Robots.txt meant for search engines don't work well for web archives - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ <comment><USER2> It appears that IA applies (or did apply) a new version of robots.txt to pages already in their index, even if they were archived years ago. That's silly, and stopping doing that would probably solve much of this problem.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's "silly". IA operates in a sketchy legal environment. There's no fair use exclusion for what they're doing, and it made sense to be extra careful and deferential towards website operators, lest they get hit by a lawsuit.

<comment><USER4> > There's no fair use exclusion for what they're doing

Fair use is not the only exception to copyright. US copyright law has a separate section on exceptions for libraries and archives.

<comment><USER5> Ask yourself what you would rather have the IA spends it's meager funds on: buying hardware and paying people to do critical work or paying a bunch of lawyers to fight lawsuits against much better funded opponents they would lose anyway.

<comment><USER6> I asked, and the answer was: "it's important to fight these fights, which is why I'm donating to the ACLU".

I believe Us Code 108 is relevant here. It starts:

        it is not an infringement of copyright for a library
        or archives, or any of its employees acting within the
        scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than
        one copy or phonorecord of a work[...]

There's obviously more to it that I haven't done research on, but that's a pretty good start and I wouldn't worry too much about lawsuits. In fact, if they were at risk of lawsuits, I don't see why respecting robots.txt would stop them–there's no "but you didn't tell me not to" excuse in copyright.

<comment><USER7> If someone wanted to sue the Archive, they would probably argue that every time archive.org serves a file they are making a copy... which is true, after all, if anything reproduced digitally is a "copy" in that sense.

Nice point about the lack of implied permission in copyright. It makes me think robots.txt probably doesn't have any meaning one way or the other legally, but is just a community thing.

<comment><USER3> > If someone wanted to sue the Archive, they would probably argue that every > time archive.org serves a file they are making a copy... which is true, > after all, if anything reproduced digitally is a "copy" in that sense.

It's more than a theoretical point - that each "serving" of a file is a copy is well established legally. In fact, even _loading a program to RAM_ was considered a copy, per MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, until Congress made an explicit exception.

<comment><USER8> And that exception only applies for people doing maintenance on your computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the linked page, I see comments about ignoring the webmasters' wishes et al.

All I can say is f*ck that. It's a free and open internet. If you put content up on a public site, anyone has the right to go and look at it. Stop complaining when someone saves it.

And sure some people complain that scrapers slow down their site and that's why they use robots.txt, but really? Really? It's 2017 and your site is affected by that. I think you have bigger things to worry about.

<comment><USER10> > scrapers slow down their site and that's why they use robots.txt

a poorly written scraper may really slow down your site, especially if it wasn't intended to be scrapped repeatedly. There should be something to be said about frequency which scrapers should follow (specified by the website owner via a robots.txt like spec).

But website owners cannot demand unreasonable frequencies (such as once a year!), and what constitutes unreasonable is up for debate.

<comment><USER11> > (specified by the website owner via a robots.txt like spec).

Nope, if a website wants such a restriction, it must enforce it. Robots.txt is a request. It's worthless.

<comment><USER12> If a robot misbehaves, it'll either be blocked or it'll go to the networks abuse section and that bot will be taken down. That a site possibly could have some kind of technical solution to this doesn't matter.

<comment><USER13> Precisely - the solution here needs to be that the server blocks the robot - if it can differentiate it from other traffic that is. That's all well and good and that's the solution which should be used here. If you don't want to be archived, block the IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The policy the Internet Archive applies re: "robots.txt" comes from an archive policy created at U.C. Berkeley in the early 2000's (The Oakland Archive Policy - [http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/aps/remov...](http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/aps/removal- policy.html)).

Jason Scott (an employee of the Internet Archive) mentioned that the Archive doesn't ever delete anything. He stated that items may be removed from public access because of changes to "robots.txt" but they're not actually deleted. (That's a little comforting, at least.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Archive.org needs to be able to apply to itself. We could then use archive.org to view how archive.org in the past viewed some interesting site, thus avoiding the whole retroactive robots.txt fail.

;).

</comment><comment><USER16> fastastic news.

Archive Team's take on this[0]

[0][http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt)

<comment><USER17> It is great news in general, but seems to be done in a clumsy and counterproductive manner that may cause the Internet Archive to be banned from crawling some websites.

 _The problem_ : when robots.txt for a website is found to have been made more restrictive, the IA retrospectively applies its _new_ restrictions to _already-archived_ pages and hides them from view. This can also cause entire domains to vanish into the deep-archive. No-one outside IA thinks this is sensible.

 _Their solution_ : ignore robots.txt altogether. What? That will just annoy many website operators.

 _My proposed solution_ : keep parsing robots.txt on each crawl and obey it progressively, without applying the changes to existing archived material. This is actually less work than what they currently do. If the new robots.txt says to ignore about_iphone.html you just do that and ignore it. Older versions aren't affected.

Basically they're switching from being excessively obedient to completely ignoring robots.txt in order to fix a self-made problem. I can only see that antagonising operators.

<comment><USER18> There's some value in allowing site operators to retroactively remove content which was never intended to be public. A common and unfortunate example is backups (like SQL dumps) being stored in web-accessible directories, then subseqently being indexed and archived when a crawler finds the appropriate directory index.

What needs to be fixed first is just the really common case mentioned in the blog post, where a domain changes ownership and a restrictive robots.txt is applied to the parking page.

<comment><USER19> Here's a slight modification to the GP proposal:

\- Respect robots.txt at the time you crawl it.

\- If robots.txt appears later, stop archiving from that date forwards.

\- Preserve access to old archived copies of the site by default.

\- Offer a mechanism that allows a proven site owner to explicitly request retrospective access removal.

If archive.org have recorded the date that they first observed a robots.txt on the sites currently unavailable, they could even consider applying the above logic today retrospectively. Perhaps after a couple of warning emails to the current Administrative Contact for the domain.

<comment><USER20> >mechanism that allows a proven site owner to explicitly request retrospective access removal. //

It should be "a proven content owner", just buying a site shouldn't allow someone to remove it from archive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the 90s I spent a lot of time on my website and I loved learning how web crawlers worked. I started using a robots.txt file without really understanding it. I ended up blocking everything thinking it would make my site faster for visitors because--crawlers might crawl the site all the time.

After I graduated from college I lost access to my website which was hosted on the Computer Science department's web servers.

I wish I hadn't used that robots.txt file. I would love to find the pages I made that compared interfold vs. exterfold staple strength, or the site I made with a ranch theme with a cowboy that had humorous advice....I don't have any content in archive.org because it honored the robots.txt file.

...sigh...wish I had backed up my stuff.

</comment><comment><USER22> To be honest I see robots.txt as a failed experiment since it relies on trust rather than security or thoughtful design.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's about security.

For example I've got a link to do delegated login like /login-with/github. When people click it an oauth flow will start. But it is useless for robots to follow so I disallow it in robots.txt. If they still follow nothing breaks and it's not a security issue but if I can avoid starting unnecessary oauth logins it's an additional benefit.

<comment><USER22> robots.txt wasn't created for security but it can have security implications if you publish a list of Disallow paths with the intention of hiding sensitive content (sadly I have that seen that happen a lot) where as a better approach would be IP whitelisting and/or user authentication.

However I'm not claiming security is the only reason people use (misuse?) robots.txt. For example in your case you could mitigate your need for a robots.txt with a nofollow attribute[1]. Sure bad bots could still crawl your site and find the authentication URL without probing robots.txt so the security implications there is pretty much non-existent. But you've already got a thoughtful design (the other point I raised) that mitigates the need for robots.txt anyway so adding something like "nofollow" maybe enough to remove the robots.txt requirement altogether.

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

<comment><USER24> This is crazy, that's not what robots.txt is for. How can you complain about the security of a thing that is not meant to provide security?

According to your logic, newspapers are a "failed experiment because they rely on trust rather than security or thoughtful design". I published an article with my treasure map and told people not to go there, but they stole it.

<comment><USER22> That was an anecdote since the previous poster raised the point about security. I'm definitely not claiming robots.txt should be for security nor was designed for security!

I said following proper security and design practices renders obsolete all the edge cases that people might use robots.txt. I'm saying if you design your site properly then you shouldn't really need a robots.txt. That applies for all examples that HN commentators have raised in terms of their robots.txt usage thus far.

I would rewrite my OP to make my point clearer but sadly I no longer have the option to edit it.

<comment><USER24> _design your site properly then you shouldn 't really need a robots.txt_

But how? For example, if you don't want a page to be indexed by Google, you add this information to robots.txt. Nofollow doesn't work for every case, because any external website can link to it, and Google will discover it.

<comment><USER22> That's a good point. I'm not sure how you'd get around non-HTML documents (eg PDFs) but web pages themselves can be excluded via a meta tag:

        <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Source: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en)

Interestingly in that article, there is the following disclaimer about not using robots.txt for your example:

 _" Important! For the noindex meta tag to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex tag, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it."_

I must admit even I hadn't realised that could happen and I was critical of the use robots.txt to begin with.

<comment><USER24> Ah, that's true, indeed. The page, though, will appear as a link without any contents, because the bot won't be able to index it.

