Persecution of Scientists Whose Findings Are Perceived as Politically Incorrect - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/persecution-of-scientists-whose-findings-are-perceived-as-politically-incorrect/ <comment><USER2> This is, rather unfortunately, a pretty pervasive issue which isn't limited to science. I've noticed this trend whereby it is somehow ok to make completely emotional (as opposed to rational) arguments as long as the point they defend is itself politically correct.

As an example (of which there are many), I recently ended up being caught up in a conversation about a man who alledgedly committed rape. Even though the evidence is still being reviewed and no verdict has been served, the man in question is already being carried through the mud and the people in the conversation were quick to bash on him (including people who were hearing about it for the first time). I pointed out that while I do believe that rape itself is a horrible crime, accusing somebody of it without proper knowledge of the facts is unfair ("guilty until proven innocent"), and should all legal and social matters be handled this way, we'd be back to something akin to the Salem trials. The unanimous response was "but this is rape we're talking about, why are you defending him?". At that point, I decided the best course of action was to drop out of the conversation.

This sort of behaviour leads to self-censorship: scientists won't even touch certain subjects for fear of retaliation and people in general will actively opt out of conversations they fear will lead to non-PC arguments or perspectives. This self-censorship therefore ends up reinforcing the "social justice warriors", some of whom would go to any lengths to support their points (including, as the article points out, lie and slander), which in any other context would be considered bullying, or at the very least, intimidation.

This is obviously not helping anybody, including the people who are under the impression they are defending their cause, since no balanced conversation can be had, and some of the people who may have rallied the cause in question would now rather stay silent. To make matters worse, we have major media outlets behaving like tabloids on steroids, dramatizing and muddling issues to sometimes borderline criminal extents.

And finally, perhaps more importantly, there seems to be a general lack of pragmatism when it comes to arguing about sensitive issues (or even in general one might argue). A lot of people seem to take points they don't agree with as signs of aggression and often retort in antagonizing ways, exacerbating ideological gaps and driving away people whose minds they might have been able to change otherwise.</comment>


Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results - <AUTHOR> Finding answers to basically any question is now behind a walled garden that requires that you create an account.
This is the exact thing expertsexchange did before StackOverflow came and ate their lunch.
What do you think about it? <comment><USER2> They should definitely drop Pinterest from Google Image Search results.

<comment><USER3> Quora and Pinterest are the worst parts of Google results. Also Google Images has been ruined. Used to be you could View Image and get the source image but now Google images hijacks that too. I gotta say I hate whoever decided that was ok. Do what I mean. Actually come to think of it I think this was due to copyright infringement case against Google. Stupid.

<comment><USER4> IIRC this was due to a lost court case:

> Almost two years ago, Getty Images filed antitrust charges against Google in > the EU, taking issue with the company's image scraping techniques to display > image search results. Earlier this week, Google and Getty Images announced a > partnership and Getty withdrew its charges against Google. Changes like the > removal of direct image links were apparently part of the agreement.

Source: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages- after...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google- removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/)

Meanwhile, the browser feature right click -> "View Image" still works for me on Firefox, as a replacement.

<comment><USER5> That only gets you the scaled down preview image. I have a Firefox extension that restores the "view original" button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Q&A is the new spam.

Quora is full of it, and so is LinkedIn.

A shill asks "a question," followed by all these "answers," recommending a particular site, product or technique (that has a backer).

I have had to leave quite a number of forums, because they became completely taken over by Asian spammers; doing exactly this. They rendered the groups useless.

TBH: I did fall for it the first time I encountered it. It's a fairly effective technique, if done right.

<comment><USER7> Cannot agree more.

Though I'll say this -- it's hard to optimize Quora's feed, but once you do that by carefully curating the topics and the people to follow, Quora can be an incredible source of super insightful answers on niche topics. But it does take a lot of work, which is a barrier to many.

Their feed display mechanism needs a lot of work imo.

<comment><USER8> Strange because I find that it's full of day-0 beginner questions and little of in-depth niche, thought out ones.

Like "Where do I start with machine learning?" often with bad spelling, or "Do you need to be very smart to become a programmer?" etc. By contrast, Reddit, the StackExchange sites and HN are a totally different league.

<comment><USER9> I used to love browsing Quora, and found a lot of answers fascinating. However, in the past year something seems to have changed. Now I get really spammy suggestions, and there is rarely new content on my feed. I get the same suggestions for days.

I don't doubt that the good content is there. I think their algorithms just changed and now I don't see it anymore. Not willing to put in the effort to figure out how to get an interesting feed again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quora back in 2011 was magical. I spent hours reading answers by some incredible people and it influenced a lot of my thinking back then. Unfortunately they kept raising money they didn't need and the VC treadmill turned the site into a wasteland.

There are still gems of knowledge but the experience is ruined. Overbearing content moderation won't let you edit your own question. Credits system was removed and instead Quora now pays people to post useless questions. They ignored every tool and feature that writers asked for. The mobile site won't let you read more than half an answer before forcing the app. Spammers are never stopped and voting rings have taken over most popular questions.

It's a sad case of a site that's successful despite the execution, not because of it.

<comment><USER11> I had the same experience.

When I was in high school, there was a group of "Quorans" (including a few "prominent" ones) that used to hangout on G+/hangouts, and I used to stop by from time to time. Back then I was very STEM focused, so it was pretty cool to have conversations with peers that had a variety of academic interests.

Unfortunately, Quora has changed significantly since then, and for the worse. The only interesting thing is how it has turned into an Indian social network of sorts, and the associated subculture in that community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quora is only one of many garbage domains that clutter google results. Pinterest is another big one.

Google needs a "block this domain from my search results"\-- they even had it, for a brief period of a few months a number of years ago. (maybe only for some users?)

<comment><USER13> I entirely agree.

Quora and Pinterest are particularly routine spam sites in my search results.

They rank just below word reference site spam, like dictionaries, thesauruses, or translation dictionaries (sites which I do benefit occasionally from), and below Wikipedia mirrors (which I feel has become so bad that I can't even get legitimate results talking about the problem itself! Try searching something like: _search results spam wikipedia mirror "revolvy" "wikiwand"_).

But for me, the worst (and most obvious!) offenders by far are "pronunciation guide" spam sites. Just a few examples:

      howtopronounce.com
      howtopronounce.co.in
      pronouncekiwi.com
      pronouncenames.com
      pronunciationof.com
      rightpronunciation.com

plus the scourge of 16-second YouTube videos on channels with names like Pronunciation Guide or Emma Saying.

(If you search for something like _" Deidesheimer pronunciation"_ or _" pronounce Canynge"_ on Google, the vast majority of results will be those spam sites, plus maybe an ancient forum thread from 2004 that veered off topic before anyone even tried to give a serious yet uninformed answer.)

These ad-infested spam sites purport to teach you how to pronounce an unfamiliar name or tricky word (an important and underappreciated service that many people use!). But usually they merely contain computer-generated bullshit, as if fed directly into all available text-to-speech algorithms. Even the ostensibly human-generated recordings and sites are often flagrantly wrong, unsourced, and untrustworthy.

There are a few legitimate sites (such as Forvo, Youglish, etc.), but too often they are woefully incomplete (by nature of their being crowdsourced). Forvo even contributes to the spam with "do you know how to pronounce this word?" false positives.

I once blocked all of the spam sites when the domain-blocking feature you mentioned was built into Google Search; then had to do it once again when I needed a browser add-on to replace the removed feature (which naturally only worked on desktop); and recently I was astonished to find that the add-on also stopped working! The spam never ends.

<comment><USER14> I know, right? How hard would it be for someone to make a wiki-style site with UGC, a reputation system (I speak this language natively and vouch / do not vouch for this content), a tracker for trending words, fun articles for Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and the like? The Web I used to know seems to be gone or at least in steep decline, supplanted by garbage like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quora answers are astonishingly bad. People with fake credentials saying nonsensical things. I really hope people realize how bad it is, but I suspect that because its something people inherently don't know the answer to, they don't understand just how bad it is. Most people stop looking after they get their answer. Most people aren't going to keep looking after they've found their answer to find a primary, reliable source.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find Quora through DDG (not sure why this is specifically about Google), but regardless, 1/3 times the result is valuable. Quora often shows up when the other results look unreliable or ad farms - not that Quora's replies are so accurate, but about 1/3 seem okay.

