The great British Brexit robbery - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy <comment><USER2> What's really scary about these recent developments is that we're losing the ability to critically analyze the ideas and arguments that are being used to influence people.

Back in the days of network TV, you might not agree with everything that was being said, but you could at least see the arguments that were being used to convince others.

Even the early so-called behaviour change campaigns, such as 'Five a Day' (a marketing campaign that most didn't realize was a marketing campaign that has long since been accepted as a piece of general health advice) were quite benign.

Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it.

I'm not sure I agree with the thesis of the piece - that Cambridge Analytica played even a primary role in Brexit happening (I think it was always pretty likely, due to UK tabloids having campaigned for around 20 years on the issue, lack of organization in the Remain campaign, Corbyn failure to engage working class voters etc, hell even a latent feeling that the EU maybe isn't that great after all), but the techniques for doing this will only become more sophisticated and I wouldn't be surprised to see them become a common feature of our democracy.

<comment><USER3> The point of democracy is the implicit threat: if you, as a leader of the country, mess up the lives of the people you govern, you'll get kicked out. Aside from that, democracy has mostly negative

This prevents the situation from getting out of hand before it completely descends into violence.

That's it. That's the sum total of what democracy gets us.

Analyzing critical ideas is not now, and wasn't ever part of the democratic process. Cicero was complaining about citizen's lack of analyzing critical ideas (except when directly hurting them in the wallet) in 70 BC. You can read about leaders from the French revolution lamenting the same, and even in cases where only limited self government exists, like today in Bahrain, you find most analysts complaining that the large majority of the people who have influence (usually local landowners) do not think critically at all.

What has happened is simple: the previous government was pro-Europe, couldn't get Europe to commit to basic concessions that would make British lives easier, and the imposed austerity made a lot of people's lives worse in a very concrete and visible way. So they were voted out.

Now you can argue that they were right, that it wasn't their fault that this happened, and I might even agree with you. But as the government, I do understand, this is not good enough.

<comment><USER2> It's interesting - as Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and Mill (On Liberty) argued precisely that it was civil society and discourse that help us protect against a tyranny of the majority.

And that generally what separates 'democratizing' nations from 'democracies' is that one simply has democratic institutions such as voting, and the other has a culture of democratic decision making, civil discourse etc etc to go with it. Iraq may have elections and be able to kick out its leaders but it sure isn't a democracy in the same way Britain and the United States are.

Now its not a 'the people are stupid' argument that I'm making - there have been people throughout history who have contended that we take a too simplistic view of affairs. Fine, blah, I'm sure they do, and I'm happy to accept there are people who don't reason critically on both sides and there's no reason to think one side has a monopoly on those.

What I'm saying is that we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all parties. It's the equivalent of someone turning up to lots of Tocqueville's town hall meetings and distributing pamphlets biased to one side to people who look like they're from a certain socioeconomic background as they walk in.

There is something that happened in Britain in the last five years that merits explanation. A population which according to Eurobarometer 2010 data, only five years ago was 45% Pro-EU and 33% anti voted 52% to 48% to Leave when the government of the day, international instutitions, and all major political parties were arguing that we should stay. This, in Britain, a country not generally known for upending its whole political system on a whim.

Now you can pin the explanation for that on whatever you want (and I happen to think your austerity theory has something in it), but it's reasonable to think in a democracy that we should be able to have a discussion (or at least know about) the factors that swayed people.

<comment><USER4> > we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all > parties

Why do you think anyone should be in the position of "determining" the information that is being seeded? Fight disagreeable speech with agreeable speech, amirite, but don't yearn for a boss to tell which is which.

<comment><USER2> > Why do you think anyone should be in the position of "determining" the > information that is being seeded? Fight disagreeable speech with agreeable > speech, amirite, but don't yearn for a boss to tell which is which.

Maybe the more exact word for what I mean is "discern" rather than determine, though determine works fine too ("Officials are working to determine the cause of a bus crash").

Anyhoo, I don't yearn for such an arbiter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it amazing how people can stay in denial about the Brexit vote: that it happened, and that people in Britain actually disliked EU enough to want to get out of it. That what people voted for is not their will.

I'm in the remaining EU, if I'd had a vote in the British referendum, I'd have voted for Remain. But the increasingly paranoid conspiracy theories about shadowy conspiracies makes me more and more disgusted with the EU status quo.

New emperor-wannabes come up with 50 billion or 100 billion or 200 billion that Britain should pay to the union. Looks like that the more absurd numbers you can come up with to punish Britain for insulting the honor of EU institutions, the better.

Get real: such payments are not going to happen. You're coming up with a "favoured trade partner" or whatever status with Uganda; you'll be able to do that with Britain as well. The British isles aren't floating away to the Atlantic, and the countries will need to continue trading.

EU is not working very well. The leader of the Commission is a drunkard. Institutions are grabbing power that I and very many others want to belong to national governments. The union wants to expand to new countries and deepen to a federal state at the same time. Very many people want free trade, but otherwise want to retain national sovereignty. Accept that, stop blaming Trump and shadowy conspiracies.

<comment><USER6> 200 billion is most probably too high, but dozens of billons? Easily. The UK has committed themselves to paying this, they don't get to withhold the money now.

Those sums aren't some arbitrarily thought up "exit fees", it's regular funding that has been decided on and committed to years ago.

If the UK wanted to avoid that they should have exited somewhere in the future, outside of the current budgetary periods.

<comment><USER7> Actually they do. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/06/100bn-brexit- bill...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/06/100bn-brexit-bill-legally- impossible-enforce-european-commissions/)

<comment><USER8> The legality is irrelevant.

If Britain refuses to pay what the rEU decides is fair, it will have a very poor position for the trade negotiations which follow.

(I'm not paying to read the Telegraph, but "admit" in the headline is loaded language, and intentionally missing the point.)

<comment><USER9> No, Britain will have a very poor position in the negotiations that follow regardless. That's why the E.U. is insisting on the payments and citizen's rights issues being resolved first: they want a British commitment to items the E.U. cares about without having to make any concessions. If you think the E.U. will go back and renegotiate, or take British payments into account at later stages of negotiation, you're as delusional as May.

I hate to admit it, but May and Davis should absolutely refuse to play ball. They should agree to terms they think are fair here, and if the E.U. doesn't go along, prepare for a really hard brexit. Which of course means that they'll capitulate.

<comment><USER10> Can you clarify what this poor trade negotiation position is?

Worst case, we go to WTO tariffs. The effect of that in theory is that EU imports to the UK will reduce, as they become more expensive relative to the same goods from non-EU countries (note that our tariffs to non-EU countries will reduce post Brexit).

UK exports to the EU will also reduce for the same reason. However, given that we're a net importer it should be clear who is in the worst position.

If the UK can sign a couple of decent trade deals with large economies like India, USA, China then we won't be worried about the EU trade at all.

<comment><USER6> Can they sign those trade deals? When? In ten to twelve years?

The UK doesn't even have the bureaucracy anymore, the capable negotiators to conduct more than a few smaller or maybe one big trade deal.

The deals between the EU and Switzerland took more than a decade. And Switzerland didn't poison the atmosphere.

Additionally, the US aren't in a big hurry. Trump said otherwise while he was campaigning, but now he has already made clear tzhat a trade deal with the EU is a priority and the UK will have to wait (after Merkel had to tell him _ten_ times that Germany cannot and will not negotiate a separate trade deal with the US).

I wish the UK the best, but I am very much in favor of us playing hardball. It's fascinating to watch the UK's non-strategy, a bit like a bit car crash. You have guilty feelings about stopping and staring, but you just cannot help it.

<comment><USER10> You don't actually need a trade deal with a country to trade successfully with them (hopefully I don't need to give examples of this).

I think you overestimate how long it takes to sign a unilateral trade deal when the parties want to make it happen. The reason the EU trade deals take so long is that 28 countries have to agree on the EU side (which will indeed be a problem for Brexit, but hardly the UK's fault).

Non strategy? As previously stated, we have a net trade deficit with the EU and are the EU's biggest export destination. Do you really think BMW group etc are going to want to stop selling cars to the UK?

Also as previously pointed out any import/export detriment to the UK from increased tariffs will be offset by the corresponding tariff reduction when trading with the rest of the world. That's not the case for the EU.

That's without considering the money we'll save on contributing to the EU budgets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Psyops.

I occasionally delve into the CIA CREST database and one day stumbled on old articles with dollar values [0] Russian Intelligence services dumped on psyops against their adversaries at the height of the cold war. In 1980 for instance this was reported:

        "According to the CIA's reckoning, the Soviets in 1979
         poured at least 200 million dollars (I assume US) into
         a variety of campaigns - using propaganda and covert
         operations - to isolate the US from it's friends." [1]

Nothing has changed.

