I've been suspended from Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-google-plus/ <comment><USER2> I only wish I could be suspended!

My profile has been "under review" for over THREE WEEKS, meaning that my profile is invisible to others and I am unable to do anything with my Google+ account, not even make comments, until some notional human within Google looks at it and makes a decision.

The irony is that, if I were suspended, I could least click that link to appeal the decision. As it stands, waiting for a review, I can do nothing.

My "crime"? I had a non-standard character in my old Google profile name, where it was not a problem but which was automatically carried over to my Google+ profile. I changed it as soon as I became aware of the problem but, more than three weeks later, I am still awaiting review, possibly permanently.

How the Hell has Google, a company of supposedly intelligent people, allowed such an obvious and avoidable problem alienate some of their previously enthusiastic users?

If a profile is automatically suspended (or, worse, placed "under review"), it should be automatically reinstated if the offending character is removed, it should not require human intervention, especially as Google have so clearly allocated no humans to the task.

</comment><comment><USER3> So - recently we had a thread where someone was mocked because he wrote about future steps he (might?) want to take.

This is what I did, just now:

\- Renamed my profile. It had my real name before, but I gave it voluntarily. Forcing people to use it is below my moral standards. I won't shed a single tear if they throw me out, I can find enough animated gif images elsewhere.

\- Thunderbird is downloading my mail archive as I write this. I set up GApps on my private domain in the past and I'm in the process of migrating to my own domain right now (already changing credentials online).

\- I blacklisted google.com/www.google.com on my laptop (hosts file). I didn't use it as a primary search engine for a while now (Hey DDG! You are awesome!), but every now and then I fell into the habit of typing google.com/google.de (usually cursing about the idiots that think that redirecting based on source ip is a nice idea. No, I cannot read hebrew. Yes, I really wanted to go to google.com and my browser is very specific about the type of content/language I want: en).

So except for being stuck in the Android world I'm in the process of leaving the harbor. Maybe someone with more sense (Hi, Mozilla?) can solve the social network issue in a better way..

<comment><USER4> What about email? None of the GMail alternatives seem comparable.

<comment><USER3> That's why the trend seems to be (and I'll follow for now, as an easy way to migrate) to grab free Google Apps on your domain.

You still need to backup your mails (run an imap/pop client somewhere) in the case that Google locks you out. But in that case mail to you is targeted at _your_ domain, you just drop the DNS entries for GApps and set up your mails _then_.

(More clever: Set it up before, but don't list it as MX. That way as soon as DNS propagates you're able to receive mails again)

<comment><USER4> Google's already locked me out of one domain for no apparent reason at all, so I guess I'm already at step 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you." And this is what bothers me about this whole ordeal. Google's playing a stupidly dangerous ( in regards to making people want to use their services ) game of determining whats a "real" name before we're asked of all things to show our ID? That's a little absurd for a social networking client.

We get why you're doing this, you're fighting this the wrong way.

<comment><USER6> That's it. Google's policies are more aggressively invasive than Facebook. They were a company I had some sympathy for. No longer.

<comment><USER7> Facebook will delete you if you have fake names, too. Mark said at e-g8 too when asked why isn't he allowing people to be anonymous on their network, and he said he knows anonymity can be a useful thing, too, but he's trying to make a social network where people use real names.

I fail to see how Google+ is any different. Use your own name and you'll be fine.

<comment><USER8> You are totally wrong about that, most of my musicians friends use there stage names, and recently I've been working in big media and all the journalists and writers use fake names as well. Quite common for high visibility people to do this.

Facebook seems total fine with it (or turns a blind eye) as long as its actually you (and not a troll account).

I used a nick name myself as I wanted to see if any spam started heading my way with that name. None so far, been using Facebook since it went public. Never a peep out of them.

<comment><USER6> Up vote this point...

Facebook pretty much allows pseudonyms in practice whatever they say. If Google+ is actively stepping on the pseudonym accounts of people with well- known names, it's a problem - seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Welcome to what I call Google's vision of an "Orwellian Computing Age". Your every action & communication will be monitored, and your entire digital identity can be deleted by a centralized, seemingly autonomous authority. Better comply with the TOS or you might get yourself "ungoogled".

<comment><USER10> Why I downvoted you: Objective discussion which leads to new ideas and solutions is generally hampered by name calling and over-generalization, which just leads to "my side is best, your side sucks" ... "no, my side is best, your side sucks". Add in the emotional charge, and people forget to think about what they say before they open their mouths.

I think you might have a point lurking in your polemic, like "I am afraid Google will start to monitor and try to control its users and content too closely, and as evidence I present their behavior on x, y, z." Why don't you rephrase with evidence, specificity, pragmatic alternatives, and scrubbed of ad-hominem name-calling?

(One of these days I am going to write a "Rhetoric for Hackers"...)

<comment><USER9> Well I didn't intend to write an essay proving something's that's fairly obvious. I think Google's intentions look harmless on the surface, but there may be some sinister consequences if they continue down this road. And at the very least, they have a bad PR problem on their hands because I can't be the only one left with a bad taste in my mouth about this corporation.

Google's strategy is to entice you to give up all concept of personal privacy. Yeah, nobody's forcing you to sign up for their services. But since Google gives away it's well engineered products for free, they are purposely making it difficult or impossible to build competing services that are capable of making money. They don't need to even compete in the marketplace based on price because they've adopted a "burn down the forest" strategy that's subsidized by their advertising revenue. Want to develop an online calendar/document editor/spreadsheet system? Better find a way to make it free to compete with Google.

If you want evidence of Google's vision, let's go step by step through Wikipedia's definition of "Orwellian":

      Invasion of personal privacy, either directly physically or indirectly by surveillance.

If you use Gmail, Android, Google Search (all free products), Google will track and process your actions. I don't need to prove anything here, this is their business model.

      State control of its citizens' daily life, as in a "Big Brother" society.

If you were to use every Google service including Android, ChromeOS etc, they would be able to curate every piece of information you consume. This is what the Google Filter Bubble concept pointed out very clearly.

        Official encouragement of policies contributing to the socio-economic disintegration of the family.

(not applicable)

      The adoration of state leaders and their Party.

There was no end of media coverage about Larry Page taking over for Eric Schmidt. And even here on HN there are an awful lot of apologetic Google- fanatics and employees.

      The encouragement of "doublethink", whereby the population must learn to embrace inconsistent concepts without dissent, e.g. giving up liberty for freedom. Similar terms used, are "doublespeak", and "newspeak"

I quite often hear people say "My data is safe with Google", and very clearly this turning out to be wrong.

      The revision of history in the favour of the State's interpretation of it.

Google's censorship cooperation with China was fairly despicable. And they only started changing after they were publicly humiliated by PBS.

      A (generally) dystopian future.

This is somewhat subjective. But I can't think of a better example of dystopia than if Google were to become an even more omnipresent part of the internet than search/advertising.

        The use of euphemism to describe an agency, program or other concept, especially when the name denotes the opposite of what is actually occurring. E.g. a department that wages war is called the "Ministry of Peace" or "Ministry of Defence".

"Don't be evil".

<comment><USER11> I bet Google probably doesn't care all that much. Users are product sold to advertisers.

<comment><USER12> Thinking about it, wouldn't a user who doesn't want to give his/her real name be less valuable to an advertiser?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you think of a social site as a party, the rules you set create the environment. And to be fair to Google what makes Facebook good to a degree is that people are anchored to a real identity — this prevents flame wars and all sorts of other noise. Honestly part of the spam problem on Twitter is the ability to setup a fake profile via robot and start spamming everyone within seconds -- fake IDs also are part of what made MySpace feel like a collection of misfits (not that that in itself is a bad thing, but it doesn't lend itself to marketing to a broader audience).

So yes I'd expect Google to want you to be real -- on the other hand that may give room for Twitter or someone new to do something more interesting. Just don't expect said site to be mainstream if you're using 4chan rules for your party!

<comment><USER14> The flip side of that metaphor, though, is that most of us go to lots of parties without necessarily taking the same identity with us to each party. Further, using people's legal names (if this fiasco demonstrates anything, it's that the concept of a "real" name is kind of a crock) doesn't _guarantee_ better interactions - at the Facebook party I run into objectionable relatives all the time, but it's not really my party and I can't kick them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like what Google is doing, but I don't like how it does it. I live in Tunisia, where almost all of my friends and family members uses Facebook. It's important to recognize the right person, because sometimes some friend add you and it's not really your friend. There is also e-militia that browse pages and comment to create false political ideas. These are two problems that needs to be solved.

It's good that Google is making effort on this, but disabling one user account is WRONG. It only happens with Facebook when you spam. Why not create an algorithm and mentor how it works? It's necessary to get this feature now, especially that it's not accurate.

And also, if you are making this feature, make sure you have a stellar support. G+ has just started and blog posts like this will KILL it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what Google intends on doing with people who simply use a fake name for their Google account/Google+ persona. Will they also get banned/have etheir Google+ accounts disabled? What about people from foreign countries? For example, if someone uses a name that basically means John Doe in a not-so- well-known language, will that also be considered misuse of the G+ service (use of a fake persona) or will it remain ignored because checking whether that is indeed an actual person's name or not would take too much resources on Google's end?

<comment><USER17> Cost of a false negative here: nothing.

Cost of a false positive: I suppose Google could lose its hard-won reputation for conscientious individualized customer service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure I understand the real name policy of either Facebook or Google+. Isn't the whole point of a social graph that it is personally curated by me? The identities of my friends/circles are verified by me.