Loading a few pages from browsing history, I don't see any walled garden.

LinkedIn results on the other hand... Google/DDG clearly didn't index the login page, so LinkedIn apparently shows certain content to the crawler that they aren't showing to the user, trying to get ranked higher for that query than the login page would be. Not sure how that isn't seen as fraudulent from the search engine's perspective.

<comment><USER17> My experience is the same. When I do get Quora, I do not have to sign up, and it's usually valuable. I would add that the presence of a Quora result at the top of search-engine results usually indicates that my query is freaking arcane and specific, and Google is doing its best to show me _something_. In other words, it's not as though Quora results are taking slots away from better results.

<comment><USER16> > usually indicates that my query is freaking arcane and specific

Exactly this. (That's what I meant with "Quora often shows up when the other results look unreliable or ad farms", but I didn't phrase that quite right.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember thinking that Quora was really good, I thought that Hacker News and Quora were two sites with the highest quality user-generated content on the internet.

At the beginning the core demographics was Sillicon Valley startup scene. It felt like a small community of smart and interesting people (my favourites were Yishan Wong and Rory Young). At one point, the site got very popular in India for whatever reason and there was an influx of low quality answers. I left some time after that. There was also a trend of people using the site to promote their products, which was explicitly allowed by Quora AFAIK.

Right now, it seems that the site is _much_ more popular in countries like India or Nepal than in the US: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=quora](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=quora)

<comment><USER19> I am from India, and I remember the time when Quora got famous. I remember reading some quality content on the platform. Then "the masses" started answering questions just to rack up upvotes (or whatever Quora was calling it). Imagine Instagram, but instead of uploading pictures of yourself you copy-paste someone else's content in an attempt to answer a question you do not know much about.

<comment><USER20> And all those 'IIT' Q/A tho

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quora is the dumbest shit ever. They send out these readers digest emails with interesting questions and shit and when you click on them they take you the freaking homepage every time. Like wtf is even the point of sending me the email than if you're gonna make it incredible difficult for me to find that particular question that i really need answered now?!

<comment><USER22> As a non-US based user, I uninstalled Amazon's iOS app yesterday because of this exact behaviour. Often a US-only deal will get posted on a local forum here in New Zealand. The link for the deal will go to the Amazon US store. If you click that link without the app, you are taken straight to the listing where you can review the price, shipping options etc.

However, if you have the iOS app installed, it opens the app when you click the link, loops twice (never loads the listing) and lands you on the Amazon US homepage. I've tried everything to stop this behaviour (changing regions, loading in logged out state etc), but to no avail.

It finally frustrated me so much yesterday (especially in the lead up to black friday) that I outright deleted the app to stop those links being captured by the native application.

It feels so liberating to click a link and get the desired result.

<comment><USER23> Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but nowhere near the team that builds the iOS app.

My experience as a user of the Amazon iOS app is that the developers deeply care about these kinds of quality issues. I have seen the looping behavior before in other contexts; I reported it, and it was eventually fixed.

In the app there is a customer service link in the hamburger menu, with a "contact us" option if you're willing to spend a couple of minutes telling them about your problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anything that requires the user to login to see the search result should automatically takes a big hit in search ranking.

\- Quora

\- Instagram

\- Pinterest

\- LinkedIn

Just to name a few. In fact, I don't remember the last time I clicked on those links because my brain automatically filtered them out already. But they are still spam and should be pushed to page 2 or 3.

<comment><USER25> Add Red Hat Access to that list as well. Nothing like searching for something relating to Wildfly or CentOS and getting results that require a paid-up Red Hat account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Everything is spammy today...

Like I was trying to find lyrics for a song today, and first 5 sites were showing author and song name, but the page said "we don't have lyrics now, you could be the one who will write them"

LinkedIn, who straight asks you to log in or create account

<comment><USER27> LinkedIn used to be good. Now it's full of senseless notification spam and ads. Edit: And fake connection requests.

<comment><USER28> LinkedIn has never been good. It's always been a snakepit of dark patterns. But I will believe that they've become even worse now.

(I'm still on LinkedIn, because many recruiters find me there and send work my way. But I barely use it. They do.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Look, as a _website_ yes Quora sucks (and so does Pinterest, mentioned many times here in the comments).

But individual _answers_ on Quora (and images on Pinterest) may very well be the only place what I'm looking for exists.

So the _last_ thing I want is for Google to stop indexing and showing their content.

Seriously -- there's zero user benefit to hiding it. It's easy to identify Quora/Pinterest in search results and choose to click or not based on your own preferences.

And at least with Quora, I never have to log in to view all the answers if I come from Google. It only asks me to log in when I try to click through to a second question.

Finally, the last thing I want is Google de-ranking results that are behind any kind of login and/or paywall. Because that would mean de-ranking most news sites I use, which would be a _terrible_ direction to move in.

<comment><USER30> > the last thing I want is Google de-ranking results that are behind any kind > of login

I'm of the opposite opinion. And can't really see your side of the argument. Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel the same way about Bloomberg, and am consistently surprised by the number of Bloomberg links posted here on HN because clicking through any of them results in "Sorry, but you read your free article, time to pay up!"

Forbes is also effectively full of opinion hit pieces of low value (although these don't seem to be paywalled). These also show up in a lot of Google searches and likewise get up-voted here quite a bit.

The question is, should google actively try to trim this content, and if so where should it end?

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't know. Google is a search engine for web content. I don't think it should discriminate based on the content being freely available or not.

Adding a feature for an end user to say restrict a search in some manner might be nice, but the point, at least in my opinion, of a web search engine is to find any and all matching content on the web. If some of that is paid or otherwise blocked content it's still doing its job properly.

<comment><USER33> I agree with your point, but as a user, I would want Google to rank results lower if the content served to the Googlebot isn't the same as the content served to the general public.

I'd expect this behavior to be a red flag in Google's ranking algorithm. Don't drop Quora, but just let them slide below the fold on results.

<comment><USER34> This behavior is known as "cloaking", and it is in direct violation of Google's Guidelines.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q&t=431s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q&t=431s)

<comment><USER35> It may be in the guidelines somewhere, but if they actually cared at all, LinkedIn and Pinterest would have disappeared from all search results years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How about: Google should let allow users to blacklist sites in the search results.

But I definitely don't want to live in a society in which someone else who just happens to be vocal enough can even start a debate that company X should block company Y from their search results.

<comment><USER37> Google Search used to have such a feature. I used it to blacklist w3schools. Of course, the feature is no longer there.

<comment><USER38> What's wrong with w3schools? I occasionally find their site useful for basic HTML stuff and it seems inoffensive enough, certainly compared to others mentioned here (Quora, LinkedIn, Pinterest et al)

<comment><USER39> w3schools _used to_ be a very bad resource but it has improved over the years. See [https://www.w3fools.com/](https://www.w3fools.com/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not only that, but the answers on Quora seem to be 80% garbage.

<comment><USER41> Add on top of that the websites that just repost StackOverflow content.

<comment><USER42> I think you have it backwards. Tons of "content" on StackOverflow is copy/pasted from another source, often some experts personal blog or a niche site, without sourcing to the original.

<comment><USER16> I've rarely noticed that. Are you saying someone will copy both the question and the answer from a place like experts exchange or a blog? Do they post them under different accounts to make it seem less obvious? Or do you mean the semi-rare occasion where someone cites a blog post?

I think I've seen an unsourced copy only once, I think it was a new answer where nobody else had seen it yet and I edited in a link to the source. But this is many years ago, I don't remember the situation exactly (and I visit stackexchange sites a lot, more than most people I think, since it's the only social site where I permit myself to go to during work hours).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Tip: Short term hack: If you do wish to cross the walled garden for a particular quora page, simply add a '?' at the end of that particular link, and then you will be able to view the page. Rinse and repeat every time you want to quickly glance at the posts.

Long term: Use uBlock origin.

Edit: This is for viewing non-tech posts in general. For anything tech, we have other pretty good sites.

</comment><comment><USER44> Quora used to have a system which rewarded good answers. Now, they pay people to ask popular questions. In the private Top Writers group (I left shortly after this change) it was predicted that this is result in a dearth of garbage questions: template "what is X times Y?", nonsense "what if" questions, etc. And sure enough, it came to pass.

