Hillary Clinton and Electoral Fraud - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-electoral-fraud-992ad9e080f6#.w7tpstquy <comment><USER2> Previously discussed and debunked yesterday on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599083)

<comment><AUTHOR> not remotely debunked...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't you digitally sign the source code of these machines and have that verified by officials? Inspection as well. You could stuff a ballot box without the machine if there's no oversight.

</comment><comment><USER4> Uhhh, apparently Spencer Gundert is too young to remember all the other times there have been election fraud (Bush-Florida) and the brew-ha-ha over the crappy voting machines we've had for way too long. Drop in the bucket, buddy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why do we even have to leave the house? Everyone should get a government issued digital certificate, and vote using email.

<comment><USER6> Because it's too hard to secure everybody's home computers. A botnet could swing an election.

<comment><USER5> Good point, I agree. Until we get computer literate humans, we can't really use computers for such things.

<comment><USER6> Even with competent computer owners it's a problem. Bruce Schneier once pointed out that, given how much money is spent on presidential elections, we should assume that election hackers have budgets of $100 million. They could easily pay for zero-days.

It's not even out of the question that organizations like the NSA could launch attacks, or their counterparts in other countries.

It's also a problem for electronic voting machines without paper trails. One researcher several years ago demonstrated a way to make a virus attacking a popular voting machine. Without a way to audit the results, there's no way to know whether this has happened.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Baltimore's bill for ransomware: Over $18M, so far - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/baltimores-bill-for-ransomware-over-18-million-so-far/ <comment><USER2> Underfunded, constant leadership turnover.... pretty much a recipe for disaster.</comment>


Google+ continues battle with fading user interest - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/google-plus-traffic.html

<comment><USER2> I'm sure the trend lines look about the same, but the absolute numbers have to be quite a bit off as they aren't including black navbar induced visits.

I'm not a big G+ user, I followed a bunch of people who post publicly, I visit maybe once a day just to see if there is something interesting...but my visits are probably 15-1 nav bar to clicking a G+ link somewhere in the open web.

</comment><comment><USER3> After the recent Google Reader update where they removed Reader's social features in favor of G+, people are now actually using G+ to +1 RSS items. Before the G+ integration, you could see over 100 people "liked" each xkcd post. Now, all that activity has shifted over to people +1'ing each post (to the tune of thousands of +1's per xkcd post).

I wonder what the breakout for follower dynamics looks like between Twitter, G+ and Facebook. In my limited anecdotal experience, Twitter is great for celebrities to mass advertise themselves with huge follower counts. G+ is niche enough that you can communicate back and forth and be heard on posts. Nobody uses Fb's subscribe feature.

</comment><comment><USER4> The reasoning in the article is a bit off for evaluating the popularity of a website. Saying the usage has dropped in 11 of 21 isn't surprising. Many websites gain users in a pattern of big spikes, followed by steep drops, but with the new plateau higher than the before the spike.

When it's a blog, the big spikes come when posts goes viral. I'm not sure what would be the big spikes for google+ now that the public launch has happened. Maybe just a bunch of little spikes in their case.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know but i kind of find the linux kernel, debian, or rather the linux community in general quite active there. Its seems to be a wonderful platform for blogging and sharing in public, but less of a facebook type of a hangout. Moreover, the posts there have more active discussions than similar posts in tumblr or blogger.

</comment><comment><USER6> I got on board early, hoping that friends and family will eventually move over from Facebook. A handful did in the beginning but eventually I realized that nobody is moving from Facebook. I eventually turned my G+ off completely. I think Google just doesn't know Social and they will eventually be folding.

<comment><USER7> Why do you prefer Google to Facebook?

<comment><USER6> You mean Facebook over Google? I don't prefer it, but that's where most of the average Internet users are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The early data appears to show usage increasing until the pseudonym purges started -- which is also when the press coverage shifted from glowing to mixed.

</comment><comment><USER9> G+ is too damn confusing. That is all.

<comment><USER10> The circle feature, while nice, makes it look like a ghost town.

I don't put people that are not on G+ in my circles so when they sign up, they see an empty feed. Facebook knows that you need a minimum amount of friends in order to find the service useful. With G+ and the circles, this threshold is higher and more difficult to reach as there are less users.

<comment><USER11> Google+ needed to make something useful for people with few to no friends. To at least counter the chicken and egg issue.

<comment><USER12> Search for topics that interest you... add those people to a circle.. voila - you have a bunch of people you can share things and discuss with. I have a circle of VC's & angels, a circle for Python enthusiasts, a circle of C#/.NET enthusiasts, etc. My stream is always full of new and interesting discussions.

I don't think G+ will be a "social network" like Facebook. And that's a good thing. There's a reason im not on Facebook but I still use Twitter and G+. A lot of the people I talk to feel the same way.

What's more interesting to you... A) Reading about your friend's drama issues or B) Reading about the latest, coolest startups and technologies?

A) Facebook B) G+

<comment><USER11> neither, i don't want to hear about my friend's dramas or about startup successes. both made me irritated or jealous =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It depends on who is spinning the news, see:

 _Google+ Sees Its 3rd Largest Week Since Launch_ [http://searchengineland.com/report-google-sees-its-3rd- large...](http://searchengineland.com/report-google-sees-its-3rd-largest-week- since-launch-101380)

G+ is bigger than Istagram and Foursquare combined yet Google bashing persists for some reason.

<comment><USER14> Having burnt several times more money and time (person years) in engineering and marketing, G+ can't smile about being bigger than Instagram!

<comment><USER13> Why not? it's younger than Intagram and one has to start somewhere. Also it's natural fit for Google, they have disparate social feature for disparate products and now they can unify them, it's mission isn't to kill Facebook.</comment></comment></comment>


What I learned after 100,000 miles on the road talking to Trump supporters - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/trump-supporters-us-elections <comment><USER2> It's all too easy to feel righteous indignation for the "others" when we're so easily immersed in our own little bubbles and personal challenges. To be sure, there are fringes on the edges of every faction of the political spectrum that are more difficult to reconcile, but if one can tune out that noise for a moment there is a possibility of reaching a deeper understanding of one another here. Whether or not you like the path chosen to office by our new President-elect--or even like him at all--there is something to be learned from listening to the large numbers of people who voted him into office and the factions that supported him. Most of them are honest, decent, and hardworking people that have similar struggles, hopes, emotions, concerns, and dreams as most anyone else in this country. The President-elect's message resonated with many people. That may seem crazy to many folks, but most folks who voted for him aren't crazy. Pay attention, engage in conversation, and try to understand why it resonated. And if you supported him, do the same. If everyone can work hard to remove the rhetoric and BS perpetuated by any of the political parties all the better.

</comment><comment><USER3> A small sampling, but their reasons for supporting Trump just show how little they know about why they're in their current situation / what electing Trump could possibly change for them. It's simultaneously sad and infuriating.

This just goes to show that education is key. Education is about so much more than the classes you take. It teaches critical thinking, which can help improve emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a powerful skill to have. It allows one to look inward, reflect on their own circumstance, and reason about how the society they live in actually affects them.

<comment><USER4> _" This just goes to show that education is key."_

 _IF_ it is accompanied with _understanding and empathy on the part of the teacher._ Condescension is part of what got Trump elected; going "oh, we have to teach these poor stupid people" or treating an education project in Appalachia as a volunteer tourism lark will do little than breed more resentment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article tries very hard to portray Trump's followers as racist, but really I just think they are desperate and forgotten. A quote really resonated with me, from Lori Ayers in Ohio:

> "I voted for Obama the first time, not the second. Now I am voting for > Trump. We just got to change things."

It's obvious that what resonates with blue-collar workers is change. The sad thing is they are probably a dying breed in a world where computers are replacing everything from air traffic controllers to bus drivers.

I'm not sure if there IS a solution, apart from massive education reform (to help their kids break out of that social strata) or massive government incentives to bring jobs back -- which will most likely not happen.

Conservatives definitely have their own problems, but liberals live in such bubbles, it doesn't even surprise me Hilary lost (even though I was leaning that she wouldn't).

</comment><comment><USER6> The narrative pushing is too much. I still cant believe how much of asian indian and asian community voted for him in philadelphia very unexpected.</comment>


Show HN: SpaceX Countdown - <AUTHOR> https://go.aws/36C1usc <comment><AUTHOR> Think 24/7 digital frame on the wall type thing that flips to the live stream one hour before launch and back to the countdown for the next mission. Critical feedback welcome!

Works on mobile but designed primarily for larger displays. For mobile (or anything with YouTube embed autoplay disabled) it displays the mission patch in the background instead of the NASA earth views loop.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice!

But quite a heavy page for what is essentially an eight digit display and a line of text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Haha... your right. I got my frame up and running with a Raspberry Pi 2 and it is temp throttling after about 5 min. The page could definitely use some optimization.

