Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924174503.htm <comment><USER2> Link to PNAS research paper: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/19/1811940115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/19/1811940115)

Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K HML-2 integration within RASGRF2 is associated with intravenous drug abuse and modulates transcription in a cell-line model

 _Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes. Here we show that one specific uncommon HK2, which lies close to a gene involved in dopaminergic activity in the brain, is more frequently found in drug addicts and thus is significantly associated with addiction. We experimentally show that HK2 can manipulate nearby genes. Our study provides strong evidence that uncommon HK2 can be responsible for unappreciated pathogenic burden, and thus underlines the health importance of exploring the phenotypic roles of young, insertionally polymorphic HK2 integrations in human populations._

...

 _Based on our cell-line experiments, we suggest that RASGRF2-int leads to enhancement of dopaminergic activity through higher expression of the first exons of RASGRF2, which then results in increased potential for addiction._

<comment><USER3> Very sensible that the mutation relates to the dopaminergic activity, just based on our knowledge of the reward pathway and the effect of addictive drugs on dopamine. There may even been a positive feedback loop here, as any viral gene inserted that increases risky, impulsive behavior may also encourage procreation.

<comment><USER4> While that might be true today, I don't agree that increasing risk-taking behaviors was evolutionarily advantageous past some equilibrium (otherwise, we'd have a new equilibrium).

<comment><USER5> Depends whether you consider this to be evolutionary advantageous to us or the virus/bacteria...similar example from toxoplasmosis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis)

Geoffrey West touches upon some of this stuff in scale - its worth a read

[https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation- Sustainabi...](https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation- Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582)

Oversimplification is that some of the viruses / genetic defects that kill us later let us live long enough to reproduce first and pass those traits/infections along.

<comment><USER6> The ancient Egyptians liked cats, and considering the effect T. Gondi has on males[1] (higher Testosotorone & dominance) and females[2] (submissiveness), this could have been a reason why they worshipped cats. It could also be considered an early example of a biological weapon used on sections of population.

With regard to addictive behaviour, some research has suggested addictions are neuro amine addictions, ie andrenaline, dopamine & serotonin. Cocaine for example last in the body for upto 2hrs and amplifies dopamine and serotonin, so being addicted to feeling good is understandable, however serotonin also plays a part in the innate immune system and the association between depression and illness has also long been known. The medical profession SSRI's inhibit the uptake of serotonin in the brain, which reduces the brains ability to convert it into melatonin (4x more potent than Vit C), plus not much can cross the blood brain barrier so the adapative immune can not work in the brain, eyes, gonads, ovaries. So whilst SSRI's can make you feel good, like everything in life it can also have its side effects because we are a bundle of realtime complex pathways oscillating in time and space.

One other point of risk taking behaviour, some of you may have noticed when you feel like you are going down with something like a cold or flu, you may also feel the need to procreate before the illness takes hold. This would suggest an evolutionary response to pass on genes, but excessive amounts of chemicals which can harm the body can also cause this behaviour as well, illegal drugs & alcohol being examples. ie did you know that smokers have elevated levels of copper in their blood stream? This is probably due to the need to deal with the risk of foreign bodies coming into the blood stream through the lungs, but copper and iron is also required to prevent anemia, which in turn is required to make red blood cells, plus its also known that elite atheletes, people living at high altitude and smokers have enlarged red blood cells. Plus smoking can also be a form of self medication if an asthma inhaler is not available, asthma being a type of allergic reaction to debris or pathogens inhaled, most commonly being from pets or pollution. [1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's almost as if evidence continues to mount that addiction is a health issue and should be treated as such, rather than as a matter of criminality.

For anyone interested in further reading on the topic I highly recommend information available from the Institute For Addiction Study ([https://www.theinstituteforaddictionstudy.org/](https://www.theinstituteforaddictionstudy.org/)).

<comment><USER8> Certain aspects? Sure. All aspects? No. I don't mind the buying the use and the minor incidentsl things. But if the addiction causes harm, be it physical, material or other major impacts on others, then it becomes both a health issue and a criminsl issue (stealing, hit and runs, deception, and obviously more). But yes, let's try and treat it first rather than seek punishment first.

<comment><USER9> Punishment runs counter to all forms of sustainable learning, according to the science of learning how to learn.

Let's lovingly apply science to criminalization of people being human, rather than criminalizing human behavior. Let's not seek to punish. Let's start exploring other solutions spaces.

<comment><USER8> Let's say you havd someone in the Army of some country, any country, and that soldier does heinous things contrary than that allowed by internstional convention on clearly a civilian population, let's say, do we still say, "oh, hey, they were high, it's an illness, let's treat them and after done, let's get them back in the army".

<comment><USER10> Yes, obviously, if that can be proven to be the cause? Proper criminal rehabilitation and reintegration is very important.

<comment><USER11> It is. But there are psychopaths out there who simply don't do violence out of fear from counterviolence. Remove the threat with social works and they laugh about it.

So in general I agree, that there are better methods than punishment, but for some it works.

<comment><USER12> We should take incidence rate of such characteristics into account before proscribing general approaches

<comment><USER11> I believe it will be hard to get those numbers. I take history as evidence that there are plenty of people or groups out there, who do violence to gain benefit. It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.

Humanism is a relativly new concept. One worth pursuing, but maybe not blinded by idealism.

<comment><USER12> > I believe it will be hard to get those numbers.

I believe it is worth the effort

> It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Different reasons have different most effective solutions. If we choose as our general solution something that has narrow scope of significant positive effect and wide scope of moderate negative effect, I'd say we've chosen poorly as that will harm society as a whole rather than help it. Which is why the hard task of getting those numbers is worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally).

Going further, a lot of what we do unconciously is just what a virus or something else "did" to survive or spread in the past, and our free will isn't that free...

Edit: "did" wasn't meaning that a specific goal was set, for example, but just that the survival rate was better for certain configuration of atoms

<comment><USER14> It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. Humans have many natural tendencies that are not socially accepted, and better behavior can be learned and tendencies suppressed. Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life.

<comment><USER15> > _Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain > addicts for life._

The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.

<comment><USER16> The more specific statements about addicts become, the more cautious I tend to be.

That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART.

The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous.

The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective such as that of SMART is a better starting point than the 'once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' approach of AA. And if SMART doesn't work, AA might very well be the only solution left.

<comment><USER14> > The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite > possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can > be disastrous.

This, absolutely this. And since it is impossible to know in advance if moderation is possible for a given person, AA optimizes for the worst case scenario and assumes that no one can handle moderation, which has the greatest likelihood of success for all who use this strategy.

<comment><USER17> AA isn't so much a recovery program as a submarine Christian conversion program; it's seldom better than nothing, and often worse. Very consistently and well-marketed, though.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the- irr...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the- irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/)

(Fun fact: when it started, it wasn't anonymous -- except one of the founders kept showing up drunk in public, and they realized this itself was pretty quickly debunking their success claims!)

<comment><USER14> I think this is a rather unfair distortion of AA. I know many who have been tremendously helped by the program. It does work for many. It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power. It's not a religious process in the sense most would think of it. I also don't think it's fair to mention any one particular person's success or lack thereof with AA when making sweeping generalizations about the program (including the founder, which I don't know if what you say is actually correct or not -- it just doesn't matter).

The other important thing that AA does, which is quite critical, is get individuals with problems frequent, implicit counseling from others who have been through the same thing. This is very hard to get in modern life in most other ways. It's possible, but AA makes it the default process. You can throw away all the other stuff about AA and dismiss it, and you are still left with the fact social therapy in any form is very effective, and AA promotes that.

<comment><USER17> When it's been studied for effectiveness, it turns out AA works for between 5% and 10% of the people in it; as it also turns out, that's about the same percentage of people for whom _any_ group support program would work.

This isn't a distortion, this is the empirical view of AA.

As for explicitly unreligious, I would like to include the twelve steps here:

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to _the care of God_ as we understood Him.

4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5) _Admitted to God_ , to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6) Were entirely ready _to have God remove_ all these defects of character.

7) Humbly asked _Him_ to remove our shortcomings.

8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11) Sought through prayer and meditation to _improve our conscious contact with God_ as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of _His will_ for us and the power to carry that out.

12) Having had a _spiritual awakening_ as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I am struggling to find an unreligious interpretation for steps 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12, even if the "higher power" isn't an Abrahamic religion "God".

What's a spiritual awakening to an atheist?

<comment><USER18> I think the key here is that people function better, and break addictions better, when they realize and submit to the concept that they do not (and can't) have complete power and control over their own lives. The notion of a "higher power" or "God" can help people get into that posture of "letting go", which helps them find real support outside of themselves (and their addictions).

