Why can't we just admit that journalists are human? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/08/31/why-cant-we-just-admit-that-journalists-are-human/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure journalists deserve the benefit of the doubt. The press in the United States over the last 15 years has anemically covered two wars, the burst of the housing and related securities bubbles, the crippling government corruption associated with said bubbles, warrant-less wire-tapping, executive orders to assassinate US citizens, and the US military playing hopscotch with international boundaries.

All while creating an atmosphere of fear that empowers government to go further when the role of the press is supposed to hold government in check.

I'll admit that journalists are human when someone can show me a journalist. It's been a long time since I've seen one doing the job.

<comment><USER3> But what good is journalism if people don't read it or believe it? Did you catch the game last night? Dancing with the Stars? American Idol? My cat pix on Facebook? Who wants boring bad news where there are so many distractions to be had?

Probably the best "mainstream" journalism is coming from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and they're already preaching to the choir.

It makes me so sad.

<comment><USER4> I would disagree that DS and CR are journalists. They are smart, discuss political and socio-economic events, and while they do partake in investigative reporting, they are not in the same league of hard-reporting by as performed by the AP, propublica and other foundations, and local big city papers.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, not in the proper context of research or depth of the parties you cited.

If journalism is considered to be "making people aware of what is going on", then I believe my contention has merit, especially when it comes to the distasteful arena of politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do journalists _want_ to be seen as human? I doubt it.

There's been plenty of exposes from insiders over the years claiming that news organizations are comically biased, both in their choice of what to cover and how they cover it. Yet journalists are still _seen_ as fairly impartial, making their biased messages more effective.

Firing guys like this one is just self-defense for the journalistic profession as a whole. Too many journalists like him, and they won't be able to get their message across.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a libertarian (small "l"). I'm liberal on most social issues but conservative on fiscal issues, so I tend to vote Republican. Do you know how many times media figures have implied that I'm a racist by proxy because of that? Calling someone a racist used to be a serious charge, but it's so over- and mis-used in this campaign season that I can't take it seriously anymore. Most of the time I just shrug it off, but when the Yahoo guy joked that Republicans delight in black people drowning, I was pissed. Really pissed.

I'm really getting sick of being called a racist because I prefer a smaller, less intrusive government. If the Yahoo guy has such a binary vision of the U.S., he should seek out work in opinion journalism. And of course, Yahoo was right to fire him. He offended roughly half of Yahoo's potential customer base, and no sane organization wants that kind of PR nightmare.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that there's so few options to chose from that chances are whoever you vote for won't share lots of your opinions, and their party possibly even less.

In most of life you can avoid having people as friends, or working for companies, and so on, based on these issues. You probably wouldn't find yourself defending a friend as "yes he's racist and homophobic, but he's also <good points here", whereas when picking a political party you end up with bad points.

I get that not all Republicans are racist, but with your party having given voices to so many far-right wackos, it's hard not to tar you all with the same brush sometimes.

<comment><USER8> > I get that not all Republicans are racist, but with your party having given > voices to so many far-right wackos, it's hard not to tar you all with the > same brush sometimes.

Yeah, like Westburo Baptist Church, David Duke, and the Truthers.

Oops, they're all Democrats. As are the New Black Panthers, who actually physically threatened folks at voting places during the 2008 elections. As are the "black bloc" folks.

I'm not saying that there aren't far-right wackos, but there are just as many, if not more, wackos that are Democrats.

And, Dem-affiliates are committing the majority of the political violence these days. Remember WTO in Seattle? Isaac kept this down during the Repub convention but the Dem convention won't be as lucky.

Care to explain why Dems don't get tarred with that brush?

<comment><USER7> My first answer is that it's because Democrats don't campaign on these things, stuff like homophobia.

The wider answer is simply that people don't hear about these things as much. Maybe some Democrats do campaign with far-right policies, but... I'm not aware of them. Wesburo Baptist Church for example, I've never heard anything about their members being democrats, though I would query that claim given they aren't a political group, so even if some of them are, likely not all of them... not to mention Wikipedia tells me their general opinion is that Obama is going to hell for being "the antichrist".

End of the day I've heard plenty of data points for Republican wackos, and few for Democrat ones, so that's where my opinion comes from. Maybe it's because I'm English that I haven't heard a different story, but plenty of Americans I know have the same opinion.

<comment><USER8> > My first answer is that it's because Democrats don't campaign on these > things, stuff like homophobia.

Oh really? A cite would be nice.

The official Republican position on gay marriage is exactly the same as Bill Clinton's. Obama had that position until about six months ago.

Are they anti-homosexual?

> not to mention Wikipedia tells me their general opinion is that Obama is > going to hell for being "the antichrist".

The occupy folks have a similar opinion of Obama these days and no one suggests that they're not good democrats/leftists.

Yes, there are some intermural arguments, but when it comes down to it, they're democrats, as are the Larouche folks and a bunch of other wackos.

> The wider answer is simply that people don't hear about these things as > much. ... End of the day I've heard plenty of data points for Republican > wackos, and few for Democrat ones, so that's where my opinion comes from.

That's a very different argument. (Data point - would you say that The Guardian reports everything of interest? Or, do they have a position that they argue?)

While your opinion may be understandable, it isn't actually based on reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read quite an interesting article recently about how the newspaper industry is changing due to consolidation. (It's here, but behind a paywall: <http://harpers.org/archive/2012/09/0084046>)

This article traces the cause of a demand for objectivity in journalism to the shift, in the 1960s and '70s, away from Citizen Kane-style private ownership to corporate ownership of newspapers: "Publicly traded conglomerates such as Times Mirror, Knight-Ridder, and Gannett bought up large swaths of the industry. And once shareholder returns became the priority, corporate overseers began pressing for consolidation, newsroom cuts, and other vaunted `efficiencies.'...To be fair, this new model had its upside for civic life: a press more focused on objectivity and sales-generating scoops than on promoting any particular proprietor's ideology, personal investments, or pet causes."

The downside of that shift has been the disappearance of markets with multiple independent newspapers. According to the article, the percentage of U.S. cities with at least two competing daily newspapers fell from 58 percent in 1910 to 2 percent (!) in 1971. I'm sure it's even lower now. The article goes on to trace the chilling effects this disappearance of local competition has had as corporate conglomerates, no longer as profitable as they once were, sell off small local papers that now have a monopoly on their local market to private owners with political motivations.

But the point relevant here is that the expectation of "objectivity" from journalists is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that has been magnified to inhuman levels by media consolidation. When you only have one place to turn for your local news, _any_ identifiable perspective looks like a slant. (A further confirming data point: I once read an essay by George Orwell, who in many columns for the _Tribune_ happily and openly discusses the paper's political slant, in which he lamented the steep decline in the number of daily papers in London...to something like a dozen.) Journalistic objectivity is almost a straw man, a stand in for the thing we really need in the news business: a greater number of independent perspectives.

