Google loses 'right to be forgotten' case - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43752344 <comment><USER2> This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it.

It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles. So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down?

It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine.

It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them.

It's also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don't think its _unsolvable_ , and people are actively working on it. If for some crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?

<comment><USER3> > It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their > government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the > public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's > why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more > than I trust mine.

I think we trust our governments much more than US citizens trust there government. There's a line from Ronald Reagan that goes something like:

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

The great preponderance of people in Europe simply do not think like this. For a huge range of issues that statement would actually sound reassuring in Europe. Essentially, if you believe in the rule of law and democracy, the government is simply ourselves, getting collectively together to fix something.

Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise many politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still remains in Europe as far as I can see (UK). Sometimes I think the difference between Europe and the US is that we despise our politicians and quite like the non- political part of our government (civil service, NHS, etc). The US appears to hate the non-political part of it too.

<comment><USER4> > Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise > many politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still > remains in Europe as far as I can see (UK).

Coincidentally, this is how most Americans seem to feel about their government's foreign policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Explaining the decisions made on Friday, the judge said one of the men had > continued to "mislead the public" while the other had "shown remorse".

Okay, great, so Google's now required to judge right to be forgotten requests based on whether the criminal has "shown remorse." Yeah, that's not arbitrary or even a little impossible to do at scale.

Let's grant that there are good cases for removing pages from a search index. If this is going to be the rubric, we should let the courts figure it out, and then an order should be issued to search engines to remove the content. This thing where you tell each search engine to remove content, the search engines decide based on, I dunno, court precedent or gut feeling or whatever, then you sue, then you appeal, I just don't see how that can work.

Eventually Google will just start granting every single request regardless of merit because being challenged will get too expensive.

<comment><USER6> Yes, google can't immitate the courts. So they just have to honor the request. Besidde people heavily intetsted Nopone gests hurt g

<comment><USER7> Wait. Nobody get's hurt when a politician asks Google to "forget" (fill in the blank), and Google just does it because they requested it? That's not right. Everybody gets hurt by that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people.

And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice.

I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news about their crime.

As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do think it's worth debating.

<comment><USER9> _> As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime._

That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to _" forgive"_ nor a way to _" pay debt back to society"_. Those are just common phrases _some_ people use.

If felons were truly _forgiven_ , they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries.

Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.

<comment><USER10> This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.

<comment><USER11> I (an EU citizen) want to keep my right to think whatever I want about a criminal - and that includes looking at or keeping records. I feel like this 'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety - I don't want to forget that someone murdered someone or raped someone, these things are unforgettable and definitely unforgivable - and I want to know about them, and I want employers to be able to look them up.

<comment><USER12> No one is getting murder or rape convictions removed from the record. This is considerably smaller scale stuff, and the story itself mentions that two men jointly fought to have news of their conviction removed, one who got 6 months in jail, and one who got 4 years, both non violent white collar type offenses, and only the guy who got 6 months actually won. The second guy lost.

<comment><USER13> >No one is getting murder or rape convictions removed from the record.

Story about German murderers suing to get their names removed from a Wikipedia article about the victim. [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER14> But German courts ended up ruling against them.

<comment><USER15> It's almost as if judges aren't stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person," said Jim Killock, executive director.

"The Court will have to balance the public's right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest."

I feel like every single comment on here has missed the point. This isn't about removing relevant information, it's about removing information that disproportionately affects an individual and is of no public interest. For example, if someone famous puts a gerbil up their bottom and gets sentenced for animal cruelty, and that gets widely publicised, it might be true but it affects that person extremely negatively at no cost or benefit to the rest of society. This is the case here: a man served his time and the court ruled that his case was not sufficiently relevant for the public interest to still be publically accessible - he cannot be descriminated against because of his past action. In developed countries this would never happen when the case is relevant for that person or society, for example a high ranking corruption case or if the person becomes a convicted paedophile.

<comment><USER17> Uh, i think society deserves to know that man abused an animal and is potentially dangerous/mentally unstable. If you're a young woman about to go on a date with someone i'm sure you'd want to know about that incident

<comment><USER18> I agree that it should stay public, but because giving the government the power to destroy information and erase history in any sense is a very slippery slope. That said in the above case the man in question would have served his time and be by all counts considered to have been rehabilitated. So it shouldn't be able to be used to discriminate against him. If for some reason he isn't rehabilitated that's a problem with the justice system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a feeling one day public titles, marriage, and criminal records will be in a blockchain ledger, and it'll be impossible for government to order them expunged. The way the governments are handling this is trying to impose secrecy with security through obscurity. But the public records exist somewhere, and anyone wanting to do a background check will eventually be able to track it down.

Imagine this case was instead about a Wikipedia article about this guy, and Wikipedia lost the case and was ordered to revert the article and expunge all edit history. Due to the way Wikipedia is cloned by many sources, and preserved by many archives around the world, it will become increasingly problematic to erase information.

If the government can go around ordering archives to expunge truthful public or historical records, it's very problematic IMHO. The notion of truth and objective reality is already under assault since the 2016 election, and the deep fakery and trolling bots will only get worse. What few institutions we have online that can try to weed out and present consensus truth would then be suspect if governments gain global jurisdiction to make edits.

<comment><USER20> And that's how we went back to book burning, again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I once got contacted by a female account manager from a well known job boards company in the Valley. I googled for her to find her linkedin so we could link up, since we were going to be doing business together, likely for a while.

What shocked me was that the first result that Google returned was a smear page against her from her ex boyfriend, something like janedoesisaslut.com or janedoecheats.com with a long essay about what she did, and a bunch of photos of her on it. It was about how, when they were together in college, allegedly the woman had slept with other guys, and the boyfriend got pretty upset about it.

It was mortifying for me to run into it, and I can't even imagine how she must feel when the n.1 Google result for her name is that, forever. This must have happened over 10 years ago, and yet it kept haunting her to that day.

I talked about this with a few lawyer friends and my understanding is that you can't actually be sued for it. Apparently, if you're not lying and just stating actual facts about what happened, you're not liable, and don't fall under defamation/libel category. You could start a JohnDoeWillGiveYouGonorrhea.com and that's totally legal. The person trying to take the site down would have to clearly prove that their lives were seriously impacted by its existence, and quantify the damages, which would be pretty hard to pull off.

Real odd legal corner case.

<comment><USER22> I wonder how this would be treated under the EU law? It doesn't involve a legal conviction or something that has a codified statute of limitations. It may contain facts, but it also contains opinions, opinions which the site creator may still hold.

<comment><USER23> The way it would be treated is the domain would be taken down (if that were requested by the victim). I'm not sure if that is EU law or something local. I am fairly certain a lot of EU countries have local provisions that effectively mean the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think that simply deleting references to information is a crude way to solve this problem. People who want to continue to bias against ex-convicts (like landlords and employers) will use background check services that aren't regulated here, but the general public will be deprived easy access to information. This seems ripe for abuse, especially for government officials.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't it be far worse to delete the original information? It's better to just make it harder for someone's life to be ruined by it, don't you think?

<comment><USER26> Yes it's not as bad as deleting the information, but it's still much much worse than just doing nothing about the information.

<comment><USER25> Worse for who? Allowing Google to render someone permanently unemployable based on ancient or false information is definitely not "better".

