Samsung readies their own Retina display laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/samsung-prototype-laptop-challenges-the-retina-display-with-2560x1440-panel-20120831/

<comment><USER3> Geek.com rewrite of an engadget.com rewrite about a YouTube video review:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUYlnhDfvlo>

The submitter looks less than legitimate as well.

<comment><USER4> What looks "less than legitimate" about the account? It's been around for over a year.

<comment><USER3> During its 400 days it's made a staggering 4 comments 1 of which was on its own submission. It almost exclusively submits geek.com and extremetech.com both of which are Ziff Davis properties and they are not at all shy about targeting and spamming HN - ExtremeTech have at least one employee that spams here [1] and had at least one puppet auto-submitting stories [2], and then there's the mysterious and probably automated 'help' from evo_9 [3] and ukdm [4] who have very long histories of heavily submitting these two sites. Finally we have adeelarshad82 [5] who exclusively submits Ziff Davis properties (PCMag.com is one too).

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441016>

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=evo_9>

[4] <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm>

[5] <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82>

<comment><USER3> That last dude is an undisclosed social media 'marketing' clown for ... Ziff Davis:

<http://www.linkedin.com/in/adeelarshad82>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sell it as a portable display not a laptop. Give it connectivity via a variety of connectors (not just HDMI). It would be far more useful than an iPad. Keep dreaming, right?

<comment><USER6> Although I might not agree with the iPad comparison, that's a really great idea I'd buy into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope they aren't infringing on any patents this time!

<comment><USER8> Rounded Corners: ✔

Rectangular Screen: ✔

Black Bezel: ✔

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Prior Art: (does not apply)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Infringement: ✔

(*it's not the rounder-corners that gets you, it's the combination of that with the additional "dress")

<comment><USER9> Really ? I expected the incredibly dumb "Apple patented round corners" meme from somewhere like Engadget not HN.

<comment><USER10> What can you do. In a court case as convoluted as Samsung V. Apple, you just have to expect these kinds of things to rub off on the populace. If the user doesn't understand the case itself, they're going to go off with their gut on whatever bias they pick up from external news sources, which means more and more people will inevitably perpetuate the "apple patented pinching and rectangles" meme. Hacker News isn't impregnable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those who are looking forward to having a laptop display with a high raw pixel count (the MBPr can only be run at 1920x1200 IIRC without hacks) - <USER2> guess this is it, and it looks like it'll run Win8 too.

Props to Samsung. Hope they don't call it a "cornea display" or something mocking.

<comment><USER12> Shouldn't Microsoft be getting the props in this case? Samsung makes great displays (they make the MBPr display too) but the OS is the limiting factor in actually running them at the native resolution.

<comment><USER13> The operating system has to be adapted for one, but the biggest problem would be the app developers: they have to make changes to their pixel assets to suit the new resolution. Apple has the same problem, they are just aggressive about pushing developers in the right direction. Its a classic chicken/egg problem, especially when considering PC diversity (its obvious where Apple is going, its not obvious where the Window hardware providers are going).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know what the color gamut is on this? Matte and high res are great, but color gamut is make or break for me. It seems Retina is at 99%, which is really impressive for a laptop.

<comment><USER15> AFAIK gamut can not be represented as a percentage. Where are you getting that info?

<comment><USER14> Really? I've always seen it as a percentage of colors that can be displayed (sRGB). Of course, a graph would be better, but according to Dell, my U2410 has 110% color gamut and it looks pretty amazing to me.

As for the Retina, I may have to take that back. First article claims the Retina has 99% vs. 71% for the previous generation:

[http://cdtobie.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/color-gamut-of- retin...](http://cdtobie.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/color-gamut-of-retina- display-macbook-pro/)

But Anandtech says it got worse (67%):

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook- pro-w...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with- retina-display-review/5)

I'm assuming calibration has something to do with it, or somebody tested it incorrectly or with inferior equipment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As I've decided not to buy another apple laptop, I welcome this news.</comment>


Show HN: I was curious to see what's happening around me, and I created an app - <AUTHOR> http://theyhq.com/ICU/

<comment><USER2> Looks like you have recreated one of the most notorious failures in the recent history of venture capital: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs)

I don't think Color failed because of the idea. Their marketing was flawed, and they were trying to create a social network. So are you. I think they eventually tacked their service on top of Facebook, which might be a good idea. I haven't really thought it through.

What's going to be your hook for getting users? I'm assuming the app isn't very useful unless other people are on it, right? Or do you have content from somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback.

Some peoples told me about Color, but we are a bit different. We don't want to include social stuff like messaging between authors and comments. Keep the app simple, and see what users wants.

We have a new feature is coming. Imagine you are an event hoster, you create an event on ICU and you get an ICU link, people take picture with the app on your event, and in live you will see all the pictures on the link. The cool thing is that peoples would like to retrieve their photos, so they need to have ICU installed.

You're right if nobody is around you, the app isn't very useful. We have couple of cities like Montreal, NYC and Paris.

<comment><USER2> > Imagine you are an event hoster, you create an event on ICU and you get an > ICU link, people take picture with the app on your event, and in live you > will see all the pictures on the link.

I spent a year working on a startup doing exactly that. We failed.

The problem we ran into is that it's cool, but Twitter (and others) already accomplish the same thing with hashtags. People just don't like to add new channels to their everyday lives.

Beyond that, it was impossible (for us) to monetize, even though we had connections to creative agencies and large companies that were marketing events. The problem is that we weren't reducing pain points or adding operational efficiency, and thus paying us was never urgent. Meetings would get pushed off by weeks at a time, and it was hard to get anyone to make concrete moves forward.

To give you an idea of what we were experiencing, imagine that you're selling your car. Which is a higher priority, getting a scratch fixed or having it waxed?

It's very possible that you'll make your money back from the waxing when you're able to sell it for more money, but that's only a possibility. You're going to first spend your money on the repairs and then on the appearance. For the business world, increasing operational efficiency is like the repair, while marketing/social media is like the appearance.

People in the business world just don't like to pay out for something that MIGHT have ROI. That's why creative budgets are some of the first to get crunched in a recession.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice feedback about your experience and thank you for it. Are you guys stop your app ? or is still live ?

<comment><USER2> We did a prototype app and discovered that it's almost impossible to get anyone to download an app. User acquisition costs for apps are astronomical. I've been on a B2B kick for a few years, so I haven't seen recent stats, but it's brutal.

We then moved to being purely social-network driven. There are a bunch of people in this space. Users submit photos on social media using unique hashtags or whatever, and there's a nice organic sharing effect.

That product (which, again, is available cheaply from various companies now) is great. Every event organizer should use it, since most events, including weddings, will try to have a unique hashtag these days. Why not harness all that content that people are posting?

Our service also supported republishing via a JavaScript and/or REST API, so the content could be used elsewhere.

All in all, it was a useful, simple product. The problem was that ideas (or even finished products) don't mean anything if you can't get some early, paying clients. We had a co-founder who had lots of connections to social- media executives, but he just couldn't sell.

The software (native and web versions) now exist only as private repos on Github.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact, if you have users and events why you would like to sell it to an investors ?

Keep it like that and start iterate on it as people post feedbacks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a neat idea, but I hope you've done some sort of privacy assessment on the concept. If I understand the app right, you share with everyone, but only if they are within a 1 mile radius of you. Maybe I'm being oversensitive, but when I see the picture of the baby or the girl in the club I think that is exposing too much information to potentially unsavory characters -- and they will be within a mile of the subject.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for your feedback.

Almost right cause your pictures not following you, but they stay where them were taken. So you will see only pictures of clubbing in zone of clubbing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome concept. I've seen an other app top that's trying to do almost the same lately, roundio.com. It's based on a map, though, but the concepts of nearby activity is very similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

I saw the same as you, but we are a bit different and we ask people to describe what they see with this sentence : "What do you see ?" It seems to create great new content.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to fix a broken attention span? - <AUTHOR> Spending all my time on the PC hasn't done my attention span any good. How do you go on about recovering said? <comment><USER2> The answer is right in your first seven words. Nobody said it was easy.</comment>


Do We Want to Live Without the Post Office? - <AUTHOR> https://classic.esquire.com/article/2013/2/1/do-we-really-want-to-live-without-the-post-office <comment><USER2> Yeah because we can't stand job security why should we allow people on their 50s to keep working when the new trend is to force anyone over 45 to be starved to death even if they're the former director of Disney Imagineering ultimately we hate workers but especially older ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> I live in a big city and would see virtually zero impacts. I'd still prefer to keep the USPS.