<comment><USER22> Except it has indexed it. It just hasn't crawled it. But content or not, the aim you were trying to achieve (namely your content not being indexed) has failed. Thus you are then once again dependant on other countermeasures that render the robots.txt irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For whatever it's worth: [http://humanstxt.org/](http://humanstxt.org/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not so sure that even Google respects it. I did some digging about the semantics about robots.txt whilst writing a bot myself, and it seems that Google doesn't _follow links_ that are excluded, but it will visit those pages. Maybe that counts as "paying attention", but I don't think they "respect" it.

<comment><USER27> they respect it, but because it's so frequently misused or plain broken, it's basically sidelined vs. more optimal methods for preventing indexation, or getting an already-indexed piece of content removed, such as the noindex tag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think the biggest argument for honoring robots.txt is that sites, especially old sites, can have a lot of really highly resource intensive pages. I don't want someone crawling a page that has 800+ DB calls... for example. Yes, I should optimize the page, or whatever... but really it may be useful for that admin, or 1 out of 10,000 users, who uses the page. It's not ideal to have someone crawl all those pages at once.

I think they should honor robots.txt, and the meta tag version on specific pages or links -- given the site publisher went out of their way to give instructions to crawlers it seems reasonable to honor those requests.

</comment><comment><USER29> Found this[1] via the Wikipedia's Talk page for the robots.txt article. It showcases that early on robots.txt was designated to help maintain bandwidth performance of web servers. Back then it would have been due to bandwidth contention, today it may be bandwidth cost to some operators which robots.txt help mitigate.

[1] [https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=377285&cid=21554125](https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=377285&cid=21554125)

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember writing a dumb parser for robots.txt. I have to agree, robots.txt is simplistic but so non-standard. I wonder why search engines can't just say NO to this. Does search engines today still honor robots.txt?

Here's my shameless plug: [https://github.com/yeukhon/robots-txt- scanner](https://github.com/yeukhon/robots-txt-scanner)

I still remember writing most of this on Caltrain one morning heading to SF visiting someone I dearly loved.....

</comment><comment><USER31> Finally. A bit late, since a lot of the archive has been removed because of new owner's aggressive (or malicious) new robots.txt

<comment><USER32> Hidden, rather than removed.

<comment><USER31> I hope so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There should be a way to direct archiving bots to a file that has the newest, compressed version of the website for them to download. Wouldn't that be easier for everyone?

<comment><USER34> Seems like it would just get abused with false content

<comment><USER33> True, but maybe it would be a good option for non-commercial websites that would like to get archived, and make the archiving more efficient for themselves and archive.org

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have some sites where I specifically block archiving from some sections for good reason. (Even if I didn't have a good reason though it would still be my choice.)

I have a very big problem with them disregarding robots directives. Sure some crawlers ignore them: Hostile net actors up to no good. This decision means they are a hostile net actor. I'll have to take extreme measures such as determining all the ip address ranges they use and totally blocking access. This inconveniences me, which means they are now my enemy.

 _edit- For those interested: Deny from 22.214.171.124 /22_

<comment><USER36> Are you under the impression that individual web archivists don't _also_ scrape websites of interest, and submit those WARC's for inclusion into the Wayback Machine, independent of the IA's crawlers?

Because believe me, we do...good luck banning every AWS and DO IP range.

<comment><USER35> Thank you for the tip. I wasn't aware of that, but it was not a problem to update the rules to account for the full AWS range based on the new information. I greatly appreciate your feedback. I am not sure what DO is though, would you be so kind as to deacronymize that for me, thank you.

<comment><USER36> We also run crawlers on our home laptops, on university servers, on every cheapo hosting service we can find (especially if they offer decent or "unlimited" bandwidth), and so on. Tools like wget and wpull can randomize the timing between requests, use regex to avoid pitfalls, change the user-agent string, work in tandem with phantomjs and/or youtube-dl to grab embedded video content...

Good luck playing whack-a-mole against the crawlers. I admit to being very curious what you're openly hosting online that you really don't want to get saved for posterity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think we should write down a legal license in our robots.txt file, as a retribution for all those lengthy EULAs these big companies make us read :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeah just ignore robots.txt because there's others solution.

If the site don't want to be scanned they can adopt a lot of counter measure and robots.txt will not save it from abuse.

He remind me the old days when my website wasn't working from US because I just fake that the site was down because there's no reason that somebody goes to my site from US (I know it's kind stupid, but when all your content is in french and you are a kid... :) )

</comment><comment><USER39> One thing that should be considered is the right for an individual to be forgotten.

<comment><USER15> In my (current) opinion, it's this law that should be forgotten. What's on the public Internet is a matter of public interest. All I can see is this law being used by bad people to hide their bad deeds, especially when those bad deeds should be known.

<comment><USER40> At the risk of going off-topic, I loved your usage of the word 'current' before 'opinion', and I'm going to adopt it.</comment></comment></comment>


Doing Customer Development (and stop wasting your time) - <AUTHOR> http://jcvangent.com/customer-development-stop-wasting-time/

<comment><USER2> Good insight from a fellow buspreneur.

</comment><comment><USER3> useful writeup including some interesting slides with lean links. thanks ft share!</comment>


Intelligent people are genetically predisposed to be healthier, experts find - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12122545/Intelligent-people-are-genetically-predisposed-to-be-healthier-experts-find.html <comment><USER2> The brain is just another organ like all the others. It would be a real surprise if we found that there was an organ that when it worked badly increased health. Imagine if the study was "people with a good liver are predisposed to be healthier". Not even the Torygraph would publish this.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure "brain health" is as good a synonym of "intelligence" as you seem to be implying it is. As one possible example of divergence between the two measures, a handful of mental illnesses are mentioned that are associated with intelligence.

<comment><USER4> That is based on the assumption that all differentiated states are "illnesses" and that all illnesses are bad.

<comment><USER5> All illnesses are, by definition, bad. That is what makes them "illnesses" and not "wellnesses". You can argue about whether a particular differentiated state is an "illness" or not, but that is just the same as arguing whether or not it is "bad".

As for your point... I fail to see the connection. It seems to me that treading carefully when equating "brain health" with "intelligence" is entirely the correct approach, regardless of one's opinion on which specific things count as "illness". Are you saying that there isn't a _single_ mental disorder correlated with intelligence?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TypeScript vs. JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/typescript-vs-javascript-b568bc4a4e58 <comment><USER2> If you really, really want to write rock solid frontend code, then you use Elm. Elm is a language that compiles to javascript and probably is the most frustrating language there is for javascript developers. Strongly typed and pure functional means no variables - only a redux like common state, no functions with side-effects - so you can't just execute rest service calls without taking special care and run time type checking. Elm is a tough medicine, but it works. Your code becomes testable and reliant. And it makes TypeScript looks like a toy language.

<comment><USER3> That's cool but what is the ecosystem like? Real life projects need external libraries, e.g., social media login, amazon sdk, material design... all of which can be used easily from TypeScript.

I may well be wrong, but Elm strikes me as an academic exercise as of today.</comment></comment>


China Seeks to Buy Control of Hong Kong Companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-13/china-seeks-to-buy-control-of-hong-kong-companies-reuters-says <comment><USER2> A significant number of the seats in Hong Kong government are voted/belong to "industry/corporations", and these have been able to decide the Government recently. China buying control of the corporations will further subvert the democracy.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like their cup didn't runneth over with democracy even beforehand... that's bizarre. Like a modern House of Lords that just leans into giving corps a seat in government...

<comment><USER4> IMO this has to do with Beijing's pushback in the mid 1900s against expanded political freedoms in what I would assume was an anticipation of the end of the 99 year lease on the New Territories [1] and the fact that HK was caught as the middle region in a multi-circle Venn diagram (between China, the UK, the US and other regional powers). They weren't able to really push any one thing too far in any direction without pissing off one of them. So they focused on what they could control: creating an incredibly effective financial center. Corporations in HK don't have nearly as much power in the US as if they pulled to far, someone would come knocking.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began- pu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began-push-against- hong-kong-elections-in-50s.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also:

[https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/china-seeks-to-buy- cont...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/china-seeks-to-buy-control-of- hong-kong-companies-reuters-says/ar-AAHe1bJ)

That seems pretty smart to me. If your two choices are either assimilation or to make a separate state (with separate laws, etc.) out of your 8th or so largest city, I can see doing this.

Obviously, both sides will alter each other with the largest one doing most of the altering.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thats is the obvious move. Can't beat them into submission? Buy them.

<comment><USER7> Obvious in what way? The protestors are not the same people who run these companies as far as I am aware so not sure what you're referring to.

<comment><USER8> Not the OP, but I guess that most of those protesters work for said Hong Kong companies and when your new politically-appointed boss tells you that you either fall in line or you can go and look for another job I think most of those protesters will choose to fall in line.

<comment><USER7> I guess that makes sense but aren't the protestors already risking their jobs by continuing to protest? I've heard of people having "sick" days and "working from home" in order to plausibly skip work in order to protest. If the goal is to fire protestors from their jobs, I don't think China buying controlling shares in a few companies makes much sense. The other comment in this thread about buying votes in the government seems to be more plausible.

<comment><USER9> You can't fire 2 million+ people in a city with a population of 7 million

<comment><USER10> You could, and people would likely start springing up cooperatives and forcibly taking company property over like what happened in Italy during the crisis. Not sure how well those fare now.

Not to mention this would vastly fuel the protests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find a lot of parallels with the French Enlightenment and HK.

It caught my attention because I'm listening to _Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon_ by Suzanne M. Desan on Audible.