Being a Christian myself, I know I function _much_ better when I'm consciously in an attitude of trusting God -- it lets me relax and simply be who I am and do what I need to do, without worrying about "fixing things" outside of my control. (And yes, I do take an intellectually rigorous approach to my faith, but that's a different topic.)

<comment><USER14> I'm not a religious man myself, but I think your perspective is wiser than most of those who call themselves Christians, and frankly, I think what you have expressed here runs deeper than the particulars of any specific religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes.

Did they take the list of all HK2 viruses, and test them all to see which one had a prevalence in identified addicts?

If they did that, would they admit it in the paper?

Maybe I've become too cynical, but my default is to assume statistical misuse these days.

<comment><USER20> They mention some very strong results (P< 0.001) which I don't think can be explained by randomness even if they were to roll the dice several times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to just wipe all known virus remains from our DNA and if yes, what would happen? Would the resulting organism even be able to live?

<comment> cc-d Considering viral DNA makes up approximately 8% of the human genome, eliminating it probably wouldn't end too well.

<comment><USER22> The technical debt of the genome. But code that the new folks are afraid to touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This so reminds me of the Asherah virus in the great book SnowCrash by Neal Stephenson. That book is still one of my favorite SFF books ever.

<comment><USER24> Now all we need to cure addiction is the nam-shub of Enki.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just to add one more sci-fi reference, this reminds me of mind rot virus in A Deepness in the Sky [0] by Vernor Vinge

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

<comment><USER26> I'll add one more sci-fi reference involving HERVs: Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Radio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There are so many more things than substances to be addicted to. Psychological dependence on certain behaviors can be just as strong as physical dependence on a substance.

It looks like this study is focused on drug addiction which on its own is really intriguing, but I wonder if there would be any evidence in the human genome to predict behavioral addiction.

<comment><USER28> I found that I'm addicted to weed, but not harmful drugs.

Alcohol ruins your day.

I can be productive on weed and/or caffeine. Both of them get work done.

I believe I'm addicted to the productivity, when I take them outside of a work environment, I want to work.

At what point is this positive reinforced habits?

<comment><USER29> You're not addicted to weed.

Addiction really has a lot to do with making bad decisions in your life to keep doing the addictive behaviour.

If its not negatively impacting your life, and it's not interfering with relationships and obligations, you're not addicted.

<comment><USER30> I think addiction is: you can't moderate usage even when you want to, and can't stay stopped even when you want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Genetic test that could tell you: "You most likely won't develop physical addiction to cocaine." would be a game changer in some demanding professions.

Most people could use cocaine as safely as caffeine but since you have no idea if you get addicted or not mostly dumb people try and some suffer greatly.

<comment><USER32> It would be more useful for treatment programs I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm still not totally sure how the "causation" part is proven. Just because the genes must have already existed in human beings long before there were drugs? Not sure if this is totally convincing though sure, that is indeed stronger than many other cases as proving causation is really difficult.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is it a particular SNP marker/mutation of the RASGRF2 gene? In my genetic report there are 99 such markers, I'm wondering if a specific one is mentioned in the paper.

</comment><comment><USER35> Huh? Viruses can affect human genes? How come I never learnt this in biology?

</comment><comment><USER36> Does this remind anyone of season one of Fortitude on Prime?

</comment><comment><USER37> I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.

<comment><USER38> No one actually believes this, including you. You may say you do, and even think you do, but you don't. Everyone acts as if they and others around them possess free will. We act that way because that's what we believe.

Honestly, I don't think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like "there is no free will," when the entire history of human thought and philosophy presupposes that there is.

<comment><USER37> > No one actually believes this, including you.

I'm pretty sure that I'm in a better position to know what I actually believe than you are, and I'm telling you, I really do believe this. There are only three possibilities: either free will is an illusion, or dualism is true, or consciousness is the result of unknown new physics. The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.

But just because it's an illusion doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't live your life as if it were real. It's a very compelling illusion as long as you don't know how the trick is done, and so far, we don't.

<comment><USER39> I think what _nardi_ is trying to say is that there's no functional difference between having free will, and acting as if you do.

What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently?

(fwiw, I agree with you; I just think it doesn't particularly matter now.)

<comment><USER40> Well your ethics should shift considerably. Retributive justice is morally repugnant for someone who does not believe in absolute free will.

<comment><USER41> The existence of punishment changes the inputs to the system and, thus, changes the outputs of the system. The system in this case being the mind and it's output being behavior.

<comment><USER40> Right which is why I specifically said retributive justice. Other penal forms may still be morally justified for the sake of the "system" as it were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I see nothing here that suggests the link is causative. It could very well be that the toll of being an addict compromises the immune system leading to conditions that most people never get.

<comment><USER43> I think they would have to have a separate, additional experiment to rule out a causal relation.

<comment><USER42> It's not hard to test this hypothesis. All they have to do is look if the elderly show the same pattern as addicts. If they do, it suggest that a weakened immune system leaves the body vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> So what does this say about all the studies on rats, dogs, and all the other animals we have been using to study addiction? The rats that choose cocaine over food, are they running a different retrovirus?

<comment><USER45> The researchers found that the presence of RASGRF2 in their sample populations went from 6% to 14% and 9.5% to 34% when comparing controls to chronic drug abusers.

So this means that addiction is a complex, multi-factor condition, and these researchers may have identified another factor. People with this gene may be predisposed to addictive behaviors but not behave that way for any number of environmental or other reasons; likewise, people without the gene may still develop addictive behaviors.

The researchers didn't study rats or dogs, so there isn't much in the way of evidence for this gene's presence in those species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This brings home the point Sam Harris makes often in his writing and blog (and books [1]): Our subjective experience of free will and being in control is largely an illusion.

I used to find that very depressing, but now made peace with compatibilism (the notion that determinism and free will are compatible) [2][3].

Sam Harris objects to compatibilism: both argue that determinism is true, but Harris thinks that thus we have no free will, while compatibilists argue that we still have the "free will worth having" (see the book by Dennett [4]).

Harris and Dennett had an insightful podcast/debate on that [5].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will- by...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-sam- harris.html)

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

[3] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow_Room_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow_Room_\(book\))

[5] [https://samharris.org/podcasts/free-will- revisited/](https://samharris.org/podcasts/free-will-revisited/)</comment>


Direct Primary Care: A real alternative under Obamacare - <AUTHOR> http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/direct-primary-care-real-alternative.html <comment><USER2> Short opinion piece that is remarkably void of any substance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did a longer write up previously and people largely nitpicked irrellevant details. What would constitute substance in your opinion? The insane health insurance prices in the US are a real problem for many people. This is a growing alternative that works.

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> After reading both articles I didn't really understand what direct primary care is, how it works, why it would have lower cost than the current model, and how it relates to Obamacare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does this work?

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/direct- prima...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/direct-primary- care.html)

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> That explains it but it doesn't sound at all like a replacement for the current health care system:

> you get basic services such as annual physicals, regular check ups and > treatment for minor emergencies of the sort that can be handled in a > doctor's office.

I could be wrong but I don't think these account for much cost at all in the current health care system. A once annual check up probably costs $1k at most, all-in, and probably less in practice. It also doesn't provide much value, compared to current health care, since it won't cure major illnesses or cover major surgeries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then I feel like I still am failing to explain something. But at this point, I am grumpy and tired and yadda.

So far, Obamacare has not impacted me other than making my federal tax forms a hair longer. With luck, our next potus will, in fact, kill this horrifying monstrosity and replace it with something more sensible, making my efforts to explain this irrelevant.

So, I think I am throwing in the towel on this one.

Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg on the next 10 years of Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/a/mark-zuckerberg-future-of-facebook <comment><USER3> On Free Basics: _" We've learned a lot about how we need to interact with governments and the political system and regulators, and build support in order to have these things work. And I think we'll take those lessons forward on the future work we're doing in Free Basics, which by the way is continuing to roll out around the world. One day, once we've shown that it's a successful program around the world, I hope that we'll get another chance to come back to India and offer it there, too._"

Come on, Mark... your stubbornness sometimes works well in making product decisions, but isn't working well in this strategic context. Free Basics rolled out in all these other countries by interacting with 'the political system', regulators, governments (not to mention telecoms.) But it was grassroots activists who stopped you in India. And you still haven't learned that what we want is not better management of regulators, but net neutrality. It blows my mind.

It is exhausting enough to have to oppose telecom networks and other industries in their efforts to turn the Internet into Cable TV (by creating different tiers and segments of the internet), and meanwhile every few months Mark wants to lunge into the conversation with this nonsense. Facebook should be helping preserve net neutrality worldwide, not putting their energy and resources into undermining it.

India wants the same Internet that Mark used to create Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Accept nothing less.

<comment><USER4> While I want them to, I don't know why they should. What's in it for them?

