Why some nations become wealthy while others remain stuck in poverty - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-some-nations-become-wealthy-and-powerful-while-others-remain-stuck-in-poverty

<comment><USER2> Amazing, not one word about colonialism.

"by the late 1700s, England had embarked on the largest sustained period of economic growth since the Neolithic age"

Right, and many countries in the world still try to resurrect themselves from that "economic growth" (hint: it was based on pirating their national and human resources). The other "thriving" European countries followed suit (e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa>).

After less than six decades since the abolition of explicit colonialism, it's still quite early to say why some countries recovered quickly while others didn't.

While I'm a great believer in democracy, I think we should be aware that a lot of these approaches are nothing but self serving democratic propaganda (propaganda, not science).

<comment><USER3> This article doesn't mention it, but the book itself does discuss colonialism quite a bit. To simplify, it argues that "bad" institutions are those that are extractive, in that they primarily benefit a small elite, and that such institutions tend to perpetuate themselves. They do blame colonialism for the existence of such institutions in much of Africa, arguing that the institutions there were originally set up as extractive by the European powers (since the goal was to extract wealth for the colonial power), and after independence they tended to perpetuate themselves, but extracting wealth for a new African elite instead.

The authors were also involved in an earlier, quite influential, paper that showed a statistical correlation between European _settlement_ and post- colonial institution quality (<http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930>). Their causal hypothesis (which is harder to prove) is that colonized countries with extensive European settlement were forced to set up institutions that were less extractive (since they politically had to serve at least these settlers, who demanded things like basic infrastructure) than those that had only a small group of administrators living there and no settlement, which were run completely on a basis of extracting wealth for the remote power.

<comment><USER2> Thank you. After posting my comment it occurred to me that I was only criticizing the article ,not the book, which I haven't read. So thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am a technological optimist and I do believe a lot of things that Kurzweil and his friends say, but this is one area where I think that whole group and most of the mainstream is living in a fairytale land.

I actually think most of the crazier sounding stuff in videos you see on the internet is more or less correct (not 100% but a lot of it). I think reality is a lot crazier than fiction.

So, although I used to be completely left-leaning and liberal, now I buy most of it to a certain degree, not just the crazy left stuff -- from the singularity stuff, the zeitgeist stuff, but also a lot of that stuff Alex Jones says (I shouldn't admit that, and I am not sure about a lot of it, for instance I don't think that there are too many vaccines involved in population control, but I can't eliminate the possibility).

What I have learned from the "batshit insane conspiracy theorists", well, a lot of it might be crazy. But I do know that they are right about some things -- governments aren't good to the people, and the United States is no exception, and the crap they tell us about world events on TV is just lies.

Empires didn't just happen for the whole of recorded history and then just suddenly stop around the time that moving pictures came out. I really believe that the American dominance should truly be considered an extension of the British Empire and in many ways has been and continues to be even more brutal and oppressive.

The world bank and the like do exercise economic warfare. The second and third world are exploited and repressed.

You don't have to be crazy to consider things from this point of view. All you have to do is stop subjecting yourself to STOPTHINK. In other words, just realize that "oh, that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory" is not a reason to put your fingers in your ears.

<http://www.globalresearch.ca/>

<comment><USER5> I won't argue the USA is totally benign and acts out of anything other that crude self interest (in the vast majority of cases) - but I think the evidence is fairly compelling that the US 'empire' IS more benign and rules with a lighter hand than most historical empires.

The US for example has killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan (bad). But you don't have to look back very far at all in time to see the Russians and even the British taking a much more brutal approach.

I guess generally I agree with you that the US acts in ways that are contrary to its stated principles, but I do have some optimism that each world empire does seem to get progressively "kinder".

<comment><USER6> If you call that "not looking very far back in time" (and I agree with that), no approach was ever as brutal as nuking entire cities. But that's besides the point.

In my opinion, the US is historically one of the most destructive "empires", in that it unlike a true empire, it takes very little responsibility for the nations it interferes in. It just takes what it needs and moves on. It doesn't even bother to properly conquer a place, just a long as resistance is sufficiently broken for the US to do it's business. It's more like a swarm of heavily armed locusts than an empire.

With true colonial style empire building comes responsibility. Many former colonial nations are still dealing with that responsibility. Post WW2 US just aggressively raids and meddles, but takes very little responsibility for the people and societies outside its own borders. To call it an empire is an insult to empires.

<comment><USER7> > If you call that "not looking very far back in time" (and I agree with > that), no approach was ever as brutal as nuking entire cities. But that's > besides the point.

This is a ridiculous point. You do realize that the allies (not just the US) were fighting the 'Empire of Japan' that was running rampant throughout China and SE Asia, raping and pillaging along the way?

To use no other term, Japan was lucky to be nuked because they weren't going to stop. They were going to fight to the last, and let me tell you (as the husband of someone who's grandfather fought on Leyte and Okinawa), the Japanese were brutal and vicious. Millions of Japanese civilians would've been killed trying to land and take the Japanese mainland. The Japanese were so adamant about fighting that it took a second bomb to change their minds.

If you said the fire bombing of Tokyo or Dresden, then I wouldn't have responded. Those were retaliatory in nature - a punishment that affected civilians more than soldiers (specifically Dresden).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know Daron Acemoglu as a prolific academic, and he has some good ideas but I don't buy the general idea he has established here. As pointed out by others I find it to be serving democratic propaganda rather than any rational train of thought. Otherwise he couldn't have overlooked such a big flaw in his reasoning, one of cause and effect.

The only possible example - if even that - he could use in his argument could be the divergence of North and South America. There are no other regions in the world which weren't already poor because of a myriad of other reasons, where he can say "Oh look, they were doing good, but then turned to repression and declined."

Back to Americas, he argues it can't have geographic reasons because at the time of colonialism South was actually more advanced than North. And it should be emphasized here the sole reason South was more advanced was geography. The flaw is, what happens thereafter is, indeed not anymore a function of the geography of Americas, but also not of the democratic institutions in place, but of the economics and politics of the colonial empires involved. Unlike North America, South America was exploited and then left without a concentration of central political authority, leading to huge regional gaps of power which then lead to those kind of extractive institutions with some kind of elite on the top. That is the effect, the result, not the cause. To grossly simplify, the region becomes poor or the power controlling the region declines, which leads to extractive institutions, which then keeps the region from developing but that is a wholly different assertion than what Acemoglu defends for this specific case.

The reasons for the outcome in Americas could be found by looking at the power struggle between the colonial empires, and the decline of the Spanish Empire. North America, where mainly England and France had influence was of course bound to overtake South America. I see no reason at all to buy this romantic "because the people were given freedom!" idea.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is overthinking and the answer is pretty simple many times. I live in Argentina, a perfect and beautiful country from the weather, geography, agricultural, business potential, touristic perspectives. But the corruption IS the system and there are not incentives to work harder. So, it is the society (including politicians) in this case.

<comment><USER10> That explanation just begs the question. We have to ask: why is the system corrupt?

<comment><USER9> It is really difficult to find the root cause. An explanation from historians is required for that.

I can say that historically people in Argentina does not have a strong incentive to collaborate economically because in the past you could live very well from the land within less than 2500 m2 that was easy to obtain. In some places you are enforced to collaborate.

Also the system was always corrupt in some areas. For example the port of Buenos Aires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a very simple premise, but I've always felt it to be true. Give people the sense of being in control, or at least have the potential to be in control (Democracy, property rights, et.c.), and they will work hard for a better future. This tends to give a lot of stable growth.

<comment><USER12> In Soviet Union people had no property rights but there were millions enthusiastically working for the future. Now there are property rights and everybody fights for them. Also, investment bankers economics is killing the West too.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I think you should try this argument on a Ukranian sometime.[1]

In this and other comments, you seem to be attributing all the achievements of the Soviet Union to their ideology. That's certainly a factor, but it's about as dumb as Americans claiming their nation is blessed by God with a special destiny. The Russians had just kicked out a severely anachronistic monarchy, so achieving progress was almost inevitable. And the Soviet Union had an empire of its own after World War II as well, and their centralized system was very good at capturing resources for a Moscow-centric elite.

But I agree it's not black and white, either. Just as the USA sometimes lives up to its own ideals in an inspiring way, you could find examples of that in the history of the Soviet Union too.

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

<comment><USER12> Holodomor was part of the Ukranian political agenda during Yushchenko ruling and is a made up 'fact'.