I'll work on that next. Maybe there should be a setting to reduce background video quality?</comment></comment>


Why I Left Medium - <AUTHOR> http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-medium/ <comment><USER2> I'm sorry but saying you felt "dead inside" because of your blogging platform choice is a bit too much hyperbole for me.

That said, I'd never give my content to a platform like Medium. I happen to like the "writing experience" of Gist, but there's this thing called copy/paste which makes it easy to get the content over to WordPress when I'm done.

<comment><USER3> I think what it comes down to is that people are scared that Medium is going to use their license to steal all your content. Their license is weird: It says it allows them to make derivative works with your content, but at the same time it says it allows you to retain ownership of your content. What does that mean? Nobody knows.

I think if Medium just clarified that one line in their license it would make everyone's fears go away.

<comment><USER4> It is standard CYA terms to keep them from getting sued by their users whenever they decide to change the site in such a way that displays your content in a different manner than what you expected.

<comment><USER3> Then they should say that's what it's for. I think that would be simple enough.

<comment><USER5> Every service you've ever signed up for that accepts user-generated/submitted content has a clause functionally identical to this.

Of course, every time someone reads one of those clauses they think it implies all sorts of evil, because reading comprehension is not a strong suit of the internet.

<comment><USER6> To put it other way round, maybe comprehensive writing is not a strong suite of the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's weird to me that people need all these amazing tools to just write stuff. I typically write things in emacs text mode buffers because I'm writing words and don't need any bells and whistles.

Almost all of The Geek Atlas was written like that and then pasted into whatever thing O'Reilly wanted me to create XML with.

<comment><USER8> I really like the idea of writing in a text editor, and have tried to do so many times in Vim, but for some reason it's very important for me to see the result as it will appear to the reader as I'm writing. I don't know why this is, it just happens. When I'm in a WYSIWYG word processor with the typography mostly figured out, everything goes smoothly.

Likewise, when I write a post on web forums, Facebook, HN, etc., I need to publish it first before I can properly edit. Seeing the post in context is somehow important.

<comment><USER9> You can very likely wire that up, if you've got a bee in your bonnet to do so.

When I was editing latex files regularly, I had an environment something like

        $ make output.pdf
        $ xpdf -remote projectname output.pdf & while inotifywait -e modify **/* ; do make output.pdf; xpdf -remote projectname -reload; done

Then any time I changed a figure or a tex file or an embedded screenshot or whatever (any transitive dependency of output.pdf), make would rebuild it and display the result. xpdf nicely does not change the scroll position (even a little bit), so this gave me a rather nice nearly-real-time WYSIWYG view.

My $EDITOR at the time was vim and it never entered my head to try to contrive automatic saving every time I paused typing or something like that, but that seems like a fun idea.

<comment><USER8> Well, there are a lot of things like that, e.g.: [http://socrates.io](http://socrates.io), but it doesn't do it for me. I like to be actually manipulating the end result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Two different parts of the brain conflicting. When I'm writing, I don't want > to be in code mode.

This is one of the reasons why I think static site generators are really in their infancy. He describes Pelican as "Jekyll for Python". This highlights what is wrong. You shouldn't have to decide on a tool based on what language it is written in; you shouldn't need to know what language it is written in.

A static site generator should have a very simple folder structure, something like:

draft/

published/

site/

templates/

That's it. You write markdown files in draft/ and move them to published/ when you're done. The generator runs as a daemon and spits out site/ No config files. No `bundle install` nonsense.

<comment><USER11> Please make this happen.

Bonus points if it's agnostic to markup format.

<comment><USER12> Please tell me you're kidding. This is already how 99% of static site generators work.

<comment><USER11> Give me a link to one then because I clearly missed it and could use your help.

The 1% of static site generators I've seen are written in scripting languages that require me to install an interpreter and related build tools. Then I'm stuck with their own custom template, markup, and configuration language. And I just don't really care to manage all of that. Even as a highly technical user.

I wrote one myself in the 90s in Perl (and have thankfully lost the source code). They're fun to noodle with if you have the time.

I currently run my site on Pelican (and even patched the WP importer so that it properly preserves WP formatting). It's great but terrible. I still have to keep around a virtualenv. I have to maintain templates that I'll never be able to reuse. It's still not quite good enough. It's a good thing I make my money programming in Python and am familiar with the developer tools.

I'd like something a little more hands-off and with fewer dependencies.

<comment><USER13> We do our best to make Pelican as user-friendly as we can, but of course there are areas we'd like to improve upon. Community contributions to that end are most welcome. (^_^)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The concept of spending your time on writing things that you are obviously very passionate about on someone's else's platform so that guy can make money off of your writing seems so silly to me. Specially among people who are supposedly tech savvy.

Just spend 5 bucks a month and less than 45 minutes of initial setup, you can have your own blog and have 100% control over whatever the hell you want to do.

People who can't do that, should probably use yet-another-blogging-platform like Medium.

<comment><USER15> Medium is providing a service with the expectation of making money, if a user is a decent writer then there is the potential of further opportunities being presented to the user. Medium (and Wordpress, and other similar platforms) are providing the user with value, it's not entirely one-way.

I'm tech savvy (B.Sc. Artificial Intelligence and Applied Mathematics, Computer Programmer working full-time for 8 years since University) and I choose to use Medium because I don't want to manage my own personal server, or buy domain names, or have recurring expenses, or have to fiddle with configuration files, or hack templates. Simplicity means the world.

Saying that; I agree with you (in that people contributing their data to platforms for the profit of others is silly.) Facebook is something I don't use because I don't see what I can get back from it that I can't already get from text messages or face-to-face interaction. Medium at least offers me something in exchange for contribution.

<comment><USER16> Your last point is interesting because I feel the exact opposite. Facebook I don't have a problem with because I just post throwaway stuff on their anyway, and all my RL friends so they actually have a better chance of seeing it vs on my blog or twitter or whatever.

But Medium feels like it's taking the part of my online presence that I want to be most unique and commoditize it into this mass website that will only ever make the founders of the site famous. I know that sounds extreme because they do provide you with a great tool and some means of exposure you wouldn't otherwise have, but it just feels so dehumanizing somehow. Like it's taking the very best part of the internet and attempting to privatize for the benefit of some heavy-hitters in the silicon valley old boys network. And I think I put my finger on something with that last bit, because Medium is really kind of the same thing as Tumblr which never bothered me; maybe because it didn't have that patina of tech insider design perfection bestowed upon us in private beta as if from the gods themselves.

<comment><USER17> Wow. You perfectly worded the issue I've had in the back of my mind with Medium (but not Tumblr like you say).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not just a matter of platform customization, it's a matter of _identity_. Who remembers the author of a Medium article after one finishes reading?

<comment><USER19> Exactly! In fact, Marco -- which the author refers to -- has also been telling this. Since 2011, in fact: [http://www.marco.org/2011/07/11/own-your- identity](http://www.marco.org/2011/07/11/own-your-identity)

After a month of struggling between Blogger's brain-dead, non-Markup, stuck- in-2001's editor and contemplating a complete switch to Medium, I also decided to just go with a simpler, static blog (running on a stripped down Pelican). As coincidence would have it, I just decided to put up some random thoughts about this today as well: [http://blog.macuyiko.com/post/2013/pelican-switch- follow-up....](http://blog.macuyiko.com/post/2013/pelican-switch-follow- up.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought HN decided couple of months ago with the whole posterous thing to never, ever, trust a third part to host you blog for free.

How long until twitter buys Medium and decides to shut everything down?

<comment><USER21> >How long until twitter buys Medium and decides to shut everything down?

You should look up who runs Medium.

<comment><USER22> How long till x buys Medium and/or it goes out of business and decides to shut everything down, like Posterous, et al?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Great Internet Scam: tricking people into taking their time to create content for your web property, thereby increasing the value of your property. We've seen one major application after another go down this same road.

</comment><comment><USER24> One of the reasons I never started blogged seriously is something like this. It's a very silly reason, I dev alot, I have ideas for blogposts.. but I just never could decide on a platform.

I don't like the idea of a hosted blogplatform, for some of the reasons Kenneth didn't.

I refuse to run Wordpress due to it's security history and upgrade hell. I know, there's security issues with everything.. except for maybe a static site with jekyll or something :). It's just that ages ago I thought that Wordpress was a silver bullet making various sites and I got bitten by it.

I never found a polished ruby/rails blog app. I've searched, maybe not lately. Has this changed?

A static site generator writing blog posts with git never excited me much, I like a kickass RTE.

The idea of doing my own blog comes up now and then but I haven't acted on it yet.

What options are there out there besides PHP? Preferable ruby/sinatra/rails over django.

<comment><USER25> Using a service like PagodaBox helps a lot with the security issues. The filesystem for everything but uploads is read-only.

<comment><USER26> Why not Heroku in this case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think it's good to have a low-overhead method for infrequent writers (people who want to expand beyond their tweet on occasion). Medium seems a good name and place for that.

