Why I do not want to work at Google (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/msg00268.html <comment><USER3> "and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa"

Never mind that those oppressive regimes got replaced by...new oppressive regimes.

I beg to differ that is Internet what makes a regime fall in North Africa. What makes regimes fall is people who can't buy food going from 30% to 75% because of inflation of commodities(created by OUR WESTERN central banks).

Probably you think revolution is great, but I have been in Libya and Syria, before and in the wars and it is horrible. A civil war is the worst thing that could happen to a country, Americans could idealize it as they have forgotten what a real war is(fighting against non developed enemies 8000 miles away is not alike seeing your home in flames, your daughter raped or your brothers killed).

I would love to use decentralized tools, but they are so bad. They have lots of features, but they are incredible hard to use.

People will start using decentralized products when they are as easy to configure and install like a mac. Only centralized tools like facebook or Google provide easy of use that my grandpa could use.

<comment><USER4> > Americans could idealize it as they have forgotten what a real war > is(fighting against non developed enemies 8000 miles away is not alike > seeing your home in flames, your daughter raped or your brothers killed).

Southerners remember what that was like: 150 years ago Yankees were raping and killing their way across the Confederacy. Young folks nowadays have forgotten, but there are plenty of folks still alive who heard about it from their elders. It really wasn't that long ago.

<comment><USER5> No. Echoes of memories from your great-grandparents' great-grandparents is not even slightly on the same side of the room (or even in the same building) as living through an actual war on your own turf, civil or otherwise. I spent many years in a few different warzones, and you cannot possibly imagine what life is like for those folks. There is nothing in Western civilization that can convey these realities of war -- not even our own brand of tyranny or the relatively brief and cursory exposure of the vast majority our soldiers to foreign warzones. In a way, this attitude is almost offensive -- no offense to you personally -- because there is inherent disregard for the huge number of human beings living in awful shitholes where the human animal reigns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is, all of those guys who were so free in the nineties failed to create any noteworthy online services so Facebook, Google, etc. took up the space.

I'm gonna get down voted for that, but maybe if there were less nerd-wars in FOSS community and more thinking about real users the Internet would look differently nowadays.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's true that we failed to create any noteworthy online services.

 _We built the internet_. Maybe you've heard of it. We also created TCP, UDP, IP, DNS, email, the Web, Usenet, IRC, Git, BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and Wikipedia. We killed AOL, CompuServe, Encyclopedia Britannica, Solaris, the Information Superhighway, and the Advanced Intelligent Network. We were only unable to do smartphones because the carriers ruthlessly shut us out, demanding insane amounts of control over handset software and using their regulatory capture of the FCC as leverage, until Apple forced the doors open for us — but on Apple's terms. And we built most of the software that runs Apple, Facebook, and Google, too.

But how can we build new services to replace Facebook and Google on a decentralized basis, like email and the Web? That's a problem with both technical aspects — how can you build a distributed full-text query processor that runs on the machines of volunteers? — and social/business aspects — how can the people who benefit from these services effectively collaborate to get them created and improved? (Kickstarter and the like show a very promising direction for this.)

Those are the problems I want to be working on, not how to persuade Google Drive users to entrust a well-intentioned but unaccountable central authority with all of their family photos.

<comment><USER6> I;m not diminishing achievements you mentioned and I'm very well aware of them. You must admit however that not all of them can be attributed to FOSS, and all of them are quite low-level compared to what average user needs to be able to use it effectively.

I just wonder if we need 10 major Linux distros none of which is easy to set up and use to an average user. (sorry, even Ubuntu is still not there)

I am a big believer in open web and it makes me cringe every time I see a new cool technology that uses closed protocols (or rather APIs) as it happens with IoT right now. But it's hard for me to attribute it to anything else than lack of leadership from FOSS community.

<comment><USER8> Ubuntu is pretty much there. The only reason Ubuntu can't do some things is because of the requirement of Flash and DRM, both of which are obsolete or overbearing technologies we should avoid.

>it's hard for me to attribute it to anything else than lack of leadership from FOSS community.

So when it's a consortium of multi-billion dollar tech companies with massive R&D budgets, political connections and marketing dollars, it's FOSS's fault. OK.

<comment><USER6> Hey, what I just said is - spend less time on bs and more on creating valuable tools to everyday users and world will be a better place. It's not about fault, it's about lack of impact. Imagine how cool place would this world be if Linux was major customer OS and open source languages would be major ones used to create customer software with open protocols. Call me idealist but I would totally sacrifice half of the Linux distros to achieve those goals... :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular > computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what "apps" they allow in > their "app store".

I don't remember it that way all. Does anyone else? From what I remember, there was a very heavy consumer demand for the App store, meanwhile Apple was telling everyone just to make web apps. They actively developed WebKit into a cutting-edge, standards-oriented, developer-friendly browser. I don't see how you could say they wanted to "relegate websites to second-class status".

<comment><USER10> Websites can't send notifications on iOS, for one. (They can on Mavericks and Yosemite.)

<comment><USER11> That's a design/ideology conflict and not something that can be fixed. On OS X, you can leave a webpage open, and it must be open in order for the notifications to be sent. On iOS, you cannot (terminated whenever there is memory pressure). Push notifications are just way beyond what a website should be able to do, and scheduled ones aren't really all that useful except for a handful of apps.

<comment><USER12> Web pages do not have to be open to send notifications on OS X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Google [will] delete your account with no recourse if you admit you're only > 10.

The US gov is mostly responsible here, not Google: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act)

<comment><USER7> Keeping your account on somebody else's server is mostly responsible, because that makes it vulnerable to nonsense like this. Google is very much oriented toward everyone keeping their accounts on somebody else's servers, ideally Google's. That's what I object to.

<comment><USER14> I generally try to avoid starting sentences like this, but here goes:

No. Just no. 10 year olds probably don't have the resources to run their own hardware, insofar as 10 year olds don't earn money, can't own property (in a legal sense), and are not wholly responsible for their own actions. Therefore, a 10 year old having an account with a 3rd party unbeknownst to the parents is a security / child protection / legal nightmare.

Saying "keeping your account on somebody else's server is mostly responsible" is disingenuous _because_ the 10 year old has to keep their account on _somebody else 's_ server.

Edit: clarity

<comment><USER7> I am disappointed in the extreme level of rudeness in your response. I note that it seems to be occasioned by your not having been able to understand my message, with the result that the person whose dishonesty you are attacking exists only inside your own head.

10-year-olds can keep their data on their own server as easily as they can keep their books in their own bedroom in their own house, sleep in their own bed, call their parents on their own cellphone, and edit videos on their own computer. While the 10-year-old may not have legal title to any real estate, it is not therefore necessary for them to live in an institution. They can live with their family.

Hopefully that clarifies my message for anyone else who may have misunderstood it.

<comment><USER14> Who's responsible for the actions and security of a minor and their property? Can a minor enter in to contracts for services to connect the physical infrastructure to the outside world? Can a minor hold insurance policies against loss or damage to 3rd parties? Should a minor be tasked with the responsibility of keeping their belongings and data safe?

> They can live with their family.

Or legal guardian. That's my point. Children probably do need protecting, so their guardians are tasked, legally, with those responsibilities. Therefore, ownership, security, consequences of actions, etc., aren't clear cut when it comes to children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Given the article is from 2011, but did this:

> and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of > oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa

actually happen? I mean to say: Sure, oppressive regimes collapsed, but to be replaced with what? Take the 'Arab Spring' countries Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen - are they better off for having traded security and stability for (attempted) democracy.

> Google, of course, wants to solve these problems too. But it has a > different, less-democratic approach in mind.

No company is a Democracy in the sense of dēmos 'the people' \+ kratia 'power, rule', where 'the people' are you, me and the next person. Maybe companies are democracies where 'the people' are the shareholders, at least to some extent, for some definitions of 'shareholder'.

Often we see "The Democratisation of x" bandied about as though it has to be a good thing, but I'm left wondering what the term actually means if the consequences are typically a tradeoff between security + stability vs. democracy.