During same Holodomor times people dies through out Russia as well, and the event was caused by coincided mismanagement and bad seasonal conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The high standard of living of Europe and the US is a very recent achievement. If you look at the last 3000 years, India and China had the technological edge for most of that period. Looking at the future, China will probably get back to the first position. Latin America seems to be finding its own model and will soon reach a pretty decent standard of living. So I think it was too narrow a period of time that was analysed to reach such grand conclusions.

<comment><USER15> For most of human history (and before that), the norm is not growth, but stagnation. Centralized empires tend to strangle economic development. The ascendancy of Europe was not a fluke, but rather a condition where a free market philosophy could take hold in a decentralized political system. Had Europe been ruled by a monolithic empire, it would have been very easy to snuff out the industrial revolution before it had a chance to be entrenched.

<comment><USER16> Yes and no. Too much centralization can be bad, but then again it took until around 1600 or so for Europe to finally catch up with China in terms of general wealth and technology. So clearly the fact that China was a centralized empire at peace with itself had something to do with it having developed such a large lead. I suspect that the actual situation is far more complex than either "centralization is good" or "centralization is bad", and that different ways of being centralized or decentralized are better or worse, and that different stages of technological development might have different ideal conditions.

<comment><USER15> The point about decentralization is to ensure development can continue unhindered by political factors. With an empire it's very easy for the ruling aristocracy (or autocrat) to kill development. Yes, you can have enlightened rulers, but then the system hinges precariously on just a few people.

For that matter, it's much more devastating when an uncontested empire falls, rather than when one of many powers may fail.

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's one of the _mechanisms_ by which centralized empires can inhibit development. But on the other hand the lack of them can mean too many wars which destroy advances people are trying to build, and a lack of trade that prevents regional specialization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The other of the Book was in the Econtalk podcast (talking about the book). I highly recomend it.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/03/acemoglu_on_why.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/03/acemoglu_on_why.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Another major factor is geography. America could not have become the powerhouse she is today if she didn't control the entire Mississippi river and bordering lands.

The only other country that comes close in this regard is China.

</comment><comment><USER19> Although I suspect what he is saying is a factor, to say it is THE reason is a major oversimplification. You have to examine a whole host of things.

For instance, geography/natural resource endowments have to be taken into account. Just look at Saudi Arabia. It is a country where a few do really well but compared to other developing countries it is doing pretty well as a whole, all because it has large oil deposits.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't recommend Tim Harford's 'The Undercover Economist' enough. There's a great chapter on Cameroon and exactly why it's the way it is.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wealthy? Doesn't the US have massive debt?

<comment><USER22> The government has significant debt. It owes quite a chunk of that money to the people of the U.S. (no really) and there is plenty of wealth split up among the citizens (I suppose much of the private debt is also owed to other U.S. entities).

Even setting those factors aside, the debt represents ~1 year of economic output for the U.S., the infrastructure and goods sitting around in the country represent much more than that.

<comment><USER12> Even if you are right 'technically' how about being right 'psychophysically' - what are these willing to occupy the wall streets do not understand?</comment></comment></comment>


Deal with RDF triples in jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/rdfquery/wiki/RdfPlugin <comment><USER2> For those of us who don't know what RDF means:

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

<comment><USER3> I think people know what RDF _is_...I just don't know that it gets used much in the web space, much less the front-end side.

Is RDF used even as much as SOAP was/is?

<comment><USER4> I've only run into it for library-type data, where Dublin Core in RDF/XML is common.

<comment><USER3> I've only ever seen even _examples_ using Dublin Core. I'd be really curious to see anything else.

<comment><USER5> Linked Data is the big initiative: <http://linkeddata.org/>

With Sparql, you've got an excellent query language.

Here's a cool app someone made last week: [http://lamboratory.com/blog/2010/08/25/a-linked-data- movie-q...](http://lamboratory.com/blog/2010/08/25/a-linked-data-movie-quiz- the-answers-are-out-there-and-so-are-the-questions/)

It generates a movie quiz based off the linked data cloud.

Also, there is a huge amount of work in the life sciences that uses RDF.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good reading material for "mobile" stuff? - <AUTHOR>

I read a lot on the internet about tech business and startups, but I feel like I don't know enough about the mobile space. iPhone, Android, Blackberry, future speculation, any of that - what are some good resources I should be reading? <comment><USER2> I would suggest any mobile tech related news site/blog/forum out there. Not much good picking up books on something that gets updated every 3 months or so. Mobile engadget, gizmodo, etc. come to mind. Howard Forums is also huge for mobile/cell phone chatter.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a startup exactly? - <AUTHOR>

My definition of a startup is a company that exist in a new and fairly volatile vertical. Startups are primarily defined by an innovative product, service or business model with an emphasis on scalability. What is everyone else's definition? <comment><USER2> It looks like you asked the same question twice... but here is what I said in your other posting:

I think a "startup" is an _innovative_ company that has existed for a short period of time. If it's software, it's probably still in beta. A startup is probably in early research and development stages. A startup is probably looking for some outside funding and the founders have some exit strategy in mind (Acquisition or IPO).

A pillow store is none of the above things so it's most probably not considered a startup. A game development shop can be a startup if it meets some or all of these things. Web development firms can be startups when they make web applications for the public or businesses to use (like 37signals).

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> they are subtly different but nonetheless ive consolidated both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My definition is merely a company that is 'starting up'. It doesn't matter if it has created its own market via innovation or entered a mature market, I consider all new companies startups.

All companies exist in volatile markets regardless of whether its a mature (many competitors) or new market (must generate demand for product). They all need to differentiate themselves from their competitors in some way in order to be successful, so all companies will have to innovate some aspect of their business.</comment>


Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it's hard to delete - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase-history-how-to-delete-it.html <comment><USER2> Where this gets weird is when the purchases are not yours.

I own a email@example.com address and it turns out there are a lot of people who share that name.

So when I started receiving emails for other people I just hit spam, until the day that wasn't enough. When I noticed that Google Assistant was telling me about flights and hotel bookings for other people who share my name whose email I'd long deleted.

And is it possible to delete those things? To rid yourself of the various places the intelligent data emerges? Seemingly no. I found no way to stop being told about these actions relating to other people... constantly being shown PII relating to those other people (flight booking numbers, delivery addresses for things they'd ordered).

I deleted and marked those emails as spam as much to ensure I wasn't receiving other people's PII... yet Google was "intelligently" preserving this and showing it back to me at every opportunity.

Very frustrating, and it makes me wonder if I ever enter an email incorrectly where my personal data will end up.

Edit: I couldn't even see the flights I've been prompted about recently on [https://myaccount.google.com/purchases](https://myaccount.google.com/purchases) so I guess there are additional systems that have similar functionality.

<comment><USER3> Ive gotten delivery tracking emails to my gmail from Amazon for crap I didn't order sent to an address ive never lived at. Apparently something like this was happening.

What scares the crap out of me is in the last week I've been getting bombarded with Zyrtek (an allergy med) ads. Now, I'd never seen an allergist or been diagnosed with an allergy until 9 days ago. The only person I communicated this to electronically was my father, and over SMS. I've not been researching allergies online, my doc gave me plenty of dead tree material.

So, how do Google and other advertisers know I have an allergy? Are they harvesting SMS as well? Are carriers selling SMS data for targeted advertising? If my health care provider is selling that info, thatd be a HUGE HIPPA violation. (Yes, I'm in the US).

Edit: grammar and clarity of thought.

<comment><USER4> Android's default SMS app sends your messages to Google to activate the "Quick-reply suggestions" and "Messages for Web" features.

<comment><USER5> Just checked my pixel's settings cos I freaked out, explicitly says generated on device.

<comment><USER6> Does it explicitly say texts not sent to Google?

<comment><USER5> To be fair it does not, but I'd say the implication that it doesn't is strong, In my device menu at least.

The help section it links to omits a statement used in another section, namely the " Copy a code in a message" section note: [https://support.google.com/messages/answer/6080324?p=smart_r...](https://support.google.com/messages/answer/6080324?p=smart_reply&visit_id=636942350834586887-3379646105&rd=1#smart_reply)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone thinking in leaving gmail, I recommend to get your own domain. For example: firstnamelastname.com This gives the flexibility of email provider.

I did that 2 years ago and decided to go with Fastmail. And then I slowly updated my accounts/contacts to my new email: email@example.com

Nowdays I never get new emails on my gmail account and last weekend I decided to finally remove gmail from my phone (but configured to automatically forward just in case).

