Indian police open case against hundreds in Kashmir for using VPN - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/indian-police-open-case-against-hundreds-in-kashmir-for-using-vpn/ <comment><USER2> As a young tech person in India, this stuff makes me _so_ angry. The ruling party here (BJP) doesn't have any real competition. Which means they can get away with pretty much anything.

They've banned VPNs. They'll chuck you in prison if you speak against the government or a politician. Then they'll brand you as an "anti-nationalist" and openly say to their supporters that you deserve to be shot.

Facial recognition is now being used to identify protestors. Bots and deepfakes are being used to spread propoganda.

Many people are upset, but there's nothing we can do. We can't speak out without fear of being reprimanded. We can vote for other parties, but there's no way that they'll ever win. The majority of the population has blind faith in BJP. The only demographic that appears to realise the implications well enough is the youth in urban areas - a very insignificant fraction of the nation's population.

Even the media is afraid to speak out against BJP because if they do then they get attacked by physical and virtual mobs.

It's a shame. So much potential.

<comment><USER3> I am in Jammu(India) right now and can attest that comments like above are only opinions and not facts. As goes for any country, people keep inventing stuff / leaving crucial details because of their own biases and self interests. The same goes for people who support BJP.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely right. It is ridiculous to think that the Government will not restrict communications in a region that has seen nothing but violence and terrorism for the past 30 years since the Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. For the first time in 3 decades the Valley is peaceful. If it comes down to choosing between deaths of innocents by deranged terrorists and cutting communication I would always choose the latter. The Pulwama Attack is still fresh in the mind of Indians and cannot be forgotten or forgiven.

<comment><USER5> How many times did you visit the valley in the last 30 years? Please tell us how peaceful or violent it was during your last 5 visits.

Please, also tell us how exactly this is bringing peace to the valley and if banning phones and internet for months has been so effective, then why did 1988-95 see the most unrest? If I remember correctly, mobile phones with EDGE/GPRS were introduced to Kashmir around what year? 2002? 2000 to ~2010 were also some of the most peaceful years in Kashmir in the last 3 decades.

<comment><USER6> Was it peaceful enough that Kashmiri Pandits could return without fear of being killed? If no, then it was not peaceful..

<comment><USER5> Not sure what that has to do with BANNING 10 MILLION PEOPLE FROM USING INTERNET for 5 months and then banning all social media but from my experience of meeting Pandits in Srinagar who HAVE returned, yes.

Plus, OP implied that Kashmir is peaceful now because of people not having internet access. Are you now saying until Pandits return, Kashmir will have no internet access?

<comment><USER6> \- I was replying to the claim that J&K was peaceful, which it clearly was not. We cannot claim that since it was peaceful for one community, it was peaceful.

\- per the media reports that I've seen, no Kashmiri Pandits have dared to return. The only few that are in the valley are the ones who could not migrate, primarily due to economic reasons. Rest have been living as refugees in their own country

\- Internet had been used by terrorists and their sympathizors, and that is a fact

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's really too bad that the two rising tech countries - China and India - have such a third-world approach to censorship on the Internet. You would think they would want to mimic the US's successful formula in hopes of building their presence as a tech powerhouse, but in this area they don't seem to be doing that.

<comment><USER8> We have yet to see how the US reacts when a massive section of it wants to secede.

India and China both face a significantly more difficult geopolitical reality than the USA.

Some of the world's most westernized and developed countries (Spain, Israel) are starting to use violence and suppressive tactics now that they are faced with even the smallest amount of secessionist unrest.

Kashmir is one of the most militarized border zones alongside the West Bank. I fully agree that there might be better and less suppressive methods that the Govt. can use to deal with the Kashmir issue, but to act as though a USA like policy would work in countries with very different ground realities is being willfully arrogant.

At the risk of sounding too cold, if the choice was between death of a few million people (which India has a long history of) and complete destruction of communication frameworks. I would choose that latter.

Now the big problem with what the Indian Govt. is doing, is that this has been going on for almost a year and they are making no efforts to bring Kashmir back to "normalcy". Such draconian policies should only come into place for very short durations with measures for removal, the second unrest goes below a certain point.

<comment><USER9> _We have yet to see how the US reacts when a massive section of it wants to secede._

We have?

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

<comment><USER10> The context was specifically for consumer encryption technologies, which wasn't an issue during the Civil War.

<comment><USER11> That really is not clear from the statement: "We have yet to see how the US reacts when a massive section of it wants to secede," which is obviously false.

<comment><USER12> It's not false because we don't know what the reaction would be if this happened today. The reaction of people 160 years ago is not at all predictive of what would happen today. Especially if the issue was not a moral one as it was 160 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I left Kashmir a few months ago, my phone and all its contents were checked by Indian police at the airport. They asked me to unlock and checked photos, WhatsApp texts, etc.

Random arrests and extra-judicial killings of Kashmiris by the Indian state is a quite regular occurrence. A laughable narrative around how they were "Pakistan sponsored terrorists" is usually spun by the media/police nexus.

<comment><USER4> > A laughable narrative around how they were "Pakistan sponsored terrorists" > is usually spun by the media/police nexus.

So who conducted the Pulwama terror attack? Have you seen the video of the terrorist and the filth that he utters against Hindus? It is obvious that Pakistan is involved in sponsoring terror. They are in the grey list in FATF for a reason and have two of the World's most dangerous terrorists: Masood Azhar (who has gone missing! how does a high profile UN designated terrorist go missing?) and Hafiz Saeed (who was roaming free till recently and was only thrown in jail because of FATF pressures). These two individuals, who are Chiefs of their organizations: Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-E-Toiba, respectively are the main conspirators in the 26/11 Mumbai Attack and the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

And shall we forget how Pakistan provided Osama Bin Laden a safe haven right next to its own Military HQ?

We are not stupid.

There have been a stream of terror attacks in Kashmir ever since the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s. But since India Abrogated Article 370 on August 5th, there has been actual peace after a long time.

<comment><USER14> Let's not push the narrative of Kashmir being peaceful after the abrogation of Article 370 without any meaningful metric for the same.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure what your argument is. Are you only opposing cutting off internet or are you opposed to kashmir's "occupation"?

There are many factors that make the abrogation the right move. We shouldn't be dividing a secular country for another Islamic state. Jammu and Leh should not be held back by religious based separatism. Even if Kashmir turns more violent, not giving into theocratic demands for another Islamic state is the right thing to do.

Maybe cutting off internet and house arrest of politicians was not the right moves, but neither was the status quo of perpetual autonomy and jihadi separatists.

Disclaimer, as I should add one. I'm no bjp supporter, and i hate the hindutva guys the same as I do the islamist crowd. After all, we call bjp making india a hindu pakistan. The word pakistan is derogatory here.

<comment><USER14> Opposed to both. I should have been clearer.

As the parent comment appears to assume that the decisions taken by the government in Kashmir are tied to the terrorism in the valley as opposed to being mere line items in their manifesto that stems from their political ideology. So assuming what they're saying is correct, I only wish to understand the metric for peace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a reminder that without physical security, electronic security is pretty much worthless. The best encryption won't save you from rubberhose cryptanalysis where they beat you until you reveal your key. Clever circumvention technologies such as VPN won't save you when they arrest your for using circumvention technologies.

These are all good things, but we in tech, oftentimes think we can program our way out of bad physical governance. We can't! We need now more than ever to engage with everyone to make sure that we have good physical governments.

<comment><USER17> >Clever circumvention technologies such as VPN won't save you when they arrest your for using circumvention technologies.

True, but my question here is: given that VPNs are pretty much essential for the way many large corporations work (they're not going to let employees access sensitive data over the internet in the clear), how does India, a country with a large tech presence and which promotes itself as a good place for software development, handle this?

<comment><USER18> You can use VPNs in other parts of the country, just not in the areas where internet access has been banned. While this is an egregious abuse of power and a gross violation of the rights of Kashmiris, it is not happening in the rest of the country.

<comment><USER19> How is use of VPN is enforced? Looking at credit card transactions?

Use-cases like these makes cryptocurrency so much appealing. Where I can potentially spend my money like normal physical cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is going to sound antiquated and tedious, so please bear with me. Rather than using a VPN/Tor/etc. which can be easily detected or requires a lot of OpSec to get right, consider having people in other countries that can help bundle archives of data for you. Ship the data back and forth over something non conspicuous and not subject to MITM proxies such as SFTP to AWS or one of the low-rent VPS providers. Use a ram based linux distribution in India to create the posts, tar the data up, SFTP to another country. A friend in that country outside of India pulls down the tarball and posts text and videos to social media for you. When you are done uploading your tarball, reboot, and all the data is gone from your end. You can boot back into whatever government approved OS image is acceptable.

If you set the filesystem permissions right on the SFTP server, then even if they beat the username / pw out of you, then all they will find is cat videos on the chroot SFTP server. Your friend will see the tarball of objectionable content in a hidden directory. Remember to sanitize EXIF data from pictures first as that has your GPS location and in some cases your cell phone serial number. Someone will suggest ssh keys over password, but they should not in this case. No data must be persisted on the India side of this scenario.

I will be the first to admit, this process is tedious. I am only suggesting it as a last resort when all else fails.