<comment><USER19> What if I want to find someone I met ten years ago and have no idea what nickname they have chosen? What about friends of my friends?

If one does not agree with the policy—just don't sign up. I find fake names on Facebook really annoying.

<comment><USER20> OK, and what if I want to find someone I met ten years ago, and I have no idea what their real name is because no one ever uses it? A ton of my friends in high school and college went by nicknames the entire time anyone ever interacted with them. I had a good friend in college whom /everyone/ called "C.C." (as in, "see see"): her name was "Corrine", but I don't really know how to spell it and I'm one of the few people who ever actually bothered to learn it.

<comment><USER21> The simple answer is: The internet, and society, does not owe you the right to identify and find anyone you've ever met. People are entitled to their anonymity and privacy.

Just because someone went to school with me, or was buddies with me in school doesn't mean they get to know what I'm up to now or where I am, or even how to get ahold of me.....

<comment><USER22> That is begging the question. What if the person WANTS you to be able to find them, but they have always gone by a nickname that they can't use because facebook's policies is real-names-only?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like being able to create new identities for different purposes. Why wouldn't Google+ allow that?

<comment><USER24> Eric Schmidt:

      The people who built the Internet did not get a stable
      version of identity; You need identity, in the sense that
      you are a person, this is who you are these are your
      friends and so on … The issue on the Internet is not the
      lack of Facebook, the issue on the Internet is the lack
      of identity.

(from [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/eric-schmidt-on-gauging- goo...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/eric-schmidt-on-gauging-googles- success/) )

See also <http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/how-to-implement-rel-author> .

<comment><USER25> Identity is not the same as "name on your birth certificate". Skud's _identity_ is Skud, not Kirrily Roberts.

I'm all for having stable identities on social networking services, but that has nothing to do with legal names vs pseudonyms.

<comment><USER26> The G+ names policy doesn't say "name on your birth certificate". It says "the name you commonly go by in real life", see: <http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271>

Even if Skud does go by that name in daily life, I don't see how it comes as any surprise that he is suspended pending review for that name. He even says it himself:

> I knew I was at risk of my account (under the name of "Skud .") being > suspended

<comment><USER14> The policy that they are _enforcing_ is that you must use your legal name, leading many people to the obvious conclusion that the policy is bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like I won't be signing up for Google+ any time soon. I don't do anything on the Internet under my real name (and that includes Hacker News).

</comment><comment><USER28> Well the good point is that google lets you delete your google+ profile easily (without losing your gmail or other parts of your google account).

I've never used Facebook because I value my privacy and was naïve enough to think G+ would be the white knight that would save us all. Way to kill your hype, Google.

Please don't think I'm bitter or it's a ragequit, I'm just glad I leave now before I become "addicted" to the service. I'd definitely be willing to try the service again, if they fix their policies.

</comment><comment><USER29> Your move, Mr. Cutts.

<comment><USER30> To be fair, I don't think Matt should be expected to respond to every complaint about Google on HN. Nobody appointed him the official Google spokesperson on HN, he's just another visitor here. Google is a huge corporation and AFAIK, Matt has nothing to do with Google+.

<comment><USER29> _Nobody appointed him the official Google spokesperson on HN, he's just another visitor here._

Probably not, but he's sure behaved like a Google PR/damage-control-drone here, pretty much any time it looks like "Don't Be Evil" might not be accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also see this post: _Preliminary results of my survey of suspended Google+ accounts_ \- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806448>

</comment><comment><USER31> I get the whole "I would never join a country club that would have me as a member" exclusivity B.S. but they are really being silly now. Is it time to boycott Google+ ???

<comment><USER32> No need, Google chooses the people it wants to be boycotted by.</comment></comment>


Can I Use ____? - <AUTHOR> https://caniuse.com <comment><USER2> IMO there should be a quick introduction (like what is on the About page) on the splash page. It look me a bit to figure out what this website is for.</comment>


Taking the leap: How I became a full time entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.coderholic.com/taking-the-leap-how-i-became-a-full-time-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> Not to be facetious, but I find it much more helpful to over-simplify it into a single, simple sound-bite: "To become a full-time entrepreneur, better your current wage with part-time entrepreneurial projects".

</comment><comment><USER3> Which website did you used ?</comment>


Ask HN: Developer going freelance, how to get started? - <AUTHOR> How would you begin marketing yourself as a freelance developer starting from scratch, zero, nada? I mean no significant web presence, no 10k Twitter followers, not wasting time with LinkedIn and not having launched an ICO.
I've been quietly employed as a Python developer for a few years now and so as a result I've never bothered making a "portfolio" (not that I know what a developer portfolio should look like - I'm not a designer with tons of beautiful things to show off unfortunately) nor really spent the time building a web presence (I quite enjoy my "offline" life). So pretty much the only thing I've got to show off is a resumé and references from previous employers, which doesn't really look groundbreaking.
Anyone who's been through this before, would you mind giving me some advice on how to get started? Thanks! <comment><USER2> I had came across a post ([https://www.codementor.io/blog/land-clients- freelance-develo...](https://www.codementor.io/blog/land-clients-freelance- developer-39w3i166wy)) that does a good job going into the details about how to get started on your freelancing career as a developer — I think you might be helpful?

In any case, best of luck to you!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never really done it with the idea of making a long term business out of it I found Craigslist and other local classifieds was a pretty good way to get jobs at least in the short term. I got one long term project, several one time jobs and several repeat customers in a period of a few months. I also looked through the wanted ads for people looking for small projects they needed done.

I did some research before I started about the kinds or rates to charge based on my skills. I kept my prices lower than the highest or even mid range but didn't go to low. I found I actually got a few clients that chose me because I wasn't offering the lowest price.

They had all had bad experiences with people offering deals. I always laid out the terms of our agreement beforehand and made sure we both agreed on the scope of the work and the fees I was charging. I wouldn't do any work before that, even for small quicl things. One or two clients questioned it but usually after a quick explanation about how it was to make sure I did the work that was agreed upon and that we both ended up happy afterwards they usually had no problems.

If I had continued doing that I likely would have found more places, either online or around my community to advertise. I never really tried to look for any remote work so I don't have much to ad for that. A lot of the above I imagine still applies.

The only thing I can really add is that until you get to the point where you're overwhelmed, always be looking for more clients however you can. But, don't take on too much at once so you can't finish things on time and don't agree to do something above your skill level. As tempting as it is to take a job and try to learn what you nees while doing it, your work will likely end up poor and your client may end up unhappy. If you want to learn something new, do it on your own time then take jobs that require those skills.

Always track your time spent working, even if you don't bill by the hour. It's easy to get caught up working on something too long and end up not making as much as you wamt out of it. Give your self clear time frames to work on something and track the actual time spent working on it using some kind of time tracking app.

If you can, also try and give yourself working hours. Even if they're long, 12 hours or longer, still make a cutoff between work and the rest of your life so you don't become trapped into nothing but work.

I don't know if this advice is the best or not but this is what I've learned from trying it.</comment>


Seymour Papert's "Mindstorms" made freely available online - <AUTHOR> http://mindstorms.media.mit.edu/ <comment><USER2> This is the first edition of this important book.

AFAICT the only differences to the second edition are the additional forewords and a new Foreword to the Second Edition by Papert. This foreword is not mentioned in this online edition by MIT [0]. I have the second edition at home; I can try to share the forewords and specially the new preface, I don't think they are online (even on library genesis).

[0] [http://mindstorms.media.mit.edu/](http://mindstorms.media.mit.edu/) "A second edition, with new Forewords by John Sculley and Carol Sperry, was published in 1993."

</comment><comment><USER3> I told some people that I consider "Mindstorms" the most important book of the 20th century.

Why is that?

Little kids (2 to 4 y.o.) are like scientists. They are curious, and they continuously experiment. The world is their laboratory, and they are having such a blast with it. They build theories about nature, they test them, debug them, discard some, improve others. This cycle is not unlike how computer programs go through.

And then they go to school. And the curiosity and joy is squashed without delay and replaced with the dread of the homework. Millions of scientists replaced every year by millions of little order obeying soldiers.

Can school be different? Can kids continue to be little scientists, and have fun, and learn by discovery and aha moments and by constructing their own internal models of the world? Mindstorms' emphatic answer is that it can, and the recipe is there.

Are we going in that direction? Fortunately, I think so (at least in the US), although I feel that the private schools and the top public schools are way ahead of the rest. I am not fully familiar with the whole education movement of the last 50 years or so, but from a distance it appears to me that Mindstorms is a (if not the) guiding force there.

If you are at all interested in education, I can't see how you can go wrong reading this book.

</comment><comment><USER4> Available in Multiple formats on the Internet Archive:

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

<comment><USER5> I'm always disappointed when I see such blatant copyright violations on the Internet Archive. It is so contrary to the generous spirit of what they're trying to do.</comment></comment>


Gab.ai, Twitter competitor, raises $1M dollars in crowd investment - <AUTHOR> https://www.startengine.com/startup/gab?utm=email <comment><USER2> That's great news for users. Twitter needs some good competition, and both sites like this one and open services like GNU Social/Mastodon are going to help make everything better there.

I also feel Gab does posts a lot better than Twitter does, since the post lengths are actually somewhat usable. 300 characters is much more practical than 140, and I rarely feel like I run out of space as a result.