<comment><USER24> Employers go to Google to find this information because it is free, not because they are randomly searching or because Google is pushing this information to them. I believe many (maybe even most) will simply switch to other services that provide background checks. IANAL but I don't see how this ruling anticipates this. Now, you could argue that services like that will be less susceptible to false information. I don't know why that would be the case and there seems to be some evidence against it on the recent "checkr" funding thread on hacker news[0]

This is a blunt technological tool to fix a delicate social issue. The information is still there, but behind a service. I believe deleting the information is already not in the public's interests [1][2], and it looks like the law agrees to an extent[3], but the solution they came up with effective puts a tollbooth in front of it.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093)

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527)

[2] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000-people- ask-Google-right-forgotten-request-MILLION-pages-wiped-search-engine-s- results.html)

[3] see paragraph 3 [http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to- eras...](http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to- erasure-'right-to-be-forgotten'-GDPR.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's absolutely insane what they are doing (EU). Should libraries remove newspapers with my name if I don't like what's written there about me? It's pure censorship. It all stems from the fact that society hasn't yet adjusted to the reality that not everything on the Internet is true. People share between themselves lots of false beliefs. The Internet is just another medium.

The problem is that if I put up a billboard that says John is a thief, they can find me and sue for defamation. If I do a website and use SEO, then it's not so easy, even though it serves similar purpose.

But that is how the world works now. We are able to send information to many people, anonymously, often in a targeted way. That's how politics work, that's how ads work, that's how HN works. The problem is not the information, the problem is trust. It's not easy to solve, but it's doable.

<comment><USER28> What if the problem is not that society hasn't adjusted to this new space we call the Internet, but that the people in charge of the internet (or rather, the things on it) haven't figured out yet that they still bear some obligation to the rest of the world?

To use your example, whether I put up a website or a billboard with defamatory information is irrelevant. We have laws that protect us, which declare that defamatory speech is not protected. Why does it matter that the speech is online or not when considering the essence of the law? As you stated, if you put up a billboard they can find you and sue you for defamation. Why shouldn't the same be possible online? If I get an injunction against a billboard with defamatory speech the owner of the billboard is required to take it down. Why shouldn't an online provider be equally obligated?

<comment><USER29> Except, in this case, the article isn't defamatory. It correctly depicts actions of genuine public interest that happened. The only argument to remove them is that they are old. I'd also note that the website itself is still up, containing the article in its entirety.

<comment><USER30> It's not entirely clear to me that there's no defamation going on.

Does running an add linking to the article for anyone interested in that person's name count as defamation? And if so, why would it be different if google chose included it prominently amongst the search results?

I'm not entirely convinced that this should count as defamation, but there is room for debate.

<comment><USER29> Information has to be false for it to be defamation, it's in the definition. The news article they are trying to de-list does not contain false information.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't have to be false for it to be defamatory. It has to be intended to ruin someone's reputation in an unwarranted manner.

<comment><USER29> Not in any legal jurisdiction I'm aware of, and certainly not the EU Courts. Truth is an absolute defense against defamation.

<comment><USER28> Truth is an absolute defense, except when its not.

[http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/truth-and- defamation/](http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/truth-and-defamation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Entering into a deeper relationship with someone (employer/employee, landlord/tenant, etc) you want to know everything about the other person. This is not because you are some nosy person - its because breaking that relationship means risking lawsuits or damage to your property or a whole eviction process which can take months to years...

Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of control over your future so people use government records and google to know if they could possibly have an issue.

This isn't a privacy issue its a minimizing risk issue.

If you give people better options for minimizing risk then google results will matter less and less. For instance I'd be happy to hire a convict if I could a) pay him less than I normally would (initially) and b) fire him at any time for any reason.

Same for renting. If we draw up a contract with a no-drugs no-weapons clause and allowed me to inspect the place once a month for the first year or so I'd be happy to rent to him.

But these things sensible precautions are illegal. There may be good reasons because of them "evil corporations" blah blah. Sensible or not that's reality - so people understandably discriminate against people based on google results. Its a fairly understandable precaution given the amount of risk involved due to regulation.

Therefore the fix isn't to make google "forget" things - that only increases risk dramatically. The fix is to make these relationships less risky by allowing business owners and landlords more control over their own personal.

<comment><USER32> So a convicted criminal should be eternally punished by losing any employment security and being paid less than their peers?

That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in.

The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and weapons in their house after all.

<comment><USER33> How do you handle someone like this guy after he gets out of prison: [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/our- tim...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/our-time-com-con- man/554057/) If we erase his past from the internet - that kind of enables him to do his scam again immediately. It's a difficult question.

<comment><USER34> > It's a difficult question.

Not at all. It's up to the legal system and law enforcement to handle this. Not up to citizens, and for good reasons.

<comment><USER35> > law enforcement

At least in my country, law enforcement has no obligation to handle anything. Legal systems punish criminals after-the-fact, it's up to individuals to prevent crimes. [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices- rule...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police- do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A human is multifaceted. In previous decades, disagreeing with a person politically did not disqualify their friendship--today that is increasingly the case. People tend to flandarize real people (that is, reduce them to singular elements) nowadays in a way that makes me skeptical most people would use information on crimes in productive ways. A person should not have to pay for their mistakes years and years after they've paid the price (in this case, jail time).

As a generalization: the push against the right to be forgotten seems like a case of information bias. Does more information really help society make decisions? And even more importantly: how do we, as a society, process information like this in a way where it could be helpful (in the common case)?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that this case involved a criminal who wished to expunge his conviction from search results.

> 'The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no > longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,' said Jim Killock, > executive director, 'The Court will have to balance the public's right to > access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the > public interest.'

'The public's right to access the historical record' seems to me to be an incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.

<comment><USER37> _It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information._

This isn't a comment about the case, or the right to be forgotten, but something quite important nonetheless - Google's search results are not " _factual historical information_ ". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. Google claims their engine ranks pages that more reputable higher than others, but without any transparency around that we can't know whether or not we agree with it's decisions.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an > index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they > like.

I'd argue that _the fact that_ a webpage says something is itself an historical fact, and shouldn't be forbidden to be said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Meanwhile, when governments want to check the background of someone before hiring them into a position of trust involved in national security, they'll send agents to investigate.

Methods include interviewing them hooked up to a polygraph, and asking their neighbors questions face to face.

All for reasons that seem to me less important then the safety of my child while alone with a babysitter.

<comment><USER39> Because a dodgy spy can cause more damage kim philby lead to the deaths of a large number of people.

And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child - than say a babysitter who got busted at 15 for smoking pot behind the bleachers with her bf.

<comment><USER40> > And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child

"X is worse than Y, therefore you shouldn't worry about Y" is a fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems crazy that this is brought to Google, the results are there because it's on the internet, go to the source and get them to remove it.

Which coinsidently would probably be a much harder case to bring because these are generally reputable news sources and not a big US company everyone seems to have a bit of a problem with already.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm a bit surprised at all the negative reactions I'm seeing here in response to this. This really seems like a win for individual rights which the tech community is normally all about.

As I see it, the heart of the matter is that the average person is _really_ bad at placing any random fact they learn about someone (or something) in its proper context. So that means people should have some legal leverage when it comes to all the information (accurate or not) that is available about them online.

<comment><USER43> To me it seems like Yet Another Barrier To Entry For Tech Startups (TM). I remember the good old days (re: 10 years ago) when you could make all sorts of cool things without being bogged down by regulations. I guess that era is over (at least for certain categories of tech like search engines).

Also, your right to be forgotten seems to be infringing on my right to remember.

<comment><USER44> Are you serious or do you yearn for the days when cars didn't have seat belts and paint still contained lead? Start-ups will adapt or they don't deserve to exist.

<comment><USER43> I'm not saying all regulation is bad. But some regulation is has a major stifling effect on innovation and startups simply because the cost of compliance is too high for new players (but manageable for established big boys).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why does anyone have a right to be forgotten after committing a crime or defrauding others?