On the other hand, I can totally see why people who write frequently and think of their corpus as more than an auxiliary to twitter would want more.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I hope more people who have a greater pull then me continue to push the idea you can control your own content and it doesn't cost you your sanity.

A lot of companies like Medium were created to simplify things. In reality, you give up quite a bit of control of your content to them.

<comment><USER28> I hope that for some people, Neocities is a useful alternative. :)

<comment><USER29> There's a good amount of platform distrust with Neocities, too, in that it has the feel of a sandbox and gives off the scent of "may go through some awkward growing pains." But what a great idea. Hope it gains traction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Medium doesn't seem to be for everyone. It does seem to simplify things for some readers though, if at the expense of many writers.

</comment><comment><USER31> This sums up all the reasons why I never wanted to go to medium.

</comment><comment><USER32> I agree with the article; I haven't ever been comfortable ceding control of my personal website to a third-party. Inevitably conflicts of interest arise.

The great appeal of Medium is the potential of featured content being re- tweeted by thousands.

<comment><USER33> And even that is absolutely fleeting. You're probably better off writing it on your own and submitting to Hacker News as the potential reach is much greater.

<comment><USER34> Assuming your subject is relevant to HN. Not every dev is interested in tech blogging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't understand why you wouldn't have considered all those bullet points before moving to a new platform.

</comment><comment><USER36> I love Medium as a guy who used Jekyll for years. It was a huge waste of time. And if I ever spend even 10 more minutes on creating a dummy blog again, I'll ask 10 dudes to beat me with sticks.

<comment><USER29> What was a waste of time about using Jekyll? How much time was wasted? And what is a "dummy" blog? I've never used Jekyll, just curious.

<comment><USER36> go read about jekyll you are on internet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > To lazily prevent link-rot, I setup a simple blanket 301 redirect from the > old domain to my profile on Medium. Things felt right

That doesn't prevent link rot at all.

301 is a _permanent_ redirect, the old links will end up being replaced and killed one by one, since they all redirect to the same content. And to top it off, now that he's stopped using Medium his profile might simply disappear one day.

</comment><comment><USER38> is there a blog framework/platform specifically for developers? I want to show code samples with syntax highlighting (and possibly the ability to actually run the sample code)? is there something which lets me embed d3.js charts? i've looked at pelican, jekyll, etc. but i want something simpler.

<comment><USER39> For automatic syntax highlighting [http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/](http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/) is excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I thought Medium was a platform which you write for. You don't become Medium platform. They are running it like an editorialized magazine. Your articles are promoted by the platform and not just by yourself. So why not maintain your own blog and write for others as well?

<comment><USER41> "They are running it like an editorialized magazine."

This is the odd thing about Medium - it's a bit like an editorialized magazine but with no editorial line or identity. If I want to read people writing about academic arts and humanities topics for a non-academic audience, I might go read the London Review of Books; if I want to read extensively researched but also personal essays, I'll read the New Yorker. If I read Medium I get - what? Some stuff written by people on the internet that some other people on the internet thought was good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I never quite understood the fascination with medium.. it's cool and all, but I'd rather invest in my own "platform" as Marco had put it and control everything with respect to my brand, content and tweak anything and everything to my heart's desire.

</comment><comment><USER43> One reason for the popularity of WordPress especially the self hosted version, "spaghetti" and all, is that many people have already learned that lesson. It's your content, put it on your domain and do with it what you will. Forget enriching a network.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can understand why the OP dislikes the homogeneity. But from a reader perspective, I don't mind it at all. There's nothing to distract from the post. It's just one simple battle-tested design. No cover to judge the book by.

> I felt dead inside.

Thanks for the hearty chuckle!

</comment><comment><USER45> The authors sentiments about why he disliked Medium are the exact reasons I've not moved over there yet. My concerns center around building an audience and being able to stay in contact with them. How am I supposed to give away an email course with in post marketing through drip campaigns in Medium? I can't. I cant customize the sidebar to let someone know about a related post that may also have some effect on their life. Just doesn't work. Medium sounds cool but it just feels half baked to me at this point. I dunno ... maybe that will change.

<comment><USER29> Exactly. Once you get any sort of marketing itch, or design itch (wait until the next set of trends really hit home and Medium is caught out), or IA or UX itch, you are going to wonder how much you could have done on your own by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> For a lot of people, the allure of Medium isn't the tools or tracking, it's the audience and distribution. If you already have an audience then a place like Medium will do very little for you.

</comment><comment><USER47> For what it's worth Medium has a really top notch team, and they are still iterating and exploring. This feedback will probably be valuable to them. I have found the Medium UI to be very good.

</comment><comment><USER48> As a reader, my main complaint with medium is space bar scroll not working. I never realised how big of a part of my workflow it was until it stopped.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how his temporary "HTTP 301 Moved Permanently" redirect to medium.com affects his resurrected blog's search engine placement.

<comment><USER25> It wasn't pretty. Not the end of the world, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is medium trying to compete with wordpress? Maybe the simplicity is its beauty. Not many people care for all the bells and whistles that you can dig into with wordpress.

I agree that if you're thinking about analytics, etc then you've probably outgrown these simple platforms. In this case you should definitely consider running your own install because now it's your business, and not just a journal.

<comment><USER18> Medium is both a promotion brand and a platform; Wordpress is mostly just a platform.

The better analogy would be [http://tryghost.org](http://tryghost.org) and Wordpress.

<comment><USER41> Ugh, that looked good until I got to the bit about using Markdown. I'm not using a vt100 terminal, for gods sake, I can handle an editing system that understands basic formatting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> @kenneth I saw that you are using Midori Traveler's Notebook. I'm just wondering how are you actually use it. I own the regular traveler's notebook myself. But it's still empty right now. I see a lot of people using it as journal, sketch notebook, etc. but I'm not one of those creative type. How are you using it? How do you decide which items go to it vs not. Thanks!

<comment><USER25> I basically use it as an idea sketchpad for brainstorming. I keep a book of the thin blank pages in it, as well as one squared. The squared goes mostly unused, but it's useful for writing down visual ideas for websites and such.

Hope that helps ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> "I have more than words to organize but want something that manages all that so I don't get distracted coding now my traffic is dying and I'm helpless to stop that and it turns out I changed to a service that only manages words well"

I feel like this could have perhaps done with another draft/iteration to tighten up the goal of the article.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is there a way to automate your own personal site to update a medium post? I've looked at Medium and while it is visually nice and laid out well, it seems very "cs student who just graduated college and wanted to make a start- up".

<comment><USER19> That would be interesting, but I don't think it's on Medium's list of priorities at the moment. Maybe it's time for an unofficial API?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is just a case of choosing something before making sure that it meets all of your requirements. I'm sure that we've all been there in one form or another. I certainly have been, more often than I'd like to admit. ;)

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm on Medium, but truthfully I'm waiting for Ghost.

<comment><USER56> Can we ping you to be a tester once we are online? :) It will look like this - [http://flipper.foraproject.org](http://flipper.foraproject.org)

We'll have the same writing experience as Medium, with markdown support, custom domains and an OSS license. You basically post into various forums, which you can moderate.

<comment><USER55> Maybe. How is the hosting handled by your project? One of the things I'm looking forward to on Ghost is the ability to hack on their dashboard. I'm asking about the hosting as well because I want to have the power to host my blog on my own servers.

<comment><USER56> You will be able to self host it, just like Ghost. Made with Nodejs and Mongo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> And you could not have been aware of all those things __before __moving to Medium?

</comment><comment><USER34> Apparently, I'm not cool enough to be invited to medium. If anyone has any pull..

<comment><USER58> Recommend a post and interact with the site, and then one day you'll notice you have the opportunity to do more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Well that didn't took long to see those kind of article pop up....

</comment><comment><USER60> i wrote a blog on this [http://www.ronyjacob.com/day/2013/08/01](http://www.ronyjacob.com/day/2013/08/01)

</comment><comment><USER61> Why not post to both?

</comment><comment><USER62> There is a constant problem where I mouse over a link and see only medium dot com. It's a contextual stripping in a marketplace that pretty explicitly judges you on the unique ribbons in your hair.

</comment><comment><USER63> The post is more about why one should join medium...