But the push to privatize it isn't coming from people like me. It's coming from conservative voters who skew rural.

If they want to privatize it I say just give them what they want.</comment>


The Sound of Silence – Jessica Livingston - <AUTHOR> https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence <comment><USER2> Not sharing your opinion is indeed the easiest way to avoid criticism. Jessica Livingston and PG shouldn't worry too much. The world can manage without their insights if they'd prefer to keep their thoughts to themselves.</comment>


Ask HN: How to self-learn ML/AI? - <AUTHOR> since this could have various responses depending on different backgrounds I'll give my particular case but feel free to share advanced resources, it may help others.
I studied economics for a while, have very little experience with a few programming languages and prefer learning by doing, so in a perfect world I'd rather start with the resources/tools that will let me start building small things asap and go from there.
thanks and have a good weekend! <comment><USER2> I think this js implementation of ML to conquer Flappy Bird is a good starting point. Learn by coding and working on projects, not by reading, I would say.

[https://xviniette.github.io/FlappyLearning/](https://xviniette.github.io/FlappyLearning/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/09/25/earths-water-is-older-than-the-sun/#.VCSWtSldUnR <comment><USER2> Woah, think of the impact this has on homeopathy! With water having memory, that memory goes back to older than our sun.

<comment><USER3> Cue a hunt for the oldest water on the planet, market it as "Interstellar Miracle Cure!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This greatly increases my expectations of life on other planets if true.

<comment><USER5> Water is one of zillions of elements that need to get together for there to be life. Expectations increasing? Yes. Greatly? :)

<comment><USER6> It's a big one though. You also need a planet with a suitable temperature. Beyond that most of the other stuff seems pretty much everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always wondered what percentage of water molecules on the earth have always been water molecules, i.e. since they became H20 how many have been separated by chemical processes and later recombined back into water. How you estimate that is beyond me.

<comment><USER8> How you estimate it is the third paragraph of the submission: compare the ratios of hydrogen to deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron).

<comment><USER9> No, that's how you estimate something completely different - the age of the hydrogen atoms that make up the water.

I believe that the GP's point is something like this: It says "the water is older than the sun", but what it really means is " _the hydrogen atoms in the water_ are older than the sun".

<comment><USER8> The subsequent paragraphs explain how they go from "age of hydrogen atoms" to "age of the water." If you want more detail than is in the article (which is understandable), then you'll have to refer to the published paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Despite the media fanfare ([http://www.pressreader.com/bookmark/7WFY0PDVE4Z/TextView](http://www.pressreader.com/bookmark/7WFY0PDVE4Z/TextView)), I have some reservations giving credibility to a single model-generated study. Not to say it's groundless, but I wouldn't jump to conclusions just yet.

</comment><comment><USER11> the sun's hydrogen is older than the sun. boom.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the title of the article is kind of shitty, and obvious. All elements in the solar systems (except those being formed in the sun's core) are older than the sun, probably the result of the explosion of some much older stars.

But what the article is really trying to say, is that it's "normal" that our solar system has (this much) water.

 _> If our solar system's formation was typical, cosmically speaking, then the findings imply that interstellar ices are in healthy supply for all up-and- coming planetary systems. And since all life we know of depends on water, that news improves the odds that other planetary systems have what it takes to support life._

<comment><USER13> > _All elements in the solar systems (except those being formed in the sun 's > core) are older than the sun, probably the result of the explosion of some > much older stars._

Don't forget those trace amounts of elements produced by our pathetic attempts at creating a fusion reactor on Earth! And all the material created by natural fission decay of fissile materials in the Earth's crust and elsewhere...

The "probably" is unnecessary. Until the sun explodes and expels the core of "new material" that it's created by fusion inside of it, ALL the non-hydrogen material in the solar system can be said to have resulted from the explosion of some much older star.

And given that our Sun is (thankfully) still in the hydrogen-burning phase of the main sequence, even if it did explode all we'd get for it is Helium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article. Now that I think of it, how comes that in all the (known) universe we have ice or ice blocks (such as comets)? Where from does it originates?

<comment><USER15> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre)

;)

<comment><USER14> Fascinating theory regarding the ice, however, regarding the formation:

"According to the idea, the solar system had its origin in a gigantic star into which a smaller, dead, waterlogged star fell. This impact caused a huge explosion which flung fragments of the smaller star out into interstellar space where the water condensed and froze into giant blocks of ice. A ring of such blocks formed, which we now call the Milky Way, as well as a number of solar systems among which was our own, but with many more planets than currently exist."

maybe too far fetched? If it was like that we would have already spotted similar galactic formations outside of the Milky Way

<comment><USER16> Well obviously if we had, their discovery would have been suppressed by "reactionary astronomers". ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is hard to believe but it seems to be true. Also, it ignites another discussion; Are we alone or do we have some company in this universe.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is not surprising at all. What would the alternative be? The protoplantary disk that became the Solar System contained free hydrogen and free oxygen but no compound thereof? That's sounds unlikely.

Water forms naturally given enough hydrogen and oxygen at a wide range of temperatures. Since hydrogen is everywhere, and since main-sequence stars produce tons of oxygen via fusion, there's probably a lot of water floating around in the universe. When a nebula collapses into a protoplanetary disk, the increased density makes it even more likely that gas molecules will meet one another and form compounds.

<comment><USER19> Water is indeed pervasive throughout the universe. Here's a pretty interesting and relevant article from NASA:

[http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe2011072...](http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe20110722.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I came to say that this changes everything since I thought the light came first. Still seemed relevant. (not trolling)

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

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.

<comment><USER21> Light was created on the first day, but the Sun was created on the fourth. And Genesis presents the Universe's primordial state as being just a watery mass, so water existed before both.

Fun fact: Proverbs 8 identifies Wisdom as the first of God's works, hence the Judeo-Christian tradition of identifying Wisdom with light. [http://www.esvbible.org/Proverbs+8/](http://www.esvbible.org/Proverbs+8/)

The New Testament also identifies Jesus as both Wisdom and Light, despite Wisdom being female in Proverbs.

<comment><USER22> The last one, you are trying to find contradiction where there is none.

<comment><USER23> Among serious Christian circles it would be phrased as "learning that first century Jewish culture was different from ours and didn't react the same to certain concepts". They didn't see it as at all weird to identify Jesus with wisdom -- not because they were idiots or missed a blatant contradiction, but simply because they didn't have the same specific hangups we do. Likewise, Jesus identifying as a "hen gathering her chicks" in Matthew 23 wasn't a gender _faux-pas_.

<comment><USER24> It's not a gender faux-pas now either in 99% of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> water on earth came from meteors and some of these meteors could have been older than sun

</comment><comment><USER26> Here is a fun fact: only elements up to iron are produced as a result of fission. The rest, including elements essential to human life, elements in your body, are only produced through fusion. Fusion is known to only occur in stars. You are stars.

<comment><USER27> Yes,except it's the other way round. Fusion in normal stars makes elements up to iron. Only supernovae create the rest of the elements.

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

<comment><USER28> It says that Lithium, Beryllium and Boron are made by cosmic rays.

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

This is crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As someone interested in science, I was really excited to read the headline and see the HN discussion. As a Christian I was surprised and kind of creeped out to see the "so much for the Bible" talk. I feel like a Japanese person must feel when an American tries to get them to laugh at jokes. But I guess in a way it's nice though that nobody ever brings up the sort of beyond- Religion-101 topics that actually challenge my faith.

Edit: Why all the downvotes? I'm saying I'd prefer we let science be science, without the didactic religion talk, pro or con.

<comment><USER30> At the time of writing there is only 1 parent comment poking fun at the bible. Let's not get too delicate here.

<comment><USER29> Only one parent comment sure, but it was the second comment on the page at the time, and is currently the longest thread on the page. Nothing wrong with calling it out.

<comment><USER23> that "longest thread" includes some moderately enlightening comments which are not at all anti-religion, but are challenging in a good way.

