Some news from LWN - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/ <comment><USER3> There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it ([http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/](http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/)).

I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- [https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info](https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info) which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.

<comment><USER4> Another problem is that when you subscribe, you choose a number of months for your subscription to last. The maximum you can choose in 24. I just now discovered that my subscription had lapsed. If I had the option to subscribe permanently, I would choose to do so.

I assume this is some sort of principled stand designed to avoid skimming money from people who no longer use their subscriptions but are too lazy to cancel... but it probably means LWN is failing to accept money from a lot of people who would be very happy to be paying.

<comment><USER5> An annuity may be preferable to lump sum. And I receive several courteous reminders to renew before my subscription runs out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a subscriber but I don't look at it as a subscription to a weekly magazine but an investment. Enabling knowledgeable people to write in-depth analysis of various patch sets or subsystems of Linux kernel—which rarely change dramatically—ensures that, later on, there'll always be an article in Google search results that'll explain the reason behind certain behaviours in a more approachable manner than reading the source code or doc.txts—they're invaluable but a bit intimidating.

<comment><USER7> I felt the same way and subscribed for years, but lately most of the content seems to be links out to external sites, and many of those seem to be reposts from HN or proggit....just not worth it anymore to me

<comment><USER8> I don't see the behavior you describe. A lot of the content _references_ external sites, to provide additional information and context, but that's a good thing: it means more people in more places are having knowledgeable discussions that are worth referring to. I don't think it has turned LWN into a content-free link farm.

Don't be afraid of hyperlinking; it's the reason the Web was created, after all.

<comment><USER7> I'm not afraid of hyperlinking, but I don't need to pay for it either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So I see a lot of confusion about what LWN is on here. While it provides a detailed write up of recent kernel development for sure, it is far from the only thing they do. LWN is first and foremost a great way to stay on top of the most important developments in the free/open-source community, without having to browse tens of mailing list discussions on a weekly basis. I see it as giving me a way to keep a tap on the pulse of the community and thus be ready when changes come. They have reports from every FOSS conference or hackaton and condense the main points into a very readable summary that saves me time, while still keeping me informed.

Apart from kernel development, it did excellent technical reporting on systemd, prior to it being widely adopted and it does a great job of keeping you in the know of how things like wayland are actually progressing.

As for the parts that are genuinely over my head, I've been surprised how many times I've read about something on LWN and not really understanding what I was reading about at the time, but connecting the dots later.

You know when you read something and have no use for it, so you delete it from your front-end memory, but it resurfaces just when you actually need it?

Just to give an example, I remember reading a series on LWN some time ago about how virtual memory is managed in the kernel and now that I am writing a toy OS in Rust, I regularly have flashbacks to that series and it makes the concepts that I am learning about now genuinely easier to grasp, because I can make an instant, be it clouded connection that I did in fact hear about this and this already, even if it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.

There's also been times when the kernel has been misbehaving on me and I remembered that there was an article on LWN talking about this very issue and how adding a certain kernel boot parameter may resolve it, and it usually does.

For me, LWN is well worth the $7 a month they ask for it just on these points alone, it is one of a very few internet publications that in fact I am willing to pay for and consider it money well spent.

<comment><USER10> And many of the actual kernel devs, and other important and notable FOSS coders, as regulars in the comments.

"LWN: A site you want to read the comments on."

<comment><USER7> That may have been true once, but imho these days LWN is as likely to have uninformed or trollish comments as anywhere else...you don't need to pay to comment

<comment><USER11> You can hide comments from nonpaying users, I do that and it removes all the noise.

<comment><USER12> If only it was the nonpaying users which were the bigger problem. There's a small number of loud and obnoxious subscribers who drown out most conversation threads and make reading or contributing not worth the effort. It used to be a place for some keen and insightful commentary. But in recent years I've found the various "factions" which dominate the discussions to make the atmosphere quite unpleasant; it certainly pushed me out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most people here are commenting about the look and feel of LWN, I really don't have any complaints about the UI/UX so far, I don't expect to read LWN on my mobile phone.

I think the main reason of the drop in readership is firstly kernel development is very involved and detailed, LWN mostly reflects the kernel mailing list and associated events and tech talks.

I guess what I find most difficult as an outsider of the kernel community, is trying to keep up. Jonathan Corbet is doing and extraordinary job summarizing the activities of the kernel community in LWN. But the kernel doesn't maintain any main "Epics" that we have in software traditional development, so take for example fair scheduling. AFAIK, the kernel community does not decide to tackle fair scheduling on the next release of kernel, ie 4.7. Then say power management in 4.8 etc...

LWN ends up with a smattering of various articles under common themes like "Kernel", "Security" etc...

LWN has in the past explained long running topics like scheduling when key updates are happening and I commend them for that.

None of the above is a negative reflection on the kernel community or LWN in how they operate but it feels kinda hard to keep up and stay vested.

Anyways just a few thoughts, will renew membership now.

<comment><USER14> Not all software uses epics. I've actually found epics personally to be a bit of an antipattern, but that's a conversation for another time.

If the kernel has anything like an epic, there is multiple concurrent epics because the Linux is not a monolithic project. Nor are epics related to any kernel version.

For example, each major GPU driver (radeon, novaeu, intel) manages their own development, and push things upstream. DRM (the kernel part of DRI) interacts with those guys, and DRM pushes things upstream.

Network drivers and the network core are managed by small teams, push things to each other (such as adding support for major intrusive features like, say, when they added segment offload support, or recently genericfied the interface for that to support more protocols; or alternatively, when they started making more complex DMA patterns like scatter-gather and other zero-copy methodologies happen). The network guys push things to each other, and push things upstream.

The storage guys also do that, storage drivers and storage core push things to each other, and push things upstream.

Every possible major section of the kernel is a project in of itself, and have project leaders, and have parts that are ran by different people.

Generally, you don't push a patch to lkml by itself, and then you're done; this almost never happens. What happens more often is you go to one of the people who manage that part of the kernel, or has significant experience with that part of the kernel, and discuss your patch with them, and then they will try to help you make a patch that can be merged upstream.

More patches are rejected than committed because of how this works. Linus, or any other kernel maintainer, does not want your patch if it hasn't been ok'ed by the people who maintain those other parts of the kernel unless it is a small patch that does something obviously useful.

And what about the companies that just push drivers? Companies employ kernel hackers that know how to write drivers. For example, Intel employs the Intel GPU driver guys, Radeon employs the Radeon GPU guys, and all those guys are _already_ major authors in the X/DRI/Gallium/DRM/whatever community; the infrastructure to make that all work is shaped by the hardware, the hardware is not shaped by the infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a kernel developer, I really, _really_ appreciate the work of Jon Corbet and the rest of the LWN team. LWN serves a vital function for the kernel community and churns out some very useful kernel articles, as well as being a decent source of news for many other open source happenings. I hope they find some extra revenue from somewhere!

</comment><comment><USER16> I stopped subscribing.

The thing is, the Glory Days when kernel development was a scary, exciting wild west are lone gone.

By necessity, the Linux kernel is now a part of the tech firmament and development is necessarily not as _sexy_ as it used to be. So it's gonna be tough to get people to pay to read about it.

<comment><USER17> I don't think kernel development is any less scary now than it used to be. It's just as scary, people just don't care to know the gory details anymore. Such systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now in the age of javascript frameworks that don't last longer than a month and silver bullets that everyone talks about but few are actually using for "production" scenarios worthy of that name.

It just mirrors internet culture as a whole. Easy to consume information, show off and fashion.

<comment><USER18> > systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now

Lest aspiring systems programmers get the wrong idea: systems knowledge is still black magic and it's still _plenty_ valuable. Knowing how systems actually work under the hood is a rare skill and can help you code circles around the node-is-close-to-the-metal [1] competition even when writing application code.

[1] [https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234856345579446272](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234856345579446272)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years.

I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. If you look at the mobile site, they have some sort of dropdown to show the menu, which is then also way too small to properly click on. Issues like this are allover the site: Tables without any proper spacing / borders, mixing centered and left-aligned content with no reason, etc.

For me it just feels clunky and even though the information they aggregate seems to have some value for others, the presentation is just way off.

<comment><USER20> > I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the > total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume > the content (spacing, choice of font).

Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge — if that's not professional, then what is?

The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS.

Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the 90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in 2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020, February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of time.

Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.

<comment><USER21> You don't really have to make it look "current" to make it better. I think a good example is antirez blog: [http://antirez.com/latest/0](http://antirez.com/latest/0)

It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No distracting content, proper font and font spacing.

