HTTP 2.0: GTFO (General Termination of Future Operations) - <AUTHOR> http://http2.github.io/http2-spec/#GTFO <comment><USER2> The complexity difference between HTTP1 and HTTP2 is pretty huge. Not sure if they're even remotely the same protocol anymore.

<comment><USER3> The old Unix model (simple, do one thing, text formats, etc.) is dead. The world has come to prefer code and protocols which perform well at scale.

<comment><USER4> Since the semantics of 1.1 and 2.0 are the same (besides push) you can choose which encoding you prefer based on your requirements and constraints. In fact, maybe we should rename HTTP/1.1 to "HTTP/2.0 Textual Encoding" or something so that people can feel like they're not missing out on anything. It worked for USB 2.0.

<comment><USER5> Or we can call SPDY^WHTTP 2.0 "binary barf kitchensink internet multiplex protocol" instead.

Let's not taint good, old HTTP in the process please.

<comment><USER6> I've never understood this sentiment. Its not like we can know what is passing through the boxes by watching the blinkenlights - this isn't paper tape anymore.

You have to use tcpdump to break up the binary bits - and since its likely encrypted, set up the appropriate certificates if you want to decipher arbitrary traffic anyway.

If its your own app, you know what requests are going where and can hex dump them any way you choose.

The whole "its binary so its bad" thing is a complete non-issue. I've heard people complaining "netcat doesn't work anymore" but there's no reason why netcat2 can't be used to talk to arbitrary HTTP/2.0 endpoints.

Sorry, I lost some mates in the SOAP wars of the late 90s and I'm still bitter.

<comment><USER7> Personally, my issue with HTTP 2 is that it seems to be designed from the assumption that Google-scale is the common or even only use case, and that optimizing Google's bandwidth use is the sole purpose of HTTP.

<comment><USER6> To me, the real reason is that we want to get to the point where all traffic is secure, and since the cost of establishing that secure connection is high we should do more with the secure connections we've got before letting it drop!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This play on words is a pretty okay joke.

<comment><USER9> I'm cringing currently. It seems funny now, but in ten years, it'll be as funny as a Java class file's header being 0xCAFEBABE is.

<comment><USER10> I'd much rather have a joke that doesn't age well than a completely wit-less corporate committee specification.

0xCAFEBABE isn't laugh-out-loud funny (not sure it ever was), but I find it a comforting reminder that Java was actually written by humans. The "Duke" mascot, too. It's not at all hard to imagine an underemployed middle manager learning about it and demanding it being changed, in fear that the Important and Serious people who would write Important and Serious software in Java would think it's not an Important and Serious language.

<comment><USER11> 0xCAFEBABE is (I can't believe I'm going to do this) vaguely sexist though, so the cringe for me, at least, is thinking about my daughter reading that and thinking her father came up with it, and thus believing "BABE" is the kind of phrase dad would use to describe women in general.

Or maybe I'm over-reacting. No idea.

<comment><USER10> Yes, you're overreacting. Babe is an endearing term. It's sexist only in the sense that it identifies the gender of the subject of endearment.

<comment><USER12> > Babe is an endearing term.

No it's not. It's only claimed to be by the users for plausible deniability, which actually makes it extra-bad.

> Yes, you're overreacting.

No, they're not. But the three people jumping out and screaming "overreacting" and "endearing" probably are panicking.

<comment><USER13> I agree that cafe babe is sexist (like 'booth babe'). The word babe itself is completely endearing though - my SO and I call one another that all the time.

<comment><USER12> Quite a few black people use the term "nigger" between themselves, and I know at least one couple that adopted "asshole" as an affectionate term. Not to mention completely ridiculous yet popular terms like "pumpkin".

Just because some people adopted the word in some narrow context doesn't change its meaning outside of it. There's many behaviors that are common and acceptable towards your significant other and yet completely demeaning when applied to a barista (that doesn't happen to be your significant other). So, whatever people call each other while watching Star Wars reruns is utterly irrelevant here.

<comment><USER14> The thing with calling someone "babe" is that it's too... forward? It's something that you call people you already know, so saying "babe" to a stranger is presumptuous. Anything in that category would have the same effect I think: honey, sweetheart.

It's also possible to use it in a belittling way, but I can't think of any synonym for "woman" which couldn't, if you use the right tone of voice. That's just general sexism, and the word "babe" wouldn't be worse than "lady" with the same delivery.

If you're talking about something that's not in those two categories, could you like me to it so I can see what you're talking about?

<comment><USER12> You could say "good morning" in a demeaning way, if you used a certain tone. It depends on specific culture, but usually there's certain very obvious (I have aspergers, so if I can see them, everyone can) protocols of interaction with people you don't know well. And in most situations you'd use the word "babe" at someone you don't know _very_ well you probably shouldn't speak at all. The one exception that comes to my mind is "you're an actor and that's your line". So, yes, it's quite a bit worse than "miss". "Lady" only in third person, like "that lady just drove an 18 wheeler over my foot!"

But yes, honey and sweetheart would work just as badly. And yes, there's quite a few words that are worse. But "hey, they could do worse!" is no real argument. Sure they could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For people interested in a high-level overview of HTTP 2.0 and why an update to HTTP 1.1 is needed, the chair of the relevant IETF working group gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at linux.conf.au called "HTTP 2.0 And You":

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiWEu6f65VE

</comment><comment><USER16> Also noticed further down, the error code ENHANCE_YOUR_CALM

<comment><USER17> That one is documenting existing practice [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#420](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#420)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh dear, how did I miss HTTP 2.0? And why are they trying to reimplement TCP exactly?

HTTP's simplicity _is_ the reason it's been so successful and proved so flexible. Please don't throw it away.

<comment><USER19> Te be fair, they are actually trying to reimplement a subset of SCTP. HTTP over SCTP gets all of the advantages of SPDY (which HTTP2 is based off of) except for the header-compression (which could have been separately implemented). Unfortunately NATs don't handle SCTP so you are left with implementing SCTP over UDP, and NATs also don't handle UDP as well as they do TCP, since UDP is stateless.

<comment><USER20> > Unfortunately NATs don't handle SCTP

It's more than that; pretty much nothing in the wild handles SCTP, and they wanted to build something that can be gradually transitioned to (it will be a rough transition for sure, but it's still supposed to be HTTP).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still can't decide whatever it's childish or fking awesome!

<comment><USER17> It means an engineer (or a number of them) is actually having fun while building this. It's a good sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think profanity has a place in network protocols.

<comment><USER23> It's a good thing there's no profanity in this one, huh?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, nobody knows what 'GTFO' means ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Receivers of a GTFO frame MUST NOT open additional streams on the connection, although a new connection can be established for new streams." Shouldn't that be "a new connection can be established for existing streams"? (Or did I misunderstand something here?)

<comment><USER26> You did misunderstand. Read the next sentence:

> The purpose of this frame is to allow an endpoint to gracefully stop > accepting new streams (perhaps for a reboot or maintenance), while still > finishing processing of previously established streams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.cnnturk.com/bilim-teknoloji/internet/kabul- edilen...](http://www.cnnturk.com/bilim-teknoloji/internet/kabul-edilen- internet-yasasinin-son-hali) now secure connection is must

</comment><comment><USER28> Bits or GTFO

</comment><comment><USER29> Something about this reminds me of RTP...

</comment><comment><USER30> what does GTFO stand for?

<comment><USER31> get the f __k out!

<comment><USER32> No, it stands for "General Termination of Future Operations."

<comment><USER33> no, its both :P

<comment><USER34> It also stands for Great Tanzanian Flying Orangutans and thousands of other things (in the sense that it forms an initialism of those words), but the standard definitely uses General Termination of Future Operations.

<comment><USER35> That may be so, but I have a very hard time believing that GTFO was not chosen because of its more established meaning.