Soon the course will cover the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_of_the_Bastille](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_of_the_Bastille). Apparently it's common in history for societies facing extreme tension to have groups rise up and loot military garrisons (lest they starve). Thankfully, this doesn't happen as often because societies let their people participate in the future of their country by voting.

Backing up though, in last weeks audible lesson, I learned coffee shops were popular in pre-Enlightenment France for people to discuss their disapproval of the rulers and ideas for a new system (Voltaire loved coffee). During this time, plain clothes police would write dossiers on the speakers. The French had a name for them, "flies". This reminded me of claims on /r/hongkong spotting infiltrators blending in with protesters.

I hope HK protesters don't suffer unnecessarily for being targeted for political disagreements. From the news, protesters are interpreted as a national security / subversion concern, if this is true, doesn't that sort of contradict the 2 systems concept?

If HK can have their system, how can the law be improved if citizens can't communicate their feelings without harassment / surveillance? Wouldn't chilling of expression / speech spoil a system where the people rule?

The French Revolution had many differences, but the core of it is people were allowed to think, have self-rule, and wouldn't be bullied when they communicated displeasure it sucked they starved while aristocrats ate well (among a trove of other things).

In HK, wouldn't having more direct rule by the people result in new laws to ease the housing costs and make people feel pride, inclusion in their own region?

With this enthusiasm for liberty and democracy surging through HK, it's only a matter of time until they are granted universal suffrage forever, since PRC agreed that they are a separate system and always intended this level of freedom and flexibility for them.

</comment><comment><USER12> The obvious response is going to be boycotts of those companies.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a CGP Grey video on the London inside London [https://youtu.be/LrObZ_HZZUc](https://youtu.be/LrObZ_HZZUc)

</comment><comment><USER14> I see almost all comments on this article are sympathetic to China. I have not dug deeper but I wonder if the accounts making these comments are all real, or could they be part of China's propaganda apparatus?

<comment><USER15> Kindly re-read the HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

 _Please don 't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data._

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's spooky to see this going on. I can only hope that this is resisted by those companies and the people sufficiently enough to limit the damage this could do.

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be nice if Hong Kong citizens had a choice of where to emigrate outside of China but Hong Kong should be integrated into the Greater Bay Area.

Hong Kong's economic relevance to the story of China has fallen to almost negligible levels, it doesn't make sense to identify it as separate from the 8 megacities that surround it which are economic marvels and productivity houses.

Our news should be populated by the numerous things occurring in the 8 larger, more populated, higher GDP outputting cities in the Guangzhou region. Shenzhen alone, bordering Hong Kong, is likely more interesting this decade and into the future.

Hong Kong functions as a mere administrative convenience for circumventing customs duties to the rest if the world.

Any nation in a similar situation would look at all avenues of integration, no matter how skeptical people were. Is that inaccurate?

I think this perspective isn't presented.</comment>


Lie on your résumé? One job-seeker's moment of truth - <AUTHOR> http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-3095-Cover-Letters-Resumes-Why-lying-on-your-r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9-wont-pay-off/?SiteId=cbmsnhp43095&sc_extcmp=JS_3095_home1 <comment><USER2> Great comments from 52 days ago <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312097>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I remember reading this possibly even earlier than that -- I am in the same position (sort of) so obviously it resonated with me. I can't understand why people would lie on their resume; but then again, I usually don't understand lying at all.

<comment><USER4> Lying is __good __.

You cannot live without lying. We all lie, everytime we open our mouths to say something. Whatever we say it's always biased, subjective, emotional (to varying degrees, ofc) - we, as humans, are simply __incapable __of comunicating the "truth", at least beyond very formal systems.

The only thing for us to decide is __how much __to lie on any given topic. Or what story to tell - it's really the same thing worded differently.

We do not value the truth. We value narrative, stories. Don't do yourself a disservice and don't make __your __story sound pathetic and uninteresting for the sake of the "truth".

In my country not too long ago there was a public debate about some very famous journalist (after his death) who used to (as his biographer insisted) put factually incorrect sentences and paragraphs in his reportages. He lied! There is evidence of this, and much of it. But there's a catch here: fragments of his works were lies, yet read as a whole they conveyed the truth in a stunning, poetic way which many hoped to copy but failed. The debate I mentioned was something along the lines: do those lies invalidate the truth he told? I'm very, very strongly convinced that that's not the case. Through his lies he almost touched the truth.

I'm talking about Ryszard Kapuścinski biography, if anyone is interested, BTW.

<comment><USER5> Sam Harris wrote an interesting essay [1] putting the case for the opposite position - that you should just never, ever lie. I don't necessarily agree with him, but its an interesting and thought-provoking read. Its about $3 for the PDF or kindle ebook.

[1] <http://www.samharris.org/lying>

<comment><USER6> That is called "radical honesty" (<http://www.esquire.com/print- this/honesty0707?page=all>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got hit backwards. My CV had PhD (failed) on it. I had had a chunk of good jobs, tried to start a bank, got nowhere, went back contracting in a dept with a lot of academic firepower.

After I had been there 8 weeks someone made a crack about 'all you doctors' including me in - and I said 'I'm not a doctor'.

'Your CV said you had a PhD' came the response.

Luckily I had my laptop at work with the original copy of my CV on it. I went ballistic, phoned up the recruitment agency, and finally got them to send a formal letter to the people who had interviewed me. I never did find out who 'tidied up' my CV - but a dodgy CV is just a burning fuse on a bomb that could go off anytime.

<comment><USER8> If you called your resume a CV, you are have way to lying abounding an academic already.

<comment><USER7> In the UK we have Curriculum Vitae. The term resumé is not used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Was he actually a member of Mensa?

<comment><USER10> I would guess that he is. Being a member of Mensa isn't really a big deal.

<comment><USER11> What about having an IQ in the top 2% isn't a big deal?

<comment><USER10> Intelligence alone doesn't make you special. I myself have a pretty high IQ, but for the first 20 years of my life, I squandered the time and resources that were at my disposal and now I'm 30 years old, still in college, and in a position that is way below my potential.

There are people of average intelligence who have created billion dollar companies because they worked hard, and there are geniuses who never contribute anything to the world. Hard working, intelligent people should be celebrated, not intelligence alone.

EDIT: Just to make sure I'm not being misunderstood. Being a member of Mensa isn't a bad thing, it's just not that big of a deal.

<comment> B-Con > Being a member of Mensa isn't a bad thing, it's just not that big of a deal.

I argue that it kind of is, in that only 2% of the population qualifies for it. And the idea is that it's not something just anyone can change about themselves and achieve.

I agree that success is very dependent on many factors, and intelligence is not a required one. But it is correlated with success in many areas (such as intellectually or mentally-oriented fields) and it gives a good base line of _potential_. Like in your case, you say you are currently working short of your potential. I wonder if your clone, minus, say, 30 IQ points, would be able to say that.

It's kind of like being a fast runner (not a perfect analogy, but I don't need it to be perfect here). That will help a lot in some sports, it will help a little in some, and it won't in others. But if you can run the 100-meter dash in a top 2% time, that's a useful bit of information, especially for a prospective coach.

<comment><USER8> More than 2% of population qualify. This is a great interview question for any data analysis related job: Explain why Mensa's brand claims are false, then explain why you thought joining Mensa would impress me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I find amazing is how many just plain _stupid_ resume lies people make. What does a 50-year old executive gain by listing a fake college degree? Nothing. (And it's not hard to unwind a lie, which you should do as time passes and the benefit of the lie approaches zero while the cost remains constant.)

I think what happens is that we hear about the sensational and embarrassing lies. This stuff gets dug up when the decision to fire an executive is already made, in order to reduce severance. If the lie is small and reasonable (slight title inflation) it doesn't much matter because that's so common, but if it's something immensely embarrassing like faking a college degree when he actually flunked out, it gets broadcast. Most of those public humiliation stories are cases of failed severance negotiations in which the company decides to be a dick and play the nuclear option against his reputation to get out of a contractual severance agreement (e.g. extortion against the fired employee.)

This is not to condone lying on a resume. I don't, but I think the public shaming that accompanies these digging expeditions is a bit much. When someone is shamed over an irrelevant resume lie, he's usually being shamed because someone (often the ex-employer) wants it that way.</comment>


The Huffington Post Has a Fake News Problem - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@timoreilly/the-huffington-post-has-a-fake-news-problem-f68d8e262cec#.xszjm6q9n <comment><USER2> This is just going to continue going in circles. Ahhhh!</comment>


Show HN: Test My Typing Speed (weekend project) - <AUTHOR> https://testmytypingspeed.in

<comment><USER2> There's a ton of typos on the site, advacned, word per minute, etc.

As aesthetics1 mentioned, the test itself is nearly impossible to type quickly because of the jarring. In fact, the faster you type the worse this jarring is.