From what I've seen the media has portrayed Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (etc.) as playing a role in the Arab Spring demonstrations, yet these are exactly the sort of 'unaccountable intermediary' you're railing against.

I think the reference to the Arab Spring without qualifying the consequences of the whole scenario from the vantage point of history is dishonest.

Democracy isn't synonymous with Security and Stability, and we should all probably have a long hard think about Security and Stability before we promote disruption.

(Edit: fixed a thing where I'd written the opposite of what I meant).

<comment><USER7> I wrote the article you're calling "dishonest" in 2011. The Syrian civil war was still mostly Assad bombing his citizens. It would not have been possible for me to "qualify[] the consequences of the whole scenario from the vantage point of history" in a document written before that history happened. I agree that Egypt, Libya, and Yemen (and also Syria and Bahrain) are worse off now than before the Arab Spring.

I agree that companies aren't democratic. I think that's a good reason not to hand our government to companies.

Historically I don't think there is a tradeoff between security and stability versus democracy. [http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary- fa...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/) goes into some detail about the unstable, insecure history of undemocratic governments, specifically to rebut neoreactionaries who are calling for an end to democracy in order to return to an illusory imagined past of security and stability.

Democracies usually don't make very good decisions. They do seem to make many fewer catastrophic decisions than non-democracies, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion from the last time this was posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2933619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2933619)

<comment><USER7> Much of that discussion was excellent, although some of it missed the point. I'll try to keep tabs on this thread and answer any questions people may have today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My startup has been trying to make decentralized computing easy, but I'm just not sure there's a huge market for it. We took OpenStack and made it so you could connect nodes from anywhere on the net and rent them out, whether it was a server in a datacenter or even someone's desktop machine.

I'm just not sure there's a huge demand for it though; originally we were thinking that people would care about price, but it turns out most companies don't care that they're being fleeced by AWS. If they do care, they're probably using DO.

Anyway, here's a demo of everything working: [http://youtu.be/998IYD_WomY](http://youtu.be/998IYD_WomY) It connects a bunch of desktop machines around the Bay Area on different networks (Comcast, Sonic.net) and blends them in with a "dataceter grade" cloud server.

The real problem with decentralization though is that the asymmetric nature of the first (last?) mile makes it really hard to do anything useful with individual nodes. If we all had symmetrical gigE FttH/FttP everything would be a lot more rosy, but so far that's really only been happening in a few places.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that's "decentralization" in the sense that I mean. A "decentralized" system, to me, is one where no single person or group of people can deny others access to it, for example by deleting their accounts or turning the system off. Decentralized systems allow distributed innovation more robustly than centralized or merely distributed systems, and so they tend to outcompete centralized and distributed systems when they clash economically.

I haven't watched your video, though.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's only part of a solution. It's a decentralized platform, and what you're asking for are truly decentralized applications. The platform can potentially enable decentralized applications while letting you manage them in a centralized way.

I'm just not sure about your economics argument though; convenience usually trumps any kind of economic reason for using a distributed system over a centralized one. This is particularly so with most internet services because the cost for most things always approaches free. I mean, we're reading HN on a website, and not through alt.hackernews, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> (Full disclosure: I work for Google. My opinion does not necessarily represent my employer's opinion, yadi yada.)

This guy's rant is really about the need for decentralization. I fully agree with him. But I disagree that decentralization is incompatible with Google's primary business model (regardless if the Internet is decentralized, there will always be ways to do advertising.) In fact Google Wave ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave)) was a fantastic and radical attempt at decentralizing common use cases such as email, instant messaging, social networking, etc. Unfortunately this project failed to gain traction due to various reasons.

To return to a more decentralized Internet, we need software and network protocols that let people easily host their mail and blog, publish their social pages, and share their vacation pictures, etc, without relying on _the cloud_ but doing it via a device that runs _at home_. An ideal place to run this software would be your Internet router, as it really is a full-blown computer that is always on, always connected. And, as the router, it conveniently bypasses the issue of masquerading/NATing which is the one reason why non-technical people do not run server software more often. Another advantage is that uploading stuff to your Internet router (eg. sharing pictures) is much, much faster than uploading them to a cloud service (Wifi or Ethernet bandwidth can be 50x-1000x faster than the typical upload bandwidth of a home Internet connection.)

It should all work out of the box with zero configuration. That is the only way the idea can gain traction. Not everybody is a sysadmin, so your grandmother should be able to make it work. Want to enable your mailbox? Just tick the appropriate checkbox on your Internet router as easily as you would sign up for some mail provider. Want to follow the social lives of your friends? Your browser can render your custom Facebook-style wall by pulling posts and pictures feeds directly from your friends' Internet routers.

We already have most of the technologies needed to implement such decentralized features: HTTP with cross-origin resource sharing, SMTP, automatic registration of DNS names to make you discoverable on the net, OpenID authentication, etc. Maybe some other needed bits can be pulled from the Wave protocol.

But the sad thing is that I am not aware of any attempt to implement any of what I described above. Perhaps it is a vision too ahead of its time. Or perhaps it is because there are 2 important problems that are very hard to solve in a fully decentralized way: (1) search, and (2) spam. You can easily search for and find your friend's blog via Google web search because it has an index of the entire web, but how do you provide this level of quality if the search engine is your Internet router? As to spam, you can easily filter email if you are the Gmail team running sophisticated analysis on the billions of emails processed daily because the more data you have the easier you can classify it, but how do you implement this filtering quality on an Internet router that does not have access to such a data set?

Perhaps the solution is to run most of the services in a decentralized way (email, instant messaging, social networking, etc) _while_ at the same time relying on a few central services for some features like search and spam filtering.

Edit: thanks for the pointers to FreedomBox and Sandstorm, I will look into them.

<comment><USER18> Git provides most of the infrastructure answers. I think the idea that someone would host a personal website in future is slightly backwards. Just clone their website's public repo and browse locally. This could be extended to social news feeds, where if you just put new content in your repo then other people that subscribe could see those updates mashed together into a single feed.

The problem here is the economic incentives to do it are low, but the technical barriers to solving this are genuinely getting lower and lower all the time, so at some point it will happen.

<comment><USER19> So to view your personal website, on my phone, I need to clone an entire Git repo, with the entire history of the entire site..

Some people just treat some technologies as a "this can fix anything" when really they're well suited to one task.

This is the sort of thinking that suggests using a Git based solution to sync binary files between computers - the thing even the biggest Git fanboy will admit it does poorly - handling of binary files - and someone wants to use it for that specific purpose.

<comment><USER7> You could make a shallow clone with just the objects you need for the front page. If we're taking Git literally here, you need to get the current head somehow, then fetch the commit object, then fetch the root directory object it points to, then fetch the index.html blob object it points to. If we're not using HTTP URLs to name the objects, and the objects in question are small, it would be pretty easy to configure the server to "optimistically" bundle the commit, the directory, and the blob into the response to the request for the head, so it could be a single RTT.

It might actually be more efficient to do a single-version shallow clone than to fetch all the relevant assets with separate HTTP requests. Git already supports shallow clones, and you can already use them to clone things like Github wikis, and now you can even push from them: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6941889/is-git-clone- dep...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6941889/is-git-clone- depth-1-shallow-clone-more-useful-than-it-makes-out). A --depth 1 clone of [https://github.com/kragen/500lines](https://github.com/kragen/500lines) is 7 megabytes, although the full history is only barely larger. My phone has 400+ megabytes of RAM.

More promisingly, though, Git blobs are identified by their hashes. That means that if both my home page and your home page use Twitter Bootstrap 2.3.2, your phone only needs to download it once to render both home pages, since it can see from the blob IDs in the Git directory that it already has the relevant blobs. (Assuming it hasn't been optimistically included in the initial message response!) It doesn't have to worry that one of us might be serving up a maliciously-backdoored version in order to steal users' login cookies on the other's site. By the same token, you can accept the blobs from anyone who has a copy, who might be closer to you on the network than the origin server. Especially if, like me, you're in Argentina with a 250ms ping time to the US.

