Show HN: Firefox addon that hides news articles about Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/phagocyte/ <comment><USER2> I was literally developing the exact same thing (I called it Novid-19 [1]). While testing it out on HN, I saw a post filtered out.

It was this post...

[1] [https://github.com/christoshadjiaslanis/novid-19](https://github.com/christoshadjiaslanis/novid-19)

<comment><USER3> You just made me spit out my coffee, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep a long list of blocked words in Twitter, Feedly, and I try... as much as I can, to only consume news on reuters.com (and 4 print weeklies). I block CNN and Facebook in my hosts file.

And yet, I'm barraged on the web with celebrity news, popular news, Tiger King (never clicked on it, never wanted it, can't get away from it), whatever the foamy coffee thing that's big right now.

I know about the shelters in place. I knew not to bring my re-usable bags to the grocery this morning.

The whole of media, content, everything you see when you open your browser and leave the house, is a monumental barrage of trending, overwhelming, unavoidable content. Memes you can't get away from but which you'll see hundreds, thousands of times.

Whatever people need to do to get away from it... you'll still get it, but if you choose and are aware of the filters you use, by all means.

<comment><USER5> I saw the first episode of Tiger King, expecting to see some epic, thrilling dramatic series, given all the buzz. I was severely disappointed. Is this really what humans love to watch?

<comment><USER6> I wasn't super impressed with the first episode. But if you are generally into documentaries and true crime, the series as a whole is great.

<comment><USER7> It was a bit of a letdown at the end. I was expecting more to it than just, well he's in prison how. Very anti-climatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know. I think it's important to stay informed about the evolution of the pandemic, and local news are also extremely useful for staying prepared and anticipating certain actions that you'll need to take.

It might be better to consume _all_ news in small daily doses rather than blocking out potentially critical information.

<comment><USER9> I agree, I understand the sentiment, but shutting yourself off is a dangerous head-in-the-sand strategy. Something to be used responsibly.

<comment><USER10> >but shutting yourself off is a dangerous head-in-the-sand strategy

only if that actual makes a material difference in your life. I think the opposite is true in this case.

People read about Covid-19 all day as a coping mechanism because absorbing more information gives people the illusion they have control over the situation.

Reality is nobody has much individual control over a pandemic, life got more dangerous, and reading a thousand papers isn't going to reduce that anxiety. We live in an age where people keep telling us that 'knowing things' is an antidote to tragedy or danger in life, because they're content creators, but really it isn't.

Everyone can learn how to deal with this in 5 minutes. Wash your hands, only leave your house if necessary, yet still people may die, even some you know. No news source in the world will fix that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Direct link in English: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/phagocyte/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/phagocyte/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I didn't notice I posted the German version, will double check next time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to say. Staying off Twitter and avoiding any non-local news has been incredibly beneficial to my mental health over the past few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm seriously thinking I should develop a plug-in that blocks news articles about the Kardashians.

<comment><USER14> I've never seen an article about the Kardashians. Maybe your news sources are the problem.

<comment><USER4> Apple news and google news shovel the Ks at me, along with brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. I've tried instructing both to stop suggesting them to me but they won't.

I don't use either anymore, but the forces are out there. I wanted some of those feeds but couldn't control it. And so I did make a choice about the sources, but those are very popular news platforms that promise customization.

<comment><USER14> try an rss reader like liferea or feedly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super- Chro...](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super- Chromatic_Peril_Sensitive_Sunglasses)

</comment><comment><USER16> This means this Show HN link won't show when using the plugin? Clever.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for the plugin. I dont know about other countries, but here in Poland we receive SMSes with crucial informations. So there is no need to read all the time about it. Unfortunately it is very hard to read anything else these days. This plugin can help. We need to take care of our mental health. And it is very easy to go into panic mode. Especially since its very hard to notice symptoms of this. It can be bad for our health also. So again thanks. Appreciated

</comment><comment><USER18> ublock origin filter:

a:has-text(Corona)

a:has-text(Covid)

a:has-text(Epidemic)

a:has-text(Pandemic)

a:has-text(Virus)

a:has-text(Death)

a:has-text(ICU)

a:has-text(Social Distancing)

a:has-text(corona)

a:has-text(covid)

a:has-text(epidemic)

a:has-text(pandemic)

a:has-text(virus)

a:has-text(death)

a:has-text(social distancing)

<comment><USER19> I suppose that this only works with a-href right?

<comment><USER20> The filter is applied to entire content of a given tag and its subtags, here is the example for HN (has-text _must_ be site-specific):

        news.ycombinator.com##.itemlist .athing:not(.comtr):has-text(/corona|covid|\bsars\b|(?:epi|pan)demi|virus|death|social distanc|\bICU\b|wuhan|quarantin/i)+*
        news.ycombinator.com##.itemlist .athing:not(.comtr):has-text(/corona|covid|\bsars\b|(?:epi|pan)demi|virus|death|social distanc|\bICU\b|wuhan|quarantin/i)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh great so I'm not the only one who's avoiding all of this. I stopped following the news after the Guardian put up a death counter.

There just isn't enough balance and too much negativity - or at least there was two weeks ago when I last checked. I can only imagine how bad it must be on those 24hr news channels. Regurgitating the same thing over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER22> For those who don't want spend too much time on news, but want to stay informed, do check us out : [https://www.thefactual.com](https://www.thefactual.com) (daily newsletter with summaries and multiple viewpoints from curated news sources)

</comment><comment><USER23> Document.write('')

</comment><comment><USER24> be interesting if augmented reality eventually allows you to block things in real life such as political signs or billboard adds. sort of a pi hole, but with goggles. granted this comment is not related but thats what i thought of after reviewing comments on here.

</comment><comment><USER25> i'm making one that replaces that psyop name with the disease's actual name: SARS-2.

<comment><USER26> > i'm making one that replaces that psyop name with the virus's actual name: > SARS-2.

The _virus 's_ actual name is SARS-CoV-2, the _disease's_ actual name is COVID-19. [0]

SARS-2 is the name of neither, and neither of the actual names is a "psyop name" and calling it that is serious tinfoil hat territory.

[0] [https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel- coronavirus-2...](https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel- coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus- disease-\(covid-2019\)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it)

<comment><USER25> meant disease; point stands: _IN 2002 the virus was named SARS-CoV and the disease SARS_

<comment><USER26> > IN 2002 the virus was named SARS-CoV and the disease SARS

Yes, and...so what?

There's no consistent relationship between naming of diseases and naming of related viruses, so trying to paint a conspiracy out of the fact that a pattern you've extrapolated from one other example (and which is takes ignoring most every other disease/virus pairing to paint as the normal pattern) wasn't followed is, again, serious tinfoil hat territory.

The actual name of the disease is _not_ SARS-2, nor is there any particular reason it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How is ignoring a major event like this in any way good?

<comment><USER28> How seeing a lot of news about an event that I can't do anything is good? It just gets me depressing! Watch the news is the worst thing at the moment! I'm encouraging everyone that I love to stay away from this. Fear/depression is way worst than this virus.

<comment><USER27> There can definitely be information overload. But ignoring everything is not good either.

<comment><USER28> I'm sorry, but I really don't understand why ignoring is not good.

<comment><USER27> You don't understand why ignoring news during the biggest global pandemic in a century might not be wise?