In terms of features: It would be cool if it had immediate feedback for errors like on Typeracer :)

Also not a big fan of that background color on the borders. The test itself is a pretty nice gray color but the background of the overall page is kind of distracting.

e.g. Neighbour: it would be awesome if I could set my culture up so it uses American-isms for those words.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. :-) I've fixed some typos. Also made some changes in highlighting the word. Is jarring still an issue ? I guess, I'm not fast enough to notice that. Added other features to TODO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When lines adjust and the 'next word' moves, it is very jarring and absolutely too difficult to track. Consider fixing this. It will be an inadequate gauge of typing speed until that is worked out. Other than that, pretty good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback :-) I've added it to TODO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> only major thing I noticed was the fact that all of the words seemed to shift a few times, which caused my eyes to have to refocus every time they shifted. It seemed to happen about 3 words before a new line, but I really was only focused on my 31337 typing skills :) [http://imgur.com/4DEz9Yu](http://imgur.com/4DEz9Yu)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to figure out another way to add new words (and remove some old ones) without changing the flow or something where new lines will slide in from the bottom without altering the position of words. Thanks :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The text should be flowing and not just random words next to each other. I should be typing sentences and not individual words.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll add that later. It's in my TODO. User should be able to choose that (words/sentences).</comment></comment>


What to do when you are on the receiving end of a 2 week notice - <AUTHOR> https://junhopark.com/posts/2016/06/07/what-to-do-when-you-are-on-the-receiving-end-of-a-2-week-notice <comment><USER2> My observation is that being hit at unawares by an employee's short notice tends to indicate a workplace culture deficit around communication between management and staff. Supervisors who work hard to know their staff as people rather than positions will tend to have opportunities to mitigate the conditions that inspire a person to resign.</comment>


What your computer does while you wait - <AUTHOR> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait

<comment><USER2> Did anybody notice the youtube style comment?:

 _WHAT A WASTE OF TIME AND INTERNET SPACE. WHY NOT REPORT ON THE GOOD THAT OUR TROOPS ARE DOING IN IRAQ? WHERE ARE THE GOOD STORIES?? OUR FREEDOM FIGHTERS HAVE OCCOMPLISHED SO MUCH IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, AND THE LIBERAL INTERNET IGNORES THEM, JUST LIKE THEY IGNORE GOD AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS!!!

IF YOU MUST HATE THE TROOPS FROM YOUR LIBERAL IDEOLOGY, WHY NOT AT LEAST TALK ABOUT JESUS? I SAW NO REFERENCES TO JESUS ON YOUR WEBSITE!! WHY NO BIBLE PASSAGES AT LEAST?? THESE MEN ARE DYING FOR YOUR FREEDOM TO SIT AROUND AND TYPE USELESS CRAP, AND ALL YOU CAN DO IS DEFICATE ON THEIR IMAGE AND THE SAVIOR FOR WHOM THEY ARE WORKING.

YOU ARE JUST ANOTHER LIBERAL TERRORIST. HOPEFULLY THIS ECONOMY WILL CLEAN UP THE INTERNET AND GET RID OF WEBSITES LIKE THIS. ENJOY HOMELESSNESS, APOSTATE._

WTF is it?

<comment><USER3> youtube style comment heh :) comments are another area where youtube is a pioneer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I was hoping for a joke or a comic. Sigh.

<comment><USER5> I was glad it was not. As much fun as a "lolcomputerz" would have been, I found a nice comparison of the speeds that things happen in my computer, all normalized to MB/s to be quite informative. It was helpful to see all of the proportions all at once.

I particularly like the analogy that if getting something from memory is like a minute long trip down the hall to get a candy bar, getting from the disk takes _more than a year_. Nicely done.</comment></comment>


Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/104581-linux-mint-the-new-ubuntu <comment><USER3> Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard.

Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together.

There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New users aren't going to switch to ubuntu because there's a start(or applications) menu. Canonical has to genuinely create a usable, unique user experience that ubuntu can call its own. It's not there yet, everyone knows. But saying people should just switch to something else and poo-pooing all over canonical isn't going to help make (desktop, mass user facing)linux the best it can be.

If you really care, get involved. Go to askubuntu.com and answer some questions. Make blog posts that illustrate how you'd improve unity. Write some code. Ubuntu is foss. Canonical neither charges for it nor sells hardware, and I'd say they're doing pretty good in spite.

All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity.

<comment><USER4> The problem, like everything Ubuntu, is that it may be 'user friendly' when everything works perfectly, but when you want to do something different or something fails, it's anything but. You're left fighting multiple levels of indirection, trying to figure out what the system is actually doing so you can _fix it_. Much of the indirection comes from Debian, but it seems Ubuntu finds a single use-case, and then builds more indirection _on top_ of the Debian indirection.

Needing to download 5GB of intermediate packages to go from karmic -> oneiric one release at a time (way to ruin apt-get, guys), a weekend fighting remotely with what turned out to be nouveau (which given its hard locking a fresh install, shouldn't even be enabled by default), and Unity tonedeafness have signalled to me that it's time to move on.

I'm giving Arch a try, and it's refreshing that I can just _edit_ /boot/grub/menu.lst without having to figure out the abstraction built on top to do things the "right way" (and avoid being overwritten). However, if Arch doesn't work out, I'm settled on straight up Debian. At least with Debian, the indirections actually get me something.

<comment><USER5> Obviously, you're not the target user of Ubuntu, so there's no point in complaining. Ubuntu is not meant for people who want to edit grub/menu.lst by hand. There are plenty of other distributions for that.

<comment><USER6> The advantage of using Ubuntu even for "power users" is the level of support available.

Since it has such a large share of the Linux desktop market it's easy to find solutions for most of your common Ubuntu problems.

I don't really want to go back to the days when everyone used a different distribution where if you had an obscure problem and used google for a solution you would come to a page describing how to fix it in another distro with a completely different package management system and where the contents of /etc were completely different.

I remember posting questions on the forums of various distributions relating to problems I was having just seeing them go unreplied to in perpetuity.

<comment><USER7> How long will Ubuntu have this user base if they keep pissing people off? Is it that hard to give the users who want the old shell in its usable form what they want?

Benevolent Dictator is what Bill Gates somewhat pretended to be for years.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure of Shuttleworth's credentials as the benevolent dictator/UI designer.

He made his money selling SSL certificates in large quantities, I don't really think he is a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

He reminds me more of the type of entrepreneur who makes his money then decides to buy an English Football club and run it into the ground.

That's possibly unkind though, there was enough good work going into Ubuntu providing good support and sorting out allot of the common Linux Desktop issues to award him some credit, but I don't really see Ubuntu as any kind of creative juggernaut.

<comment><USER8> Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop. Windows 8 is doing the same, and MS's TV ads trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.

Maybe they are right, and the future of mass computing is in entertainment consumption and not productive work. Maybe the dream of a popular powerful OS is dead. Maybe it's time for power users to return to being a.nich

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything.

I have found Ubuntu's strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines around Apple OSes for similar reasons, Canonical sort of 'turned left' and drove off the road to a new place.

I remember distinctly when I left Sun and had to give up my Suntools interface for what became Windows98 at the time. And it was hokey and painful and it crashed a lot, except that over the weeks and months it crashed less and less, all without a software update :-). And I realized it was not so subtley training me not to use features that failed. Of course if you use something long enough you become reasonably facile with it. When I switched my desktop to Linux I was always more comfortable with KDE for that reason, the whole 'start' menu on the lower left, the control panel abstraction, the way things laid out on the screen.

When I went to Google I got a Macbook as my laptop choice, it was different, and I struggled at first, but once I became reasonably good at navigating around I found that I was also less annoyed with Gnome.

I think the Unity strategy at Canonical will pay them big dividends. Mostly because the Linux desktop market has been such a small part of the whole desktop market as to barely merit a full pixel width in a pie chart of desktop OSes. I believe that part of the reason for that is that the strategy of being 'kinda like' MacOS or Windows in the GUI has failed Linux badly when it comes to non-technical users. It failed them because there was neither the cohesion of implementation, nor the quality of testing, in either KDE or Gnome which would ever cause a non-technical user to think the GUI was 'better' than the one they left behind. Unity breaks that cycle because _it doesn't work like the GUI you used to use._ and so I think users cut it some slack, they realize they are in a 'new' place and learn how to do the things that they want to do in the way that this gui does them. And there isn't a mental comparison to their previous gui because it wasn't like this at all.

Assuming, and its a big assumption, that Canonical can execute on the Unity strategy well, it will continue to be the dominant Linux distro. Further it will increasingly leave behind every other distro, because while others may trade off market share amongst the technical users, where programmers slosh from one to the next, Unity will be gaining non-technical users who won't go anywhere else in the Linux space. Ever.

<comment> old-gregg Great comment. But allow me to disagree on comparing Gnome 2 to OSX. In my opinion old Gnome was exactly what you're talking about: "driving off the road". It wasn't like Windows or OSX, it was its own thing, the best desktop environment, in my opinion. The only element reminiscent of OSX (only visually, not functionally) perhaps was the menu at the top.

Unity, on the other hand, is the exact replica of Gnome 3, just not as polished graphically. They both have this weird "buaaa mode" where you're typing instead of clicking on a shortcut, they both destroy virtual desktop functionality and if anything, they're basically cloning OSX bad habits: instead of switching between windows on Alt+Tab they're now switching between apps (across virtual desktops!).

So I would suggest that the opposite is happening. Instead of staying in the "new place" Ubuntu is basically trying to get on the road and follow OSX.

Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to "drive off teh road to a new place" when it comes to desktop UX without a significant change in hardware: we're still using basically the same computers as we did in late 80s, even the screen real estate hasn't improved much.

<comment><USER10> > _Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to "drive off teh road to a new > place" when it comes to desktop UX_

Sure it is.

3d file managers[1] never took off. With todays hardware they'd be a lot nicer to use.

Users have been limited to quite small (sorry about my incorrect terminology here, I'm going to go read some man pages) total virtual screen size within which their windows were located. Now graphics cards, and system memory, are huge; this leads to possible radical new interfaces.