(This assumes you're using something cleverer than the standard git clone protocol, which builds a thin pack including all the objects you lack.)

So git-cloning websites to view them could actually be _faster_ than loading them over HTTP the way we do it now, because it eliminates a lot of the unnecessary security issues that we work around with bandwidth duplication and high latency.

<comment><USER19> You're kinda proving my point for me there.

The _only_ upside you actually identified there, is a reduced number of requests, which is already possible by using HTTP Keep Alive and HTTP Pipelining.

<comment><USER7> I was just explaining why the downsides you were writing about weren't serious. I didn't devote much effort to explaining the upside. I guess that a lot of things that seem obvious to me aren't obvious to you, probably because you haven't spent much time thinking about them. I'll try to do better:

1\. You can use 10MB of widely-used JavaScript and stock icons on your web page, and the browser will be able to see the page after downloading 100K instead of 10MB. HTTP keepalive and pipelining don't help at all with that.

2\. There are no more broken links, so people can link to stuff that isn't hosted on their own server without fear that it will go away next year, or be redirected to more commercially remunerative content, such as linkspam. (This is conditional on them caching a copy on their own server, of course.) HTTP keepalive and pipelining don't help at all with that.

3\. Resources can be cached close to you on the network without you having to trust the cache not to feed you corrupted versions of them. (You do have to trust the cache to not report you to the feds for reading an article about how to download Interstellar.) This makes a huge difference in page load time by reducing latency. Again, while HTTP keepalive and pipelining can reduce the multiple of latency, they can't reduce the latency below 2×RTT to the origin server, and practically speaking they're limited to several times that. This is especially important if you're trying to host your personal pages on a high-latency residential internet connection, and/or browsing from a high- latency country.

4\. Making every website not just archivable but also forkable enables a new kind of lightweight collaboration. Well, not totally new — I mean, we're doing it now on GitHub and, in a different form, on Wikipedia.

5\. Naming web pages by hash rather than by IP address or by a DNS name that maps to an IP address makes it easy to host them on dynamic IP addresses, including with transparent failover when one of them goes down for a while.

<comment><USER19> CDN's already solve #1 and #3

#2 is no different than mirroring content, e.g. how fireballed.org works, but over longer time.

#4 collaboration is about working on something together. Every visitor to your site is unlikely to need/want/care about collaborating on it.

#5 You're suggesting an SHA1 hash is easier to remember than a domain name? Seriously?

<comment><USER7> This "X is no different than Y/X already solves Y" conversation reminds me of thinking, around 1992, that clicking on a link to a page on another web site was "no different than" connecting my FTP client to a new FTP server, logging in, cding to some directory, and downloading and viewing a file from that directory. In some abstract sense, yes, they're the same thing; but in terms of human experience, they're very different.

You ask, "You're suggesting an SHA1 hash is easier to remember than a domain name? Seriously?" Consider that if I seem to be saying something that's obviously ridiculous, even to you, then maybe you've misunderstood what I was saying, as in this case. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your lack of understanding is genuine, not feigned to give you an excuse to be rude, but you were rude anyway.

<comment><USER19> You suggested Git based web page hosting would allow for local mirrors of content so they are available regardless of the availability of the original site.

I told you that is already happening in practice, without the overhead of Git.

in your example, i would not agree those two things are the same. Clicking a link that goes to a [http://](http://) url and clicking a link that goes to the same file via ftp:// i would say are _reasonably similar_ for the end user.

you're right, i didn't read into #5 enough. so for the purposes of "easier dynamic ip hosting" you're suggesting that browsing to a sha1 hash means it can come from any computer that has a copy of it?

but nobody is going to remember hashes. so you need to use dns or similar, so say "foo.com" has a GIT record, the value of which is an sha1 hash.. but then the client needs to find somewhere to get that from... so presumably you're suggesting some kind of peer to peer system for hosting?

and all of that is somehow better than the existing model, where you simply have a DNS server that has an api to update the IP address of an A record quickly?

You've also skipped over a big issue here.. this whole concept relies on a website being nothing more than static files.

It also effectively removes the ability for the author to have any idea at all about how many people view his site.

Git is reasonably good at what it does. It has some flaws but for versioning text based content, and fostering collaborative working amongst developers/authors, its a reasonably good solution.

As a replacement for HTTP web pages, caching proxies, CDNs, parts of DNS? not so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One reason why companies would rather get fleeced by aws etc. is that hosting your own server is both troublesome and expensive. This isnt much of a problem if you live in the temperate region but it is a HUGE problem if you live near the equator. Temperator can easily rise up to 33 degrees centigrade and beyond and maintaining a server without round-the-clock cooling in an air-conditioned room is close to impossible(unless your server is a single raspberry pi). That's why people would rather pay for Iaas services, sometimes it is simply cheaper for someone else to host it.

</comment><comment><USER21> A serious point here: warehouse scale computing beats p2p in a dsl (or even feasible fttp) environments. Essentially the model of the internet we have is broadcast with decoration from the upstream channel.

To change this services using upstream that make money for the pipe providers are required. Otherwise, no upstream.

Freeloading cannot work. Repeat CANNOT. Because you need fellas with highschool educations to look after the fibre and the boxes.

Downstream will remove the boxes and put them into warehouse scale facilities.

So - Haxxors, get yourselves to the internet of things if you wish to see democracy preserved.

Freedom is in peril.

Defend it with all your might.

<comment><USER22> Why do you think that for FTTP? I do see the problem with ADSL as it is currently implemented (as analyzed very well by kragen in the mail linked to in a sibling post to this), but why would the same problem apply to FTTP?

Also, I don't get how you get to freeloading - upstream bandwidth is as much part of the product that the customer is paying for as the downstream bandwidth is.

<comment><USER21> Downstream bandwidth is mostly delivered using caches. Upstream bandwidth is not delivered using caches. So to provide the backhaul for upstream bandwidth we will do deep reach into the datacentre <-> home and interconnect in the data centre. Therefore fttp will not provide p2p connectivity unless there is a need for local connectivity because deepreach and datacentre networking is rendered non viable by sheer traffic volume. But the traffic will need to be geographically localised and/or the services will have to provide the economic support for backhaul uplift.

I think we can probably do petabits on single mode fibre bundles now with the right boxes but the trick is the right boxes, which are spensive and take lots of electricity to run. So even if you can pony up for an FTTP roll out then the use cases are going to be constrained by the network architecture that is used to support it.

Now, for most people this is not a problem as the up channel is basically irrelevant in terms of bandwidth in the current consumer internet, but if you are the sort of person who imagines a decentralised and democratic consumer internet which is not mediated by massive supernational companies, or if you are the sort of person who is interested in where the value is captured in the industry value chain I think this does matter.

Sharing other peoples content will not fund a democratic internet even if governments fund and regulate fttp. We need a new class of applications that generate revenue sufficient to pay for the infrastructure that will facilitate them. If we get that then the infrastructure will also facilitate a shift away from the data centre (not it's elimination though as it will be the way that the current usecases are delivered)

If you have any ideas please write them up - before the industry dies!

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry, but I still don't get what you are trying to say.

For one, caches are not exactly located on customer premises, either, right? They tend to be located in places that have easy access to power and are well- connected with fibres, and so far transmission speeds seem to be mostly going up.

Also, well, yes, social networks tend to be geographically localised, so I would very much expect p2p application traffic to also be geographically localized!?

Widely consumed content that's distributed in a p2p fashion obviously is just as amenable to caching as widely consumed content that's distributed by a central service, if it's distributed through some kind of content-addressed network. If that's cheaper for the ISP, they could just put caching nodes into their data centers.

Finally, I completely don't get why you think my communication should "generate revenue". My telephone calls don't generate any revenue either, do they? I simply pay someone for moving my bits around, that should be sufficient motivation for them to take care of moving my bits around.

<comment><USER21> I think that caches work where you have a vast imbalance of requests for a particular bit of content - they seem to me to define centralization.