On the other hand, I have often heard a claim that I think has some truth to it but may seem opposed to this one. The ubiquity of modern media puts media consumers in a paradox of choice: since there's so many choices for where to get news, people tend to just select the one source whose perspective they agree with, and ignore the others. That claim, if true, would seem to contradict the idea that what media consumers really want is a greater number of perspectives.

But I think, actually, the two claims are compatible. First of all, the claim that the demand for journalistic objectivity is a product of the decline of competition in news is, in the first instance, a claim about local news markets, whereas I mostly see the "paradox of choice" argument made in connection with national news media. Second, to the extent that the claims are about the same media sources or markets, they are only incompatible if the paradox-inducing array of choices for media are truly providing independent perspectives. Having a lot of choices only leads to paradox if you can't figure out what differentiates the options. That, anyway, has been my own experience: I don't generally seek national news from multiple sources because, whenever I look at other options, they all seem to be reporting the same thing in much the same way.

In short, it looks to me like the answer to both the unrealistic demand for objectivity and the paradox of media choice is to have a greater number of independent perspectives in news media. I hesitate to summarize this as a need for "more competition" in news media; there's a lot of competition already between the corporate conglomerates already, but that hasn't led to more independent perspectives. We need more of a certain _kind_ of competition, competition that I think will only arise among local, independently-owned news sources.

<comment><USER10> Having a greater number of independent perspectives that lack objectivity is like having a greater number of clocks that are all set to different times. The advantage is illusory -- there's still only one correct time, and now there's an even lesser chance that you're looking at the clock that tells it.

<comment><USER9> Obviously, proposing that we need more independent perspectives does not mean that I think journalists should abandon their professional ethics, or that there's no distinction between news reporting and opinion pieces. Journalists still need to report the facts, and in that sense, we _should_ expect them to be objective.

Unfortunately, reporting the news is usually not like reading a clock. Composing any article involves making a variety of decisions in a variety of circumstances -- where to be, who to quote, which connections to prior events to draw, how much background to report -- that all affect what goes into an article and what does not, and which give it an inherent perspective. Two journalists might write articles which consist entirely of reporting objective facts, yet provide quite different narratives about the same events.

The demand for "objectivity" becomes unreasonable when it asks for even this curational perspective to be eliminated. There is plenty of room for a greater number of independent perspectives in our news sources, even _within_ journalists' obligations to objectivity and "straight reporting."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see that this opinion piece by a journalist (so described in the biographical squib on GigaOM) has reached the front page of Hacker News. As a definition, I'll say that a journalist is "a reporter who writes for an editor," a definition I heard quite a few years ago to deny that certain solo bloggers are journalists. I think the issue of writing for an editor is important, because I have been a reporter who wrote for an editor (at an obscure company in Taiwan that published English-language trade magazines for international businessmen procuring products in Taiwan). I later became an editor for the same company, and learned how to read raw manuscripts from cub journalists while still doing some beat reporting of my own.

Journalism is not easy. Finding a source who will tell you the facts and not lie to your face is harder than you might think. Finding reference materials that accurately represent the world of reality is still not trivially easy, even in this age of the World Wide Web. (Some subjects, notably some medical subjects, are notoriously misrepresented on the Web. Wikipedia is plagued by edit wars

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars>

and is still not based on reliable sources for many of its key amateur-edited articles.)

Even if a journalist carefully gathers correct facts about the external world, the journalist is swimming uphill, because the journalist is writing for readers who on many subjects already have their minds made up. I almost think the title of this submission should be followed up with a submission titled "Can't human beings acknowledge that all humans are human?" because confirmation bias

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>

(yeah, this is a rare example of a good Wikipedia article on a controversial subject) is a common feature of the thinking of all human beings, so it's not easy for anybody to learn new knowledge simply from observing the facts of the world. Persistent misconceptions persist because they fit the cognitive biases of the human mind.

So rather than give in to the cognitive bias of tribalism, decrying journalists as members of the other tribe, while praising HN participants as smarter than journalists, I'll suggest that each of us lay out our observations of facts, examine one another's statements, and generally proceed with tolerant awareness of our own foibles and yet bold pursuit of truth.

On the issue of the submitted article, if someone employed by a news organization makes a factually unsupported comment slurring a big part of his audience, I'm okay with his employers seeking a new person to fill that position. There is a meaningful distinction between a journalist, a reporter who writes for an editor, and a freelance commentator, and if the person who makes off-the-cuff remarks disparaging other people gets good enough at that, he can gain a job like Stephen Colbert's--IF he shows a sense of humor about himself as gentle as Colbert's.

<comment><USER12> I find the 'strategy' of defense in the article rather odd, and misplaced. The problem with the article is it frames the issue as one of "bias" but , as you point out, that is a strawman, and this is not your normal case of Bias. Its not the reporting of some true things at the omission of others. Its not asking questions that lead to a similar result.

(1) Fabrication vs Bias. The "journalist" has no data to support his suggestion. It is malicious in intent. It isn't that it is a "bias" to one side or the other. Its the tactical depoloyment of that. Making stuff up and putting words into people's mouths are not _reporting_ the _news_. Its not even biased reporting. Its propoganda.

(2) Humor defence. Is weak. Its a racially tinged remark. What if it was sexist? What if he was Joking about rape? What if he was _fabricating_ about rape as a joke? Make jokes about rape and you will end up in court for creating a _hostile work environment_. [edit: Political affiliation is not a protected class, but do you want to create a nasty environment based on political beliefs? Even if its ok in _news_ , what about _engineering_? Recruiting Strategy?]

(3) PR spin. The individual that was fired was a part of the eco-system. He surely has friends and connections that he's worked with. Do these people also look foolish now? Probably, a bit. We should expect some articles coming forth to protect the subjects reputation a bit. By doing this, the authors are of course acting in their own self interest. And, the way the article puts it, this Yahoo! was dismissed somewhat with predudice (They counted to 1...) and most folks don't want to be associated with that.

(4) CEO Spotlight. The bias was anti one party. Thus, implicitly, it was pro the other. Even if this remark was in your favour, would you want to be associated with manipulative, fabricating, bull-baiter employee? Would you want to have this guy be in charge of the _News_?

At a professional level, Yahoo handled the situation well. Like a band-aid, the did one-quick ouch. At a personal level, you sort of feel bad for the guy that got fired. But the fact that it bordered on an ethics issue directly related to his job performance tempers the sympathy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Should journalists be allowed to have opinions? If so, when and where — and > how — should they be allowed to express them?