 _" Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It's owned by ^Peter Thiel^, "_

Let that sink in. How long till this article is flagged?

Reference:

[0] Values in CIA reports are often redacted because they are an indication of resources.

[1] CREST (Psyops Russia 1980): DEPARTMENT OF DIRTY TRICKS, SOVIET STYLE Document Release Date: January 13, 2011

Summary: [https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia- rdp90-0...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia- rdp90-00552r000707160159-7)

Document: [https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA- RDP90-00552...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA- RDP90-00552R000707160159-7.pdf)

<comment><USER12> So this raises a very important question: what about the CIA psyops? Is this kind of thing only "not OK" when certain parties are doing it, or is it one of those things that just makes the world worse and should be banned by treaty like biological weapons?

After all, the west regards "regime change" as its prerogative; what if the rest of the world wants to "regime change" us?

Edit: yes it's whataboutism, but I think addressing that has to be part of any good solution. Otherwise the only solutions are bad ones: every country has to build a Great Firewall to stop its domestic politics being destroyed by foreign intelligence agencies.

Also, note in the article that seemingly everyone is fine with CA doing this kind of stuff to _other_ countries. This is like shipping thousands of tons of guns to Mexico and then being surprised when some of them turn up on US streets.

<comment><USER11> _" what about the CIA psyops?"_

The CIA psyops question is a good one. The CIA was setup by Eisenhower to collate intelligence not engage in operations. Psyops is operations. The question of CIA dabbling in operations was resolved in '63\. Post '63, there was no real threat to the CIA charter.

I'll double up, _" why has the CIA got an Airforce?"_ [0] T

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_the_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_the_United_States_Government)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a worrying story. And not only because it highlights the possible role that outside factors might have played in swinging key elections to the right.

It's worrying because it runs a great risk in making those living in the London bubble (myself very much included) of thinking Brexit was caused by malignant forces rather than poverty and lack of opportunity. The latter being a hard problem to solve, the former something we can uncomfortably accept.

Brexit was a democratic vote. It was about as democratic as you can get with no possibility for gerrymandering, first past the post or any other sort of voter suppression.

It's a damn shame it happened, but when those of us living comfortable college educated lives choose to endorse policies which allow vast swathes of less skilled labour to be automated and hammered down with zero hour contracts, as the so called 'Brexit heart-lands' have been, then what do we expect but to see a resurgence of fear and the consequent nationalism that arises?

Certainly Cambridge Analytica might have some effect on marginal elections like Brexit or Trump/Clinton, but at the end of the day we've built a system which provides no safety net or training for those whose jobs we're replacing with automation and over efficiencies of scheduling and the introduction of the 'gig' economy.

I think the roots behind these problems are your age old problems of increasing inequality, poor educational opportunities and gutted job markets in northern towns. We've basically shafted a whole generation of folk who unsurprisingly voted for a nationalist agenda out of sheer desperation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Direct democracy is dangerous. Major decisions, and joining /leaving EU is certainly one, should require e super-majority. Say 60% of the vote and 60% of the Parliament.

50%+1 just doesn't seem right. These are life-changing decisions and there needs to be a general consensus.

<comment><USER15> the problem with the supermajority argument is that there was no such vote to join the EU in the first place. You can't apply stringent rules in only one direction of a decision, or you're weighting the default to the position you personally prefer. At the end of the day, the vote could be repositioned from "remain/leave" to "be in the EU/not be in the EU" to make it an A/B rather than a yes/no decision, at which point the argument about direct democracy being unfair becomes clearly biased.

<comment><USER16> >the problem with the supermajority argument is that there was no such vote to join the EU in the first place

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Commun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Communities_membership_referendum,_1975)

>The electorate expressed significant support for EC membership, with 67% in favour on a national turnout of 64%.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER17> EC membership, not EU - from the perspective of the British, they voted for membership of a trading block, which then morphed into a new megastate wannabe without any vote taking place to legitimise it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture citizens' browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to commit crime.

The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying said David."

Steve Bannon was the former vice president of Cambridge Analytica. Terrifying is indeed the word. A little alarming too that Sophie Schmidt was swimming around these waters.

<comment><USER19> Pre-crime is very much alive and kicking. For a publicly visible example, see the multitudinous "terror convictions" in the U.K. that have involved the arrest and lengthy incarceration of people who have allegedly plotted, or have thought about beginning to plot, terrorist acts.

Less publicly, there is a rather well hidden court circuit that has been about since 2008 which specialises in these cases, specifically the ones which can't be disclosed due to "national security". I know about this from a family friend who was a high flying barrister (QC) who was asked to preside. He refused. They destroyed him in the press ("paedophile sympathiser"), Cameron went on national TV to decry him, they suicided his wife. He is only just beginning to quietly practice law again. Every time I think I'm maybe paranoid I recall this episode, and know that the truth is likely even darker than I know.

What a wonderful world we live in.

<comment><USER20> >Cameron went on national TV to decry him, they suicided his wife.

Sources for this? It seems unlikely that the Prime Minister would on TV to denounce a barrister for refusing a gig. They would just have got another barrister to do it.

<comment><USER19> I promise you he did - it wasn't to denounce him for refusing the gig, rather to denounce him as part of the retaliatory smear.

Here's a pertinent link. If you read the court transcripts, none of the things ascribed to him were said by him - it was just another fairly average day in court.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2386556/Lawyer- Rober...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2386556/Lawyer-Robert- Colover-called-girl-13-predator-barred-sex-cases-condemned-Cameron.html)

Here's an equanimous piece by a barrister befuddled by what happened to him, as the subtext is all sorts of secret.

[http://barristerblogger.com/2013/08/29/criticism-robert- colo...](http://barristerblogger.com/2013/08/29/criticism-robert-colover- unfair/?fdx_switcher=true)

<comment><USER20> The outrage had nothing to do with a refusal to preside over a secret hearing, as the links you provided show. Whether or not the Daily Mail article was fair is a separate issue. It may have misquoted him, but what he actually said was stil pretty bad.

>Yes, your Honour. Very much so, and she is undoubtedly it is fair to say very experienced, and one hesitates to use the word, but it is a word that has been used in other cases, I think the officer would agree that she may well be what is described as predatory in respect of her activities.

(Said of a 13 year old.)

<comment><USER21> I think madaxe_again's argument is that similar things are said every day without a frenzy being raised, pointing to some other motivation behind it.

That said, considering that he specifically chose that word, I agree that it's pretty bad, and find it hard to believe that it's a common occurrence for barristers to call 13-year-olds' actions "predatory".

<comment><USER19> In mitigation such things are pretty normal - particularly coming from the prosecution under direct questioning, which this was. You don't mince words when asked for a direct opinion by a judge.

Of course the press pieces don't address the context, as the context was and is a state secret.

Bob is a Rabbi, a youth worker, a kite festival organiser, and a stand-up bloke and father of three very well adjusted adults I've known since I became a conscious entity.

<comment><USER21> Fair enough, but in any case, the argument wasn't on whether what he said was fair or correct, or whether the reaction was appropriate, but whether the (over)reaction was _because_ of some unrelated case.

I mean, it's not exactly uncommon for anything involving pedophilia, often even when there's no actual evidence of such, to explode in Think Of The Children hysteria, and a man in an official position calling a 13-year-old a "predator" sounds exactly the kind of thing that can trigger it.

So the question is: are barristers often referring to 13-year-old as predators, and the media just specifically picked up on this case?

<comment><USER19> The answer to that query is a pretty sound yes - mitigation looks at the precise circumstances and behaviours of surrounding that which is being sentenced over, and this is the sort of thing that is raised.

<comment><USER20> I think what people find difficult to understand is how this could be construed as mitigating. No-one can seriously think that a 13 year old girl is in a position of powerto "predate" on an adult man. What the defence really seems to be doing is trying to blame the victim by saying it was her fault for being horny rather than the perpetrator's fault for failing to exercise any self restraint.

<comment><USER19> Bob was the prosecution, responding to a query on a defence mitigation statement by the judge - honestly, if you read the transcript, the context is clear.

<comment><USER20> Surely the fact that the prosecution said it makes it worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a textbook example on how to create a demonizing narrative with little to no facts at all.

Guilt by association, throwing in the Russians and Holocaust deniers, some evil billionaires - it has it all. Funneling foreign money into national elections is always happening - through foundations, local branches, tax location, and so on.

Absent from all of this are of cause any facts on what Cambridge Analytica is doing different than being just another programmatic ad buying firm.

<comment><USER23> It's a compelling narrative, and yes it would be easy to dismiss as being conspiracy theory.

However, it's the first time I've seen an answer to the question "who's driving Brexit" that seems realistic.