In terms of generate revenue - I mean provide a service that people are willing to pay for at a level that will fund a network that enables the use case and decentralization. Current services are tending to deep reach from the datacentre, because that's cheap. If all services that people are willing to pay for are suited to that model that's what everyone will get. To have a different infrastructure model you need a service that people will pay for that is not well served by deepreach from the datacentre.

It's not the moving of the bits that is at issue, it's the how the bits are moved, where and who by.

<comment><USER22> "I think that caches work where you have a vast imbalance of requests for a particular bit of content - they seem to me to define centralization."

Hu? Caches for geographical distribution are actually a form of decentralization! The problem with the existing ones is that they are mostly under centralized control, but there is no technical reason why that has to be, and an ISP's caching web proxy (which weren't that uncommon back in the day) is a simple example of caching infrastructure under decentralized control that could help an ISP reducing the load on their upstream connection for often-requested content. You don't need youtube to copy a video from your machine to the cache at some viewer's ISP, that's just the way it is commonly done right now because in that way youtube can make money - or, if you want to decentralize further, you could copy to a cache on the machine of some customer of said ISP in some geographic region: The more requests there are for some content, the more likely it is that there is a copy in your neighbourhood that doesn't need to be transferred from the original source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe if Google actually open-sourced as much software as they consume, that would offer a way out. Some people would still want to run the centralized as- a-service tools because it's on a huge professionally-run infrastructure and because of network effects. Others might want to run the same services locally, to support privacy/decentralization goals like the OP's. Google's main revenue stream (ads) shouldn't be affected, and they'd even benefit from outside contributions.

So why don't they do this? Because of the difference between "shouldn't" and "wouldn't" at the end of the last paragraph. What if code to support ads - <USER2> other invasions of privacy - were embedded into every other thing they might open source? Then the sheer difficulty of refactoring to "sanitize" everything else would probably create a sufficient barrier to opening it up, and revealing how all of that ad infrastructure really works might hurt their business in other ways.

When Google continues to run as the new AOL (closed source, walled garden) I don't think it's part of a deliberate philosophy. Nor is it an accident. It's because their continued uber-prosperity, if not their actual survival, depends on it.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it has to be that extreme. They do have a corporate culture of extreme secrecy, which I think comes from growing up in the shadow of Microsoft, Yahoo, and other much bigger companies. But I don't think their survival or even prosperity depends on secrecy any more. However, it's deeply embedded in their corporate culture, and I think it's actually spreading to other Silicon Valley companies.

There _is_ an issue of incentives, but I don't think it's as strong as you think. I think it's just that running services makes them money, while releasing open-source software doesn't, so they devote lots of effort to running services, and comparatively little to releasing open-source software.

It would be very challenging for them to open-source "as much software as they consume." That would be a many-billions-of-dollars effort. But it wouldn't be necessary — the great thing about software is that you can copy it, so even if you only release a tiny fraction of the amount of software as you "consume", everyone still benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe tag with (2011)? It's possible some of the institutional issues have changed in the past couple years.

<comment><USER7> Well, they have changed, but they've changed for the worse. Google has gradually been succumbing to the pressures I identified in that post; witness the move of Android to put gradually more services into proprietary Google Play Services, the ban on disconnect.me, the years-long struggle over pseudonymity on Google+ (finally resolved for the best), the ugly debasement of search results to drive traffic to Google+, the ban on non-Chrome browsers accessing Hangouts, the abandonment of XMPP compatibility by deceptively pressuring Google Chat users to move to Hangouts instead, and so on.

These are by no means crimes, but they're more evil than the things Google would have done in 2008 or 2009, and they're certainly not moving the internet in the direction I want to see it move in.

<comment><USER25> > the ban on non-Chrome browsers accessing Hangouts

What do you mean by this? The documentation lists support for Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari.

[https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1216376](https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1216376)

<comment><USER7> I haven't tried using Hangouts lately, so maybe it's been fixed. It got broken back in August; [http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or- la...](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you- wont.html?showComment=1407817453520#c5518384044027599177) explains:

"I can understand asking why Hangouts doesn't work in Firefox. In short, we wanted to transition to WebRTC sooner rather than later, and at the moment there are things holding us back on both our side (e.g. upgrading our ICE implementation) and the Firefox side (e.g. supporting multiple video streams).

"But overall, surely you're not arguing that transitioning a major Google application from a proprietary plugin to an open web standard somehow demonstrates that Chrome doesn't value web standards."

<comment><USER26> It doesn't look like it was fixed. I tried:

1\. Go to [http://www.google.com/hangouts/](http://www.google.com/hangouts/)

2\. Click "get hangouts"

3\. Click "computers"

Result is "You'll need to download Chrome before installing the Hangouts Chrome extension. Do you want to download Chrome now?"

edit: I think i remember being told on twitter that this was a confusing UI that would be changed. But that was several months ago.

<comment><USER27> I think the "confusing UI" thing becomes apparent if you click and try it. By hangouts on "computers" they mean as a desktop-installed app (which is just a wrapper around a Chrome app). I don't know why you'd want that (basically just a bookmark on your desktop?) but that's what it is.

If, however, you just start a hangout inside of gmail, it works fine in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE (just hung out with myself on two computers in multiple browsers to test that out) and there was never a time that was broken, contrary to the GP post.

<comment><USER26> Well, when you click "get hangouts" the options are "Android, iOS or Computers". So anyone that wants to run it on anything but a smartphone gets told that it can only run on Chrome. I don't see it mention anything about an app as opposed to running in a browser.

Perhaps this is just a confusing UI, but if so, it would be very easy to fix. If that's the case, I'm puzzled why it hasn't been fixed.

<comment><USER27> yeah, I had never visited that site until that discussion was making the rounds on twitter, so, no clue. I could see an argument for "this is a site where you can install hangouts as an app". There's nothing particularly wrong with using Chrome as a runtime (imagine if Mozilla's old Prism project had stuck around and people made "native" apps with it...requiring Firefox to run it would be just that: a requirement to run the app because that's how Prism worked), but if your motivation was to get users to use hangouts, I don't know why you wouldn't also mention that you probably already have it if you use gmail, so just open it up in there.

My only claim is that if you open up a chat window in gmail and hit the video button it works in other browsers and that using hangouts that way was never broken.

<comment><USER26> If so, I wonder why the site doesn't just say "to run Hangouts on a computer, just load a hangout in your browser" (possibly with a link to the right place). It seems such an easy thing to fix, and it was pointed out publicly, yet no change has been made.

It seems unlikely to me that the assumption is that people that pick "computer" over "smartphone" distinctly want a native app as opposed to just running hangouts in the easiest way possible. All they did was click on "get hangouts".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Bloody hell, talk about rose-colored glasses.

No, back in the nineties, you could _not_ do any of the things he talks about. Not unless you were a high-status employee of a handful of major corporations or universities. Most people couldn't get online at all, and those who could were lucky to have client-only access to e-mail and the web.

Nowadays, anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account can set up an always-online server running pretty much any software they choose. The Internet is far more decentralized, by the criteria he invokes, then it was back then.

<comment><USER7> Your experience may have been limited, although I am not going to claim that mine was typical.

As I explained in the article, I did the things I talked about (running online services, including email and web pages, accessible from the entire internet) with a US$20/month dialup internet account on an ISP run by a group of MUDders who ran the ISP as a way to play MUDs, starting in 1997. I installed my first web server (from EIT's Webmaster's Starter Kit) temporarily on an IRIX workstation in a university computer lab, in 1994. I was an undergraduate student at UNM, a state university in the second-poorest state in the US, although I admit UNM was unusually progressive. The year before, I was an unpaid student system administration intern, with a user account on all the Suns at the math department, assigned tasks like "please get tvtwm to compile on SunOS 4.1.4; Prof X wants to use it".

I agree that it's pretty awesome that anyone who wants to pay Amazon or DigitalOcean US$5 a month (and can get access to a credit card they'll accept) can run any internet-facing server software they want. Unless they're WikiLeaks, say. Or infringing on an invalid Amazon software patent. Or just want to not have random employees have hardware access to their machine for reasons of security and privacy.