Quora made a conscious choice to trade quality answers for more questions (of any quality). They surely saw in advance what the site would become and did it anyway. It used to be a place where you could read thoughtful replies from intelligent people, and it's become a spiritual successor to Yahoo Answers.

<comment><USER10> Agreed, writers are what make the site and Quora has routinely ignored their requests and warnings. I'm constantly surprised at how inept their decisions are considering the team behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Google does not need to drop Quora from its search results, Quora itself is already on the way to irrelevancy. It used to be a place for thought provoking questions and answers, nowadays it just contains a copy pasted text from the first google search result. A perfect example of a niche but strong product ditching its target audience in order to pursue popularity.

</comment><comment><USER46> Though Quora can be useful requiring an account whereas the full text is freely crawled (cloaking) is against Google's guidelines[1] and as mentioned in their help page violating the guidelines is a reason for the site not to be shown. Based on that, what should definitely be banned is Pinterest which goes against half the guidelines.

[1]: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER47> I agree completely... sort of on the same topic: It used to be _really_ bad with Pinterest infecting image search. Same problem, almost all hits directing to the Pinterest walled garden. It appears to me that this has gotten better recently, but I don't really know why.

<comment><USER48> I may be wrong, it I think they made the name of the source more prominent in the preview, and also made cutting and pasting the full quality image straightforward. Just my thoughts, no way to validate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> There is very little signal on quora, mostly noise, the UI is confusing and it pollutes results, so I cannot agree more.

But there are many more websites that should be "removed", instagram, pinterest (basically everything that requires a log-in). Also, all reposts should be removed, there are so many sites reposting SO or mailing list content with weird UI.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think Quora is such total garbage info and unfounded opinion I just add them to pihole blacklist.

Quora actually points to a flaw of algo only search engine rankings - do a lot of people link to it? Is it a lot of keyword intense content? Yep and Yep!

But the important - is it actually useful, relevant information - well that's secondary.

</comment><comment><USER51> I agree. If website presents one content to Google and another to anonymous user, it's scam. Actually Google is known to punish that behaviour and ban those websites. Probably Quora is considered too big to fail.

</comment><comment><USER52> We really need a feature to block websites from Google search. It's impartial and a common thing on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube.

If a Google search engineer reads this, please think about it.

<comment><USER53> They used to have this feature and removed it. Unlikely they'll bring it back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've expressed this before, but: just disable JavaScript. Your browsing experience is improved drastically. You can still whitelist a few scripts that you need if you want to.

<comment><USER55> solid advice, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's mind boggling that the 'world's greatest search engine' does not have a series of advanced features that let's us really alter our searches in a consistently customized way.

The 'advanced search' section does allow for some things, but it's a little awkward, moreover, 'the things we want' are not on there!

The ability to drop sites - or at least discount them (i.e. quora, pointerest)

The ability to turn off Google's extrapolated information, such as the definitions that appear.

The ability to tag/highlight result from some sites (i.e. put a pin on some sites, say Wikipedia)

The ability to prefer some words over others in the weighting

The ability to actually _require_ some words (I find it amazing that top results often don't have a key search term - I understand why that makes sense in some scenarios, but for most others _I typed the term because I want it_ )

Etc. etc..

There are a ton of other features that would be useful, I'm surprised they haven't moved into this niche.

I feel that Google is no longer 'search' it's just 'find'. We type it as a means to 'get to that thing' and we just click on one of the first results.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wanted to like quora. I tried to engage there and contribute to raise my professional profile and, yes, pitch my side projects as parts of answers when relevant.

That experiment has run its course, and my hypothesis was proven incorrect. I thought it would help, but it was more like shouting into the void.

There is a lot of astroturfed questions, vague questions, and questions that seem as if they were automated.

So, I've moved on.

<comment><USER58> _I wanted to like quora. I tried to engage there and contribute to raise my professional profile and, yes, pitch my side projects as parts of answers when relevant._

Why wouldn't that be considered "astroturfing"?

<comment><USER57> I always thought astroturfing was answering your own question, or asking questions that directly referenced the product or service you were affiliated with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I personally disagree. While it is absolutely true that there is a lot of garbage content on Quora, it is certainly one of my favorite sites on the web because for all the garbage you come across, you can come across some wonderful gems and actual helpful people, and in general I find it pretty easy to just mentally filter the garbage out. That might be because I have spent a lot of time trawling through it and answering questions though.

And perhaps I just like quora so much because it's the only place on the web I've gotten any meaningful amount of impressions and engagement on content I've produced (aka answers), so perhaps I am sonewhat biased due to that. All that being said, I can certainly see why someone might find it annoying, but I think that if you take the time to engage with it and understand the ecosystem within it, it'll make it a lot more tolerable.

Or you can likely just follow what I assume will be a suggestion from other users here as to how to filter quora results out of your queries :)

</comment><comment><USER58> Google should also drop Medium for the same reason.

<comment><USER46> >You've completed your member preview for this month, but when you sign up for a free Medium account, you get one more story.

Why people even post there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> There are a number of sites that are mostly useless in Google results. Perhaps a larger issue is that any company that solicits public data input be required to sign an ironclad agreement with _me_ that my content is under my copyright and if they ever try to monetize my content they share any revenues with me. Otherwise they get class-action sued into oblivion.

<comment><USER61> The legal situation is rosier than you think. What you demand is already the case: content you create is copyrighted by you and can't be relicensed by anyone else without your permission. All without any agreements at all!

Now, it would be tyrannical not to give you any way to transfer rights to your creative output. So some publishers do allow you to agree to a Terms And Conditions waiving certain of these rights, or transferring them to said publishers. It goes without saying that no one would ever compel you to agree to such conditions, but some publishers might not agree to publish your work without such an agreement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I agree but they should only lower the reputation. Most of the answers are obnoxiously misleading and others are basically spam.

</comment><comment><USER63> But why wouldn't Google's secret ML sauce gradually learn the right dose of Quora vs Wikipedia to give to the public? That seems more principled (data- driven) than doing a blanket ban on Quora based on gut-level (possibly correct) intuition of search experience.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm torn. A lot of my searches are filled with Quora spam, but I also have found some extremely deep, well written answers on esoteric topics there. (To be fair, I think most of those are discovered in targeted emails they send, not Google searches)

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm not sure I'd support that, but before they drop Quora they should consider dropping Answers.com. I don't think any reasonable person would argue that site isn't a complete waste of space.

<comment><USER66> Somehow I still occasionally get Experts Exchange popping up in my Google results. I didn't realize they even still existed.

<comment><USER16> Me too, it popped up like last week and was the only result I could find (I already moved from DDG to Google because the results were irrelevant with any keyword combination I could make) and the answer was, like on stackoverflow, some "accepted" kind of answer (so marked by the person who asked the question). All posts were readable except that one: for the marked-as-answer post, you had to pay.

They've certainly moved on from scrolling down to see the answer...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I tried to report a competitor for vote manipulation last month. They have ~20 answers that have the same ~10 users upvoting every answer (and no other answers). In response, they closed my answers .

</comment><comment><USER68> Small tip for anyone that doesn't have a Quora account:

Appending ?share=1 to the end of any Quora URL will remove any signup walls you see. You can even automate with a quick Greasemonkey script for all Quora URLs.

</comment><comment><USER69> In the beginning I kept going back to Google because the results on duckduckgo just wasn't as good, but it slowly improved, so much that I actually haven't used Google for search for about two years now. Even local searches for my country has become much better on duckduckgo.

And when I have occasionally tested Google to compare results, I also noticed a rapid decline in the relevant results at Google. So much that I can hardly recognize that search engine any longer.

</comment><comment><USER70> I think google should add a search filter option instead that is by default ignore paywalled/login requiring results, or not ignore them by default, but if the top answer is paywalled/login requiring show an option to do the same search without paywalled/login requiring results

<comment><USER65> Google already has a browser extension for filtering search results, but you have to configure your own blacklist. It would be cool if there were an extension that was like that but more advanced; I'm thinking the uBlock Origin for filtering search results that could work for both Google and DuckDuckGo based on premade block lists.

