Filling hospitals with art reduces patient stress, anxiety and pain - <AUTHOR> https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/22-28-july-2019/chelsea-westminster-hospital-arts-research/ <comment><USER3> When not in hospital, we suggest people need mental stimulation, exercise, good food and daylight to stay healthy and sane. None of these things are possible when you're convalescing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm _very_ thankful for the fact I still have both my legs, but staying sane is extremely difficult.

Half of the bays on my ward literally had no windows. There were people around me that hadn't seen daylight in over a month. There wasn't any publicly accessible free WiFi, the TVs were costing over £40/week. There's no library, no social spaces and absolutely nothing to do. Even the staff are too busy to have a conversation with. You had two meals served 6 hours apart. It wasn't awful but certainly wasn't great. Even buying and eating a lot of my own food left me loosing a tonne of weight. And not a single accessible gym or swimming pool even close. Being able to get healthy and fit seems like a no-brainer.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good, but I find it impossible to believe this isn't causing more problems and actually increasing recovery times costing them more money over-all.

<comment><USER4> Where is this? In the US I've never seen a hospital without windows and free tv. Although gyms are different, likely because if you are healthy enough to hit the gym you are healthy enough to go home.

Although one thing that always stood out is no one is expected to sleep in a hospital. A nurse or doctor will likely be in every few hours doing something to wake you up. And in between there will always be noise from the hall.

<comment><USER5> >if you are healthy enough to hit the gym you are healthy enough to go home.

Please don't perpetuate the myth that sickness can be seen from the outside by a layperson.

<comment><USER6> GP isn't wrong though, if you're well enough to go work out at the gym you don't need to be in a hospital taking up very expensive limited bed space. Treatment for a very sick people is often done outpatient or in non-hospital skilled nursing or residential facilities. Not looking sick doesn't factor in here.

I'm assuming GGP was not referring to physical therapy facilities however, some hospital inpatients do require that.

<comment><USER3> There are a number of reasons people are kept in hospital and their ability to exercise may or may not factor into this.

I spent 10 weeks as an inpatient on 6* daily IV antibiotics (which would have been impossible to do at home) to treat a serious infection in the bone in my foot. On some of my better days I managed to cover nearly 10 miles on crutches or in a wheelchair. Being able to use a gym to work out would have been better and substantially safer all round.

On the flipside, it's amazing how many doors one can get through using nothing but a lollypop-stick from the ice-cream machine in reception or a pair of crutches to open gates from the other side. And technically the "no public access" signs don't apply because you're not public, you're an in-patient at that point... but there has to be better ways of staying fit and sane that would apply to the other 99.9% of patients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before everyone piles in with their opinion, has anyone actually found the research mentioned in this article? I've searched quite thoroughly, but I can't find any sign that it has actually been published anywhere. I did find the paper from 2004 and was not impressed.

[http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/resources/research/documen...](http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/resources/research/documents/ChelseaAndWestminsterResearchproject.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Indeed not, and I am EXTREMELY skeptical of the claim that birth times are reduced TWO HOURS (!!!) by the addition of art. That's the kind of effect you see in papers that get retracted for outright fraud, let alone dubious and irreproducible studies.

<comment><USER9> I think this is the paper on the birth time.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003039921...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0030399210000654)

<comment><USER7> Unblinded (somewhat unavoidable), informal randomisation, n=26, the sole author is an interior designer with no scientific training. Paper states an "average" difference in birth times of 2.1 hours (not clear if mean or median), no SDs or p-value stated. Published in _Optics & Laser Technology_ for some reason; the editorial board appears to be entirely comprised of engineers.

<comment><USER10> On the plus side, at the very least the same hospital and hospital rooms were used. I initially assumed they were comparing an expensive, spacious upper- class hospital full of art with a run-down brutalist Medicaid hospital, and conflating sampling bias with causality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been working in some fast-growing software companies. Every few years, we change office and get one in a better place, with new furniture, fancier each time, tv monitor is everywhere, each wall had pictures and was colourful.

I had to go to the hospital, nothing serious. It was so extremely sad to see 30-40 years old furniture, dark rooms that had never been re-painted, power outlets had been refurbished for the new European type. There was a sign that said, "Do not leave weelchears in this zone". Of course, there were wheelchairs as they did not have space anywhere else.

It felt so completely wrong. Are we, as a society, investing in the right things? Austerity in Spain means that there is no money for hospitals, education, etc. Anything that is not live-and-dead is a luxury. Meanwhile, those companies, all registered in tax havens like Malta or Ireland, had money to spend in fancy breakfast, new furniture every few years, unused monitors in every wall, ...

We know that to go to a hospital is a bad experience as you would like to be anywhere else. Why do we make it so much worse? Why we do not invest in life quality?

I know that there are countries where it is worse, I am happy that everyone in the country had free health care. But, it could be much better.

<comment><USER12> > I know that there are countries where it is worse, I am happy that everyone > in the country had free health care. But, it could be much better.

Doctor's offices in the US look nicer than those in Italy, where I lived for a number of years. But ultimately, patients pay for that, and overall the US health care system is reaaaallllly expensive.

<comment><USER13> See this NPR interview with a healthcare expert from the Kaiser Foundation:

 _GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, why do people get hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills for staying in a hospital?

ROSENTHAL: Well, the first thing I tell people when they ask me this question is to go into your local hospital and look around. And the marble lobbies, the art, the concierges at the front desk - our hospitals look like not five-star hotels - seven-star hotels. I mean, I think the most stark thing when people go overseas is hospitals in Europe, which deliver really high-quality care. They look like junior high schools. You know, they're not fancy, but the care is good._

[https://www.npr.org/2017/07/02/535240692/the-call-in-your- qu...](https://www.npr.org/2017/07/02/535240692/the-call-in-your-questions- about-the-senate-health-care-bill)

That's not to say there's not a happy, affordable balance.

<comment><USER14> > And the marble lobbies, the art, the concierges at the front desk - <USER2> > hospitals look like not five-star hotels - seven-star hotels.

Is there specific examples of these hospitals? I've never seen anything that extravagant in any of the hospitals in Pittsburgh.

<comment><USER15> Living in California I can tell you that there is free parking with valets. You can charge your electric car and the lobby is definitely not looking bad at all. In one hospital, in Washington, there was a super high ceiling with a piano where a musician comes sometimes during the day to play. It's not everywhere like these two examples, but I've seen a couple where the level was way higher than in Canada or Europe.

<comment><USER16> Living in SF I can tell you there are hospitals that charge $35/hr to park there while in the ER

Edited to correct typo

<comment><USER15> Not the case in Mountain View or Los Gatos. Neither the case in Seattle or Kirkland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Having spent many months of my life in hospital rooms, even just a brightly colored paint job really makes things feel better. A lot of older hospitals have very sterile, bland colors on the floors and walls that would make even a healthy happy human feel depressed.

<comment><USER18> Reason for that though: it's easier to see blood and other fluids on a bland / white wall. Since fluids are a common way for infectious diseases to spread, they need to be cleaned thoroughly and completely.

Source: wife is a nurse in the ER.

<comment><USER19> Have you ever looked at a seemingly clean surface with a UV light? It's surprising how much invisible ick there is, and it pops out since it visibly fluoresces. This might be a useful way to see the spills?

<comment><USER18> Yes, that's another verification tool they use for highly contagious (think HIV / AIDS / HEP-C) patients.

However, those lights are usually handheld and small. Expecting cleaning staff to cover 100% of all walls each time they cleaned it (which is multiple times a day) is prone to failure.

Plus those lights work best when the room is dark. Which means you could only clean it at night.

And some rooms have multiple patients, so now the cleaner people will need to work around them / have them be OK with the room being dark for a while. This can work, but again not every patient will be comfortable with a "crime scene investigation" happening while they recover.

<comment><USER20> "think HIV / AIDS / HEP-C"

Think viable transmission vectors for those diseases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The hospital I work at was looking at cost saving measures. Someone realized we were paying $65k a year in art insurance. Generous people would loan the art to the hospital on the condition that the hospital would insure it. When times were good, the hospital had no issue paying for the insurance, but once we had to cut costs, it became clear we couldn't be a free art storage facility for citizens. They inventoried everything, returned pieces that they no longer felt like insuring.

<comment><USER22> That does sound like a pretty insane recurring cost. Doesn't seem like there's any need for really valuable art that requires insurance when murals, photos and reproductions of the same nice art would do it. Hopefully they just replaced that all with something much cheaper.

<comment><USER21> I think you could deduce that no pieces would be of substantial value. No one would loan a valuable piece to a hospital knowing that it's likely going to be put in a public hallway and potentially touched or damaged many times a day.

<comment><USER22> If you're paying 65k for insurance, the pieces are valuable. They could well be behind glass or protected in other ways.

<comment><USER23> I think you're underestimating how big even a "small" hospital can be. That $65k could easily be covering thousands of works.

<comment><USER24> This. Our small rural community hospital with two ICU beds is one of the largest buildings and employers in the area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article seems to be describing this as if it's a new idea, but at least in my experience, when you walk through some of the more world class hospitals (The Cleveland Clinic comes to mind), there is clearly a tremendous amount of thought in regards to interior architecture.

High ceilings that damp out sound, generally light and soft colors, soft sounds and diverse art installations.