How about they start with "in my opinion" or some other obvious marker, and everything else should be assumed to be fact?

> Why can't we just admit that journalists are human?

Those of us with a bit of experience already know that journalists are "human" and that these transgressions are made, and will read the same story from a bunch of other outlets to compare.

Of course the general public is not forgiving when it's your damn job to overcome the human impulse to be partial. Do we forgive judges for doing the same? I hope not. You've been trained to cope with and recognize your personal biases, and to at least give a best attempt to separate them out and maybe put them to the side.

What's even more frustrating is the "I'm only human" defense when you're not so sure that the manipulation was non-deliberate, to incite an increase in readership. I think there is a reasonable due diligence that can be easily identified as done or not done. If you haven't, then you don't get the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><USER14> > How about they start with "in my opinion" or some other obvious marker, and > everything else should be assumed to be fact?

Sadly, I think the problem is that journalists have the same dilemmas as teachers. If you're a teacher, you're generally considered to be a teacher whether you're at work or not, so you have to uphold some arbitrary standard for public behavior 24 hours a day (i.e., make sure no photos of you being drunk while on vacation show up on something like Facebook).

A "journalist" who isn't perceived as being "objective" 24 hours a day (impossible) will rightly or wrongly be criticized as having their opinions bias the work they produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem here is not that the journalist is human, had an opinion, or has shown a little emotion, the problem is that he mindlessly bashed subjects of his reports revealing bias that is most likely crippling his ability to properly do the job and apparently influencing published materials.

<comment><USER16> > _The problem here is not that the journalist is human, had an opinion, or > has shown a little emotion, the problem is that he mindlessly bashed > subjects of his reports revealing bias that is most likely crippling his > ability to properly do the job and apparently influencing published > materials._

Yes, whereas cunningly (instead of "mindlessly") bashing subject of your reports gets you promoted.

Fact is, almost all news stories have an agenda, and all newspapers cater to various interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, I haven't read the articles yet, and it's the next thing I'm going to do, but I would like to say some words : Admitting journalist are human is not a problem for me, I can understand that they have differents opinions of mine, political views etc... but there is three things which come regularly and that I can't accept from them and consider as a professional mistake : -to not study a subject widely before writing a paper or when making a report. (as a daily reader of newspaper and media website I've come across many of those mistakes...) -to not apologize or at least recognize for their mistakes when it's proven that what they have written is wrong... (just a recent exemple, how many media are going to acknowledge that the picture they used was not the good one in the issue of a christian girl accused of blasphemy in Pakistan ?) -to claim of being "objective" for some of them...

And I'm not saying that all journalist have those flaws...

</comment><comment><USER18> > Should journalists be allowed to have opinions[1][3]?

I'll play devil's advocate and say No.

> Should scientists be allowed to have opinions?

> Should programmers be allowed to have opinions?

No. You can't just -believe- that PostgreSQL is faster than MySQL or that ruby is easier to code in than java just like you can't just -believe- that our lifestyle is leading to the increase in global temperature.

Would you trust a programmer who answers a question with "Well I feel like X is true, therefore that is what we should do."

> Should journalists, scientists or programmers be allowed to have INFORMED > opinions[2]?

Yes. Of course. That's our job.

"After doing the research there is no clear consensus on the performance differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. However there are certain concrete and philosophical differences that lead me to choose PostgreSQL, they are as follows..."

Journalists need to be smarter than the reader. They need to give an opinion that isn't just pandering to their readers (or their investors). They need to provide insight beyond the facts regardless of what that does to their own personal beliefs.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion>

[2] - "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."― Harlan Ellison

[3] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Im_entitled_to_my_opinion>

<comment><USER19> > Would you trust a programmer who answers a question with "Well I feel like X > is true, therefore that is what we should do."

Absolutely. Preparing formal proofs for every possible option is logistically impossible. A good programmer will have an intuition and form an opinion about which options are better suited for the given problem. With that, even the best programmers can get it wrong sometimes - they too are only human.

<comment><USER20> You're conflating two things - in one situation, an objective answer exists ('Which database is best for our purposes, for some understood definition of 'best'?), and the means for identifying that answer are clear (ie, performance testing/profiling), but it's logistically impractical to carry out that process.

In the other, there _is_ no objective answer: even the most debated political topics are inherently subjective, because the tradeoffs involved are value judgements (ie, whose satisfaction is worth more? is X/Y/Z immoral?) and there's no process - however slow - that will prove an 'objective' answer to, say, whether abortion/gay marriage is 'moral', or whether it is 'moral' to tax the rich to feed the poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _Yahoo fired its former Washington bureau chief on Wednesday for a joking > comment he made during a video broadcast from the Republican convention. > Isn't it about time we admitted that journalists have emotions and opinions, > rather than expecting them to be impartial robots?_

The worst is the hypocrisy of it. All major political news stories have ten tons of hidden agendas, prejudices and interests they cater to, but when a guy makes a joking comments it's suddenly too much...

<comment><USER21> But isn't it like dropping the F-bomb at work? It's a matter of professional standards, just something one doesn't do.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tips/advice on quitting a tech job - <AUTHOR> Its been a while since I've changed jobs and as I prepare to leave my current (tech) company to join another (tech) company I'm wondering what advice, strategies, and "Gee I wish I had done X when I moved on..." others have out there specific to the tech community.
I've read a lot of the general advice out there: "leave on good terms", "make it about you not them", "give a reasonable notice period" etc and appreciate that advice.  But I'm wondering what other issues are particular to our sector.  For instance I'd like to keep my phone/laptop and I'm sure my company would really appreciate a 4 week notice period, would it be aggressive to do something to the effect of "I'm leaving and would like to give 4 weeks notice, I'd also like to keep my laptop/phone for free or exceptionally cheap..."
I like everybody there, have been well liked myself and have been a long-time valuable engineer to the company; I have already accepted another offer and am uninterested in a counter-offer <comment><USER2> Why do you want to keep your phone and laptop? At least to my ears, that sounds odd. Why should they not want to use that for your replacement?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea there is "I'm giving 4 weeks to do you a solid, don't you want to give me my phone/laptop to return the favor?"</comment></comment>


Making Chips at 3nm and Beyond - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/making-chips-at-3nm-and-beyond/ <comment><AUTHOR> What's next in chip scaling?</comment>


On the evolution of programming style: How far C++ has moved from its C roots - <AUTHOR> http://blog.feabhas.com/2012/03/on-the-evolution-of-programming-style/ <comment><USER2> Let me give one other way of doing it: "C++ without classes"

        std::pair<double, double> findRoot(double a, double b, double c) {
            if (a == 0.0)
                throw std::invalid_argument("a has value 0.0!");

            double root1 = (-b + sqrt(b*b - 4*a*c)) / (2*a);
            double root2 = (-b - sqrt(b*b - 4*a*c)) / (2*a);

            return std::pair<double, double>(root1, root2);
        }

It seems too many C++ programmers see a problem and think "Hey, let's use classes!".

