New Zero Day Java Vulnerability Being Exploited in the Wild - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/10/new-java-vulnerability-is-being-exploited-in-the-wild-disabling-java-is-currently-your-only-option/ <comment><USER2> This family of JRE attacks is far too common. Basically, when an unsigned applet runs, the JRE tries really hard to prevent it from creating a ClassLoader object. However, if you manage to create a ClassLoader object, it's game over -- you can break out of the sandbox and do whatever you please.

<shameless plug> For those interested, a recent blog post of mine analyzes a similar attack that uses CVE-2008-5353: [http://jsaxton.com/fun-with- wireshark-and-ie-java-exploits-p...](http://jsaxton.com/fun-with-wireshark- and-ie-java-exploits-part-2/) </shameless plug>

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone's interested in how the exploit works, here is my humble interpretation of the pastebin link:

jsaxton86's comment sets the scene nicely so I'll just copy it here:

"This family of JRE attacks is far too common. Basically, when an unsigned applet runs, the JRE tries really hard to prevent it from creating a ClassLoader object. However, if you manage to create a ClassLoader object, it's game over -- you can break out of the sandbox and do whatever you please."

The exploit is very clever, it never actually creates an instance of the ClassLoader object, but rather it uses Java reflection to call a particular method on a ClassLoader object, which was tricked into creation inside a separate exploit involving the JMX (Java Management Extensions) framework.

JMX has its own methods to instantiate classes, and a subclass of ClassLoader ("sun.org.mozilla.javascript.internal.GeneratedClassLoader") is passed in as a String; then the method defineClass is called via reflection in a way that deceives all the ClassLoader protection. Once this method is allowed to be invoked via reflection, it's "game over" as explained at the start.

<http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cUG2ayjh> [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/javamanag...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/javamanagement-140525.html) [http://www.cs.rit.edu/usr/local/pub/swm/jdoc6/com/sun/jmx/mb...](http://www.cs.rit.edu/usr/local/pub/swm/jdoc6/com/sun/jmx/mbeanserver/MBeanInstantiator.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone has posted the source code here:

<http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cUG2ayjh>

This is a result of two vulnerabilities one of which Oracle tried to fix in the last patch release with CVE-2012-5088.

[http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea7-forest-2.3/...](http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea7-forest-2.3/jdk/rev/43113374306c)

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2012-5088>

</comment><comment> mark-r Is there any reason to keep Java on your browser anymore? I can't remember the last time I needed it.

<comment><USER5> No, and in fact, Java should be completely uninstalled. 99/100 people never use it for anything, browser or otherwise. The small percentage that does can just reinstall it as needed, as Java is a free download.

Uninstall it, completely, and the next time this article is posted (with the dates changed and little else), you'll be glad it has nothing to do with you.

<comment><USER6> Minecraft players are currently staring at you, frowning.

<comment><USER7> They should just use the standalone version then. I see no reason one would prefer to play inside a browser.

<comment><USER8> The poster he's replying to said 99% of people don't need Java AT ALL. Not just the browser.

<comment><USER6> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The exploit has already made it to exploit packs: [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/01/zero-day-java-exploit- deb...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/01/zero-day-java-exploit-debuts-in- crimeware/\[1\])

</comment><comment><USER4> Metasploit module has been made available: [https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit- framework/blob/master/m...](https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit- framework/blob/master/modules/exploits/multi/browser/java_jre17_jmxbean.rb)

</comment><comment><USER10> How many use Java applets still? It is high time browser plugins for Java are killed. But the article advises to uninstall Java, not understanding Java browser plugin is different from Java.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does this apply to server side java as well, or is it only the browser client crap that noone has used this decennium?

<comment><USER12> No, it does not. This is non-news. Agreed, nobody uses that anymore, nobody should.

<comment><USER13> All the people commenting on this saying Java is never used by anybody and no one should be having it installed are way off, seriously. There's a reason Java is #2 on the TIOBE language list. Just because _you_ never _see_ it doesn't mean it's not being used. You might not know this, but Gmail is Java powered on the backend. Many banking sites use Java for a backend. In the corporate world, Java rules and is required to be installed on their machines.

<comment><USER12> This has nothing to do with Java. It's a browser plugin issue. Disable the plugin and forget.

<comment><USER13> You must have missed my last sentence. People work at the companies who are running Java on the server. People work at the companies who are developing Java on the desktop. A lot of people. A significant enough number of people that the language makes #2 on the TIOBE list. Debates about the TIOBE relevancy aside, it's at least somewhat of an indicator.

People are working for companies that use Java, and these employees cannot disable Java in their browser because it's required for their job. I happen to work at one of these shops, and I can confirm to you 12,000 people in the US from just my company alone who must have Java in their browser and running constantly. We're not alone in this regard. We're all vulnerable, and the suggestion to disable the plugin doesn't help much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nonsense... I have never heard of anyone being attacked in any way through java... it's just "security" firms that come up with all kinds of obscure things and try to scare people for pretty much nothing...

</comment><comment><USER15> If this is known, why hasn't Sun fixed the issue?

<comment><USER13> Wondering why Oracle hasn't patched a vulnerability is an exercise in frustration. You pretty much have to expect that if you're running Java, you're running a insecure program that will never be secured. Historically, by the time Oracle has patched the current flaw, there will be a couple more they haven't patched again.

<comment><USER16> Would Oracle patching Java monthly instead of quarterly help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [http://superuser.com/questions/201613/disable-java-plugin- in...](http://superuser.com/questions/201613/disable-java-plugin-in-google- chrome)

</comment><comment><USER18> Damn... I thought it was another remote DoS (like the semi-recent hashmap degenerating that could be triggered by using parameters in URL like aa=xx, ab=yy, ac=zz, etc. or the floating-point 12-years old bug that people noticed could be remotely triggered on any Tomcat server) and that, once again, I'd have to apply a workaround on my Java servers.

Thankfully this one is only concerning Java applets.

Java applets where probably the stupidest thing ever. They surely did s _ck and did bring terribly bad reputation to Java : (

Don't know who's still using them.

Can Google Chrome even be made to run Java applets?

I know latest OS X don't even _ship* with Java anymore...

<comment><USER19> Java applets are still in wider use than you seem to realise. For example, in some places, they seem to be the norm for things like on-line banking or interaction with government web sites. As a second example, they are also used for UIs on network-accessible devices. As a third, I've seen quite a few used for interactive illustrations on academic/training web sites. People have been doing these things with Java for at least as long as they've been doing them with Flash. And there are plenty more cases: tomjen3 already mentioned games, IIRC the conference call/screen sharing service used by one of my clients is Java-based, etc.

The likes of Google and Mozilla might want us all to drop these tried and tested technologies and move to shiny new ones like HTML5 and the latest JS and CSS developments, but realistically, it takes time for users to move on. Most of us don't have the luxury of controlling our customers' platforms so we can ensure they run up-to-date builds of Firefox or Chrome with all the latest toys.

It takes time for developers to move on, too. I'm currently working on a project that uses a Java applet for a client. If I were starting the same project today, I'd probably chose different tools, but it wasn't started today, and not so many years ago when the architectural decisions were being made, those new tools didn't exist yet.

The main thing holding Java applets back today seems to be the second rate support they now get from the major browsers and/or Oracle, assuming they are supported at all. The number of blatant, show-stopping bugs in browser/Java interactions is getting silly, and code that has worked for years is breaking because someone installed a software "upgrade". That's a pity, IMHO, because the JVM is still a decent platform, and there are several interesting modern programming languages other than Java itself that we could be using to develop web apps otherwise.

<comment><USER20> I've literally never seen Java in the wild that's not part of an exploit kit. I've disabled Java in every browser / OS since about 2007, and I'm yet to be unconvinced by not having it.

Can you show me any examples of what I might be missing out on?

<comment><USER19> The applet I'm working on is rather specialised, so talking about that isn't going to prove much. Others have pointed out some common examples from among the fields I mentioned, such as Minecraft, WebEx, and Danish government web sites. Each of these has a significant user base relying on Java applets.

<comment><USER21> Does Minecraft use applets or is it just a standalone desktop Java app? Does installing Minecraft create any vulnerability to this bug on a machine whose browsers have deactivated any Java plugin?

<comment><USER22> There are unrelated.