<comment><USER22> And has terrible contrast on the main page content's text making it hard to read if you have poor eyesight, poor light conditions or a poor monitor.

This would probably fail a basic Universal Accessibility test based on that alone.

<comment><USER23> I don't like low-contrast sites, but on my monitor that one is stark black- and-white. In fact there are no CSS rules for the color, and the font stack is "Inconsolata, Courier" so I don't know what the issue could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really like LWN and I subscribe - although the Kernel Development part is usually way above my head and my interest level.

If you perhaps not enjoy LWN enough to subscribe - at least consider if you have any friends that might be interested or persuade them to subscribe - <USER2> they're already readers.

<comment><USER25> It is important to have good quality and well researched articles. LWN provides this for free software (so not just the kernel). As long as LWN continues their reporting in this way (high quality), I'll continue my subscription (more like a donation; don't need to get anything back for myself).

Well researched information is an important way to avoid incorrect assumptions to spread. Thereby hopefully avoiding bad decisions to be taken, as well as actions on problematic things (e.g. gmane).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about:

\- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.

\- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe.

\- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content partnerships etc.).

\- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO could be improved, too.

<comment><USER27> > \- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old > subscribers.

I simply tried to change the font-family to Segoe UI (or whatever your OS' font) in Developer Tools, and it looks more interesting than Times New Roman

<comment><USER26> I think they should improve the general information architecture. Make content more discoverable. Categories, tags, overview pages, or just a better layout of the home page, which is not only date-based.

Essentially increasing the visitor time for new visitors, then increasing the recurring visitors, then increasing the sign ups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> LWN is one of the finest resources on Linux.

I cannot read the kernel source code as easily as the great articles on LWN that lovingly explicate the details. Sometimes even the articles are challenging for me but I learn something new every time I visit it.

If HN and the now nearly defunct Slashdot are popcorn, LWN is fine organically grown fruit and vegetables.

I am off to subscribe to LWN and urge you to do so if you find the kernel interesting

They also cover lots of non kernel topics. There was a fine article on the software modifications usef by VW to cheat the pollution testing, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm somewhat a new reader in the past couple years to LWN and actually was thinking about subscribing just a couple weeks ago. In honesty, I didn't even realize LWN had subscriptions until recently.

Either way, I've gone ahead and paid for the year up front, please keep going, I thoroughly enjoy the articles!

</comment><comment><USER30> I have been a subscriber for a while now and I consider it some of the best money I have spent ever. Just look at the wealth of information available at

[http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/](http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/)

that is being enabled by your subscription!

</comment><comment><USER31> I've never been inclined to subscribe to LWN, even though I read about an article a month when it's posted to HN. Looking through the frontpage, I see:

* 6 x LWN.net Weekly Edition for $DATE

* A few weekly security advisories

* "Some news from LWN"

* Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle

* New software releases

None of these interest me. Here's what does:

* Klitzke: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

* Python's os.urandom() in the absence of entropy

* One-time passwords and GnuPG with Nitrokey

There are a few articles I like there. But they aren't discoverable and I can't find what I want without working to filter the noise.

Contrast this with hackaday.com, where every article is a really interesting feature, there's no news on bugfix releases or kernel changelogs, and they mix feature news, cool stuff in the store, and community projects.

<comment><USER32> You didn't click into the Weekly Editions? That's where the real good stuff is. And it is separated into categories so you can skip the kernel news page if you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have been a subscriber for years but stopped the subscription last year, it's just that I'm doing less kernel related development these days.

lwn could do better though, make the website visually better, have a mobile app, do some beginner friendly kernel corner and such, also add a save-my- favorite-articles function under my account(last time I checked there is no such thing), adding tag support,etc. In fact just moving to wordpress will probably solve many of its website "issues" so it can focus on the content as it has been for a long time. You need the landing page stay up to date to attract new and young subscribers.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sad to hear this. The quality is top notch. I have used them as an example that people willingly pay for quality several times.

</comment><comment><USER35> I know that Jonathan Corbet is having cancer but he still keep working on and supporting this site. Not mentioning this is the best place for kernel developers, hackers to keep up with latest kernel news. God bless Jon.

</comment><comment><USER36> One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq:

[http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn](http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn)

Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for.

If you want people to subscribe to your thing, step one should be to tell us what it is.

<comment><USER37> So what does it mean?

<comment><USER38> Currently, nothing. But it used to stand for "Linux Weekly News". Of course, that name no longer makes sense since they're far away from producing only weekly news, but they sticked to it, and I think that this is a reason why they don't use their "full name" anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been supporting LWN for _years_ , because I love the Kernel page. I've learned so much from reading it over the years. I don't know of anything else like it. Their other articles are often great, but kernel nerdery is what keeps me.

I'm happy to keep supporting them.

(Since others have commented on the design/redesign I'll say one thing: The way the sidebar works now means I can't zoom text in on my iPad because it gets covered by the sidebar. It's a serious functionality dent which I wish would be fixed. That's it.)

Keep up the great work.

</comment><comment><USER40> This policy of having the strict title on the page is a bit much. The original title provided context as to what this link was about; the current title, the title on the page, is meaningless. It also makes the current top comment, mherdeg's "There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article.." make little sense

</comment><comment><USER41> LWN produce some of the highest quality articles around - well worth a subscription. Something I think may harm their subscription rate is how quickly they release articles to non-subscribers (1 week after publication?). This makes it easy for non-subscribers to justify not going for the subscription because "some weeks I don't get time to read LWN until a week late anyway". I think it could easily be stretched to a couple of weeks IMHO. Especially as the "subscriber link" mechanism is in place for articles readers would like to share.

</comment><comment><USER42> One thing that comes to my mind is that perhaps refreshing their website look- and-feel would get them some new readers...

<comment><USER43> Be honest: if you had not written this comment, would you have subscribed in six months if they started looking like Medium 2.0?

<comment><USER44> The complaints in this thread are mostly things like spacing and broken layouts, not fancy web X.0 fads. Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they still pay attention to making the content readable without strain.

<comment><USER45> > Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they still pay attention to making > the content readable without strain.

really? The font size is smaller here than on LWN, and the width of the text is smaller on LWN than on HN.

Comment metadata is slightly better on HN, but largely because on LWN you can put a comment title and here you can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've been reading LWN off and on for 10 years and just now found out it's a subscription service. They might want to think about marketing.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is unfortunate as the content is amazing and $7 a month is quite reasonable.

At a couple of places I have worked at we had a group subscription for the department, $45 it not terribly hard to get approved. I think its a great perk to list for prospective candidates too.

</comment><comment><USER48> Some employers will cover their employees' LWN subscriptions.

</comment><comment><USER49> I bet LWN could run entirely off some large subscriptions from companies like Google, which employees hundreds of Linux kernel developers. LWN is legitimate business information for many people and their employers. The model could be similar to the legendary newsletters of yore, like "Shannon Knows DEC".

Maybe they don't want to refocus away from the public, but it could work.

<comment><USER50> LWN does actually have corporate subscriptions. I currently work for one that just requires me to log in to LWN from the company IP range once a month. I'd guess, though, that is not quite enough to run the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> As many have echoed here, the design and layout is very early 2000's. I understand the minimalist and nostalgic aesthetic but I feel they could really benefit from some small UX tweaks . It doesn't have to look like the latest startup but it could definitely benefit from just some basic UX love and a fresh coat of paint.

</comment><comment><USER52> LWN is and has been the best in-depth news source about happenings in the Linux world. I particularly love the articles explaining kernel internals, or covering the pros and cons of some approaches.

I'm proud to have been a subscriber for the past 4 or 5 years.</comment>


A Digital Detox Test: Unplug Twitter and Facebook. Put Off Email and Smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/fashion/digital-detox-email-smartphone-social-media.html

<comment><USER2> More than need of Detox I feel lack of a system to consume random information. All networks weather Google+ or Facebook or Twitter want to lock users in their restricted systems. You can't always get news in your favorite network because posting to a variety of protocols is not so much feasible for content providers. Frequency of news also increase as networks get bigger and bigger.

Also I am trying to get into Android development which makes it a necessity for me to follow various news portals to stay top of the next big thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> February challenge: 24 hour fasts from email and social networks ⌘ [http://www.hibernate.cc/](http://www.hibernate.cc/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Rather ironic.. considering a detox diet is snake-oil BS designed to lure idiots with money.</comment>


FSF adds Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre to list of endorsed GNU/Linux distributions - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-hyperbola-gnu-linux-libre-to-list-of-endorsed-gnu-linux-distributions <comment><USER2> Reads like the FSF likes it because it doesn't bundle "non free" software by default.