Imagine a "Zoomable UI" - documents open in their own full size window; any document opens in its own window tiled next to it; the user can zoom in as far as they like to do detail work, or out as far as they like to organise all these documents. Programs would open toolbars in their own windows. Any toolbar would be able to work on any document (because it's Unix, so all input and output is text, right?) - but the result wouldn't necessarily make any sense.

That's not particularly radical; tiling WMs exist already.

[1] (<http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml>) {my favourite is FSV.}

<comment><USER11> 3D file management never took off because no one has yet found a meaningful and intuitive use for three dimensions that couldn't be accomplished with two.

The screenshots of FSV on that site show me a 2D interface that's been extruded into cubes and displayed isometrically. Usable, but the 3D is superfluous. All the other 3D file managers appear utterly unusable.

What on earth is going on in this screenshot of Tactile3D: <http://www.tactile3d.com/overview/screenshot_orbis_9.jpg>?

Or this one of TDFSB: <http://www.determinate.net/webdata/img/TDFSB2.jpg>?

<comment><USER12> To me, the clearest mandate for using three dimensions for file management is in creating a space that people can become as mentally familiar with as they can with a house.

We already know that one of the most powerful methods for creating a lasting memory of intangible items, the "memory palace", is basically walking around a three-dimensional space.

It seems clear that there is a possibility here to create a fully-functional three-dimensional metaphor. However, it is not an evolutionary step. It would be something so foreign that it would be better to teach it to people who never managed files before. And to be honest, with apologies to Dropbox, the numbers of such folks is back on the rise because file management itself is an increasingly irrelevant task, not just on iOS but on Chromebooks and just about any non-desktop computing device.

And so although there is a very interesting potential, I have to wonder if the quest for better file management is even worth fretting over anymore. Hasn't being "ready for the desktop" largely been an exercise in skating to where the puck has been? Maybe a revolutionary file manager would have been strategic ten years ago, but now?

So I welcome Canonical's focus on touch devices. Yet I'm concerned about the sheer inertia of maintaining an identity, in being Ubuntu, on a significantly different platform. We saw how well the Windows Tablet PC succeeded at being Windows, and in so doing lost the platform. I sure hope that's not what happens here.

<comment><USER11> But a file manager's principal function is to organize things. And people _don't_ think three-dimensionally when they're organizing things. They don't even think _two_ -dimensionally. It's always a _single_ dimension, some kind of vector, and they compose things into one-dimensional vectors that may contain other one-dimensional vectors, but they're always looking for one dimension at a time.

If you're looking for a quotation from your favorite author (assuming Google wasn't helpful), you're not going to nevigate a three-dimensional conceptual space to find it. You're going to first iterate through your list of bookshelves, and find the appropriate shelf (assuming you have lots of books and sort them into shelves e.g. by topic or alphabetically). Then you'll sort through the books on the shelf and find the book you need. Then, you'll go through the chapters of the book, etc.

The mind organizes information into categories, and groups categories within categories. Visual mnemonics are great, but they help us to find the specific item we're looking for at the appropriate level of abstraction, and they work just as well in organized, two-dimensional spaces as well as three.

I agree that there may be a lot of potential for some major breakthrough, but having to remember that your Economics paper is stored in an inventory slot in a chest in the inn in that logging town outside Stormwind isn't it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Linux Mint has put Google custom search into the distribution in order to raise revenue. It's in firefox both from the address bar, the search box, and in the quick search from the 'start' menu. It's very annoying, and it isn't just a matter of opting out. Mint doesn't support an easy way to remove it from all three locations without getting technical.

I used mint for a couple of months, the custom search engine came back every time I updated a browser, and it was very annoying to reset settings. It was a deal breaker for me.

<comment><USER14> Also, this is absolutely unacceptable:

 _Our goal is to give users a good search experience while funding ourselves by receiving a share of this income. Search engines who do not share the income generated by our users, are removed from Linux Mint and might get their ads blocked._

<http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851>

<comment><USER13> > Search engines who do not share the income generated by our users, are > removed from Linux Mint and might get their ads blocked.

Wow, that is insane... With that sort of mentality, the next logical step is to gain market monopoly, pre-install a version of adblock with custom filters, and start charging the entire Internet to show ads.

<comment><USER15> If Google blocked Mint Linux from its results in response, it wouldn't be much of a threat.

<comment><USER13> I'm not saying they'd succeed, but based on what they're doing already I'm sure they'd be willing to try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Disclaimer: I like Linux. Also very speculative.

While people argue over distributions, Gnome 3 is the silent winner. You may not see it now, but in ~2 years the choice of distribution will be mostly meaningless. Because finally: Linux is going to be standardized through a unified interface - both beautiful and stable. In fact, in 2 years the only reason people will still be running other operating systems, is because those have the app marketplaces. Why is that? MacOS is already getting cheaper each version, they do not intend to make money with it anymore. It doesn't make sense either, nobody wants to pay more than once for something, and by that, I mean that people expect to run Windows or MacOS on their phones, tablets and everywhere without having to think about something as pesky as a licence. Windows will make money by selling applications and appliances in their Windows Store, it's the freemium model we know from games. In fact, they will make more money than before. Most people don't even know that Office is a paid application suite, now they actually get the opportunity to pay for it. This may seem small, almost idiotic to us programmers but people can't pay for something they don't see. So here we have it again: Linux is going to be behind, but not because it lacks functionality, ease of use or beauty. It will lack apps.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think people are looking at these operating systems the wrong way. In the past, Ubuntu was the easy to set up but hacker-friendly linux. Nowadays, they are transitioning to being more for OEMs and other devices. Linux Mint is simply coming in to fill the gap that Ubuntu is leaving as it transitions to other markets.

<comment><USER18> Well-said!

The great thing about Linux – its killer feature compared to Windows or Mac – is that it's open-source, meaning each user is free to tweak it however they see fit. Ubuntu has been an interesting experiment in whether such an open- source system can also be designed to be competitive with a casual market; they're finding that the casual market's extremely difficult to penetrate, and so they're trying to innovate and make something genuinely appealing. I'm curious to see if they succeed or not, but it doesn't really matter either way, because Linux remains the turn-into-anything choice for people who need (or just want) more control over their computing environment.

As Ubuntu makes drastic changes, a new iteration of Linux becomes the go-to for people who want a conventional installation. Maybe it would have made more sense for Ubuntu to remain the conventional brand and for a newly-branded brand name to be the one fiddling with Unity, but Ubuntu's already got a name for itself and Shuttlesworth wants to take advantage of it. I think it's beautiful how Linux is capable of branching and splitting so painlessly. I don't use it myself, but that's okay – Linux doesn't need considerable market share to remain the valuable tool that it is.

<comment><USER19> "I think it's beautiful how Linux is capable of branching and splitting so painlessly."

You've nailed it for me with that quote. Thanks. Points up the difference between commercially packaged OS and a free (ish given Ubuntu's binary blobs) one.

<comment><USER20> in the past 2 months i used extensively gnome2,3, unity, xfce, kde4.6 etc and i am so happy for such a small market share there are many choices. this is the power of open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It honestly boggles my mind that people can't read things like these and see that it's "choice" here that's why Linux on the desktop is doomed to be nothing more than a niche product for us geeks.

Desktops succeed because they're consistent. Possibly the most important thing is to have a consistent API. X at this point is venerable. Nascent Linux desktops come complete with cruft. Lots of cruft.

Honestly I can understand why Canonical wants to start again (Wayland, Unity, etc). Even more honestly, I just don't see adoption of any Linux desktop going much above 1%.

I have a 6 core Xeon with 24GB of RAM on my desktop and _Ubuntu still feels sluggish_. Go down to 2 cores and 4GB of RAM and I'd have a better experience with either OSX or Win7.

<comment><USER22> I don't ever want Linux on the desktop to succeed then if I have to sacrifice choice. I'm thrilled with Ubuntu every day, and if I had to sacrifice any of the flexibiltiy and customization I enjoy... well, I'd just use OS X.

Also, I have no freaking idea how your Ubuntu feels sluggish. Being in Ubuntu on my Quad/8GB is vastly faster than being in Windows.

<comment><USER19> cletus and drivebyacct2

I've discovered recently that its the video hardware and how that interacts with the precise (sic) choice of graphics driver that governs Unity speed.

cletus: you can test my hypothesis by logging in with the Unity 2d session and seeing if the UI becomes more responsive. Scaling (super-s) will be 'ragged' without 3d effects but should be faster.

drivebyacct2: what is your graphics card and what driver? I need a new desktop box soon myself...

I'm giving Unity a try and I have to admit its a little _fussy_ and _busy_. My fallback is Debian with a tiling window manager (dwm) so I've been going in the 'menuless' direction for some time.

<comment><USER23> You might be affected by:

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/763005>

There is a series of known bugs where the window manager picks the wrong refresh rate resulting in choppy animations.

I noticed that this happens consistently with all compositing window managers (compiz, xfwm4, mutter) except kwin.

Disabling VBlank syncing may help. The bug report above has instructions to disable VBlank syncing with Compiz/Unity.

If you are using mutter (gnome-shell) you can put this line in /etc/environment, restarting your X session afterwards

      export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none

However, in my experience, Unity/compiz becomes sluggish again after a certain amount of clients are displayed on any (virtual) desktop.

