each year. An attacker can't do anything with them except send them early (and force you to open your safe "sometime within the next year".)

<comment><USER16> That's a good point, I didn't think about that. It does add some extra complexity though—like, if I do want to make a real transaction, I have to re- make the subsequent "keep-alive" transactions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless for Pixel 4 facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20896181/google-contractor-reportedly-targeted-homeless-people-for-pixel-4-facial-recognition <comment><USER2> Seems like google is trying to do a good thing in a bad way.

They are trying to get their facial recognition working regardless of skin color, Which is a good thing _even if you 're against facial recognition in general_ since it reduces inequality.

They are doing it by targeting homeless people, which would be fine if they went around it the right way, but instead they lie and deceive. I'm willing to bet there are _plenty_ of people willing to cooperate for $5 and no lies so I'm at a bit of a loss as to why they chose to go for the lying and deceiving route.</comment>


Applicative Programming, Disjoint Unions, Semigroups and Non-breaking Errors - <AUTHOR> http://applicative-errors-scala.googlecode.com/svn/artifacts/0.6/chunk-xhtml/index.html

<comment><USER2> The title is facetiously obfuscated (though accurate): this is about performing a sequence of computations which might throw errors (such as validating input), collecting those errors along the way.

The punchline:

        val f = (Person(_, _, _)).curried
        val age = validAge(args(0))
        val name = validName(args(1))
        val postcode = validPostcode(args(2))

        postcode <<*>> (name <<*>> (age map f)) match {
          case Success(p) => println("We have a person: " + p)
          case Failure(e) => e foreach println
        }

I'm puzzled by the author's choice of argument order, which means the call to the Person constructor at the end has to be reversed (arguments in reverse order with `f` at the end). In Haskell, using the built-in Applicative typeclass and flipping his definitions of <<star>> and vmap:

        instance Functor (Validation e) where
          fmap = flip vmap

        instance Semigroup e => Applicative (Validation e) where
          pure = Success
          (<*>) = flip (<<*>>)

you can write the constructor call in the natural order:

        Person <$> age <*> name <*> postcode

which is obviously analogous to what the call would look like without error handling:

        Person age name postcode

IMHO this shows the power of the technique described more clearly: that with a bit of plumbing up front, you can add arbitrarily sophisticated error handling behaviour _without_ much disruption to existing code.

One of my Haskell 'aha' moments was that you could do this with Parsec (a parsing library) to build data structures in a way that mirrors the grammar being parsed:

        data Section = HostSection {hostNames :: [String], hostOptions :: [HostOption]}

        hostSectionP :: CharParser st Section   -- hostSectionP parses Chars and produces a Section
        hostSectionP = HostSection <$> hostHeaderP <*> many1 hostOptionP
          -- many1 is like '+' in regex

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> PDF version:

[http://applicative-errors- scala.googlecode.com/svn/artifacts...](http://applicative-errors- scala.googlecode.com/svn/artifacts/0.6/pdf/index.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice quote: "Non-breaking error handling is just an applicative functor on a partially applied disjoint union type constructor with semigroup error elements so what's the big deal?!"

</comment><comment><USER4> From the Haskell code it looks to me like the <<*>> operator is doing a monoid append, no?</comment>


Don't Let Facebook Make You Miserable - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/dont-let-facebook-make-you-miserable.html?ref=opinion&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Facebook doesn't make me miserable because I feel like I'm having less fun and being less glamorous than the friends on my news feed—it makes me miserable because it's an addicting timewaster with minimal utility and I'd much rather be [reading a book, playing music, writing software, hanging out with friends IRL, working on a project, sleeping, watching TV…]

<comment><USER3> I've noticed Facebook seems to be really good at spamming me with useless notifications, it even somehow manages to do it after I've unfriended 90% of the people that I am not close friends with and blocked most notification types. Yeah I could prune my friends list even further and only check it passively, but then all I'm stuck with is basically an incredibly bloated email/chat service that is loaded with ads. Then again this is the 21st century, a lot of other tech products seem to fit that exact description too. In any case, I'm a lot happier after deleting it.

<comment><USER4> Some time last year Facebook began giving me notifications within the application that... "Your friend uploaded a photo" or "your friend updated their status."

Maybe this is because I stopped using Facebook for so long, there weren't any real notifications to give me. They wanted it to seem like I'd missed something.

<comment><USER5> Biggest mistake I did with my Instagram account was to link it to my Facebook. I believe it is impossible to unlink them, even having disconnected all external application access as far as I could go in both.

Why? "Your friend Xxx is now on Instagram". Etc etc. I don't want to know, and I don't want my account visible to everyone there. Please just respect my wishes to make the integration go away!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps we should take NYTimes advice a step further and stop letting them make us miserable either. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. Whenever I think of reading "legitimate" news like the NYTimes, I am reminded of this quote from a Soviet novel by Bulgakov. In it a doctor gives advice:

        If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic]
        never read soviet newspapers before dinner.[1]

Over the past few years, motivated by the above quote and other reasoning, I taken a few experimental fasts from the news. During those weeks I found myself at no disadvantage that I could detect, but I did feel better and more productive.

[1] [https://medium.com/@antonkovalyov/never-read-soviet- newspape...](https://medium.com/@antonkovalyov/never-read-soviet-newspapers- before-dinner-57aa720ba363)

<comment><USER7> I like reading the newspaper -- print, rather than online -- specifically because it comes out only once a day. It's not an endless stream of pretend- immediate attention-grabbers, but a curated collection of the important stuff that happened yesterday.

If the print newspaper were invented today, it would grab hundreds of millions of VC money in Silicon Valley as the cure for news overload. (I guess the pitch would have to include some silly AI or IoT angle though.)

<comment><USER8> I read an app that updates once a day with 6 short news items. Takes less than 5 minutes to read when I'm on the pot and I'm done with news for the rest of the day. Works pretty well, I don't think I'm less informed than other people I interact with.