<comment><USER3> Most U.S. tech companies were strong proponents of the FCC's net neutrality regulations because they don't want telecom networks to intervene between them and their users by segmenting access based on pricing or speed. Although it seems once you are as successful as Facebook (and now, Netflix) you start thinking less of "what if the ISP wants to rip me off by differentiating access to my app?" and more like "how can I partner with the ISP to get an advantage by differentiating access to my app?"

<comment><USER5> They gotta pull that ladder up behind them. If they don't they might actually have to innovate and compete in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something about Zuck just seems inauthentic and robotic. Maybe the style of writing makes it sound like a sponsored PR piece, or maybe it's the incessant corporate speak. I suspect the reality is Zuck is a strong CEO and weak innovator. Facebook is established and boring, and now all that's left is to entrench the world with proprietary Zuckernet. I strongly suspect Zuck will become the characterized depiction of the robber baron, but that's just my unfounded prediction.

<comment><USER7> I believe the problem with Mark lies in the fact that to many of us he hasn't build anything substantial. Sure, from a technical point of view Facebook is spectacular. Other than that it's a boring place adding no value whatsoever to the Internet. There's nothing innovative about it. He's isn't solving any kind of problem. Compared to other giants of our industry he seems dull and irrelevant. And so does his vision.

<comment><USER8> Facebook adds "no value whatsoever"? One billion people every day would disagree with you.

Facebook is the primary method that billions of people across the world use to stay in touch with family and friends. It's one of the most important pieces of my life and something I come back to almost every single day.

And no, I've never worked there nor will I ever. I don't own a single share of FB stock. I'm just a user who appreciates the value of what he uses, or at the very least, can appreciate the value that other people get out of a product that I myself may never use.

<comment><USER9> >It's one of the most important pieces of my life

Reading this made me sad.

<comment><USER8> Why does that make you sad

<comment><USER10> Cause it's just a tool. A tool that promotes laziness in communication and personal contact. All for the low low cost of all your privacy so they can sell you to whoever. It's a convenient tool though

<comment><USER11> The point of tools is literally to enable laziness. Feel free to go back to the telegraph if you really want to work harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spread FB to everyone so he can deliver news in headlines absent of nuance with the effect of reinforcing existing held beliefs, strengthening conspiracy theories, and increasing polarization and radicalism. Thanks Mark! Glad your hot or not prank worked out so well for you.

<comment><USER13> Is facebook really not just an extension of Hot or Not.

It started as a place for dudes to see if girls had boyfriends. Now, it's all about using people's baby pictures to sell advertisements.

I don't know why women would want to use a service that is so inherently anti- woman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious what others think about the vision for a more-connected world. While I think the positives far outweigh the negatives in abstract, I wonder if the relatively segregated and disconnected civilizations we've built until now are equipped to deal with the complexities of a more-connected world. Cultural differences, religious differences, ethical differences, etc. are all potential points of friction when you begin connecting groups that had previously been separated by geography but can now interface with one-another. I think Mark's vision for a more-connected world is inevitable -- arguably, it's something that's been happening for all time, albeit perhaps not at the pace we see today, as digital connectivity provides the ability to connect distant groups far easier than physical connectivity ever allowed. I just hope the outcome is a net positive for humanity.

<comment><USER15> What I'm curious to see is if anyone is going to take the opposite end of that bet: Facebook's "openness"/"World is flat"/"End of history" vs. decentralized, tribal, anonymized, balkanized social networks.

As Facebook keeps accumulating users, and as users accumulate "friends", the SNR decreases and makes the product experience less valuable, notwithstanding the efforts they make to "optimize" the feed. Mine is mostly filled with things I'd rather never see.

Facebook is a social network that mostly reproduces geographic social networks, but that doesn't connect people based on affinities. The people discovery mechanism is close to non-existent. People in your Facebook neighbourhood are people who most likely live in your current, past, or "work" neighbourhood.

Are there any social networks that try to dynamically create communities/"neighbourhoods" based on behavior? (e.g. upvote a post and you get "closer" to the poster, with symmetric behavior for downvoting, and second order effects propagating to other users based on their own upvote/downvote of said post).

Apologies if that's too vague, I'm thinking out loud here.

<comment><USER16> The only systems that readily comes to mind is Reddit.

It's amazing how you can wind up on a subreddit and realise that you're nowhere near the bottom of the rabbit hole that you've been calling a hobby for the past n years.

I don't know if this qualifies for what you're after, though, because these communities are:

* based on users actively seeking out forums based on what they consider themselves to be interested in, and

* each community is centred around a single topic. There might be a subreddit for people who love Fraggles and a subreddit for people who love pop-tarts, but no subreddit for people who love both Fraggles and pop-tarts.

<comment><USER15> Reddit does have the affinity thing, but as you point out, it's not nearly as granular as it could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Of all the household name tech leaders (Brin, Bezos, Musk, Jobs, etc), Zuckerberg really does strike me as the least substantial and most likely to be inauthentic. Obviously this is just a personal opinion but Facebook seems so laughably inconsequential compared to all of the companies that have made these other founders rich and famous. Apple invents incredible stuff. Google has organized the world's information in astounding ways. Musk is trying to change how energy is consumed (clown show aside). Facebook sells ads based on viral videos of cats falling off furniture and provides yet another forum for people to showcase their own vanity. It's not surprising to me that this is a guy who right before Facebook, created a website to compete with "Hot or Not".

<comment><USER11> You're underestimating how highly people value their own vanity. All Narcissus needed was a puddle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The contrast to Elon Musk's plan is so striking.

Musk is trying to fix global climate change, avoid the 1 million+ yearly traffic deaths and secure the future of the human race in case there is a planetary-size disaster.

Zuck just wants more more users, "engagement" and in the end - <USER2> for monetization.

<comment><USER19> Google wants to organize the world's information. Elon wants to go to Mars, reduce carbon emissions, save lives and increase efficiency with self-driving cars. Zuckerberg wants more users and for us to sit in VR pods like zombies.

<comment><USER20> > Zuckerberg wants more users and for us to sit in VR pods like zombies.

[http://blogs- images.forbes.com/parmyolson/files/2016/02/1271...](http://blogs- images.forbes.com/parmyolson/files/2016/02/12719113_10102665120179591_3471165635858509622_o-1200x799.jpg)

He just looks so happy with his zombie army.

<comment><USER21> My gosh, that is terrifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not entirely convinced FB will exist in any significant form in 10 years.

<comment><USER23> Why do you think that? I'm trying hard to think of something that would make it go the way of Friendster.

<comment><USER24> I had an idea the other day of creating a three-fold informational website.

1\. How to backup your Facebook content and delete your account.

2\. How to use non-Facebook services to share photos, organize events and talk to friends.

3\. How to open an online trading account and purchase PUT options against FB.

In my delusion of grandeur I imagined this site going viral with the idea that if a critical mass of users decided to follow through on those steps then Facebook's network effect and user base would crumble and their stock price would plummet.

All that lost stock value would flow directly into the hands of the users that went through step 3... a legitimate capitalistic redistribution of wealth and a new opportunity for the world to define social networking is done.

I still kind of have stars in my eyes when I talk about it.

<comment><USER25> I think the biggest challenge in doing something like this and making an impact is a call to action.

Some users strongly dislike Facebook and already have the motivation necessary to execute on something like this if you made the process easy. I suspect, however, that most Facebook users are either indifferent or genuinely enjoy the service, and it will be difficult to convince these people they should cease using Facebook. Citing privacy concerns or some of Facebook's well- publicized unethical behavior seems to me like it would mainly preach to the choir.

So how do you sell this?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it's definitely not an easy sell and would require the right presentation, but I think there is a strong undercurrent of fatigue and discontent with Facebook that can be tapped into with the right message.

I think that message could energize and wake up a decent number of people and if this generated momentum then it'd feed into itself.

The fact that a measurable decrease in users could create a panic in stock price that can be profited from directly is another selling point. I'm not well-versed in investment instruments, but I do believe that spending $100 on PUT options before even a 10% drop in stock price would pay off quite handsomely.

I mean, you may like Facebook... but it's not like you couldn't create a fresh account after you make a little money, right? How much money have they profited from sharing your personal information? Every large company can benefit from a reality check...

Dunno if that message would play to more loyal users, but my mental cost/benefit analysis for this idea seems pretty favorable.

<comment><USER25> I think for the average consumer the idea of purchasing stock on a whim, let alone shorting a stock, is an alien and uninvitingly risky act. A site that asks me to follow some instructions to spend $100 to help bring down big F would send off all kinds of mental alarm bells. There could be money to be made, but I think profiting from Facebook's loss muddies the issue.

<comment><USER24> True, but like you said, most of the ethical arguments against Facebook are preaching to the choir. Sad as it is, money (even the chance of it) typically motivates more effectively than ethics.

