The Tragic Death of the Flip - <AUTHOR> http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/the-tragic-death-of-the-flip/ <comment><USER2> There's a second part of the tragedy, too, something that nobody knows. That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet.

That is, when you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you're filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you're seeing, in real time- thousands of people at once.

\---

That's awesome and so sad!

<comment><USER3> FlipLive is kinda awesome, but as you said... _when you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot_... Personally, I cannot think of too many occasions where the average person is: 1)in range of wifi, 2) has something worth sharing with an audience who are available there and then, 3) wouldnt rather use Skype video conferencing so as to get two-way communications. There are a few, but I'm not sure there's enough.

<comment><USER2> More than 40 hours of video uploaded to youtube every second of every day. A good portion of it is people just sitting in their bedroom talking about all the stupid shit they just bought at Target. And if they could record and upload in one easy step, that's a huge market right there.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but they didnt have to spend $200 on a new device to do it - they just used the camera built into their $400 laptop

<comment><USER4> True, or buy a $15 webcam

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article doesn't mention it directly, but after reading the bit about the FlipLive makes this more likely to me: the wrong people in Cisco finally realized what Flip might be able to do. Which is replace Cisco's teleconferencing enterprise business. And doing so even a little bit would probably cost them a pretty penny, so they're dumping it to protect what they see as their "core" business.

<comment><USER3> There was never any risk of v1 of FlipLive cannibalizing the teleconferencing business - it was one-way only - no way for the 'viewers' to send a stream back to the publisher's camera. BTW - I wrote some of web software (the ActionScript) for FlipLive.

<comment><USER6> can you explain some of the thinking behind the flip slide? It was bigger and didn't add much function. Thanks

<comment><USER3> I didnt work on that project. I was a contractor, so pretty much only saw the stuff I worked on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Phil Torrone at Make made a passionate if somewhat optimistic call to Cisco to open source the Flip tech now it's being killed off:

[http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/rip-flip-camera- hey...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/rip-flip-camera-hey-cisco- open-source-the-camera.html)

Although if it was a technology acquisition, as TFA speculates, they're even less likely to do that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't buy companies and kill them. The next time cisco offers to buy a company, the owners may think twice. That is what happened to Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm kind of curious why, if they were profitable as this seems to imply, they wouldn't just spin it off as a subsidiary. If it wasn't profitable, perhaps they tried to sell it and failed.

One of the theories for shutting this down that I've heard is that having consumer electronics companies lumped in with the rest of the company lowers the margins, which is a bad thing in the eyes of Wall Street analysts. Cisco stock price took a huge beating (20%) this past quarter when their margins dropped by a couple percentage points, and I believe they're scrambling to get those numbers back up. Seems they're "reorganizing" Linksys as well, probably to get margins up there as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> If the FlipLive was to debut yesterday, certainly there was inventory to back that up. What kind of lead time does production of that have? How much extra $$ did cisco blow by killing an in production product the day before it launches?

<comment><USER5> The initial reports said "Cisco said the shutdown of Flip will result in restructuring charges of up to $300 million this fiscal year". See [http://www.industryweek.com/articles/cisco_closing_flip_busi...](http://www.industryweek.com/articles/cisco_closing_flip_business_24364.aspx?SectionID=2) for example.

I assume that might include the money to stop production/get rid of inventory they don't want to sell/whatever.

<comment><USER11> There is something very shady about the whole thing. I have worked in video (production) for most of the last decade and the flip was the hottest thing to hit camcorders since the invention of mini-DV. Phones and digicams also do video, but do not compare well for a variety of reasons. Flip hit a certain sweet spot that other products do not, and was poised to continue capitalizing on it.

You pull the plug on a product when you start losing money on it, not because you can see marginal net going to zero several years in the future. I would very much like to know the inside scoop on this one.

<comment><USER12>
        You pull the plug on a product when you start losing
        money on it, not because you can see marginal net going
        to zero several years in the future. I would very much
        like to know the inside scoop on this one.

While this seems logical, it's not true. Many companies have margin targets that their executives are heavily incentivized to meet.

I've personally seen situations where lucrative (50+% margin) sales opportunities were given a no-bid because despite being extremely profitable, it would hurt the executives' bonuses. I've also seen entire product lines dismantled despite substantial revenue (and profit) contributions because they were "hurting the company's operating margin."

Executive compensation is a strange and often stupid beast. It's not at all surprising to me that something like this could happen.

<comment><USER11> Interesting to learn; I had not realized compensation incentives could have such a distorting effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The story of the flip is fascinating. It was launched at the perfect time : camcorders were expensive and difficult to use. Hardware was cheap, youtube was growing like crazy and here came the flip that took advantage of all these trends to create a product that became a super hit. But it had a short shelf life with the launch of the iphone 3gs and other smart phones that could essentially do the same thing. To me the flip is a great example of a company that identified a profitable niche took advantage of industry trends and made max $$ in the few years that it was around. Too bad, cisco you were too late to the party.

</comment><comment><USER14> As someone who has had to do a lot of live streaming to the internet via webcams/camera setups the FlipLive sounds amazing. If it was really as user friendly as the traditional Flip camera (which was a great product and I'm sorry to see go) it would have gained at the very least a sizable niche following, especially with the burgeoning lifestream movement. Its a pity that this is not going to be released, but theres a great startup opportunity here for anyone looking for one.

<comment><USER15> Are you a "cam girl"?

<comment><USER14> haha rereading my post I guess that would be my first thought too - I actually do some recording of events for my university. And its a real bitch trying to get the equipment functioning, a plug and play like option would be ideal

<comment><USER15> Then it was worth the demerits! Thanks for having a sense of humor, unlike those bluenose downvoters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what the practical consequences are for the decision maker(s) who wasted $650M corporate funds buying then dumping Flip?

<comment><USER17> I think they'll get a fat $2M bonus this year, for their strategic insight that Flip technology should be incorporated in Cisco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article starts on a false premise:

"The masses still have regular cellphones that don't capture video, let alone hi-def video"

I happen to live in South America, and.. surprise, surprise.. everybody (that wants one) has a cell phones with video capabilities. They're beyond crappy, sure.

The 2nd most sold cell phone in Argentina and Uruguay by mid-2010 was the Nokia 5130, and it does video (Video recording at up to 176 x 144 pixels and up to 15 fps):

<http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_5130_xpressmusic-2569.php>

The year before, the 2nd biggest seller was the Nokia 5200, which also does video (it sold millions of units here, was the most desired by teenagers, and even I had one :) ).

There are also millions (in units sold) of Chinese knock-offs you in the 1st World don't know exist, with video capabilities, built in TV tuner, dual SIM and more. I've seen them all across South America, from Peru to Paraguay to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

The top seller was the Nokia 1208, just because it's the cheapest and simplest, but most of the other entries also do video (The Sony Ericsson W205 A, Samsung GT E2120, LG KP 570 and the other Nokias). No iPhone in the top 10 sellers.

The second point they make is I suspect wrong as well: "They're the people who buy Flip camcorders". I had never seen or heard about Flip before its death.

Main source (Spanish):

[http://fortunaweb.com.ar/cuales-son-los-10-telefonos- celular...](http://fortunaweb.com.ar/cuales-son-los-10-telefonos-celulares- mas-vendidos-en-2010/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Tragic, but necessary, we all knew where they were heading:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6hB9NTYD0E&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6hB9NTYD0E&feature=player_detailpage#t=186s)

</comment><comment><USER20> The only reason Cisco bought Flip was because in theory it promised to push more bytes through the pipes and hence the routers. I don't believe the product itself had a noticeable impact on the pipes, i.e. the smartphones are not a direct competitor to Flip by they push more junk through the pipes. So in this regard the Flip became a useless distraction for Cisco.

Still why kill it? May be 550 workers are too much of the burden. This is criminal.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why do they kill this if it is profitable? Why not just give it to the employees?