<comment><USER9> Economist Espresso?

<comment><USER8> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I cut facebook out of my life three momths ago when I realized a pattern of my activities. Something hapened and I ranted there about my thoughts, others were offended ao they commented & we would fight not understanding each other.

Then I used to ignore them and continue.

Then one fine day, I sat on a bus, there was something going on about Kashmir and Indian military and I found that the guy next to me was also posting in a heated discussoon.

It was there that I figured out we are wasting time, we think our opinions matter, but they don't. Fb is just a waste of time. Of course, if you use it to stay in touch with frnds then it's a great tool, but there are other tools for that, if you can't get your friends on something say telegram's secret chat or signal (i hear it is peivacy focused) then it's a tragedy.

I have been living peacefully without fb/whatsapp.

Life is amazing when you realize the crazy volume of time we spend on whatsapp & the return on that time is nothing. We are superficially in touch with people

<comment><USER11> Been free of Facebook for more than 3 years. There's never been a single moment where I felt I was missing out. Even the staying in touch - for those that matter we found other ways to stay connected.

The final straw for me was actually a girl from my elementary school who wanted to friend me. The chat went like this...

Me: I have to ask you something. So we haven't seen each other for decades, the last time being when we were 7 year olds. Back then we probably exchanged less than 100 words. I don't mean to be rude but I'm genuinely curious to know why you want to connect with me?

Her: Oh I'm sorry. Didn't mean to offend

And that was it. She didn't have a reason other than "just because". That was when it really clicked for me what an utter waste of time Facebook actually is.

Never looked back

<comment><USER12> Sorry, that was a pretty mean response. Maybe she scoped you out and thought you were cute? Maybe she's just trying to make new friends and remembered you being nice? Why wouldn't she just say that to you? (instead of sorry, didn't mean to offend)? Probably because your response made her go "oh crap, this guy is an a-hole - bail) That's exactly what my response would be.

<comment><USER13> Or maybe Facebook's "Add Friend" feature suggested GP to the girl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As my Facebook cohort aged up into their mid-20s, my feed is all baby photos and overchurned memes that have been re-shared across 5 different sites, interspersed with relentless posts from artists I forgot I liked long ago, and ads that are trying hard to be local. Its utility is increasingly not defined by the Feed, but by being a contact list of Everyone You Ever Met Who You Don't Want To Unfriend, which has some uses for communication, warding off the most superficial kind of loneliness, and when someone is giving away spare goods a la Craigslist.

Most of the visually enticing bragging has moved onto Instagram, where the content is front-and-center and all about the number of hearts, imitating the style of celebrity influencers: beach scene with brand cocktail, friends taking a multi-selfie at an event, etc.

Conversely, my Snapchat is full of relatively mundane stuff: morning selfies with makeup on point, silly antics at a party, funny faces and filters.

To me, Instagram is actually the most frustrating, as it's the one that amplifies discrepancies between the popularity of your friends the most. For those of your real life friends who attract a lot of likes, it makes you feel like an increasingly irrelevant fan of a rising celebrity; while those who get very little validation are attract solely the sympathy heart, and often get deleted at the end of the day, leaving both the poster and you dissatisfied.

For these reasons, Instagram is a bad fit for people who are self-conscious about their relative lack of popularity, which is -- let's face it -- quite a few people. On the other hand, it's a great fit for people who, for whatever reason, can get plenty of likes from strangers and friends alike: no wonder it's the favored platform for social media influencers and their sponsors.

<comment><USER15> I rarely post on Facebook any more. Finding something agreeable to all my friends and family and still being authentic to myself is hard, and a losing game.

Instagram can be made into something that is not just a mirror of your Facebook. If there's little difference between the two, you end up with the same problems - FOMO, envy, self-loathing. Instead, if you follow artists/photographers/creatives, you can find an interesting, beautiful world. Of course, there's a tension here. The more popular someone is, the more likely their feed is to devolve into brand endorsements. That commercial force corrupts.

So while its possible for instagram to be less superficial that Facebook, its a constant battle.

<comment><USER16> > I rarely post on Facebook any more. Finding something agreeable to all my > friends and family and still being authentic to myself is hard, and a losing > game.

This is my primary issue with Facebook and one of the reasons I stopped using it. It's fine while you have a tight social circle, but once you have several social circles on Facebook, it's very difficult to navigate those kinds of tastes, whereas in real life it's never really an issue because the people never meet.

As another poster said, Facebook is most useful as a collection of contacts, but that usefulness is constantly at war with being able to express yourself.

<comment><USER17> I've never used FB but I did use Google+ for a while, not really for the social aspects but instead to join Android app betas, this was before Google moved the beta signups to the Play Store, and I always found the way G+ allowed you to define different circles to be a very nice feature.

I know G+ gets a lot of hate but the circles aspect seemed well implemented and made compartmentalizing your different social/professional circles much easier and more transparent. I wonder why FB doesn't allow something similar?

I've been tempted to join FB in the past, not to partake in the social activities, but as a tool to manage my contacts, but I'm incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of my different social groups and my professional contacts sharing the same connections to me. If I could completely separate different circles to ensure they have absolutely no overlap or ability to see my other connections I would probably use FB.

<comment><USER18> Facebook does actually allow something similar, at least I have seen some actual (offline) Facebook ads in Europe that described your exact problem and introduced the possibility to share only with "close friends" or "family".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Outside of Silicon Valley, people are marginally bewildered when you tell them you don't have Facebook. Inside Silicon Valley you'll quite often run into someone that works at Facebook and they'll switch to a psych analysis algorithm to understand how their service is not catering to you, while trying to mask their offense.

It must be good because of the daily active user number! Yeah well Tobacco has a high DAU too.

<comment><USER20> I remember a professor who equated smartphone use with smoking, he told people to go outside with the smokers if they wanted to use their smartphones/Facebook.