I think if there are enough people willing to go through a convoluted process to help a Nigerian prince that it becomes a meme, then there are plenty of people who would be willing to go through the perfectly legitimate process of opening an E-Trade or Charles-Schwabb account and buying PUT options. Everything on the site would be verifiable by any financial advisor, though they may not understand/agree with the overall strategy.

And really this is just my personal musings, I have plenty of my own doubts otherwise I would be building this site and not openly sharing and commenting about it on HN.

... Of course, if some people here did think it was viable I wouldn't take much convincing to start putting it together...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Facebook to me just looks like a service that wants to build as big of a walled garden as it can and then feed the inhabitants whatever it wants to further its agenda. Then they just speak of it in terms of "helping" everyone.

</comment><comment><USER27> If he actually going to deliver "Internet access" with those drones, or is this another one of his shenanigans trying to force-feed people Facebook as the "Internet" in poor countries?

<comment><USER28> Not sure why you were downvoted. I think for the average, uneducated internet consumer facebook is kind of becoming a one-stop shop.

<comment><USER29> Exactly, and I've started to look at the bright side of Facebook's "centralization" of the internet: it allows niche communities (like Hacker News) that aren't mainstream to thrive again. The end of the Eternal September.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am not able to buy into his 10 year vision without feeling like things are getting muddled between charity and FB's business model.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nothing is free, not even the free internet you get from that massive, public, for-profit advertising platform called Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER32> Prodigy Online - Facebook 2026 Edition.

</comment><comment><USER33> Good to see two of the more influential CEO's having globally positive 10 year plans.

<comment><USER22> Is Zuckerberg really all that influential?

Or are people just wiping his bottom because he happens to be making money (for now)?

<comment><USER34> >Is Zuckerberg really all that influential?

Yes.</comment></comment></comment>


Guide to the Many Meanings of Quantum Mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/your-guide-to-the-many-meanings-of-quantum-mechanics <comment><USER2> "The Many-Worlds Interpretation has it that each time we make a measurement, reality splits into several alternative versions, identical except for the measurement outcome."

That's not right, the Many-Worlds Interpretation is just that the wavefunction in the Schrödinger equation (or its generalizations) is real, and it rejects that there's a separate process that somehow collapses the wavefunction to the single "branch" we perceive ourselves to be in. At the metaphysical level, there's no splitting involved, and no ontological measurements either (much less a "we" to do the measuring).

<comment><USER3> No offense intended, but the "lost contact with empirical reality" critique really lands for the above description of MWI. A mathematical construct (the wavefunction) is taken as more real than basic empirical experiences like "measurements" and "we."

<comment><USER4> From a physics point of view this is a very strange thing to say. Why are 'we' or 'measurements' things of special status? Because we have a soul or something? Now, that would be a theory where an abstract concept is taken to be more real than observable things. The measurement apparatus is also a physical thing that should be described by the physical theory in use as would the humans be. The very painful point about the copenhagen interpretation is this distinction between 'normal' time evolution and the special procedure when a 'measurement' is carried out. Actually, there exist mathematical proofs that the normal time evolution when applied in cases where information is transferred from microscopic stats to macroscopic ones leads to something that looks like a collapse of the wave function but is actually a split of it. This is as a physical theory much more attractive than giving a 'measurement' a special status. The question what this all means is a bit more mind-boggling though including multiple worlds and that kind of stuff. Taking 'a mathematical construct as more real than basic empirical experiences' is basically the history of physics and it has in the past been highly successful.

<comment><USER5> _Why are 'we' or 'measurements' things of special status?_

Because we experience the world through our senses. Everything else is one mathematical model or another that we've created. And our models aren't even consistent!

 _very painful point about the copenhagen interpretation is this distinction between 'normal' time evolution and the special procedure when a 'measurement' is carried out_

This is not a special procedure. Measurement occurs whenever physical interactions take place. To measure a particle, we bounce another particle off of it and then try to detect the result. The measurement is the particle collision, not the detection. It's like playing billiards in the dark. We don't know where the balls are.

 _Taking 'a mathematical construct as more real than basic empirical experiences' is basically the history of physics and it has in the past been highly successful._

Except for all of the times when it broke down. When one model was found to contradict our experiments and we had to replace it with another, which later turned out to be wrong as well. Perhaps the most embarrassing example of this, in human history, is all of our attempts to make geocentric models work [1].

The most well-known critique of science's institutional habit of inventing new models whenever old ones broke down is probably Kuhn's paradigms [2]. If you're interested, you're better off reading Kuhn than anything I have to write here. I think the best evidence for Kuhn's thesis is the abject disappointment we witness every time particle physicists fail to overturn the standard model. If that's not supremacy of measurement, then I don't what is.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

<comment><USER6> You say "The measurement is the particle collision, not the detection.", but this is not right.

When two particles bounce off each other, there is no collapse according to traditional copenhagen, instead the wave function just evolves according to the SE. Even worse, when that particle (let's say photon) then travels to the measurement device to interact with the particles that make up that machine, the evolution is similarly governed by the SE. Somehow though at some point, nature decides that a measurement has taken place and collapses the wave function. What dictates where that happens? Honestly this way of thinking about it makes no sense to me. The MWI is, to my mind, the simplest explanation for all of this mayhem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This recent video has a very watchable overview of several interpretations [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ25E9gu4qI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ25E9gu4qI)

</comment><comment><USER8> Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel has nice videos about Quantum Mechanics and interpretations:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw)

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

Some quantum materiel also on Science Asylum:

[https://www.youtube.com/c/Scienceasylum/videos](https://www.youtube.com/c/Scienceasylum/videos)

</comment><comment><USER9> > I am also personally offended that Baggott gives short shrift to > superdeterminism. In this approach, quantum mechanics is emergent from a > deterministic hidden-variables model which acknowledges that everything in > the universe is connected with everything else. He either mistakenly or > accidentally leaves the reader with the impression that these have been > ruled out for good, which is most definitely not the case. I cannot really > blame Baggott for this, though, because this omission is widespread in the > scientific literature.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that hidden-variables theory was considered in scientific literature, and was experimentally disproved.

<comment><USER10> Hidden variables theory was not disproved. Local hidden variables theory was disproved, but, actually, all local theories of any kind whatsoever that say that experiments have definite results have been disproved.

EPR is the argument that showed any local theory agreeing with the results of quantum experiments must have hidden variables. Bell showed that any hidden variable theory must be non-local. Conclusion: theory is non-local.

Many worlds escapes this by not having definite results of experiments or anything else. Since anything that could happen does happen, there is no need for non-local communication to achieve the (non)results.

Bohmian mechanics is a mathematically consistent theory (uniqueness and existence proven for a wide range of Bohmian systems) and it gives rise to an explanation of the quantum formalism. One can choose to dismiss because of prejudice, but there is no mathematical or physical reason to do so. Its biggest flaw, being nonlocal and thus philosophically (not actually) incompatible with relativity, is what Bell established as having to be the case for any theory with results.

The story with quantum field theory is more questionable, but there is a perfectly fine setup with creation and annihilation of particles, thereby being compatible in spirit with much of QFT. The biggest problem is that technically QFT has problems with having a well-defined wave function. But there have been Bohmian inspired methods of solving that problem, basically using boundary conditions that respect the preservation of probabilities under annihilation and creation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone interested in QM foundations, last year the IQOQI Vienna had a very interesting lecture series on Scientific Realism that many living philosophers and scientists to discuss the matter. Very interesting exposition + lots of different ideas presented: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtIs3eEC6pzL1v_haWfzn...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtIs3eEC6pzL1v_haWfznvgiIqEK_dUo4)

Warning: each lecture is ~2.5h long and informationally dense so can't be played at 2x speed.</comment>


Is it a bad idea for an online merchant to only accept Google checkout? - <AUTHOR>

We're setting up payment processing on our site. We don't need anything fancy. Google has anti-competitively good pricing; it's free for the seller through 2008.<p>Perhaps there is something more professional seeming about an authorize.net style merchant account, but it's easier for us if we don't have to handle any credit card information. How much does using Google Checkout hurt us? <comment><USER2> "[...]Visitors will leave at the slightest obstacle.

So if you want people to visit and order from your site, don't put any obstacles in their way. Whatever you do, don't force visitors to register."-Paul Graham, "The 10 Secrets of Selling Online: #4. Make Your Site Easy," <http://store.yahoo.com/easy.html>

By accepting only Google Checkout, you are adding an obstacle to everyone who does not already have a Google Checkout account, and thus discouraging casual browsers from executing a purchase. I'd personally encounter a lot less "mental friction" logging into an existing Paypal account or the like and pressing a few buttons than going to another site, starting creating an account, finding and typing in a credit-card number, enter an address, glance through the Terms of Service, etc...