So I don't think the internet is far more decentralized. It's bigger, which is pretty great, and it's a lot cheaper, which is even better, but it's also more centralized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Because Google makes its money by spying on its users.

It's also an advertising company, which means it brainwashes and deceives people in to buying garbage.

Both activities are unethical, and I wouldn't want anything to do with ether.

</comment><comment><USER10> > My friends Len Sassaman (who committed suicide in the first few days of > July), Bram Cohen, Jacob Appelbaum, and Zooko O'Whielacronx have made > substantial contributions.

One of these things is not like the others. Three of these people have made significant contributions, in code. One of them has talked a lot and claimed the work of others as their own.</comment>


Need a job? Learn Drupal - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10458748-62.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

<comment><USER2> Setting up and learning drupal is something one can learn almost overnight. It's probably a very competitive market and will only help you find a new job if you have past experience.

A better strategy to finding a job would be to specialise in rarer/more unique skills, which people can't put on their resume, and learn overnight if they get accepted for an interview.

</comment><comment><USER3> wow. Drupal, a job, cnet?

How did this ended up on the front page? Does the article link to mahalo article to explain drupal or what?</comment>


Main characters are more likely to die in children's cartoons - <AUTHOR> http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7184

<comment><USER2> This has been a running gag in my family since I was seven, when I said "Why does Disney think that two parents is too complicated?"

I loved Frozen, but as soon as they introduced the parents I whispered to my wife "Bet you dinner they're dead within five minutes." "In a Disney movie?" "Three minutes, then."

I think that, narrative-wise, this is partly because Disney basically always has a coming of age element to their films (it is a theme almost as common as true love) and the existence of live parents means that parents would be able to resolve the conflict in most cases. You thus have to explain the inability of parents to help ASAP. Killing them is the quickest way to do this.

Presumably this is covered in Hero With a Thousand Faces, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> This might be explained by "the parent problem" : if a story has a child protagonist that has to solve difficult problems, how can the story set it up so the parents aren't stepping in and solving the problems for their kid? A common answer is, kill the parents! See [http://pcwrede.com/the-parent- problem/](http://pcwrede.com/the-parent-problem/) for a nice discussion of variations and alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER4> Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) made this very clear in an interview that I saw several years ago. He said that in order for children to be heroes, the first thing that you have to do in any children's book is get rid of the parents. Sometimes you can get away with putting the child in a place the parents cannot reach, but it's far more common to kill them off. Only this way can the child rise to the occasion, demonstrate leadership, and save the day.

I hadn't noticed this pattern before he said that, but now I see it _everywhere_.

Of course, in "A Series of Unfortunate Events," the parents die in a fire on the first page of the series. And then, as the books say, things go downhill from there... (I absolutely love that series, and so do my children, although it might be too dark for many.)

</comment><comment><USER5> In Grant Morrison's seminal _Doom Patrol_ run, he forwarded the idea that traditional children's stories and fairy tales were actually deliberately meant to traumatize children, to get them ready for harsh reality.

<comment><USER6> > * traditional children's stories and fairy tales were actually deliberately > meant to traumatize children, to get them ready for harsh reality.*

In Peter Paul & Mary's concert album, Peter Yarrow introduced the hilarious satire "Blue" with a similar riff. [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2TZ_zQjMfQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2TZ_zQjMfQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll add my hypothesis to the mix: Adult dramas can create layered emotional conflicts without needing characters to physically fight. Kids have smaller attention spans and a poorer ability to grasp emotional nuance, so cartoon writers have to create simple conflicts: Good versus evil, good guy fights bad guy. And with fighting comes more death.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByNewberyMed...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByNewberyMedal) comes to mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating site, thanks.</comment></comment>


Combining HTTP and JavaScript APIs with python on google appengine  - <AUTHOR> http://united-coders.com/christian-harms/combining-http-and-javascript-apis-with-python-on-google-appengine

<comment><USER2> Use a spell checker next time, each typo makes your articles less appealing.</comment>


Atomico invests €350,000 in simple file-sharing startup Ge.tt - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/atomico-invests-e350000-in-simple-file-sharing-startup-ge-tt/?preview=true <comment><USER2> Great work by the Ge.tt team. I hope they be able to grow this service even further. The competition, Venture cup, which they won in 2010 was won by us (Iconfinder) in 2011. Small world!

<comment><USER3> I love Iconfinder!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see a Danish startup getting traction. Go Europe! ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ge.tt is by far my favorite file sharing service, been using them since beta. They've also released some of their code as open source on Github.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting what business model will allow them to cover costs of providing 2GB for free? (without mentioning signup-free 250Mb)

</comment><comment><USER7> congrats to ge.tt

</comment><comment><USER8> Glad to see this, knowing it will help ge.tt survive a good while. I've been using their file sharing service frequently since I first saw it advertised here on HN about a year ago. With features such as f.e. their MP3 player, and the real-time sharing (share files while they're still being uploaded), it's definitely the best file sharing solution I've seen. Also a big thumbs up for letting people share anonymously and instantly, without the hassle of registering an account.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I learned about ge.tt from a HN comment on a Techcrunch story about Kicksend 4-1/2 months ago.

And ge.tt has the fewest "clicks" to share a file I've ever seen. I've recommended it to non-technical friends a few times since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish I would get funding for my file sharing service that has been out for a good 5-months+

<http://dropsauce.com>

Maybe I need to develop a mobile app for it and market it some more to get some recognition. :/

<comment><USER11> Well, looking at your website I wasn't sure what to do. Your step 1 is "enter unique name for your drop" - it should be : "upload a file to share" that's the main thing.

I would make the upload file the center, take a look at ge.tt :)

<comment><USER10> Well to be honest I have a different approach to sharing. If you've ever used drop.io you know mine is similar.

The idea behind mine is you can create custom urls for the files you upload hence why you have to select a name (or keep the random one generated for you).

It's a shame that some people just give up trying to figure it out without even attempting to click or interact with a site.

I appreciate your feedback but I can only dumb down the process so much :)

<comment><USER12> It's not 'dumbing down' the process. It's making it clearer for the end user what exactly your site does. If someone on HN couldn't figure it out - you've got problems.

For example, Change from "Enter a name for your drop" to "Enter a name for your file drop"

On your title it could be - "dropsauce - Drop off your files at Dropsauce & share them"

Right now your site looks like it's about naming your drop. Not about putting files which can be password and time protected.

<comment><USER10> Good feedback and I understand what you mean.

The reason for drop vs add button is because some browsers don't support drag- n-drop (they wouldn't see that option).

Maybe I will go back to the drawing board and make dropping/uploading files the primary focus and naming it or changing passwords/expiry more of an option.

Would hiding those items in a collapsable div be the right thing?

I.e. the first thing you see when you get on the page is to upload files. And if you want to change options, click to expand the form and change it there.

Again appreciate the feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Podcast 9 – A powerful podcast app with audio snippets and transcripts - <AUTHOR> https://podcast9.com/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Today we launched Podcast 9 on Product Hunt! Here's the launch post:

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/podcast-9](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/podcast-9)

Would love to hear your thoughts about it!

</comment><comment><USER2> iOS only?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now yes! Android coming soon hopefully</comment></comment>


Weekly Hacker:  We're accepting nominations - <AUTHOR> http://weeklyhacker.com/

<comment><USER2> > _Despite HN's extraordinary growth in popularity, we've refused to step down > to the quality level of Digg and Reddit._

Please do not say things like this.

1\. It uses these other services as a yardstick by which you measure yourself, thereby placing more importance upon them than upon you;

2\. Negative comparisons of competing services is one of the early signs of a corruption in your service -- e.g., Reddit's perceived deterioration was pre- empted by a significant number of its users constantly comparing themselves to Digg's users;

3\. Your standards for excellence should be internal, not external. So, instead of saying, "I want to be better than X", you would say, "I want to be the best possible Y."

Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Just changed it.