</comment><comment><USER22> Yahoo:Delicious = Cisco:Flip ?

<comment><USER19> Yahoo:Delicious::Cisco:Flip

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another sad story of a dinosaur trying to buy the innovation it couldn't build itself, and failing miserably in the end.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't see what's so tragic about the death of a consumer device that don't really sell.

<comment><USER25> Do you also think we'd be better off without the many van Gogh paintings that didn't sell during his lifetime?

<comment><USER26> Terrible argument - Flip cameras aren't suddenly going to become valuable in 200 years. Or 50. Or 2.

<comment><USER25> I'm not trying to argue, I was simply trying to discover how much he thought popularity matters. If he figured van Gogh was unimportant, it'd be pointless to try to convince him that sometimes having companies doing interesting things is worthwhile.

(On another note, is Mac OS 9 valuable now? Will it become more valuable eventually? Should Apple just have closed shop since they had a small marketshare and a product that isn't valuable now? Could the lessons learned from the Newton have possibly been applied to make some other kind of consumer device?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> American "free enterprise" at work. Why some people worship this nonsense is beyond me.</comment>


New findings suggest laws of nature 'downright weird,' and not constant - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-04-laws-nature-downright-weird-constant.html <comment><USER2> Many objects we see have a dipole and spin. Is it reasonable to see the universe also have a dipole and perhaps spin as well? I would seek to find how this may simplify some physical models. References to this are appreciated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.</comment>


Ask HN: Why not PHP posts in HN? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Honestly? Because PHP sucks. Part of it is tribal loyalty - not wanting to be seen as the sort of person who would write PHP; I suspect more people know it than admit as much here. But mostly it really is a really bad language.

<comment><USER3> please explain why PHP sucks

I am a php developer for years and truthfully, I don't find it sucky

<comment><USER4> PHP = your Blub[1]. You don't find it "sucky" because you haven't used something better. Or, if you have used something better, you didn't spend enough time to learn how to use it properly.

I'm an unashamed PHP expert. There's a ton of money to make in fixing other people's PHP, and it's often easy work.

That doesn't mean PHP is "good". With discipline, you can write readable, DRY, easy-to-maintain PHP. That doesn't mean the same code wouldn't be _more_ readable and _easier_ to maintain in another language. While PHP has great documentation and is "easy" to write, it has lots of surprises and inconsistencies.

Although IDEs with autocomplete, static analysis, and XDebug support have made PHP much better, its typing is still a problem. When you're writing extremely large systems, you end up with some very sneaky bugs due to PHP's weak typing.

Google "PHP sucks" if you want to read more.

(Note that Python, Ruby, and JavaScript also suck. I'm really excited for the Go/Dart/Scala/Rust/others era where we've built languages that fix the mistakes we discovered while writing huge applications in the last few decades.)

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)</comment></comment></comment>


There are no kernel updates without risks involved - <AUTHOR> http://anantzoid.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/there-are-no-kernel-updates-without-risks-involved/

<comment><USER2> I keep one of these with OpenWRT on it in my laptop bag for those times when I need a wired connection but only have wifi available. Its powered of a usb port and was only $30USD. Its like a little network swiss army knife.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Dap...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=TL-WR703N)</comment>


Vivaldi, Your Next Browser? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/vivaldi-your-next-browser/ <comment><AUTHOR> Having almost exclusively used Opera <= 12 back in the day, Vivaldi really reminds me of those days. The fact that it powerful and (apparently) stable, represents a plus. What I don't know, however, is if it will pick up momentum and become relevant...</comment>


JavaScript spread to the edges and became permanent in the process - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/javascript-edges-permanent-james-duncan.html

<comment><USER2>
        The big change started when Google launched Maps.

Google Maps definitely deserves the credit on this.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why everyone always points to Google Maps. Gmail was launched a full ten months before Google Maps. Granted, it was an invite-only beta, but the participants in this conversation would have been the ones with access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who cares about this stuff, when JavaScript/ECMAScript hasn't even a sane split function. And when will ECMAScript receive for each?

Why hype new stuff when the foundation isn't nice by now?

The only real reason for JavaScript being so popular is that web developers have to learn it.

However, I do admit JavaScript has a lot of potential. Just start on the bottom or you'll at some point have to break everything or live with annoying stuff.

I think OO is fine. If you want more there is Joose: <http://code.google.com/p/joose-js/> ... and other libraries. That way you don't have to care about making everyone happy.

Deliver a good foundation and the community will take care about the rest.

<comment><USER5> Javascript is also popular because it's FUN and FAST. I'm working on a project where I've been doing parsing of HTML in Perl and I'm ripping the guts out to do in an embedded V8 engine - has the added bonus that I'll also be able to deploy the guts to a browser.

Getting up close and personal with Javascript changed how I programmed in other languages. Passing anonymous functions around, abusing map and grep functions (which are easily enough hacked in), and the knowledge that many people will be able to read and understand and contribute to your code...

<comment><USER4> Oh and Node.js!

I'm also coming from Perl and what I always liked is the huge variety of modules on CPAN. JSAN has been around for a while, but only recently both Node.js (npm) and JSAN had a nice growth.

<comment><USER5> I used to run a JSAN mirror back in the day - I had thought it was largely defunct :-/

As a Perl programmer for ~ 14 years, CPAN is what keeps you coming back to Perl over and over and over and over again...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thiel: The majority of the capital I give companies is just going to landlords - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-capital-give-companies-just-going-landlords-134709786.html <comment><USER2> Maybe nitpicking here but Theil is not giving money away. He's investing it as he is expecting a return. He invests it in Silicon Valley companies because there is a concentration of talent and capital. Is this an optimal way to distribute resources when the vast majority of that money will ultimately go to landlords? Probably not, but Thiel is also not running a charity.

<comment> xkcd-sucks A large portion of his funded companies' profits go to investors, and the circle of life is complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have no idea why people still insist on building their startups in SV. As a startup founder, you want to be penny pincher and have maximum runway. Even keeping aside high commercial rents, the people available for hiring need huge salaries + options because they need to pay their bills as well. Why not just go to SV for fund raising and go back as fast as possible?

<comment><USER4> It's my understanding founders sometimes want to go back home while the VCs insist on SV. From the VC side, I wonder if the high burn is almost a plus: they need the founders to need a lot of money so the VCs can scoop up a higher percentage, and they need the founders to feel the monthly burn so they build something fast.

<comment><USER5> From the VC side, it's because they don't want to help build your business, they either want you to be a unicorn (where you absolutely need the top talent that can only be found in SV for exorbitant salaries) or go bankrupt. If you want to build a business with less than a billion dollars of revenue, best to avoid the VCs altogether, they'll just fuck you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Time for land value tax.

<comment><USER7> Texas uses property taxes instead of income tax. This seems to benefit landlords more since they can afford lawyers to argue with appraisal boards to lower the appraised value of their properties and ultimately their tax basis. This is among other loopholes like agriculture exemptions that they use. I'm starting to think an income tax would be preferable.</comment></comment>


EA made fun of Zynga on YouTube. Today Zynga posted a FB ad attacking EA. - <AUTHOR> http://www.lutopia.co/clash-of-the-titans-ea-vs-zynga

<comment><USER2> You know I hate to say this -- but I just can't get excited about either company. Although I guess that's indirect inspiration to make something better...</comment>


How does the coronavirus kill? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes <comment><USER3> Interesting read. My father-in-law died of Covid-19 last week. The thing that got him in the end after a 9 day battle was kidney failure. He had heart problems and diabetes already as underlying conditions.

There's one thing I take away from all of this and that is to eat and live healthy to reduce the things working against you as you get older. Age is bad enough on its own.