<comment><USER8> When you have your own domain, I suggest enabling a catch-all email. You can then make up a new email for every account ("email@example.com"), enabling you to track where spam comes from, disabling certain emails, etc.

migadu.com even offers reg-ex based catch-alls, pretty nifty.

[https://www.migadu.com/en/benefits.html#anchor_catchalls](https://www.migadu.com/en/benefits.html#anchor_catchalls)

<comment><USER9> I want to elaborate a little further because I thought this might be unclear if you don't really know what a catch-all adress is:

A catch-all adress is an adress where all emails of your domain that you didn't explicictly make a email adress for will land.

So if you own foobar.eu and you made firstname.lastname@example.com your catch-all adress, you could just make up arbitray email adresses on the spot (e.g. shady-online- firstname.lastname@example.com) and all mails that are sent to that adress will land in your catch-all adress.

There are multiple cool things about this: \- you can just block that adress if it annoys you \- if you ever get spam and it is adressed to shady-online- firstname.lastname@example.com you know exactly who fucked with your data \- you don't have to disclose your primary email adress to stranges, you can just make something up.

<comment><USER10> thanks for adding that clarity. much helpful !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Relevant HN discussion about this behavior 7 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18090590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18090590)

(I don't think this article is a dupe; current events have recontextualized the debate)

</comment><comment><USER12> I find this curious because I have been repeatedly told by Google people on HN that Google stopped reading GMail years ago.

<comment><USER13> Yeah... it was maybe one and a half years ago I think?

But they stopped reading it for showing contextual ads.

They're still reading it to show you useful information across Google properties, like in Google Maps the location of the theater you bought tickets to see a play to tonight. Removing that would be removing a useful features that people liked (unlike the ads).

<comment><USER14> there's always a catch with these guys.

<comment><USER15> They also read emails to catch spam and phishing attempts.

<comment><USER16> They also read emails to index them for search.

<comment><USER17> Even though email search can't find anything. Ridiculous coming from Google.

<comment><USER18> Really? I don't have a problem usually with gmail

<comment><USER12> I support the parent's comment.

I've had e-mail messages open in the GMail web interface that when I search for the words I can actually see on my screen come up with nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These stories have turned into click baits.

The data in question here is nothing compared to what your credit card company, bank, Amazon or TurboTax has.

Unlike many folks here I find value in this and can't see it harming my privacy. In fact I think Gmail is still dumb compared to what Google or maybe a startup could potentially provide.

I'd love to be able to ask a query such as "show me the receipt for that red flower pot I bought last year" or "show me all my dentist appointments this year".

<comment><USER20> The difference is that I know that the credit card company or Amazon is collecting my information because I'm directly involving them in the transaction.

I thought I had all my Google privacy settings at "paranoid", but I did not know this was even occurring.

<comment><USER21> Exactly how are you not involving Gmail when you set your transaction receipt email address to be your @gmail.com?

While I do understand the point that /purchases looks creepy, your comparison is dishonest.

<comment><USER20> I'm not involving gmail in the transaction because I didn't ask them to _read_ the mail.

If gmail (and email in general) is going to make use of the "mail" analogy, that comes with the expectation that they do not open your mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just pay for Fastmail, I finally did it and its so nice. Easily worth the money.

<comment><USER23> I want a service that can handle all my domain's traffic on a per domain per month basis instead of per user. PurelyMail is the only one like this that I've found but it's still in beta and the owner has been having some problems getting past Microsoft's spam filters.

Is there any service that will host my email with as many users as I want for a flat (or bandwidth/storage-based) fee?

<comment><USER24> Look at [https://mxroute.com/](https://mxroute.com/)

They've come in handy for a couple of my colleagues.

<comment><USER25> I took a look at it and liked it (though it doesn't seem to expand much on privacy), but the service being situated and hosted in the U.S. is something I do not prefer at this point. I wish there were services like this outside the five eyes, nine eyes and fourteen eyes countries (I know Migadu the company is in Switzerland but has its servers in France, but it doesn't seem to have adequate staff or the intention to respond to people).

Additionally, mxroute does not seem to provide any trials. Its policies say that payment issues from the customer have to be resolved within 24 hours, but that refunds to the customer may take 72 hours. That seems unfriendly to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone explain what the point of deleting a purchase is? The email is still there, the data is still there... how is this affecting what Google does with your data?

<comment><USER27> If there is no point then why does Google allow you to do it?

<comment><USER26> Reduce clutter? Maybe you want to only remove some but not others?

Let me turn the tables on you -- why _doesn 't_ Google have a button to delete all of them at once?

<comment><USER28> A guess: They build a model of you as a customer. If you delete some information step by step then you possibly start with what bothers you most. So you do the data cleaning for them and train their algorithms. Not to mention that deletion is most likely just "hide this".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You can easily delete purchases here:

[https://myaccount.google.com/payments-and- subscriptions](https://myaccount.google.com/payments-and-subscriptions)

However, I have a feeling that removing your Google history doesn't actually remove it, just prevents you from seeing it.

<comment><USER30> Just for the fun of it, I figured I'd try to log in and see if Google has any info on stuff I've purchased.

I'm over VPN so they insist this device isn't recognized (even though I've signed in from this exact machine, over this exact VPN connection, last week). Google helpfully offers to send me a security code over the phone.

Even better, though, it has a "Can't use your phone?" option. You know what happens if you click that option?

It takes you to a screen that says "You're trying to sign in on a device Google doesn't recognize. For your security, use your phone to show it's you signing in and not a hacker." and the only option on that screen is "Go back & use phone."

I think there's a joke about how to understand recursion here but I can't quite put my finger on it yet.

<comment><USER29> I'd recommend removing your phone from here, and setting up 2-Step verification instead:

[https://myaccount.google.com/security](https://myaccount.google.com/security)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> integrate-this Google has gotten to the point where it creeps me out. I've switched away from Chrome. I don't use their search engine unless I can't find the results on Bing or DuckDuckGo.

I don't know if it's going to get to the point where it hurts their business (I'm just one person), but I'm to the point that targeted advertising is a really good way to make me not want to buy a product.

<comment><USER31> I second this. Try DuckDuckGo + FastMail and (Safari + Wipr extension for an advertisement free WWW)

I too switched away after being a lifetime Google Advocate: Android, Chromebook, GCP, Linux + Chrome and many, many of their products. Honestly, I don't care about privacy that much I'm just sick and tired of how good Google became at distracting me! Never mind the ads and how I had to use incognito search for anything because if I searched something (e.g. buying a monitor) google keeps suggesting similar stuff to get my attention or suggesting articles on the homepage of Chrome (mostly android).

What was once a simple beautiful tool to find answers, fast. became part of every aspect of my life, trying to get more and more of my attention/time.

Time is gold. Google lost respect for my time and I lost respect for Google.

<comment><USER32> Agreed, and a quick shout to migadu.com for email. I'm a long time happy Fastmail customer but Migadu's offering is interesting and different enough to have a look at.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I've been hiding my time with Gmail. Planning my exit.

Fastmail is a leading contender, but thanks for posting Migadu. It does sound interesting.

They offer a lot for a low price, but I wonder how?

I'm intrigued!

<comment><USER25> > They offer a lot for a low price, but I wonder how?

They don't respond to queries or requests. I presume that's how. To avoid repeating my comments too many times, let me suggest looking at my other comments on this post.

<comment><USER32> Couldn't disagree more. I've mailed them twice and had a personal response within a few hours.

<comment><USER25> That's good to hear. But I haven't had the luck to hear back from them. So my guess is still that it's a tiny team with many other priorities than this platform, and so misses responding or acting many a times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I would love to leave gmail but two things hold me back:

1\. Archive export. This is the main thing, I've got a 15 year record of emails and now and then being able to search back to something that happened 5-10 years ago is a life-saver. Is there even a way to export your gmail archive?

2\. What to replace it with? I've heard FastMail is a good alternative, and some people really like ProtonMail, but I've had a hard time evaluating services because it's not a trivial thing to set up and use an alternative email account, and I'm not sure what other than real daily use would be a valid test run.

<comment><USER34> 1\. For export, takeout.google.com lets you export your emails in mbox format. [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190)

Third-party email services may also have flows for importing email from GMail, for example Microsoft Office 365:

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/import-gmail-to- out...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/import-gmail-to- outlook-20fdb8f2-fed8-4b14-baf0-bf04b9c44bf7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This information is also scraped and sold by unscrupulous companies that you give access to your email.