Others bear the cost and you get the luxury of starting over? After seeing so many serial scammers on the Internet getting away with crime time and again by finding new, naive victims after we catch them, it gets really tiresome when the government gives the scammers tools to force us to take down reviews and warnings.

<comment><USER46> Justice systems work differently in Europe than in the States; Rehabilitation and reintegration being key not throwing someone in a hole and loose the key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am just curious, what about the edge cases? What if a person commits acts of domestic violence with their romantic partners, and then gets Google to remove that record. Don't their future partners deserve to know? What if someone commits legal but shady acts in dealing with people. Why should they have a right to remove it from the public record?

<comment><USER48> What if they stole cookies ? Shouldn't store managers deserve to know ?

Where do you put the limit then ?

<comment><USER49> The manager can make the decision whether they care that the person stole cookies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It is odd that this is google's responsibility. Why isn't this directed at the original source?

<comment><USER51> Because having this information wasn't the problem. The problem now is that anyone anywhere can have access to all the data about you at any time. The scale of the ability has changed the behavior. The same issue comes up with cops tracking cars.

It was never an issue for society for a cop to tail someone driving on public roads because they could only follow a few people given the resources necessary to tail someone. Now they can buy a few cameras that track license plates and have real time tracking of _everyone_ on the road with the ability to store the data forever until they decide it's useful, which is has changed the actual results of cops being allowed to track people.

This right to be forgotten used to exist simply because you had to put effort into finding out data about people. People could move to another town and restart their life. The courts in this case appear to be trying to reset tat status quo

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> What I hate the most about this is the cute Orwellian euphemism for censorship.

</comment><comment><USER53> Your "right to be forgotten" is my "duty to be misinformed".

</comment><comment><USER54> And people downvoted me when I said the EU was an enemy of freedom...

<comment><USER55> What freedom? The freedom of the individual to be forgotten? Or for the corporation? What freedom is EU the enemy of? I think the fact of the matter is this will give more freedom to those that need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Hmm. This is interesting.

I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did.

This should never be applied to violent criminals.

<comment><USER57> What if someone was a violent criminal in the past, like due to an Alcohol addiction, but went through therapy in prison and is now a peaceful citizen?

Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals).

Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitation which means we give them another chance to integrate and follow the law.

<comment><USER56> I just think that a violent crime is not excusable in any circumstance. Yes they have served their time, but if someone is capable of violence even once, it should not be possible to hide this information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still publicly available.

It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.

</comment><comment> Paul-ish Can people use proxies through other countries to see unfiltered results, or are the results removed in all countries?

</comment><comment><USER59> > The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding > the case

I can see the win for freedom of speech there.

</comment><comment><USER60> Perhaps Google the service provider or ISP or carrier could censor search results according to the specific geo the query originates from. i.e. in many states it is not illegal to conspire to intercept communications so long as one of the parties are aware, or if this is a place of business.

</comment><comment><USER61> Here is the full judgment: [https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-...](https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-Nnt2-v-google-2018-Eewhc-799-QB.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER62> Is right to be forgotten applicable in Court Judgements? [https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html](https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html)

</comment><comment><USER63> Every company that is fighting DDPR needs to fire legal and compliance. It literally says 'blah blah <stuff none of them want to do> by this/specific/date, NO EXCEPTIONS'

</comment><comment><USER39> Interesting that the one that won NT2 (conspiracy to intercept communications) looks like one of those dodgy PI's that the tabloids / News international uses.

</comment><comment><USER64> Google and the confusing umbrella phoeniecisms

</comment><comment><USER65> Right to be remembered about being forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER66> Sounds vaguely like Glenn Mulcaire

</comment><comment><USER67> well, they also won it

</comment><comment><USER68> ashik526

</comment><comment><USER68> Ashik526

</comment><comment><USER69> I find this result disgusting.

<comment><USER70> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER71> I would say that in the US we mostly consider right to free speech more important than the right to be forgotten.

<comment><USER72> A judge heard the case for two individuals. That's a pretty fair way to do it. Americans also believe in the rule of law, versus the rule of the powerful.

<comment><USER71> The reason we have the freedom of speech in the US is because its the powerful that abuse the ability to censor.

<comment><USER72> Which powerful entity do you mean? The people who want things unlisted, or Google?

<comment><USER73> The government.

<comment><USER72> I don't understand your point. I read this as similar to libel or truth in advertising laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Once a criminal, always a criminal... even if you get it expunged from your record?

<comment><USER75> Your record just shows you've been caught.

I don't know anyone that hasn't broken laws. Hell, they make new laws every day for us to break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Fuck the courts that rule in favor of censorship. I hope this makes every European employer check Google.com before hiring a single person.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe this opens up a opportunity for a new search engine that excludes people from the EU and allows a much less censored view of things.

<comment><USER59> I think that's already the case, isn't US results not affected by this?</comment></comment>


DungeonDelveXL (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.frayn.net/games/ddxl/index.html <comment><USER2> This is my fourth week at my new job, and this link was the first one I've found that was blocked my the corporate firewall (didn't even realize we had such a policy) - the reason? Pornography. Man, I'm missing out.

<comment><USER3> One might argue this is excellent MS Excel Pornography

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A gentle reminder: VBA is a fully-fledged language, capable of anything a normal language can do (including things like making HTTP get requests!). You should be very careful about running macros on anything you've downloaded from the internet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there any repository of Excel applications like this? I would love to see what other people have done.

</comment><comment><USER6> I really wanted to try this but it doesn't work on 64-bit Excel, any tips?

</comment><comment><USER7> Not running on x64 version of Office 365. I guess it is written for 32 bit versions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Getting syntax errors for Office Libre

<comment><USER9> It uses VBA, so it's not going to be compatible with non-MS office products (and the author doesn't really advertise compability anywhere anyway).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please review FolderBoy: fluid idea organizer with super-fast search - <AUTHOR>

FolderBoy is a real quick note taker and information manager. FolderBoy allows you to jot down ideas, notes, etc, and then find them again with a super-quick search-as-you-type (one of the quickest search of any note-taker to date).
The beauty of FolderBoy is that it's so quick to take notes, create folders and organize your info: quick to get your info in, easy to organize said info, and quick to get your info out.
FolderBoy has nested labels: the ability for any folder or note to have multiple parent folders. Thus, you can organize you info in a flat-label like structure, or a hierarchical structure, or a combination of the two, depending on what comes naturally. And we have drag and drop.
http://www.folderboy.com/index.htm?f=hn
Click the "Try It Now!" button. NB: there is no sign up form. It goes straight to the demo account. <comment><USER2> Very nice. I like it more than evernote. There should be a way to save to the site without visiting (for instance, to send myself a bookmark). An Android app would be awesome too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, you're right on the money re saving to FolderBoy. Our plans include:

* Android + iPhone app (very simple app: one text box).

* Browser plugin so you can save the page you're on to FB, or save text to FB

* Email to FolderBoy: send an email to a secret address, and your data is imported.

Email...oh boy. Wouldn't it be awesome if all your email contents could be under search-as-you-type? Email makes up such a large chunk of our personal data. If anyone has any ideas on this front, we'd _love_ to hear from you.

Re Evernote: we also think it's better (although they have far more features than us), in fact FolderBoy was partly born of our frustrations with the rigidity of Evernote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > allows you to jot down ideas, notes, etc, and then find them again with a > super-quick search-as-you-type

that describes the OSX open-source app Notational Velocity too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple has a good philosophy when it comes to search-as-you-type + personal info...we want to extend concept that to the web. We want users to be able to "Google" their own personal info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool concept.. just a suggestion for the logo.. the mascot does look quite right.. looks like a mean person (no, this is not supposed to be funny or something, I mean it)

<comment><USER5> I agree. The logo seems kind of "old" too. Or maybe i'm being too much of a perfectionist here. I doubt the average user will notice it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we may change the logo later.