<comment><USER2> Much better. Thank you. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another idea, is to take the best comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments> and ask those commenters to discuss them on video, or whatever. There's film called Waking Life, check it out: [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=waking+life&...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=waking+life&aq=f) You could give HN readers some version of their own Waking Life.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're serious about this, I would suggest starting at <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders> and working your way down the list.

<comment><USER5> I strongly disagree.

I remember that there came a time when the people with top karmas were given a different decoration around their name. Their name was in bold and gold I believe. This would be too similar.

Overall karma count shouldn't be used as a measure to exclude others from participating in this, especially newcomers, who could very easily bring a lot to the table.

<comment><USER4> I agree that there are people who aren't on that list who would be good to interview. However that list has a high enough density of interesting people that people on HN are likely to be curious about, that it is well worth mining it for suggestions of who to contact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea. I'd love to see you working with the producer of HackerMonthly to get these in there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a good adjunct to this site would be a list of HN side projects and their creators.

</comment><comment><USER6> Vanity :-)</comment>


A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra - <AUTHOR> http://shoup.net/ntb/? <comment><USER2> I'm soon starting my trek through every problem in the algebra text that Harvard's PhD prelim recommends for study:

Abstract Algebra by Dummit and Foote [http://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Algebra- David-S-Dummit/dp/047...](http://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Algebra-David-S- Dummit/dp/0471433349/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212180146&sr=8-1)

I've started the first section of the first chapter, but that was only in a few hours of spare time. I'll be posting solutions by chapter soon and post my stories/insights on Hacker News. Here's section 1.1 (except the last problem, 36):

<http://therobert.org/alg/1.1.pdf>

Comments are appreciated. Better now than when I start the real journey. :)

<comment><USER3> D&F was my sophomore-year college algebra textbook so all I can say is, good luck!

It gets very hard very quick and some of the questions are intentionally above virtually everyone's head.

<comment><USER2> Cool, you're from the University of Chicago. What (math) field was your thesis in?

<comment><USER3> Chicago math students don't have to write theses. I guess they figure it's enough just to get through the curriculum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> hmmm why are you posting the solutions online? Apparently, this book happens to be a popular textbook in many schools [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Abstract+Algebra+by...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Abstract+Algebra+by+Dummit+and+Foote+course+textbook)

<comment><USER2> I assume you meant to reply to me. Thanks, I'll set the robots file appropriately.

And I'm posting it for the same reason that guy posted his poker bot earlier. If you're determined enough, you can always cheat and that won't change whether there is a program or solutions manual online, but hackers and autodidacts can enjoy the intellectual sharing.</comment></comment>


Google sets up 'right to be forgotten' form after EU ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27631001

<comment><USER2> I don't think this bodes well for the quality of Google's search results.

What if someone asks to have a page on my blog removed because it talks about them. Do I get to contest it, am I notified at all. What recourse do I have if my income is affected by the removal of the page.

"Google said it would assess each request"; manually processing each request sounds like a terrible way to handle this. Will spammers use this as an attack vector until it's automated, at which point they can start to have competitors pages removed.

I think any manually tampering with the SERPs is a slippery slope to bad quality.

<comment><USER3> When I search for John Doe I want to find relevant upto date results.

If I am getting ten blogs that you have set up with excessive SEO purely to attack John Doe with something that happened ten years ago then that's possibly not what I want to find.

The Google form requires proof of ID which makes it much harder for spammers to automate attacks.

Manual checking of each case does have problems but I hope it means that Google only removes results from people who have an expectation of privacy and where those results are irrelevant.

Don't forget this only applies to EU servers.

I can ask to be forgotton from google.co.uk and even if Google comply those same results will be on google.com

And this result applies to all search engines (probably all companies) with a Euro presence.

I am glad that Google took this fully through the court process. It's something that needed full scrutiny.

It does clearly highlight differences between EU and US. People talk about "censorship" \- some people in the US cannot comprehend just how much people in EU don't mind not being able to say some things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a glorious day for google. They're so big that an entire continent created a law just for them to follow.</comment>


Connecting squid's fins to an iPod causes changing patterns in their camouflage - <AUTHOR> https://blog.backyardbrains.com/2012/08/insane-in-the-chromatophores/ <comment><AUTHOR> The longfin inshore squid has the largest axons of all animals (around 1 mm in diameter). They were crucial in understanding neurons and the mechanism allowing the signal to travel down the nerve. By connecting squid's fins to an iPod with wires from earbuds the scientists were able to initiate action potential in the neurons involved in changing squid's camouflage.

[https://blog.backyardbrains.com/2012/08/insane-in-the- chroma...](https://blog.backyardbrains.com/2012/08/insane-in-the- chromatophores/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential#Experimental_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential#Experimental_methods)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longfin_inshore_squid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longfin_inshore_squid)</comment>


Unsub links at the TOP of your emails will lead to higher conversions . . . - <AUTHOR> http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/unsub-links-at-the-top-of-your-emails-will-lead-to-higher-conversions/

<comment><USER2> Brilliant. Putting the unsubscribe link at the top should be the standard for all legit email marketing. Burying it at the bottom in ultra small, lightly coloured text is just nasty.</comment>


Study shows space travel is harmful to the brain - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2012-12-houston-problem-space-brain.html

<comment><USER2> > _The round trip to the red planet, in particular, could take as long as > three years._

That _"up to"_ is technically correct, but seems pretty misleading. I don't think anybody would seriously propose such a trip.

Per wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_mission_to_Mars#Windows>)

> _However, typical Mars mission plans have round-trip flight times of 400 to > 450 days.[14] A fast Mars mission of 245 days round trip could be possible > with on-orbit staging._

And of course if you are only interested in a one-way ticket (obviously with a drastically changed life expectancy when you arrive) then you are only looking at a trip in space of a few short months. (I think _in theory_ you can get down to 88 days to Mars with the Aldrin Cycler, for example).

No part of going to Mars isn't going to likely kill you, either nearly instantaneously or slowly. Mars missions are going to create _a lot_ of bodies. I'd love to be proved wrong there, but that just seems to be the reality of anything we can do in the foreseeable future. This risk is understood though, nobody who has seriously considered going for it is unaware. You may as well write articles on the dangers of BASE jumping.

<comment><USER3> I dunno. NASA has pulled off some ridiculously long odds in the past, and I'm always amazed at how low the body count of manned missions to the moon is. (Apollo 13 was nothing short of a miracle, even all Hollywood interpretations aside).

I think that so long as no one attempts a mission to Mars before they're actually ready to do so, we'll be alright.

<comment><USER2> If get bored after a few missions and don't go back, then we might pull off a low to no body count. But the more missions we do, the more those unavoidable risks start to stack up. If we actually start getting up to "colony" scale, my money is on there being a decent bodycount, regardless of any herculean precautions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Throughout the history of man, people have jumped into the unknown abyss, wondering if they would ever return. Today, we have lots of evidence that somebody might or might not return, but if nobody jumps, we will never cross the abyss.

I hope people continue jumping.

<comment><USER5> Let's hope the Martians fare better than the Native Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "While space is full of radiation, the earth's magnetic field generally protects the planet and people in low earth orbit from these particles."

The magnetic field protects only against charged particles (usually coming from the Sun). Galactic cosmic rays or solar flares are not blocked. The atmosphere blocks most of that, as well as the planet itself. In low-Earth orbit, you have half the horizon covered by the planet, so you get only half the radiation.

On Mars, you would get a little lower radiation as you would in low-Earth orbit. The atmosphere albeit thin does provide some shielding and the planet itself removes half the radiation (as in LEO). Greater distance from the Sun also reduces the impact of solar radiation.

Normal radiation levels pose little danger in space, you mainly have to worry about shielding during solar coronal mass ejections. When that happens, you usually have a few minutes to hours of warning (courtesy of our fleet of solar observing satellites). For adequate shielding you need to design a 'storm shelter' in the middle of the spacecraft, surrounded by the crew's food, water and waste.