Of course, depending on your product, there may not be such thing as a "casual browser" who may leave and look at a similar product merely based on the inconvenience of making an account, but it is nevertheless a large obstacle; it's just that the seeker and prize on either side have suddenly increased in strength.

</comment><comment><USER3> Put it this way. You are not going to see an increase in sales by exclusively going with Google Checkout. Given that managing credit card information isn't that difficult (I am setting it up again for the umpteenth time tonight), why not just bite the bullet and manage it all yourself. That way, you can run experiments to converge on an optimal checkout process.

Beyond that, it is hard to say exactly how much you will be hurt. A few years ago a site I was working on moved from exclusively PayPal to an on-site form, and sales increased instantly about 20% and then over 100% after tweaking of checkout process. That was back when PayPal forced you to create a PayPal account, which I believe Google does now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't expect to see an increase in sales from the Google Checkout, but I had hoped it wouldn't hurt. It's a big incentive to me that they don't charge merchants anything, but the 20% increase in sales you saw is huge, so I guess I'll bite the bullet and get a real merchant account. I know that this has come up before on news.yc, but who are you using for payment processing?

<comment><USER3> I didn't mean to suggest you thought you might get an increase in sales. I was just trying to frame the point. So sorry about that.

In the past I have used CyberSource and VeriSign, and have recommended CyberSource in the news.yc discussions. (The PayFlow division of Verisign has been acquired by PayPal.) CyberSource has a small business option that has worked well for my businesses. They have an easy to use API, etc.

However, for this project I am trying out PayPal Pro. Not that I love PayPal or anything, but I thought I would give it a shot. (Last time I evaluated PayPal, they didn't have a merchant option.) Two things I like about them so far: 1) they don't seem to require an explicit personal guarantee, although I am not live yet and it might be implicit in the terms; and 2) they seem to have American Express integration from the get-go, as opposed to all the others where you have to sign up with them directly. I could be wrong on both of those, though.

Another thing. In your case, the difference from off-site/on-site checkout might be substantial because I imagine trust matters a lot in the medical arena. It is one thing if you are buying a T-shirt and the merchant has you leave the site to pay, but on a professional site for a serious product, you expect the site to just have that checkout process as part of their site. That is not to say you can't additionally offer Google Checkout and/or PayPal for those customers who prefer it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure that off-site checkout inherently makes a customer feel less trust. Our competitor uses Yahoo Stores for their checkout. I think the alternative is just as true, that many people would prefer a trusted third party. So then my question becomes "will using Yahoo Stores lower sales?" and I don't see why it would.

Ebay's Yahoo Stores competitor ProStores seems like a reasonable alternative to Yahoo Stores, it has really cheap pricing for those with a small catalog of items. And while I don't have a problem integrating a payment processing API into my own shopping cart, it seems like it is outright cheaper to use a prepackaged off-site solution so I'd rather not do it myself.

<comment><USER3> Sure, there are qualitative arguments both ways in terms of trust. It was just a conjecture. I'm sure people have done quantitative research on this, and it probably varies by situation anyway, so it is probably not worth discussing further.

But that it is a different thing from off-site vs on-site. I can pretty much guarantee the optimal checkout process (among the universe of checkout processes) would be an integrated solution minimizing the number of steps and abrupt transitions in the overall process. Such an optimal process might include additional options for Google Checkout, PayPal, and others, i.e. third parties for those people who want that.

What it comes down to, is that for every step, there will be a drop off %. Putting checkout on your site allows for less steps. And it allows for more possibilities in look and feel, etc. That is, it allows you to move more freely around the universe of checkout processes toward the optimal process for your particular situation.

From experience, this universe of checkout processes can have vastly different outcomes in terms of sales. By the way, I worked on another site that saw an immediate increase in sales from moving off Yahoo Store to an integrated checkout, and then another big increase when the checkout process was further optimized with, among other things, upselling and coupons right in the process.

I just don't understand the want to move this off-site when you have the capability to do it on-site. I assume the main goal of this site is to sell stuff. So I would imagine that you would at least want to experiment with one of the main things involved with selling stuff, i.e. the checkout process. You could even run experiments testing off-site vs various on-site configurations. I suppose I could see a compelling argument if it took months to create something functional. But it is probably an order of magnitude shorter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, if your product competes with mine. No otherwise.</comment>


Ask HN: Extraordinary people who have inspired you - <AUTHOR>

I've started reading biographies lately out of a desire to study actual success outside of any theoretical ideas. The definition of success here is broader than just financial success. I'm looking for anyone who lead a particularly interesting, inspiring, or worthwhile life.
A few people who were influential to me:
Richard Branson
Dean Kamen
Richard Feynman
PG (our obvious common denominator) <comment><USER2> Gary Simmons: Local sys-op and owner of used car lot. Helped me set up my BBS when I was a teenager.

Mr. Edwards: 6th grade science teacher, leader of the Sour Lake Elementary Model Rocket Club.

Uncle Todd: Showed me my first computer (Apple II), fed me with electronics, bought me my first decent soldering iron.

Professer Hahn: Had the patience to walk me through physics that was way over my head, because he believed I could do it and was so excited about it. We eventually co-published a paper.

Steve Koster: Web early-bird, ex-boss. Taught me stuff about design. Gave me the freedom to hack on cool stuff and get paid for it.

All of those people have done infinitely more to inspire me than anyone on your list. The difference? They're people that believed in me and acted on that.

Could I propose a new rule? No more fawning over Paul on this site. It's just kind of yucky.

<comment><AUTHOR> The list was of people who'd inspired you. I was honest. Besides, admiration is not fawning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Three people:

1\. My daughter. She's not yet 5. She's inspirational because watching a small child come to grips with the world and discover it makes you look again at things you take for granted and see them as new again.

For example, I showed her the pendulum of a clock and how it swings back and forth based on its length (not the size of the weight or the angle it starts at). The length of a pendulum counting seconds is where we get the length one metre from. So time and space come together in such a simple thing. Also you can use a pendulum to show the rotation of the earth.

So many simple and beautiful things to discover. Also, the original measurement of the metre was done by Mersenne of primes fame. BTW, did you ever notice how children count things by pointing at them one by one and saying the number? That sort of counting let's you can go straight to Cantor's pairing function that the number of rationals is the same as the number of naturals. It's child's play.

(OK, better stop of I'm going to turn into James Burke: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_>(TV_series))

2\. My A level Advanced Maths teacher who told me that there was "a Group, Ring or Field lurking in every corner". He showed me the beauty of logic and studying systems specified by a few axioms.

3\. When I was about 6 years old my parents took me to Cambridge for a couple of days organized by the National Association for Gifted Children (<http://www.nagcbritain.org.uk/>) where I remember clearly a man (no doubt a Cambridge don) explaining to me the theoretical operation of a computer. It was only years later that I realized that he had explained the operation of a Turing Machine. I was utterly fascinated.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ben Franklin, for me. It seems like it will take the rest of my life to get a full picture of how his mind worked.

<comment><USER5> For anyone who hasn't read it: The autobiography of Ben Franklin! <http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/148>

Also: it's been a year since this has been submitted. I think dupes should be allowed once a year. Does everyone think this is ok to submit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Agrelo (grade school teacher and cultural agitator)

Friggi (ex coworker)

Nietzsche

G. J. Sussman

Will Wright

Danielle Bunten

Tim Peters

PG

Norvig

</comment><comment><USER7> Mohandas K. Gandhi, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky

Just to add a little to the ideas vs execution debate: stories of people whose ideas were not recognized in their time (e.g. Hermann Grassmann) generally interest me more, especially when the reasons for their failures provide lessons from which to learn.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ben Franklin, Richard Feynman, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Marcus Aurelius

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly? Ray Kurzweil.

</comment><comment><USER10> Warren Buffet, of course.

And many, many others.

<comment><USER11> For being rich? Or for having being able to think independently and for spending his whole life doing something he loves? Either way, he's got a lot to look up to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Noah Webster. Guy Steele. Bill Cosby.

</comment><comment><USER13> In order:

Gandhi, Einstein, Alinsky.</comment>


How were 1920s hams able to measure megahertz frequency? - <AUTHOR> https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/10441/how-were-1920s-hams-able-to-measure-megahertz-frequency?rq=1 <comment><USER2> Standing waves along a parallel pair of conductors. You bridge the two conductors with some sort of voltage/current indicator (very simply a light- bulb with two wires sticking out of its base) and measure the half-wavelength in meters between two maxima. Note: to keep things compact, you use this method for frequencies around 50 MHz and above.

I was shown this method when I was playing with valve/tube oscillators way back when I was a teenager.