.

disclosure: I wrote some of them ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Tale of a 'Normal' Person: A Reality Check - <AUTHOR> http://www.socialbias.com/the-tale-of-a-normal-person-a-reality-check/

<comment><USER2> I felt Tivo made it mainstream when I overheard a kid in the suburbs ask their daddy why they couldn't pause the movie.

I usually keep a tab open to summize (my city as search term), and I've been noticing a lot more 'normal' people talking about life as opposed to technology. Also, notice that most of them have less than 100 followers (as opposed to the pied piper Scobelizer-types 5k+ followers and Scobelizer- wannabees 1k+ followers). It would be interesting to see the distribution of followers on Twitter. My hunch is that as Twitter goes more mainstream there will be more normal people (with 20-30 followers).

</comment><comment><USER3> This was my thinking 2004-2007 and was my biggest mistake. Targeting late adopters has not proven to be a successful strategy.

<http://friendfeed.com/e/41230d54-d425-07c8-38a3-4bada029126b>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.

<comment><USER4> this is key. Look at Google. they target technical types, but for joe average, their product is just as usable as the compitition, who explicitly targets the average user.

Joe average is going to have a technical person setup his computer- If that technical person, say, makes firefox the default browser, assuming it mostly works, joe average is going to use firefox. This might also be why OSX is doing so much better than previous macOS versions. Whenever a non-technical person asks me for a laptop reccomendation, I tell them to get a mac, in part because I know they might come to me for help (and I'll be damned if I start rooting around in a windows box that isn't properly backed up. Reboot, reboot, then format and reinstall, I say.)

the other side of this is that it needs to work for joe average... this is why Linux on the desktop took so long to take off (it looks like it's getting a toehold in the low-end- by 'just working' for simple tasks) even now, linux on the desktop only 'just works' if you don't need commercial software.

so yeah, you must target the early adoptors, but targeting the early adoptors alone is not enough. You must make it usable for the average person.

(which is funny, because I've put almost zero effort into the usability of my product. I don't have a support budget, so if you don't know UNIX well, eh, for now I'm not the best product for you.)

<comment><USER5> "Look at Google. they target technical types, but for joe average, their product is just as usable as the compitition, who explicitly targets the average user."

Do you mean search? Its not the case that yahoo or live search targets only at average ppl. It very well targets you and me too. On the other hand with Gmail, it targets only at savvy ppl. People are not used to conversations or tagging or archiving.

<comment><USER6> Aside from the tags-and-filters system, none of that is a massive shift from what people already do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I once tried to imagine what one of those people was thinking and i felt a strong vacuum in the right part of mi brain. I don't know if anyone of you was ever asked himself what makes these people different. Weren't we the different ones? These people are boring, they live in their own worlds. Thats probably exactly what they think of us :D We understand nerds problems because we are nerds and these problems are our own. But we don't understand normal peoples problems, because they are not our problems. Our best shot is at the common stuff(communication is the most common) In this case we are trapped. We can search for ordinary peoples problems and solve them with software, but those are not our problems and we don't understand them. How are we to know if we are not solving it wrongly? Or if we are solving a completely different problem in a really messed up way? So here is my best shot at it. Get a boring job, get married, have kids and get stupid. Have problems and then get smart again, get divorced and start working to solve the problem. Sounds ridiculous right? :D Boring people not always have boring problems, but they can seem boring if you don't understand them. Im sure average Joe thinks solving the problem with multi-core processors is boring too.

<comment><USER8> If you have a way to make multi-core processors improve the speed of day-to- day tasks, then all the "average Joe" has to know if that it makes his computer faster. And because that's something that he _does_ care about, you have a $100 million idea.

It's absurd to think that there are no real-world problems which have interesting solutions. To say that you can't understand what more "average" people would find useful is not an assertion of your superior intelligence, just an assertion that you're not particularly perceptive or curious.

<comment><USER7> Upon hearing this i was enlightened.

<comment><USER8> I think that only happens once the squirrels start bringing you food while you're under the tree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure I agree with this description. In my experience, there are quite a lot of people sharing photos online. There are very few people willing to pay for software (that is not already bundled with their hardware).

</comment><comment><USER10> "As it turns out, there is something special about them — they're normal people, doing normal things."

No, they're people in stock art doing absolutely nothing but standing around and looking stupid.

<comment><USER11> Yes. But can you find a better i.e. more normal photography?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "They believe that a wild horde of malcontented hackers are watching their every move in unchartered internet waters. . This is most conspicuously manifested in their distrust of giving their credit card information over a webform."

Though something like 5% of them will click any link in any email that has either "PayPal" or a misspelling of "Viagra" in it and enter their social security number, mother's maiden, credit card number, address, and waist/inseam sizes.

</comment><comment><USER13> is it just me or do these guys' post seem to reek of quite a bit of arrogance?

Great that they're 'making something people want' but their posts are generally condescending -- stop the incessant chatter and show off this amazing product you've built for 'normal' people that is going to change the world and be uber-profitable.

<comment><USER14> It might just be you. This post seems pretty clearly to be from someone who get Geoffrey A. Moore's thesis in "Crossing the Chasm" - there are a VAST number of consumers out there that are NOT techie/early adopters and don't understand things in the way that we techie/early adopters do. If you don't plan on how to include that segment, then your startup is in trouble.

<comment><USER2> Flip Video: 13 percent of the camcorder market

<comment><USER15> The Flip is a fantastic example. We need something like that for digital cameras.

<comment><USER16> I agree. I am trying to find a dead simple digital camera for my parents (both on their 60s), that also takes some good quality pictures.

Imposible to find, and it seems that newer versions just cram more features into, things that my parents will never be able to figure out, or use them properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Normal", in this sense just describes an imaginary HCD pseudo-human. There is no such thing. There was once a time when normal people didn't have computers, cell-phones, tv's, radios, cars, refrigerators... you get the idea.

Don't fear the niche, or the early adopter. Today's weird geek toy might be tomorrow's necessity.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is the exact audience and mindset we are using in designing our product.

If you're young (like me), another way to think of this would be to ask yourself "why would my parents use my product? How can I make it easy and intuitive for them?"

</comment><comment><USER19> This describes almost everyone I know. (Maybe that's why I spend time here).

OP, however, never mentions the most important thing about this demographic: _they just want it to work_.

They expect things to work intuitively right out of the box. They don't want to install any add-ons, extensions, or downloads. And they don't want to have to get an education just to try something new.

The gas pedal is always on the right and when you enter a room, flip the toggle switch up to get light.

So why doesn't your web app work like that? If it doesn't work right with the browser and resolution they got when they bought their computer at Office Depot, if they have to wait for Flash, or they don't know what it is, they'll leave and never come back.

This is the 80% in the middle of the bell curve, and they _do_ have money to spend. Pay attention.

<comment><USER20> _They expect things to work intuitively right out of the box_

20% or so of mobile handsets are returned to the shop. Rarely are they defective but just too difficult to use correctly. (The percentage varies by handset, I can't find the article I learnt this from at the moment)

<comment><USER21> I remember that stat and I can believe it. The interfaces on those cell phones sucks :S

<comment><USER15> I've got a bog-standard cell phone (Razr) and _I_ still get tripped up by the interface. I hate it!

<comment><USER22> Don't get carried away now. Razr is shit. Most other cellphones aren't _that_ bad.

<comment><USER23> Yes they are. I can't think of a phone that I've actively liked beyond the iPhone. Voyager? Not even close. And apparently people think that's a good phone, too.

<comment><USER24> The bar for a good cell phone is vary low. I really liked my SCH-A990 because it worked well as a phone and you could use it as a 3MP camera but while it was better than average its interface sucked.

To take a picture you open the phone, rotate the display, close it an it looks like a normal digital camera with a 2 inch LCD on the back and a nice large button on the top right to take photos. Now all you need to open the shutter your ready to take pictures.

But, while that button takes photo's with a short click, by holding it down you can go to movie mode and take movies. So then if you did a short click that same button wold start and stop taking movies or if you held it down again it would go back to pictures. Who on earth thought that up? Nobody I handed the camera to knew how to work it without messing it up several times. But, most of them still thought it was a _Great_ cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Problem is, a lot of techies aren't "normal" (in the sense outlined in the article) and they've been following the scratch-your-own-itch advice.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen I went for a "normal" market, for all "normal" in the domain "speaks Spanish, but no English."

