Whither Plan 9? History and motivation - <AUTHOR> http://pub.gajendra.net/2016/05/plan9part1 <comment><USER2> Not knowing the details but reflecting on what the summary said and what I do know of Xwindows style systems...

Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network.

We have learned, since that time, that trusting the network isn't really a good idea. Even a local network might not really be trustworthy.

The division of services that they describe sounds quite wonderful for normal office tasks; but doesn't work well for networks that can shard or for remote users that tunnel in (VPN) and might be disconnected.

<comment><USER3> > Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network.

I don't know how true that really is. It certainly trusts that the network is _there_ , and after authentication/authorisation it trusts that network devices are not malicious — but that's no different from anything else.

I do think that there's some excellent work yet to be done in authenticating local networks. How do I know that the DHCP server I'm talking to is the right DHCP server for my network? How do I know that the WiFi access point I'm talking to actually is who it says it is?

Really, that is a specific instance of the broader problem of naming. I don't have an answer, but I'd love to read some attempts to get at the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like to imagine that something like containers could provide a rationalised POSIX successor like Plan 9 while still cooperating in the main with a less- clean kernel like Linux. Not certain exactly how that'd work, but it might provide a nice path to building cleaner systems.

<comment><USER4> I like to think that Android, iOS with Swift, Windows with .NET, Unikernels are somehow evolution paths for what Inferno/Limbo could have been.

Maybe someone tries something like what you are proposing, using Go in place of Limbo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone had any experience running the RaspberryPi Plan9? It seems like the ideal way to set up a small cluster using some cheap RaspberryPi Zeros as compute, maybe one for file storage and another as a terminal.

<comment><USER6> The Plan9 raspberry pi is probably the easiest way to get Plan 9 up and running, but not very powerful. The default image only has a 2gb partition. If you're interested in venti, it's a difficult process that needs to be manually set up (vs the ISO installer where it just asks you if you want to install fossil or fossil+venti) It makes a great introduction to Plan 9, and would probably make a great terminal for an existing Plan 9 cluster, but I wouldn't try making a cluster of them.

I use mine as a login server (and something to drawterm into when I want to play around with Plan 9 without booting up a VM), which is a great use case for it. I initially wanted to use it for Go development, but:

1\. I had to start by writing a git client, which I never finished enough to be useable.

2\. plan9/arm is only in Go tip (and will be in 1.7)

<comment><USER5> Interesting stuff. I was always intrigued by Plan9 (via Go). The same thought had crossed my mind too, that Plan9 may be a great dev environment for Go; apparently the 9p package is excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> previous "discussion" here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767597)</comment>


Protein discovered inside a meteorite - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-03-protein-meteorite.html <comment><USER2> A team of researchers from Plex Corporation, Bruker Scientific LLC and Harvard University > has found evidence of < a protein inside of a meteorite.

there is a mismatch between the title of that article and the level of confidence these researchers were expressing.

the preprint is here:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11688](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11688)

<comment><USER3> One of the cites at the link is a previous paper on similar investigations of one of the same meteorites plus one other, that was published in 2015 in _Meteoritics & Planetary Science_, a journal with a long publication history. That paper is cited by two other papers from different authors. [0]

At some level, these researchers seem to be doing basic chemistry. Maybe they're not characterizing the implications correctly or maybe they haven't controlled contamination, but if proper research discovered extraterrestrial protein it would probably generate papers that looked like these.

[0] [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8914643017753968792...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8914643017753968792&as_sdt=5,26&sciodt=0,26&hl=en)

<comment><USER2> >> At some level, these researchers seem to be doing basic chemistry <<

what it looks like to me is that a couple just received a good research grant set up a laboratory in started putting it to good use. we need to find these polymers on samples that are still off world, or we need to be able to demonstrate such polymerization in an environment mimmicking conditions off planet.

<comment><USER3> "Basic" is not meant to be derogatory. They're chemists; that's what they _should_ be doing. It would be more troubling if their results came from "novel" chemistry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I need to make time to ask someone to ELI5 to me how this research is done without contaminating the sample with terrestrial-originated protein. The meteorite was on Earth for some time, and bacteria are staggeringly invasive little bugs.

I believe they successfully avoid contamination, but I have no idea how.

<comment><USER2> sanitize a small sample then crack it open under cleanroom conditions to obtain an assumed pristine sample.

[edit] This is the full pdf below, if you look at page 2, you will see how they generated prepared and analyzed the sample

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11688](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11688) [PDF]

and this is the meteoritic report for the subject:

[https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?code=95](https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?code=95)

the thing with structured peer review is that noone knows it all , and a team of specialists [review commitee] are much more powerful than a team of generalists, to the end of revealing any artefacts of procedure, or hair splitting levels of knowledge regarding metalo-organic chemistry that could explain abiotic process that would produce amino acid polymerization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read a comment on HN or Reddit a while back about how some molecules were found in a meteorite that were left-handed where every molecule on earth is right-handed or something to that extent.

If my memory serves it was as if molecules fit together like a lock and key except this molecule's key/lock combo was inverted.

Apologies if I'm bungling it up but it felt as though it was significant. As if the molecule found was unlike any molecule on earth due to its lock/key orientation.

<comment><USER6> I think the homochirality of amino acids might be what you're referring to:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)#In_bioch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_\(chemistry\)#In_biochemistry)

"The origin of this homochirality in biology is the subject of much debate.[12] Most scientists believe that Earth life's "choice" of chirality was purely random, and that if carbon-based life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, their chemistry could theoretically have opposite chirality. However, there is some suggestion that early amino acids could have formed in comet dust. In this case, circularly polarised radiation (which makes up 17% of stellar radiation) could have caused the selective destruction of one chirality of amino acids, leading to a selection bias which ultimately resulted in all life on Earth being homochiral."

<comment><USER7> I've also heard some scientists say that parity breaking could explain the origin of homochirality. Personally, I'm happier with the "random chance" hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Proponents of panspermia are pretty happy about this finding I bet.

<comment><USER9> To be perfectly honest, you've drawn my attention to an ambiguity I had never before noticed: does panspermia's hypothesis that "life" came from space require that life arrive fully formed and functional, or does it advocate that complex organic chemicals arrived from space and assembled on earth into a working configuration?

I have always found the idea of panspermia to be a bit of a cop-out as it totally sidesteps the problem of abiogenesis: it's all fine and well to say "life came from space" but you still need to explain how life arose in space to begin with.

<comment><USER10> It's only a cop-out if you try to use it to explain the origin of life in general, not just on Earth.

Life arose very quickly on Earth, almost as soon as it was capable of surviving, so it raises the interesting question: were we just lucky, or is it easy to spawn life, or did it come from elsewhere? The answer creates very different pictures for what Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy actually look like.

<comment><USER11> I'm always confused by that. So there's only one form of life possible? Otherwise life may have arisen before, been wiped out when Earth changed, and life arose again. We may be just the latest in a long series of life forms.

<comment><USER7> theoretically possible but there is no evidence to suggest this. Weighing the various hypotheses, most people would suggest the "simpler" (fewer wipeout/arise events) hypothesis, given the assumption that life arising is considered very rare.

<comment><USER11> Because the earth remade itself several times. Any previous life would have surely been erased. The assertion was that life arose just once. That's hard to prove.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before we even get into the role of expert peer reviewers, does the article pass basic tests of authenticity, let alone extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof?

The third author of the referenced paper does have a page at Harvard, here: [http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mcgeoch/index.html](http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mcgeoch/index.html) where she says she is at the "Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University" but she's not listed as faculty in that department here: [https://www.mcb.harvard.edu/faculty/faculty- profiles/](https://www.mcb.harvard.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/)

Could be a student... but do a search for Malcolm. W. McGeoch, Sergei Dikler, Julie E. M. McGeoch from Plex Corporation, Bruker Scientific LLC and Harvard University

and you will start to wonder if these people even know their names have been used in this article. Shame on phys.org for not calling the author for a quote or doing any other legwork to convince me this is anything other than a UFO hoax or the output of a paper-writing AI. It _could_ be, but ...journalist please.

<comment> T-A You can look up McGeoch, Julie here:

[https://www.directory.harvard.edu/](https://www.directory.harvard.edu/)

Associate of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Previous papers on arxiv (just click the author name on the abstract page):

[https://arxiv.org/search/astro- ph?searchtype=author&query=Mc...](https://arxiv.org/search/astro- ph?searchtype=author&query=McGeoch%2C+J+E+M)

I am all for healthy skepticism, but insinuating a hoax based on an ad hominem without even spending a few seconds to do a quick check is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They believe that this meteorite is native to our solar system, so it's not a candidate for panspermia from anywhere interesting.

<comment><USER14> That's probably what should interest us the most - the article says the protein arrangement is previously unknown but functional (?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Crunchy on the outside, chewy protein center.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like this should be bigger news

<comment><USER17> It's a potentially pretty big deal for understanding extraterrestrial chemical processes and estimating the likelihood of life, but to be clear this isn't anything like actual evidence of alien life.

It's a bit of a stretch to call this a "protein" TBH. The protein part is composed of only glycine, so there's really no information (e.g. DNA) required to synthesize it, just glycine and a chemical environment that would cause it to polymerize. The caps at either end are not protein components at all, as the article mentions, and protein backbones on Earth are never cyclic afaik.