If you've ever let a service scrape your inbox for travel itineraries they probably read all your email ever and sold that information. Surprise!

</comment><comment><USER36> I use all my mail through G Suite on a domain I own through a third party registrar.

I logged into the link provided in the article and got a message "You don't have any purchases".

Maybe this feature isn't available to me since I'm a G Suite user rather than a gmail user? I actually wouldn't mind having this feature available, although I do keep google's location history disabled.

<comment><USER37> I think this is because Google just doesn't do a lot of the data scraping in G Suite accounts that it does in gmail accounts. So I think it just doesn't have any stored "purchases" to show, rather the fact that the purchase interface doesn't work.

I say this based on information I've read in the past about how G Suite / Google Apps accounts are treated. I hope this is the case, but am certainly not sure about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sometimes Google seems totally unaware of _why_ people might find this stuff discomforting.

<comment><USER39> They are absolutely aware. They banned my dev play account because few competitors reported as similar app and there is no human to view my case.

They just stopped giving a shit. Funny, how all the senators talk about breaking up Facebook when Google is 100x bigger and 100x monopolistic.

Break up Google. And unban my account in the process ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's always amusing how people are _shocked_ when stuff like are discovered, although Gmail is designed to serve those kind of things. This is a free service, and as a free service they have to make money with something. I don't see any problem with that. If you don't want this, don't use Gmail, there are lots of available alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER41> Just setup your own mail server using mailcow for example. Pretty easy and awesome for privacy. I did it too: [https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/mail- server/](https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/mail-server/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Same thing for your flights/hotel reservations btw via myaccount.google.com/reservations

</comment><comment><USER14> They own up to this practice--albeit not the top link, at least for me.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+purchase+history](https://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+purchase+history)

<comment><USER43> It's not exactly hidden: [https://www.google.com/search?q=my+purchases](https://www.google.com/search?q=my+purchases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wish it was just the things I buy. All my Ebay sales and purchases get confirmation to my Google email, all bank reports come via email, and my doctor too uses a service to send my prescriptions to my gmail address. Recently someone at that service changed the way they operate so now I receive a link where I have to put my equivalent of SSN to download the prescriptions, so data theft while absolutely possible, in this case has to be deliberate. Still, the amount of personal information available for mining to Google and others is plain scary: I've seen with these eyes lawyers sending photos of sensitive documentation via Facebook or Whatsapp; that's even beyond stupid.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't understand why people don't have a problem trusting Google with all their information (as is the case if you use Gmail).

Even if you ignore the privacy implications and the fact that it's a company whose business is to target ads, there is still incompetence. Case in point: my YouTube history regularly gets mixed with somebody else's. I get videos watched by a child that likes Masha and the Bear and Peppa the Pig. Reported to YouTube a number of times, they seemingly ignored it and don't care.

I turned off my history, but I still get recommendations for Masha and the Bear.

Now, that purchase history of yours, who else gets to see it?

</comment><comment><USER46> Look at the difference between the emails you get from amazon today when you make a purchase, and several years ago.

Today, this is what shows up: [https://imgur.com/UF2YBVa](https://imgur.com/UF2YBVa)

5-6 years ago, here's what it looked like: [https://imgur.com/lBWWkin](https://imgur.com/lBWWkin)

Honestly, amazon has so much information about what I buy and why I buy it, I'm a little upset that I can't get these data from any retailer I shop at and import it into some software where I can actually look at what the trends are.

</comment><comment><USER47> I routinely revise my Google privacy settings across a bunch of different pages and I was totally unaware they tracked purchases by scanning email in Gmail. I don't see the value this offers to customers but I see why harvesting rich e-commerce data makes sense to Google.

<comment> compiler-guy I can see some value for those who want someone to automatically track what they buy. That may be useful for records, or reorders, or whatever.

Seems likely to be useful for Google too in the way you describe, although it isn't clear to me how Google uses it.

<comment><USER48> Sure, maybe it could be useful. But why is it hidden where no one knows it's there to be used?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> well I went and looked at it and realized I don't really buy very much online at all, but I was thinking - what about the invoices I send out - they should have that organized somewhere too.

</comment><comment><USER50> I smell a new service for backing up and then deleting the emails for you

<comment><USER51> Does Google really delete the full emails when you delete them? For example, if they used the content of an email to generate a profile to show you ads, do they reverse the process when you delete that email?

<comment><USER52> At least part of your Google ad profile is editable:

[https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated](https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Even following the steps in the article, provided by Google, it is impossible to delete purchase history.

<comment><USER54> The only way to do it is to go to each individual email that Purchases uses as a source and delete them from Gmail. I did it as part of moving all of that to FastMail, personally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is there a list or mind map anywhere of all of the nefarious things google does? Most people reading this forum can spend the next three days talking about all the evil shit google does and Not even run out of things to say.

</comment><comment><USER56> They host your emails that is where this data comes from, if you don't like that then delete said emails.

The media's modus operandi is to try and implicate tech companies with supposed violations whether it's justified or not, they will gain clicks and tarnish the reputation of a hated competitor, there are no drawbacks, they also keep perpetuating the notion that utility and invention must be sacrificed on the privacy altar.

<comment><USER57> _They host your emails that is where this data comes from, if you don 't like that then delete said emails._

Deleting emails is no solution - Google has already scanned the email by the time it shows up in your mailbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Why do people care about this :)?

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow next you're going to say my bank and credit card company tracks my purchases, too? Scary!

<comment><USER60> It's worth asking "why" companies would do these things.

A credit card company can legitimately use fraud detection as a reason for looking at purchases. They can upsell budgeting software as another legit option people would accept.

Why would Google be tracking this information? What use is it for them if they truely not doing it for ads?

I was oddly reminded of the Selfish Ledger video that was leaked from Google... [https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x- selfish...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish- ledger-video-data-privacy)

<comment><USER61> From PBS Frontline's "United States Of Secrets" (part 2)[1]:

        LIZ FIGUEROA, (D) State Senator, CA, 1998-06: We walk into this room, and it's myself
        and two of my staff— my chief of staff and one of my attorneys. And across from us
        was Larry, Sergey, and their attorney.

        All of a sudden, Sergey started talking to me. He said, "Senator, how would you feel
        if a robot went into your home and read your diary and read your financial records,
        read your love letters, read everything, but before leaving the house, it imploded?"
        And he said, "That's not violating privacy."

        I immediately said, "Of course it is. Yes, it is." And he said, "No, it isn't.
        Nothing's kept. Nobody knows about it." I said, "That robot has read everything.
        Does that robot know if I'm sad or if I'm feeling fear, or what's happening?"
        And he looked at me and he said, "Oh, no. That robot knows a lot more than that."

If the robot really imploded without any benefit to Google, why were they paying to manufacture use it?

If Google truly doesn't use the purchasing data to sell ads, why did they pay their expensive engineers to develop the tools to extract the data from email receipts?

[1] [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of- sec...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of- secrets/transcript/)

<comment><USER62> Simple: if you use the Google assistant, you get notifications about packages and flights. Flights get added to your calendar automatically, and other such niceties (for example, I get notified when I have a credit card payment due). A lot of people find this useful.

An ecosystem with useful features leads to profitability without any sort of malice, like people buying Android (or pixel) phones, or google homes, or whatever.

<comment><USER60> Consider this, Google is focused on maximizing profitability and most features people don't pay for. How does that work? Who are the paying customers, how does Google maximize income from them, and how does it impact the non-paying users?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> If you delete your history from Google, it only means that you aren't able to see it anymore in your account... Google keeps everything.

<comment><USER64> Do you have a source for that?

<comment><USER65> It's interesting to me that whenever someone responds that Gmail scans mail for advertising several google employees show up to fall all over themselves to deny it. But if you mention retention you get silence.

I wouldn't be too shocked if no single human actually knows what the real retention behavior is for gmail.

<comment><USER66> >It's interesting to me that whenever someone responds that Gmail scans mail for advertising several google employees show up to fall all over themselves to deny it. But if you mention retention you get silence.

You're not looking hard enough.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863438)

<comment><USER64> Good find, though I do tend to doubt mere company employee claims (lying is endemic to every corporation I've known from inside). In any case the user making the claim you link to came from a throwaway login.

