Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/oct/20/facebook-fake-amazon-review-factories-uncovered-which-investigation <comment><USER2> Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I purchased several sets and returned them). The crappy ones are also selling for $30 per set but they are made out of weak aluminum and come bent up. To get the nice American made ones I have to got 10-20 pages deep or search by brand name and even than the real ones are usually on page 2 with page one featuring the same crap from China. Now, don't get me wrong, I am sure they can make quality arrows in China, but what makes it to the top of Amazon is utter crap.

I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a particularly noticeable example because it's something I regularly replace as they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).

<comment><USER3> It's really baffling to me how despite being one of the largest companies in the world and being centered around e-commerce Amazon doesn't do anything about these issues weakening their core product. I say "do nothing" not "fail to stop" because I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon does anything at all to prevent or discourage these behaviors.

I wonder if it's because they push the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra too far. After all, their current approach is successful so why risk changing anything? That would also explain why the website overall looks so dated in many areas.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's baffling at all. Facebook is the largest social media company, and what do they do to try to stop all of the propaganda, troll factories and hateful things going on there? Naught. They know that they are the largest company and therefore doesn't have to do anything as long as their position stays the same. Which it seems to be doing. Yes, there are people leaving the platform but where do they go? There is no real contender, therefore Facebook will remain number 1.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's completely the same thing though, this propaganda and trolling could arguably be a positive for Facebook by driving engagement. Of course there's a balance to maintain but it's not necessarily all bad. Socially and ethically it might be bad but bean-counting-wise it might not be that terrible. Facebook doesn't really care if people trust what they see on the platform as long as they generate pageviews and get ad impressions.

On the other hand I don't see how fake reviews and bootleg items do anything but hurt Amazon by making people distrust the platform. You don't want to add friction to the buying process by making people triple check that they're not getting duped.

And it's not like it's a new problem either, lack of trust was a huge issue in the early days of e-commerce, I'm sure Amazon doesn't want to return to these days where you felt like you were swimming in a sea of scams.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that before you bought stuff largely from Amazon.

Whereas now it's more akin to eBay which always suffered with scam problems (and responded by giving buyers far more power - which then resulted in buyers scamming sellers instead of the reverse).

I wish it could return to the days where you just bought stuff from Amazon - or at least make it very easy to only search for their products.

<comment><USER6> Have you tried eBay recently? I've bought a few things from there in the last year and found it pleasant and professional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full- time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn't do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics).

I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon's death if they don't admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.

<comment><USER8> While this could be seen as off topic, I don't think it is: I strongly recommend purchasing that bike light from your local bike shop. If you have a local bike shop, it is likely struggling. But it is also likely that the lights they have on offer there are specifically selected for their utility, particularly their utility in your locale. Perhaps it will be a few dollars more than Amazon, but you will reap the benefit.

<comment><USER9> Depends on the shop, I guess. My local bike shop carries quite a lot of cheap garbage too, but at high markup. I also have trust issues with many such shops. I know some where at least one person working there seems competent, but in most I've been, I get the distinct vibe of employees being domain- clueless salesmen paid to push things (similar to what's typical in electronics/home appliance stores).

<comment><USER10> I use Google's reviews to check that, always sorting by worst grades first. Saved my ass a few times, especially as an expat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription.

My wife bought me "luxury" branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they'll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won't be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can't refund me.

Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren't delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn't find my address anymore. Well guys you've delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!

My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said "Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item". He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.

<comment><USER12> Amazon customer service is now quite terrible. Anecdote: I know somebody who has an office that is literally within a 2 block radius of Amazon HQ in Seattle (the new Doppler and Day One buildings). Getting Amazon's third party delivery contractors to successfully deliver to their office suite door, in a high-rise office tower, has been an amazing struggle.

Deliveries get sent back as "rejected" all the time, when the delivery person has actually not even bothered to sign in at the lobby and go up to the office suite floor. More than a half dozen phone calls and chats with Amazon customer service, requesting that they edit the delivery info for the building, have been pretty much fruitless.

<comment><USER13> This has been similar to my experience recently with a package marked as rejected.

It's a shitty caught in limbo situation - they refused to acknowledge even the possibility that the delivery service might not have made an honest effort to get into the building, and they wouldn't let me cancel the order without a penalty, but they couldn't tell me where my package was and had no way of contacting the carrier for me to schedule another time for delivery. There also seems to be no policy to automatically retry the next day. All they could do was take my phone number and then the delivery company might call me later if they felt like it. It was very bizarre.

Since then I have stopped using free 1-day shipping, because at least in larger buildings UPS and USPS can generally get in fine as they're delivering multiple packages every day. The random small companies that handle the one day shipping seem to be a lot less reliable.

<comment><USER12> > The random small companies

At least in Seattle, the "random small companies" are frequently some random dude with a van and a phone app. They're doing ubereats type package delivery now. There's a pickup center at north Aurora and 145th where a motley assortment of drivers pick up packages and take them to the customer destination now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

<comment><USER15> The only way to describe this is as an unfortunate inevitability of review systems as a whole.

<comment><USER16> I'd say of _unmoderated_ (or poorly moderated) review systems. E.g., we don't see this on Angie's List or Houzz.

I've found that the only way to get useful information out of most Amazon reviews is to look at the 1- & 2-stars, trying to filter out the fake competitor hits, and see if there are any consistent issues that aren't DEU issues. Then look at the 3- & 4-stars and see what seems to be good. That said, I expect it'll only be a matter of time until this strategy is no good.

<comment><USER17> I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work. Meaning that everyone is shown the reviews of their added family members, their trusted people (with less weight) and so on and on. If they betray the trust the system could even have a "trust less" button. It'd actually give people the ability to choose who they trust.

<comment><USER18> Are you kidding? People I know have TERRIBLE judgement when it comes to products. Who builds trust based on that characteristic?

<comment><USER19> But a web of trust based on, "I like this reviwer, so I trust who they trust" seems reasonable.

<comment><USER20> I am really curious if this would actually work. I also think if you trust a reviewer and it turns out they are a bad reviewer than your trust rating should lower. (you turned out to be a bad reviewer reviewer)

That said I have no idea if this would. Seems those 87k people mentioned above would just trust each other to raise their trust ratings.

<comment><USER19> Its not about total trust "rating". That not how web of trust works. You, the informed and responsible user, have to look at who their connections are.

It's more like Linkedin: if someone adds you and they are a mutual connection with a bunch of coworkers you like, that's good. But if their mutual connections are all social climbing spammers, you know they either are one themselves or don't know enough not to fall for that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> *-star reviews on all of the major review sites are 2-dimensional. They should be 3 dimensional (0-x stars) + time. This way if clusters of 5-star reviews show up in an extremely short period of time it's a red flag. Instead of seeing a static "this product/service got x stars", we should be able to see "this product/service, within the last 1 month, received on average x stars". And then you can extrapolate, oh they received on average 2 stars before they upgraded their product, and now the product is getting 4 stars. Or something like: "this restaurant was getting on average 1.5 stars last year, but recently they're getting glowing reviews. Maybe they fired the manager?".

<comment><USER22> Fake review services have already figured out how to slow-drip reviews. If you put a mediocre product on Amazon and buy reviews, there will be no legit review history to compare against either. It's a tough nut to crack if the fake reviews are linked to real purchases already.

<comment><USER21> I'd say by slow dripping the reviews won't they have to contend more with the "real" reviews? After all by pushing a bunch of 5 stars quickly the average will be bumped up substantially and be unaffected by real reviews. At least in this case they'll have to contend with legit reviews and will not be as easy to sprout all the way to the top of the search results for same reason.

<comment><USER23> It's the same no? If there are 10 times more fake reviews than legit ones and they can spread them over time, you can't use the distribution to detect it.

<comment><USER21> I think there are probably a number of reasons it's different.

1) 1000 5-star reviews with maybe a handful of 3,2,1 star reviews trickling in as actual consumers realize their mistake is less of a signal not to buy than if I see another low review trickled in amongst the 10-20 5-star reviews.

2) The company defrauding by purchasing the reviews is not going to make their money back as quickly probably since they won't end up on top of search results as often. So these companies will be stretched a lot thinner and probably recoup their expenses a lot slower than if they start instantly showing up on top of peoples' search results. And in order to keep from "floating" a bunch of free stuff without reviews they'll have to be extremely coordinated about how they distribute their products and request recipients to provide the reviews in order to make it a worth while pursuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Also this very interesting Planet Money episode #838 about people all over the world receiving weird packages full of random Chinese items that they never ordered.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/episode-838-a-series- of-mysterious-packages)

Turns out they are phantom packages from vendors on Ali Baba and TaoBao gaming the review system. This is called "brushing".