<comment><USER4> NYT just has an article about kidney failure being a cause of death for COVID patients:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/kidney-dialysis- co...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/kidney-dialysis- coronavirus.html)

<comment><USER5> wow. How are we supposed to plan for future calamities like this we cannot predict what we are going to need for the next pandemic. Looks like we should overstock everything we could possibly ever need.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cameron Kyle-Sidell is a New York ICU doctor that has been trying to help figure out why treatments aren't working as expected. His videos are highly technical but interesting to watch.

Kyle-Sidell believes it's a diffusion hypoxemia problem, leading to pulmonary edema (which is something you see in high-altitude sickness)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRlvX3VrAQ&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRlvX3VrAQ&feature=youtu.be)

[https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1251259213554335744](https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1251259213554335744)

<comment><USER8> The hypothesis suggested in the science article sounds more plausible - <USER2> patients are truly oxygen deprived, but potentially because of the vascular Nature of the infection, the typical gasping response is not initiated

<comment><USER9> I know nothing about medicine, but is there any way to skip the lungs and give patients oxygenated red blood cells directly?

<comment><USER10> Yes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation)

<comment><USER9> Interesting, thanks. Apparently it's already being used to treat covid-19. But the potential side effects seem to be nasty and the survival rate not great, so I guess it's only really a last resort treatment.

Human bodies are just too damn complex. Even when the problem is clearly identified--a lack of oxygen in the blood--there's no way to just insert more that doesn't cause a hundred new problems :-/ Natural selection seems to be really bad at modular design.

<comment><USER11> > Natural selection seems to be really bad at modular design.

Or the other way around, modular design does not appear to be a requirement for "success.". We like it for the reduction in complexity but that is ultimately a tradeoff.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's successful until it's not. Nature's primary approach to debugging seems to be: you die. We clearly weren't intended to open up the hood and fix things.

<comment><USER12> Biology doesn't care about individuals. It cares about populations. The main mechanism is exponential growth, capable of quickly filling carrying capacity boundaries of arbitrary size. Individual death is a small setback, as another branch of the exponential growth tree takes over shortly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Only one thing is clear about our immune system: it's extremely complex and even after a century of prodding it, we still don't know it well enough to prod it in targeted ways and know what to expect.

Especially, suppressing the immune system is always dicey, since its not just one variable you tune up or down. However, there _is_ a magic bullet of sorts out there, Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG).

IVIG is just concentrated antibodies made from plasma of thousands of donors. Its original use case was to clear out a patients antobodies to suppress any antibody-mediated autoimmune response, but turns out IVIG can have global immunosuppressive effects through other mechanisms as well. Importantly, it's very "benign" \- almost no known side effects, and your general immunity is still left intact. This has led to extensive use of this drug off-label for anything dealing with excessive immune responses.

The more and more I think and look, the more I'm convinced IVIG might help worsening covid patients. Indeed, a case study from China suggests it can be beneficial (3 of 3 very sick patients fully recovered) but of course a proper study is needed (IVIG is quite possibly the worst drug to try and ramp up production). On the other side, a pre-covid trial of IVIG on ARDS patients (already on EMCO) showed no effect, though I personally felt the study was too broad. More studies are also needed, because I'm sure any _new_ IVIG made, since it pools thousands of patients' plasma, is bound to have anti-covid antibodies as well, and this could have some potentially dangerous effects as well (Antibody-Dependent Enhancement). But I'm still cautiously optimistic and am hoping to write to some experts after gathering more data to see what they think.

<comment><USER13> Isn't the original use of IGIV as a supportive therapy for people not producing antibodies (for whichever reason)?

In the case of COVID-19, plasma therapy (which transfers antibodies from a survivor to an infected) is one of the more promising short term mitigations.

<comment><USER8> Yes, that was the original use. But turns out it has other effects as well, one of which is through the increased dosage of a small fraction of antibodies with increased suppresive activity.

You have to be careful with concoctions that have direct antivirus activity though, because it can have a dangerous side effect (ADE). However this is also a very important intervention possibility (probably more important than just IVIG), but it needs to be done in an extremely controlled fashion. But the two approaches are supposed attack in completely opposite angles so I think they should be discussed and tested independently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding the oxygen saturation levels that have been so much in focus the last few days (the usual thresholds for starting intubation might be wrong for Covid-19 patients): is this a metric that is measured directly or is it usually derived from proxies? That's what my debugging instincts are shouting whenever I read something about the oxygen saturation mismatch, it would be easy to get misled of the proxies have never been (noticeably) unreliable before.

<comment><USER15> Pulse oximeters measure the light absorbed by hemoglobin. So that's pretty much a direct measurement, I don't think it could be wrong.

[https://opentextbc.ca/vitalsign/chapter/why-is-pulse- oximetr...](https://opentextbc.ca/vitalsign/chapter/why-is-pulse-oximetry- used/)

<comment><USER14> Couldn't there be a million other things that change light absorption?

<comment><USER16> Not inside a body, no. These aren't the most accurate tests (the big failure mode has nothing to do with the science, it's that the little clamp falls off the finger), but they are _very_ mature technology with well characterized behavior.

Basically everyone who's been under anaesthesia of any kind (even stuff like wisdom teeth removal) for the past 3-4 decades has had one of these on them. We know how they work.

<comment><USER17> I read that despite the simple measurement mechanism ("shine a light through a finger"), the accuracy is generally pretty high (+/\- 2%). This document from the American Thoracic Society does state some corner cases though [1]. Quote:

"How accurate is the pulse oximeter?

The oxygen level from a pulse oximeter is reasonably accurate. Most oximeters give a reading 2% over or 2% under what your saturation would be if obtained by an arterial blood gas. For example, if your oxygen saturation reads 92% on the pulse oximeter, it may be actually anywhere from 90 to 94%. The oximeter reading may be less accurate if a person is wearing nail polish, artificial nails, has cold hands, or has poor circulation."

[1] [https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient- resources/resource...](https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient- resources/resources/pulse-oximetry.pdf)

<comment><USER18> One very important thing to note is that the Oxygen - Hemoglobin dissociation curve has a sigmoidal shape. It is not linear. After a certain point, around 90 %, there is a very sharp drop-off.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen–hemoglobin_dissociati...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen–hemoglobin_dissociation_curve)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a science person nor do I know how a virus kills a human body but this one is for sure something amazing. What we can't see can lead you to an absolute death destroying your whole body, it certainly is quite shocking. It's 2020 and we are still losing so many lives, yet we are still lucky to be alive because of the advancement in medicine and health care.

<comment><USER14> It's a virus that is completely unadapted to the human body, fresh off the boat from whatever animal it evolved on. It's like an early prototype medication: it already has the desired effect (reproduction in a body part that serves as a launch pad for transmission to other hosts), but it's chock- full off side effects. Unfortunately, it is so good at pre-symptomatic transmission that those side effects impose very little selection pressure.

At this point we have an interesting link to the topic of contact tracing apps: if we shift our countermeasures from wholesale isolation to fast, computerized contact tracing that is fast enough to overtake the infectivity/symptom last, it will increase the evolutionary advantage of less damaging strains (asymptomatic cases don't trigger a contacts cascade)

<comment><USER20> If you compare it to MERS/SARS it is actually less harmful (at an individual level) than those. But of course this ends up meaning more harmful at a collective level since it takes a while for people to develop symptoms while still being able to infect other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if there is something in your immune system, maybe genetic or your viral experience, that determines how well your body will cope with this new virus. There are reports of really old people (I read a 103 and 99 year old's stories) who recovered from a bout, yet my niece lost a 30 year old friend.

I guess its like debugging an app you have never seen and the source code is in a language you barely know; everything seems like a clue as to what is going wrong, yet much of what you think it's doing is simply a mystery because you don't understand enough.

Even in 2020 there are mysteries in the human body we simply don't understand yet.

<comment><USER8> This was very true for the H1N1 epidemic but it's not clear something like this is happening with Covid. If anything, the opposite might be happening where prior infection with a related virus makes the current infection much worse.