But, it's still a very complex organic molecule ofc, which is very significant on its own, and its similarity to protein is evidence that protein-based life could be more common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't build my app

</comment><comment><USER19> just mix with all the ones that were already

</comment><comment><USER20> Nothing to be surprised about. The seeds of Life are everywhere. Earth is just a tiny microscopic point compared to the infinity of the Universe;

<comment><USER21> An observer observing themselves is not data.</comment></comment>


Microsoft is a dying consumer brand - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/27/technology/microsoft_pdc/index.htm

<comment><USER2> earlier submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1838736></comment>


Let me take care of that - <AUTHOR> http://bobspace.com/let-me-take-care-of-that

<comment><USER2> I agree it's a good way to take responsibility, but I can see it getting out of control if you don't leave people the opportunity to learn. I've had a problem going too far this way and creating a team where, no matter how much a I simplified and documented, no one could fix build problems but me. I've since backed off a bit on later projects and made sure people get their hands dirty early so they don't feel like I "own" the build (or an app or module or whatever).

</comment><comment><USER3> Great advice. Lending a hand on subjects which you know you can just do better can save a lot of time, and you can avoid frustration by just communicating that you're taking the responsibility.</comment>


Point to Point in the Datacenter with Andy Bechtolsheim - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/10/10/to-point-in-the-datacenter-with-andy-bechtolsheim/ <comment><USER2> I'm on the enterprise networking side and I find it funny that a lot of the time I have to explain that it would be cheaper to buy higher speed links on the new server regardless how little bandwidth is actually going to go through them. I've hard a hard time using 32 port 100G switches in a few racks (can break out into 128 25G ports) instead of 48 port 25G switches (same ASIC family/generation, basically the same price per switch) because a lot of servers being ordered "don't need 10G NICs" and the 100G platforms don't support 1G anymore.

<comment><USER3> That's also one of the hats I wear at work.

48 port 10GBE switches that support 1, and have 40GBE uplinks are pretty inexpensive. The real problem is, 10 isn't replacing 1, the nbase-T/802.3bz 2.5/5 NICs are (which, they themselves, are just 802.3an 10GBE ran at half or quarter clock)... the places where 10 replaced 1 is where that happened years and years ago, and 40 is now replacing 10. A lot of the newer 48 port 10GBE switches have 802.3bz support, and a lot of newer platforms are coming out with 802.3bz by default in 2020 or 2021.

You're right with the rest, though, the 10gbit serdes family (4x10=40, 10x10=100) is being replaced with 25gbit serdes to build 25, 50, 100, and 400; and even more ridiculous is 100gbit serdes is coming out soon, so theres going to be 8x100=800 as a future 802.3 spec.

<comment><USER2> I'm curious if 3bz is ever actually going to take off in force. The 11ac wave 2 marketing campaigns certainly pushed it but in the end it never actually mattered since goodput was never actually that high, the same seems to be on repeat with 11ax. Intel's 10th gen core line has native support for it so maybe we'll start to see it trickle in through that. The biggest problem with 3bz is it's not like when 10G took over the DC where they could go phyless and drop legacy to cut cost, all of broadcoms upcoming edge focused ASICs are committed to supporting 10 and half duplex still after the fiasco that was the last time they tried to remove support for those. As a result 3bz will likely be more expensive and gig to the user will likely remain "good enough" until they need workstation class and they'd rather have 10G anyways.

I actually got to play with one of the early 32x400G switches recently :D. I don't think we'll be going for them anytime soon as we've only just started rolling out 25G at scale but it certainly was something to behold.</comment></comment></comment>


No Man is an iLand - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketnext.com/stories/no-man-is-an-iland/

<comment><USER2> And yet I felt the gaming I tried on mobiles and tablets constricted to poking and flailing with too little feedback, which was fine for slower stuff and puzzle games (and I can enjoy those, but they aren't all I really want). Until, that is, I hooked up a PS3 controller via bluetooth. Now I'm back to actually enjoying some racing games and replaying GTAIII just for the fun heck of some comfortably controlled nostalgia. A thousand game flowers blooming is nice and all, but it would be nice, imho, to start having some convergence toward good/better controller(s) (where good maps, for me, to something where form follows function relative to the shape of human hands and how I have lots of fingers and they still train moderately well to precisely timed coordinated actions using tactile feedback... oh and hooks into lots of games/platforms).

</comment><comment><USER3> No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne, 1624</comment>


Hackney Woman Stands Up To London Rioters In Stirring Speech (NSFW) - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5828966/hackney-woman-stands-up-to-london-rioters-in-stirring-speech-nsfw <comment><USER2> A transcript would be good.

</comment><comment><USER3> this isn't a black thing. It's an idiot thing.</comment>


Show HN: Augmented Reality flight tracker - <AUTHOR> https://planefinder.net/3D/#AR <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

I am one of the creators of Plane Finder 3D.

Plane Finder 3D is the latest of our creations. We are a small team of 4 based in the UK and created the first flight tracker for iOS back in 2009!

The new AR (ARKit) mode just looks so awesome! . We use our network of thousands of ADS-B receivers around the world to feed this app it's data. You can project the airspace onto a coffee table or anything flat actually (moving car roofs are not recommended!).

All you do is then move your iPhone/iPad around and you can zoom around the "sky" with your device! You can see more info at [https://planefinder.net/3D/](https://planefinder.net/3D/)

Hope you like it!</comment>


Coffee - The Wine of Islam - patrick-james http://www.superluminal.com/cookbook/essay_coffee.html <comment> patrick-james Really interesting article on the history of coffee in Muslim culture. Needless to say, I don't think any of us would be awake right now if it weren't for the consistently revered reputation of this humble seed.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you find that interesting you might also consider reading into the controversial use of khat in the middle east.

For those that don't know, Khat is a leaf which releases an amphetamine like product when chewed. Traditionally scholars would consume it to help them stay up at night and pray or study however, like all good things, its beneficial uses gave way to its degenerative abuses.

Now Khat is considered Haram (banned from an Islam legal perspective), because its misuse over rides any benefit. Its sad to see some countries though (Yemen, Somalia) have not been able to overcome the addictive and economically lucrative product. Large swathes of Yemen for instance grow the product, which means large aquifiers are redirected primarily to this crop, depriving others from growing staples and other produce. This in turn contributes to a lack of food within the country, resulting in reduced health (particularly in young children). The other knock on effect is that once peopel start chewing it (around lunch time) the whole city shuts down. Someone should really do a case study on it.

Marijuana is also another interesting psychostimulant with a (tenuous) link to Islam. The original assassins (Hashashins), though considered an extreme sect with barely any resemblance to traditional Islamic orthodoxy, relied on Marijuana to produce what we know term assassins!</comment></comment>


Daytum: beautifully-designed site for tracking personal statistics - <AUTHOR> http://www.daytum.com

<comment><USER2> To give some context to this: Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer who has been known for creating annual reports -- very specific graphic design productions that include minutiae about his life over the past year. You can see 2008's report here: <http://feltron.com/index.php?/content/2008_annual_report/>

Some time ago, he partnered with a coder to create Daytum, which is an easy way for people to track other statistics about themselves in much the same way that Nicholas Felton does in his reports.

Yes, the details people track in Daytum are usually trivial, unnecessary, etc. Yes, it's a bit of a novelty. But it's certainly unique, and sometimes it's cool to have something like this to track random statistics, even if only for entertainment value.

<comment><USER3> That's fair enough, more art than utility. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hard to read, main page has no lower case.

Without signing up, I don't understand how it works. Do I have to manually enter all my stats into a spreadsheet, or is it better than that?

</comment><comment><USER5> Not exactly the same goals, but <http://your.flowingdata.com/> is simpler and quite useful for things like tracking weight, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> But seriously, who needs to know how many hotels someone's slept in over the last month, or what baked goods you've got in your house? Surely the novelty wears off pretty fast.

There are some things that I want to track (running data from my Garmin watch for example), but something as general as this isn't going to be much use for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's more for the entertainment than it is for productivity. It's a Feltron production—he's the guy with the ridiculously specific annual statistic reports.

<comment><USER6> If it's more for the entertainment, I wonder whom they envision paying for this service ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe they don't? Felton's a professional graphic designer who makes money as- is. Not every web service needs a business model.

<comment><USER6> They have a $4/mo pricing for premium accounts. That is what I was referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ehh - having to watch a Vimeo video to understand how this works and how to do things on Daytum is extremely annoying. More work should be done on the ease of use end.

I get the idea that it's cool to present minimalist designs, but they should seriously considering adding some clear on screen instructions for new users.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks nicely laid out. But I cannot read it. Perhaps a slightly darker shade of grey could help with the contrast.

</comment><comment><USER9> This type of applications reminds me a bit of the Moodstats — <http://moodstats.com> , from way back in 2001 (if I recall correctly).

Built by the Cuban Council - <http://cubancouncil.com> \- in Macromedia Director.