<comment><USER19> lvillani, yes, the nvidia form of this bug and its associated work around has improved the performance of Unity with my old desktop significantly. Lots of searching Ubuntuforums and the interweb had not turned this up, so thanks.

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux- restricted-m...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-restricted- modules-2.6.20/+bug/92599)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I use awesome wm on my debian laptop, but I prefer Unity and Gnome Shell to the old gnome 2 or kde or xfce. They are really starting to come together as coherent interfaces instead of having mismatched UIs.

Some tweaking tools are around anyway and more will come with time. Gnome shell extensions are pretty good and they'll mature with time.

<comment><USER19> I suspect that users of tiling window managers are already quite a long way along the axis that Gnome appears to be moving along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "The desktop seems crowded, and yet on a large monitor there's so much real estate to get to that left menu that it's a chore; multi-monitor just never felt right either. To make matters worse, Canonical seemed to ignore all protest, which made users feel alienated and not cared about."

When I use OS X, I do miss the NeXTSTEP menu bar. I do wonder how much research is going into large screen UIs these days. It seems like we need someone to concentrate on the workstation again.

<comment><USER26> What I find ironic is that the developers (and designers) that work on these OSes are most likely using a giant monitor or dual-monitoring, or both. However, they're still designing for a single 1024x768 monitor. WTF?

With Aero Snap in Win7 and multi-mon taskbar in Win8, MS seems to finally start supporting some of these features.

OSX is busted on the 27" iMac. I know because I own one. OSX needs Win7-style window docking so bad... I spend way too much time managing windows on the 27" iMac.

<comment><USER25> The one good thing about Lion has been the mission control interface. I got it rigged on pushing the scroll wheel of my trackball and it keeps me out of the window managing business.

I really think going back to the NeXT window bar would fix a lot of my hatred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _> it's Ubuntu without someone else telling you what to do or taking the OS into a direction that you're unwilling to follow_

Debian, anyone?

<comment><USER28> the prevailing theme in most comments regarding mint i've seen on reddit and various blogs is that people like mint because it's easy. one of mint's big selling points is that they include the ubuntu-restricted-extras package by default, rather than making people install it.

if people can't install a single package, i don't think debian is for them.

<comment><USER29> And yet, Mint has a version that's directly downstream from Debian, not based on Ubuntu at all.

<comment><USER28> what does that have to do with anything? the parent suggested debian, not "some other debian-derived distro" linux mint debian edition is definitely not debian.

<comment><USER29> You're exactly right. But it could be a gentler introduction to Debian for some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I had a really nice config runnig Gnome2 + XMonad. I tried for hours to get this config running again nicely with Ubuntu 11.10, without much luck.

Then I stepped back and thought for what I'm needing or want a desktop: automounting + wifi.

For automounting I'm now starting 'thunar --daemon &' in my '.xsession', and for wifi and it's config I'm using 'wicd' and otherwise just XMonad.

<comment><USER31> A one-line change to xmonad.hs to make it use xfce instead of gnome, and I was on my way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For those who don't want to shift to a new distro, Xubuntu is a great option. It's lightweight without losing any of the features you've come to expect from a fully-featured DE.

And best of all, it's not going to pull the UI rug out from under you at a moment's notice.

<comment><USER33> Why switch to XFCE? Can't you just install Gnome?

<comment><USER34> Sure on Ubuntu 11.10 I installed Gnome 2.2 (see below comment for correction) as follows. This may not be possible on the next Ubuntu release. That's why I am migrating to Mint.

How to install gnome-classic on Ubuntu 11.10

# apt-get install gnome-session-fallback

# cd /etc/lightdm # gedit lightdm.conf change user-session=gnome-classic

hold down the alt key when right clicking the menu bar to add frequency and system monitor applets.

<comment><USER35> > This may not be possible on the next Ubuntu release.

What, are they gonna stop making it based on Linux and move to something that can't run Gnome?

<comment><USER34> Gnome fallback is supposed to be a temporary feature of Ubuntu. Sorry - <USER2> can't easily find where I read that.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, but at what point does that stop the "power users" who seem to hate Unity from installing Gnome themselves? Hell, I removed Gnome entirely and replaced it with Xfce once. It's still Linux. Just because it comes with Unity preinstalled doesn't mean you're stuck with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like the forced search from Mint would be annoying.

The real problem I have with Unity is the lack of a Focus-Follows-Mouse setting. Possibly there is some hidden settings I could change, but that's a deal breaker. Even Windows7 has a registry setting for this I use.

I installed a different windows manager on 11.10 and login with the user default from the login screen, wasn't that big a deal. I load AfterStep, but it's kind of a cluster out of the box and I'm thinking of going to something else. Back in the day spending hours getting my window manager running exactly 'so' wasn't a big deal, but it's not so fun after a decade.

</comment><comment><USER37> I still can't understand why Canonical doesn't just put out a Gubuntu similar to Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. That way, they can keep pushing Unity forward while making it reasonably easy for uses who prefer Gnome to choose that option. I know it's possible to get gnome running (I did it on my netbook, which is running 11.10 - my desktop is still on 10.10), but the method feels unnecessarily hacky.

<comment> muuh-gnu > I still can't understand why Canonical doesn't just put out a Gubuntu

Because they guessed that not many users would switch to Unity if they can keep using a Gnome-2-like. But they _want_ them to switch to Unity so they have to basically force them by forcibly removing the Gnome-2 option.

<comment><USER37> I thought the idea of Unity was to attract new users with a simple interface optimized for non-power users. There's no reason why such an approach has to alienate existing users who _like_ having a more expressive interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It reminds me of the die-hard KDE users and Kubuntu. I think Canonical did well with the creation of Ubuntu, which made it possible to throw a Linux desktop at a newbie user for the first time. From the sounds of it, Unity hasn't lost that angle. Since it's actively looking at tablets, I think they are here to stay. With tablet hardware getting more powerful, it could be surviving contender to iOS and Android.

<comment><USER39> Extremely doubtful that we'll see Ubuntu as a contender to iOS and Android.

If you're going to run linux on a tablet-sized device, why not just use Android? It has an existing application store(s), and more importantly an existing userbase.

Look at WebOS, if there's any competition out there to compete with Android or iOS WebOS would be the best option. From everything I've seen and heard it is quite fantastic. If not slightly buggy and a little slow. It wasn't executed well by HP or Palm but there's obvious potential.

I figure, if Palm and HP can't compete with Android and iOS, there's no way Ubuntu is going to do it.

I'll happily be proven wrong if they do, but I just can't see it.

<comment><USER40> Android is 'built on' Linux but it doesn't expose Linux to users in any remotely meaningful way (contrast, for example, with Maemo).

I agree with you that it's doubtful, but if Ubuntu doesn't do it then I just don't think it can be done - Fedora and Debian aren't even going to try and most other distros don't even have the resources to start.

<comment><USER39> Sorry, late reply here.

I know that Android is built on linux. But I don't see that as being hugely important. It's about the interface and the "mindshare" of the users and particularly the developers if you want to have a solid app selection for those users.

There's going to be a huge issue with ANY new platform. It's the chicken and the egg all over again.

Apple created a platform and got a bunch of users interested because the product was so mindblowingly refreshing amid all the crap phones available to consumers at the time. While applications weren't available from the get go, the users loved the phone despite the lack of apps.

When the app store was made available in the second iOS release allowing developers to make applications for those phones it effectively bypassed the chicken and egg problem.

Take a look at WebOS. It was unique and refreshing although not mindblowingly refreshing like the iPhone/iPad were. Thus, it's userbase was small and it's developer base even smaller. Developers wouldn't look at the platform because there weren't enough users. Users won't look at it because of the lack of applications.

Many of the original iPhone purchasers were tech savy people. They were the only people willing to spend $500-600 on a phone. People always ask those tech savy people for advice. Those tech savy people say "I love my iphone and here's why." But the same didn't happen with WebOS because the tech savy people wouldn't buy the device because it lacked apps. At least, not until the TouchPad hit $99 anyway.

What makes you think Ubuntu has a chance here? Seriously. Granted, I will give you one thing about Ubuntu and that's at least that they're trying to provide a consistent experience. Which is assbackwards from Linux in general with the Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, Xfce, XMonad blah blah blah. Sure, those give you choice. But on a tablet or phone, choice isn't always a good thing, at least not the same level of choice you find on a desktop.

But I just don't see Ubuntu as a possible threat to anything here at all. As someone else already mentioned, if someone wants a tablet OS, just fork Android and run with it. At least you have a working base for something that's already seen success. You can mold it into something unique like Amazon and B&N did. I don't think Ubuntu can compete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I really don't get what is the big deal about not liking unity, this sound strange on "hacker news" site where people are using keyboards rather than mice most of their time.

From my opinion, the alt+tab functionality is an improvement, the app/docs search works great and the overall look and feel is smooth and fine.

I do not pay too much attention whether my active apps are represented as rectangles in a bottom bar or as lighting dots on a left bar.

In general, when preaching about the ability to choose it is also include the ability to choose not to use gnome and use something new.

Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth owes me nothing, seriously, they have been providing me the entire Ubuntu distro platform and infrastructure for free, and in the last year alone, I have installed Ubuntu on about 500 network appliances I provided to my customer.

I, and perhaps every Ubuntu other users, owe to "Ubuntu" more than Ubuntu owe to us, so all this rant and complaining gets to my ears as a spoiled child complaining to his mama.