<comment><USER66> I'm skeptical of company claims on Hacker News as well. But it met the condition described by the parent poster, and really has no more or less veracity than any other anonymous comment.

<comment><USER64> True enough

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Wow, that never showed up in any privacy setting. Google is so evil.

Is there any way other than deleting the account from stopping this?

It says I have to delete the mails to delete the data, but I have already deleted the mails (as I usually do) and the data is still there! Including information like flights and purchases.</comment>


Building RESTful APIs with Java Spring Boot Framework – For Beginners - <AUTHOR> https://ranvir.xyz/blog/building-restful-apis-with-java-spring-boot-framework-for-beginners/ <comment><AUTHOR> A few days ago, I was learning about how to write restful APIs using the Spring Boot framework, and I was able to come up with this.

Also, Let me know, how does it looks and is there any other approach followed in the industry?</comment>


Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16/yale-students-made-a-better-version-of-its-course-catalog-then-yale-shut-it-down/ <comment><USER2> Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.)

It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps, less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools (although I haven't looked too closely).

Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions.

Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as well.

Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the others :).

[1]: [http://ninjacourses.com/](http://ninjacourses.com/)

[2]: [https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/](https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/)

<comment><USER3> How would one start to begin making such an scheduling algorithm? I'm asking for learning purposes. What should I be reading? Or their resources for basic such things...

<comment><USER4> Constraint programming would be a good start, you can also google nurse scheduling problem.

You might want to research Prolog (since the Prologs tend to have good CS libraries), specifically Eclipse (not to be confused with the IDE): [http://eclipseclp.org/](http://eclipseclp.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it.

The basic reason why Yale doesn't want this information easily accessible is because it would force them to acknowledge that many of the staff are brilliant researchers and absolutely lousy teachers.

This notion that thinking freely about tough problems, and having the ability to pass your knowledge down the generations go together isn't true in the hyper-competitive academic environment today. If a professor doesn't publish, he/she can lose tenure, but if a professor doesn't teach well, he/she can have more time to publish.

I think the best universities to learn are those where the professors truly want to teach. Where their research isn't an end in itself, but a way to inspire questions for another generation. Yale seems to be asserting that it's not in this category.

<comment><USER6> I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like "accent too strong, can't understand what professor says" become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually cheaper.

Yale understandably knew that such platforms can be useful, but need some tweaking: anonymous reviews tend to aggregate YouTube-grade insults — and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as "sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!" by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late.

"Open" and teenagers with social bias don't mix nearly as well as one would love.

<comment><USER7> Your penultimate sentence contains some sweeping generalizations. Not everyone who submits a review for a class is motivated by spite. Of course, as with any voluntary review system, participation will come from those who are strongly opinionated. But that goes both ways (Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that the site only included numeric reviews...leaving no room for reviews such as "sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!", or whatever that means).

Some teachers ARE lousy. And some teachers present the course material in an engaging, captivating manner.

And yes, some students are lazy. But others want to learn, preferably from the latter type of professor. Labeling any student who forms an opinion about a professor as an "entitled [student] who failed after submitting a paper a month late" reveals a lack of faith in the ability of a young adult to take a genuine interest in his educational experience.

<comment><USER6> No sweeping generalisation: I simply wrote that academic executives react badly (all of them) to senior teachers (some of them) having a break-down after reading poorly written and spiteful reviews (no matter how few of them there are, and there always are some in a campus the size of Yale).

> Some teachers ARE lousy.

Very much so — I am one, and I've always told that most of my teachers at my school were criminally bad. (I _did_ take steps to have some of them sent to jail.) I do not remember arguing the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rather than use that system I hacked together an easier to use alternative from my bed using python + flask in literally 60 minutes and released it[1].

The administration went crazy when hundreds of students started using it and asked me to take it down. While its not as impressive as something made at Yale it seems to be a common theme, I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity.

[1] [http://timetables.tomforb.es/](http://timetables.tomforb.es/)

<comment><USER9> ASP.net? What sorcery! My undergrad website was developed in classic ASP. Our version control was copying files to a networked shared folder.

For an example of how utterly fucked classic ASP is: it has no API for accessing file uploads. If you code it yourself, it disables all of the rest of the parsing (query string, form variables, ...), which you then also have to code yourself. Not to mention the whole "hasn't been supported by Microsoft for a decade" thing.

<comment><USER10> Who would want to upload files via the HTML standard? Shouldn't you be using some sort of SOAP API with an ActiveX control? Or maybe the users should login to their local ActiveDirectory server and transfer the file to a shared folder via SMB/CIFS. /s

<comment><USER11> The hair on my neck was raising up until I got to the /s

Well played.

<comment><USER12> If he wrote a few lines more before getting to /s, could the sudden electrostatic discharge fry your computer? ;).

<comment><USER11> Goodbye Macbook Air as I throw it across the room :)

<comment><USER13> Thrown by the electrostatic discharge, I presume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ", where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system. It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some are invalid (obviously, these are my own personal views, nothing more), but the main takeaway is as with most problems, the core issue is _not_ technology, it's politics.

Students who have these "we could change the world!" ideas rarely understand that they're not the first person to think of idea X, and that the issue is who you know who can pull the right strings.

<comment><USER15> At least this is the internet; if the creators remained anonymous, it shouldn't be too hard for them to continue providing the service in spite of the administration's wishes to the contrary. Especially with for instance something like Tor, assuming that's still functional.

<comment><USER16> Did you read the article? Yale not only attacked the authors of the site, they used their web content filtering software to block it as malicious. Not much can be done about that and still retain you users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's not blow this out of proportion. They scraped private data (that required a Yale login) without permission and accidentally made it available to a wider audience than intended.

Yale has historically been very supportive of these things. A couple of years ago, they acquired another very slick course catalog website, Yale Bluebook, for a good chunk of money [1].

[1] [http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university- acquires...](http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university-acquires- yale-bluebook/)

<comment><USER18> Yale did eventually force the students to take the site down (or face disciplinary action) --- but their first move was to block it from the campus network, meaning that for a time, everyone _outside_ Yale could see it, but a Yalie who wanted to would have to go off campus to Starbucks.

<comment><USER19> The article said that the site required Yale credentials to view the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about open sourcing the tool. Release the tool as a self hosted solution, and let any one who wants to host it, host it. Or just use for their own purposes. I am not sure if that could get them in trouble, as I am not sure what crazy provisions Yale has in their student honor code. To be safe I would obfuscate my connection to the open source tool, if I were a student.

<comment><USER21> It would still require abuse of credentials and sharing of data which has not been cleared (or may be legally unclearable) for public availability.

Just because someone has the ability to use their credentials to view information does not remove legal liability for the use of that data upon the institution providing the data.

The reason this got shut down was because there could easily be liability and security concerns - about which a couple of hacking students could give two shits.

If the students were, in fact, accepting other students' credentials to access the system in any custom form (pulling data for the particular user vs. harvesting no-account-specific data), and I were on the chopping block for IT security at the uni, you better believe this would be shut down fast. Every single user of that third-party system would be forced to set up a new password and reminded of their obligations for proper handling of their own security.

Now, get off my lawn!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

<comment><USER23> I do webdev for a big hospital and when we brought up the possibility of patients reviewing their doctors, the doctors got really defensive.

Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work. Too bad for them public rating systems are inevitable.

<comment><USER24> Some of the defensiveness may come from professional pride... Teaching (and medicine?) is not as easy to rate as, say, a product on Amazon or an Ebay seller. Speaking as a sometime adjunct instructor at a research university, the "course evaluations" represent to me bringing corporate management theory to a theoretically more high-minded institution. As others have commented here, the pressure to publish lowers the priority of teaching for full-time faculty. Bringing in low-paid part-timers to teach is not a healthy response to this, and publicly rating/berating teachers is a band-aid on a situation already lacking in trust and respect.

In a healthy college of Yale's quality, course choices should come from competent individual advising of the students and student-to-student discussion, rather than from ratings and a scheduling algorithm.

<comment><USER25> Bad algorithms are bad and misused feedback is misused and competent advisers are competent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation information available to individuals not authorized to view the information._

Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually.

When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway -- it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask questions later. Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be _fatal_ to an instructor's career. Failing to take action to suppress their unauthorized distribution can also invite nasty lawsuits.

So this doesn't seem to be about "the man" stepping in and quashing student creativity and initiative (as much as some may prefer that narrative). If anything it seems that Yale did the right thing, in this case.