</comment><comment><USER10> uses google charts to generate charts. that's what i use on a similar project (also flot). i was hoping to see something with a little more javascript interaction. i have the same problem exploring Felton's reports: jumping around is jarring. would rather see mouseovers and zoom ins. ultimately, looking at a really big poster, one that makes sense at different scales when standing 20ft away and 2ft away, is probably the best experience. i want to capture that through a web browser somehow. ideas...?

<comment><AUTHOR> I get what you're saying. Felton's primarily a print designer; his report is designed for print purchase. I didn't have the same problem with this site, though—what did you find jarring?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know if this is "beautifully designed" - more like "sparsely and starkly designed, which conforms to someone's particular idea of beauty".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry. I will never use an adjective again. For the record, I don't think the design is sparse or stark. For me, sparse is something like NowDoThis, and stark is something like Daring Fireball. But if it conforms to your particular ideas of sparsity and starkness...

The front page isn't the wow factor here. The profiles are absolutely beautiful. Check out <http://www.daytum.com/feltron>. Then check out the bar graph on <http://www.daytum.com/feltron/page/10835>, and see what happens when you hover over elements. There are a few dozen different output options available, and they're all displayed terrifically. The interface for the logged-in user is similarly unique and beautiful. It's a perfect example of an interface that's interesting and singular not because it's trying to be particularly aesthetic but because its goals require a unique approach.

<comment><USER11> The use of words instead of numbers to indicate integer values is especially annoying to me.</comment></comment></comment>


Thunderbird Usage Continues to Grow - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/ <comment><USER3> Thunderbird is great. I use it daily since over 12 years. I do have some issues though:

* The ''Compose Email'' editor is weird. Especially for hyperlinks. Why is it so hard to check the URL of links? (No tooltip? No statusbar hint? Not even a right click menu to copy or open the link in Firefox?)[1]

* Font size handling is also quite weird. [2]

* But you can't ''View Source'' from compose email editor. (You have to save a draft and view source from there.)

* Getting the ''Compose Email'' editor in a tab instead of a window would be great too. (Is the Compose Email editor really the only thing still written in C and nobody wants to touch it?)

* Following authenticated RSS feeds theoretically works, but is completely unusable. [3]

Still one of my favorite applications. Many thanks to anyone spending time to keep it alive and improve it further.

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457300](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457300) [2] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782215](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782215) [3] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267203](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267203)

<comment><USER4> Having looked at it again today after about 8 years:

* The onboarding experience is horrible; tries to sell me a gandi email account, then the setup wizard fails with an opaque error. Had to abort and configure manually.

* Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin and results in the GUI getting garbled bad; overlapping items, truncated labels, unusable dialogs etc. Sorry but 12px is not a reasonable font-size in 2015.

* The default conversation view seems to be some kind of in-joke, it only shows the first few hundred chars of each message. A semi-reasonable conversation view can be bolted on with another 3rd party plugin but it feels rough (flickering redraws, ugh).

* Forwarding multiple messages inline is still not possible.

* Search has improved a lot.

* Fully disabling HTML mail is still an exercise in frustration.

* A whole bunch of "wtf" was enabled by default (Silverlight plugin, Flash plugin)

* During setup it tried to connect to about 8 different domains (mozilla.org, CDNs, whatever other crap), none of which was my mailserver. It should not do that.

All that said. It's still one of the best (if not the best) GUI mail clients available. That's how bad the competition is...

<comment><USER5> > * Fully disabling HTML mail is still an exercise in frustration.

Shouldn't View > Message Body As > Simple Text do that for you?

<comment><USER6> Doubtful. If the parent poster is worried about privacy and security, he wants to configure it so as to always read emails as plain text without ever loading images.

<comment><USER5> Um... that's what the option does: it refuses to display HTML; if no plain text part is given, the HTML parts are converted to plain text for display.

If you're only worried about http image bugs, TB disables all remote content loading by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Thunderbird for almost 10 years now and I literally never had a crash or unexpected behaviour. Once the e-mail accounts are created, everything just works. Software that is this pleasant to use is very rare. It is the only reasonable free e-mail client that I know of. Why I use thunderbird and not a web based client? I have multiple e-mail addresses and it's nice to have everything in one place, also it's accessible if you're offline.

My only nitpick about Thunderbird: If you want to search for a message, you have to go through the menus "Edit->Find". I don't like that for two reasons, a search is not an operation that edits anything so that's really a wrong classification. And searching is not equal to finding. Maybe my search has no results. "Find" is the wrong word here (the equality of searching and finding is a very widespread misconception in software).

<comment><USER8> > Why I use thunderbird and not a web based client? I have multiple e-mail > addresses and it's nice to have everything in one place, also it's > accessible if you're offline.

This is quite easy to do in Gmail (and presumably other webmail clients) with forwarding.

<comment><USER9> Yeah? Now reply to someone with the appropriate From/Reply-To addresses from that mashed up gmail account. Thunderbird does this seamlessly, figuring it out from who the email was To if possible. That's why I still use it.

<comment><USER8> > Now reply to someone with the appropriate From/Reply-To addresses from that > mashed up gmail account. Thunderbird does this seamlessly, figuring it out > from who the email was To if possible.

The Gmail web app can do the exact same thing: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22377?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22377?hl=en)

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. I wonder when they added this, it definitely didn't used to be able to do that.

<comment><USER8> It's 5+ years old. I've been using it since at least the late 2000s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thunderbird is my go-to client in any company I work at if I can figure out how to make it work.

For those of you at companies with newer Outlook exchange servers _([http://i.imgur.com/J31q7xo.png](http://i.imgur.com/J31q7xo.png) )_ or the even newest-newer _([http://i.imgur.com/7eX8S1e.png](http://i.imgur.com/7eX8S1e.png) )_, get davmail proxy server. [http://davmail.sourceforge.net/](http://davmail.sourceforge.net/) ...and you have to get the Lightning plugin to handle the exchange-calendar stuff.

____

Disclaimer: Don't ask me about how trustworthy davmail is with handling full access to you email account. I just know a lot of people use it and I've never heard negative. Though honestly, I wish mozilla would just acquire the project and provide a verified source & binary on their site. Or just do whatever davmail is doing directly in the thunderbird code.

<comment><USER11> +1 to davmail proxy; it is incredibly important to my productivity. I actually donated some money to the developer, but I should do it again.

The davmail code even handles Outlook having two-factor auth enabled, e.g. it'll recognize the extra form field, ask you to enter your token once, and then keep the session open, just like keeping the webapp loaded in your browser tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used both Firefox and Thunderbird, but ended up 'moving back' to Seamonkey. My reasons for this move were the rather heavy load the combination of FF and TB puts on my - older - hardware as well as the fact that SM is more or less up to par with FF and TB while offering some 'convenience' functionality (eg. CTRL-2 opens mail from within browser, CTRL-1 opens browser from within mail). Another advantage SM has is that it supports the 'original' FF sync (which I use in combination with the Owncloud 'Mozilla Sync' app) without the need to jump through hoops. It also has a 'normal' preferences dialog, normal tabs, normal... everything. In other words, it did not succumb to the 'Chrome copy' trend which FF embarked upon.

Seamonkey happily provides me access to my mail (several accounts), dozens of open tabs in several browser windows and more in about 500MB of RSS. Firefox and Thunderbird together would use almost double that. While this might not matter on a recent system with 8+GB of memory, on this Thinkpad T42p with a maximum of 2GB it is a significant difference.

<comment><USER13> In general I'd advise against using the MailNews portion of SeaMonkey if you're also using the profile for web browsing. (MailNews is the guts of Thunderbird.)

MailNews results in a non-trivial amount of main-thread I/O that is going to badly jank your browser experience. The good news is that the worst of it will be when using the MailNews-related UI like switching folders for display, but it's still going to have an impact.

<comment><USER12> Although I'm close to ambidextrous, I have yet to manage the art of actively browsing the web while actively switching folders in the mail clients. Maybe if I had two keyboards attached to this machine it'd work, but I don't really feel the urge to try.

In other words, while theoretically a problem, in practice I don't see this as a viable reason to refrain from using both mail and browser in the same process space, ie. Seamonkey, not even on a relatively under-powered (1.8GHz Pentium M) machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was looking for a new Mail client a few months ago, I wanted to pick Thunderbird, but did not because I believe I read that Mozilla was sunsetting it which is why I did not go for it. Is that not true? It was extremely disappointing news since Thunderbird was an awesome mail client and with the recent interest in mail clients, I thought it was a great opportunity for Mozilla to provide an O/S alternative to the Mailbox, Sparrows and Outlooks of the world.

<comment><USER15> Mozilla stopped actively developing Thunderbird a few years ago. It's still being maintained by a small group of developers, but it hasn't received any significant new features in some time, and mostly just gets maintenance and bug fixes. That said, they have did commit to adding more developers to the project a few months ago, and do have some plans for new features in the next few months - [https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2014/11/thunderbird- reo...](https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2014/11/thunderbird-reorganizes- at-2014-toronto-summit/)

<comment><USER16> That blog post is very informative and encouraging!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Love my thunderbird. It is the unsung hero of open source projects. Not as visible and spoken about as web browsers, kernels or games.

Works on Windows, works on CentOS, works on Ubuntu. Never crashes. Gets steady improvement since forever.