EDIT: It looks like Google took down their extension. _boo they suck_

<comment><USER71> A suitable replacement? "Personal Blocklist (not by Google)": [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal- blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot- by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm frequently clearing cookies (not manually) and have no problem reading Quora answers. I also find a lot of useful results there.

Just for a test I searched for "how an atomic clock works" on DuckDuckGo and found this nice answer on 9th place (below few HSW and YT results): [https://www.quora.com/How-does-an-atomic-clock- work](https://www.quora.com/How-does-an-atomic-clock-work)

</comment><comment><USER73> Personally I'd rather they not remove any search results, because I can scroll past or use "-site:quora.com" if I don't want to see those specific ones. Google's search results have already gotten bad enough as it is without them doing any more "algorithmic censoring", if they modify their algorithms to exclude/derank Quora they risk removing even more possibly better results too.

</comment><comment><USER74> >is now behind a walled garden that requires that you create an account

I am not sure I get it.

If you land on quora from google you can read the question and answer (whether either make sense is another issue).

If you click (while being on quora) on another question listed, then it prompts you for "Continuing" and logging via google or facebook.

You can still type a question mark at the end of the address in the browser address and hit ENTER, the linked to page will load fine.

</comment><comment><USER75> The quality of answers in Quora is ok. As good as all the Stacks that are not computer related for instance. We do need better but no one has worked out how yet.

So your point is it's a walled garden, but then so are many news sites, so would you block them as well?

I'm not also sure it's walled, I can access the articles fine atm. But I do know they did wall it many years ago so not sure if it's changed or something else.

</comment><comment><USER76> Search results consisting of links to inaccessible content aren't very useful.

HN posts of inaccessible and/or paywalled content also aren't very useful.

</comment><comment><USER77> Instead of "Google should drop X", Google should allow users to weight domains in search results from zero to some-large-number, and to easily share lists of those weights. E.g. let the SPLC curate a list, the NRA curates another list, etc.

Meta-weights would also be useful, users could subscribe to the SPLC list but weight it by 1.5, weight the NRA list by -1, etc., whatever works for you.

</comment><comment><USER78> Incidentally , what is wrong with google's crawler/indexer? Using their search console, I'm seeing thousands of pages of original content which are crawled, but not included in the index for no apparent reason (no explanation). In fact the number of indexed pages keeps going down and down very fast. Is this some fresh evil i m not aware?

</comment><comment><USER79> As much as I've come to dislike pinterest and quora I'd not be happy with google dropping either from results. There are plenty of other "reasons" that will "accidentally" creep in as acceptable later.

The potential for even more scope creep is real.

That said, various controls to let me exclude my definition of "junk results" are still a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER80> Quora is more like ask.com's old q&a site where they basically scrape yahoo answers for new questions and filter them. The difference is that quora has real people/voluntiar who is technically writing answers of those yahoo answers questions for quora and old ask.com used to use dumb serp results. They are printing money now

</comment><comment><USER81> Absolutely. Notice how Gabriel Weinberg is spamming his DDG search-engine. Nothing against DDG, but this is a shady tactic for promoting your business.

[https://www.quora.com/profile/Gabriel- Weinberg](https://www.quora.com/profile/Gabriel-Weinberg)

</comment><comment><USER82> Quora tried to grow too fast by generating questions and spamming these to users for them to fill as fast as possible. A pile of garbage growing too fast is going to get caught and punished. I can totally see it being delisted by google and shutting down as a failed experiment that ran its course.

</comment><comment><USER19> The worst is when you expect Google to display a stack overflow question or a Github issue in response to your query, but instead what you get is a Quora answer. You already know that though the question matches (almost) your exact query, the answer is going to be badly formatted and useless.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yelp, too, if you are using an iPhone without the Yelp app installed, you can't see any of the content.

</comment><comment><USER83> Also there's the issue of many of Quora's answers being generated by sales and marketing content purveyors. The platform has been reduced to useless marketing content as is mostly devoid of quality answers. Just like content marketing killed blogs, it's claimed Quora as a victim as well.

</comment><comment><USER84> I thought this is what the -site: operator was supposed to exist for?

Could that perhaps be a solution client/user side?

<comment><USER16> Yes, but adding a list of sites to remove to every single query you ever type... search engines should just remove bad sites (note: I am actually _against_ removing Quora, this is just about the general case). Also, there is a maximum input length for some reason, so that might not actually work.

("For some reason" \-- to prevent monster queries of course, but I mean, removing sites doesn't cost much computational power at all. With some literal quotes and AND/OR operators you can create short queries on which it basically times out after 5 seconds and only returns a few dozen results that it found so far, and when you reload the page, there are suddenly a lot more results. So it shouldn't be limiting input length but complexity, which it already does by timing out.)

<comment><USER84> _Also, there is a maximum input length for some reason, so that might not actually work._

I actually didn't know that. My first thought was a browser add on that allows the user to blacklist domains they'd rather not see results and construct a query based upon.

Seems like that moot if a sufficiently long list would result in sites being left off and end up in queries anyway.

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I agree they should drop quora results, but for a different reason. My reason is that the quality of info is ridiculously poor. Most answers read like covert adverts for some app or another. It's got to a point where it's not even that discreet anymore.

</comment><comment><USER86> If a website didn't require an account initially it should not require it years after it's founded, that's just nonsense and it will drive people away to other alternative websites giving the same service without requiring registration.

<comment><USER87> Unfortunately that's not the case. They plaster us with nag screens and content hidden behind logins because it works. Most people don't care, and the company gets another profile to spam and track.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> In a way they are a violation of Google's policies right? They serve different content to google bot and human.

May be adblockers should pretend to be the googlebot so they don't get discriminated.

Oh that would create a whirlpool of cascading effects.

</comment><comment><USER89> I think Quora and all other social silos should get the Internet Death Penalty.

</comment><comment><USER90> Quora used to be great back in the day, it still is good for sometimes I find many gems there. But these days there are a lot of BS answers on quora which are akin to YouTube comments section.

<comment><USER91> on youtube at least nobody is pretending to be an expert

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> I am surprised to see so much negativity towards Quora. I wonder if this is a case of Quora being so massive that this post is rallying the vocal minority, which seems large only because everyone happy with Quora is staying silent.

Personally, I get a lot of value from Quora answers. There have been specific cases where the knowledge I needed was only found on Quora. For example, how to access Library Genesis when their main domain was down. Another interesting one was "What's the net worth of Sam Altman?" The answers seemed pretty reasonable, and I like that speculative questions are allowed.

I don't remember creating a Quora account, but even if I haven't, I think creating one is an ok price to pay. It keeps the site running.

</comment><comment><USER93> I have found interesting and enlightening articles on Quora but most of them are garbage, the analogy is weird compared to stack overflow. I don't know what went wrong with this site.

</comment><comment><USER94> Agreed. The answers always seem like cliff notes. Just enough to point me to other resources. Also, that expertsexchange drove me crazy... we gave in as a company to buy a subscription.

</comment><comment><USER95> Absolutely not...sure it's spammy. So use an extension for a personal blocklist by all means, but as a Quora user I like having answers readily available. Don't make your lack of creativity Google's job to fix.

/grump over

Seriously though, I know this'll be unpopular but Google already tracks User Experience Signals to identify sites whose answers are difficult to get to. If Quora should be identified & ranked lower, that's totally a Google problem, but dropping entire companies & making it Google's role to monitor sites & decide which logins are "walled" and which are just UX is a terrible idea (do you trust Google to get it right every time?).

</comment><comment><USER96> Unrelated but i read ExpertsExchange as

Expert Sex Change the way you wrote it out.

</comment><comment><USER97> The questions on Quora are also really low. I'm absolutely done with answering questions that amount to doing an undergrads homework or how to learn language X in Y time.

</comment><comment><USER98> Well they should really do something since Quora now seems to be used mainly for people to gain some extra SEO points by placing links to their websites in the answers.

</comment><comment><USER99> I'm using DuckDuckGo since a year and a half and I'm getting nice results, including old content and less spammy websites like Pinterest or other places.

</comment><comment><USER100> I like Quora results, I find them useful. Of course, I'm not loathe to actually register for these useful sites so I don't see the pop ups people complain about.