<comment><USER3> What's std::pair if it isn't a class?

<comment><USER4> a struct ;-) ... <http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/std/utility/pair/>

<comment><USER3> I was waiting for that! :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The subject matter is interesting enough. But if it's a discussion on style, why is the code presented so unbelievably bad?

Needless duplication of code; simple one-line declarations (i.e. a struct with three doubles) spread out over 5; empty constructors with trivial initializer lists defined outside the class header; needless empty destructors defined (again, outside the class declaration) for classes without virtual functions; "} else {" spread out across three lines (pet peeve of mine).

The disaster of an Error enumerant deserves a paragraph all by itself. It's got only two values, "OK" and "FAIL". Guess which one evaluates to boolean truth? (And yes, I'm aware of how errno and the like work -- but error codes tend to be something other than "FAIL").

This looks like code generated by an IT employee at a local soap manufacturing company, not something to be seriously considered by people interested in C++ evolution.

<comment><USER6> > This looks like code generated by an IT employee at a local soap > manufacturing company

Too bad you go and ruin a perfectly reasonable comment with that crap.

<comment><USER5> Which moral calculus allows you to call someone else's work "crap", where I can't cast aspersions on the quality of technology adoption in the soap manufacturing industry?

<comment><USER6> I didn't know the phrase "cast aspersions", so I went to look it up. It means "to slander".

I'm sorry I slandered your slander.

<comment><USER5> To be clear: I was just pointing out the hypocrisy in pulling out my (admittedly) mildly ad hominem slur comparing the OP author with an IT robot and calling it "crap". You can't reasonably demand civil discourse if you aren't willing to practice it.

But to be honest: I don't think my quip was really that bad. Did I hit too close to home? Do you do soap automation?

<comment><USER7> Mseebach was insulting your words, based on their content.

You were insulting people, based on their jobs.

And now you're attacking mseebach. In truth you don't sound very repentant.

<comment><USER5> So my crime is the use of a mild (and very common) ad hominem in a context where I would expect most people would see the humor, not being uncivil? And it's OK to call things "crap" just so long as I don't make an ad hominem argument in doing so?

Sorry, your argument is steaming crap. The idea that one can't invoke the _pervasive_ metaphor of bad IT-generated code (or, I guess, imply that the local soap industry might do it) but that it's OK to flame away at the author who does is just dumb.

And for the record: I don't believe I expressed any repentence. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It should be noted, it's very clear his executable sizes are for a Debug compilation. I tossed the same code for the final example into VC10, and sure enough in release mode the compiled size is 10KB, and in debug it's just less than the size he stated. This is for 64-bit.

I'm not sure what point it serves to compare debug mode executable sizes, but that should be clearly stated in the article. As other people stated, the final example really ought to lose the wrapping class in the spirit of C++11 brevity and functional decomposition.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know the point is to discuss style, but I wish he had done it in a way that didn't include a textbook example of floating point programming that can yield inaccurate results. An accurate way wouldn't be so difficult:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_equation#Floating_poi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_equation#Floating_point_implementation)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting that with a modern C++ compiler all of these programs are equally valid. This is both the biggest strength and the biggest flaw of C++.

I imagine the size differences are overhead from bringing in STL and maybe template instantiation and are relatively fixed? I would have liked to see performance benchmarks as well as executable size to see if the program has gotten slower, faster, or remained basically the same.

<comment><USER11> No, the majority of that overhead is from the use of `iostream`s (which are known to be pretty bloated compared to `printf` and friends), the use of exceptions (try/catch is a morass of stack-unwinding code), and the added bloat of class information (RTTI and symbols in particular).

If it were compiled with full optimizations and the final binaries stripped, they'd be much closer in size. Moreso if exceptions are disabled or if the class is replaced with a simple function taking/returning tuples.

<comment><USER2> Not only is iostream bloated, but it often injects a static constructor into every translation unit (which visibly angers the – usually calm – LLVM style guide[1]). Oh and it's really godawfully slow unless you turn off a magic flag somewhere[2].

Friends don't let friends use iostream.

[1]: <http://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#ll_iostream>

[2]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9371238/why-is-reading- li...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9371238/why-is-reading-lines-from- stdin-much-slower-in-c-than-python/9371717#9371717)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like the author of the C solution has never written a lot of C, but too much C++. ;-D

</comment><comment><USER13> Pointless... Because at the time you want to suck out performance of any of those, you would have to stick your guns to the provided macros or inline functions from Intel, ARM, IBM (PowerPC/AltiVec), etc. - and reimplement this using them - SSE2, AVX, whatever.

This is not even funny....

And packing three doubles in structures - good programming technique? Okay.. That's enough (it might be good sometimes, but not always)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the overusage of classes is directly related to schools teaching Java instead of C or lisp or... well anything else.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a dumb example. Should have used a root finder. C sucks with those.

</comment><comment><USER16> Page not found :/ Does anyone have a cache of the article's text?

<comment><USER17> Here you go, courtesy of bing cache: <http://pastehtml.com/view/bswjqr9ry.html>

<comment><USER16> Thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Streak.com - Do sales, support and bug tracking all inside Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.streak.com <comment><USER2> Nicely done. Two concerns: 1) exposure to breakage when Gmail changes, 2) potential introduction of protection against invasive integration.

Google has three options: 1) turn a blind eye, 2) block deep integration (same game AOL played with AIM), or 3) introduce client-side integration API. #1 is temporary. #2 is nightmare for Streak. #3 requires strategy change by Google.

[update] Rapport doesn't have this problem because they are using Outlook PIA to work directly with Outlook object model.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great timing! We just hired a customer support person this week, and we started using HelpScout.net, but we aren't finding that it's very polished.

We're going to give Streak a shot, and hopefully give you some good feedback.

P.S. You are missing a question mark on your home page: "Want to know where the customer is in the sales pipeline."

<comment><USER4> OH please tell us how it turns out. It's one thing for me to take a stroll through myself and another thing for someone with a running business to actually try it out with real data and clients and use cases. This looks simple, and I LOVE simple. I'd rather work with something simple and a few features than something complex with a lot of features. Features are useless if I'm afraid of them or have to educate myself to learn them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been using Streak to help with hiring, fundraising, and business development at MixRank. It works really well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone that needs to stay on top of their email.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been trying to manage customers with emails for a while. What a nightmare. This looks like a great product. But, I'm not sure I'm willing to share all my emails.

I think a good work around would be to create a gmail account specifically for handling client stuff. Or you guys could offer email address which are already gmail integrated.