Bottom line, my vim is the same vim, my chrome is the same chrome and my Konsole is the same, oh, sorry, it is a bit different and better now, because I set "Ubuntu Mono 11pt." as the default font.

<comment><USER42> Except that lots of people don't agree with you. People have already been using gnome-do (quicksilver) for fast keyboard app launching for a few years; it's faster, more focused, and less keystrokes than the Unity bar. You also can't use it without installing some extra stuff and getting unity to give up its monopoly on the mod (win) key.

As for the alt+tab functionality.. well, if you are used to OSX and its third rate window management (can't move or resize windows without aiming at a tiny bar or handle?) and broken virtual desktop implementation, then maybe this kind of impoverished behavior is a welcome change. Since I have OSX experience, global menu's aren't a big problem for me, except when they are hidden by default and show up on different screens depending on window location. An interesting compromise for multi-monitor users, but mystery-meat menu decision is mind boggling.

For people who have now had ~16 years of window-centric keyboard navigation, having no good muscle-memory way to switch among 3 windows in 2 different applications is a nightmare. Having alt-tab slide your entire desktop over is just an insult on top of that injury. We use exact same set of tools (vim, chrome, and a terminal), but you must only ever use one window each; I can't imagine how you could tolerate the new app-switcher's behavior otherwise.

Your point about the only change being the font is also interesting, since in Ubuntu 11.10 you cannot change your fonts (or any colors on your theme, or gtk2 themes which a majority of apps will still use) without installing some third party tool with a terrible UI that looks worse than anything has since gnome-2 was released. The terminal is the only program that provides a UI for changing it.

In general, I agree with the posts in this thread that say you can massage the XFCE desktop into a worse version of what gnome-2 was about 3 years ago. After trying very hard to get along in Unity and 11.10 (gvim freezes for 30 seconds on start-up if you have installed foreign language packs, a bug fedora fixed about 9 months ago but persists in ubuntu), I've given up am using XFCE w/ Compiz (which doesn't work that great but is usable) until I find a weekend where I can ditch it for something else.

The part that's sad is that I did not find Gnome3 to be much better than Unity; it still has the same "enhanced" (broken) window/app collection which I find completely unsuitable for doing real work without encountering incredible friction. So for me (and probably others), Gnome3 has joined KDE4 as some unusable tangent, essentially killing off systems I was very happy and productive with. Gnome2 is a temporary fix; it's a dead end. XFCE still feels very spartan; in the past 3 years Gnome2 has got better and better and XFCE has barely moved. Hopefully, someone (maybe Mint, or maybe the ElementaryOS guys) will raid the remnants of Gnome2 come up with a system that has a living development path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> There has been a huge incentive for operating systems to try to adapt to the laptops and smaller form-factors distancing themselves from the age-old desktop form-factor. We all have been affected by that push at some point. Ubuntu has been no different.

Ubuntu more than any other has tried a bit of everything. I've long settled on the Xfce version called Xubuntu. So after trying Unity for a couple of hours after installing the recent Ubuntu I could just install "xubuntu-desktop" and be done with it, back to my trusted experience.

Interestingly, many users seem to settle on the default experience and then feel cheated when it changes to something they don't like. Users coming from Windows found home in some version of Ubuntu. Then felt cheated when it changed some more.

Experienced users have all of this baggage, all the learning they have undergone... But the Linux distros namely Ubuntu want to try to make something for people who have barely used a computer, pushed by partners like Dell and so on.

Windows too has changed a lot throughout versions. The lucky ones kept on using Windows XP.

</comment><comment><USER44> One of Paul's imperatives is to make a few people very happy rather than a lot of people kind of happy. That in mind, I think this is a good move for Canonical to move to Unity in 11.10. If people want the user-friendliness of GNOME, they can go to other linux distributions. But Canonical is doing well with open source technology - they've actually moved linux to something beyond the more savvy users and hackers - it's accessible to anyone used to Windows, with a bit of tweaking. I don't think they should stick with what's safe just because it's ubiquitous. They can't directly compete with Apple and Microsoft, so experimenting with what Linux can be specialized in or how to make it unique are worth disappointing a few users, I think.

(EDIT): I forgot to mention, I also don't think changing UI will affect Canonical because of past history with it. Facebook has a mass of complaints every time ot changes, but it's still growing every day. The two examples don't entirely match up, but I think the same will apply to Canonical.

<comment><USER10> > _They can't directly compete with Apple and Microsoft, so experimenting with > what Linux can be specialized in or how to make it unique are worth > disappointing a few users,_

To me this feels a bit like what Opera has churned through - first you pay; then you pay to get rid of ads (or not); then it's got great CSS (which is rigidly compliant but makes some sites look weird); then it's free; then it's got versions for mobile technology; then it's got social stuff built in; etc etc.

Opera is a great browser. Unfortunately, not many people know that it's a great browser, because they use IE or Safari or Ff or Chrome.

Facebook does get a lot of criticism from users when it changes UI. I think the difference is that you only read that if you're already using Facebook. All the furore about $LATEST_CHANGE_IN_OS is written on blogs, and that gets read by people trying to decide whether they're going to go for some Linux distribution.

Many Linux distributions aren't very good at "elevator pitches", and most users are too lazy to plough through a bunch of wiki pages to find out just why Mandriva is different from Mageia.

<comment><USER45> _Opera is a great browser. Unfortunately, not many people know that it's a great browser, because they use IE or Safari or Ff or Chrome._

Operas has very good mobile market share, i.e. where it matters now. They executed well on that space.

Whatever advantages they have on desktop (questionable IMHO) don't seem to be compelling or strong enough to win users over. And just like everyone else, they now have to fight the Google Chrome advertising juggernaut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Linux Mint looks good for Linux developers who want a high-productivity environment based on Gnome & debian. Canonical is re-purposing Ubuntu for the casual, ease-of-use, mobile and tablet markets.

Its easy to understand why ... those markets are growing quickly. And Microsoft is going in the same direction with their Metro look-and-feel.

</comment><comment><USER46> It seems that nothing made more for the spread of minor linux distros than the introduction of Gnome 3...

<comment><USER10> ... and they knew it was going to happen, because of the annoyance that KDE caused when they went to KDE 4.0, and the number of people that moved from KDE to other desktop environments.

Gentle iteration (改善) is fine, and complete overhaul is fine, but the combination of killing off the old version and introduction of workflow- breaking new versions; with a supposedly community driven project ignoring many users has been very frustrating for some users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am glad about Unity and Gnome3, because it made me try the Xfce4-Desktop. Simple, fast, without many settings and other stuff that distracts from work. It's what Gnome should be according to the original philosophy of the Gnome project.

</comment><comment><USER48> What's wrong with sticking to an older version of Ubuntu - 11.04 or earlier where you're not forced to use Unity? That's what I do. And I get a lot more work done without having to worry with the latest shiny new toys in town.

<comment><USER49> What's wrong with selecting "Gnome" as a desktop rather than Unity when logging in? It's literally 2 clicks to change.

<comment><USER34> Have you tried Ubuntu 11.10? Where are those 2 clicks?

<comment> clark-kent The 2 clicks is the tools icon right next to Username on the login screen.

<comment><USER19> My fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 has exactly two entries in that menu...

Unity Unity 2d

You can install other desktop packages from the repositories of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As a fairly recent main machine ubuntu convert (6 months or so), I'm actually a fan of unity. Like everyone I hated it at first, but now that I have got used to it I prefer it to regular gnome stuff.

I agree however that 11.10 has been a nightmare as many useful (but not hardcore) features have been removed from the UI of many packages for reasons such as "casual users are unlikely to need this". This is the problem that is likely to get me looking else where for distr.

<comment><USER40> I spend most of my time in a terminal and I thought Gnome 2 was a mess and was never totally happy with it. I don't think 11.10 has been a nightmare at all, I have found it to be an improvement on 11.04, where most of the 'removals' you cite actually occurred.

I originally started using Ubuntu for the driver support (after a while you want to work rather than compiling everything and editing files in /etc, which means you either roll your own de facto distro or you switch to something which has an 'out of the box' workability).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I stared using Ubuntu as primary desktop system from 7.04 and switched to Arch+KDE when Unity came out as the default UI.

I don't have any issue with a distro refining the user experience, trying to appeal to a more general market. However, the initial Unity was such a half- assed, buggy release that my confidence in the maker of Ubuntu was destroyed.

Pissing off base/sophisticated users in attempt to attract doesn't look like a good omen for future success.

</comment><comment><USER52> I like Unity and I consider it a cheapish version of OS X gross general style guidelines. I like full screen application idea, distraction free globalmenu. Hiding maximize/minimize/close controls as an option. MeMenu it's great. Non intrusive notifications. And so.

But left taskbar and being unable to integrate Docky with Compiz effects beauty it's a continuous pain

</comment><comment><USER53> While I can agree with the sentiment that Unity's not ready for prime-time (by a long shot), the last paragraph of the article identifies the silver lining:

If one distro makes a change you really dislike, there are plenty of others out there to try.

Changing OS is a pretty big deal but it's nowhere near as big a ballache as it used to be, and virtualisation and live CDs are brilliant ways to try before you buy, as it were.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, having already regretted going from 10.10 to 11.04.

In 11.04 the Gnome fall back just about worked. In 11.10 it does not. As for Unity I can't tell whether it's working as intended or is buggy.

Every progressive update from 10.04 has gotten increasingly slow to boot and respond.

As we speak I'm preparing to install Mint, with a fall back to Ubuntu 10.10.