Nothing there about why Hyperbola is interesting beyond that. So I can't tell why I would want it instead of another distro that disables "non free" by default, like Debian.

Not criticizing, I did check their home page and didn't find an answer there either.

<comment><USER3> > So I can't tell why I would want it instead of another distro that disables > "non free" by default, like Debian.

Just pointing out that Debian does not meet FSF criteria for excluding non- free strongly enough. Instead they endorse gNewSense, which is pretty much deblobbed Debian.

<comment><USER2> That's helpful. The replies here would be a good start to revamp their home page elevator pitch.

<comment><USER3> Personally I find the following blurb from their front page crystal clear:

> The Hyperbola Project is a community driven effort to provide a fully free > (as in freedom) operating system that is stable, secure, simple, lightweight > that tries to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) under a Long Term Support (LTS) > way.

> Derived from Arch plus stability and security from Debian, Hyperbola > provides packages from it that meet the GNU Free System Distribution > Guidelines (GNU FSDG) and replacements for the packages that don't meet this > requirement.

If that doesn't sell it to you then I suspect this is not distro for you. Yes, you need already know what Arch, Debian, LTS, and FSDG mean to understand the point of this distro, but that just means the target audience is not just random Joe six-pack</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Working Remote Disrespectful? - <AUTHOR> Is it disrespectful to seek accommodation to work remotely when it isn't easy to meet in person? <comment><USER2> If you have a disability, then the right to work remotely is covered as an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Otherwise it really depends on the employer and manager.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. People saying this most likely have others reasons to make you feel this way. (they want to and can't or they don't want and also don't want others too etc.) Remember : people are petty and until they give a reasoning with facts it's all just imposed culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, good point, you reminded me of the classic distinctions of - "I'm ok, you're ok" v. "I'm ok, you aren't" v "you're ok, I'm not" v "you're not ok and neither am I"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends on the job, the reason why you can't meet and other context. Currently, I wouldn't say it's disrespectful since it's pretty normally accepted for jobs that don't REQUIRE a physical presence. But if it's just a matter of not wanting to meet someone just because, then yes, it might be disrespectful.

<comment><AUTHOR> To what extent should social anxiety, social awkwardness, and the associated inefficiency due to extra sociocognitive demands be accommodated then?

For example, if it were hugely distracting and performance impacting to have normal office activities occur simultaneously with a regular meeting, should being able to call in be considered reasonable? And for contrast, if it were annoying to have regular office activities take place during periods of work that require concentration, how much annoyance should be considered reasonable and when would it be unreasonable to work remote most days?

Where is the line between discomfort and disease?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As long as you discussed working remotely with your managers or it's part of the job, you have nothing to worry about.

You don't really provide much detail on your situation, so I'm assuming you're overthinking things.

</comment><comment><USER6> Disrespectful of whom? Have you asked why they think it's disrespectful?

<comment><AUTHOR> Disrespectful of the leadership team and of the establishment and/or workers, in general. The general idea is that everyone should be in the office out of respect to meet face to face but I presume also in fairness through sameness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Depends on the country and culture. Where are you?

<comment><AUTHOR> United States, Midwest</comment></comment>


If You've Met Aliens While on DMT, These Scientists Would Like to Hear from You - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpjxm/dmt-aliens-study-johns-hopkins <comment><USER2> The book A Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark by Carl Sagan goes in depth as to the origin of peoples propensity to believe that they have indeed encountered such creatures. I would highly recommend reading it.

<comment><USER3> I love Carl Sagan and especially love when he branched out into topics like this. But I also wonder if he ended up being on the right track - does anyone happen to know if contemporary research backs up many of his speculations about human evolution in books like _Dragons of Eden_ or _Demon-Haunted World_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw them a few days after taking DMT. I was sitting on a sofa, reality paused, some tube-limbed harlequins stepped out sideways into it, cut a few things up, looked inside them then put them back together, then they fucked off and reality restarted.

<comment><USER5> That's what my buddy said about them too. He only saw them when he blasted off, but could feel them around for a while after.

Definitely on my todo list.

<comment><USER6> Having met a person who started having regular psychotic episodes after a dmt trip, I've removed this from all of my todo lists.

She would start hissing, cursing in gibberish, clawing etc. and is the most horrific thing I've witnessed to date. If there's demonic possession, this must be what it looks like.

So, no thank you.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like some wires got crossed up on the way back down; it might be fixable, though probably not through conventional means. (Stuff like tantra or properly taking part in Ayahuasca with a trained shaman comes to mind). But then again, when I hear about those God-drunken yogis wandering around in India, sometimes with followers, I wonder too if this was her destiny.

Blasting out on a whim without preparation is like getting launched into outer space without a spacesuit. (And the things we think we are preparing for are usually the very things that create a lot of turbulence in the journey). Lots of people are lucky, have guides watching over them, the way little kids gets watched over by parents on the playground. ("Ok, come away from the busy street -- oh look, would you like to play with this?") Sometimes, people are not so lucky. There is a vast knowledge and wisdom in the old traditions about this, and scientific knowledge is ill-equipped to understand or even handle the misadventures.

I wouldn't say never though. DMT is an endogenous neurotransmitter produced by the pineal gland, so under rare circumstances, dosages of DMT can be released naturally and directly into your brain.

<comment><USER8> > DMT is an endogenous neurotransmitter produced by the pineal gland

Has this actually been proven? I've heard it repeated often but never seen any evidence to back it up.

<comment><USER7> Rick Strassman, MD wrote about it in his book back when he was conducting research on the effects of DMT.

I could not find a paper that did a targeted study, but did find this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5048497/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5048497/)

<comment><USER8> Strassman is certainly more trustworthy than McKenna =) I should have been more targeted in my question. I was wondering more about the pineal gland as the source of production than if endogenous DMT exists. According to the link below, they have Rick on their podcast saying that DMT is produced by the lungs and then transported to the brain, maybe stored in the pineal gland? I'm gonna have to give this a listen.

[https://www.naturalstacks.com/blogs/news/rick-strassman- pine...](https://www.naturalstacks.com/blogs/news/rick-strassman-pineal-gland- dmt-and-consciousness)

<comment><USER7> Cool! I did a search on "DMT produced in lungs" and found this one: [http://q4lt.com/qa-with-dr-steven-barker](http://q4lt.com/qa-with-dr-steven- barker)

"Dr. Barker: The only studies conducted on lung tissue were not specific to lung anatomy. My comments were based on an assumption that, if DMT is primarily produced in the lung (where, at that time, the highest enzyme activity had been described) and DMT played any role in schizophrenia, it would, thus, be considered a lung disease. However, I think DMT may primarily be synthesized in the lung during specific physiological states; controlled breathing, such as occurs in many meditative practices, extreme physical exertion, hyperventilation, near-death changes in respiration rates, hypoxia, etc. DMT synthesized in the lung would go directly to the brain, by-passing the metabolic destruction that would occur from liver metabolism. There is some evidence that DMT is neuroprotective and may play a role in neuronal survival in extreme physiological states (either intentional of unintentional) that also alter lung function. Similarly, DMT can have a dissociative quality (OBE) that is also protective in extreme events (trauma, etc.). While DMT produced in the lung may have many other "normal" biochemical functions, it may be one of the hormones that responds to extreme stress (physical and mental) and the role of the lung in such events is well understood."

<comment><USER8> Good find! That would provide a mechanism to support the mind-altering claims of holotropic breath work, which I have never tried but understand to be a close cousin of hyperventilation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have seen them doing an ultra marathon on the second night of no sleep. It's weird how you brain fills so much detail in. The creatures I could see were like gollum from LoTR but with reptilian skin..they were either smoking pipes or playing elaborate music on instruments I have never seen before..

<comment><USER10> The non-fiction book "Why people believe weird things" begins with the author's recounting of his own meeting with aliens, during a coast-to-coast cycle race where he had gone without sleep.

In reality it was his crew trying to get him off his bike before he fell asleep and fell off

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've done DMT quite a few times and I can totally see why religious people make this a religious experience. Or as in this case use aliens or other 'mythical' creatures instead of God figures.

There is this very strong feeling of being connected to more and just being able to get a short glance to a different world that is always there but hidden from you.