<comment><USER18> Crashes once a month for me. I could not even setup an account [0] until I found a weird workaround. Anecdotes ...

[0] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1069244](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1069244)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Germany has long been our #1 country for usage

I also heard that Firefox enjoys a major market share in Germany (a not-that- reliable source is [http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Internet-Explorers-market- share-...](http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Internet-Explorers-market-share-so- small-in-Germany?share=1)). I even heard from a fellow German university student that "everyone [in Germany] uses Firefox" \- obviously an exaggeration, but there must be some truth in it.

Anyone has an explanation (preferably backed by data) for the popularity of Mozilla software in Germany?

<comment><USER20> I'm a foreigner living in Germany, and can tell you this is true. 'Everyone' uses Firefox.

They also really like these 2-click-social-media-buttons, because it apparently gives better privacy (load the tracking/tweeting/liking script upon the click of a button, and when clicking again run the like/tweet function) [http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Fuer-mehr- Datenschutz...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Fuer-mehr-Datenschutz- Neue-Version-der-2-Klick-Empfehlungsbuttons-2101045.html).

Which seems like security theatre to me. Why not just load the script on the first click, and then run the tweet function immediately after?

<comment><USER21> _Why not just load the script on the first click, and then run the tweet function immediately after?_

Because the tweet function invokes a pop-up window, which browsers won't allow unless attached to a click function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have been using Thunderbird for many years now. Previously, I was using Emacs for e-mail, but realized that I needed something that supported HTML. Also, I was switching from Linux to the Mac, and I wasn't sure if I would ever switch back -- and thus not only wanted an open-source solution, but also one that was cross-platform.

Overall, I'm quite satisfied. The program is solid, the interface is good, and it does a great job of handling the many messages I both send and receive each day. It's smart about handling being off-line, many different accounts, and my other needs. Searching for messages within a particular mailbox (which I do a lot of) is fast and easy.

I realize that it's in vogue for everyone to use and love Gmail -- but several of my clients have forced me to do so, and I really can't stand the Gmail interface. Maybe it's just me, but having a standalone e-mail application is just about what I want. (Although I still do miss SuperCite in Emacs...)

There was talk years ago about Mozilla abandoning Thunderbird, or spinning it off. I'm very happy to see that they continue to invest time and money in its development, that it continues to be popular, and that they're proud to celebrate its popularity.

<comment><USER23> Gnus in Emacs does support HTML! It's not the most beautiful, but it works, and is getting better.

I also use several Gmail-backed custom domains, and that works just fine as well -- no one knows I'm using Gnus (unless they look at the User-Agent header, of course).

<comment><USER22> Hmm, I'll take a look... it would be fun to return to Emacs as a mail client, although I must admit that without working HTML, it might be a bit annoying. That said, I so so so miss having all of my favorite Emacs commands at my fingertips in e-mail...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Best email client out there, hands down. I use GMail on the web for quick checks, but it's impossible to do serious email management in GMail. If you're serious about managing your email, you need a real email client and Thunderbird is the best I've seen. VERY happy to hear it continues to grow, and thank you very very much to those who continue to hack on / maintain it.

<comment><USER25> It's impossible to serious email management in Gmail? Are you trolling?

Gmail was built by engineers to manage email efficiently. Everything can be keyboard driven. Labels work better than folders. Filters super easy to create. I receive 200+ emails a day, and Gmail keyboard shortcuts are my go-to tool. Aside from sub-optimal (usually chorded) keyboard shortcuts, every local client I've ever tried has simply choked on the volume of mail I deal with, Gmail doesn't.

I use MailPlane to get the Gmail UI but with smooth integration into OS X and multiple Google accounts loaded in parallel with the Google multi-login nightmare.

<comment><USER14> I am not learning new Keyboard shortcuts only for Gmail.

Thunderbird (and other decent desktop packages) allow me to reuse the over a decade worth of training I have with my OS's KB shortcut semantics.

In addition, using the keyboard in a browser is a mess. It is very easy to not have the current context set to a different application, and Gmail's non- standard K/B shortcuts can lead to unpredictable (and destructive) changes in other applications (for example, accidentally entering random text in a document open in my text editor). Using standard OS K/B shortcuts means that if I am doing a search, and even if my current app is not the one I think it is, it's likely to still do a search, and not enter random characters.

<comment><USER25> That's a nice post hoc rationalization but in practice it doesn't actually come up. I don't have any other app with the same semantics as Gmail. For instance, what app combines forward/next navigation with selecting, labeling and archiving? Unlike vim which I miss in native text fields, there is no context outside of Gmail that the muscle memory wants to kick in; the corollary being that there is not a comprehensive set of OS default shortcuts that maps cleanly to the set of things I want to do in email. In fact Mailplane does attempt this for Gmail so you get ⌘-n, etc, but the common ones are really not sufficient to cover a power user's email workflow—you're going to need to learn a few things specifically for your client of choice regardless of what that is.

<comment><USER26> >That's a nice post hoc rationalization

Come on, you did sort of ask for clarification didn't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to use thunderbird before switching back to apple mail - I thought they had discontinued work on it? I know I heard something about that. It also doesn't do a few things apple mail seems to do; i think it was a matter of rule execution and multiple from addresses.

The UI could also use some cleanup. While I don't like apple changing things because they can change things (when they do), i feel like Thunderbird UI has room for improvement in usability and aesthetics.

Well, i've been thinking about setting up a mail client in my linux VM, guess I could install it and see how it fares.

Are there any other open source email clients that people use, that are maintained?

<comment><USER28> I've heard praise for Slypheed.

[http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)

<comment><USER29> I think you're looking for Claws. It used to be the development version of Sylpheed, but they're now separate. It has a lot more active development.

[http://claws-mail.org/](http://claws-mail.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder is one of the reasons this is happening because Thunderbird works well with PGP, Enigmail and Torbirdy etc and that many of the online guides which show people how to use this?

<comment><USER31> Wouldn't surprise me if that's the case, or at least if it's a factor in increased downloads. My default mail client on Windows is Postbox, but ever since I started using PGP, I switched to Thunderbird because Enigmail doesn't play nice with Postbox.

Thunderbird's UI could be a bit better but it performs well and does its job without causing too much trouble, so I'm quite happy with it.

<comment><USER30> Yeh, the UI could really do with an update. It would be great if it looked like OS X Mail etc but I guess most open source stuff often looks a bit dated - and Thunderbird does the job pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thunderbird is great as a cross-platform mail client; I run it on FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows. The Windows version has a slightly different menu layout, but I don't really mind this and it rarely comes up in regular use anyhow.

I do however have two gripes:

1) When saving an e-mail as a draft, and then re-opening it another machine, it often changes the From mail account. As such, I end up sending mail from my personal mail account when intending to use my business mail account. This was reported as a bug years ago, but has still yet to be fixed.

2) When logged into the same IMAP account from several machines, sometimes a mailbox created on one machine doesn't show up on another, and the only way to get it to show up is to toggle "show subscribed folders only", restart Thunderbird, toggle it back, and restart again.

<comment><USER33> Have you reported the two problems, or at least asked about them on the Mozilla support website?

<comment><USER32> There was already an existing bug report in Bugzilla when I first ran into issue 1) years ago, and I added my comments to it.

Issue 2) I haven't. As annoying as it is when it does happen, it's not that common and although requires some extra steps, doesn't result in looking unprofessional to clients like in 1). However, there has been a few instances lately where my staff have created new subfolders within a shared imap folder and moved e-mails into them, and I've been unable to find those emails until I recall this issue. So it's probably worthwhile to start gathering details and file a report to prevent this interruption in workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This will probably get voted into oblivion. I think it's great that people like Thunderbird. I use it to back up my email once in a while.

But, I do find it interesting that anyone would chose an app mail reader over an online mail reader, one that I can access all my mail from any device anywhere in the world. (should I choose to trust that device).

Yes, I get that maybe you don't trust gmail/hotmail/yahoo but I guess I just wonder if maybe the time and effort making Thunderbird would be better spent on an open source email server that's as easy to install as something like wordpress but more secure.

Of course maybe it's just me. I haven't used an email app since about 2003. First it was oddmail, then yahoo mail, then gmail. There's no way I could go back to having access to my mail stuck on one machine. If you like your setup good for you.

I guess I'd be curious what you get out of it though. Do you run Thunderbird on all your devices? Does each device have access to all your email? Can you search it quickly? If you don't have thunderbird everywhere do you find yourself waiting until you get back to device that does have it to use email?

<comment><USER35> With any IMAP client your mail will not be stuck on one machine, you can maintain a copy on the server as well, and access it from any other IMAP client.

<comment><USER36> Right. I can't see why anyone uses Gmail. The built-in mail client in Android works just fine with IMAP servers. I have two desktops, a laptop, and an Android phone all using the same IMAP server. Everything but the Android phone runs Thunderbird.

It's rather nice that Mozilla maintains Thunderbird but doesn't change it much. The Firefox UI keeps changing, but not improving. Over three years, Firefox moved add-on icons from the top to the bottom, then hid them, then moved them back to the top again. I'm worried that if they change Thunderbird, they will "add social features", make it send your contacts list to Mozilla HQ for "syncing", or something like that.