They managed to interview a "brusher". So the brushers have to make themselves look completely real during the buying process, hesitating, clicking links from different vendors and only after a while select the actual item they target. To get the "verified purchase" tag something has to be mailed somewhere. But instead of the actual item the vendor sends a package with random stuff and sometimes they send these to addresses of previous unknowing international customers to make it look more real.

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. Also, I've extremely curtailed any purchasing on Amazon as I've come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a degenerative crap house.

<comment><USER25> I met a family member (like 2nd cousin or further away) at some wedding a few years ago. I only talked to him once, but he was very clear about this situation. He owned a hotel, and was trying to track down the writers of bad reviews on Yelp. Primarily, as the owner of the hotel, it was his job to find out what's wrong about the hotel and improve it.

But he started to investigate some of the 1-star reviews, and came to the conclusion that these people didn't exist. He dug through all the receipts, he tried to track down and correlate the time with when these reviews popped up and tried to track down any issue. His ultimate conclusion was that a number of the 1-star reviews on his hotel were simply fake.

The discussion continued to talk about tort law, and how he's unable to even get a person to sue. He can't sue Yelp, because Yelp wasn't the author of those posts. So he was basically helpless to defend against 1-star reviews. In any case, if people can fake a 5-star review, they can also fake a 1-star review. And based on what I discussed with this man years ago, it seems like it really is happening right now.

Its probably easier for a Hotel-chain to leave bad reviews on their competitors. There are only so many hotels in a given area, and Yelp easily allows you to list all of the competitors in your region. Its probably less of a thing on Amazon, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't exist there either.

<comment><USER26> So you can leave a review without even using the service or product on Yelp?

Without a verified purchase, why would anyway take the review seriously?

<comment><USER27> How would you even implement a verified purchase? For a hotel _maybe_ you could forward an itinerary (which can be faked) but there's probably no receipt for a random taco stand that only accepts cash. Granted the latter does not care as much as the hotel but whatever they do would need to cover everybody.

<comment><USER28> After thinking about this problem for... umm... 30 seconds...

Allow users to write reviews, and then send a message to the hotel owner saying "X has posted a review of your business. Do you accept that X was a guest on X date?"

The hotel owner is forced to verify the stay before he gets to see the review.

Of course he'll know all about the outliers who had a bad experience and complained at the hotel and might want to lie about the guest staying, but such guests are usually _very_ motivated and willing to prove their stay with receipts, photos, etc.

<comment><USER29> Then the hotel owner can put a ton of fake positive reviews and verify all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Let's not forget that these fake reviews are being paid for. That's clearly better than non-paid-for fake reviews. That is, there's _some_ friction for the malicious actors.

Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.

This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a review.

But it does seem like there's an easy improvement that Amazon could make: offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.

<comment><USER31> > That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.

Fake reviews are just another form of marketing, like traditional junk mail. Making mail spammers pay postage doesn't seem to have changed the fact that most of the snail mail I get is junk, even in the digital age. Charge reviewers a quarter or a dollar to leave a review. If I was passionate enough -- one way or the other -- to leave a review, I'd pay it! I'll bet it would squelch the fake reviews overnight. Just tune the charge to find an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.

<comment><USER32> Charging for reviews doesn't solve anything. The company paying you for the review will then just reimburse you for the cost of the fake review as well. But you'd get rid of almost all honest reviewers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A bit off topic, but companies/organizations that use punctuation in their name make sentences look screwy. The organization in this article is "Which?" which the Guardian faithfully reproduces (without the quote I used). As a result, every time the name of the organization comes at the end of a sentence, the Guardian doesn't end it with a period, they end it with a question mark. This made me go back and reread at least one sentence because I thought I misread it. I read the sentence as a statement, not a question (and it was a statement.)

<comment><USER34> Completely agreed. I think Wikipedia has the right idea for dealing with company names like this - use title case and omit anything that isn't pronounced. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trademarks#General_rules)

<comment><USER35> AP, CMS, and any other grown-up style guide would eschew goofy punctuation in company/brand/band names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The fantastic podcast Reply All did an episode on this a few months ago: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply- all/124)

<comment><USER37> I just heard this yesterday! Can second, great episode.

<comment><USER38> So... Five stars then? ;)

(But seriously, HN comments are actually great at recommending things.)

<comment><USER39> Definitely HN is the latest in a long string of sites that _were_ good until the general public discovered them, Reddit being the most recent example. You're right: love the suggestions here and I hope the signal : noise ratio remains favorable for a good long while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I was looking in Amazon for a protective case for the iPhone XR that my SO has preordered.

Apparently there are many cases and even more reviews of very happy customers (verified purchasers as per Amazon) who were making very positive comments on the perfect fit of the case (on a phone that is not yet on sale).

<comment><USER23> Probably the inventory variant scam. They added the new case as a variant of older ones and got the reviews carried over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't live in the US/UK/Europe so Amazon deliveries are things I pay a lot for and take a while to get to me. So when I buy something, I have to be damn sure I'm going to like it. That's lead to the following strategy: filter reviews to only look at 1-star and 2-star reviews and make sure you can live with it if _all_ the things people say there end up being true. It's served me well so far and no amount of 5* reviews will change my decision to buy or not. Also, I look for things elsewhere, and only go to Amazon for buying, I don't use their search. That helps a lot as well

</comment><comment><USER42> "use the reporting tools" \- as far as I'm aware there is no reporting tool for "this product is fake" and "this review looks fake".

If they did want to fight fake reviews they would make reporting easy.

They'd also not allow completely different products to be listed on the same page.

...

</comment><comment><USER43> A colleague recently pointed me to fakespot.com, where you paste the URL of a product (like an Amazon product) and (it seems) it does an ML type analysis to score the likelihood of fakeness in the aggregate of reviews with a score and then highlights the likely fake ones and why it thinks what it thinks.

There's surely a market for verification for customers as much as there's one for the criminally-minded sellers.

<comment><USER44> Which begs the question of why Amazon isn't offering this themselves, or doing it in the background in a way that prevents this from being the problem it is.

I have to wonder at some level if in the short term this boosts their sales figures, but long term erodes trust in buying from them and diminishes their stranglehold.

I used to trust Amazon reviews to the point I'd often not read a ton or research reviews else where before purchasing.

These days I often opt to just buy from a retailer from a name brand. With Amazon increasing prices it often isn't much difference in price and there's better quality control.

It has officially become a chore to buy something on Amazon if you care about doing any due diligence.

<comment><USER45> I would guess that the reason that Fakespot works is that not too many people use it (relative to the total number of Amazon users) so people writing fake reviews don't specifically try to beat it.

Anything Amazon is doing, the people writing fake reviews will specifically try to counter, so Amazon has a much harder job cut out for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Great planet money podcast on this [1] with owner of site [2] that tries to surface fake reviews.

[1] [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370)

[2] [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/)

</comment><comment> a-dub This sort of thing seems pervasive these days. I see it on Yelp, Google Reviews and Amazon. (hell, the NYT has had pieces on people buying their competitors products en-masse just to give them 1-star reviews and move the relative needle in terms of Amazon reviews).

It will have to be fixed though, it seems that buying things sight unseen only really works when you have a lot of evidence (reviews) that the product is good.

Seems like a good way for an upstart to differentiate themselves.

</comment><comment><USER47> Another example of Campbell's Law playing out [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER48> Nowadays, going on Amazon for product hunt is equivalent to searching for a malware-free good quality torrent.

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen I now check fakespot before every Amazon purchase.

<comment><USER49> There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.

<comment><USER50> "markets find new ways to cheat people"

This is a fascinating construction. To me, it makes perfect sense (and reality seems to be heavily underscoring this perspective) but I feel it challenges some profound assumptions very commonly held by Western culture, about how the world works.

If markets replace normal transactions with the optimal ways to cheat people, as a natural consequence of what markets are, how can we disrupt that phenomenon and replace markets with something else that selects for other values?

<comment><USER49> > _how can we disrupt that phenomenon_

Traditionally the answer to "How can we stop people from getting cheated?" is to introduce consumer protection regulations and actively punish the cheaters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> One way to solve this problem would be to create a curated directory of reputable sellers on amazon and just link to their products. Sprinkle some Algolia magic dust for search and voilà. Easier said than done but it's a start.

Actually it seems one site/app is doing that [0] haven't tried it personally but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.

Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]

      [0] https://canopy.co
      [1] https://canopy.co/about

</comment><comment><USER52> Amazon is worth an enormous amount of money. They can afford to solve this problem. Here's one idea: invite regular amazon users with accounts active for at least > 1 year, who have some kind of verified identity/address, and ask them to become certified reviewers. Give them amazon credits/coupons in exchange for reviews of all the items they've purchased in the last 6-12 months (if they haven't yet left a review for those items). Don't pick people who have only been purchasing a few items from the same vendor. Find people who have a purchase history in line with the average user, not a company insider trying to game the system.

