Ask HN: Which webcomics (other than XKCD) do you read regularly? - <AUTHOR> I used to read about twenty webcomics regularly, but stopped reading any at all for several years.
I could just start reading some of my old favorites again (those that are still updated, anyway), but I'd probably be missing out on some worthy additions/substitutions. Hence this "Ask HN".
Comments on why you like your picks would also be appreciated. <comment><USER2> Only three others, scaled back from a dozen or two a number of years ago:

[https://sinfest.net](https://sinfest.net) (I learn a lot from the two forums)

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic)

[http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/](http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/)

Strong Female Protagonist is a wonderfully fun—and deep—look at the world of superheroes.

Edit: lists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. SFP is just the sort of thing I'd have missed out on. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Electric Imp Raises $7.9M To Power The Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/16/electric-imp/ <comment><USER2> _"Users can remotely control lights..."_

Bzzt. Stop talking about controlling lights! No average consumer is going to put a new module + $25 Imp card in every light switch in their house. But hey, let's put a single Imp in an X-10 controller and do it that way! Now I'm still rewiring every switch and messing with neutral bus bar jumpers? C'mon.

Getting devices on the net is nifty. Let's start with the big items first. Thermostat is a good place to begin. But now we already have wifi thermostats. So why do we need Imp?

<comment><USER3> It is annoying how they grab for low hanging fruit like the light switch. Arguably the real need is not domestic but business. There are millions of businesses that need to automate small things. A cheap and easy way to do that without needing engineering expertise would be very cool.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _this_ is a big idea. i hope these guys pull it off. if they don't, someone else will.</comment>


Second East Bay HN meetup is this Wednesday - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news/browse_thread/thread/ace9b857c09bdadc

<comment><USER2> Put me down as 'unlikely' for this one, but almost certain at the next. Looking forward to it (one of these days...).

</comment><comment><USER3> bdr wrote ---

The second EBHN meetup is going to be this Wednesday, starting at 7:30, at the David Brower Center (<http://bit.ly/9N82Kj>)! We had a great turnout last time at Jupiter's, but decided the next one should be somewhere we could mingle more and bring out the laptops. So, thanks to Jose for offering to host at the Brower.

There will be (at least some) beer and pizza. RSVPs helpful but not required.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in :) The last was one was great...

</comment><comment><USER5> RSVP'ing as per the email thread, I'm a "maybe".

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone want to do a Cambridge/Boston HN meetup?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm in. This seems like the kind of thing that would be easier to organize on meetup.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The Google Group is free, and has worked fine so far.

<comment><USER3> Google Group is at:

<http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Total noob here - going to try to locate you in the Brower Center.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm in. Clint</comment>


Multi Level Marketing is a great way to piss off your friend - <AUTHOR> http://hustlebear.com/2010/04/26/how-multi-level-marketing-is-a-great-way-to-piss-off-your-friends-and-always-leave-you-poor/ <comment><USER2> singular friend, cuz by now that's all you must have</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good open source video conferencing suites - <AUTHOR> In light of the Zoom Zero Day does anyone have any good recommendations for open source alternatives? <comment><USER2> I've found OSS alternatives to necessary business tools to be subpar experience and have decided to shy away from them.

Have you tried Google Meet yet? It's included in your gsuite subscription and is on par with Zoom.</comment>


In Praise of Blue Notes: What Makes Music Sad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/arts/music/in-praise-of-blue-notes-what-makes-music-sad.html <comment><USER2> ...discovered Nick Drake - Pink Moon...

<comment><USER3> great news! turns out this article wasn't a complete waste of time and energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Minor Chords?</comment>


Windows 8′s Greatest Sin - <AUTHOR> http://techpinions.com/windows-8s-greatest-sin/11907

<comment><USER2> Terrible article.

Interviewing companies about their plans to move to Windows 8 less than a month after it's released?

Of course the numbers are going to be low. I would be surprised if 1/3 of the people interviewed had ever even seen the product.

Companies are known for keeping old software as long as humanly possible, not turning on a dime to adopt something that just hit the marketplace.

The author then follows with a bunch of conjecture focused on how individuals make decisions, but corporations are not individuals, and don't make decisions like "maybe I should just buy a mac" on a whim.

There are lots of things to consider like your current system architecture, your employee's skillsets, corporate software, the cost of purchasing hundreds or thousands of new machines, etc. etc.

So what are you trying to analyze, individual decision making or corporate decision making? Because the two are completely different.

This article is literally the bottom of the barrel when it comes to tech news, and I hate that I took time out of my day to read it.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I think the bad assumption is

"If I'm Going To Have To Buy New Computer Hardware Anyway…"

You don't. I don't think most people running Windows 8 think they need to buy a touchscreen.

PS: People seem to disregard that 4M people upgraded to Windows 8 within a few days of release. That's about the same number of new Macs purchased in an entire quarter. Microsoft made the upgrade path to Windows 8 far simpler than any prior release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Under most circumstances, I would agree with this analysis. Pushing the customer into doing what I think it was Joel Spolsky called "the dreaded market survey" is a terrible idea, because, as the article says, once you disrupt their normal workflow they're as likely to go with someone else's new alternative as with yours.

The problem with applying this line of thinking to Windows 8 is that these days, for Windows, are not "most circumstances." Customers' routines have _already been_ disrupted, they are _already looking at_ other peoples' alternatives, and many are choosing them. So for Microsoft the issue isn't whether or not to let the gravy train roll on undisturbed, it's to do something to keep at least some of the gravy from spilling out.

The cause of this disruption is two-fold -- first, the beginnings of a massive platform shift from PCs to mobile devices, and second, the feeling among most Windows users ever since XP or so that the Windows they already have is "good enough." This puts Microsoft in the awkward position of competing against both competitors with superior offerings for those customers who want something radically different, and themselves for those customers who are change-averse.

All of which is why, _in this particular case,_ just quietly sitting pat would have been a bad idea. It's debatable whether Windows 8 is the product that will square this circle -- that will make Microsoft relevant again to both those who want massive change, and those who want none at all -- but what I don't think is debatable is that they needed to at least _try_ to create such a product if they wanted to defend their position in the marketplace.

(Whether that product should have been called "Windows" is another story, but that's a subject for a separate rant.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Really poor article. Here's what I think is probably its lowest point:

> _"This forced Netflix' customers to re-evaluate their subscription plans. > And when they chose, many of them chose to cancel their subscriptions > altogether."_

Not sure how you can attribute the cancellations to "forcing customers to re- evaluate" and completely brush over the fact that the price went up 60%.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article seems to suggest that businesses will re-evaluate their options and many will choose to go from Windows to Mac.

Whilst this may happen more often that it used to, Windows still has some important advantages.

Apple stuff is expensive, in the UK a Mac Mini will cost you at least £500 whereas a cheap dell powerful enough to run Office and other apps can be had for less than £200.

Microsoft also has an complete eco-system with Windows Server & Exchange etc as well as client OSs and has an army of professionals who are highly trained in these specific tools.

One of the big reasons IT depts love Windows Server is the amount of fine- grained control it can give over permissions on Windows clients as well as IE etc, there is also extensive third party tooling built around this.

As far as I am aware there isn't really an out of the box solution that provides this sort of thing in the Mac world.

There may be a lot of small businesses who can swap a Windows Server for a bunch of Mac (or even Ubuntu) boxes and a dropbox account + web apps. On the other hand I'm not sure Fortune 500s are exactly dying to put all of their data at the mercy of google etc.

<comment><USER7> Apple isn't even going after the "enterprise" market. The Mac works very well in a Windows server based network, with Exchange. So in other words, it's perfectly fine having Server 2012 (or 2008) with Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint (and all the rest), with PC's and Mac as clients.

And frankly, I don't think MS is even going after the PC anymore. It already owns it. It wants what it doesn't own: mobile. IOS and Android are kings in mobile. MS isn't even on the field.

That's what Windows 8 is all about. It's about leveraging Windows 8 (on the PC) into users buying Windows based phones and tablets.

And that leveraging is a big risk. and I don't know. I mean, it's clear to me Metro is not aimed at enterprise. Time will tell if it's a good bet or not. I hope so. Cause if not MS will become irrelevant - sort of like what CA or Novell are right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't really agree with this article at all. For one thing, as people have already pointed out here, making coclusins based on companies' plans just does not make much sense.

1\. Do people really and honestly think that companies will abandon Windows for iPads or macs? I find that extremely unlikely for reasons that I think we already know (iPads are not good for productivity, I doubt companies will shell extra $$$ for Macs). Companies being wary of a brand new Windows release is nothing new. Remember when Windows XP came out? People and companies hated it initially. The article's comparison to Windows 7 is funny because it failed to say how most of these companies who looked forward to upgrading were running an OS that was 8 years old! (XP - the same one they initially claimed they would not use)

2\. I don't buy the fact that most people think that they can get away wit just having an iPad. Most people that I know use an iPad as a SECONDARY device. It is more fun than a laptop for consuming content. Sure. But what if you have to actually, you know, do some work? This is basically Windows 8 / Surface's entire value proposition. One device to work AND play.

3\. Why is the article ignoring the fact that most people won't feel comfortable spending ~$1,300 on an Apple computer when they could get an HP or something for $600 or even less? Let us not forget the fact that not everyone can shell out the money for a Mac.