<comment><USER21> I once saw those behaviours described as "idle animations"(on Reddit of all places).

<comment><USER22> I once made a recommendation of "people checking their smart phone" to add as an idle animation for a Facebook game I was working on once. So makes sense to me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I liked Facebook early on when it was set up in a way that was pretty easy to customize (even with plug-ins). It felt easier than creating a custom web page — even as someone with the skills to do so — and it was more likely to actually be seen by people that I knew.

Then they started compartmentalizing everything. After awhile, if you wanted to mention something that didn't have a field in their form, there wasn't really anywhere to _put_ that. All the plug-ins went away.

Then I started to realize that if I learned too much about things by reading a feed, I had _no idea_ what to talk about in person because I already "knew" everything. Ironically a social platform was making real social behavior more difficult.

Eventually though, knowing things was not exactly beneficial because it was like dirty laundry. Paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff that I didn't want to see. Oh, great: didn't know that co-worker was actually super-religious and was going to start posting every possible religious thing that crossed his inbox [hide]. Oh, great: friends that go to the same places every single weekend and post the same maps of those places and the same pictures every single time [hide]. Oh, great: pages of the latest political diatribes [hide]. Oh, great: 50 things I have already seen on Reddit [hide]. These days if I do log in, I can scroll for quite awhile and see nothing interesting at all, even after being gone from Facebook for a week.

That means it's become a glorified address book, which is kind of where we started and perhaps where we should have always remained. What is the multi- billion-dollar "value" of Facebook now?

<comment><USER24> Don't you find that when you meet people in real life, they then refer to something on their or your Facebook feed?

Sometime ago, I put up a music video and yesterday I was chatting with a friend who had seen it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The biggest mistake (or genius move, depending on how you look at it), IMO that Facebook made is to show you cards in your feed about what your friends liked or commented on or when a totally random person says something about your friend. You don't know any of the parties involved in this but somehow are being shoved a photo, a video, or something else about them.

Obviously this is the addictive part for a large number of people, an endless stream of crap to keep looking at. Had the exact opposite effect on me. It finally drove me away from Facebook. I just realized my feed was utterly useless at that point.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure where I read this suggestion, but a couple of months ago I unfollowed everyone on FB. Now my newsfeed is basically empty - and my Facebook experience is much improved.

I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER27> What is your Facebook experience now? Just Messenger?

<comment><USER28> I did the same thing. Still have Messenger, but without push notifications.

It works beautifully. The immediate FOMO fades quickly.

Nothing of value is lost. Real friends and important info finds a way to get through.

<comment><USER29> > Nothing of value is lost. Real friends and important info finds a way to get > through.

I've also found this to be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have to say, I am glad no one in my social group cared when I left Facebook. We still talk and hang out.

That said, I did not have any "miserable" problems with Facebook because I removed everyone from my wall except close friends and family, essentially making Facebook just Messenger. Maybe Facebook changed the rules by now or something, but I recommend to ruthlessly unfollow people you don't care for but might want to be able to talk to one day.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. I took it to another level... and deleted my Facebook account. If I need to be social I have a cell phone.

<comment><USER32> Me too, and it was simultaneously the best thing I ever did, and also "meh". For one, very few people cared that I left Facebook, and those who did were fortunately the ones who actually cared about me. Also, I expected it to be this big, life-changing, zen-inducing move, but turns out, I replaced FB with Reddit, HN and youtube.

On the other hand, every so often, whenever I come across other people's Facebook wall, I realise that I'm not really missing out on people sharing their life, but instead, on looking at long pages of the loud, angry venting, and I realise that, at some point over the past four years, I went from missing facebook to realising that I'd built up too much mental resistance against it to ever put myself through opening an account ever again. That, plus the feel-good factor I get from being "more privacy conscious".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Facebook makes me miserable because it has become the defacto medium for social communication. When decent alternatives arrive offering end to end encryption, Facebook goes and buys them.

Say what you will, but WhatsApp/Messenger usage statistics correlated with Facebook usage statistics of less privacy conscious contacts can still paint a pretty damn good picture (read marketing profile).

You literally can't use any popular (digital) communication methods without opening yourself to advertisers or those wanting to buy an election. It's a minor miracle we still have email.

<comment><USER34> >You literally can't use any popular (digital) communication methods without opening yourself to advertisers...

I use uBlock origin for general stuff and FB Purity for Facebook (laptop use). I see roughly zero ads. I donated a bit to the FB Purity guy - It was a noticeable improvement to my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't get it, where is the misery? Are people really so fragile that they get upset seeing some old classmate in a luxury car?

I put off creating a Facebook account for a long time but eventually gave in. And I was pleasantly surprised to find how well it works for sharing photo albums with my friends and family.

<comment><USER36> _I don 't get it, where is the misery? Are people really so fragile that they get upset seeing some old classmate in a luxury car?_

I don't think it's any particular, discrete thing like that in itself, but rather the accumulated impact of the social media heuristic described over a period of years.

For a more extreme example, look at LinkedIn. Judging by the posts, one can easily be led to believe that all of one's connections are super-successful but utterly brainwashed corporate droids. It's a warped and misleading portrayal of human reality (for most of them, anyway—there are always those few that really do drink the Kool Aid that much). But it's naturally going to lead a lot of people to the anxiety: should I be as invested in my work as these amped-up salespeople? Am I working hard enough to promote my professional brand?

<comment><USER37> "Are people really so fragile"

Yes, people are generally fragile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's interesting how the vast majority of responses to this post are from people who have either left facebook entirely, or severely crippled it.

Are the majority of HN folks off facebook, or is it just the vocal ones?

<comment><USER39> I use it and really like it to share photography and keep in touch, but I think its degraded a lot recently.