So yeah, good on them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. That's from crowd investment alone. The creator calls Silicon Valley full of liberal elites too.

I can't help but feel nervous, like Trumplites are coming for Tech and winning grassroots support.

<comment><USER2> Eh, I'd say things are simply becoming more representative of the population as a whole. I mean, look at Twitter and how it moderates its platform. It's pretty clear that right wingers who break the rules get dealt with much more harshly than those from the other side, and things like the Trust and Safety Council include very few people from pro free speech organisations or non left wing organisations in general.

And when people think they're being censored/ignored by such platforms, well of course they'll start their own/check out ones more sympathetic to their views.

It's not really winning grassroots support. It's winning over the people who were already conservative and felt major social networks were being unfair to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's see how fast this gets ghosted..</comment>


Firstrowsports.tv Was Seized by ICE Tonight - <AUTHOR> http://www.firstrowsports.tv/

<comment><USER2> The site is not accessible through .tv domain, but .com domain is working and redirects to <http://www.firstrow.tv/>

According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tv> the .tv TLD is administered by Verisign.

EDIT: strangely enough, www.firstrowsports.tv is still working (I'm connecting from Europe, so there might be caching involved), but firstrowsports.tv redirects to the ICE notice.

<comment><USER3> Europe as well, but I get both are redirecting to the ICE notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Really_? US law-enforcement/copyright-goons siezing a .tv domain? I know Tuvalu "outsourced" that all to Verisign, but still...

Maybe bit.ly wasn't such a bad idea after all...

</comment><comment><USER5> go to <http://atdhe.eu> just moved from atdhe.tv</comment>


Bullets that we've dodged as a species - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/06/07/bullets-that-weve-dodged-as-a-species/

<comment><USER2> All in all an interesting article, some of those catastrophes were perhaps prevented by concentrated effort (banning of DDT, campaigns against spreading HIV). But WTF is this:

 _The last few years have seemed to offer a lot of lessons about human hubris. Here are some of the things that we've learned we can't do safely: (a) drill for oil in mile-deep water (Deepwater Horizon), (b) build nuclear power plants on tsunami-prone coastlines (Fukushima), (c) build the world's biggest airliner and engines (Qantas Flight 32), (d) protect cities that are below sea level from flooding (Katrina in New Orleans)._

a) _The world's deepest oil platform is the floating Perdido which is a spar platform in the Gulf of Mexico in a water depth of 2,438 metres (7,999 ft)._ And it works just fine!

b) Japan's coast is full of nuclear power plants which should work well unless a 1 in 1000 years earthquake strikes

c) what? Didn't the flight land just ok showing how robust the platform is? During an uncontained engine failure the turbine disk isn't supposed to hit the plane. This one did and it was ok.

d) The Netherlands? Hello?

<comment><USER3> d) Hell, even more recently with the Mississippi river floods, New Orleans totally escaped that thanks entirely to our ability to protect low lying areas with human engineering. I'm sitting in my living room at a 3 feet above sea level and about 19 feet below the Mississippi river level as I type this right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I admit I'm working with hindsight, but the cancer prediction just seems like, well, a bad prediction; can we really call it a "bullet we've dodged"? Does anyone know how credible this prediction was considered at the time?

</comment><comment><USER5> Betting against predictions of exhaustion of this or that natural resource seems to be one of the smartest ways to bet.

<http://www.perc.org/articles/article588.php>

[http://globalgeography.aag.org/PopulationandNaturalResources...](http://globalgeography.aag.org/PopulationandNaturalResources1e/CF_PopNatRes_Jan10/CF_PopNatRes_Jan1011.html)

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of these have happened in alternate universes.

and evolutionarily, we dodged lots of bullets.

Imagine if we used the alligator's method of sex determination - based on temperature of the egg at fertilization. Even in ancient times kings would have been able to grow armies.

Imagine if our skull wasn't as thick and primitive humans had institutionalized personality altering brain surgery, and our world were descended from them.</comment>


Lessons learned in 30 years of programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=49725 <comment><USER2> _Give people credit, even if they don't deserve it._

This, a thousand times this. I'm constantly surprised by the effect that a simple, heartfelt "good job" can have on motivation. I'm regularly surprised by the effect it has on _me_.

We're social animals, this kind of response is wired in deep.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice article. I sometimes feel like the youth focus in tech really robs us of getting the perspective that grizzled old timers who've seen it all and done it all have. Bonus points if they still cut code more than they attend meetings.

</comment><comment><USER4> The comments on that post are reasonable, but the comments on the linked stories about

 _the most negative people in my thirty years of programming_

are really god awful. That's pretty screwed up community there.

</comment><comment><USER5> > "It pays to share everything you know."

The article states something about a "boss" not being too happy with you if you don't share everything...but my question is, do you guys think it's best to share everything you know even if you're self-employed or own a small business? Or does this statement/suggestion only hold when being employed by someone?

<comment><USER6> Specially when you are self-employed you should open up the barrier. This brings interchange of ideas. It is not only you who gives knowledge away, you also receive insights and ideas from people _inside_ your target industries. How else do you want to stay up to date in your race against an ever faster changing worldwide knowledge base?

<comment><USER7> In fact, I am quite curious if there is a certain connection between Kirkhoffs law and opensource software (well, open-idea-software, but giving out ideas is almost as good as giving out source, but giving out source definately is more than giving away an idea). Recall, Kirkhoff's law dictates that the security of a cryptosystem must not depend on the secrecy of the system itself, but on the secrecy of the key's involved (and probably P != NP). And now, remember again: There are some ridiculous well-going open source programs (linux, gcc, ...) and even more, there are certain really well going commercial open source systems (such as mysql). Thus, I am pretty curious, if there is a similar kirkhoffs law for software (as in: the commercial success of a software can be achieved even without keeping the source secret, or something similar).

<comment><USER8> not really sure about the validity of your overall point, but at least for mysql I would say that's a one off.

most open source software is not going to be ridiculously profitable, and buyng mysql was a desperation for sun which didn't pay off.

not every startup can open source their code. some can, as reddit did, but this would not seem to be advisable from time zero, more something you have the luxury of after you dominate the brand/space.

that said, I tend to share everything knowledge related and not worry about it, trust to karma.

there are many forms of wealth.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fruit and vegetable intake and the risk of overall cancer in Japanese - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0917504016301575 <comment><USER2> Did anyone else read the statistical analysis section? There were some "interesting"/unclear choices made, but I'm going to pick on one in particular that could affect the outcome: the decision on how to weight the individual cohort studies on which this study is based (pg 6).

> A random-effects model was used to obtain a single pooled estimate of the > HRs from the individual studies for each category. The study-specific HRs > were weighted by the inverse of the sum of their variance and the estimated > between-studies variance component.

First note that there is no citation which motivates this weighting scheme. There may be a valid reason for doing it this way, but that's not clear from the paper.

Second, "the sum of their variance" I take to mean the sum of the variance components of the regression model. That's interesting because the components mean very different things. In the simple case of least squares, there's the "explained variance": the "strength" of the relationship between Y and X, and there's also the residual variance: the variance in X that isn't explained by Y. Aside from the fact that they mean different things, their sum is not a constant and so are not directly comparable across models/studies.

Third, weighted by the "between-studies variance component" has the effect of down-weighting studies that show a large difference from the mean study result and up-weighting studies which are similar. Now, what would you say if I conducted an experiment and transformed the raw data points according to this same procedure? "That's not fair because that's not the data we collected!"[0] And herein lies the problem: the purpose of this meta-analysis is to assess whether we can draw any consistent conclusions from the results of the individual cohort studies, but by weighting studies toward the mean the authors are taking it as a forgone conclusion that the mean study is ground truth.

I'm by no means an expert on meta-analysis so someone please chime in if you think I'm off base, but this all strikes me as a very peculiar and unjustified set of steps being taken before the model is even fit.

[0] Yes, there are cases for data transformation, motivated either by theory or meeting regression assumptions, but this is neither.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is strange. Even if vegetable intake is not beneficial against cancer - should higher veg consumption not crowd out red meat (I think you eat less meat when eating more vegetables), leading to less cases of colon cancer? Also, what about vegetables with high fiber that gets converted to butyrates, and is thus anti-cancer? Is it all BS? Or is "overall cancer" a metric where high fiber might decrease colon cancer but leads to more cancers in other areas?

<comment><USER4> i think the most important take away with nutrition is eat what your ancestors ate. you're probably not japanese so its less likely that the results apply to you.

I myself switched from drinking soda to OJ. my health declined slowly for a long time until I found out my body doesnt like oranges.

fruit can be healthy but i doubt we are supposed to eat all fruit diets. Astin Kutcher took on Steve Job's all fruit diet and ended up in the hospital with pancreatitis. And we all know what happened to Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER5> OJ is just sugar water though, the value of fruit is (I think) the whole fruit.

<comment><USER4> true, but i have an even stronger alergic reaction to the fruit :)

its also worth noting that fruit is sugar water. its 98-99% water + 2% sugar and fiber

<comment><USER6> > its also worth noting that fruit is sugar water. its 98-99% water + 2% sugar > and fiber

Oranges, apples, etc are only 85% water. Grapes 80%. The rest is fiber and is likely why your body tells you to stop eating them. Two and a half apples is a lot less appealing than a can of soda (actual sugar water).

The whole percent water thing is completely meaningless though, human brains are 85% water and babies are 80%.