<comment><USER32> I have no idea what you're talking about. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Needs TITS verb now to complete the picture.

<comment><USER37> You code in Ruby don't you.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for that, now I don't know which of you two are trying to be more intentionally offensive.</comment></comment></comment>


The Secret To Getting Rich And Changing The World Is To Have A Stupid Idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-is-to-have-a-stupid-idea-2014-2

<comment><USER2> $100 million business is one where you make $100 off a million people per year. Which means that 312 people out of ~313 would never buy your product.</comment>


Analysis of 25,000 Lab-Confirmed Covid-19 Cases in Wuhan - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/14tGJF9tdv4osPhY1-fswLcSlWZJ9zx45/view <comment><AUTHOR> What interested me about this report is slide 11, which estimates that the transmission rate R was still 1.25 with the lockdown in effect. See slide 32 for more explanation: "Traffic ban, mitigation (social distance) and home quarantine helped reduce R from 3.88 to 1.25, but was not good enough".

Only with the centralized quarantine (slide 36) did R fall below 1.

As I come to understand of what it means to "flatten the curve" (lower R, but it stays above 1), I don't know whether North American or European countries can tolerate these social distancing conditions for many months while people still die in droves. But I also don't hear any discussion of adopting the drastic quarantine measures China took to reverse the rate of spread.

Have anybody heard Western governments preparing for possible mass quarantine sites yet?

<comment><USER2> I've heard Washington state looking at putting patients in Hotels. Also friend in Washington says they are building a patient ward in the soccer field near her house.

Link: [https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/temporary-field-hospital- be...](https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/temporary-field-hospital-being-built- shoreline-soccer-field/VC76H2XIWVCTNMRCUFIEWNTPRA/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Extension that adds quotation marks to your pages for "comedic" effect - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/suspicious-quotes/extension <comment><USER2> Snarky as hell, I love it! I especially like the author's "humble" brag from Harvard admissions. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately if you read more closely you will see that it is a rejection letter :'(

<comment><USER2> Oh... well that explains the snark. Sorry to hear that, keep your head up. The student makes the school, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Such a "brilliant" idea!

This can result in some pretty funny lines, good "work"!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I had a lot of fun building it too :O

Pro "tip" for longer term usage: set the intensity crazy low, like 0.5%, so it doesn't get annoying.</comment></comment>


Urban Darwinism: How Species Are Evolving to Survive in Cities - <AUTHOR> https://e360.yale.edu/features/urban-darwinism-how-species-are-evolving-to-survive-in-cities <comment><USER2> Planet Earth II has an episode about this as well. Can't remember if they mention the darwinsm aspect, but pretty sure I remember the Anthropocene term was introduced.</comment>


Ask HN: You must build a backlink index of the web. How do you do it? - <AUTHOR>

I was using Duck Duck Go today, and decided this is a good question for the community.
The question: Say you have to build a backlink index of most (yes intentionally vague) of the web that is updated relatively frequently (at least every 30 days). A full scrape of even a reasonable slice of the web using 80Legs (at least using the old pricing model) would be more than USD $200k. Yet many people are building products, from search engines to SEO tools, that need and use this data.
How are they getting it, and how would you get it? Would you buy this data or build it yourself from the perspective of:
- The CEO/Entrepreneur who has to pay for the creation of or acquisition of this index and the engineers to maintain it.
- The CTO who has to build the index or integrate with someone else's.
It's currently easy to get around Yahoo Site Explorer's per IP/day limits. Word on the street is it's going away soon. Aside from Yahoo Site Explorer, I'm also aware of Majestic SEO, SEOMoz, lots of desktop SEO apps, and then more 'bare metal' sites like 80legs. Are there other ideas or tools or technologies i'm missing? <comment><USER2> We did exactly this at SEOmoz - built an index that's primarily focused on link data. It's accessible through a free API - www.seomoz.org/api - up to 1 million calls a month free and more at fairly low rates. Our index isn't quite Google-sized. Our last crawl (updated once per month) was 65 billion URLs, which we estimate is between 50-65% of Google's main index.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you've got about it if you'd like. Feel free to email me (rand at seomoz dot org).

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you trying to build your own index or do you just want to make a limited number of calls to someone else's index?

<comment><AUTHOR> right now, we could use between 100k 1MM queries/day... if we had enough capital, we'd love to find a way to gather and product-ize the data. we think there are a lot of people who could use it, but that's a lot of work and huge up-front cost

we're in the position of not needing enough volume to build our own but not having enough revenue to afford to license a full index either.

<comment><USER3> Always tough to be in the in-between stages. Providing an index is something we'll probably consider in the near future. We did a survey with our users and found that a fair number would like to have an index of our/their crawled data.</comment></comment></comment>


Distributed Everything - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/surveillance-state/19a5db211e47 <comment><USER2> _" IRC. Everyone who wants to make sure their messages land use IRC as a backchannel now."_

No, damnit. IRC is logged, double logged, and then has all of the logs shipped offsite to be engraved in bedrock. IRC servers, because of their history in pirated content, are very heavily controlled by law enforcement. A huge number of raids have been carried out around the world based off what people have said on IRC.

IRC is very much not the solution to the widespread monitoring of facebook.

<comment><USER3> A lot of my friends who use IRC as a primary communication channel will stick to invite-only self-hosted SILC IRC networks. These are essentially 1 step above darknet (eg: local IRCd), and are a far cry from the efnets of the IRC- verse.

<comment><USER2> All it takes is a warrant and a plea bargain, and your private 'darknet' (haha) irc server is now a honeypot collecting all the traffic you thought was private. The more popular an easily controlled solution like private IRC servers become, the greater the advantage for law enforcement and others to control them.

End-to-end encryption is a requirement for secure communication. Anything less is the same as scribbling on paper and tossing it to the recipient, and hoping nobody catches it on the way.

<comment><USER4> As long as we can all agree not to get complacent, it's a step in the right direction. Arguing that people need to go form 0 to 60 in under a second isn't going to get us anywhere.

For example, if you want to convince someone to become a vegan, which path is more likely to succeed:

      Omnivore => Vegan

or:

      Omnivore => Vegetarian => Vegan

or even:

      Omnivore => No red meat => Only fish => Vegetarian => Vegan

<comment><USER5> On the other hand.. what's easier, convincing someone to change a habit once, or convincing them four times?

<comment><USER6> Some diet habits are harder to persuade, and many won't stick with them. So anything is something.

<comment><USER5> _anything is something_

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recently I've been fascinated by the concept of individuals having a "private cloud" service - a server that they own or rent, which has all the data that an individual could hope to have centralized, contains APIs and UI for remote access from client devices, and acts as the middleman for most transactions with the outside world.

The beauty of this is that if it were developed as a unified system, minimal tinkering would be necessary for a layman user. A preinstalled, auto-updating OS would do the heavy lifting - we're aiming for a situation where a bare minimum of configuration becomes necessary. Once configuration is done, all the user needs to know to reach _all_ of their data is a URL and a password. The server itself can (ultimately) become the identity service for all remote accounts.

It has a straightforward progression of development and adoption, too. Create a web app that kludges together some messaging, identity, and storage solutions - the stuff needed to do this at an 80% level already exists, for the most part. Package it into an image installable on a VPS. Subsequently, make native apps for the client devices, or adapt existing ones, to match the experience of Dropbox/GTalk/etc. Last, build a hosting service or sell hardware tailored around simplifying the configuration process, providing backups, etc. As you get further into the adoption process, more and more possibilities to reclaim data open up, since you'll hit the critical masses necessary to push new protocols into the system.

<comment><USER8> Yup, this is the kind of thing I'm working on at the moment and I'm finding that other folks are thinking along similar lines (but taking different approaches). The first application we want to build on top of the underlying 'private cloud' is email.