Most people will explain it like this, but everybody also ads 'graphics' or concepts based on their own believes in order to even comprehend the experience.

I love DMT but I also highly believe that we are seeing some kind of natural process in our brains here and not some kind of deeper connection.

In other news I saw genesha dancing for me on a rainbow of thousands of never seen colors and I had a fox helping me getting back from something I can only describe as lost in my own head. Dmt is strange but beautiful

</comment><comment><USER12> If I had to hypothesize, I'd say that most hallucinogens generally stimulate lower-levels of the neocortex's sensory perception hierarchy, resulting in a distorted and more vivid experience of basic things like colors, textures, etc. But DMT is somehow particularly able to stimulate a higher-level representation that corresponds with the perception of a fellow intelligent creature. This is combined semi-randomly with one or more high-level representation of animals and objects to create the perception of intelligent "aliens" with a bizarre form.

<comment><USER13> What is wrong with hypothesizing that invisible beings around us can only be seen under certain circumstances?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Every few years I get stuck for a few moments in the state between sleep and waking up. Always manifested the same way. In the middle of a dream environment a gateway with a totally alien, totally inexplicable intelligence would appear. I'd be paralyzed by it for a few seconds. As I got older a realized the terrifying alien world/intelligence was waking consciousness intruding into the dream state. Always interesting after I wake but true Lovecraftian horror as it happens.

<comment><USER15> This is called sleep paralysis. It's surprisingly common, and the source of a lot of folklore and ghost stories. I get it often: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like an anonymous internet survey won't solicit very high quality data... I suppose even a rough idea of how common these experiences are is a start.

</comment><comment><USER17> They weren't aliens, they were Persian elves.

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate? I see to be one of those rare people who is genuinely fascinated by peoples' DMT experiences (and dreams!).

Speaking personally, I've done DMT twice but never at the doses necessary to break through. I've experienced ego death from psilocybin but it seems as if the DMT experience is different in terms of the vividness and visual complexity.

<comment><USER18> Google "machine elves"

<comment><USER17> I just did, and that was indeed the experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Universal love, transcendent joy!

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said- the...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus- person/)

<comment><USER8> That was fantastic, thanks for posting it! It would make for a great story to be read aloud too, if one could find a way around the several-dozen-digit number...</comment></comment>


CoreOS and Kubernetes 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/kubernetes-1.0-and-cloud-native-computing-foundation/ <comment><USER2> > Also today, we are launching Kubernetes Training. The first workshops will > be delivered by Kelsey Hightower, product manager, developer and chief > advocate at CoreOS, and will take place on August 5 in Portland, August 7 in > Seattle and August 10 in San Francisco.

For anyone who wants to checkout a previous version of Kelsey's workshop, it can be found on youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA8XNVPZM2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA8XNVPZM2w)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9pF- Bv8AkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9pF-Bv8AkI)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZbwDH- _a_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZbwDH-_a_M)

It's a very good introduction.</comment>


Silicon Valley parents raise their kids tech-free – and it should be a red flag - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2 <comment><USER2> "Technology" is a very broad term. A kid could be on social media, passively consuming media or on Khan Academy learning mathematics, actively engaging with the content. So it doesn't make sense to have a blanket ban on all technology, because frankly you're depriving the kid of a whole range of other experiences, many of which will be beneficial.

The last time this came up on Hacker News, there was a very insightful comment that basically said that isolating children from technology will isolate them from their peers, thus causing the same problems that the ban was supposed to prevent.

Edit: more commentary

<comment><AUTHOR> > _" Technology" is a very broad term..._

It does seem intuitive to discriminate among the technology but I think there is an insiduousness in assuming some activity to be perfectly benign or healthy.

The problem is that it all tends to blend together to add up to _a lot_ of device time such that even "healthy" tech activities become part of the overall addiction. And, the total time spent on-device comes at the expense of other forms of entertainment/activity, social interaction, and learning which might make for a healthier balance.

So, no matter the content, it's probanly still an issue of degree and overall balance.</comment></comment>


Why Bitcoin's Erratic Price Doesn't Matter - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/12/21/why-bitcoins-erratic-price-doesnt-matter/

<comment><USER2> The price does matter. Keeping a network with 250 PHash/s running costs 219 million Dollars per year (1 GHash/J mining efficiency, 100 $/MWh energy costs) and probably quite a bit more if you account for other costs like hardware, rental or cooling. If your block reward is worth nothing you will have a problem keeping the network running. Scale back the hash rate and you get vulnerable. Increase the fees - with 100k transaction per day you are looking at costs of 6 Dollars per transaction for electricity only - and you damage one of the main selling points of Bitcoin, cheap transactions. And this again is prohibitive for Bitcoin adoption in underdeveloped countries which are often suggested as a core market.

<comment><USER3> This is the scariest thing about BitCoin, this efficiency bubble. What happens when the world's miners decide that a different crypto-coinage is more profitable?

I don't believe that the difficulty parameter in BitCoin adjusts very fast (every 2016 blocks or ~14 days) and you could have transaction speed disruptions. If a block doesn't solve in 10 minutes but instead an hour, you'll have a lot of very unhappy people waiting for transactions to seal and they'll abandon the network after selling off their assets. That's just the time aspect, you mention the transaction fee aspect, and that will drive people away as well if they start to creep near what legacy financial systems charge. The declining block reward in BitCoin guarantees that transaction fees will increase because of the limited capacity of the consensus network's data- storage/transaction block.

<comment><USER4> At present:

* Bitcoin is doing badly in terms of electricity cost versus block rewards. If it keeps going down, the miners are going to switch off.

* All altcoins are doing worse.

Because the altcoins are basically alternatives to Bitcoin, but their value has gone down even more than Bitcoin's.

(I could be wrong - are there any that haven't, which have non-negligible exchangeability and/or trading volume?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The erratic price prevents it from being a store of value or a unit of account. So it is a currency that clocks in as a medium of value transfer only. Even then, the transfer involves another currency on either end in almost all cases.

<comment><USER6> > The erratic price prevents it from being a store of value

Not true in itself. Consider the stock market: it's value has been unstable for the past two decades, yet it is still one of America's most popular stores of value. Consider also gold and housing, two other popular stores of value that also have unstable pricing.

The erratic price does however prevent it from being a unit of account.

<comment><USER7> Housing is a store of value in a way that gold and bit coins aren't; if the price of housing crashes to 0 you can still live in the houses. Also, the price of housing is highly likely to only crash to the cost of building a new house - wear and tear + scarcity costs for land.

There is a speculative component in house prices, and this is a concern for anyone who is "storing value" in them, but there are fundamental uses for housing far beyond the fundamental uses for gold.

Equities have a value story too. The dividend on stocks represents a future earnings value which is tradable. Also Equities provide voting rights which have value.

Fiat currency has a value story; the states monopoly of violence provides it with the ability to collect tax from economic activity where that monopoly holds true. Tax revenues are a future income stream that has value; hence the underpinning of fiat.

Bitcoin has rarity and speculation only.

<comment><USER8> Well, the key difference is you pay property taxes on a house. And as long as you keep doing that, and paying all associated upkeep, you can hopefully see appreciation. Oh, and you can live in it.

The point is, there's no analog to the digital nature of placing a conversion value based on the bits of a certain integer value stored in a distributed blockchain.

The latest round of blockchain technology is showing, bc is good for a lot more than currency. In fact, there are many things that BC can do much better even than it can be a currency.

My point is, I bet on the long-term value of bc technology, but actually not on the long term value of Bitcoin as a digital asset.

For example, very soon enough you will be able to cheaply, easily, and freely store your USD or whatever currency you want on a blockchain, and use it to spend and trade freely. Choose any blockchain and conversion rate / resolution you want and issue a legally binding IOU. Of course the trick is handling redemption!

<comment><USER7> Totally agree that block chain technology is very interesting and I think valuable. I think that particular block chains will gain value as they begin to underpin particular applications, but of course if the value of a block chain becomes an impediment to the application the users may disrupt that application and move to new blockchains.

For my education could you expand on your thoughts around "The point is, there's no analog to the digital nature of placing a conversion value based on the bits of a certain integer value stored in a distributed blockchain". I think that you are making an interesting point here but I haven't quite grasped it so am intrigued.

<comment><USER9> I think there's a lot being said about blockchains because of Bitcoin, but other then Bitcoin I haven't seen any appreciable or desirable uses of them. At the end of the day, you're spending a lot of power and CPU cycles on something very transient.