Mercer, Bannon, Thiel, et al. and their psy-ops arms - what's their involvement now in the French election. Presumably if the article's narrative is factual they're trying to get Le Pen elected to further fragment Europe? Which French campaigns have had unsolicited calls from AIQ/AIS/Cambridge Analytica?

<comment><USER22> You find it realistic.

I find it another pseudo-logicical explanation for those who can't accept the fact that most voters don't agree with them. Who are trying to justify their own moral superiority by pretending those who don't agree with them were all scammed and cheated into that believe.

Nothing personal but since we are already picking those narratives that we favor let me just pick the other extreme.

<comment><USER24> > most voters don't agree with them

Replace 'most' with 'a slender majority' if you want to retain the fig-leaf of objectivity and rationality that you seem to covet.

Politics is littered with examples of groups who were deceived into voting against their own self-interest. This isn't some kind of bizarre conspiracy - it's business as usual. It strikes me as more bizarre to pretend that democracy is some kind of idealized machine that extracts considered, rational decisions from large aggregates of people. It never was and never has been. It's simply the "least worst"[1] way of choosing our leaders.

[1] [https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of- government](https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of-government)

<comment><USER22> I am not here to defend Democracy or 'the system'. In fact I noticed the fallback to those fundamental critique comes always up when one's own favorite did lose. How the voting system works has been known for decades. It is the job of politicians and all those trying to shape the public opinion to convince people to vote.

<comment><USER24> > In fact I noticed the fallback to those fundamental critique comes always up > when one's own favorite did lose.

Of course. We have vested interest in complaining when we 'lose' and praising the outcome when we 'win'.

But your original post seemed to be dismissive of the idea that there is anything to be worried about. Even if we agree on the existence of a major cognitive bias here - it's irrelevant to the question of whether there is a real issue that should be addressed.

The problem with a "backdoor in democracy" is similar to the problem with cryptography backdoors. You can't control who'll make use of them so everyone should be scared.

<comment><USER22> It is similar to the US campaign finance reform - if you want to spend money for your candidate you will always find a way to do it. For me it is much more surprising why so little money has been funneled into EU elections so far.

<comment><USER4> Maybe they thought they were invulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There have been a lot of speculation and finger pointing at social media platforms for influencing high-level decisions. What I'd like to ask the elders here on HN is: Wasn't this always the case? Were elections in the 70s 80s all fair and fact-based? Were not political parties using information to their advantage and for pushing their own agenda?

Because to me it seems that only the tools have changed, rest is pretty much played by the same book.

<comment><USER26> There weren't that many traditional news outlets in the past, and those that publish flagrant lies tend to get a reputation for this ( not that that ever stopped some of them ). Nowadays, I barely recognise half of the sources I see material forwarded from, which allows a range of much more extreme opinions / alt facts to be shared with the world without any real requirement for self regulation ( obviously, this is a contentious point, but I do feel things are a lot worse in this regard now ).

<comment><USER27> Over in the UK, a fairly large percentage of the traditional news outlets available published flagrant lies on a regular basis and still remained extremely popular despite a reputation for the same. Like the Daily Mail, every tabloid in existence, every free paper in existence and arguably a decent percentage of local ones.

And that hasn't changed much since. I mean, the Daily Mail (if Wikipedia is accurate here) was the most popular paper in the world in 1902.

Either way, I suspect the sources the British public have access to haven't exactly gotten much worse (or better) since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Personally I think Brexit was a bad idea but I don't understand the sentiment in the article. Back when Obama was using big data (and yes, big money) to win the election he was hailed as smart and tech-savvy. Now when it's the Brexit supporters doing it democracy is coming to an end. How about instead of weakening people's support for democracy leftists instead try to win elections?

<comment><USER18> Yes, except I don't recall Obama using big data to blast people's facebook feeds with fake news citations, irrefutably wrong numbers and xenophobic clap trap.

"With great power comes great responsibility" and all that...

This is the problem with the far right (or any political extreme). They're not interested in debate or acting responsibly.

An excellent example was Le Penn's 'debate' a few days ago with Macron. It was a fucking shambles and embarrassing to watch. She had the whole of France watching - it was her time to shine and capture voters with her programme. She failed miserably because other than soundbites, there's no meat on the bone. The FN cannot withstand the sunlight and rigour of genuine, intellectually honest political debate.

They (and all other extreme parties) know this of course and so their solution is to try and debase the system itself. To convert people from reason to "gut".

Given that back drop, yes, it's a little concerning extremists are awakening to the awesome power of big data. Coupled with the delivery mechanism and reach of the internet, it's a propagandist's wet dream and potentially extremely destabilising if left unchecked.

<comment><USER29> 'To convert people from reason to "gut".'

Here in the UK all discussion of migration was successfully suppressed for decades by shouts of racism from the left. Perhaps if a sensible debate on migration had been allowed, and perhaps if the EU had been willing to yield a little more than absolutely nothing around controlling migration, Brexit might have been avoided.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure it has much to do with the EU. The UK's domestic politicians did a poor job of managing migration. Had the brains in London allocated proper resources to the North and applied some common sense approaches to where migrants were placed and in what numbers, most issues would have been resolved.

Don't forget too that around half (iirc?) of annual migrants arriving in the UK come from outside the EU...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On the hand hand, Trump supporters are claiming that Soros is -- more or less legally -- financing left wing organisations and influencing the political debate in many countries.

You know what? Both of them are right, and actually this is not a new phenomenon, rich people have been influencing democracy for a long time now.

<comment><USER31> George Soros is a euphemistic stand-in for "the international conspiracy of rich Jews" \-- a persistent scapegoat with a very sordid history.

<comment><USER15> is he? My understanding is that he actually funds organisations like the Open Society Foundation and Media Matters - just because he's Jewish doesn't mean he's a stand-in for old conspiracies, especially if he actually does fund progressive political organisations.

<comment><USER32> Having once been a recipient of an Open Society Foundation grand on the order of X00,000$, I have to say that both of you are right: His jewishness is definitely used to amplify opposition to him, by people opposing him primarily because he advocates for open democracies.

It's important to clearly state what is meant when people talk about Soros' "liberal" or "progressive" values: the work I have seen is almost exclusively concerned with the _mechanisms_ of politics, not the content. It is motivated by his experience of seeing both fascism and communism devastating his native country and opposes both extremes. The work I was involved in organised debating competitions for students from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and everything in between and there's nothing "liberal" about it, unless you count allowing women to participate on equal footing as such.

<comment><USER33> How did you get one of those grants?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm looking forward to the discussion on this. I'm normally quite liberal in privacy concerns and think that a lot of people tend to overreact when it comes to what Facebook et al does. But this just puts it all into perspective how powerful and nefarious closed organizations can become.

</comment><comment><USER35> One irony is that these predictive/manipulative systems built on mass data and psychology are (currently) being used by the 'right' rather than the 'left', though they fit better philosophically with the latter.

Does anyone know of any work on the politics of trust/agency in the information/ algorithm age ? How does a normal democratic person self educate in this world without falling back to a siege mentality/ trust in a small cell, or proceeding in a 'happy-go-lucky', 'life is short' manner.

My uneducated guess is this is not that different from some periods of history (Russia, Communist Europe, French Terror, US west expansion?, Ethiopia?), but it feels different from 1960s-90s western Europe (though maybe not - qn raised by samsonradu in this thread).

Another way of putting the problem is as an arms race between vested interests with advanced predictive/ manipulative systems and the general populace. This is probably not new - does it balance out or does it get more concentrated ?

<comment><USER24> > though they fit better philosophically with the latter.

In which case you're talking about a different left to any that I would identify with. People seem to have begun to forget that there is such a thing as "libertarian left". On the contrary - When I first started learning about politics I was surprised that there was any such thing as "libertarian right" \- it seemed obvious to me in my late teens/early twenties that the right was about maintaining power and the left was about making the world a better place (I was naive but not an idiot - I didn't regard state socialism as belonging to any 'authentic' left)

Power is power. Left and right are labels that shift hugely over time.

All that really exists are shifting alliances and existing power structures. "Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in".

This is why an independent judiciary, legislative safeguards, whistleblower laws, a free press and all the other checks and balances of a healthy democracy are the most critical things to defend right now.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure that many right-leaning people would agree that "the right was about maintaining power and the left was about making the world a better place". This is a perspective I see quite often these days, and I'd like to point out that left and right aren't equal to "good and bad". They're merely different perspectives on the best way to structure society - and the left- right spectrum doesn't even make that much sense in the first place, given that (as you've noticed) most left-leaning people hold as much in contention with marxist-leninists as they do with conservatives. So while I think you're right that left and right shift around, I think that's partly because they're fairly nonsense labels in the first place.