The other method is to compare the frequency as measured by your oscillator- style frequency meter (using known calculated values of coils, crystals and capacitors) against several known 'standard' frequency sources.</comment>


Tara Vancil on exploring how to be online in radical ways (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://elliott.computer/tara-vancil-on-exploring-how-to-be-online-in-radical-ways/ <comment><USER2> Over the weekend I fell into a wiki-hole about the Gopher protocol [0]. I'd heard of it as a sort of weird predecessor to the Web as we know it, but what I didn't realise is that it's still fairly active. There's a network of community maintained servers keeping the non-commercial spirit of the early Internet alive [1].

It's also easy to set up and run a gopher server. It took about 30 mins to get going on my raspberry pi, including setting up dynamic dns and port forwarding for remote access.

As gopher sites are just a collection of plain text files, they're fast, clean and minimal.

As well as new cool stuff like above, rediscovering and repurposing older tech could be another way of diversifying the monoculture of the current Web.

Was thinking today how cool a combined Gopher browser/server/editor app could be. It wouldn't look much different to the one above...

Oh yeah, it's also possible to browse HN from Gopher. [2]

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29)

[1] [https://sdf.org/](https://sdf.org/)

[2] gopher://hngopher.com/

<comment><USER3> using HTML rather than plain text was the real win. HTTP vs Gopher wasn't anything anyone cared about compared to the ease of use of Hypertext links.

And then came inline images, and it was all over.

I'm all for plain HTML, no CSS, no JS, but going back to plain text is a big step backwards.

<comment><USER4> I actually prefer plain text, which is why I like HN.

Images make it too easy to shut down interesting discussions with crapflooding; just look at any typical imageboard for an example. Images also make it easier for people to attack site hosts by posting illegal content, which is important to prevent if you are hosting controversial discussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever since I first heard of Beaker ([https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)) I fell in love with their idea and concept. They've made making web apps/sites really fun and easy. They are on Open Collective if you'd like to help (I'm not associated with them in any way): [https://opencollective.com/beaker](https://opencollective.com/beaker)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm always super excited to hear about Beaker, but I just don't feel safe browsing the web without extension support for the privacy tools I use.

I know that Mozilla is looking at getting low-level DAT support in Firefox so this kind of stuff could be handled through extensions instead, anyone know what the status of that is?

<comment><USER7> There's a Firefox DAT add-on

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately you need to run a DAT gateway on your local machine for the add- on to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems to me that with a new protocol one could also offer an alternate domain name system as well, and presumably it would be free. You'd want each browser to offer a little time slice to domain name resolution, but you'd also have people like me who would be willing to pay for nodes on the network that did nothing but peering.</comment>


Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History - <AUTHOR> https://theworthyhouse.com/2020/01/10/ages-of-discord-a-structural-demographic-analysis-of-american-history-peter-turchin/ <comment><USER2> Discord is the greatest voice chat, I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER3> Uhhhhh...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ooh look, Moldbug hired an editor.</comment>


Displaying RSS or Atom feeds in PHP with under 10 lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://www.brighthub.com/hubfolio/matthew-casperson/articles/55494.aspx

<comment><USER2> I'm going to have to be pedantic on this one...

13 lines of php (including the open & close tags) plus 1501 (including comments) lines in the 'library' file .. or does the op think that libraries don't count as its in another file?</comment>


GitHub mirror compromise incident report - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Github/2018-06-28 <comment> rich-and-poor He should have sat on the password. He should have watched for PRs, and started pushing updates immediately after they had received approval, and then merging. Instead, he panicked and kicked out all the maintainers, who realized the intrusion only 10 minutes after he gained access. And all he did was add `rm -rf /*` to build scripts, and the N word to the readme.

The malicious commits:

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/e6db0eb4](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/e6db0eb4)

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/afcdc03b](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/afcdc03b)

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/49464b73](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/49464b73)

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/fdd8da2e](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/fdd8da2e)

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/e6db0eb4](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/e6db0eb4)

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/c46d8bbf](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/c46d8bbf)

[https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/50e3544d](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/50e3544d)

<comment><USER2> Forcing any commit to be a PR merged by another dev would have solved it

<comment> rich-and-poor Do you know of any companies that do that? That seems like a big hassle.

<comment><USER3> For mine every feat/fix/refactor is a new branch which then requires 2 approvals to get merged, among other things (style guide enforced as linting, minimum test coverage threshold, etc ).

Tbh it's cool, coming from a previous job at a startup where version control meant just zipping the project from time to time.

<comment><USER4> Same here. All code goes in a Pull Request, and requires at least 1 approval.

Since Pull Request review is a high priority activity there's no "bottleneck", and you double the bus factor for free + prevent bad things from happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something to note here: "Evidence collected suggests a password scheme where disclosure on one site made it easy to guess passwords for unrelated webpages."

For any folks out there who've been using or promoting formula-based passwords, this is the potential impact: a leak on one site can be leveraged by an attacker towards other sites you use.

<comment><USER6> I suppose it's only as good as the formula itself and at least it protects you from automated attacks. Still, I wouldn't advise anybody from going with formula-based passwords, just use whichever password manager you prefer and use unique strong passwords per-website.

Maybe one day the web will get its shit together and let us login everywhere with a certificate that we'll be able to securely store on a HSM and easily revoke and update if necessary but in the meantime it's the best we can do.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to add "truly random" to

> use unique strong passwords per-website.

... use unique, truly random passwords per-website.

"Strong" is ambigous and hard to explain how to do right. Random means, in practice: "don't come up with one yourself, but let a tool generate one for you".

<comment><USER8> To nitpick slightly, I think "truly random" is the wrong phrase here. Computers can't generate such numbers (only pseudo-random). What they can do is generate unpredictable passwords. Unpredictability is the feature we want in a password, whether that happens through "randomness" or something else doesn't matter.

Of course computers are far better at coming up with unpredictable passwords than humans are.

<comment><USER9> RDRAND is supposed to generate very true random numbers

<comment><USER8> Well either a RNG generates true random numbers or it doesn't. There's no room for "very" here. From Intel[0]

> With respect to the RNG taxonomy discussed above, the DRNG follows the > cascade construction RNG model, using a processor resident entropy source to > repeatedly seed a hardware-implemented CSPRNG. Unlike software approaches, > it includes a high-quality entropy source implementation that can be sampled > quickly to repeatedly seed the CSPRNG with high-quality entropy.

So it's a cryptographically secure pseudo random number generator that takes entropy from the processor. It's not a True Random Number Generator. And again, if it does work well for cryptography, it's the unpredictability that matters, not the randomness itself.

[0] [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-digital- rand...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-digital-random- number-generator-drng-software-implementation-guide)

<comment><USER9> From the link you provided:

> This method of digital random number generation is unique in its approach to > _true random number generation_ in that it is implemented in the processor's > hardware

> The all-digital Entropy Source (ES), also known as a _non-deterministic > random bit generator (NRBG)_ , provides a serial stream of entropic data in > the form of zeroes and ones.

> The ES runs asynchronously on a self-timed circuit and _uses thermal noise > within the silicon_ to output a random stream of bits at the rate of 3 GHz

What on earth would classify as TRNG if not above?

Just fyi, checked, and NIST SP 800-90B defines NRBG as following:

> Non-deterministic Random Bit Generator (NRBG):

> An RBG that always has access to an entropy source and (when working > properly) produces outputs that have full entropy (see SP 800-90C). Also > called a _true random bit (or number) generator_ (Contrast with a DRBG).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To be clear, GitHub itself was NOT compromised. The password of a Gentoo contributor, who presumably wasn't using 2FA, was.

The title should probably clarify it's a "Gentoo mirror on GitHub compromise incident report"

<comment><USER11> Glad I clicked through. When I scanned the Hacker News titles earlier, I'd assumed Github had been compromised. Very misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As they have now done, they could have reduced the threat exposure by requiring 2FA to join the organisation, and using a password pattern scheme does expose you to a targeted attack so ideally encouraging password manager generated passwords is probably also recommended.

But Github could probably have helped by detecting logins from unusual IPs for that user - i.e. a login attempt from an IP they haven't logged in from before, and required something like email verification too. Although if they were using an easy to guess pattern, then likely the admins email could have been compromised too.

Edit: GitHub could also warn people whose accounts have admin access to organisations if they don't have 2FA enabled.

</comment><comment><USER13> Small piece of annoyance, the clickbait press had a field day with this. From the positive which I appreciate[0] to claiming putting `rm /*` in the wrong place so that it didn't even work is "file wiping malware."[1]

For the most part, this appeared to the work of a teenage skiddy (given the addition of a readme with a racial slur as the text), and not any actual sophisticated attack.

[0] [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/gentoo-stops-github- rep...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/gentoo-stops-github-repo-hack-in- an-hour-setting-standard-for-security-response/)

[1] [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/file-wiping- malw...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/file-wiping-malware- placed-inside-gentoo-linux-code-after-github-account-hack/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Always require 2FA for something as important as your code base.