<comment><USER7> The proportion of water is certainly _not_ meaningless when considering the expected caloric intake of a food administered ad libitum. Satiety is partially controlled by stretch receptors in the gut lining and common sense will tell you it's much harder to consume the same amount of calories from a 2g/100mL sugar solution as from a 10g/100mL solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really liked this. I wish more negative results such as this were published and discussed, especially when they go against general intuition and feel-good narratives.

</comment><comment><USER9> How are they controlling for deaths from other causes, e.g. cardiovascular disease? If you're not dead from some other cause then you're going to be more likely to die from cancer, even if vegetables are actually conferring a significant anti-cancer benefit.

I see that they are using people years to track followup, but I'm not clear from the methodology whether this is enough to fully control for this issue.

<comment><USER10> Are you stating that death from cardiovascular disease would be higher (or lower) from people who don't eat fruits/vegetables which means they have a "lower" chance of getting cancer?

My guess would be that they didn't take that into account and that the deaths from cardiovascular (or other diseases) would be ignored in the assumption they are "similar" between the two sides.

<comment><USER9> To rephrase, I'm suggesting that eating vegetables may lower the risk of cardiovascular disease.

If you don't die from cardiovascular disease, then it's more likely that cancer is the thing you do die from. So even if eating vegetables reduces your risk of cancer, you could actually be more likely to die from cancer if you eat vegetables.

<comment><USER10> Ahh thanks for the clarification. Your logic makes a lot of sense. I believe there was a study that showed pesticides _may_ cause cancer (it was probably done in mice or something) from a long time ago but this is just the top of my head so I don't know if there's any relation to fruit/veggie consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone, is there also a study like this where the consumption of red meat (or meat in general) affects the risk of overall cancer?

<comment><USER12> We know that processed red meat causes cancer.

The quality of the evidence is very very good.

The strength of the effect is weak.

Because the quality of the evidence is now very good (as good as for smoking) the WHO information was widely misreported as "red meat as bad as smoking".

This is likely to make web searches less useful.

Here's something from the English NHS about it: [http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/10October/Pages/Processed- meat-c...](http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/10October/Pages/Processed-meat-causes- cancer-warns-official-report.aspx)

> A key statistic provided by the infographic is that if everyone stopped > smoking, there would be 64,500 fewer cases of cancer a year in the UK, > compared with 8,800 fewer cases if everyone stopped eating processed or red > meat.

<comment><USER13> Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the definition of _processed_ red meat? I assume it lies somewhere between gnawing on a freshly slaughtered animal carcass and buying beef jerky form the corner store, but I'm not sure where, exactly.

<comment><USER14> "Methods of meat processing include salting, curing, fermentation, and smoking. Meat processing includes all the processes that change fresh meat with the exception of simple mechanical processes such as cutting, grinding or mixing."

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is for Japan, doesn't they already eat a lot better than the Western world, that is, less red meat, less processed foods, more high oily fish etc.?

<comment><USER16> In my experience, this is generally true, but the Japanese diet is changing rapidly. I came to Japan almost 10 years ago and I remember seeing quite traditional lunch boxes (called bento) in the convenience stores. Now everything is deep fried, or comes with fairly large portions of meat. Unless you go to a specialised bento store, it's pretty difficult to get a bento with a piece of fish, vegetables and rice.

Also, with the reduced restrictions on imports, I've seen a veritable explosion of steak restaurants and yaki niku places (Korean barbeque). Now that they can get cheap pork from Canada and cheap beef from Australia, meat has gotten very popular. The meat sections of the grocery stores in my area are about the same size as the fish section. And even the small town I live in has the same number of butchers as they do specialty fish stores.

Having said that, it's still not difficult to eat a traditional Japanese diet and certainly older people tend to eat that way. Not sure what will happen in the next generation or two, as the culture is shifting (to my eyes, anyway). It may be for the best, though, as global fish stocks are shrinking in an alarming way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Studies that invalidate common beliefs are really interesting.

<comment><USER18> Keep in mind that's the only reason we're hearing about this study. If they found what would be expected it wouldn't be as interning. Man bites dog and all that.

There are probably lots of studies that say the opposite if you look for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Forks over knives ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forks_Over_Knives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forks_Over_Knives)) quite clearly argues that meat increases cancer risks manyfold.

T. Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn are no quacks either and the document makes a solid argument for minimizing meat intake, at least for adults.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought we were under the consensus that these large scale associative studies were not accurate/effective in predicting causal effects, especially in nutrition.

I can't find any studies right now, but I remember reading about mechanistic explanations for plant compounds such as isothiocyanate and resveratrol in reducing and even completely suppressing tumour growth.

</comment><comment><USER21> This study doesn't account for strict plant-based diets. There isn't a single reference to animal product portion size. It just lumps everyone together. Some groups had larger fruit and vegetable portions. But all had animals.

<comment><USER22> The study wasn't trying to account for strict plant-based diets. It was attempting to find a correlation between fruit/plant intake and cancer rates.

<comment><USER21> It would be unfortunate if someone reads the headline and thinks this means that this study negates the meat consumption-cancer risk correlation studies.

Though, when considered in regards to the large body of plant based diet studies, this study does add more evidence to the notion that to benifit from plants we probably need to omit the animal products altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps pesticide consumption offsets fruit and vegetable benefits.

</comment><comment><USER24> Every day, the case for eating plants gets weaker. I'm starting to believe that plants aren't necessary for human health, and are possibly harmful.

This website has been eye-opening: [https://zerocarbzen.com](https://zerocarbzen.com)

<comment><USER25> I think you are suffering from confirmation bias.

<comment><USER24> Doesn't change the facts.

Why should I believe that plants are necessary for health?

<comment><USER26> Confirmation bias means they aren't strictly facts you're believing</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/google-debuts-tez-a-mobile-wallet-and-payments-app-for-india/ <comment><USER2> I live in India. Many people have launched UPI based payment apps. Even government launched an app called BHIM. It is really good. UPI is a really good concept.

The problem: None of these apps is used by most of the vendors in cities. Except for Paytm which is available with many small vendors in cities. They used the demonetization period to heavily market the app by going vendor to vendor singing them up.BHIM is really good but government needs to work on its marketing. They can use college/school students everywhere to do the same. JIO has granted access to fast mobile networks to common people. We need to teach people how to use these apps.

<comment><USER3> >>Except for Paytm which is available with many small vendors in cities.

No. I live in Bangalore and 'many' small vendors don't accept Paytm. They did it momentarily as a last ditch effort to not see their business crash.

Cash has come back like no tomorrow.

Also you don't have to teach people anything, or provide any amount of free internet plans. If they are smart enough to use WhatsApp and while away time on the internet to do unproductive stuff they can also use payment apps.

The reason why don't use it because they want to cheat on taxes. That is the issue. And its social and cultural in nature. Its not a technology related problem.

<comment><USER4> This is spot on. The resistance to online payments and the newly introduced GST is not technical/financial it's because they don't want to pay taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not having a wallet option is a deal breaker.

Cashless payments is very popular amongst youth here and majority of us college students don't have a functional bank account which makes us either carry our parents debit cards or our parents "Paytm" us (yes, it's become a verb here) our monthly pocket money.

Regardless of that, there is still a very poor adoption of cashless modes of payments by street hawkers and kirana stores. And many high revenue businesses I have seen going directly for card POS systems like mswipe etc as wallets have some monthly limits and high fees for transferring to bank account. So the competition for tez is with physical card swipes and seeing the overall internet connection health even in the cities, it's a pain to use apps to pay majority of the times.

<comment><USER6> No its not. Why do you want wallet when you can transfer directly from bank account with same ease? 270 million bank accounts were opened under Jan Dhan, mainly poor.

Paytm is transforming itself to payment bank and UPI provider.

<comment><USER7> Lots of people are unbanked/underbanked -- that is where mobile payments (like MPESA) shine. Assuming that everyone has a credit card and/or bank account is a US-centric assumption that came about as a result of COPPA, and the big companies miss out on getting adoption from teens, children, and people who have been locked out of the financial system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Government of India has made it mandatory to link your Aadhar number with your Tez account. Please link your Aadhar number to enjoy uninterrupted service." \- Waiting for this to happen. My Indian friends say they are getting these messages from the Income Tax department, their banks and even their ISPs, e-wallets providers, telcoms etc.

<comment><USER9> This is a story i'm trying to understand. 1. Indian Government wants to emulate something like SSN (in the US) as a single identifier for every citizen in this country. 2. This is an easy way for a Government to track the actions of every individual digitally and financially - end of Privacy!

<comment><USER10> 1) SSN is not really a model for a unique identifier for every citizen. Immigrants have SSNs too, and can have different ones if they have done multiple stays in the country. You also can live without an SSN in the US.

2) I mean... the government is entitled to know where your money is coming from if they are asking you for taxes. otherwise, there would be no way to combat tax fraud. This is not a new thing.

<comment><USER11> But the way Aadhaar usage is being conceived by the Govt it seems to do more with the "tracking" aspect of it than finding trails of money. In fact it has little to do with the "money". For that we already have had PAN numbers (in case of individuals) which are unique and the Govt and the Income Tax department has record of it, so do the banks.

Also, the way Aadhaar has been handled by the private contractors (the way the contracts were given are also very questionable), and the way they have gotten unrestricted, unregulated access to it (and it doesn't seem someone has been done to curb this) is really disconcerting as a citizen.