</comment><comment><USER26> Our target market is the people you described. I'll let you know how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think "normal people" are as anti-Apple as this post makes them to be. Also, "normal people" are certainly much less tech-phobic than they were, say, 15 years ago.</comment>


2017 JavaScript Rising Stars - <AUTHOR> https://risingstars.js.org/2017/en/ <comment><USER2> It's a bit unfortunate that Elm will always be left out of lists like this.

Yes it's a different language that compiles to JavaScript, but unlike other languages that do this, Elm exists solely to excel at front-end web development.

Ironically, that Redux and React equivalents are some of the "batteries included" in Elm can make it harder to pitch because at first it seems like you'd have to add that stuff in.

<comment><USER3> They included purescript (compilers), so why not elm, which has orders of magnitude more users?

<comment><USER4> Do you have anything to back up the assertion that it has orders of magnitude more users?

I'm a fan of elm, but but overall population of functional programmers is quite small, so I wouldn't be shocked of Elm, PureScript, and Reason had similar populations of developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Super anecdotal / off topic but still fun. In 2014 I emailed with a guy who worked at Google to take over control of a domain he wasn't using. All was well and he gave me access. I checked his Github project. Some tiny SPA framework with three examples and a handful of github stars. Looked nice. Fast forward three years.

Over 2017 me and my (former) small dev team embraced Vue.js, built a non trivial checkout flow and visited the first Vue.js Conf Poland. I'm neck deep in Vue for other projects.

That guy in 2014 was of course Evan You, creator of Vue.js, and I guess I bought the domain for one one of the candidate names for Vue.

<comment><USER6> Another anecdote. I have been working on a large mobile game in Unity for over 3 years. I need to write a tool to manage the virtual (game) item database so we could add content to the game without updating the app. I could build this app with any environment I wanted (desktop or web, any language/framework).

I chose to make a desktop app with Electron and Vue and Element UI without having any experience with any of those and hardly any JS experience. I had a full working app that synced with a server and allowed multi-user editing with auto updates in under 3 months.

Shared libraries and projects are definitely accelerating developers' abilities to quickly build things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm, this feels very misleading. What is the correlation between Github stars and real world usage? This is not statistics, it's just 1 variable.. It almost feels like Vue.js is going to take over React just because it received more Github stars? I use React already for years, never gave it a star on Github, and I think many with me.

<comment><USER8> Stars are pretty useless for what they wanted to measure. Real-world data paints a different picture [http://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue- vs-@angular...](http://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue- vs-@angular/core)

Even searching Github for 'import React from 'react' and 'import Vue from 'vue' results in similar percentages. Roughly 7-8 million projects in Github on React, under a million on Vue.

Despite the hype, Vue has been mostly a flat over the last 2 years with a slight upward bend, but only to the point where it begins to catch up with the old Angular 1.x.

<comment><USER9> From your link, in the last year alone Vue has had approximately a 5-fold increase in the number of downloads.

Describing this trend as "mostly flat with a slight upward bend." is very misleading.

<comment><USER8> See it in context. The fastest growing framework on npm right now for instance is Preact (as per official report posted by Lauri Voss last week), but Preacts userbase is so small that it could grow hundredfold with insane growth rates percentually without scratching a competitor. That also applies to Vue. React gets more users in a week than Vue in its entire lifespan.

Go 2 years back on that page and you see a clearer picture, yes it did grow, but relatively contained compared to its competitors, specifically React.

And is it any wonder to anyone? I really ask myself. Would you go back to a stryingly typed templating framework with a complex api and ever changing ruleset, reliant on dependency injection and all the other stuff we went through with Angular? I don't think anyone would. It rather looks like Vue is catching the last remaining Angular 1.x refugees, but there isn't an ever increasing supply of those.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, Vue did embrace JSX in it's 2.0 release. I think Vue is leaps and bounds ahead of Angular in elegance and usability. I like Vue, I just don't think it has the ecosystem that React has. Maybe it will catch up eventually.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it _needs_ the ecosystem React has. It has all of the components you need to build excellent software - great debugging experiences, testing, routing, state management. At that point it doesn't really matter all that much what else you've got.

<comment><USER8> Honestly that is like saying Windows Phone doesn't need the apps.

React has a self sufficient cross platform eco system. I don't think people using primarily web frameworks even realize the implications of that yet. React works outside of the browser, and not just natively on mobile but literally everywhere. Imagine you use React as you always would to make a native command line application ([https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react- blessed](https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed)), but now you want to have a store or move things around, so you `npm install react-redux react- motion` and you just apply it ([https://github.com/gaearon/react-blessed-hot- motion](https://github.com/gaearon/react-blessed-hot-motion)). Look at the code and try to picture the overhead if you had to do this in C++.

Being able to transfer code and knowledge, and seeing new renderers pop up for the wildest platforms each day, as well as official renderers made by big vendors ([https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native- windows](https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows)), the idea of a web-bound Angular-like framework seems odd in 2018. I wouldn't expect Vue to get the same kind of popularity without at least competing or doing something new.

<comment><USER11> Vue has a bigger ecosystem than you're thinking.

[https://github.com/lyonlai/blessed-vue](https://github.com/lyonlai/blessed- vue)

Either way, it's not such an issue. It's not hard to build on React when you want react and Vue when you want vue. They're easy to pick up the concepts on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've had some questions on how libraries were selected. Basically, they were manually added and tagged on [http://bestof.js.org](http://bestof.js.org), and we then reused the data to build the Rising Stars rankings.

So if you see a library missing, it could be because we didn't know about it and didn't add it to the database, or maybe tagged it in a way that excluded it from a specific category. Feedback welcome!

<comment><USER13> Hey Sacha, we both spoke at NordicJS where we met. You mentioned your survey found a bunch of stats on my library's growth, and I know it has gone up by +3K in 2017 (total of 7K+ now), yet it seems unfortunately left out because gun isn't "tagged" as anything more than a database, not even a NodeJS framework (when it is, at least as much as Feathers is).

30+ projects were highlighted with less than 3K+ increase in stars, so it is just frustrating/disheartening to see mine left out. :/ Any chance there could be a "Everything Else" category or adding "NodeJS Framework" as a tag to us?

<comment><USER12> Hey, sorry about that! It looks like we do have Gun in the BestOfJS db, so we could add it. Like you said the only problem is figuring out in which category…

<comment><USER13> Thanks, and great job by the way. Shooting you an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article mentions that Ava differs from Jest because of its focus on speed. Just figured I'd mention we are in the process of migrating from Ava to Jest, and we gained a 5x speedup in running our entire suite.

<comment><USER5> I never understood the Ava speed claim. Always was much slower than either Mocha or Jest.

<comment><USER15> I don't know for sure, but I think Ava embraced testing concurrently before the other testing frameworks did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somewhat predictably, the (static, non-interactive) page took about 30 seconds to load, thanks to all the Javascript.

<comment><USER17> Nope, javascript is less than 1/4 of this page, time for the "above the fold" render for me (on standard laptop + broadband) is under 0.5 seconds.

Please examine other possible causes for a 30 second page load, unless you're running on an 1st gen raspberry pi, 56k modem and a browser with a showstoppingly bad js engine.

EDIT, using chrome's dev tools I tried loading with the "slow 3g" preset, rendering of useful textual + hyperlink content took under 10 seconds, images slowly came in after that over a longer period.

<comment><USER18> > using chrome's dev tools I tried loading with the "slow 3g" preset, > rendering of useful textual + hyperlink content took under 10 seconds, > images slowly came in after that over a longer period.

That is not an achievement.

<comment><USER17> On a page crammed full of images its alright, they're going to be slowing down the loading of everything.

If it were a plain text document and it was only JS loading and parsing that slowed it down then it would indeed be embarrassing.

My response is to the person asserting that JS is the reason this page is slow. I'm not making a statement that this is the greatest and fastest loading page on earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I actually find this very informative, it gives a good overview of the js landscape right now. I'm however perplexed as to why the back button doesn't work, which makes navigation really hard particularly annoying on android mobile as pressing back ends up closing the browser. It uses react, so I thought that was pretty much supported out of the box. Any idea?

<comment><USER20> Where is the category for Angular ecosystem?