<comment><USER27> _The site required Yale credentials to log in_

Requiring these credentials seems like a perfectly legitimate way to protect this information. Later in the article it mentions other reasons that were more likely to have contributed to the decision that they made.

<comment><USER26> The main point is that the evaluations are the University's property. It would be irresponsible of them to entrust their protection to a third party -- especially when that third party seems to have set up their site without obtaining the University's permission first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back in the day when I was a student, some other student built a php based support forum with uploads for stuff you wrote during lectures and tests ordered by professor and ratings, discussion about lectures and test prep etc.

It was the de facto meeting and exchange place for all things related to that degree and was great value, I skipped quite a few classes that had good material and opted for self study. Must have saved me lots of hours. The most interesting thing was that there wasn't much pure leeching. Most people that used it went out of their way to help new students, provide lessons learned etc. Some professors actually had accounts (sometimes "undercover", was always fun when they got "exposed")

The guy started it when he started his BA (equivalent) and wrote his MA thesis about it and then the side faded away when he graduated (but by then there was other stuff available anyways)

Wasn't sophisticated at all but man was it useful. Talk about identifying customers and fixing their problems :) /old story

</comment><comment><USER28> Were there any updates since the last discussion [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261)

([http://126.96.36.199/](http://22.214.171.124/))

</comment><comment><USER29> Seriously, reading this article it's almost as if they're deliberately re- enacting Harvard's response to houseSYSTEM (which included course reviews, scheduling features, and of course, The Facebook) from 11 years ago. It really says something about institutional behavior. There must be some kind of Independent Thinking Students Emergency Playbook they hand out in elite university administrations.

As then-President Summmers said on September 15, 2005, "We are a community that is committed to the authority of ideas, rather than to the idea of authority." What a perfect line to summarize their utter hypocrisy.

[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain) website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a few.

[http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25](http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25)

He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got taken down pretty quickly.

It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.

<comment><USER31> The original site is at ([http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/](http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/)) where you can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.

<comment><USER32> That's the same guy behind the Accessible UK train timetable ( [http://traintimes.org.uk/](http://traintimes.org.uk/) ), which is an absolute life saver when trying to find quick train information on a mobile.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for sharing! That site is brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the author posted on Reddit that they had been contacted by the administration and their project was being re-considered.

</comment><comment><USER33> Did the same thing at my college. We crawled their course catalog. They blocked our IP.

Our big addition was being able to sort classes by time and day, the university ended up adding that feature, so I guess we got what we wanted?

</comment><comment><USER34> With all these negative anecdotes I thought I'd share a counterpoint.

In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a new student group registration site from scratch in PHP. My manager approved, I gathered requirements from the stakeholders in the office for student activities and 3 months later shiny new mysql-backed PHP registration system.

They also did cool things like let me open source the custom CMS I wrote and push forward with a standards based HTML template while the rest of the University was still on a standardized but antiquated table-based template.

I realize now that I've been incredibly lucky with the people I've had above me in every single organization I've worked for in the last 15 years.

<comment><USER35> UMN also allowed some Schedulizer website (now defunct :() to pull their schedules so you could just plug in your courses and search for optimal schedules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Will someone please disrupt Academia? Tenured professors don't want you to see that many suck at teaching so any website that brings that to light is shutdown.

<comment><USER37> Problem is that Academia thinks that professors must be good at teaching and research. It's akin to wanting your Librarians to be good at Calculus and Library maintenance.

Research and teaching are separate skills, one doesn't imply the other. Research requires great amount of intelligence and imagination and dedication, while teaching is best suited for those that have great speaking abilities, great charism and slightly lower intelligence (it's easier for people of same IQ to relate). Asking to researcher to teach will detract from researching and vice versa.

One solution is to have cooldown period of research to focus on teaching. But I think R&D should be kept separate from teaching, but in the same way teaching shouldn't be bogged down by standardization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So Yale students learned an important lesson - some of the staff cares much more about looking good than about helping students, and the administration of Yale would not be on the student's side in this case, because students come and go and the teachers stay.

<comment><USER39> Which is a rather odd position because it's the students who pay the bills. Of course, Yale, so it seems, feels safe for being Yale.

Let's see where online courses such as the Udacity one that starts today lead. Yale may want to reconsider their position or build their own system so they can have the metrics in place to guide their long-term strategies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> [XKCD] University Website [http://xkcd.com/773/](http://xkcd.com/773/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Typical American double standard. We promote free speech but don't you dare use it in a way we don't approve.

Is that really free speech then? I'm not free to say/do anything you don't approve of.

And since when is it ok to threaten disciplinary action on a student that didn't do anything wrong just provided a service students desperately need.

It's like me threatening to shoot your family if you don't sell me your house.

The second one is clearly illegal this one for some reason is ok can someone enlighten me?

We're talking about these people's future in both situations?

<comment><USER42> Well, technically...

Yale has made it clear they would set in motion procedures in which they may decide to no longer to business with these brothers, over this website.

If I don't like someone or something someone said, I don't have to do business with them. Yale is no different. Yale is a private organization that may do business with whomever they wish for whatever reason they wish, outside of the public policy decisions of the government. They have decided to utilize this right.

Its not that Yale is violating anyone's rights, its that Yale is a making a decision that reflects poorly on their institution.

Its the public institution equivalent of [insert bad thing here] to your neighbor because of something they said. Its not a freedom of speech violation to react that way, its just going to lose you alot of respect and alot of business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The more I reflect on my time at university, the more I realize it was an utter and complete scam. Fortunately I was lucky enough to attend junior college for a year and a half after graduating, took classes that I actually wanted to take instead of whatever BS was prescribed by my program, and didn't deal with manipulative twits for professors who held me hostage, forcing me to do their research for them before they'd let me graduate. The sooner academia dies, the better. I certainly won't shed any tears.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ah, embracing innovation the British way.

I recall that 6 months before one of those "date the person right next to me" sites picked up in the US, something similar was launched by some students in a UK university (a pretty high-profile one, though I can't remember which one... LSE? Imperial?). Anyway, long story short, the university IT department shut it down on the grounds that it was not appropriate use of IT facilities.

Six months later, the same launched in the US and grew insanely fast.

<comment><USER45> So this is "the British way" even though it's being done at Yale, because you have one anecdote about something semi-similar happening at a university in the UK?

(Only semi-similar, because I think you can make a better case for shutting down a dating site using university IT facilities than for shutting down a course-info site not using university IT facilities.)

<comment><USER44> I'm just taking a pot shot at Britain for this. Clearly, as this example shows, it's not just a British habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> These brothers will be successful in spite of Yale. A story like this definitely lends some cred when it comes to hiring time.

</comment><comment><USER47> I had a similar experience at my university (University of Waterloo), which I discussed some time ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163)

In my case, it was internship postings instead of a course calendar, and I was actually "punished" for it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I and some friends made a similar piece of software for our university. They reluctantly started emailing us CSV dumps of the course schedules but eventually stopped. It's surprising how resistant to technology a university with a reputation for engineering can be.

</comment><comment><USER49> Maybe I missed something, but wouldn't this work fine as a browser extension? I guess it depends on whether any individual student needed to crawl the whole dataset, or only the subset of courses they are interested in. The Yale administration is very clear that students have access to all the relevant data, so let each student run their own app. The app could build the schedule workbooks in local storage, no external entity required. Professors get the privacy they want, and the students get the convenient view of the data they want.

</comment><comment><USER50> I actually built a similar, albeit simpler, course scheduling website for students of my university, UAEU. I however couldn't improve it because I feared that it might catch the eye of one of the higher-ups and lead to my expulsion. So I've left it as is. Quite a few students are using it, which is more than enough for me.

Here's the site (no domain yet):

[http://nameless-shore-4042.herokuapp.com/](http://nameless- shore-4042.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> We used a quite similar tool (although much more MVP) in my business school in France (ESSEC): we would share a google spreadsheet where we would comment and rate our professors and classes. Although the administration knew about it, they wouldn't accept it officially, which is quite disapointing in my opinion. There are more than 10 years of data in there: the link is transmitted to every promotion.

</comment><comment><USER52> Is the issue privacy, or making it too easy to compare faculty ratings with one another? In general faculty and class ratings are not popular with tenured faculty who view greatness as synonymous with citations. Tenured faculty also are fighting the "dumbing down of classes to improve ratings". (I'm not sure if this is a reality or not at places like Yale)

</comment><comment><USER53> This bring back memories. I did the same thing at my university way back when - especially back when people still didn't bother to develop for iPhones.