<comment><USER22> Do you have any sources for that last sentence?

<comment><USER23> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7102551/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7102551/)

<comment><USER22> Thank you, that is super interesting.

I wonder how valid this bit still is:

> the discrepancy between the severity of cases observed in the Hubei province > of China and those occurring elsewhere in the world

I think at this point we've already seen very severe cases in many other countries, no? I don't have proper sources though, just thinking of misc news articles I've read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> please read this report by dr sherif sultan based on consultations with frontline doctors and postmortem examinations. it forms a coherent picture of symptoms and medication trials that we keep hearing about.

[https://www.facebook.com/ProfSherifSultan/posts/319343963736...](https://www.facebook.com/ProfSherifSultan/posts/3193439637368071)

Here is a treatment protocol that is being regularly kept up to date with latest information

[https://www.evms.edu/covid-19/medical_information_resources/](https://www.evms.edu/covid-19/medical_information_resources/)

i fear that well meaning doctors are killing their patients because they don't have updated treatment protocols: even though so much of this information has been released in chinese treatment protocols many weeks ago, i still keep seeing "news" articles with these "new discoveries".

i fear a tragedy of the commons situation where everybody assumes the next guy already knows. who is responsible for keeping treatment protocols updated and propogating this information to doctors? much of this information is readily testable, why are we not hearing either positive or negative feedback to this data?

please help me get this information out to doctors. even if it is not all accurate, they can make a better informed judgement. please help me understand if my understanding of this reality is correct, or how to get more information about this. thank you for your attention.

<comment><USER25> The updated protocol to change Ventilators to ECMO was distributed at April 11, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Latest theory is high correlation with air pollution. NOx and tiny dust particles. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720321215)

This would explain the extraordinary high death rates in Lombardy, Spain, Styria, Wuhan,... compared to other regions with worse ICU situation and more seniors.

<comment><USER25> And esp. Belgium. The highest outlier without proper explanation so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am putting this here to help others. Fry me whateveter. I'm no medical or WHO but I also prepared and knew it was coming week 1 of Jan. I have made many accurate predictions weeks or months ahead this while time so time it for what you paid. It's pulmonary edima 'esque yes, but it's an underlying issue that I think is a big determining factor in who lives and who dies. Lung capacity sure is important BUT the lungs strangle themselves by on over immune system response to fight this aka inflammation. And that's it. Most Americans eat tons of sugar and carbs. They are walking around already in a state of heavy gut inflammation unknowingly. Chrone's and IBS are rampant too. I have seen several people who say the 'normally' struggle with lower immune responses get through it ok. Because the start with a lower inflammation baseline. Others are starting already heavily inflamed due to diets, and then when they get COVID it the lugs over inflame as well causing medicinal issues I don't know the specifics of but that I think can be deadly. Over inflammation has a name and it's not good. It can cause all sorts of other issues and being over inflamed in your lungs well we know what happens then. Fast. Do a prolonged fast for a few days. Only black coffee and water. This will create new white blood cells. This will eliminate gut inflammation. It will reset your old immune system with a healthy new one. You go 72hrs you will also get Autophogy and new stem cells. I can go on but if my post Sparks your interest, and you might agree what do you have to lose? A few days without food I do it all the time. If I'm wrong why not try and save your life by giving you a heads start with no already in state inflammation? It will be healthy for you either way. Also look at the curves and national diets.

<comment><USER27> Proposing intermittent fasting as a cure for COVID-19 with no clinical research is dubious. This is the same as any other quack medicine.

Ironically carb consumption is important to maintain immune function in very active individuals.

<comment><USER28> The poster did not claim it was a "cure". The way I read it was that if you're gut biome is dysfunctional because you eat too much, that is a factor in the immune response to SARS-CoV-2. That is actually possible. Resetting your gut biome with a 72 hour fast is known to provide significant health benefits. Clearly the poster is not a medical professional and states that fact. But everything stated is reasonable advice. It's certainly not "quack medicine".

<comment><USER29> That's an interesting idea. Could you point me at any papers on the subject?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/publishers-sue-internet-archive-over-massive-digital-lending-program/ <comment><USER2> > In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet > Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a > program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an > unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even > if IA only owned one physical copy.

This was a complete overreach by IA and they are paying the price. If you lend out digital versions all of which are backed by a physical copy, it is hard to argue that the publisher is being harmed. However, if you loan out unlimited digital versions of a single copy, that is much harder to justify, and that provided the the opening the publishers needed for a lawsuit.

I love what the IA has done, but i think they unnecessarily stepped into a minefield for not that much benefit. Even Google with all its resources has not directly challenged the publishers.

<comment><USER3> I still don't understand why they thought they would get away with it.

Did they think they could draw a confrontation with the publishers and somehow come out victorious? Or that the publishers and their legal teams would voluntarily look the other way?

I still can't tell what their plan was. Or what point they were trying to make. Or how they expected to handle the legal challenge.

It's a shame that they tied this to the Internet Archive. I seriously doubt the people who donated to the IA wanted their funds to be used on this.

<comment><USER4> I think they were considering being charitable by taking into account people's feelings and situations during a trans-national emergency.

I myself borrowed an old book (which I already owned, but I wanted to compare differences among versions), turned a few pages, but then got distracted and didn't open it again (the virtual loan expired).

I think it's a shame that people are trying to crucify an exemplary organization for doing a charitable act (no good deed goes unpunished, and all that).

And, to be quite honest... Most of the books are at least 20 years old... So it's not like they were distributing best sellers that were actively being sold.

I think it's a situation where publishers "are being forced" to be litigious, because they have an obligation to their shareholders to always take the option that yields more money; the Internet Archive just happened to leave themselves open to being a target, so they _have_ to do it.

This reminds me a bit of Commander Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity, and if I recall correctly, that David Bowie didn't own the rights to his own song and thus was unable to approve or deny an extension for Cmdr Hadfield's video on YouTube (and the controversy of the takedown).

<comment><USER5> > _they have an obligation to their shareholders to always take the option > that yields more money_

This is not true, and I wish people would stop repeating it like gospel.

<comment><USER6> They'll probably stop doing it when it stops seeming to be the case.

<comment><USER7> Since this comes up a lot, I did some digging.

The actual standard, from In Re Walt Disney, is that business decisions aren't reviewable unless "the exchange was so one-sided that no business person of ordinary, sound judgment could conclude that the corporation has received adequate consideration".

In, Shlensky v. Wrigley, the Chicago Cubs were sued for refusing to install lighting for nighttime games: their president believed baseball was best as "a daytime sport." This is absurdly nebulous (and kind of bizarre), but the Cubs nevertheless won. That decision was based on Davis v. Louisville Gas and Electric Co, which says "the directors are chosen to pass upon such questions and their judgment unless shown to be tainted with fraud is accepted as final. The judgment the directors of the corporation enjoys the benefit of a presumption that it was formed in good faith, and was designed to promote the best interests of the corporation they serve."

While you _can_ get sued for nearly anything, the legal standard is basically "Did you egregiously rip off the company so that you could make money?", not "Could you have squeezed ten cents more out of the public?"

<comment><USER8> When I've herd this concept invoked the source has generally been attributed to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.[1] That ruling seems to cut in either direction depending on the analysis. But in the end the most compelling argument seems to be lack of enforceability...

      the rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is
      virtually impossible to enforce as a practical matter. The
      rule is aspirational, except in odd cases. As long as
      corporate directors and CEOs claim to be maximizing profits
      for shareholders, they will be taken at their word, because
      it is impossible to refute these corporate officials'
      self-serving assertions about their motives.

      — Jonathan Macey

While the rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is not an enforceable law, it is a standard of conduct for officers and directors of a company.

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

<comment><USER7> Macey's whole article develops that idea a bit more (here: [https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/](https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/)).