My 2 (3?) cents :)

</comment><comment><USER9> MS had to do this. As many point out there already are alternatives and it's clear mobile devices are the future. MS made the tough choice. Will it hurt them in the near term? YUP. It's an unpopular, bold move but I think the correct one. Kudos to Balmer for having the gonads to push the company in this direction. We're looking at maybe 2 years before Win8 takes hold.

For what it's worth, I think Win 8 acceptance will be molasses slow. Win 8 will affect Android's share not Apple's. I have a newer ICS tablet and I still prefer my IPad Gen 1. ICS feels slow despite having a much faster processor.

</comment><comment><USER10> This was all inevitable. The market has changed. There wasn't much Microsoft could do. Given a typical lifecycle of a Windows OS is about 2 years, in 2012 they had to build an operating system that was truly touch-enabled, compatible with ARM architectures and could compete with iPads and Macs. This way they have their bases covered until Windows 9.

</comment><comment><USER11> Exactly. Most Windows users remained Windows users for so long because they lacked a good alternative. That has only changed, and now many market segments are no longer hostages to Microsoft's OS.

<comment><USER12> Most people use OSes to run apps and contain data/media. The fact that most of the applications used are on Windows is a huge reason folks haven't gone elsewhere. This is more true in the business realm than the consumer realm that has the major growth in alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the key (single-sentence) paragraph is:

 _Windows 8 is designed for a touchscreen._

This seems to be the TL;DR of many reviews. If this becomes 'common wisdom', which looks likely, then I think MS are going to lose a lot of people on the upgrade train as this guy suggests.

<comment><USER14> Lose them to who? Is Linux or a Mac really a viable upgrade path for most corporations? How much Windows expertise has been built up over the years/decades? How many interoperating windows products are they already running? Legacy software? All of these are major barriers to switching.

And this is the key to Microsoft's strategy with Windows 8. Roll out their next generation paradigm while piggy-backing on the momentum of their current generation software and infrastructure. If they had waited too long to transition, it would have been a situation of "well if I have to relearn everything anyways...". Forcing this paradigm on their desktop and server customers _now_ was key to keeping the majority of their userbase in the transition.

<comment><USER15> _Lose them to who?_

Themselves. On the desktop, there may not be a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8...with the exception of IE10. As a former enterprise IT manager, I would seriously consider staying with Windows 7 and switching my users wholesale to Chrome or Firefox...despite the lack of GPO options with either of those.

<comment><USER16> Chrome supports policies: <http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy- list-3>

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the link. I hadn't investigated for several years and it's nice to know they've jumped on the GPO bandwagon. All the more reason to get your enterprise off IE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Windows8 comes up with brutal UI changes, pushing current Windows users to learn how to use it. This might scare off some current Windows users, and they will consider buying Mac instead, but don't forget that Apple is raising its prices, that might bring people back to Windows.

<comment><USER18> So the logic here is "Wow, the new start screen is different, so I might as well go learn a different OS, with a different set of apps, and different hardware"?

Not to mention if the person has more than a single PC, they're now using two totally separate systems? It also ignores the folks upgrading to Windows 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would be more interested in knowing how many companies plan to adopt Server 2012.

<comment><USER20> Anecdotal but we're not. We have 240 windows 2008 r2 machines and are waiting for a good reason to upgrade.

<comment><USER16> For me, one reason is the new server manager, it makes it so so much easier to manage multiple servers at once. ([http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server- cloud/windows-server/s...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server- cloud/windows-server/server-management-automation-features.aspx) click the plus on Server Manager)

<comment><USER20> We use Powershell and WMI remote exec (which is underneath all that anyway). All our Win admin is via console.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DNS-over-HTTPS Update - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/02/dns-over-https-doh-update-recent-testing-results-and-next-steps/ <comment><USER2> Some dubious arguments there. Why should I trust Cloudflare? Yes, EDNS client subnet leaks the IP address to the authoritative server of a domain. But in almost all cases, a DNS lookup is followed by a connection to an IP address of that domain anyway, so my IP address will be known by the domain owners.

</comment><comment><USER3> > .. will check locally if the browser has a Facebook login cookie

I can't believe I read this on Mozilla. I have no cookies - Private windows. What a mess.

> ..portion of our United States-based users in the Release channel will > receive the DoH treatment...will use Cloudflare's DNS-over-HTTPS

That's it. That was the last straw. And thank you for the fish.

<comment><USER4> Or... you know, you could just disable it in your browser?

<comment><USER5> Just like you can disable Windows telemetry, Facebook personalized ads, Google's personalized ads - most people don't and it's actively harmful for their privacy. But I'm not surprised Mozilla has done this, they have ran "experiments" before that hurt people's privacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know how switching to DNS-over-HTTPS affects adblocker apps on Android like Blockada, DNS66, etc.?

<comment><USER5> They will break unless DoH is redirected.

</comment></comment><comment> s-p-n Is this good or bad?

<comment><USER4> It depends on who you ask. I think it's a major positive because I'm not getting filtered 53 traffic now.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I want to implement a network fuzzer in a VNC server. Is it possible? - <AUTHOR>

i want to implement a network fuzzer in a vnc server . How far is it possible to code it from scratch and  any good ebooks or links on it? <comment><USER2> I'm not clear on what you want to do. Do you want to fuzz a VNC server?

There are some ways you can do that. Try to find docs online that detail the protocol or read the source of open-source VNC servers to infer the protocol. You can then use some existing tools to generate some traffic (peach or scapy, among many others). I'm not a fan of Peach for a few reasons, but some people use it.

In general, you'd want to cover edge cases of inputs being parsed. Signed/unsigned edges for integers, strings of various lengths with common bad input patterns, unordered type-length-value pairs, etc and etc.

Try finding past vulnerabilities in the server you're trying to break and see where others found holes. Check the changelog. Try instrumenting an existing client.

<comment><AUTHOR> i would like to implement a netowork fuzzer on a client system through a vnc server installed at the server , and if i find an anomaly in the system , i would like to take up complete control of the system. is it possible?</comment></comment>


Using IAM Access Analyzer - <AUTHOR> https://www.ibexlabs.com/using-iam-access-analyzer/ <comment><USER2> if this supports for ssm parameter store rhen it will be a killer feature.</comment>


Effects Of Raising And Lowering Speed limits - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html <comment><USER2> The article unfortunately doesn't mention how wide-spread the limit changes were announced, how long the new limits were in effect and how many days/weeks lay between setting the limits and the measurements.

The biggest problem with not having these data is that one cannot rule out the "adoption" factor - if I drive the same road for years, I usually don't give a bleep about speed limits any more...</comment>


Embracing Conway's law - <AUTHOR> https://wingolog.org/archives/2015/11/09/embracing-conways-law <comment><USER2> Shoot, now I'm that guy who complains about article titles - It's a fine article but I'm not sure what if anything it has to do with Conway's law, which states "Organizations build architectures which mimic the communication structure of the organization." There doesn't seem to be much if any discussion of communications, organizations, or architectures in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting a webpage not available error. Has anyone got a mirror?

<comment><USER4> Try without https: [http://wingolog.org/archives/2015/11/09/embracing-conways- la...](http://wingolog.org/archives/2015/11/09/embracing-conways-law)</comment></comment>


A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better? - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/a-glass-battery-that-keeps-getting-better <comment><USER2> The really important bit, comparison to lithium ion:

 _> She did say that large battery banks that might be spun off from this research stand to not only have higher capacity, but also be substantially lighter than lithium ions. Although, she adds, perhaps the greatest weight savings will come not from comparing one battery cell's mass with another. "The biggest difference would be that you don't have to have the same stainless steel bunkers in each of the cells," she says._

Not flammable is a big deal in battery tech. We try to pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller cells, so continuing to improve the capacity makes inadvertently releasing all that energy even more dangerous.

Here's another cool project working on that problem with a solid polymer electrolyte. Video shows it continuing to provide power while being sliced into pieces with scissors: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to know what's wrong with the polymer electrolyte, the demo is so amazing..

<comment><USER4> Can't find any details myself but the usual issue is energy density or number of charge cycles.

<comment><USER5> Or prohibitively expensive production cost

<comment><USER6> A Venn diagram with the labels 'production cost, 'energy density', and 'number of charge cycles' with 'Ideal Battery Technology' in the centre.

<comment><USER7> Only if you declare the center as infinitely perfect in every way. If you allow each axis to trade off with the others, then there is no single ideal. Fixed storage would rather have better prices and cycles in exchange for worse density. Mobile devices would rather have better density in exchange for higher prices.

(You can look at it like a path through the solution space. If you keep letting someone pick which attribute to improve, over and over, you eventually hit infinity/infinity/infinity, but different users will take very different paths to get there. At any particular count of improvements, their ideal batteries are significantly different.)

And with regard to kickopotomus's comment, you can get away with a _much_ higher cost if you're targeting the right niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Headline is misleading. The battery has a brief burn-in period where it gets better.

> They also published a graph that showed an increase in capacity over more > than 300 charge-discharge cycles. (This increase, however, pales in > comparison to the cell's at least 23,000-cycle lifespan.)