Then, there's "Snoopgate". It was hushed as if it never existed.

<comment><USER9> You are right. Remember those days when SIM card agents used to sell our data to marketing firms (and use to stalk girls), when those kind of amateurs get to handle Aadhar registration - the result would be data leaks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As long as country doesn't mandates using cashless payment modes, launching new payment apps won't help. Country already has too many such apps, with google bringing another it will only eat the competitions share of profit, instead of increasing the demand. Indian people still aren't very comfortable with online payments. They still like to trade in cash.

<comment><USER13> Currently UPI transactions are free (except for a few banks). So many are transferring using this. Once they start charging the user for transaction, this will drop. Even if the charge is .50 paise.

<comment><USER3> The charge has to be 0. For one simple reason most of the everyday buying in India is in the FMCG sector where profits are razor thin.

No one will be spending the profit equivalent just for a transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> PS : It's pronounced like 'Taze' but with a soft T. It means 'quick' :)

<comment><USER15> FYI, 'soft T' doesn't mean anything to western English speakers. They have a 'T' and a 'Th', the latter of which is actually a fricative, and not really a 'T' sound in the strict sense. I guess an Indian 'soft T' is better described as a more Italian sounding 'T', articulated mainly against the teeth.

<comment><USER16> Is a soft T like the way some Americans say "water", i.e. with a "D" like sound, as compared to the hard "T" in water traditional in British English?

<comment><USER17> No. It's a soft T the way Spanish or Italian speakers say their Ts.

<comment><USER18> Imagine saying "both age" without the "bo"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Problem is not the quality app but the adoption rate. There are already tons of UPI apps available and none so far have been successful (Bhim, Phonepe and paytm are top 3). Google is already is late to the game. So, If Google wants this to make it hit, it really needs to heavily market it. Otherwise It would be like another futile attempt to switch Indians to digital payment systems, which currently, they are reluctant. I have high hopes for this one.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is certainly good for India. I predict, over time, cash-less transactions in India will increase, as more companies start investing in cashless transactions.

<comment><USER21> This good for Google.

India is already going cashless. There are plenty of wallets and chash-less apps spending money trying to buy market share. Every vendor and their younger brouther has their own wallet app. You'd be hard pressed to find a shop without a paytm or phonepe or whatever barcode at the window.

It's already happening. Google is trying to ride the wave, and the government is trying to ride the Google PR wave!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using Chillr app for payments, And it has a great experience but sadly there's a limit of 5k/day – which is ridiculously low if they want SME to go cashless. Whereas, Google's Tez has a 100k/day limit which IMO would work as a leverage for the app.

<comment><USER23> Chillr app now have 1L per day limit on UPI, the other IMPS limit is as mandated by the respective bank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Tez means Fast or Speed in hindi.

Fun Fact: In the 1994 Keanu Reeves movie the number plate for his car is 646 TEZ.

<comment><USER25> Must be Arabic or Persian in origin...

<comment><USER26> Persian and Hindi are both Indo-European languages, so they share a common root.

(Arabic isn't in that language family).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo- European_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)

<comment><USER27> Languages don't only derive from other languages in their family.

Hindi has both Persian and Arabic influences, so it could plausibly be Arabic in origin. It isn't in this case, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have downloaded it, and it's a bit clunky to work with. Hope they iterate fast on this one. But I also think, this should not have been a problem since I used Google Wallet and it was a superior experience. May be the teams were different?

<comment><USER6> Google wallet don't have licence in india. Its an outdated concept to UPI anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1)The question is, how to gain transaction in a market where employees ask for paychecks over PayTM. 2)I wish the article would have mentioned India's ban of paper money as legal tender. 3) Tez roughly translates to "fast" in Hindi

</comment><comment><USER30> Not even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.

<comment><USER31> I read your comment and checked the app page. ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.nbu.paisa.user)) It had 4.5 stars. I was like what is this commenter talking about.

I then dig into the comments and there are a massive number of negative comments. I am not sure what is happening here but the rating seems artificially inflated. It shows that there are only 9 1-stars and yet in comments there are way more 1-stars. Really sad to see this sort of gaming at the play store level.

<comment> lurker- I don't know how the Play Store commenting system works, but I think before jumping to conclusions then it's important to consider that if there were any foul play then it would probably have been better achieved through "shadowbanning". I do feel it would make sense if the Play Store didn't count comments made by newly registered users or known bots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The name is poorly chosen imho. This is going to create confusion with an existing high-profile cryptocurrency project (Tezos, written in OCaml).

<comment><USER19> it's an Hindi word meaning "Fast" which I believe reflects the app characteristics accurately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ah, Google is using their Nearby tech for something directly useful! Still surprised how little it (or similar tech) is in use

</comment><comment><USER34> What is the difference between this and Android Pay?

<comment><USER35> This one uses an Indian method of payment called UPI which is inter-operable with other banks app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What better way to invade the privacy of and collect data on another billion or so people?

</comment><comment><USER37> > English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.

In all my years of living in India, I've not come across one person using anything other than English. Most people, even in IT, hadn't the slightest clue about how to type their own language into a PC. Didn't stop them from being "proud" of <insert object> though.

<comment><USER38> Not sure what echo chamber you live in. Many people in India don't speak, read or write English. Most of them carry and use mobile phones. Why would you exclude them from using the app?

<comment><USER11> That comment is either just a low effort troll attempt or made by someone not at all familiar with India and definitely not familiar with her linguistic diversity. Or maybe someone with extremely limited existence in one of this country's many urban bubbles.

In fact had Google launched the app only in English or English+Hindi I would have been really surprised because they would been losing on the clear majority of India - the rural India, 2nd tier cities, and town and below. Internet is exploding there, clearly engendered by Reliance Jio and other operators following close and in panic.

Also, the way Govt went all guerrilla on demonetisation (nationwide) and the way Govt is pushing digital money the larger population, who are not at all proficient in English, will have to come on board the digital payment system (and in my humble opinion will have to suffer a lot because planning and infra neither are well prepared; but that's another matter) and for the inclusion of regional languages are not a smart move per se, but a must.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I like how beautifully white are all the people in Tez ads. /s

<comment><USER39> Yes, downvote me because I pointed out to blatant racism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not to be confused with TEZ the abbreviation for Tezos, the largest ICO (cryptocurrency) ever.</comment>


Will a larger iPhone cannibalize the iPad? - <AUTHOR> http://virtualpants.com/post/74295829587/will-a-larger-iphone-cannabalize-the-ipad

<comment><AUTHOR> Reports were released today that Apple may finally be poised to launch an iPhone with a display of 5" or more. Do you think they have delayed this release due to a fear of decreasing iPad sales? If a 5" or larger iPhone is released, do you think it will affect iPad sales? Personally, I find little use for an iPad when I'm using a phone with a 5-6" display.</comment>


Apple rolls out new MacBooks, drops prices - <AUTHOR> http://news.google.ca/news/url?sa=t&ct2=ca%2F0_0_s_1_3_aa&usg=AFQjCNFwgVNjVENl4KlpbF3bsPJ5_ol53Q&cid=1257440554&ei=xlAtSrDeBYauMrLa5OwC&rt=SEARCH&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-dyn%2Fcontent%2Farticle%2F2009%2F06%2F08%2FAR2009060801919.html

<comment><USER2> The addition of an SD slot is awesome. Much more useful than the current expansion flap thing which I don't even know what you plug in there :/

<comment><USER3> Of course the SD slot is not a very welcome change to people who have stuff that plugs in that "flap thing", because now the MacBook Pro apparently doesn't have any means of internal expansion. (Why is it called Pro again?)

<comment><USER4> According to the keynote, Apple found that only 1% of users were using the ExpressCard slot.

<comment><USER3> According to market share statistics, less than 1% of computer users have a MacBook Pro.

<comment><USER5> Which would make it even less of a big deal, applying to less than .01% of computer users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Big drop in price for the MacBook Air too, especially for SSD: $1,799 with 128GB SSD which was the previous price with a regular hard-drive.

<comment><USER7> There was a rumor about new Air models at lower prices. Does anyone know if there are actually new models planned, or if this is what they should've said - same model, lower prices?

<comment><USER8> Aren't the processor speeds different now?

<comment><USER7> Yes, so I guess this is all they meant, not a major revision or addition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly OT, but new iPhone (as mentioned in the OP article) as well.

For those who feel like following the liveblog, <http://live.gizmodo.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> "Apple also introduced a handy new feature called "Find My iPhone," designed to help iPhone owners who have misplaced their device. Lose the device under the sofa, and users will now be able to send the phone a message ordering it to make a sound. If the device has been stolen, it will now be possible to send an iPhone a command to erase its memory, so that sensitive information is not compromised. "

I smell a security risk.

<comment><USER11> _Apple also introduced a handy new feature called "Find My iPhone," designed to help iPhone owners who have misplaced their device. Lose the device under the sofa, and users will now be able to send the phone a message ordering it to make a sound._

What? Is this a parody?

<comment><USER4> It is a tie-in to Apple's $99/yr. MobileMe service. You can locate the phone on a map and remotely display a message or play a sound.

<http://www.apple.com/mobileme/whats-new/>

<comment><USER11> Ah, alright; that makes more sense. Journalism fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now that the online store is back up, I see what they've done with the MacBooks. I thought they were going to discontinue the old white MacBook soon, but instead they've renamed the new one to make it a Pro. And now there's a 15" Pro with integrated graphics only, like the regular MacBooks.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Apple site hasn't been updated with these and the online store is down. Doesn't Apple usually make sure the site has all of the new products right when they're announced?