</comment><comment><USER64> what the heck is Medium

<comment><USER65> [http://bit.ly/167W0io](http://bit.ly/167W0io)

<comment><USER64> ;) thanks

I guess my attempt at irony failed

(again)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> He's got an affiliate link in the article. He is so greedy.</comment>


3 Must-Have Tools For Email Marketers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/5bc2cf2e950b?v=2

<comment><USER2> Is "Email Marketers" a euphemism for "spammers"?</comment>


Ask HN: Open source advertising? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to help the open source community by adding an advertising box to the dashboard of Tomato.es[1].
Analytics data (march 2013):
11,987 Visits
5,355 Unique Visitors
27,181 Pageviews
2.27 Pages / Visit
00:02:01 Avg. Visit Duration
64.82% Bounce Rate
40.05% % New Visits
Only open source projects will be eligible for these slots.
If you're interested about this feature please submit a pull request to Tomato.es GitHub project[2] with your project's logo and a link.
[1] http://tomato.es
[2] http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes <comment><AUTHOR> Links:

[1] <http://tomato.es>

[2] <http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes>

</comment><comment><USER2> I am looking for contributors to work on a project bitcoin-like based on an universal dividende: OpenUDC.org

<https://github.com/Open-UDC/open-udc> <https://github.com/canercandan/django- openudc>

Thx.</comment>


You're Using JSON, Why not MessagePack? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andrewvc.com/why-arent-you-using-messagepack <comment><USER2> For the same reasons we are in the process of switching from Protocol Buffers back to JSON:

* It does not support our languages. Is there a Ruby module with no C extension? A C# library? Lua? What about that really cool language coming out next week? What about C?

* Even if it does, why have to deal with someone else's poor API design? JSON has a million parsers for everything, and if by chance you don't like any of them, you can write another one in about two hours.

* It's not human-readable. Enough said.

* It's smaller than JSON, sure, but is it smaller than gzipped JSON? PB's aren't for our purposes. Neither are TNetstrings. This might be, I haven't checked, but I doubt it.

<comment><USER3> > Is there a Ruby module with no C extension?

Why is the "with no C extension" part important to you?

<comment><USER4> This is important if you want to use JRuby.

<comment><USER5> There's a protobuf java library.

<comment><AUTHOR> And a jruby messagepack library

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The "4x faster than Protocol Buffers" claim is misleading, as I have explained before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2146147>

I'm working on a Protocol Buffer library that can serialize/deserialize to _either_ JSON _or_ Protocol Buffers. That way you can do all your development with JSON, but if you ever find you need the efficiency improvements of a binary format, you can just change your Serialize() call.

Having a .proto file gives you the benefits of something like JSON Schema: a place to document all your fields and what they mean, and a few very simple validation constraints like the expected types.

<comment><USER6> You already said it, but just wanted to back you up: The MessagePack benchmark is completely useless!

It consists of serializing 3 integers and a string 200,000 times.

MessagePack defines 27 different types¹ (excluding reserved ones) with variable bit length for the type identifier, length somewhat correlated with frequency of use.

A benchmark should therefor test real life data and a lot of it.

Their inability to produce such benchmark makes me question the sanity of splitting up e.g. the type marker for "array" into 3 different types depending on the size of the array — this adds complexity, so it would be good to know what exactly the authors based this design choice on, hopefully not that it made it faster to serialize a 3 element array 200,000 times.

¹ [http://wiki.msgpack.org/display/MSGPACK/Format+specification...](http://wiki.msgpack.org/display/MSGPACK/Format+specification#Formatspecification- TypeChart)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Because it isn't human readable, which will make debugging it far less convenient than glancing at some JSON in a browser (or in Firebug).

<comment><USER8> This. Never liked nor used XML for that exact reason.

<comment><USER9> Rather than down vote you for a simple mistake, I thought I'd let you know that xml is just as human readable as json.

<comment><USER10> Most people find formats like JSON and YAML much easier to read than XML.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't make XML any less human readable really. Hell, if you read and write XHTML a lot, it pretty much speaks volumes of its readability.

For large docs, I'd prefer XML too. I mean, I'd rather hunt down a missing closing tag than a missing closing bracket when the thing is pages upon pages long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Zip both resulting strings and I bet you it's a wash. Since JSON is mostly used (at least by me) for sending data to client side javascript, it doesn't make a difference. JSON is just easier.

<comment><USER13> Yup. We tested messagepack a while back in our environment. Speed difference was 2% versus gzipped JSON. Not enough to invest time in changing a working system and losing human readability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Changing data formats all the time is usually not worth any of the effort involved. XML to JSON seemed to take long enough, and now that we've got a lightweight, internationally accepted, easy to read by humans and computers alike, data interchange format, I think we'd like to keep it for a while.

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://bsonspec.org/> is another such alternative.

<comment><USER16> Yes. The first thing I said when I saw this post was "How is this different than BSON?" Given that BSON is the basis of MongoDB's storage engine, I'm pretty confident in it and probably won't be moving over to MessagePack anytime soon.

<comment><USER17> bson messages are often larger than their json counterpart. The benefit of bson isn't size, but rather ease (on the cpu) of serializing and deserializing.

<comment><USER16> I agree in part. Most of the time JSON and BSON are very similar in size, and sometimes larger (due to length prefixes). But, size benefits do emerge when you need to store binary data inside the object. Instead of a base64 encoded string, the binary data can be stored directly.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, GridFS would be pretty silly in JSON.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence I'm not using JSON or MessagePack because I need to send arbitrary binary data. I understand why people use JSON, and it has its domain (sending data to and from the browser), but in other situations I don't think it is a good protocol.

Another poster mentioned tnetstrings, those look interesting, however I am not sure how well those would handle binary data.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say JSON's main domain is sending data to the browser - I'd say it's exchanging common data structures (lists, hashes, strings, numbers) between environments, including between different languages. Sure, it doesn't make sense if you're shipping binary blobs around, but most of the time you're probably dealing with lists, hashes, strings and numbers.

<comment><USER19> JSON is good for edge labeled trees. XML is good for node labeled trees. But the data structures we want to transport are most often edge labeled graphs. You usually end up having to invent a mechanism for canonical node references to turn the tree into a possibly cyclic graph and vice versa. ISTM to improve on JSON, focus should be here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd love to see some benchmarks comparing the size of gzipped messagepack vs gzipped json for a wide bunch of example messages. If this is better than json, and has objective-c libraries, it could be magic for our purposes! (file size is very important when making mobile apps).

</comment><comment><USER21> There's also TNetStrings which mongrel2 is using now. (<http://tnetstrings.org/>)

<comment><USER22> Which is itself really just a flawed reimplementation of bencode. (Bencode can be parsed without lookahead; tagged netstrings cannot.)

<http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#bencoding>

<comment><USER23> It's actually an extension of DJB's netstrings. Hence the name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm certainly glad if MessagePack allows non-string keys in maps, as it apparently does (I've only read the spec so far, but not had a chance to try the code). This is a real pain in JSON.

My stock "basic data type" set comes mainly from Ruby these days. I wince a little at the lack of interned-symbol type, but it's possible to live without that. But what of string encodings? In a recent piece of code which I wouldn't mind replacing with MessagePack, I prefix strings with fixnum IANA encoding numbers. I suppose that's too much to ask in this context, though… ? How do other people deal with this—just force everything to UTF-8?

</comment><comment><USER25> because when JSON is Gzip'd there's only around ~5% in it: <http://goo.gl/b2Uur> (the bit on geojson).

<comment><USER26> I think you mean _25%_. And it comes out ~50% the size of MessagePack after gzipping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Because many other programs understand JSON.

</comment><comment><USER28> * fucking use JSON

* if needed: use snappy for blob storage (ie for key value stores)

* if you have an need for very high perfomance in your application that is mature to some degree, evaluate some binary protocols or compression and see how they perform.

the bad thing is that i already see full stack frameworks popping up "now with <binary-protocol-xy>" and everybody will scream "YEAH!". Most YEAH!-sayers will seriously be butt-hurt by the plain fact that it isn't human readable. Switching between JSON/binary won't matter, there will be situations that are not debugable.

Trivial performance optimizations won't fix a broken design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your tone in really just not constructive and also not appreciated.

As far as JSON being human readable, most JSON sent over the wire has no whitespace and generally needs to be run through a parser if you're going to read any significant amount if it.

You even say in your third point that if you need high performance you'd look at a binary protocol, this is one such protocol. Also, you completely ignore the space savings mentioned.

Your name is green, you're new to HN, and frankly comments like this drive away the kind of users we want here, so learn to talk to your peers respectfully, or keep your mouth shut.

<comment><USER28> What i am saying is that as long you try to "improve" your project with marginal "improvements" you will fail at anything. For the majority, things like message pack is micromanagement. It will cause a lot of work and noise with minor improvements. The tradeoff is too high, for the majority. The minority are people who already have shit done. That are people who are actually saving alot of money with squezing the last bits of performance out of something. my viewpoint is probably out of scope because its wholistic, but thats where to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Because MessagePack doesn't work in MacRuby.

<comment><USER30> because no support for brainfuck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a naive question - why would I not use something like ZeroMQ for messaging ?

I completely understand the need for JSON when you are communicating with the frontend/Javascript. But if you are doing backend messaging, would you not rather use ZeroMQ (which comes with its own protocol).

From what I understand (from previous HN posts), it is super fast and handles binary data very efficiently. I also understand that you can tune stuff at the OS level to wring the last bit of performance from ZeroMQ.

P.S: yup, it is written in C, but all bindings apparently work very well.

<comment><USER7> They're different types of thing. ZeroMQ doesn't replace JSON, it replaces HTTP. If you're using ZeroMQ it will help you get some bytes from one place to another, but you still need a serialization format. You might well send JSON over ZeroMQ.