<comment><USER21> Where is the category for Ember.js ecosystem. It is actually huge and amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> First I'd heard of dva [1] (#6 in the frameworks section), interesting that it eases use of redux-saga as well as the usual abstractions over redux. redux- saga has been something I've avoided after initial evaluation (I also avoid redux unless absolutely necessary), but might take a second look with this. Hope the project gets some more English translations!

[https://github.com/dvajs/dva/issues/1#issuecomment-334334184](https://github.com/dvajs/dva/issues/1#issuecomment-334334184)

<comment><USER23> Ditto with Ant Design (#14 on most popular projects) where most of their community is Chinese: [https://github.com/ant-design/ant- design/issues](https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues). Their UI framework is the most comprehensive I have seen.

I am sure english will remain the dominant language for a while but I wonder if it makes sense to start learning new (human) languages just to open up the number of communities you can learn from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is Polymer left out of frameworks top 10? It has 18k stars and should be No. 3...

[https://github.com/polymer/polymer](https://github.com/polymer/polymer) [https://risingstars.js.org/2017/en/#section- framework](https://risingstars.js.org/2017/en/#section-framework)

<comment><USER25> First of all, that is "stars added in that year", not "stars total".

Secondly, shouldn't the fact that that would have made Polymer #3 given you some thought?

Polymer has ~19k stars total.

React has ~85k stars total.

Vue has ~80k stars total.

AngularJS (v1) has ~58k stars total.

Angular (v2+) has ~32k stars total.

Ember has ~18.6k stars total.

Preact has ~17k stars total.

So Polymer is behind React, Vue, AngularJS and Angular on total stars, having just surpassed Ember. Placing it 3rd in the rising stars list would have placed it before Angular.

I'd think "Polymer is more popular than Angular" would have been pretty newsworthy.

<comment><USER24> Oops, my bad. I guess this is the reality I didn't want to embrace. Everyone reinventing their own "standards".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Note, this ranking is based on number of new GitHub stars in 2017. Vue.js currently has ~79k stars and, number two on the list, React has ~85k stars. Vue.js is poised to surpass React this year in number of GitHub stars. Whatever that is worth.

It's great to see Vue.js getting so much love. I've been extolling it's virtue on HN and elsewhere for years now. The fact that it has gained so much traction and is _not_ the baby of one of the big Internet megacorps is a testament to it's genuine quality as a frontend Web framework. After many devs finally realized that Angular sucked even though, or especially because, it was backed by Google, it was sad to see the same people jump on to the React bandwagon, in a large part, because it was backed by Facebook. There are legitimate reasons for liking React but a lot of its adoption has been due to FOMO. Vue.js stands on its own.

</comment><comment><USER27> Michael speaking, from Best of JavaScript project. One year ago, when "JavaScript Rising Stars 2016" was published, the topic was hot on HackerNews, there were a lot of questions about the data. What was compiled here is only the variation of the numbers of stars on GitHub, over the span of one year. Of course it's just one metrics we picked, but we hope it will give you a good understanding of what was the JavaScript landscape in 2017.

</comment><comment><USER28> ClojureScript surpassed CoffeeScript. That has to be a milestone, or some end of an era and the beginning of a new one, or something along those lines.

</comment><comment><USER29> After comparing react vs vue.js a _lot_ i finally decided to use React instead, for the long run. The real reason is not technical, but that I'm concerned about hit-by-a-bus-factor. Life is too short to bet on it.

I hope the big guns like Alibaba or someone else acquire Vue.js and make it a real competitor to React.

<comment><USER11> There's plenty of community, it's just well-driven by Evan. I wouldn't be worried about bugs going unfixed if Evan weren't on the project anymore.

<comment><USER29> believe so, another point is that React Native seems really nice, that Weex for Vue.js seems a lot weaker, ideally with React you will be easier to leverage it with React Native.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Most promising project for larger enterprise I discovered in 2017:

Single SPA - a Javascript Meta Framework [https://github.com/CanopyTax/single- spa](https://github.com/CanopyTax/single-spa)

 _> >Use multiple frameworks on the same page without refreshing the page (React, AngularJS, Angular, Ember, or whatever you're using)_ _> >Write code using a new framework, without rewriting your existing app_ _> >Lazy load code for improved initial load time._

Unfortunately also missing in lists like this one.

</comment><comment><USER3> > You want to add new features to the language... such as "type checking".

Feel free to put that in scare quotes, as if you can barely register its existence! In fact, that whole enterprise is probably misguided and full of falsehoods, anyways, having witnessed the lies and attacks, first hand, for years! Better nip it in the bud now, while you still can!

<comment><USER31> _> scare quotes_

I don't think the author had malicious intent.

Unfortunately, we use quote marks for at least 2 different meanings:

(1) <scare_quote>type checking</scare_quote> ... as dismissive sarcasm

(2) <term_of_art_quote>type checking</term_of_art_quote> ... as a delimiters for industry vocabulary

Based on all the other uses of quotes in the blog post, he's using it as (2) terms of art. Some style guides suggest using _italics_ instead of quotes for _terms of art_ but a nice property of "quotes" is that it survives copy & paste into plain text files.

<comment><USER3> Ah i see.. my mistake, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great for vue, my favorite frontend framework for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER33> From the Vue.js information page on that site, 'The concept of single-file component that includes template, logic and styles in a single file .vue file is really nice.'

NO IT IS NOT!

<comment><USER5> Instead of shouting, could you give some pro's and cons you have encountered using Vue single file components?</comment></comment>


Google deletes artist's blog, a decade of his work - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-blog/ <comment><USER2> From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1]

I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper...](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper_fears_censorship_as_google_erases/d5da89a)

<comment><USER3> It's still problematic, even if the work was distasteful or even illegal. There was no process involved, no chance for appeal, no explanation of the charges that precipitated it. If it truly is illegal materials that violate laws, then deleting it is deleting evidence and helping cover up crimes. If it was art that borders on distasteful to some then google is deciding taste and public values with private algorithms.

I'm not sure what the right thing is here. To require any publishing platform to retain works they decide violates their TOS seems like a big burden. But we live in a world where publishing seemingly _requires_ the cooperation the private sector. If not google, at very least a hosting company of some kind. If we want the allow social norms to change we can't stifle everything that falls outside of the norm.

<comment><USER4> But possession of child pornography is what's illegal. They very well may have reported the owner of the blog to the authorities but, in the mean time, google was both possessing and distributing the material.

It's not that it's violating their TOS, it's that Google thought they may have been violating the law.

EDIT: At least if that's what the content was.

<comment><USER5> From the OP who said:

> "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia > is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)."

Because of the words 'book' and 'writing', I have the impression that everything there is written text and no certainly no pictures.

This puts it in a nebulous position, at least in the USA.

Dunlop v. U.S., 165 U.S. 486 (1897), ended up ruling that text-only content can be deemed obscene and being text-only is not a reason to get total 1st amendment protection. However later cases, decided there was a division between erotica and obscene material, which is essentially decided on a case- by-case basis subjectively.

When it comes to things such as obscenity, its not really enough to go by our 'feelings' and intuition on the matter.

For instance, would you believe the US is a fully functioning, 1st world democracy, where sex toys are illegal (Alabama, upheld by State Supreme court and enforced as recently as 2009)?

To me, personally, anything that comes entirely from someones fanciful imagination, no matter how distasteful, should not be considered illegal unless it directly results in the harm of another individual.

<comment><USER6> So in the US (and Japan and only a handful of other countries), fictional depictions of under age or incestual content isn't illegal (per the court case you referenced above), so long as you're not using real people to act it out.

This doesn't hold true for ... most of the rest of the planet. In the UK a man was put in jail for Simpsons porn, something that's legal in the US (although potentially a trademark violation; unless you can argue it's satire).

In Cooper's home country of France, fictional depictions are actually illegal (books like Lolita are banned).

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

But as already stated, even if legality wasn't the issue, yes they are still a private company and can do what they want. The article mentions this and there really needs to be an effort to educate people that they need multiple backups, not just on-line, but on their own media.

<comment><USER7> No, Lolita by Nabokov is not banned in France. I saw this book myself in a French library a few years ago. And according to French wikipedia ([https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Les_traductions_fran.C3...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Les_traductions_fran.C3.A7aises)), a new French translation was published in 2001.