Besides downloading the Java app, you can play Minecraft in the browser through an applet at <https://minecraft.net/play>.

So no, if you are not running Java in the browser, a malicious web page can't run neither Minecraft nor other Java apps that you have locally installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please, please, please turn on Click-to-Enable in your browser. You'll appreciate it even if not for the security benefits.

[http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57536917-285/enable- clic...](http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57536917-285/enable-click-to- play-for-chrome-plug-ins/)</comment>


Bypass Paywalls Clean for Chrome/Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/magnolia1234-new/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean <comment><AUTHOR> Refactored extension/add-on with lots of new sites, bug-fixes, add custom sites and update-notification.

[https://github.com/magnolia1234-new/bypass-paywalls- chrome-c...](https://github.com/magnolia1234-new/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean) (no google analytics)

[https://github.com/magnolia1234-new/bypass-paywalls- firefox-...](https://github.com/magnolia1234-new/bypass-paywalls-firefox- clean)

<comment><USER2> Why did you switch from github.com/magnolia1234 (now deleted) to github.com/magnolia1234-new ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Clean start. But why bother if you're not using it anyway?

<comment><USER2> You don't want to reveal the reasons for your github suspension/deletion? (I could understand if they didn't tell you. Such notices are frustratingly often deliberately uninformative.)

The first time this project was discussed on HN I thought that it's not trustworthy and I believed the project description to be dishonest.

That somewhat rhymes with stuff one would need to do to get suspended on github - hence my question.

Then again the legal situation of paywall bypasses is pretty grey, so it's genuinely interesting to know whether github has potentially some kind of policy against it.

I know you're officially not involved as you said that the first time you posted the project. An unofficial answer would be equally interesting!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a place in tech for me? If so, where? - <AUTHOR> I've lived in Silicon Valley my whole life and have now worked here for about 8 years, mostly doing QE of some sort. For the last year or so, though, I feel like I've hit a wall.
I don't really care about working on world-changing projects, or a pool table and fridge full of snacks, or even tons of free t-shirts. I really just want to walk in at 9, do work with some minimum threshold of interesting-ness, and walk out at 5 without worrying about whether I'm on call or what ridiculous promise the sales guy in our open-plan office has made.
Do you have a job like that? Does it exist? If so, where, and how can I get there? <comment><USER2> Yes, it's possible. Many people just work 9-5. I've done interesting work at multiple companies since 2004, never worked more than 40 hours (past few years I've worked less than 40 hours).

How to get such a job:

1\. You may already have one. At many companies you can show up at 9, go home and 5, and _no one will care_. Really. You just need to be productive and do your job and everyone will be happy.

If you work in company where _everyone_ works crazy hours this is harder, because you'll feel constant social pressure to work longer (even if manager doesn't care). But if you pay attention you might find other coworkers doing the same.

2\. There are many companies that have work/life balance by default. E.g. read descriptions of companies that say "work/life balance" on [https://www.keyvalues.com/](https://www.keyvalues.com/). Some companies there define work/life balance rather bizarrely, but some meet my personal definition. And in either case you can get insight into their culture.

You can also often get a sense during interview ([https://www.keyvalues.com/culture- queries](https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries) has some good questions).

3\. You can negotiate explicitly. Negotiating takes some practice, but definitely possible.

4\. How will you get your work done in 9-5? Turns out you're actually less productive if you work long hours. I write about it e.g. here: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance- so...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance-software- engineer/)

Productivity skills can also help, e.g. [https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/03/stay- focused/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/03/stay-focused/)

5\. More difficult, but also possible, is <40 hours/week: I've done it, as has this guy I interviewed for my blog who has been working less than 40 hours a week for 15 years now - [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time- programmer...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/)

6\. Finally, I've written a book about the topic, covering negotiation skills, productivity skills, interviews with people who have taken different paths to this goal, and more: [https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)</comment>


The Insect Apocalypse Is Here - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html <comment><USER2> I think the American suburban yard may be equally responsible with agriculture for a lot of this in the US. The use of herbicides and pesticides is completely unregulated. Additionally lawns are an unnecessary waste of time for most people and have a large carbon footprint. I had a small native plant yard that attracted hundreds of pollinators and arachnids. I was treated like and criminal forced to cut most of it down. I still get a fair amount of terrestrial arthropods but not as much.

It sickens me when I see workers with those sprayer packs or trucks that look like small chemical plants.

Before I decided to comment I submitted my write up, if you are interested you can read that you can read here:

[http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban- ya...](http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-yard-to- reverse.html)

Edit: I did want to mention that I definitely seen a massive decline in butterflies and moths over the last 15 years.

Update: I quoted 40 million acres below, which is for turf grass which probably includes athletic fields. I am not against everyone having a lawn or athletic fields. I do think people should be able to cultivate their native environment on their suburban property and this should be encouraged and even incentivized. My neighbor's kids play in their backyard, so they have a need for it. Of course a non herbicide non monoculture lawn should work ok too. That's what I grew up with.

Also I think that gas powered devices need to be replaced with electric devices. I think something like 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled alone in relation to lawn maintenance.

The thing that scares me is the normality of spraying for mosquitoes. In my area it's the invasive Aedes mosquito species, the native species are a lot less aggressive. Also with some of these other very scary invasive species like the marmorated stink bug, ash borer, lantern fly, that new Asian tick, etc. Are we going to end up using more and more insecticides and subsequently kill more and more of our native fauna?

<comment><USER3> Lawns are one of the most ridiculous human inventions I have ever observed. You take normal self-sufficient grass out, then reseed with some sort of crippled grass that needs constant fertilization and watering. To make things worse, you mandate it to be unnaturally short, so people have to constantly mow and use herbicides to keep the normal grass out. And all of this is made mandatory for some reason. Aside from creating grass mono-cultures, this is just a gigantic waster of time and resources that doesn't produce _anything_ in return.

<comment><USER4> Lawns are useful for standing on outdoors, given that they are not up to your knees, not concrete, and not dirt. That's why most people maintain them. If you never go outside then there is not much need for a lawn.

<comment><USER5> I rarely see anybody standing on their lawn in my neighborhood. In Florida they even warned us to not let our dog on the lawn because it was so toxic.

I think lawns are mainly for looks.

<comment><USER6> I think it was mainly a status thing, in that you could afford to have vast amounts of land that weren't producing anything, and the workforce to maintain it. Like, it's something a French king would do at a Chateau to complement their rose gardens.

It's just crazy to think that now it can be against the law (or at least against HOA rules) to _not_ have a lawn. Like it's illegal to plant a vegetable garden in your front yard.

<comment><USER7> >or at least against HOA rules

WTF!? I am from Europe, is this really a thing? Although,it wouldn't surprise me, watching American Movies, lawn and suburbia seems inseparable.

<comment><USER4> The homeowner's association has a lot of power in the US, so it is inevitable that it will be misused and used incompetently. However only in the most close-minded and controlling of suburbs can you not plant a vegetable garden.

<comment><USER7> But what is their reasoning for this?

<comment><USER5> I think it's about the looks. Everything needs to be tidy and clean.

<comment><USER8> HOA's and HOA bylaws are normally mandated and created by the bank doing the construction loan. They do this to protect the value of the property while they hold interest in the remaining lots. The mortgage industry also loves this since in the end they may be stuck with a property if there is a default.

<comment><USER9> HOAs are a fascist alternative to actual community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> OT, but as I grow older I find it harder and harder to read those hyper- storified newspaper "stories". I don't care about the life story of all those people and their kids and how and why they were riding a bike in the forest 30 years ago.

It's supposed to be a great progress in journalism to put people first and make stories relatable, but it's gone too far -- and it always sound the same.

Bugs population is in sharp decline, here are the numbers, here are what scientists think are the causes, and the possible consequences, and the possible remedies -- is what I want to read.

Sorry for the rant.

<comment><USER11> I just immediately close the tab on any article that starts with "[person's name I don't recognize] was [doing something not directly related to the article's title]". If it's a topic of particular interest (like this one), I'll come here to see if there are comments.

<comment><USER12> Pretty much what I did. I tried skimming a bunch but it was paragraphs of narrative crap. I use to read articles in The Atlantic when I was younger, but I've grown tired of this long form journalism.

One thing I do enjoy are long form podcasts, because I can listen to them on the train or on long drives.