<comment><USER31> Here's my specific doubt - my application uses arrays, maps, lists, etc. Can I not use zeromq to send these data-structures as binary data rather than serializing them to JSON ?

<comment><USER32> You're going to have to send them as a sequence of bytes _somehow._ MessagePack converts your data structures into a straightforward binary format, or lets you roll your own custom serializers easily (I've used it, and it's good stuff), and JSON does something similar in a less compact but more human-readable form. If your data structures are very simple, you could roll your own, e.g. send an array of ints by just converting them to network byte order and sending them.

Once you've got your data expressed as a sequence of bytes, you can send that with ZeroMQ. Or with HTTP, or raw sockets, or whatever. The serialization format and the transport protocol are pretty much completely independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Because JSON is around twice as fast to encode/decode in Node, which is where I really need the performance. MessagePack is just slow, complicated, and unnecessary.

<comment><USER34> Citation needed, especially since the node-msgpack library docs say it's anywhere from 1.2-3X faster. <https://github.com/pgriess/node-msgpack>

<comment><USER33> Good point... a Node MQ project formerly based on msgpack recently switched to JSON and increased its performance by almost 200%: <https://github.com/aikar/wormhole/issues/3>

I've done several of my own benchmarks as well and can confirm that the current Node JSON implementation is much faster than MessagePack. Their benchmarks are most likely quite old.

<comment><AUTHOR> That mostly speaks to the quality of node's MessagePack implementation, nothing more. Benchmarking data format serialization is hard, because one poor implementation throws things off.

<comment><USER33> MessagePack in Node isn't much more than bindings to the C++ library ([https://github.com/pgriess/node- msgpack/blob/master/src/msgp...](https://github.com/pgriess/node- msgpack/blob/master/src/msgpack.cc)). For me the bottom line was "What's faster in Node, for my project, right now?", and the answer was JSON.

There are benefits to MessagePack that have already been mentioned here, namely not having to base64 binary data first (smaller size), but that's true for any binary message format. I'd love to see some other binary formats thrown into the ring and see how they compare to MessagePack in both size efficiency and encode/decode performance. BSON seems like an interesting option, but I don't know enough about it to comment...

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but, optimization is tricky, and you can say the say thing about ruby's messagepack and JSON libraries, where the speed difference is reversed. I, unfortunately don't have the time to go digging as to why, but there's a discrepancy somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I love MessagePack. Using it a lot in Etude (etudeapp.com).

</comment><comment><USER36> If you are representing this on an HTML page you'd need to Base64 encode the bugger, adding a lot more overhead.

Honestly I'm not sure why you wouldn't just simply use gzipped/JSON. My test show nearly no difference (1-2%) in performance with MessagePack, yet you get to leverage all kinds of things that already understand JSON.

</comment><comment><USER37> Premature optimization?

</comment><comment><USER38> How does it stack up against Pickle? Because that's what I'd be using in Python in places where JSON doesn't make much sense.

</comment><comment><USER39> with orthogonal GZIPing, I'm happy using JSON (which allows me to read the data in my browser debugger, curl, etc.), while getting good compression.

</comment><comment><USER40> There is also Thrift.

</comment><comment><USER41> What about bencoding?

<http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#bencoding>

Seriously, this is not an either or question. Just use the right tool for the right job. I wouldn't serialize my data to XML on a micro controller but so I wouldn't drive my JS frontend with binary serialized data.

<comment><USER42> This was one of my thoughts, too. Bencoding is hardly ever used outside of Bittorrent, but it's a useful serialisation tool.</comment></comment>


"How We Almost Messed Up Trello" – Trello CEO, 6 Months Before It Sold for $425m - <AUTHOR> http://businessofsoftware.org/2017/01/almost-messsed-trello-michael-pryor-trello-paul-kenny-ocean-learning-bos-usa-2016/ <comment><USER2> Those words do not appear in the transcript, and I'm not going to listen to the audio for it.</comment>


Reddit's challenge: More users and higher costs - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-57547743-2/reddits-challenge-more-users-and-higher-costs/

<comment><USER2> I don't necessarily see how this is article is anything surprising, really. Bigger sites === more resources needed.

I started and presently run a large subreddit (top 30) and after awhile it takes its toll on you. Sure you find other moderators, but they lose passion after getting no return. That will be the bane of reddit's existance as subreddits are what is keeping the site alive, but the quality seems to decline when you get X amount of users, and at that point, it becomes less of a hobby and more of a full-time job.

<comment><USER3> I started and run a subreddit in my niche. It's top ~4,000 in subscribers, and top 1,300 in activity levels according to Stattit. See my profile for the subreddit name.

Having created this forum has _really_ helped me within my field. The subreddit is really popular, and my self-interest in its operations doesn't seem to have caused any rancor, since the forum is so clearly providing value.

This likely is not a solution for the largest subreddits, but I expect that more small to mid sized subreddits will be created and maintained by 'enlightened self-interested' moderators.

My role often makes me think of this XKCD: <http://xkcd.com/810/>

edit: Obviously, this does nothing to address the server load issue

<comment><USER2> +1 on helping you get acquainted with your field! I've added an AutoModerator bot which goes through and removes particular links on submissions, but other than that, a lot of stuff has to be manually approved (or removed from the spam filter).</comment></comment></comment>


It's been a bad day. - <AUTHOR> http://www.encryptomatic.com So what do you do when your data center majorly (and I mean MAJOR) blows a raid disk swap, and your backup is corrupt, and piecing things back together will take days?  You get to work. <comment><USER2> Sorry, I hope 1&1 fixes your issues soon.</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of single founder does YC accept? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on my YC application, but I was wondering if I should even expect to have any chance at getting accepted at YC.
I have experience of building high quality products that had early adopters' attention (was covered on various top tech news sites multiple times), and I bet I have the best answer for "case where you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage". Also I gave up everything to work on the startup, so I am pretty committed. (No going back to school and stuff)
BUT. I'm a single founder. Trust me, I really want to get a co-founder, but I know it's extremely important to find someone who I know will work out well with, so I can't just get a co-founder quickly for YC application.
I am informed that it's almost impossible to get into Ycombinator if you're a single founder. But I also know a few got in. How did those few single founder companies get in?
I really want to get into YC, and I'm doing my best to fill out the application, but it would be more encouraging to know that there's even a chance. Please help. Thanks. <comment><USER2> After thinking about this for a while and getting rejected twice as a single founder, here's what I've come to believe: Apply anyway. Bust your balls to be successful regardless of the outcome.

If you try too hard to find a co-founder, there's a good chance you will find the wrong one. Plus, YC hates newly wed co-founders almost as much as single founders (probably even more). And regardless of acceptance into YC, you don't want to end up with the wrong co-founder. It's better to go it alone.

The deadline for checking all the boxes to be a YC founder was three years ago. You _could have_ met a co-founder in the normal way, in the way that lovers meet. You _could have_ built cool shit to prove you're a hacker. You _could have_ moved to Silicon Valley to work at some hot startups and build connections.

If you didn't, hard luck. Startups are hard, do it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the scale of things that will positively affect your startup, finding a cofounder is probably near the top. (Sounds like you know this already.) Out of curiosity how are you looking now? I know its hard but there might be more options to explore.

Particularly in the bay area; I've had great luck at Startup2startup, founder dating, and YC events (how I met my current awesome co-founder).

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're a single co-founder you'll likely be set up with one or someone from another startup (if they fail). Of course getting in is much harder as a single founder. So be honest, are you open to having a co-founder? mention it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, applied as a single founder. You can read his application here:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. But I was more interested in YC's perspective. I've done enough research and am confident i can write a good application (I've written business plans and pitch decks and raised money with them too before)

However I was curious about why YC selected those single founder startups. Of course the application has to be top quality, but I'm sure there are lots of others whose applications are top quality but still don't make it.

Thanks!

<comment><USER6> If single, must be ready to mingle = willing and working hard on trying to find a cofounder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you have traction ? - traction forgives a lot of faults.

</comment><comment><USER8> Getting rejected twice (going for three) gave me the motivation to thoroughy prove them completely wrong.</comment>


Evidence over Hysteria – Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/six-four-six-nine/evidence-over-hysteria-covid-19-1b767def5894 <comment><USER2> The trouble with an article like this is that it mixes well reasoned arguments with nonsense. The economic cost of closing schools and shutting borders is real, especially as the epidemic continues for months. The trouble is that the article downplays the seriousness of covid-19. A mortality rate of 0.6% means nearly one million deaths if covid-19 spreads to half all Americans.

The article points to South Korea as an example of a success story in the fight against covid-19. South Korea immediately began widespread testing for covid-19 as soon as infections were detected. They trace cases and isolate people suspected of having become infected. South Korea has universal healthcare, ranking first among OECD countries for access. All of this is pretty much the opposite of we've been doing in the US, which is why a lot of people here are worried about what's going to happen in the next few months.