<comment><USER21> ssh could be used for proxy, so it might be marked as a VPN by ISP hardware. Better way would be to use something very popular like Gmail or Google Drive. I hope that chances are small for Google to co-operate with Indian government.

<comment><USER20> One of the reasons I suggest SFTP is that contractors in India are very often asked to transfer data to US and EU companies this way. It is often required for contractors to do their job. You can disable port forwarding on the SFTP server in the event that government officials want to verify it is not a proxy. If the VPS used is AWS, it is even less conspicuous. The admins of the account for the VM must be outside of India. The server can even contain work related files to make it legit.

This process is predicated on the idea that you want to get the word out about things occurring in your country and that you do not need to take credit for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think India is well on its way to becoming hybrid regime in the Democracy Index. [https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2020/01/22/global-d...](https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2020/01/22/global-democracy-has-another-bad-year)

</comment><comment><USER23> Governments everywhere do not like secrecy. Unless, naturally, it is their secrets. Everyone else should, ideally, sit at the table with their hands palm up and on the said table.

I wish it was an isolated incident, but the more politicians you hear, the more it becomes apparent that it is all about the side you are on.

</comment><comment><USER24> The most populous democracy on earth, everybody!

<comment><USER25> Yeah, one that's nuclear armed and constantly on the brink of war with its nuclear armed neighbor.

A bit worrying, no?

<comment><USER26> Turns out Civilization bugs are more prescient than we thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Remind me again, does India have a democratic government or an authoritarian regime?

<comment><USER28> A democratically-elected authoritarian regime.

<comment><USER29> Literacy is key to eradicate authoritarian BJP in India. Because the last standing state is the most literate state in India which is Kerala.

<comment><USER18> I don't think this is true. Some of the most educated and wealthy people support the BJP, fascist though the party may be. Look at the vote split in the recent Delhi election. All upper caste voters flocked to the BJP by margins of 20%+. Dalits and Muslims voted AAP. Upper castes are disproportionately wealthy and educated.

My theory for this is that such people (relatives of mine included, sadly) are just higher on Maslow's heirarchy of needs. At the bottom you need roti-kapda- makaan (food, clothing, shelter), followed by bijli-sadak-paani (electricity, roads, water) and higher up health and education. If you've had all of this all your life, you take them for granted. When Modi comes along and peddles a grand vision to Make India Great Again, like it was in Vedic times, that captures the imagination and inspires us. When the BJP tells us that all of our problems are because of Muslims and that we need to put them in their place to fix everything, we're only too willing to listen.

<comment><USER30> This is pretty spot on. Something as simple and basic as the Maslow's hierarchy explains the voting pattern in India. It is no coincidence that rising middle class has coincided with the rise in BJP's electoral returns. With their basic needs met, their worry now is to protect their Gods, reconstructing a temple that was supposedly demolished 500 years ago and goddam cows! They really do not care about the plight of the less fortunate around them. Concepts like freedom of expression, individual liberty, equality etc. are of not much importance to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quick summary of the situation in India

\- In 2014, Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister on a plank of "development for all". Since the BJP's pedigree was one of Hindu nationalism (aka Hindutva), this was a change welcomed by many. He had a good track record of development as Chief Minister (equivalent of Governor in America).

\- After a couple of major missteps (invalidating all high value currency notes, tax changes), growth started to slow. While it had been 7-9% between 2004 and 2014, it was now 5% or less.

\- The BJP started to capture and subvert institutions that make India function as a democracy including the Courts[1] and the Election Commission[2]. They intimidated and coerced the media into toeing the BJP line [3].

\- In 2019, the BJP won re-election. In this campaign, there was no talk of development (because there was precious little of it), no discussion of rampant unemployment. The BJP tried to convince us that the main issue was Pakistan (it wasn't) and how they were an existential threat to the nation (they weren't) and how Modi had "taught them a lesson" (he hadn't).

\- Since then, Hindutva has made a big comeback. It is now priority #1, above unemployment, above low growth.

\- The BJP is staking everything on killing the separatist movement in Kashmir and removing all special privileges of Kashmiris, building a temple over a destroyed mosque, and removing illegal Muslim immigrants. Though seemingly disparate, all of these facilitate the broader goal of establishing a Hindu Rashtra - a nation of Hindus, by Hindus, for Hindus. One where the secular Constitution of India is no longer valid.

\- To enforce this, the BJP has resorted to totalitarian tactics, including the effective house arrest of millions of Kashmiris, coupled with an internet blackout. Thanks to the aforementioned capture of the Courts, the Supreme Court has done nothing to right this injustice [4].

That's where we are now.

On a personal note, writing this down broke my heart. I love my country and I grieve to see what is being done to it.

[1] - [https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/judging-the- judges/ci...](https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/judging-the- judges/cid/1438565)

[2] - [https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover- story/article29618205.e...](https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover- story/article29618205.ece)

[3] - [https://thewire.in/media/punya-prasun-bajpai-bjp- media](https://thewire.in/media/punya-prasun-bajpai-bjp-media)

[4] - [https://scroll.in/article/935432/analysis-supreme-court- orde...](https://scroll.in/article/935432/analysis-supreme-court-orders-in- kashmir-petitions-undermine-the-spirit-of-habeas-corpus)

<comment><USER31> > building a temple over a destroyed mosque

Wasn't this a Supreme Court order both parties accepted? The BJP isn't forcing this, although this has been their goal for decades and they will certainly claim credit for it.

<comment><USER18> See my points about undue influence by the BJP over the Court. Realistically this influence meant there was no other decision those judges could take, even though it was ridiculous to award land based on "fervent religious belief", with no proof other than scripture. Worst of all, the destruction of the mosque was unlawful even according to judges themselves and yet they saw fit to compound that injury by taking away the land under the mosque and awarding it to groups allied with the original destroyers of the mosque.

You're right about the BJP claiming credit for it. We're going to hear about nothing else for the next four years, especially during state election periods.

<comment><USER31> > See my points about undue influence by the BJP over the Court.

Even if it's true, it doesn't mean the BJP influenced this court decision. You don't have proof for it, so you shouldn't speculate.

> Worst of all, the destruction of the mosque was unlawful even according to > judges themselves and yet they saw fit to compound that injury by taking > away the land under the mosque and awarding it to groups allied with the > original destroyers of the mosque.

They awarded the land to build the temple because they found archeological evidence that the mosque was built on a non-Islamic structure which is recorded in history as Hindu. The case wasn't about whether the mosque demolition was illegal or not (it was). It was about resolving who the disputed land belongs to. The mosque superseded a Hindu place of worship of huge significance. There was no "perfect" decision here; it was always going to compromise one party over the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> These discussions quickly devolve into political mudslinging , I wish there was way to filter out such posts.

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://archive.is/Gf3Pg](https://archive.is/Gf3Pg) if anyone blocks guce.advertising.com

</comment><comment><USER34> If Pakistan had just listened to the UN and actioned first step of the security councils resolution 47, we would not be in this position.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is very sad to see. Privacy is a right.

</comment><comment><USER36> _The majority of the population has blind faith in BJP. The only demographic that appears to realise the implications well enough is the youth in urban areas - a very insignificant fraction of the nation 's population._

Sounds all too familiar here in the US. We are effectively held hostage by rural voters, and the obvious remedy for this state of affairs -- abolishing the Electoral College -- will mean that those voters have the same legitimate grounds for complaint against us.

At some point we _have_ to start re-evaluating the conventional wisdom that democracy is the best possible form of government at all possible scales.

<comment><USER37> Who is "we"? This is how democracy works, and those rural voters have a say in what happens. This country would crumble within months without all those flyover states contributing to the nation.

<comment><USER38> Curious as to your line of thinking here. What exactly do the coasts need that only flyover country can provide?

I live in a flyover state and I like living here just fine, but I find the idea that California is going to crumble if North Dakota stops supporting it to be hilarious.

<comment><USER37> Flyover country provides food, manufacturing and talent to many corporations that you don't know but interact with every day.

As a 20 year resident of California, this state is absolutely broke and barely survives as it is. It would be a failed nation-state if it was on its own.

<comment><USER38> I'm gonna argue that all of those things are fungible commodities easily bought by the next supplier should they become unavailable from flyover country.

Curious why you've lived for so long in a state you apparently have a lot of disdain for. There must be something keeping you there.

<comment><USER37> If they were so easily bought then they would be, but you missed the fact that the state is broke and can't pay for anything anyway.

Family keeps my primary residence here, but that's irrelevant to the discussion.

Here's an exercise: ask a CA resident to name 10 things that have gotten better over the last decade in this state. I'd be surprised if they name 1.

<comment><USER38> These things are commodities, a bushel of corn is a bushel of corn is a bushel of corn. They're not more difficult to buy from elsewhere, the logistic just become marginally more expensive. There's not a buyer in the world that's going to buy the more expensive stuff first, but a marginal increase in logistics cost to buy corn from mexico instead of kansas is not going to result in california sinking into the ocean.

What state do you think is just full to the brim with people waiting to talk about how good things are?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> kashmir to me is war zone. As you know everything is fair in war.