Note that we've had astronauts spend years in space and the physiological damage was from low gravity rather than radiation. I don't understand why NASA has never built a rotating space habitat to solve this problem.

<comment><USER7>
      I don't understand why NASA has never built a rotating space habitat to solve this problem.

Because it's difficult to do right. There is a maximum usable RPM beyond which humans cannot function due to dizziness/disorientation, and a somewhat lower max beyond which excessive coriolis effects would make working in the habitat incredibly annoying; generally, you don't want to go about 2rpm, though you could push it by screening your astronauts for spin-adaptability. This puts a lower limit on how large the habitat must be to achieve any particular level of spin gravity; for anything approaching 1g, it's pretty large, and no one knows just how little gravity is required to prevent the physiological effects of microgravity. To get even half a g at 2rpm, you'd need a structure 112 meters in radius, which is pretty dang big for a spacecraft.

You could probably still manage that with current technology if you just have two small spacecraft modules at the ends of a 224m tether (or a somewhat shorter tether if you have some unmanned equipment that's heavier than the crew module and can serve as a counterbalance rotating with a smaller radius), but then you've got a bunch of other problems to deal with. How do you dock with a rotating structure? Safely approaching a rapidly spinning tether in orbit is not an easy task. Then you have to match rotation, unless there's a non-rotating hub, which would result in enormous complications to the structure. How do you move it / do stationkeeping? All thruster burns now have to account for the structure's angular momentum. And stationkeeping will be more of an issue that with 'normal' spacecraft because tidal effects will make a tether in orbit want to wobble. Additionally, there may be electromagnetic drag to deal with, and the associated voltage buildup across the structure that you'll need to find a way to safely discharge.

And then there's space debris. If the cable is damaged, you either get flung off into an unrecoverable orbit, or you hit the atmosphere and burn up.

So, all in all, hardly surprising that NASA hasn't bothered yet.

<comment> mkr-hn How about a giant donut balloon that inflates once in space? NASA could fill it with balls and charge admission while waiting for the expedition's supplies to reach Mars.

<comment><USER7> An inflatable torus might be a good way to create a friendly working environment for further construction, but further construction will be required. There're still the issue of docking to worry about, and you get new problems when you allow inhabitants to move around an arc; some active system is required to ensure that, as people and equipment move about, other stuff gets adjusted to ensure that the center of rotation always remains at the center of the torus. Otherwise, it will start to wobble, resulting in different gravity levels around the torus and inducing stretching force along some axis. If the balance is successfully restored (and the station does not tear itself apart) but not quickly enough, then you have vibration damping issues to worry about.

These problems become less severe as you make the structure large and larger (and thus the mass of the inhabitants less significant), but larger structures are of course more difficult and more expensive to construct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Out of all the of astronauts who flew, only 8(Some sources say 11) have died of cancer. About the same number of cosmonauts have died of cancer. Even fewer died of brain cancer. Deke Slayton was the only Skylab astronaut to die of a brain tumor.

</comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't seem too surprising. The atmosphere and magnetic poles do work pretty hard to insulate us.

</comment><comment><USER10> Precision medicine will work to prevent the effects of cosmic radiation and DNA sequencing will probably be used to select candidate that are less likely to develop Alzheimer's or cancer in high risk environments. Surely it's been already figured out but the article doesn't mention it.</comment>


Ask HN: Free Alternatives to Google Classroom - <AUTHOR> I work in a university and we are looking for a temporal free alternative for Google Classroom while the official campus is complete. I'd appreciate any recommendation.<p>Of the whole suite, we are more interested in the part that the students can send questions to the teacher assistants a get a reply. <comment><USER2> Check out Microsoft Teams for Education. It's very nice product similar to Google Classroom.

Maybe even non-educational Teams version would be enough if you just need it for students and teachers to communicate.

[https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/MicrosoftTeam...](https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/MicrosoftTeamsforEducation_QuickGuide_EN- US.pdf)

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/remote- learn...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/remote-learning-edu)

[https://www.microsoft.com/en- ca/education/products/teams](https://www.microsoft.com/en- ca/education/products/teams)

Disclaimer: I developed few features for this in the past.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can give Ace Learning a try. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sri.aceapp...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sri.aceapp&hl=en_US). sriram at sandpiperlabs.mobi

</comment><comment><USER4> You can use Google forms for free.</comment>


A Mouse Can Infect Your Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/235173/a_mouse_can_infect_your_network.html

<comment><USER2> From the article:

"IT security admins must understand that a computer can be compromised by almost any hardware device plugged into it. Hardware is hardware -- the instructions coded into it and its firmware takes precedence over software. When we talk trust boundaries in computer security, you always have to remember the hardware boundary must be discussed and defended. If I, as the attacker, can convince a victim to plug in some sort of hardware or if I plug it in myself, then it is, for all intense purposes, game over. If I can plug something into your USB, DMA, FireWire, and now mouse port, I'll likely succeed in carrying off a malicious action."

Wow, what a lot of nonsense! Why would a hardware USB device necessarily have access over the whole computer? And the author doesn't even know that there is no different between a USB port and a mouse port ...

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is pretty useless. The actual hack is detailed here: [http://pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards-hacker- inte...](http://pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards-hacker-interface- device-hid/)</comment>


Yahoo Engineer Complains About Lack Of Innovation At Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/20/technically-yahoo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> "Right now Flickr video does support HTML5, but apparently only if it detects you have an iPad. "

Wait,They just have to enable it for the web. It is not lack of innovation. They _do_ support HTML5.

I have seen lot of anti-yahoo posts in tech crunch. This is one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every employee has a right (and in some ways, a duty) to criticize his / her employer. This is how a company improves.

I am just surprised that given the vibrant startup environment, TechCrunch hasn't been replaced by a decent news source in that format (e.g. a more blog- like version of HN with some sort of an editorial voice).

<comment><USER4> > This is how a company improves.

Not sure about _publicly_ criticizing, specially then the thing being criticized looks so irrelevant in comparison to other very cool stuff the company developed (and a lot of it was given to the community as open-source)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The headline reads like one of those ironic Onion "everyday thing that's not really news" headlines.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hadoop, YUI, YQL, Traffic Server... (and it took me all of 5 seconds to compile this very incomplete list of open-source innovative things)

Claiming Yahoo doesn't innovate because Flickr doesn't support video tags on the browser the guy wanted is not exactly fair...

</comment><comment><USER6> Some people still need to learn not to use UA sniffing when there are better alternatives. Here is a hint for Yahoo: <http://videojs.com/>

I's ridiculous that Yahoo engineers still didn't figure this out yet. The new Yahoo Mail is yet another example, if I access it with a modern browser that it doesn't know, it immediately bitches that it may not work on it, but it would probably not bitch about IE6.

Seriously, Yahoo should get it's act together and stop acting like it's 1995.</comment>


Facebook's Platform Opportunity - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2020/facebooks-platform-opportunity/ <comment><USER2> I have a feeling that technology companies that have as their primary source of income advertising (aka Google & FB) are going to encounter major problems in the next decade for a couple of reasons.

1\. The growth period for distribution for digital ads is basically over. We're firmly in the consolidation period and Google and FB have taken the majority of the digital ad market. There's basically no room to grow into, it's just about eating up the boundaries and new entrants.

2\. Regulation seems to be coming for user data and these big ad platforms. Google and FB are trying to play the regulatory capture game so they stay in business, but again it's not a growth business - it's playing defense.

It seems like Google is best positioned to actually pivot to selling enterprise/consumers services with GCP and their services offerings. They also have an opportunity in hardware.

Facebook on the other hand seems to only have hardware as it's future, but they are up against Apple and Samsung and Google for that.

<comment><USER3> I basically agree with you, disagreeing on just point: I think (and hope!) that VR hardware like Oculus Quest and the accompanying media store might get big. I rarely use FB (mostly for shamelessly plugging new books I write) but the Oculus device pulled me back in a little. Currently, Oculus entertainment like Lucas Arts' Vader Immortal trilogy is such fine entertainment that it blows me away. Other Oculus activities like watching Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in a VR theater is cool, but the graphics resolution needs to increase for that use case.