<comment><USER28> Yes. :) I don't even have a TV, I blocked news sites in my /etc/hosts about 4 years ago. So, I'm ignoring the news for more than years and have no idea why it is good for me to hear that, especially now. There is virtually nothing I can do to help and nothing good on that (watch news will give me anxiety) IMHO is a good idea to ignore the news, especially during the biggest global pandemic in a century

<comment><USER29> For one thing if you are aware of how your national or local government have responded to the crisis you can vote accordingly the next time elections come up. This may or may not affect you personally, depending on if you do or _can_ vote, but it'll definitely be a factor in many elections across the globe.

Additionally if you were paying attention you might have started taking precautions earlier - getting set up for home-office, ensuring you had supplies (obviously I don't mean panic buying 50kg of pasta, but at least a sensible supply of the essentials to see you through a small period of quarantine) and postponed or cancelled trips into affected areas.

In my case if I was a little more informed and a little less flippant I would have not travelled to Austria for a skiing trip when I did. I thankfully isolated myself for 2 weeks when I came back (which I learned from the news was required by law for those returning from Austria). Plus I learned by the news that losing sense of smell and taste was a likely indicator of Covid-19. I got tested and discovered I was positive. Had I not learned this my girlfriend (who had moved out during my 2 week post-trip quarantine) would have returned and I might have infected her, and I might have been less careful in my apartment building and infected my elderly neighbours.

I actually made my decision to go ahead with my Austria trip before ANY European country entered lockdown, including Italy. Official guidance was that travel was fine, even to many parts of Italy. Had I been paying more attention to the news, I _might_ have been more skeptical (I am not sure about this, though).

Yes the news can be overwhelming, you _certainly_ shouldn't binge it and if you're easily spooked you should maybe take it in small doses otherwise you'll get yourself all worked up for nothing. But burying your head in the sand completely is perhaps too far in the other direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So you are saying, it would be possible to block news on the latest trump thing that happened?

Its great to have a laugh but it gets old fast.

Would never block Covid-19 myself, but then again i think the media in the Netherlands are quite informative and value quality content above quantity.</comment>


Hand dryers vs. paper towels: the dirty fight for the right to dry your hands - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/25/hand-dryers-paper-towels-hygiene-dyson-airblade <comment><USER2> Personally, I dislike air driers enough that I'd often rather dry my hands on my clothes than use one. There's something about the physical act of drying your hands on cloth that the air blowing devices are missing.

I prefer the reusable cloth towel rolls over paper towels though; I wonder why they're not basically everywhere.

<comment><USER3> Because most people do a terrible job washing and so they'd cover the roller towel in germs they didn't actually clean off

<comment><USER4> I watched a hippy at a shop slowly loose the battle for environmentally responsible hand wiping. They replaced the brown paper towels with nice white cotton towels which became filthy within a day or two. And then tried to goad/shame people into washing their hands 'properly'

Also when I was a kid roller towels were common and totally disgusting 100% of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just shake my hands for a bit and walk out of the restroom. Only takes about three minutes to fully dry.

</comment><comment><USER6> jeans</comment>


IRS: Review of the System Failure That Led to the Tax Day Outage [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2018reports/201820065fr.pdf <comment><USER2> No matter how bad you feel about your own career, just read this and be thankful that you don't have to sit in on a monthly meeting between the IRS, IBM, and _Unisys_ (unless you do, in which case, despair).

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't a post-mortem, it's a CYA report.

A monthly standing meeting as a result of failure to communicate? Even if they had implemented the recommended procedure prior to the failure, this wouldn't have mattered one bit: "ensure that decisions not to install microcode bundle updates are documented and approved." That's not a fix. It wouldn't have affected the impending decision favorably, just made it documented and rubber- stamped.

The approvals aren't done by a person with any technical knowledge, it's a standard-issue bureaucrat. Literally, "authorizing official" and "responsible directors" spelled out in the PDF consist of an actuary with an MBA and BA in economics, a single graduate in "Sceince" from '77 whose resume is littered with leadership platitudes and zero indication of hands-on work in technology, two-three underwriters, and the usual coterie of HR, procurement, inclusion professionals.

This is how you get gridlocked bureaucracy and why the Federal retirement system is literally run out of a Pennsylvania cave.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkho...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole- of-bureaucracy/)

<comment><USER4> > Even if they had implemented the recommended procedure prior to the failure, > this wouldn't have mattered one bit: "ensure that decisions not to install > microcode bundle updates are documented and approved." That's not a fix. It > wouldn't have affected the impending decision favorably, just made it > documented and rubber-stamped.

I got the impression that it was more that the goal is a more in-depth discussion of the technical aspects of the updates and the risks associated with doing and not doing the update. "Formalize the monthly microcode bundle meetings with IBM and Unisys to include documenting meeting participants, detailed meeting minutes, and discussions of risks identified in the release notes for the current microcode updates."

I'm not disagreeing with you about this being a CYA report, but at the same time, to me this feels like a problem with no solid solution. The only thing I would venture to say would have helped, based solely on the report, would have been notification of the issues the other IBM customer had in January to customers who had not upgraded; at the very least to disseminate what the condition looks like and the monitoring script much sooner.

<comment><USER3> Just to distill that statement into specifics, the "goal" as you see it literally says (1) they had no written record before, and now they will and (2) two other vendors did the actual work. There's nothing technical about it but it implies intent behind the recommendations.

IMO, that statement alone does illuminate a "solid solution", which is to reduce vendoring out some of these critical functions and gradually staff leadership with a mix of people who have significant hands-on experience with technology. Or more shortly, "care for properly."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In June 2017, International Business Machines (IBM) initially discovered the firmware bug ... and developed a fix, made publicly available in a November 2017 microcode bundle. In December 2017, the IRS agreed with the contractor recommendation to remain on the older microcode bundle for the 2018 Filing Season because it was considered more stable... On Tax Day, April 17, 2018, the IRS experienced a storage outage due to a firmware bug on one of the IRS's high-availability storage arrays. Because of the outage, 59 tax processing systems, including the Modernized e-File (MeF) system, were unavailable for approximately 11 hours between 2:57 a.m. and 1:40 p.m.4"

<comment><USER6> "By early afternoon on April 17, 2018, the contractors had determined that the root cause of the Tax Day outage was a cache overflow issue causing repeated warmstarts and had deployed a preventive script on the storage device that will monitor and correct the issue if the condition reoccurs. At 1:40 p.m., all IRS mainframes and databases were fully operational and ready to resume tax processing operations."

overflows... even happen to the best of us.

Props to the IRS for having the processes in place to handle. It took hours, sure, but at least it was ordered and the rest of us can benefit from this

<comment><USER7> Best of us?

<comment><USER8> Anyone can make software with unlimited VC funds and few, if any, requirements and expectations. Not everyone can make software for over 300 million people in a centuries-old bureaucracy.

<comment><USER9> As someone currently working in the nuclear industry, I can comment that the pervasive bureaucratic fog of war adds a level of mental overhead that means you really have to challenge yourself to still get decent thoughts converted to action by the end of the day.

If I leave this industry I feel like my over-exercised skill of juggling this mental overhead will be pretty useful in places where the burden is lower. I'll feel like I have an extra brain just laying around in reserve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't imagine I'd want to be with in miles of the group at Unisys or IBM responsible for supporting the IRS.

"Per the ESS Managed Services contract, Unisys or IBM as the managing contractors who are responsible for the IRS Tier 1 storage environment should have been first to identify the outage and contact the IRS. During this outage, it was the IRS who initially recognized a problem, and the IRS had to reach out and notify its contractors to prompt action on remediation. The contractors did not uphold their contractual agreement."

It seems like it comes down to a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't decision to install (potentially?) major upgrades as soon as they come out, or wait to see if early adopters have any issues.