</comment><comment><USER101> Can someone reuse Google search results and apply custom filters on top? In essence, can I add custom desirable features on top of Google search?

</comment><comment><USER102> Yes, I have not really ever found any satisfying answer on quota.

Wondering, wow many upvotes a post like this needs to get attention from somebody from google?

</comment><comment><USER103> If you're lucky, you may get a good answer. Which you can read without an account. But you can't see other stuff using links.

</comment><comment><USER104> I don't visit Quora more than once a month. The feed is full of irrelevant answers with bullet lists about celebreties.

</comment><comment><USER105> What about all the link here on HN that link to websites like the New York Times that block content if your in incognito mode

</comment><comment><USER106> Why doesn't every site just dupe me into divulging more of my data and spam me with ads. That's how I likes my internet.

</comment><comment><USER107> They didn't do anything about Pinterest, the worst offender to ever exist, so I don't see anything happening.

</comment><comment><USER108> I don't think it is unfair for people to monetize their content. They may do so either by charging a subscription fee or by requiring people to register, but they need a way to get traffic to them. Isn't a search engine the top of the funnel for that purpose? And if so isn't it appropriate that these results continue to be listed? Would we treat Quora or Pinterest (the typically named offenders) differently from journalistic outlets

</comment><comment><USER109> Quara has quality information but it's never the info you actually want. I mentally skip over those links now.

</comment><comment><USER110> Maybe it would be easier and better if we just removed the walled gardens from Quora and Pinterest and their ilk.

</comment><comment><USER111> Add the following rule to uBlock Origin

      www.google.com##.g:has-text(https://www.quora.com)

</comment><comment><USER112> You can use "-site:quora.com" for searches to exclude quora. Google search has pretty intuitive api.

</comment><comment><USER113> I have never followed a Facebook link from Whatsapp because of this. Ironically,same parent company.

</comment><comment><USER114> Search results shouldn't be editorialized. (This is not an endorsement of Quora, which sucks)

</comment><comment><USER90> This is true for medium.com articles as well which get on top positions an Google consistently.

</comment><comment><USER115> This is just hitting the nerve of Quora. :D

May be, there may be some answers which can really be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER116> While we're at it, I'd ask to remove TripAdvisor results as well.

</comment><comment><USER117> And LinkedIn as well...

<comment><USER118> It never shows content to me. I don't understand why it continues to be returned in search results. Every link is broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> The web used to be fun and unpredictable. It feels like Google has become a tasteless bland search engine serving up the highest bidders these days. The known authorities on any given subject. It's not difficult for small niche websites to be buried by ever expanding domain authorities. Google is killing small internet business for sure. Quora is garbage. I'm also tired of clicking on 5 news articles to finally find one not buried behind a paywall. Google needs more competition. Most of the results should be date based, first to the market regarding whatever, should be more of an authority. Instead, we have niche websites swallowed up by established brands. It's BS. I need to give DuckDuckGo more consideration.

</comment><comment><USER120> You can just reload the page to escape that walled garden

</comment><comment><USER121> They might as well drop NYT, WSJ, The Economist. Whenever I see those sites at the top of the results I don't bother clicking because they are just paywalls. This month somehow I was "out of free articles" for all of them since the beginning of the month.

</comment><comment><USER122> And of course Medium

</comment><comment><USER123> I frequently get good results from Google/Quora.

</comment><comment><USER124> All I want is a button that allows me to block a website from appearing on my search results. They can keep it for others. I know I don't want articles from Quora, Pinterest, and paywalled news sites when I am searching for something on Google.

</comment><comment><USER125> Same thing with medium and Facebook. Me no likey.

</comment><comment><USER126> Ha, ha. I read that as "expert sex change" lol

</comment><comment> code-is-code Same for LinkedIn

</comment><comment><USER127> sometimes I just need personal advice and experience instead of long content with ads in the end, so Quora is ok for me.

</comment><comment><USER128> speaking of head scratching results...

Past couple of years I have wondered how 'chat iw dot us' has been a top result for 'sex chat' search, and they run google ads this whole time.

that one and 'the porn dude' in those results, which doesn't have a chat system - they way the algo is working in those. Of course I am a bit biased, it's sad to me that little content wins in that vertical - lots of content is penalized for something.

<comment><USER128> I'd love to know what the downvote was for on this one. One of the side effects of the ymyl stuff added to the algo soup is that small sites with little content can crush larger sites with much more info.

It's terribly obvious in that vertical. I'm sure that was part of the goal, however what may be good for the spam team is not necessarily what is best for the users who are searching for particular things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> What's Google? Use DuckDuckGo instead.

</comment><comment><USER130> Can you emulate googles crawler to trick your way around paywalls?

<comment><USER131> Setting a Googlebot UA will work for any low tech filter, besides looking at the ASN of the source IP or the javascript engine behavior I'm not sure what else sites could really do to figure it out sans coordinating with Google to define the indexer source(browsing/click pattern maybe).

There's bound to be at least one googler in this thread and since the ASN check would be the hardest to fake and easiest to setup... someone go change their UA and go to nytimes or something from the office and see if it works(bonus points for any SRE who does it from a data center).

</comment></comment><comment><USER132> Related, but I used to use a Bypass Quora extension in Firefox (which just tacked on something like ?share=1, so quora nag screen doesn't hit you), but switched to another extension. It gets me past the vast majority of paywalls and nag screens: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

</comment><comment><USER42> Quora reminds me of Yahoo Answers

<comment><USER16> Indeed, both contain both garbage and useful results. Much like the rest of the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> Quora, Pinterest, and Instagram have been mentioned already, but I'd like to throw another one in this bucket: Amazon

<comment><USER17> And all paywall sites. Combine this with the ability to hide all paid ads in search too (the flat-out ads that look more and more like results as the years go by), and there's something I'd pay for. Maybe they could bundle it in with my YouTubeRed subscription? Hmmm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> From image search they should also drop images that link to an academic paywall (e.g. Elsevier) where the image is not even shown. So painful.

</comment><comment><USER135> You can block cookies from quora.com, or, equivalently, open in a "private window", to avoid the paywall.

It's similar to news sites which block you after 3 visits -- clear your cookies and you can go back to them.

Some sites have anti-anti-tracking technology, and you must enable cookies and/or JavaScript to even view one page, but Quora isn't one of them (yet).

</comment><comment><USER23> Yes, Google should exclude or at least visually distinguish all paywall and loginwall content.

I also want a law that requires cancel/close buttons to be obvious, accessible, large (of at least a minimum pixel size) and highly contrasting from the content that it's on. This would solve a lot of the pop up login dialogs on web pages that do not actually require login.

</comment><comment><USER136> You realize Google has a official program that will surface paywalled news sites in search results, knowing the user will not be able to see the linked results?

[https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/programs/](https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/programs/)

</comment><comment><USER137> The few answers on Quota which aren't completely bogus are usually out of date.

</comment><comment><USER138> or at-least bring back the personal block list

</comment><comment><USER139> Completely agree

</comment><comment><USER140> Noting

</comment><comment><USER141> Same thing with paywalled news. I wish Google would remove "walled content" by default.

</comment><comment><USER142> Medium has to be downgraded, it's become total rubbish behind a paywall.

</comment><comment><USER143> and NY times?

</comment><comment><USER144> I was reading about the paywall that Pinterest put up and they did an A/B test and apparently people DO sign up when forced for the paywall... it's amazingly annoying though.

</comment><comment><USER143> and medium

</comment><comment><USER145> drop quora from the internet entirely

</comment><comment><USER146> Not sure if it's been posted, but you simply append this to the url to avoid the paywall: ?share=1

</comment><comment><USER147> You can teach them to do it yourself by bouncing back from Quora and going to another result. Perhaps it'll also encourage Quora to remove their paywall from search engine referrers, as many news sites have done.

<comment><USER65> > You can teach them to do it yourself by bouncing back from Quora and going > to another result.

Isn't that what a lot of us are already doing? Quora used to actually be OK, but it's been total trash for the last few years and I can't think of a single time I've found a good answer through that site.

Maybe Google doesn't deindex them because it will seem anti-competitive? After all, they've publicly stated that they're more interested in providing "answers" than being a search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> Pinterest results come up in google images and you need an account to see them? Newspaper articles have paywalls? Don't see the difference

</comment><comment><USER78> google needs some competition. I think , instead of breaking up google, they should break up Bing away from MS.