</comment><comment><USER40> Very sad. But a great lesson for the rest of the world. Democracy with an uneducated populace is a disaster waiting to happen

<comment><USER41> So the solution would be to not have democracy until the unwashed uneducated masses become otherwise so?

The East India company would've agreed with you :p

<comment><USER40> No. That is stupid. The solution is to make sure that education is never skimped on.

The lesson for countries like US that are cutting education in favor of tax cuts is that lack of education in a electoral democracy is a self-fulfilling disaster.

<comment><USER42> This guy is the only person that understands root of entire problem being discussed in this thread. What was and is literacy rate in all of Kashmir in early 20th century and especially now in insurgent districts? Government of India and UGC are making big hue and cry about online education. How do they expect these areas to take part?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Misleading Title. It is not about using VPN but about propagating rumors.

This is a law in India, as there were instances of riots caused by social media rumor.

Actual News \</comment><comment>----- The FIR has been registered while taking cognisance of the social media posts by miscreants by using different VPNs, which are propagating rumours with regard to the current security scenario in the Kashmir valley, secessionist ideology and glorifying terrorists, the police said.

I am young Techie from India too and I totally support it.

<comment><USER44> Suppressing secession is tyranny. India should know a thing or two about that.

<comment><USER4> No one suppressed secession. There have been secession movements not just in Kashmir but in North East too. That doesn't give anyone the authority to conduct terror attacks on fellow citizens. When things go beyond a point of no return then force is needed. Since the day India Abrogated Article 370 there hasn't been one major terror attack in Kashmir. That is good enough for the rest of India that was sick and tired of hearing Civilians and Army men being targeted by terrorists in Kashmir ever since the Kashmiri Pandit exodus in the 1990s. If you want to learn a thing or two about India, you better read up on Exodus and Genocide Kashmiri Pandits and how they are now refugees in their own country. Then you have the rights to lecture Indians on what is democracy and what is tyranny. We have been the most accommodative over the years and our patience has been tested far beyond permissible limit. India already went through a terrible Partition in 1947 on Religious lines where Muslims did not want to live with Hindus. Did that solve the problem? Nope. We already had one Partition. Won't allow more. And we shouldn't even be justifying it. It is surprising to me that people here question the decisions of a Sovereign Nation on what it should and should not do. Would you be willing to have your Nation broken up into multiple pieces because some Tom, Dick or Harry doesn't like the way it is now? Don't be ridiculous!

<comment><USER45> > Would you be willing to have your Nation broken up into multiple pieces > because some Tom, Dick or Harry doesn't like the way it is now?

As someone who conceivably sees this happening to his country in the relatively near future (English; Scotland leaving the UK), I'm not sure it's my right to prevent the secession of an identifiable group/country/region (the special status under Article 370 seems to suggest Jammu and Kashmir _might_ be such) against their will.

> Since the day India Abrogated Article 370 there hasn't been one major terror > attack in Kashmir.

Only six months on from abrogation I'd be somewhat reluctant to draw any firm conclusions. Based on my limited understanding, major attacks do not seem to be have been of such a frequency that you would necessarily expect one to occur within that six month period.

<comment><USER4> > the special status under Article 370 seems to suggest Jammu and Kashmir > _might_ be such

Nope. Article 370 was always a temporary provision. It was not permanent Special Status. The Act itself said that the provision was temporary and could be lifted by just Presidential Consent. And the will of the people cannot be taken into account without considering Kashmiri Pandits who are the original inhabitants of Kashmir but were kicked out by Jihadis in the 90s. Read up on Exodus and Genocide of Kashmiri Pandits. They are living as refugees in their own country. For past 30 years. Has there been a greater injustice than this? And you can see the vitriol against the Pandits in the comment section for yourself. See your sibling comment on how ridiculous some can get when it comes to the treatment meted out to the Pandits. If this is how their reaction is towards Kashmiri Pandits in the virtual world imagine what it is like on ground. They were given 3 options: Raliv, Galiv ya Chaliv which translates to Convert, Die or Leave. Another popular slogan: "Leave your women behind". You may have calls for separatism in your country but it was never on religious lines. You will never understand that pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The India government is taking action against spreading misinformation & fake news via VPN enabled social media. What is wrong here. Title is misleading and sensationalist.

<comment><USER46> For one, it's unconstitutional.

From the article:

> Mishi Choudhary, executive director of New Delhi-based Software Law and > Freedom Centre, said that the authority did not need to chase people who are > using VPNs, and should restore internet access like any other democratic > society.

"Any alleged rumors can be addressed by putting out accurate and more information through the same social media platforms. Content-based restrictions on speech can only be allowed within the restrictions established by the Constitution and not in an ad hoc manner," she said.

<comment><USER4> It isn't unconstitutional. Quote the Act that prohibits the Government from taking precautionary measures. We are dealing with a region that has seen countless terror attacks since the Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s. For the first time since August 5th there has been peace in the valley with no major terror attacks. If restrictions of communications helps attain peace then so be it. I rather communications be cut than have lives lost needlessly because some deranged lunatic decided to blow himself up in the name of his Religion. And do not forget that the Pulwama Attack is still fresh in the minds of Indians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Can anyone contribute a source which doesn't break EU regulations by forcing me to accept cookies?

<comment><USER48> Make your choice: Accept that the next time you visit they will remember you.

or

Choose not to visit.

or

Delete your cookie

or use curl

or go private browser mode

or hunt in google for the title to read the cache page

or pay someone to copy over the contents to text.

Plenty of choices. I'd go private browser mode in your case. Well I would just accept the cookie.

<comment><USER49> It's not really about the cookies - it does _not_ limit itself to "the next time you visit they will remember you" \- even in the case of private browser mode (or if deleting cookies) it won't proceed without "agreeing" to the use of cookies _and other similar technologies_ (i.e. whatever fingerprinting methods they can figure out - their privacy policy lists that they're tracking pretty much everything that I could think of, including my actions on other sites) and granting permission to a very large number of third parties to use this data in the future.

That's not reasonable. Consent must be freely given (and if provision of services is conditional on consent, then it shall be deemed not freely given), it must be opt-in and it shall be as easy to withdraw consent as it was to give it. And if your legal basis for processing data is something other than consent, then don't ask to "agree" to it, implying that this happens with consent - but in their case their privacy policy does list consent as the basis for processing this data.

Their current behavior of "surely you'll permit us to track everything" is both immoral and illegal, and it should be eliminated, not tolerated.

It's worth noting that they are an exception. While various "GDPR-banners" are quite popular, as a matter of principle, I never agree to anything on them and refuse consent to everything, and it turns out that it's not a problem for most sites, they note the preference, follow the law and it ends at that. GDPR has no issues with storing a non-personalized cookie noting that preference, which some sites do, so as not to ask every time. So the fact that Verizon Media is agressively flounting the law is not appropriate. Most of the fault probably lies with the Irish regulator, which has been far too lax in proactively policing the many international companies (including Verizon Media) which have their EU operations and their GDPR compliance domiciled in Ireland, but I'm sure we'll force things to change eventually.

<comment><USER48> In this case I don't understand.

They ask for consent. You choose to provide it.

If you are putting forward the idea that you should be able to not consent but still use the service or view the content. Anyone not providing access is doing an illegal act in Europe. I'm not sure that's fair either. You choose to visit the site.

<comment><USER49> Well, _I_ personally choose _not_ to provide it as a matter of principle, but regarding those who do click "agree" the position (both legal and moral) is that they don't really _choose_ to consent.

GDPR permits multiple legal basis of processing data (e.g. the need for data to fulfil a specific contract), but they generally don't apply to processing all kinds of semi-relevant data for targeting advertising. Consent is a legal basis under GDPR if and only if it's truly voluntary; one of the key criteria is consent being feely given. You can't "trade" something for that permission (give me consent and I'll give you X, refuse consent and I'll refuse X), it must be freely given because the user _wants_ to give that data, because they believe that it's good for them for the service provider to have and use that data. I.e. you can voluntarily choose to allow tracking for advertising purposes because in that case the ads are more relevant to you, or you can refuse that tracking if you think that this is not what you want.

So the idea is that privacy and consent to violations of privacy is not something that I can trade away (e.g. by choosing to visit a site) - it's not for sale, they can't buy it, I can't sell it. Offering something in return (e.g. the ability to visit the site) can not be a way to obtain consent. If refusing consent will result in access being revoked or some other bad consequences (e.g. losing discounts) then it's not considered a free choice. (GDPR recital 42 "... Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent _without detriment_.)

They can deny people access to the site. But if they extract a click on "I agree" by forcing to choose to click there or go away, then that click does not and should not be counted as a consent to violate people's privacy; these rights are fundamental and they can't be given away with a click or sold for some money or traded away as a point in, for example, an employment contract. Revoking access (or threatening to revoke access) to a site is not a legally (and morally) valid way to gain permission to violate the privacy all their users.

And _that_ is the intended point of GDPR - there should be no way for web companies to structure their legal or technical mechanisms in a way where they somehow obtain a permission to abuse the data of all their users. They can use some data of everyone for specific limited purposes (e.g. the legitimate need clause). They can use data for whatever purposes specific people choose to volunteer. But they do not, and should not have a way to "extract permission" to simply sell all their users privacy to third parties; nothing they can do in their privacy policy or terms and conditions or web click-throughs can provide that - the intended result is that they _can 't_ get the permission from everyone to do everything, and they actually have to stop doing many of the things they currently list in their privacy policy.