Just some notes. Great product, props from Canada :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Using streak in a shared gmail account is pretty popular and works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exactly what I was looking for!

But please, please start charging for your product. I don't want this product to disappear in a year when you run out of funding and still don't have a sustainable business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Taking a quick poll here - how much would everyone be willing to pay for this?

<comment><USER8> It would be great to have this free for individuals - so that they can see if they love it or not. Either make it completely free for them, or free for 2-3 micro-funnels, or free for managing ~250 leads (like highrise).

After that it would be ideal to charge a little ($5/month) for the next 2-3 users, and more for larger teams. Ofcourse, give more features as the team sizes grow.

Note that your market is larger than a CRM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Already got my support and deployments team using Streak and its been an amazing experience! Constantly adding new features and making our lives easier.

</comment><comment><USER10> Finally, it looks like someone nailed it, or at least has a great start. We want to work inside email, not launch a separate app.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just started using it for our hiring funnel at AeroFS and I already love it. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks extremely cool, and I'm really tempted!

In light of recent things like Path etc. (and without insinuating anything!) - could you clarify what information is sent via Streak's servers, if any?

<comment><USER13> In order to use Streak you have to give oauth access to your inbox. We use that data in order to link you to your emails from within Streak.

Specifically on Streak's servers we store message meta data but no email contents.

<comment><USER14> Security and Trade Secrets are my major concern as well. Meta data could mean "gmail message ID", but it could also mean "all header info, including message title & users emailed." Of course, that's in addition to the value of the additional data (box title, notes, "deal size") that streak is being used for.

Privacy policies are not very comforting on their own... Heck, "everyone" has one! I might suggest some more details, perhaps on your website, to satisfy wavering customers. So far there isn't much to make a businessperson feel comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks nice! But I can't watch any of the videos because clicking on the play button (in the lightbox) closes the lightbox :-) I'm on Safari 5.1.3 on OS X.

<comment><USER16> I have the same issue on Safari 5.2 on OS X 10.7

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently the youtube embed object takes a while to load on Safari, we're looking into it....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've used google apps/gmail for years, in my large previous organization and currently in our 100+ organization. Obviously you know this, but this type of "glue" is great - I'm glad you guys took advantage of this. I am in the market place daily, there is NOTHING that compares to this so far. I am excited to see where you take this!

</comment><comment><USER18> I was literally thinking earlier today that I wish someone would write this app.

Unfortunately it doesn't play well with Rapportive profiles for me (HD Beach theme, comfortable sizing) - seems to be some jumping over each other.

I realise it must be very hard making bootstrap GMail addons play with each other but it would be great to use the two together

<comment><USER13> We do play nice with Rapportive usually, but ya difficult to test all different configurations. Will have to troubleshoot that with your specific settings.

<comment><USER18> I've also got boomerang in there too. You've got an heroic job on your hands ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really really cool.

Minor copy edit on your splash page - there's a 't' on the end of 'messages' in this section:

Streak Plays Nice Streak never alters any data in your Gmail. No extra labels, and no moving around your messagest. Streak adds a layer of organization on top of your email and stores this separately and securely in our own cloud.

</comment><comment><USER20> You need chrome 15 or better for the extension to install. If you go go there and click on the install button without chrome 15, it generates a javascript exception with no visual or textual clues to the user that is going on. Person on chat was responsive.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can you provide some insight as to how this is implemented? Do you use contextual gadgets?

<comment><USER13> Contextual gadgets are pretty limited. If you want to get started in Gmail the best way I recommend is to use James Yu's excellent Gmailr (<https://github.com/jamesyu/gmailr>). We did some prototyping with that. Since then we've taken that core code and rewrote 90% of it to fit our needs and make our own platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks incredibly useful and well designed. I've shown my CEO; perhaps we'll be incorporating Streak soon. Two copy niggles:

"Streak is great for sales, but did you know you can also use it for: hiring candidates, handling email support, organizing dealflow, fundraising and organizing your personal projects."

This is a question - add a question mark to the end (bonus, invented by Dr. Evil)

"We put indicators right in your inbox to show you which emails have to do with which deals you are working on."

Awkward / run-on. Try - We added email indicators showing you the association to the deals on which you are working. (remove the wordy noun modifiers and prepositional phrases)

</comment><comment><USER23> What a beautiful homepage. Professional and...just beautiful!

Would this be compatible with Fluent.io?

<comment><USER13> Fluent.io appears to be a different client to Gmail. Right now we only work with Gmail's webclient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> nice product. Just out of curiosity, how exactly do you attach your app to Gmail? The way I imagine it: basically, this is just a big javascript application which inserts itself inside the gmail view using DOM manipulation?

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks cool - although my cynical assumption is that this product a) would work great in demos with a simple number of folders,etc and b) will be bitch to maintain given when Google changes the UI or generated code / structure.

Having looked at the gmail generated source there isn't a human generated component so something trivial like $('#button_bar').appendChild(..) doesn't work requiring more clever approaches (and perhaps the streak guys are insanely clever). If I had the time I'd pick apart the extension source to see how streak works.

<comment><USER13> Trust me, it took a little while but we've been able to tame the beast known as Gmail's DOM. We have some pretty sophisticated infrastructure to handle the different versions and updates to Gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any plans for Salesforce integration? Can you use SF.com as a backend?

</comment><comment><USER27> I've used the Beta for a multi-user sales pipeline. Worked wonders!

</comment><comment><USER28> Some dreams come true. Even when you are not hacking on them.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good work, but I think good for Google apps users (only?)....

<comment><AUTHOR> co-founder of streak here: streak works with both google apps and non apps accounts. We've noticed some of our early users using it for non business purposes as well (task management, event planning, etc).

<comment> mike-cardwell Exactly how did you "notice" this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our users told us. As we were building features, we'd email our users and ask them for feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Something I've been thinking I should do, but never got round to. Good idea, will give it a spin. BTW, I was thinking about working on this because a number of Mortgage Brokers I have interacted with in the past have all been using gmail and they all seem to be in desperate need of a CRM solution that integrates with gmail. So, there, a segment for you to target.

BTW, found a typo on the main page -- "messagest".

</comment><comment><USER31> This looks really useful, but some parts of a pipeline I might need external people (who are probably not using gmail) to action/move items along a pipeline.

It might be cool if you could generate a URL for a pipeline for someone so they can collaborate (change statuses/comment) without needing to use gmail. Although I haven't really thought of all the consequences of this.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is fantastic. Glad you guys came along. I was wondering why it took so freaking long for something like this to show up.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is awesome! Thanks for the great work.

</comment><comment><USER34> Login screen is showing an odd domain name, apps.googleuserscontent.com, is requesting authorization to my account.