<comment><USER13> I do the same thing every time and I am glad to see there are so many others who feel the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember being a kid in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. Whenever we went to a pond or lake in the woods, there would be little frogs and salamanders everywhere in the water. Now there aren't and I find this mass extinction right before my eyes really, really disturbing. [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction- countdown/am...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction- countdown/amphibians-declining-alarming/)

<comment><USER15> Going to a Pacific Northwest beach today vs 30-40 years ago, You may also notice a lack of seagulls on beaches. I remember Kalaloch on the Olympic Peninsula used to have thousands of the vermin. Go there now, and you are lucky to see 10 in an entire day.

<comment><USER16> While I find all of this stuff totally disturbing - claiming that you'd be lucky to see 10 seagulls at Kalaloch Beach is insane.

I used to live in Olympia and would visit Kalaloch/Ruby Beach on a monthly basis - even camped there a couple weekends ago. There are seagulls(and Bald Eagles, and even Pelicans) all around there to this day. I even have photographic evidence(shot on a medium format toy camera right in front of Kalaloch Lodge earlier this year): [https://i.imgur.com/hMwDuXs.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/hMwDuXs.jpg)

I'm not sure what these birds' patterns are wrt to collecting food but a cursory dig in my photos shows that I've captured pictures of anywhere from a handful to hundreds of birds on this strip of coast on different occasions over the course of the last year and a half or so.

<comment><USER15> To elaborate on my observation: aprox 30 years ago in the summer you would see thousands of seagulls on Kalaloch. Perhaps 50-100 in eye view at all times. Over the last few years I've gone to Kalaloch in summer you are lucky to see more than 2 at a time.

Seagulls still exist obviously, but there numbers are drastically smaller. As they are basically rats with wings, perhaps it's just better trash management, but the observation still stands.

<comment><USER16> You said something far more alarming and also flat out wrong - that's what I'm refuting. This 2 or 10 or whatever tiny amount of birds at a time thing you are claiming to experience...doesn't match my experience whatsoever. I can provide more photographs if you don't believe me.

I can't speak to the pacific northwest 30 years ago so I'll take your word for it that there were more birds on the coast then.

<comment><USER15> Sorry you don't believe me.

Here's my own photo evidence from South Beach in July 2017. [https://photos.app.goo.gl/JzporX8XmFFswgSu8](https://photos.app.goo.gl/JzporX8XmFFswgSu8)

I didn't go in 2018, but 2016 and 2017 I was there for about a week. same empty beaches both trips.

You being there in Nov may be why you see seagulls, I never have been there in winter.

I don't have any photos handy from the 1980's to scan, but it truly is a stark difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Plausibly one of the Horsemen of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction) .

Edit: Actually, I regret being flippant with this. I find this development gravely troubling.

<comment><USER18> Biomass of mammals on Earth as of 2018 \- Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs (60%) \- Humans (36%) \- Wild animals (4%)

Wow.

<comment><USER19> Keep in mind we are able to sustain our livestock populations beyond what a natural ecosystem for the same area could support.

What would be more interesting is to see how the natural mammal biomass has changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reading this in the NYT this morning, added to other coming global disasters, it occurred to me that given there isn't a _whole_ lot I can do, my only regret is that I won't live long enough to see the end of the movie.

Choke ourselves with CO2? Kill all the insects and the crops die off? (Maybe _that_ was the disaster in _The Road_.) Something else even worse that we're currently fucking up, and don't even know it yet? Growing up, I thought it was going to be nuclear war, but I'm starting to think it will be not with a bang, but a whimper. But unfortunately, I can't flip to the last chapter. I just want to know how it ends. :-)

<comment><USER21> > Choke ourselves with CO2? If you look at the units of the Keeling Curvy [1] > you will notice that we are around 410 ppm of CO2. The PEL is 5000 ppm [2], > so no, we won't choke soon especially because plants grow faster[3] with > more CO2 so there is a negative feedback loop (to some extend).

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

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

[3] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the- experts-d...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does- rising-co2-benefit-plants1/)

<comment><USER22> Your second link says that 1000ppm CO2 has significant negative effects on human cognition after only 2.5 hours exposure.

Your third link says that while increased CO2 in isolation makes plants grow faster, the negative effects that come with it would overwhelm any positive effects. Negative effects include drought, heat stress, invasive insects and disease, and increased forest fires.

It also says that for wild plants that don't get artificial fertilizer, availability of materials like nitrogen limits their growth regardless of CO2 availability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder whether there might not also be additional factors that we have not considered. For example, insect viruses. We know that when human populations mixed between continents upwards of 95% of one population vanished due to disease. Very few people study insect diseases (and are usually just happy that a 'pest' has been killed), and there are so many species it would be a nearly impossible task to study them all. Globalization is now mixing members of all species and their diseases with them. It would not surprise me if part of this drastic decline was also due to massively virulent diseases sweeping through completely unprepared populations just as European diseases did to the indigenous populations of the Americas.

<comment><USER24> Possible... But we know from a previous pesticide problem - DDT - just how disastrous a single chemical can be. And that was in the seventies: Big Ag has only gotten bigger since. I think agriculture has to be treated as the main cause unless definitive evidence to the contrary is produced. (And at the scales we're talking about, that evidence should be pretty easy to turn up, if it exists...)

<comment><USER25> this is some really weak reasoning, lol. it most likely has many causes. as others have said elsewhere, it impacts rural uncultivated areas like rainforests as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think we could fix this before it's too late. Anectdata, but I have my own yard, and a big chunk of it is now overgrown with strawberries (it basically looks like ivy, so the neighbors think it's fine). Insects love that patch of the yard. Combined with a handful of "wild" areas where I let the natives and wildflowers grow untended all season, my yard was swarming with fireflies, June bugs, butterflies, random pollinators I've never seen before and the occasional chipmunk.

None of my neighbor's yards are remotely close to the biodiversity I have. My neighbors all spray for weed and mosquito control. If we mandated that a certain portion of our green spaces had to be reserved for insect and bird life, if we mandated a certain portion be meadows, basically, unsprayed, untreated, untouched, I think it'd go a long way to improving things.

</comment><comment><USER27> I forget where I was reading about this but it was a trucker commenting on this. He had been driving trucks since the 70's supposedly and everyone was saying how there are no bugs on the windshields. He said he noticed that it came in waves. Some years, tons of bugs, others none. Now I know this is some unverified person on the internet that I can't find the source to, but it was interesting to hear if true.

<comment><USER28> Well, I grew up in northern Ontario and we were talking about it at my family reunion and EVERYBODY remarked how few bugs there were these days compared to when we were kids. June Bugs, moths, grasshoppers ... every species has been hit. And this is all across Ontario; Kenora to Toronto, Sault Ste. Marie to Ottawa.

<comment><USER29> Same. I spent summers there too. Anywhere close to humans has been slammed. I used to have trouble sleeping because of how loud the frogs were at the pond by the lake. There were tens of thousands of them. Might be a hundred at the same pond today.

The Anthropocene isn't going to last.

<comment><USER28> Or crickets! I can't remember the last time I heard a cricket let alone the steady din of a field full of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like how the conversation here degenerated into arguments about watering your lawn; something which isn't really done in Germany, where this phenomenon was first noticed.

FWIIW I noticed the lack of bugs mostly by noticing Spain seems to still have a lot of bugs sticking to the windshield (not so in Germany). Also the total lack of lightning bugs when I moved back to New England after two decades.

</comment><comment><USER31> There is not one mention of glyphosate (or Roundup) in this article. Why?

If I had to bet on one overriding cause of this, it's glyphosate.

<comment><USER32> Glyphosate is a herbicide. Why blame it when there are dozens of insecticides used in agriculture?

<comment><USER33> There's recent reporting that Glyphosate affects insect gut bacteria.

[https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/Glyphosate- disrup...](https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/Glyphosate-disrupts- honey-bee-gut/96/web/2018/09)

I think the larger point being, the more chemicals we insert into the environment without a holistic understanding of their interactions and impact on various ecosystems, the more we run the risk of collateral damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I live in northern Italy and cannot confirm this thesis and I would say even the opposite for my region. I never noticed so many insect than now and every year are coming new species. The population of this new species is multiplying rapidly!