It's reasonable to ask whether school closings or shutting borders are the right policies. But we should be discussing alternative means of containing the virus and we need to be clear what we're up against.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, the problem with your argument is that there is absolutely no way to be sure, today, that the mortality rate is even within an order of magnitude of 0.6%. And as more evidence comes out that this thing is spreading faster and more stealthily than expected, one consequence is that the true mortality rate may be much lower than those estimates.

<comment><USER4> The South Korean testing has been quite extensive, and not just limited to the people with the most obvious symptoms unlike in the west. Given they appears to have contained the virus without resorting to a full lockdown, it seems unlikely they would have missed a large number of cases. If they had, those asymptomatic or mild cases should be constantly restarting the chain of transmission.

1.1% of their cases have died, and an additional 0.8% are in serious or critical condition. And they're a best case scenario: the health care system was not overloaded, and their diagnosed cases are skewing disproportionately young.

The Diamond Princess also has had a fatality rate so far of 1.1%. In that case we know with absolute certainty that there is no massive hidden iceberg of infected but undiagnosed people. There might be a hidden iceberg of unreported fatalities though, since once they were off the ship, the cases stopped being tracked as Diamond Princess cases. On the plus side, the demographics obviously skewed very old.

Anyway, there's very good reason to believe that the IFR is at least 0.6%. Suggesting that it's actually <0.06% seems just ludicrous. Is there any evidence at all supporting that, or are you just arbitrarily demanding "absolute certainty" in a time-critical situation?

<comment><USER3> > If [South Korea] had [missed a large number of cases], those asymptomatic or > mild cases should be constantly restarting the chain of transmission.

If enough people have already recovered from mild or asymptomatic cases (it would have to be a pretty hefty percentage, granted) then that, combined with not-total-lockdown conditions, could bring down the R0 value enough to cause the same result. Do you think it's much more likely that the virus has been totally contained?

> The Diamond Princess also has had a fatality rate so far of 1.1%. In that > case we know with absolute certainty that there is no massive hidden iceberg > of infected but undiagnosed people.

This might be the strongest evidence against the "mild and everywhere" theory. However, there are still something like five out of six passengers who tested negative but could have recovered before they were tested. Even if they're not a great representative sample, testing them all for antibodies might be a good move.

<comment><USER4> > If enough people have already recovered from mild or asymptomatic cases (it > would have to be a pretty hefty percentage, granted) then that, combined > with not-total-lockdown conditions, could bring down the R0 value enough to > cause the same result.

They're reporting basically no new cases at this point. For that to happen naturally, they'd need to have gotten like 2/3rds of the population infected. And it's quite hard to see how that could be true.

Korea had the most comprehensive testing (320k tests, available to basically anyone with even mild symptoms). They have so far confirmed infections in 0.02% of the population, and only got positive results in less than 3% of the tests. It's hard to believe that 60-70% of the population got infected, but even in the skewed sample of people who got tested only 3% being positive.

Compare that with something like Switzerland where the number of confirmed cases is at 0.08% of the population despite worse test coverage (basically only get tested if your symptoms warrant hospitalization), and there's no sign of it slowing down yet.

Or Spain which has 3x the cases of Korea on a similar population, has a health care system that's melting down, and where more than 55% of the tests are positive.

If herd immunity provided by all the undetected cases protected Korea, why is it not kicking in anywhere else even once their infection rates are obviously higher?

> Do you think it's much more likely that the virus has been totally > contained?

"Totally contained" is an exaggeration, since they are still finding new cases. But given how long the infection rate has been stable, it does look like they've managed to reach a R0 of almost exactly 1 with the aggressive testing + tracing strategy.

The only alternative that's at all plausible is that the Korean numbers are being fudged somehow, and they actually have a lot more cases than are being reported. But then why aren't the hospitals in a crisis unlike in other affected regions?

<comment><USER3> > They're reporting basically no new cases at this point.

It's like 50-100 new cases every day, looks like. I'm getting out of my depth with what exactly that allows us to rule out, but it sounds like "constantly restarting the chain of transmission" might be the actual reality?

If that drops further, then maybe these new cases are just the ones that incubated longer instead?

<comment><USER4> > it sounds like "constantly restarting the chain of transmission" might be > the actual reality?

Yes, but it's a tiny number of undetected cases restarting the chain, and those chains being detected and lopped off before they have time to go exponential. But it's just not possible that they have tens of thousands of undetected cases that are spreading the virus further. That'd spin out of control quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Our focus here isn't treatments but numbers. You don't need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn't say. Numbers are universal."

That's 180' from what I believe and have experienced repeatedly in industry settings. Transforming the numbers to meaningful data is _always_ fundamental to success. For example here the number of cases confirmed is determined by the testing approach and process - you must know that to be able to make meaningful comparisons (there are many other aspects to epi data but that's just one).

</comment><comment><USER6> This article has been censored by Medium. Can't say I'm surprised as it goes against the official hysteria promoting big pharma narrative. This is what I now get:

410 This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.

\--

It is archived here: [http://archive.md/yuaUq](http://archive.md/yuaUq)

<comment><USER7> It also has been torn-apart by numerous people with way more credibility. e.g. [https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360](https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unrelated - is there a term for exhaustion of opinions?

I swear you could go into any HN comment thread related to this outbreak and it breaks down to; Person A saying X is going to happen and then Person B saying Y is going to happen and then Person C saying that No! Z is going to happen!

How did everyone get so opinionated about something so unpredictable and unprecedented? In any case I think we should all calm down regardless of how dangerous this situation is. Stay sane, everyone!

<comment><USER9> My family is unemployed right now, an opinion has to be formed, then we are all kept indoors. I foresee continued growing pains

<comment><USER8> But how can we form an opinion while shouting at each other? We know what the answer is; and it's called sharing. Unfortunately nobody seems to want to entertain this idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny How many caught the flu? and is testing positive for Corona the same as having Ebola or Leprosy ? or will you be sick for a week and recover like we normally do from the flu>? Keep in mind more people have died in the U.S. from seasonal, common flu than has died World Wide from this 'epidemic'. (Which started in the most populous country so listening to the pundits it should have had 100s' of millions deaths!) How is that possible?

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe it's not a good idea to upvote these layman ramblings and influencer opinions.

<comment><USER12> Do you wager that the majority of news circulating today is written by pandemic experts and medical professionals?

<comment><USER11> There are large number of government organizations, pandemic experts, medical professionals, and research groups communicating in the social media and blogs.

There is no reason to post news articles or blogs from random Joes in HN when you can post directly from experts.

<comment><USER13> There was a time when blog posts by "regular Joes" was the norm on HN and it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Quality content can come from anywhere.

I'd rather judge them on the merits of their contribution than some meta signals.

<comment><USER11> > I'd rather judge them on the merits

This assumes that you can do that. If you are not an expert you can't possibly have the background to put things in the perspective.

This is not the issue of the ability to read and study, it's about missing variables and weighting evidence. If you don't have the background, you must spend weeks studying to get some hold of issues.

Argument from authority is fallacy of reasoning but it's not fallacy when learning and gathering relevant information. We you can reason only after you have learned the subject.

Social media is full of people who learned basic math behind SIR model and are building layman theories based on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Half of the article is about making numbers relative (active/total cases, cases/population, etc).

But death toll is counted in absolute numbers. No one will think 1M deaths is victory just because this is 1% of whatever. People are right to be hysterical, we have tough times ahead.

<comment><USER3> By that logic, with those numbers (and if 1M is the total globally), then we "lose" almost as badly to the seasonal flu, every year.

I'm not saying we shouldn't care about deadly illnesses. But the world is a dangerous place, and we've been pretty bad about changing that, historically.

Also, if we ruin 5 million lives to save (some percent of) 1 million, is that worth it? How about ruining 50 million lives? We can save lives with drastic measures, but drastic measures will have bad consequences too, and it seems like nobody has any perspective on that.

<comment><USER15> What's the name of this fallacy?

1\. "New thing X puts us at risk of losing Y lives every day."

2\. "We lose Y lives to car accidents every day".

3\. "Ergo, X is harmless!"

You now have 2Y lives lost every day.

<comment><USER3> That's not even _close_ to what I'm saying. How did you read my comment and understand it as that??

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Still, there is a massive blindspot with this type of graph. None of these > charts are weighted on a per-capita basis.

Since this is an exponential phenomenon, I don't buy that "per-capita" matters (on top of the fact that he seems to be pulling in numbers as a snapshot in absolute time rather than windowed from initial cases).

If the numbers double every 5 days, the US can have 16 times the population of some other smaller country and be only 3 weeks from the same per capita effects.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, Farr's law is all about the general shape of an epidemic, plotted as number of infected people against time. It does not say anything about the location or height of the peak. The devil is in those details.

</comment><comment><USER18> Starts well enough, but gets more questionable in the middle and downright risible at the bottom. Claims to be more objective, empirical, etc. than others are unrelated to _actually_ being more objective, empirical, etc.

> driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles

...as filtered through one person's understanding and biases. Often this results in a very different picture than perusal of the original source material would.

> I'm most known for popularizing the "growth hacking movement" in Silicon > Valley

That's an anti-qualification.

> Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per- > capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations

This is right after he got done explaining why total number of cases of useless. So _why is it here_? Because it suits the overall theme of minimizing the threat.

> Daily growth rates declined over time across all countries regardless of > particular policy solutions

Sounds compelling, but is it true? Note that the first chart is from SoberLook, which is definitely not one of the top-tier sources cited at the beginning of the article and not even one of those supposedly cited at the bottom (Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins). Bit deceptive, that. I'll leave it to you to figure out what kind of source SoberLook is. Oh, and we're using the "losing metric" of total reported cases again. Doesn't everyone know by now how fraught that is? The author certainly does.

The second chart already shows a very different story. There's no legend (which is suspicious) but it's clear that many of the lines do _not_ flatten out as would be necessary to support the author's claim.

> Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, > while ignoring the economic shock to our system.

We're starting to see a hint of where the author wanted to go with this, probably before one word was written.

> According to WHO's COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based > spreading is very rare.

Hm. _Where_ did van Kerkhove say this? Why is there no specific citation, as for more convenient factoids?

> The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small > handful of cases.

Same as above. No citation. And does the data actually show that?

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmission.html) "The virus that causes COVID-19 seems to be spreading easily and sustainably in the community"

[https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situati...](https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situation- reports/20200313-sitrep-53-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=adb3f72_2) "Community transmissionis evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases,"

Don't let the digression about aerosols (which nobody has claimed to be a primary mechanism for spread of COVID-19) fool you; the experts, including those included in the author's appeal to authority at the beginning, seem to have very different beliefs than those he presents.

> Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by > high temperature and high humidity.

One study. Minimizing again. It's a very pretty temperature graph, which doesn't actually prove _anything_. If you follow the link, you'll see that it was actually limited to China, which might not tell us much about anywhere else. What we actually know about the temperature sensitivity of coronaviruses is that they're remarkably _stable_ up to about 37°C, and infectivity only starts to decline above that.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830)

> Children and Teens aren't at risk

This does seem to be true, or close to it, for once. But why only talk about the lowest-risk groups? Why not people in their 20s, or the high-risk folks at the other end of the spectrum? Minimizing again.

This is getting long, so I'll stop dissecting each little piece. You get the idea. Let's skip to the end, where the agenda becomes clear.

> Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption > with little evidence to support their draconian edicts.

Very objective choice of words there. Inflicting. Draconian.

> Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in > authoritarian city ordinances

Attributing motive.

> The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual > citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society

More appeal to emotion, and expressive of the author's real priorities. Don't get me wrong, politicians taking advantage of the situation to extend authoritarian power is a real and valid concern. But no way in hell should it be our _first_ concern. It certainly doesn't justify twisting the facts and minimizing the threat that disease poses to the most vulnerable - not just the old but also the homeless, the already ill, etc. Those people are not expendable to "Support business and productivity" as the author puts it in a heading.

<comment><USER19> "Transmission in China happened among family members and close contacts. True "community spread" was less common.

"This virus is not circulating in the community, even in the highest incidence areas across China," Van Kerkhove insisted.

What's the difference between spread among close contacts and community spread, you might wonder? Van Kerkhove said the data the mission saw in China pointed to the virus finding its way into households and transmitting there. One family member gets infected and infects others. The "secondary attack rate" — the percentage of people in a household who got infected after someone brought the virus into the home — was between 3% and 10%.

Van Kerkhove said true community spread involves transmission where people get infected in a movie theater, on the subway, or walking down the street. There's no way to trace back the source of infection because there's no connection between the infected person and the person he or she infects. That's not what the Chinese data show, she said.

Marc Lipsitch, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, found this claim puzzling. "I have reached out to the World Health Organization to understand the basis of some of those statements. My perception is that there is significant community transmission, especially when you aren't aware that someone is sick, because there's not enough testing," he said.

[https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/06/were-learning-a-lot- abou...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/06/were-learning-a-lot-about-the- coronavirus-it-will-help-us-assess-risk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great, so we just make sure there's lots of testing being done so we can focus our efforts, and hugely expand our health care system to take care of that tiny 1% of the population. And we've got a whole week or two to do it. So why's everyone so worked up about it?

</comment><comment><USER21> Now is the time for extreme caution. We can laugh about how it was an overreaction later.

<comment><USER13> When people are losing jobs at a higher rate than the worst recession in the modern era, while kids miss out on critical education time, and everyone is basically self-imprisoned in homes I think it's fine to constantly question if we are overreacting. Even if that answer is mostly no, we're not.

Emergency funding will only go so far and once we get past a month of extraordinary measures the serious pain hitting millions of people will be a guarantee. Even in countries with far wider safety nets than the US, none of them are designed to handle this sort of unprecedented event.

Then we see Hong Kong announcing 50 new cases in a single day [1] after getting down to zero for an extended period. The only certainty is that there will be no easy answers. Which I think the OP posts downplays in their 'data driven' recommendations.

[1] [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health- environment/artic...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health- environment/article/3076113/coronavirus-highest-risk-yet-new-covid-19)

<comment><USER22> This exactly. Medicine is all about the dosage. If we are overreacting than we're not helping people extra - we're actively hurting people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really sick of marketers acting like their "I write viral Medium posts!" experience is an epidemiological qualification.

<comment><USER24> This one is really much worse than any other I've seen. He is the 32 yr old CTO of the California Young Republican Federation, without medical background, who is recommending that schools reopen because closing them is counterproductive. I'm not sure how this got upvoted on Hacker News to the extent that it made the front page. Why did he write this? What is his agenda?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The very first chart this guy shows, and then rubbishes, is from the Financial Times. The methodology behind the chart and why they show the data the way they show it is explained pretty clearly on his twitter feed.

[https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?...](https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?s=20)

I'll probably do myself a favour and stop clicking on coronavirus medium links

</comment><comment><USER26> This is an article written by a "growth hacker" who knows literally nothing about public health, claiming to explain public health to all of us.

This crap shouldn't be on HN. This forum has become next to useless, slowly, then all at once in the last few weeks. I would assert that this community could do better, but at this point maybe it can't.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a bad article.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is bullshit. As but one example of the guy's cluelessness: the curve of (new) infections over time _is not a bell curve_. The shape is roughly similar. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the normal distribution.

<comment><USER29> If that is your only criticism, you may be throwing away a whole article over a typo. The virus caseload in China is looking bell curve-ish.

I am not on board with everything in this article, though. I am unsure about his proposition on reopening schools, for example. But I'm not throwing it all away over that one part.

<comment><USER5> Maybe you should because the fella has demonstrated sloppiness and ignorance on one issue, and that shakes my faith in the quality of the rest of it. If you are going to attempt to influence life and death policy you better be good. Compare the quality of this article to the Imperial College report last week.

<comment><USER5> This fella goes to town on the nonsense in the GP : [https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241549349999411201](https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241549349999411201)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google: Focus on the User - <AUTHOR> http://www.focusontheuser.org Engineers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace got together to demonstrate that Google has all the information it needs to serve more relevant results to users—if it's willing to surface results from other social networks beyond its own. <comment><USER2> As long as Twitter (and Facebook even more so) don't allow Google to actually index them fully, I don't think that a service like the one outlined here would work very well.

And even once these services open up more: At what point would you set the threshold for inclusion of $social_network in the list? I certainly would not want a list of various social network batches under every search result.

Only list the ones the user is active in? Sure. But how do you determine "active"? Networks in which the user posts a lot? In which he reads a lot of other users content (how would Google find out about that?)?

The integration as it is currently made for G+ basically only works because Google has all that G+ profile data and for it to work as well with other networks, I'd say, Google needs specialized access to it.

Or to be more cynical: So twitter wants to have their accounts integrated into the search results of a search engine? Easy: Just create a search engine too and have all of Google's user switch over.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to guess how well such a service would work. It has been built and is available on the site.

Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.

<comment><USER3> Blake:

If Focus on the User really doesn't want to be "evil" and you want to "focus on the user" then the plugin needs to be changed. The edits the plugin makes are better, but it just looks like Facebook/Twitter are just making sure they get their websites mentioned. It appears they are not focused on the user, but focused on how it will help them.

Here are some major suggestions:

1\. If someone searches for cars in Google, 95% of the time they are looking to either research cars, buy a car, or the movie Cars. First of all do you honestly feel that Ferrari's facebook or google+ page is more relevant/useful than the websites of CarsDirect, Edmunds, or MotorTrend? The Google+/Facebook pages are more prominent than these websites. That makes zero sense. I don't know if you can do this, but if possible the "People and Pages" section should be removed. If not, see #2.

2\. Why would the first result be Ferrari's facebook page in this search over Ferrari's own web site?