While knowledge of the issue from January for another IBM client would have changed things, I'm not sufficiently familiar with if issues like this are routinely spread among the install base.

It sounds like the presentation of the firmware upgrade had about as much information as change logs (unfortunately) normally do: Fixed bugs. Performance enhancements. &C with no further detail. Details would have perhaps aided in identifying the issue more quickly once it began happening, but I'm not sure I believe it would have changed the initial decision unless it was something whose trigger was inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER10> Call me sick, but I really love reading post-mortem reports I wasn't involved with. I feel like you can learn so much from other people's pain.

...it's almost like watching the TV show Jackass

<comment><USER11> "Hi, I'm Jeff Bezos, and this is 'Prime Day Cascade Failures in Sable'!"

<comment> murph-almighty "Hi, I'm Equifax, and this is 'Enabling mass-scale identity theft!'"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So spelling out IBM as International Business Machines I'm pretty sure is outdated and incorrect. Makes me think that the IRS is some sort of monolithic technology backwater...

<comment><USER13> According to Wikipedia [1], the company's formal name is still International Business Machines Corporation.

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

<comment><USER12> I stand corrected.</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung's Galaxy Fold Smartphone Release Delayed - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsungs-galaxy-fold-smartphone-release-delayed-11555941705 <comment><USER2> I was honestly hoping they would keep the release date to see just how widespread the issues would be. The screen layer being taken off is one thing, but the issues with little dust particles getting under the screen was what interested me. The next device should be tested by throwing it in a bucket of sand. My iPhone would get dirty but i doubt it would break.</comment>


Turkey threatens to expel 100,000 Armenians - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8572934.stm

<comment><USER2> Ha ha ha! Displace much, Turkey?

"Serdar Argic" was just a symptom of a much larger and weirder disease. Also: 1915 was a genocide! Everyone knows it, but only Turkey's strategic location next to Russia keeps the USA from blathering on about it. Which speaks just as poorly to the USA's morality, as it does to Turkey's.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is the saying that those who do not remember are doomed to repeat, this takes it to an extra step or two.</comment></comment>


Hand Signals in NYC fine dining - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/02/opinion/sunday/20111002_Schott_Sign_Dining.html

<comment><USER2> While discrete hand signals may not mean much to a middle of the road dining establishment you can bet that the people who implement these protocols do so because they are effective.

They essentially communicate a level of professional behavior when working around their patrons. Small things like this are what distinguishes an apprentice from an artisan.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I've noticed this type of signaling often in the hospitality industry. I'd compare it to a DSL with which a leader can communicate unobtrusively with those they lead. In certain cases it takes more time and effort to communicate information or instructions verbally, and it's more noticeable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I was a teenager, I delivered furniture with my dad, who was a furniture refinisher. He used to pride himself on being able to deliver furniture without ever saying a word between himself and his delivery partner, and trained me to do the same. The reason, he said, was that it shows a level of professionalism to be able to competently make the delivery, navigate the halls without scratching anything, set everything up, and never talk at all. Certainly it made the job more fun to do.</comment>


Show HN: IronDB – a resilient key-value store for the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gruns/irondb <comment><USER3> > When a value is retrieved via its key, IronDB... > Looks up that key in > every store. > Counts each unique, returned value. > Determines the most > commonly returned value as the 'correct' value. > Returns this most common > correct value > Then IronDB self heals: if any store(s) returned a value > different than the determined correct value, or no value at all, the correct > value is rewritten to that store. In this way, consensus, reliability, and > redundancy is maintained.

I'm not sure any of these properties are ensured the way anyone would want. Why do this? What are the failure modes this protects against? If only one of the backing stores is active when a result is written, and then the others later become active with no data, is blank data returned for the prior result? It seems like recording timestamps would fix this problem nicely on a single system and make this thing overall quite reliable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cookies are frequently cleared by users, and the other datastores -- IndexedDB, LocalStorage, and SessionStorage -- can be unceremoniously purged by the browser under storage pressure.

See my other comment, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297177)

I'll explicate this in the documentation. Thank you for your feedback, bazizbaziz.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the response! FWIW I'm overall really interested in this, as I maintain an application that uses localStorage to keep very important data while the app is offline until it can be uploaded.

I recently tested localForage [0] to see if it could be more reliable and get around storage limitations of localStorage. Unfortunately, LocalForage has a very annoying problem where it picks a _single_ storage backend to use, but the one it chooses can switch on page reloads (yes, even on the same device/browser.) and this switching causes data loss as keys stored in the other backends are unaccessible. I'm very interested to see if IronDB can help here! Thanks for working on this.

[0] [https://github.com/localForage/localForage](https://github.com/localForage/localForage)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonderful.

Don't hesitate to let me know if there's anything else I can help with, bazizbaziz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Confused. Why would you name your K/V database irondb when there is already a time-series database called exactly that?

Think this is their site: [https://www.irondb.io](https://www.irondb.io)

<comment><USER5> Yup, I was wondering how the hell a timeseries database would run in the browser.

Nope, this is just syntactic sugar on top of calling (up to) 4 JavaScript functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe this is useful tool, but several things strike as weird to me:

\- save all values everywhere: why not select the one that would last the longest (that people delete least often)? Or maybe two, if you want a cookie but also want to survive over "delete all cookies". But then again, if a user wants to delete cookies then you really shouldn't try to keep it.

\- "Data is stored resiliently but can also be voluntarily purged if the user designedly clears cookies and application storage." So you delete data when the user wants to delete data. Which database doesn't have this feature?

\- doesn't use Flash, Silverlight, or Java -- which do?

\- "healing" is usually used in the context of distributed computing, but here it means that it gets around user wanting to delete stuff from it's browser, but perhaps isn't in-the-know enough to delete everything but just the cookies.

No offence to the author but all this sound malicious. Perhaps this is why evercookie isn't maintained?

<comment><AUTHOR> > save all values everywhere: why not select the one that would last the > longest (that people delete least often)?

For improved resiliency.

You can also configure IronDB to only use any two datastores of your choice, if you so desire: IronStorage's constructor takes an Array of storage implementations of your choice. See [https://github.com/gruns/irondb#api](https://github.com/gruns/irondb#api).

> So you delete data when the user wants to delete data. Which database > doesn't have this feature?

A database where the data therein can be deleted without warning. Browsers unceremoniously delete IndexedDB, LocalStorage, and SessionStorage under storage pressure. See [https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant- and-o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant-and- offline/web-storage/offline-for-pwa#how_does_cache_eviction_work)

> doesn't use Flash, Silverlight, or Java -- which do?

Evercookie, a similar library, uses Flash, Silverlight, and/or Java.

See [https://github.com/samyk/evercookie](https://github.com/samyk/evercookie).

> No offence to the author but all this sound malicious. Perhaps this is why > evercookie isn't maintained?

No offense taken.

Thank you for your feedback, kreetx. Don't hesitate to let me know if I can answer any other questions, or if there's anything else I can do for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not clear to me how this is more privacy-respecting than Evercookies, except that it doesn't use browser extensions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Evercookie's goal is to store data indelibly, regardless of user intention.

IronDB's goal is to store data reliably, e.g. in the face of storage eviction, but not against user intention. If the user clears all browsing data, that willful action is respected.

Thank you for your feedback. I'll clarify this in the docs.

<comment><USER8> Why do we need a library to store data reliably? Aren't browsers API already reliable? Does the LocalStorage API for example sometimes fails to store its data properly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearing cookies is a common user action. Even for relatively non-technical users.