<comment><USER24> I find nothing to disagree with you on, here. I was careful to speak in the past tense about my own views.

I still have an innate affinity with the left in an idealized form, but I understand that there is such a thing as an intellectually valid conservative political philosophy based on something more than self-interest.

There are scoundrels and there are the righteous (and many of us are a mix of both). Making the world better for everyone in it is the only political aim I can fully support. If we agree on that we still have a very difficult task converting the aim into concrete policy decisions. Spotting scoundrels is sadly another intractable problem.

<comment><USER36> Please define "better for everyone" as I think this is the source of much of the liberal/conservative split.

<comment><USER37> I fight the left because of Venezuela, Cuba, and every place else where Marxist ideas have infected the minds of the masses to give assent to dictatorship. To me, the left will never conjure anything other than the ideas of misery, starvation, political violence, and destruction of life on a massive scale. The Soviet Union, the gulags, China, North Korea. Not one single success story.

<comment><USER24> You have a very narrow view of the left. How about civil rights, votes for women, basic protection from horrific working conditions?

How about the fight against absolute monarchy. How about the American Constitution and the Founding Fathers? Where does the term 'left' even come from? Who were Thomas Paine and Jefferson inspired by?

The long march towards basic decency in western society has been the task of 'the left' since the Enlightenment and maybe before.

EDIT:

> The Soviet Union, the gulags, China, North Korea.

To anyone on the libertarian left these are all abhorrences. I'm much more of a centrist than most who would identify with the left but - unless you swallow the narrative of state socialism whole, it's hard to include these examples in any authentic history of the left.

(not that that stopped a large percentage of leftist thinkers defending them way past the point of decency - to their eternal shame. Read up on the split between Sartre and Camus and the split between Orwell and most of the rest of the British left)

EDIT 2

> and every place else where Marxist ideas have infected the minds of the > masses to give assent to dictatorship

Luckily there's no such thing as right-wing dictatorships, eh?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How silly is this article?! If anything the establishment, Clinton and friends has the most money and the biggest aparatus.

Brexit happened because EU has failed in handling urgent problems around refugee inflow and monetary/fiscal constraints (forcing countries such as Greece into pro-longed economic depression) plus EU's lack of democratic legitimacy.

</comment><comment><USER39> No matter what happens, someone is going to come out of the woodwork to claim credit for it. I don't buy the narrative that some big hedge fund guy masterminded the whole thing while the rest of humanity stupidly played into his hands.

A more likely scenario is that people already had some theories about globalisation and its negative side-effects and then maybe several interest groups used their influence to help reinforce those ideas through social media. Let's not forget that there were also other interest groups that were trying to promote/reinforce the opposite view point.

I don't fully buy into the echo-chamber argument. I think that by the end of the 2017 US elections, Everyone had a pretty good understanding of both candidates. That was probably the most transparent election we have ever seen. If anything, there was too much information on both candidates and it just made both of them look terrible.

<comment><USER40> It sounds like you didn't read the article. At the least, your comment doesn't address the main issue presented in the article: that the Brexit vote was heavily influenced by non-UK interest groups. The article presents a pretty solid case, with plenty of evidence of foul play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I admit I did not study the article very carefully, but did it point out the actual methods used to affect people? I understand they collected data and analysed it to be able to do micro targeting, but how was this data used in practice? Was it Facebook adds or something else?

<comment><USER42> It may have had only a tiny effect but considering the election could have swung either way with 100,000 votes in the _right_ states so who knows.

[https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-the-trump-campaign- buil...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-the-trump-campaign-built-an- identity-database-and-used-facebook-ads-to-win-the-election-4ff7d24269ac)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-new-attack- strate...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-new-attack-strategy- keep-clinton-voters-home-1476221895)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside- th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump- bunker-with-12-days-to-go)

a.) identifying Clinton voters and sending negative Clinton ads based on race/gender/policy reversals(by Clinton) to make them consider voting for anyone else, or not voting b.) identifying voters who were on the fence and sending them ads for Trump + identifying geographic clusters in swing states and sending Trump there for campaign rallies

<comment><USER43> TFA is about the Brexit vote, not USA president.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sadly, over the past few months The Guardian has become a repository of increasingly shrill and paranoid anti-Leave articles, although few are as fully tin-foil-hats-on as this one.

</comment><comment><USER45> Oh dear, they used data to persuade voters and win the election. If they're left, they are supporters of Science and Progress and thus it's natural they win. If they're not left, they hijacked the democracy by using creepy tricks and doomed us all.

</comment><comment><USER46> If you don't like the result of an election, just claim that the Russians "hacked" it somehow, or that "billionaire Trump supporters" robbed the good guys out of the win they deserved!

Please.

</comment><comment><USER47> Seems like yet another conspiracy theory to grab attention while automation continues to eat jobs.

<comment><USER24> A lot of the things touched on in this article can be easily verified and have been reported by multiple sources.

Whilst you might dispute the way the jigsaw has been put together, there is definitely something troubling occurring at the nexus of data-based marketing and the democratic system.

> while automation continues to eat jobs.

Surely concern about one does not preclude concern about the other?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The article is very interesting, but did anyone else found the surface stylistic choices ... more than a little weird?

"The world had not yet turned."

"The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the mystery that was AggregateIQ."

"[..]Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state? [beat] A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration."

"Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on?"

Instead of pseudo-Lovecraftian horror story prose, I'd prefer straightforward presentations of the facts. It's less annoying and less confusing to read. "The world had not yet turned." Indeed.

<comment><USER49> I found the article was far longer than it needed to be and took a long time to explain what actually was going on, and seemed to take a circuitous route to its conclusion.

Saying that thought I did find it very interesting, and worrying.

What can people do about it really though? I mean, I think people vote with conviction for whatever they vote for - and no one likes to be told they've been conned, or made a fool of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's worth mentioning that this Guardian page had so much ajaxy crap embedded it that it brought my dual-core 3ghz laptop to its knees reading it. It was almost impossible to scroll through the article.

It would be a metaphor for the surveillance culture, if it weren't actually a genuine sign of that culture.

</comment><comment><USER51> Not surprised that The Guardian is running this, because ever since the 2007/2008 cricis they have proven themselves to be firmly in the champagne left camp. Thus EU is good because EU is about European peace, full stop. Say anything else and you get shouted down as fascist or just get to witness them stick fingers in their ears and go "lalalala EU is peace lalalala".

</comment><comment><USER37> This article is genius is the way it depends on layers upon layers of propaganda. It's freaking brilliant--the underlying assumption that only leftist ideals are "correct" and "good" and thus everyone who voted against such ideals must have somehow been manipulated into doing so or is not in their right mind. That's the too-clever communist brain right there--write an article to promote leftism by rejecting all the intellectual challenges to it and then accuse the right of manipulating technology against the only true good in the world. Never mind the true track record of leftism!

Brexit--the people have had enough of unelected EU demagogues telling them what they can and can't do in their own country. The problem is, the UK is probably 30 years too far gone, but we'll see.

US--Trump bested an ethically compromised internationalist after 8 years of Americans suffering through a different ethically compromised internationalist. There's no tricks there, it's just that Americans finally woke up to the fact they they were being sold down the river and getting zero in return. Plus, anyone who has been paying attention knows that the Clintons are like Bond villains in that they have succumbed to influence peddling via their foundation and they are implicated in many questionable deaths whose timing could only have helped their cause. In short, the Clintons are criminals, clever ones, but still criminals.

On the matter of Reddit--I don't think the centipedes are paid shills. I have no evidence to back that other than the fact that I have been involved in other grassroots movements and I can tell the difference between astroturf and the real deal. The people on The_Donald are the real deal, and they fought hard to even have a voice at all, what with the owners of reddit always manipulating the underlying tech to marginalize them. That the The_Donald even still exists on Reddit is because if it got banned, approximately half of Reddit's user base would migrate elsewhere overnight. The_Donald is followed by more people than nearly the rest of Reddit combined, although the people who run that site have done their best to cover up the facts. And yet, The_Donald doesn't get the ban hammer because to do so would put them in extremely hot water with their advertisers and investors. Reddit needs Trump supporters far more than Trump supporters need Reddit, however--and that's something that everyone in smug Silicon Valley would be wise to remember--I'm looking at you, Apple, Facebook, and Google--you know you tried to influence the election outcome, too. We all know. So beware.