And once they dig into details, the "apparent increase of entropy" is further exposed as bait. Sounds pretty credible, and not controversial

> She says their glass electrolyte is a ferroelectric material—a material > whose polarization switches back and forth in the presence of an outside > field. So charge-discharge cycles are effectively jiggling the electrolyte > back and forth and perhaps, over time, finding the ideal configuration of > each electromagnetic dipole.

> "This is what happens as you are charging and discharging," Braga says. "You > are aligning the ferroelectric dipoles."

<comment><USER9> Right, nothing surprising about having a break-in period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sounds similar to the concept of self-healing materials. Such materials aren't necessarily at full health (optimal structure) following manufacture, so could expect to see improvements through use.

Some materials and devices also benefit from being broken-in; where properties which impede utility are degraded more rapidly than properties which positively contribute to it.

<comment><USER11> I thought of concrete vibrators. (probably not the best analogy though)

When people pour concrete they get a certain strength out of it. But if they vibrate it, air and excess water gets removed, and the concrete aligns together to become more cohesive.

<comment><USER12> I think this is a great analogy since air bubbles are easier (for me) to imagine than the polarity of particles

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > In fact, she adds, up to a point, rising temperatures only increase the > electrolyte's performance.

This is the case for normal lithium-ion batteries as well; they perform better at 120°F than at 70°F (and lose significant performance at even lower temperatures).

<comment><USER14> Cold weather performance is an issue for the folks who replace their motorcycle battery with a lithium ion aftermarket upgrade. [https://advrider.com/f/threads/lithium-ion-batteries-in- cold...](https://advrider.com/f/threads/lithium-ion-batteries-in-cold- weather.934390/)

<comment><USER15> I have a LiFEPO4 battery in my motorcycle, and even here in the bay area of California, I notice the change it its cranking ability on colder days. It's a real issue with the chemistry, as attempting to charge it while cold causes some unfavorable reactions as well, so relying on resistive heating to bring it up to temp isn't a great idea.

It _is_ kind of amusing that cranking it a few times until it peters out from lack of charge, waiting for the heat to spread internally, then firing it right up as the capacity recovered due to temperature overcompensates for the previous drain, is a valid thing to do.

<comment><USER16> Have you tried heating blanket?

<comment><USER15> For my location, it would be more trouble than it's worth. If I lived somewhere a little colder, though, I think some kind of thermal control would be a real necessity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> there is some critique on previous papers[1] I would wait for an update from this blog to actually assess if these claims can hold water

[1] [http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery- part-2/](http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery-part-2/)

<comment><USER18> what if their claims only hold energy?

<comment><USER19> Then we still won't have our water batteries with water density better than that of a bucket

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lighter weight and cheaper. So both for transportation AND grid storage? A good direction.

<comment><USER21> > "The BMS is to control temperatures," she says. "In our case, we don't have > to have that." In fact, she adds, up to a point, rising temperatures only > increase the electrolyte's performance.

No need for the stainless steel bunkers to isolate cells. This IS an important breakthrough (if verified).

<comment><USER22> BMS Is also to balance charge in a string of cells. Also, I thought this material was actually heavier per kWh the last time it showed up here.

<comment><USER23> The two are inter-related, the unbalance in Li-Ion packs is largely caused by the negative temperature coefficient of the cell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If it is nonflammable I wonder what its failure mode would be and how it could be triggered and what counter measures are needed if any.

If it has the energy bound within and accessible there must be some way to release it and some would be faster than others.

<comment><USER25> Probably the only way of releasing the energy fast is to short the battery with a thick wire, or to burn the whole battery with an external source.

There's no rule that having lots of bound up energy has to be dangerous, that it has to be possible to release it quickly. There's enormous amount of potential energy in pure hydrogen gas. If you can just fuse the atoms. But it's incredibly hard to release it.

<comment><USER26> Similarly, a candle carries over 10 times the energy of the same sized stick of TNT but you'd have to work pretty hard to get that energy out quickly.

<comment><USER27> Do you have a source for the candle fact? Thats quite interesting.

<comment><USER28> A quick search shows tnt has 4 kJ / g while paraffin has 42 kJ / g. A lot of energy is in paraffin's hydrocarbon chain, but less energy per bond and it is less accessible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Original source has a question mark at the end of the title.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is the second release from the Goodenough lab from early 2018?

I wish there was more evidence of confirmed working prototypes. It sounds too good to be true, like the 2018 announcement.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can we make the battery transparent and hook an oled to the back?

<comment><USER32> Jonny Ive would you this to go thinner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This could bring electric aviation (constrained by a battery's specific energy currently) a decade forward. Let's see how it pans out.

<comment><USER11> or make electric cars a lot more interesting (literally lower hanging fruit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'll believe it when I can buy a cellphone with one.

Miracle batteries are like Alzheimer's cures and memristor computers: they show promise in the lab but fall down hard when used to develop products people actually use.

<comment><USER35> Yep. You can bet that if a patent hasn't been filed the creators have no faith in the scalability of their invention.

<comment><USER36> I'd be very surprised if a patent wasn't filed. filing patents has nothing to do with scalability or production. it just is to control an idea.

<comment><USER35> Exactly. When a group doesn't file a patent it means they know the idea is worth less than the application fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We need better batteries, this seems promising!

</comment><comment><USER38> > thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over > many charge-discharge cycles.

Well that's just nonsense.

Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.

<comment><USER39> I almost feel like this is a straw man to make this controversial. I don't see why anyone, even a layman, would say this.

<comment><USER40> A false "entropy of matter natural law" argument used to be forwarded by "evolution debunkers." Richard Dawkins debunked this fake natural law with a thought exercise involving an hourglass with water in one chamber and salt in the other. You can tilt the hourglass to mix the salt and water in one chamber, but if you sit the device in the sun, such that the sun shines on the full chamber, you will eventually see the hourglass return to a state where water is in one chamber and salt is in the other.

<comment><USER41> It's too bad no one ever did this on YouTube. That would be highly persuasive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pluto's demotion is a great opportunity for science - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/plutos-demotion-is-a-great-opportunity-for-science.ars

<comment><USER2> This article makes an excellent point. I can only speak from the US perspective, but I think a lot of the reason the average non-scientist has trouble with things like pluto suddenly not being a planet anymore is the way science is taught to us as kids. For the most part, everything in science is presented as a nice tidy package with little ambiguity as if we have it all figured out. Sure, you get the occasional "scientists don't understand XYZ yet" sort of explanation here or there, but for the most part everything is presented as settled. This presentation persists from the time kids are very young, all the way up through high school.

As a scientist, training yourself to be objective and questioning is one of the hardest skills to learn. It takes until college before you start realizing that science is messy and has all sorts of caveats, controversies, and disagreements. Some of the issues are presented to students, but they are often the ones which are blindingly obvious now (i.e. we have confirmed to 99.9% certainty that the sun does not revolve around the Earth). Rarely are the really dicey controversies presented.

It takes even longer for you to realize that not only does all this ambiguity exist, it's actually _the norm_. Once you start looking back at history, you realize some of the biggest scientific discoveries were based on people saying, "what if all my assumptions are totally wrong and there is a completely different explanation for what I observe?". Or, some new kind of technology enables you to view some previously hidden phenomenon and all your assumptions are overturned immediately.

Unless you actually pursue a science-related career, you unlikely to ever really understand any of this.</comment>


Spectrum Nerd - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectrumnerd.com/data.html

<comment><USER2> Very neat visualization! Note that these charts are of static allocations, not dynamic usage. Dynamically, we use very little of the spectrum that we've statistically allocated, even in a busy urban environment: [http://www.sharedspectrum.com/wp- content/uploads/2010_0923-G...](http://www.sharedspectrum.com/wp- content/uploads/2010_0923-General-Band-Survey-30MHz-to-3GHz.pdf) (see Figure 9 for the punchline). Look at all that open real estate, and think about how much we've managed to do with a measly 100 MHz in the ISM band.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not so sure this is actually "available" spectrum, as it is unused-by- carrier spectrum.

For example: the large dark spot in New Mexico is probably that way for a reason: The VLA is smack in the middle.</comment>


Dallas health worker who tested positive for Ebola wore 'full' protective gear - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/10/12/dallas-health-care-worker-who-treated-thomas-eric-duncan-has-tested-positive-for-ebola/?hpid=z1 <comment><USER2> More people should understand that hospitals are messy. Really messy. From wiping vomit to feces to rolling over patients to changing chucks to wiping down monitor cables to handling bottles of saline that you may inadvertently leave out in the open for others to touch to not disposing spare gauze that may be contaminated to forgetting to wipe down your stethoscope to tearing your gown off as you rush to see another patient, etc etc etc. There are any number of people going in and out of a patient's room, performing a wide array of tasks, handling an even wider array of objects. Add to that the often hurried nature of hospitals and you get an environment prone to breaches of protocol.

I say this not to incite panic, but to provide insight that many might not have. It is more likely that during the thousands of interactions that this patient saw, the messiness led to a breach, instead of the virus infecting via a vector we've not yet realized.

<comment><USER3>
      More people should understand that hospitals are messy.

_American hospitals_ are messy. It gives me no pleasure to uniquely qualify that. The fact is that, the more you read on the topic, the more you will learn that this is an uniquely American thing, at least among the industrialized advanced nations.

If you exclude the Cleveland Clinics, Cedar Sinais, Beth Israels & Stanford Meds of the hospital world, most American hospitals are woefully bad for patients, in terms of HAI rates(Hospital Acquired Infections).