And that's what I want Verizon Media to do - it's not that they haven't done some ritual to legitimize their tracking, it's that their current tracking is fundamentally illegitimate no matter what legalese they write in their terms and conditions, and they should stop the mass invasive tracking of all their users except the minority who might intentionally opt-in for whatever reason. And if they don't stop it, they need to be forced to stop.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kickstarter switches to Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/making-payments-easier-for-creators-and-backers/ <comment><USER2> I have no experience with Stripe, but Amazon Payments was a huge pain in the ass for me when trying to set up my Kickstarter. Kickstarter verified me just by asking for a bit of personal info. When I tried making an Amazon Payments account, it locked me out after one failed attempt of verification with absolutely no reason for why it failed. I was pretty sure I should've gotten 3 attempts, but nope.

I then had to fax a bill proving I exist to Amazon in order to unlock it and try again. Got another attempt, and it locked me out once more. I then got a warning saying the next failed attempt would permanently disable my account.

Called up Amazon and they unlocked it for me. The rep was about to hang up, but I made sure she stayed on the line to walk me through the issue step-by- step. Turns out Amazon's system didn't like the way I input my street address, even though it verified just fine on Kickstarter. Verification normally takes a few hours/days to tell you that you failed, but the rep stayed on the line and made sure it went through fine that time.

Sorry for rambling on, but Amazon Payments gave me more trouble than any other payment service. Even Paypal was better. Googling for answers to my problems gave me countless results from other people who had the same mysterious problems, and it seemed many couldn't even get a response from customer service. If Stripe is even marginally better, then I'm glad they're moving on to them.

<comment><USER3> Funny how big companies continually do this.

Only a few big companies avoid doing this which is why startups will thrive until they too become big slow companies.

<comment><USER4> You can kinda tell when a process is designed around fraud prevention, rather than being designed around user experience. Big companies make big targets and so they naturally become more risk averse.

<comment><USER5> Yet they also have the resources and manpower with skills to smooth it all out if they wanted to. That is, if it's even possible; the financial system's burdens may be insurmountable to provide a good UX.

<comment><USER6> >the financial system's burdens may be ripe for someone to provide a good UX.

ftfy :)

where there's pain, there will eventually be innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm shocked that Amazon is killing off their payment service. I'm also shocked that the first I'm hearing about it is Kickstarter moving away from that platform.

From my vantage point, I can't imagine why they would kill off that service. It seems like easy money, with very little risk involved for them. The only thing I can think of is some change to the PCI rules that make it a less appealing business to be in. Anybody know why they're exiting that market? Google searches haven't turned up anything useful.

<comment><USER8> They don't say that Amazon is killing the whole payment service. Amazon just discontinued the payment product used by Kickstarter, so far I can tell.

<comment><USER7> "Late last year Amazon decided to discontinue the payments product that we have used."

I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, I'm just not sure what else that could mean. When I see a button to pay with Amazon, the button says "Amazon Payments" on it, which I, as a layman, would call the Amazon Payments product if I had to call it anything.

Of course, Kickstarter may have just misspoke. Or, like you said, it's a specific product that only applied to Kickstarter. Either way, it's quite confusing from where I'm sitting.

<comment><USER9> I think the specific "product" they are referring to is Amazon's willingness to accept the authorization at a certain point and then only actually charge the card later when Kickstarter signaled that the project was funded.

I remember hearing a long time ago that Amazon wasn't particularly happy with this arrangement, and had specifically declined to offer it to Kickstarter competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's been a number of questions in this thread about Amazon killing off a payment product. Here's an excerpt from the email I got from them back in October:

"We want to let you know that we are retiring the payment processing features of FPS as we transition to our new solution, Login and Pay with Amazon. FPS will not be available for processing payments after June 01, 2015."

FPS = Flexible Payments Service.

I've been using it on one of my sites. Yes, it's extremely annoying that they're killing it off.

<comment><USER11> this really sucks. they're pushing everyone towards the widgets-only page- integrated checkout process "Login and Pay with Amazon".

the problem here is that it kills the uniformity on our site. paypal has a leave-to-login & come-back-with-token process if you need auth-only charging or physical goods. we prefer this because our UI is the same for all payment methods, including paypal, our own processor and amazon.

<comment><USER12> Look at Amazon Simple Pay. That's what we've been using in lieu of FPS for the past few years, the process is identical to PayPal with regards to the checkout experience and integration, and it doesn't seem to be discontinued (yet).

<comment><USER11> their Simple Pay guides point to FPS functions for "advanced" usage. do you auth first and capture on shipment without relying on FPS functions (or widget checkout)?

[https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_G...](https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Getting_Started_Guide.pdf)

[https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_A...](https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Advanced_Users_Guide.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has probably been stated several times by now, but the amazon documentation is absolutely horrible. Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal all have fantastic tech and reliable services in addition to fantastic documentation. I don't have an opinion for any other payment-processing vendors.

Now for the war story: Business was focused on deploying amazon-payments because of the cheap fees. In order to change their minds, I had them call into tech support. After 3 hours and 5 hangups, business opted for another vendor. The implementation was effortless and only took me a few hours.

<comment><USER14> > Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal all have fantastic tech and reliable services > in addition to fantastic documentation.

Paypal sucks for merchants. You're basically at their whim without any legal recourse. Just see what happened to Wikileaks or hundreds of merchants having their accounts frozen and their funds locked without any real reason!

<comment><USER15> PayPal isn't really that bad. Most of the horror stories are from people breaking the terms of service (donations without getting approval, long preorders etc). Wikileaks was blocked by MasterCard.

We've been in PayPals sights a few times (we had a site bug once that double- charged a bunch of customers, and charged one customer 28 times! We had to do over 1000 chargebacks.) We got a massive rolling hold but the whole time PayPal were willing to talk to us. We've even won some customer card chargeback disputes on digital goods through PayPal.

For a short while we switched to a traditional merchant account but that was hell from day one. Aside from the paperwork to get set up, they hated the fact that 40% of our sales were outside the U.S., that our sales are highly seasonal, etc.

That said, to someone starting today, I'd still probably recommend Stripe instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this mean Stripe is extending the auth and capture timeout from 7 days? Or is this a special exemption for Kickstarter?

[https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support- aut...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-authorize- and-capture)

<comment><USER17> You don't use auth and capture -- you create a customer (with the card/token) in stripe and then create a charge against the customer.

Having a customer allows you to charge the user without entering in their info each time.

EDIT: I built beaconreader.com which is a crowdfunding site and we use stripe. One thing to note about creating customers is that on the backend Stripe (and other payment providers) tells the banks that it's a recurring charge, even if only charged once, which I believe allows them not to deal with the auth and capture step. I could be wrong, but there's something like that lets processors get away with it.

<comment><USER18> Hi zmitri: Do you have any more details on how Stripe and banks signal recurring charges. What you're describing sounds interesting, but with our app we see decent churn from the use of debit visa/mastercards

<comment><USER17> No details whatsoever but I can across this because customers at certain banks asked why their one time charges were showing up as recurring in their bank statements. I emailed in to stripe asking what was up and they let me know it was standard practice to do that, and it would do so if I used a stripe customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this mean Canadians (and other non-Americans) can finally launch a Kickstarter denominated in USD ?

From what I understand, unlike Amazon Payments which required a physical US address, to accept USD Stripe only requires a bank account denominated in US funds.

<comment><USER20> _To accept USD Stripe only requires a bank account denominated in US funds._

I can confirm this is the case. We're a Canadian company and we have a USD account within our RBC business account. A week after getting a charge processed through Stripe, the funds end up in the USD account.

<comment><USER21> Does your Canadian USD account have access to the US domestic payments system, so you could make deposits into it over ACH with a routing number and account number?

Back in Denmark I had a USD account, but it could only send and receive USD by SWIFT wire transfer, so it wouldn't function in the same way as an American USD account.

<comment><USER20> _Does your Canadian USD account have access to the US domestic payments system, so you could make deposits into it over ACH with a routing number and account number?_

Don't quote me on it, but I think deposits can be made to it through ACH. The relationship in transferring funds between Canadian and American banks is only quasi-international.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised Kickstarter needs a payments partner at all. They are a pretty big business.

In fact, I think they already did charges directly for non-US backers.

<comment><USER23> Processing credit card transactions is a hard enough problem that it rarely makes sense for any non-payments company to do it themselves. Dropbox and Airbnb use Braintree (a Stripe competitor) for payments, and they are both much bigger than Kickstarter. Even Twitter and Facebook have been known to use Stripe for various products, and they are obviously much bigger than Kickstarter as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> With Stripe's straight-forward pricing at 2.9% + $0.30, I don't understand the pricing ambiguity here:

"and Stripe, our payments processor, will apply credit card processing fees (about 3-5%)."

Why 3-5%? Is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER25> Last time I looked 'crowdfunding' was on the prohibited businesses list for Stripe.

Kickstarter might have cut a deal to pay a higher percentage in order to be allowed to use Stripe.