It's a real shame that when people discuss architecture we largely focus on the exterior of buildings, but truly the craft is about how people move through and experience a space. This is especially relevant in the current era of large glass office towers, which while on the outside tend to seem rather bland, tend to have a far better interior experience than their external one puts on.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious if this applies to doctor offices too. In Japan, doctor offices are very barebones: small, cramped, and only has enough space for the doctor and one patient.

Since Japan has national health care, they spend the minimum amount necessary to keep these offices operational. So there is no art, no big spaces, no "nice to have" things.

If a patient only spends 15-30 minutes in that environment, will it really impact their stress, anxiety and pain?

<comment><USER26> The article says its for patients "receiving intrusive examinations, surgery, chemotherapy and emergency care".

So looks like the target of study is high stress cases.

As for cost, no one said you have to install Picasso or brand names. Plenty of local artists could contribute to wall designs, or even contributions from the affiliated hospital university's art department.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I bet filling hospitals with plants would work even better.

<comment><USER28> I was looking if I would have to add this comment...

Ditto for natural ventilation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This was a great initiative in Brisbane, Australia a few years back [https://www.arts.qld.gov.au/aq-blog/art-in-the- stairwell](https://www.arts.qld.gov.au/aq-blog/art-in-the-stairwell)

</comment><comment><USER30> I run [https://healthcaresnapshots.com](https://healthcaresnapshots.com) which publishes photos of healthcare projects from around the world.

We have found that there is a wide variety of styles within healthcare facilities from bland and cold to colorful and vibrant. My gut tells me that decision makers don't try new things for a variety of reasons, with one being that they don't know what the possibilities are that exist.

Articles such as this will hopefully help more people in the right places know what is possible and worth trying.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this really what is causing the impact? Or do hospitals that care enough to budget keeping up nice appearances tend to care enough to manage patients' health better as well?

</comment><comment><USER32> > It also found that 16 out of 19 clinical staff working in the children's > emergency department noted that zoo-themed digital art, showing moving > images of animals, improved young patients' anxiety, while 15 out of 19 > clinicians said it decreased their pain.

What I find interesting/odd is that the article focuses on the patients. Yet makes no mention of the art's affect on the doctors and staff

</comment><comment><USER33> But as a consumer I don't want to pay for art installations in hospitals in addition to the enormous hospital bills and healthcare insurance.

</comment><comment><USER34> We've realized that years ago..that's why we launched: [https://POPteam.io](https://POPteam.io)

There is no better feeling than seeing all those boring spiritually sterile hallways magically transform into a kaleidoscope of humanity.

<comment><USER35> are you specifically targeting hospitals and working with them? or is this just a plug for some random startup that does art for other startups

<comment><USER34> Random we are not. we've given this a ton of thought when we pivoted from our mass-customization marketplace: [https://JuicyCanvas.com](https://JuicyCanvas.com)

Our clients include the full spectrum of businesses and consumers ( Uber, Burning Man, Private Schools, Medical Clinics, and Families )

<comment><USER35> cool! thanks for the response

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think it's safe to assume that anything you can do to make the patient feel more comfortable and take their mind away from their situation will help with stress and anxiety. It's like the dentist chairs with a netflix table above your head. You are less likely to be aware of what's going on in your mouth and be hyper sensitive to the doc's every move if you are distracted by the latest avengers!

</comment><comment><USER37> No, I'm so sick of the local cancer centers rotating corps of musicians. Want me to get stabby? Keep playing your drum hippie...

<comment><USER38> Or if it's an "Art Installation"

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> How is this news? Every hospital I have been in recently has art on the walls, some lots, some not so much but it's there.

Even the dismally badly designed, and laughably misnamed, Great Western Hospital in Swindon has pictures on the walls, unfortunately few of them are where the patients spend the most time.

</comment><comment><USER40> A good friend of mine works with an organization in North Carolina called Arts For Life [0]. They set up tables where kids can create art, not just have it on the walls around them.

[0]: [http://www.artsforlifenc.org/](http://www.artsforlifenc.org/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Pragmatic question: What channels do artists have today to sell art to hospitals?

The average price of paintings or photograph prints are a tiny fraction of what they spend on medical equipment, and if it reduces patient stress, it sounds like an incredibly big win-win.

</comment><comment><USER42> Articles like this are interesting when compared to what the wealthy are doing with the world's most inspiring art: keeping them locked away in port boxes to function as wealth management assets.

You would think we could find a way to improve the situation.

</comment><comment><USER43> After several rounds of kids with hospital stays I really appreciated common spaces with an assortment of furniture where you could take some time to ... not feel like you're in such a serious clinical place.

</comment><comment><USER44> Filling hospitals with BBC 24 News Broadcasts, raises stress, anxiety and pain

</comment><comment><USER45> This works outside of hospitals for people who aren't patients too.

</comment><comment><USER46> The art would need to be something neutral or soothing that doesn't evoke strong emotions, something pleasant. I'd suggest Bob Ross style paintings to be the standard.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was a patient, be in hospital more then two months, i always thought if there was classic music echo in the passage or my room, the pain will be less.

</comment><comment><USER48> The hospital where I work has art around the halls through which the patients move. It changes every few weeks and features mostly local artist.

I quite enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is known to anyone who plays the game Rimworld.

</comment><comment><USER50> Definitely notice that the best hospitals in the nation invest in the look and feel of their hallways with art and positive colors!

</comment><comment><USER51> What's the control group? Is it an undecorated hospital or a hospital decorated to the same standard but without using art?

</comment><comment><USER52> Sounds like spurious correlation. Is it that the hospitals that can afford art can afford better care?

</comment><comment><USER53> getting sunlight also relieves depression and exercise and eating right will help with weight losss. This are obvoius things but they are not cures within themselves.

Im sure there are tons of things hospitals can do to help the surroundings. Whose going to put up the money?

</comment><comment><USER54> Being facetious. But does blood splatter count as art?

</comment><comment><USER55> So would filling the hospital with less patients.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm sure it probably helps the staff as well.

</comment><comment><USER57> It all depends on the type of art.

</comment><comment><USER58> They should probably qualify what _kind_ of art seems to reduce anxiety. I could line a patient waiting room with H.R. Giger paintings, but that might not achieve the same result:

[https://slowsoulburn.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hr_giger_du...](https://slowsoulburn.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hr_giger_dune_v1.jpeg)

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lwoGruDK7ww/TWaPQYPMQ9I/AAAAAAAAAc...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lwoGruDK7ww/TWaPQYPMQ9I/AAAAAAAAAc0/1tYozs93qZA/s1600/hr_giger_lilith.jpg)

[https://slowsoulburn.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hr- giger_00...](https://slowsoulburn.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hr- giger_003406131.jpg)

[https://pickadolla.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/elp___h_r_gig...](https://pickadolla.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/elp___h_r_giger_tribute_by_algbral-d3bbkjn.jpg)

<comment><USER59> I would be interested to know if this artwork actually would actually have the same result for certain people, i.e. goths, punks, or other alternative artists.

<comment><USER60> I would be pretty stoked to see H.R. Giger artwork in any place (I have visited his gallery & cafe!), but I think it might be bad to dwell on it for a long time, since it would probably push you towards thoughts about existential questions and the nature of humanity, things like that. Probably not the best subjects for when you're already anxious about possibly-life-threatening hospital situations, heh.

<comment><USER61> The folks who decorated Denver International Airport would like a word with you...

[https://www.outtherecolorado.com/gallery/whats-creepy- apocal...](https://www.outtherecolorado.com/gallery/whats-creepy-apocalyptic- paintings-denver-international-airport-2/)

<comment><USER62> I bet that those are a smart plan for disclosing terrorists and trafficants of endangered species watching how people reacts to the paintings. There is a lot of children depicted in the murals. There is also a lot of guilt, and emotional themes subtly related with a typical work at an international airport.

Psychological warfare seems the only logical reason for having this paintings near to customs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should my startup use cloud services hosted in the US? — on startups — Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/cc0dcde44ee <comment><USER2> No. As a curious ironic symmetry, now Icelandic Pirate's Bay server is more secure than anything in the USA. Their Pirate party political success, and ordering the CIA to leave suggests it is a good safe haven candidate and sends the world an important message of hope.</comment>


The OpenSSD Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project

<comment><USER2> My understanding is that this is a largely academical board, designed for use by universities. They might be successful in such a realm - although I suspect any professor worth their salt will be given dev boards by a hardware company for their research. Beyond that, I don't see this to be a particularly useful project - it's sad but the competition in industry would make open source competition difficult, commercial implementations are mature, and it's hard to do SSDs right anyway. I know that these are quite expensive, for a start.</comment>


Engineering the Extinction of 40 Species of Mosquitoes - <AUTHOR> http://rockstarresearch.com/engineering-the-extinction-of-40-species-of-mosquitoes/ <comment><USER2> This links to Janet Fang's article in Nature: [http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

The thesis of that article is that nothing of ecological significance would happen without mosquitos, but the examples given don't seem even close to conclusive.

We know many species of fish and birds that eat mosquitos and mosquito larvae. From a few minutes of internet surfing, it doesn't seem like anyone knows whether other insects would take their place or and how quickly that would happen.

IANA biologist, but maybe fish and birds can survive a couple months while something takes the place of the comparatively short-lived mosquito? In any case this whole idea seems totally under-researched.