Buried in a pile of books, surveys and studies during the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a few years ago, was an eminently readable book called

      Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed
      My Father--and How We Can Fix It by David Goldhill.

In 2007, David Goldhill's father, in good overall health, checked into the hospital with a minor case of pneumonia. Within a few days, he developed sepsis, then a wave of secondary infections. A few weeks after entering the hospital and the day after his 83rd birthday, he died.

Here's an Atlantic piece by Mr. Goldhill

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how- amer...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american- health-care-killed-my-father/307617/)

A Reason TV discussion with him

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvSa9nC4JcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvSa9nC4JcQ)

I think his points are still relevant, even after the passage of the ACA.

In a few years, I am certain that we will have to revisit the issue of how little we get as consumers of healthcare in America, for how much we spend as a nation, all over again.

<comment><USER4> Um, it's not just the USA:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327766/Mid- Stafford...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327766/Mid- Staffordshire-NHS-hospital-scandal-left-1-200-dead-happen-again.html)

1200 dead because of avoidable cleanliness problems

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PPE is hard... Every time you take it off is an opportunity for infection. It's very easy to get complacent and not be as careful as you should be (yes, even when dealing with something like Ebola). When you're donning and doffing dozens of times a day, mistakes happen. It's very likely she wasn't the only one to be exposed, but hopefully she's the only one that was infected.

<comment><USER6> Do they do a decontamination shower before you remove your PPE?

<comment><USER7> Showers can actually do more harm than good if the equipment is permeable, or the individual did not follow protocol when donning. Meaning even little things like not cuffing your gloves.

The can cause overconfidence in regards to contamination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Entering panic mode too fast, according to the chief of the CDC "there was a breach in protocol"[1]

Frankly, this hospital mismanaged the index patient from the beginning and though the woman infected now wasn't on the initial list...the list itself wasn't complete because they didn't properly diagnose the index patient ebola to begin with.

[1] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-chief-on-second-ebola- case-t...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-chief-on-second-ebola-case-there- was-a-breach-in-protocol/)

<comment><USER9> Isn't the breach in protocol using anything under BSL 4? The problem is there is no way to ensure BSL 4 outside of a couple specialist labs. So the protocols are basically dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

"Only 15 BSL-4 facilities were identified in the U.S. in 2007, including nine at federal labs."

<comment><USER10> Those are labs, and there's some surge capability, that count of 15 either includes some that can move to BSL4, or there are a few that can do that.

There are 4 hospitals in the nation that have a total of less than 20 beds that are set up for diseases like this. Emory (CDC), the NIH in Bethesda, the biggest with 10 beds is in Omaha, Nebraska, and there's one in Missoula, Montana, not far from one of those BSL4 labs.

<comment><USER10> Ah, it turns out we have a grand total of 23 hospital beds nation wide in theory qualified for Ebola:

3 at Emory: [http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/2005/July/July%2...](http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/2005/July/July%205/isolationunit.htm)

3 in Montana, and they've never used them or put their protocols to the test: [http://missoulian.com/news/local/st-patrick-hospital-of- site...](http://missoulian.com/news/local/st-patrick-hospital-of-sites-in-u-s- ready-for/article_da521772-4839-11e4-b266-4342d105e33f.html)

7 at the NIH, and it sounds like they've gotten some use: [http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/translational-research- resourc...](http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/translational-research- resources/resources/special_clinical_studies.html)

As mentioned before, 10 in Nebraska, and they _don 't_ have a BSL-4 lab handy; hopefully they have, or are setting up, a mini-lab there, for as Emory realized, it's not practical to send samples from Ebola patients to the hospital's main lab: [http://www.nebraskamed.com/biocontainment- unit](http://www.nebraskamed.com/biocontainment-unit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As reported in this news story, "'Clearly there was a breach in protocol. We have the ability to prevent the spread of Ebola by caring safely for patients,' [Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] said in an interview Sunday on CBS's _Face the Nation._

"Frieden also promised that protocols at the hospital would be reexamined to find out how the disease was apparently transmitted." Other patients with quite advanced cases of ebola, who were on the brink of death, have been successfully treated in United States hospitals without any health care workers in those hospitals being infected so far. The Dallas hospital where this latest incident happened will definitely have to review its infection control protocols, but we know already that other United States hospitals are doing things right.

Terrifying news like this came out when SARS was first spreading around the world in 2003. SARS is especially easy to transmit from one person to another because it is an airborne virus. No doubt there will be other cases of ebola infection spreading in the developed world, even in hospital settings, now that the first few cases have been discovered. But SARS transmission decreased a lot once people in China started taking precautions like self-isolation and masks to cover coughs. West Africa has a lower availability of equipment, supplies, trained personnel, and even information today than rural China had in 2003, but with sufficient outside help the transmission of ebola can also decrease a lot, until numbers of new cases start falling instead of rising.

<comment><USER12> You can't compare this thing to SARS at all. Not only does it have a longer incubation period, but SARS lives outside the host for up to 6 hours (4 days in poop). Filoviruses can live up to weeks outside of the host.

Not to mention SARS is spread from respiratory droplets. This thing is spread by: A) vomit B) saliva C) sweat and if you are running a high grade fever you are going to be sweating and transmitting this thing from every pore in your body.

So no, this is not going to be as easy to contain as SARS especially once it hits somewhere like India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The WaPo headline is rather sensationalist.

Of course he was wearing protective gear (it would have been news if he _hadn 't_).

He may have worn it, but what procedures did he follow for removing it? That's where infections are likely to occur - the article even notes at the very end that the nurse in Spain who was infected was probably infected this way.

<comment><USER14> This is the critical question. She probably dons and doffs protective gear a few dozen times per day, as do most of us who work in a hospital, but we rarely practice doing so correctly. The topological distinction between in and out becomes totally blurred when most people remove their gowns. Therefore, it is probable that many people would think they are correctly removing full protective gear, but have never or rarely correctly removed such gear and therefore got themselves contaminated in the process. Less likely, we don't understand the transmission vector and some fomite is at play. Ideally, in an unusual situation such as this, there should be observers closely eying all contact including de-gowning.

<comment><USER10> Somewhere I read that if you're really serious about this, you get yourself sprayed with something that glows in ultraviolet light, remove the protective gear, and then look for spots where the agent made its way onto you.

<comment><USER5> That's a common training technique (a lower tech method is simply to spread some sticky liquid (like maple syrup) on your PPE).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was an Ebola documentary on PBS a few nights ago and one of the people noted that he touched a need and that's how he contracted Ebola.

People have likened Ebola to HIV, but HIV does not transmit this easily. Even during seroconversion (which is when you might get vomiting and such with heightened viral load) I've never heard of anyone contracting HIV in a hospital.

I feel like the information on transmission has been poor. For example, is skin a barrier for the virus?

<comment><USER10> " _is skin a barrier for the virus_ "

We don't know. It's strongly suspected broken skin is not a barrier.

<comment><USER15> I'd expect broken skin isn't, but what about intact skin? With HIV we can answer a bunch of questions about transmission. With Ebola I can answer very few. I think this increases the anxiety.

<comment><USER16> It absolutely does. I think the problem is that the virus can live on a surface in bodily fluids for a long time, or a dead body for days.

So you touch the surface with the virus then you wipe your nose, rub your eyes, eat with your hands.... and you could get infected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of this thread is speculation. Let me interject by actually citing some research which may answer some questions.

@kenjackson: "Is skin a barrier for Ebola?"

Yes. According to Bausch et al.

"Taken together, our results support the conventional assumptions and field observations that most EBOV transmission comes from direct contact with blood or bodily fluids of an infected patient during the acute phase of illness. The risk of casual contacts with the skin, such as shaking hands, is likely to be low."

In the same paper, they note that:

"We found [Ebola] to be shed in a wide variety of bodily fluids during the acute phase of illness, including saliva, breast milk, stool, and tears. In most cases, the infected bodily fluid was not visibly contaminated by blood."

This lends credence to Kyro and JshWright's assertions that hospital and PPE protocol are hard to exactly follow, every time (I'm certainly guilty sometimes). Even if the equipment or chucks aren't stained with blood, there is a possibility that the patient's tears have leaked onto the material and remain unseen.

[http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/196/Supplement_2/S142....](http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/196/Supplement_2/S142.full.pdf+html)

<comment><USER18> Would UV lights kill the virus, if, for example, it were to be sneezed out from a patient. Assuming the patient room was awash in UV light, would that kill the virus if it found airborne/aerosol method of transport from an infected patient?

<comment><USER17> Yes. In a sense.

According to several sources, it may take up to an hour for the virus to be invalidated by UV light. That makes it not really practical for the patient or the HCP involved.

Not only that, but I suspect at the energies required, the amount of UV radiation would be quite harmful to the patient as well.

"Inactivation of virus stocks.Virus stocks were inactivated by exposure to UV light for 1 h. Proper inactivation was controlled by the incubation of Vero E6 cells with the inactivated virus particles and subsequent screening for the presence of viral proteins (immunofluorescence) and viral RNA (reverse transcription [RT]-PCR targeting virus-specific transcripts). The UV- inactivated stocks were used at the same dilutions as the noninactivated stocks."