I can imagine a future Oculus Quest as being a primary way to interact with the Internet, streaming entertainment, immersive 3D games, etc. I think FB has a lot of headroom for how big this business could get.

Just to be transparent: in the distant past, I worked on VR for Disney and SAIC, and games for Nintendo. So, I am prone to exuberant joy by any good VR experience, so please take my opinions with the large dose of skepticism that they deserve.

<comment><USER4> > I can imagine a future Oculus Quest as being a primary way to interact with > the Internet, streaming entertainment, immersive 3D games, etc. I think FB > has a lot of headroom for how big this business could get.

100%. if they get it right.

Facebook as a company was entirely doomed long-term until they bought Oculus (should that have been allowed?). VR is going to explode in the next ten years, and if Facebook plays its cards right it will become a VR platform company instead of an ad company. And that VR will be far more stable than faddish social networking or ad spam. For most people I know Facebook is dead, and Instagram's demise is just one gimmicky app launch away (TikTok++).

I'm gutted about Facebook's purchase of Oculus personally, because (unlike the article) I think Facebook's behaviour has been absolutely reprehensible, including its refused to remove outright, hugely damaging, political propaganda from its platform for the sake of profit. I really don't want a company with that culture owning the VR space. I pray it won't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook was a platform for several years. And most value came from 3rd parties. Just to mention the wall as we know it today was a 3rd party application.

So what happend to the platform? Facebook canibalized it. Copied better apps. Blocked developers who was too good, bought others. Closed APIs when the ecosystem started to grow.

Collected detailed information about ideas people had for applications.

For me, doing any app integrated with Facebook is something to be considered as 100% risk. Either you fail, or you will be succeed and destroyed.

I will never participate in any "platform" made by Facebook. And i believe a lots of developers who wrote anything using Facebook Platform share the same feeling.

<comment><USER6> To me, Facebook was just first to the Cannibal party. Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and most known platforms does the same thing too by cannibalizing Third-party apps and products (Amazon). Will you never build on these too?

<comment><USER5> Never, correct. Especially nothing around FB, GOO. Moreover i am moving this year away from all services provided by these companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure if investing in FAN will make Facebook less of what it is today to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Author argues Google is a platform because of DoubleClick but fails to mention how Google is moving away from that model as fast as it can. See AMP and hotels as examples of Google trying to bring all ads in house. There is also ad fraud that is a huge problem for 3rd party properties which Facebook doesn't have to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER8> I strongly believe Facebook is missing out on becoming a cloud platform.

I drew up my thoughts with Stratechery-like pictures. [https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed- op...](https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed- opportunity-02-03)

<comment><USER4> My impression is that Facebook's engineers are unlikely to be able to compete with Google's and Amazon's in that space. If so many of them are writing PHP, how does that translate to building cloud infrastructure services, for example?</comment></comment>


Almost Everything You Have Been Told About The Minimum Wage Is False - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/01/30/almost-everything-you-have-been-told-about-the-minimum-wage-is-false/ <comment><USER2> This article starts out with some bad assumptions, namely that raising the minimum wage would only affect workers who are "at or below minimum wage" \- a group claimed to be 31% teenagers.

However, a more intellectually honest statistic would be to look at the populations at or below a proposed new minimum wage (say $10/hr), which you'd find is a much larger portion of the US population and a much smaller percentage of teenagers.

<comment><USER3> It also discounts people who currently do not work, because the amount of additional pay (after taxes and reduced benefits due to having a higher income) is so minuscule compared to the amount of time they have to spend. If the minimum wage was raised, it may lead to more people actually seeking work, since they difference between not working and being paid welfare, and working and having reduced welfare (maybe even going off it completely) is higher, and this guy ignores that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This clown is making a pretty myopic argument.

The weakest part by far (paraphrasing): "Since food service worker productivity hasn't increased over the past 27 years, neither should their wages."

So when you sit down at a restaurant in 2014 compared to 1987, you're paying significantly more for your dinner. Why? The owner has higher operating costs in 2014 than in 1987. Fuel costs more, which means the production and delivery of fresh food to his restaurant is more expensive. Rent is also higher. This isn't complicated, I'm basically describing the effects of inflation.

So even though the restaurant isn't any more productive for its customers in 2014, it costs significantly more, because the restaurant owner is passing off his rising costs to the customers.

I'm sure if you pointed this out to Mr. Dorfman, he'd be fine with it. The system works! But as soon as we suggest raising the cook's wages in proportion with the owner's profits and the customer's bill, he gets enraged, starts sputtering about government forcing business to give handouts to greedy lazy bottom-feeders (who aren't actually poor, apparently?).

In reality, there's only one difference between the restaurant owner and the cook: The owner has leverage to increase the amount of money he gets (raising the price of a sandwich), while the cook doesn't. Neither the owner nor the cook has increased productivity whatsoever in the past 27 years, and expecting significant gains would be insane.

The restaurant industry has been around for millennia with only a handful of major improvements to productivity, none of which have happened in the past 30 years. Yet somehow, this is solely the fault of the cook.

From the comments section, a telling quote from this imbecile: "Why is it 'true' that full time work should be enough to meet all your basic needs (which is undefined anyway)?"

...you don't need an undergraduate Econ degree to answer that one. If you're working full time and it's not enough to support your basic needs, you're going to die.

</comment><comment><USER5> >"Having established that the number of minimum wage workers is small and shrinking, that most minimum wage workers are not poor, and that most of them are young and working their way up the ladder"

Except it doesn't.

It says that 2.5% are on or below minimum wage, that's 3.6 million people and doesn't include those on slightly above minimum wage, that would be affected by the changes. That's a significant number of people.

45% of minimum wage workers are over 25 years of age, so not that young.

And I really don't know how Mr Dorfman thinks he has established that they are 'not poor'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here - someone did the few minutes of Google searching and rational analysis that Dorfman didn't have time for, you know, to keep this piece from being complete bullshit.

[http://www.mathofpolitics.com/2014/01/30/poor-work- counting-...](http://www.mathofpolitics.com/2014/01/30/poor-work-counting-the- working-poor/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was going to say this was just more partisan bickering, but at the end he does offer a credible solution: Raising the Earned Income tax credit. This is actually a good idea.

Unfortunately it won't gain any traction because it's not drama. I wonder how we could make increasing the EIC a more exciting, dramatic and controversial issue so the media will cover it.

</comment><comment><USER8> As another comment by calciphus points out, the data is completely wrong. Yet, let's assume for a second that it's not. If so few people are affected by the minimum wage, why would there be so much opposition to raising it?</comment>


Ask HN: For political demonstrations – What privacy features should FB develop? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yup. That's FB's business model you're talking about. If you could measure privacy, every additional bit FB allows means that much less profit. How much do you think they're willing to forego?

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook... privacy features... lol

<comment><AUTHOR> Additional question. How can separate platforms/apps take advantage of facebook data without degrading user privacy? Ex. If I wanted to communicate with my existing FB network, without exposing myself to FB.</comment></comment>


Bilingual Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://paradite.com/2017/09/17/bilingual-numbers/ <comment><USER2> it took me quite sometime to get used to English numbers too. I remember when I first came and people asked me for phone number, I had to translate it word by word in my mind, as if it was not my number, or I was making up a fake number because I didn't want to tell them my real number, kinda awkward.

Unlike English, where large numbers are broken down by the number of thousands they have, Chinese forms numbers between 10,000 and 100,000,000 based off of how many tens of thousands they have. So we have a single word for 10k, for example. And a single word for 100million. But we don't have "billion".

So I have to do these unit conversion in my mind.

We also don't say abbreviations like "one twenty", "nineteen eighty two", as Chinese words have less syllables, there is no need for this shortcut.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points on large numbers. It took me very long time to get used to saying 6000 as six thousand but 6500 as sixty-five hundred. I tend to say sixty point five thousand.

Same with money, instead of six fifty, I would say 6 point 5 dollars.</comment></comment>