<comment><USER37> > I can't see why anyone uses Gmail.

For a relatively consistent experience across platforms, without having to depend on a local application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's in maintenance mode, so unlikely to happen, but ...

please please add support for something which is not mbox format storage.

Maildir, sqlite, whatever. I hate "From" inside an email becoming ">From". It's fragile as hell (although, last time I suffered corruption was in 2006 in Windows; never had my mbox corrupted in Linux).

Even with this, I prefer it to all other email clients, native or web, that I've tried.

<comment><USER28> > please please add support for something which is not mbox format storage. > Maildir, sqlite, whatever.

Support for maildir format has existed since Thunderbird 12.

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Pluggable_Mail_Stores](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Pluggable_Mail_Stores)

You can follow the steps outlined here but to minimize the risk of data loss, please back up your profile first.

[https://jaisejames.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/to-activate- mail...](https://jaisejames.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/to-activate-maildir-in- thunderbird/)

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles- tb](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb)

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird- data...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a- new-computer)

<comment><USER38> I'm kind of ashamed I missed this ..

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I use Thunderbird since eons. IMHO it's the definitive email client - <USER2> beats it; hence, it has no "export" features. :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> Very annoying that the latest versions on the release channel 31.5.0 still shows nothing on standard calendar invites. Yes, I might install a big ass plugin, but what about just showing me the stuff that is actually in the email (that can easily be verified with "view source")? It's been like this for ages as well. Not very promising unfortunately.

<comment><USER28> The calendar component of Thunderbird needs to be installed as an add-on for historical reasons.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/projects/calendar/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/projects/calendar/)

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

[https://blog.mozilla.org/calendar/2006/10/sun_microsystems_a...](https://blog.mozilla.org/calendar/2006/10/sun_microsystems_announces_int/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am glad that Thunderbird increases in popularity. But this makes me wonder even harder why they don't work towards a features that allows syncing Thunderbird (and it's calendar [sunbird]) with their FirefoxOS apps. Apparently there aren't many people interested in offline-synchronizing anymore these days. :(

<comment><USER28> Firefox OS has a dedicated Email app which supports multiple email accounts and offline mode.

[https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/email](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/email)

[https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia-email-libs-and- more](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia-email-libs-and-more)

What exactly do you mean by syncing Thunderbird with Firefox OS apps?

<comment><USER41> I would especially like to synchronize Firefox OS with my Lightning calendar. As far as I know, you have to publish your Lightning calender online to make it accessible for Firefox OS.

<comment><USER28> You can publish your Lightning calendar only on your home intranet and then sync with the calendar app on your Firefox OS phone over your home wifi. Once you step outside your home, the calendar app on your Firefox OS phone will continue to show you your calendar entries because it has offline support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why are there annual bumps in the graph?

<comment><USER43> They seem to be in July/August - perhaps it's summer holiday season, and people don't open their email as much?

<comment><USER44> Schools and Universities would be prime candidates for that and I bet the user base has a large proportion of those users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I haven't thought about Thunderbird in years! This is rather surprising to me. What's the draw for using Thunderbird over the web- and mobile-based clients like Inbox?

<comment><USER46> local storage, multiple accounts, separate inboxes, doesn't try to be too clever

<comment><USER47> Well except with the new auto-discover when configuring an e-mail account (workaround: work offline, it will skip the wizard).

<comment><USER28> Or you could just configure the email account manually.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manual-account- configur...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manual-account- configuration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> ...and still it looks and behaves like we are in 2002.

Don't get me wrong, I like and use Thunderbird but sometimes I wish they would put more effort into improving the UI

<comment><USER46> I use Thunderbird every day, and I agree with you.

If they want to kill some low-hanging fruit, search is fundamentally broken. I've almost never found what I'm searching for -- it's reddit bad. It's usually better for me just to go log into that gmail account and search from there.

<comment><USER49> Really? I don't remember having any major problems with search recently. Search is a few orders of magnitude better than the junk mail classification, at least for me. I don't know what algorithms they use for junk classification, but here are some observations:

1) I mark 100% of the emails from a particular sender or with a particular subject line as junk, yet the junk classifier still puts emails from that sender or with that subject in my inbox. This is the low-hanging fruit -- the stuff that is so obvious that it is spam that a human can figure it out without looking at the message body at all, yet Thunderbird can't seem to get it right no matter how much you train it. I can only guess that they are placing too much weight on the body content (which is easily padded with hidden text to con the algorithm) when a bad sender/subject should trump whatever is in the body.

2) Emails from people that I've emailed in the past sometimes end up in the junk folder. I thought they were supposed to be whitelisted automatically (by automatically being appended to some special section of your address book).

3) I've implemented message filters to detect certain words like our product name and move the incoming message to a high-priority folder, yet messages that should match the filter still end up in the junk folder on rare occasions (and, yes, I have it configured to run the filter before junk classification is applied -- I'm assuming that junk classification should not be applied if a filter moves the message out of the inbox).

4) It sometimes seems to just stop learning, so I have to reset and retrain the junk classifier or it gets to the point where the only emails that it recognizes as being junk are the ones in a foreign language.

<comment><USER46> Yeah, search is a huge mess. For example, I'm out looking for houses and I've gotten a bunch of notices in the past couple weeks for open houses. I search for "open house" and not a single result it presented was for any of the emails I've previously received. In fact none of the emails it returned seemed to have either "open" or "house" in them, I have no idea why it selected the emails it did.

Actually, I've developed a theory that the search actually uses a stochastic method that randomly samples emails from my mailboxes in the hopes that some of them will match my search result.

<comment><USER13> Assuming you're using the global search mechanism, a porter stemmer is used which means that the search engine sees all of "house", "houses", "housed", "housing", etc. the same.

The search also biases the results based on recency and things like whether the message has been starred/flagged, whether it was authored by/involves contacts in your address book, etc.

e15ctr0n is right that your best option is to use quotes to do a phrase search of "open house" in this situation, although you will still run afoul of the porter stemmer. (Unfortunately a post-pass filter if you realllly want "house" was never implemented. There is an open bug, however.)

<comment><USER46> No, I mean, I actually searched for "open house" in quotes. (I tried the terms without quotes as well, but when that first set of results turned up useless I tried the quotes).

The results were literally what I describe, just a random sample of emails from the last few years. I keep using the search hoping I get something useful returned, and even when I do things like put in exact phrases I know are in the message, I get a random pile of junk back.

I should just learn my lesson and stop trying to be honest.

<comment><USER49> I just did some tests using "Edit > Find > Search Messages" to search (I'm not sure what asutherland means by the "global search mechanism") and based on a few tests searching for "contains" matches on the body text here are my conclusions:

1) If you use quotes, it is looking for the quotes in the text, so I'm surprised you got any matches at all.

2) If you don't use quotes, it is still looking for an exact match (except that it's not case sensitive), so searching for "open house" without quotes should not match unless the words are adjacent to each other.

3) It doesn't seem to pay attention to token boundaries, so a search for "house" (without quotes) matches "warehouse"

So, it is a little unintuitive (and really should have a help button that explains exactly what it does), but it seems to work for me. I don't use IMAP, though, and the comments by qznc about IMAP [1] seem like they may explain why you are seeing what you are seeing if you use IMAP.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9124667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9124667)

Edit: I just noticed e15ctr0n's link to info on the global search -- I don't have that enabled (probably disabled it to save disk space a long time ago) so if that's where you are seeing problems, that explains why I never noticed.

<comment><USER46> Thanks for checking it out.

So for fun, I just sent myself an email with the subject "open house" and body "open house" (no quotes).

I then searched for "open house" (with quotes) and got a list back. Sorted by relevance, they return in the following chronological order: 2008, 2012, 2013x7, 2012x23, 2011x12, 2010x12 and on and on. Nothing from 2014 at all, and nothing from 2015 at all.

All of the returns have "open house" (or some variant) in them, quite a few have punctuation or non-alphanumeric characters right next to them, so that's cool. In quite a few "open houses" scores more highly than "open house".

So I filtered down to one mailbox. Now, I get a few from 2014, but no joy on my recent one.

I change the filter to another mailbox. About 10 down (there's only 12 "matching" in this mailbox) I see one of the relevant emails I was looking for earlier, but not the one I explicitly just sent myself.

If I remove all filter constraints and sort by date instead of relevance, the email I just sent shows up at the top, followed by some emails where "open houses" match my query, followed by the earlier email I was looking for.

So it's kinda working if I sort it by date. Sorting by relevance seems to be entirely useless. Sorting by mailbox is kinda useful, but doesn't seem to show most recent.

I dunno, it still seems faster and more accurate to hit each of my mailboxes separately from the web interfaces if I need to search them.

I think qznc might have hit the nail on the head about IMAP and getting weirdly out of sync.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Thunderbird is great and I have been using it forever. I have only recently run into the first real problem at work getting SMTP to work with our Office 365 account.

I have the settings the same as the MS online app smtp.office365.com, port 587, and I can receive mail just fine. I have spent a few minutes here and there googling around and trying to figure it out but so far no luck sending mail (if anyone has any ideas...)