</comment><comment><USER144> "expertsexchange"... I can't be the only one who read that as "expert sex change"

</comment><comment><USER149> This coming from HN that posts 1000 NY Times articles a day.

<comment><USER150> I hate it equally. What good is knowledge if you cannot reach it. Google organizes something that is useless to me. And I will not enter the social media circus.</comment></comment>


Xkcd: Time - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/ <comment><USER2> Changing every half-hour or so – anyone up to crack the (probably) SHA-256 checksum[0]? :-)

[0] [http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043&si...](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043&sid=a1c7bf145ef1f3be91cd56a27372048d&start=40#p3301961)

</comment><comment><USER3> its brilliant, i dont know how they do it!

<comment><USER4> What is it about? I didn't get it.

<comment><USER5> the picture changes every half-hour. Someone put together a gif of all the frames here[1].

[1]: <http://primis.org/time/output.gif>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Didn't get it.</comment>


Show HN: PostDish – What's on Your Plate? - <AUTHOR> https://postdish.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all!

With this lockdown in place, I've found myself cooking more than normal - <USER2> with that, lots of new food pics have been piling up on my phone.

I hacked together PostDish this past weekend as an easy way for people around the globe to share what they're cooking, eating, and enjoying.

Recipe functionality will be coming soon to share recipes of delicious dishes that you post!

Open to all feedback! Thank you

PostDish - what's on your plate?</comment>


Show HN: Crono, an open-source programmatic time-based job scheduler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gduverger/crono <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, HN. I made Crono. I've been working on it on and off for 2 years and I just open sourced it today.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, some tasks are missing (email and message), and I have to write more unit tests but it's a start and a foundation to build upon.

I was hoping to get some early feedback. Thanks.</comment>


Elon Musk: Telsa CEO Says Population Is Accelerating Toward Collapse - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/07/07/elon-musk-world-population-collapse/ <comment><USER2> Important part: Accelerating _downward_. Still at upward velocity. But, not for long. This will require major changes in economic strategies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Knowing Elon this tweet will be followed in a few months with a new kind of drilling company.

<comment><USER4> FarmX - Smart livestock will farm themselves.

<comment><USER3> And then Snowball turned to Napoleon, 'you know I've been thinking..'</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I build an airline booking system? - <AUTHOR> Hello, I turn to this community for advice.
My close family owns a small airline that used to be for personal concierge services (6 planes). They are trying to move into another space which is air travel for remote place within the country (LATAM), where other airlines don't usually go. They have asked me to build an app as a booking system for travelers.
I am thinking that before going for an app (iOS/Android) it would be best to build the website system that works well on mobile and then if needed, go native (iOS/Android). Either way, my question is the following:
Is it best to hire a team and build the system or buy software for this? What would you do? Any guidance would be appreciated!
Please keep in mind the following that this is at a very small scale compared to a regular airline you find on KAYAK.com. Total fleet can't carry over 150 passengers. <comment><USER2> As a first step, I would try to understand the customers and how they book their flights. Do they use apps, websites or even any technology at all?

Sometimes your target market may not be all that tech-savvy to begin with and would prefer booking over the phone. It is something you'll have to validate with your customers. Once you know them, then you will know what to build. And once you know what to build, you will know if what's out on the market can support their needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have any specific experience in the field but I'd imagine that there is probably not a huge amount of software that is targeted at such a small niche - most commercial software is likely very large systems integrated into large commercial airlines where they have 1000s of routes to cater for, and is thus likely very expensive compared to the needs/budget of a small service like you've described.

If simple searching for something applicable doesn't turn up a suitable option, consider this:

Build the system, and keep in mind (without letting it massively delay delivery of a working product) that if it's built well, it can probably be licensed to _other_ small operators as well. Not necessarily as a means of making profit, but simply as a way to recoup costs.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> That explains why I've only found solutions for big systems - such a small niche. Tank you for the input!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There will probably be some 'off the shelf' software out there that fits your requirements & budget.

Some quick ideas: [http://www.navitaire.com](http://www.navitaire.com), [http://www.airkiosk.com/](http://www.airkiosk.com/), [https://tflite.com/](https://tflite.com/)

Another approach that might turn up some useful leads: try googling for flight & fleet management software that integrates with Avinode. You could also try looking through the past exhibitors at EBACE (some of which I'm sure will offer booking/scheduling software for small airlines).

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> As a first step, I would suggest trying to use an existing service to sell the tickets. The lowest-tech solution that will work for you is probably the best. Making bookings is a really common problem -- do you have special needs that would require you to have a highly-customized booking system?

On an unrelated note: an interesting niche on Airbnb are people who charter boats. You book the boat just like a regular place, but then they include a sailing trip, food, a guided tour, etc.

That might be something for your family to consider. Just a thought, no idea if it makes sense for you at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Had to read it twice to get it. I like your first idea, a simple booking system, one that doesn't even cater to airlines might work to begin with.

As for the Airbnb, it is something to think about. Why not try it as a channel? Will keep in mind. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bigger question is the business question: Is the new "product" viable?

This means that the focus of the "software" should be toward answering that question. In other words, the "app" could connect to a manual booking system behind the scenes [aka, "something that won't scale"]. The keys at the early stage are reliability and flexibility. The choice of technology should be driven by data and the data should come from the actual business process not _a priori_ assumptions.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER7> Many years ago I worked for a guy (ex TWA) who ran an "airline" by doing a sort of arbitrage between chartering whole biz class jets and selling individual seats. Believe it or not he did it all by sticking cards on a wall and marking the map with coloured pins.

With 6 planes and 150 pax, you could probably do the same. If not, at least think in terms of keeping it simple.

The far bigger question is "How do potential customers find you?" Are the flights scheduled? or run based on demand?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a web developer, contact me through email@example.com and i'll be more than glad to give You some advice, and walk You through it

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd look into ITA: [http://www.itasoftware.com](http://www.itasoftware.com)

<comment><USER3> It's kind of depressing to me that for _so many_ people these days, the first "solution" they think of for something thats basically core business (or a dependency for their core business) is, "quick, how can I find a way to simultaneously hand over all my business data to; and make my business reliant on, Google/Amazon/Facebook.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How fast can a post go down in ranking? 400 ranks in an hour? - <AUTHOR>

The post I'm talking about is this:
"HTML7 magic on Facebook" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3922402
It came up to Rank 18 at one point and in the next hour it quickly tumbled out of sight all the way to rank 455. Is this possible? The last time one of my posts hit the front page, it stayed there for at least half a day. What's going on?
Is this some evil conspiracy to keep the news about Facebook using HTML7 away from public knowledge? :) <comment><USER2> It was probably flagged a few times.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the explanation.

So my conspiracy theory could be true.</comment></comment>


The Great Millennial Car Comeback - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/millennials-not-so-cheap-after-all/391026/?single_page=true

<comment><AUTHOR> Just yesterday, we had a great discussion on the assumption that Millennials don't want to own stuff: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9407597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9407597)</comment>


"Just open-source it" is not realistic - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/07/06/fred/ <comment><USER2> Regarding the money thing, remember there are other currencies than dollars.

When I open sourced my own RSS reader[1] some of the "non-monetary currencies" I received:

      * Several (non-robot) recruitment emails from well-known companies doing Ruby
      * Additional development time from strangers to fix things I wasn't interested in
        doing (i18n, performance improvements)
      * Additional testing time to iron out all the bugs
      * 50-100 "qualified followers" (i.e. other developers/designers) on Twitter, many
        thanking me for creating the project - increasing my network reach
      * Five people have sent me messages that their merged pull requests were there first
        open source contributions - that feels really cool
      * Links from two of my favorite blogs - OneThingWell and The Changelog
      * Being referenced in a Ruby book written by a community leader
      * Socially-validated (1.8k+ stars) open source project that I can forever point to
      * Material for future blog posts, user group/conference talks

Not all of these have the same value to each person - but for me, they were worth the trade-off. Could I have charged for the software instead? Probably, but I have a day job that pays me well and I enjoy. I wrote the software because I wanted it to exist (one of my favorite things about being a developer) and any extra benefits are just icing on the cake.