This way you don't have this perverse practice of incentivizing people to leave positive reviews on items they want for free. If a reviewer is found to be fake/scamming the system, just remove all their reviews and block them from future reviews.

It's time to stop allowing the raw internet to leave reviews. The scammers have won. Time to move on to a more sophisticated filtering system. This feels like email before gmail came along and largely solved spam. It'll get better again.

<comment><USER53> It's probably more profitable to leave it the way it is... Which opens up the door for a competitor.

Imagine if there was a different site that became known for its highly reliable ratings. It would eat Amazon's lunch and dinner.

<comment><USER54> The more I think about it the more potential weaknesses I see at Amazon that can be exploited by a competitor. At least in the traditional retail business, I cannot judge AWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I use fakespot.com, and it's surprising how often the ratings are deceptive. Just paste in any Amazon product URL.

For iOS, this shortcut makes it easier: [https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/9id390/check_ama...](https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/9id390/check_amazon_review_quality_with_fakespot/)

</comment><comment><USER56> Even bigger issue on FB is fake ads. About 2 out of 3 ads I see are usually of some very bad product but with very attractive video and headline. I've seen people in my family buying often and getting regrets. Now I have developed muscle memory to absolutely not trust any product/sign ups on FB.

</comment><comment><USER57> There's another side of the medal. Merchants that are trying to sell anything on Amazon have to have some positive reviews, otherwise their product will not be sold at all, even when the product is great. I guess that here two factors contribute, the product is being outranked by others, which have good reviews, and users not trusting such products.

I totally see how in this chicken and egg problem merchants would choose to buy some fake reviews.

Now, add the problem of lack of transparency in reviews, i.e. there's no record of rejected legitimate reviews, no record of removed reviews; and now you have a dysfunctional system. No one is happy about it, but it degrades both quality of Amazon and trust in it.

</comment><comment><USER58> On this post, many commentators seem convinced amazon will have issues resulting from lack of trust. Any leading indicators that would bring some credibility to this claim that anyone can share? In general, the HN community seems to be a bit more opinionated (and informed) than the average nonHN reader wrt privacy and other things that get attention in the tech circles. Always looking to understand the difference between HN community and the broader populace.

</comment><comment><USER59> As a result I never trust five star reviews. I only trusts reviews that has some critism.

IMDB is also a site that has gone downhill, filled with fake reviews.

</comment><comment><USER60> Markets where you can not tell how good a product is simply by reading the technical spec or scientific tests, eg markets where fake reviews will have a strong impact is not a market you want to enter, because everyone is hustling and the price people are willing to pay will keep dropping.

</comment><comment><USER61> What are some solid sources of product reviews these days, where the reviewers are both competent and unbiased? I will occasionally go to sweethome or wirecutter, but I'm never sure if I'm just reading a well hidden PR piece from a sponsor or if this is their actual opinion.

</comment><comment><USER62> Ive been having a direct experience with follower bots on soundcloud. I'll post some weird music, and bots will immediately like or follow. I do not follow them back, so they unlike and unfollow.

<comment><USER23> Yeah it looks like there is a "reputation economy", even for platforms where money is only indirect. Instagram auto follow/unfollow, Twitter followers, Youtube likes and subscribers, etc.

You can buy likes/karma/points, followers/subscribers, and also whole accounts.

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a burgeoning market for GitHub followers and stars so you can look good during background checks. Or that you could buy LinkedIn "acquaintances" and "skills" and even Facebook "friends".

I'm worried about what's next. Rotten Tomatoes? GoodReads?

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I despise Amazon now. Every search returns ads for Chinese fakes and other overpriced fba products. I absolutely love Costco and dream about having Costco prices and impeccable quality with Prime.

</comment><comment><USER64> I assume modern journalism is just the pursuit of the ability to conflate as many big tech names into one headline as possible. Jackpot for the Guardian here!

</comment><comment><USER65> Protip: if you find a crap product that's being shilled for in the reviews, you can talk your way into getting paid decently for your silence. I know someone who was paid several hundred dollars to not leave a bad review for a something that cost under $50. One scathing review that exposes their scheme might lost them tens, maybe a hundred multiples of their unit profit margin.

<comment><USER66> Or you could behave ethically and not allow yourself to be bought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is unrelated comment I know. But i did not found any suuport or FAQ on this site. Can anyone tell me why it's saying that I am still a new user so that I can't post anything on this site? how much time it will take to aactive my account?

</comment><comment><USER49> Couldn't you post a five star review, get reimbursed, and then change your review to an honest one? Asking for a friend.

<comment><USER68> The offers on those Facebook groups all seem to ask for amazon profile name before agreeing on the deal, to check your reviewing history. I doubt your proposed scheme would be long-lived.

<comment><USER69> So you have to be an honest fake reviewer.

The irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Fakespot.com

<comment><USER49> Reposting a comment I left elsewhere:

There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> If this is such an obvious issue in E mercantile capitalism, then it seems an obvious choice for other places that money and power come into play.

</comment><comment><USER72> Honestly, I'm shocked that in 2018, anyone believes anything they read in online reviews written by strangers on the Internet. It's got to be common knowledge by now that most of them are fake and often paid for, and that some companies manipulate which results you see based on not-quite-above-the-board criteria. Who actually takes these things seriously anymore?

<comment><USER61> I'm more interested why this isn't something that Amazon didn't decide to police. They know when someone purchases something from their store, they can limit reviews to those people who have many confirmed purchases from them and perhaps have some kind of human validation to them (showing ID?). Just spitballing here, but it seems like a solvable issue.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client? - <AUTHOR>

I've used Alpine / Elm / Mutt. I've used gMail / Yahoo Mail / HotMail. I've used Evolution. I don't like any of them.
I spend 90%+ of my time on urxvt/screen/emacs/irssi. If I can get a email client that integrates nicely into this, it'd be ideal. What I think I really want is something that allows me to FUSE mount my email directory. So I can cd into my directories, ls to see new messages, write messages in a directory, and move them into ~/Mailbox/send/ ... to have them sent, etc ...
Anyone know of anything remotely like this? (Or a really cool email setup they use themselves.)
[On, on the FUSE side, I really like this since it allows me to use tools like grep, rm, sed / awk, ... to do funky things with my email.] <comment><USER2> Try wanderlust on emacs <http://gohome.org/wl/>

o Very good IMAP support (Supports pop3,nntp,MH, filesystem too)

o Offline support

o Works perfectly on large (>2gb) imap folders

Use the WL from CVS as the download/documentation on the website is outdated. (<http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/wanderlust/>)

Yet another imapfs implementations: IMUS (<http://github.com/rtyler/imuse/tree/master/>) and fuse-mail (<http://code.google.com/p/fuse-mail/>).

</comment><comment><USER3> I currently use gnus in xemacs.

I don't like it, but it is better than the other options I have tried. However, I may revist mutt, it has been a long time since I messed with that.

I originally went to gnus because I am on a lot of mailing lists and I liked the idea of handling mailling lists the same way I read usenet. I still want that, and I would probably need to do a lot of custom configuration to get that with mutt.

It took me a while to realize that by your "FUSE" comments you expected the mail reader to keep the mail in it's own format, and you just wanted it exposed to other tools. The useful mail clients offer a variety of back-ends, from Maildir to mbox to a remote imap server, and you can handle mbox and Mailder with grep and etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I still use mutt. It's not great, but it's better than anything else I've tried. I ssh to my mail server and run mutt in a screen. My mail server has imap and webmail set up too, so it's fairly convenient no matter where I am.

I've wanted Mutt to be properly scriptable; it doesn't have much good in the way of configuration. I've been casually puttering around ideas for a long time about writing my own email client that's much more customizable. Maybe use a database backend?

Edit: looking at Sup, maybe it's what I want.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been really enjoying sup -- <http://sup.rubyforge.org/> \-- in fact, that really wordy quote about five down is mine.

<comment><USER6> I think I'm going to use this for some week.

Mutt -> Gmail -> Sup ? I hope so.

<comment><USER6> After the first 10 minutes of testing, imported my gmail account, wrote few test emails, I don't think this is really read for prime time. Also does not play well with my messing with my IMAP account via other clients. Is slower than gmail since for some reason the IMAP account is accessed to retrieve messages when I open a thread.

Btw to be able to write new emails with vim again is a joy... Still almost everything Sup is doing is in theory possible to do in a web-based or resident application with improved font rendering, simple icons to signal status of messages and so on.