<comment><USER54> Having now installed Mint 11 I can say it it's a real improvement over Ubuntu 11. Fast to load and shutdown, responsive, beautiful UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> "your activity on the web, every search query you make and product you buy will help fund our project." - <http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851>

help fund your project and sell my soul too...

</comment><comment> clark-kent Why not run Ubuntu classic on 11.10, which uses a very polished Gnome 2 shell?

<comment><USER56> It's a dead end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Canonical should just start a new parallel line, GNUbuntu for the GNOME desktop (not to be confused with anything GNU-related).

</comment><comment><USER58> i'm actually switching to archlinux after using mint for a year or so

</comment><comment><USER59> I just check the stats on DistroWatch: <http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity>

It's based on pageviews as I recall, but that's a decent metric for getting a feel for a distro's "buzz". The data suggest that Mint started to surpass Ubuntu nearly 6 months ago-- not 2 like this article's author implied.

</comment><comment><USER60> I primarily use OS X but just recently put Ununtu on a laptop. I was totally new to Limux and hated Unity. Unity would be absolutely awesome aside from 3 major flaws:

* The dock won't auto hide until hovered over like in OS X.

* I have to search for the app I want to use most of the time. There should just be a whole menu or list

* The dock should be able to be moved different areas of the screen.

I tried to get used to it but couldn't. I switched to ElementaryOS (loved it). Then I switched to Crunchbang which runs OpenBox and I've never looked back.

Ubuntu is amazing for newbies except for those 3 flaws. Its the only distro I've seen that could make a Windows or Mac user feel right at home.

<comment><USER50> _I have to search for the app I want to use most of the time. There should just be a whole menu or list_

Not sure if this is how your supposed to do it, but I just search for the program once from the dash home, then once it's open I right click on the icon and click keep in launcher.

 _The dock should be able to be moved different areas of the screen._

did you get the Compiz Config settings manager (sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager)? It has a bunch of settings for the dock (it's not fantastic but it helps).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> [http://intosimple.blogspot.com/2011/11/decline-of- ubuntu.htm...](http://intosimple.blogspot.com/2011/11/decline-of-ubuntu.html)

<comment><USER62> Link's broken, yo.

<comment><USER61> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3225931> The author was unfortunate to have his post deleted by mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Desktop Linux users are flocking to a distro that looks like an uglier version of Windows 2000?

"Tonight we're gonna GUI like it's 1999!"

I guess if they had any aesthetic sense, they'd probably be switching to OS X...

<comment><USER6> To be fair , whilst it's not the most attractive distro out there it does have allot of usability improvements over Windows 2000. For example the compiz grid which provides the 'aero snap' type functionality of windows 7 as well as decent application search as well as applets etc. I think Windows Vista is probably closer than Windows 2000.</comment></comment>


How Well Do Hand Sanitizers Work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2245896/?from=rss

<comment><USER2> "In 1847, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that washing one's hands with chlorine between deliveries practically eliminated fatal infections among laboring women. (His colleagues ignored him and later committed him to a mental hospital, where he was beaten to death by guards.)"

There's better reading on that here (link found in the original article): <http://www.semmelweis.org/about/dr-semmelweis-biography/>

It's amazing how stubborn we can be to changes, even positive changes.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Today, numerous modern studies show that in randomized trials, meticulous hand-washing, when coupled with other infection control measures like surgical draping and universal gloving, reduce the rate of life-threatening infections during surgery and intensive care unit stays.

But in hospitals, outside of these clinical trials, just half of doctors and nurses regularly clean their hands before patient care, despite widespread publicity."

This is a silly comparison. During surgery (when people are literally split open) and in ICUs (when their body is profoundly damaged), the human body is unnaturally and incredibly sensitive to infection. If you've ever witnessed a surgery, you'd know that surgeons are insanely, mind-bogglingly obsessive- compulsive about washing their hands and keeping a sterile operating room.

But 99% of people in the hospital or doctor's offices are not so compromised, so it's not surprising that doctors and nurses aren't religious about hand washing "before patient care".

<comment><USER4> I've talked to doctors about this, and they point out that if they actually sanitized every time they come into contact with a patient their hands would get so dry the knuckles would start bleeding when they bent their fingers.

<comment><USER5> I hear there is this stuff called "moisturizer", which restores the moisture and oils that have been washed away by soap.

<comment><USER4> Of course, given that the moisturizer is unsanitary, the doctors and nurses would immediately have to wash it off again. :/

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a problem that could be solved. It's not all bacteria and viruses that need to be killed completely, it's mostly MRSA that is the problem. That probably doesn't live in moisturizing lotions; and once you've removed it from your hands, it's not going to come back until your touch it again.

Also, what about just wearing rubber gloves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The studies mentioned don't show that _using_ hand sanitizers is ineffective, just that _mailing_ the sanitizers to people along with informational pamphlets is ineffective. If you actually read the first study they report finding a significant (though small) effect on respiratory infections for families that claimed to have actually used the products.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've always wondered whether the growing modern obsession with bug killing and so forth might be counter productive.

Has anyone seen any studies they can recommend into the long term effect on our immune system?

<comment><USER8> What I'm more worried about is the claim that they kill 99.9% of germs. This would mean that the most resistant 0.1% get all the free space to grow. We're not disinfecting our world, we're creating evolutionary pressure on the germs to become resistant to our countermeasures.

<comment><USER7> Does that mean they kill 99.9% of known germ types (i.e. some are resistant). Or that it is able to kill 99.9% of germs on a known object (i.e. some random subset of germs will escape destruction for whatever reason).

I suppose the former but I've never researched.

<comment><USER8> That's interesting. I always interpret it to be 99.9% of the population on a given surface. It could be read as types also I guess.

EDIT: the article posted here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1031922> seems to support the 'types' theory, although it also casts significant doubt on the validity of the claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are a lot of misconceptions about the effectiveness of various hand sanitizers. What's important to know: common hand based sanitizers with a ~70% concentration of alcohol, when used properly and when left on the hands to dry (some people use the sanitizer and then wipe) are extremely effective at killing exposed bacteria, without the risk of developed resistance.

<comment><USER10> This is my first winter using (employer supplied) hand sanitizer. I have to say that so far, I haven't had any seasonal illinesses - and I don't take flu shots either - so I believe it has helped (along with regular hand washing and wearing gloves whenever I go out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hand sanitizers are a great example of fear-based marketing, which is very effective, just like fear-based politics.

<comment><USER12> I guess our brains are wired so that emotional content trumps informational content. (Which also explains why there always seems to be several "dramatic" posts on the front page of Hacker News like Calacanis vs. Cutts.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Used to use alcohol (basis of hand-sanitizer effectiveness) to sterilize in hospitals (before autoclave). Had to soak for 20 minutes in pure alcohol. What difference can rubbing dilute alcohol onto your hands for 3 seconds do?

<comment><USER14> There might be a difference in how thoroughly you need to sterilize something (1) before bringing it into prolonged contact with someone's bloodstream, internal organs, etc., versus (2) before briefly touching your food / blowing your nose / ... with it.

<comment><USER13> No, no difference really, if your goal is to avoid transmitting a virus.

<comment><USER15> Yes there is. It's like the difference between going to Volgograd as a tourist today and going to Stalingrad as a member of the German army in the winter of 1942-43.

<comment><USER16> Ah, a simple metaphor we all can relate to. :)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, if I had been saying it out loud I would have been grabbing for words halfway through and would have realized it was a bit overwrought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've met Chuck (the first author referenced) a few times, and a couple interesting germ related items I remember him relating to me: The cleanest place in a women's bathroom is the toilet seat (nearly half of women wipe it down before use). The cleanest place in a men's bathroom is the inside door handle. Bathroom air dryers are the least sanitary - those aerosolized droplets he mentions in the article are sucked up and blown right onto your hands. Overall though, he gives the impression of someone who is absolutely not an obsessive hand washer.

</comment><comment><USER18> You can count me as one of the unsurprised.

The fact is that the sanitizers only work while moist, and they evaporate quickly. You'd basically need to bathe constantly in it (which would destroy your skin, by the way) for it to be effective. After handling raw meat or between handling infected patients? Sure, good idea. After driving to work? It won't make a damn bit of difference once you push the elevator button, much less once you hang out in a co-worker's office or pick up your phone.

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only person that finds the consistency of Hand Sanitzers just icky, I really like the feel of soap or am I just getting old ;/

<comment><USER5> I also hate hand sanitizers. I feel very dirty after using them, and feel the need to wash my hands. So I just wash my hands and skip the sanitizers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i wash my hands with soap and hot water every time i get home to my apartment (after grabbing the door handles of the supermarket etc. etc.), and have done so since young age. i don't lick my fingers or poke myself in the eye, ear etc. without having absolutely clean hands. incidentally - and i know correlation is not always causation - i never get sick. ever. rhinovirus doesn't get me. calicivirus doesn't get me. no flu has ever gotten me.

<comment><USER21> _no flu has ever gotten me._

 _ever_? I know people say this all the time, but are you sure, you have never had the flu?

<comment><USER22> I believe them. I'm not quite that fastidious about washing my hands after being out in public, and I've only had a flu once when I was 10-12. It was a 24-hour flu and it was very unpleasant, but thankfully that's the only time I've had it.

I generally don't get sick. I catch a head cold sometimes during the season but again, it's usually pretty mild and gone the next day.</comment></comment></comment>