[1]: [https://github.com/swanson/stringer](https://github.com/swanson/stringer)

<comment><USER3> I just took a look at stringer and having recently set up tiny tiny rss wish I knew about this at the time, as fever support was something I really wanted. I'll take a look into it when I get a moment, but your post inspired me to create a /r/repos subreddit to post open source repositories worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck ([http://ignitiondeck.com](http://ignitiondeck.com)) to raise money over a longer duration.

We've had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive.

Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you'll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it's appropriate. In this case, I'm trying to help.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm happy you self-promoted. Ignition Deck looks really awesome, and I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise.

For example, [http://ignitiondeck.com/id/crowdfunding-a-video- game/](http://ignitiondeck.com/id/crowdfunding-a-video-game/) is the most valuable crowdfunding breakdown I've ever seen.

<comment><USER4> Thanks a lot. My partner Shawn worked very hard on that one, and we put a lot of time/effort into it. Glad you found it useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summary: "I might want to make money out of this, so... nope."

<comment><USER7> Open-source and profit aren't mutually exclusive, in this case he was unable to get enough of the latter to justify the effort of the former, perfectly reasonable.

<comment><USER8> You're both right, that's what the blog seems to be saying to me. Can't argue with either. I think this is also a not-so-hidden hint of 'if you wanted this open source, you should have paid more attention to that kickstarter!'

I can't really blame people for not backing that kickstarter either though. Why $30K for an OSS feed reader when there are so many open source ones [1] that could be easily retooled to most purposes? The market for this stuff is so incredibly over saturated as it is. Rather make something _new and different_ if you're going to do a kickstarter.

[1] [http://opensource.com/life/13/3/eight-open-source-rss- feed-r...](http://opensource.com/life/13/3/eight-open-source-rss-feed-readers)

<comment><USER9> I mean, looking at the Kickstarter, I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what Fred _is_.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-reader-extraordinaire

There's a vague description of being an RSS reader that you have control over. There's all kinds of talk of the various technologies that Fred sits on top of, but very little talk about what Fred itself actually _does_. There's a single image on the Kickstarter page, which isn't the product itself, and looks like something whipped together in Paint in 5 minutes time. There's a link to a demo site, but, again, it's not entirely clear what's going on when you get there.

It's not that people are unwilling to pitch in or that $30k is necessarily even too much for that, but it has to be something people want and you have to give them a _reason_ to want it. The lack of any kind of compelling pitch seems to be what killed the Kickstarter in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At my company we've open sourced a ruby gem for an elastic search client but kept the rails integration closed for some of the same reasons. I just don't have time to write a version that runs with vanilla rails. Our gem relies on a bunch of conventions and libs that are not standard for a rails app. Sure we could extract it, but we would have to rewrite parts that depend on other tools. Sure they could be open sourced as well, but we've hardly got the time to do that. The reality is that most oss projects are small and are maintained by one person with occasional patches from others. Without that one person most die.

</comment><comment><USER11> just want to point out: if the reason for holding it back is almost entirely because she wants to get paid for it, she should actually explain how open sourcing it excludes her from income. after reading it, it sounded like she was concerned about the sunk cost--which would be irrational.

so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?

<comment><USER12> Because, well, making it available for free means that fewer people will be compelled to buy it?

<comment><USER11> and if no one is compelled to buy it to begin with? that's what I'm asking. I don't think we can just assume that someone would buy it.

<comment><USER12> Sure, we can't, but if you open source it, you'll make strictly less money than if you hadn't (because if nobody was going to buy it, they aren't going to pay you money if you open source it anyway).

This is too simplified, as you can have other monetization models, but usually you don't open-source things if you want to charge for them.

<comment><USER13> > Sure, we can't, but if you open source it, you'll make strictly less money > than if you hadn't (because if nobody was going to buy it, they aren't going > to pay you money if you open source it anyway).

That isnt correct, a lot of people buy open source software specifically because it is open source.

<comment><USER14> And statistically, they're absolutely _dwarfed_ by the money flowing to proprietary applications.

It's possible to sell open source software, but it is very, very tricky to get right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "I might make myself look a bit messy by releasing this. I also imagine that some other people might have to put in some amount of work (much less than the work I put into writing this in the first place) to get this to work, so I'll make them rewrite it all from scratch if they are in need of this functionality." I don't believe this person understands empathy.

I realize if you want your project to flourish as an open source project, you need to make it palatable. However, a tarball of shit is better than NOTHING. This person isn't even deluding themselves by saying they'll "get around to open sourcing it." You won't do the world a disservice by releasing working code. Seriously, just come out and be honest and say "I don't want to open source it because I don't wanna."

<comment><USER16> > However, a tarball of shit is better than NOTHING.

bzzzt! Wrong!

Releasing stuff that is "close enough" as a product and have it succeed is wasting other people's lives as they struggle to fix your ball of mud and make it work better over time.

Better to wait and not waste other people's time.

<comment><USER13> Just in case anyone who is thinking about releasing open source softare reads this, it is entirely wrong.

Software (open or otherwise) is never done, its always too ugly, missing some features, slow and / or buggy.

If you are thinking about releasing your stuff as open source, do it now, it probably is too early and nobody will use it, someone may pick up it or your next library, share some knowledge report some bugs or evern fix stuff.

It is very easy for software developers to verify the stability of the libraries they are using, you have absolutely no responsibility to them by releasing software that has bugs, it all does.

<comment><USER16> Baloney! Releasing dysfunctional crap is giving your users crap that they have to do the grunt work to maintain.

It's entirely one thing to release functional and ugly code, it's entirely another to simply code dump broken crap and think that's a good thing.

<comment><USER13> People spending all their time fixing broken libraries that they would have been quicker writing themselves is a problem that pretty much never happens, there are multiple ways in which to determine if a library is likely stable or mature enough to be used, and testing whether it works or not is usually a fraction of the time that it would take to write the thing from scratch.

If you open source some code without making any grandiose promises and someone somehow ends up in the position where they are wasting their time fixing it, its entirely their own decision / fault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not wanting to proselytize on a failure but presumably 15 minutes of graphic design input on the video thumbnail would have helped the Kickstarter pitch?

</comment><comment><USER18> I just don't think that there are enough developers yearning for yet-another- feed-reader, and one written in C++ of all things, to really support an open source project for it.

Much less one that is being held hostage by it's author.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't just help thinking that if this software was truly both non-trivial and useful that it would be relatively easy to pick up $30k "after" open sourcing it via consulting or customization work.

<comment> wes-exp I feel like the OSS consulting model benefits from releasing buggy, hard to use software that requires the developer's assistance to get working.

It sounds like she wants to release software that works well without needing any maintenance, which would tend toward a payment up-front model.

<comment><USER19> I don't think you get any guarantee that just because you pay for software that it works well and is not buggy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone explain/summarize what this is? I gather it was/is feed reader, but I can't find much more and she (?) is very vague. Or I don't know how to navigate her blog.

<comment><USER21> I was wondering too so I found the kickstarter. It's some kind of personal feed reader server: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed- rea...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-reader- extraordinaire)

<comment><USER20> Thanks!

I am surprised by this trend — put a project on kickstarter and promise to open source it. Build it on tech that's been open sourced for free.

Trying to stay positive here. But haven't they heard of the millions of people who contribute to (quality) open source software every day?

<comment><USER22> ... and dont forget the few thousand FOSS projects already freely available on Gitorious, Github, Bitbucket, Google-Code, Launchpad, Sourceforge and ... so many more !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> clark-kent Your project doesn't have to be perfect or complete when you open source it. You just have to set your version number correctly somewhere between v0.0.0 - v1.0. Developers will still find it useful while they know it's not yet 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tell that to Acquia.

</comment><comment><USER24> In other words, capitalism ruins it for the rest of us....

<comment><USER25> What's the alternative? Do you want your tax money to go towards supporting this particular developer so that she can open source this particular project? Because that's the alternative. Or are you saying that she shouldn't have the right to determine what to do with her code? Because that world sounds pretty awful too.

<comment><USER26> Sure, funding free software democratically as a public good is rational. There's no law of physics which makes you choose between directly compensating people, and their work being open. Books, music and movies could then also be open.