EDIT: This is distinct from various toy applications of the "you _could_ do _this_ with a blockchain..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this article is pretty much on point.

Bitcoin's price isn't really what matters, even bitcoin specifically doesn't really matter. What matters is whether or not the technology will have wide adoption, how that looks, and what sort of effects that will have.

The price of bitcoin is a side game. The volatility makes for flashy daily "news" as fortunes blink in and out of existence but that doesn't ultimately matter.

Money is the original network effect technology. I also suspect that banks and the entire financial system is incredibly fat and lazy. This enormous industry could be usurped.

</comment><comment><USER11> paywall?

<comment><USER12> someone pasted it here -

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2q0jb4/why_bitcoins...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2q0jb4/why_bitcoins_erratic_price_doesnt_matter_wall/cn1uzzb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry if anyone feels offended, but why exactly does this article have any relevance on Hacker News?

I can understand people submitting pieces about their own apps or startups but why does anyone think that we need more "financial product XYZs price is underestimated, I'm bullish, BUY BUY BUY" articles.

<comment><USER14> There are also occasional articles about rocks on Mars, strange bacteria commanding killer fungi, and vikings in Arctic Canada. It's not that Bitcoin is the one odd topic that somehow squeezed in, it's more that hacker news likes to stray outside it's original scope a bit. Personally I enjoy that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I have an idea how to become a competitor to Amazon. What should I do? - <AUTHOR> I'm an engineer from AOL. I have an idea how to become a pretty serious competitor to Amazon and other online stores. I have a couple grands in my pocket, which is not enough to hire even 1 engineer. <comment><USER2> To be frank, describing Amazon as an "online store" suggests a gross simplification of their business model. Amazon's business is built on traditional pillars of retailing: customer service, B2B relations and owning the best real-estate.

No competitor is going to get better deals with UPS, Fedex and USPS. Partially because Amazon has located warehouses such that they help negotiate better shipping contracts and thus provide better customer service.

It has dumped everything that could be a profit into expansion for twenty years. A newcomer would be hard pressed to sell me a Kindle, a movie download, a used book and bearings for my clothes dryer all on the same order at an attractive price and with an aggressive delivery schedule.

If your idea might have legs, some VC will back it.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good points in your comment. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should recruit the rest of a founding team that can get a working version built without hiring.

Y Combinator funds that sort of thing, and can help a lot with turning an idea into a growing business. You can still apply late for the Winter cycle, though if you don't have the complete team yet the Summer cycle might be better. [http://www.ycombinator.com/apply](http://www.ycombinator.com/apply)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're serious about this idea, you should run it by some of your friends/ co-workers that you respect. If they seem excited by it, continue to develop the idea with them and bounce ideas off them. Once you gather a group of people that work well together and have a general understanding of the problem/solution, start building an MVP. Competing with Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc is extremely difficult because of positive network effects. Building a product to compete with the bigs guys is going to require an enormous amount of effort and a team that seriously believes in the product. If this is something you're set on gather a small team and get to building and tweaking. You may find that your competitive advantage doesn't exist, but you may also find that you can deliver in a way/space that the big guys can't. The key, however, is to get to building and chasing down users like there's nothing else that matters. Like others on here have said ideas are a dime a dozen, so just get to building.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I appreciate your input. Clever advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The way to think big is to think small. You can't go head to head against Amazon all at once. You need to pick a very small area and specialize.

Can you be the best site for selling pewter figurines, plumbing supplies or bowling equipment? I think you can!

By niching down you can develop a reputation, have a custom-tailored search and navigation setup, etc. As you start getting more customers and income, you can broaden your offerings.

For instance pewter figures -> fantasy art -> fantasy books -> board games.

Amazon started with books before it started selling everything else. You could try the exact same strategy.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a professor I know that claims he can get you back to 1994, but beware: he keeps calling everyone Marty and thinks there are people out to get him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for taking time to write this comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You are an engineer . . . start building a basic MVP . . . don't worry about automating behind the scenes stuff . . . do all that stuff manually in the beginning if it's faster to get up and running. Think launch fast, like in 7 days or 30 days. Get the idea out there fast where people can use it and validate it.

You are going to need investments to roll out an idea on this scale. But work up an initial version to prove the concept. The farther you can bootstrap it the more equity you'll retain.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ideas are dime a dozen, if you are an engineer, you don't need to hire anybody. Go out there and build a prototype. Find users that will use your prototype. If it has a positive growth, you can easily find funding for it. If you are already thinking about hiring another engineer, then I suggest you read more books on startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that ideas are worthless. I have some thoughts how to start small. The good thing about the concept is that the business can really grow. The very best part is that it can very easily grow by the word of mouth. I think I'm going to build a small business plan and start working on the project itself.

As for the books. I read a lot of them. But, I came with the concept while I was reading "Zero to One" in a subway train. At one moment I got like a recovery of sight. BOOM! I closed the book without intending to open it again.

<comment><USER9> While business plans may help you revise your idea, I would recommend against working on it. Just build your product and get it out there and iterate from there. You can accomplish so much with so little. But you have to start first. And nobody did anything great without starting it. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazon's prices are subsidized by EC2/AWS services. (For example, bulk purchasing of internet bandwidth for AWS results in a discount that greatly benefits Amazon's e-commerce need of bandwidth.)

Therefore, your first step is to spend a few billion dollars building datacenters, hiring programmers and product people, and create a competitor to AWS that has approximately equal market share. That should take 5-10 years.

When you are done, you can start your e-commerce system that competes with Amazon's. You'll have the infrastructure that costs about the same (i.e. is similarly subsidized) and you'll have a fair fight.

<comment><USER11> Server costs have become so minuscule that they can be considered a non-factor nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Network, find people who can work with. Develop the idea more.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Amazon just unveiled one-hour delivery. That was my idea. I'm crushed.

</comment><comment><USER13> p2p Amazon?

<comment><AUTHOR> No.

<comment><USER14> LSD?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had some thoughts about it. Could be killer! But I want to taste it first ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The First Honest Cable Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso

<comment><USER2> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5461315>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5460789>

</comment><comment><USER3> Epic. Must. Be. Shared.

<comment><USER2> You mean like it was 3 hours ago. And 2 hours before that.

<comment><USER3> No, I meant to everyones' inner circles.</comment></comment></comment>


How we've scaled Dropbox (2012) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc <comment><USER2> They've posted about this on their tech blog:

[https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket- infrastr...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket- infrastructure/)

[https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/extending-magic- pocke...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/extending-magic-pocket- innovation-with-the-first-petabyte-scale-smr-drive-deployment/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious what the state of their affairs is today. 2012-2018 is a huge amount of time in tech world and I'm curious what improvements they've made.

</comment><comment><USER4> The evolution of their SQL schema (around ~45:00 on) is pretty cool.

For example to implement undo/version control for files, they just added a single `prev_rev` column. There are some arguably better (but more complicated) ways to do it but it would've been premature optimization since this simple solution clearly worked out for them.

<comment><USER5> If I am understanding correctly a sort_order column would work as well. Essentially then you can just do select with order by sort_order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if their focus on data center build out (rather than differentiation of their offering and customers, yes admittedly debatable) will be deemed a success or misstep in the long run

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like an investor level presentation. Pretty sure, there are 10x more layers of controllers needed to handle 1M> users.</comment>


Low Total Testosterone in Men Widespread, Linked to Chronic Disease - <AUTHOR> https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/body-work/low-total-testosterone-men-widespread-linked-to-chronic-disease <comment><USER2> I've known a few guys who've found out they had low testosterone after many years of struggling under various other diagnoses.

One in particular made a pretty dramatic turnaround after beginning to receive supplemental testosterone. Over two or three years, he went from an obese borderline alcoholic to a tee-totaling body builder. When I knew him, he told basically every man he encountered his story, and urged them to get their testosterone checked ASAP.

The fast and loose reference point he told me for a general indicator of a good testosterone level was how many days per week a man wakes up with an erection. He said if it's not at least 5/7 days, you probably have low testosterone. I'm sure that's not universally true (for instance, I would expect that decreases with age -- he was around 40), but I always thought that was an interesting thing.

Of course, this is all anecdotal, and my buddy was not a doctor. This is not medical advice or anything approaching it, just a story I know about the subject. Always speak to a qualified medical professional before making any decisions about your health.</comment>


Google+ Photos Is Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/20/google-photos-is-shutting-down-on-august-1st/ <comment><USER2> I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform, and back to standalone solutions similar to their offerings from the pre-Google+ days.