3\. The Autosuggestion thing should work the same way as above. When I search for Matt Cutts I am not looking for either his Facebook or his Google Plus page, the most relevant result would be mattcutts.com, no? Or just remove the autosuggestion thing period. Assuming that I want to go see Matt Cutts Facebook profile over his Google+ profile is silly.

4\. Make it so that you can actually remove Google+ results period. When I search for NFC Championship Game I don't care to see that MG Siegler went to that game. Nor would I want to see that on facebook either. It just ideally would be removed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think people are slightly missing the point here. This appears to be less about the google+ personal search results (searching over your friends pictures or whatever), and more about surfacing content on queries where you don't have personalized search results (e.g. that "movie" search that has hugh jackman's profile show up).

I think the idea is that if google ranks someone's twitter profile first in the organic results, why not show it in that social box? There is something of a point here.

(although for many of the example searches there are several results before any social networking results...so it would seem focusing on the user would have financial and wikipedia results for AT&T before their twitter account is listed. And then we're just back to no elevated results. But social networking is special now, I guess?)

This would be a lot more compelling if they would drop the attempt at a "grassroots" "just bringing up the issues for discussion" feel. As it is, it comes off more as that "fair search" group that was really pretty much just expedia and bing. It seems at least plausible that this actually came from some engineers hanging out, discussing this, and writing some code, and if someone had just blogged about it and put it up on github, I think it would be getting a better response (if only to prove the point). Instead, I feel like the page is just trying to manipulate me. It feels like marketing.

</comment><comment><USER5> While I think they make relevant points, the underlying logic of this whole video is questionable.

Before the recent changes, "Jamie Oliver" simply didn't show up when searching for "cooking", I expect. It didn't matter if his twitter or G+ page were the first result for him, because they were probably on page 800 of the search results.

Now, with the additional info it has via G+, Google is featuring him and some other people alongside the normal results when you query for Google.

Where Twitter falls in the query for "Jamie Oliver" doesn't seem particularly relevant to that. I understand the thinking, but I don't think it makes sense to say that because Jamie Oliver is a top G+ result for "Cooking", and Twitter is the top result for "Jamie Oliver", then Jamie Oliver's Twitter must be the top social result for "cooking".

The OP is assuming that search results are somehow transitive in nature, and I'm don't think they should be just taking that for granted.

Should Google add links to the other services in those G+ listings coming up alongside the results alongside the cooking SRP? Maybe. But that seems like a UX/business question, not one that you can answer quantitatively.

</comment><comment><USER6> This attempt proofs Google can do better in social results than what it is doing now. But, this also shows what great importance Google gives to Google+. They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+. A lot of us may believe that this won't work for Google+, but Google must think otherwise. Google has made their bet on using its most potent weapon - search to increase the user base of Google+.

This also shows why we need a strong alternative to Google Search. I hope Bing hooks up with Twitter, Facebook and other services like Foursquare to make a better social search. They have tried too long to beat Google at its own game.

<comment><USER7> "They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+"

It's my understanding that search results are unchanged - is this wrong? I thought the social box on the side was just something that came up in addition to the natural search results.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is incorrect, as the second section on this page demonstrates: <http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php>

<comment><USER7> Hm, that's not really what I mean. That's just providing additional information in the result. That additional info favors Google+, sure, but it's still not a rearrangement of the primary natural search results.

<comment><USER7> @blakeross

As a branch of the main Macy's result, yeah. It isn't a natural result itself. If your goal is to browse simply natural results you just look at the primary results. Those do not appear to be different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Antitrust issues occur when you use your dominance in one market to give you an unfair advantage in another. I think FB, Twitter,and MySpace are using this to advertise Google _just might_ be doing that. The focused language on how the results are what Google would come up with naturally if they weren't forcing the "inappropriate" G+ results is a little over-the-top to be natural, IMO.

<comment><USER9> I believe Facebook's position on use of competing technologies in Facebook apps is relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336> (Google Adsense banned from Apps)

And less seriously: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook- is-ba...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-banned/) (Google+ Ad banned)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Often these results are irrelevant for users, such as when Google links to Mark Zuckerberg's empty Google+ profile on a search for "facebook"._

For the record, Mark Zuckerberg can make his profile not visible to search engines if he so wanted: [http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1151728&authuser=1)

<comment><USER11> That's not really the point though; Mark has made _zero_ posts on his Google+ account and updates his real Facebook account fairly frequently. One is a freshly-updated, lively social search result and the other is almost worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Focus on the... profits of our respective companies perhaps? If users want this 'feature' they'll switch to a search engine that supports it. In that case these companies are wasting time whining when they could be scooping up these users. Clearly they don't actually believe users care, so they're whining about it instead.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't bing already provide facebook integration?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not to sound too down on it, but.. "well, duh". It's not like Google forgot they were able to do this. They have made a business decision, and the site doesn't really tackle why they should change their minds.

</comment><comment><USER15> Focus on the user? There are so many sharing links that I can't focus on the search results!

</comment><comment><USER16> From the source code: <http://www.focusontheuser.org/dontbeevil/script.js>

if (/MSIE (\d+\\.\d+);/.test(navigator.userAgent)) { alert( "Unfortunately, this tool does not currently work in Internet Explorer. " + "Please try another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari."); return; }

That's not very nice. Surely this can be made to work for at least IE9 :)

<comment><USER17> I browsed the source briefly, and while they could get this to work on IE9, there is so much css/dom manipulation (which even ie9 is not great at) that it might slow down the browser enough to be seen as annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In an ideal world, maybe... unfortunately the majority of the sentiment on this discussion disagreed with the author: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497255> (Nice guys finish first. Eventually.)

What's next, giveusersbetterads.org by "several Google employees" to convince Facebook they should allow Google Adsense in Facebook apps?

</comment><comment><USER18> _Google Plus's Real Goal is Not to Kill Facebook (or twitter), but to Force (them) to Open_ [1]

It seems to be working.

[1] [http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to- kill-f...](http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill- facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open)

</comment><comment><USER19> "Focus on our services (instead)."

</comment><comment><USER20> So in my opinion, my site provides better value for some keywords better than Yelp, Twitter or Facebook. So how can I get preferred placement on Google search results?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd say "focus on the server," which seems to be overloaded and currently unavailable.

</comment><comment><USER22> a link to a facebook page of imdb? this is a joke right?

</comment><comment><USER23> I have no idea why would anyone feel entitled to any sort of placement in Google search results, they do not charge anyone for being indexed, and if you don't care for the results that is what the address bar on web browsers is for.

This whole issue feels artificial and exaggerated: social profiles? seriously?! that is the least of any user's concerns. I think Twitter/Facebook and whomever should focus on their own products and not resort to these sorts of PR stunts.

<comment><USER24> Just to play devil's advocate here: for almost everyone in the non-techie general population that I've seen use the Internet, Google's search bar IS the address bar.

They want to get to Facebook? They type "facebook" into Google and click the first link. They believe that Google is how you access the Internet, clinging onto the old AOL frontpage mentality of portals and site discovery. That's why search ranking matters so much.

<comment><USER8> What's funny is that even people who never used AOL or Yahoo! (the early version :) still do the same thing, which I think says more about the cognitive load of browsers, domain names, bookmarks, etc, than it does about Google. Google makes all that load just disappear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I find it quite funny to see the exact same phrases used to defend both Google and Apple when they do something unfair: "it's their [website|store], they are free to show what they want, you are not entitled to appear."

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to- kill-f...](http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill- facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open)

This I think is what Google is doing. The more Facebook opens up, the better for them. And it's working fine, I guess. Since when users switched to the timeline format, some of them had their privacy set to public.

</comment><comment><USER27> Bookmarklets require too much effort. Get the Firefox restart-less add-on here: <http://t.co/OFokUDSs></comment>


What are your objections to using remote workers based in your own country? - <AUTHOR> We're a startup in YC's Startup School.
Our website is:  https://assistable.com/
We're in the process of identifying objections to using remote workers based in the U.S. & Canada by clients in the same countries and time zones.
What are your objections to using remote workers based in your country and time zone and how might we be able to overcome them? <comment><USER2> The biggest issue around remote is the fully remote part. It's just so much easier to work and get things done when you can sit right next to the person. I'm all for some remote work, but office work is important too. The ad hoc conversations across skill sets really leads to more ideas, progress, and innovation.

I had the chance to sit with a peer from a fully remote team I work with, and we got more done in a few hours than a typical week or sprint. I've also worked at an office that allowed for 1-2 days of work from home. This was the best environment I have ever experienced, in no small part due to the founder.

Happy to see a fellow SUS participant here, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Having to file paperwork and dealing with every state's tax office where one remote employee works. [https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1152296035533905920](https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1152296035533905920) has a great rant

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch! That's a nightmare.

<comment><USER2> If in US, you can use Gusto to handle all this, hassle free on your end.</comment></comment></comment>