And under storage pressure, browsers evict data stored in IndexedDB, LocalStorage, and/or SessionStorage. See

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant- and-o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant-and- offline/web-storage/offline-for-pwa#how_does_cache_eviction_work)

IronDB is resilient in the face of such events.

Thank you for your feedback. I'll add an explanation about such in the documentation.

<comment><USER9> If anyone could point to an up to date docs around storage eviction in browsers it would be greatly appreciated. It's been a big hit to our team's confidence in the "use the platform" mentality that this is not accurately documented.

<comment><USER10> I remember reading a 5MB limit some place (ages ago) and I'm not able to find the reference at the time.

My team has been assuming that is true (for local,session)Storage and so far haven't been bitten.

Only occasionally have we even gotten close to that size. You can also shove loads of data in the DOM.

Edit: one of the old refs - <USER2>

[https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota- resear...](https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-research/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the point of storing the same data in three distinct storages? What kind of disaster are you trying to avert?

ps: this will back fire real bad when safari and friends add permission prompts for each specific storage that this library fills up in a for loop.

<comment><USER12> The usecase I've seen more recently is that paywall news sites now store the number of page reads in multiple places. You end up having to clear more than just your cookies to 'reset' the read count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What are the differences with localForage (or similar solutions)? The fallback to cookies if no localStorage?

[https://github.com/localForage/localForage](https://github.com/localForage/localForage)

<comment><AUTHOR> localForage only uses a single datastore. E.g. LocalStorage or SessionStorage or IndexedDB. Thus, stored data is lost forever if the browser unceremoniously purges that datastore due to storage pressure.

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant- and-o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant-and- offline/web-storage/offline-for-pwa#how_does_cache_eviction_work)

IronDB redundantly stores data in multiple datastores -- cookies, IndexedDB, LocalStorage, and SessionStorage -- and self-heals if the data in any thereof is deleted or corrupted. For example, stored data is safeguarded in the event the user clears their cookies or IndexedDB is purged due to storage pressure.

tl;dr: IronDB is resilient in the face of data deletion. localForage isn't.

<comment><USER14> It's kind of ridiculous that a library needs to exist to guard against this browser behavior, although I empathize with the browser vendors' argument, which is that browser storage should essentially be used for caching and that browsers should somewhat aggressively defend against disk space consumption that most users don't even know about.

It would be nice to have an in-between where if a user authorized an app to permanently consume up to X amount of disk space the browser would allow it. But pulling off that user interaction well (i.e., getting the user to make an informed decision rather than blindly clicking yes or no) seems quite hard.</comment></comment></comment>


World Population Growth - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/ <comment><USER2> If you ever want to feel really old, go to Population.io [1], enter your date of birth and country (fake it a bit if you wish), and look at how many people in the world are currently younger than you. This is both fascinating and shocking even if you enter the information for any smaller children you know (from the last decade or so).

[1]: [http://population.io](http://population.io)

<comment><USER3> You are expected to live 40.1 years as a citizen of India

Well that is depressing.

<comment><USER4> Not really. You're expected to die in childhood. Survive that, you'll likely live about as long as anybody anywhere else.

<comment><USER5> Close, but not quite. Ie at age 30, the site gives me 53.4 more years in Germany, and 42.1 in India.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing that is a little bit off in the analysis is the statement

"China, India and Africa are (and have been for a long time) the most populous regions in the world"

Actually, according to that data, Africa only overtook Europe in population between 1980 and 1990. I remember when that happened, because I'd always assumed Africa had far more people. They will, but it hasn't been for 'a long time'. It was quite recent really.

<comment><USER7> Until extremely recently Africa has (with the exception of the Nile delta) been very under-populated.

Even today it's regions do not rank amongst the most populated regions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density) (with the exception of the Nile delta)

Historically Africa had very little population growth compared to the tiny population that survived the "out-of-africa" exit.

I would speculate: part of the reasoning for this would be the lack of domesticable livestock, and why that would occur in the place where humans had evolved from simple inefficient sapiens.

<comment><USER8> Scarcity of reliably arable land combined with extreme disease burdens probably have something to do with that.

<comment><USER6> It's actually much more simple. It's just urbanization vs rural. As urbanization increases, population density can increase. Until very recently Africa was mostly rural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Peak population will be a huge paradigm shift for the world economy. For the entire history of the world we have relied on growth, and the main deiver of economic growth has been population growth. No more!

<comment><USER10> Peak population isn't coming in the next few centuries. The 2008 UN data these charts are based on had mistaken data on African growth. African fertility is much higher than expected then and continues not to fall.

The later 2100s in these charts now look to add several more billion and growing, almost all in Africa. Or from Africa; migration from poorer and overcrowded countries means Europe will probably be majority African by 2100 and have several hundred million more than shown in these charts also.

The post-2008 revisions of UN projections are quite sobering about the future and sustainability of humanity. We are not on a path to sustainability. We are cratering full speed toward a potential Great Filter.

<comment><USER11> I really don't think earth is going to be able to support 9 billion people without some sort of dramatic paradigm shift in the way, as a species, we consume things

<comment><USER12> 9 billion is 1.6 billion more people than we have today. What dramatic paradigm shift do we need for the earth to be able to support such a modest increase?

<comment><USER13> It would be a "modest increase" if we had spare carrying capacity. Instead, what we have now is a situation that is going from bad to worse, but since the crisis is unfolding in slow motion, most people do not recognize it as such; after all, most people alive today have either never seen what a good situation looks like, or where too young to grasp the meaning of the changes they observed back then.

The (human) carrying capacity of Earth was estimated to be around 2 billion, which was surpased sometime in the late 1920's. Contrary to other comments here, that does not mean that after you hit population 2,000,000,0001 we all die (we clearly did not). Instead, what it means is that given the technological level we had at that time, we'd consume renewable resourses faster than they can renew themselves, and we'd also produce waste faster than the environment can degrade it. Otherwise, more than 2B people would cause environmental degradation, which would itself reduce the carrying capacity in the long term.

Please note this definition is tied with humans technological level. It is not set in stone, since we have some degree of control over our impact in the environment, and we have the ability to use the same resources in a more efficient way. The big tragedy of 20th century is that this fact was not recognized but for a handful of theorists, and therefore it was not a political and economic goal to explicitly manage the carrying capacity of Earth. As of 2016, the situation is still the same.

By example, we gained a bunch of technologies that allows us to do the same stuff more efficiently. Given explicit economic incentives, we might have... maybe doubled our carrying capacity (CC=4B). Unfortunatelly, because this was not a goal itself, we engaged in a buch of economic practices that negated much of this benefits, so if we are generous these might have been reduced by half (e.g. CC=3B). Also given that population growth was not arrested back in the 1970's, but only slowed down, the carrying capacity has not improved at all (CC=2B).

Currently, environmental degradation is going in overdrive. We have lost a lot of time, and the resources we need to make an orderly transition are already commited to keep the system going. Population will go down, one way or the other. I don't believe in a single sharp die off many apocalyptic thinkers profetize, but adding and extra 1.6B mouths to feed will make the downward tendency of the curve more steeper than it needs to be.

<comment><USER8> A couple of questions about your numbers:

> was estimated to be around 2 billion

By whom? A source would be nice, which is why I generally refrain from using passive tense when stating facts.

> Also given that population growth was not arrested back in the 1970's, but > only slowed down, the carrying capacity has not improved at all

How exactly does population growth affect carrying capacity? If I have a car with 7 seats, its passenger capacity is the same whether I have no passengers or 6 passengers. If population is an intrinsic factor in carrying capacity, then whatever definition of carrying capacity you are using is inadequate.