<comment><USER8> It's been a while since I've read _Lolita_. If my memory serves me correctly, the novel contains no depictions of sex or sexual intimacy.

Amazing work of literature, by the way.

<comment><USER9> That's incorrect. For example, the scene where HH climaxes with Dolly on his lap.

(I don't think Lolita should be banned anywhere. It's not a pro-pedophilia artwork.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice.

But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication.

That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect.

The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I used to use gmail (with email@example.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since 2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain.

(Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens. I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.)

Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need meta-domains that can't be transferred, that _are_ our identity, but I don't know how that would be implemented.

I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list.

Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is warranted by the importance of your communication.

<comment><USER11> Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies.

Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.

Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication.

I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication.

I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.

<comment><USER12> Hm, I've spoken to gmail's lead developer for imap many times over the years and never detected even a hint of hostility. What have I missed?

<comment><USER12> I'll elaborate a little.

The impression I have formed is that gmail will have whatever features google's gmail-for-businesses product needs. If a considerable percentage of customers (ie. the ones who pay per month and user) use a particular feature, then that feature stays and is maintained.

<comment><USER13> Does not the ol' Don't-Be-Evil corporation owe it to society to maintain features that support the common good?

I know from my experience in hwops that plenty of people on the corp domain DO believe that they are working towards a better world--and that making more money will only accelerate progress towards that goal.

The question is: are they wrong? Has Google lost its way?

Let's look not just at this IMAP issue but also at the OP as we ponder that.

<comment><USER14> XMPP is even better example than IMAP.

<comment><USER12> Rumour had it that they tore down the federation due to an unmanageable spam wave. Something about friend requests from spam puppets. I've never heard details. Has anyone else here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah yes, the "customer support by Internet shaming" strategy, the only approach that appears to work with inexplicable Google takedowns.

<comment><USER16> Seems to be the only approach that works with a lot of companies these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You get the picture.

That correspondence was, and remains, important to me.

Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it?

The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have.

But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want.

From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me.

That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership.

The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.

<comment><USER18> We do have a problem because Facebook and Gmail are huge, and because people are starting to assume the convenience and size of them somehow means Facebook and Gmail should be considered public services and regulated as such.

While I see the same problem you do- that we're all at risk of losing the correspondence and history that we care about, man do I think your reaction is super weird.

Facebook and Gmail are private web sites, and always have been. _You_ are mistaking them for public services, when they are not and never were public services. Your mistake in no way means that laws should change or that Facebook should be required to archive and provide you access in perpetuity. You made a choice, and if you realize now that your choice comes with implications you don't like, you should start correcting that choice yourself. You should collect and gather your digital assets out from Facebook and Gmail, and archive them yourself.

Facebook is not the post office. If you want the post office, use the post office. The post office services cost you money, and Facebook's don't. The post office does not archive your correspondence _at all_ , while Facebook does. The post office delivers physical goods, while Facebook only delivers digital goods. I am just not seeing any reasonable way to conclude that you can treat Facebook like the post office in order to suggest that Facebook be required to provide you what you wish for.

Your language is so strange to me - "That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff". _You_ gave them your stuff. If you don't want them to have it, don't give it to them.

I'm completely lost as to how the laws are unfairly balanced in this situation. I'm normally in favor of all kinds of regulation, but this just seems unreasonable to me to suggest that we should have laws that require Facebook to provide you with permanent archive access. Do you want to pay for that archive access, or are you demanding that the government ensure that Facebook has to pay for it forever? The post office isn't required to keep archives for you, how how does your analogy work here?

<comment><USER17> The utility of Facebook to me is exactly the same as that of the post office. The post office derives value from me by directly charging me for it. Facebook doesn't, but it's not because they asked and I said I won't and so they offered to offer me the utility anyway out of their benevolence. It's because they found a way to have advertisers pay for it on my behalf, in return for me looking at the advertisements of those advertisers. My attention and my presence on Facebook has value, just as my cold, hard cash has value. The reason I'm on Facebook is because it has a utility for me. If it didn't have that utility, I wouldn't be on it, and advertisers wouldn't pay for my being on it. When Facebook unilaterally takes away that utility from me, it feels akin to the post office closing my P.O. Box with my mail still in it.

Facebook and Gmail are private websites. What is privacy we talk about? Ownership? Investment? Is that all there is to it? Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would. Why would the public object at the closing of a private website? After all, they don't own it, so what's in it for them? Whatever is in it for them is what I'm arguing needs to be protected, and not necessarily under Facebook's or Google's terms.

My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute. I receive payments for work I do using PayPal. My ownership of my PayPal account, and hence access to money I've worked for, is directly tied to my Gmail address. If Google can take away my Gmail address, they are, effectively, taking away my PayPal "bank account." Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is "a private website"? I don't think so.

I didn't give Gmail my stuff. They offered to carry my communications between me and those I communicate with. I derive value from it, and so do they. It's a business transaction like any other, even though no money changed hands between them and myself. The world has come to know that David Wanjiru can be found at firstname.lastname@example.com. That arrangement has suited David Wanjiru. That arrangement has also suited Gmail.

The question then is, who owns "firstname.lastname@example.com"? If a prospective employer who's had my CV for three months wishes to talk to me, they'll fire an Email to firstname.lastname@example.com. If my PayPal account becomes compromised, PayPal will send remedial steps of action to email@example.com. When the higher education loans body in my country wants to pursue me for my college student loans, they send Emails to email@example.com.

How then can it be proper that Gmail owns firstname.lastname@example.com, so much so that at the press of a button, firstname.lastname@example.com ceases to exist? And that this is done without any reference whatsoever to this David Wanjiru person?

Do I pay for Gmail and Facebook? No I don't. But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.

If they no longer wish to provide me that service, fine. But they can't block me out at their own will. They can, and the terms of service I agreed to say as much, but that's what I'm saying should change.

I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if I wished to).

Now they offer me unlimited storage (with a few caveats). If they want to revert back to 6MB mailboxes, they can't just unilaterally do so and get rid of my excess. They'd give me a chance to save my stuff, just as they've done in the past when they shut down services like 360 and Geocities. My argument is that the opportunity to save my stuff should be mine by right, not simply because Yahoo has good basic manners.

<comment><USER19> > I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm > asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer > willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they > want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. > When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. > Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, > and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said > 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if I wished to).

There is "Gmail for Work" which does provide some of the guarantees you are looking for. Though none regarding illegal content, as per the laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somewhat relevant [https://xkcd.com/1150/](https://xkcd.com/1150/)

<comment><USER21> Not somewhat, but really, really relevant.

Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation.

And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?

<comment><USER22> This makes me laugh my ass off. This is a bit of a pet peeve I have with people and modern technology. They believe they have a right to use a service even though they're not paying for the usage of the service. Then they turn around shocked and angry when the free service is removed. `Why! why did they do this to me, this is the biggest injustice! How un-professional of them!`.

Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.

<comment><USER23> To be fair, Google's ad dept. wants you to put _everything_ about your digital life into their services, yet nowhere do they warn you about backing your stuff up with the same gusto that they put into getting you to use the service in the first place. It's not quite a "Chad's Garage" scenario.

"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities."

Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The fact that every single comment in this thread amounts to "should have backed up" makes me a little sad. Is this really what we want to expect from companies like Google? Is this acceptable? Is it just a "force of nature" that I should consider beyond the ken of man?

What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think worth having a conversation about.

<comment><USER25> Definitely. My dad, a now-retired programmer, was dealing with an error at his bank in the 80s. It was a bunch of work and frustration. At some point he asked why a thing happened and the rep said, "Oh, the computer just does that."

He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."

I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.

<comment><USER26> >"Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."

I think the angle your father was coming at this was, computers are deterministic. There are lots of times when computers don't act deterministicly, flipped bits for one, also edge cases like Race Conditions etc

<comment><USER27> Flipped bits don't follow any pattern where you can say "oh it does that". Race conditions are the responsibility of the programmers just like anything else programmed in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I found the following cryptic snippet, from the Guardian's coverage of this topic:

 _" He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities."_

I have little idea what the above really means, but it almost sounds like advertising/marketing for prostitution. My best guess at the moment, is that Google considered the above to be a flagrant violation of its rules, and hence, shut down his page immediately.