Ford's response to the Dodge Brothers was:

       My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the
       benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
       number, to help them build up their lives and their homes.

and Macey says this was precisely the right amount to torpedo his case. If he had said less ("we're expanding"), he would have been fine. Had he said more and provided even a shred of a business justification (goodwill, better work from talented workers, expanding the customer base), he would have been fine. As it was though, he put the court in a situation where they more or less had to find that he couldn't openly do as he pleases with other people's money.

 _Shlensky_ has a fairly similar fact pattern. The Cubs decision was supposedly driven by non-economic factors, namely beliefs about 'proper' baseball and possible effects on the neighborhood. However, they left open the door that these factors might themselves affect Cub's business prospects, a door that Ford slammed shut on himself. As a result, the Court found:

      "Plaintiff in the instant case argues that the directors are
      acting for reasons unrelated to the financial interest and
      welfare of the Cubs. However, we are not satisfied that the
      motives assigned to Philip K. Wrigley, and through him to the
      other directors, are contrary to the best interests of the
      corporation and the stockholders. For example, it appears to
      us that the effect on the surrounding neighborhood might well
      be considered by a director who was considering the patrons
      who would or would not attend the games if the park were in a
      poor neighborhood. Furthermore, the long run interest of the
      corporation in its property value at Wrigley Field might
      demand all efforts to keep the neighborhood from
      deteriorating. By these thoughts we do not mean to say that
      we have decided that the decision of the directors was a
      correct one. That is beyond our jurisdiction and ability. We
      are merely saying that the decision is one properly before
      directors and the motives alleged in the amended complaint
      showed no fraud, illegality or conflict of interest in their
      making of that decision."

(from [https://casetext.com/case/shlensky-v- wrigley](https://casetext.com/case/shlensky-v-wrigley))

<comment><USER9> Just so you know, this is what a mobile user sees when someone uses code blocks to format quotes on HN: [https://i.imgur.com/EDI0Ist.png](https://i.imgur.com/EDI0Ist.png)

It makes people scroll side to side to read the quote.

Please don't use code blocks for quotes.

<comment><USER7> There's a link at the bottom to the text, if that's easier.

And frankly, the fact that there's no other way to indicate a block quote is absurd.

<comment><USER9> I agree, there should be one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _However, the publishers may not be interested in forcing the Internet > Archive out of business. Their goal is to get the Internet Archive to stop > scanning their books. If they win the lawsuit, they might force the group to > shut down its book scanning operation and promise to not start it up again, > then allow it to continue its other, less controversial offerings._

Some context is useful. The IA, due to the coronavirus, is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending." Now, an "unlimited number of people can check out the same book at the same time."

I can understand why the publishers would be upset. The IA need not go bankrupt for this. They may simply capitulate and revert this new feature. I am not convinced the publishers want to take the IA down; they merely want to threaten that unlimited concurrent checkouts should not be permitted (and perhaps, even more, that no books at all should be scanned).

<comment><USER11> > is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending."

This is definitely inaccurate. Many elements of CDL are clearly still in effect, such as the use of DRM to enforce the "check out" provision. It's a real lending system. The only thing that's new is the "unlimited" claim wrt. the number of copies that can be checked out at any given time - and we still don't know how far that "unlimited" actually goes. We should wait for IA's legal response on this.

<comment><USER12> Is the extent of the 'unlimited' important? Lending a single book more than they own is an impossibility if they are respecting IP - no different to a physical library photocopying entire books so they can lend more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That would be an immeasurable loss to humanity, the IA should be protected by the government. I've contributed some very old cartoons I managed to find on VHS rips and was very glad that the IA exists to safekeep them, many 30-somethings in my country have fond memories of these cartoons.

Terabytes upon terabytes of historical data would vanish if the IA were to go bankrupt.

<comment><USER14> > _the IA should be protected by the government_

Bankruptcy doesn't mean dissolution. If the IA goes bankrupt over this National Emergency Library boondoggle, the servers will still be around. A new organization could lift them out, clean them up and re-launch the service with a more focussed mandate and better internal processes.

<comment><USER15> The question is what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user- submitted material). Ideally someone will scrape them and a new similar entity will spring up. Is there anything in law that would prevent that from happening?

<comment><USER14> > _what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted > material)_

Presumably, they legally hold those data. As such, it could be purchased by a new organization out of bankruptcy (assuming IA loses and goes into liquidation versus restructuring).

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but could they give it away?

<comment><USER16> Prior to a court judgement, yes. After? Uncharted territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We are in the middle of a national emergency and the IA made an aggressive an panicked move to try and improve people's lives at a time when frankly people really needed help.

I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked.

The IA probably overstepped, but given the circumstances I hope that any court decision amounts to little more than requiring the IA to roll back their unlimited policy. No damages awarded. We should encourage people to help each other in times of crisis, any judgement granting damages sets a very bitter tone for future crisis management.

<comment><USER18> > I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name > of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked.

This could be read as:

> the end justifies the means

"Compassion" can be stretched to mean anything as long it's good to someone. I think IA's cause is a very noble one. I can stand behind that. However, noble causes don't give you legal exemption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Love the IA and I am a donor, but kinda agree they stepped over the line here, maybe got a little overexcited when the pandemic hit. Hopefully they can be humble, admit the mistake, clamp down on the book piracy part and get things legal again so it doesn't put the rest of their great stuff in jeopardy.

</comment><comment><USER20> > In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet > Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a > program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an > unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even > if IA only owned one physical copy.

I don't understand why the IA people thought this change would go unchallenged. Seems like a pretty suicidal move to me, although I wish them luck.

</comment><comment><USER21> We need to put Internet Archive on IPFS or something similar, finding a single location for 50PB+ archive is going to be difficult but one can easily find 50000 people with 1TB of free space and a stable server+internet connection.

<comment><USER15> Is there a way to cut the archive down to a manageable yet relevant subset based on one's interests? Say, "I have 500GB free space and I care about mathematics, what do I take from the archive"? Because 50000TB is too much for crowdsourcing, particularly if it's supposed to be crowd-served rather than just crowd-hoarded. I would guess a high percentage of that is video, which perhaps should never have been part of the archive to begin with due to its signal-to-noise rate.

<comment><USER22> In 30 years with our 2^largenumber drives, we'd be regretting we didn't add chive more video.

<comment><USER23> But will we have "2^largenumber drives"? Aren't SSDs already beginning to have problems with bit flipping?

<comment><USER23> Addendum: QLC is one way some SSDs are made slightly denser¹ that comes with a cost: decreased reliability and extended sustained write performance (the amount of data you can write quickly in one go is limited, and decreases as the drive fills up). [https://www.howtogeek.com/428869/ssds-are-getting- denser-and...](https://www.howtogeek.com/428869/ssds-are-getting-denser-and- slower-thanks-to-qlc-flash/)

[1]: 25% denser than TLC

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is so frustrating to hear. A lot of comments mention the IA "overreaching" with this. While I agree from a legal perspective, I don't agree morally. The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. Is there any individual who argues that 120 years of monopoly is reasonable?

The worst part for me is the lack of agency I feel. I see something so vehement being enforced globally, and it makes me feel like I'm being ruled by some enemy mafia, not a representative democracy. Similar to the war on drugs in the US, I see this as actively sabotaging society for the benefit of a few.

<comment><USER20> > The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years > corporate copyright monopolies passed into law.

I agree, but I don't see why that automatically makes the recent modifications (that brought on the lawsuit) by IA morally right.

Even if some works should already be in the public domain and are not yet, the IA modification was also taking money away from relatively recent works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The argument that is made in this article on behalf of IA that millions of books are locked up in libraries during the pandemic won't hold. Almost all libraries during the pandemic have dramatically increased access to digital lending. Library usage has increased with many books fully checked out at libraries. Meaning these locked up copies are in use.

IA rocks, yet this new program hurts authors. Not just publishers.