Remember xchat? This IRC client had a lesson, it was possible to retain everything of good there was in text-only IRC clients, and add the good stuff of GUIs. The nerd email client I'm waiting for is something like this.

Fast: just scan IMAP for new messages but take everything local otherwise.

Great interface: mixed between curses but with improved rendering and config menus thanks to GUI toolkit or even web-based can be ok.

Easy to configure: unlike mutt for example. Spun is nice from this POV at least for the first steps.

Give me my editor: if resident, fire vim for me in some way, otherwise implement a decent editor with vim and emacs key bindings if it's web based.

It's worth to note that even a web-mail can be scriptable, using javascript.

<comment><USER3> As a stop-gap measure, you might find that one of the extensions or plugins that let's you edit text boxes in a browser using vim or emacs would help in using gmail.

<comment><USER6> Yes I used to have one of this extensions, don't remember the name but was capable of editing with Vim all the textarea elements in every web page. To switch between firefox and xterm was not very comfortable at least with my window manager. What I could like more is an extension that can give vim features to the browser text area.

Btw there is something strange going on here: the textarea is the _most popular text editor out there_ , the most used one where millions of people write short and long text every day, and still browser developers are not realizing that it should be improved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You want mh (mail handler) or perhaps a modern variant. I haven't used it in over a decade, but it's totally command line. Messages are actually files and folders are directories, so there's no need for FUSE or any wierd hacks like that. And there's a pretty decent emacs mode.

</comment><comment><USER8> Emacs? gnus:

<http://www.gnus.org/>

<comment><USER9> I use Emacs for most things, but the fact that elisp isn't multithreaded made gnus a painful experience for me. I've had much better luck using Mutt--and setting the program's editor command to emacsclient -nw.

Sounds like this guy had a similar experience:

[http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/2007/10/emacs-tricks-7-do- not-...](http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/2007/10/emacs-tricks-7-do-not-use- gnus.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You could just write a FUSE driver to support this. It would not be very hard.

Since that sounds like what you want, why not do it?

</comment><comment><USER11> nmh and its Emacs client, mh-e, are pretty nice, and are an excellent fit for working in screen. It's been a couple years since I used it actively, but it's worth a look.

nmh in particular is a bundle of small command-line programs that "just" dump out a list of subject lines for unread messages, etc. Easy to build on.

</comment><comment><USER12> pine is the best and has been so forever. Supports ldap, ssl, imap and nntp and much more. <http://www.washington.edu/pine/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Do look at MH and similar systems

</comment><comment><USER14> www.mew.org

</comment><comment><USER15> The upas program in <http://swtch.ccom/plan9port/> mounts remote mailboxes as file systems

Though see a caveat <http://fixunix.com/plan9/329502-9fans-p9p-upas.html>

I don't use it myself as I run a real Plan9 system.</comment>


GoatCounter 1.2: unique visits, events, password auth, and more - <AUTHOR> https://www.arp242.net/goatcounter-1.2.html <comment><AUTHOR> As a bonus, the author also released an user-agent parsing library for Go:

[https://github.com/zgoat/gadget](https://github.com/zgoat/gadget)</comment>


Thomas Friedman: The Earth Is Full - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08friedman.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

<comment><USER2> Friedman is an idiot[1], but even a stopped clock is right twice a day[2].

[1] Try reading _The World is Flat_ — it's 300 (edit: apparently 600!) pages of stupid platitudes and anecdotes. I literally threw it away after I made it through the first third. It's like _The Four Hour Workweek_ meets the worst aspects of American liberalism (and that's spoken as a self-described liberal).

[2] Unless you're: a) using a digital clock, or b) anywhere in the world that has abandoned the AM/PM system.

<comment><USER3> It's one of few books that I've just put down and thought was completely useless and unnecessarily verbose. I couldn't get near finishing it.. The copy I have (hard cover, ughh) weighs in @ 600 pages of drivel.

<comment><USER4> Have you read " The world without us " - it was a demonstration of the zoological vocabulary of the author and nothing more. Freaking horrible book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The next six months will be the critical period for Earth.

( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_%28unit%29> )

</comment><comment><USER6> after reading this [1] I realized I no longer had to take Friedman seriously.

[1] <http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html>

<comment><USER7> Most of the article is critical of Friedman's writing and communication style. For example the author quotes Friedman:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Then the author critiques: Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This critique was surprising to me. I found Friedman's passage to be quite understandable and it did not offend on any level. Being "herded on board" is a common phrase, and "hunting for space" is also a common phrase. To me they are fine used together because I don't actually expect the writer to be latching onto the herding metaphor in such a committed way. They are simply cliched phrases and the metaphorical herding phrase isn't meant to be used as a metaphor but rather a cliched way to communicate a common experience. Perhaps this style of writing is less than ideal, but for someone critiquing a book about ideas it seems weak to complain about the writing and communication style and ignore the actual ideas that are being presented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd agree with the gravity of the problems described, but I sincerely disagree with the almost-inevitable turn to optimism towards the end. "Gilding insists he is a realist". Straightfacedly Friedman hands on the assurance that given the choice to trod on as always or change, we'll suddenly wake up and give up greed, sloth, consumerism for some happiness-based economy (which is bullshit, in a catatonic collapse nobody's happy, no one except a few mavericks I guess).

How is that supposed to happen? I get it, miraculously, so we don't have to get off our precious asses now and can wait it out till the crisis sweeps us off into some kind of all-together-now rapture.

Already the ice-caps are melting off, within my lifetime world population has doubled, food-prices are rising, life for very many people in this world is starting to get more difficult, bit by bit. Yes, there is technological advancement, yet the price of energy has steadily been rising, at the same time fundamental world problems are on the rise as well. It does not suffice to assume that we invariably will find technologies in time to mitigate all these problems. We are in for trouble and very many people will feel the consequences.

How harsh they'll be is hard to tell in advance, but there's reasonable evidence that they (and arising social dynamics, i.e. war) could be lethal to the social and economic world system du jour, when given several decades to do their magic.

So it's better to think ahead and take action, as individuals and as society.

</comment><comment><USER9> Whoop-de-do, what are we going to do about it? Mass murder? Birth rate control(ala China)? Build more land? This type of nonsense is no better than the rapture preacher.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone ever tried building an OS that doesn't use files? - <AUTHOR> Since the beginning of computer time, all computer systems have been based on the idea of a "computer file". OSX, Linux, Windows, and every other OS has been based on the system of files and folders and filenames and crap like that. I'm not too versed in computer history. Has anyone ever tried making a computer system that does not use files?
In my opinion, referring to the data that computers deal with as "files" made sense in 1954 when every large company had a "paper file system", but in 2014, I think its time to come up with a new system that better mirrors how we use computers.
I'm working on a project I'm calling "Library Transfer Protocol", which is aiming to replace the concept of "file" and replacing it with 'Library item'. Basically, in 2014 computer usage more closely mirrors the workflow of an author (revisions, publishing, etc), rather than an employee filling up a file cabinet for internal use (thank to the facebook and the like)
Before I get too into this project, I'd like to know if anyone has ever tried doing something like this before. <comment><USER3> Several experimental systems have proposed replacing the traditional file system with what they call a "single level store": you have data structures in memory, then the OS saves them and restores them as needed from disk storage - but there are no traditional files on the disk, and the users don't interact with the disk storage at all - they just interact with the data while it is in memory. In this scheme, the disk storage is something like the pagefile in a conventional OS, but that's all there is - there are no conventional files.

An interesting single-level store was discussed by Robert Strandh in his 2004 proposal for a Lisp operating system, Gracle. I can't find the original paper on the web anymore but some pertinent excerpts are in [https://github.com/jon- jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/gracle_ex...](https://github.com/jon- jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/gracle_excerpts.txt). Strandh referenced another experimental OS with a single-level store called EROS. I see he has a more recent LispOS at [https://github.com/robert- strandh/LispOS](https://github.com/robert-strandh/LispOS).

<comment><USER4> the problem I have with flat systems that uses tagging or meta data is that one day when adding pictures I might tag them as "pictures," another day I add some pictures and forget that i called them pictures before and this time call them "photos." A week later I might tag them as "images."

Makes searching and organizing a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER5> I see no reason why an intelligent system couldn't learn common synonyms. It would be a pain to do on an exclusively local system, but on a networked system it could trade tags with others and learn these synonyms. You might call yours 'photos' while I call mine 'images'. When I transfer a file from you to me, it would be able to translate the tags into my own personal folksonomy. Which would be more convenient than the current situation where I have to rename and integrate into my filesystem every file I download from you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> BeOS had a nice idea, although it still used files. It's file system doubled as a database, and you could add arbitrary columns to files. For example, contacts were empty files in a special directory, and had attributes like "address", "name" and so on. Mails were also stored in plain files, but unlike mbox/Maildir all the metadata was stored as attributes, not in the files, making it easy to process them with scripts, or to sort them in the file browser.