I can understand if Google considers certain aspects of his page to be unacceptable, but I wish they had notified him of the reason for their decision, and given him a week's time to download all his data and transition to a different website. As someone who relies on gmail/drive very heavily for important documents/correspondence, reading something like this makes me feel quite uneasy.

<comment><USER29> He was taking existing ads for escorts in the wild and critiquing them as satire.

<comment><USER30> Are you sure it is "satire"?

<comment><USER31> Definitely fits the definition: > A literary device of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Humour, irony and exaggeration are often used to aid this.

<comment><USER32> But shouldn't satire be pointed at powerful and not powerless?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Everyone should occasionally use Google Takeout to back up their stuff, but non-tech users don't understand this.

I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger. But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like how comments are handled.

Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a small add-on to my own web properties.

Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.

<comment><USER34> I had no idea Google Takeout existed. Thanks. I backed up my Gmail over IMAP in the past but this looks far easier.

<comment><USER35> I love Takeout. Given how much of our lives is invested into digital platform, I wish every Internet company had something similar to Takeout for user data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscooper- theweaklings.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER36> Ha! Found a copy of the home page at last, cached just yesterday!! For those curious enough, here is the link:

[http://188.8.131.52/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...](http://188.8.131.52/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper- theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&fr=yfp-t-100&ei=UTF-8&u=http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4DJlbOV5E8J:http://www.dennis- cooper.net/%20http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper- theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&icp=1&.intl=in&sig=CCAAR6c4TCWHwpM030gyVw--)

<comment><USER37> Interesting find.

But now I'm really confused. That page still exists as of this minute: [http://www.dennis-cooper.net](http://www.dennis-cooper.net)

The link from the fusion.net story is: [http://denniscooper- theweaklings.blogspot.com/](http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/)

That blog does _not_ exist. So maybe we're talking about two different things?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One click and you have a backup...

[https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout](https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout)

<comment><USER39> The article says they've taken down his email address, so presumably he doesn't have access to that page as well.

<comment><USER40> I think the GP meant to say that you can prevent _future_ damage to some extent through regular backups. When things have already gone wrong, it's too late to start making backups. The cloud is no different from physical media in that regard, even if the data still exists in some data centre, you can't access it any more.

<comment><USER41> I'm not aware of any tool to automate regular backups of cloud services, even though many of them have "download everything" buttons like this now (awesome). That sounds like a thing that should exist.

<comment><USER42> If I could regularly have my computer auto-request a Takeout archive, and then auto-download it when Google notifies my email it's been completed, that'd be a tool I'd enjoy having.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If it's really due to some kind of erotic pictures, then I don't understand why often american companies like Google act like iranian. Is there any laws in USA that allows to punish Google for hosting images of woman nipples? Why both App store and Google play's TOS include sins from Old Testament?

<comment><USER44> I've heard that ad companies don't like to mix ads and boobies but I have no idea why.

<comment><USER45> I'm guessing because associating your product with porn works like associating it with charity in reverse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Friendly reminder that your stuff is not "backed up" in the cloud unless you have a local copy. Otherwise it just _lives_ in the cloud, meaning it lives on someone else's server.

<comment><USER47> Well, if you have read-only copies on different enough servers, owned by different enough people, it's a backup to some degree. Security is never an absolute.

But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated risks in the ways that matter".

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why did Google take him down with (presumably) no warnings? Or did they?

Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve".

The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final.

Edit: Clarity

<comment><USER49> This is a new age in customer support, if you can call it that. Amazon and I'm sure many other companies do the same thing. You don't even have to actually violate TOS. That's probably why no one can reverse the decision. They'd have to admit to closing the account on a whim (might be a bot's whim, but it's still a whim), unrelated to any actual TOS violations. They can choose to not do business with you anytime, even if you've paid them, and your only recourse is to sue them. Yeah, that's going to work out well ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Summary of the article

> It's gone because it was kept entirely on his blog

Take backups.

<comment><USER51> They closed his email-account too, though? It has never occurred to me to backup my entire Gmail archive. Should probably look into that now...

<comment><USER52> Speaking of that, what is the best way to make a backup of the contents of an email account (not specifically Gmail, but IMAP in general)?

<comment><USER53> An easy way is to use an IMAP client like the macOS Mail.app that syncs raw email + metadata in .mbox format. You can find the files in ~/Library/Mail/V4. Combine with Time Machine for extra backups in case you're worried that your mail server decides to clear your local copy over IMAP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Since a few years loggin into Blogspot (former Blogger) became very difficult for me - I am constantly being bounced between the authentication pages, and most of the time I end up with an error. I think Google is just preparing for discontinuing it.

<comment><USER55> There are still a _ton_ of pages in Blogspot. Closing Blogspot would be a Geocities-closure-level event, or bigger.

<comment><USER56> They aren't paying? Shut it down!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> There is a legal definition of child pornography:

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256)

Did his work fit this definition? I doubt it, because he would have been in jail by now, given that he never concealed his name. Also Google is notorious for heavy handed treatment of smaller AdSense publishers, which makes me doubly sceptical.

[http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after- googl...](http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-google-for- unpaid-adsense-earnings-2015-01/)

<comment><USER58> Who cares anyway, algorithmically full time surveillance of the public basically castrates pedophiles, limiting them to fiction.

So the usual will happen, public shaming of the "artist" into some pseudo- religious organization, where he/she/it can be forced by the "believers" to uphold some the marriage/basic-income-for-beauty Contract. Another horrific social machine from the past.

Could we at least pressure potentially creative persons into something socially useful? He/She/It who makes the biggest scientific contribution of a group of three, gets a good life and "surveilanced" freedom, the median gets publicly outed and "surveilanced" freedom, the least contributing goes to some prison. Repeat every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.

<comment><USER60> There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist.

The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.

<comment> obj-g But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define what he was doing, you _might_ take the time to learn how to make a simple site.

<comment><USER61> And maybe if your actual work is keeping you busy, you might not want to have to deal with all that on top of it.

<comment> obj-g You might not want to, but maybe you should. Case in point.

<comment><USER27> Not case in point. Whether you make your own site is completely orthogonal to whether you have backups. There are people that use blogger or wordpress for free and back it up, and there are people that pay for hosting or servers to host customized websites and don't back them up.

<comment> obj-g You're right, I guess. I suppose I worded it poorly. I really just meant that if you're going to be a "web artist" you should probably be a bit more web savvy in general. Make your own site, learn about backing up, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I think a more appropriate title would be "Google disables artist's Blog". The author describes the blog and email accounts as disabled and has no direct evidence that anything has been permanently deleted

> I've asked about whether the work on Cooper's blog has been deleted > permanently or is simply on a server somewhere, and I'll update this post if > I hear back.

</comment><comment><USER63> More accurately stated: Artist stores (the sole copy of [1]) a decade of work on a service he doesn't pay for and which provides no guarantees of service or quality... Why is the title written to make it seem it was Google that did something wrong here?

[1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.

<comment><USER64> Do you really need to "source" a post like this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> How does one make you primary artistic medium the internet for a decade and yet don't know how it works enough to have backups of your work?

It's as if I worked in artistic welding but, never learned anything about the dangers of highly pressurized tanks of gas and then get surprised when leaving the tank valve open causes a fire and ruins your artwork.

He didn't have any backups anywhere else. He just completely relied on Google to do it for free forever just because. After a decade of making work that controversial, you never just save that stuff to jump drive?

This person is incompetent and irresponsible. Google owes him nothing.

</comment><comment><USER66> concerning to say the least considering every galaxy/Android phone I've owned backs up to google in such a seamless & effortless way. My wife backs up all our family photos to google. Google offers "Unlimited free storage" if you allow them to compress your photos.

[https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en](https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en)

It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.

<comment><USER67> A good case for "yes, and"; backing up to the cloud is convenient and subject to very different failure modes to local storage. Why not both?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Never be a sharecropper, always have backups.

<comment><USER69> What is the meaning of 'sharecropper' in this context? I'm aware of sharecropping in the agricultural sense[1].

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

<comment><USER70> Working someone else's land, rather than owning your own.

i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog.

This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.