What we're concentrating on now is improving the core features of FolderBoy: the ability to store, organize and find your data from one central location.

<comment><USER6> the logo's fine. reminds me of the fallout mascot. nice site. very clean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Straight to demo account:

<http://www.folderboy.com/demo.htm?f=hn>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.folderboy.com/index.htm?f=hn>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

<http://www.folderboy.com/index.htm?f=hn></comment>


Worst Epidemics in History - <AUTHOR> https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-10-worst-epidemics-in-history.html <comment><USER2> I was reading about this interesting fungal infection that primarily infects people with HIV/AIDS:

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

You can get it via inhalation and most commonly comes (at least for westerns) from people visiting places like South East Asia. The mortality rates are super high around 30-70%.

It must suck to have HIV, so many things can kill you, it's like handcuffs which prevent a lot of personal freedom.

I read about an HIV-infected doctor who got infected from attending a microbiology conference which had samples on display.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Spanish Flu was one of the rarer ones that appeared to target only young healthy adults, but its believed that this was due to the Russian Flu weakening the immune systems of that generation first when they were children.

[https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2017/11/13/why_did...](https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2017/11/13/why_did_so_many_young_people_die_from_the_spanish_flu_110453.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's up with the commas in 10,00,00,000?

<comment><USER5> It's the author giving you a hint that what follows is over 9000.

<comment><USER6> Please don't try to turn HN into Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> teshier-A How was this published with wrong numbers? A simple wikipedia search gives you different estimates (parentheses)

Plague of Justinian 541-542 100,000,000 (25-50M)

Black Plague 1346-1350 50,000,000 (75-200M)

1918 Flu (Spanish Flu) 1918-1920 20,000,000 (50-100M)

<comment><USER7> what makes you think that Wikipedia has the right numbers? (if there is a discrepancy to begin with?)

<comment> teshier-A There is a discrepancy, and Wikipedia is sourced... pretty hard to back the other one in this case isn't it ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Earlier epidemics were larger in a population-percentage sense. So much worse virality than later ones by far?

And I'd add another 'epidemic': WWII which spread across the planet, killing I think 56M?

</comment><comment><USER9> "Spanish flu" is something of a misnomer.

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

\---

To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.[10][11] Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII).[12] These stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit,[13] thereby giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish flu".[14]

...

The major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, was identified by researchers as being at the center of the Spanish flu.

\---

So actually the "French Flu"</comment>


How Do You Punish Your Employees? - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2016/01/05/how-to-punish-employees.html?2016-01 <comment><USER2> I like how this came right after the article on most Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a horrible article, I sincerely hope that you're not in a position of power. The majority of these will destroy a company - attempt to bully or strike fear into actually good employees with self confidence and they'll just leave.

<comment><USER4> It's satirical

<comment><USER3> Embarrassing. I checked through some other articles too, and the top few seemed serious

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to be serious sometimes )</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is it possible for an open-source project to be successful without unit tests? - <AUTHOR>

I'm getting ready to publicly announce/release a Ruby project (< 1.0). At this point no unit tests have been written. What do you think, can an open-source project be successful without unit tests given the popularity of TDD among developers? <comment><USER2> This is a good question. In addition, if anyone has good resources on setting up a development environment that includes things like unit testing and continuous integration I'd love to have it. I always want to implement these concepts into my projects but find myself getting so caught up in the complexities of setting them up that I just say screw it and move on to working on coding without these additional tools.</comment>


Do you use the clipboard in the terminal? - <AUTHOR> http://dagonist.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/clipboard-terminal-the-beginning-of-a-beautiful-relationship/ <comment><USER2> On Mac OS X you can use `pbcopy` and `pbpaste` to copy and paste from/to the Terminal.</comment>


Is the Universe Actually Made of Math? - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math <comment><USER2> From what I can tell, this is just a restatement of The Anthropic Principle, which itself is not a theory, but a trivial answer to a trivial philosophical question. He says we can make "all kinds of predictions", but I wonder if he has ever made even one.

<comment><USER3> +1, and I hate these kinds of articles.

99% of this "profound" bullshit has been covered and recovered for hundreds of years by various philosophers and scientists. Get yourself an introduction to philosophy book of some sort and it will clearly lay out some of the most popular and lasting arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm reminded of Greg Egan's "running on the dust" theory. The main idea is the same: if a simulation algorithm describes our universe, there's no need for a machine to run the simulation. We exist... in the abstract, in the same sense as numbers exist.

<comment><USER2> Well, I say we exist in the non-abstract. Or don't exist in the abstract. Or non-abstract. Or whatever. A radically different "view", and yet the implications are the same (non-existent, that is).

This isn't too far removed from arguing about whether the Holy Ghost is indeed the same entity as God the Father.

<comment><USER5> You are right that it doesn't offer any concrete predictions at the moment and perhaps it never will. But if everybody dismissed notions just because they couldn't immediately see what they could be used for we'd live in a pretty boring and backwards world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't read this guy's work but this interview makes it sound pretty ridiculous. First, he just ignores the bohmian and GRW interpretations of QM that are very popular right now. Next, he seems to ignore interpretations like many-minds because "physicists agree that there's an external reality" which is presumably similar to what we see, and not actually in a big superposition. So for the sake of according with physicists' intuitions, he posits various hierarchies of physical worlds. And then, it turns out that these worlds are actually made out of "math," whatever that means, but which certainly doesn't accord with physicists' intuitions. So what's the point? The other theories on offer are far simpler than this bait-n-switch.

<comment><USER7> _First, he just ignores ....very popular right now. Next, he seems to ignore..... many-minds because "physicists agree that there's an external reality" ... So for the sake of according with physicists' intuitions,.... doesn't accord with physicists' intuitions_

You should applaud him. To discover or innovate you must "ignore" and make "no assumptions" nor "judgements" only make "observations". Only a very few people do this and sadly that is why most discoveries and breakthrough are made by accident.

<comment><USER6> Right... but you shouldn't ignore something that posits fewer entities than your theory yet has the same explanatory power. And you also shouldn't posit something for reason X and then posit something else that undercuts reason X, because that's inconsistent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Made of math" means more or less I think "metric" in the sense of topologies.

So fudamentally, the simplest universe you could think of would be in a set of related topologies without defined metrics.

Then going up from there you get into more complex metrics, like say, Einstein's Reimann metric, and the like.

Perhaps our world has a metric of 26 dimensions like in string theory.

Anyway, as near as I can tell, Tegmark's "made of math" idea effectively means all topologies and metrics exist eternally, we happen to live on one of these metrics, or more precisely, upon one of the metrics in which self-aware substructures like us could exist.

Anyway, makes as much sense to me for a theory of everything, as for example, positing the "Intelligent Design by the Flying Sphaghetti Monster" being shoved down the throats of children these days!! :-)</comment>


Show HN: DerivePass – Emoji Password Manager - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/derivepass/id1195431375 <comment><AUTHOR> Just a few words from the author. This app came out of my frustration and lack of trust (read paranoia) in exiting password managers. All of the popular ones stores passwords in the "vault", which means that these companies take responsibility for ensuring that your data is safe. It is hard for me to believe in this, even a bit, so here we have DerivePass.