So many people share articles that they've never read, they're really just sharing a headline. Or post from useless meme pages (I can go to reddit or something for that). So I have hidden almost every article source ("Hide all from Buzzfeed/NYT/science memes page" etc)

All I want to see are people's mundane life updates and baby photos, personal projects, and other "lives of my friends" things. I love that facebook is an open letter system to your friends, I just wish more people would use it that way.

<comment><USER40> I wish there was an easier way to block out "external" content, I'm really, really not interested in re-shares of clickbait from newspapers and other sources, or the inevitably political outrage and bullshit that people share.

I just want the unique thoughts and photos of my Facebook friends to see what's going on in their lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I stopped using Facebook about 4 years ago. Haven't looked back since. I haven't lost contact with anybody that I cared to not lose contact with. A random "hey what's up" text is usually enough.

</comment><comment><USER42> Like the majority of the people here, I use Facebook sparingly, but I constantly need to go back there because of numerous groups that I follow. Is there any way to sideline the infamous "news feed" and instead curate a manual feed containing only group posts?

<comment><USER43> try their standalone Groups app

<comment><USER44> Ah... Thanks! I didn't know this. I wanted the groups feature but don't want to deal with the feed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I uninstalled the apps (db/messenger) and only visit it about once per week. I logout after I visit.

Checking it takes about 5 minutes. There are usually 10 posts from friends at the top.

The rest of it is total garbage. Petitions, fake news, etc.

I noticed that if I visit Facebook more than 5 minutes per week, I will feel miserable.

95% of my fb feed is designed to make me upset. I just don't need all of that negativity.

</comment><comment><USER46> Totally unrelated to the article, so I understand this might be down voted...

If I used a bot to delete all of my posts (and literally everything else) after which, I deleted my account... is that actually deleted? Edit: It's been a year or more since doing this.

It was such a time waster, and I felt that... if I remove some of my data, it might be a good idea. It is a bit tinfoil-y, I admit but the less data that is out there, the better since Facebook is going into a lot of other markets.

Edit 2: Reason for deletion was that I noticed some of my very old posts were not created by me but said they were. I assume it was either a virus or, more likely, some of my friends xD... I am sure the teenagers can relate.. people go on your screen in labs and write "HACKED" (NOT REALLY SILLY!!!)

<comment><USER47> Chances are that none of this is actually ever deleted but simply made unavaible, in the realm of the shadow profiles facebook is reported to have on people that are not yet registered.

Even if you probably can't achieve actual deletion, what you did probably didn't hurt and removed information for other public or API access.

<comment><USER46> That sucks. I have said too many silly things on Facebook. oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> the common counter to this feeling is that if facebook makes you miserable, then your friends are probably just not good ones.

of course, this ignores that we all have friends who do things we don't like, and they're friends in spite of that. so the question is, given that facebook is used mainly for

1\. communication

2\. event planning

3\. keeping the relationship alive.

how do you get those things without all of the bloat, both cognitively and as a matter of tech?

I feel that facebook is overkill if that's indeed true. what we (or at least I) need is just something that will sift through my calendar and all forms of communication and just let me know if I haven't contacted a friend in so often.

such a thing would eliminate the need for facebook for 99% of people, I suspect.

<comment><USER49> Unfollow everyone

<comment><USER48> I don't use facebook, but that seems like silly advice. if you're going to unfollow everyone, then the primary value prop is gone.

each time you bother to manually check on someone, you could've just called/emailed/messaged them. at that point you might as well delete your account imo.

<comment><USER50> Unfollowing someone is different from unfriending them; in the former case, you just stop seeing the person's posts in your news feed: [https://www.facebook.com/help/190078864497547](https://www.facebook.com/help/190078864497547)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I left facebook a couple of weeks ago. It's been great so far, because I don't feel the urge to read comments on news sites' fanpages. When I did, it usually ended in resent against people from my country for being so stupid.

</comment><comment><USER52> That's more like Instagram than Facebook.[1] There are paid "Facebook influencers" [2] but it doesn't seem to be as big a thing as on Instagram.

 _Remember, sharing is spamming._

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/may/05/earn-a- living-...](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/may/05/earn-a-living- instagram-micro-influencers) [2] [https://socialix.com/facebook- influencers](https://socialix.com/facebook-influencers)

<comment><USER53> Can you expand more on the _sharing is spamming_ ?

Seems like a point with some depth to it.

<comment><USER54> Everything you share is visible to all your friends AND their friends, so you are grabbing attention of few hundreds/thousands of people, most of whom are total strangers to you - that's called spamming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I know hindsight bias is a thing, but I the response in me that bubbled up was "of course."

I think everyone under the age of 40 knows that their insta and fb involve posts that make us look cooler/more hip/sexier than we really are. Isn't that how things have always been? How many nytimes articles have been written about Irritable Bowel Syndrome, to use their example? Or how often do you talk about it with friends before the internet? Has that really changed?

It's just the medium that has changed. Some thing's are new, some are the same. People presenting the best of themselves certainly hasn't.

</comment><comment><USER56> Contrary to every comment so far, after I stopped using FB for some time, I've now started to use it again. It is not that I care much about what dinner some random friend is having, but I've started to use it to publish some photos that I take with my smartphone.

I don't care much about the upvotes, but as I do a lot of walking on the mountains around my house, I now have a kind of a motivation to snap a photo, add some effects or change the colors a bit (on the phone itself) and publish.. :)

Oh, and there's someone I follow who posts a lot of beautiful places on my country, places I eventually would like to go..

<comment><USER57> Instagram might be a better fit though?

<comment><USER56> Probably, I don't really know what Instagram is..

Edit: I've checked it, thanks, it seems good, but I'm wary of adding another app to my list. As long as I can add photos and my closest family/friends can see them, FB is enough for me. :)

<comment><USER58> FWIW, I finally signed up for instagram a few months back - mostly to post artwork. I had hesitated: I don't have facebook on my phone, after all, and figured facebook was enough.