<comment><USER35> I just drove across central Italy from Rome to the Adriatic--mostly at night on the Autostrada--and got maybe two bug strikes on my windshield. That seems pretty thin to me.

<comment><USER34> I know it because we have a farm at home and I see the diversity of insects constantly and the amout of some new species causes problems in the farms

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can this be explained due to changed land usage? For example [1]? Anecdotaly, I experience huge differences. The wild places seems to be humming as 20 years ago but there are less and less wild places.

[1] [http://archive.is/UUgzj](http://archive.is/UUgzj)

Edit: Improved English.

<comment><USER36> It's a problem for sure, but it's not _the_ problem. It's not like there's just _one thing_ that we're changing in a way that effects ecosystems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Strangely I've been reading the opposite should be occurring: [https://www.uvm.edu/gund/news/global-warming-more-insects- hu...](https://www.uvm.edu/gund/news/global-warming-more-insects-hungrier- crops)

Global warming should be increasing insect metabolism and their populations.

I think it's very possible that we actually don't know what's happening, or if our solutions are making things worse as we try to engineer nature back to what we believe to be the "natural state." The only thing we can do is try to be as clean as possible, but I often wonder if what we find as solutions now are just going to cause massive problems in the future. There is no way to really tell.

<comment><USER38> Global warming/climate change is, above all, one result of an experiment of unprecedented scope. "What happens to this planet when we release vast quantities of heat trapping material into the air?"

This is the very first time we've run this experiment, and the experiment is ongoing.

In other words, there are and will continue to be enormous uncertainties about the details of what's ahead of us.

> if our solutions are making things worse as we try to engineer

As what one might call a 'climate change alarmist', going back a couple of decades now, I hear you and I don't necessarily disagree. I am far less eager to push forward with, for example, geoengineering and other grand responses than my fellow climate change 'true believers', simply because of how uncertain all of this is.

Having said that, we as a civilization need to increase all manner of related research 100x or 10,000x, as soon as possible.

In the same way that we have been forced to directly manage all kinds of natural resources because of our actions (for example: deer populations), so also will we be likely required to directly manage our atmosphere in various ways.

But we need to be really fucking careful about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> In case you were as annoyed as me by the verbosity:

"[A] 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent."

</comment><comment><USER40> Another thing that strikes me is that this 'science' comes from informal~ groups of passionated people. No market to be seen here. Yet it's the foundation of our lives..

</comment><comment><USER41> In an ecological sense, what are the downsides of humanity killing itself off in the very near future? It seems like nothing but a net-positive for the rest of life residing on earth.

<comment><USER42> So what you're saying is, "in an ecological sense" you're fine with it if my children die of starvation? Well good for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> While it seems sensible to turn and look at our use of pesticides for the cause of the decline in insect populations there appears to be another, much more sinister, element at play.

"Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven't bred it into new strains, it hasn't changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.

They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska's paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors."

I suspect there are multiple vectors involved in the observed declines and we have reached the tipping point where past colony sizes can simply no longer be sustained given the increasing pressures on multiple fronts.

Source: [https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food- nutrie...](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients- carbon-dioxide-000511)

</comment><comment><USER44> This study appears to be yet another alarmist rehash of what has been previously discussed on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533)

Here's one of the original papers:

[https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...](https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2..).

The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper:

"What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbroich Bruch Nature Reserve, near Krefeld, using Malaise Insect Traps. The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in the number of flying insects. Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were found. Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in 1989, were still present in 2013."

"The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220 acres). Due to the reserve's relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the area only recently."

So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world. I think that is a bit of a stretch, even for statistics.

Since different bugs breed in different seasons, and numbers depend on the fruitfulness of previous generations, food supply, predation, disease, temperature and so on, this bug weight could vary considerably from year to year (or site to site) for any number of reasons. While one year cicadas thrive, the next year there may be none.

BTW they're measuring the weight of dead bugs - not how many bugs or what species of bugs - just the weight of bugs. Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol.

I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea.

See the original HN posting for discussions pointers to the earlier papers.

<comment><USER45> There have been many subsequent studies in different regions all cited in the article and all finding a precipitous decline.

<comment><USER44> moultano says> _" There have been many subsequent studies in different regions all cited in the article and all finding a precipitous decline."_.

Nope, wrong on both counts. All the article says is that professional researchers are _looking_for_data_sets_! From the article [underscores mine]:

 _" Since the Krefeld study came out, researchers have begun searching for other forgotten repositories of information that might offer windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers have analyzed long-term data, belonging to _Dutch entomological societies _, about beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72 percent, 54 percent) that mirrored the Krefeld ones. Roel van Klink, ...is _looking_for_ historical data sets... So far he has found forgotten data from 140 old data sets for 1,500 locations that _could_be_resampled_.

In the United States, one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance comes from the work of Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. "And so here I am in Year 46," he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere — even species that "everyone regarded as a junk species" only a few decades ago — all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. "But, of course, I don't cover the entire globe," he added. "_I_cover_I-80_."

... One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the Danish car study. _

<comment><USER45> I don't think you even read the quotes you posted, let alone the whole article. How does the second one you posted not meet your criteria? You also missed one.

 _a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, "Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico." The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards — and, crucially, their prey — 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It's easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it's sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.)_

<comment><USER44> You said> _" _many_ subsequent studies in different regions _all_ cited in the article and _all_ finding a _precipitous_ decline."_

There aren't "many" there are only a few. Those are scattered in content, some are unpublished, some are unpublished data, all by varying types of researchers in different fields and with varying methodologies. One study is about spiders, another about insects, etc. This is hardly "Insect Apocalypse" \- it is just "Insect Madness". I'm willing to wait until more serious research is done and collated.

The fact is this article and many others about "Insect Armageddon/Apocalypse" were triggered by a single study of a a single 220-acre area of German wilderness by a bunch of amateur bug-chasers. Here they are:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld- germ...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germany- insect-armageddon.html)

And here's their paper that started it all:

[http://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp- content/uploads/20...](http://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/Orbrioch-Nature-reserve.pdf)

Read it and weep. A study of 220 acres in Germany. See

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533)

for criticisms and notes.

Not that their work isn't worthwhile (I'll leave that for others to decide). But from their original article we now have many, many misleading and alarmingly shrill articles, all predicting a worldwide insect population collapse based on very little scientific evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This would seem like a good time to invest in urban, vertical, pestacide-free farming enterprises. Anyone have recommended trading companies?

On another note, evolution is an interesting discussion point. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-birds- evolving...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-birds-evolving-to- avoid-cars-3530859/)

I'm reminded of Henry Ford's attempt to industrialize natural rubber production and the evolution of the insects in response that made his endeavor very challenging. Are some insects simply avoiding 'grey patches of death' ?

<comment><USER47> I think vertical, pesticide-free farming could be beneficial. But I don't see any reason to make it urban. We benefit from farming being very specialized, and it seems like putting it around other human activity would just make it more difficult than it needs to be.

<comment><USER46> Urban would just reduce time/cost of transport of food to cities.

Would also increase resiliance of cities to catastrophies to be entirely food supply independent assuming it can generate sufficient energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm seeing a lot of people giving anecdata here but it's very easy to fool yourself and imho this feels like a story that is going to need a lot more study for us to understand what's really going on. I can't think of any obvious reason that either climate change or pesticide use in areas hundreds of miles away would affect insect populations. But, there's a lot I don't know. So let's find out but not panic.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it not possible to breed insects to try and replace some portion of the natural base population? Obviously other changes causing the population loss would also have to occur (e.g more responsible use of insecticides, less reliance on monoculture agriculture) - but insects are pretty good at reproducing so I'd think this is at least something we could try and ameliorate.

<comment><USER3> This is a problem likely caused by humans trying to manage too much in nature. Does it really sound reasonable to respond by taking over the working of even larger chunk of nature?

I think a much more reasonable approach would be to scale down pesticide use, scale down our overall biomass footprint by reducing meat consumption and scale down anything that involves cutting down "wild" trees or "re-purposing" forest landmass.

<comment><USER50> We may already be so deep in the uncanny valley of geoengineering, so to speak, that we're past the point of no return and our only chance for survival is to take control of the unintented consequences of human civilization with intentional large scale action. At this point, the losses we've seen so far and our predictions seem so bad that it may be worth the risk of even more damage to gain valuable experience in geoengineering that could be eventually used to turn our planet around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Isn't there an "insect apocalypse" every few years and never actually coming to any sort of fruition?