As far the allegations about Jews running the world--I have no idea who runs the world. I grew up in NY State and I can say with some certainty that Jews and Jewish interests have an undue influence on politics and commerce which is outsized compared to their overall numbers. It's not some grand conspiracy, it's just that like all groups, the insiders would rather deal with like- minded folks versus non-liked minded folks because it guarantees their own success while diminishing competition. It's a mind-set as old as civilization. It's not anti-semitic to observe this, it is only anti-semitic to bring up the fact that certain Jews are far-left and that they, like Soros, are promoting a far-left agenda that runs against the political and economic interests of literally everyone else on the planet. You can't say that global internationalism is anything but anti-democratic at the local level. Just look at Agenda 21, or at any globalist initiative, and you see what I'm talking about. It all looks benign, but slowly and surely, individual rights are being removed as the ownership of everything of any real value is being trickled to the very top. All the while the left proclaims that they are doing this for the people--which is the big lie the left has always used while robbing regular people of everything.

Again, I don't think this is some Jewish conspiracy--there are plenty of good Jewish folks who are caught on the wrong side of it like the rest of us. Maybe it's an inner-circle kind of thing amongst billionaires? There are many rings, many facets and many competing interests, I'm sure. But the one common trend is the continued disenfranchisement of the regular citizens both politically and economically. We simply can't have any more of that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Maybe it'a because the Brits (as in the civil population) never really got to experience the horrors of war for the last 200 years, at least. I live in an Eastern European country, and each and every village around these parts of the world has a stone monument in the center-village area commemorating the names of those that died in WW1. Lots more died in WW2, but because that happened as we were fighting the Soviet Union no monuments were erected while we were under communist rule following WW2.

Talking about communist rule that was the result of WW2, just today I learned from my father that one of the hardest things for my parents raising me as a kid under communist rule was the central heating and electrical power would go out at the same time in the middle of winter. Now, imagine raising a 3-old kid while there are -10 or -15 degrees Celsius outside and for you with no way to warm your apartment (as an aside, I think that the fact that Cuba is a tropical country was one of the main factors of Castro staying in power for that long, when you don't have to fear that your kids will die of cold then you become a lot more acceptant).

In comparison, the EU, with all its quirks, is like heaven on Earth. The Leavers deserve whatever is that will come to them, even if they didn't know what they were voting for.

<comment><USER53> _Maybe it 's because the Brits (as in the civil population) never really got to experience the horrors of war for the last 200 years, at least._

Are you serious? What do you think the Blitz was?

<comment><USER54> The Blitz was huge. It was terrible. It was also _across a channel_. He's talking about ground-level, street-to-street fighting, where you see men clomp into the town in which you live and remake your society, and that's very arguably a difference of kind. Britain has not seen fighting on its soil that was not internecine in the better part of _a thousand years_ (honorable mention to the French who bailed on Fishguard Bay, though). The countries he's talking about were stomped on in living memory.

<comment><USER55> He didn't say that what happened to other people and not him long before he was even born was worse than what happened during the Blitz, he said British people "never really got to experience the horrors" of WWII, which is simply a denial of fact, offensive and the words of someone who doesn't know even basic history.

Not everywhere in Eastern Europe was Stalingrad or Warsaw, particularly in fascist, anti-Semitic states like Romania, which eagerly invaded the USSR alongside its Nazi ally, and was second only to Nazi Germany in murdering Jews.

<comment><USER52> > He didn't say that what happened to other people and not him long before he > was even born was worse than what happened during the Blitz, he said British > people "never really got to experience the horrors" of WWII, which is simply > a denial of fact, offensive and the words of someone who doesn't know even > basic history.

I know my basic history, thank you very much. I moved office recently and in my way to work I'm passing on a street which used to have a Jewish cemetery until 1942 (or 1943). At that point all the tombstones were taken way, the buried taken who knows where and some garden was built in that place. On my way to my previous office I used to pass on the street where 2 Jewish synagogues had been burned in 1941, by the members of a right wing party which was all powerful back then.

> "never really got to experience the horrors" of WWII, which is simply a > denial of fact, offensive and the words of someone who doesn't know even > basic history.

Have the British experienced the horrors of communism, which was brought to us directly by WW2? No, they have not.

> Not everywhere in Eastern Europe was Stalingrad or Warsaw, particularly in > fascist, anti-Semitic states like Romania, which eagerly invaded the USSR > alongside its Nazi ally, and was second only to Nazi Germany in murdering > Jews.

We invaded USSR because of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which saw the Soviets take part of our country (I'll let you search on wikipedia which part exactly). I, for myself, do not think that was the best decision for us to take, but saying that we invaded USSR like we were the Golden Horde searching for things to loot then you're utterly mistaken.

> offensive and the words of someone who doesn't know even basic history.

I don't care if people get so easily offended by things that are very close to the truth (as in we can't never know the historical truth 100%). To put it more bluntly, I was always asking myself as a kid, in my head: "Has my grand- mother been raped by the Russians as they entered our country?". Answer: she was probably not, or, if she was, it doesn't matter, now, as she's dead, but that question was put by a lot of kids and grand-kids after WW2 all the way from Berlin to the gates of Moscow (you can replace "Russian soldiers" with "German soldiers" as you go East). What I'm trying to say is that things on the Continent have been fucking bleak, and what happened in Britain, as a comparison, is kids' play. I don't care if you find that offensive or not.

<comment><USER53> _What I 'm trying to say is that things on the Continent have been fucking bleak, and what happened in Britain, as a comparison, is kids' play_

Putting aside your ridiculous belief that Brits did not suffer in WW2, what I don't get about your position is that the EU is run by powerful, entirely unaccountable leaders who very frequently and publicly take a dump on the entire concept of democracy and voting. The EU's law making is done in secret, which is similar only to North Korea in opacity.

[https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630](https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630)

And the EU is busy telling eastern European countries they're going to be punished financially and legally for not adopting "european values" (as these countries are without a doubt in Europe geographically, what that means of course is "german values").

Of all the people who should be attuned to the dangers of powerful leaders who dislike referendums, citizens of ex-Soviet countries should be the _MOST_ aware. Yet you are running headlong into another giant undemocratic bloc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Another way to hijack democracy is to purposely invite people into your country who you think will vote for your political party.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and- order/6418456...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and- order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural- says-former-adviser.html)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-blair-brexit- immigration...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-blair-brexit-immigration- eu-referendum-2016-10)

<comment><USER57> That would be a funny plan, considering that immigrants to western countries tend to hold more conservative values than natives, and thus should be expected to vote for conservative parties.

<comment><USER45> Any data to support the idea immigrants vote more conservative than natives in UK? Would also be useful to specifically consider recent immigrants, as immigrants 30 years ago might have totally different demography.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sanictype, a Windows Utility that Autocompletes Words - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Ajusa/sanictype <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this over the course of this week. I needed a faster way to write college application essays, so this was clearly the most productive use of my time :P

All joking aside, this is the first project I have ever submitted to a community forum. This is still very much a work in progress, but it is usable enough where I feel comfortable putting it out there. Right now, I am using it in google docs to write essays and stuff, but it will work for any text inputs in windows.

The main issue it has right now is consistency. Windows api is hard, especially since this is my first time doing anything as low level as this. Keeping track of the word that the cursor is right next to is a pain, and if there is a better way than the one I have implemented here, please tell me. I would love any feedback that helps me become a better programmer.</comment>


Let "QUIPU" organise your research so you spend more time to explore content - <AUTHOR> http://quipu.tilda.ws/ <comment><AUTHOR> The very best startup ideas tend to be something the founders themselves want, that they can build, and that few others realise are worth doing

Register your interest for early Beta access at - [http://quipu.tilda.ws/](http://quipu.tilda.ws/)

I want to make QUIPU so that knowledge seekers, like myself, can have all the explored content organised, connected & displayed in real time.

No more time spent on indexing, trying to remember where that statistic came from, or keeping 50+ tabs open to avoid dropping a line of inquiry.

Clear representations of research information can be created from the "digitally exhaustive information" we create when combined with powerful artificial intelligence to do the organising.

Please us know what you think about it.</comment>


Fun with BPF, or, shutting down a TCP listening socket the hard way - <AUTHOR> http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/125005930662/fun-with-bpf-or-shutting-down-a-tcp-listening

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't a temporary "iptables -j REJECT" had been easier?

Or even maybe "iptables -m condition --condition <> -j REJECT", which would mean you could control the reject by "echo 1 > file". Then a basic suid program (or sudo rule) that writes zero or one to the file, and you can control everything without a root. Like from the upgrade scripts.

<comment><USER3> The rest of the blog post seems to imply the application needs to be aware this is happening anyway, so it can clear the backlog, so it may as well be in charge of this. Conveniently, this also means (setuid) root is never involved at any point, whereas it would be for your iptables solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where is the documentation for BPF? For example, let's say I want to mangle packets and change the encapsulation on them. How would I go about doing this? It seems like it's a full-on VM. Is there any description of the language - and a compiler?