I recall this has been advocated by Lessig and Stallman. Go far enough in this direction, you end up with ideas like Participatory Economics. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics))

Unfortunately, to people in non-democratic countries (who, for example, can't choose to stop allocating their taxes to prisons, drones, armies and surveillance), taxes are some awful thing. But in a saner culture, people would rather enjoy deciding on collective purchases.

<comment><USER27> where and when do collective purchases go to anything besides enriching the wealthy or politically connected?

"[The socialists declare] that the State owes subsistence, well-being, and education to all its citizens; that it should be generous, charitable, involved in everything, devoted to everybody; ...that it should intervene directly to relieve all suffering, satisfy and anticipate all wants, furnish capital to all enterprises, enlightenment to all minds, balm for all wounds, asylums for all the unfortunate, and even aid to the point of shedding French blood, for all oppressed people on the face of the earth. Who would not like to see all these benefits flow forth upon the world from the law, as from an inexhaustible source? ... But is it possible? ... Whence does [the State] draw those resources that it is urged to dispense by way of benefits to individuals? Is it not from the individuals themselves? How, then, can these resources be increased by passing through the hands of a parasitic and voracious intermediary? ...Finally...we shall see the entire people transformed into petitioners. Landed property, agriculture, industry, commerce, shipping, industrial companies, all will bestir themselves to claim favors from the State. The public treasury will be literally pillaged. Everyone will have good reasons to prove that legal fraternity should be interpreted in this sense: "Let me have the benefits, and let others pay the costs." Everyone's effort will be directed toward snatching a scrap of fraternal privilege from the legislature. _The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim, will not always have the greatest success. "_

<comment><USER26> Without democratic collective purchases, it's precisely the wealthy elites who are most able to afford things. (Virtually by definition.)

What did this 19th century fellow know of efficient public healthcare, roads, the publicly funded research which led to things like computers and the internet? What about cooperatives, a natural way to purchase things which none of the participants could afford individually?

Part of the right wing likes to frame itself as anti-statist. (And are trotted out when anyone proposes funding anything decent, rather than ways to kill and control.) But of course, the "socialists" are the most serious about transcending these violent nation-states. Take the Occupy movements, influenced by "anarchists" (and think what you will about them, but these socialists aren't exactly the biggest supporters of nation-states).

As mentioned, it's hard for people in non-democratic societies to imagine how to rationally team together to allocate funds. In such hierarchical societies, wealthy/powerful elites make such decisions; the rest are supposed to obey their bosses every working day, in their corporate communes. Like indoctrinated cult members, we often have a difficult time imagining how to rationally function and accomplish simple goals as a horizontal team.

<comment><USER27> 'Without democratic collective purchases, it's precisely the wealthy elites who are most able to afford things. (Virtually by definition.)' What? By what logic are you operating?

This is utterly rediculous, and quite frankly bordering on racist. it's often in the poor areas of the 'non-democratic' societies where people learn how to co-operate, and exchange without the state, and rationally function and accomplish goals as teams.

The socialists are about forcibly redistributing property: allocating the fruits of labor as either the electorate or an elected elite sees fit. In the first case, it will be the marginalized minority that gets punished, in the second case, it will be the unconnected poor that get punished.

Nobody is saying don't help out the poor, but the idea that the state is a qualified agent to help out the poor is laughable and there is plenty of evidence spanning milennia that it is a bad idea.

As for public healthcare. Healthcare in the US sucks, but would I rather be part of the private healthcare system or the VA (public healthcare)? Did you not see? As part of the 'healthcare reform bill' all legislators and their staff were required to join the public option. They are busy carving out an exemption to this as we speak.

As for publically funded research, it's horrifyingly wasteful, and all, I mean ALL of it goes to the "1%". Realistically there is no professor that is not a part of the 1%, and their work is built on the backs of a very very exploitative system of labor where grad students and postdocs' most productive years are sucked dry _. Much of that essentially becomes subsidies for the military-industrial complex or the pharmaceutical-medical complex_ (allowing them to shove off some of what should be R&D money off onto the backs of the public).

Don't beleive me? Here is a 501(c)(3) - and four-stars on charity navigator, no less - organization that operates 90% on NIH money (and negotiates a sweet 85% 'overhead' deal) its president makes 1.3 million dollars. [http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/330/3304359...](http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/330/330435954/330435954_201109_990.pdf)

The hilarious thing is this: i'm now working at a different nonprofit science research institute. About 10 years ago, it was almost entirely run on the endowment - salaries given to postdocs and professors were generous, and the president was paid about 1/1000th of the net worth of the company. Since then, the net worth of the nonprofit has decreased by two orders of magnitude, and it is almost completely run off of public funds, in fact private granting organizations are turned down because they bring in no overhead. Now, the president gets paid three times what he did back then. Moreover, his son is about to be employed with us (uh, that's a no-no), as is the grandson of a board member.

There is something about accepting 'public monies' that is almost magically a corrupting factor.

<comment><USER26> I take seriously any claims that I've done something racist, as racism is commonplace. However, it seems your claim is based on the misunderstanding that I'm referring to non-elite nations as non-democratic.

But I think anyone can see that I consider my country, the US, to not be a democracy; and it's hard to imagine we're a free people when most of us obey commands from a "boss" all day. (The US has a top-down form of government with some barely-functioning democratic forms; our corporations are akin to dictatorships, where power is strictly top-down.)

<comment><USER27> you are free to leave your boss. Your country is liable to extort money from you at the end of a gunbarrel if you try to leave it.

<comment><USER28> This may come as a shock to you, but the majority of Americans depend on their employment to obtain little things like food, roofs over heads, medicine, heating, etc. It is not so simple to 'leave your boss' unless you consider dying of starvation to be a good choice. And where do you go after you leave your boss? Oh... another boss.

<comment><USER27> so you don't think there's a categorical difference here? This may come as a shock to you, but being unemployed is not exactly the end of the world. If you're a good person, there are usually people who will step up to help you out in a time of need, and even if you aren't there are social services.

<comment><USER29> _even if you aren 't there are social services_

Where do you think those social services come from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've found open source so liberating that I couldn't even consider closing down my source ever! For a while, for me, it's been morally wrong to close source code or rely on sources that's not within your reach.

"why should I compromise my own ability to license this and make some money from it?" It's the same reasons you don't do slaves anymore. This guy needs to figure out better business models because the ones she's trying to do are obsoleted.

Also it's not wonder that her Kickstarter failed, it sucked very hard. Big TL;DR with no marketting material that would motivate people to pick on it. Most of people who saw that thing probably had no idea what they could do with her project.</comment>


Best libraries (in any modern language) for generating PDFs and Excel sheets? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> JasperReports for both PDF and Excel sheets. It does everything one could ever want from a report generator, and then some. Unfortunately, it isn't exactly easy to use. It involves a great deal of XML configuration and manual, absolute positioning.

There used to be iReport for visually composing reports, which to some extent simplified report design. Be aware though, that with one of the more recent versions they've switched to an AGPL. So, you might not be able to use this if you want to keep the source code for yourself.

According to the JasperResports website, Jaspersoft Studio now is their preferred solution for visual report generation.

For just Excel sheets it's probably easier to use Apache POI, which is a robust library for generating and ingesting anything Microsoft Office.

</comment><comment><USER3> Latex for PDFs</comment>


Why the cloud is almost always cheaper - Joe Stump [video] - <AUTHOR> http://webpulp.tv/post/848819707/simplegeo-joe-stump

<comment><USER2> Yes it will be cheaper, but you do need people that know how to use the cloud, which is getting more expensive in my experience. Supply-demand and all that. The good news is that you're less likely to hire poor coders if you're hiring people that already know how to use AWS.

<comment><USER3> The interesting thing is that AWS - and it's competitors - are getting _easier_ to use, which only helps with the further commoditization of it. More and more people are going to want - no - expect - that their infrastructure will be easy to allocate/spin up on demand.

We are rapidly heading towards a future where using/getting more servers or server time and storage is going to become just like plugging in a toaster - "just give this thing some electricity".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of good points on cost tradeoffs considering personal costs, lost opportunity costs, and specifically Cassandra and SQS. Since there is a download link, this would make good airplane viewing.</comment>