<comment><USER3> From the first article, it mentioned that we have eradicated similar disease vectors like screwworm and melon fly before, so what have been the environmental impact of that so far?

<comment><USER4> What percentage of the next level up on the food chain lives off mosquitoes? What percentage lives of screwworms and Melon flies?

I have no idea about the answers, but if there is a significant difference there then that might be where trouble could come from.

The problems really start at the reservoir hosts, the mosquitoes are just the transmitters. Controlling the reservoir hosts might be more feasible than eradicating 40 species of mosquito, it sounds like a very ambitious plan to me.

Panama had only 2 problematic species around the (prospective) canal zone.

Eradicating those mosquitoes to allow construction of the canal to proceed without the crews succumbing to Malaria or Yellow Fever was a huge success:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_cons...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_construction_of_the_Panama_Canal)

<comment><USER5> Does the fact that we have done this thousands of times now, accidentally, without any knowledge of the species being affected, make it any better?

Does the fact that essentially all of the interspecific dependencies in the temperate and Arctic zones have shifted completely in response to simple climate change since the last glaciation, make it any better?

<comment><USER6> > _Does the fact that we have done this thousands of times now, accidentally, > without any knowledge of the species being affected, make it any better?_

It sure does not. After all, tens of thousands of species have gone extinct in our watch. Who knows how many of those were due to having done "this".

> _Does the fact that essentially all of the interspecific dependencies in the > temperate and Arctic zones have shifted completely in response to simple > climate change since the last glaciation, make it any better?_

Nope. And I seriously doubt they have shifted "completely".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live in a mosquito infested area and I have had malaria. Personally, I would love to see the end of all mosquitoes, even if it meant losing a few fish species.

However, even with an incredible amount of research and preparation, eliminating mosquitoes would have an untold number of effects. One effect would most certainly be the exponential growth of the human population. This could be a more difficult pest than mosquitoes.

<comment><USER8> This is actually addressed in the article. If people are reasonably certain that all their children will survive to adulthood, they tend to have fewer children.

<comment><USER9> Supply and demand, I guess. A higher survival rate is going to mean more competition for resources. Increased competition yields higher prices. Higher prices usually mean parents decide to have less kids. Of course, I think industrialization plays a huge role too. If you have a family in an agrarian third world country, then more kids equal more labor, and as long as that kid is healthy and productive, having him is a net positive for income.

<comment><USER10> But there are less children, less teenagers, less everything, so your hypothesis doesn't hold water.

Let me put forth another hypothesis. Lower mortality means investing in your children has a lower risk. This means you can invest more in your children. Further, lower mortality means lower risk that all your children die, so you don't need to get lots of children for "diversification".

<comment><USER9> I don't think you understand how population growth works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Radiolab recently did a bit on this (Kill 'em all):

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em- all/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Every time I read an article about this kind of thing, the big selling point usually refers to political and economic ease of eliminating a species of mosquito compared to other trying to fix distribution of medicine and improving infrastructure and health care access.

This seems kind of backwards to me. Wouldn't working on the distribution problem be more effective than eliminating mosquito species? Obviously this is a much more difficult problem, but improvements in this area have benefits beyond disease elimination and treatment. That such things are difficult to achieve via current philanthropy efforts seems to highlight such philanthropy as flawed and in need of adjustment.

</comment><comment><USER13> Article quotes 6 digits numbers to exterminate mosquitoes over large areas. I believe that is within reach of local governments. Even Kickstarter campaign could fund it. So the question is more when, rather then if.

</comment><comment><USER14> According to the article, only a small fraction of mosquito species carry diseases harmful to humans. Are there predators that depend solely or mainly on those specific species for food? Could other species take up the disease vector role if the currently harmful species were eliminated?

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think it's possible right now for us to predict how the world would change if there were no mosquitos. I expect they play some important role that we don't yet understand. Bees come to mind

<comment><USER16> One of the takeaways of the article for me was that it's a small subset of all mosquito species that are conveying this disease. I'm not an ecologist, but wouldn't the elimination of one sort of (disease vector) mosquito lead to a different (non-disease vector) species taking over the niche in the ecosystem?

<comment><USER17> Some other mosquitos would likely take over the "human" niche yes

But if the Malaria parasite is gone they may not be infected. If it's not gone the parasite would eventually adapt to the new mosquitos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oxitec are the ones to follow in this space. Really awesome work: [http://www.oxitec.com](http://www.oxitec.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Engineering the Extinction of 40 Species of Mosquitoes_

Hmm, to me it sounds like:

Screw science (which takes time), let's apply half-learned stuff in real life instead and see what sticks.

E.g let's apply what little we know to extinguish mosquitoes we don't like, despite not fully knowning the ecological consequences of our actions. Hopefully we won't have to deal with the mess (or there won't be a mess).

After all we did something similar before. If you do something once and it turned out OK, then even if you don't understand it, it will always come out OK in any other context, right?

</comment><comment><USER19> "What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!'

Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."

<comment><USER20> A warm sentiment to be sure, but wonder if it also applies to the orcs marching across the Pelennor, whom you know are intending or enslaved to deal death. Do they also deserve pity and mercy? If not, then why do mosquitos?

<comment><USER19> In the quote above, Gandalf only advises that one should not strike without need. In the cases of both mosquitoes and orcs, it's not at all clear that xenocide is requisite to ensure the safety of humans or the many dwellers of Middle Earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Engineering a major environmental fuck-up"</comment>


Kim Dotcom claims to have evidence Joe Biden ordered the shutdown of Megaupload - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-mpaa-riaa-corrupted-the-u-s-government-120814/

<comment><USER2> Can we get some neutral coverage on this guy once in a while? Why always torrentfreak?

<comment><USER3> I haven't seen anybody else cover the story.

<comment><USER4> That's because there rarely _is_ a story, there's just TorrentFreak whose business is pandering to digg (once upon a time), reddit, hn, etc and the people on them who want to believe they're saving the world one pirated movie at a time.

The really sad part is it works just as well on hn as it ever did on digg.

<comment><USER5> Well, if this actually turns up like Kim says it is, then it WILL be a story (right?).

<comment><USER6> Wow. Do Democratic VPs always run the Internet? (In case you're wondering about partisanship, there's only been one Republican VP since the internet really took off, and he was busy running the world...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the interesting thing about megaupload as i understand it is, that even though they are protected by the digital millenium copyright act, there was something different in their service. they try to prove that they were knowing that copyright infringement did take place?

so as i understand megaupload, there were many many links pointing to the same failes, as they wanted to minimze same uploads, meaning that they got takedown notices for links rather than content. in a nutshell: they removed links instead of content afaik, and there they differ from rapidshare and others... can somebody help me out if this is the case? (i never used megaupload but as i understand it that was there working model)

<comment><USER8> As far as I recall, they were not protected as internal emails disclosed not just knowledge of piracy, the company actively encouraged it from within.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Romney is simply the better bet for a free Internet."

Didn't Romney say something to the effect of 'Porn should be banned on the internet'?

<comment><USER10> Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)[1]: Signed into law by President Clinton on October 28, 1998. I don't care what your politics are but the Democratic party is not the party that wants to stop the Republicans[2] from shutting down the Internet as we know it. Most people on HN probably think they do, however.

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

[2] This presupposes that the Republican Party want to shut down freedom on the Internet.

<comment><USER11> Who knew the DMCA banned porn? Not me, that's for sure!

<comment><USER10> If the porn is copyrighted then the DMCA will allow the content owners to send a DMCA notice for each copyright infringement. That's the law and now you know it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> First Waco, then Megaupload.</comment>


The new Remember the Milk - <AUTHOR> https://www.rememberthemilk.com/new/ <comment><USER2> Been a user for probably a decade. I like the smart add where they'll take all the status, date, tag, list, url info all in one line. I loved the old site; it never changed and was consistent and easy. The new site is quick and easy as well. Good job team.</comment>


Meet the Highest-Paid C.E.O.s in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/29/business/how-much-ceos-made-last-year.html <comment><USER2> ..and surprisingly they all have severe hair issues. go figure.</comment>


How the Power Law Changes Everything You Knew About Knowledge Worker Recruitment - <AUTHOR> https://wijet.pl/power-law-in-recruitment <comment><USER2> Couple things:

I would speculate power law is very task specific(aka 5 years of java development doesn't translate into 5 years of python development).

Most task don't require that level of proficiency(aka crud apps)

Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng already have pretty well paying jobs are most companies willing to spend that kind of money? And I wouldn't hire them to optimize my database or something.

If you wrote a library you are probably the one that is best at using it. Next would be people that go to conferences and training related to that product/library</comment>


Ask HN: Startups building dev tools, how are you selling it? - <AUTHOR>

There seems to be 2 problems:
1) Developers as target audience. In big companies they don't have buying power. In startups, they don't have money.
2) Little control over outcome. The value (& therefore monetization) is mostly based on how & when the developer is successful with his usecase.
Large companies like Microsoft & Oracle emerged out of developer products once. Has it become high effort - low return game now? Thoughts? <comment><AUTHOR> Related links:

Will Developer Tools Startups Ever Find Investors? - [http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/22/will-developer-tools- startu...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/22/will-developer-tools-startups- ever-find-investors/)

PG on building a compiler in Bring Back Moore's Law - [http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)</comment>


China Tells U.S. to 'Live Within its Means' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/business/global/china-a-big-creditor-says-us-has-only-itself-to-blame.html

<comment><USER2> As long as the Federal Reserve exists, I don't think this is possible. Given that it is just as PRIVATE as Federal Express, it is not actually the government that creates the Federal Reserve Notes, but an external entity. [1]

This 3rd party does get interest paid for that.