<comment><USER7> While true, many apps, including github, make this problematic for something like an admin account.

2FA, by it's nature, is bound to one single software, tool, or piece of hardware[1].

This limits the access of e.g. an administrator-login to one person and her personal phone, only. A bus-factor that is unacceptable to many.

Software like AWS allows more granular set-up, but still complex. Linode, Digital-Ocean and even docker.io, last time I looked, make it impossible to share the admin-account by allowing multiple 2FA devices active on one account simultaneous. And if they did, that would greatly lower the security of that account (still better than no 2fa though)

[1] 2FA, like google authenticator (or one of the much better open source alternatives thereof) make it possible to share a 2fa secret across devices, but that is both insecure and hard.

<comment><USER12> Github allows multiple administrator accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Github supports U2F (two-factor auth). Please use it.

<comment><USER16> Github's SMS or TOTP requirement for u2f use is a shame - why would you use u2f if you have already set up these? And if you want to use u2f because you don't trust your phone as a security device (hello Android users) - not good. Or maybe you don't want to mix your personal phone with work it infra, it's a bad equation there too.

I guess you could still use a software TOTP implementation on your workstation to fool Github, but then you are not getting the additional security from u2f because the totp codes are a substitute for the u2f token.

<comment><USER17> What if you just throw away the TOTP secret right after you get it and verify it on Github? You don't have to use your phone either. Just because you used TOTP to set up u2f on Github doesn't mean you have to store the TOTP secret indefinitely.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I guess you could navigate it this way. But clearly this is not something Github wants users to do, so I wonder if this way is bad somehow. Maybe there is no backup mechanism to recover from u2f token loss other than the old 2fa mechanisms, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there any generic incident response plans or playbooks for foss projects? Is gentoo's documented anywhere?

Gotta say,a bit impressed by the response.

<comment><USER19> I don't normally post on hackernews (so I've made a throwaway). I'm Antarus from the report.

We don't have a plan for Gentoo. I work for Google and I mostly used a vaguely similar plan to the Google incident plan.

1) Communicate early. For publically visible stuff (defacement was very obvious) you want to get a message out quickly before a natural narrative forms.

2) Communicate often. 3) Mitigate the problem first (e.g. prevent the malicious stuff from being downloaded) then investigate second.

4) Assign roles to people and be clear who is responsible for what. 5) Collect lots of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd sleep better at night if every organization were this transparent.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mirror is the important word here.

I'm pretty sure it didn't impact anybody.

<comment><USER5> From the incident report it sounds like the gentoo/systemd GitHub repo is __not __a mirror: the official repo is on GitHub and they 're now looking to mirror it onto Gentoo infrastructure.

Does anybody know why this is the case?

<comment><USER22> > The main Gentoo repositories are kept on Gentoo hosted infrastructure and > Gentoo mirrors to GitHub in order to "be where the contributors are."

Doesn't sound to me as if it's not a mirror.

Though I guess you could say as their CI depended on this mirror, it had a higher status than _normal_ mirrors.

<comment><USER5> I'm specifically talking about [https://github.com/gentoo/systemd](https://github.com/gentoo/systemd)

From their incident report (under [https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Github/2018-06-28#What_went_bad...](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Github/2018-06-28#What_went_badly) ): "The systemd repo is not mirrored from Gentoo, but is stored directly on GitHub."

And from their Action Items: "mirror systemd repo on git.gentoo.org"

I'm curious why they seem to treat this repo differently from the others, using GitHub as authoritative and adding a mirror to git.gentoo.org rather than making git.gentoo.org authoritative and mirroring to GitHub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Github supports two factor authentication, maybe make it mandatory for all admins?

</comment><comment><USER24> > Clearer guidelines that even if users got bad copies of data with malicious > commits, that the malicious commits would not execute.

Eh, that sees unwise. To suggest based on what you think you are "sure" about security protections, that users should not worry about having a copy with malicious code.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not enabling MFA is just unacceptable at that level...

</comment><comment><USER26> No 2FA?

</comment><comment><USER27> Actual link to full report:

[https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Github/2018-06-28](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Github/2018-06-28)

<comment><USER28> Thanks, we've updated the link from [https://lwn.net/Articles/759046/](https://lwn.net/Articles/759046/) which points here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> what mitigations do you use to protect systems that automatically updated after every git push?

<comment><USER18> Don't auto-update production like that? If a change will affect all users,manually review it and as another commenter said,gpg signatures. Have every prod commiter use mfa too.

<comment><USER29> I have seen a lot of people describe their continuous delivery where the code is checked in and moves into production after passing tests. I wasn't sure if they had a way to deal with this type of issue or I am misunderstanding their process somehow. I</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you get your scientific papers from? - <AUTHOR>

Given the recent hubbub about ACM's money-seeking ways, I'm wondering where HN members get their scientific research papers from?
I'm currently both an IEEE and ACM member; I find the IEEE digital library to be somewhat of a joke - ACM is much better in comparison, but still lacking.
I don't like putting 100 bucks in a million different organizations in order to be able to search for science (which should be open to all!) so this begs the question: what's the most cost-efficient method of obtaining scientific papers for research? Also, what resource has the best search engine for said papers (both ACM's and IEEE's engines suck)?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> ArXiv usually has most of the scientific papers that I read. Google Scholar gets the rest. But probably the best place is looking up the author an finding his personal website and downloading papers. EDIT: Also check with your university if they have an agreement for papers.

</comment><comment><USER3> A few different places, depending on the situation:

1\. Google scholar

2\. Authors' personal websites

3\. EBSCO Academic Alumni Edition via my alma matter's alumni association

4\. Email requests to friends who are currently enrolled at major universities

5\. Visits to the local university (Minnesota) library, which offers terminals for free public access to journals

</comment><comment><USER4> Google scholar can usually find PDFs which authors' posted to their personal websites.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/> and ACM digital library and sometimes google scholar

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought I would try a couple of the suggestions here. What I was looking for was criticisms or alternatives to (Java) exception handling, an interest of mine. ArXiv may have the the paper but their search interface is pretty primitive. Google Scholar gave much more useful results after tinkering with search terms.

My usual approach to finding papers in a new area of interest is to google around until I find a Wikipedia article that looks like a good starting point. I have found Wikipedia itself to be pretty hopeless for searches. In the article or some of those that it links to, I usually find researchers working in my area of interest. Of particular value are survey articles because of the large number of references. Then I follow the authors to their research departments and projects and co-workers. That usually provides a week of reading.

If I'm looking for something serendipitous I read the comments here and follow the links.

<comment><USER7> In my (admittingly limited) experience with ArXiv, CS is not well represented. Most CS researchers just don't put their papers up on it.

Try searching on the ACM Digital Library. When you find a title, Google for it (doesn't even need to be Scholar), and you'll often find the author's copy on their webpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested in what turns up here, outside of arxiv - I have no clue, short of the odd self distributed paper.

I'm very much dependent on university journal subscriptions to get full text articles - mostly from sciencedirect. It's a shame, as it puts so much stuff out of reach if you're not in the same position.

I think in the CS and math fields arxiv can be very useful, but papers in my field (mostly CFD related) are fairly sparse.

It might be worth seeing if you can still get access from your university, even if you no longer attend or are affiliated/employed. I know mine offers library services to students after graduation (for life I think), which I assume includes access to journals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our university doesn't even offer this while you're studying there, most unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> filetype:pdf title

<comment><USER10> Sometimes you can get books this way too but a lot of the time it is just a preview of a first chapter. Another way is to search for a non-prominent quotation from the book with filetype:pdf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Author's personal websites...

</comment><comment><USER12> Usually universities have electronic subscriptions for most journals based on the IP range of the university network.

I ssh one of the computers on campus. cd to my public_html directory and use elinks to download the pdf.

I think many people do this trick because I keep finding good papers in various ~username/ folders indexed by google.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wrote a firefox plugin to help solve this problem. See <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45524/>.

So far it only replaces the link on portal.acm.org with a google scholar search. Contributions beyond this are welcome.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've managed to keep my university affiliations since graduating so I still have access to most archives for free via my university library.

Once that stops working I guess my next approach would be to mail a friendly request to one of my friends still in the academic world and have them download the pdf for me.

</comment><comment><USER15> Many universities have alumni "library" programs, where you pay a certain fee to gain access to the university's library. As a student, I've never had to use it though and simply showing up to a site with my university's domain name (VPN) pretty much lets me in anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Google Scholar.

In California at least, you can also get pdfs of papers at most UC and CSU libraries without being a student. Stanford too, last time I tried. Of course this means you do actually have to physically go to the library in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER18> <http://arxiv.org/>

</comment><comment><USER19> mendeley.com</comment>


Web 2.0, Revenue Models and Profitability: A Web 1.0 Comparison - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/web-2-revenue-models

<comment><USER2> The lameness of this article is that he's making all of his conclusions on 3 big companies. That's an enormous generalization.