<comment><USER13> Ok, this are complex questions... but I will try to address them as best as I can.

1\. The guy who first came with the 2 Billion figure in the 1920s was the scientist Raymond Pearl, though the copncept of 'carrying capacity' as we understand it today did not exist. Pearl's work was for the most part statistic/economic; It was Eugine Odum who later picked up that earlier work in the 1950s and applied it to the ecology concept of 'carrying capacity' which was independently developed by the observation of animals in natural environments. You can check the standard form in Odum's textbook "Fundamentals of Ecology".

The problem with the original formulation for Carrying Capacity is that it is assumed to be fixed, because animal behavior is governed mostly by insticts. Humans, even if ultimately subject to the Laws of Nature, can show much wider variations in behavior due to culture, availability of technology and many other factors. According to the wikipedia page, UN has several estimations of current carrying capacity, and they vary widely (From 4 to 11B) depending on each researcher biases and methodology.

I personally assume that the results in the higher end of the spectrum come from cornucopians that fail to take into account the economic and political presures that get in the way of implementing the (theoretically) optimal solutions, and therefore assume that actual carrying capacity is closer to the 4-5B range... but then, it's my own bias speaking there.

2\. Other concept you can take from Odum is that long term carrying capacity can be eroded by organisims that happen to find a short term way to reproduce beyond the current carrying capacity of the ecosystem they belong to. This is what I was talking about in my previous msg, though I admit it sounds a bit convoluted and ranty in retrospective.

If you have a 7 seat car and you usually drive around with 10 or more people on it, (or with merely 5 fraternity bros that usually behave like baboons on meth) someone is eventually going to break one of the seats - probably the copilot one, which happens to be the least robust one. Then, you end up with a 6 seat car, at least for the lenght of the time that it takes you to fix it. And if you do not fix the seat but keep driving around with the same people on board, you are going to break another seat, and another.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the background info, and I think you have a good point about carrying capacity degradation. I don't think "degradation" is a single variable though--it's a trade off current well-being, future well-being, and for a lack of a better word, "nature". We can absolutely provide a high standard of living for 9-11 billion people, but to do so we have to discard our desire to "preserve" the world as it is and actively take control of it to a far greater extent than we do now, i.e. large scale geoengineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In a large part thanks to this guy, who invented a process for extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere - an invention that now feeds half the Earth's human population.

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

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

Cheers, Fritz

<comment><USER15> Radiolab had a great episode on Haber:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve- proble...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve-problem- fritz-haber/)

<comment><USER14> that was a great listen, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This paper [http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_ca...](http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf) by a UN group surveyed studies of the "carrying capacity" of the Earth. The bad news is that the largest number of studies say we are near the bounds of capacity. Worse, many studies say we have overshot sustainable capacity.

But there many studies that claim carrying capacity is much higher than current population, and that the projected 16 billion simultaneous living humans is within capacity.

It seems like whether we have a soft landing at the end of the oil age could dominate any calculation. The ability of renewables to scale up is only just crept past the starting line of a long, but necessarily urgent race. I'm not very enthusiastic about the odds.

</comment><comment><USER17> As population is one of the indicative of productivity (although a weak one), you can see how many big events were driven by population growth. For example,

\- During World War II, US had more people then Germany, France and UK combined. This certainly enabled deployment of massive armies on many front and huge amount of weapon production.

\- Japan's population suddenly started rising and overtook many western countries. Its increased productivity might be the reason why this tiny country felt it can take on the world.

\- India and China are odd balls. India had massive population since very early times compared to European countries.

-Somewhere in 1870, US population crossed a threshold and became the most populated western country.

-Population for 2100 AD is estimated at 10 billion.

</comment><comment><USER18> See also Hans Rosling's TED talk on the subject, [1].

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth/transcript)

</comment><comment><USER19> If there are heritable traits that lead to people having more kids in a developed world environment then at some point evolution will take over and we'll start to see exponential growth again.

<comment><USER10> Yes. The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population with mandatory birth limits or unlimited expansion of land area to extraterrestrial territory.

Otherwise evolution will always exceed its limits and produce a crash. Malthus explained it all mathematically 200 years ago, even before Darwin documented the mechanisms.

<comment><USER20> > The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population > with mandatory birth limits

This is demonstrably not true. Look at Japan and western Europe: declining population. Its a function of economic situation (no need for more than 1-3 children) and female reproductive choice. If we give that to the world, the population problem goes away. The mathematics of population dynamics work for animals, roughly, but the assumptions don't hold for humans because of the changes in behavior.

<comment><USER10> There are people, even in Japan, that want a whole mess of children. That preference is heritable. Each generation has more of these people because they're the ones that reproduce.

Eventually those fertile and natal enthusiasts will dominate the population and exponential growth resumes. The current situation is a temporary response to an external shock, specifically to reliable contraception. But Malthusian conditions will return; Darwinism requires it.

<comment><USER20> I respectfully disagree. Your assumption about the preference being heritable is questionable.

<comment><USER21> Couldn't it not be a gene but a meme that is inherited, instead?

> Each generation has more of these people because they're the ones that > reproduce.

I.e. each generation has more of these people since people who see having children as something positive reproduce and teach these values to their children.

Being a memetic instead of genetic factor would have the advantage that it is easier to "unprogram" it, i.e. by having rules/incentives in the society that discourage reproduction or by education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> With 15% of its population undernourished, India still has a serious hunger problem [http://qz.com/807050/with-15-of-its-population- undernourishe...](http://qz.com/807050/with-15-of-its-population- undernourished-india-still-has-a-serious-hunger-problem/)

</comment><comment><USER23> With the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria I wonder if this projection of exponential growth and then plateau will happen sooner.

<comment><USER19> The population was rising before the first antibiotic was discovered so I'm guessing that it won't make all that much of a difference. In general public sanitation made a much larger difference in the reduction in death by infectious disease since the 19th century than medicine has.

<comment><USER4> And ironically Public Health is the lowest, least respected medical specialization. Doctors practicing that earn like plumbers or construction workers. Yet we all own them our collective health and well-being.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just a note, in the first figure, the annual population growth rate is shown as the percentage of the population size at that time, not as absolute growth rate in number or humans added. Neither is more correct than other, but they are different ways to present things.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting article, but most graphs would be more readable if they would use log scale.

<comment><USER26> Not sure, I think that linear scale is more understood.

My only complaint is that the graph 5 should have been ordered by the population growth rate because as it is now leave a bit distorted general picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> All I can say is, if you want to maintain that standard of living in western democracies, you'd better get used to immigration.

<comment><USER27> Can you elaborate?

I'm pretty in favour of open borders as an immigrant myself but that statement could do with some supporting evidence.

<comment><USER28> It's not so much a question of evidence as basic math.

Imagine a society with 100 people. A working adult can create 50 widgets per year, and there's 15 kids and 5 retirees. The economy produce 80 * 50 = 4000 widgets per year, which gives a per capita income of 40 widgets. You can have whatever tax, welfare, or income redistribution policies you like, but there's only 4000 widgets to go around.

Great. Now let's say 5 new kids are born, the 15 existing kids become adults, 30 adults retire, and the 5 existing retirees die. Bonus: we got 3% better at making widgets, so a working adult makes 51.5 widgets. We now have 100 people, 5 kids, 30 retirees, and 65 working adults. Total widget production = 65 * 51.5 = 3,347.5 widgets per year, or a per capita income of ~33.5 widgets. Again, policies can change the distribution, but not the total number.