My viewpoint is that to do this properly, we need to think through things from the ground up with privacy and security built in, otherwise I don't see it as that much better than current systems (you'd just be getting the _illusion_ of security/ownership/etc). It's really not the kind of system that lends itself to the mantra of 'move fast and break things'. Such software would also have to be open-source (to a large extent) so that others can verify security or people can deploy it to their own machines (I'd personally prefer a hosted version, knowing that I can migrate off if I want to).

The question is what kinds of business model can one build around such a product. Would you be willing to pay for such a service? If so, how much and what features would you expect from an early version? Would an app-store model make sense to you?

In any case, if you or anyone else is interested in finding out more about the work (esp alpha releases), feel free to drop me an email (in my profile).

<comment><USER9>
      > from the ground up with privacy and security built in

Couldn't agree more!

      > I'm finding that other folks are thinking along similar lines
      > (but taking different approaches)

Not sure if this is the right place for it but does anyone have a list of all these similar projects? I know of:

* ArkOS [[https://arkos.io](https://arkos.io)]

* FreedomBox [[https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/](https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/)]

Seems to me that something like this can be built faster if resources were combined in some way. I guess the tough thing here is that people seem to have different visions as to what the end product would look like. Perhaps effort would be best expended by collaborating on a solid, secure "base" image which could then be forked as needed.

\---

My ideal system would:

* Be open source.

* Be built with a security mindset from the ground up.

* Have some sort of full system/drive encryption.

* Run on something like a Raspberry Pi with local storage attached.

* Have one identity per-person for social use (public/private blog, private chat, private audio/video calling, private email, private sharing of photos, videos, private VRM [1])

* Have the ability to spawn off anonymous identities that would not be traceable back to your IP/device for anonymous publishing/chat/email where required.

* Be easy enough that I can give one to my parents, create accounts for them, show them once how to use it and then forget about it.

* Have all of this backed up through some distributed, encrypted system like SpaceMonkey [2].

* A possible late addition for mass adoption - the software could "trick" users into doing things they shouldn't (in a controlled way) and then after they've done this, tell them that what _could_ have happened would have been quite serious (such as giving some . This would lead to more careful behaviour in general by all that use the software, which could only be a good thing.

Anyone know of such a system in the works? I'd love to contribute.

[1] VRM - Vendor Relationship Management. Keeps track of who you've shared your personal details with, generates a unique email for each "connection" (where connections can be you telling someone to flick you an email or you signing up to a site) in order to cut off communication at your convenience, not theirs. Sharing of personal details (such as name, birthday etc.) for sites that require it would initially be done directly, eventually moving to a system where this software IS the proxy by which third parties communicate with you (physical mail, messages, phone calls etc.). No more spam!

[2] [http://www.spacemonkey.com/](http://www.spacemonkey.com/)

<comment><USER10> Looking over your list of things in your "ideal system", I know that we are attempting to build something like that at Airdispatch ([http://airdispat.ch](http://airdispat.ch)) - feel free to give it a look, and let me know what you think (my email is in my profile).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think while there's a valid point in here, it strikes me as kind of harsh towards the larger public, which has never heard of IRC … for a reason. It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. Which is why it's essentially stayed around as more of a backchannel than anything else.

Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals.

Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this.

If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.

<comment><USER12> > It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical.

IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services like Twitter and Facebook. :)

<comment><USER11> The teen chatters of the world—the ones who set the cultural trends—got a handle on it, but did their parents? :)

<comment><USER13> The parents often don't catch on Twitter either.

I think it's mostly due to a different communication culture, not technical ineptitude.

<comment><USER14> Parents who are grownups are too busy to fool with nonsense like Facebook and Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He is missing an important point here that is well illustrated by his coffee metaphor: I don't go to Starbucks, but I don't make my espresso drinks at home either -- I go to smaller coffee shops for two things: convenience, which he acknowledges, and what he ignores -- specialized expertise.

I could spend time learning how to make a good latte or mocha at home, but right now I don't want to; I have better things to do. And in the short term, what I could manage by myself probably won't be as good what I get poured at the small shop down the street.

Similarly, everyone who wants to write online could learn all the web tech, but using Medium is, yes, easier, but also probably results in a higher quality product (in both presentation and especially distribution) than what they will manage on their own in the short term. There is expertise that's gone into Medium that many writers don't have or want to acquire (yet).

Sure censorship can be an issue, but I don't believe that these skills are becoming impossible to pick up when they become needed, as he seems to imply. Use Medium or Svbtle or whatever while they work and move off when they actually become a problem, or simple when your time and interests change enough that you actually want to pick up web development (or espresso brewing) expertise.

<comment><USER16> A small coffee shop would align with the author's intent. The post favors distribution over centralization; federation, so long as it's into small- enough chunks, tends to do the same thing.

<comment><USER15> But at the moment, Medium is a small(er) platform. If my local coffee shop does a hugely successful business and is pushed by the market or management decisions to resemble the Starbucks he describes, I will probably find a new one.

I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams) started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at least. But maybe that makes me foolish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How to be go to places.

Poogle Glus, F __*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address /contact book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it.

It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse.

A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble. Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish.

Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.

<comment><USER13> Who exactly needs attention, and from whom?

* Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them.

* "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people.

* Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them.

* People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives.

Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is good (lower prices, more openness).

But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of censorship) may be one of such things.

<comment><USER17> Businesses don't get the attention they want and have little idea if the attention they get from spamvertising are curious page views, capable buyers or people that think their business is crazy.

Quite a common theme on HN.

Also having to know the name of a business to search for them biases everything towards big players. Good luck remembering these [http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.pn...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.png) when you need them.

Impossible to remember app/startup names are one of the failures of the web's design. And the design of computers in general. When I need contacts or video chat I shouldn't have to memorize brands like Facetwitter or Skype, only contacts and video chat. New players that improve on those services can live under those tags.

Top bloggers and news services are adopting content farm tactics because that's the model that fits the web. So journalism/news that the web was supposed to liberate from censorship and centralization are declining in quality and usefulness because of the current web's design pays them through ad impressions.

Commercial advantage of a new model for the web has to be significant and decentralization could be a feature but I don't think THE feature. For Linux customization, price reduction and feature parity were THE feature. In the early days it didn't have feature parity. A new model getting feature parity with the current web seems like a harder task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Shameless self-promotion while also using the same service you denounce. Why did you post your criticism of Medium on Medium? You wanted a larger audience to hear your opinion. That's what the majority of writers on services like Medium are aiming for. Plenty of people currently joining Medium in troves are probably just as capable of creating their own blog, and I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of them use both. Syndicated sites are where people come to have their voice heard. Just like how this was posted on Hacker News, a central site where like-minded individuals enjoy viewing pertinent information and have a larger discussion about these matters. Isn't that one of the primary functions of the internet?

Plus, using names like 'Shitter' and 'F __*book ' made me discredit your argument rather quick, personally. What's next, is 'Micro$oft' also keeping you down? Or would you rather everyone create their own OS?

On another note, IRC is a safe-haven? That's fascinating news.

</comment><comment><USER19> The founding fathers set up America as a distributed system. It's no accident that as the federal government has taken more power from the states that it has gone to shit.

<comment><USER20> I think there needs to be a strong balance. For example, I think the "centralization" of EU has been great for unifying citizens across the continent, unifying trade, making it easy to travel and work in other countries, and perhaps the most important aspect - stopping European wars.

So far it seems like a pretty democratic system, and the laws tend to be much better, and with a lot more _common sense_ than the ones being passed in US right now. But I'd be really wary about making it anymore centralized than it is.

<comment><USER13> _Removing barriers_ is a good thing. So removal of trade tariffs and border checks and visas within EC is a good thing.

Centralized rule is usually less beneficial, to say the least. Besides adding another layer of bureaucrats that need to be fed, it _removes diversity_. If, for instance, you think that legalization of marijuana in Netherlands is a good thing, imagine a EC directive that overrlues this decision.