<comment><USER28> Server Hostname: smtp.office365.com. Port:587 SSL: STARTTLS Authentication:Normal Password

See [http://blogs.technet.com/cfs- file.ashx/__key/communityserver...](http://blogs.technet.com/cfs- file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components- weblogfiles/00-00-00-89-14-metablogapi/2677.image_5F00_6CC8A660.png)

Then click "Done" and not "Re-test".

<comment><USER50> I'm not at work and so can't try it out, but I'm pretty sure those are the settings I used. Maybe I clicked "retest". Have to try again tomorrow. Anyway, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I miss command line mh. While I can still use it, email has gotten increasingly mimey, and using mh these days feels too much like swimming upstream. I also think calendar and email is a natural integration.

That said, TB has been my email client for years and years. It has everything I need, and works well. It also has warts, but if you use any kind of software you get used to warts.

</comment><comment><USER52> I was a long-time Thunderbird user, but the mail application I really loved was Opera's M2. It had an awesome auto-folder system that would create virtual folders for mailing lists, people you regularly corresponded with and date ranges. It's only downside was that it was tied into Opera and there was no way to tell it to open links in another browser.

<comment><USER28> Have you tried Saved Searches in Thunderbird?

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-saved- searches](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-saved-searches)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I quit using this at my last job because, although it supports opening mail in a new window, it did not support closing the message when you click reply/reply-all/forward. It's not a big deal unless you have to clear upwards of 50 emails a day.

Otherwise it was a great client, and it was much easier to customize than Outlook.

</comment><comment><USER54> Love Thunderbird since the days it was the email client of the Netscape suite.

Thanks for all the work invested into it.

</comment><comment><USER55> The UI could still use polishing. For example, the attachment confirmation dialog is so confusing. I'm tempted to send them a patch that makes the wording clearer.

"Did you forget to add an attachment?" ("Oh, I didn't!", "No, I did!")

<comment><USER56> I notice that too when it pops up. I wonder if they make it confusing by design, to ensure you carefully read it, and not just blindly click through?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> My only complaint with Thunderbird is there is no easy way to backup/restore its database.

<comment><USER28> Thunderbird saves personal information such as messages, passwords and user preferences in a set of files called a "profile", which is stored in a separate location from the Thunderbird program files.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles- tb](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb)

You can move your profile across computers, or back them up to restore later.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird- data...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a- new-computer)

<comment><USER57> I know about those (these are helpful links, thanks!). They are stored in different locations on different OS's, even different versions of the same OS. There needs to be a menu item called "Backup" where you give a path to back it up to, and "Restore" where you give a path where it was backed up to.

Reading the documentation on those links just proves the point :-)

<comment><USER28> The beauty of open source is that you can scratch your own itch. :-)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/Thunderbird](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird)

<comment><USER57> Yeah, I already wrote my own compiler, editor, games, language, etc. How far do I have to go with this? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Inveterate Thunderbird user here.

Would like an extension to be able to execute actions in 1 click (such as creating a pdf rather than multi menu clicks) and I'm willing to pay for that. Anyone who can write thunderbird extensions contact me by reply.

</comment><comment><USER59> Ever had e-mails disappearing in spam/archive or other folders?

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615957](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615957)

</comment><comment><USER60> A loyal user of Thunderbird here, in fact I recommended it to many other users, who are all using it now I believe.

Keep the good work, and evolve it please!

</comment><comment><USER61> I keep asking Santa for regex email filters.

<comment><USER28> The FiltaQuilla add-on supports regular expressions.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquil...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/)

If you look on the authors web page it describes how to use either JavaScript or regular expressions in the search field.

[http://mesquilla.com/extensions/filtaquilla/](http://mesquilla.com/extensions/filtaquilla/)

Here is a related, tutorial-type blog post with screenshots:

[http://www.digiblog.de/2010/11/regular-expression-mail- filte...](http://www.digiblog.de/2010/11/regular-expression-mail-filters-for- thunderbird/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> version 38? I am on version 31 and T-Bird says it's up to date.

<comment><USER63> > our next major release, which will be Thunderbird 38 in May 2015

Thunderbird releases go like 24->31->38...

<comment><USER49> Any idea why? On the surface, that seems completely insane.

<comment><USER28> 24, 31, 38 represent the version of Gecko that Thunderbird ships with.

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/New_Release_and_Governa...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/New_Release_and_Governance_Model)

Thunderbird now follows an Extended Support Release process, rolling out every eight release cycles equaling every 54 weeks.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/organizations/faq/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/organizations/faq/)

This is because Thunderbird is no longer in active development; it is primarily in maintenance mode.

[https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird- stabi...](https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability- and-community-innovation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> AH! Please, don't make me laugh. One of the worst email clients around. One of the best open source email clients around.

That's all. (Why don't they make a new UI and add more stability?!)

<comment><USER65> Which email client do you use and think is better?

<comment><USER64> honestly? Thunderbird, but sometimes I'm tempted to give it up and use just a web app or Opera Mail. Why I use it? Proprietary software smells and it is the best in security terms (that's why it's so much popular in Germany).

It has a bad integration with gmail/outlook for students (I know it's their problem). It doesn't have a modern UI (things like a multi line view that would make users happier). Furthermore, I can't use it in background since it takes 300+ MB. I may list something else, but these are things that could be solved with a more active development.

What is better? I would use mailpile (it promises a lot!), but web apps doesn't give you so much freedom.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you hiring? I'm working on a project and would benefit from feedback - <AUTHOR> I work for a small game/web development company based in the US. In my spare time, I've been working on our newest project, 'jobblast'. It's a way for me to pursue a project I've been wanting to work on for a while, and also gives us a chance to give back to the community. We're getting ready to release the "alpha" version within two weeks from today.
jobblast is a "minimal" job board for developers. My goal is to investigate job boards and the hiring process, in general, and create a tool that is truly beneficial to the developers looking for work as well as the companies that will hire them. All job posts are reviewed, by me, and they are free. There's no cost to anyone and there are no ads.
The question for you is...
Are you hiring? Is the company you work for hiring developers? Feel free to check us out and get in touch. If you'd like to stay up to date with the project, you can subscribe to the newsletter with the link below. If you are hiring and would like to give us a try, you just need to shoot us an email (look below) and we will go from there! When we launch, your job posts will be the first that everyone will see.
I welcome any and all feedback. If you have questions for me, ask away! You can always get in touch at the email below, as well. I'm excited to see where this goes.
Some other questions worth considering...
1.) What struggles do you consistently have while searching for candidates for a developer position?
2.) What features would benefit you as a job seeker or hiring organization?
3.) Do you expect there to be a "catch" with a completely free job board?
4.) Does the idea of an open-source job board excite you?
http://jobblast.xyz/
firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> I think in all of this you're forgetting the basic premise of a job board which is matching supply with demand. Curation is a part of maintaining high quality in the board, yes, but there's still the need for enough supply to make people come to the board. In your description above, there's nothing unique.

If you are going to curate the supply by hand, that to me isn't appealing as it's not sustainable. If I post a role on the board and the board becomes stagnant because your ability to curate for free goes away, I wasted my time posting there.

Likewise, if I were a developer looking on your site and the listings are stale, I'm going to turn away.

What unique advantage does your board offer that no other board offers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the response. I'm going to think on this a bit. I thought that free postings would be a good strategy but it isn't enough.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "If I were running a major job board today I would make it a priority to provide value for my customers…both seeker and recruiter. I would build tools and publish information that helped them get a job faster or connect with more quality candidates. I would educate them, I would make them want to come back to the site each day to get what they need."

by "crisr2"

[http://www.jobboardsecrets.com/2017/09/05/the-lack-of- innova...](http://www.jobboardsecrets.com/2017/09/05/the-lack-of-innovation- in-major-job-boards/)

Education for job seekers and employers has been a goal in the back of my head when I've considered this project before. There's a lot of information out there already, but it's food for thought. I know that content-marketing is a thing and could be done with educational articles, but as I stated above, I'm not trying to profit off of this, directly. Good educational resources (maybe even outside the realm of articles) would be good marketing, nonetheless, and useful for the audience.

One feature that I've been working on, is the "stats" page. I want that information to be clear and available. The page will have things like "Current User Count", "Company Count", "Most Viewed Postings" and so on...hopefully to give job posters an idea on what's "working" and what's not.

I'm still considering how filtering will work. It won't be "hard" but I want to get it right. Design-wise, it's hard for me because I've been working on back-end API's most of my career and I've barely touched an interface, besides small fixes/additions. The right interface will make or break filtering.

Along those terms, I want job seekers to be able to get updates effectively _when_ they want them. A job seeker in "Atlanta, Georgia" who wants to find work there, should get relevant updates emailed and/or texted to them. It's pretty straight forward and it's been done a thousand times but _I_ haven't personally written a system like that before. It should be fun.

Innovation is what is lacking but I'm sure it will come. I plan on releasing "early and often" and keeping track of my progress through Medium articles.</comment>


Photobucket limits displaying of images on external sites to $40/month plan - <AUTHOR> http://blog.norphil.co.uk/2017/06/photobucket-alert-new-sort-of-ransom.html <comment><USER2> How is this ransom? You just have to pay money to use their service. $35 a month isn't a lot of money for anything remotely serious.