Much to my surprise, It seems to be a much better platform for artwork and photography (most of my followers are posting the same, so generally interesting to go through as well). It will also post to facebook from the instagram app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I check Facebook maybe once a week now (via the Tinfoil app), for perhaps a minute or two. This is just to check messages that my friends sometimes send out when trying to organise meet-ups.

This is the only utility I get from Facebook now. Anything else is just akin to endless spam, except it's from people I know (some well, some not so well).

I made the mistake when I first opened an account of adding all my family and colleagues. Man, that was quickly realised as a grave mistake.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've found Facebook to be a great product for me. I went to an international school, and many of my high school friends are spread across the world. I'm not super-close with all of them, but close enough to want to know what they're up to (and visa-versa). Facebook allows that (as do many other things - which I also use).

I've also got a lot of friends who purposefully stay off Facebook for the same reasons espoused in the posts on HN, and I understand that reasoning too.

The only minor irritation I have is that a lot of events that go on in my city, or that my friends host, use Facebook events. I'll occasionally get a complain from a non-facebook using friend that they didn't get invited to ______, and it's usually just because they weren't on Facebook and the host doesn't know them well enough to go out of their way to invite them.

And the person not invited usually responds along the lines of "well, apparently the party host is not a close enough friend to SMS or email or call me, so whatever," That might or might not be entirely true.. but either way, why are you complaining about not being invited?! Because you are using Facebook as some gauge of friendship, and now you feel this friendship isn't a 'deep' as you thought it was because they don't want to SMS you individually?

Quite frankly, I love being invited to things by far acquaintances, because it just gives me an opportunity to meet new people. I don't use Facebook friending/event invites as any metric for the depth of a relationship. Just to find new stuff to do.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm so happy that I stopped using Facebook a year ago! It's just funny to read all the psychological studies about Facebook and how the people suffer from using it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I have a strategy for making facebook a lot less interesting:

1\. Unfollow (not unfriend, i.e. not noticable) all your friends - this will clean up your newsfeed and confuse the algorithm

2\. Follow some pages that do not post a lot from brands you are interested in

3\. Uninstall the facebook mobile app and increase your battery

All in all, I can still use messenger for some things but without the load that facebook brings to the table. You might miss out on some things but you'll be happier because you are oblivious.

</comment><comment><USER63> Is "I don't have Facebook" the new "I don't own a TV"?

<comment><USER64> Probably not, because I'd guess that most people on Facebook still have TVs, and most people _not_ on Facebook _also_ have TVs.

(clearly this doesn't include areas where most people don't have TVs.)

<comment><USER63> (I meant more in terms of it being a meme/posturing, rather than a literal truth)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I have dropped facebook for everything but events. I muted / unfollowed everybody, disabled all non-event notifications, and cleared out a lot of personal information.

What set this off was seeing a a buddy I hadn't spoken with in nearly a decade. Typically bumping into an old friend and catching up would be great, but we both knew nearly everything about each other due to our investment in social media. We still had stuff to talk about, but I felt somewhat robbed of that moment.

From day one I avoided adding people from high school or other areas of my life where I wasn't interested in sharing real-world social experiences. It might sound harsh, but I just don't care what these strangers are up to.

Social media is fine for some people, but I've never been happier to be ignorant of my friend's lives until I spend real time with them.

That being said, the event organization aspect of Facebook is great, and I know a lot of people who have stayed with the site for the same reason. The sooner a simple, centralized event organization platform becomes popular, the sooner we can start a proper exodus.

</comment><comment><USER66> Back in 2013, after a complicated break up, I decided that seeing photos of my ex randomly appearing with her new SO in our common friends posts was not helping me at all, and so, I left Facebook. After all these years I've not missed it one bit. You end up knowing who truly cares about you, as they will always reach you whether you are on Facebook or not.

</comment><comment><USER67> I have never used Facebook, so I can't chime in in these threads to say "I quit Facebook because…", since I've never used it. The reason? Even if we disregard the admittedly huge walled-garden and privacy issues, it just seems to be an extremely time-expensive and constantly distracting hobby, with not much to really recommend it.

<comment><USER47> I'm also part of those who never registered an account on facebook because it was obvious from the get-go what this was gonna be about.

There were only one major difference from the previous similar services namely the shift to having people carelessly use their actual names which is something that was unthinkable until then. And a minor difference in the large use of tricks from the dark book of anti-patterns and dark patterns to get more and more unsuspecting people on board.

To be 100% honest I did use facebook for a little while as I was employed in the shady business of uncovering online users identities and tracking them in the real world. The emergence of facebook made my job a breeze at first, then before long made the whole job position entirely expendable, clients would simply use facebook themselves to conveniently find all the info they were after in one place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I did leave FB for awhile. But I realized that there are groups on Facebook that I do find interesting. I do get the occasional event invite on FB, sometimes personal, sometimes even work related. And, there are some people I enjoy communicating with, on Facebook.

But, I really don't have much interest in what most of my friends post. Luckily, it's easy to just "unfollow" them to declutter my feed. They are still on my friends list and we can still communicate via FB/Messenger if needed. I just don't have to scroll through pictures of their food or kids or pets.

<comment><USER19> Maybe a groups and events app would have a lot of utility.

They could probably bake it into messenger.

<comment><USER69> > Maybe a groups and events app would have a lot of utility.

Facebook has stand alone apps for groups and events, individually.

[https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-the- events-...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-the-events-from- facebook-app/)

[https://groups.fb.com](https://groups.fb.com)

<comment><USER19> Great! Ive seen several communities move off of their own custom built sites into facebook groups

A crude solution driven by the people simply being there

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This article is absolutely true on everything, except for the title. The title gives the impression that one should continue on as is on the Facebook. That's misleading to the intent of the whole article.