[http://jvi.asm.org/content/75/22/11025.full](http://jvi.asm.org/content/75/22/11025.full) [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00705-010-0847-1](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00705-010-0847-1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe we need to create Robot nurses to treat Ebola patients.

<comment><USER20> Can be hacked. Still vulnerable to viruses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I posted the following in the now killed thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444976)):

 _As many commentators undoubtedly will say, additional cases are to be expected. However, it 's a problem that both in Texas and Spain, the people infected have been health workers. Health workers that are supposedly well- protected and well-informed about Ebola specifically (at least the spanish nurse was, it's not clear in this case yet).

Now it's true that there are more bodily fluids in a hospital than outside, but given all the protection and procedures, is the difference so big that a health worker is at a much bigger risk than a person who happen to sit next to someone infected on a bus?

There are two cases as I see it. Either it's likely that other people, non- health workers, have been infected. We just don't know about it yet, or it has been decided that it's not in the public's interest to know. Or the protective measures are so bad, the disease so misunderstood or hard to protect against, that health workers effectively can't protect themselves against the risk.

Either case, it's a big problem. In the west too._

In that thread people were saying the health worker was infected before they knew Duncan had Ebola. In this thread, when it turns out that the health worker did know Duncan had Ebola, people are saying that it's obvious. Funny how these things work.

No one except mainstream US media is advocating panic. That doesn't mean it's not a serious issue that requires our attention. Saying "Ebola is overrated, more people die of X every year, don't panic ffs" doesn't add anything to the debate - it's neither controversial nor insightful.

To guide the discussion, here's a suggestion for people who disagree with me. Either argue why there are more than the two cases that I outlined, or argue for why either of the two cases aren't a problem in the coming weeks and months.

<comment><USER22> At the time you posted this, there were 1 or 3 other comments. Yet you still summarize, _In this thread, when it turns out that the health worker did know Duncan had Ebola, people are saying that it 's obvious._

Going one step further, none of the comments that were posted at the time you made that summary really said much about whether the worker knew that Duncan had Ebola.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So far this hospital has completely screwed up both in providing medical services and explaining what happened. Does it really make sense that an apparent emergency room worker would be wearing full protective gear including a face shield before they had even diagnosed Ebola? And if so how did the virus get through? Magic? No somebody, most likely the infected person, screwed up. All it takes is a touch of your comtaminated gloved hand to your unprotected face.

Like when they blamed the computer system then later denied it was a problem or when they said the initial patient's fever was 101 and it later turned out to be 104 we may have to wait for the truth to come out, if it ever does.

<comment><USER24> From the Post article linked here, "The person treated Duncan, the Ebola patient, after his second visit to the ER, on Sept. 28." This was not an ER worker, and their contact with the patient was after the diagnosis.

<comment><USER23> I may be wrong that it may be an ER worker but according to the NY Times "it occurred at some point DURING or after his second visit to the hospital on Sept. 28."[1] He tested positive on Sept. 30.[2] We will have to wait to see what the facts turn out to be.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/us/texas-health-worker- tes...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/us/texas-health-worker-tests- positive-for-ebola.html?_r=0)

[2] [http://www.modbee.com/2014/10/11/3587238_timeline-for- first-...](http://www.modbee.com/2014/10/11/3587238_timeline-for-first-case- of-ebola.html?rh=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what makes this virus so much more contagious that other strains.

<comment><USER26> It's actually not that contagious. There is a unit of measurement for this called the Ro number (high #=more contagious). Ebola is about 1.8 currently, pandemic flu was 1.9, measles is 15-20.

<comment><USER12> What? You do realize that a RO can actually grow in size which is exactly what this is doing right?

When the outbreak began in Guinea it was RO = 1.5 Early July, the RO in Sierra Leone was 2.5. Today in Liberia, the virus has been spreading so fast that the RO hasn't been computed (and we won't officially know since Liberia has been acting shady and is not reporting all of their statistics).

I think you probably saw some infographic floating around and are citing that, but that RO is a variable number.

<comment><USER26> I assumed the inclusion of the word "currently" would have implied that the number is dynamic, my apologies if that wasn't a safe assumption. I haven't seen any data putting the Ro in any country over 3.0. Obviously waiting to see new data that includes September.

Data until Aug 26, 2014. [http://www.eurosurveillance.org/images/dynamic/EE/V19N36/art...](http://www.eurosurveillance.org/images/dynamic/EE/V19N36/art20894.pdf)

Data until mid Aug, 2014. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3505](http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3505)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> At some point, we're going to have to talk about how this black, uninsured man walked into a Dallas hospital, which discharged him and then later lied about his condition when he first went to a hospital. And we're going to need to talk about Republicans slashing CDC funding and every other type of public health funding they could get their hands on. And we're going to need to talk about how the two white Christian missionaries got flown directly to a specialized hospital in Nebraska immediately upon diagnosis, and survived.

(edit: very predictable downvoting on this. But it's simply a fact that politics and race have played a part here. I don't like posting it any more than you like admitting it to yourselves.)

<comment><USER28> Thomas Eric Duncan took a pregnant woman who later died of Ebola by taxi to look for treatment. He lied on a questionnaire at the airport in Monrovia that asked if he had been in contact with anybody infected by Ebola. Because he lied his own country said that it would prosecute him if he survived!

If Thomas Eric Duncan had not lied at the airport he never would have been allowed onto an airplane. If Thomas Eric Duncan had told the hospital in Dallas that he had cared for a person with Ebola he would have been isolated immediately.

Thomas Eric Duncan isn't dead because he was black. Thomas Eric Duncan isn't dead because he didn't have insurance. Thomas Eric Duncan isn't dead because Republicans. THOMAS ERIC DUNCAN IS DEAD BECAUSE HE LIED!

<comment><USER29> Actually, what Mr Duncan did was help his neighbors drive a woman who was 7 months pregnant to the hospital. The woman was presenting symptoms that are not unique to Ebola (fever & convulsions). The woman was not hemorrhagic. The group was turned away at the hospital and so they drove her back home. Mr Duncan then assisted in helping the woman back into the house. This is almost certainly the point at which he was exposed. The woman was not tested for Ebola until after her death, so Mr Duncan could not have known but he could have suspected.

Thus the possibility that Mr. Duncan thought he was only helping a pregnant woman get to the hospital to help with a troubled birth. At that point, the most information he could provide is that he cared for a sick pregnant woman.

Relying on the fact that Liberia would prosecute him is a bad idea, due to the precarious nature of justice in that country. I would imagine that Liberia would say just about anything to prevent public opinion in the US from going sour. Liberia is facing an existential crisis and are in desperate need of all the help the US can give.

Mr Duncan's trip to the US was planned weeks in advance, so he was not fleeing the country in response to his exposure.

<comment><USER30> > Mr Duncan's trip to the US was planned weeks in advance, so he was not > fleeing the country in response to his exposure.

Citation for that?

<comment><USER22> He needed a visa to enter the U.S. (probably to even board the plane).

It's easy to find articles talking about him receiving the visa in August (I guess he would have applied for it some weeks or months before that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Please, share this Ebola awareness poster ! [http://bit.ly/1vF1COO](http://bit.ly/1vF1COO)

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/screening-ebola- takin...](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/screening-ebola-taking- temperature-cant-work.html)

"Some Ebola experts worry that the virus may spread more easily than thought -- through the air in small spaces, for example."

Aerosol transmission is a very real possibility and has been demonstrated in the field and in some experiments, including working its way through the air ducts of a building, from one part to the another, infecting monkeys, and not just through one room.

Though some strains are not as effective in that mode of transmission as others.

edit: To the down-voters, at least make your case. The people that worked with the virus, and in the hot-zones, made theirs.

<comment><USER27> Here's my case: you made your alarmist "case", such as it is, by posting a junk article from a junk, far-right blog whose other charming entries include:

-9/11 truther articles -racist crap about Ebola spreading over the Mexican border because of insufficient efforts to secure said border -several other non-scientific articles about Ebola -an article about "Obama's Ukrainian stooges"

If you want to make your case, find one cite--just one will do--from a legitimate publication of any kind.

<comment><USER32> [http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news- perspective/2014/09/commentar...](http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news- perspective/2014/09/commentary-health-workers-need-optimal-respiratory- protection-ebola)

"We believe there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks."

<comment><USER27> Thank you. I very much appreciate that additional cite.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition Draft - <AUTHOR> https://eloquentjavascript.net/3rd_edition/00_intro.html <comment><USER2> Great book to read if you are considering becoming a front-end developer! Instead of just "tolerating JavaScript's quirks", the author taught me how to use the language's unique features to build maintanable applications eloquently.

</comment><comment><USER3> Used the 2nd edition as a textbook in college a few years ago. Highly recommended to anyone who has at least a little programming experience and wants to learn Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER4> is there an accompany forum for learners of this book to discuss content and exercises like Coursera, et al.?

<comment><USER5> That's a great idea. I really loved _Eloquent JavaScript_ online version, a forum would make it even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been learning fundamental concepts of web development coming from UX for a couple years now and this text has been absolutely instrumental in my learning. Highly recommended!

</comment><comment><USER7> Thought this was a well-worded draft for ECMAScript language specification Edition 3.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would say this is definitely not a good book for beginners with little to no programming experience. I don't know anyone who got past chapter 6 who was not already very familiar with programming patterns. I would try the You Don't Know JS series or JavaScript the Good Parts instead.