<comment><USER26> That hysterical because my Kickstarter got denied because they said my project was 'prohibited' because it was a financial service. It's actually an Open Source project: [https://www.github.com/stackmonkey](https://www.github.com/stackmonkey).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The biggest shock is that Stripe is used by Facebook and Twitter. I had no idea!

<comment><USER28> What? Facebook uses Stripe for their entire payments system? Even the ads?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It looks like Amazon discontinued WebPay (person-to-person payments) in October 2014. Maybe Kickstarter was using that (or an API version of it) to pay the funds from themselves to the project organizers?

[https://payments.amazon.com/help/76056](https://payments.amazon.com/help/76056)

<comment><USER29> I imagine they were using Amazon Flexible Payments, which is being sunset in a few months. I am glad to hear that other groups using Flexible Payments have decided to jump ship from Amazon rather than continue to migrate to Amazon's replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome. This fixes one of my least favorite things about Kickstarter both as a project creator and backer.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's amazing that a company switching their payment processor is this big of news. It really says something about the state of payments right now, it's exciting!

<comment><USER32> Not really, it's more of a win for Stripe, a YC company, so it's news for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Stripe are so successful! Truly a great example of developing a product which is at least one order of magnitude better than the competitors.

</comment><comment><USER34> I tried backing a kick starter once (the oculus one actually) but Amazon gave me a bunch of problems. I ended up giving up. I'm glad they're changing, I might actually try backing something again in the future.

</comment><comment><USER35> As someone who has built products that used both Amazon Payments and Stripe, I have to say this is definitely the right move, even if the impetus was that the former service is meeting its end.

I built essentially a Kickstarter copycat in all but positioning and the amount of work involved there was dramatically more difficult than setting up a non-trivial implementation of Stripe marketplaces. But the developer pain is not nearly as strong as the customer pain. Amazon sucked for creators, and Stripe is pretty painless.

The right move, and further cements Stripe as the rightful market leader.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like good news. I can understand why they would choose amazon payments since amazon has more credit cards on file than anybody else including Paypal. But Amazon payments or Paypal (I am not referring to their gateway offering) is often something you use to complement a more classical credit card processor (i.e. users are able to input their CC infos directly on your site) like Stripe or Authorize.net. I really do not understand, until now, their choice of going exclusively with Amazon Payments for all this time. Preferred rates maybe?

</comment><comment><USER17> Took 'em long enough.

Only downside is that Amazon has smaller fees for micropayments than other payment providers at 2% + $0.05 for debit cards and 5% + $0.05 for credit.

For comparison, Stripe has a rate of 2.9% + 30¢ -- but I'm sure KS will get a better deal due to the magnitude of their throughput.

Given that the average pledge size is $25 it won't that much of a problem, but any of those $1 pledges are close to halved from KS+Stripe fees before they get to the creator.

<comment><USER37> Our average pledge is actually closer to $75 and the median pledge varies between $25 and $30.

Source: [https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats](https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats)

<comment><USER17> I saw it here: [https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards](https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards)

I read too quickly though, $25 is most popular reward level, $75 is average. Either way, it shouldn't be a big deal since it's much higher :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great news. As a 2x Kickstarter creator and having backed dozens of projects the Amazon payment process has always been the worst part of the experience.

</comment><comment><USER39> Stripe is a great company to work with. I am part of the team that runs [https://cottonbureau.com](https://cottonbureau.com), a crowd funded apparel site.

We launched with Amazon in 2013 and quickly transitioned to Stripe after only two weeks with Amazon. It has been smooth sailing ever since. The APIs, customer support, and overall ease of use make this the right move for Kickstarter too.

</comment><comment><USER40> > We've worked with Amazon Payments from the very beginning of Kickstarter — a > year before we launched, in fact. They've been an excellent partner, > processing $1 billion in pledges. Late last year Amazon decided to > discontinue the payments product that we have used.

Killing a payments product that racked up $1bn+ in payments boggles my mind. That is a level of profit to /keep/ a product, come what may.

<comment><USER41> $1b+ in payment was processed, which is far and much different than $1b+ in profit. We don't know what the margin is on that.

<comment><USER42> If you cant find a way to make money on a billion dollars going though your service you are doing something wrong...

<comment><USER43> Presumably the feature that is being discontinued is for authorising payments that aren't actually taken until later in the future. I could certainly imagine this has a disproportionately high support cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Kickstarter-like services with both a payer and a recipient are exactly the kind of case where I hope cryptocurrencies can contribute and unlock all sorts of unfulfilled potential.

People who have only been on the customer side and are in the (small) majority that haven't encountered major problems think credit card systems are working fine. The truth is that there are major problems. First, the fees are substantial and even prohibitive for some types of services. Second, fraud including "friendly" fraud is prohibitively expensive in some industries such as those selling highly re-sellable items and/or accepting payments from certain countries. There are various vague arbitrary rules that fall under anti-fraud or anti-money laundering imposed by payment processors, bank or jurisdiction (which is ambiguous) that can suddenly deal a mortal blow to the service. Things are often dealt with callously penalizing people for being statistically suspicious.

The downside is the loss of all the fraud protection and guarantees offered by CCs. But, the onus moves to the wallet owner who is really the only person who can do something about it.

I wonder, can you start or contribute to a kickstarter in Nigeria or is that whole country effectively banned?

</comment><comment><USER45> Do I understand this correctly that you need a credit card to support a Kickstarter project?

Different countries have a different credit card culture. In the USA you absolutely need one. In Germany you can find a lot of people who don't have one just because you don't need it in your day to day life.

<comment><USER46> Do you mean they pay everything cash or they use debit/atm cards? In Europe these cards usually still work with the VISA or Mastercard networks.

<comment><USER47> For internet transactions a lot of ppl use payment from they internet banks. Debit cards are mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is one of the top things people always asked Kickstarter. In general Braintree now seems like a better choice since it lets people pay with Payapl. Though I don't know if it could meet Kickstarter's needs to hold onto the money until a certain point.

</comment><comment><USER49> All - Could you please share what credit card processor you are using? I tried 2Checkout but they are asking me to remove certain features from my website which I can't do. I can't let a bank be the product manager of my website.

<comment><USER50> We use Stripe and couldn't be happier. They're excellent in all respects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just to state something a bit different from the herd: I use Amazon Payments (not FPS) for LiberWriter, and I'm happy with it. It makes particular sense since our customers have to have an Amazon account in any case.

</comment><comment><USER52> So happy about this. Hated having to pay through Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER53> Does this mean that you no longer have to to be in US/UK/Canada for starting a campaign on Kickstarter?

</comment><comment><USER54> I was going to support the new 3doodler project after their launch email calling in for support, and then I saw that I needed my credit card at the payment step. I figured, they could reach their goal without me anyway...

<comment><USER55> How did you expect to pay?

<comment><USER14> If he's European, uh, we use things like inter-bank (SEPA) payments (prepaid) - usually arrives within one banking day, when both use the same bank or bank group, even instant. Or SEPA invoices where I as the customer only have to input my IBAN account number and be done. Or (not applicable here) pay when the postman arrives with the package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Wonder if WePay was allowed to bid on it.

</comment><comment><USER57> Ugh, stripe is a royal pain to use, horrible direction for kickstarter

<comment><USER23> I've had a totally opposite experience. Stripe has been amazing for us. Clean API, good documentation, a slick dashboard, responsive support team, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I am very surprised Amazon is killing payments.

All in all though, this means I will be _much_ less likely to support any Kickstarters.

With Amazon Payments, I did not have to re-enter my CC#. Backing a project became an impulse buy. Click, type PW, done.

Now I have to go get my wallet, type in a bunch of information, which gives me a LOT longer to think about if I really want to back a project or not.

Indeed the primary reason I use Kickstarter over other funding websites is because I don't have to re-enter that payment information so often.

<comment><USER59> There's a "Remember this card for future pledges" checkbox. So if you value having your CC saved, you can keep that feature.

<comment><USER60> But this is then an extra place where his credit card details are stored, and he may not have decided to trust Stripe like that yet.

<comment><USER61> What Kickstarter save is a unique token, ex. da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 (not a real token, just an example).

The token can only be used with the private / public key pairs that Stripe provided to them, so even if a hacker got access to Kickstarter's database, they would still need the private/public keys to make use of the tokens.

Also, my expectations are that only whitelisted IPs should be able to access Stripe with the key pairs of Kickstarter.

<comment><USER62> Not only that. The hacker could only use the token to transfer money between you and KickStarter, not to another account. So unless they also had access to make withdrawals from KickStarter - they couldn't do anything useful other than annoy KickStarter with a bunch of erroneous charges.

<comment><USER61> Haha, I forgot to mention that.

Basically, the only important information Kickstarter gets from any card are the last 4 digits, whether it's Visa, Master Card, AMEX, etc., and the expiration date.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ashley Madison hack treating email - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/V5tmcFXq <comment><USER2> Thankfully it looks like no one has paid the scammer [https://blockchain.info/address/1StimU1BDBeZyrHzdK6wvK3bbfP9...](https://blockchain.info/address/1StimU1BDBeZyrHzdK6wvK3bbfP9Dgb38)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was received on public email for one of my bitcoin-related projects. (and no, this email was not used on AM =))

<comment><USER3> Received same email on email I used for bitcoin related services

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is either de facto extortion or a scam making one think it is extortion.</comment>


What the Hell Was Megadeth, Arizona? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cuepoint/what-the-hell-was-megadeth-arizona-3519a751149d

<comment><USER2> Megadeth's 'Youthanasia' was their first radio-friendly album, riding of the success of 1992's 'Countdown to Extinction', which was their most commercially successful album.