It generates password using scrypt from the Master Password and domain/login combination. As you type - it displays emojis that represent the Master Password in secure way. Only domain names and logins are stored in the cloud, and they are secured by AES-256 encryption with key derived from the Master Password too.</comment>


Fox Censors Cory Doctorow's "Homeland" Novel From Google - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/fox-censors-cory-doctorows-homeland-novel-from-google-130420/ <comment><USER2> This is my biggest issue with the DMCA. Issuing a take-down notice for content you do not own should result in _large_ fines. Maybe you get a couple of false positives, but at some point you have to be accountable for this stuff. If you want to rigorously enforce your copyright, good on ya... but be prepared to pay out the nose when you hurt someone else in the process.

<comment><USER3> > Issuing a take-down notice for content you do not own should result in large > fines

It effectively does. The DMCA makes damages, costs and attorneys fees mandatory for material misrepresentations. Doctorow can sue at no cost to himself, while Fox would be out a significant amount of money in two sets of attorneys fees plus whatever damages Doctorow can show this caused to his sales.

<comment><USER4> Once our content was taken down because of DMCA from Poland (With just a gmail address). We got our content back online with counter following procedures with google after 15 days. (That is the time required after counter for the DMCA complainer to respond back). How can we expect to sue some on in Poland with just a email address and no idea who the real person is and what they are worth?

DMCA is an American law that only hurts people who live in US. It is very easy to abuse DMCA and trouble people in US if you live outside the country.

<comment><USER5> They're supposed to put your content back up once they receive the counter notice. Your provider screwed you.

<comment><USER3> He said it was put back online after 15 days. That's how it's supposed to work. There is a gap between the content being taken down and going back up to allow time for a copyright holder to go to court and get an injunction.

<comment><USER6> It would be nice if Google would let submitters to provide (and honor) a OnDMCANotice event handler, so the counter-notice gets sent inmediately, maybe documented with a reference to IP registration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "links to downloadable editions of the text of Homeland. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs license, which lets you share it, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. If you'd like to make a remix, please get in touch with us. "

<http://craphound.com/homeland/download/>

Most of his ebooks for free here:

<http://manybooks.net/authors/doctorow.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not really sure why it is big news that content copyright holders have automated DMCA scripts running.

Sure, there should be some compensation for false DMCA take downs, but this story is just surfing on some artificial wave of rage against Fox & Murdoch.

<comment><USER9> Automated takedown scripts are illegal. Takedown claims must be signed under penalty of purjery.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but is it news that they are used, and that the abusers are not punished? I'm afraid not.

Now, if one of these big companies weren't just caught at this, but actually suffered some legal consequences -- _that_ would be news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope that soon it will sink with the masses that DMCA takedowns are mostly censorship.

Currently the system allows taking down everything you don't like.

Just amend the law to have a fine of 0.01% of yearly corporate revenue for each bogus notice sent and enjoy the show.

<comment><USER12> >I hope that soon it will sink with the masses that DMCA takedowns are mostly censorship.

I'd wager "the masses" don't understand the concept of censorship and certainly don't care about universal protections against it.

<comment><USER13> Who would accept that wager? The results are already in and you are correct. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a bit confused about the text of the original article's first DMCA takedown, namely " _Allegedly infringing_ URLs". Why isn't this "URLs that are definitely infringing, under penalty of perjury" as it IMHO was supposed to be in the original law ?

And why aren't lists of "possibly, maybe, infringing URLs" automatically forwarded to trash until the requester bothers to sort out infringing and non- infringing URLs, as (s)he's supposed to?

<comment><USER15> Technically... URL is an identifier (locator), not the content. Even more, URL alone does not always denote the content as IP and HTTP headers may affect the result. So, _technically_ a requester can't be sure that re-requesting the resource under a given locator will produce the same content.

But if lawmakers get it, they must also know that URL can't infringe by themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not the first time this has happened. "Down and out..." had similar issues, e.g. [http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/08/improper- dmca-t...](http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/08/improper-dmca- takedowns-come-to-the-final-frontier/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think Doctorow should busy himself filing takedown notices everywhere Fox's "Homeland" appears legitimately.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's time there's a penalty for false takedowns. You shouldn't be allowed to just get Google or others to take down thousands of urls at a time, just by identify a keyword. And we're only in the early days of this. The DMCA requests to Google are skyrocketing every year.

</comment><comment><USER19> I stopped reading it when Cory demanded Rupert's head. That's just silly.

<comment><USER11> Yeah it is old and shrunken. Won't look good on the wall. Will still buy it though for a dollar or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This isnt censorship. Studio is just trying to prevent copyright violation on its property. Given the book shares the name and the author it was affected as well which is unfortunate but not malicious.

<comment><USER21> Correct me if I'm wrong, an infringing title would be a _trademark_ violation, not a copyright violation. The DMCA applies only to copyright violations.

<comment><USER9> Parent was saying that Doctorow's book was affected by accident, incidental to a legitimate claim against another book with the same title.

<comment><USER22> The TV show "Homeland", right? Not another book?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Torrent freak sensationalising as usual. Fox was sending takedown notices to Google of links to the Homeland TV show. Included in these notices were some links to a novel with the same name that was available on torrent sites. Seems like a simple mistake. As much as I dislike Fox the title here is completely misleading.

Edit: I agree with the other commenters there should be some sort of financial penalty for this. It's a simple mistake but as it will impact the author of the novel negatively Fox should have to reimburse him in someway. I'm not exactly sure how that would work but it's something that needs to be looked at with the DMCA.

<comment><USER23> It's not a simple mistake, it's the result of using dumb automated systems without caring in the least if it affects anyone else. In the past they've already sent DMCA notices about news articles[1] and to takedown notices themselves[2].

[1]: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120525/01520819073/fox-i...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120525/01520819073/fox- issues-dmca-takedown-to-google-over-sf-chronicle-article-claiming-it-was- movie-chronicle.shtml)

[2]: [http://www.myce.com/news/dmca-takedown-notices-run-amok- than...](http://www.myce.com/news/dmca-takedown-notices-run-amok-thanks-to- fox-41103/)</comment></comment>


MongoDB vs. Cassandra - What's your choice? - <AUTHOR>

After reading many different discussions on MongoDB vs. Cassandra, it seems to me that there are two different use cases for these products.  MongoDB feels like a good fit when database accesses are done in a document-centric manner with little need for transactions and concurrency management, whereas Cassandra is a better fit for high-write, transactional, or element-based updates to data.<p>What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> > MongoDB vs. Cassandra

None. We use OrientDB [http://www.orientdb.org/](http://www.orientdb.org/) (it supports more than one "storage" mode: [http://nosql- database.org/](http://nosql-database.org/) )

On the plus side, it's Java based (without native stuff), so it can run existing production machines where mongo can't be compiled (Sparc, HP, etc).

Another nice advantage is the support for SQL syntax, so for existing teams, the DB people won't feel left out :).

</comment><comment><USER3> First, java is not a plus IMHO. Any time I have used anything java based, it's been quite slow. You also have to deal with all the typical java issues like memory and heap space, but that is another diacussion all together. NoSQL is just that, no SQL. If you want an SQL database, use one. The creators of the nosql db's did so for a reason, I don't see the need to back port it in. Sorry for the rant.</comment>


Get your act together, Data.gov - <AUTHOR> http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/get-your-act-together-datagov/

<comment><USER2> The problem with data.gov and sites like it is that they are built on faulty premises about data:

1\. Fiction: Data doesn't require lots of work to make it useable, so we can just upload whatever we have and it will be useful to somebody. Fact: the big useable datasets (census, ipums, nlsy, all the private marketing datasets) have armies of people cleaning and integrating them. It costs money, it takes time, and it is easy to screw up.

2\. Fiction: Links are worth something. Fact: links are worthless.

3\. Fiction: XML adds values. Fact: aascii tab delimited in consistent formats add value, while XML SUBTRACTS value.