<comment><USER52> > Isn't there an "insect apocalypse" every few years and never actually coming > to any sort of fruition?

Would you call an 82% drop "coming to any sort of fruition" or are you holding out for a higher threshold?

Seriously, what's your threshold for giving the idea a second thought?

Do you need an actual full-on insect apocalypse with tangible and irrefutable economic consequences before you utter the words, "I'm not saying I'm sold on this whole insect apocalypse thing, but I think we ought to at least listen to what the entomologists are saying."

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about the subject, but what's your threshold for simply not dismissing it?

<comment><USER51> This is the fruition I'm referring to: "could alter the planet". Never seems to be the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Should we build tiny insect/animal greenhouses ? to compensate and restart their population ?

<comment><USER53> If we stop spraying them with stuff specifically designed to kill them hopefully they'll come back all on their own.

<comment><USER40> obviously but so far industrial farming is not near pesticide-free, so maybe people who have time can create small pockets of biodiversity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Noticed fewer spiders in my house this year. Last year I couldn't go a day without a couple on the walls. Other bug populations seem higher though here in the PNW. Been finding a lot of little beetles? On my walls, plenty of ants and flys.

</comment><comment><USER55> Anyone still think a hominid with cognitive facilities honed by evolutionary processes for small group interactions is (magically) up to the task of managing a global civilisation?

<comment><USER42> They're evidently capable of doing advanced mathematics and of producing microprocessors among many other things, so whatever we think about them managing the globe, their intellectual equipment goes well beyond "small group interactions".

<comment><USER55> That's fair: we have managed a pretty remarkable act of scaffolding up from an impressive evolved set of cognitive abilities. My sloppy throwaway line didn't capture my thought, which should have encompassed far more than 'cognitive', and made clearer that it's specifically large group decision-making I don't believe us to be capable of. We only survived the 20th century by the skin of our teeth (it was dumb luck), few ecosystems (which constitute our home) will survive the 21st, and I doubt global civilisation can survive for long as their collapse proceeds apace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'd always thought the Insect Apocalypse would be a little different. You know, like Evolution or Killer Bees or basically any scenario where _we 're_ the ones dying.

<comment><USER57> Not to spoil the ending for you but...

...if we continue to sabotage earth's ecosystem, we will be the ones dying.

<comment><USER58> Sci-fi daydreamers: "Don't worry, we'll just go live on Mars." [Where _everything_ is dead...]

<comment><USER57> Oh yes, I love these. There are also the 'we just build our own closed ecosystem' types. Hilarious.

<comment><USER59> ...and why would you even go all the way to Mars to do it? Why not just do it right on Earth where you already are.

<comment><USER19> Honestly, why not both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> How would one donate money to these specific people? What others are similarly no-nonsense and worthy of support?

> _For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. "Scientists > thought this data was too boring," Dunn says. "But these people found it > beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth > for all the rest of us."_

Why don't we support that more? That was my first thought, and then I remember we instead kinda empower those that subvert it, e.g

> _In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful > environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such > as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the > People 's Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at > play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed > the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct > action movement._

> _A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on > confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as > McDonald 's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather > intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and > practices, and evade accountability."_

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth- insight/2013/j...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth- insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism)

Collectively, we're kinda like a youth on a motorbike riding without a helmet because their peers might find that "gay". By that I mean, the main hindrance is in our head, it's not that it's _so_ hard to put a helmet on, compared to the power of habit, memes, peer pressure. And yes, when you actually are in that situation, it can be powerful -- but in hindsight, you sometimes realize all the options you had but dismissed.

> _It 's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the > ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and > most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to > destruction._

\-- Noam Chomsky

Just take that "paying for popularity can be fraud" article. I found it interesting from a technical/legal perspective, but the discussion itself is in big parts around the morality of it, namely how it's fine because "everybody does it, that's what a startup _needs_ to do, etc.". My point isn't that that's so horrible and the reason the insects are gone, but compare that with this:

> _And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. "We think details > about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life > histories of entomologists," Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a > society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg's on the 2017 paper, > dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that > focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn't want to talk about what drew > him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of > wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying > them._

That's not sexy, that's not "how it's done in the modern world" \-- but it could be argued that it's how it _should_ be done, and if we were more serious, too, then being so "dry" would be no problem at all. Just like not paying for popularity would be fine if _nobody_ does it, and might make the marketplace a lot more efficient and friendly, as well save a lot of energy and resources. The notion of Kant's categorical imperative doesn't _have_ to be completely absent from our thinking, we could rediscover it. Then maybe we could be talking about our survival as a species in a world that's worth living in.

Sorry for being being polemic, but frankly, my initial reaction to this article was to actually sob for a few minutes. This hurts like hell. I was alarmed by talk of bees disappearing over 10 years ago, but like everybody else I had "other shit to do", and I simply can't bear see it all play out in my lifetime. Because I know all the CRAP we distracted ourselves with, and I see how we lie about that later on. First the smug condescion towards those taking anything "too seriously" we don't want to take seriously or don't understand yet, and then instantly jumping to "oh well, it's too late, nothing anyone could have done". There always were and are small little voices, and we always mostly ignore them, and pretend that's being mature and realistic, instead of cowardly or foolish.

Let's change. We actually can. And let's start with stopping to excuse our own (in)actions with what everybody does, or "how humans are".

        Let nothing be called natural
        In an age of bloody confusion,
        Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
        And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
        Be held unalterable!

\-- Bertolt Brecht, "The Exception and the Rule" (1937)

        But go not "back to the sediment"
        In the slime of the moaning sea,
        For a better world belongs to you,
        And a better friend to me.

\-- Voltairine de Cleyre

<comment><USER61> > How would one donate money to these specific people? ... Why don't we > support that more?

Insects and other arthropods are generally considered gross and annoying by most people. In many urban environments, less is usually considered better. Conservation efforts are a lot more attractive when they focus on big animals more like us.

There are some great organizations focusing on habitat restoring and arthropod conservation. Xerces in the US is one worthy of support to reach the kind of people doing this work -- [https://xerces.org/](https://xerces.org/)

<comment><USER60> And then there's the effort put into making us even more squeamish. Kinda like you can't sell pointless cleaning products to people who aren't paranoid about "germs" etc. Yes, nobody wants insects in their home, but there's still a difference between that and finding them "gross" when they're outside doing their thing IMO. I wouldn't assume that our distance from insects is just a result of our "natural" being grossed out by them, it might also be the other way around. Probably a bit of both. I'm sure there's a lot baked in for good reason evolutionarily, insects do transmit diseases after all. But still, we also have a lot of great ways to deal with that without outright having to turn everything into a wasteland.

Maggots and fruit flies and spiders are one thing, but if people are grossed out by a butterfly, the problem is with them. Yes, I also jump when a big fat spider crawls on me when I don't expect it, but other than that, it's a matter of practice and perspective. ("it's even more scared of you than you of it" and all that). If we can't grow up to even that level we're truly hopeless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The Times is really going hard on the gloom and doom lately

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com)

<comment><USER63> Not surprising. I'm sure it gets the clicks and the ad eyeballs, plus as a bonus it supports their political agenda.

<comment><USER64> Which political agenda is that?

<comment><USER65> How do you feel reading this article? Who benefits from that feeling? Is there anyone you're more likely to give money or votes to? Are there any actions with economic impact you feel like you should take? And most cynically, isn't there a part of you that feels like you're morally superior or have secret knowledge that the other people below you on your social scale don't share, and you now despise that other group for not "seeing the truth" that much more, solidifying an "us vs. them" mentality with another brick in the wall?

Yes, there's politics here. Being "political" doesn't mean it's wrong, though we have that default reaction for a fairly solid reason, but, still, being "political" doesn't mean it's wrong. There's definitely politics, though.

<comment><USER66> > ...part of you that feels like you're morally superior or have secret > knowledge that the other people below you on your social scale don't > share...

I see where you're going, but can't this criticism be applied to any factual journalism?

And isn't it therefore vacuous?

<comment><USER65> "I see where you're going, but can't this criticism be applied to any factual journalism?"