</comment><comment><USER71> Substitute "World of Warcraft" for "Facebook" in the comments below! There were so many similar discussions about WoW years ago. I am afraid the fact is that some people are very vulnerable and games and social properties do not account for or accommodate that fact.

Everyone else is reading this and thinking - "Oh yeah, I suppose I shouldn't be so bothered".

</comment><comment><USER72> I don't use Facebook. I still feel miserable for the same reason I feel miserable when I see war. FB is designed to encourage the absolute worst of all our human nature, dressed up as a "tool to reconnect with people". To make the war analogy even more true, now people are actually 'dying on Facebook'.

</comment><comment><USER73> Just a simple question: If Facebook is harmful why not cut it out of life and cancel the account? Done this some years ago being a lot more happier as a result...

No need to read untrue postings from people claiming that they are the "winners of life" while everybody knows that they did not achieve anything for real...

<comment><USER74> Addiction.

<comment><USER73> Seems like I'm just to old for that kind of addiction. Thanks for insight :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I've ended up just moving the messenger into a fluid (osx) window on my status bar and not having the site in my browser all the time has helped a lot.

Being able to pop down just the messages with a click and back off straight after means I'm only going to the site every other day to check the notifications for a few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER76> To avoid FB making me miserable, I only follow people whose posts tend to be interesting. The tools are there. Just use them.

If there's something I can ask FB to do is to make it still easier to manage privacy of posts, and to unsubscribe to second-degree stuff like "X liked Y" or "X reacted to Y".

</comment><comment><USER77> I don't even look at my feed for this reason. I think it kind of offends people though when I meet them and had no idea they went to Yosemite the past weekend. So now before I hang out with someone, I brush up on their feed real quick.

</comment><comment><USER78> I deleted Facebook fully years ago and my social life shrunk in quantity, but improved immensely in quality.

I don't think Facebook is universally bad, but if you have your doubts, try quitting it for a month and see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER79> The way I cut out Facebook out of my life was to use a password manager to generate a 128 character password, store it in the password manager (which itself has 50+ character long password) and log-out of Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER80> Facebook is great to find out what family and friends are doing since virtually everyone is using it. That's all.

It will never make me miserable since I rarely post and don't care about "likes"

</comment><comment><USER81> Tl;dr - reading FB makes you jealous so quit and read popular Google search requests instead and be happy about how big a mess everybody else _in fact_ is.

</comment><comment><USER82> I just have Facebook so I can occasionally message some contact. I use it as messenger purpose only.

I like snapchat a lot better since it's actually social.

I am a lot happier as a person

</comment><comment><USER83> How do you know if someone doesn't use Facebook....

</comment><comment><USER84> Slightly ironic that the article has social media buttons. It's much better to let the media make you miserable.

<comment><USER28> On a cynical meta level, the article is like Beer telling you not to let Wine make you miserable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I deleted my Facebook account a few months ago and it has felt great to not waste time on their.

</comment><comment><USER86> I glance at the thing every so often.

That's OK fine. Anyone who really matters can use other channels.

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't let it make me miserable. I deleted it years ago.

</comment><comment><USER88> If a Facebook post of a photo of a friend sitting in their new BMW, sipping 30 year old single malt next to a 19 year old bikini model whist reading Grant's Interest Rate Observer on a beach in Nice captioned with a Kurt Vonnegut quote is making you miserable then I suspect there are larger psychological issues at play then social media usage that might be remedied with a walk in a park, physical interaction with another human being or a good book.

</comment><comment><USER89> Seriously? Who says that we have no choice but to compare ourselves with others?

Facebook is a great way to stay connected with old friends. There's a pleasant feeling about seeing how the people you once knew are doing these days.

If you do inevitably end up focusing more on the Maserati, the million dollar wedding, etc., then that's your problem. Your insecurity. Whenever I scroll past those things, I simply say, "Cool" and move on.

And to the people who stopped using Facebook altogether to help them concentrate better: Self-control. It's like how a lactose intolerant person blames the ice-cream in the freezer for making them eat it.

<comment><USER59> > Who says that we have no choice but to compare ourselves with others

Human nature</comment></comment>


Climate Impact of Internet of Shit - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/1265701098934984707 <comment><AUTHOR> A documentary episode where the director looks at the climate costs of Amazon's business practices</comment>


The Mysterious Case of the Linux Page Table Isolation Patches - ah- http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-mysterious-case-of-the-linux-page-table <comment><AUTHOR> This seems important.</comment>


Toxic Firefighting Foam Has Contaminated U.S Drinking Water - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/toxic-firefighting-foam-has-contaminated-u-s-drinking-water-with-pfcs/ <comment><USER2> This is an example of how USA's miliaristicness harms American people.</comment>


Where are all the women, Wikipedia? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/09/where-are-all-the-women-wikipedia <comment><AUTHOR> Nobody will read this Guardian article after tomorrow. Sure wish the author had led by example and written another 500, or 8,000, words on Margaret E. Knight, that will be handed down to the generations...</comment>


Inside the Algorithms Facebook and Twitter Use to Build the Perfect Feed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/perfect-facebook-feed/ <comment><USER2> As soon as I read "Build the Perfect Feed" I audible laughed at the link bait title. This may be an article inside their algorithm (which in fact, is probably interesting), but how can you honestly say it's "Perfect" when clearly a lot of people openly complain about how poor it is?

</comment><comment><USER3> Surely this is a joke, the FB feed is far from perfect, unless the only criteria used is "does it vertically scroll"

<comment><USER4> Quality and Engagement wise, FB feed is worse than Twitter IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        ... ORDER BY created_at DESC;

</comment><comment><USER6> The Facebook feed is garbage. I think a drunk narwhal is just grabbing crap (2/3 of which are embedded ads) and throwing it up there.

When I'm on the mobile site I only get about a page and a half down before it just starts repeating the same 5 things over and over. I can't believe a site with so much money is so freaking broken.