      The site XXXXX.apps.googleusercontent.com is requesting access to your Google Account for the product(s) listed below

<comment><USER35> That's a Google domain, and the numbers represent a specific Chrome extension... in this case, Streak.

<comment><USER34> I realize it's a Google domain, but not a trusted Google domain.

If you look at do a search for "googleusercontent.com" it shows that it hosted malware and some other nasty stuff.

      http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=googleusercontent.com/

If I'm on streak.com and try to login I would like to be authorizing Streak.com

<comment><USER35> I understand the sentiment, but it can't work that way. What you're authorizing for access is an anonymous unsigned Chrome extension, not the website streak.com. If they allowed the extension to define its own name so that you'd see "streak.com", then you'd see malware masquerading as safe- sounding names in the authorization dialog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing work guys. Played with it a bit and looks really intuitive and easy to use!

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks impressive so far, I've basically been doing this kind of thing manually in gmail using labels, for supporting Smart Shooter.

So its free for now whilst in beta, I just might be hooked by the time they start to charge for it..

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow. This is really great. We are just at a point where we consider switching away from Lighthouse for bug tracking. Do you provide - or plan to provide - an api, so it's possible to integrate with other systems?

</comment><comment><USER39> Congratulations to the streak.com team. This is a great product.

 __*

This brings another point: There is a need for a better business email application that is as easy to use as Gmail, but is not owned by any of the big 4 (MS, G, APPL, Y!).

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats on the launch! I love the UI and set-up process, it's very smooth.

</comment><comment><USER41> This looks very promising... I've been looking for a CRM solution for my company for awhile. Question: is there a way to set up a gmail filter to add existing client e-mails and contacts into a box?

</comment><comment><USER42> This looks awesome - I'd love more information about how it works in a multi- user environment.

For example, if 3 guys in my company do sales, how do we prevent everyone contacting the same leads?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't go into it much on the homepage but we think Streak really does well here. You can share a sales pipeline to specific people or to your entire domain and you can assign leads to different team members.

There's a small demo of how sharing works at the end of the bug tracking demo video.

<comment><USER43> and what about multiusers helpdesk?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use it internally as a multi-user support tool but have a ton of new support related features coming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I use Streak as a "Personal Salesforce". It has been incredibly useful because it helps me stay on top of 30 different conversations in 5 different contexts.

</comment><comment><USER45> Great product. But I personally prefer to use my inbox for handling mail only and not get it in the mix of other processes like hiring, bug tracking etc...

</comment><comment><USER46> Given that Google might acquire your company, why would you want to provide it with 100% of your sales, support and bug tracking information?

<comment><USER47> 100% of your sales, support, and bug tracking information will be reflected in the email inbox of your employees.

If you're not hosting your own email servers, all that information is available to some 3rd party.

These companies have contracts in place preventing them from abusing the potential information they can gain, and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they could gain from cheating like this.

<comment><USER46> > _and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they > could gain from cheating like this._

No they don't. That's the problem.

Apparently there are not a lot of folks here who have spent time on the other side of the acquisition table: They're confusing a gentlemenly game where people play by the rules with a streetfight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> signed up, and been loving it! for now no slow downs of gmail. Is there any way to group boxes together? I created one box per client for some of my clients thinking i would put each issue in there and then figured out that i would have to create a box for each issue. so how do i group boxes, eg those belonging to the same project?

<comment><USER31> Looks like you could create a Pipeline for each project, and then add the boxes to the project pipeline.

It would be nice if you could save a pipeline setup so you don't have to recreate the same stages every time you need a new project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Looks cool, is it just for a single user or does it sync with everyone in your organisation?

</comment><comment><USER50> This looks awesome, is it a Chrome plugin? Is there only Chrome support?

<comment><USER13> Right now we only support Chrome.

In the future we'll be in all the major browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> My question is: Are you guys a YC company? Because you should be!

</comment><comment><USER52> I am having login problems. I am stuck on step 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're having problem, please goto gmail and Streak will ask you to sign in there.

The usual culprit is third party cookies being disabled - we wrote a help article here: <http://support.streak.com/customer/portal/articles/386931>

<comment><USER53> I disabled 3rd party cookies when the whole Google/Safari flap arose recently and was wondering if I might be missing anything. In this case the app just doesn't work so that's pretty obvious. I'm wondering if I'm experiencing any other harder to discern problems?

Are 3rd party cookies really required to deliver this sort of app or is it just easier? I suppose otherwise session IDs would need to go in the URL or POST variables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Looks great, but no FF 10 support?

</comment><comment><USER55> Omar, this is fantastic. You rock

</comment><comment><USER56> What is the Streak.com stack?</comment>


Young People Don't Want Construction Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/young-people-dont-want-construction-jobs-thats-a-problem-for-the-housing-market-1533029401 <comment><USER2> > Some economists say the construction industry could attract more workers if > builders raised wages further to better compete with other industries.

Seems obvious. Young Americans will happily work in craft industries like home building if there is a future in it. That means higher wages, but also good benefits and job training.</comment>


Cloud Challenges for Databases: The Inherent Availability Problem  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xeround.com/2010/10/04/cloud-challenges-for-databases-the-inherent-availability-problem/

<comment><USER2> Annoying marketing piece devoid of any real technical content.</comment>


Deleting the Family Tree – Ancestry.com erased 10 years of correspondence - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/myfamily_shuttered_ancestry_com_deleted_10_years_of_my_family_history.html <comment><USER2> tl;dr: You know how when fly-by-night growth-hacking startups suddenly shut down and do little to help their users export their data because the users never had to pay a dime to run the servers, and someone always comments, "If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"?

This is not one of those situations. Ancestry.com charged as much as $240 annually for its service [1]. Furthermore, the MyFamily.com social network was just one small part of Ancestry.com, meaning the parent company still has the money (and I would think, the actual servers/backups) to make its paying customers whole here. What the OP describes is a seriously incompetent handling of a shutdown...and one of the variety that is most painful for customers.

[1] [http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press- releases/2004/01/m...](http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press- releases/2004/01/myfamily.com-inc.-exceeds-1.5-million-paid-subscriptions/)

<comment><USER3> My Family had years of chat history and photos on "MyFamily.com" when they shut down. This included information from members who have now passed away.

I agree fully, their handling of it was insensitive and incompetent and I'll never have anything to do with any of the "Ancestry" products again.

Fortunately we found Spokt.com which (after a few rocky starts) was able to "sort of" import most of the data into our new Spokt account. I feel terrible for those families who didn't and permanently lost a large chunk of their family history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ancestry has a borderline monopoly on web-based genealogy, and unfortunately doesn't seem to be a very good steward for that data.