So the government wants an amount of X dollars to exist.

The FED ceates X but demands Y interest.

However, only amount X exists and X+Y does not. To pay back Y,a new amount has to be created.. Over which interest Z should be paid, etc. etc.

In other words: it's impossible to pay back the national debt to the guys who have claimed the magic right to put ink on some cotton and call it a million dollars. Dollars which can no longer be exchanged for silver as was possible a few decades ago...

Now why do these banks keep loaning money? Well they already own the country since the default of 1933. The current collateral is every U.S Citizen and their future labor if someone has a birth certificate!

The only free people in that sense are those who have a Sovereign/Freeman of the Land status, living under Common Law instead of Maritime Admiralty Law.

Youtube: "Have you met your Strawman?" & "Choosing Freedom" for more of an introduction..

[1] See e.g. The Money Masters - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXt1cayx0hs></comment>


Many Hollywood stars iCloud accounts hacked for photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/jennifer-lawrence-ariana-grande-picture-leak?bffbnews&s=mobile

<comment><USER2> Right now the story is on the leaked photos. I'm interested to see Apple's response and the subsequent backlash around the apparent security fail.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, BuzzFeed just liked straight to /b/... I feel like many BF readers will click the link and be rudely surprised by what they find.</comment>


A detailed analysis of H-1B visa lawyers – based on open source H-1B filings - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Stilt/a-detailed-analysis-of-h-1b-visa-lawyers-25f400b3ac70 <comment><USER2> Pretty sure this is just a clever tactic to sell people their services. The section of the article where one expects to find the top 5 most successful lawyers has been replaced with a link to a list subscription page, which undoubtedly is a channel for pitching their paid services.</comment>


Ask HN: Any info on dell scam support calls - <AUTHOR> Just wondering if anyone knew anything about the scam support calls supposedly coming from Dell.  My son just had one and before I caught it he felt it was legit and allowed the person remote access to his laptop.  The person had all his details, phone number, name, machine model, service tag etc.  So he didn't think about why would Dell be calling out of the blue, we've now had that discussion.
I shut down the network the second I heard the remote session (about 5 minutes into it sadly) and then have scanned every machine and changed all our network creds, router config etc.  Nothing shows up on the machines as infected and no rootkits etc were found.  Any ideas on what this scam is?  Does Dell have a massive security leak or data breach and they aren't discussing it or did I just miss it?
Anything else I should do to try and make sure nothing is compromised?  Right now I still have his computers off the network. <comment><AUTHOR> Well, for anyone that reads this. Talking to Dell they claim everything is secure and no data has been compromised. I just don't believe it, the scammer called our unlisted phone number and had all the machine and our personal details that we had given to Dell for a prior support call. So either Dell has people in India stealing customer data and using it to scam people or Dell has leaked/lost customer data and isn't being honest about it. Either way something isn't right.

I'll give Dell credit for quickly responding to me, but telling me that everything is secure and I need to file a complaint with the FTC just doesn't cut it.</comment>


We've just released a free Lean Canvas Tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.startitup.co

<comment><AUTHOR> Sign up to get it. Once you create your lean canvas, you can just share it with everybody.</comment>


Princeton's Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9a4yny/princetons-ad-blocking-superweapon-may-put-an-end-to-the-ad-blocking-arms-race <comment><USER2> Why don't we go about this problem another way: instead of blocking the ads let's just extract the content? Hash it. Put it on a modern-day Pirate Bay & load the content from a cache, skipping the ad bs altogether.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not really sure ad detection was the biggest issue versus actually stripping the ad from the website without killing the website in the process. The current war seems to be between ad blocker-blockers and ad blocker- blocker-blockers.</comment>


Twint – Twitter scraping tool written in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/twintproject/twint <comment><USER2> Inspired by Twint I created an alternative web client that relies almost entirely on web scraping. The parser is more complete than Twint's due to the different goals, supporting things like polls and videos properly. It's still work in progress but very usable with features like RSS and convenient profile search. [https://github.com/zedeus/nitter](https://github.com/zedeus/nitter)

<comment><USER3> I don't use twitter android application and the browser version on mobile is extremely slow. This made twitter usable on my browser again. Thanks! PS: It would be even more useful if someone hosts it in a domain like <someshortcode>twitter.com, then I can just add shortcode to the url and escape from the slow, official one.

<comment><USER4> Use a PWA instead. Go to Twitter on Chrome and do "Add to Home Screen". Really fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I created a tool that uses Twitter's public facing (but private) API.

[https://github.com/pauldotknopf/twitter- dump/](https://github.com/pauldotknopf/twitter-dump/)

You can use it to download every tweet from a user, not just the last 3000 that their API supports. It uses the same query syntax that the web search uses.

<comment><USER6> Does it work on suspended accounts? Mine got reported by a bunch of Trump supporters so I lost 17 years of tweets and Twitter won't listen. I can still see my own tweets, but only a page at a time. I'm thinking I might need to use a scraper like Twint instead of the API.

<comment><USER5> If you can see it while you are logged in, then yes.

Check ```twitter-dump auth``` for instructions on how to use your web cookies with the command.

When the command queries Twitter, it will look as if it is coming from you.

<comment><USER6> Nice! I followed the instructions but after I paste the curl command I get this error:

Unhandled exception. System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Length cannot be less than zero. (Parameter 'length') at System.String.Substring(Int32 startIndex, Int32 length) at TwitterDump.Program.ParseCurlCommand(String curlCommand, Dictionary`2& headers) in /home/pknopf/git/twitter- dump/src/TwitterDump/Program.cs:line 150 at TwitterDump.Program.Auth(AuthOptions options) in /home/pknopf/git/twitter- dump/src/TwitterDump/Program.cs:line 113 at TwitterDump.Program.<>c.<Main>b__0_1(AuthOptions opts) in /home/pknopf/git/twitter-dump/src/TwitterDump/Program.cs:line 33 at CommandLine.ParserResultExtensions.MapResult[T1,T2,TResult](ParserResult`1 result, Func`2 parsedFunc1, Func`2 parsedFunc2, Func`2 notParsedFunc) at TwitterDump.Program.Main(String[] args) in /home/pknopf/git/twitter- dump/src/TwitterDump/Program.cs:line 30

What'm I doing wrong?

<comment><USER6> NM, I figured it out. Chrome has several "copy as curl..." commands now. I was using "Copy as Curl(cmd)" but "Copy as Curl (bash)" is what worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> JFYI: Twint is already the name of a popular payment app in Switzerland

[https://www.twint.ch/en/](https://www.twint.ch/en/)

<comment><USER8> "popular" is a stretch, it's what a few banks are trying to get people to use because they couldn't get NFC working on apple devices with their apps. Until recently they have been giving money away like crazy to get people to use it.

It requires extra hardware at the cash register (if using bluetooth) or modification to the vendors terminal to be able to display a qr code.

Sadly the app is extremely slow and cumbersome to use at a cash register compared to other options such as NFC payments on android or just straight tap and pay credit cards.

It would be a great system for payments online as scanning a code is very easy compared to entering all your CC information but becauses the fees are so high (compare to credit cards) the largest online electronics retailer (digitec) in Switzerland dropped them after the intro rates expired.

<comment><USER9> It's probably an attempt to implement what WeChat/Alipay has. In China the majority of POS terminals has this device [https://www.alibaba.com/product- detail/Specialized-Alipay-an...](https://www.alibaba.com/product- detail/Specialized-Alipay-and-Wechat-Payment-Desktop_60787993760.html) , which is a fancy housing for a camera that scans the wallet barcode on your phone (optimized for the perfect angle and to prevent glare, I'm guessing). It seems preferable and faster than Bluetooth...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A strong quality label is that twint's twitter account got suspended - evidently Twitter doesn't like that a third party tool scrapes tweets better than they allow to.

<comment><USER11> Their API is absolute garbage. Search is incomplete and streaming consumes GBs/hour even when you're getting no results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh hey, glad to see a project I contributed to get a mention on HN.

I wrote the Splunk integration with Twint for crawling Twitter timelines: [https://github.com/twintproject/twint- splunk](https://github.com/twintproject/twint-splunk)

Feel free to hit me up if there are any questions about that part of Twint.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for your hard work! The tool has been extremely helpful in my political science research. I have noticed that a sort of error occurs when I try to scrape too many tweets from too many accounts at once (which I do by referencing a txt file with the account names that I want to scrape tweets from). I've fixed this by just making shorter lists of account names. Is there another workaround I am unaware of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like a decent tool, but I personally would not use it in production. Took a few minutes to look through the code: They basically use the HTML pages instead of the APIs. What puts me off is that the code is missing tests altogether and has quite a few separation of concern issues. HTML extraction is everywhere, storage is embedded into the package. Cool proof of concept, not ready for production, I think.

Minor stuff: Printing instead of logging. Would prefer a package that only does the retrieval and nothing else. Hardcoded SQL(ite?) storage.

<comment><USER15> Fair objections perhaps, but regarding using HTMLs -- scraping is the whole point, because getting API tokens these days is hard.