Selection of what facts to present is intrinsically political. (Related, I can't find it in myself to get too upset about "filter bubbles", because you _can 't_ simply absorb "all data", and consequently, you are always going to be in a filter bubble merely due to that fact. You can question the nature of your current bubble, but you can't "escape" the way some people seem to think they can.)

The _specific_ case of prompting you to feel an in-group reaction is not always a primary goal, though anyone would be excused for thinking otherwise if they consume too much mass media or explicitly political media. Of course if you try hard enough you can always pattern match to a given story somehow, but it's certainly sometimes a more explicit goal than other times. As an example, a straight-up insult targeted at a group may prompt in-group feelings, but not necessarily any "secret knowledge" feelings.

"And isn't it therefore vacuous?"

In the strictly logical Aristotelian sense of "statement is true or false and nothing in between", yes, all statements are political, and the statement is vacuous since it fails to distinguish between cases. In a logical system with degrees of truth, some statements are definitely more political than others ("Vote $PARTY" vs. "Wheat is a staple crop of humanity" vs. "Vote $PARTY or you are despicable human being unworthy of life"), even if you never really reach true zero. In the human sense of "things that are vacuously true but you still need to keep in mind even so", it's something to keep in mind. There's a surprising number of statements that are obviously or vacuously true, yet we still need near-constant reminding of or we just somehow forget them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I clicked mainly because the clickbaitiness of the headline annoyed me and I wanted to inform myself a bit before complaining about it. The NYT rewarded me by telling me I have one less free article this month. That annoyed me even more so I hit back.

They are very smart over there, and the NYT didn't get where it is thanks to short term thinking. Surely they have thought about what a bad experience clickbait is and how much it damages their brand.

<comment><USER68> I love that 90% of the top comments on hn are people complaining about website design. Extremely relevant and not at all boring.

<comment><USER69> This is silly, but in some ways the design and flaws of major news and content sites is a topic more relevant/interesting to a discussion forum for hackers than ongoing environmental collapse is.

Sure, the latter is a much bigger deal and affects hackers as much as it affects all life on Earth.

But doctors talk about medicine and care. Teachers talk about education and learning. Hackers talk about design, UX, etc.

We should all be talking about ecosystem collapse. Yet it's not a thing we interact with every day (yet), whereas NY Times' paywall is.

Human brains are lousy at risk, it's true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why won't all the fleas die

<comment><USER71> Because if they do, something even more nasty will come in their stead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> What is it with modern journalism that everything has to start with two screens of personal stories?

The article stands on its own without the story of a boy, and his father, and their ancestors, and personal experiences.

<comment><USER27> It's like they are getting ideas from recipes. Want to know how to make muffins? My grandmother died and left me the recipe. She was a nice old lady, etc etc.

<comment><USER73> I know you're just kidding, but to the OP, this is from the magazine section. I haven't read the article yet, but sometimes at least, enjoy the occasional story in my news.

<comment><USER74> I think they're serious. Recipe websites make for great content farms as they naturally get page views that last for several minutes while requiring no creative writing skills for the recipe content. Prefixing the pages with some prose that the user has to skim through while searching for the start of the recipe affects engagement for the ads which monitor that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What happens when you break your site's daily usage record… by 10x?  (Fundfill) - <AUTHOR> http://jbalfantz.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/what-happens-when-you-break-your-sites-daily-usage-record-by-10x/ A retrospective on what happens when your site suddenly gets loads of traffic.  Are you prepared?  Here's what went right and what didn't with Fundfill's biggest day. <comment><AUTHOR> You might remember our website problems from this HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6522973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6522973)</comment>


Apple stepping up pressure on music labels to snub Amazon  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/03/apple-stepping-up-pressure-on-music-labels-to-snub-amazon.ars

<comment><USER2> It looks like every day that passes, Apple is trying to really demonstrate they're the new Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I just remember it differently because at the time I was using Linux and always looking for ways to deal with everyone else who used Office and/or Exchange, but IMO the "New Apple == Old Microsoft" comparison is way off base.

Apple is easy to avoid, trivial even, you can buy one of many other music players, buy other phones and use other media managers. You don't _need_ to use any Apple product unless you opt-in to their system (buying a device) and even if you do opt-in, if you buy DRM-free tracks (which Apple pushed for, btw) you can leave iTunes any time you want if you buy a non-Apple device (the only exception being video which is still DRM-laden AFAIK).

Old Microsoft was impossible to avoid because government and businesses opted you in, and you couldn't opt-out no matter how hard you tried if you wanted to interact with those systems. Word documents were difficult or impossible to reverse engineer and MS did what it could to prevent any advancement in that area, and Exchange was nearly impossible to interface with (it's still problematic) if you weren't using Outlook.

I mean, it's not like government and businesses are using iTunes and thereby forcing people to buy Apple products to interact with the corporate iTunes system (as was the case with old Microsoft, Exchange and Office).

Besides, Apple is certainly behaving badly, granted, but in this case they aren't even pressuring the labels to _stop_ doing business with Amazon, they're pressuring them to stop giving Amazon a day of exclusivity. The Old Microsoft way was to threaten to cut off vendors just for competing, not for giving a competitor an advantage.

<comment><USER4> > The Old Microsoft way was to threaten to cut off vendors just for competing, > not for giving a competitor an advantage.

What specific incident(s) are you referring to? The closest thing I can think of is threatening to witholding volume discounts based on vendor behavior. As I understand it this practice is only illegal because the dominant market position of Windows and Office makes MS (retroactively) a monopoly. If a small startup did the same thing that would be fine both legally and (IMO) morally. I don't know of any cases where a vendor was threatened with not being able to sell Windows or Office (i.e., "cut off"), however.

<comment><USER3> I'm not referencing anything specific, so I could very well be wrong with that example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How did apple and Microsoft ridiculously complexify file management. Why is it so hard to add and delete files ? Why do I have to sync with special software? Why can't the damn thing (zune or ipod) be the disk that it is? All about locking in control.

<comment><USER6> Is this the way most users of these devices feel? I don't get that impression at all. I'd go so far as to say that I bet MP3 players would be _significantly_ less popular today if they all required file management via Explorer/Finder.

<comment><USER5> Are users really that incompetent? With all the millions of copies of Microsoft word, photoshop, winamp, etc that require knowledge of files and folders can the concept be that inscrutable to everyone? I mean, most people who are under the age of 50 these days are more likely than not to grasp the concept of a file, I'd bet.

<comment><USER7> There is a significant difference between understanding something intellectually and understanding it in such a way that it becomes intuitive or second-nature. That the task of getting the content from one place to another can be done reliably with practically no user intervention is a boon for people who don't find operating a computer intrinsically rewarding, and one of the key reasons the iPod was and is so successful among those people.

Being a HN reader, you probably have enough experience with computers that the cognitive load of tasks like file management is basically zero. But for most people, even many people who use computers on a daily basis, the cognitive load involved in managing a library of thousands of files is much higher than that of simply plugging something in. Unless they have a particular motivation to favor the former, the latter is always going to be more appealing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So let's see here. Being a monopoly in music distribution and telling suppliers where else they can sell their stuff. Hello, anti-trust!

<comment><USER7> _Being a monopoly in music distribution_

What definition of monopoly leads you to that conclusion?

<comment><USER9> If you are large enough to determine the entire music industry you are a monopoly.

Microsoft gets all sorts of crap for windows being a monopoly yet there is still mac and linux that anyone can change to. Yet they are still considered a monopoly.

By that definition apple is a monopoly.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft hasn't been a monopoly for, what, a decade?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see now that when Jobs said that the "Don't be evil" mantra is bullshit, he meant pretty much that.

Apparently, not being evil is bullshit.

<comment><USER11> Dude. Wrong person(s)/company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is it with Jobs lately? Having a near-death experience and then deciding to be _more_ of an asshole must be the true embodiment of "Think Different".

Edit: Perhaps he actually died last year and they got him to the pet cemetery before the stock went down.

</comment><comment><USER13> If this were a movie, Apple would be the greedy figure that eventually gets left behind by every who believed in him when he winds up with a gun pointed at his best friend's head.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just to be factual. Apple is not asking anyone to snub Amazon. They, according to a single anonymous source, are no longer providing promotional support to releases that give a competitor an exclusive period and then grant the iTunes store the right to sell their material after the best selling day is over.