Don't even get me started on how hard it is to have a coherent discussion in the comments section of a post.

<comment><USER7> > I can't believe a site with so much money is so freaking broken.

But it's broken by design. The Facebook people believe their followers will accept anything they do without bailing out, and events prove them right. Even you continued to scroll through the garbage -- "When I'm on the mobile site I only get about a page and a half down before it just starts repeating the same 5 things over and over" \-- without canceling your Facebook subscription, without voting with your feet, without doing anything but complain about it.

> Don't even get me started on how hard it is to have a coherent discussion in > the comments section of a post.

Maybe a social medium other than Facebook deserves your level of loyalty and energy.

<comment><USER6> So many choices. What was I thinking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You'll never have one feed perfect for everyone. What we need is to decentralize the social network back - and let everyone control what his node does - what information is taken from in-feeds, what is presented to the user and what information is passed to out-feeds.

I call that social routing.</comment>


An Interview with Adam Wildavsky, Retired Googler, MIT Grad, and Bridge Player - <AUTHOR> https://coderintros.com/interviews/adam-wildavsky/ <comment><USER2> Rather overly-familiar comment to end on.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a back-end HTML form processing service? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a service that can handle all the back-end stuff of HTML forms?  Like Wufoo without the front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript.
The reason I'm asking is because I recently made a conference sign up form using Wufoo but I couldn't customize the form as much as I'd like to.  I wanted to have the form prevent users from selecting an event that has already had a certain amount of people sign up.
Does anyone else here feel the need for a service like this?  Or would you prefer to create the back-end from scratch?  I was going to but I only had a few hours to create it. <comment><USER2> There are a bunch of other form builders out there like FormStack[1], Zoho[2], etc. I haven't used those 2 personally (only Wufoo) but I'd imagine some of them have some more advanced functionality with their more advanced plans.

[1] <http://www.formstack.com/> [2]<http://www.zoho.com/creator/online-form- builder/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing. I've briefly examined the features of both services as well as other similar ones, but they all mostly focus on the front-end side and tightly integrate with the back end. I'm sure it's possible to hack together your own version of the font-end. However, that still wouldn't let me, for example, limit the number of sign ups for a certain event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am building a service to handle the backend of any HTML page. I think it will handle your use case just fine. <http://www.steveapp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will request an invite to try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was on hn a few days ago: <https://squaresend.com/blog/sending-emails- with-javascript>

</comment><comment><USER5> Is <http://getsimpleform.com/> too basic? No affiliation, I came across it when making something similar

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good start, but as you said is very basic. The JSON data would be useful for determining if a spot is taken but it doesn't have a nice way to view all the entries (without building that yourself).</comment></comment>


Strategikon of Maurice - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategikon_of_Maurice <comment><USER2> _Snippets of Tacticus ' advice turns up in various Discworld chronicles, and it can be gathered that he was a very realistic, down-to-earth general. For example, the section of his autobiography entitled "What to Do When One Army Occupies a Well-Fortified Fortress on Superior Ground and the Other Does Not" begins with the sentence "Endeavour to be the one inside."_</comment>


If the Internet had a README.md, what would it say? - <AUTHOR> http://readme.md/ <comment><USER2> Newbies... The Internet has a RFC*.txt, not a README.md!

[http://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt](http://www.rfc- editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt)</comment>


We're only being dishonest to get your attention. Join us! - <AUTHOR> In response to a story currently on the front page titled "FB is the Only Other Platform Used by 20% of College Students. Join Us!" [1]
Do you actually want to hire people who are going to fall for dishonest linkbait like that?
YC companies, I understand that you get to post job ads on HN and they automatically show up on the front page. Great. But please, show some respect to the people you are trying to recruit, and show some respect for this exclusive privilege PG gives you.
If you read the full post[1] you'll see that what they are referring to is the college students at a single university. At this university, apparently, 20% of students signed up at launch, and 30% of those use it daily. Making it more like 6% of students, at one university, who use their app. Probably a little more if you count weekly or monthly users. But still. That, in comparison to what the headline claims (20% of college students, everywhere) is ridiculously inaccurate.
And also, what about Google? Way, way more than 20% of college students use Gmail, Docs, etc. And what about things like Craigslist? It is even claimed that their app can tell you "exactly what you need to get done every day, with no input". No input is qualitatively different than "very little input, but it's really easy and quick."
You can, and should, do better. In addition to misleading people being a mean thing to do (even when effective), it doesn't do you any good to mislead your own future employees, anyway. Geez.
---
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269664 <comment><USER2> YC companies always have the worst link-baiting lines to get you to click on their job offers. Just put them in a standard template so we know who is looking for what before clicking on the link. I propose:

{company} ({yc season}) looking for {role}

Role should be the actual function title and if applicable mentioning the language-stack (i.e. RoR, node) the candidate should master.

<comment><USER3> I second this strongly. I'd pay a lot more attention with a simple format. It's more respectful to the audience and makes you seem more professional.

Common objections:

 _But we 're young and hip, we wanna look different from the big companies!_ \- Doesn't matter. Still bad practice.

 _But we don 't like labels. We want generalists._ \- Then specify that. Asking for a "ninja" or some other nondescript title is retarded.

 _But we want to say what we do!_ \- That's what the post is for.

YC companies have the exclusive ability to post job ads on the front page. I _highly_ doubt there's any reasonable justification for posting anything aside from a standard template. It's not like you need more help.

<comment><USER4> What about this objection?

"We A/B tested the copy and we got far better results with custom, quirky copy than we did with a standard format. Why should we purposely use a version that people find boring and has been proven to be less effective? If you don't like our job postings, then the job isn't for you anyways."

<comment><USER3> Then I respond with this:

"Your A/B test demonstrates it's better for you in the short term. Great! Now you're just being dishonest, instead of ineffective and dishonest."