<comment><USER71> For a counter argument, I like to read many blogs that are more or less defunct, but have valuable material. The author has moved on (or passed on) but the material is still sitting on Google servers instead of disappearing when a hosting contract lapses. perhaps using free services and making backups is the best option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How To Backup Gmail Accounts (+Restore)

[http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore- gmail/](http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/)

</comment><comment><USER72> So there's a good chance this guy is a creep. That doesn't change the fact that any content any of us have posted to a third-party site (be it Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) can be taken down at any time, without notification or appeal. Certainly these third-party companies mostly take down the pedos and creeps, but that doesn't really matter. Power is delineated by the maximum possible reach of their actions, not by how they choose to act at any given moment.

</comment><comment><USER73> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063) ?

</comment><comment><USER74> It looks like his work is not deleted, just not accessible due to possible TOS violations? I am guessing he can get it back.

The title seems like click-bait.

<comment><USER75> My thoughts too. Annoying.

<comment><USER76> Still happy to upvote it as is creates healthy and useful discussions.

Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google service department.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> >"[If Google doesn't] respond and rectify the situation, I won't have any choice but to sue them," Cooper wrote. "I don't want to do that for obvious reasons, but I will if I have to."

Really? Because you didn't take the necessary steps to create your own backups!??

Edit: Reading some of the other comments about the ... um ... content ... of his blog, no wonder he didn't keep backups!!!

<comment><USER31> Victim-blaming isn't going to help anyone. And even if he would have had backups, Google has completely dispersed his followership, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> This just underscores the need for a government to defend our rights. Corporations can't be relied on to do it for us.

<comment><USER79> Although I agree completely with your statement, especially wrt right to repair and DRM, I don't know what you would want the government to do in this case to protect a person's data when they choose to store it on a free service that offers no guarantees of anything, and specifically states in their TOS that they may remove an account for any reason at any time.

On top of that, this person chose not to take the simple step of using Google Takeout to back up the years of data that he couldn't afford to lose. If my business or mental health depended on that data, I'd be doing that every couple of weeks at least.

I do think it would be nice if Google would, when they remove an account, give you a couple of days to go to Takeout and download the data.

Just deleting it with no warning seems very rude indeed, especially when you consider the amount of advertising revenue they generate from serving people's data.

Google should also make less claims about, "A safe place to store your data"!, if they continue to remove people's data without warning or recourse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Reminds me of what happened to my old Youtube account. One day it was just taken down - no warnings, no chance to back anything up (I had a backup on my home computer, but that hard drive was reformatted while I was in college). Contacted Google, and never got a response. Lost some videos I made as a kid that I would love to see again.

Aside from the obvious "back up your stuff" mantra, this points to a couple things:

1\. We need a decentralized web ASAP (eg. IPFS) 2\. Private corporations should have some degree of responsibility over being reasonable with their services. This guy should've at least been given the opportunity to back up his stuff, or hell even just a response from customer service.

<comment><USER79> Re: Point 1, I agree with you that we definitely need a decentralized web, but I wonder how many people would be mirroring your youtube videos. Even IPFS still needs your data to be stored _somewhere_. I have some youtube videos with literally 2 or 3 views. Those wouldn't be mirrored on a decentralized net. Zeronet is working on using "zerocoin" as a way you can pay the decentralized net to mirror your data. This is a killer feature. I don't know if IPFS has a similar feature but I hope so.

Re: Point 2, I agree completely, it seems way too draconian to just delete immediately with no warning. With the size of google, there's always going to be the chance that an account is removed by mistake. At least give people a couple of day's chance to get their data before it is removed, if only as a goodwill gesture of thanks to the millions of people providing free data for Google to serve and make advertising revenue from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> >Early last year Andy Baio wrote about how most of the archival projects Google touted in the early 2000s, such as Google News Archive and Google Groups, were quietly abandoned several years ago.

Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?

<comment><USER82> In the sense that Google Groups has been "well" since the current design went live. It's a slow, buggy, frustrating product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> There is no cloud, only other peoples computers.

</comment><comment><USER84> Ultimately this is where the decentralized web should go. Having a built-in archive function, will not only prevent work from being lost... the decentralization might prevent it form being shut down.

</comment><comment><USER85> Sue for damages and get the data back via discovery before you lose.

You could also ask your "fans" to send you their cached copies. Or you could search your local browser history. Or you could hire forensic analysists to examine any drives you may have had the data on.

You could also pay lots of fees and bloat up the bitcoin blockchain with it, if you don't want to lose it again.

</comment><comment><USER86> Regardless of content the fact that he didn't have backups is juts plain stupid. Deserves pretty much everything he got. Im not sorry if that sounds like im an a$$hole but people really need to assume their OWN responsibility not blame others when things go wrong. 14 years worth of information is something that should have been backed up if he didn't want to lose it, no excuses.

</comment><comment> Const-me That's one of the reasons why I prefer desktop-based e-mail clients.

With a desktop client, an e-mail provider like gmail is able to terminate or suspend my account and prevent me from using my mailbox, but they can't block me from accessing the e-mails I have already written or received.

</comment><comment><USER87> Losing the email would be a disaster since the decentralized web is now relying on a centralized email system.

</comment><comment><USER88> I'm not going to comment on the topic of the content involved. But seems to me that using your own doamain name (not hosting the blog on blogspot) and/or a backup would have solved this issue.

Even if you're using blogspot, that's no reason not to have a backup.

</comment><comment><USER89> Well, at least he still has a Facebook account.

Whew.

</comment><comment><USER90> Some on here note that the email account was also banned. Not to state the obvious but isn't it possible it had nothing to do with the blog, and everything to do with something else related to the account?

</comment><comment><USER91> Why would you keep 14 years of your labors on a server owned by an uninterested corporation with no off-site backups anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER92> Tldr; Child porn writer has works deleted by service provider.</comment>


New Bill Would Empower President to Punish U.S. Companies That Boycott Israel - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2018/06/28/israel-boycott-law-bds/ <comment><USER2> History will, hopefully, sort out the moral inferiority of making legal migrants feeling unwelcome (and, in so doing, destroying a cornerstone to the vitality of the American experience), collectively punishing individuals because of their country's demographics and supporting the genocide of a people cramped into a ghetto with higher density than Warsaw ever was. One could say "hurt people, hurt people" but repeatedly, intentionally killing unarmed protesters with live ammunition looks like the Final Solution 2.0.</comment>


Hackers use OAuth, fake Google apps to phish users - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/3192484/security/russian-hackers-use-oauth-fake-google-apps-to-phish-users.html <comment><USER2> Relatedly, be very careful which apps with "native browsers" you enter 3rd party credentials into. For example if you install an app and it opens a WebView with the google login screen, the app can read and write any arbitrary content to and from the DOM in the WebView.

Not sure about android but this is definitely possible on iOS.

<comment><USER3> Note that web view oauth logins to Google are disabled since 20th of April:

> On April 20, 2017, we will start blocking OAuth requests using web-views for > all OAuth clients on platforms where viable alternatives exist.

Source: [https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/08/modernizing- oauth-...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/08/modernizing-oauth- interactions-in-native-apps.html)

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 I'm honestly surprised it took them that long to abuse OAuth.</comment>


A report providing trends and insights into developer activity on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-05-06-octoverse-spotlight-an-analysis-of-developer-productivity-work-cadence-and-collaboration-in-the-early-days-of-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> Wow, the increase in contributions to Jitsi (under theme 3) is pretty remarkable :)

As an experience in scaling organizational capacity to accept open source contributions, it'd be great to hear from the Jitsi team about how they've handled the influx.</comment>


Do you need a way to manage and register domain names for customers? - <AUTHOR>

I am making a service that allows non-tech businesses to easily create websites, and I find that the hardest part of the process for them is registering and setting up domain names.<p>Is there any interest in some kind of API to manage domain names that are on the customer's account?  So maybe it uses OAuth to authenticate the user and then a token to make calls to the API on behalf of the customer.  This would eliminate a significant amount of difficulty on the customer side. <comment><USER2> Some registrars such as Badger have APIs that should let you do this. ([http://badger.github.io/account/](http://badger.github.io/account/)).

Edit: They allow creating an account and using it programmatically; not sure about the oauth aspect, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I'll look into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> gandi.net offers an API to process domain related stuff. It also offers the ability to manage domains as an authorized user while the owner is some other entity.</comment>