Its a lot like the never-finished WinFS from Microsoft.

Funnily, modern file systems (extfs3/4, NFTS, HPFS+?) all support extended attributes in some form or another. However, they are currently only rarely used: Mostly for the "this file was downloaded from the internet, do you really want to open it" flag. I wish more programs would use them to store interesting metadata, but it's basically a chicken and egg thing now.

Windows and GNOME also have concepts where you can have calculatable attributes - you have a little library that looks up metadata in a database or parses it from the file, and then serves it as an additional attribute on the file (visible in the file properties tab). You can see it e.g. on mp3s or word documents in windows. However, it doesn't seem to be widely used either, and I wouldn't be surprised if that function has been gutted out of GNOME lately.

<comment><USER7> I've long wanted metadata fields to help me organize things, but the Achilles heel of systems that use them has always been the lack of standards. I use 2-3 different OS's daily and others less frequently, so I value having the same view of my files no matter where I am. The end result is I just throw everything into the file name.

<comment><USER8> At one point there was a command+database called pq floating somewhere in the plan 9 ecosystem. You'd pass in a path to a resource and it would return a path to the relevant metadata.

[http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/using_pq/](http://www.plan9.bell- labs.com/wiki/plan9/using_pq/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Basically, in 2014 computer usage more closely mirrors the workflow of an author (revisions, publishing, etc), rather than an employee filling up a file cabinet for internal use (thank to the facebook and the like)

How did you come to this conclusion about patterns of usage? I'd think the typical user/consumer would more likely have 1000 mp3 files rather than 1000 personally authored Microsoft Word documents (or Photoshop PSD files, etc.)

What about another common usage such as digital camera photos? The digital camera (or iPhone) has jpg "files". How would the user mentally translate the "files" living on a FAT32 flash card and copy them to your "Library Items" storage system? Do they keep 2 mental models of storage paradigms in their head? If your proposal includes a driver/wrapper for hiding the FAT32 file inside the concept of "library item", it seems like you're just renaming "files" to "library items". It's more a shift in terminology rather than shift in paradigm as a sibling comment already noted.

The filesystems in an operating system (NTFS, ext3, etc) are already implemented as _special purpose databases_. The "rows" are file id entries and they each point to the "blobs" which are the file contents. Whatever you propose to build has to reimplement this underlying "database" as well. Whether you call the rows of that database "files" or "library items" or "objects" or "documents", it isn't going to revolutionize the approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> My system is only meant to be used by humans. Software will still use the traditional filesystem.

Instead of the user supplying a filename/path for new content, they submit arbitrary metadata. When retrieving content, they query via a language called LQL (Library Query Language).

Basically the system works a lot like ID3 tags for mp3 files. 'Arbitrary metadata' is a lot like the fields for 'title', 'date', 'album', etc except they are arbitrary (you can use any set of key/value for metadata items)

Libraries can connect to other libraries. A 'Library' is much like an email inbox, except its one user per machine instead of multiple users per machine. Each library is 'addressed' via a domain name. All communication between libraries is done through HTTPS.

Traditional filesystems use a permission system that is very archaic. In 1960 it was common for there to be multiple users on one machine, but in 2014, everyone has their own machine. File permissions are useless, since I'm th one person who ever uses this computer. "Permissions" in the 2014 sense is which of my facebook friends gets to see these photos.

<comment><USER10> So, you're not building a filesystem (because that's _hard_ , and requires concrete engineering skills), but instead a glorified file metadata search?

So, MongoDB with a file URL? (Hint: that's you could implement the MVP of this, and if you use a URL you can even reference user files they don't store locally)

And file permissions are dead? Because nobody has kids that use the same desktop they do?

This is (from a technical standpoint) the silliest goddamn thing I've ever heard.

From a product standpoint, you could probably pitch and get a few M. Why the fuck not.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I'm buoding is most definitely not a "filesystem". Those use filenames and folders and crap like that. My system does away with that.

What you said about a glorified metadata search is right on.

Some people share devices, but most people we share with use other devices.

I'm glad you think its silly because all great things have haters (bitcoin, justin bieber, etc.)

<comment><USER10> So, don't be so dismissive of "crap like that". There are a lot of legacy ideas that are with us not from sheer inertia, _but because they work_.

Many modern filesystems are littered with the reeking remains of attempts at supporting metadata (for example, NTFS), most of which nobody cares about and which just add implementation complexity.

If you want to pitch a more useful and more abstract version of what you're describing ("how can we present searching and accessing a metadata forest backed by traditional hierarchical file stores") then by all means I'll be friendlier but right now you're coming across as a crank ignorant of the history of the ideas you're decrying.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not building a filesystem. I'm building a non-filesystem. Not metadata jammed into a filesystem. A whole new system that is used by the end user in lieu of the filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple's Newton OS used object-oriented data stores called "soups" rather than a file-oriented storage paradigm:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29#Operating...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29#Operating_system_and_programming_environment)

</comment><comment><USER12> MTS, z/OS (its a long story), OS/360 and basically everything written before Multinixs (the pre-cursor to Unix). Didn't use files. Stone age computers.

The hierarchical file system as you listed it really only started to come into its own in the mid 60's. With LISP machines at MIT and Multinix at AT&T.

Storing data in _files_ as you call it is old, and well known solution to this problem. Because finding a node on a tree is simple, and this is how file systems tend to work. Because thinking of objects, as subsets of various super classes of objects is easy for people to understand, when you don't explain it in those words.

The reason very old OS's didn't store things like this, is because there weren't much permanent storage. Actually MTS uses what are roughly _files_ but uses a dot notation to seperation files. Which will look similar to usenet

           misc.data.logs.9-12-2014.dat

Where data is your current record.

:.:.:

I support moving to a more revision, publish, etc. structure. But moving away from the tried and true hierarchical model will be difficult. Even an object based file system will develop a hierarchy of inheritance.

<comment><USER13> Although Multics didn't store "files" per se, but segments, which has a max size of 1 MiB of 9 bit bytes (36 bit CPUs). The were organized in a hierarchical manner, with '>' as the separator (vs. '/' for UNIX(TM) and its descendants, and '\' for MS-DOS and Windows since '/' was used in version 1 for argument :-( ), and were accessed in single level store fashion, mapped into your address space.

There was some time after its creation (as I remember hearing, at least) a "multi-segment file" abstraction created for data sets that were > 1 MiB, something of a kludge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a long history of mocking and decrying the file as a user-level concept, and many applications hide the concept from the user, even though they store user data in the filesystem. Music players (such as iTunes) are an example: there are songs, albums, and artists, but files do not show up in the UI in any way. This is standard practice at the application layer. However, implementing something at the OS layer with the expectation of exposing it directly to the user goes against the current thinking that it's the application layer's job to provide user-friendly concepts, and that the job of the OS is merely to support the application layer in doing that.

If providing support for application-level user-friendly abstractions is what you want to do, then I would suggest studying applications with UI abstractions that you admire and judging your OS storage layer by how well it supports application development.

</comment><comment><USER10> Files are a shorthand for "documents". Don't be so hung up on terminology.

First, look into history more--there are several non-hierarchical (read: flat) file systems out there.

Second, while the workflow might mirror authoring more closely (which I think is horsehit, but that's neither here nor there) the _artifacts_ of that process are what matter. Existing notions of a "file" map very cleanly onto the storage and organization of such artifacts.

There is an argument to be made for having better querying capabilities or permissions or whatever, but what is to be gained from throwing a commonly- accepted idiom away?

<comment><USER15> There's nothing to be gained by throwing an idiom away, but maybe there's a lot to be gained with a new idiom.

<comment><USER16> Butg there is the time spent in learning a new idiom, and maybe nothing is gained. Tech churn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On the AS/400 there was no traditional file system, the only storage was in a database.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i)

Unlike the "everything is a file" feature of Unix and its derivatives, on OS/400 everything is an object (with built-in persistence and garbage collection).

<comment><USER18> But in the end, isn't that just a putting files in database?