I imagine they were afraid that people would get the wrong information, which is fair in a way, but if Yale's website was anything like my university's, then the website would far outweigh the alternative.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm sorry, was someone under the impression that Yale or any other institutions of higher education are progressive, cutting-edge institutions employing best practices in IT or cost management?

These are reactive, hidebound institutions that have been able to go for at least a century without transformative reforms.

They're rather overdue for it.

</comment><comment><USER55> Rename it "Stanford Bluebook+", give Stanford a 4 year license, and transfer.

</comment><comment><USER56> My simple question, what has the Yale administration gained by doing this?

Now the Washington Post has picked up the story, making them look petty and childish. Does whatever point they are trying to prove offset the PR damage?

</comment><comment><USER57> Once you understand that these universities are more or less (publicly or privately owned) corporations, their behavior starts making more sense. As far as I know, many of them actually turn a profit.

</comment><comment><USER58> Oberlin did this, too - but the department supported it and I got credit for working on it. [https://oprestissimo.com/](https://oprestissimo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Similar web application but it was not punished [http://www.metutakvim.com/](http://www.metutakvim.com/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Say anything you want, as long as it's positive.

</comment><comment><USER61> Just give us the data and let us decide which application presents it in a form we can consume efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER62> Why not just limit access to validated students?

<comment><USER63> Access was in fact limited to validated students. I think the administration was concerned about graduate students and others who weren't authorized having access to the data.

<comment><USER64> What's the problem with graduate students having access?

At the place I went to graduate school we could view the same info as undergraduates in terms of course timetables and instructor evaluations, and it didn't seem to cause any problems.

<comment><USER65> _What 's the problem with graduate students having access?_

Anything in the institution that the bureaucracy does not control completely, represents a "problem" to the bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Is lecture attendance compulsory at Yale?

<comment><USER67> IIRC, no.</comment></comment>


The Problem with Twitter Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.languagejones.com/blog-1/2014/12/24/the-problem-with-twitter-maps <comment><USER2> > Spatial statistics aren't the same as regular statistics

I've always been frustrated with the gap between statistics and spatial statistics. For example, some of the methodologies with conducting hot-spot analysis is somewhat misleading, especially to uninformed geospatial analysts. For example, Esri [0] implements this first by conducting geospatial aggregation, then calculating z-scores based on Gaussian assumptions, then generates a corresponding "p-value" to extract "statistically significant areas" that are coined "hot spots". At that point, an analyst typically color- codes those p-values showing regions with low p-values as "extreme" areas of interest. I'm really curious if there's any empirical or anecdotal research that validates this methodology.

There are some attempts to try and normalize sampled data. Location Quotient [1] (and Standardized Location Quotient), for example, compares a local measure to a global measure. However, this too has Gaussian assumptions and doesn't properly account for variance in the data.

I would definitely love to see a hierarchical Bayesian spatial model that takes into account a geospatial prior (such as the overall density of tweets) allowing you to solve for the posterior of cluster centers. Has anyone seen this done before?

[0] [http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//0...](http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//005p00000010000000)

[1] [http://www.bea.gov/faq/index.cfm?faq_id=478](http://www.bea.gov/faq/index.cfm?faq_id=478)</comment>


I'm Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, but You Are Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://shift.newco.co/im-sorry-mr-zuckerberg-but-you-are-wrong-65dbf8513424#.1hsi9bwqp <comment><USER2> I think facebook (or better its users) is more responsible for the misinformation of both candidates which is causing this deep hate between fractions.

We can't agree on everything and that is actually a very good thing but we need dialog not outright dismissal of the 'other' side. You can not label an entire group crazy, you need to understand why they have a certain opinion or view. Only then we can find common ground and solve problems. In fact you may be surprised how similar people from opposed sides actually are when you remove this pile of garbage blocking everyones view.

<comment><USER3> While you preach about listening to both sides, Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon wants to ethnically cleanse Silicon Valley.

[https://i.redd.it/3tx94qwvixxx.jpg](https://i.redd.it/3tx94qwvixxx.jpg)

Full Article: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon- flattered...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered- and-coaxed-trump-on-policies-key-to-the-alt- right/2016/11/15/53c66362-ab69-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html)

<comment><USER4> > ethnically cleanse Silicon Valley

That's a gross misrepresentation of the article you posted. Congratulations, you chose the most appropriate thread!

<comment><USER3> > "We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our > talented people in this country," Trump said. He paused. Bannon said, "Um."

> "I think you agree with that," Trump said. "Do you agree with that?"

> Bannon was hesitant.

> "When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from > South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . " Bannon said, not finishing the > sentence. "A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society."

What could Bannon possibly have meant by this besides wanting to deport them en masse?

Mass deportation is ethnic cleansing, in case you didn't know.

<comment><USER5> Talking about the distribution of race in Silicon Valley

~ some magical jump in logic ~

Talking about deportation

~ another magical jump in logic ~

Talking about ethnic cleansing

I don't really follow. Nowhere does he talk about "mass deportation" or "ethnic cleansing" or anything even closely related.

<comment><USER3> Trump is saying that we have to keep the talented people in the country.

Bannon disagrees that we should keep the talented people in the country, but he doesn't want to say it to Trump's face, so he says a bunch of code words for "whites only society."

There's only one way to make a whites only society. It's ethnic cleansing. Trump happens to have already brought discussions of mass deportation to the mainstream.

Mass deportation is a type of ethnic cleansing, by the way. It's right in the definition. There is no leap of logic there.

As an aside, Bannon is significantly overstating the percent of CEOs who are Asian.

<comment><USER6> Making assumptions based on ambiguous statements is dangerous. He does not use the words "mass deportation" he does not even say explicitly that he disagrees with Trump. Instead of agreeing he nuances his position first, noting the percentages (which I agree sound a bit far from reality) that cause him to not flat out agree.

The furthest you can take his words is that he is of the opinion that the government should do something about there being a disproportionate amount of non-American born in SV power. There are lots of ways he might think that might be corrected, some of which are not even unfair or racist. To assume the very worst is not constructive.

<comment><USER3> > corrected

Your choice of vocabulary says something about your opinions, as well.

Enlighten me. How else would he go about changing the demographic makeup of anything besides ethnic cleansing?

<comment><USER6> By analyzing the socio-economic drivers that caused the discrepancy and disrupting in them some way.

<comment><USER3> That "disruption" means killing off capital flow in Silicon Valley. People follow the money. Why would it be desirable at all to do that unless you're a racist ideologue?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fake news is just a nicer word for propaganda. Maybe what we saw happen on Facebook was a reflection of our society and the US political system? Even if Facebook changes something, 4 years from now we are still facing a 2-party oligarchy with a strong grip on control. I had hopes for a better 3rd party showing with all of the negative campaigning, but it turns out that America can't get enough of the major party candidates. It's like a reality TV show played out on social media. Life imitating art?

I deleted (vs deactivated) my personal facebook account in the run-up to the election. The cost/benefit math wasn't worth it anymore. Too much wasted time and energy with little room for critical thinking or diversity of opinions. I doubt I'll rejoin anytime in the foreseeable future. No judgement to folks who are still on it, it's just not for me.

I feel much less anxious and more at peace without facebook than I ever did with it. I'm encouraged to make more time for face-to-face and phone conversations.

If someday I am responsible for marketing or customer service, I would consider using facebook for business purposes to communicate with customers. But I'd let someone else manage it who enjoys social media.

I am left wondering if facebook just had its myspace moment? Was that peak facebook? If so, what's next in line?

<comment><USER8> some fake news doesnt care about changing your mind OR reinforcing your opinion. it's just pandering for a click, for ad revenue.

<comment><USER7> That's a good point, though it could be an AND too. Push an agenda and make money. We can't easily know the actors, but the motivation is similar to grab power or its surrogate money.

<comment><USER8> I would think the first motivation is to cause addiction. Get you worked up about a cause so you come back for more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hilarious. The "wrong" candidate gets elected and suddenly half of the Internet is involved in a debate about media and news sources and apparently huge amount of them are "fake news sites".

<comment><USER10> Exactly. I detested both candidates, but it's ridiculous to frame this situation as one in which the "wrong" candidate won, and shows true bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What happened to the "vouch" button? This seems like an interesting, non-spam, somewhat tech related (well and politics, but something about the role or perceived role of tech companies in politics) article. Not sure if I agree with it, but it doesn't seem deserving of a flag.