<comment><USER12> No. This is Apple's standard operating procedure; the site goes down for a few hours while the presentation is being done. (So that the site doesn't "scoop" the presenters.) The site should be back up soon after the show's over.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the info.</comment></comment></comment>


Learning from Founders - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html <comment><USER2> If anyone hasn't picked up a copy of this book, you should go grab at it amazon right now. It's fairly inexpensive and very enlightening.</comment>


Aak HN: What time series metrics API should I emulate? - <AUTHOR> I need to design a time series metrics API. The API will be read only, needs to support some but not extensive query flexibility, and will be used with a relatively limited number of metrics.
Are there any existing APIs you like that I could use for inspiration?
Are there any you hate that you hope I avoid emulating?! <comment><USER2> My first thought is that time series data sets vary drastically in scale.

For instance, there are two CPI numbers that come out once a month for about 80 years so far, or 1920 numbers total. That's "small data". Other systems collect that many numbers in a millisecond.

I like the time series handling capabilities in pandas myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, good point, I left that out.

My system will max out at perhaps 1M data points in any given series. More typically it might have 1/10th or 1/100th of that.</comment></comment>


Warning: SaaS Privacy Debt Will Crush Your Roadmap - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ironcorelabs.com/warning-saas-privacy-debt-will-crush-your-roadmap-3869e79e3105 <comment><USER2> See this is what worries me. Software developers have long left security and privacy concerns to IT. But they can't produce force shields that magically protect apps or the data they can access. Developers will eventually have to take action and the longer that can is kicked, the more painful it will be.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article is correct as far as it goes, but really falls under the umbrella of IT compliance.

And implementing PCI, SOC2, etc. along with GDPR, etc. is a massive and ongoing project.</comment>


An update on our workplace commitments - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/update-workplace-commitments/ <comment><USER2> So this brings to light a question - how has the work from home/shelter in place effected harassment and other bad behaviors? Has the physical change resulted in overall changes or did it just move to the virtual world? Has any of it gone up or down?</comment>


Nvidia's AI-Powered 'Content-Aware Fill' Is Mind-Blowing - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2018/04/23/nvidias-ai-powered-content-aware-fill-is-mind-blowing/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't seem any better than Photoshop's content-aware correction tool. Would love to see a side by side with the same images.

<comment><USER3> Err, really? The article shows this and the difference is quite stark:

Damaged: [https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/04/missing.jpg](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/04/missing.jpg)

Photoshop: [https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/04/contentawareres...](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/04/contentawareresult.jpg)

Nvidia: [https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/04/nvidiaresult.jp...](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/04/nvidiaresult.jpg)

To be clear, it's far from perfect, but it seems to me to be substantially better than photoshop's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This appears to be running on Linux.</comment>


HANA C++ Development Environment and Processes - def- https://hookrace.net/blog/hana-cpp-development/ <comment><AUTHOR> Been part of that team. I liked the distributed compile cluster the most. However, the 4 years taught me that large scale C++ development is not my thing. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER2> Fascinating read Dennis - do keep it up.</comment>


Cool New Features in Python 3.8 - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/python38-new-features/ <comment><USER2> In related news, PyPy now appears to consider their Python 3.6 interpreter released, if I'm understanding this correctly: [https://morepypy.blogspot.com/](https://morepypy.blogspot.com/)

While I'm happy this work is being done, waiting over a year from a 3.x release for an ~4x speedup from PyPy is kind of a bummer. Most of my work is already on 3.7.

</comment><comment><USER3> Walrus operator and f strings are the best new features IMO.

<comment><USER4> f-strings aren't new in 3.8...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> alas, still i remain in wait for a pipe operator like Elixir's</comment>


Introducing Hourly Billing - <AUTHOR> https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/09/introducing-hourly-billing/ <comment><USER2> I've been wondering about this since they first started beta testing the hourly billing option. Here are my questions:

1) Would hourly billing attract a different kind of usage pattern than what Linodes have so far been used for?

2) Will this hurt performance for other customers?

The reason I'm curious about this is that even the cheapest Linode comes with a lot of CPU power, especially compared to EC2. But the CPU is not dedicated, in fact it's massively oversold. This is great for people who occasionally need to use 8 cores but stay relatively idle most of the time. Guess what, if you keep a server online for months, it's going to be idle a lof of the time.

Hourly billing, on the other hand, encourages people to fire up an instance, compute whatever they need to compute as quickly as possible, and shut down the instance as soon as they're done. In fact, that's exactly how I use EC2's high-CPU instances. Everything is scripted to ensure the most efficient use of resources throughout the lifetime of the instance, because every hour costs money. Why use 50% CPU for two hours when you can use 100% CPU for one hour for half the cost?

This kind of usage pattern, if widespread among customers, can lead to higher overall CPU usage on the host node (as well as of other scarce resources such as I/O), because fewer instances will sit idle. With EC2 this is not a problem AFAIK because the CPUs are dedicated to my instance. But Linode's CPUs are shared.

For a "traditional" Linode customer, the implication is that there will be busier neighbors. Officially, of course, you would never get less resources than a fair share of the host node. But it has usually been the case that, in Linode, you get a lot more resources most of the time. If people can no longer rely on this unofficial assumption, there could be trouble ahead for Linode.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like that they configured the 'cap' to be the normal monthly price. It's a smart move that ensures that hourly customers AND monthly customers are getting treated fairly.

<comment><USER4> Yep — Digital Ocean does it the same way. It's great to see good ideas spreading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> YESSS This is awesome news. Linode is my favorite VPS host, and now it's going to be so much more viable for quickly testing things, and also for quick scaling up.

This is doubly good news because Linode instances are well-geared towards CPU work (having 8 cores by default), so if you use a queue-based architecture for background processing, you can now spin up 10 instances to process a bunch of work, and take them down a few hours later when the rush is over.

I especially love the monthly cap, so people who just want a server don't pay unpredictable amounts every month.

Thanks, Linode.

<comment><USER6> I'll need to choose a cloud host soon for an online service that will require great uptime, and Linode is one of my top choices. The reviews, uptime, and prices are great, including management services. The ONLY thing that's keeping me on the fence is lack of SSD's, as there will be a ton of I/O on the relational database. I read that they're beta testing SSD servers, so I hope they come out soon.

<comment><USER7> Bear in mind that Linode's SAS arrays apparently already outperform Digital Ocean's (presumably somewhat crappy) SSD setup, so this may or may not be a silver bullet.

I have a Postgres-based service on a Linode — it works fine in my (mainly read-based) use case, but I do pay for quite a lot of RAM in order to get enough caching.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a source for this? I just did a quick google search, and although they're somewhat comparable, DO outperformed Linode. And the tests were for read-only, not writes. I'd wager that writes are much faster on an SSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good on them. Competition between Digital Ocean and Linode for the customers that often sporadically use machines will just be great.

Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo.

<comment><USER9> Yeah it is a good move to compete, but I still think the customer base might be a bit different.

I still think of Linode as more of a "real" type hosting environment, in the time I used them I didn't didn't notice any difference from actual bare metal servers. If I didn't know better that's what I would think they were.

DO, to me is much more of a "toy" and experimenting type of service. I have tried hosting things on "droplets" and had strange issues, dropping, outages etc. Not frequent of course, but over say a week or two of uptime. I'm ok with it because it's $5 and what else would you expect? But I wouldn't think of hosting any real sites on droplets personally.

It's just my opinion and many people I've talked to have had the same experiences. Both are great services for different applications.

<comment><USER10> Linode is the toy here.

They have a long history of hiding information from customers during security incidents and outages.

No one running a proper site would be crazy enough to host on Linode.

<comment><USER11> Do you have anything to support your claim?

<comment><USER12> It keeps getting brought up due to their repeated issues and lack of transparency.

For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915)

<comment><USER11> I mean, a single instance (perhaps one more) is hardly a "long history" or "repeated issues".

<comment><USER12> Personally I wouldn't use them, and wouldn't recommend them. But I'm not here to argue about it.

I took the time to search for five seconds because you wanted references, but were somehow incapable of making your own research, or making up your own mind.

If you search you will find repeated instances, and that means a long history, with no changes after even a single security problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fact is linode is more expensive than Digital Ocean. I actually hope they stay that way. Why?

My expectations are that they take that extra money and give me more assurances. Pricing is screwy and I fully admit this just may be pricing psychology.

For the extra amount I expect:

* Better support

* More stable network and disk I/O

* Feature decisions that favor stability over bleeding edge.

Every quarter I am looking at digital ocean and wondering if I need to move our production boxes over. So far though Linode has me hooked. The extra amount I save is not worth it. Digital ocean wins hard on price but they need more than that to buy a customer. Just like the competition between Azure and Amazon, Azure needs to do MORE than price match. Azure needs to go above and beyond what I expect from Amazon.

<comment><USER14> Outside of the standard SSD drives, DO has not had any major data breaches that I'm aware of. That's a pretty big one. At this point recommending Linode to a company I work for seems borderline negligent considering their security history.

<comment><AUTHOR> DO had the issue where you could delete a droplet without scrubbing the disk. So the next person to create in that area could read the disk and recover any data from it.