The most historically successful of surviving democracies, Switzerland (850 years of largely uninterrupted democracy) is hugely decentralized, with most decisions made by voting or referenda on municipal or cantonal level. Not coincidentally, it sports huge differences in local laws: e.g. such a basic thing as women suffrage took 25 years to be gradually accepted in all cantons.

If you want a strongly centralized, standardized government, take a look at USSR (late) or China (quite alive).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I liked it. Couple of notes.

The internet was more distributed and _protocols were way more flexible_. Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just TCP/IP.

The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as "locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location.

An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers.

Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse.

But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> you know the kind of solution you come up with when you just realized you made some terrible mistake and adrenaline keeps flowing no matter how much you try to stay calm? this is exactly how this post looks like to me. Don't get me wrong, you are damned right. But unfortunately it's nothing new, we saw similar trends in the past with other media and you know what.. people will read your piece, say you are brilliant, then forget about it and keep doing what feel more comfortable to them, which in the end it's just the way they learned to live. Nodejs, HTML5 and CSS3.. seriously? Well done catching the problem in its n-th instance, but encouraging people to develop tech skills to avoid something they don't fully understand is not really going to help. unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER23> I find it funny that the author chose to publish this on medium. Had he not, would I have ended up reading it? Which is better, reaching a large audience with mild incitement which is tolerated by the censors, or being able to be as provocative as you wish, but remaining unread?

<comment><USER24> Non issue, I and most people here I think read the article because we found the link here on the front page. Not because the author used Medium.

</comment></comment><comment> luke-stanley Deleting everything on Facebook is NOT likely a good way to increase engagement on a separate platform. More likely, people will just forget about you! The problem is, with the Dunbar limit, these tools serve part of peoples memory. There almost certainly MUST BE A TRANSITION to the new peer based tools.

Why doesn't Ven Portman / Ev Bogue mention PGP? I don't see his public key anywhere, why talk about emailing people what you are working on openly if you want to "evolve beyond reach"? Hard to take seriously.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let me mention [https://nightweb.net](https://nightweb.net)

 _Nightweb connects your Android device or PC to an anonymous, peer-to-peer social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices and PCs._

Also, posting this on Independence Day just feels right.

</comment><comment><USER25> > A year ago (late 2011/2012) I got very interested in this > centralized/distributed problem. I'd been traveling around the world. First > I went down to Mexico, and saw how free it is down there. I went back up to > San Francisco, and I sold my iPhone in the Mission.

I don't understand the logical link between those sentences. What does he mean when he writes "[I] saw how free it is down there." and why did it lead him to sell his iPhone ?

</comment><comment><USER26> Brilliant article. There's a great list of current-gen distributed things towards the end, but we still need people who make things to keep making non- centralized _usable_ platforms. Get us out of gmail-istan and fadbook-istan and hn-monsterator-istans. Give us our nerdependence back.

<comment><USER20> Google has been relatively "good" to us, the users, so far, and they've even been our allies in some cases(SOPA, ITU).

But make no mistake, when the Internet will start a trend towards fully decentralized/more anonymous services, they will become our _enemy_ , because that will endanger their very way of making a revenue.

If I were a Google boss I'd try to start making money from other business models besides ads as soon as possible, possibly from hardware, like Apple. I think they're already planning this to some extent with Motorola, Google Glass, and even Google Fiber. But they need to hurry up. That trend might arrive sooner than they expect (within 5 years).

Facebook is already dead. They just don't know it yet (it takes a while for the market inertia to stop).

<comment><USER27> I agree with your point, but think your wording sidesteps the issue. Google has been our allies because the same things that we were against (IE a closed internet) directly endanger their revenue. They won't change their attitude when they see a huge threat to their revenue, although we may notice that their motives have always been revenue, and that does not necessarily align with ours.

Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed advertising through other means goes down.

Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger you are the better you can take advantage of it.

<comment><USER13> BTW why a rise of anonymous private communication would mean an end to the existing web, as indexed by Google? A lot of things are still perfectly OK to do in public. Consider open information sites as Wikipedia, most business information sites, and even most online commerce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why is Mailchimp filtering 'bitcoin'? That was one of the most shocking parts of the article for me. (Which is a sad point in itself, that I almost expect many of the other things mentioned. But that innocent Chimp filtering out a word that the valley loves right now? Strange.)

<comment><USER29> Yes, that stood out to me, too, because it is surprising and should be easily verifiable. Any Mailchimp users or employees care to comment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Amusingly, as I'm typing this, the author's site is down: [http://evbogue.com/](http://evbogue.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> While I do agree to some extent with this post, it is naive in a lot of places. Forgive me if this comes across as picking at the post, but I feel that some of these things need to be said.

      > You know the sources. You're all on them. [...] Shitter.

While Twitter is grouped with all of these others, I don't find Twitter to be on the same level as Facebook or Google Plus. Maybe it's just me, but I view it as a very large, public forum/chat. (I guess I'm in minority here?) Chatting on Freenode in a public channel isn't necessarily any more private than Twitter.

      > When you use these services, you're not even a button
      > pushing Starbucks at Barista. You're just ordering a
      > free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the
      > future. You're not even pushing the button.You're just a
      > user.

This is misleading. People contributing to Medium are _creating content_. They are not passively consuming content via YouTube, or only posting ephemeral content via Twitter. Just look at the post that you created. Sure it's published via a 'central' service, but you are not a 'drone' just regurgitating content or providing little to no value to your readers. The real danger in centralized services is when they eclipse everything else. The inflection point where they become a blackhole, sucking everything else in (e.g. long-form blog posts aren't read by a large audience if they aren't on Medium) is the real danger.

      > So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails,
      > I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails.

The MailChimp/Tiny Letter issue is an issue of centralization _caused_ by the downsides of decentralization. It becomes increasingly hard to deal with email as the 'small guy' because:

1\. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making sure your emails are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g. Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail).

2\. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that email admins must play with spammers. If email was a centralized service, spammers would probably be easier to block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword.

This leads to less competition in the email market because it's a hassle that few people want to deal with when deciding to start a new business.

      > So as more and more people started using these services,
      > I noticed the level of the conversations around me
      > dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have
      > in kindergarten.

Unfortunately this is what happens when you draw in more and more of the general public. You can't solve this issue with decentralization, unless your decentralized solution sets the bar high enough that these people just choose not to participate.

      > You don't accidentally end up inside someone's public
      > furry porn collection

Most people don't view accidentally stumbling into someone else's furry porn collection as an upside. You're never going to get many people to 'sign up'(1) for something like this.

(1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized service. Just 'signing up' as in joining in.

      > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no
      > idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no
      > idea how to create a link to another website.

If you ever think that the general public is going to want to write HTML or deploy Node.js applications, then you have another thing coming. This is like suggesting that everyone should learn how to repair their car to avoid getting screwed by shady mechanics. It doesn't hold up in the real world. It might be nice, but it's a pipe dream.

      > Don't just log out. Delete your accounts. This will
      > force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way.

I appreciate the sentiment, but how many people has, "Go start coding in Vim and disable the arrow keys to learn," convinced? And this is among the 'tech elite.' I don't understand how you think that this is convincing argument for the general public.

      > Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital
      > Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server.

First, the 'distributed vs. centralized' debate needs to have terms defined. Sure, Facebook is definitely centralized, and P2P is definitely decentralized, but what about hosting your own server? It's more decentralized to host your own server than something like Facebook, but the government can still just ask your hosting provider for access to your server without a warrant. So how has this really helped us?

It's made it _harder_ for the government to get access to your data because data is now in lots of little silos rather than a handful of huge ones, but it's still not the panacea that it's presented as here.