<comment><USER16> I was teaching a hands on workshop (meetup) on how to use the Twitter API a few months ago, and the hardest part for everybody was getting those API keys, clicking through several pages, checking boxes, having it emailed to you.

Then it turned out Twitter refused half of the attendees the API key.. (maybe they thought it was spam coming from the same wifi, same time).

So then I just gave out my API key to the rest of the class, and in a few minutes it was blocked..

For a service that has a history of empowering users to protest and to spread news in crisis situations, it's a shame their API is so locked down.

<comment><USER15> Yep. At least it was a realistic experience :)

The hardest part when working with data is often not manipulating data per se, but spending time on crap like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd be interested to hear if this tool could be used to scrape malware hashes (or links containing malware hashes) from Twitter? This or any other tool really... it appears my brain has turned to mush today and I cannot find or get anything to work :(

<comment><USER18> What's your use case for this? I scrape a ton of pastebin links and other sources of hashes posted by folks on Twitter about Emotet, trickbot etc. and I'd be happy to point them to a webhook or get them to you another way? Happy to talk through how we do it too.

<comment><USER17> Interesting! I'll reach out to you via LinkedIn and/or Keybase to explain my use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> nice job, twitter api is terrible

</comment><comment><USER20> I noticed that you don't use tweepy ([https://github.com/twintproject/twint#requirements](https://github.com/twintproject/twint#requirements)). Can you highlight the difference?

<comment><USER21> Tweepy is for API access, this is a scraper.

<comment><USER22> And the main advantage is you don't need to authenticate and you aren't rate limited.

<comment><USER20> A question I asked before, but I get different answers. what are the -legal- limitations of scraping data when we have an a limited access API

<comment><USER22> The problem is that there isn't a straight answer to this, see this recent thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559)

It kind of comes down to how well you can defend yourself from it being called a DOS attack (follow politeness standards and robots.txt), from violating their copyright (generally not problematic if you don't distribute the data), and from violating their terms of service (this is key in the case of twitter and reddit, carefully read their TOS).

However, the scraping of public information like in the case of tweets or reddit posts is the less problematic part. It's when you distribute the data or aggregations of the data that it could be problematic to use scraped public information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> TWINT is also the name of the product for mobile payments in Switzerland (twint.ch). I hope the reject won't run into a fight over the name.

<comment><USER23> s/reject/project

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've used a fair share of (painful) APIs over the years and I have one simple plea: can we please stop being a-holes? Can we stop scraping websites that have APIs? They are already offering machine readable data and maybe they have a reason for not providing everything. Scraping their sites circumvents this API and not only abuses their systems, but also makes your code super brittle - any change to their site breaks your code - if you code wasn't broken already as you were banned by the provider.

<comment><USER25> If people are resorting to scraping then clearly the official API isn't fit for their purposes.

As an example, here are two key features that are missing from the Twitter API at the moment:

\- Bookmarks. You can privately bookmark tweets on the Twitter website and apps. There is no way to access the list of tweets you have bookmarked in the API.

\- Threads. The concept of threads - where a tweet has replies from the same author get special treatment in terms of display - is key to how Twitter is used today. The official API doesn't support them, in that there is no way to look at a tweet and see that there exists a threaded tweet reply.

There is no good commercial reason for excluding either of these features from the public API, other than that Twitter have made a strategic decision not to invest resources in expanding the API to keep up with new features they are adding to the platform.

Given that, is it any surprise that people are resorting to scraping?

<comment><USER25> You say "maybe they have a reason for not providing everything" \- I cannot think of a reason not to provide me with API access to my own private bookmarks other than "we decided to invest our engineering resources elsewhere".

Which isn't a bad reason! But it's not a good argument for people not to scrape their own data.

<comment><USER26> > But it's not a good argument for people not to scrape their own data.

Why would you want to scrape your own data if you an already request all your data and get a whole archive? [https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your- account/how-to-dow...](https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how- to-download-your-twitter-archive)

<comment><USER25> Because then you have to trigger and download a GB+ file every time you want to programmatically access your latest bookmarks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: United Nations General Assembly Voting, 1946-2019 - <AUTHOR> https://un-project.github.io/un-votes/ <comment><AUTHOR> A single-page application to visualize voting similarity between countries at the United Nations General Assembly.</comment>


Many New York City Starbucks Locations About To Put An End To Squatters - <AUTHOR> http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/08/05/many-nyc-starbucks-locations-about-to-put-an-end-to-squatters/ <comment><USER2> Best line in the story "At Grumpy's, employees said there are no laptops allowed, period." Why am I not surprised?

</comment><comment><USER3> Bang goes the only reason to ever visit Starbucks.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't ban laptops. Just kill free wifi and you'll get rid of the squatters.</comment>


The rise of EduTube: how social media influencers are shaping universities - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/dec/02/the-rise-of-edutube-how-social-media-influencers-are-shaping-universities <comment> barry-cotter Don't read the article. I wasted precious minutes of my life on it and learned nothing of any value.

</comment><comment><USER2> Searching brings up the error:

        This page isn't working
        www.edutube.org is currently unable to handle this request.
        HTTP ERROR 500</comment>


Google Startup Launch - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/startups/ <comment><USER2> It's tough to say what their intent is regarding this program. My initial inclination is that they have multiple possible motives for providing this service:

1\. To bring more awareness to their developer services and offerings in the small business sector. They've recently stated that SMBs are of huge interest to them. For example, check out "Google My Business", a recent play of theirs:

[http://www.google.com/business/](http://www.google.com/business/)

2\. To potentially fuel early stage acquisitions and/or funding opportunities via Google Ventures. What a wise play to see how startups are using your offerings to vet them before acqui-hiring or offering funding.

What are everyone else's feelings on this play?

<comment><USER3> I think the basic idea is that if Google helps high growth companies launch, using entirely their infrastructure, that will pay dividends down the road, in many areas across the company. Startups built and scaled on Google products will stay loyal and have vendor lock in.

Also the emphasis on UX assistance and Play store priority sounds like they really want to improve the Android ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> > vendor lock in.

I think this is the final goal

<comment><USER5> Nah, I don't think that's the final goal. Individually luring in startups doesn't scale well at all. I suspect they are trying to get a much higher 3rd- party throughput through their services to seed the community with use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a simple case of Google follows BizSpark.

Next up, Larry Page dances across the stage shouting "Developers, developers, developers, developers"

I am (slightly) serious though. Google seems to slowly be following Steve Yegges advice to become a platform - and this is the best way to give that platform a workout. Without developers building on GAE / ApIs it's never going to break out of the current hole of being a few great API Islands in a sea of otherwise invisible underwater services.

</comment><comment><USER7> How much of Google's cloud stack are you required to use to apply for this program? If they require you to use GAE for your backend for example, I think it's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of startups.

<comment><USER8> GCE is a more generic/flexible backend service. Run whatever you want on there.

<comment><USER9> > Run whatever you want on there.

"Supported distros include Debian and CentOS."

Apparently not. This seems quite limited.

<comment><USER10> "Include" is not "limited to": [https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/operating- systems](https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/operating-systems)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not quite clear on this program. It it more of a biz spark type thing from google? Are they planning to fund some early stage startups?

<comment><USER12> It would seem that they are attempting to promote the use of their platforms for new startups in exchange for personalized feedback, networking, and free promotion. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up funding some of the resultant projects down the road but currently it appears that they're just testing a new method of connecting their developer relations teams with promising startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We had applied to this initiative a few days back. Not sure what is going to come of it. We use Google Cloud for our public cloud (mowbly.com), but we have kept the product deployable across any other J2EE capable environment like EC2, Azure etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> The [https://developers.google.com/startups/develop](https://developers.google.com/startups/develop) section reminds me of [http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/](http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/)

This may also be a way for Google to get eyes on early promising individuals or companies for acquisition or funding (think [http://www.intelcapital.com/](http://www.intelcapital.com/) maybe)

Edit: Clicking the apply button has a survey that includes how you will be working w/ Google Tech

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know what the eligibility criteria for this is? is this open to people from all over the world or restricted to a particular demographic?

<comment><USER16> From what I can see in the application form it looks like you can apply from every country. I also can't find any other information that conflicts with this.

It looks like the eligibility criteria are pretty lax, but they are probably going to receive tons of applications and do some heavy filtering. It wouldn't be unthinkable that the country plays a role in that filtering, but that is only speculation.

<comment><USER15> yeah i saw that, but they also mentioned this is a beta program and they're giving preferential treatment to teams nominated by their own developers. Might make sense to just wait it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google icons:

 _we will release these icons later this summer through our design guidelines available for use on Android and web_ :

\-- [http://youtu.be/isYZXwaP3Q4?t=12m21s](http://youtu.be/isYZXwaP3Q4?t=12m21s)

presumably soon there: [https://www.google.com/design/spec/style/icons.html](https://www.google.com/design/spec/style/icons.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> This could be a good content marketing play as well for qualified lead gen outreach on other platforms -- offer clear value to developers in exchange for their e-mail addresses and accompanying data points about those developers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Got no idea about the eligibility criteria for applying this. I'm curious about whether people currently using Google Compute Engine and applying material design get the higher priority or not

</comment><comment><USER20> My prototype is deployed on AWS. Would I be ruled out?

Also, having not use their stack, how hard would it be for me to move over to their stack which, I'm guessing, would be a requirement.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if there is a deadline or time limit to apply?