I discovered Megadeth in the 2000's and they quickly became my favorite band. I haven't kept up with them very much in recent years, but the band and the fans have always had a tight-knit community on the internet. It's interesting to see the impact that 'Megadeth, Arizona' had on the WWW at the time. We've really come a long way in the last 20 years.</comment>


MIPS Acquired by AI Hardware Vendor Wave Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/12989/mips-acquired-by-wave-computing <comment><USER2> More discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17312244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17312244)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone explain why arm dominated mips? Why is arm better for embedded? Why no mips phones for example?</comment>


The Untold Story of How the Apple Store Cube Landed in Midtown (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/story-behind-the-apple-store-cube.html <comment><AUTHOR> The store never closes and is very busy.</comment>


Donald Trump to Americans: Go Incorporate Yourself - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/11/22/donald-trump-to-americans-go-incorporate-yourself/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> Corporations are people, why not come full circle and make all people corporations at birth. Black is white, up is down.</comment>


Comparing Ember and Angular - <AUTHOR> http://www.benlesh.com/2014/04/embular-part-1-comparing-ember-and.html?spref=tw <comment><USER2> People claiming that framework size doesn't matter is a bit of a pet peeve for me: download size may not matter once the files are cached, but the uncompressed size still translates directly to how much code the browser needs to parse and execute on every page load, and may also negatively affect the weight of execution payloads across operations in your app.

These costs are not as small as you might expect. The performance tests I put on the Mithril ( [http://lhorie.github.io/mithril](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril) ) site illustrate this problem. I don't have Ember there, but if anyone more familiar with it would like to contribute (the rendering test is really simple), that would be most welcome.

There's another independent test here ( [http://jsperf.com/angular-vs- knockout-vs-ember/292](http://jsperf.com/angular-vs-knockout-vs-ember/292) ), which actually surprised me.

<comment><USER3> I think its important to note with the perf test and download size stuff that the frameworks that are bigger/slower to render provide more functionality and more templating options respectively. Thats not to say they're better, but just trying to clarify the tradeoffs under discussion.

<comment><USER2> That's not necessarily true. I can't speak for the jsperf test since it's not mine, but for the Mithril site tests, I exclude "optional-but-not-really" things like Marionette and ngRoute/ngResource/friends from the tests (whereas I include the entirety of Mithril - templating engine, router, etc) to try and tilt the tests in other frameworks' favor.

Sure one could argue that Angular has filters or whatever, but hey with Mithril you can express templating things that you can't with Angular (e.g. tables with nested loops, or w/ for-else constructs), so it's not really a apples to apple trucks comparison. With an order of magnitude more code, one has to wonder how much of that extra code is more functionality and how much is just bloat.

<comment><USER4> A big factor here is that Mithril describes templates programmatically rather than strings of data. It's the difference between:

      function render() { eval("(function () {}());"); }

and

      function render() { (function () {}()); }

These are going to run at much different speeds because one involves parsing multiple times while the other only needs to be parsed once. The tradeoff is some complexity (though there's also more flexibility too).

          {{item.x}}

      m("ul.foo", [
        items.map(function (item) {
          m("li", item.x);
        });
      ]);

<comment><USER2> Yep. I'd argue that Angular is far more complex though, with its `track by $index` and `ng-repeat-start`/`ng-repeat-end` and the scoping implications of caching filtered expressions in the view and the `ng-init` watcher trap and all that. But I digress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As somebody who has built actual applications with both Ember and Angular, I think this article totally hits the nail right on the head.

Though, in regards to the "Angular is backed by Google" comment, while they don't actually "back Ember" in the same way Google "backs Angular", it seems that a ton of large companies are also invested in Ember ([http://emberjs.com/ember-users/](http://emberjs.com/ember-users/))!

And, I know the Ember folks are really proud of the community they've built as well. I theorize that Ember's lack of a single corporate backer is what has enabled its incredible community to flourish.

<comment><USER6> Ember:

      * Yahoo
      * Square
      * Vine
      * NBC News (front page)
      * Netflix (real time tools)[1]
      * Zendesk
      * Groupon
      * Twitch
      * CodeSchool
      * Urbanspoon
      * Discourse
      * TravisCI
      * Ghost

Angular:

      * DoubleClick
      * MSNBC (front page)
      * BBC [2]
      * The Guardian [3]
      * Huffington Post [4]
      * Udacity [5]
      * Desk.com [6]
      * Plunker

Please reply if you know more, would love to build out a real census of who's using what

[1] - [https://twitter.com/ebryn/status/433402427979493377](https://twitter.com/ebryn/status/433402427979493377)

[2] - [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Building-BBC- Live](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Building-BBC-Live)

[3] - [https://github.com/guardian/guardian.github.com/blob/master/...](https://github.com/guardian/guardian.github.com/blob/master/developers/about.md)

[4] - [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-pavley/huffpost- content-m...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-pavley/huffpost-content- management-system_b_3739572.html)

[5] - [http://www.quora.com/Udacity/What-is-Udacitys-technology- sta...](http://www.quora.com/Udacity/What-is-Udacitys-technology-stack)

[6] - [http://www.desk.com/careers/angular- engineer](http://www.desk.com/careers/angular-engineer)

<comment><USER7> Couple more for Angular:

* MSNBC

* Plunker

<comment><USER8> Looks like also SpaceX is using Angular: [https://www.angularjobs.com/posts/752-angularjs-developer- at...](https://www.angularjobs.com/posts/752-angularjs-developer-at-spacex-in- hawthorne-ca)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I kind of can't believe he called Angular easy to learn. One of the most common things you hear about it is the steep learning curve, which is not helped by the docs (the skimpiness of which is another frequent lament). In my experience Angular is learned by Googling problems you have, which are then explained in Stack Overflow posts.

As an aside - this is something I've hardped on before, but I just really think it is not helpful to anyone to use examples whose names are so abstract:

        ng-click="foo = 'bar'; blah(foo + bar + '!!!); shazbot = nanoo && nanoo"

This is meant as an example of something you should not do. But it's nonsense - it's quotes and semicolons separated by meaningless names. Of course that is the point, but in turn that is my point - give a better example, one that models something one may do in the real world but should not, so that the person reading the example actually understands what not to do. Instead of that, something like this:

        ng-click="shoppingCartId = 52; initCart(52); var myShop = new Shop();"

People know what shopping carts are. "shazbot" and "nanoo nanoo" are whimsical references to an old sitcom. Entertaining to the author, perhaps, but not helpful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Re:

> _Ember 's routing is just flat out better than anything else I've seen out > there._

I'm the lead developer of ui-router. I've read everything I can about Ember's router, and I just don't get it. Barring some boilerplate-saving conventions (we don't offer any, but we do offer APIs that let you roll your own pretty easily), could someone explain to me what the big deal is?

Also, re: the score-keeping thread, I know Angular is used extensively within the BBC.

<comment><USER11> I just recently started using Angular, but ui-router definitely gave me a bit of trouble. I had to dig through StackOverflow to find answers to questions like how to enforce that certain views must only be accessed when the user is logged in. Another bit of trouble I had was doing things like logging the user out, then immediately redirecting them to the login page. Had to redirect then to the home page so that the state change hijacking code fired and redirected a second time.

I can definitely see that ui-router is a valuable component and it's very powerful, but perhaps I have not achieved the zen of it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used both and I much prefer Angular, more flexible and I find the simple object approach way easier to understand than the getters/setters.

If you worry that much about difficulty of maintenance because someone is calling their controller SomethingCtrl and another one SomethingController, you can choose one and enforce it during code reviews.

I guess it's down to whether you prefer doing things your own way or having to follow their structure.

Also not having some random divs popping up in your html is nice.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have worked for both Ember and Angular...i prefer Angular for personal projects and Ember in my company. Reason is simple. With Angular , you can write code in many ways. If code goes to maintainance, it gonna get messed up. With Ember, unless you use lot of jquery, that issue not gonna rise. I am waiting for HTMLbars too.

</comment><comment><USER14> Been using Angular for 10+ months now, it's been a great ride and has saved 1000's of hours.

Feel like I should try out Ember over the weekend.

The HTML mustache style puts me off though I have to admit!

<comment><USER15> Maybe, but were those 1000's of hours saved the ones where you should have been learning how to use JS, HTML and CSS?

<comment><USER16> How can anyone do 10+ months of front-end web development without knowing all three (well)?

<comment><USER15> I've seen it a lot. If they knew what they were doing it'd have been done in 3.

<comment><USER16> What would have been done in 3? What are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a discussion playing out in our development team at the moment.

The one thing we've observed that he touches on in mentioning that Angular is backed by Google but doesn't really go into as much as he might, is that it feels like Angular has more momentum generally in the developer community - more posts on StackOverflow and more Git activity, plus more job ads.

If you're in it for the long haul that may be a significant factor.