To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like Facebook, centralized. The stovetop expresso maker is more like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting your own server? That's more like renting an expresso maker at a community- center. Technically you don't own the expresso maker, even though you are renting/leasing it. At any time, the expresso maker could be used be someone else if that's what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements that are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with law enforcement).

      > Deploy using Node.js using Bitters.

I'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?'

      > Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your
      > filter bubble, and respects your privacy.

Unfortunately there are a few issues here:

1\. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data. Sure, they aren't sending usage statistics back to Yahoo! (so far as I know), but how free are we really from the giant data silos when we are still connected to them for things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to the point that it would be severely cutting into Google or Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the program would probably be terminated.

2\. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of functionality as the big players. Many people have attempted to switch to DDG over the recent NSA revelations, only to switch back to Google.

3\. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to have everyone switch from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA targets them instead. What have we really won, then?

The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition in the web search market, but if we are to attempt to hold the web search engine market to the distributed ideal we are discussing, then what we really need is something else.

<comment><USER31> _I 'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?'_

Maybe it has to do with selling his "Deploy Node" product for $37.

<comment><USER32> Don't forget to sign up for Digital Ocean with his referral link.

<comment><USER33> And send him money via Gittip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Have you considered that, perhaps, the reason facebook is full of people with nothing to say is because most people have nothing to say?

I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before.

The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep.

And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh.

Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.

<comment><USER35> There is this great quote attributed to Mark Twain:

"If you have nothing to say, say nothing."

The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this, but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to "dumb shit".

<comment><USER34> I do wonder how much of that we're responsible for sometimes. I was quite little when the internet started to become popular, to the extent that I barely remember it, but I do remember that it used to seem to make people... well, I don't want to say smarter but definitely more rounded.

Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments, the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think, how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better conversations to find them and be nurtured by them.

Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a desired quality then ... oh dear. :/

You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that there's nothing _on_ the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily true - but equally actually _finding_ something like Gwern's site or Hacker News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain circles already....

The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive structures to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You want people to give away so much and propose what?!

> start by learning some Internet basics. HTML5 and CSS3

Isn't this a bright future? People all around saving the world by typing HTML tags and CSS rules. Let me clarify something: HTML is a DOM serialization. It's editing by hands is as stupid as typing UTF-8 byte by byte.

Our tools are weak. Consuming and publishing are disconnected. To publish information one has to convert it and push on server. Now it's copy, not original document. Modern web tries to solve this problem by making web the only place. Sure it requires resources and for sure it's centralized.

I'd like to have all hypertext goodness on local computer. Make interconnected notes, publish them by clicking button and don't worry about synchronization or file name. Interconnect with web, know that every page I'm interested in is cached locally, edit these pages in place.

It would be nice to use 320MHz 16MB RAM wireless router as always present server.

> You have no idea how to type HTML anymore Can you write HTML WYSIWYG editor? > Can you write tooling to query interconnected data?

Maybe at least some users would not need to store data outside

</comment><comment><USER37> I agree with the message behind this post, but it comes across as hyperbole. The thing that irks me on his website is that the sole payment method for his eBook (Deploy Node) is PayPal. Nothing wrong with this of course, but in the context of this post, well it seems a bit off.

</comment><comment><USER38> This blog post is a threat to medium.com and maybe they'll delete his account? Please.

That said, cjdns and pump.io were interesting to read about. I don't see any practical benefit to using them now, but they look like fun hobby projects.

</comment><comment><USER39> Unfortunately, even if you run a VPS on DigitalOcean or Linode or the like, you are still using a very centralized service. These services concentrate many servers in a few data centers. The US data centers are mostly on the coasts, though Linode has one in Dallas. Sure, this is efficient, but efficiency has its downsides.

I think we need at least one competent web hosting provider operating in every state of the US, and more for the large states.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you are pushing packets anywhere on the public internet you aren't really all that disconnected. Much of what the author talks about assumes all of your contacts are highly intelligent and paranoid programmers. That leaves out 99% of my family and friends. Any highly technically advanced decentralized secure non-NSA-readable communication technology is likely indistinguishable from magic to the general public.

</comment><comment><USER41> This analogy just seems a bit confusing to me and threw me off the main point...

End users, readers = coffee consumers

Bloggers = baristas, either working in their own store or a Starbucks.

Mixing the two up doesn't make sense. Well, there are a couple of bloggers that are their only readers - hopefully less guys than the ones that brew their own coffee though ;).

<comment><USER41> Is's hard to find a analogy that really fits well...

Bloggers typically benefit from their activity, wether they blog on a platform or have their own blog. In both cases, they have an audience.

As your main point is about fully controlling the tools you'd use for their work, maybe something like racing drivers building their own cars would work better...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The author suggested Bitters for publishing a good web site. That may be a good option for us hackers. For our non-hacker family and friends, it seems to me that the best option is currently self-hosted WordPress. But WP is quite infamous for insecurity. Is there anything better?

<comment><USER42> [http://www.movabletype.org/](http://www.movabletype.org/) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Okay, this is kind of off-topic to the main gist of the article, but I'm a Singaporean living in Singapore, and I believe that the article is rather mischievous (or the author genuinely does not know/bother to know the facts).

First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people.

Next, I'm tired of people saying that free speech is limited in Singapore. It is not. There are rules in place to prevent over-zealous extremists (of any kind or nature). I urge anyone who feels otherwise to take a look at Singapore's short national history - about mass inter-racial riots that caused massive turmoil in the country. This is why the laws have been enacted. These laws simply say that we aren't allowed to publicly denounce another religion, or another race. And before you start jumping up and down saying "that's limiting my freedom to speak!", let me clarify. It's not what you think. It's not that I can't complain or even speak badly about someone else's race or religion in public. I can. But the moment I start shouting these insults, that's when the authorities would take action against me. It's only civilised, and the government has formalised this civility. On one hand, people ignorant to historical events in Singapore can simply surmise that they are tools by the government to inhibit freedom of speech. On the other hand, however, and this is what I personally feel, these laws exist to keep the peace. Think about it. Singapore is a small island filled with people of different races and religions. Yet we don't have religious wars and we certainly don't have racial riots.

And finally, the claim of, "I suspect at some point the Singapore intelligence agency may have hacked into my email while I was there (another IP was registering on my Gmail account). Also I believe I was interviewed by a Singaporean spy." I seriously doubt it. Do you really think that if a highly trained spy wanted to covertly interview you, a technical writer and web developer, that you would know? And if they did want you to know, you _would_ have known that you're being interviewed. I doubt (and here I'm assuming) that spending hours reading conspiracy theories online would make one an expert in counter-intelligence. Again, like what I said, this ill-constructed idea that the author has is probably due to the lack of understanding of the so-called "blogging license". And again, I repeat: one DOES NOT require a licence to blog.

Over the last couple of years, I've seen an increase in the number of people (mostly foreigners) writing articles about Singapore, saying that citizens' liberties are curtailed and limited. Again, as a citizen, this isn't true. Just like how Americans value their "freedoms", sometimes till the point of absurdity (absurd at least to foreigners like myself, and with regards to "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"), we Singaporeans value the peace and harmony within our tiny island-state. We put this, sometimes, even above our own personal liberty - like the freedom to shout racist remarks in a coffeeshop. Is that wrong? Only someone who has seen the bloody effects of racial and religious unrest would be qualified to answer the question.

<comment><USER44>
      First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people.

While the term "Blogging License" may be be slightly hyperbole I feel that you just denying that such a thing exists is disingenuous, at best. Specifically since you then gloss over a real onerous requirement that each "news" website (whatever that is), which reaches more then 50k unique viewers per month over a two month period indeed is required to be licensed.

So if you have a puny little blog with a couple dozen, or hundred readers then, yeah, you don't need a license. But if you run an even semi successful blog you damn well need to be licensed.

In my view it's really self evident that such a law is rife for abuse if a site doesn't toe the governments line.