<comment><USER14> To me that doesn't seem comparable to clear text passwords being stolen at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally. For a while now I've been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) when I need to spin up a quick testing server independent of my standard Linode hosting. The capped pricing per month is a nice touch, exactly the way Digital Ocean do it.

As a Linode customer this makes me very happy, especially knowing it should hopefully garner the company a few more customers. A great company that deserves the success they get.

<comment><USER16> When comparing to AWS, it's worth noting that both Linode and DO continue to charge hourly fees for instances that have been stopped but not destroyed.

AWS does not do this. Stop an EC2 instance and you stop paying hourly instance fees. Even if it hasn't been terminated.

There are small fees for maintaining EBS volumes if you are using them for inactive instances, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Several points here: #1 what is consider hourly usage? services actually running, or just having the VPS enabled even though there is no actual usage account time in the hourly billing? #2 linode should really work in their UX, site is not visually enticing, though hacker news isnt either :P

<comment><USER11> I also wondered that. See [https://library.linode.com/billing-and- payments#sph_if-my-li...](https://library.linode.com/billing-and- payments#sph_if-my-linode-is-powered-off-will-i-be-billed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does a Linode instance stack up against an AWS instance in computing power? I have something on AWS which pushes a c3.large instance to around 80 percent of CPU util. I am thinking of going with a different provider for that server at least, if it makes sense cost wise.

<comment><USER19> Linode doesn't oversubscribe to the extent AWS does. This results in Linode _consistently_ beating AWS in just about every benchmark due to it being more consistent.

<comment><USER20> AWS doesn't oversubscribe at all. This is a pretty baseless rumor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does Linode have the ability to grow a VPS?

<comment><USER22> You can resize a VPS quite easily, but it does involve anywhere between 15-30 minutes to complete.

<comment><USER23> It takes way longer than that at larger sizes.

On one of my 4096 boxes there:

> You will experience downtime while your Linode is migrated. We estimate 144 > minutes to migrate your Linode, but that may vary based on host and network > load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> DigitalOcean is doing this since the beginnning.

<comment><USER25> Thats the point. There was no widely recognized host before that could try to challenge big "cloud" companies. Now since DO is around trying to steal the market with pricing (and acceptable quality), Linode needs to step up their game. All of sudden it turned out that they can give twice the resources, hourly pricing and still make money. Hail to free market competition!

<comment><USER26> To be fair, Linode doubled some aspect of their plan [without raising prices] every year before DO even existed.

<comment><USER27> And has a history of upgrades since 2003.

[https://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/page/3/](https://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/page/3/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 2009 called - they want their pricing model back.

It's amazing that the industry has come so far that it now seems normal to be able to spin up a server, have it available in a minute or so, then bring it down when done with it and only pay by the minute or hour.</comment>


Dunning-Kruger on a massive scale: we're bad at recognizing misinformation - <AUTHOR> https://www.quod.us/article/people-overestimate-ability-to-recognize-fake-news <comment><USER2> Someone didn't get the memo.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12918362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12918362)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know of a better term to describe a cognitive bias where people are quantitatively overestimating their ability? If so I'll gladly use it in the future.</comment></comment>


Everything you need to know about the WannaCry / Wcry / WannaCrypt ransomware - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-wannacrypt-ransomware/ <comment> nv-vn What I still haven't had answered is how does the infection actually spread? The bottom of this article says not to open email attachments, but also mentions closing certain ports. Is this being activated accidentally by the users or is it spreading by some exploit?

<comment><USER2> "The malware spread via SMB... used by Windows machines to communicate with file systems over a network. An infected machine would then propagate the infection to other at-risk boxes [that have] not received the critical MS-17-010 security patch from Microsoft which was issued on the 14th of March ... In other words, you had to be almost 2 months behind in your patch cycle in order to get hit with this. Windows 10 machines were not subject to the vulnerability..."

More details starting about a quarter of the way into the article.

<comment><USER3> I am running Windows 10 1607 with build 14393.1198. My system update history says the latest update was "2017-05 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1607 for x64-based Systems (KB4019472)".

How to I verify if I have MS17-010 update installed? Do I need to upgrade my windows 10 1703(Creator's update) to get this patch automatically?

<comment><USER3> If anyone is wondering these are instructions[1] to check if you have MS17-010 update, and how to stop the attack vector[2].

[1] : [https://superuser.com/questions/1208741/how-to-check-if-a- sp...](https://superuser.com/questions/1208741/how-to-check-if-a-specific- windows-security-update-is-installed/1208772#1208772)

[2] : [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43952057/how-to- protect-f...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43952057/how-to-protect-from- wcrypt-wanna-cry)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible to just refuse the bitcoins that have this wallet in the ledger? That way they cannot spend the BTC they ransomed?

</comment><comment><USER5> The article points out that the phone-home domains this ransomware uses were generated by keyboard-mashing. Can we tell what keyboard layout was used?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's still unclear to me why this spread so much wider & faster than other exploits.

<comment><USER7> As soon as one machine is infected it will use windows shares to infect any other machine on the network that is vulnerable, without those users needing to do anything wrong. If you're un-patched anyone on the network gets infected you are infected.

HTH

<comment><USER6> Yes, that helped – thanks!

I had assumed that such a behavior would be common among worms; I guess Windows security must be generally better than I'd thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title of this post is just annoying. "Everything you need to know...".

Really? Everything? Will anything wrong happen if I will be a bit more curious than The Author?</comment>


Show HN: XS.js - an ultra-small CSS rule builder in 10 lines of JS - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/plugnburn/9229beaadbe23819f118 <comment><AUTHOR> Some explanations:

\- this is a companion to previously announced XT.js, but for dynamic CSS construction;

\- ES5 compatible;

\- no at-rule support at this point (as we are on JS, .matchMedia FTW, and dynamic @keyframes building is too specific task to multiply the size twice and more);

\- due to engine limitations we have to already insert the <style> element into <head> before we can even start appending rules, so, unlike XT.js, a reference to already inserted <style> is returned.</comment>


How Google builds web frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-google-builds-a-web-framework-5eeddd691dea#.wsda6mh7o <comment><USER2> maybe I'm missing something, but there's a lot here that don't sound right...

"When you employ trunk-based development in a single huge repo, you have only one version of everything. That's kind of obvious. It's still good to point it out here, though, because it means that — at Google — you can't have app FooBar that's using AngularDart 2.2.1 and another app BarFoo that's on 2.3.0. Both apps must be on the same version — the latest one."

I don't see how sharing the same repo implies everything uses the exact same dependencies. Why can't apps share the same repository and specify their own dependency versions?

"What if AngularDart needs to make a major breaking change (say, going from 2.x to 3.0) and that change breaks 74 thousand tests? Will the team go and fix all of them? Will they make changes to thousands of source files, most of which they haven't authored? Yes."

This just doesn't sound reasonable. I could see forcing framework devs to fix mission-critical stuff on some google's biggest projects, but every single one? Hundreds/thousands of projects?

"One of the cool things about having a sound type system is that your tooling can be much more useful. In sound Dart, tools can be sure that a variable is of a certain type, for example. For refactoring, that means that many changes can be completely automatic, with no need of confirmation from the developer."

I'm sure a good deal of API changes can be fixed with automated refactoring, but plenty can't! How do you automatically go from factory pattern to builder pattern for example. More importantly, I'm assuming developers don't have all 86TB of the code checked out locally and loaded up in an IDE... So how is this automated refactoring done?

<comment><USER3> I'm not really working on Google3 (the shared code base) but I hope the following answers might still be helpful.

Same repo: projects in Google are encouraged to use other project's code. You can only do that if the versions of their dependencies match. The general guideline is that all projects use the latest version and move in sync.

Breaking Changes: I have never been involved in such a huge breaking change, but I would expect that the conversion is done gradually. Ideally, some teams are also helping in the migration (or sign up as guinea pigs to test the latest versions).

Automatic refactoring: These refactorings are done with a tool called Rosie. Search for "Google refactoring, Rosie" to find some papers/documents about it. One of the first hits was this document: [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google- store...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores- billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext)</comment></comment>


The Complete Guide for Hiring Your Remote Development Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.15five.com/blog/complete-guide-hiring-remote-development-team/ <comment><USER2> Yes, we should put as much effort into hiring as we do capital spend planning!</comment>


Show HN: GitDuck – Learn from other developers by watching how they work - <AUTHOR> https://gitduck.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I'm Thiago, GitDuck co-founder and I'm here to answer any questions. We built GitDuck to help developers to learn from others as if they were in the same room.

We have been working remotely for a while and always struggled when we had to explain something about our code. "Should we talk in Slack? Wait, let me find the commit link... Let's do a Zoom? Oh, the person is offline now... :$" We miss how easy it was in the office to just stand up, watch another developer working and directly ask a question. We built GitDuck to solve this.

Check some examples: Bug fixing live: [https://gitduck.com/watch/5d6fbc7d5e065d2267a2789e](https://gitduck.com/watch/5d6fbc7d5e065d2267a2789e) Working in our extension [https://gitduck.com/watch/5d6f9a675e065d1394a2789a](https://gitduck.com/watch/5d6f9a675e065d1394a2789a) Asking for help: [https://gitduck.com/watch/5d11eda36cee9c35f57de99b](https://gitduck.com/watch/5d11eda36cee9c35f57de99b)

It works directly from VS Code (soon other IDEs) and combines both screen and source code sharing in one place. Besides being focused on developers, that's the main difference from doing a screen sharing call or uploading to YT/TW.