<comment><USER18> > The one thing we've observed that he touches on in mentioning that Angular > is backed by Google but doesn't really go into as much as he might, is that > it feels like Angular has more momentum generally in the developer community > - more posts on StackOverflow and more Git activity, plus more job ads.

This is true, however:

\- Angular is considered by both it's supporters and detractors to be very complex and it's documentation a little difficult. I've used Angular for some older production projects, and used ractive.js about 5x more newer projects, and I've searched/asked more questions for Angular.

\- A lot of people think Google, rather than Getangular LLC, created Angular. I've also met a lot of people who think Angular is popular inside Google, or that Angular is used for Google+, both of which are incorrect.

The fact Ember is so popular despite the 'by Google' misconception around Angular actually makes me quite confident about Ember.

My Ember knowledge, BTW is limited, I went angular -> ractive.js, so there may be ember downsides I'm not aware of. Ember's new htmlbars templating looks really clean though, so I'm pretty excited to try ember once it's the default.

<comment><USER17> My personal view is the supported by Google isn't as robust a defence as some would like to believe - after all, it's not as if they don't have a history of dropping things with little or no warning.

<comment><USER19> It seems kind of a weak point it me, in way. The fact that Ember is around kinds speaks that it is quite good -- it didn't need a full time corporate backer to rise up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have worked a bit with angular lately, and am now knee deep into my first ember project (with ember-cli).

I agree with a lot of the points made in this Series, a really good write up.

In Ember I feel I have to write a bit more boilerplate around dealing with collections, (i.e. sorting).

Can't wait for HTMLBars, the script tags littered around the dom are just not very nice, and I find myself using :last-of-type CSS selectors and the likes a lot.

I also think that the directives in angular just work nicer than the components in ember, because there is more control over what's bound into their scope.

Ember's approach to structure is great though, and the router is really nice to work with, much much nicer than ui-router.

Both are great frameworks though, and I really appreciate the work of both teams to give me great tools like this to work with.

</comment><comment><USER21> Choice is good , monoculture is not. The more frameworks we have to choose from,the better it is.

I personally prefer the configuration over conventions thing,because I dont like magics,but I understand that kind of pragmatism.

<comment><USER15> If that were true, two poor frameworks would be better than one good one. Luckily we have 50 poor ones.

<comment><USER21> the black or white argument is of course a logical fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Was hoping in his comparison of download size that he'd mention the total size of all included libraries. I've not used either yet (only watched some talks, etc), but have noticed a few times Yehuda argue that Ember is bigger because it includes a lot of functionality you would use 3rd party libraries for in Angular. E.g., if you add up all the libraries _most_ people use with Angular, that are included out of the box in Ember, they'd be similar.

Does that hold any water?

<comment><USER23> It really depends what you need. I just launched a pretty trivial Angular app, which required ngRoute and a local storage interface. Total size of the three: 112.7k. All the standard-issue angular modules put together amount to 129k.

For non-trivial stuff, I'm sure people need a bunch more extras, third party libraries and so on. But it's a pretty major bonus for Angular that you can use it productively either for a full SPA, or for the kind of trivialities that one typically duct-tapes together with jquery. The small-ish size (I know, not THAT small) is part of that, but so is the flexible and modular design.

Not that I dislike Ember - it's very nice. And I am in the fortunate position at the moment where page-load size is not a huge concern (or rather, a battle that has already been lost before I clock in).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't know if it's just me but I've found that when I just use regular javascript or jQuery or specific javascript libraries that I only need, I am able to produce something faster and with far less frustration of having to learn MVC on the client side which I feel is enough for server side but not the client side.

I used backbone.js for days where as something I could've done within hours in jQuery and ajax with Python flask running in the background.

Not only that you need build automation, dependency manager, phantomjs static html renderer...it's really more than I can deal with and feel that this extra overhead doesn't really bring much to the table more like work for work itself is created to boost the credibility of such work.

<comment><USER25> For small projects, you can certainly get stuff done more quickly with native JS and/or jQuery.

Once you get past a certain number of developers, or project size, are framework really shines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Damn just as I was reading that our corp firewall blocked the domain for hosting malicious content (it's usually over zealous)...

</comment><comment><USER27> How's this for a revolutionary idea: The server sends text hat can be rendered on any device with minimal resource usage, can be cached, can be parsed by robots, and even formatted by the user.

Rendering pages in javascript just wastes the user's computing resources (and opens them up to nice vulns) and prevents search engines from indexing your content.

<comment><USER11> Cool. How do you provide instantaneous feedback with this system? As in, if the user has a list of items with delete buttons, and you want to remove the item from the list as soon as the user clicks the X? Think about using your browser and having it reload every toolbar and menu every time you clicked on something.

All sarcasm aside, plain HTML has plenty of great uses, but just because you don't see a reason for client-side apps does not mean that they don't exist.

<comment><USER28> Can you not use AJAX through jQuery to gain this instant feedback? Do I really need to load an additional library to send and receive data to the server and update the UI, when I can already do that through jQuery?

This is an aspect of the HTML vs JS rendered page debate I'm still trying to wrap my head around. I understand really large and complex applications need libraries like Angular, Ember, React, and the like to render their pages with JS.

But what is so backwards and old-school about rendering HTML server side and then manipulating the HTML client side with a thin layer of JS and AJAX?

It feels as if the debate is between plain vanilla HTML pages and highly complex JS rendering, without any middle ground and integrating the benefits of both.

EDIT: Thank you for the responses. I'm genuinely trying to understand the pro and cons – of not just each framework – but of the methodologies in general, and your answers help.

<comment><USER3> Sure. And if you display a count of the number of items in the list, you can update that with jQuery too. Are there other dependencies? Maybe if the list gets too small there's supposed to be a warning message or something shown? I can check the list size each time with jQuery and display/hide the message if necessary.

Eventually as these side effects pile up, jQuery by itself becomes a mess. You have a ton of checks and complex behaviors after each user event.

Or I can provide some structure on the front end so that I can model my data in a reasonable way and have the DOM respond based on changes to that model. Obviously for stuff thats mostly static, server-side rendering is better. But when you're displaying stuff that includes complex relationships and behaviors, modeling it on the client side becomes an important part of maintainability. This doesn't have to be complicated. Backbone is certainly not complicated. But it is the best option if you want to have complex UI behavior tied to an underlying model and need responsive UI feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ring - a new approach to gestures - <AUTHOR> http://logbar.jp/ring/

<comment><USER2> Good foresight .</comment>


Online Advertising's Shady Core: Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Enabled by the MagicalHypeFactory (aka Google), Bing, Yahoo! etc. as explained in the article.</comment>


GWEI: Plot to make Google eat itself - <AUTHOR> http://gwei.org/index.php <comment><USER2> What I found surprising about that is that they apparently already own about half a million dollars worth of Google stock. I was expecting something far more toyish.

<comment><USER3> This site is quite old and is actually an art-project started in 2004 or 2005 (just Google for 'ubermorgen' in combination with 'google will eat itself'). At this time the price of the shares was much lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is funny but it shouldn't really be possible for it to actually work. Every time they get a payout Google has almost certainly profited more from the same activity, assuming their margin on ads is higher than what they pay out to adsense users. So every time they make money they add more than that to the total value of Google, ensuring they could never buy 100% of it.

<comment><USER5> Well the revenue share from AdSense was revealed to be in the 65% range. So given a poor profitability by Google in the next few million years, it could still work.

<comment><USER4> According to this:

[http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue- share.ht...](http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html)

it's 68%. Wow, I wasn't expecting google to pay out quite so much.

At those percentages it actually becomes possible. Depending on how profitable the sites and Google are at serving the content and the ads (respectively) it could work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The news page was last updated in 2007... Is that because the system is just plodding along running itself, or because this experiment was all over and done 4 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER7> They write about their own methods:

"Now we have set up [...] Adsense-Accounts [...]. Each time someone visits a Web-Sites within our network of sites, he/she triggers a series of robots. For each click we receive a micropaiment from Google."

Robots? For clicks? That would mean, that they are stealing money from AdWords advertisers.

Did I overlook something?

<comment><USER8> Looks like a quick way for Google to make a share buyback this way for nothing after legal action costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are all Google's share's on the market? I think the IPO was only for a part of the company, right?

<comment><USER10> Indeed. Most of the stock is held by the founders and not currently for sale.

<comment><USER11> In addition, the type of shares on the market have less voting power than what Larry, Sergey, and Eric have. From their most recent yearly report (10-K)[1]:

"Our Class B common stock has 10 votes per share and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. As of January 31, 2011, Larry, Sergey, and Eric owned approximately 91% of our outstanding Class B common stock, representing approximately 67% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. Larry, Sergey, and Eric therefore have significant influence over management and affairs and over all matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of directors and significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or our assets, for the foreseeable future."

So while this "Google Eats Itself" thing may accumulate a fair amount of Google shares and be worth a lot, it won't really give them any power over the company.

[1] [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125110...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312511032930/d10k.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is surprising and somewhat ironic to me that these guys have a pagerank of 5. I mean, for this to work they'd require legitimate websites that generate significant ad revenue, that they could afford to keep pouring in Google stock (instead of, say, buying a Maserati).