</comment><comment><USER22> I would also see this as an opportunity for Google to increase the quality of apps entering the Android ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER23> Exciting! :D I submitted my project. Hopefully the response is promising and not just a marketing scheme.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does this package include priority SEO placement?

That would be a real value add ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is this BizSpark for Google products?

</comment><comment><USER26> Too bad "get your new website out of our organic search sandbox with manual approval" is not one of the features provided.</comment>


We discovered our parents were Russian spies - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/discovered-our-parents-were-russian-spies-tim-alex-foley <comment><USER2> The most interesting thing for me is how easily KGB survived the fall of the USSR. Not only did they seamlessly continue all their espionage programs started during the Cold War, but they also easily came back into full power in less than a decade, appointing one of their agents as the ruler of Russia for life.

This shows the power of any major secret service. They can do literally anything they want. They don't care about anything except their own survival, and they will easily adapt to any circumstances and any political climate.

<comment><USER3> This is why having been born just out of dictatorship in Portugal, and knowing how the McCarthy worked out, why I always wonder how US citizens have this glamours idea that their secret services follow some kind of law, besides their own agenda.

<comment><USER4> What did McCarthy have to do with the secret services of the US?

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _they are fighting a legal battle to win back their Canadian citizenship, stripped from them six years ago. They believe it is unfair and illegal that they are expected to answer for the sins of their parents_

This is mis-stating (I suspect deliberately) the situation under Canadian law. They weren't "stripped" of Canadian citizenship (as can happen to war criminals who lie on their citizenship applications); rather, it was discovered that they had never been Canadian citizens in the first place. Their parents lied to them and told them that they were Canadians; but the fact that they were harmed by their parents' fraud is not a reason for the fraud to be made reality.

On the other hand, the Canadian government _does_ seem to be wrong when it comes to blaming them for the circumstances and annulling Alex's student visa. The fact that have they lived in Canada and identify as Canadian seems like strong considerations in support of an application for a visa or even permanent residence; the fact that they were tricked into thinking that they were Canadian once doesn't mean that they shouldn't have the opportunity to truly become Canadian.

<comment><USER6> They were born in Canada so they should be citizens independently of their parents.

<comment><USER7> The article mentions the applicable exception:

> Everyone who is born in Canada is eligible for Canadian citizenship, with > one exception: those who are born to employees of foreign governments.

<comment><USER8> So do the children of "actual" Canadians who betrayed their true country and turned to work for foreign, non-Canadian governments have their citizenship annulled? The children of the Canadian counterparts to Ames and Hansson? (I'm sure there have been some)

Or have about those Canadians who work legitimately for foreign embassies? Canada clearly has those [1]. I assume their kids don't have their citizenship retracted.

My guess that this is meant as some sort of punitive action against the parents, but it seems wrong to punish the children. Even assuming the kids knew, as the article pointed out, what's a 16-year old who finds out his parents are foreign spies supposed to do? Call the FBI? I can see children in a totalitarian country reacting that way out of fear or an excess of patriotism, but have we really reached that point here in the West?

1\. [http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/nnrsdnts/ntcs/frgn-eng.html](http://www.cra- arc.gc.ca/tx/nnrsdnts/ntcs/frgn-eng.html)

<comment><USER5> Children of Canadian citizens acquire citizenship by blood. The "employees of foreign governments" clause only applies if the parents are neither citizens nor permanent residents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It clearly sounds like money is no obstacle, and perhaps this is due to the parents' return to Russia as heroes and subsequent plush career placements.

So while the kids's psyche are probably quite damaged, they won't be going hungry.

Very interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER10> maybe its time for all the people everywhere to start to act like secret agents, and thus we can achieve equality. Never talk about yourself, fake your CV or dont have one, mount recording cameras everywhere around you,use SSL, dont care too much about the borders that governments make. You will not suffer that much as real agents do sometimes. No more ambush sufferings either, as people will avoid meeting in public crowds.

</comment><comment><USER11> I assumed at the time, and at the time of other similar busts, that US counterintelligence (mostly but probably not entirely the CIA), is aware of some number of persons doing illicit intelligence-gathering here. Whether, when, and whom to arrest and deport I take to depend on factors including whether our agents have been arrested, whether there is some other point we need to make, etc. I would not be surprised to learn that more than another ten Russian agents remained known or at least suspected, but unmolested for various reasons: to protect informants, to channel information or misinformation through them, or simply to have someone to arrest a few years down the road.

</comment><comment><USER12> Surprised not a single mention of "The Americans" which sounds very similar (and a great show).

Edit: my bad. I did a search and it didn't return anything.

<comment><USER13> I liked the 1st season and stopped watching in the middle of the 2nd one, felt that the writers deliberately tried to make the main characters less likable than they were in the beginning.

<comment><USER14> I think they tried to use a softer introduction and then harden them up once the audience got to know them. They are brutal killers, you aren't necessarily supposed to like them.

SPOILERS

They eventually reveal themselves to the daughter and she tells her priest. It's really pushing suspension of disbelief for me that the several additional mouths stay shut.

<comment><USER15> Except, from the little I read, there was no murders attributed to these "illegals".

No doubt a bit of TV license. Just like the top spies or doctors spend time doing boring labwork a low level worker could do.

<comment><USER16> Dramatic TV shows, movies and books are about entertainment, not telling the truth as it really happened. Almost all such things carry the disclaimer "based on" and anything can be changed and be different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a pretty cool story. A shame they got caught. :(

</comment><comment><USER18> This is probably quite common among Grauniad writers.

</comment><comment><USER19> To me, after all the Snowden leaks , the story about two Russian spies sounds kind of ridiculous because of the level of hypocrisy :)

<comment><USER19> Usually hypocrites don't like it hypocrisy being mentioned ...</comment></comment>


Notes from Peter Thiel's Speech at the National Conservatism Conference - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bonniekavoussi/notes-from-peter-thiels-speech-at-the-national-conservatism-conference-on-july-14-2019-6a51b26b202 <comment><USER2> "China is an unusually dirty country dirtying up the planet. Trump's 25% tariffs on China should be reframed as a carbon tax."</comment>


Ask HN: Source of truth for Devops, because GitHub is just not enough - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,
I'm trying to understand what's the best way to improve the RCA (root cause analysis) process in a distributed system, both technical (microservices) and organizational (devops, devs, analysts).
No matter where I worked (as a Devops/SRE/Backend) I noticed a recurring problem - there are just too many moving pieces and not enough visibility to monitor them.
Detecting that there is a problem becomes easier by using tools like APM (datadog) + Exception management (Sentry) + Logs (Kibanha). But from my experience even when you know something is broken, it's hard to find out why. It becomes even more prominent when working with multiple teams (dev, devops, infra, analysts) who use various systems & tools.
While debugging a problem I find myself forced to open several tools (Kibanha + Datadog + AWS + Github + Sentry + Slack) and use different techniques in order to pinpoint the real root cause.
I know Github should be the single source of truth, but from my experience this is not the case for most problems. For example: infra changes that were done via the AWS console, manual schema changes, recent deploy/rollback, Cron runs that we forgot about, an undocumented DB change, etc.
The RCA tends to lead me away from Github and into the dark corners of the system. To mitigate this pain, I've found several solutions that helped us. For example:
Important Cron runs status (start/end) are sent to Kibana
Asked people to write about infra config changes in a dedicated Slack channel (but sometime people just forgot)
Some questions that I find interesting:
Do you also feel this pain? Or is it just me?
What are the best practices for tracking all of these changes?
Did you implement some in-house solutions in order to solve this?
How to reduce the time it takes to find the root cause?
Is it just me or slack become a super important tool in the process of tracking changes?
Would be happy to get any advice or feedback. <comment><USER2> You are on point about observability, that is a keystone in the mitigation and RCA process.

I don't think source code can be the source of truth. It lacks the observability of live systems. How would you know what's going wrong without logs and metrics?

You infra ought to be code (terraform et al) but this still does not cover the state of the live system.

DevOps, and generally development, will require many systems to get a RCA. The many moving parts and information sources are part of modern development and systems. Too many technologies and tools to unify.

Slack should not be anything more than a communication system, def not a source of truth or tracking platform.

Sounds like your company needs to improve its practices.

#DevOpsLife</comment>


Robin Feldman on Drugs, Money, and Secret Handshakes – EconTalk - <AUTHOR> http://www.econtalk.org/robin-feldman-on-drugs-money-and-secret-handshakes/ <comment><AUTHOR> This episode discusses the incentive structure of insurance companies, drug companies, and other middlemen driving up the price of drugs.

The patent system with respect to drugs is a mess. The proliferation of secondary patents on established drugs has to be done away with. Drugs are expensive not because they're any better, but because of monopolies gained through abuse of patents.

The 80/20 rule on insurance company profits also has a perverse effect. The only way for insurance companies to earn bigger profits is by increasing costs. If they try to save money for their customers, they would be forced to earn less.

In my opinion, the system needs less tinkering by government and more control by individuals over their own care.

<comment><USER2> Excellent episode! It really highlights the nuanced nature of the industry as it stands, with the incentive structure defined by employer-provided health insurance, the patent system, and the "PBM" middlemen.</comment></comment>


How Medellín reinvented itself as a tech hub - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2015/01/02/lets_all_move_to_medellin_how_a_once_terrifying_drug_city_reinvented_itself_as_a_tech_hub/ <comment><USER2> I just came back from Medellin this week (Monday), and I wouldn't say that Medellin is a tech hub or will be one any time soon.