He's missing the whole lean, mean segment by looking only at the top.

Try comparing the sheer number of companies during 2.0 and 1.0, and you'll start to see the difference.

<comment><USER3> I was gonna make the same comment. Since when was web 2.0 (hairs goes up on back) about 3 companies.

If you need a real example of lean companies look no further than YC companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who remembers the first Web 2.0 companies, before the 2.0 buzz word was around?

I'm talking about Flickr, the early Flickr, how lean and neat was that!

Can we now look forward to more creative and lean things? At least until Web 3.0 rises to drown it all in money and unoriginality, again.

<comment><USER5> I still don't know what web 2.0 means. As far as I can tell it was coined by a publisher to sell more books.

Sounds like what consultants/talking heads do to move those awful self-help, get rich quick, business books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Again, I must run and hide behind the great work Twitpic is doing.

<http://blog.twitpic.com/2008/12/be-yourself/>

 _Twitpic is self funded and ran by one guy from his apartment_

He does it because he loves it, not because it pays the bills. Does everything HAVE to turn a profit?

<comment><USER7> If it's a business with shareholders and investors it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone mentioned a while back that advertising is a business model for web properties just as much as it is for tv shows/sitcoms. The shows that make money have a significant loyal audience. The few that charge money to the end users have a content their audience can't seem to live without (read porn).

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in hearing the definition of pornography which covered Basecamp, CrazyEgg, that WoW guild hosting app I heard about earlier, or for that matter Bingo Card Creator.

"But Patrick, that's not fair. You're talking about real companies that have paying customers. I'm talking about 'web properties' that aim for userbases the size of nation states, and accordingly have to aim for the broadest possible reach and the poorest possible customers."

But _why_ are we talking of those? The model demonstrably fails when you can afford to throw hundreds of millions at it. The "We provide value to customers and all our employees keep their clothes on, thank you very much" model has worked for thousands of sales in a year, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the author makes a very good point.

"the fact that offering free, advertising-supported services to millions upon millions of people is not a lean and- mean undertaking"

and

"They figured that the revenue and profits would come eventually but clearly that was putting the cart before the horse"

I see lots of people on HN building great products who have clearly not asked (and answered) the most important question: How will my service make money?

It should be becoming painfully clear that layering advertising on top of a useful service does not work.

Adsense works because it puts _relevant_ ads in front of people who are already searching for something.

FB users are connecting with friends not looking for products.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Web 2.0 is not like Web 1.0. It's in a special (ed) class of its own."

The author clearly does not get it. Profitability is not a "pipe dream" for companies like Digg and Facebook. If profitability was the only objective, I'm sure they could achieve it. The pipe dream is attaining the massive scale necessary to build a publicly traded company.

<comment><USER12> Actually I think you don't get it. What you're missing is that the whole purpose of this article is to refute the thinking that you obviously subscribe to (given your comment).

So it isn't that he doesn't see your point of view it's that he thinks you are wrong (he obviously sees your point of view because he wrote a whole article that's clearly intended to refute it)

It seems to me that, by thinking he must be too stupid to see your point, it's you who are missing the point. I mean, he might not be right but at least he's got enough perspective to see that there's another side to the argument.

<comment><USER11> "The whole purpose of this article is to refute the thinking that you obviously subscribe to (given your comment)."

What type of thinking is that? That VC companies are required to shoot for the home run exit? That's not a mode of thinking, it's the reality of the VC industry. Lean, efficient, profitable companies are great, but unless they aim to become big businesses they are not VC worthy.

As for the other side of the argument, I must be too stupid to see it. All I could glean from that convoluted mess was that Digg and Facebook should be more like Google and eBay.

<comment><USER13> For the VCs to have a big exit the company eventually most be profitable, very profitable. That has to be the ultimate goal. But to get there you can't just keep giving things away for free and hope that one day you'll magically figure out how to make money.

Even if you'd rather shoot for being acquired, it still makes sense to try and reach profitability as soon as possible. If you keep living on VC money forever sooner or later you run 2 risks: 1) the VC money will dry up, like in a bad economy 2) the valuation of the company gets so high it doesn't make sense for anyone to acquire you.

<comment><USER14> For both of the companies referenced, the founders have been reported to have "cashed-out." I don't think either 1 or 2 is part of their thinking. Just follow the standard VC Web 1.0 agenda - get big fast. Home run or complete failure.

People seem to have forgotten all the failures that produced. VCs are fine with 9/10 complete failures, as long as there's 1 home run.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Tree-Based Way to Navigate Browsing History - <AUTHOR> http://joeltg.github.io/visual_history/ <comment><USER2> I've been wanting this for years. I worked on the Chrome team and wanted to make something like this the built-in way to browse history.

Instant install :) Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Thank you! Let us know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

On a side note, we were really torn on whether to use favicons or tab screenshots as the node images. If anyone has design opinions on this, we'd love to hear them!

<comment><USER2> ... Also, I just realised it overrides cmd+arrow keys. Those are super important for navigating in text on OS X! Unfortunately I'll have to disable until it doesn't do that, since there doesn't seem to be an option to remap or disable those keybinds.

<comment><USER3> You can remap or disable keyboard shortcuts in chrome://extensions, I believe! (you might have to enable developer mode first)

Edit - also, dismissing the view with esc. or clicking anywhere is something I should have done from the start. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been wanting to build something like this. It would be really cool to see all tabs' histories side by side rather than just the current tab. Even though a tree gets wide pretty quickly, you're seldom using multiple tabs simultaneously, so if you make line-height a function of time, you shouldn't have too many items on a row.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you know any similar add-on for Firefox?

<comment><USER6> I found this after a bit of searching:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session- histo...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-history- tree/?src=api)

Note: I haven't tried it and it's last update is from 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is beautiful, definitely the type of stuff you see get added to major browser versions.</comment>


Tesla relied on too many robots to build the Model 3, Elon Musk says - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-robots-production-hell-elon-musk <comment><USER2> Don't blame the robots for bad design!</comment>


Ask HN: Is YouTube Working Properly? - <AUTHOR> Is Youtube not working for anyone else? Front page isn't properly loading recommendations for me on Chrome and I clicked a post and got a 404. <comment><USER3> On one hand congrats to the person who registered the channel name "status" \- anyone Googling "youtube status" right now might land on their channel.

On the other hand if Youtube is down then anyone landing on this person's channel won't see content, so they won't be able to ride that SEO wave after all. It was a good effort, but came up short.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, there are 500 and 503 errors in the dev console.

Twitter is usually first to report this stuff: [https://twitter.com/search?q=youtube%20down&src=typed_query&...](https://twitter.com/search?q=youtube%20down&src=typed_query&f=live)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's down for me. Tells me my channel "has no content". I have a live stream scheduled in less than 24 hours - keeping my fingers crossed this is resolved quickly.

<comment><USER6> Where are you located? It works fine for me, including a Live Steam I just joined. I live in LA.

<comment><USER5> Northeast US. Actually it appears to have come back maybe two or three minutes after my first comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Update: It's back on track. Refresh your pages fellas.

\---

Thought I was the only one. All videos are being met with a 'Video unavailable" warning.

I highly doubt this was a scheduled outage. Really looking forward to see what caused this.

edit: yes confirmed - [https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/](https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Wordpress.org also had issues earlier today. I doubt it's related but hey, who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My recommendations are not loading in "old" or new youtube. Visiting a watch?v=xyz url loaded the video with no description, channel info, comments or related videos.

Edit: back to normal? (with disable_polymer=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> Direct links to videos are working but no recommendations, descriptions, or comments. Doesn't seem to be an interaction with an ad blocker either.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm still watching, but my subscription feed is showing an error message

</comment><comment><USER11> Nope. [https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/](https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's down for me. Gitlab.com had problems all day with shared workers due to a GCP issue. Perhaps there's more problems there.

</comment><comment><USER13> Intermittent bugginess -- "Video Unavailable" or missing recommendations / comments (both features in my book).

</comment><comment><USER14> It's back up for me. Looks like they got it back pretty quick, hope theres some kind of postmortem.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not working properly for me either can't see YouTube channels uploaded videos

</comment><comment><USER16> Live stream I was watching died and won't load anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's definitely down here where I live (Germany).

</comment><comment><USER18> I got a few server errors on it a few minutes ago.

</comment><comment><USER19> still works, watching videos from embeds

</comment><comment><USER20> Nope, nothing works. Nothing loads.

</comment><comment><USER21> Down for me

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Working again for me now - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER22> And it's back.

</comment><comment><USER23> it is so dead

</comment><comment><USER24> home page is not uploading properly

</comment><comment><USER25> youtube is fucking down!

</comment><comment><USER26> down.</comment>