Let us know what you think, thanks!

<comment><USER2> Any plans to support Jetbrains?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very soon! A lot of people are asking for it (23% of the registered) and we internally also use WebStorm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks from the github repos like this is MacOS only right now, is that right?

I'm guessing mostly based on [https://github.com/gitduckhq/aperture- node](https://github.com/gitduckhq/aperture-node). If you're running in VS Code though I think you might be able to use web APIs to do this easily, e.g. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API).

Have you tried that? Either way, any ETA on Linux support? :D

<comment><USER4> Hey there, I'm Dragos, the other co-founder of GitDuck.

> Looks from the github repos like this is MacOS only right now, is that > right?

You guessed right, only MacOS (for now) because that's what we use ourselves

> I'm guessing mostly based on [https://github.com/gitduckhq/aperture- > node](https://github.com/gitduckhq/aperture-node).

We started using this package in our first implementation but we got rid of it as it was not really suiting our needs. We're using FFmpeg now.

> If you're running in VS Code though I think you might be able to use web > APIs to do this easily, e.g. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- > US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- > US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API) > Have you tried that?

We thought about that but afaik VSCode doesn't expose those APIs to the extensions :disappointed:

> Either way, any ETA on Linux support? :D

Yeah, we're working on it, we should come up with a version for Linux and Windows in around 2-3 weeks!

Thanks for your comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really cool concept!

Btw, I found a typo while registering. The email confirmation page says "Help sharing GitDuck to have earlier access to the platform." The word "sharing" is the wrong tense, "share" or "by sharing" would fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for spotting it! I've just deployed the fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So it's kinda like Twitch for coding?

<comment><AUTHOR> The big difference is that we link the source code to the video. So you can click on the code and watch exactly when the developer wrote it. We are also making it work directly from the IDE and GitDuck is 100% for developers.

<comment><USER7> Could this be done as a twitch extension?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the full experience, you couldn't select/fork/interact with the code. In Twitch/YouTube the watching experience is linear (you watch a video from start to the end). In GD the code defines what part of the video to be played.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> support for Xcode?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very soon! We started with VS Code and are following the demand from the people registered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also great for video documentation of your code!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! One side effect that we learned is that there isn't much difference between something we wrote 3 months ago or today. As we can replay any coding session, legacy code feels like a brand new commit.</comment></comment>


Evidence of Google blacklisting of left and progressive sites continues to mount - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/08/goog-a08.html <comment><USER2> So my bona-fides as one of HN's loud mostly-left-leaning people are pretty good, and--seriously, guys? _Truthout_? Like, at times they've historically had some alright commentary--I originally wanted to say "mostly by mistake"\--but it is one of the more obvious crank magnets I know of on the left. It's like a poor man's Alternet (and that's saying something).

If Google's dinging stuff like Truthout at the same time they're getting the right wing all aflutter at their epistemic closures being pushed down Google's SERPs, I don't really have a problem with that. The amount of information warfare directed at average citizens from all sides is titanic and Truthout/WorldNetDaily etc. have no inherent right to credibility among people literally unable (through many factors, not all of which are ignorance or stupidity--this stuff also just requires an investment of time to really understand and be able to critically evaluate, and time is at a premium when you are getting paid fifteen bucks an hour or less) to ascertain the prudence of that credibility for themselves.

<comment><USER3> > If Google's dinging stuff like Truthout at the same time they're getting the > right wing all aflutter at their epistemic closures being pushed down > Google's SERPs, I don't really have a problem with that.

I do, and I'm pretty left leaning as well. What bothers me is that Google is using human judgment rather than their supposedly infallible algorithms to punish certain sites to the advantage of others. There is a good chance that what they're doing to one side of the spectrum today will be done to the other at some point in the future.

<comment><USER2> Algorithms are human judgment put into code; there's no meaningful difference. I am all in favor of a neutral arbiter for search engines; one doesn't exist, though, so, there you go. It all comes back to people eventually.

There is a hierarchy of threats to deal with. The information war being directed at everyday citizens to empower _real scary dudes_ is being carried on the back of willful and knowing disinformation campaigns from both non- state and (external) state actors, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The defenses we have are limited, and while I agree with you that it very well may be problematic down the line: if that means I'm in a foxhole with Google, I can live with that for now and work to fight that threat later.

<comment><USER4> Furthermore, those algorithms are designed to reflect the prevailing winds of the market, if you will. So an unintended (?) bias, plus changes in backlinks, searches, etc. will be reflected in SERP. This happens all the time.

That said, nothing surprises me any more. I'm sure there are plenty of intelligence community "double agents" embedded in the tech Giants with any kind of influence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The left: "Google is trying to ban us" The right: "Google is trying to ban us"

And nobody stops to think maybe the problem is advertiser funding trends to sensationalist yet substantively bland content, it's gotta be political bias against us, the righteous underdogs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Usually when I click a link titled "Evidence of X", I expect to see, well.. evidence. I see some correlations being made of traffic reduction, with no sources, as well as some selective paraphrasing of guidelines to Google evaluators.

At a casual glance, the lack of evidence and sources makes it seem like Google's alleged approach of floating more authoritative content to the top is working, at least in this case.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is having a pretty extreme impact if their numbers are correct:

"Truthout, a not-for-profit news website that focuses on political, social, and ecological developments from a left progressive standpoint, had its readership plunge by 35 percent since April. The Real News , a nonprofit video news and documentary service, has had its search traffic fall by 37 percent. Another site, Common Dreams , last week told the WSWS that its search traffic had fallen by up to 50 percent."

"As extreme as these sudden drops in search traffic are, they do not equal the nearly 70 percent drop in traffic from Google seen by the WSWS."

It would be nice to have some independent verification of these numbers, if only because some will doubt their veracity due to the source(s) being considered part of the political "fringe."

</comment><comment><USER3> Which political side gets blacklisted isn't even relevant, what is relevant is the power that companies like Google, Facebook and a few others hold and how media giving airtime can make or break political candidates, swing elections and quietly manipulate public opinion one way or another. This makes them powerplayers in the political arena without any checks on that power.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article leaves open the possibility that left and progressive readers are switching to other search engines.

We cannot draw our own conclusions unless we also know about changes in total traffic to the sites, in addition to change in number of visitors referred by Google search.

<comment><USER4> Or, just getting similar news elsewhere. As a fringe cause (if you will) goes mainstream (so to speak) some of the core infrastructure gets left behind.

You sell yellow widgets. They catch on. I start to sell them as well. I could very likely steal market share from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't see any evidence in this, it is heresay with numbers.

Even if the numbers are accurate maybe there was just an algorithm update in Google's search.

They have no evidence there was malice and the numbers they have aren't that strong.

</comment><comment><USER10> Related discussion from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338)

</comment><comment><USER11> Go google!</comment>


If you're drinking tap water, you're consuming plastic pollutants - <AUTHOR> https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-05/if-youre-drinking-tap-water-youre-consuming-plastic-pollutants <comment><USER2> Also watch out for the dihydrogen monoxide, No matter how good your city's water treatment plant is they can't get all of the chemicals out.</comment>


What is the best tool to draw an idea? - <AUTHOR>

I have one twitter based idea which I have put in words. But I would like to have a prototype which contains screens and will show how exactly the homepage, other pages will look like. Basically it should explain the complete flow of the application. What is the best and easiest tool to do that? <comment><USER2> Sounds mad, but even though we have CS3 and most other graphics/design packages, we use the drawing tools in Powerpoint a lot to do quick web page layouts or site designs, regardless of what PP's actually meant for.

The reasons are this: anyone can use the tools without have to learn anything, it's really quick, the way it works tends to make you keep things simple (very important), you can create a template page and then cmd+V it across all the other pages (slides), you can scroll through the pages (try doing that in Photoshop), easy output to pdf/jpgs etc if you want to share and of course if you want to present the design...well 'nuff said.

If you're designing for Twitter I'm assuming that graphically you're doing something very clean and simple. This method helps you keep it that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a cool idea. Never thought of PP in this way. Will surely give it a try.

<comment><USER2> Here's one we're working on to give you an idea: <http://www.movix.co.uk/reelsapp.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're on Mac, OmniGraffle! <http://balsamiq.com/> on the web is good for prototyping as well. Windows, hmmm .... Vizio???

<comment><USER4> Wow I've been using pencil but I keep losing the paper. This is good!

<comment><USER5> OmniGraffle and Balsamiq are great for higher fidelity prototyping, but I find that the precision it allows and the care I end up taking pushing my mouse gets in the way of getting ideas down.

I usually stick to a fat pen and paper or whiteboard. When I'm done, I scan each page or take photos of sections of the whiteboard and then load them up as a presentation in Google Docs (easy to share with partners).

No losing papers or accidental erasures there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pencil

<comment><USER7> I thought paper might also be handy but on deeper consideration, I realized you are right.

"I have this twitter-based idea. I've brought a pencil so you can stab your eyes out while I explain"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> HTML

<comment><AUTHOR> HTML is good but I guess it may take more time

<comment><USER8> Yes it may take a day or two, but there is nothing like communicating an interface and what you actually want to do with an actual pre-prototype. I view it as a step before communicating with code see [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating- with-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with- code.html)

It will also help later on in allocating tasks and workflow to other members of the team. As you develop code just update the prototype.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool</comment></comment></comment></comment>