4\. Fiction: a good dataset is easy to use. Fact: even a good dataset (google IPUMS for an example) takes a lot of work to get to know how to manipulate, presuming one can use some sort of statistical programming language in the first place.

5\. Fiction: simple summaries of common data data are useful. Fact: everybody has already done the simple summaries. (This is just a bonus item, and doesn't apply to data.gov, but does apply to faulty thinking about data in general.)

6\. Fiction: Federated data is just fine. Fact: Data that is curated, cleaned, and integrated into one big monolithic package is FAR better, because an analyst can then learn the conventions and names and such in one piece, and parallel categories are more likely to align.

7\. Fiction: Good data is easy for a layperson to use. Fact: good data still requires a lot of skill. Well, maybe in nations with decent public schools a layperson can do something with data, but not in the US.

What I WOULD like is the following (taken from another post, now deleted):

An ideal data.gov would have a lot of staff who put together a few integrated and curated datasets from the agencies. These would be hierarchies of data in a few formats (shp, txt, raster, SQL text dump, and ...?), along with well written codebooks and narrative READMEs. They would be distributed using git or subversion. The staff would have the expertise to make such nice data packages for you and me, and they would have the political oomph to demand that the agencies release the data to them. The staff would also give classes on how to use the data along in some open source statistical packages to do useful work. Good examples of curated data that I know are IPUMS and the Portland Metro's RLIS (both google-able).

<comment><USER3> I don't understand what you're getting at with this list.

1\. Yes, datasets need to be cleaned. But you need to have the dataset before you can clean it, and different people will want to clean it in different ways. Get it up there first, and keep the political debates confined to the gathering methods. Griping about raw datasets only gives them an excuse to keep delaying putting anything out (in other words, this critique is actively harming the movement, please stop making it).

2\. I don't understand what you mean by this. If a link points to a high- quality dataset that's otherwise hard to find, then it's very valuable.

3\. Not all data is expressible in tab-delimited ascii tables. I'd like my SEC filings in well-structured XML, for instance.

4\. This is a strawman. Nobody serious has ever said a good data set is easy to use and understand.

5\. Ironically, this is the one point you make I agree with, and then you claim it doesn't apply to data.gov. I think this is actually the worst thing about data.gov right now, that they think they're giving us anything when they post their little summaries. Give us the raw data, please.

6\. Isn't this just restating a combination of #1 and #3? Yes, big clean monolithic data sets are nice, but the priority is getting access to the data in the first place.

7\. You're restating #4, which was a strawman.

<comment><USER2> OK, we disagree. Except that #4 IS sort of redundant, though I want to make the point that data is almost impossible for a layperson, and still really hard for a practiced analyst.

<comment><USER3> I actually meant it when I said I didn't understand what you were getting at. I initially read it as you saying that there shouldn't be a data.gov at all (because raw data's useless, curated data's expensive and difficult, and simplified data summaries are likely to be misinterpreted by lay people), but that can't be right, so I'm really curious what you were actually trying to say. What would an ideal data.gov look like, to you?

<comment><USER2> I moved my reply to my top comment and screwed up the reply tree here. So this is for the comment that follows this one:

data.gov is fundamentally flawed, and won't be anything but annoying until it is reworked into something along the lines of what I suggest. Or so I think...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's Fractured Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.chinasolved.com/blog/2009/08/12/chinas-fractured-web-part-ii-hey-futurists-screw-you/

<comment><USER2> "No other form of media or infrastructure in the PRC is exempt from state planning--it is illogical to assume that the internet would enjoy special privileges."

That's an important point. I can remember being an official interpreter for Chinese government officials visiting the United States a decade ago. A question they were often asked, when in interviews with American counterparts, was "Do you have an email address?" At the time, the answer was surely no. Internet use in China has scaled up only as Internet control has scaled up.</comment>


Good Online Courses Anywhere - <AUTHOR>

I have been considering UC Berkeley for online course for credit. I like UC Berkeley because it is reasonably priced, <US $1000, has 'Anytime Access' and the professors have a decent rating on 'Rate my Prof...'  I also need online because I am east coast US.<p>Does anyone have any other suggestions for Universities with good/cheap online courses.
And suggestions on what to look for? <comment><USER2> Have you tried Udacity, Coursera etc? These courses are also giving some certificates also.</comment>


What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #3/3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know_21.html <comment><USER2> That this series has been published so close to WWDC makes me wonder if we're being prepared for some announcement.

 _Edit: although it's more likely that Lattner is just bracing himself for the onslaught of questions he'll have to field and hoping to be able to refer people to these articles._

</comment><comment><USER3> OK,

I've vaguely looked at each of these, being a c++ programmer rather a "true" c programmer.

One thing that was a little annoying was their discussion about purpose of undefined behavior. That is, I don't believe "undefined behavior" in the C Language exists for speed _as such_. Rather, undefined behavior is machine- specific behavior and it exists in C so the programmer can write machine specific code, the C Language being a "high-level assembly language" or "system-programmer's Swiss army knife". Speed is one outcome, certainly but there are other ways to get speed (a Just In Time Compile can come at least close naive c code). The _point_ isn't speed. The _point_ is "do anything", the point is that a chip designer can write c code and look on his screen to see the resulting assembler and decide where to go from there.

It may be the llvm folks bypass this point because llvm is "virtual machine" rather than a chip. But it is slight annoying not to mention this if "What Every C Programmer Should Know"

Perhaps they should have called their article "what C-programmers should know about optimizing compilers..."

<comment><USER2> _One thing that was a little annoying was their discussion about purpose of undefined behavior._

Could you quote an offending passage that claims that the purpose of undefined behavior is for speed? I see discussion of how undefined behavior creates opportunities for optimization, but nothing about purpose. Indeed, the word "purpose" does not appear in parts 1, 2, or 3 at all.

So please share whatever passage has the semantics you claim.

 _It may be the llvm folks bypass this point because llvm is "virtual machine" rather than a chip._

I'm curious: what exactly do you mean by this?

I don't mean to be rude, but whenever I read anybody say that LLVM is a virtual machine, it always comes off as if everything they know about LLVM came from learning the acronym.

<comment><USER3> Pohl: Could you quote an offending passage that claims that the purpose of undefined behavior is for speed?

Me: How a-bout, "Undefined behavior exists in C-based languages _because_ the designers of C wanted it to be an _extremely efficient_ low-level programming language."*??

Seems pretty clear. You don't necessarily need the literal term "purpose" here - the term "because" in this passage implies purpose ([http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer- should-...](http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should- know.html) \- yes, that's first article, sorry).

<comment><USER2> I see, it's a historical claim without a citation. What kind of machine was it back then, a PDP-11? I suppose it's possible they would want to save cycles here & there. Do you know something specific about the history here?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Were you watching on TV when Challenger broke up? - <AUTHOR> I've just watched footage of the Challenger space shuttle breaking up in this documentary [0], and although I knew what happened, I've instinctively reacted like I didn't know it was going to happen. You know how they show replays of a sports person getting a nasty injury in slow motion and you react now that you're seeing it properly? Like that.<p>So, if I'm reacting like that, I can only imagine what it was like for people watching it live. It must have been horrible. Did you watch it happen?<p>[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGh9eg2kNgc <comment><USER2> Growing up in Orlando, watching a shuttle launch was something we did outside. I think the only one I watched on TV was a day junior year we skipped high school and Phil drove to Titusville. He had a 72 Impala hardtop with the small block 400. We hung out in his sister's apartment drinking beer and watching the broadcast of Shuttle on the pad until just after lift-off. Then we stepped out onto the back balcony and there it was just a few miles away coming up over the landscape.