<comment><USER12> The vouch button appears when a story is flagged to the extent that it's killed, but [flagged] can appear before then.

<comment><USER13> HN has been one of the more civilised corners of the Web, and I've commented on that specifically.

In the past days and weeks, but most especially since November 8's election, the tone as soured considerably, and I'm seeing active and non-derailed discussions such as this getting flagged.

(I'd submitted the link myself, only to learn it was a dupe.)

HN relies on the wisdom of crowds -- my suggestion would be to consider crowds only a first approximation of wisdom. The site Advogato -- an old-school online forum from the late 1990s -- had the idea of a trust graph. I'm not sure that's an ultimate solution either, but the idea that you exercise specific judgement, overriding user actions, seems to be coming back into vogue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been sick for weeks and done nothing but read news stories when able most of the day.

One of them said 170 million Americans read Facebook every single day.

How does that not have a massive influence?

</comment><comment><USER15> Under any circumstance I really don't like the idea of a huge corporation like facebook to begin censoring private conversations and beginning to shadow ban people based on their naivity in regards to what they share etc.

Facebook is not a company that should indulge in what is truthful and what is not. It should preferably be a medium to keep in contact and discuss links with friends and not much more. I already think that there is too much filtering of what ends up in my facebook feed.

<comment><USER13> How about the idea of limiting the scope of those private discussions then?

Every uninformed, misinformed, bioted, and/or intentionally disinformational screed needn't be spread to millions of readers.

Information and media systems have always had profound impacts on society, frequently highly disruptive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Technology does amplify problems, yes. But it also amplifies the solutions. If your problem didn't have a decent solution in the first place, then yes, you will just have a bigger problem.

I'm not sure how this is something directly related to Facebook. I think misinformation spread has been a problem that was amplified with the easier access to the information in general.

Maybe this is like the problem of modern warfare. Modern bombs tend to affect people en masse (citation needed, yes, please bear with me) and with nuclear weapons, the problem of civilians getting hurt/killed got amplified. The problem was (hopefully) solved by understanding the consequences of using extreme force over time, especially the chain reaction that can be triggered.

What I'm trying to say is, maybe, we need to create a solution which we can "amplify" with the technology, and that is not _just_ Facebook's responsibility. However, them being the "nuclear weapon" of the social media, yes, they do share the burden.

<comment><USER13> You might want to look at _Techno-Fix: why technology won 't save us or the environment_. There's the problem of unintended consequences, a/k/a "bite- back".

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/techno-fix-why-technology- wont...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/techno-fix-why-technology-wont-save-us- or-the-environment/oclc/709681580&referer=brief_results)

Joel Mokyr also looks into this problem in his new book _The Culture of Growth_ :

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/culture-of-growth-the- origins-...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/culture-of-growth-the-origins-of- the-modern-economy/oclc/944469144&referer=brief_results)

<comment><USER16> Thank you for the links, I'll have a look over the weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When you look at the numbers Trump got same number of votes that previous republican candidate got. Hilary got significantly less votes than Obama. So if there's any role of social media it's not about giving Trump supporters a voice. It's about poisoning Hilary and election in general for people who would otherwise go and vote against Trump.

<comment><USER18> Have they finished counting yet?

They counted 100 million votes in one day; I don't understand why they haven't counted 7 million in more than a week.

<comment><USER19> The 100 million votes are in easy reach and clear to read. The 7 million are scattered all over the place and includes all the difficult cases where you need to decide whether the vote is eligible or not, and is clearly readable or not, etc.

<comment><USER18> That's not what the media reported. For example:

> "We probably have about 7 million votes left to count," said David > Wasserman, an editor at Cook Political Report who is tracking turnout. "A > majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington.

> What's with the delay? Several states, notably California and Washington, > have liberal absentee and mail-in voting laws. California, for instance, > allows residents to submit ballots up to three days late (although they must > be postmarked on or before Election Day). These provisions have made > alternative voting pretty popular, and the ballots a bit harder to count. > California alone has more than 4 million votes pending; Washington is > waiting on another 700,000.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clintons...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clintons- popular-vote-lead-will-grow-and-grow/507455/)

Not scattered (4 million in CA alone), and not necessarily hard to read (mail in ballots).

<comment><USER19> Still, they were not in the ballot boxes where the majority votes are. That checking of postmarking date of an absentee ballot, one by one, is what makes things slow for those kind of votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If i understand correctly, Trump became president because of the Dunning- Kruger effect? Apparently the people responsible for these false stories first tried anti-Trump stories and they weren't shared that much. Then they tried Anti-Hilary stories which were shared more so became more popular.

</comment><comment><USER10> Facebook can't win here. When they have humans more in the loop of selecting news stories, they get blamed for bias. When they remove the humans, they are blamed for AI which isn't perfect. Yes, Facebook can improve how it selects news stories, and they are working to do that.

</comment><comment><USER21> I take a fundamental issue with the core thinking behind this post. It seems to be: "the voters should not be allowed free communication between themselves - it needs to be policed and curated for them. They should preferably get most/all of their information and political opinion from big media.

Some telling parts from the post:

"Facebook's viral and social mechanisms allow the amplification of content well beyond its original media budget, thus exacerbating the issue."

"A thousand "Hillary Clinton is a crook" "opinion pieces" probably don't fall into your count of fake news per se (even though, it's worth pointing out that their very title would constitute libel and is a lie). And opinion pieces are much, much harder to police. "

</comment><comment><USER22> Fb makes all if its money by separating people into neat little echo chambers and making them feel warm and cozy and in possession of the Truth. Basically driving a number of wedges into the society. A _little_ blame would be in order, I'd think.

</comment><comment><USER23> Mark Zuckerberg built the worth of Facebook convincing advertisers it can influence people to buy their brand, yet why all the sudden does Facebook's influence not apply to deceptive news?

Remember Upworthy? It had misleading clickbait headlines and within one week it was gone from the Newsfeed. Facebook has the skills to fix this.

It has been said the media has a liberal bias. Conservative media denies that global warming exists. Liberals and the overwhelming majority of scientists accept it does. Can you name one issue where conservatives and scientists refute liberals?

</comment><comment><USER24> Zuckerberg also addressed some of these criticisms in responses to comments on his original post [https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271)

<comment><USER25> From that post: "Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news."

People might say they want accurate news, but what many really want is news that supports their views, i.e. confirmation bias.

Traditional papers try to give you a balanced mix of news. Of course, they don't always get it right. Before the TV and the internet, they used to enjoy stable monopolies: one newspaper per city (see the section "We Buy Some Newspapers ... Newspapers" in Warren Buffet's 2012 letter to the shareholders [http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2012ltr.pdf](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2012ltr.pdf)). To get to that monopoly, it helped to have good independent journalism. Once they had established their monopoly, the culture often remained (e.g. the board of editors defends its independence). That culture is still largely intact today, even though their margins are under heavy pressure from the internet.

Facebook has a commercial incentive to feed you posts that you will click on. With their detailed user profiles and immediate feedback, the result is predictable: in the case of the election, you will get positive stories of your candidate, and negative stories of the opposite candidate.

Facebook faces some big ethical challenges, and I'm not sure how to fix them. In the mean time, I think we should cherish existing newspapers. If they disappear, without being replaced by something as good or better, we will miss them badly. The president-elect has been bashing them during the election, and is continuing to do so. If you don't have a subscription yet, I suggest you seriously consider subscribing to the NYT or WaPo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, you didn't collude enough with the government and main stream media to get Hillary elected."

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems easy to blame Facebook for this. I don't like how he called out their algorithms, probably not even knowing how they work. Meanwhile Twitter is just banning alt-right accounts openly, and no one gives a shit.

<comment><USER28> I'm still not sure what "alt-right" means, but all I've seen is them banning racist or otherwise abusive accounts. Can you link some unfair bans?

<comment><USER29> Azalea Banks

<comment><USER28> Seems to be for exactly racist and abusive tweets. [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/12/azealia- banks-...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/12/azealia-banks- suspended-twitter-racist-rant-zayn-malik)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/azealia- banks-...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/azealia-banks-axed- uk-music-festival-zayn-malik-twitter)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inventors of spinning wind turbine win James Dyson award - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/15/james-dyson-award-inventors-spinning-wind-turbine <comment><USER2> Besides being one of the ugliest things in London, the Walkie Talkie allegedly melts down cars and also creates dangerous winds...</comment>