<comment><USER5> The canonical documentation is in the kernel source tree: [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/filter.t...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/filter.txt)

You can use tcpdump as a makeshift compiler using it's '-d', '-dd', and '-ddd' options:

        ~] sudo tcpdump -i en1 -d 'tcp port 13'
        (000) ldh      [12]
        (001) jeq      #0x86dd          jt 2	jf 8
        (002) ldb      [20]
        (003) jeq      #0x6             jt 4	jf 19
        (004) ldh      [54]
        (005) jeq      #0xd             jt 18	jf 6
        (006) ldh      [56]
        (007) jeq      #0xd             jt 18	jf 19
        (008) jeq      #0x800           jt 9	jf 19
        (009) ldb      [23]
        (010) jeq      #0x6             jt 11	jf 19
        (011) ldh      [20]
        (012) jset     #0x1fff          jt 19	jf 13
        (013) ldxb     4*([14]&0xf)
        (014) ldh      [x + 14]
        (015) jeq      #0xd             jt 18	jf 16
        (016) ldh      [x + 16]
        (017) jeq      #0xd             jt 18	jf 19
        (018) ret      #65535
        (019) ret      #0

While BPF has STORE instructions, I'm not sure in which context they can be used. It's definitely not intended to be a generic system for rewriting packets

<comment><USER6> If I recall correctly, BPF also explicitly lacks any looping instructions, or instructions that can be used to create a loop. Forward jumps only. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why can't they just use a lock around the accept() like the thundering herd solution, that way the thread shutting down the socket can do so knowing nothing else is accepting new connections at the time?

<comment><USER5> The process accepting the connections (the kernel) runs entirely asynchronously to the application, and there is no way to signal it to stop accepting new connections except by calling close(), which has the dual effect of triggering the connection resets.</comment></comment>


'UK the worst place to live in Europe'  - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/UK-the-worst-place-to-live-in-Europe/articleshow/5125621.cms <comment><USER2> The real news from that is not how bad the UK did, but how well Poland did, ahead of Italy, Sweden, Ireland and the UK.

That's quite amazing news.</comment>


Staggering $150,000 salary for IIT graudate questions national value of IIT. - <AUTHOR> http://tech2.in.com/news/general/staggering-rs-80-lakh-package-offered-on-day-1-of-iitbombay-placements/615342 <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/ndtv-special- ndtv-24x7/iit-...](http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/ndtv-special- ndtv-24x7/iit-placements-fat-paychecks-but-at-what-cost/256949?pfrom=home- topstories)</comment>


Loopt was a lemon, dropping to just 500 daily active users prior to sale - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/09/loopt-dau/

<comment><USER3> Well, it's been a long week and this seems an appropriately crazy way to end it. It's off by several orders of magnitude. VentureBeat never called for the story but I'd be happy to speak about it if they'd like to.

<comment><USER4> I hate reading attention grabbing, poorly reported articles like this (if this is true).

It would be neat if HN attributed karma to domain names's, so that consistently poorly reported stories begin to affect new submissions from the same domain.

<comment><USER5> page views first, facts later seems to be the trend :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps it WAS a lemon, but it was still a $40MM lemon at the end of the day.

No matter how you analyze it, several startups have suffered a far worse fate.

Not sure why all the haters come out every time a sale, acquisition or shutdown is announced.

<comment><USER7> Haters? If startups are allowed to act so smug with imaginary valuations, the "haters" are certainly allowed to gloat when those valuations are shown to be what they are. These are the rules to this particular game.

<comment><USER8> Really? I didn't know that rule.

Valuations represent investors' hopes. People's hopes for ambitious projects are often disappointed. Is it ok to gloat whenever someone announces an ambitious target, and doesn't hit it? Is it ok to gloat when someone enters a marathon and fails to finish, for example? Seems to me like an asshole move.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's an asshole move, but asshole moves are to be expected in such a high-stakes game. If someone works really hard on a project that fails, or doesn't do as well as he'd hoped, its definitely mean, and idiotic, to gloat. But, if in the process he gets to gamble tens of millions of dollars of other people's money, well, that's a different thing altogether. The project may very well still be his passion , he may very well work just as hard - <USER2> harder - but once he takes all that money that's a different territory.

If someone fails to finish a marathon after confidently convincing a lot of people to place large bets on his winning, I don't know if that makes it "ok" to gloat, but it's certainly asking for it.

To put it simply: when you run a marathon you want to be valued for your effort; when you ask people to bet on you, you're asking to be judged on the outcome.

A win or a loss, I understand there are some very talented, and nice, people involved, and I hope they won't let whatever happens to them affect their self worth, their true valuation, too much. They will still be just as talented and just as nice even when they choose to play a high-stakes game and lose and feel some humiliation, perhaps, when others do gloat for justified or not-so- justified reasons. It sure does sting, but that's life. A man's (or a woman's) true worth isn't measured by his success, and that's important to remember. People will gloat, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Super easy Sass media queries - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/sass-media-queries/

<comment><USER2> I like the screen min/max shortcuts. I do question the need for device- specific queries, since it has been suggested that queries should be tailored to the content and not the device. Are there going to be queries for all the other possible mobile screen sizes? Of course not. That said, I do see a possible exception for hi-def screens.</comment>


Issue with GitHub - <AUTHOR> Not able to comment on PRs, apply labels <comment><USER2> I am also having issues with commenting on PR.</comment>


Hi, I'm Collis, CEO/Cofounder of Envato, Ask Me Anything - <AUTHOR> https://managewp.org/articles/11176/hi-i-m-collis-ceo-cofounder-of-envato-ask-me-anything <comment><USER2> The President of the United States chooses to use Reddit for their IAMA post. This guy wants us to use his Wordpress website? No thanks. Seems like a scam to collect data on us and that's No Bueno.

</comment><comment><USER3> I noticed that Envato hosted an Elixir meetup. Have you guys been using it in production? If so how has it worked for you guys?

<comment><USER3> Whoops, viewing from a mobile app so didn't realize it was a link to the AMA. Ignore me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You may know me as the founder of Aviato, from the hit TV show 'Silicon Valley'.

<comment><USER5> "Take Aviato. That's not a name that I found. That's a name that found me."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Hello! I'm Collis, in 2006 I cofounded Envato, the company behind ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, and Tuts+."_

Never heard of any of them. Or Envato. What are they?

<comment><AUTHOR> For context, some Envato data from last year: [http://www.envato.com/2014](http://www.envato.com/2014)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> theme forest is great, keep up the good work!</comment>


Peer To Peer Loans Grow - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576331141779953526.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised they didn't mention www.Kiva.org, although the model is slightly different, we've also been pretty involved in small business loans in the U.S. and the numbers continue to grow. I had the pleasure of sitting in the other day on an investment committee discussing risk of small business loans via a new partner in New Orleans and the depth of detail of the risk assessment was striking. This is perhaps why we've managed to keep overall default rates fairly low, which makes me wonder if Prosper is really just figuring out the right risk strategy this time around.

</comment><comment><USER3> _But by spreading risk, peer-to-peer loans tend to have lower interest rates than comparable bank loans, consumer-credit experts say._

That doesn't make sense. Banks make tons of loans, which by definition spreads out the risk of any individual loan going bad. In addition, sometimes they have insurance or other derivatives on their books.

I would say banks have their risk spread out a lot better than any individual investor, unless that individual is Paul Graham status of $$$.

</comment><comment><USER4> Investing on LendingClub is extremely fun. They give you CSV data of all past and upcoming loans to play with and show you your Investor Percentile, which compares your return to other LendingClub lenders. I enjoy competing to get the highest return by predicting which loans will default based on past data. Currently I'm in the 92nd percentile of lenders.

<comment><USER5> On average how quick do you see a return from your investment (loan) on this site? How common are losses and what assurances does lendingclub give?

I'm just wondering if it'd be a good thing to sign up for and play around with, I've currently got a spare $30k sitting around not doing anything (except losing value I suppose).

<comment><USER4> Payments are made in equal amounts each month over a 3 or 5 year period.

Losses depend on the kinds of loans someone invests in, so this varies.

These are unsecured loans, so defaults are normal. My strategy is to try to limit myself to the minimum per-loan investment, which is $25 per loan. This way a given default won't significantly harm me (I'd only be out $25 per defaulted loan).

Of course, none of this is investment advice, read the prospectus, etc...</comment></comment></comment>


Delayed Impact of Fair Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2018/05/17/delayed-impact/ <comment><USER2> "Machine learning systems trained to minimize prediction error may often exhibit discriminatory behavior based on sensitive characteristics such as race and gender. One reason could be due to historical bias in the data."