Sounds reasonable to me. I wouldn't allocate my best marketing spots to weakened releases either.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wonder how much of this will happen once Jobs retires.

<comment><USER8> I can tell you how much - look at Microsoft in 1990s.

If there is an opportunity to make a lot of money by abusing the antitrust law, the money will be made and distributed via bonuses to the sociopaths. The sociopaths will infiltrate the company, any company, as soon as they smell blood in the water. The law moves too slowly to impede them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bezos (lowering costs for consumers) vs Jobs (fleecing consumers) - I know who i'm rooting for

<comment><USER3> It sounds like you like one, and not the other, and are making up summaries to fit.

<comment><USER16> No, because jobs has been around longer and pirates of silicon valley movie, i actually like jobs more. However, from an intellectual standpoint i think bezos is the better man for consumers.

<comment><USER3> I see where you're coming from, but I think you're overlooking a few things.

Apple basically showed the labels that selling music online was "good", they pressured the labels to drop DRM and regularly pressure the content owners (music and video) to lower prices.

Basically everything great about Amazon MP3 (prices and lack of DRM) is there not because Bezos insisted on it, but because the labels are eager to (re)gain the upper hand against Apple.

Besides, Apple is objecting to Amazon getting a day of exclusivity in return for featuring new releases, I don't see how that benefits anyone other the label and Amazon.

Not that I approve of Apple's tactics here, just saying that painting Bezos as the good guy is not exactly correct and while Jobs has freakish control issues, he has historically focused on providing the best experience (in his eyes) for consumers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What has been some of the better achievements in comsci in recent times? - <AUTHOR> <comment> vanilla-almond The emphasis on object-oriented programming (OOP) seems to have loosened in the profession. I think this is a good thing (but others will disagree). New languages (Rust, Nim, Julia, Go) have object-like features but are not traditionally OOP.</comment>


Apple Macbook Retina stains - <AUTHOR> http://www.staingate.org

Apple is disappointing severely again.

Anyone had a screen replacement out of warranty? <comment><USER2> weirdly, my 13" mbpr has probably spent 95% of it's 3 year life outdoors, under a roof but otherwise exposed to sunlight and natural conditions. Once a week I blow it down during blowing leaves off the deck with a petrol leaf blower and it pretty much looks brand new. Just my 2c.

[http://staingate.org](http://staingate.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you mis-posted the website URL. You should be fine to go ahead and repost.</comment>


Facebook accused of spying on Belgian citizens like the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/facebook-spying-belgian-citizens-nsa-data-regulator-lawsuit <comment><USER2> Any country having any sense of protecting its citizen's privacy would ban facebook.</comment>


Java, please stop ruining my fun - <AUTHOR> http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2009/07/java-please-stop-ruining-my-fun/

<comment><USER2> Unless I'm missing something, can't you just define a classpath and put your jars in there, then javac will look there first. I did all of my development work in Eclipse and it did a lot of the heavy lifting to give you nifty things like incremental compilation and build management.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that you need eclipse to manage things bothers me to no end. I realize that Visual Studio is pretty much a requirement in the .NET world, but all the tools are also accessible from the command line and VS ties into the default build tools, unlike eclipse.

<comment><USER2> Eclipse hooks into your command line java compiler, that's why you define it in your preferences. There is also an environment variable CLASSPATH that you can set that the javac command-line command will use to resolve jar locations

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the classpath problem is the number 1 reason Java failed on the desktop. Sun would've been much better off freezing the core language at Java 2 and solving the classpath problem than wasting all that time since then cluttering up the core with unnecessary features.

</comment><comment><USER4> Classpaths! Brutal!</comment>


Learn Authentication the Hard Way: Part Three - <AUTHOR> https://www.andrew-best.com/posts/learn-auth-the-hard-way-part-three/ <comment><USER2> I am currently an IAM engineer and can I just throw out there how much I hate OAuth/OIDC, I work at a large org and have to integrate with dozens of different vendors and applications and not a single one has the same way of doing OAuth because to quote the spec, wait it isn't a spec it is a "framework" we have to remember that, under interoperability it says

> OAuth 2.0 provides a rich authorization framework with well-defined security > properties. However, as a rich and highly extensible framework with many > optional components, on its own, this specification is likely to produce a > wide range of non-interoperable implementations.

Don't get me wrong, OAuth is still better than WS-Fed and what we had before but we really need to come up with a real standard and spec for authentication, because OAuth/OIDC is a joke. It isn't just me either that thinks this one of the authors of the OAuth spec said as much[1]

Can anyone tell me what their experience with OAuth has been, or have they been able to get it to work across multiple different systems. I would love to believe it is just my org, but it seems like the entire identity space is a clusterf __ck.

[1] [https://hueniverse.com/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to- hell-8eec45...](https://hueniverse.com/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to- hell-8eec45921529)

<comment><USER3> We implemented OAuth about a year ago with Okta, and it's been an absolute nightmare. We have a couple of clients that have their own IDP, and they want us to let them use SAML to authenticate. I can't figure out whether the difficulties are inherent to SAML itself or because of Okta, but I hate it either way.

<comment><USER4> SAML2 is kind of hairy, technically, but--speaking as someone who used to do this full-time up until six years ago and has stepped into other sings since-- most of the pain was from half-baked implementations and utter crap-tier error/exception reporting. Like, on one hand you'd be plagued by a lot of small-time implementations that had a very inadequate appreciation of the spec, and/or only supported about 10% of it, or had fatal flaws in their naive handling of XML or even worse fatal flaws related to XML-DSIG and canonicalization... and on the other hand you'd get these monstrous enterprise products that specialized in offering only the most oblique of views into their inner configuration or error states. It really takes a lot of patience and expert level skills in 5-6 different things to cut to the heart of most practical issues in the space.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple and Google release the first version of their contact tracing API - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/29/apple-and-google-release-first-seed-of-covid-19-exposure-notification-api-for-contact-tracing-app-developers/ <comment><USER2> They intend to release the first version of the API publicly in mid-May, with the system-level integration to follow in the coming months</comment>


Alchemy is secretly fixing blockchain's node nightmare – Techcrunch - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/alchemy-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> Pretty ambitious, but I think as the blockchain app industry develops this could become an indispensable platform. Once deep fakes start having serious consequences, there will be a rush to have source of truth for all kinds of applications and media, and every dapp will use something like this.</comment>


Digg To Lay Off 37% Of Staff, Product Refocus Imminent - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/25/digg-to-lay-off-37-percentof-staff/

<comment><USER2> I've never understood why Digg required so many staff (~80) while competitors such as Reddit have < 10 people. Bringing their numbers down to a level more appropriate for their product (and revenue opportunity) can only be a good thing.

<comment><USER3> reddit has ~5 people and they _still_ have problems paying for themselves. i can't imagine who paid for digg's 80.

<comment><USER4> Digg raised 40M in vc money, reddit raised 100K before they were acquired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Digg story just goes to show you that political metaphors don't always translate well into tech. Digg was never able to diversify content (read: _expand, scale, grow_ ) because it was never worth it for minority voices--and here I'm referring to non-liberal, non-young, non-male, non-athiest users--to attempt to carve out space and participate. The value proposition of helping diversify Digg's content wasn't worth the time to newcomers.

And so those users of other demographics simply went elsewhere to build their communities. The latest Digg was an attempt to push back against the niche that ruled Digg, but then that niche just found another community as well.

Real life democracies, in government, exist as a compromise simply because there isn't always the ability to pick up and move to a new nation state if you aren't happy with the local rules. On the web it's all too easy to move somewhere else, so typically all web communities are niches that push away newcomers who are different. On the web democracy does not give rise to real, long-tail diversity; it's just a quality filter.

<comment><USER6> Which is why reddit's use of user created and managed sub-communities (ie, subreddits) is such a brilliant way to pre-emptively deal with this before it happens.

<comment><USER7> This is very true. I would have left Reddit long ago if it weren't for the subReddits. I can still find the site/community that I love at Reddit.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recall in 2006/2007 a lot of my clients were asking if I could build integration with Digg, into their existing sites. Digg was huge back then, and my clients put a lot of thought into how they might get more traffic from Digg. Several of my clients thought it was essential to have a Digg strategy.