<comment><USER9> Beginnners might want to try The Javascript Way book on [https://github.com/bpesquet/thejsway/#](https://github.com/bpesquet/thejsway/#). Best I've seen yet.

<comment><USER4> this book also have a forum for it, albeit low traffic. [http://forum.thejsway.com/](http://forum.thejsway.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Blogwashing - <AUTHOR> https://eggonomy.com/blogs/news/blogwashing <comment><USER2> Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

<comment><USER3> How is this Googles fault? They're just following the market. People want "modern" information. They don't want old stuff from two years ago.

<comment><USER4> What people say or indicate they want and what people need can be two very different things. The long term potential backlash from solving for the former should be weighed against the short term gains, but that's tricky!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content?

This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing up, be it for SEO, for my more up to date 'voice' or because I switched to Gutenberg and removed janky slider plugins that haven't been updated since 2014. Should I re-date? Or leave them as-is?

<comment><USER6> Often dates are extremely relevant, for example a 10 year old hardware review won't be as relevant as a new one. On the other hand, blogs don:t have to be static, some programing technique might still be relevant, but need to be updated for a new version of the language.

Solution: put a "first published" and a "last updated" date, or use a wiki that makes the revisions available online and a way to link to the different revisions.

<comment><USER7> A variant of that, but something I'd like to see is listing initial publication and current revision/update status (including initial). Then at the bottom of the post put a summary of each update so readers know how the post has evolved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick.

But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

<comment><USER9> Is the blogosphere dead though? I see links to tons of previously unknown to me blogs on this site. The community has moderated the spam out. Thanks guys!

<comment><USER10> It is "dead" in the sense that you are more likely to comment on the post on a third party site like HN or Reddit. A decade ago the conversation would be happening on the author's site, in the comments section. That died off because bots and click farms flooded comment boxes with spam and chased away legitimate visitors.

Authors of popular blogs didn't want to handle comment moderation, and once they started encouraging discussion directly on FB, Reddit or HN, it was game over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "freshness" issue is one that causes problems and subtly sets priorities.

Problems come up when looking for older content on purpose. A lot of older content is very relevant still today. I know people who could not find something they knew existed in Google. Switched to Bing and it came right to the top. The difference was the way newer content was prioritized.

Google doing this sets priorities. It says that newer is more important. Is that true? Many would argue it's not. Google says it is and "advises" people where to go based on that.

I find these worth considering.

</comment><comment><USER12> Prioritizing new content is going to exacerbate a lot of already existing problems with the WWW. I won't echo the already good list of reasons why old content is relevant. But I will point out it will usher in a new era of re- showing you old content that has been repurposed "as new" via minor edits. And it's going to also help convince a growing audience of web surfers that only the latest/greatest is worth knowing about. That in turn puts additional pressure on content producers to obsess endlessly over SEO tricks and gimmicks. In sum, this worsens the user's experience by prioritizing things that benefit Google. And this, of course, should be no surprise to anybody who has watched Google's business decisions over the past 4 or 5 years.

<comment><USER13> Yes, exactly that. Also Google doesn't take actions when you report something or they just dismissed the reports: spam-blogging, spam results when you're looking for references, badly translated news sites copying content from legitimate sources, and the list goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is 100% Google's fault. They discourage both "old content" and "thin content", so guess what happens?

Content writers create posts like "Ultimate Beginnner's guide to X in 2019" articles and just update the post title and "Last updated" metadata each year. Nobody's going to create a brand new guide to building muscle or whatever if the core information doesn't change year to year.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't be the only one thinking that:

1\. it's possible the author double checks the content each year and redates so that visitors know it still applies

2\. the author updates the article to be current and redates it

It's a little weird to say this is "blogwashing". It's pretty common (for me at least) to check the date of an article when it's a tutorial so I know if it's current or not. And I've seen this happen before where authors append a "changelog" to the article at the end so you know that it's up to date.

</comment><comment><USER15> How does everyone feel about only showing the updated date on the blog post itself but keeping the real / original published time in the meta tags?

I do that on my site mainly to keep things less cluttered. Every post has an "Updated on November 12th 2019 in #docker #flask" line at the top of the post and that date is either the original published date or the last time I updated the content in the post, but the meta tags are always the correct values (ie. I don't refresh the published date with the updated date).

But now it's making me think I should include both the "Posted on" date as well as a separate "Updated on" date in the presentation of the page itself to be crystal clear. My only concern with that is that will eliminate some vertical space on the page because I can't fit all of that on 1 line cleanly. I would have to break the dates and tags onto 2 lines. For example, this is what a current line looks like: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/make-your- static-files-produc...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/make-your-static-files- production-ready-with-flask-static-digest)

<comment><USER16> On some of my sites, I only list the updated date too. I prefer to keep it simple for the average visitor. The reason is that these topics are more time sensitive so I regularly update all the posts to list latest information, advice etc. Having the original date there might give a bad impression to some and they may think the content is old and outdated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Search is just getting worse and worse, its a problem that probably nobody can solve with the current paradigm. I think in a few years there will be a significant opening in the search market for an algorithm that manages to structure information differently

<comment><USER18> Or, some public database of the crawled web where we can apply our own algorithm.

I've always dreamed of a grep for the web, for instance. Trying to Google for code is a pain, even when quoted/verbatim.

<comment><USER19> This exists: commoncrawl.org

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re- publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.

<comment><USER21> I thought Google heavily penalized your site if the human version was different from the googlebot version

<comment><USER22> How do they detect that? Presumably human review, which can't possibly cover every malicious page on the internet. I assume if you report the site they queue it up to be scanned by a human, unless their solution is just to have versions of googlebot that are harder to detect - possible, but if someone is already going out of their way to trick googlebot, I don't know how well this would work in practice.

As a starting point, your not-googlebot needs to spider sites differently from googlebot (so it can't be detected by traffic analysis), imitate average user hardware well (GPU acceleration + high GPU performance, more realistically slow network, slower CPU hardware, etc), use network addresses not obviously Google's, and imitate user behavior (plausible input events, scrolling, etc). This is within Google's capabilities but is definitely an undertaking and SEO types could eventually identify their strategies.

<comment><USER23> >How do they detect that?

Easy, their crawler has a google bot user agent. Then they sample some number of links with a human like user agent, and diff the output, plug the diff into some algorithm to assess the score.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Actually, a lot of sites keep updated posts with new information, which is useful. Which I believe makes it harder for Google to figure out who is gaming SEO and who are providing actual value.

<comment><USER25> How so? Could they not ML-detect the main body/content of the post and do a simple diff to previous "crawls" of the same content? You would think this gets picked up and somehow "resolved" because it's essentially a _duplicate_ post or entry in their crawled pages DB.

<comment><USER26> > Could they not > ML-detect the main body/content > a simple diff > previous > "crawls" > the same content

Yeah, I could do that in an afternoon :^)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What? I thought I read somewhere on Google's webdev infos that they know when an article was first created vs. updated. Not sure if this "old trick" still improves the ranking of an article, but surely enough, it baits people into clicking on a link.

I noticed it a couple times myself. Stuff that's obviously an older article appears in the SERPs as if it was published a few days ago.

<comment><USER28> It could be a self fulfilling thing, if the CTR increases on a search listing (because it appears newer to the user) that listing generally moves up because of higher CTR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another great trick is just increasing version numbers in your blog posts! People look for content relevant to their version number, so you should just make sure you have copies of your content with all the version numbers people might search for!

And with version numbers, you are not limited to dates in the past, you can even write articles about the future!

Here's a brilliant example: [https://gorails.com/setup/ubuntu/20.04](https://gorails.com/setup/ubuntu/20.04)

How to set up Rails on Ubuntu 20.04, which will be released in April next year. You can already read the guide today! Some of the links might not work yet, because obviously you can't download Ubuntu 20.04 yet, but once it's released, those guys are bound to be the first ones who had a guide out!

<comment><USER30> But won't their article be old in April, and get less viewership than the one some other author is holding back until day-of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting that the text in the search bar in the screenshot says "AWS Pinpoint Alternatives" doesn't actually line up with the text at the bottom where it says "Searches related to Send with SES — AWS Pinpoint Alternative" and you only see 5 pages of results. The text at the bottom should repeat the search phrase verbatim.

I get completely different results on Google if I actually search for the phrase in the search bar, with no sign of the blog in question. I see zero evidence that the scummy SEO tactic actually works and a lot more evidence of a faked "Google" screenshot.

</comment><comment><USER32> Frankly, I don't see a problem with this if it is done consciously rather than automatically. *

Usually, I'm interested in currency not recency. If, say, a technical article was written in 2015, I don't exactly care that it was _written_ in 2015 but do care very much whether it's outdated today or not. APIs change, etc. If the blogger has re-dated the article, that suggests they believe it is still current, which is useful information to me.