<comment><USER19> Well, if you see it this way, then there is no way to not use files at all. You favorite song will always be a string of bits and you will have to store it on some persistent storage if you want to listen to it again after power cycling your device. You will also always need some metadata to remember where you stored the bits. You can now decide how to call your bits - files, rows, objects, ... - and make some choices about the kind and structure - flat, hierarchical, indexed, ... - of your metadata, but there is not much more to the whole thing. Maybe you can add some goodies like redundancy, garbage collection, deduplication and what not, but in the end there is not that much of a difference between files, databases, registry entries, user account information or even objects in memory - everything is just a bunch of bits with some metadata.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> WinFS was supposed to be in Windows 7, unfortunately they decided to drop it, I was really looking forward to that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS)

<comment><USER16> I was disappointed by this as well. Not so bothered at the time it was dropped, as I was a bit pro Linux and didn't want to see a killer feature that would beat it. There was a lot of talk of an open source equivalent, but it seems that as nothing came of WinFS, nothing open source appeared either. It would be damn useful having a queryable filesystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Browsers. Browsers are de facto operating systems (though typically running on another OS, not on bare metal), and they don't think in files. They handle windows, tabs, documents, document elements (DOM nodes) etc.

<comment><USER22> > Browsers are de facto operating systems (though typically running on another > OS, not on bare metal)

What does this mean? Are you defining "operating system" loosely enough that you could also count the JVM, for example?

<comment><USER21> Good question; I don't have single definition for "operating system".

The Wikipedia page for Operating Systems says "An operating system (OS) is software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs", and by that definition, the JVM would count as one.

Though most users also expect some GUI/Desktop from an OS, and that's what browsers offer, but not the JVM. (The JVM allows programs to have a GUI, but it doesn't have a GUI itself, for example for launching other programs).

<comment><USER23> As used in the gaming world, "platform" conveys approximately the same thing and likely wards offs nitpicking about what is and isn't a kernel etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The One Laptop Per Child laptop uses a Journal instead of folders -- [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal](http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal) \-- and GNOME's "Activity Journal" project is similar. (Smartphones are starting to use some of the same ideas, too.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've toyed with the idea of replacing files with processes. If you have some data that you want to keep, you have a process that holds it in its process memory, and can give it other process via an IPC mechanism (if the other process is local) or over the network (if remote, although you could of course also use the network locally).

I never got around to trying it out. I think I may have tried to start some discussion on usenet along these lines maybe 10-15 years ago, but no one seemed interested.

A "directory" would simply by a process that provides some kind of lookup service to let other processes find the data storage processes that contain the data they are looking for.

You'd still have disks on your computer, but they would be mostly used as swap space.

The system would include some standard simple data holding and directory processes that implement a Unix-like namespace and permission system, but it would be easy to override this for data that needs special treatment. Just write a new data holding program that implements the special treatment you want and knows how to register with the standard directory processes.

</comment><comment><USER26> For your project make sure you plan what to do if one application created the item, but another program wants to open it.

Don't try to do it by applications registering types they can open - <USER2> never succeeds, there are simply too many file types in the world.

Also think about how to send data to someone else.

And finally think about how to integrate with existing devices that still use files.

</comment><comment><USER27> Worth a look:

irmin, [http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing- irmin](http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-irmin)

plan9, [https://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf)

<comment><USER28> Not disagreeing with you, but plan9 went the other way, huh? Rather than 'no files', "everything is a file!"

<comment><USER27> Trying to provide some balance :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _> I'm working on a project I'm calling "Library Transfer Protocol", which is aiming to replace the concept of "file" and replacing it with 'Library item'. Basically, in 2014 computer usage more closely mirrors the workflow of an author (revisions, publishing, etc), rather than an employee filling up a file cabinet for internal use (thank to the facebook and the like)_

Please define how a "library item" is different from a "file".

Is it made of bytes that can be read into a buffer and accessed?

(If not, how can an H.264 video or MP3 object exist as a library item and be processed?)

Do you not have spaces which assign names to library items?

The Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol has already replaced the concept of "file" with "resource". A URI doesn't necessarily name a file.

<comment><AUTHOR> A Library Item is an abstraction above 'file'.

The user constructs a query then sends it to a server, the server returns a list of items that match the query. For instance this may be a query:

INCLUDING artist contains "Pink Floyd"

and the results will look like this:

[ {"artist": "Pink Floyd", "title": "Another Brick In the Wall", "mimetype": "audio/mpeg", "album": "The Wall", "url": [http://drive.google.com/blahblah.mp3"](http://drive.google.com/blahblah.mp3") etc }, {"artist": "Pink Floyd", "title": "Money", "mimetype": "audio/flac", "album": "The Wall", "torrent_url": [http://drive.google.com/blahblah.torrent"](http://drive.google.com/blahblah.torrent") etc. }, {"artist": "Pink Floyd", "mimetype": "image/jpeg", "album": "The Wall", "url": [http://drive.google.com/albumcover.jpg"](http://drive.google.com/albumcover.jpg"), "purpose": "album artwork" etc.} ]

You can add more to the query to filter out the content you don't want. The query language is much like a SQL WHERE clause. The query language is meant to be super simple and something your grandma could figure out.

The app then can retrieve the actual file from the url. The end user has no idea about the underlying file crap.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Your proposal doesn't really sound like it deprecates files, but rather that it enhances them with attributes. Most operating systems other than Unix have already expanded on the file as a bag of bytes to one that supports features such as extended attributes and forks. Even most contemporary Unix file systems have xattrs (most notably XFS), but overall they seem to have had limited impact, and in the case of NTFS-style alternate data streams, even introduced some nasty security risks.

Really, what you seem to want is a file system with built-in version control and network sharing? Git and Mercurial are already virtual file systems of sorts, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER30> Look up Common Lisp's file handling functions. The number of options to open a file seems ridiculous in our world, but in that one function you can see a history of how many different ways "files" used to be accessed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Did you just describe git? Git has revisions of files, and they can be tagged, merged, etc. It still works on top of a conventional file system though, because why reinvent the wheel?

<comment><AUTHOR> Git is pretty much only for versioning (specifically annotation of versioning). My system is more for indexing/sharing data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While not exactly an answer to your question, you might find it worthwhile to take a look at the 1060 NetKernel platform - [http://1060.org](http://1060.org)

"NetKernel can be considered a unification of the Web and Unix implemented as a software operating system running on a microkernel within a single computer."

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

</comment><comment><USER32> Palm OS?

<comment><USER26> Yup, was going to say the same thing.

It didn't have files, it had database records instead. In general each app used its own database, but it was possible to read databases from other apps too.

<comment><USER33> Also came here to say the same thing. IIRC, it was also free-form data, so it was NoSQL before it was cool.

 _begins trailing off..._ I wonder if I still have any old PalmOS app code laying around on an old hard drive somewhere. Would be fun to have a look at that. I think that was the last time I did C++.

<comment><USER26> I still have my Palm V - it's still charged, and I use it occasionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What your building sounds like a document management system: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system). Might be worth looking at some to see how they'd fit with what you're envisioning. Even if you write it yourself, it can be helpful to see how others have solved the same problems.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yep, check out camlistore ([http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)). It can be quickly described as a big database at which you throw all your content, along with a JSON containing any attributes you want. These attributes are indexed and then searchable.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the file metaphor is a must for the separation of OS and applications. Unless you have a better conceptual framework to deal with this problem, you'd probably live with "files".

</comment><comment><USER37> MUMPS... it's sort of a database/os/programming language hybrid that uses a key value store.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yes, iOS.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is it on github?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/priestc/LibraryDSS](https://github.com/priestc/LibraryDSS) thats an old repo from when I tried to write code for this about a year ago. Most likely if I ever get around to working on it again, I'm going to make a new repo for it.</comment></comment>


Teaching Kids to Code – The English Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/teaching-kids-to-code/

<comment><USER2> Expecting key stage 1 kids (age 5-7) to be able to develop and debug programs is a big ask.

I would have left any coding to secondary at 13-14 just a I did when I did my CSE</comment>


But I Have A Family. And A Mercedes. - <AUTHOR> http://triangletechtalk.com/1/2013/02/but-i-have-a-family-and-a-mercedes

<comment><AUTHOR> The author of this piece is a friend, and I get where he's coming from. But there's one bit in this that rubs me the wrong way, and that's the implication that "later in life" founders magically lack "commitment and passion" somehow, relative to younger founders.

I'll go back to what I said before[1] and contend that - for some, if not most of us - older founders are likely to be _more_ committed and passionate, because we have the "running out of time" mentality.

I also reject the notion that you aren't committed to a startup just because you haven't quit your dayjob yet. I still work, but anybody who has followed the history of Fogbeam Labs for the past 2+ years would be crazy to suggest that I'm not committed to this. The simple truth is, I have to pay my rent and put food on the table while we bootstrap this thing. Although, in my case, it's not like I am driving a Mercedes or living in a big fancy house or anything.