<comment><USER26> " _Almost all libraries during the pandemic have dramatically increased access to digital lending. Library usage has increased with many books fully checked out at libraries._ "

Do you have a source for that? My understanding was that digital lending and physical lending came out of different pools (in fact most digital lending is through something like Rakuten OverDrive); using a library's physical inventory would likely violate it's digital license.

<comment><USER25> Source: [https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/public-library- associat...](https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/public-library-association- survey-coronavirus-resources/575978)

Hope this helps. The main point I was trying to raise raise was in response to the article where an advocate of IA argued that IA was justified because books are "locked up" during pandemic. Yet libraries are putting their licenses of those works to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see any information about how many books were actually "borrowed". Somehow I have the feeling it might be fewer than sitting in the shelves of all the physical libraries.

Has this emergency library been popular? I read about it on HN, not anywhere else. The world is not full of HN readers.

I'm considering writing to those publishers that I will stop buying books published by them and borrow them from a (physical) library instead, copying pages I want to keep. Be the letter of the law whatever it is, this was a exceptional situation and it was not done for personal benefit.

<comment><USER28> It's in [https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national- emergency-l...](https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency- library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/)

> Trying to compare a physical check-out of a book with a digital check-out is > difficult. Assuming that the number of physical books borrowed from a > library corresponds to digitally borrowed books that are read after the > first day, then the Internet Archive currently lends about as many as a US > library that serves a population of about 30,000.

Of course you won't find any real information in the publishers' complaint. It's all rhetoric and no substance, except where they claim everything and its opposite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hope this news isn't drowned out by the current protests. Unpopular lawsuits, bills, etc. tend to appear and get a hard push during times when media attention is focused on some other larger outrage.

The timing of this is extremely opportunistic and reinforces the idea that the IA is in the _moral right_ (not necessarily the legal right). Imagine if this was filed when the only news was about COVID-19 and working from home? What type of outrage would it have manufactured by all of the working parents stranded at home trying to fulfill the duties of being a teacher too? Of course publishers wouldn't do that. It would be a PR death move.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea. Considering that a large part of HN makes fat salaries writing software which is either sold for high price(MSFT types), or mining user data and advertising (GOOG types). If their work was being distributed for free (SQL server, Windows), software developers would make much less money and would be up in arms here. Why should authors be deprived of the value of their labour. If not, will you be happy if all software was made free in "National Emergency Software Library", and you were being paid peanuts? After all , people also need a good OS and Database apart from books.

<comment><USER20> > I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out > books for free was a good idea.

I'm not sure how many people are thinking that. Some must be, but not necessarily many.

There's a difference between "giving" and "lending". The IA have never given away copyrighted books.

I've used the IA's lending library in the past and the copyrighted ebooks were protected by Adobe DRM. You were allowed to take out a few books for a few weeks (like in a real library). You were required to return the books before a given date. And if you didn't, the ADOBE software wouldn't let you read the book anymore (because of the DRM).

According to the article, until recently, the IA would scan a book and would lend out the created ebook only to a limited number of people at a time, based on how many copies of the physical book that they had.

What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

<comment><USER30> I don't think anyone has any problem with the original lending scheme. That was totally fair.

> What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially > unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the > book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

This is the relevant part, and what has prompted the publisher lawsuit. Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why books.

<comment><USER20> > Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for > free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why > books.

I'm not sure what the IA was thinking when they made that modification. Perhaps they thought that during the pandemic such a change would be found temporarily acceptable.

I agree with your point that programmers, software publishers, authors and publishers should all be able to make money and get paid for their work. I'm not sure though what are the best business models for making that happen.

What I've settled on myself, for the moment, is buying physical (paper) books, buying ebooks without DRM, downloading old ebooks in the public domain for free (or buying them cheaply from sites that do a good job on the markup) and taking out books from my local library.

My wife buys Kindle ebooks (with DRM) from Amazon, because she requires a very large font size, and the Amazon solution was the best that I found (biggest selection of books of the type that my wife reads).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"

-Alternatively attributed (in one form or another) to Edmund Burke, George Santayana, and Sir Winston Churchill, and possibly your high school history teacher, as well!

Related:

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationism)

Also, if you're criticizing or downvoting this (which I am completely OK with, BTW!), _you 're equally-and-oppositely criticizing and downvoting all of the links above_.

I see myself only as a messenger... a simple "knowlege-mover"... I only move knowledge from point A (the links above) to point B (Hacker News)...

That, and I see myself as simple, humble student of history...

OK, now that that's said, you may proceed to downvote and criticize to your heart's content! <g>

In fact, I'd be glad if you did!:

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

The Internet Archive is worth at least 1,000 Googles -- because of the History it provides... it's the closest thing to a record of our Civilization (through the years that it was active) that we have at this point in time.

Destroy History, and you destroy Civilization itself...

<comment><USER32> Disagreeing with you or your post is not disagreeing with the content of those links. Neither is critizising you transitive.

Giving more context and explaining your points besides name-dropping would be helpful. I get the impression, that your comment, disregarding complaints about possible downvotes, could be reduced to:

"censorship"

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The IA is good, but the decision they made is very bad and has put their entire operation at risk.

Their leadership clearly both cares about archiving the web and also for advocating an expansionist view of content distribution (that in an emergency, any private organization has the right to distribute whatever content they want however they want to without regard for the right holders of the content?).

That's fine for them to hold both views but both roles are now at risk. It's a very sad and completely avoidable situation and I hope that the IA will course correct and avoid disaster.

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of the comments claim that publishers could collect $150k per work in statutory damages. However, that usually only works if the book was registered timely with the USCO. I don't know the rate among book authors, but most photographers don't register, so they don't qualify.

If the IA was clever to only choose books without registration, then the maximum they can be trialed for is the financial damages that publishers can prove. Given that everyone is trying to save money nowadays, it's very hard to convincingly argue that everyone would have bought the book if there had been a waiting list for renting it.

I also see the possibility that the IA is just trolling publishers. Maybe they did keep track of the numbers internally and never lent out to more people than they had licenses available through their partners. In that case, the publishers would incur large legal costs only to later be told by the court that nothing illegal had happened.

EDIT: There's also the claim by the IA that the average user only looks at the book for 30 minutes. That, in turn, would mean that what the publishers call "borrowing" here is more akin to me browsing an in-person library without actually checking out anything. So there's a good chance that 2-3 copies of each book are enough to make it difficult to prove this illegal, meaning maybe this is clever trolling after all.

[https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national- emergency-l...](https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency- library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/)

<comment><USER28> The lawsuit is about 127 books which have a copyright registration, listed in the attachment: [https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us...](https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.1.pdf)

The publishers have already proposed an alternative to statutory damages:

> Alternatively, ordering Internet Archive to render a full and complete > accounting to Plaintiffs of Internet Archive's profits, gains, advantages, > or the value of business opportunities received from the foregoing acts of > infringement of the Works and entering judgment for Plaintiffs against > Internet Archive for all damages suffered by Plaintiffs and for any profits > or gain by Internet Archive attributable to the infringements alleged above > of Plaintiffs' copyrights in amounts to be determined at trial;

[https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us...](https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0.pdf)

This would probably be a very long discovery process, like ACS and Elsevier vs. ResearchGate: [https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643](https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643)

<comment><USER34> Agree, this can potentially take a long time and a lot of money to go to court. That's why I am considering the possibility that the Internet Archive is effectively trolling them by doing everything legally but talking about it in a way that upsets publishers.

BTW, thank you for the link to the attachment. Some books, like RE0000172597 The Magician's Nephew will likely be too old for statutory damages. Others, like TX0005757057 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Leadership Fable were not registered timely and will likely be blocked from statutory damages due to that. But TX0008865827 The Man Who Solved the Market for example is registered timely, so that one would qualify for statutory damages, if they can prove that this book was willfully infringed.