Also, photobucket has a $10 a month plan for up to 100GB of image storage that supports "unlimited linking". Most forums won't need more than that. Nothing about this pricing page looks extortionate to me: [http://photobucket.com/pricing](http://photobucket.com/pricing)

Maybe I'm missing something important here, but to me it looks like some people have a very rigid view of what online services ought to cost.

<comment><USER3> I think the ransom is that people have been using Photobucket to host images posted on forums for 10+ years, often hotlinked. Suddenly all of those historical hotlinks are going to break unless each user pays $400/year.

Changing the terms is one thing, but I think OP is upset that old images aren't grandfathered.

Also, I know one obvious solution is to just move all of one's images to a new host and edit the posts, but not all forums allow editing very old posts, some threads will be locked, etc.

<comment><USER4> If the issue is that the traffic costs money, grandfathering old images doesn't solve the root problem.

<comment><USER3> You're right, it doesn't, and the bandwidth of image hosting at that scale clearly costs _someone_ real dollars. It's hard to imagine a good solution to the hotlinked historical images problem.

Maybe a futureproof one is to maintain one's one domain with image urls that redirect to the user's current host. I think this is the best approach for book publishers. It's always frustrating to read references to blog posts etc from a book more than a few years old and then find the links are broken from a third party not maintaining the domain or changing it. Link rot is a real problem we don't talk about much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Photobucket are within their rights to do this but it is really sad that so much of the message board culture is inaccessible because popular free image hosts tend to go away after a few years. I would lay money that 90% of posts over 10 years old have broken images.

The moral of the story is for forums to host images themselves, but nobody wants to do that because:

a) uploading files is annoying to implement and exposes the forum to security issues

b) storing the files can take a huge amount of disk space

c) serving the files can take a huge amount of bandwidth

d) the first message board to allow uploading files would just become a huge dumping ground of images for other boards to link to, necessitating implementing a referer block just like Photobucket

Personally I think that the message board developers have really dropped the ball by refusing to implement a really bullet-proof solution into their software by default. It is a hard problem but the only real solution is to host the images yourself. Third-parties are always going to let you down eventually because their goals do not align with yours.

<comment><USER6> e) you have to self-police against CP and terrorist groups using your servers to host their illegal content.

<comment><USER7> Can you get charged if that happens? Sure you were hosting it, but you didn't know? Do you really have to look at all the pictures? What about privacy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been seeing this the past week on a lot of forums that I still frequent.

There's one particular car forum where I've been following a guy for the past three years doing a project car build. 80+ pages on the thread, with hundreds of images. Now they're blocked.

Several other big threads suffered similar fates.

Needless to say, none of them have any plans on paying up $400 to Photobucket.

The real loss here is the potential loss of history - many niche forums have 15+ years of history on them, a lot of it in the form of how-to guides, FAQs, etc about things you won't find in any manual.

<comment><USER9> Forum should download and host linked images. External links are not reliable and it's not the first incident.

<comment><USER10> That's technically a good idea, but also exposes you to a bunch of DMCA problems if you don't limit it to known image hosts. Not that the requests would be legitimate, but it's still a nuisance.

<comment><USER5> You are exposed to the DMCA whether you host the images yourself of not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really $400 for the privilege of allowing you to send an arbitrary Referer: header with every request, no? ;-)

Sometimes I've run into a similar issue where links I post work fine for me but others have complained that they could only be accessed by copy-pasting into a new window. Those with their browsers' referers disabled or same- domain-only have probably encountered this before.

More fun is to "fake" the referer header by configuring your filtering proxy to always send the one the site expects.

I suppose, like adblocking, once users smarten up to it and/or browsers disable referers by default, this sort of ridiculousness will slowly fade away or change.

Edit: I can confirm this Proxomitron filter works to make all the images show up in the linked forum thread:

        In = FALSE
        Out = TRUE
        Key = "Referer: photoFucket"
        URL = "*.photobucket.com"
        Match = "*"
        Replace = "http://www.photobucket.com/"

<comment><USER12> Can't you just put the image in an <iframe> with <meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" /> on?

<comment><USER13> No. Think about where photobucket is used.

<comment><USER11> Also, just turning off the referer doesn't work for Photobucket --- you need to send it the right one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> PhotoBucket lost my trust a long time ago.

What will we do when Imgur stops growing and investors push them to make money off their content?

[https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur- goes-...](https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-out-of- business/)

All these companies burn through investor money, have no real profit making business plan, bank off being the most popular image hosting site of the day/month/year, then capitulate and turn to dark practices and extortion to make a buck, leaving room for another darling startup to take their place. Rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER15> I forgot that Photobucket even existed, with far more superior choices like Google Photos and Dropbox existing. This is insane, RIP Photobucket.

<comment><USER16> What about imgur?

<comment><USER17> Only a matter of time before they do something about hotlinking. Direct image links now redirect to tell you to download their app, I'd be surprised if they didn't start watermarking embedded images or putting ads on them. Reddit hosting images on their own site haven't helped imgur

<comment><USER18> I wrote a simple extension to disable the new direct image link behaviour: [https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti- hotlink](https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a great way to simultaneously make a quick buck and kill your company.

</comment><comment><USER20> This will be a big hit to old forums. I think phpbb allows you to just set a image with link [link] in a post. So, in your phpbb database you would have some link like: [http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg](http://photobucket.cdn.etc./32328hio/image.jpg) hard coded into the table. [links] would have never been in the album like the OP suggests downloading. They need a quick python script to locate links, upload the contents, replace the url (all using google images, s3 etc).

<comment><USER10> I'd probably implement that as a "forever caching" image proxy hosted on a subdomain of my forum domain, plus the batch/live domain replacement for the database. Then it also works for future attempts to embed photobucket images, and doesn't require downloading all the existing images at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems:

\- Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for their service so they are disabling a use case that people have relied on for years (making a free service no longer free is always harder than charging from day one)

\- This is significantly more expensive to most people than just using AWS S3 or similar. It's just one easy to write / follow AWS tutorial or micro-app away from being obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER22> We are working on a tool to transfer photos to Imgur easily (even replacing old links). Interested? Write to cobyoijaix(at)yandex(dot)com.

</comment><comment><USER23> More accurately, Photobucket has a $399.99 tier, and this is the only tier which allows using them as a third party host for images embedded on other sites. Images belonging to an account that is not on this tier well get replaced with an image indicating the feature needs unlocking.

<comment><USER24> and that means for people who use these images on ebay all that work is lost i can get all my photos it is the work involved in putting the right photos in the right listing i might as well start over from scratch it would take more time to do that then to make new listings

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Imgur has been around for a long time now, and their terms allow hotlinking on forums. Clearly consumers aren't going to pay $400/year for this feature. Why does anyone still use Photobucket?

<comment><USER25> It's possible that Imgur will, when it gets as old as Photobucket, change their terms and start charging more. Will we expect people in tech forums in the future to be writing "What does anyone still use Imgur?"

The answer to both the future and the present questions is that they have been using it in the past (inertia) and have not moved their thousands of images (cost/pain).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> yes ive been hosting images on photobucket for years with links to my ebay listings some listings with 12 links to photobucket and to have all those links broken (3 years of work) unless i suddenly pay photobucket 40.00 a month is extortion and could possibly ruin my business

</comment><comment><USER26> The title is a bit ambiguous to me, so to be clear: the $400 are to activate the service, without which a placeholder image will be displayed instead. It's not "oh, you hotlinked one of our images, now pay $400".

(I'm not defending either practice.)

<comment><USER27> The author implies that without the higher plan you can't even export an archive of your files, making it extremely difficult to migrate to a competing service instead of paying the fee (for a month at least). That seems like the more egregious practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In the meantime, just use bukk.it for memes:

[https://bukk.it](https://bukk.it)

</comment><comment><USER29> Photo-who? I thought this article was from 2006 or something.

If it's true that any publicity is good publicity, I guess this is one way to get it.</comment>


Introducing a Better Free Plan - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/2012/11/14/introducing-better-free-plan/

<comment><USER2> We listened to our users and found what was important to them: faster syncing. We have hopefully found a way to provide that but still make sure the folks who really get value can pay like normal. As usual, this is always a fine line.

Another thing we introduced for users wanting a little more on the free plan is referrals (and other bonuses). You can check that out here: <https://zapier.com/referral/> Hopefully we can open source the Django app that drives this mechanism (its really cool!).

<comment><USER3> Your email went out twice, once with no subject.

Did the old free plan have a limit on tasks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we screwed that up.

The old free didn't have a published limit but because the syncing interval was slow it effectively did. The new free is just publicizing that so that there's more transparency for how Zapier works.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Certifications for people who contribute to open source? - <AUTHOR> I guess a lot of the people coming to HN contribute to open source software. The quality and standards of popular open source libraries are generally higher than what we see in proprietary software. However, the benefits of contributing to open source are mostly intangible. I wonder if there could be certifications for people who contribute to open source in a substantial way. Could this be an alternative to a university qualification? Or does it already exist in one form or another? <comment><USER2> Your Github profile is kind of exactly this, isnt it? The people i know who are strongly involved in Open Source get their job offers based on this.</comment>


Myactivity allows you to list and remove all your Google activity - <AUTHOR> https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity <comment><AUTHOR> The level of detail you can find on this page about your activity is impressive.