If anything, the very reason I'm still single and childless at (almost) 40, is because I've spent my entire life to this point, relentlessly focused on getting here, to the point of being able to do a startup, and putting myself in a position to have a shot at making it big. Now maybe I'm weird (OK, I know I am), but this "later in life" founder will challenge anyone's level of commitment and passion.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5203830></comment>


Secretary of Defence Carter Names Three to Defense Innovation Advisory Board - <AUTHOR> http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/06/10/carter-innovation-board-hoffman-mcraven-isaacson/85700270/ <comment><AUTHOR> He named LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman; Walter Isaacson, head of the Aspen Institute, former CEO of CNN, and a biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and others; and Admiral Bill McRaven, former head of Special Operations.

I don't pretend to know much about those people or the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, but if you could pick anyone to advise the Department of Defense on innovation, who would it be?</comment>


Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product? - <AUTHOR>

In my own experience, and from reading Hacker News, I've noticed that there is still a lot of friction when starting a startup. Things like incorporating (choosing which type, what state, actually filing, etc), payroll, taxes, and so on. These are all tasks that just seem to take founders away from working on their real goal.<p>I was wondering what tasks take you away from working on your goals -- what things do you wish you could just quickly take care of and get back to work? <comment><USER2> The two biggest time-sucks for YC alumni seem to be talking to investors and dealing with visa problems.

<comment><USER3> An interesting thing about YC is that it saves time spent securing funding at the early seed stage: a week on the application and a week preparing for the interview, with a definite yes or no by a certain date.

Can you see later stage investors (100k, 500k, etc) doing the same thing?

<comment><USER2> They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.

<comment><USER4> Do you think you would be closer to typical investors if you had "rolling admissions" like they do?

<comment><USER2> Yes, in a sense. We just couldn't deal with as many startups if we had rolling admissions. So that would mean funding fewer, which would let us take longer deciding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's actually quite possible to just ignore those tasks, work on your goal, and then retroactively take care of them once your goal's on it way.

There's a big task that has to be done beforehand, though, and is a huge pain: figuring out what people want (and will pay for). It's much harder than it seems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, I totally agree.

Unfortunately, these tasks do have to be done at some point, and they aren't the goal of your startup, so they do take you off-course. Minimizing the time they take would be a good thing, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not starving in the street: AKA full time job.

<comment><USER7> vote one on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only tasks which I find stop me from working on my product are various administration and customer support chores. The one-time items like incorporation are trivial in terms of time-cost.

Being forced to step away from development has actually saved me more trouble that it's taken away. Being forced to take a breather to tally up expenses or polish up some documentation takes my mind away from the development task at hand and helps give me a better perspective on things when I return. On far more occasions than I'd care to admit, I'll find myself thinking about the 'absolutely essential' work I was intently doing to improve my product and realize it was either completely unnecessary or else could be done in a better manner.

Those insights would not likely be gained if I had been focused entirely on development. Mix it up.

<comment><USER9> > customer support chores

 _This may sound trite_ : That's not a bad problem to have..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading Hacker News

though i use it for taking breaks...

</comment><comment><USER11> My other projects.

</comment><comment><USER12> Deliberation....you can discuss and plan things all you want but at some point you have to just dive in

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm at a stage where I'm hacking most of the time (yay!), but I've learned that I can get really stubborn about solving problems, and don't know when to just take the loss, and do something in a way that is less robust but at least works.

In fact, I'd say I waste several hours a week being stubborn about problems, and I'm not a particularly stubborn person.

I would pay good money for a solution that always gave me insight into when I've been spending too much time on a task...but I'd be surprised if that could be pulled off.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe what you're referring to is yak shaving:

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> The only thing stopping me is that I'm not entirely confident with PHP yet. I'm working on small sample projects until I'm certain I can go out and build everything optimally.

<comment><USER16> Prototyping fast, then start the second edition. Don't wait until you are confident enough to start. I find that whatever I do whatever language I use, I always do the best in the second version.

<comment><USER15> I'm mocking up every page in HTML right now. My cofounder and I are scouring over all the details, trying to make absolutely gorgeous pages. (I know every person who makes an HTML thinks this, but I truly think that the few pages we've finalized are superb.)

Next semester, I'm in an advanced PHP course - enough to really firm up the things I'm working on. I'll probably have a prototype made winter break, so I'll be able to fix up the beta and stabilize it as part of that class, and have a working model in time to apply for YCombinator this summer.

I'm working with other PHP projects so I can get confident enough in PHP to make my site. The code for it is really simple: one of the things that makes me certain about my idea is that it's an incredibly basic one that hasn't been used in the way I'll be using it. I'm not too worried about it getting complex, so I'll know exactly when I'm ready to dash it out. But HTML first.

<comment><USER17> Unless you're certain about the UI elements, doing a hard design may be a bad move. I personally get better mileage from building the core architecture/functionality first, and working on the rest, ideally with public feedback on both after a certain stage. I've made significant changes in usability in the past as a result of this. If you end up hard-coding stuff before it gets scrutinized in the forge of actual use, you'll have a harder time making changes down the road.

YMMV. It helps if you use a framework or something else that can get you started. Just remember that customizing a framework isn't your core competency.

<comment><USER15> I'm very good with frameworks - I've got several years' experience with Drupal - but this project I want coded by hand, because I want to be absolutely certain of what's going on on every page of the project.

The UI elements are pretty much set. This is an idea that's been a long time coming, and we've got ourselves almost entirely planned out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just work on the product!

It's way too easy to spend time on things that aren't core to your business.

Don't worry about where to open a bank account, where to incorporate, etc. This can all be fixed later on, and won't prevent you from making something people want.

</comment><comment><USER17> payment systems.

<comment><USER19> That doesn't stop me, but boy is it a pain in the ass (I'm currently building our payment system).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Finding good documentation on PyXPCOM.

<comment><USER20> odd, I didn't expct to be moderated up there. Is someone else working on something involving PyXPCOM? Wanna chat?

<comment><USER21> A friend of mine is working in a research project about integrating and contextualising web and desktop applications. He's building their system using Firefox, PyXPCOM and SproutCore. I have an email address on my profile page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fulltime PhD :(

<comment><USER23> Who is forcing you? Also, doesn't doing a PhD come with lots of opportunities to do interesting stuff? What are you working on? Maybe we could exchange places, I always wanted to do a PhD...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> can't get my head around ruby on rails..

<comment><USER25> If you are struggling with RoR, I would recommend doing a 1-5 day online tutorial on Ruby (the length depends on how quickly you can pick it up). I skipped pure Ruby and went straight to RoR. In retrospect this was a mistake as a grounding in Ruby would have saved me a lot of pain.

<comment><USER24> can you recommend any courses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> School.

<comment><USER27> school</comment></comment>


New networking features coming in Docker 1.9 - chris-at http://www.container42.com/2015/10/30/docker-networking-reborn/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm assuming there is a huge performance issue. An RT of 0.78 milliseconds for two things on the same host is terrible.</comment>


37Signals: How a Restaurant Kitchen Translates to Software Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/686-what-gordon-ramsay-can-teach-software-developers

<comment><USER2> Good piece, but I sure hope Anthony Bourdain doesn't get the idea he can start writing books on software dev.</comment>


Show HN: VS Code extension that fades out the colors until you take a break - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schneefux/vscode-winddown <comment><USER2> I kind of need the opposite, something that pokes me with a stick if I take a break before I'm supposed to.

<comment><USER3> I often leave the window while waiting for something to build, and that's when I get distracted. Would be cool if leaving the window started a timer, and if I'm not back within five minutes it pops a notice on the screen.

<comment><USER4> Eliminate all loading times from your workflow using incremental and background builds. The computer will constantly do work for you, but the computer is a work horse, not your baby. Get the fastest CPU you can afford, with silent cooling.

<comment><USER2> There are occasional scenarios where this doesn't work out. The data mapping tool we use (MapStruct) doesn't automatically rebuild with changes in IntelliJ which means I have to manually kick off a compile step any time I have changes in the mapper. Worse still, that compilation doesn't always register in the build as seen by the in-IDE JUnit runner so I sometimes have to run all the tests from maven instead of just the one I care about through the IDE. Fortunately, this isn't a big part of my workflow, but wait times aren't always avoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't use VS Code, but I like that there's experimentation in this space -- every X minutes, do something to the UI to remind you to take a break.

I currently use Time Out on Mac and every X minutes it slowly greys out the entire screen. The hardest scenario is if I'm in "the zone" and super focused on fixing a bug, etc. and the notification pops up. I end up feeling antagonistic towards the break reminder.

This looks like it's a good balance.