I quote Human Rights Watch on the issue :

 _On May 28, 2013, the Media Development Authority, which is controlled by the Ministry of Communications and Information and is responsible for regulation of Singapore's media and publishing industry, announced that all "online news sites" that reach 50,000 unique viewers per month over a two-month period must secure a license to operate. The licensing regime took effect on June 1, and the Media Development Authority released a list of 10 websites that will initially be impacted, including AsiaOne.com, Business Times Singapore, and Yahoo! News Singapore._

([http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/07/singapore-licensing- regim...](http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/07/singapore-licensing-regime- chills-news-climate))

<comment><USER43> My point was that a license was not required to simply blog - which was what the article was insinuating. For the exact rules for licensing of news websites, go to [http://www.mda.gov.sg/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease/2013/Pages/...](http://www.mda.gov.sg/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease/2013/Pages/28052013.aspx)

I'm not saying I agree with it. But at the same time I think that as long as it is not abused (to be addressed below), it is intended to prevent the new class of "independent journalists" from writing baseless stories without getting their facts right.

> In my view it's really self evident that such a law is rife for abuse if a > site doesn't toe the governments line.

Exactly. Contrary to what many may think, if or when the government does begin to abuse this right, I can assure you that we, the citizens, will be up in arms and take them to task.

<comment><USER45> > I'm not saying I agree with it. But at the same time I think that as long as > it is not abused (to be addressed below), it is intended to prevent the new > class of "independent journalists" from writing baseless stories without > getting their facts right.

Who decides which facts are right and how does paying $50,000 prevent someone from publishing false information?

> From the linked fact sheet: _The new Licence provides greater clarity on > prevailing requirements within the Class Licence and Internet Code of > Practice, and explains what MDA would consider "prohibited content" in the > existing Internet Code of Practice, e.g. content that undermines racial or > religious harmony._

Literally everything said by US civil rights leaders during the 20th century could be construed as "undermining racial harmony" (in the US). Why is preventing this kind of thing important?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> You want a distributed F __*book? Try PSYC on GNUnet![http://about.psyc.eu](http://about.psyc.eu) [https://gnunet.org](https://gnunet.org)

</comment><comment><USER47> > Little did I know that Singapore doesn't have the same freedom of speech > laws we take for granted in America.

> In other words, you can get in big trouble in Singapore just for saying or > writing something.

whoa... sounds like my country.

</comment><comment><USER48> Meanwhile - [https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080](https://twitter.com/PenLlawen/status/352824120804782080)

</comment><comment><USER49> > How about Visit my distributed website at > [http://220.127.116.11/](http://184.108.40.206/)

FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.

<comment><USER50> DNS is HIGHLY distributed (more so than SMTP)

<comment><USER51> The protocol is, while the domain system isn't. But then, you could say that about IPv4 and IPv6 - you have to get your allocation from somewhere, and your LIR gets it from its RIR and your RIR gets it from IANA. As long as you're using publicaly addressable computers, the system is in _some_ way centralised. (And that's probably okay).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Anyone notice the parallels between this and the transcendentalist movement?

</comment><comment><USER53> > a suburb west of San Francisco

Hawaii? :)

</comment><comment><USER54> Why so many points? Does this considered a good writing nowadays?)

</comment><comment><USER55> Commenters: you need some terms defined with context. Let's do that. I'm a founder and one of the current maintainers of the distributed/federated microblogging platform rstat.us.

In this particular context, centralized vs distributed have to do with control over both storage and propagation of your data more so than its architecture. Or at least, the concerns over how to better control storage/propagation drive decisions about architecture. Twitter, Facebook, etc are centralized in this case. Your data goes to them, they propagate it, you have little to no control. Their system is designed around that. Identi.ca, rstat.us, diaspora are distributed. You control the software that holds the data and distributes it to others. Many designs are possible, even that which you design yourself.

Do these distributed platforms still have centralized components? Yes. There are lots of centralized pieces. Doesn't matter. Minimizing them is still the goal. Less is progress. It's not perfect; it's better.

What's stopping distributed platforms from overtaking centralized ones? The typical things: politics, lack of resources, high barrier of entry for non- tech folks.

Can distributed platforms do X? Yes. For example, the very usual: "But they can't handle spam!" Sure they can. Distributed platforms exist to share information. They can share blacklists. Share training data for spam filters. Ultimately, if they can distribute content, then they can distribute metadata. The only thing a centralized platform can do that a distributed one cannot is provide immediate global consistency... but considering most centralized services grow to the scale where they are internally distributed anyway, they can't even do that.

What do we need to do to succeed? We need software that is light, easily understood, easily augmentable, modular. Something that can easily and freely be deployed with minimal effort from a city's public library. Deployment on hosted or publicly available servers... or packaged on cheap hardware to be used in the home or taken with you. Hardware and deployment services that don't really exist. But creating the software may be the motivation to create them.

Who will build it? I've published research on distributed systems and distributed databases. I founded rstat.us with some friends which has had over 60 diverse contributors from around the world. It got some good, albeit small press, but OStatus (the protocol that rstat.us sits upon) is being superseded. So I'm working on this:

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n) \- Support for social sentence generation for many languages/cultures

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus) \- A discovery layer and data structures for distributed social graphs. It negotiates the protocol so many different distributed social systems can interact (which is the point, ya think?). (models)

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus- mongodb) \- Small persistence layer. (models+db)

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus](https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus) \- Rack extension for interacting with the social graph and content generation as hypermedia over HTTP. (controllers)

\- [https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site](https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site) \- Example site (hoping to pull much of the view/presentation logic into a separate repo)

Modular. Easily modifiable. Released as closely to the public domain as is possible (CC0.) With these combined, you can build any number or variety of distributed social web systems (image sites, photo album sites, hosting of web comics, flash games, blogging, etc etc etc.) Hopefully they will share a common deployment strategy so if you build a new thing, however unique, it will be just as easy to deploy from the point-of-view of somebody not very well-versed in technology.

So... Me. I'll do it. With some help. If you care, here is my gittip (I only need $250/wk to squeak by): [https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/](https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/)</comment>


Can Robo Advisers Replace Human Financial Advisers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-robo-advisers-replace-human-financial-advisers-1456715553 <comment><USER2> Sure Robots can make sensible estimates based on math and economics. But do they have the human touch?

AI challenges remaining in this field: pushing loser funds on unsuspecting clients; pumping and dumping near announcement dates; exploiting numerology for fun and profit (dividend repricing, splits and mergers etc); recognizing fear and its opportunities.</comment>


Early-Career Setbacks Can Set You Up for Success - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/smarter-living/career-advice-overcome-setback.html <comment><USER2> That seems pretty obvious because anyone who succeeds on the first try just got lucky.

Reality is very complex and it takes years of failure to understand the full complexity of anything. Sometimes you just try something and it just happens to work the first time; this doesn't mean that you know what you're doing.

If you succeed too early, it can give you false confidence about your abilities and this makes you unwilling to accept advice from 'unsuccessful' people who have a very thorough understanding of what's going on.

People who've endured constant failure throughout their careers and who never gave up are often way more talented than successful people who've only experienced a few failures.

Failure is relentless. It's the default outcome for essentially every action, no matter how well it was planned beforehand. There is almost always something completely unexpected which pops out of nowhere and ruins everything.

Small things which pop out of nowhere to ruin everything are extremely common. When you have a lot of capital, you don't even notice those, but if don't have capital and you've failed many times before, you learn to operate at a different level; the essence of your strategy is not about looking at numbers and making broad, obvious projections, instead, your strategy is centered around anticipating and mitigating all possible small unexpected things that can go wrong.

<comment><USER3> > When you have a lot of capital

just causes a different set of failure modes (cocaine burnout, celeb wannabe, reality shock, etcetera).