You can also "Pause" activity tracking for various services - search, map, youtube search, etc.</comment>


Brain Test malware re-emerges: 13 apps found in Google Play - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2016/01/06/brain-test-re-emerges/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of an old xkcd comic. One proposes a spam-detection system in which one must provide well-thought-out commentary on other posts to make posts of your own.

The other states that "Spammers will just write bots that can make intelligent statements about other posts-- _oh_."

In any case, I'm kind of surprised. Malware that is hidden under a legitimately-made, _fun_ game is a new one.</comment>


Flash (left half) vs HTML5 (right half) - <AUTHOR> http://labs.codecomputerlove.com/flashvshtml5/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't work for me in chrome. I expect it not to work for the flash half, since i have that turned off, but the HTML 5 is supposed to be, you know, standard.</comment>


Hack HN: Make a Capacitive Piano Keyboard for Your iPad - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2014/11/07/make-a-capacitive-clothespin-keyboard-for-your-ipad/

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to step-by-step instructions here:

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Clothespin-Piano-for- iPad/](http://www.instructables.com/id/Clothespin-Piano-for-iPad/)</comment>


How gut bacteria change cancer drug activity - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-04-gut-bacteria-cancer-drug.html <comment><USER2> Interesting. I wonder if there's work being done to combine this approach with the modeling done for personalized chemo treatment to determine drug effectiveness against tumor tissues. It feels like combining modeling techniques for the disease + host would provide the best result.

All I got when I started reading papers and articles describing the function of gut bacteria in the body is that "it's complicated". So its interesting to see the words "manipulating gut bacteria".

<comment><USER3> There is Personalized OncoGenomics (POG).

> ...compares the patient's normal DNA (each cell's complete set of > instructions) with the DNA of their tumours. It also compares the RNA of > their tumours to reference RNA.

[http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/everything-you- nee...](http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/everything-you-need-to-know- about-pog-personalized-oncogenomics-program)

[http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/bc-doctor- pioneers...](http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/bc-doctor-pioneers-a- new-approach-to-cancer-treatment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, this work was done in C. elegans, a worm, on one class of drug used on colorectal cancer. So, obviously there's still a long ways to go, but there's enough noise in the gut bacteria space at this point to know that they're very important in a variety of ways to our health.

<comment><USER5> I read a lot in various media, but I'm still ignorant how.

The vagus nerve has been mentioned; does that shuttle nutrients around, or what?

How exactly do these micros take digested chyme and make this incredibly efficient alcohol->waste reactor?

<comment><USER6> So the vagus nerve, when you sense that you are about to eat, stimulates your stomach to release enzymes that help break down what you intake. This leads to a feedback chain that releases and inhibits other enzymes down in your intestines to further break down this food.

As for the microbes that make up our gut Flora, the simple answer is: they have different enzymes that break things down. They may have an enzyme that adds a chemical group to a drug, activating it or inactivating it. It's far more complicated, and not something I'm very knowledgeable about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe this can make antibiotics work better.</comment>


US Government tries to restrict publication of details on avian flu virus - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/12/us-government-tries-to-restrict-publication-of-details-on-avian-flu-virus-that-spreads-among-mammals.ars <comment><USER2> While censorship _can_ slow the spread of "evil ideas", as with nuclear weapons, attempts like these miss the fundamental cause, and stops education on how to deal with a potential biological attack. The childish example analogy is Dark Arts in Harry Potter: "Professor, how can we defend against the dark arts if we don't know what they are?"

What bothers me is a tendency to segregate knowledge into "too dangerous for citizen consumption" and "certified innocuous". Segregations like these don't just keep people out of the know - they have the perverse effect of stunting growth on those within the special circle [1], as people in the know write off anyone without their clearance level as incompetent, or lacking sufficient knowledge to make an informed decision.

[1] [http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel- ellsberg-...](http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg- limitations-knowledge)

</comment><comment><USER3> These restrictions remind of ITAR. Building a rocket for a hobby? Never talk to foreigners about it, lest they make nuclear rockets. If that doesn't faze you, remember that USA almost stopped ecommerce because of ITAR banning export of cryptography that was once declare a munition. Because they didn't want foreigners to have access to encryption research.

What will happen is that honest people will follow the government and suffer from lack of potential discoveries while foreigners have their own avian flu virus studies, including 'mutations' that the US Government can be unprepared for.

<comment><USER4> This super virus was created simply cause the "scientists" could. What, they gonna learn infection rates from ferrets?

Personally I would destroy the virus and hope everyone forgets about it. Not because I'm afraid of terrorists- I'm afraid of it getting out.

<comment><USER5> I would normally agree with you, but on the other hand I'm even more afraid of Governments creating stuff like this in secret, and then doing who knows what with them. Open science is probably the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be clear: this is a request to the journals, the journals haven't decided what to do with it yet.</comment>


Solar farm in Australia could power Singapore via 4,500km undersea cable - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-australia-project-awarded-major-project-status/12506516 <comment><USER2> I'm sure it could, but maybe before building a 4500km undersea cable, we could try and decarbonise the energy grid of Australia itself, currently the number two per capita emitter of CO2 in the world.

<comment><USER3> Australia has 150GW of renewables projects in their development pipeline, versus the 15GW of fossil generation on the continent. You can work on transmission and generation in parallel.

<comment><USER4> I agree with the general point, but I'm still anxious about it. The mining lobby/industry is huge. If extra demand could justify opening a new mine or prevent closing one, I fully expect that to be abused.

<comment><USER3> I assure you, it's not a concern. South Australia has so much rooftop solar coming online, the grid operator has real concerns they'll see net zero demand on the grid for substantial periods of time. Renewables deployment is in full swing, and still accelerating.

I don't see coal ever being cost competitive enough to keep digging out of the ground ever again once we make more headway.

The words "tipping point" are bandied about, but it looks like we're there. That doesn't mean we're out of the woods, but it does mean it'll be harder and harder to justify non renewables continued use. We just need to push the throttle down on more renewables.

<comment><USER5> >I assure you, it's not a concern.

Its not the coal you burn in Australia...it's the Coal you export, remember we live under one Atmosphere:

In 2016, Australia was the biggest net exporter of coal, with 32% of global exports

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

<comment><USER2> No, it _is_ the coal they burn in Australia -- currently >2/3 of electricity generation --, it's just _also_ the coal other people burn elsewhere.

<comment><USER5> >No, it is the coal they burn in Australia

Yeah ok that too then :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sharks love biting cable with electricity flowing in it. Even with redundancy, submarine cable cuts cause big outages on the internet, I am sure they know this but I wonder why they think the risk is not a deal breaker?

You know what would be cool? Robots/Drones that dig trenches in the ocean floor and bury the cables! But even to lay them down like it is done now, it is very expensive with only about a dozen or so cable ships in the world I believe.

<comment><USER3> It's not a deal breaker because there are many underwater HVDC cables in operation across the world that have been reliability operating for years or decades.

If sharks (or other active water hazards) are a concern, you bury the cable with water jets below the sea floor.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for explaining, learned something new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Solar farm in the Sahara desert could power Europe with a hydrogen pipeline.

<comment><USER2> Or, you know, just build more solar and wind in Europe. Plenty of low hanging fruits, no need for intercontinental mega projects.

<comment><USER5> >Plenty of low hanging fruits, no need for intercontinental mega projects.

As if that's something bad, maybe Solar in the Sahara, Wind/Water and thermo in europe?</comment></comment></comment>


Does a bug tracker with a floating web widget exist? - <AUTHOR>

Back in 2004 I created a bug tracker for my thesis.
The special thing was that there was a floating layer to report bugs - It would automatically send data on users' browser, path taken and more.
I was wondering if something like that exists today? And if it does not, would you be interested in one - probably as an extension to existing trackers. <comment><USER2> I've been running BugMuncher ([http://bugmuncher.com](http://bugmuncher.com)) for about 4 years now, it captures user's browser/os info, path through the site, and allows them to include a highlighted screenshot of the webpage.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info on the original implementation here: [http://janit.iki.fi/bug- tracking-tool/page/18/](http://janit.iki.fi/bug-tracking-tool/page/18/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yep - check out [http://bugherd.com](http://bugherd.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll take a look at Bugmuncher and Bugherd.</comment>


Their eyes are on D.C.: Capital area said to have good shot at Amazon HQ2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/their-eyes-are-on-dc-capital-area-said-to-have-good-shot-at-amazon-hq2/2018/01/20/27a92898-fd37-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?hpid=hp_local-news_amazon-105pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.368b922c9361 <comment><USER2> Has there been any indication of the new HQ's purpose? Duplicate functionality, admin, technical, etc.?

I've wondered why they wouldn't simply locate the new HQ at or near their existing NoVa location(s).

If I'm (not) betting, I'd flip the Dublin bookmaker's DC-area rankings: NoVa would seemingly have the things that people "want" (traffic and all), while Maryland wouldn't seem to resonate, and DC seems better suited for a small footprint/satellite office (lawyers and lobbyists).

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't come to DC. Traffic and transit and everything is bad enough as it is.</comment>