A WHOIS shows the owner as a guy called Hans Bernhard at ubermorgen.com.

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

Apparently gwei is supposed to be "conceptual art" project, which explains why so many legitimate sites link to it. If you look around it's been mentioned in Daring Fireball and other legitimate sites as an interesting "conceptual hack". Probably it's Hans Bernhard's other projects that serve as the "hidden Web-Sites" that power gwei.

Either that, or the five hundred Gs is just a number fabricated by a webmaster who insists on using obnoxious flashing backgrounds.

Either way, I doubt gwei was supposed to be a project seriously bent on taking over Google. It's just modern art!

</comment><comment><USER13> OMG. blinking background! Irritating.

If you want to read those content, disable the stylesheets using "Web Developer Tool".

</comment><comment><USER14> according to their own calculations [<http://gwei.org/pages/google/googleshare.php>]: 202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google.

looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like a hoax to me.

If not, it's pretty mean to the advertisers (and possibly criminal).

<comment><USER7> Why does this get downvoted?

GWEI write on their web site that they are using "robots" for "clicks". If that is the case, it would be criminal, since they would be stealing money from AdWords advertisers.

I don't think its true though, because those kind of accounts usually get banned quickly and the advertisers get their money back.</comment></comment>


Disturbing Scientific Discoveries  - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/93785079.html

<comment><USER2> It's the comments I find the most disturbing about that article.

<comment><USER3> From one of those comments:

 _I'm still a teenager, so I've got plenty of time. Who am I to say it's wrong or right? For the most part I believe everything here, but that's because of what I see with the media and everything. This is good. :)_

No you whipper-snapper, it's _not_ good.

Sweeping generalisation: I weep for the teenager of today.

<comment><USER4> Give it 20 years, they'll come around to your point of view eventually.

At least they're interested, that's a beginning.

Apathy is a much bigger problem than being still an uncritical consumer.

I remember the first time I had first hand knowledge of an event that was covered by the media, and how much my personal, eye-witness experience deviated from what I read in the newspaper and saw on TV the next day.

It was a moment of absolute amazement, and then I suddenly realized I'd probably been duped to a greater or lesser extent for years about any number of things.

<comment><USER5> Maybe, but from my observations being apathetic and being uncritical are closely related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally I find Godel incompleteness to be a far more disturbing discovery than any of the things listed in the article. Something about a fundamental limitation on deductive systems just scares the hell out of me.

<comment><USER7> Godel's theorem implies that in a consistent system there are unprovable truths. I've always wondered if those truths could be things no one would care about anyway. Are statements like "this statement is unprovable" useful for anything other than proving the Incompleteness theorem?

<comment><USER8> The halting problem seems kind of important. Also, at least two of Hilbert's problems -- the continuum hypothesis and solving general Diophantine equations -- turned out to be undecidable (the latter because it reduces to the halting problem.)

Edit: Er, actually, the Diophantine equation question would be uncomputable (like the halting problem), not undecidable. The ideas are closely related, though.

<comment><USER7> I meant statements which state that the statement itself is unprovable. Or are you saying that the halting problem exists because of incompleteness?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen I remember Keats and the whole truth is beauty, beauty truth thing. I feel like it's actually, truth is ugly, always. I mean, have you ever found out the truth and not been disappointed?

<comment><USER9> Have you ever proved a mathematical theorem on your own?

<comment> daniel-cussen Yes; that's actually a pretty good counterpoint. But what about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem? That is a mindbreaker.

<comment><USER10> _what about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem? That is a mindbreaker_

Why? If I had to guess, I would say you are uncomfortable with intrinsic uncertainty. Or is it something else?

<comment> daniel-cussen Well, to begin with, it's set theory, which is notable for driving at least one person mad, and further, it's one of the more unsettling parts of set theory. And I mean actually working through it, not just knowing about it. But reading it over, "mindbreaker" is clumsy; perhaps "disturbing" or, better yet, "unsettling" would be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some of these aren't even scientific discoveries:

\- We've already changed the climate for the rest of this century \- There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we're probably in one now.

Seriously?

<comment><USER12> Yes, seriously. Realize that most of the doubt about climate change is engineered by astroturfing campaigns and financed by oil companies.

Among the actual scientists, the overwhelming consensus is that climate change is happening on a scale that is threatening, and to a significant extent caused by humans.

<comment><USER11> That is great! But the point is that this a prediction into the future and is not a fact. A fact is something that you can prove, and you can not prove the future. If you can, come talk to me we can start a business :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone finds that list disturbing then they really need to get out more.

Personally, I find what people capable of in our darker moments disturbing, but science is essentially the antidote for that. Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" being strongly recommended:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World>

</comment><comment><USER14> "c², or the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, which equals 34,700,983,524."

Does that number actually tell anyone anything?

<comment><USER12> It tells people that (because it's such a huge number) "a little" mass contains "a lot" of energy. The actual number and unit isn't really important to get that point across.

<comment><USER14> The point was that as mph is quite arbitrary unit it is practically impossible to see the amount of energy. If the speed of light was given in m/s then the amount of energy would have been easy to see. ie E = mc². c = 300 × 10^6 m/s, c² = 9 × 10^16 (m/s)², so with that equation 1kg of mass actually contains approximately 9 × 10^16 joules of energy which is a lot.

What would the equivalent thought process be in imperial units? Lets say you have 1 lb of mass and want to figure out the amount of energy contained in it with the equation E = mc² and c² being 3.47 × 10^10 miles per second, just to know the scale of things (which was kinda the point in the article imho). How would you do that?

edit: Another point of view: velocity and kinetic energy. E = 0.5mv², that should be familiar to anyone familiar to physics. So with a velocity of 5.5 × 10^9 inches per year you don't need a lot of mass to have a lot of energy, because the multiplier is so huge, right?

<comment><USER12> The point was that the text is intended to be understandable by people who are _not_ necessarily familiar with physics, who don't have the faintest idea what a joule is and who wouldn't even understand scientific notation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A bit of a correction: dark matter isn't "exotic". It's the most common form of matter there is.

</comment><comment><USER16> This article is going to sound really silly when archaeologists dust off the bits in 500 years.

</comment><comment><USER17> At least bacon is good :)</comment>


Cyborg Soothsayers of the High-Tech Hogwash Emporia - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/cyborg-soothsayers

<comment><USER2> TL;DR:

This piece is an exploration -- explicit/intentional or not -- of how countercultural, SF, and neo-pagan concepts like transhumanism, post-humanism, superhumans, sci-fi concepts, and visionary futurism have been co-opted for economic and political power by a certain segment of Silicon Valley and its wider diaspora.</comment>


How important are human-readable slug components in a social platform's urls? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a new social platform and we were discussing our url structure. I've noticed that sites like HN, youtube, facebook, and vine use only some type of encoded url fragment and that's it.
e.g. https://vine.co/v/e0mQeEep1IJ
Whereas reddit and others use an encoded fragment AND an optional human-readable component.
e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3oc22e/this_guys_facial_hair_makes_it_look_like_he_has_a/
Is it safe to use only the encoded fragment and not include the human-readable part? The only reason we considered the human-readable part is for SEO purposes but is that even important at this point?
Any info appreciated thanks! <comment><USER2> I am more likely to follow links with a human-readable slug because it acts as a double-check that I'm not being baited by the link text. For example, if the text is "You'll never guess what this guy has on his face" and the slug says "this_guys_facial_hair", then I have a better idea of what I'm going to get into.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a good argument for using human readable slug.. definitely</comment></comment>


Learning more about Generation M  - <AUTHOR> http://methainternet.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/learning-more-about-generation-m/ <comment><USER2> I like Generation Y as a name not because it's overly meaningful, but because I hope that Generations X, Y, and Z will be the last generations of humanity and that the names will make sense in retrospect.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y></comment>


Y Combinator CEO Michael Siebel AMA on Whale - <AUTHOR> https://askwhale.com/p/f85232/ <comment><USER2> No way I am going to watch 45 seconds videos when it would take me 10 seconds to read the answer.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm super interested in this and love AMAs on reddit, but video is just so much more annoying than text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's this fascination with video over text?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is "Whale" a ycombinator backed company?

<comment><USER6> At very least it looks like it is founded by Justin Kan (Twitch, etc.), who is a YC partner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "This video requires 8 coins to watch."

Yawn.</comment>


Show HN: ReactJS – Iframe component with maximise to fullscreen button - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/mjunaidi/pen/BaNjwKw <comment><USER2> Handy! I like seeing all these little problems solved in React JS, and its good UI inspiration.</comment>


Supreme Court ruling may limit class-action consumer lawsuits - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/sc-dc-0428-court-class-action-web-20110427,0,1239412.story

<comment><USER2> How come when the Court enforces a bad law, people look at the court not the law?</comment>


Pizza delivered by drone - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0if2PM6OBrI

<comment><USER2> They did a nice job with the video, but the concept is unrealistic for a few more years. The drone can't navigate autonomously via GPS through all those obstacles.</comment>


Empirical open source lib review processes - <AUTHOR>

What standard processes do companies use to empirically review different open source library options in order to come to the best decision? <comment><AUTHOR> More specifically small teams and aside from legal.</comment>