<comment><USER6> <shameless plug> I created a browser extension called Remindoro[0] exactly for this purpose. Right now it is available for Chrome and Firefox. It is also open source[1]

Edit: But I really like the idea of this VS Code extension and will definitely try out. As I type this, I just got lost in editor for like 2 hours and a VS Code extension like this would have helped.

[0] - [https://palerdot.in/remindoro/](https://palerdot.in/remindoro/) [1] - [https://github.com/palerdot/remindoro](https://github.com/palerdot/remindoro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not bad but still intrusive.

So idea is to let you continue for some time and not be intrusive and not change anything (OK, anything important at all). Suggestions like chaning fonts or graying the screen are just not that.

Besides color, what else could be done ? Here is some brainstorming from me:

1\. THe more you work, the slower are keys rendered, just as when computer slows down. This allows for some continuation but eventually you will stop to let computer (and yourself) rest.

2\. The more your work, the more random, very short, beep sound is inserted on key presses. The same benefits as above unless you turn off the volume in which case the good old BIOS beep could do. This may deconcentrate a bit tho.

3\. The more you type the more mouse starts moving on its own. Eventually it just flies around like crazy (until you use it, then when you don't it starts again). Yes you can still continue working like nothing happens.

4\. The windows border colors start changing, the more you work, the more frequent it gets. It can be less distracting then mouse flying around.

All of above wont change a thing in your workflow which is important here as you want to allow some continuation and you don't actually want to change anything for user (screen size, font size, brightness changes, etc. are all intrusive and can change word ordering, syntax coloring etc. something you may depend a lot upon ( I do ).

<comment><USER8> Of course it's intrusive, as are your suggestions, as the whole concept is literally to intrude so you take a break. If you just want a suggestion to take a break try timed notifications.

<comment><USER7> Of course I can use timed notifications. There is also snooze for continuation.

That is not the point here tho. The point was to reinvent it with something more subtle :)

<comment><USER9> Random beeps and mouse movement are less intrusive?!

<comment><USER7> It depends on how you define intrusive.

To me the most intrusive thing is to change things in my environment. Font size for example will change how lines wrap and scroll position. The color will mess with syntax highlighting. Etc.

Something not intrusive will not change my editor but something not important for that type of work. It doesn't mean its not distracting, it should be for this kind of thing.

Mouse movements are defenitelly intrusive in classic IDE, I don't use mouse in vscode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As some one, who is back to no syntax highlighting at all, I would like the opposite. From distraction-free to papagei-mess.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious, why did you remove syntax highlight. I feel like I couldn't function properly if I didn't have my Dracula themed VS Code.

<comment><USER12> Maybe exactly for that reason?

<comment><USER9> So, to not function. Great reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure that a VS code extension is a complete solution - When I code, it is rarely typing in the IDE for 25 straight minutes. It is thinking, taking notes, drawing, testing in the browser, looking at dev tools... and then a few minutes of typing once I have figured out what I want to do.

I also question the wisdom of breaks at specific intervals. Do I really want to get knocked out of flow because a timer expired? I take my breaks when I complete a task. Sometimes that is after 10 minutes, sometimes it is after 2 hours.

If I were in your position, I'd look for a different metric than just time. Maybe measure the rate of activity across all running apps, and provide a notice of, "Your typing speed has dropped, and you are taking more time between mouse movements - if you are slowing down, maybe it is time for a break?"

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks extremely annoying, but the raw doing of the project is interesting. I appreciate it exists but I hate it :D

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea a lot! It seems like people are concerned about this interrupting their flow, maybe add a command that allows user to reset the timer? so that they can keep their flow, but are reminded that they need to take a break.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would you want to interrupt your code flow?

<comment><USER7> To "stay healthy" obviously, as by not doing that you may need to interrupt forevever.

<comment><USER16> You don't often get sprints where you are typing consistently, those are usually your most valuable "zoned-in" sessions.

I don't see why you would interrupt that, it takes awhile to get zoned back in.

Go walk around after you have a good session. This seems really annoying.

<comment><USER17> So, this still allows your valuable zoned-in session to continue and also reminds you that it is time for a break. Taking breaks increases your productivity, in overall, across time. Mainly because you save yourself from the huge dips of exhaustion caused by pushing your organism over its limit. Your body will strike back, believe me.

<comment><USER16> I prefer to zone in for 3-18 hours then rest the day after.

Been doing this for 12 years and I'm healthy (according to my doctor).

It's not manual labor, it's not that strenuous on the body. I filter the blue light to help eye strain and stretch when I feel like it.

<comment><USER17> That is an interesting approach and you might actually be an outlier. However, in a generic context, the idea is that someone needs to take breaks to minimize the risk of exhaustion and other medical problems and it does make a difference in someone's overall productivity when they do not push themselves too much. So, to answer your original question "why would someone want to interrupt their workflow" the answer is: In general, even if someone loses a few of their valuable zoned-in epiphanies, they gain an overall well-being and retain their health, which makes them be productive all year-round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like for me, this would end up just making me gradually strain my eyes without noticing. I'd prefer it to try doing a gradual change that didn't make it harder to see - maybe increase the font size until I'm working in a 20character wide screen or something, which would be annoying but not bad for me?

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting idea, but I would think a personally optimum pallette is optimum, and altering that is working against oneself.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't really need help taking a break but nice project</comment>


How do you choose to use a specific programming language? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65047/how-do-you-choose-to-use-a-specific-programming-language

<comment><USER2> Interesting question, made more interesting to me since no answers suggest using a multi-paradigm programming language.</comment>


Stripe Lands Apple in Quest for $720B in Payments - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-17/stripe-lands-apple-in-quest-for-720-billion-in-payments.html <comment><USER2> Another great win for Stripe. They have been able to enable developers and small teams to build great solutions and great to see Apple took notice.</comment>


The BP Culture's Role in the Gulf Oil Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/06/the_bp_cultures_role_in_the_gu.html

<comment><USER2> In all these articles where they say: It is scandalous how BP was making money at the same time the security stuff were done at minima, they forgot to tell that because the security stuff were done at minima they were (and still are) making so much money.

This applies to BP but also all the oil companies because every single field which is a bit large ($1B investment) is collaboration of many companies with one operator.

Check here, it is really interesting: <http://www.offshore- technology.com/projects/>

We are all closing our eyes when they pay the dividends and provide cheap gas for the SUVs.

Even in the article it shows that the government in the US is not doing its job: "BP snubbed the Environmental Protection Agency's suggestion to stop using Correxit. In response, the EPA blandly called for a "study" of other dispersants". A good gov. would have simply stopped BP with crazy huge per day of use fine.

In Europe, BP cannot operate that way (at least in Germany) because when they are not following the rules or when the TÜV (independent very strong control organization) say "we are not happy" the refinery is stopped from one day to another. The full refinery stopped.

But when the government does not care or pushes for profits because it is part of it the results are ugly. In Nigeria, the delta is dead thanks to Total and Shell way worse than in the gulf of Mexico but nobody cares and the gov. there just want money now.

Sad, but as long as we depend so much on oil for energy, it will continue.

<comment><USER3> A good government wouldn't have listened to an insane clown like Congressman Ed Markey and within hours have ordered a stop in the use of Corexit without weighting the alternatives, which in this case was using no dispersant at all (due to the quantities required).

The EPA et. al. have considered Corexit to just fine, given the alternatives, for at least a couple of decades. That BP was correct to tell the EPA to sod off can be judged by how this manufactured controversy disappeared so quickly.</comment></comment>


You have infinite email addresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.rohanjain.in/infi-mail/ <comment><USER2> This is neat, but I'd think that buyers and sellers of lists of email addresses will just scrub these tags off of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> In practice, I haven't see that happening much. If spammers were smart enough, they would actually do something useful.

If a service you subscribe does this, it is a good clue for you to mark them as spam and delete account after setting garbage values.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Chrome Extension to add a Tweet button to GitHub repos - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/snikch/twithub

<comment><AUTHOR> I got sick and tired of landing on a GitHub repo that was awesome, and having to manually share it.</comment>


ImageShack and Symantec both hacked - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=jhLt7s83

<comment><USER2> It's disturbing just how bad some of ImageShack's code is, not only from a functional standpoint but from an aesthetic one too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wowzerzz! Looked like they got completely pwned!

In all seriousness, sure, show they have bad security. But this isn't the ethical way to go round it. All their source is in the open, it's the worst thing you could imagine.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whee my username is in there as a PHP file

<comment><USER5> What's that from? Did you host a mirror for Imageshack?

<comment><USER4> I helped Alex out with some extremely basic form-swapping JavaScript way back when the site was brand-new, and the was a hidden tribute page for me for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> define('YFROG_AUTH_SALT', 'Obama reveals tough executive pay limits ');</comment>