Generally, the genealogy community is very open and sharing. Distant relatives (n cousins nth removed) will spend hours helping you out. Random people will go to local libraries or town halls to pull hard copies of vital records. LDS has one of the largest free genealogy libraries in the world.

Then here comes Ancestry. $240/yr. to use their software, which puts everything you do behind a paywall. Want to share your family tree with others? They have to pay Ancestry for the privilege.

There's serious value in digitized records that might well be worth the subscription fee alone. But these are public records that Ancestry has bought the _exclusive_ rights to digitize. They're aggressively monetizing public data while shutting out competition.

It's great that family history is so easy for the masses, but I'm worried the long-term future is going to be silo'd and less effective in the long run.

<comment><USER5> You can get the subscription fee waived if you join the LDS Church.

[https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account- familys...](https://familysearch.org/blog/en/create-free-account-familysearch- partners/)

<comment><USER6> How do they verify you're LDS?

<comment><USER7> They ask the Church's servers.

The Church is meticulous about good record keeping (which is what makes them so good at genealogy in the first place), and every official member of the LDS church has a unique member identification number, used for things like tracking donations, ordinance records, and, of course, genealogy. Nowadays, the vast majority of these records are digitized and you can access them online through Church-owned-and-operated websites. If you happen not to be in the system yet (maybe you were baptized in the jungles of New Guinea and have only just made it back to civilization), it's pretty simple to meet up with a bishop or clerk who can verify your paper records and tell you what your membership number is, which will let you set up an account on Church websites.

So, to summarize, the Church knows who its members are, and knows how to associate them with online identities. When one of them wants free access to Ancestry.com, it's basically the same process as "Sign in with Google" and such- you tell Ancestry that you're LDS, Ancestry asks the Church's servers if you're telling the truth, and the Church's authentication system teels Ancestry to let you in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good > custodians of our data,

No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself.

I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity.

Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure.

Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.

<comment><USER9> > > It's natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good > custodians of our data,

> No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else

I respectfully disagree: it _is_ natural for people to assume that companies won't callously discard their customers' data. If it wasn't natural, we wouldn't need to have so much effort going towards education about the terms of service to watch out for and how to make your own copies. Too many people have a mental model for corporations which grossly exaggerates the level of stability and long-term planning.

<comment><USER8> Ok, you have a point. Trust is natural (think about the attitude of little children) and education goes like "don't trust strangers". Hoping for the best often is a sub optimal strategy. I was starting from that assumption.

<comment><USER10> Trust isn't for "little children." Trust is what makes the world go round. I trust that my bank won't close overnight and steal all my money. I trust that the food I buy is safe for human consumption. I trust that random people on the street won't attack me because they feel like it.

"Hoping for the best" (or perhaps "trusting that people won't screw me over") is actually an _extremely_ good strategy -- far better than not trusting anyone with anything. I can hire third parties to cook my food, do my taxes, handle my banking, even babysit my children after a background check (where I have to trust the background checking company) and a brief interview. If I couldn't trust people, I simply wouldn't be able to function in the modern world.

So I have a company, who I have paid to store my data. The company has been good so far, I use their services frequently, and I have every reason to trust them (they've had my credit card info, and my family's for years, haven't screwed me over, haven't lost any other data in all this time...) The company is shutting down, and they explicitly tell me that they will let me download all of my data, including text conversations. I download the data, only to open it weeks later and find that the company has failed to do what they said they would. In this one particular case, the strategy of "trust" has failed. However, in the long run, it's made my life a heck of a lot better.

<comment><USER8> Reputation.

We pick banks, stores and neighborhoods based on reputation. We trust some of them because they proved to be good and we don't trust others (I bet there are areas of the world and maybe of your city where you won't walk alone in the night.)

We get educated to trust according to reputation.

Personally I don't trust much Internet services because so many of them die young. I always wonder how many years any of the services I have to use for work will stay with me and how I can move my data somewhere else, in the few cases it makes sense (example: you can export Trello's data, but then what?) My customers and I use them because they are so convenient but I'm sure that sooner or later one of them will die in the middle of a project and we will be burnt. I have redmine wikis from 8 years ago. I'll have Trello's boards for the projects I'm working on now in 2022?

But I also don't trust much any "normal" company. I expect that they make their interests first, mine maybe. I buy from them but caveat emptor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests. It may actually be harder for them to do things like construct family genealogies for today's people than for those living in the 1700's because with digital data stored in the cloud, preciously little of it will survive across the next few centuries.

There should be a role here for government, to let people give digital data in permanent archival for historical purposes. But given how poorly governments are preserving their own digital data, I doubt it could actually work.

<comment><USER12> This exaggerates the problem. There is more preserved data about people than ever before, just like there was more preserved data last century than there was the previous century. There is simply vastly more data collected. I speculate that deleting 20% of this century's data would still leave an order of magnitude more data about people than was recorded last century.

I think future historians will look back in the same way we do now. We're horrified that people discarded, burned or reused records from every century in history, but technology allows us to record and preserve more every year.

<comment> mark-r I think the problem is in assuming only 20% will be deleted. When you consider companies going out of business, technical obsolescence, etc. the figure will be closer to 99% after 50 years, that's my prediction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's pretty terrible.

Well, there is a whole family who will look at hosted services with a much more jaded eye now. Who wouldn't?

Truth is, this kind of garbage devalues everybody. When a large family like this loses out in such a painful way, word gets around. Clearly they are not alone either. People who tend to be into this stuff are very seriously into it. Understandable. It matters.

Future offerings, however well their intent and execution might be, will have to work to overcome the painful experiences. And that is just a waste.

One thing nagging at me though. Did they really just delete it? Seems that having a fall back would make great sense, if anything, for legal reasons.

Or maybe it's better to have it really, really gone. Limit the potentials, so to speak?

From time to time, I export various things. Just ordinary worry, but I'm reasonably informed. Who here isn't?

Perhaps ordinary people really do need to advance to the next level of literacy. "The basics" today are different. In some ways, simpler. In other ways, potentially more complex.

Just saw danso comment. Yeah, my thoughts too. It was possible to treat people right. Do they really just not care?

If this were me, I would have a very hard time sleeping at night, particularly given some options. It was easy enough to set up and make the money...

<comment><USER14> Word should get around. Centralized services suck. I long for the days when people cared that the internet was decentralized, and some of the best apps were too. Email, the Web, even IRC. We can do it today, but instead the startups want to capture as much of the market as possible and rule their little world while maintaining huge datacenters.

<comment><USER15> Owning the users' data makes it harder for them to move to a competing service. That's not a secret.

<comment><USER16> That's not the only way to retain users, or to make money.