A bit off-topic:

I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that.

Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").

Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER3> Can they bring Google Reader back now? I'm still bitter about it being killed to focus on Google+. Now that Google+ is dead in the water it makes the decision to kill Reader even worse.

<comment><USER4> What's obnoxious is that everyone watching from the outside knew all these forced G+ moves were annoying and not welcome. One of the worst outcomes, imo, is the addition of G+ comments on YouTube videos - you end up with comments like "Check this out" in the video's actual comments section. Those comments are completely useless and destroy any sort of conversation, if it's even possible to have one in YT comments.

<comment><USER5> >What's obnoxious is that everyone watching from the outside knew all these forced G+ moves were annoying and not welcome

What makes you think it was any different from the inside?

<comment><USER4> Optimism, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't understand Google products sometimes. Google+ Photos is different from Google Photos? Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets[0] are all separate things, though somehow interconnected?

And I'm a technical user. I literally don't understand how (or if) non- technical users are expected to be able to understand how these work.

But seriously, this has to take the cake. "Google Photos" is replacing "Google+ Photos", though "Google+" is still around, and you can use Google+ to share photos from "Google Photos" (but not "Google+ Photos", at least not anymore).

[0] Going to drive.google.com and then clicking "New Sheet" will redirect me to docs.google.com, even though Google Sheets was (at least at one point) presented as a "new" product distinct from Google Docs. At least that's how it seemed to me when they launched it.

<comment><USER7> See here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9888387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9888387)

"Google's product strategy: Make two of everything"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much longer before they kill Picasa and Picasaweb, which just provide a different UI (and different editing software) for the same archive of photos?

<comment><USER9> I have never seen Picasa used for anything but spam. Can't think of anyone I know who actually uses it properly.

<comment><USER10> I converted my parents over to Picasa when it came out and they still use it; they don't have interest in moving family photos over to the cloud.

I am assuming that your comment re: spam is about is about Picasaweb (it doesn't make much sense to me for users to submit spam into their own desktop software). Perhaps a reason for this is that it mostly gets used by people who started with the desktop software and those people keep the photos private so that the only photos seen in public are spam?

<comment><USER9> I get emails from companies who upload their product photos to Picasa and then use the share feature to spam. No matter how many I marked as spam, they still make it through unhindered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am curious why they aren't automatically migrating all existing user content from "+Photos" to the new "Photos" service?

Seems like it would be an easy win.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure they aren't. All of my Google+ photos wound up in Google Photos without any work on my part, other than maybe actually accessing photos.google.com.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it funny that we're even having this conversation? That Google can offer two products, differentiated by a single character (Google+ Photos and Google Photos), with few obvious indicators as to which I should use?

It's confusing to me, but trying to explain it to my mom is absolutely impossible. I wonder whether the average user even knows there's a difference between the two. It's a perfect example of unnecessary redundancy.

<comment><USER2> I really feel like it is just to cleanse it of the connection to Google+. The product should have been an evolution of Google+ Photos, but they are clearly trying to de-couple services from Google+.

Look at the Inbox vs Gmail experiment for example. While not tied to Google+, Inbox runs parallel to Gmail and accesses the same things. Just a different window dressing. I'm sure many at Google want to see Inbox take over Gmail at some point.

This is one of the reasons I doubt we ever see a Material Design Gmail. I think they'll run with it until Inbox is "ready".

<comment> pablo-massa I think that the strategy there was make a new product (Inbox) to test how to reinvent Gmail. Gmail needs a redesign but have a very large user base to take the risk of make mistakes. With Inbox they are free to innovate and try to fix the email problem without carrying a giant on they shoulders. I think even Google don't know yet what's is going to do after.

<comment><USER2> Precisely my point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope this means I get the gallery app back on my phone instead of that godawful photos app. The photos app can't find half the photos on my device since it doesn't seem to have a functioning media scanner any more, and it took me half an hour to get the thing to spit out the path to a photo once when I desperately trying to copy it over to my computer to use it for something. Not that it is easy to copy anything in Android any more since you can't just mount the phone as storage any more, you have to use some broken media transfer protocol that doesn't work natively on mac and the official Android transfer app doesn't work. All this with a Nexus 6 that should be a top of the line Google experience device. I just want Gallery back and the ability to see the photos on my device and where they are, Photos is terrible and makes me fight it every time I open it.

<comment><USER15> Christ was that a galling experience on update: expecting me to get online to see the photos on my device that I had just taken.

BTW: I am unrelated to them but I do recommend QuickPic, it does pretty much exactly what you'd want and very little else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >"They already made us abandon our "picasaweb" stuff for Google+ Photos. Killing off Google+ Photos sends the clear message "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs". Not that shuffling gigabytes of photos around every couple of years isn't fun but, well, it isn't fun."

From the TechCrunch comments.

<comment><USER17> I work on the backend for Google Photos (and Google+ Photos and Picasaweb).

Picasaweb, Google+ Photos and Google Photos all store the photos in the same place.

There was never any need to "shuffle gigabytes of photos" when moving from picasaweb to G+ Photos and there won't be any needed to move from G+ Photos to Google Photos.

I don't see howany of that adds up to "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs".

<comment><USER18> Google is amazing but in the same token my grandma and my mom were using Google+ Photos. Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means.

You can bet I'm gonna think twice about recommending any Google product to my family just because of the time sink in doing support.

<comment><USER19> Doesn't this just mean that you need to click a different button to access the photos? There's a hierarchical change to make Photos a top-level product, and the product itself has had a facelift.

<comment><USER20> It's even the same button. The old photos launcher opened the photos page of G+, the new launcher opens a separate app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use Gmail, Maps, search, and, to a limited extent, the original, "basic" applications within Google Apps (is that still what it's called?).

For the rest, Google has basically taught me not to make the investment.

(I don't have any Adword nor advertising needs, at the moment. Otherwise, I imagine I would be using them.)

I was thinking of switching from the default text messaging application to Hangouts, on my phone, for the sake of maintaining a history of texts that the default app will dump beyond a certain count, but after incidentally running across comments about how fucked over Hangouts apparently has become, I'm pretty much not going there.

Google seems to be doing fine, revenue-wise, but they are losing me as... well, I guess I'm one bit of the "merchandise" that forms the basis of their revenue.

I don't hate Google. And I like the initiative on security and, "true names" aside, privacy. But I'm not excited any more about their product development.

Even in the physical world, I understand the impending, huge market for autonomous cars, and I like the pressure that Fiber has been providing to the erstwhile moribund large-scale ISP marketplace. But I miss the "moonshots." Although maybe they gave e.g. solar power enough of a nudge -- if not a push -- when it needed it, domestically.

P.S. Personal pet peeve. In my work, particularly in large organizations, I saw the need for something like Wave. (Anyone who's ever wasted time and effort on the outside of an extended and essential email chain conversation might relate -- as one example. Or trying to effectively maintain same and keep all in the loop and revisions straight, when on the inside of one.) But the terribly overburdensome (in terms of client processing demands for average clients of that time) and partially cryptic UI were a big initial turnoff.

Back to Gmail and Apps and whatnot. What Googlers actually seem to use for their own work, and lives (Maps, Picasa now become whatever...), seems to be better maintained. "Initiatives" to "secure markets" (Plus, I'm looking at you)? Yeah, not cutting it.

Initially, I would have given Plus a chance. Except that, for much of what interested me on it, I didn't care to go about publicly using my "true name" (health, psychology, and technical topics where some of my opinions might put off a potential employer).

</comment><comment><USER22> From the article, it sounded like you had to manually transfer you pictures. Not so.

I just went to photos.google.com for the first time and the last ten years of my pictures were there in chronological order.

</comment><comment><USER23> The new google photos is not a complete port of google+ photos. I enjoyed google+ photos. It had a poor man's HDR and a whole lot of other editing features which were functional and useful. They removed them all in the new google photos. Another feature I miss is the auto-panorama feature. I can't see panos generated automatically any more after my account was migrated. Hoping they are brought back soon.

But I still like the idea of forking out the photos. That was the only thing I was using in google+

</comment><comment><USER24> Why can't they fold it in with the new Photos service?

<comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure that's exactly what is happening and Techcrunch is just confused.

There's no "tool" to migrate your photos...all my photos are already in the new app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No thanks, I'll keep my photos in Google Drive. I'm sure the interface is much better, but it is easy to sync drive with another service down the road if the time comes where that is necessary.