But the last one - i.e. the only one in my 3 examples that could get statutory damages - looks like it was uploaded by a contributor and the preview page was only viewed a mere 621 times... So that could be a DMCA safe harbor defense, that IA simply didn't notice before that this unpopular contributor-uploaded book wasn't legal.

[https://archive.org/details/manwhosolvedmark0000zuck/](https://archive.org/details/manwhosolvedmark0000zuck/)

BTW, it looks like the IA has now disabled the group pages for suing publishers, which might gently nudge viewers towards other books, potentially driving sales away to their competition.

<comment><USER28> 622 times is on the high end! The average is less than 50 and the median I'd guess less than 10. But that scan was uploaded by the Internet Archive itself, only the physical book was donated by a prominent Internet Archive employee. I wonder if the publishers selected it out of spite for him, or even to keep the door open to including him personally in the suit (that would be nasty).

Why do you say C. S. Lewis is too old for statutory damages? Do you think the Internet Archive can claim it looked like it could be in the "last 20 years" phase (<[https://archive.org/details/last20>](https://archive.org/details/last20>))? I don't know... The publishers will probably claim the Internet Archive should know better, but at the same time they claim it doesn't understand a thing about copyright:

> IA erroneously decided that they were public domain works based on > elementary misunderstandings of copyright law.

As for harming sales of books by making those publishers less visible, it will be interesting to see, but it's hard to make predictions. Just to be sure, publishers in their complaint write that IA's lending both _increases_ and _decreases_ sales at the same time:

> the traffic that IA drives to Better World Books [by having copies of the > books] results in more book sales

but:

> IA competes directly with Publishers' works in all formats (including, > without limitation, print and digital) and market segments (including, > without limitation, commercial, library, and school).

Indeed the complaint is mostly focused on purely hypothetical damages based on speculative predictions like:

> Consumers begin to view works as cheap and become increasingly > unappreciative of what it takes to produce them and unwilling to pay fair > value for them.

The problem with all these arguments is that they would apply to libraries lending physical books as well, if they were not established yet. Kyle Courtney makes this point: [https://kylecourtney.com/2020/05/18/libraries-do- not-need-pe...](https://kylecourtney.com/2020/05/18/libraries-do-not-need- permission-fair-use-first-sale-and-the-fallacy-of-permission-culture/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What can users do to help the Internet Archive in its time of need?

<comment><USER36> Donate please!

<comment><USER37> Done. Some quid that I could have spent in a book by Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley or Penguin Random House went instead to the Internet Archive, and I'll be doing the same every time I plan to buy a book by the above publishers, which I have just put in my do-not-buy-from list.

Clarification: not that their reasons were unsound, they're perfectly understandable, but going straight with a lawsuit without other attempts to solve the problem equals to bullying, and I'm not supporting it with my wallet.

<comment><USER38> They did first try asking the IA to stop unlimited lending, so they did not go straight to a lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Concerning as they seem to have been foolhardy.

I'm a donor and am now torn between donating more so they can get through it or cutting donations as it's all going to get passed to the publishers (given what appears their legitimate concern with IA's behaviour on this)

What's the best approach?

<comment><USER28> Donate as usual: the money doesn't stay on the Internet Archive's bank account for long, it won't go to publishers. You can donate more later if the Internet Archive asks for donations specifically for the lawsuit, and at any rate after the lawsuit to accelerate operations (whether they win or lose).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> in a society with digital technology the publishers are basically rent seekers. aggregators will end up replacing them.

a business model for aggregators other than advertisement is needed.

<comment><USER30> Publishers are rent seekers and software companies are not? Microsoft selling windows and office is ok but publishers making money is not?

<comment><USER41> Microsoft actually makes something in crude terms. Software companies create value with the product they build. The IP is the product.

Publishers take someone's work in crude terms. They might build a bit on top of it (proofread, format, etc) and then put it on a medium for distribution. Medium is technically the product here.

To me a better comparison would be a company writing the windows installation to a CD and then selling = publisher.

I could be wrong so am very open to hear the reverse argument.

PS: recently a friend wanted to publish his own book and the publisher asked for him to pay the entire printing cost and a lot of other fees plus taking a % of sales. This is the closest I got to interact with the industry and was a bit shocked and also understanding that they can't find everyone but still... came to be as a bit greedy

<comment><USER30> > Microsoft actually makes something in crude terms. Software companies create > value with the product they build. The IP is the product.

Software companies create and sell products out of the labour of software developers. Publishing companies create and sell products out of the labour of book authors. Both are tangible products. Windows is no better stream of bytes than Harry Potter. The IP is the product for "Harry Potter" also.

Also, you are trying to convey as if authors have no harm in books being distributed for free. They receive royalty from book sales. Giving their books for free is like saying a FU to them. I doubt any software developer is going to work for free, so why expect the same from authors.

<comment><USER42> They have to sell enough to cover the advance before they get royalties. Most authors never get there. "Piracy" is not the reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I am an author and I support the IA in this decision.

</comment><comment><USER44> Whilst I agree with their archival mission for the internet, I find it abhorrent that THEY are charging people to access other people's books (and not paying the copyright holder anything).

Take a look at the screenshots at page 25 of the complaint filed before the court.

[https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit- interne...](https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit-internet- archive.pdf)

The Authors' Guild said that the Internet Archive said:

"has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author."

and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) said:

"It is the height of hypocrisy that the Internet Archive is choosing this moment - when lives, livelihoods and the economy are all in jeopardy - to make a cynical play to undermine copyright, and all the scientific, creative, and economic opportunity that it supports."

<comment><USER45> Who is 'they'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> We still don't understand digital ownership and the copyright laws are lagging far behind against the consumers.

Before Internet, once you created something, the only way for someone to steal your "work" was to steal/copy an actual thing. In the digital age, everything is just ones and zeros. Law makers are clueless to what awaits us.

<comment><USER47> That's arguably backwards. See Breyer's article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs" [1], where he made the argument in 1970 that because copying was relatively slow and expensive, and most works made most of the money in a limited window after release, there really wasn't much need for long term copyright protection. By the time copiers could make and distribute copies there wouldn't be enough of the market left for them to get back their costs.

As copying technology becomes cheaper and faster the case for copyright gets stronger, at least if we are going to stick with the approach we currently use. That approach is based on the idea that a free market is an optimal way to determine the allocation of resources and we should use it whenever we can.

The mathematical economists can actually prove that is true in markets for goods that have certain properties. Copyright law (and patent law) artificially imbue certain intellectual works with those properties.

There are, of course, other systems we could use. One approach would be to treat these works as a public good. Have some tax funded government agency give out grants to authors and film makers and so on to make new works, and their output is public domain.

Some problems with that approach include determining the budget, and determining what works get funded. It's hard to see either of those not getting politicized out the wazoo.

Another possibility is similar, except you give out the grants after works are created. An author creates something, releases it to the public domain, and the agency determines how many people are actually reading/viewing/etc the work. Then pay the creator based on that.

Another approach is similar, but without taxes. Creators can be funded by charitable foundations, or by directly soliciting donations from the public.

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

<comment><USER32> That's a really interesting topic. I wish there was more... realistic discussion about those things.

I remember 10 years ago, when the pirate party was hyping up, there were a few propositions of basically a tax based system: remove copyright, but add a 10€ entertainment tax. It felt unrealistic to me to replace a multi billion dollar industry with 80million/year. Digital objects might have nearly zero reproduction cost, but producing the art still costs money. Splitting the cost of a single 320$mio movie on 8bil people, still costs everyone 4cents.

In a similar veine the limitations for artists to monetize their money and rely on others: artist could market directly to consumers instead of having advertisers! But that would mostly select for people that are good at advertising themselves, what morphed to influencers.

<comment><USER11> A movie doesn't _have_ to cost $320M - by way of example, the Blender Institute's freely available movies cost far less than that to make. Movie making is a "multi-billion dollar industry" only because of the incredible amount of sheer waste that's involved in that pursuit.