It is amazing to me that Digg could have fallen this far.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the top problem with Digg is that the biggest founder, Kevin Rose, simply has no incentive to follow through and give Digg a good exit. His shares in Digg are too diluted and he's too heavily-invested outside of Digg for that to ever be a possibility. He probably made more off of the sale of ngmoco than he would with Digg.

As weird as it might sound, my ideal Digg situation is that Kevin buys back shares from VCs (everyone knows Digg's over-funded) to get some sort of monetary incentive to perform.

Digg's potential is so great. It's just sad to see it go down like this.

<comment><USER10> My ideal Digg situation would be this poor neglected founder who has plenty of incentive to perform being given an opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Digg is facing issues on two fronts.

First, it's struggling with delivering unique value to its customers. When Digg launched in December 2004, it faced limited direct competition in the market of social media aggregation. Since its launch, Digg now competes with a myriad of services, such as Reddit (launched in 2005), Techmeme (2005), Huffington Post (2005), Newsvine (2006), and Hacker News (2007), just to name a few. There are now a huge variety of media aggregation websites targeting general and niche audiences. In addition to increased direct competition, Digg is now also facing a substitution threat posed by companies such as Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), and Google Buzz (2010). An increasing number of consumers are turning to these services for their daily fill of news.

Second, Digg is struggling with an untenable cost structure. With about 72 employees before its reduction in staff, Digg has about 9x the number of employees of Reddit, a key competitor. Consider another competitor, the Huffingpost. It attracts about twice the number of visitors per month, employing a full-time staff of just 60. Commentators have also noted that Digg had unusually high infrastructure costs, although I suspect they have remedied some of these issues since these reports. With revenue of just $15 million, and a unsustainable cost structure, Digg is currently operating at a loss.

For Digg to survive and prosper into the future, it must refocus and develop a service that delivers unique value relative to the many competing services that are currently available. Given the range of competition, it's not clear what Digg can change to deliver unique value. Next, Digg must continue to reduce its cost structure by reducing its human resource and infrastructure costs. Needless to say, increasing value for customers while reducing costs is a difficult challenge.

<comment><USER12> HN doesn't seem a significant threat:

[http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...](http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=p&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=3m&u=digg.com&&u=ycombinator.com&);

<comment><USER11> Perhaps HN isn't a significant threat, but it still poses a threat; each new service likely eats away at Digg's share of the market, assuming that people have limited time to use social media.

As an anecdote, I was using Digg substantially up until the 2008 elections. I haven't used the service since then. Instead, I'm spending time on Hacker News (+ Techmeme, Twitter, Facebook).

<comment><USER13> You are no longer using the service because the signal/noise ratio is crumpled. It's what happens when there are lot of new members and little moderation as well as abusing/power users.

HN is a niche social website and I don't think that it eats from Digg or any other social website.

<comment><USER14> HM alone does not, but one of Digg's problems is that they are facing a pack of ravenous midgets that focus on one specific niche. If you are interested in a small selection of niches then Digg is simply a useless place to go for information -- what you care about will never surface and all you see is a bunch of articles trying to game what remains of the general interest audience Digg once commanded. You could walk down a list of all of the major Digg categories and list two or three sites that do the job better for that specific niche; this is what is going to kill Digg. Digg is like an online social newspaper, and it is suffering the same fate that the print versions have gone through with better competitors peeling off profitable niches and leaving a dull husk behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well that answers this question from yesterdays (Digg: A Cautionary Tale) thread.

 _Maybe my perception of the costs associated with running a high traffic such as this are way off, but doesn't it seem like $15m in revenues should be able to sustain the company... at least to the point where it doesn't operate at a loss?_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827027>

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks like someone with a brain finally took charge of Digg.

Also how common is it to offer to find jobs for people being layed off?

<comment><USER17> > Also how common is it to offer to find jobs for people being layed off?

Very.

The uncommon thing is that statement being any more than a useless platitude.

<comment><USER18> Just for the record 'useless platitude' is a pleonasm.

<comment><USER19> Upvoted for causing me to learn about pleonasms.

<comment><USER20> You clearly need to read Stephen Fry's autobiograph (Moab Is My Washpot) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Management fails utterly in decision making and employees suffer by layoffs. I don't see a bright future for Digg ahead given these actions.

Edit: This is on the basis that the layoffs will likely not be management.

<comment><USER22> They just got a new CEO, so this is the new guy coming in and cleaning up the mess, so to speak. He's doing what needs to be done to get back to profitability, so it appears he's doing his job properly.

<comment><USER23> I remember an article a few months back were someone argued that layoffs was a tipping point for companies. The argument was that after the first round of layoffs everyone in the company feel a little less secure about their job and as a result the company stooped innovating. Anyone has that link ?

<comment><USER24> I don't have the link, but this really depends on the company and how they handle the layoffs.

Like if you have a round of layoffs, but you have employees with faith in the management and the product, you're going to have remaining employees that stick around and work hard. Generally people that don't fall in that mold are going to get laid off in a situation like this.

If you have employees that are sitting there with an expectation that the cpmpany will fail, however skilled they might be, they're going to start looking at other options.

I think what I'm saying is: the initial tipping point in a case like this isn't the layoff, it's the ensuing fallout. One strategy that I've seen fail is using fear to keep people working. A "you're lucky you're still here" attitude has had people (like myself) out the door on the first other offer they find. An attitude of "this sucks, but we have to do it to stay around, no one is to blame" (which Digg seems to be going with) prevents things from going further south. Something like that can even unite the remaining group in difficult times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice that Joe Stump, who IIRC was CTO during Diggs peak, but left some time ago, just updated his Twitter to help any of his Digg friends who got laid off find something.

</comment><comment><USER26> Note the comment from Michael Arrington:

\---

you'd be amazed at how people start adding up. We have something around 40 people at TechCrunch, 20 full time.

\---

and the replies to that comment, such as:

"How may of them were hired to boost your ego?"

"Yes, in the absence of efficient cost control and good management, expenses always rise to meet income."

</comment><comment><USER27> 2010 has seen the end of diggs growth and it has also seen the beginning of its decline. It went up a lot faster than it went down though, so they have some time to correct course.

That's much harder than it seems though, attracting visitors to your site is one thing, getting them to come back after they've soured on you is a completely different one.

Digg always had a very large number of employees for a site in that segment, but just throwing people out is not going to make things better in the short term (likely worse). At least they'll stop burning money while they figure out what the next steps are.

</comment><comment><USER28> It will be interesting to see if/how they pivot.

<comment><USER29> entering "25 mi/hr" turn at 100mi/hr ... may be it is a pivot if you're driving a Ferrari or Lambo

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wonder what effect this will have on 1) the existing user base. Will it further accelerate the defection of users or won't matter? 2) the retained employees. What if a few "wanted" players leave voluntarily?

It'll be interesting to see how they plug and reverse the leak in traffic.

<comment><USER31> thanks! </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>== [url="<http://www.TopYields.n]Top> Dividend Yields[/url]

</comment><comment><USER32> When the boat is sinking the solution is to:

1\. Throw stuff off the boat (including passengers);

2\. Bail water off the boat; and

3\. Fix the hole in the boat.

Kevin Rose tried (2). The new CEO is trying (1). Both of these delay the I editable.

The hole in the boat in his case is the $40m in funding Digg has received. I'm not sure there's any recovering for that.

The crux of Digg's problems is that it went the way of most online communities: it became extreme, exclusive and inbred. That's hard to recover from.

Ultimately Digg is now largely irrelevant. Twitter and facebook have supplanted it as the sites for discovery for most people.

<comment><USER33> Like a lot of people, I used to use Digg, and don't anymore. I think the hole in the boat is much more that the committed userbase has moved on leaving it to become a LOLCAT paradise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I hope that the CEO follows through with this -- if so, it's the best thing that can be done under the circumstances and a nice thing to do.

"It's been an incredibly tough decision. I wish it weren't necessary. However, I know it's the right choice for Digg's future success as a business. I'm personally committed to help find new opportunities for everyone affected by the transition. Digg's Board members have also offered to help find placements within their portfolio companies."

</comment><comment><USER31> haaaa! thanks for dividend. </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===== <a href="<http://www.TopYields.nl> rel="dofollow">Top Dividend Yields</comment>