I think the most important reason against it is the Internet. It's hard to find even the average U.S. city Internet speed here. Additionally, you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because there is no concept of "hot spots" (The only "public" hot spot is the Juan Valdez Cafe, which is the Colombian equivalent of Starbucks).

Another major reason is that nearly no one speaks English. If you want to get by, you MUST know how to speak Spanish. This is a huge hurdle, knowing that English is the de facto technology, hacker language.

<comment><USER3> > Additionally, you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because > there is no concept of "hot spots"

I live here. And my brother travel all around the city, so if in USA you can get wifi free everywhere then this is true, otherwise we don't see that get internet acces is difficult at all..

<comment><USER4> Free wifi is likely less available there than we are used to in the US. I went to Europe last year for vacation and it was hard to find free wifi, too. I almost got stranded in Denmark one day because my credit card didn't work in Europe (no smartchip), and I had counted on using wifi to contact the person I was staying with. Every place in the US that I use for free wifi was charging for it in Europe, and even then it was harder to find paid wifi hotspots than back here in the US. In the US, you can get free wifi at any Starbucks, McDonald's, public library, most coffee shops, a lot of restaurants--we have come to expect it to be in a lot of places. When traveling, only hotels that are aimed at business travelers charge for wifi in the room (because business travelers aren't paying for any of it and thus don't care about the added cost for wifi)--the cheaper hotels offer it for free. When the OP complained about not having hot spots in Medellin, that's the expectation he's got--and he'd probably make the same complaint about Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland (I know I did).

EDIT: On review, basically what Ivanca said.

<comment><USER5> It should definitely not be hard to find wifi in Denmark. The biggest coffee chain (Baresso) has wifi at all locations that isn't even passworded, and most smaller cafes have a hotspot with a password (in Copenhagen at least, working in coffee shops on laptops is very common). There is also wifi at public libraries, on the buses, on the commuter rail, in malls, at museums, etc. And in Sweden, every 7-11 has wifi, which means that hotspots are almost literally everywhere. I doubt you could walk more than a few blocks in Copenhagen or Stockholm without hitting free wireless.

<comment><USER4> Ah, well I wasn't trying to throw any stones at Denmark or Sweden. My point, probably phrased with too many words, was just that nobody would go to Denmark expecting chickens in the street or no civilization, but wifi just wasn't as available as I'm used to in the US there, either. (It was free at 7-11 in Denmark, too, although only for 10 minutes--that was still long enough to save me from spending a long afternoon at the train station in Aarhus.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am from Medellin and eventhough I am not living here anymore, I come every vacation period to visit my family.

Things have definitely changed for good and the city is becoming an important economic hotspot for LatAm, a product of that is the enhancement of the tech scene off course. The government is financing entrepreneurial acts through non-profits, specially those that are tech-focused; the city has been a national art epicenter for a long time (which correlates strongly with entrepreneurial mindset) and the 2 public universities in the city are great. Internet penetration in the country is exponentially increasing (pretty much everyone in the major cities has a connection); pretigious accelerators such as Socialatom Ventures exist and the country has examples of tech companies that are targeting global markets such as Koombea in Barranquilla and Authy (YC S12) and Bunny Inc in Bogota.

However, the deepest problem right now is our mentality. VC firms here are only interested in investing in copy cats, they just wanna play it safe and replicate what has worked in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv.

In addition to that there's a really small amount of people interested in computer programming, or having the rule-breaking mentality that renowed personalities such as Paul Graham remark the importance of.

Things have definitely improoved, but we are really far away of making everyone "move here".

<comment><USER3> Not much different to others parts of the world, methinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I live here.

Medellin have a lot of "sleep" talent, but not significant investment or "cool" job opportunities. The government have a "face" for be a tech hub, but fall _very short_. And despite the good intentions of some people I have know, barely pay attention to the community neither apply real steps to push harder.

For example, I win one of the contest for tech startups among more than 1000 (or 2000? I don't remember) and the prize was US 2.000 aprox (with absurd restrictions: I only can use it for buy presentation cards, brochures and similars! And I get the full restriction only after the win!), with TONS OF USELESS "support" (ie: A lot of the money supposedly for impulse the startup machinery is for the consultants that provide "support" and "assistance").

For example, all the programs I have tried demand half-time for be in the "consultan support thing-y". For 6 MONTHS or more. All for the promise to travel to silicon valley, and meet some investors.

So, is like when the vice-president of the SENA (the main tech-jobs-formation institution in the country) say to us (aka: a dozen of the "most promising founders back them) "We have US 5 millons to support yours" and NONE of us get more than a place to code and that was all.

That is the bad. Sorry for the rant (I have tried for more than 4 years several things before quit)

\--- The GOOD:

Medellin have become a very _good_ place for turist and we have a lot of visits for all over the world, with the obvious USA/Australia/Europeans plus Chinese and others.

The internet and related stuff is good. Not asian-amazing but for my understanding, far better than in USA. A LOT of internet penetration, more than in other latin-america countries.

A lot of untaped potential. However, is hard to build a startup: The idea of not get money for months is something very few can do it (And I mean: can. Is not about want or desire).

I'm lucky doing alone, but honestly I'm too relaxed than most ;), however, convince others to join me (and others startups) is very hard. Except if you promise a classic job arrangement, that is..

So is my belief than the one that get here a be ycombinator-alike will have a blast, because we don't have any significant player, like for example, a kind of google/famous startup where everyone wanna work.

Not even the financial industry or any other that is the "obvious" place to get employment.

So, among big companies, small groups of >5 developers are not uncommon.

Others good things:

\- Medellin is considered the best city to live in the country. And that was true even in the times of the terrorist bombings!

\- Not to hot, not to cold. Great food. Not to big, all the modern stuff is here. Good public transportation.

\- Ultra-safe water supply. You can drink from the tap.

People are nice in general, and with foreigners even more. Not many of use know english well (as you can infer from my writing!) but is not hard to find qualified translators (my brother not only do english, also Chinese, so I know this from first hand), and around the city is becoming more and more common to have signs in both spanish/english.

So, I think the city is in the moment were the potential is there, and things are becoming more and more aligned, so is the moment to create things!

<comment><USER7> Coming from a first world country, I've never registered clean water as a significant contributor to quality of life.

Thank you for the interesting perspective, I wish you good luck with your short term endeavours.

<comment><USER8> Safe tap water is far from universal. I was just in rio and most households use filters as the public supply is not safe.

<comment><USER9> Even in the US, such as in my town in Massachusetts, tap water--though safe to drink due to chlorination--is quite disgusting due to high levels of minerals from well water. First world problems right?

<comment><USER10> Well, that's subjective. When I was in Canada, the local water supply contained a lot of minerals. Some of the locals disliked the taste for that reason, but I positively enjoyed it. Certainly not in the same category as microbial contamination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess i'll never wrap my head around the idea of working out of a coffee shop...

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I am being over critical/skeptical but tech companies could be a great way to launder money for organized crime in that part of the world.

<comment><USER3> Nope!

That is what I say with untapped potential. We are not even targets for them!

Corruption is the most big problem, and yes, contracts with governments and big companies still rely too much in "I know you, you know me, where is my 'commission'?"; but, the developer is not a "high class" worker in the way is it in the Silicon valley. Programing is still see as "the thing that nerds do to make computers run", so we are not high on the list of things that make shady actors huge money.

\----

A big problem is get quality investors. Not get money: I have several offers among this years, but from people with a lot of money but no understanding of tech, or the assumption that investment in a startup entitled them to become the boss and get 50% or more on it. Not many get in that bad terms, so that is another reason the "shady actors" are some few connected companies but not more. The rest of us are in the shadow, working hard and not getting in troubles.

<comment><USER12> I wasnt talking about making money, but cleaning dirty money, different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought this was going to be an article about Washington, DC</comment>


Ask HN: Future of Uber - <AUTHOR> For the past couple of weeks, it seems like Uber has drawn a lot of negative press. Do you guys think this will actually affect them in the long run? Amazon gets a lot of negative press and it seems like it doesn't affect them at all. <comment><USER2> I think it absolutely will fail. I'm in the know about much but I was a contractor there at 685. Even from my perspective everything I'm reading sounds 100% true.

One thing no one talks about is the company absolutely does not scale. People talk about drivers being contractors but no one ever talks Ubers actual contactors base. Operationally the company is run by contactors. I've seen people say the have 11,000 employees but really closer 14k thats compared a 40k+ contract base. God if that held it might be closer to 50k by now. Yea you read that right. No joke I'm told they were growing by 1k contractors per week and I believe that.

Not one single operational process is defined or automated. For a company that pretends to be bleading edge the sure get a lot of crap manually. I once heard a group of data scientist sitting out on one of there many couch lounges talking about automation and new customer service call center opening in South America one said out "oh well fuck it we can always leverage more human capital till we figure it out.

Think about it. Their rapid growth was only fueled by a army of contractors. Every time they expand they need 1000s of cars, driverops people, new driver onboarding, insurance claims.

They don't care about these people, most perms treat contractors like theyre disposal. And to the company they are they want to automate it all but seems like there's no single vision to do that and no plan to get there. And they way everything changes or gets thrown out for something else on a whim I don't think they'll ever get there.