(* - Caveat: no, I've never redated a blog article myself. But I am only a very infrequent blogger anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER33> That's not just a thing done by blogs. Several "news" sites like (german) t3n.de do this. Or some sites like cnet.com etc... mostly content like "The best CMS as of {insert year here}" \- so mostly things you can use years later. However, it doesn't help if the library isn't receiving any updates anymore. I don't think it's just to get a better search ranking but also to manipulate users (they want to use up-to-date software/etc)

<comment><USER34> I've been working for an online news network in Germany for several years. They hire people (mostly students) to do nothing but update their old articles on at least a weekly basis. Even too a point where it becomes almost unreadable because of so many useless and non-contextual updates. But it works in terms of ad revenue from google traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Vast numbers of people are currently employed writing/updating articles with titles like "What You Need To Know About Cats In Mid-November 2019".

This is Google's fault.

<comment><USER36> And it's a 5 year old article that has just edited the title. you still see the comments from 3 years ago

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Old way sharing is in danger when big guys like Google don't fight back spam and black-hat SEO. I try to do my search on different search engines so older content- sometimes well established articles on programming - and meaningful new content can both go to surface. Since four or five years ago if you search something with Google then sponsored content goes first, sometimes it's just brand propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't really see the harm in re-dating a blog to keep it high in search results. There is a lot of information that once publishes stays relevant and informative for years, to get dinged on seo because it is stale says more about google then the blog authors. Also they have an image which doesn't tell you if a links url was updated in an edit.

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh gods I hate this, when I'm looking for how to get something done on a framework which has gone under big changes, I need to look up the articles within the last 6 months.

But this bullshit makes that really hard.

</comment><comment><USER39> Some Blog

November 13th 2422

This week, Groaar and Mrumfm have been experimenting a new invention. We are considering calling it "wheel". Will keep you informed.

Comments

This is old news. Our tribe has been using it for eons.

</comment><comment><USER40> > It's almost 2020... Google knows about this

Google also knows about vertical search [1] and actively destroys anyone who pops up with a good new algorithm and hope for a startup.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search). I am pretty sure there has been a HN frontpage article about a couple with a vertical search startup that was legally and practically destroyed by Google.

<comment><USER41> First, does this have anything to do with the OP article? Second, care to link to anything to substantiate your claims?

<comment><USER40> > what does this have to do with OP

OP made the point that Google does not want to address this problem and may even facilitate it (maybe passively). However, they have actively prevented progress on search engines that may be more difficult to SEO engineer/hack (because of their specificity) and particularly have prevented people with good vertical search algorithms from building a business (read: actively sabotaged their business). [1]

In any case, Google known as well to quash any other small projects that they feel challenges them. [2] [3] [4]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case- against...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against- google.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941) web browser [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929) person's idea taken after interview [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324) business

References [2]–[4] are not specifically important; there are easily a dozen such kind of complaints if you just search for "google" on HN.

<comment><USER41> Wouldn't leaving a persistent flaw in Google search results which could be avoided by using a vertical search engine be an example of Google assisting vertical-search start-ups?

<comment><USER40> Maybe in theory, but if you look in particular at the reference labelled [1], it seems like they prefer to act as though it doesn't exist and if other people try to get vertical search going, then they simply block their startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Am I the only one who still bristles when people say blog but mean blog post? Or is this generally accepted now?

<comment><USER43> what's a blog? oh you mean a weblog. /s

<comment><USER42> I'm assuming your point is that words get shortened for convenience and that that's OK. That's a fair point. It's also true that language doesn't always evolve in ways that make sense, and I get that.

With that being said, there's a huge difference between shortening "weblog" into "blog" and shortening "blog post" into "blog":

First, when "weblog" was shortened to "blog," "blog" didn't already mean something (and certainly didn't mean anything in the relevant context). When "blog post" got shortened to "blog," "blog" already had a meaning - AND it already had a meaning _in the context of the internet_. One of these leads to confusion, one of them doesn't.

Second, when "weblog" was shortened to "blog," we didn't already have a shorthand way of saying "weblog." But we've been shortening "blog post" to "post" basically since the beginning. There was no reason to shorten it to "blog" also. "Post" was just fine.

I'd argue that a more fair comparison would be if, after using "blog" for a while, we decided to shorten "weblog" into "web" instead. It would have been silly, because "web" already meant something, and because we already had a shorthand version of "weblog" (i.e., "blog") - so why did we need another?

But I guess your sarcasm and the down votes answer my question anyway. The internet has accepted "blog" as meaning "blog post." I might as well get on board.</comment></comment></comment>


Gay Developers Boycott As Mozilla Appoints Allegedly Anti-Gay CEO - <AUTHOR> http://instinctmagazine.com/post/gay-developers-boycott-mozilla-appoints-allegedly-anti-gay-ceo

<comment><USER3> Maybe they should boycott companies that do business in India since homosexuality is actually still outlawed there (as in outright illegal - <USER2> in Russia homosexuality is legal)... This gets no press.

But no, let's rag on Mozilla because Brendan Eich has views we don't agree with.

Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman both have views I don't like but I use Linux and GNU software... In fact, if I were to boycott everyone I didn't agree with I'd have to live in a hole in the ground.

</comment><comment><USER4> The biggest impact this could possibly have is in producing legislation that lets large donations conceal their source because of fear of hateful retaliation. Ironic I know.

If we don't want to have those laws we need to be a little less witch-hunty about what we discover in the records.

<comment><USER5> Do we though? I think we need to fight to keep speech in the open. There's no constitutional right to free speech that can't be traced back to you.

If we're going to equate money and speech then we have to equate the fact that speech is audible. Money masquerading as speech needs to be as well.

If you're not willing to stand up for what you believe then you have no business saying it.

<comment><USER4> You don't think anonymous speech should be protected?

        Voting?
        Reporting crimes in your neighborhood?
        Protesting an employer decision?

You can't think of any case where people would want their speech to be anonymous with just reason?

<comment><USER5> In the US voting is not guaranteed to be anonymous. It's protected and (mostly) un-traced to prevent coercion. But the fact you voted is recorded. If you live in a district with few enough voters (or voters who all vote the same way) your voting record could be used to tell who you voted for.

I don't think the other ones you mentioned are particularly compelling, no. There are ways to protect the names of people who report crimes without guaranteeing absolute anonymity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally, I'm so sick of everyone being so damn sensitive about everything nowadays. Guess what? Business is business and 99.99% of the time CEO's are appointed on their business acumen and not their personal beliefs. If Eich is a professional he'll keep the two separate.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't like to tell other people what to do, but I wouldn't want to see any revenue generated (even indirectly) by me find its way into this guy's pocket. Not that there's a truly positive or better option....

</comment><comment><USER8> Warning, this site seems to have some articles that are probably NSFW at many places.

</comment><comment><USER9> While they're entitled to do that, wouldn't it have made sense to boycott long ago when Eich helped found Mozilla?

<comment><USER10> Sounds like it only came out the Brendan Eich was homophobic when he recently supported overturning Prop 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMO, Mozilla's work for the public good is more important than this.

Times are changing quickly, but remember that Obama was on the same side as Eich, and prop 8 passed with a majority of voters. I don't think it is very helpful to be shaming everyone who did not support gay marriage in a vote 6 years ago.

<comment><USER12> > Times are changing quickly, but remember that Obama was on the same side as > Eich

Really? Can you cite any statement or action of Obama advocating for or directed toward advancing the cause of _removing_ the right of same sex couples to marry any place that it had been established?

<comment><USER13> In 2008, when Prop 8 was on the ballot, Obama was for civil unions but professed to believe that marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman. "I'm not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do believe in civil unions."

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6K9dS9wl7U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6K9dS9wl7U)

<comment><USER12> Not promoting same sex marriage is not the same thing as promoting withdrawing it where it has been established. So, that's not an example of what was asked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this just intolerant of his own views and morals? He's free to have those, last I checked.

<comment><USER15> Of course he is. That doesn't make a boycott wrong, or the those who boycott "intolerant." Further the causes you wish to further, but be aware that as a consumer I may choose to withhold direct or indirect support based on your decisions. That's fair for everyone.</comment></comment>


DNA Tattoos Are the Final Frontier of Love - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/style/dna-tattoos.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Reminded me too much of the poem in one of my favorite cyberpunk/snow crash- esque mixtapes ever:

 _Where is my mind?

An abandoned oil rig stands in for the garden of Eden. A garden is a walled space with vegetation. It contains encrypted knowledge of good and evil. 777 terabytes of data contained in a single gram of DNA. Wiping a tear off your cheek. Salty.

The ocean is grey. Makes you feel like there's something wrong with it. What's the word?

'Contaminated'

Mandate Tonic,

Dance Titan Om,

An albatross has swallowed an Evian bottle.

When 2 become 1.

Like all people, they contained multitudes. Like all situations, this was several situations at once. sometimes I looked away and ate peanuts and drank Club Mate. Sometimes I thought about what time it was. Then I was on the verge of tears. Then I laughed a lot.

420 Park Avenue

Drexciya

François Rabelais

Quake 7 Arena

Caiman Nearness

Arcane Sans Mine

Amnesia Scanner

In a taxicraft. Magnetic hover. Tunnels. Plebs light fires and roast stray cats. Taste memory of gnawing on stringy cat meat. Cats are mostly bones and fur. Memories of paper money, also on fire. Memories of diamonds. Rare minerals, tea bowls repaired with gold.

Kintsugi. Gnu I Kits. King Suit.

Nothing less than a 1000 years old.

Street view, upper level:

Gregorian monks in technical fabrics. Robes with mesh and intelligence. UV face tattoos glow in the dark. Yellow contacts, sharp fangs.