<comment><USER17> But it's a cheap and lazy way, so it's ubiquitous unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I started out using Ancestry's web-only approach but once I really got going on my family history (i.e. < 1800AD) I quickly hit the limits of what the web UI was offering. Many others hit this wall as well, and that is why there is cheap desktop software, Family Tree Maker, that integrates seamlessly with the online web UI. My entire tree (~4.5gb) lives offline on my Mac, is backed up with Arq and is two-way sync'd to Ancestry's online version. Of all the providers out there that have "data lock-in", I really don't consider Ancestry one of them. If you really care about your data, keep the copy-of-record on your computer. If Ancestry's online service ever folds, your official copy will keep working perfectly.

This isn't the same thing as replacing a social network service, but the actual trees do capture comments, stories, submissions, etc. from other users.

<comment><USER19> > (i.e. < 1800AD)

Now this is impressive. How did you get back that far? I've trouble finding out who my great-great-grandparents were.

<comment><USER18> Basically anyone who ever set foot in the U.S. is 99.9% guaranteed to be found electronically now. That will take you to where they came from and in most cases that original generation will be known. Since people did not travel much (as we know it today), chances are they are mostly from that place , wherever it is, for some time back. Thanks to Napoleon (you don't thank him much, do you?), standard records have been kept across at least Europe back to their inception in ~1810. Prior to that, records devolve into individual church parishes and are mostly in Latin. It is super easy to pick up the Napoleonic civil record format in any language. I never could quite grasp the hand- written ink-well pen Latin records of the late 1700s so I don't know how much further back I will be able to go.

I do have to give a special shout-out to the Polish national archives as well as the U.S. National Archives people in Maryland. I was able to deal with the Poles entirely online and request hundreds of records which they reproduced for a reasonable fee in a short time. The U.S. archives also went out of their way to help me. Hell, even the FBI FOIA process worked well and gave me a valuable dossier. The one awesome lead that let me down was the NYPD FOIL request I made. A relative many generations back ran with Al Capone when he was in Brooklyn and was gunned down. The NYPD never caught the killer and supposedly had a hat left at the scene and other evidence. Murder investigations are kept indefinitely so they _should_ still have it in some warehouse somewhere, but they couldn't find it after searching for it manually. (Digitize all the things, people!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> OT a bit, but I am surprised that the author's family managed to keep a family-based social network going for so long.

When my family tried to create one on Geni, it brought a few crazy relatives out of the woodwork, and Geni's "growth hacking" strategy of spamming anyone who was invited to join the tree led to angry real-life confrontations between inviters and invitees. Our family tree is maintained a little, but the social aspects died a quick death.

<comment><USER21> They have some weird nuances too. We had an issue where a crazy person added a newborn child, which meant that they "owned" the record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I bet 99% of people think gmail is magically forever too and don't even backup locally.

<comment><USER23> For those who don't: [https://www.google.com/settings/takeout](https://www.google.com/settings/takeout)

<comment><USER24> Any idea if there's an interface to easily do this via the command line?

<comment><USER25> [http://gmvault.org/](http://gmvault.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And this is why I tell the spouse to periodically back up everything from the Ancestry.com account to local GEDCOM files. Never trust an online service with the only copy of your data.

</comment><comment><USER27> It ought to be illegal to just shutdown and erase without giving public data like this to a historical organization.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure about that: the converse is closer to the truth now due to copyright law, giving people's private family correspondence and data to historical organisations without the families say so seems as wrong as wiping the data. Ancestry could have kept the data archived and offered it up for download to their users for a payment - their whole _raison d 'etre_ is supposed to be preserving family history after all.

It would be interesting to know why they shutdown the service, presumably not making enough profit, whether anything replaced it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> _Moreover, why not make an effort to warn users? My best guess is that Ancestry intended to export the data properly, hit a technical snag, and made the cynical decision to not follow through, in the hopes that nobody would call the company out on it._

Perhaps it isn't the cynical decision, rather it's the result of nobody being left to turn on the lights, let alone handle a technical task. Once companies enter shutdown mode, there's frequently nobody left to complain to. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the specifics here.

<comment><USER30> Ancestry.com still exists as a (paid) service, they just shut down this subset of their offering, so it's definitely not "nobody left to turn on the lights".

<comment><USER29> All the worse, then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm surprised Ancestry.com doesn't charge people for the data recovery. They would clearly pay since many paid $60 for the third party service beforehand.

There is no way I can believe Ancestry.com doesn't have the technical talent to pull the raw data from the system pretty trivially. Unless it was running on some obscure in-house database backend that doesn't exist anymore and thus can't be read, I don't see why they can't put an engineer on this project for a month [and if it takes them that long...] and at least give people the raw data. Or partner with Spokt or whatever and have them charge a fee to transfer it if they want to cover their costs. People are willing to pay for this data, even if it is incomplete or difficult to digest in the delivered format.

I also can't imagine they don't have a copy of the data somewhere... on some old magnetic backup tape or squirreled away in some DB admin's folders.

</comment><comment><USER32> I realize the article speaks about the frustration this user had with trying to work with Ancestry.com to try to get his data back after the closure. However, has anyone gone to Ancestry and stated they will take on the liability of looking through the data and getting it into an exportable format and returning it to these users? Seems like an interesting open source project. Maybe Ancestry hasn't been given the right offer just to have the data taken off their hands.

Certainly there are legal issues and privacy issues. Are these really insurmountable? If enough people really want their data, I somehow doubt that this couldn't be worked through. And I absolutely cannot imagine that Ancestry just deleted all of it when they shut down. It's probably sitting in cold storage somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER33> Isn't Ancestry a subsidiary of MyLife.com now? What incentive have they to preserve this data, since their money is made off "Nice identity you have there, be a shame if something happened to it" spam?

<comment><USER34> Nope, its not.</comment></comment>


The value of owning more books than you can read - <AUTHOR> https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/value-of-unread-books <comment><USER2> I certainly agree that sitting in a room full of books you haven't read feels so great because of how humbling it is.

I was once in the house of a very wealthy family (as a waiter), and their library was just so perfect it almost evoked a feeling of the sublime. I made detours on the way to the guests just to pass through the space.

A recent move has me scared off accumulating though. It seems you pay for a book once, and then pay for it again in time, money, and effort every few times you move house.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article! I'm currently trying to build up my classical literature section. So many great books to read and so little time. :)

<comment><USER4> Read the summary, most of them are overrated and movies are fine :P

Edit: its not cheating, it's maping

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://publiclibraries.com/](https://publiclibraries.com/)

<comment><USER5> So many books we will never read.</comment></comment>


Most popular APIs for Web and SaaS developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.getapp.com/blog/popular-apis-developers-saas-cloud/

<comment><USER2> Would be nice to see more SaaS vendors dropping true data about their API usage</comment>