<comment><USER32> While I believe there is quite a lot of waste, I still think that such a change would have a huge impact on movie making and other things.

I don't know enough about the Blender movies and the cost involved, so I have to adress it in a "strawman" like way by comparing it to open software: Having volunteers working on it for free greatly reduces cost, but diminishes that those often have jobs in the related industry, indirectly funding the project and helping the peoples skills. Switching to free software for everyone (forbidding advertisements and data collection for further income of course!) on a small tax scheme would very likely have a devastating consequence medium term for open source software as well.

But all of this is just speculation by me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I really like what IA does, but I can't see a justification under copyright law that would allow them to have unlimited checkouts of the same book. They'd be well advised to drop the policy and hope the limited time they offered this, and their status as a non-profit, is enough to get those who filed the suits to drop them.

</comment><comment><USER49> It is a bummer, but they messed up.

Is it possible they were under financial duress anyway and were looking for attention grabbing move to garner support?

I don't understand it, and I find it hard to believe that their legal counsel green lighted it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Speaking of the Internet Archive, what happened to the "MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video]"[1]?

That link was HN front page[2] material less than a month ago, and the link never worked for me.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording- colle...](https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-collection/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867)

<comment><USER51> MTV decided they wanted to remain historically irrelevant and sent a takedown notice.

<comment><USER26> Anyone remember when MTV was "Music Television"?

Yah, me neither.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The dataloss would be over 18 petabytes. Why not stop lending? Could one claim Force majeure? Ia is a library.

</comment><comment><USER53> One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that IA allowed authors to remove their books from the national emergency library. This doesn't make publishers happy because they can't make the decision for their authors.

</comment><comment><USER54> They're just going to make everyone use libgen which won't end piracy.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is there a backup on the IA? If this lawsuit takes down IA, will the wayback machine content simply be lost forever?

</comment><comment><USER56> Where can people donate to their legal defense fund?

<comment><USER28> For now there's always [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> they're just a few months ahead of themselves on the collapse of the legal system

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there a way to mirror IA?

<comment><USER59> Yes-ish: [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive)

<comment><USER60> 50 petabytes as of 2014, yikes.

<comment><USER61> 50k people each donating 1TB in a loss-resistent schema could do it. Miiight? be achievable?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, something like ArchiveTeam's Warrior virtual machine [1], but instead of connecting to a JSON tracker to coordinate and download content for archival, it connected to the Internet Archive's bittorrent trackers [2] and consumed then seeded the least available items constrained by the disk space available to the virtual machine. As more virtual machines are launched, item coverage increases automatically.

This doesn't take into consideration data the Internet Archive isn't providing as a torrent, such as the Wayback Machine archive or OpenLibrary. OpenLibrary can be replaced by Library Genesis [3], but I am unaware of any replacement for Wayback.

EDIT: I'd like to see a rack of Archive storage nodes in every museum or other cultural center in the world, all contributing some space, power, and connectivity to distribute digital cultural archives globally.

[1] [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr...](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior)

[2] [https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360004715251-Arch...](https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360004715251-Archive-BitTorrents)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> That's OK. Archive has been deleting all kinds of content because it ruffles their Bay Area feathers. It's clear that projects like this aren't ready for the long haul and once you let activists become curators it's all over.

<comment><USER63> They didn't delete it, they hid it. It still exists and will probably be made public again when it becomes historically significant</comment></comment>


Longtime Climate Science Denier Hired at NOAA - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-science-denier-hired-at-noaa <comment><USER2> What are his credentials? If they're good, great!

Science needs to be challenged. The tenacious, even if wrong, scientist is perhaps the most important scientist: this is the scientist most likely to find all the holes in a scientific argument and force the "correct" to cross their Ts and dot their Is

Or we can do what physiology did and have to sort through 75 years of incorrect results.</comment>


Visual Representation of SQL Joins (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/33052/Visual-Representation-of-SQL-Joins

<comment><AUTHOR> The big payoff is the image at [http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/Visual_SQL_Joins/Visu...](http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/Visual_SQL_Joins/Visual_SQL_JOINS_orig.jpg)</comment>


Some Windows 10 Pro licenses are mistakenly deactivated  Comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/comments/30855 <comment><USER2> I can confirm this happened to me on two of the systems I used. Though now at least one appears to have fixed itself.</comment>


Incident Command for DevOps: Learning from the Fire Department [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn8-R6Pt9hY <comment><USER2> ICS like this is well already well developed for dealing with cyber incidents, e.g. malware incursion or data exfiltration. A really well thought through example is the NIST cyber security framework [0], which defines a cyber defensive lifecycle (identify, protect, detect, respond and recover). At least in the UK, this lifecycle has been adopted by Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) organisations such as electricity generation, transmission and distribution.

The key to successful incident response is to design, agree and test the ICS processes, roles and Command and Control (C2) hierarchies _before_ incidents occur, capturing the results in an Incident Response Plan. The IRP will typically involve standing up an incident response team when an incident reaches a pre-defined severity level. Incident response teams are often structured into bronze, silver and gold levels of command (gold typically including Cxx individuals such as CIO and CFO, not just DevOps roles) that temporarily replace Business as Usual (BAU) management with incident C2. In the UK at least, the bronze/silver/gold hierarchy was developed by the 'blue- light' services (police, fire and ambulance), and is itself a simplified version of military C2 chains of command.

If management don't buy into this type of approach, it doesn't node well for an organisation's ability to deal with a crisis.

[0] [https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework](https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework)

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone wanting to dig into the ICS the authoritative introduction is the NIMS IS-100[1] course. Be aware that it's your standard government produced course, i.e. not entertaining in any way but generally manages to get the point across.

If I understand/remember correctly, IS-100 and 200 are the required courses on ICS (along with 700, 800 for NIMS itself) for all frontline firefighters on any fire department wanting to receive federal money.

1\. [https://training.fema.gov/is/courseoverview.aspx?code=IS-100...](https://training.fema.gov/is/courseoverview.aspx?code=IS-100.c)

<comment><USER4> Yes these are dry... I took them as part of a CERT org a few years ago and retook for EMS operations chapter in a class right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coincidentally am finishing up an EMT class and prepping for the NREMT test. I have been very struck by the similarity between the differential diagnosis process an emt uses and the troubleshooting a server or network issue. Similar problems too when you get tunnel vision (It must be asthma/It must be the DNS resolver... etc). Nice video!

</comment><comment><USER5> ICS seems like a natural fit for so many professions. I wonder if there is a future for a Fire Officer to teach/adapt ICS for <insert profession>?

<comment><USER6> I had a 10 year background in fire/EMS before getting in to tech, and have "sneaked in" ICS concepts and practices to several of my employers and teams.

I tried to introduce the ICS concepts formally and up-front, but met a lot of pushback; "we don't need that", "we're not dealing with fires" or "it's too complicated".

By using ICS principles without calling them such, people usually see the value. I even got a sizable promotion and raise due to my "clear and concise handling of several serious incidents and putting procedures in place to handle similar in the future". All I did was direct people in to ICS functions and act as an IC.

I agree that ICS concepts should use used more widely and outside of just emergency services, but getting past the "stigma" of the title is the hard part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Volunteer Firefighter and SRE here.

ICS is crucial in any and all of our incidents and should be the model on how any disaster is handled

</comment><comment><USER8> "While I go work with Slack for a couple years..."

Can't be encouraging for Slack, couple of years. But, that's the deal now, people leave tech jobs every 1-5 years for something better or start their own company.

<comment><USER9> I'm the speaker in that video. Historically, on average, I've stayed at each of my employers for about 2 years. Google was a big exception, as I was there for almost 6 years, but partly that was because I had 3 fairly different roles during the time I was there.

So far, a month in, I'm loving working for Slack; it's a great company, and an excellent group of people. So there's every possibility that I'll be there longer than 2 years!</comment></comment>