Monks are chanting:

Google Krishna,

Shrinkage Go Lo,

Angels Rig Hook,

Regal Kings Ooh,

Ice cream melting on his chest.

Yourdicklooksgreatinthoseheels.com

Handguns, rare butterflies. elaborate prison tattoo of a tiger in mid leap.

Augmented reality contact lenses.

Red bull energy drink.

Fleshlight. Shell fight.

Septum streched, thicker rings are more beautiful. chain on neck.

Bull ring on nose.

Fake lashes. AFK lashes.

Nails so long that these hands can no longer grab things.

Voice control override.

This could be us but you playin'

thunderdome

thunderdome anagrams

We're gonna take everything before we secess. We need more weapons. Hi-speed Wi-Fi provided by drones is a given. Arab money in ciphered currencies. Treasure island. Buccaneers and buried gold.

A stream of more or less violent crimes.

What was violence again?

Floor 312. We're there. I hand the driver a flake of skin and a fingernail.

The oil rig. A bird flies over. We extend our arm and stand completely still. Bird lands. Bird makes sound. Gently touch bird. It lets that happen. Bird says: ______________ . Identify bird: sparrow. Place filter on sparrow. Mosaic, turbulent displace, hue/saturation. Bird is simplified, jagged edges, orange for now.

scan_

[https://soundcloud.com/amnesia-scanner/as-angels-rig- hook-1](https://soundcloud.com/amnesia-scanner/as-angels-rig-hook-1)</comment>


Myths about keeping America safe from terrorism - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123101159.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the TSA airport security is all just misdirection.

It's so clearly theater, and particularly the most recent set of regulations being so obviously ineffectual and just stupid, that it can't be serious. At the same time, there are so many better targets that remain unprotected: energy and communication transmission hubs, bridges and tunnels, malls and arenas, etc.

Can it be that Homeland Security is fully aware that what they're doing to air travel is stupid, but it's all designed to keep attention tuned there? Like a magician that's directing attention away from the real trick, DHS wants to keep the terrorists from thinking about the "better" targets. They keep all of the debate focused on air travel, so alternate ideas aren't discussed and incubated.

I'm start to believe that DHS has chosen air travel as cannon fodder, intentionally concentrating terrorist attention there, in order to keep everything else safe. It's kind of like the wildebeests at the watering hole. As long as the lion is eating the one weak animal (air travel) the rest of the herd (American infrastructure and industry) is safe.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I have a hard time believing this, as it isn't just US air travel which is hit by the stupidity. All over the world we are suffering from this and I can't see the air industry taking to being a sacrificial cow, without protesting about it.

</comment></comment><comment> bjelkeman-again As usual, missing is from this is any analysis about causes of terrorism, which seems to have gone missing in most/all(?) discussions about terrorism these days. They are only talking about how to deal with the symptoms not the causes. That will never solve the situation, only dampen some of the symptoms, at best.

<comment><USER3> Terrorism is a tactic. It is nonsensical to talk about the causes of superior firepower, the causes of ambush, or the causes of propaganda.

Islamic Fundamentalism is an ideology. It is likewise nonsensical to talk about the causes of Buddhism, socialism, or libertarianism.

But just for kicks, in your view, what exactly _are_ the "causes" of terrorism? They are central to the claim you are making, but you don't say what they are. Why?

<comment><USER4> Since no one else wants to, I'll take a stab.

Meddling. We meddle in other people's affairs (in the Middle East). Iran and the Shah, where we supported a brutal dictator. We give money to many oppressive governments in the Middle East.

Of course, the thing that increase terrorism the most was invading Iraq when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan. The second thing was invading a country (Afghanistan), rather than just sending in a squad to arrest Bin Laden.

We are seen in the Middle East as bullies that only care about oil. This is grist for the mill of terrorism, where we setup ourselves as an easy target.

<comment><USER3> _the thing that increased terrorism the most was invading Iraq..._

9/11, USS Cole, Kenyan/Tanzanian Embassies?

Also, while the war in Iraq has not made the US popular in the region, it has given the people of the Middle East a very good look at the practice of terrorism. Surveys show that groups like Al Qaeda have suffered an even greater loss of esteem than the US has:

<http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/12/17/saudi.poll/>

 _We give money to many oppressive governments in the Middle East._

This was the theme of GWB's second inaugural address. Thanks to him, Iraq's government is now the most liberal in the region. The idea was to create pressure for change in neighboring countries like Syria and especially Iran. That nobody was ecstatic about the Stalinesque Hussein regime's ouster and subsequent replacement with a constitutional democracy is a bright sign that "oppression" is a lot more complicated than the victim-villain narrative that predominates in the media and public discourse.

Did I mention that Israel is one of the world's most open societies if you ignore all the stuff they do to the Palestinians?

The point is that this issue is full of contradictions. But it's hard to see how the oppression of the Middle East's huddled masses would elicit murderous, self-immolating rage from the son of a Nigerian bank chairman living at a tony London boarding school (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab), or an Egyptian studying architecture at a German university (Mohammed Atta).

 _We are seen in the Middle East as bullies that only care about oil. This is grist for the mill of terrorism, where we setup ourselves as an easy target._

Superpowers are not nice. But they are even less popular than they are nice. They get blamed for all the good they could do but don't, doubly blamed for their screwups, triply blamed for their vices. And when they do something right, nobody pays attention:

[http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2009/1211/Iraq- oi...](http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2009/1211/Iraq-oil-fields- European-Asian-firms-win-first-contracts)

So I absolutely agree that the US has a big PR problem in the Middle East that to some extent is structural and can't be gotten rid of. But that doesn't really tell us much. Any project undertaken by an actor as big as the US is going to be a mixed bag. Because of the PR problem, people will see the bad and not the good, making the US less popular and giving it more of a PR problem.

I think people stop thinking about problems like terrorism too early. They quit in a funny way though. Rather than just declaring the problem impossible, people tend to settle on some really unrealistic solution that will never fly in the real world, and then complain that it isn't happening.

So for example, people go on about how the US should consume less oil (which would add major unemployment to the region's problems), stop backing Israel (which would destroy trust of other allies, threaten a high-tech trading partner, free up Syria and Hezbollah, and piss off a chunk of the Florida electorate), or stop being a superpower (Riiight).

There have to be better solutions, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can I weigh in with "myths about the myths"? Cause this article is loaded with them.

 _Terrorism is the gravest threat facing the American people -- Americans are at far greater risk of being killed in accidents or by viruses than by acts of terrorism_

Terrorism is the gravest threat facing the American people today because small numbers of people acting violently have the ability to sway a populace to do irrational things. That's why it's an existential threat, not because you count up dead people one way or another (damn, I get tired of this old chestnut)

* When it comes to preventing terrorism, the only real defense is a good offense. -- But offense has its limits...an emphasis on offense has often come at the expense of investing in effective defensive measures, such as maintaining quality watch lists,"

The problem here is that the magical amulet that keeps bears away is really beyond questioning. Or in other words we don't know what _didn't_ happen because we took certain actions. Obviously strategies that are both totally offense or totally defense are going to miss attributes from the opposite tact. But nobody has suggest or is implementing strategies that are one way or the other. Best you can say is that there is an opinion call involved here, one way or the other, and that there's probably not a right and wrong in the traditional sense.

I could go on, but the article is just bad. Bad, bad. I got to this point and dang if he isn't digging out Bush as a strawman to kick around some.

Terrorism is a complicated subject. In a lot of ways it's just rough-and- tumble politics taken to the logical next stage -- blowing up kids in a bus to get politicians to do what you want. Articles that have the words "myth" and "terrorism" are almost guaranteed to contain exaggerations and oversimplifications.

<comment><USER6> _Terrorism is the gravest threat facing the American people today because small numbers of people acting violently have the ability to sway a populace to do irrational things._

Just to be sure I'm reading you correctly, I think you're saying that you _agree_ that yes, terrorism is the gravest threat facing the US right now. Furthermore, the reason that it's the gravest threat is because a few terrorists "have the ability to sway a populace to do irrational things".

If so: horse hockey.

As to the first part, a person's odds of being personally affected by terrorism are infinitesimal, especially if you don't live in NYC, Washington, LA, or San Fran.

Yes, it only takes a few terrorists to commit an attack. But how we react to it is entirely up to us; they have no power to "sway" us into irrational acts --that has been purely the choice of our leaders and media, who have used the fear of terrorism as a way to build their own powerbase and advance their own agendas. I do not know ONE SINGLE private citizen who is actually afraid of terrorists, despite having zero confidence in our TSA and security procedures.

<comment><AUTHOR> "As to the first part, a person's odds of being personally affected by terrorism are infinitesimal, especially if you don't live in NYC, Washington, LA, or San Fran."

The OP was claiming that it is incorrect to state, as the article does, that "effects of terrorism" == body count.

Any time I fly I suffer the effects of terrorism because I'm now forced to spend an extra few hours engaged in security theater. I get additional delays driving along the US southern boarder as well. I have politicians looking to restrict my means of expression because of supposed fears of terrorism.

Now, even granting all that, I don't know that this is the _gravest_ threat facing the USA, but the opportunistic reactions to terrorism certainly is a major problem that affects people daily.</comment></comment></comment>