> Failure is relentless

Very true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Irresponsible sanguine BS. Path dependence is huge. Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems: these things can knock you out of the "high-achiever" game very quickly. Comebacks are rare and you can't go back to being "high-potential". This game has less to do with ability than mass psychology, like stock trading or politics. Hardships are a nice flair to your success story, but only if they come before stepping into the competitive part of the pipeline, or after you already made it out. The middle is brutal and unforgiving.

The other option is to get out of that game, stop living in the cult of personality, and focus your life on exchanging money for direct value to the customer ( i.e. indiehacker). This seems much harder than peddling a resume in exchange for salary or investment or a professorship or whatever.

<comment><USER5> So what would the "responsible" message be, in your book? "If you get unlucky and have bad boss, family problem, health problem, etc, too bad, sucks to be you!"?

Cause trust me, people who have bad stuff happen to them _already know it sucks._

<comment><USER4> This is a good point. I don't know. I suppose there are two options: 1) stick with it 2) do something else. I have heard of cognitive biases in both directions, and I don't know which is generally stronger* in most people. Probably the best advice is to seek better advice from someone that knows what it takes to win.

*You could probably study this with outcomes of job switching and divorces. I'm not sure how though...

<comment><USER6> Do something else is great advice.

My manager was a great people manager and would generally rank high in terms of emotional intelligence (imo), but getting into details and weeds was not his strength.

When the problem we are trying to solve requires a decision maker to remove abstractions and deal head on with complexity, he would do the opposite. He would avoid the tough conversations - Every. Single. Time.

My boss saw his reports (me specifically in this case) as the abstraction. It removed complexity from his plate and made his job easier, but honestly, his poor decision making set me up to fail. I did my best, but when it was clear that I need management support and I won't receive it, I had no other choice.

I left. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't agree with this article and this culture of making failure a beautiful thing. A Failure is a failure.

When people fail, a lot of things go bad. Many of them get depressive, they go through a lot.

It's like saying that having abusive parents make you a strong person. Completely bullshit.

I doubt this has any positive effect on "setting somebody up" for success. It is much easier to be successful if you don't mess it up. For most of the world, people aren't even allowed to fail once.

<comment><USER8> There's a spectrum between "I failed -- awesome!" and "I failed -- I will stop trying". I think articles like this are trying to push us away from the second end of the spectrum, not necessarily push us to the first.

<comment><USER9> There's also an art to realizing you've failed (or are going to fail), and making the best outcome possible from it. Many things don't work out the way you expect them to first time. Things may initially be "failures," but maybe ultimately be some form of "success."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school.

How much you make is a powerful signaling mechanism that (if you have a modicum of skill to back it up) utterly dominates everything else, and has a compounding effect over the rest of your career. You will be able to afford to not care about money as much 10-20 years in when you're all set, but initially it's very important that you get the highest paying job you can.

<comment><USER11> >Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school.

I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program.

My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time.

Today, sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort.

Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.

<comment><USER10> Frankly I can't imagine why someone would stay in Bay Area if they can't land at least a $80-100/hr job. How do you pay $3K/mo rent on $22/hr? How do you buy that $5 gallon gas or pay twice as much for utilities?

MS is a waste of time IMO, and I say so as a MS myself (my alma mater only offers 6-year MS degrees, so I couldn't bail; if I could, I would). I got zero benefit out of my master's, and I'd be further along in my career (as well as monetarily) if I studied 2 years less. In fact, I'd say I got zero benefit from my degree period, other than to serve as a confirmation to the potential employer that I can survive at the toughest tech school in the country. That's worth something, but I wish I could be done with this hazing ritual in a year or two. Everything I use day to day I had to learn myself, school was barely involved.

70K is where things _start_ in the software industry nowadays, for the bottom of the barrel candidate who's still able to code somewhat competently. Talented grads pull $100K+ right out of the gate pretty easily. FAANG will drop $120-150K on you like it's nothing, and if you don't suck it goes way up from there. Quite obviously, these numbers are US-only. Few people in Europe make this much even at the more senior levels, let alone as a fresh grad.

<comment><USER11> Strange post.

First, you realize the vast majority of workers in the Bay are not software engineers? And even less people make $80-100/hr?

Second, when you make $22/hr, you aren't staying in a studio for $3k a month. You're in a house sharing a bathroom with a few others roommates for <$1000/mo.

Third, you may have missed the part where I indicated while I currently work in tech, I studied biomedical engineering and worked in the medical device industry. BME salaries do not start at a floor of $70k like software.

As for why? Had I not done all the grinding early in my career I wouldn't have ended up at a "top tier" tech company today. THAT is why one stays in the Bay Area. I agree with your point that everything useful you must to learn yourself for the most part, rather than being taught it in school, but I disagree with the rest of your sentiments.

<comment><USER10> Why is it "strange"? I'm referring to software industry in particular, with its expectations around career progression, income, standard of living, etc. It's like I was talking about lawyers in SV, and you'd responded with "do you realize the majority of people who are in SV are janitors".

This is borne by my own experience, and is not guaranteed to apply to other industries. Most have much lower earning potential, and for them SV is truly unlivable, so I don't get what they're looking for there either.

<comment><USER11> That's a poor and inaccurate analogy; neither the original link nor my comment was specifically about the software industry. In fact, my comment was specifically _not_ about it. You responded to my comment, not the other way around, and are going off into some tangent about your personal livelihood, which is hardly relevant to the article as a whole.

There's an unfortunately-not-uncommon "software engineer superiority complex" and general myopia and my spidey sense is going off right now.

Anyhow, I'm not sure how much more to spell it out. My early career setbacks and determination to stay in the Bay Area led me to my current situation in a competitive tech company in a career I enjoy. Had I followed your worldview I'd probably have left for some miserable place in the middle of nowhere and be far less successful than I am today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> non-entity Encouraging, but I'll remain cautious about this. Regardless of early career stumbles I'll be successful by the average person's idea, but I doubt I'll be considered successful by my own ideals or by that of many people here, for example.

</comment><comment><USER11> Lots of disagreement against this article.

I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program.

My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time.

Today I'm at a Letter Corp in tech, and while sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort.

Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.

<comment><USER12> That's a great story, and I think something a lot of people need to hear things like your story especially for the jump from school to working. I have a friend who basically became a nomad and only recently landed his first professional job, and it seemed like every year he got more anxious and doubtful about himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Absolutely. Better to do a startup early and see it fail than make the same mistake mid-career. It showed me startups are a mug's game.

<comment><USER14> Yeah it's best to get the lesson early on that venture-backed startups are 99% of the time just smoke and mirrors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article seems to be drawing a very broad feel-good conclusion from a very weak foundation.

</comment><comment><USER16> Non-paywalled: [http://archive.is/bUZBu](http://archive.is/bUZBu)

</comment><comment><USER17> " _Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow- win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On the one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger," which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists._ "

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3)

</comment><comment><USER17> [Note: I can't read the article. Sorry.]

Early-career setbacks can also set back your career permanently.

My first job out of college was with Taligent. That did not go well. (Well, there was OS/2 for a short time before that...) Then I worked on the WorkplaceOS/IBM's uKernel. That didn't go well either.

Since those first years, I went back to grad school, worked for a university, and got comfortable for far too long. Then I went back to IBM. (Don't do that.) Since then, I have worked for various "enterprise" things and other low-risk, low-reward endeavors. My salary peaked at about $120k.

Be careful when you take advice from people who are successful.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well duh. If you're barely getting the grant, you're not going to be in a place where you can impress people and progress very well.

If you miss the grant by a bit, you'll find somewhere where you're a better fit.

It's not the setback that helps

<comment><USER19> _We find that the near-miss group naturally received significantly less NIH funding in the first five years following treatment, averaging $0.29 million less per person (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.28), which is consistent with prior studies. Yet the funding difference between the two groups disappeared in the second five-year period (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value > 0.1, Cohen's d = 0.02)._

From the paper [0]. This does not look like the rejects found similar opportunities in more suitable places.