EDIT: That probably sounds harsh. I have nothing against YC companies, this advertising is just something I personally find disagreeable and annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a newer HN user I was surprised that there are no comments on job postings. I've also noticed some interesting posts and think there could be some constructive conversation around them.

I can appreciate why there are no comments but also I think it would be interesting to allow direct feedback to job postings.

Anyone else ever thought this, too?

<comment><USER6> Comments are off on job postings because they tend to become a running critique of the company or product doing the posting.

<comment><USER7> "because they tend to become a running critique of the company or product doing the posting"

Why do they feel that is bad? And have they ever been on on HN job postings (if so how long ago)?

<comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022018)

Some more background info. Other issues were:

\- outing companies that were still under the radar

\- hijacking threads with other job postings

<comment><USER7> Thanks.

PG did a good job (as tptacek did) of trying to spin this [1] but the bottom line is there aren't comments because somehow it's not good for YC. (Which is fine of course since it's YC's sandbox.)

Fully see the problem of course with the "outing companies that were still under the radar". I would have just left it at that. The rest is just a distraction that gives people a reason to refute the additional points made.

In selling it's best to just concentrate on the strongest angles. Otherwise you give people an opening on something that doesn't even matter or a problem that can be solved.

[1] Reminds me of when trying to "explain" to children why they can or have to do something. The bottom line is "we're your parents and that's why and a different set of rules applies to us".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It wouldn't have been that bad had they made one simple change .. from (20% of College Students) to (20% of <some big name school>) or (20% of a major public university).

It would have actually been more impressive if they weren't so vague .. now they are probably going to turn off a lot of good prospects.

I say this as a YC alum whose 1st job post was fairly ill-advised (though not dishonest). Believe me, it is quite tempting to play around, so I wouldn't be too hard especially on the smaller teams who haven't been recruiting/employing for too long.

They will learn, soon enough. It's also important to note that many teams consist of 17-22 year olds, and as this app is aimed at college students it seems like it could be one of those teams. So cut them some slack.

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured they would learn by getting called out like this. And since the post was anonymous, it doesn't really hurt them anyway. Free learning experience.

<comment><USER8> I agree with this (particularly since it's anonymous), but piling on seems kind of mean.

Another option would be to simply email the given address and state your complaints. For example that you may have been interested (if you were), but felt mislead by the posting.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason I publicly posted this is because it is an issue about community standards, not just a personal issue between me and the company.

It's interesting to think about my own motivations -- I wonder if I would have been gentler if their post _hadn 't been_ anonymous. If so, should I have been gentler even though their post was anonymous? Anyway, I apologize if this caused unnecessary hurt, I didn't mean to.

<comment><USER8> I didn't mean to imply that _you_ were piling on, and I don't doubt your intentions one bit. . The problem is that once this is posted, you have little control over the outcome in the comment threads and piling on is inevitable. Again, not a criticism of you at all, my reply was aimed at the comments in the thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for addressing this, I was wondering what was going on with that other post. The content did seem intriguing, but also a little shady at the same time.

<comment><USER10> FWIW this shows what it takes to get to the front page. There are a lot of interesting links in "new" right now but only stuff with a bit of negative tension gets boosted to the front page (fear & conspiracies work!) Disclaimer: I provided the crucial vote that boosted this here very thread.

<comment><USER11> YC job ads are not voted on. They appear on the front page automatically.

<comment><USER10> i'm not talking that YC job, I'm talking about _this_ post replying to the YC job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hats off to that! Lots of the job postings on HN tend to make outlandish requests/offerings just because 'hey we got HN front page'. Some are downright shameful.

Also, in before the HN cabal muzzles this one.

</comment><comment><USER13> What is really dishonest is not having an option to downvote a job ad.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like they've changed the title and apologized.

</comment><comment><USER15> The way I saw it was that they only operate at a few universities, and at the ones they do, they have 20% of the student body.

That being said, I agree it was disingenuous at the least and downright misleading at the worst.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's a load off. I thought they were talking about Tumblr.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thankyou for posting this!

</comment><comment><USER18> seems like this worked, being at the top of HN and all...

</comment><comment><USER19> who cares honestly, everyone talks shit when they are recruiting. if an applicant can't figure that out, what gives?

</comment><comment><USER20> Unfortunately, dishonesty sells. How did all the large megacorporations get to where they are now?

Not by being great programmers and free thinkers, but by being greedy businessmen and, later, buying tons of lobbyists.

This piece of shit company is ... well... just being a normal company.

<comment><USER21>
        Unfortunately, dishonesty sells. How did all the
        large megacorporations get to where they are now?

        Not by being great programmers and free thinkers,
        but by being greedy businessmen and, later, buying
        tons of lobbyists.

        This piece of shit company is ... well... just being
        a normal company.

Citation needed.

<comment><USER7> Although I am one to also ask from time to time for links or citations I think that in this case this is clearly one persons opinion as opposed to someone saying "it is well known that dishonesty sells and that all large mega corporations get to where they are by.." [1]

As far as "dishonesty" in business that is determined many times by when the consensus actions of a particular industry is. Behavior in one industry in many cases means you have to play the same game or perish. Each industry works differently.

[1] Add: In which case a citation would be appropriate.

<comment><USER22> Confirmation bias is pretty close. People actively seek out not neutral factual information, but whatever makes them happy. Conservatives watch Fox NEWS because it makes them feel good about themselves. Liberals watch MSNBC because it makes them feel good about themselves. "Truth be damned, lie to me! It makes me happy."

Big oil doesn't cause global warming because that would make a bunch of rich powerful people bad guys, and they can't have that.

And, sales, marketing, and advertisers aren't sleazy liars because that would make them bad guys, and they can't see that. They can't. It's impossible. Can't be true. No way.

Advertisers are just showing people what they want to see. What they demand to see. They demand to be lied to, so it's okay.</comment></comment></comment></comment>