The thing about this discussion is that it aims to balance social welfare goals and profit maximizing goals but without any criteria for attaining basic fairness on a general level.

To wit, suppose a machine learning algorithm is looking at twenty or fifty piece of data about a given individual, all of which are entirely irrelevant to the individual's chance of repaying a loan. But by random chance, one of those pieces of data, say handedness, happens to be correlated with a group's repayment history. So, some individuals with a good handedness are given loans more frequently and some individuals, with a bad handedness, are given loans less frequently. This situation doesn't matter to the company since the data is irrelevant and they only give out so many loans anyway and shitting on, say, left-handed people, gives them no grief. Moreover, if this trend is noted by all the companies soon it will be made "true".

Which to say, companies making life-defining decisions like mortgages or parole-granting, just should be prohibited from the using a lasagna of random data to make their decisions and instead should be required to use specific rules with specific reasons behind them.

And cry me a river about missed chances for optimization. This about the structure of society and optimization doesn't benefit society here imo.

<comment><USER3> This isn't about overfitting. Race is almost exactly the opposite problem: the signal in the data is so strong that you can't help but pick it up, even after you censor everything you can think of. If you try to predict any kind of consumer behavior from a racially heterogeneous dataset you will end up finding something that correlates with race, because practically everything correlates with race.

<comment><USER4> > practically everything correlates with race.

Hold on, excuse me?

<comment><USER5> lol. what this person is basically saying is that racism affects almost every part of a person's life. I know it seems unbelievable but "practically everything correlates with race" is the most nerd-intelligible way I've seen of explaining/expressing that racism is pervasive.

<comment><USER3> That's not what I'm saying.

<comment><USER6> You've been using this account primarily for political and ideological battle. That's destructive of what HN is for—regardless of your ideology—and we ban accounts that do it, as explained here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If you want to keep commenting here, please (re-)read the guidelines and use this site as intended from now on. The intention is intellectual curiosity, and that is the first casualty of ideological war.

<comment><USER3> Apologies, and thank you for the correction. My comments betray a lack of intellectual curiosity and I will strive to harmonize them going forward.

<comment><USER7> Wow :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you use data such as repayment history, income, assets, and other metrics highly related to whether or not somebody is going to pay back a loan, and the resulting model does not output equal representation among arbitrary population groups, I fail to see a problem. If the data being used to train the model has absolutely no knowledge of arbitrary group identifiers, such as "gender" or "race," the resulting output quite simply _not_ biased.

However, if something like "race" or "gender" is actually being used as a _feature_ input, then the output from most ML strategies is highly likely to pick up on correlations between racial and gender groups and certain outputs. That is undoubtedly going to lead to negative discriminatory outputs.

So while I see absolutely no problem with the first scenario I mentioned, and I clearly see a problem with the second scenario...I'm inclined to believe that the politics of many people would lead them to have a problem with both.

<comment><USER9> I am not saying that this is the case in your examples, but sometimes these "predictors" create an unfair feedback loop. e.g. Cops patrol majority black neighborhoods more because of higher misdemeanor rate and because misdemeanor is a strong predictor of crime. This higher patrol rate leads to higher arrests (for crimes such as having weed on you that might not have a significant difference among races and neighborhoods). The arrest data is then fed back into the system, leading to even more patrols, essentially creating a forced equilibrium. Whereas if we didn't use the model the system might have naturally evolved to a different state. This is one possibility of why these models might be effective in the short term but not "fair" (i.e. not effective in the long term). But in any case, I think it is obvious that the benefits of a private company (such as the insurance company) are not necessarily aligned with the benefits of the society.

<comment><USER3> Misdemeanors are not a predictor of crime, they _are_ crime. Further, many types of misdemeanors are quality of life issues that have outsize impacts on the people who live in those neighborhoods. Go to a town hall meeting in a bad neighborhood and see what people complain about. It's often not so much burglaries as the guys who are chronically drinking and breaking bottles on the corner at 2 am. It's not terribly enlightened to criticize the police for going after QOL violations you would never tolerate in your own neighborhood.

As for whether police attention creates feedback loops, we can check by looking at crime victimization surveys, which generally show the same patterns of racial disparities as arrest records. For that matter, the black / white murder gap has been stable at about 6-8:1 for as long as we've been keeping track, and you can't change that by selectively hassling certain people for weed.

<comment><USER9> I fail to see how crime victimization surveys disprove possibility of feedback loops. You can have higher murder rates among the black population, yet have overall similar misdemeanour rates. You can even have a higher misdemeanour rate among the black population but have a propostionally even higher arrest rates due to these models and their feedback loops. Or maybe I am missing something in your argument? Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER3> Well, the victimization surveys tell us that for every category of crime that matters, there are large disparities in base rates that (a) predate policing decisions and (b) recommend focusing on black neighborhoods, because that's where the crime is. The idea that higher arrest rates are a self-reinforcing statistical artifact has no support from the data. The notion that "crime is where you look for it" is specifically undercut by victimization surveys as well as by murder, a crime that is largely impossible to conceal from the state indefinitely. If the baseline disparities are already so high to begin with, there's hardly any variance left over to be explained by self- reinforcing patrol strategies.

Put another way, if you took the first-order strategy you'd come up with by looking at the body count, and then layered the most moustache-twirlingly racist jaywalking policy that you could think of on top of it, the two strategies wouldn't look that much different.

That's all before questioning why it is a bad thing for neighborhoods to be policed for misdemeanors. I lived in West Baltimore for years and I can assure you that my neighborhood was, if anything, chronically underpoliced.

<comment><USER9> So now you have moved the goalpost to:

>> There might be unfair feedback loops, but they would be effectively negligible.

First of all, it is curious to me that you mention the 8x disparity in murder rate but don't mention that the violent crime survey disparity is less than 0.2x. Secondly, you just claim that the policing has nothing to do with people being arrested at different rates but do not offer any evidence.

Here are the actual numbers if you really care about facts. The victimization rates are 20.5% whites vs 24.1% blacks. Less than 18% difference. On the other hand incarceration rates are 0.7% whites vs 4.5% blacks. That is more than 540% difference. This means the blacks are being arrested at about 32 times the rate at which they commit violent crimes. So your claim that:

>> "we can check by looking at crime victimization surveys, which generally show the same patterns of racial disparities as arrest records"

is not only ignorant and false. It is so far from the truth that it is laughable.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to respond substantively to this post, and in particular to your figures, but hn has threatened to ban me for discussing this topic. I suppose each of us can only make of that what we will. Best wishes!

<comment><USER9> I would have personally liked to hear your response but I guess it is what it is. Best wishes to you as well!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Looking for a developer to help me finish my sideproject left by the wayside - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys.
I was building a sideproject of mine and the developer left me because he had IRL problems. Anyone wanna help me finishing it?
Hit me up at gianluca [at] fabrica [dot] io <comment><USER2> Take what exactly? You're not exactly selling this.

<comment><AUTHOR> corrected.

<comment><USER3> There's no details at all with regards to what the project is, how can one decide to join you if they have no idea what you're doing?

Web/desktop/mobile? Game? App? We've no idea. You should share _something_ about it, otherwise I don't expect you'll see many responses.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple brings Google-style machine learning to 'Photos' - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/06/13/apple-brings-google-style-machine-learning-to-photos/#gref <comment> King-Aaron I don't like the idea of having all my photos run through facial recognition in my own library...</comment>


The Disconnect: An offline-only, digital magazine of commentary, fiction, poetry - <AUTHOR> https://thedisconnect.co/ <comment><USER2> Related (also on HN front page): [http://nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/the- online-magazine-you-c...](http://nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/the-online- magazine-you-cant-read-online) ; [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17782794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17782794)

<comment><USER3> Also discussed on HN a year ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15079619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15079619)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brilliant idea, but it is a bit of a pain for desktop users, no? I'm not sure how I feel about impairing the usability of the site for people whose primary network connection is an older desktop.

I wonder what their bounce rate is for links shared on different devices?

<comment><USER5> What do you mean? You can disable internet with one click on any device.

<comment><USER6> How do I do that on my desktop?

[https://imgur.com/a/xG1YWwU](https://imgur.com/a/xG1YWwU)

<comment><USER5> Oh, sorry, I swear there used to be a Internet Off switch there, the same as on wifi. I guess it's harder than I thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> What mechanism does the web site use to detect whether you're online or offline?

<comment><USER7> Looks like browser events 'offline' and 'online': [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/NavigatorOn...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/NavigatorOnLine/Online_and_offline_events)</comment></comment>


Just a programmer? - <AUTHOR> http://pauldyson.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/justaprogrammer-revisited/

<comment><USER2> If companies were to actually reward people in proportion to the time and skill they brought to the success of a company, then you wouldn't see "Just a programmer," because the top programmers (at least at technology companies, where the product is mostly or entirely software) would be making more than the CEO.