<comment><USER27> You can actually sync from Google Drive to Google Photos (and vice versa): [https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6156103?hl=en](https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6156103?hl=en)

You get your Drive and your shiny interface.

<comment><USER26> Ah thanks. I just created the "My Photos" folder automatically through google drive settings, and it automatically added every photo I've ever sent through google hangouts. Yikes, who wants that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Confused beyond the point of caring, that's saying a lot.

</comment><comment><USER29> Just came to know that it is not possible to rearrange (organize option from G+ photos) photos in an album.. its strange Google missed it...

<comment><USER30> Organization seems to be the most common missing feature from Google cloud offerings (its, IMO, the biggest problem when you have more than a few items in Google Play Books.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have passed the point where I would use any service Google launches, where they keep data I want to keep; and it's not because of Snowden.

They are acting like they are a bunch of startup teams constantly getting aqui-hired, with services getting changed, merged or canceled. I couldn't possibly recommend any of their services[1] to non-technical people, at any time something will stop working.

I'm not a wall to throw things at to see what sticks.

[1] Beyond search, of course

<comment><USER32> Search is replaceable with DuckDuckGo for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How many photo products has Google had? Have _any_ of them been successful?

<comment><USER34> I thought people liked the Picasa app? (But then again, I never used it myself ;P.)

<comment><USER35> Picasa's an acquisition, and all of the stuff Google added to it was eventually folded into G+ with little fanfare so I'm guessing it wasn't a huge success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> wow. i have lots and lots of pictures, mostly hosted to share on forums, that were uploaded all the way back on picasa.

then picasaweb. then google photo web. or something. photos still there.

then i was forced to join google+ to continue uploading/editing/sharing. And i think it became google+ photos. or google photos as everyone called it. i can still see all the pictures i uploaded to picasa showing as my pictures on my plus profile.

and now, i have no clue what they mean with this announcement. will i have to migrate? am i already on the right photos? will i lose things if i do not migrate?

i have backups so i can't care less. what worries me A LOT is that those photos are linked on all short of forums and people will not find the information i produced if the links dies.

Thanks for "organizing the world information", google.

</comment><comment><USER37> Google+ had photos?

</comment><comment><USER38> Next: Golang is shutting down.</comment>


Debunking that C++ is faster and safer than Rust - <AUTHOR> https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0733/ <comment><USER2> > As you can see, the documented behavior and the absence of undefined > behavior due to signed overflows do make life easier.

Not having undefined behavior does make life easier, but having it be defined and then giving the example which benefits from the way that Rust chooses to define it is not really fair.

> With less effort, Rust generates less assembly code. And you don't need to > give any clues to the compiler by using noexcept, rvalue references and > std::move. When you compare languages, you should use adequate benchmarks.

Actually, the issue is that C++ just can't match Rust's semantics here. By default it will allow for exceptions, by default it will copy; if you watch the talk rvalue references cause the double indirection and fixing this would require some changes in the language to accommodate the use case.

<comment><USER3> > the example which benefits from the way that Rust chooses to define it

I'm actually struggling to see what the practical benefit is in having it wrap around. The program is still producing garbage at that point, which you're not handling, so why not let the compiler just forget about that case just like you already did?

<comment><USER4> The practical benefit is not in the wrapping specifically. The difference is in it being UB vs not UB; that is, overflow is a "program error" not UB, and so the language defines how implementations must handle this error.

You aren't supposed to rely on this semantic, as it's an error. If the checks get cheap enough, rustc will also check in release.

<comment><USER3> I mean, the post seemed to be arguing that the wrap-around is somehow beneficial, so I'm not sure you're saying the same thing. But if all you want is check + crash when that happens then can't you just use a compiler flag or a different data type or something else for that in C++?

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying that the wrapping behavior is beneficial. I'm saying that having it be not UB is beneficial.

<comment><USER3> But if all you want is check + crash when that happens then can't you just use a compiler flag or a different data type or something else for that in C++?

<comment><USER4> Different type? Sure. Disadvantage is that it's not pervasive. Compiler flag? Probably, I am not an expert on compiler flags that change language semantics; we don't do that in Rust, but I know C and C++ compilers do.

<comment><USER3> > Compiler flag? Probably, I am not an expert on compiler flags that change > language semantics; we don't do that in Rust, but I know C and C++ compilers > do.

What do you mean? Is Rust's -C overflow-checks just a joke then? [https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/expressions/operator- exp...](https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/expressions/operator- expr.html#overflow)

<comment><USER4> Okay, so let's review the language's rules here:

* There are two modes for overflow checking: enabled, and default.

* If overflow checking is in "enabled" mode, overflow results in a panic.

* If overflow checking is in "default" mode, the results are two's compliment wrapping.

* Debug builds are "enabled" mode.

(There's a few other details, but this is good enough for our discussion. See [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0560-inte...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0560-integer-overflow.md) )

Rustc implements this as follows:

* When debug_assertions is on, it's in "enabled" mode.

* Otherwise, it's in "default" mode.

* -C overflow-checks turns on "enabled" mode, regardless of other settings.

This is completely consistent with the rules of the language. If these checks ever get cheap enough, rustc may even start to turn them on by default, which is also acceptable under these rules. We'll see if that ever happens, though.

<comment><USER3> So let's review where we are right now. C++ left the entire thing _undefined_ , which gave compilers the complete freedom to add flags that define e.g. wrap-around or trapping or other behavior. I suggested you can use such flags if you want. You complained about that and said it's "changing" language semantics... despite the fact that it's 100% consistent with the "rules of the language". You even went on to claim "we don't do that in Rust". All right. So I pointed you to a Rust _compiler flag_ that changes the default wrap-around to a _panic_. Now you're saying that's _not_ changing Rust's language semantics... and your defense is "it's consistent with the rules of the language"...?!

<comment><USER4> Undefined behavior is different from implementation defined behavior. Code that exhibits UB is not a valid program. Flags that take UB and define it are categorically different than flags that tweak various options, because flags that define UB expand the set of valid programs, where flags that tweak options do not.

<comment><USER3> Okay, you're very confused. You're getting it almost backwards.

Undefined behavior is behavior that the language _does not define_ , _not_ behavior that the implementation is _prohibited_ from defining. That's why you can't treat it like (for example) a random-number generator. Implementations are well within their rights (i.e. 100% consistent with the language) to define previously-undefined behavior to be _anything_. They're also just as welcome to leave them undefined. Both are 100% consistent with the language and neither is "changing" the language semantics. No program that exhibited UB is going to misbehave somehow just because someone decided to define the behavior under UB. The semantics already allowed anything to happen. Whatever they define falls under "anything could happen".

Implementation-behavior is behavior that the the implementation _is guaranteed_ to define. Like with UB, the implementation has freedom to choose a behavior. Unlike with UB, it is not allowed to leave that behavior undefined. So the program can be sure to have a well-defined output.

It is _completely_ wrong to simultaneously say changing "wrap" to "crash" is "not changing semantics" and somehow "consistent" with the language rules, but that changing "undefined" to "wrap" is "changing semantics" and "not consistent" with the language rules. If the language wraps on overflow, then changing that to a panic is _actively shrinking_ the set of valid programs; _valid programs_ that used to behave one way now behave differently. (They crash!) The latter is merely _expanding_ the set of valid programs; programs that had _no rights to claim any behavior_ under UB now actually have a right to claim something under the implementation, but that doesn't change the behavior of previously-valid programs. They're still provided exactly the same guarantees they already were.

(P.S., UB isn't even a property of a program, but of an execution. But I'll leave that out since the simplified version is clearly confusing enough as- is.)

<comment><USER4> I do absolutely understand that UB does not prohibit implementations from defining something. That's part of the core of what we're taking about! I'm saying rustc chooses to _never_ do so. C and C++ compilers do choose to do so. That distinction is what we're talking about.

(As well as that overflow is UB in one language and not another, of course.)

<comment><USER3> No comment on everything else I wrote beyond that 1 sentence? Your positions are quite contradictory, which is what I've been trying to explain in the entire comment.

<comment><USER4> I just don't think we're going to get anywhere, but wanted to correct the assertion that I do not understand this aspect of UB.

<comment><USER3> I mean, your positions are contradictory, but sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The bug has been present in LLVM since 2006. It's an important issue as you > want to be able to mark infinite loops or recursions in such a way as to > prevent LLVM from optimizing it down to nothing. Fortunately, things are > improving. LLVM 6 was released with the intrinsic llvm.sideeffect added, and > in 2019, rustc got the -Z insert-sideeffect flag, which adds llvm.sideeffect > to infinite loops and recursions. Now infinite recursion is recognized as > such (link:godbolt). Hopefully, this flag will soon be added as default to > stable rustc too.