I was living in Gainesville (you can't usually see anything from there) and sitting in a morning sociology class when Challenger launched. I came back from class, flipped on the TV and there was Dan Rather and a talking head with a shuttle model. The thing I remember most was going to statistics class that afternoon and some student saying they couldn't believe it had happened and asking if it really had. I was kinda' stunned because I figured any intelligent educated person would know that blowing up is something rockets tend to do. Of course the big deficiency was in my model of other minds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I watched it live (not on TV) in the sky from the playground of Ocean Breeze Elementary, about 20 miles south of the Cape. It was my 12th birthday.

It took a few minutes for it to sink in that it had exploded. We knew something was wrong, but the teachers wouldn't confirm that it had exploded - I think they didn't want to deal with a bunch of crying kids. We observed a lot of debris falling from the explosion. Some of the kids in my class speculated which of the pieces was the escape pod. We presumed that there had to be one.

Then we went inside and turned on the TV, where they just showed it blowing up over and over. We were all kind of numb. A couple of kids were worried about their parents losing their jobs. I remember kids at lunch making the joke, "what does NASA stand for? - need another seven astronauts!".

</comment><comment><USER4> I was watching live when it happened. I remember I had stayed home from school that day for some reason, and I lying in bed watching the launch when it happened. I don't remember much about how I felt though. I think maybe I didn't know how _to_ feel, as I was pretty young (13 or so) at the time and had never experienced anything quite like that before.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was in elementary school at the time. Many of the teachers brought TVs into their classrooms to show the launch. It was horrifying to watch the shuttle disaster like that-- from what was supposed to be a celebratory, fun thing to watching a live tragedy.

</comment><comment><USER6> This happened on my 3rd birthday. Can't say I remember exactly what I was doing at the time but I've heard my parents talk about seeing it on TV.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wasn't watching live, but I want to say we watched on the six o'clock news that night. I was four at the time.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it normal to outgrow your interests? - <AUTHOR> I'm still pretty young (low twenties), but I notice as the years go on my interests (computing and non-computing related) change <i>dramatically</i>. I think back to my old hobbies and have zero residual interest in them - this makes me worry; what happens when there's no new areas to become interested in (or at least no low-hanging fruit). Has anyone come across the same issue? <comment><USER2> I've been through this. But also you can revisit your old interests after a break.

I played D&D when I was in junior high and high school. But took a 15 year break. A few of my friends were playing so I joined a game and played again for a year, it was awesome.

I was deep into RC cars when I was about 12. But hadn't touched them since then. When I was 34 I got into RC planes and now FPV quads.

It's been really fun to revisit these earlier interests as an adult. For example I have the money now to buy the nice toys I wasn't able to when I was younger.

I also have two kids and am revisiting and picking up new interests as they grow up.

<comment><USER3> +1 for being able to buy the nicer toys. I've just noticed this myself recently. It's nice not to have a budget of about $30 lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes hugely similar to me. When I think of the things that I was passionate about even 3 years ago, I'm sure a different person now.

I'm in my late 30s now, but I'd say don't worry, there is always something new to be interested or excited by!

<comment><USER4> After thinking about this some more I'd extend this further - the people I love the most are those that have also grown with me.

I've been with my wife since 1999, and I'm sure if either of us were the same as we were then we wouldn't be as excited to still be together.

Similarly the friends that I've lost touch with are those that _have_ stayed the same, and over time it's me that has no longer found this exciting or interesting in a person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Completely normal. You'll never run out of things to be interested in so long as you are curious. Plus, you are just on the beginning end of the brain stablizing itself and stuff, so add on a few years after that to get to rediscover yourself, and get your life closer to whatever it is you really want... and you wind up with some things you are interested in, some things you did, and some you pick up again. (I'm in my late 30's). And hopefully you've had some nice life experiences along the way and can look forward to having some more.

Personally, I think it is all good that we evolve and change. It keeps us from being stagnant.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are in fact-- seasons of a Man's Life, this theme is as old as time (see 1 Corinthians 13:11).

Relative to worrying about no new areas to become interested in-- I was reminded of the Sharon Gannon quote "We create the world we live in. If we want to change what we don't like in the world, we must start by changing what we don't like about ourselves."

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess it is.

I recently bought a new desktop with the intention of gaming again but for some reason I can't stand playing for more than twenty minutes.

According to Steam I have played two hours in three weeks which makes my new PC a poor investment.

I really want to enjoy gaming as I used to do but I simply can't, and I don't know whether I'm too busy or I've simply lost interest.</comment>


An airport-inspired puzzle from Terence Tao - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/an-airport-inspired-puzzle/

<comment><USER2> 1\. its better to rest on the walkway - not seeing any disagreement about this one.

2\. its better to run off the walkway. Why? Walking normally is more expensive (in terms of time required to cover N distance) than walking on the walkway. The question can be rephrased as, all things considered, "would you rather spend less time on the walkway or the ground?" You would rather spend less time on the ground, because it takes you more time to cross it.

Naive proof: your normal speed is 1m/s, run speed is 2m/s (can be done for 1s), walkway moves at 1m/s. Track is: 2m of ground, 6m of walkway.

Running on walkway: 2s to cover ground, 1s to cover first 3 meters of walkway running, 1.5s to cover last three meters = 4.5s. Running on ground: 1s to cover ground, 3s to cover walkway = 4s.

Look at it this way: the normal (no-run) time is 5s. Running on the ground chops off an entire second; running off the walkway chops off only half a second.

<comment><USER3> For #2, running off the walkway gives a greater boost to speed percentage- wise; since travel time is inversely proportional to speed, it is thus reduced greater.

(For positive u and v`>v>1, v`/v<(v`+u)/(v+u))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen has the best explanation.

</comment><comment><USER5> As far as the non-relativistic version of the question, I'm pretty sure it makes no different if you pause while on or off. Both for question #1 and #2 - it makes not difference.

Relativistically I'm not sure, but I think it's best to pause while on the walkway, since while running on the walkway most of your energy goes to increasing your mass rather than your speed.

<comment><USER6> > As far as the non-relativistic version of the question, I'm pretty sure it > makes no different if you pause while on or off.

Nope.

<comment><USER5> Is this going to become like that thing about airplanes on treadmills that move backward at the same speed as the plane, where everyone is 100% sure they have it right?

I see the reasoning that if you walk on the treadmill you enjoy it's speed for less time - but that's not what you care about. You care about how long it takes you to get from the start of the treadmill to the end, and if you walk you get to the end faster.

So if you can walk 100 meters in 1 minute, and that's what you do on the treadmill, you will have covered an extra 100 meters in 1 minute.

Or you could cover that 100 meters on the ground, and it will also take you 1 minute.

The speed of the conveyor makes no difference - that is totally fixed, the only difference is do you cover that 100 meters on the conveyor or off of it.

I typed and rejected many examples to give you, but none were intuitive. So if it's this hard to explain then I'm 100% sure this is going to become like that airplane on a conveyor belt.

People are going to argue about this forever.

What is it about conveyor belts that makes it hard for people?

<comment><USER5> OK, the post below made it easier to me to explain: You can NOT add miles per hour to miles per hour. So you can not add the speed to walking to the speed of the belt.

You need to do hours per mile + hours per mile.

So the conveyor takes a certain number of hours for each mile, and you walking takes a certain number of hours for each mile.

The length of the conveyor is fixed. So the number of hours the conveyor supplies is fixed - nothing you can do will change that. You can add in your hours per mile on it or off of it, it doesn't matter - it's exactly the same in total.