But it's typically the CEO and board who determine salaries, so who ACTUALLY gets rewarded? The people who determine the salaries and their closest friends (the management), of course. Does merit take part in these decisions? Sometimes, but all too often, not.

Since there's a natural desire to understand where you rank relative to others, and that ranking is frequently done based on how much money you make..."just a programmer" is about how low in the money (and influence) spectrum you are when you're programming for someone else.</comment>


What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/09/30/what-founders-ask-founders-about-getting-into-yc/ <comment><USER2> Most people I know that are interested in starting a company need help near the beginning, within 6-12 months of setting out on their own. Almost always pre-revenue, and very early traction (if b2b, maybe just a few users evaluating).

Where are these kinds of entrepreneurs supposed to go? Is it still YC, when they have to compete with already-successful applicants?

Kudos to GitLab bootstrapping to $1M ARR though. That's truly incredible. They should write a story about that part. :)

<comment><USER3> I agree - It really feels like YC is now geared towards more later stage companies. Companies that are in the growth phase vs. finding product market fit. Also you have to be full time on your idea in order to be taken seriously.

Is that a misconception?

<comment><USER4> YC is still very much accepting companies that are still finding product market fit. But as far as I know you it really helps if you're willing to commit full time.

<comment><USER3> Yeah - definitely able to go full time after. It's hard and very privileged to be able to go full time now when the company is so early stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reading through your YC application, you were already so successful ($1M in rev, 60% growth rate, 1M users), did you ever have second thoughts about going through YC? If you had not gotten in, what would you have done otherwise?

Congrats on your success!

<comment><USER4> Thanks! We never had second thoughts about YC. We did talk a lot during YC if we wanted to take outside investment. If you take investment you need to work to a liquidity event (acquisition or IPO). Since we would like to stay independent the only option is an IPO. Not many companies make make that.

But we also wanted to make GitLab a great and popular solution. For this we need the best marketing and sales people. When we tried to hire those they wanted options in the company. It is not fair to give options if it will take very long to cash them. So we needed a liquidity event in any case. In that case it was better to take outside investment so the chance of getting to IPO was higher than without it.

If we would have not gotten in we would have continued GitLab and probably applied again for the next batch.

<comment><USER5> I'm very curious about the part where prospective employees wanted options, implying you need a liquidity event anyway. Aren't there other models for that? For instance, a partnership track setup, or paying dividends on shares, or some other sort of revenue sharing? Equity in profitable privately owned bootstrapped companies must be valuable, or there would be no incentive for the founders of such companies, so why not offer a share in that value?

<comment><USER4> Great question, I'm sure there are multiple models possible. One complication is that our priority for next few years is to grow as fast as possible. This means that you're not making a profit but investing back in more growth.

Since we took outside investment that period is about 5 years. Without outside investment it will take longer, maybe 10 years. Many potential hires don't want to wait that long. They might wait 10 years but only if you get a substantial windfall at that point, not the first small profit share.

Partnerships are more common at consultancy and finance firms where labour generates direct profits. I think they are less suited for product firms where the labour comes years ahead of the revenue. A liquidity event is a great way to bring the 'windfall' forward.

Of course things are not black and white. We choose a 4 year vesting period [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock- options](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options) There are startups now doing 6, 8, and 10 years. We didn't have a good reason to deviate from the norm, so with our vesting time we stuck to what is usual in order to be an attractive employer and hire the best executives.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the answer! This is all great food for thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> GitLab CEO here, AMA

<comment> open-source-ux In your Y Combinator application, you say:

 _"...to create and grow a competitive open source offering you need to have a proprietary commercial version to generate scalable revenue, support income alone is not enough._"

I've often wondered if you can make money selling an open source software product that isn't dependent on support or services. In your application form, you're essentially saying this isn't possible.

Do you have any advice for people creating open source products regarding this view of open source vs closed source for sales and revenue?

Do you still feel that anyone with an open source product should also be providing a closed-source commercial version which will actually be the main source of revenue?

How have people in the Open Source field reacted to this viewpoint given that there is a strong negative reaction to closed source in some quarters.

I'd love to find a way of selling an open source product that didn't have to rely on a service contract or support for revenue. Is it impossible without a closed source offering?

Any thoughts, much appreciated.

<comment><USER6> Another open core YC founder here. Can confirm it's the best way to go. Pure oss tends to become services heavy quick.

Another thing to think about: If your open source support is good enough, they may not pay for your support offering either.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for chiming in, I totally agree.

Of course some products and markets have been able to make the support model work, like RedHat.

But it is very hard to pull off and I think it used to be easier in the past when companies where very worried about support and licensing. Nowadays they are much more comfortable with open source.

What we are seeing is that companies that pay for our premium support tend to cancel that after the first year because they didn't need it.

We want to make a product that is easy to install and maintain. This reduces the demand for support. There is a incentive for companies selling support to be a bit less aggressive documenting everything.

An open core model needs a very careful balance between being a good steward of the project and the need for revenue. We documented what we learned so far on [https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship](https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship) and keep our ears open on forums like these.

<comment><USER6> We've had conversations with board members at most of the major open source companies (eg: large and private or public)

and the consensus has been that you need a lot of components for the support contract to work.

One difference we've found for example that seems to work pretty well is providing support for deep learning models. Each "model" solves a problem like "face detection" "cat finder" "fraud detection" and we charge for the platform used each time for each model. This reflects the amount of work we do for customers but also provides an SLA for deep learning they might not otherwise have.

Source control has a wider user base and tends to favor an easy to install integrated experience.

Machine learning applications tend to have fewer people who know how to build them but they are just as critical for the business.

Eg: points of accuracy in a model can directly map to revenue or profits. That's easy to explain to an enterprise customer.

So despite the smaller potential user base "data scientists" in this case, we've found it fairly easy to go to market.

One thing I think people miss is that the bulk of open source infrastructure companies tend to be devops or operating systems with lots of moving parts.

They don't tend to be applications or machine learning.

I think what a lot of us are finding is that you have to innovate on the business model itself in order to really capture value for both your user and the customer as well as your startup.

<comment><USER4> Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What did you learn at YC that you feel you would have not learned elsewhere or that it would have taken you longer?

<comment><USER4> We learned many things. The two most important ones:

1\. You can do more than you think. We came in wanting to grow into a 30 person company in 2020. Now we're 100+ people and plan to IPO in 2020. You realize that you have only so many years left and you want to make them count. And that with some help you can aim higher. Not every company should take VC and I love companies like Basecamp. But YC helped these two EU founders be more ambitious.

2\. You can ship faster than you think. Seeing what is now [https://www.wayup.com/](https://www.wayup.com/) and other people in our group achieve much more than us every two weeks made us question how we worked. We learned to iterate and launch the minimal iteration as soon as possible. It was a counter-intuitive lesson that greatly increased how effective we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What did getting into YC 'liberate' you to do that you later found out was just a mental block?

<comment><USER4> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12615911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12615911) but I don't think we would have overcome the mental block without YC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Minor typo...the link says the deadline to apply to YC is October 4 2017...should be 2016...could throw some people off...

<comment><USER4> Thanks, fixed with [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/e9fa504f...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/e9fa504fed806b902e0a555dcba7a35b5bc22b36)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Croissant, a Lua REPL and Debugger - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/giann/croissant <comment><USER2> Wish this could be ported to every other repls

</comment><comment><USER3> Wordplay: Lua meaning Moon in Spanish, "Croissant" meaning crescent in French, like a Moon crescent.

<comment><USER4> Lua means moon in Portuguese, not Spanish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A very beautiful repl indeed - It's got spit and polish!

</comment><comment><USER6> wow! this is beautiful and very impressing! I love Lua and can see myself making a lot of use from this REPL.</comment>


The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning <comment><USER2> Interesting I might get it.

You can read some pretty nice reviews on Amazon ;p

[http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Thinking-Learning- Refactor-P...](http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Thinking-Learning-Refactor- Programmers/dp/1934356050)</comment>


Techniques for writing reliable API tests and QA automation - <AUTHOR> https://assertible.com/blog/4-techniques-to-reduce-api-testing-errors-and-improve-your-qa-automation <comment><AUTHOR> I've been building a lot of API and web app testing automation and wrote an article to share what I've learned.

To sum up some bigger points:

\- use as little end-to-end tests as possible

\- when end-to-end tests uncover bugs, write new unit tests

\- dilligently remove flaky tests and tests that don't provide value

\- keep test data consistent, short-lived, and as small as possible

Would love to discuss problems anyone else has encountered testing APIs and web services.

(note: I am a co-founder @ Assertible)</comment>