What we're seeing is that if an aging workforce lowers the overall workforce participation rate, _as a society_ , we get poorer. If productivity increases, _as a society_ we get richer. It's just a question of which change is larger, and in the US (and Europe, and much of Asia) the answer is the aging workforce. The demographics are clear and brutal.

The most critical metric is the ratio of current workers to retirees; that number is climbing and is going to continue without a policy change that somehow reduces the number of retirees, or increases the numbers of workers. Large scale skilled immigration _might_ do the latter, but failing that, we're basically out of ideas.

This article spells it out fairly nicely I think: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-10/innovatio...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-10/innovation- falls-and-retirees-pay-the-price)

<comment><USER29> What you're describing is a pyramid scheme. Get more and more new people in to pay for those already there. If immigration falls or stop rising you suddenly have a problem.

A more robust, sustainable solution is to improve productivity via other means (including automation).

<comment><USER30> or just be ok with having less shit.

<comment><USER31> ...or murder the retirees, and take their widgets.

The apparently abhorrent option is still an option, if you get desperate enough.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


At Least 37M People Have Been Displaced by America's War on Terror - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/magazine/displaced-war-on-terror.html <comment><USER2> The degree to which ordinary Americans are isolated from the violence of these conflicts is mind-boggling. The notable absence of car-bombs alone is telling how privileged we are to be able to lead our lives without fear of getting murked on the way to Starbucks.

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

<comment><USER3> Mass shootings (either, school shootings, shootings in church, shootings in clubs, that vegas shooter, the occasional incel shooter, etc.. etc..), are a form of terrorism, albeit not necessary with political motives.

Most of the world do not experience them either.

<comment><USER4> I can say we have been effectively terrorized by mass shootings when things like this hang in kindergarten classrooms:

[https://i.imgur.com/ztiYy9R.png](https://i.imgur.com/ztiYy9R.png)

<comment><USER2> It's terrible, right?

But, it's important to contextualize it with the level of violence occurring in these countries destabilized as a result of US foreign policy. Much of it makes the violence in the US (as horrific as it is) look like Sesame Street:

"On 9 August 2018, Saudi Arabian expeditionary aircraft bombed a civilian school bus passing through a crowded market in Dahyan, Saada Governorate, Yemen, near the border with Saudi Arabia. At least 40 children were killed, all under 15 years old and most under age 10."

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

"MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Four attacks across Afghanistan on Saturday night and Sunday killed at least 26 government security officers, while two schools were also set ablaze, according to Afghan officials."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/world/asia/afghanistan- at...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/world/asia/afghanistan-attacks- schools.html)

"BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with explosives on the playground of an elementary school in northern Iraq on Sunday morning, killing 13 children and the headmaster, the police said. Shortly afterward, another suicide truck bomb struck a police station in the same village, killing three officers."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/world/middleeast/deadly-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/world/middleeast/deadly- bombing-at-elementary-school-playground-in-iraq.html)

"HELMAND, Afghanistan/KABUL (Reuters) - At least 40 civilians attending a wedding party were killed by explosions and gunfire during a raid by U.S.-backed Afghan government forces on a nearby Islamist militant hideout, officials in Helmand province said on Monday."

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack/at- lea...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack/at- least-35-people-at-wedding-party-killed-during-nearby-afghan-army-raid- idUSKBN1W80MI)

This stuff just goes on...and on...and on...

But, compare it with the death tolls from school shootings in the United States within the last 20 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll)

Consider that our foreign policy can have the effect on others that school shooters have on our own children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "War on Terror" is newspeak, it's well known that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 nor had they WMD as claimed to invade them.

<comment><USER6> You conveniently forgot about 5000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs that US troops found in Iraq.

<comment><USER7> Oh you mean the caches of weapons sold to Iraq by the US that had been buried for decades?

As opposed to the rationale for the invasion which was Iraq building stockpiles of WMD from their own factories?

Or are you talking about a different cache of chemical weapons?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems to imply unfounded causality placing the blame at the feet of America. If ISIS wasn't fought then there would have been millions of people displaced all the same. There has been a decades long ongoing civil war in Somalia. There's nothing which suggests that things would be peaches and roses in Somalia if only the US hadn't been fighting Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda there. If anything there could have been greater displacement of people fleeing the more successful and bolder Islamist forces.

<comment><USER9> The creation of ISIS is a direct and predicted result of the catastrophic US policy in the Middle East. The conditions for ISIS to exist were not there before US involvement, and wouldn't have arisen. Al Qaeda themselves likely wouldn't have been an issue if it was not for US meddling in the Middle East.

<comment><USER8> That's just not true. It's precursor, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, predates the Iraq war. It is true that the downfall of Saddam gave them opportunity, you can't definitively say similar opportunity wouldn't have come about in an Arab spring uprising just as there was in Syria. Islamist and Jihadists groups are all throughout the region and sub Saharan Africa. To claim that these are just American reactionaries is a self centered western view.

<comment><USER9> It's precursor would never have been able to pose any challenge to the Syrian military if it wasn't for the weapons the US and it's allies pumped into them.

The Syrian Army would still have been able to destroy the Jihadists if it wasn't for the US waging war against the Syrian Army, by the way of airstrikes and missile strikes.

I can definitively say that Iraq would not have collapsed into a failed state if Saddam had been deposed organically. Hell, if it wasn't for the occupation of Iraq by the US up to and including this very day its possible the Iraqi state would have been able to rebuild itself, one way or another.

That being said, a large amount of terrorist groups in the Middle East find the roots even earlier, in the US support of jihadis against the Soviets.

And wouldn't you know it! The founder of Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, was financed and trained in order to go fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. Financed by who exactly? By Bin Laden, of course. Which himself got his money and material for who? Wouldn't you believe it, it's the old red white and blue again.

<comment><USER8> Your story is nonfactual. The first US airstrikes in Syria were in 2014[1], the first US airstrikes against the Syria Government were in 2017[2]. Both long after the Syrian Armed forces had lost control of the situation.

The mass defection of Syrian Army soldiers and officers to the Free Syrian Army guaranteed that the conflict was going to a bloody mess with arms falling into hands of all parties, long before the US started supplying arms. And no, you can't for certain say that Iraq would have fared better, as Iran would have fueled Shia sectarianism all the same in Iraq as it did post US invasion. Iran in fact was Sadam's greatest concern before his WMD bluff backfired.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American- led_intervention_in_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American- led_intervention_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_attacks_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_attacks_on_Syria_during_the_Syrian_Civil_War)

<comment><USER9> >Your story is nonfactual. The first US airstrikes in Syria were in 2014[1], the first US airstrikes against the Syria Government were in 2017[2]. Both long after the Syrian Armed forces had lost control of the situation.

Yes, and that has contributed to make the ISIS mess even worse. In that way the US is responisble for that.

>The mass defection of Syrian Army soldiers and officers to the Free Syrian Army guaranteed that the conflict was going to a bloody mess with arms falling into hands of all parties, long before the US started supplying arms.

The Free Syrian Army, which was also incidentally funded and armed by the US.

>And no, you can't for certain say that Iraq would have fared better, as Iran would have fueled Shia sectarianism all the same in Iraq as it did post US invasion. Iran in fact was Sadam's greatest concern before his WMD bluff backfired.

In which case either he would have been overthrown or the country would have fragmented. In both cases, the state or states would have been able to crush ISIS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's why a foreign policy should be non-interventionist (aka isolationist). In this case Trump's America first or Ron Paul's call to end foreign wars would have helped.

Is Trump the only president since the 90's who hasn't started new wars?

</comment><comment><USER11> > While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these > countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing > role in these conflicts.