[0] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Worth noting that the paper is specific to _science_ careers, while the Times article tries to extrapolate it to careers in general regardless of field.

</comment><comment><USER21> People who fail are also bigger risk takers, I wonder if this has any effect. I've failed a couple times already and I always come back stronger. It seems like it is because I take risks that keep things growing. If I wasn't a risk taker, I'd probably be where I started, and even though maybe I'd be happier, I'd be much less successful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _failures in the first phases of your career may mean you can come back stronger than those who never stumbled_

<comment><USER22> Similar to plants that live in too controlled of micro-climates. They don't develop the correct stress hardening and fall over / wilt at the first sign of normal weather.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love how we play a game where only about 1 in 5 people tops can "win" or suffer harshly.

</comment><comment><USER24> Failure can be a powerful teacher.

</comment><comment><USER25> _licks finger and holds it up_

Nope, still screwed.</comment>


Has Google Maps Been Giving You False Information for Years? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/has-google-maps-been-giving-you-false-information-for-years/242006/ <comment><USER2> Where in the article does it back the question that is asked in the title?

Google is always tweaking their services and if they decided that the data wasn't as accurate or good as they had hoped I am more than happy for the feature to disappear and re-appear at a later time.

What is going on with all of the Google hate that seems to be growing across the Internet? It is almost like someone is systematically attempting to get bad articles about Google out in front of the public.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anecdote in support of Google Maps: I was going from South San Francisco, to the Marin County Fair on July 3rd, at 5:00 PM. this is normally about a 45 minute trip at this time of day on a sunday, even with a bit of traffic. Google Maps called it as 1 Hour 40 Minutes with traffic, the in-car GPS with traffic updates called it as an hour. We got there in 1 Hour 35 minutes.

I've always had a great experience with the Traffic Data in google maps - particularly in the Bay Area. Hope we get it back soon, it's worth paying for in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> A link bait title. Google took down their traffic estimates, stating that they were not as accurate as they could be. From that, the Atlantic accuses Google of lying all these years.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article seems full of idle speculation and not much fact.

</comment><comment><USER6> Link-bait. _Sigh_.</comment>


Dumbo - Python module that allows you to easily write and run Hadoop programs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/klbostee/dumbo

<comment><USER2> At one point we used Dumbo for a lot of stuff at Yelp, but we finally ended up writing our own framework:

[http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/10/mrjob-distributed- co...](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/10/mrjob-distributed-computing- for-everybody.html)

It's open source and easy to use, and makes hadoop on EMR exceptionally clean. Check it out.

<comment><USER3> Nice work on mrjob! We've been really happy with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also: <https://github.com/bwhite/hadoopy> and <https://github.com/Yelp/mrjob>

<comment><AUTHOR> And for anyone who didn't see it earlier: <http://yahoo.github.com/oozie/>

These four are the only one's I know of. Does anyone know of any others?

<comment><USER4> Unlike Dumbo, mrjob & hadoopy, Oozie isn't a Python Streaming library, so I'm not sure what you're looking for by 'others'?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mean to imply that it's another Python Streaming library. I included it because it's a library for working with Hadoop jobs. Unless I am mistaken in that? I haven't yet tried Oozie myself.

<comment><USER4> Right, it's just that there's a whole slew if you decide to leave the Python Streaming world (which I figured people reading this would care about).

Cascading, cascalog, wukong, innumerable others.

<comment><AUTHOR> You were certainly justified in questioning what I was talking about. I didn't know there were so many others actually. Thanks for the names of a few, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://discoproject.org/>

Thats another project of similar vein. Although it has native support for Python and you dont need to install Hadoop (which may be better for some).

<comment><USER4> To be clear, Disco is a full replacement for Hadoop (including MapReduce, HDFS, etc). I've heard good things, but you also leave the (rather large) Hadoop ecosystem.

As a Python developer I've found Dumbo / mrjob to be easy to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which do you prefer using, Dumbo or mrjob?

<comment><USER4> They're pretty similar, it's hard to make map reduce very complex in Python.

What mrjob has going for it is that it's very easy to run a job on Amazon's EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) so you don't have to do any Hadoop setup. You can run Dumbo on EMR, too, it's just more manual (last I checked).

That said, Dumbo has been around longer and seems to be smarter about input/output formats. It seems that by default it can ready just about any type of Hadoop format (look up SequenceFiles, for example) and by default it'll output compressed SequenceFiles, too, which help save space and I/O.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Analyze Covid-19 immune passports self-infection data – Statwing YC S12 - <AUTHOR> https://statsiq.iad1.qualtrics.com/statwing/statsiq/open-data/covid-19-immunity-certs <comment><AUTHOR> (Putting this in a separate comment because it's a bit meta, and not about the dataset itself)

This "here's an interesting dataset to play with" approach might ring a bell with some folks here. Statwing was a YC S12 company, and we were acquired by Qualtrics in 2016. We used to try to find interesting datasets and stick them into Statwing, like the Stack Overflow survey of software developers discussed on this HN thread[1].

It's 2020, and @lejohnq and I (and a team of other socially-minded engineers) are still working on Statwing (now called Stats iQ). We were looking for a way that we could do something (anything!) useful to help with COVID-19, and realized that we could apply that old approach to interesting public health- related questions.

So, yes, there is an element of "we hope people play with Stats iQ, like it, and then sign up to use it professionally on their data or want to work with us (we're hiring)" But I can assure you that we personally stand almost nothing to gain financially from this, and that the primary reason we care about ROI on this is so we can justify doing more work like this in the future.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7874289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7874289)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was a lot of discussion in the early days of the pandemic about "immunity passports" (also called "immunity certificates"), which would allow individuals who had recovered from COVID-19 to live with fewer restrictions than others. Some proposals were limited to more high-risk situations--for example, an eldercare facility might require immunity certificates for its employees.[1]

That conversation was derailed because it was initially unclear whether recovering actually yielded immunity from further disease and infection[2]. The scientific consensus is now that at least some degree of immunity will be conferred[3], so this conversation could re-emerge, as in a report produced by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and backed by former UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt[4]

Assuming that the various technical and scientific hurdles could be overcome, there would still be one fuzzier objection---that such passports would create a perverse incentive for some folks to intentionally seek out infection so as to obtain these privileges.

We wondered if that objection was well-founded. So we surveyed 1,000 Americans, asking them whether they'd seek out infection in order to be granted certain privileges, like the ability to attend large gatherings or be employed at an eldercare facility.

A quick report of a few findings is in this footnote[5]. But, at least to me, just as interesting as the top-level finding is the _why_ , the correlates of that willingness.

We put the data into Stats iQ (formerly Statwing, YC S12), an easy-to-use, cloud-based statistical analysis tool, so anyone can analyze it. It's a fascinating dataset, and it contains some interesting findings that we didn't actually set out to learn about (e.g., it turns out that about as many people were happy as sad to have been stuck at home for a few months, and that sentiment was associated with gender and parenthood).

We hope you find it to be as interesting as we have, even if some of the findings are, frankly, a bit dark.

[1] [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765836](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765836) [2] [https://www.who.int/news- room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...](https://www.who.int/news- room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19) [3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus- immuni...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-immunity- antibodies.html) [4] [https://institute.global/policy/taking-uk-testing- strategy-n...](https://institute.global/policy/taking-uk-testing-strategy- next-level) (The report advocates for health passports generally, in which antibody testing would supplement mass testing generally) [5] [https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/americans-seek-covid- infectio...](https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/americans-seek-covid-infection- for-immunity/)</comment>


Apple launches Big Sur public beta - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21356413/apple-macos-big-sur-public-beta-now-available <comment><USER2> Too much padding.

Blurry text (there is still no sub pixel antialiasing).</comment>