<comment><USER7> Well like the airplane on the conveyor belt thing, there really is a right answer to this and you don't have it. This is a similar explanation to one of the comments on the blog: imagine one section of ground followed by one section of conveyor belt. Two people going exactly the same speed walk along the ground section and one stops just before the conveyor belt and one stops on the conveyor belt. They both stop for the same time. When they resume walking the one who stopped on the conveyor belt is ahead. No matter how many section of belt and ground follow this, the one behind will never catch up.

<comment><USER5> No, that's not correct.

You forgot that they both have to get off the conveyor belt at some point.

The guy who got on first will then walk slowly, and the guy who got on second meanwhile will be both walking and being pulled forward by the conveyor belt, while the first guy is walking slowly. This will catch him up to the first guy.

And if you tell me that the first guy is already walking so of course he's ahead, then you forgot that, for both of them to stop at the same time, and yet one be on the belt and one on the ground, the first guy must have had a head start.

Better have two belts, one placed one meter ahead of the other. So, one guy will be walking for that meter, while the other will be riding the belt and walking, and both will reach the end at exactly the same time.

<comment><USER7> It's confusing alright. When the guy in the lead gets off the conveyor belt the distance between them will close. But the second guy won't catch up. The distance between them will vary according to speed but the time between them will stay the same.

<comment><USER5> I concede. You are right, it's better to pause on the belt. I thought about it all night, using edge cases, like a really slow walker, fast belt, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the first case, you go faster when you pause on the treadmill, and the time required does not change if you run on or off the treadmill.

Those seem like the intuitive solutions to me.</comment>


URI Prefix Middleware for Clojure Ring - <AUTHOR> http://theatticlight.net/posts/A-url-prefix-for-Ring/

<comment><USER2> I watched a talk posted here a while back that also explains how Ring middleware works pretty well, and I'd recommend some of the other parts of the talk to Clojure web developers as well:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971919></comment>


How the '60s Counterculture Is Still Driving the Tech Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://techonomy.com/2013/11/60s-counterculture-still-driving-todays-tech-revolution/ <comment><USER2> > _"Wikipedia is written by a whole bunch of people who don't know what > they're talking about. But it turns out that collectively, a bunch of people > who don't know what they're talking about know more than one person who > spent their lifetime researching it."_

This immediately brought to mind this article: [http://jsomers.net/blog/it- turns-out](http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out). I mean it vividly popped into my brain because of the utter nonsense of this claim.

It doesn't _turn out_ that an army of ignorants knows more than an expert. What _turns out_ is that free trumps paid, and (perhaps surprisingly) can muster an enormous army of manpower, which in turn leads to a comprehensiveness that is unattainable by a traditional monetary business model. I mean you don't need to look very far to find factual inaccuracies and indeed slander on Wikipedia that can not be fixed because the rules are not oriented towards truth. So to draw the vacuous conclusion that Wikipedia won because its articles were _better_ than Britannica belies a sort of willful ignorance about how the world works.

That's not say doing an end run around overly comfortable gatekeepers isn't a good thing in general, but man what a braindead quote.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of evidence that Wikipedia's articles are actually better than Britannica: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Compar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Comparative_studies)

<comment><USER4> Britannica articles aren't written by "one person who spent their lifetime researching" that topic.

<comment><USER5> Actually, they often are. But Wikipedia articles are written by dozens or even hundreds of people who spent a significant part of their lives researching the topic. Individually none of those people can match that Britannica expert's experience, but collectively they dwarf him.

<comment><USER6> Britannica's expert model also risks some pretty biased and incomplete articles, depending on the expert chosen. There's a _relationship_ between being prominent in a field and being willing and able to write a comprehensive, neutral overview of the field, but it's not quite the same thing, and some top researchers are very bad at the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The intersection of tech culture (and notably Silicon Valley) and 60s counterculture is a fascinating topic.

The best book on the subject is, in my opinion, "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff [0]. It's a fantastic book, although it requires the reader to already have some knowledge of the people and historical events, as it is not meant to be a computer history primer.

But yeah, it's a great book, and a lot of stuff in there might surprise some readers. For instance, I learned that there was LSD research happening a few blocks away from where I used to live in Menlo Park :)

Timothy Leary also has an interesting essay in Laurel's "Art of Human Computer Interface Design" anthology[1] about what he believes are the intersections of computing as a human tool and psychedelics.

When you start to look into it, you'll realize that the tech industry and California's friendly attitude towards psychedelics have always somewhat gone hand in hand- and people who are not familiar with California's atypical culture might be surprised to know that some of the engineers and designers behind their favorite products share a few things in common with the ol' Timothy.

Queue the necessary: "There are two major products that come from Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture- Pers...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture- Personal/dp/0143036769)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Human-Computer-Interface- Desig...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Human-Computer-Interface- Design/dp/0201517973)

<comment><USER8> Were any of the creators/contributors to BSD UNIX acid-trippers? Honest question

<comment><USER9> Given the number of contributors[1], it's hard for me to imagine the answer being "no".

[1] [http://www.netbsd.org/people/CSRG- contrib.html](http://www.netbsd.org/people/CSRG-contrib.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      "...'Is the bottom getting out of poverty?' Going from
      next-to-nothing to twice that is so much huger than going
      from being a one-billionaire to a two-billionaire," Brand
      said. And, thanks to the sharing and social revolution,
      "that's going on like mad now."

I can't subscribe that this notion is happening. Really, I think the opposite is happening. With the evaporation of the middle class in the USA and personal anecdotal experiences I think the above statement is false. If there is any evidence or arguments to support the claim that the social revolution is decreasing poverty I'd really be interested in hearing them.

To that, I'd also like the to see sources and arguments that the crowds are truly wiser than an expert.

<comment><USER11> > the crowds are truly wiser than an expert.

it depends on whose opinion one asks - crowd's or an expert's :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think the editor who picked the title actually read the article.

"Indeed, he noted, his maxim applies as well to mankind's Biblical first act of insubordination in the Garden of Eden as it does to the 1960s counterculture that was the progenitor of the personal computer."

A better title would take into effect something like one dude says all innovation requires disrespect (LOL) and if thats the case are social media startups sufficiently insubordinate to be disrespectful enough to be our only source of modern innovation. Or something like that. Its a long complicated argument (and mostly wrong) so its going to be difficult to create a short linkbait headline.

For something that covers so many distinct topics, its pretty well written.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have yet to see a Wikipedia article that's better written than a traditional encyclopedia entry. You can praise Wikipedia for the breadth of its knowledge, certainly, but the depth?

<comment><USER14> That very much depends on the subject, for instance popular culture is covered very well on Wikipedia with little delay.</comment></comment>


Self-healing polymer uses sunlight to repair itself - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/a-polymer-that-can-fix-its-own-scratches.ars

<comment><USER2> Interesting. What's weird is that polymers typically degrade under UV light. Think way back to when you used those play-school shovels and left them out in the sand for a couple days. I guarantee that you saw some cracks.

One of my favorite professors here is doing research on self-healing metals. It's pretty sweet. They're using magnesium alloys for structural self-healing applications because magnesium exhibits a martensitic transformation (i.e it changes shape when you heat it). Oddly enough, martensitic metals are used in bra-supports so that they return to their original shape when washed, yet still give good support.

I love materials science.</comment>


Inside 21's Plans to Bring Bitcoin to the Masses - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is presumably the source of the recent spate of "mining from toasters" articles started by FT's Alphaville [1]).

The Vimeo clip shows a live demo from Oct 2014 of a bandwidth auctioning protocol, (the article links to the actual transactions eg [2])

[1] [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the- compa...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that- wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/)

[2] [https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GB...](https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GBuz9x6z)</comment>