This makes the scary-headline conclusion pretty worthless.

<comment><USER9> It really isn't. US actions made it possible for the problem to become what it is. If it wasn't for US involvement Iraq would have been a strong state and would have destroyed any force like ISIS, Al Qaeda wouldn't be much more than a reading group, Syria would be peaceful, Libya would still exist, and so on. It can be true that you have had a strong contributing role and that it wouldn't have happened if you weren't there - that's just how multicausal events works.

<comment><USER11> That's all awfully speculative, especially the part about Al Qaeda being just a reading group.

<comment><USER9> And yet, it turns out that every single major terrorist group has had the US implicate in their origin and rise. Isn't it funny how that turns out?

<comment><USER11> "Implicated" as in they hate the US and wouldn't exist without us as their enemy.

<comment><USER9> No, as in were founded due to direct action and were allied with the interests of the US.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Idea Sunday – have an idea you want to see executed? - <AUTHOR>

Do you have an idea you would like to see executed but do not have the time or skills for? Then post it in this thread. <comment><USER2> Yes!

SmartConsent: A way to engineer an end to campus sexual assault. The rape whistle can be improved upon. Even a very simple reengineered "garage door opener" transceiver glued to the upper right hand corner of every bed on campus would do the trick, and would permit young women and men to call for "Consent First Response" on a Red Alert (physical harm) or Code Blue (perceived coercion) whenever they are feeling uncomfortable and need a discreet first responder to come help sort things out.

<comment><USER2> Here's a more recent video presentation from Shanghai that goes into greater depth on the possibility space:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9oi2xcLlDU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9oi2xcLlDU)

You can skip ahead to about 9 minutes 18 seconds to get a sense of the core arguments that build toward the conclusion that we need long-press-activated, always-on, always-available digital rape whistles attached to student beds and student wrists.

Watch the videos for the caveats, disclaimers, and possibilities. If you're interested in starting, just drop me a line at:

firstname.lastname@example.com OR firstname.lastname@example.com

I'll help however I can. Dozens of rapes happened this weekend that I could not help stop with smartconsent alerts.

And to be sure, this is a "free" idea that's public domain, as far as I know. All the videos are released via Creative Commons Universal, and all the wiring and prelim code for this project that I have so far or will build is released with the MIT License. If you form a nonprofit or for-profit company to build out and sell SmartConsent, I assert no proprietary interest. I just want to sleep easier at night knowing that I helped get this project and design thesis into good hands.

<comment><USER2> I've been building a prototype with an Arduino Yun. The code is half- functional at present. The roadmap is very clear. The problem is that I work as a chemistry teacher in 上海, and I can not do this technology justice of my own. You will need to pitch in, Hacker News, to make this a reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Space elevator.

Ok now a non-facetious answer: I'd like something I can install on my computer which will prevent it downloading 100mb updates when I'm tethered instead of on a normal network.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something like Youtab ([https://www.youtab.me/](https://www.youtab.me/)) but that prints out the entire music sheet for violin/piano, etc

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9oi2xcLlDU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9oi2xcLlDU)

</comment><comment><USER5> A cheap way to duplicate car keys/fobs. Car companies charge well over $300 so it seems there would be a huge margin.

<comment><USER6> I recently bought a chipped key and key fob for my '07 Toyota and programmed them myself ($29). I had the local hardware store cut the key for $5, which made the total cost $34. The dealership wanted $50 to program both of them. So, worst case for me was $84 if I needed dealer to program.

Edit to add: Have you checked for your make and model on Amazon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A way to share ideas without having to worry about someone stealing it and not giving me credit.

</comment><comment><USER8> I want to read distinct words from paper using android phone camera</comment>


The pitch deck that helped us get an $865M valuation - <AUTHOR> https://mixpanel.com/blog/2014/12/18/open-sourcing-our-pitch-deck-that-helped-us-get-our-865m-valuation <comment><USER2> Mixpanel helped Mixpanel get their $865M valuation. Mixpanel is solving a huge problem with a bunch of software, gobs of data, and smart people. Beyond that, they're pulling in revenue. Regardless of how good, or how brief your deck is at the end of the day your value comes down to your organization, your ability to execute, and your future revenue potential.

I'm not going to say their deck doesn't have value, but I will say it doesn't seem like it has much of one. Maybe that's the point.

<comment><USER3> I still am not sure why to choose Mixpanel over their competitors though. I use Flurry and Google Analytics right now, and (as noted in their slides), they are free. What does Mixpanel bring that they don't?

If you say real time, then I'm not sure the 15 minutes it takes GA to add new data is really worth it. I have 20+ million data points a month but the percentage of my profits that Mixpanel would cost for that is crazy.

Also, Parse is now letting you track analytics real time completely for free in unlimited numbers.

<comment><USER4> I personally use Clicky Analytics which costs me like $12 a month. Gives me real time tracking, Twitter campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff in a no nonsense interface that is easy to use. Of course, I don't need detailed analytics nor need to action particular events like sales, etc (because I just track simple apps and blogs). Google Analytics falls into the same category as Clicky and other basic analytic platforms, they show you the views, but don't really let you dig deep and query it.

I've always seen Mixpanel as a mixture between an analytics tool and a data analytics platform. Seeing the number of visitors is one thing, but being able to action specific events and drill down in the data is where a product like Mixpanel really pulls away from the pack. I like how Mixpanel allows you to query your data like you are querying a MySQL database.

A perfect use-case for something like Mixpanel is online media. Say for example you are Youtube. You don't want to just know what videos the most popular or which videos make the most money, you want to know where the people are coming from and what is driving them to consume specific media. If 15% of your revenue is coming from say the top 5 Youtuber's, you want to know how those Youtube channels are getting their traffic, is it subscriber count or something else? You want to ask questions like, "Of the top five Youtube channels, how many of them received their views from Google Plus shares?"

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound like something that would be worth it for my company, but I can at least appreciate the value to some other companies now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a terrific deck (and thank you guys for open sourcing it, even in redacted form - an excellent compromise that's totally fair.)

Take note of a few things:

* They don't use BS "corporate speak" \-- no synergies of optimizing user solution metric analysis.

* There's no fluff. Just, none. Problem. Solution. How We're Doing. Why We're Better. What We Want To Do. The Landscape.

And it worked. This should be the baseline for every pitch deck.

<comment><USER6> > They don't use BS "corporate speak"

I don't know: "penetrate organisations", "sales enablement", "widen our lead flow to lower cost per acq. long-term". I'm not sure I'd call that plain language.

You might say 'but I know what they all mean, they're not BS', but then a MBA might say that he knows what 'synergies of optimizing user solution metric analysis' and it's not BS to him.

One person's rational and precise technical language is another person's BS corporate speak.

Not saying it's not a good slideshow - sorry! I mean 'deck'!

<comment><USER7> That's not corporate speak - that's very precise language in different domains. For example, anyone in sales knows exactly what that means.

<comment><USER6> Yes that's exactly my point. To some people 'synergies of optimizing user solution metric analysis' sounds like BS, but I'm sure to the people who use it it's actually very precise language with a specific meaning. And to them 'penetrate organisations' probably sounds like corporate BS.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps, but there are _definitely_ people who just stick in a string of verbized/adjectivized nouns in order to sound sophisticated or intelligent. In reality they just sound like they are full of hot air.

It's one of the many reasons people are so put off by salesmen.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree. A lot of technical people miss this. Sales people often (but not always) do this because they don't understand the product - they tend not to have a deep technical background. They compensate by picking up the language - most sales people spend a lot of time in conversations with other customers, product managers and technical people where a range of words are used. It lets them pick up the words, and get a shallow understanding of the concepts.