Also I want to throw out that harassment happens a lot to contracts and if you see anyone complane watch how fast their contract gets pulled and new meat for harassment is swapped in.

<comment><USER2> I also meant 1000s of csrs, customer service representative, replying on my phone. Every support or billing issue submitted through the app is answered by someone. More often than not they're trying to use low cost call centers in Asia and Latin America.</comment></comment>


Biometric Keystroke Based Authentication (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ratatstaters/punchTimeAuth <comment><USER2> Interesting, but that idea wouldn't let me in the site if I used another keyboard. Or a password manager.

<comment><USER3> Or a different PC altogether, or you hurt your hand, or you're drunk, or, ...

This probably wasn't meant to be practical and only a fun experiment, I hope. :)</comment></comment>


Kb: A minimalist hacker-oriented knowledge base manager - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gnebbia/kb <comment><USER2> Awesome Knowledge Management List:

[https://github.com/brettkromkamp/awesome-knowledge- managemen...](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/awesome-knowledge-management)

Interview with maintainer:

[https://www.pythonpodcast.com/contextualize-topic- modeling-e...](https://www.pythonpodcast.com/contextualize-topic-modeling- episode-267/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you! Any particular recommendations from your experience? (I may end up spending my whole weekend on this :-D)

<comment><USER2> Nope, total analysis paralysis.

<comment><USER2> Also, I'd like an external knowledge with a spaced repetition system used as an API for the internal knowledge management system in my brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's not minimalist, this is minimalist

        sn() {
            rg -S -C 2 $1 /some/folder/with/snippets/as/files
        }

        $ sn git #searches for snippets containing `git`

<comment><USER5> I can do one better: Just learn to use the standard unix tools directly. If you keep stacking wrappers upon wrappers and grow to depend on them you will be totally lost once you have to work on another machine. It also makes it easier to e.g. replace grep by fzf.

For reference:

        kb list -> find
        kb list foo -> find | grep foo
        kb edit --title "git" --category "cheatsheet" -> vim cheatsheet/git
        kb delete --id 1 -> rm path/to/file
        kb grep foo -> grep -r foo

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! I started from there, then these commands evolved into functions and the functions evolved into bash scripts which then evolved into a python program in order to have something more readable/structured and cross platform.

But of course no software is an excuse to not learn the good old UNIX core tools. kb is not better than these tools, it just packs them up in order to have a slightly nicer output and be able to associate metadata to the notes in a clean way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a fantastic name for a command-line knowledge base! Extremely heartening for anyone who's gone through the briar-patch of browsing through a self- disorganizing hierarchy of sub-kilobyte text files. The animated screenshots on GitHub are very welcome. Interesting.

I would like to see more import/export options.

<comment><USER7> Ditto on the import/export functionality. The .tar.gz file format is an odd choice. A plain json dump would be the obvious choice here, as it would be easier to manipulate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm lazy. I've found a gitlab wiki sufficient for my basic needs. 1\. Version control 2\. Easily editable from terminal (markdown) 3\. Easily viewed via browser (either on gitlab or self hosted gollum instance) 4\. Supports some HTML, such as `details` and `summary` for drop down visibility. 5\. Supports `[[_TOC_]]` to add a table of contents (works well with in `details` at the top of every page) 6\. Supports nested directories for the sidebar navigation on gitlab (github forces a single layer)

</comment><comment><USER9> For me this kind of tool needs to provide a way to sync between devices to be useful, and ideally be available on mobile. As it's using sqlite3 to store documents, it's probably not trivial to sync with something like Dropbox.

<comment><USER10> I missed it was in a database when I checked it out. That'd be a hard no for me.

I much prefer separate text files for any minimal notes solution, since that plays well with nvAlt, Obsidian, 1Writer, etc, and is the safest sync in every file syncing service (they pretty much all know how to deal with text conflicts). It also lets me write side tooling to crawl and process notes much more easily than if I had to hit a database.

At this point, a proprietary database had better be justified by something epic like Roam's bullet transclusion or Evernote's back-end handwriting OCR, or some other killer feature that's hard to replicate locally in decoupled files. Otherwise, it's just not worth even considering.

<comment><USER11> A ubiquitous public domain library is a proprietary database now?

<comment><USER12> No, but it is non-transparent and can't be edited with a text editor, without being unpacked and repacked like Fossil. Yet another layer of indirection is the last thing I want when I'm in a hurry to write down a thought before I forget it. Of course that can be overcome with practicing the tooling, but that's also a non-negligible transition cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What advantage does it have over text files, an editor and grep?

<comment><USER14> I think it basically _is_ text files, and editor and grep. Just conveniently packaged under one command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So much better than man pages. I get that you need a huge manual to cover everything. But 99.99999999% of the time someone needs to just decompress a tar.gz or create a tar.gz file, they really don't need the man page.

Edit: although, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like this doesn't come pre-loaded with anything :(

Edit 2: Oh man, thank you guys!

<comment><USER16> You might like tldr.sh, bro pages, or cheat.sh (Edit: My pleasure!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't want to be negative but for me nothing beats markdown files with visual studio code.

<comment><USER18> What's your setup?

<comment><USER19> I would say it is markdown files, and Visual Studio Code. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tiddlywiki plus OneDrive has been my go-to for a personal knowledgebase for a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this. I'll give it a try for sure.

I'm struggling with a good tool that does help me manage my documents and content. There was "Google Desktop" more than a decade back that Google discontinued.

Basically, it used to create a Google like experience locally on my desktop. It used to index my pdfs, email (outlook then!), excels, basically everything I used back then.

Would be grateful to get any recommendations on alternatives for those old enough to know what Google Desktop was! :) (un-minimalistic but neat is also ok)

<comment><USER21> I would love to have something like google for my local notes! I usually go into these threads with the hopes of finding a tool like that. Something that would go over my plaintext notes (PDF support can be a nice to have too), index them, and allow me to search through them google style.

</comment></comment><comment> lucid-quiet Not that this isn't useful, but I think I get all these features with an org- mode file and a ripgrep search using counsel. I think I get all the same features.

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like everyone has the same ideas at different but slightly overlapping spans.

I've been managing my "work log" notes in such way from a few years already.

[https://gist.github.com/fmeyer/dfbe320b7f53808f52e2fa7edd12b...](https://gist.github.com/fmeyer/dfbe320b7f53808f52e2fa7edd12b810)

</comment><comment><USER23> I wanted something similar but that worked online.

I didn't really like any of the alternatives so I ended up coding my own.

It is open if anybody would like to use it as well.

[https://nostashapp.com/](https://nostashapp.com/)

I work better with it.

My standard workflow is to keep notes about what I want to do at my day job in a TODO note, and about what I did in a Journal - $date note (each day a new journal note).

Then anytime I do something new or I complete some weird or complex procedure, I write a note about it. And if possible I make it public.

I end up being on top of all my responsibilities quite more easily.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very slick and well done. An optional way to hook it up to a tag suggestion service might be nice.

</comment><comment><USER25> What happened to man pages?

<comment><USER26> I always found them to be _too_ detailed.

It's easier for me to just write down most commonly used syntaxes of commands, or use something like [https://tldr.sh/](https://tldr.sh/).

<comment><USER27> Don't get me started on "man find". I usually end up googling it (I don't use the terminal frequently).

Why can't I type "find toto.txt" and it looks for the file everywhere? If I need a more complex search I'm fine providing more arguments but give me something by default so that I don't spend 10 minutes trying to find how to use find ;)

Yes I could make an alias, but it won't be available everywhere.

<comment><USER28> You might find,

[https://github.com/sharkdp/fd](https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)

to your liking. It is simple, intuitive, and very fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for posting!

Is there a way to tag sub-kb's. I have a tech group I'd like to share documentation with, but maintain a personal database as well. I suppose I can use 2 different files.

This really does look like the better version of `um`, `tldr`, and local manpage and use examples. Thanks for making, pushing, and sharing</comment>


NASA discovers hidden portals in Earths upper atmosphere - <AUTHOR> http://www.telescope.com/Articles/Current-Articles/Astronomy/NASA-Discovers-Hidden-Portals-in-Earths-Upper-Atmosphere/pc/9/c/192/sc/199/p/103046.uts

<comment><USER2> What a lot of unintelligible gibberish. It mixes some real science with science fiction and other physical phenomena that are completely unrelated.

The magnetic portal is a "hole" in the magnetic field. The particles of the solar wind can are not deflected. This is not related to "wormholes", "Casinir effect", "faster than light travel", teletransportation, "tunels", ...

If you are interested in reading the real science and experiments, go to [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag- portals....](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't really understood in which way this is a "portal". Is this a clear, magnetized path, like a sudden "highway" from sun to Earth; or are we talking about portals like Portal, the game?

Neither this nor the NASA article [1] really explains what's happening. I think it's more like a "highway" or flux tube [2] but I'm not sure at all.

[1] [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag- portals....](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals.html) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_tube](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_tube)

<comment><USER4> By the NASA definition, a portal is an unbroken magnetic path between the earth and the sun. No instant transmission of anything is happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes, when you think "I want some of what he's smoking" it turns out to be quite literal.

If it's this guy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jay_Brown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jay_Brown) , I'm thinking some telescope retailer's site bought some filler content and got quite a bit more cosmic value than they expected.</comment>