Be aware that this isn't a LLVM bug but a direct consequence of the insanity of C++ specification (wrt. forward progress induced undefined behaviour).

The C++ rules around forward progress allow C++ compilers to faster eliminate code which doesn't produce any observable side effects (without the code triggering undefined behaviour) but it also removes code which intentionally or not hangs the process in a busy loop or is intended to cause a stack overflow... (e.g. for testing protections).

The flag currently isn't added to rust as the penalty effect on compiler time (needs to run more analysis) and runtime (doesn't eliminate all code it should) is currently pretty high.

So this might take a while until _fully_ fixed (you always can pass in the flag yourself if you want).

Through some fixes which make it harder to hit the bug until a proper solution is found _might_ not be so far of (I hope).

<comment><USER6> It's indeed not a bug for C++, but to be clear it _is_ a bug for C and Rust that use LLVM but don't have that same guarantee as C++. LLVM assumes that guarantee holds for all frontends, and added the sideeffect opcode so that frontends for languages that don't have that guarantee have a way out.

</comment></comment><comment> nv-vn Important to note that PVS-Studio is a static analysis tool for C++. As such it would definitely be in their interest to have more people use C++, but since they're arguing in favor of Rust here it definitely speaks to the fact that their analysis is unbiased.

<comment><USER4> They have also previously posted some negative ones too, so I was surprised to read this for that reason. I think it also contributed to my confusion around the title vs text, that others have expressed in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a case I stumble on: Rust seems to generate unnecessary branches. Compare copying an optional range:

C++: [https://godbolt.org/z/VCf638](https://godbolt.org/z/VCf638)

Rust: [https://rust.godbolt.org/z/jRFiw_](https://rust.godbolt.org/z/jRFiw_)

I think the key difference here is that C++ allows specializing optional on trivial types - can anyone shed more light?

<comment><USER8> It looks like the C++ version always does the copy, regardless of whether or not the optional is empty, whereas Rust only bothers copying if there's anything there.

Is this a remnant of #[inline] on Option's Clone impl methods?

With "larger" types (e.g. an optional several-GiB array) it seems like this could save some time depending on where things are in memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is a bit click-baity. It's more about busting myths by a particular C++ programmer against rust.

Anyway for a truth (well maybe it is a myth?) that we can't bust yet... Rust is simply not available on all platforms that C++ is. Two platforms that I think are missing:

* 16-bit MS-DOS

* 32-bit PowerPC (Linux)

<comment><USER5> Is anyone besides embedded doing _any_ 32-bit dev outside of maintaining legacy code?

I mean 64-bit PowerPc is by now around 17 Years old and even 15 years ago some of the most widespread users of PowerPc (Xbox) switched to using 64 bit PowerPc architecture...

<comment><USER10> Xbox 360 still ran in 32bit mode with the exception of the hypervisor. No use of 64bit pointers on a system with a max of 1GB of RAM other than just wasting cache space, and there's no real other benefit tacked on like you see in other 64-bit archs.

<comment><USER5> Thanks I didn't know this. I just looked up since when PowerPc 64-bit is a think.

<comment><USER10> Ah. In that case the PowerPC 620 was a 64 bit design from the late nineties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting article. Most of the time I do not like myth busting articles because they are to much focused on opinions and taking things out of context but this one is very well written and fully based on facts on both sides. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER12> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just looking from afar, I don't have time to analyze every other claim, but this one:

> Both C++ and Rust have generated identical assembly listings; both have > added push rbx for the sake of stack alignment. Q.E.D.

seems to be completely wrong: a decent compiler is able to align the stack without "touching" it. For the variables inside of the function to be pushed to the aligned stack position, only different offsets have to be calculated. For the stack itself to get to be aligned, only the register has to be updated, surely nothing has to be pushed.

So something else must have been happening there, and I don't have time to analyze what, but I'm sure push is surely not necessary for alignment alone.

<comment><USER7> You are correct, it has nothing to do with alignment. rbx is a callee-saved register, so the callee saves it.

<comment><USER14> Do you mean thar rax is caller-saved?

<comment><USER7> rax is indeed caller-saved, but I was referring to rbx. In this code:

        int bar(int a, int b) {
           int z = a * b;
           foo();
           return z;
        }

[https://godbolt.org/z/a8Y35r](https://godbolt.org/z/a8Y35r)

Where to put `z`? It has to be someplace where `foo` won't clobber it, like a callee-saved register - in this case ebx.

But now `bar` is responsible for saving the value of ebx for its caller. That explains the push and pop.

Alignment is unrelated; this is just about calling conventions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is an endlessly perplexing headline, as its core assertion, "C++ is faster and safer than Rust", is what the body of the article spends its whole time attempting to refute. A more accurate title for the content of this article would be "Debunking the myths that Rust is not safer or as fast as C++".

<comment><USER16> Ok, we've debunked the title above.

<comment><USER17> Are comments about the title of articles offtopic? Because sometimes comments that discuss titles, without being inflammatory, are flagged, and sometimes they aren't.

<comment><USER16> I suppose they are in principle, but we don't have an explicit rule against them, and user passions around titles burn so hot that it wouldn't make a difference if we did. There are also so many of them that you're not likely to see consistency around what gets flagged vs. not. Are there specific links we could look at?

<comment><USER17> Thanks for replying. I was thinking about the "Make X Y Again" types of article that, intentionally or not, invites offtopic discussion.

The original comment from simonw ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137531)) originally did not have many comments but was already flagged when I saw it first, which was strange to me because the comment basically says "this is a bad title (it distracts from the content), don't do that". This is quite a reasonable comment to me.

So under that comment are many exchanges that may or may not be offtopic, but I was curious in particular about why that parent comment was flagged, and what recourse users have when something is flagged but maybe shouldn't (wasn't there a "vouch" action?). My opinion is that if the submission itself brings political subject into light, even indirectly, it is unfair to flag political comments as offtopic.

<comment><USER16> A bunch of users flagged that comment. We can only guess why users flag things, but my guess is that in this case they thought it was a specimen of the very distraction it was worrying about.

<comment><USER17> I agree that it's probably what they think. My opinion is that flagging is unecessary in that case since people can already downvote and hide distracting comments.

Thanks for your answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Strictly speaking it's the compiler that generates faster code.

<comment><USER19> You'll never get faster code out of JS, though. Language design matters a lot.

<comment><USER5> Well, there are some close to native code speeds for some (very constrained) use-cases.

They way it's done is that if you use a certain stile of C the compiler will speculative do assumptions about the code allowing it to basically add all the C optimizations. Except that it always has to check if the assumptions are uphold and then fallback and that because it's a JIT it has much less time to optimize the code and do cross-code-section optimizations.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Stranded by Trump - <AUTHOR> https://strandedbytrump.com <comment><USER2> Anyone have thoughts / ideas on what people need that developers could create for times like these? ie. What are the biggest problems in today's political climate which a developer may be able to solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> The EFF probably has some things. [https://github.com/EFForg/](https://github.com/EFForg/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And why is this being flagged?

<comment><USER4> I was hesitating saying anything, but I've noticed MANY of the anti-trump stories getting flagged aggressively. It's not uniform, and I can't quite say I've noticed a pattern, but there's enough that it's stood out a few times on articles that I thought were very tech related (bigCo employee situation legality). While it could just be people getting fed up with the political news, it doesn't really sit well with me given the relevance of recent events.

<comment><USER5> _While it could just be people getting fed up with the political news_

I think this is it. In many submissions, the same points are repeatedly made. And it's pretty much pure politics at this point, which generally doesn't fair well on HN and is generally off-topic per the guidelines.

<comment><USER6> Idk, maybe it's just me but the stakes are so high right now that to hide from political engagement would be downright irresponsible as a citizen of the US/World especially with the power we developers have to affect the world. This community's foundation was built on people wanting to make a better world not hide in our bubbles

<comment><USER5> Considering how much political discussion is actively going on right now on HN, I'd hardly describe it as "hiding".

Edit to add: You repeatedly bring up comments along the lines of "why was this flagged" or regarding the appropriateness of politics on HN. None of this should be news to you at all at this point. Why do you persist on bringing this up, when you've been around long enough to know the situation on HN and the community's well-established stance on these points?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>