So most commonly you should just assume the sales guy is confused rather than being a tricky genius!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The slide that helped them get an $865M valuation: [https://image.slidesharecdn.com/v1-classified-141218103325-c...](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/v1-classified-141218103325-conversion- gate01/95/mixpanel-our-pitch-deck-that-we-used-to- raise-65m-7-1024.jpg?cb=1418921966)

<comment><AUTHOR> That slide looked very similar 2, 3, and 4 years ago. It was not enough, many people still passed on us. Raising any amount of capital (in part due to the risk at each stage) is more complex than showing a single graph.

<comment><USER11> Yes but executing at a high pace for 2, 3, or 4 more years dramatically changes one's opinion of the company and its opportunity to reach scale. If you've grown MRR from $10k to $100k, that still doesn't answer the "will it scale" question. If you've grown MRR from $500k to $5M, totally different story. Good work keeping up momentum!

<comment><AUTHOR> pmarca: if you're reading this, feel free to chime in ;)

<comment><USER12> On this topic, Mixpanel at this stage is the magic blend of:

* Track record of consistently impressive revenue growth. * Impressive current level of revenue. * Comprehensive plan and organization in place to continue growing revenue. * Large and expanding market. * And bonus points, doing all that while simultaneously generating vs burning cash!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Happy to answer questions if other founders have any on the topic of fundraising, pitch decks, etc.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for sharing this deck!

I think the most striking thing to me and others in this thread is how austere and matter-of-fact this deck is. Obviously your growth and scale is great, so the numbers speak for themselves.

How has your deck changed from when you were series A, still unproven, and presumably needed the pitch to fill in the gaps in belief that the business hadn't yet filled in reality?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a whole lot. In 2012, the most important thing I realized while making a deck was to state your problem, solution, and vision at the beginning.

Your deck shouldn't tell the whole story. YOU should be telling the story. And your slides should function as bullet points to tell that story.

In 2012, the only addition to our deck was a clearer sense of how we'd use the money with a use of proceeds section. I think that's unnecessary though. I think a "what we plan to do in the next 12-18 months" is more specific.

<comment><USER14> Thanks Suhail. It is reassuring to hear from someone who has clearly had success pitching to VCs. I am big fan of the 10-20-30 Kawasaki rule for slides and yours is pretty close to that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Regardless of the "open source" nomenclature, this is actually pretty helpful. Not a lot of sizzle and flash in these slides, just hard numbers and facts. That can be harder for a younger company, where there is less data to pull from. But the matter-of-fact nature of the deck is key. You should have a vision, but you need to back it up with an actual execution plan and reasons for why that plan is achievable.

<comment><USER16> agreed Tim. A lot of it seems obvious, but it is so easy for young co's to get caught up in wordsmith'ing.

VCs want the clearest picture in the fewest amount of words.

<comment><USER17> Wordsmith'ing becomes a necessary evil for a lot of young co's when you _don 't_ have MixPanel-like numbers. If you don't have metrics, you have to have vision and pedigree and those are extremely hard to articulate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish more companies released their pitch decks like this. Creating a great pitch deck is an artform in itself. Even in redacted form, I think it goes to show you don't need to use technical terms and corporate speak to raise money. Of course having a steady stream of growth also helps as well. Look at that growth graph, impressive.

Seems being concise, using facts and getting to the point quickly is the way to go. I've seen a lot of companies who go as far as creating pitch videos with fancy production, graphics, voiceovers and a soundtrack to try and use fancy visuals to get funding.

Congratulations on the recent funding round. You have a great product Mixpanel.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow awesome exactly what i was looking for , i will use it as guide to create my own pitch deck for my company Pingmergency . [https://medium.com/@ravensley14/pingmergency-ycombinator- win...](https://medium.com/@ravensley14/pingmergency-ycombinator- winter-2015-2432e052845c)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wouldn't it have been nice to hear what they actually said while they went through this deck with potential investors? Something like this would be a better share/embed IMO: [http://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs](http://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs)

</comment><comment><USER20> The only thing I would really read into in that pitch deck is their revenue and growth rate. VCs are not swayed by hip fonts and background colors (as much as we would all like to believe).

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting to see that Marc Beniof funded them. Salesforce has so much inside info on corporate America, I wonder if he's secretly running a hedge fund on the side that just trades on the info it can glean from its users on the state of the US economy.

And will at some time in the future, will MP be able to do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER23> Why do you hide your growth rate when you show your graph?

<comment><USER24> Assuming this is a genuine question, its done to not provide information to competitors. Hence when startups are asked about numbers they reply using % instead of absolute values.

<comment><USER23> The first number is shown, so you can extrapolate what are the others. I'm not talking about absolute values.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mixpanel getting this money at this valuation has more to do with the market conditions than anything else.

<comment><USER26> Completely agree.. Using the word 'bullshit' in a deck and not seeing people flinch is pretty crazy.

This slide deck is very basic.

<comment><USER27> well I disagree...their deck could've been one or two slides with the numbers they are pulling. I almost feel like they knew the rest of the deck wouldn't be as important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let's take a look at their pricing plan

[https://mixpanel.com/pricing/](https://mixpanel.com/pricing/)

I wonder how much of their MRR X 12 months is multiplied by to reach $865M valuation.

        AVG MRR X 12 X ?? = $865,000,000

I can't fathom what the ?? will be, it would have to be significantly crazy. It isn't 1000.

Is it 100 ($8.6m ARR) ? Is it 50 ($17.2m ARR) ? Is it 25 ($34.4m ARR) ?

What is the average valuation multiple for SaaS? Is it higher or lower than other Startup models (consumer, yearly subscription)?

If one was to replicate a similar valuation with their SaaS what would it take?

<comment><USER28> Their average MRR per customer is four or five digits (see slide eight), and they have 2,814 paying customers according to their homepage, so their MRR is at least ~three million, which puts their ARR at at least 36 million. This implies a multiple of 25 at most. (I think 20 is a common multiple for SaaS companies at this stage.)

<comment><USER27> Do you remember groove? They had 14 as a multiple for their SaaS but it could've been at the time they had 70k MRR.

ARR at 36 million....and 25 the multiple...gotcha now I have a solid number to gun for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You can't open source a pitch deck can you? Open sourcing is for source code, hence the name. This would go under a Creative Commons licence.

<comment><USER30> All: we took "open-source" out of the title. Let's stay on topic now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed it on the blog too! :)

<comment><USER31> You could say "we're opening" or "we're opening up." Ambiguity removed, while keeping the original meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Where do I submit a pull request?

</comment><comment><USER33> Let's hope it was the company which got them the valuation, because no Powerpoint presentation is worth $865M

<comment><USER34> The title says 'helped'..

<comment> floody-berry Unless they did a study with various presentations and found this version resulted in higher numbers, I doubt they have any clue how much it 'helped', or if it helped at all short of just being _something_ to toss up with their revenue/business numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I understand that VCs value succinct, but not sure what the value of this is to anyone else. Other than to beat home the point that VCs like succinct.</comment>


Show HN: Movie ratings over time using the Wayback Machine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/abrenaut/mrot <comment><USER2> FYI: IMDb ratings database is public, you just need to download ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.imdb.com/pub/ratings.list.gz file every week.

You can even apply diffs retroactively (I think) to get older ratings:

ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.imdb.com/pub/diffs/

(via [http://www.imdb.com/interfaces](http://www.imdb.com/interfaces))</comment>