Apple will not allow Verizon to preload software on iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/11/apple_will_not_allow_verizon_to_preload_software_on_iphone.html

<comment><USER2> As a consumer I'm glad that Apple would not let Verizon pre-load their crapware on the iPhone. If only other manufacturers could do the same. Unfortunately they are not in the same position with Apple. As a matter of fact, Apple will not Verizon the iPhone if they do not agree to that.

I love using the Nexus One with its pure Google-Android experience. I have yet to upgrade to Nexus S.

<comment><USER3> The annoying thing is even the Nexus One comes with preinstalled apps that you cannot remove.

Specifically: Amazon MP3, Twitter, and Facebook.

<comment><USER2> Twitter was pre-installed on Nexus One? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember seeing it out of the Box.

As for as default Facebook installation and integration is a bad idea. I really hate that.

<comment><USER3> I got mine just before Android 2.2 came out (I got the 2.2 OTA update right after pulling it out of the box) and it definitely did have Twitter.

<comment><USER3> Aah, it was 2.2 that added Twitter to the base OS:

[http://support.twitter.com/groups/34-mobile/topics/125-troub...](http://support.twitter.com/groups/34-mobile/topics/125-troubleshooting/articles/247932-i-can- t-uninstall-twitter-for-android)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand the purpose of preinstalling the apps, but why make them so hard to remove? Do they think an informed user is going to spend all this time trying to remove crapware he obviously doesn't want to use and finally give up and say "Ah well, you win verizon. $25 worth of hip-hop ringtones please."

<comment><USER5> The reason they are usually hard to remove is because they are burnt to the ROM.

<comment><USER6> This, and the carriers _want to have a relationship with you_.

With all the creepiness, and clinginess, that implies. In their warped, MBA, boardroom bullshit philosophy, uninstallable apps are essential to that goal.

<comment><USER7> The apps are uninstallable because the carriers are getting paid for those apps to be there. If they let you uninstall they don't maximize their income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The carriers have this fear of being relegated to the "dumb pipes" role. What the phone-bundled crapware shows is that they don't deserve any better. They're incapable of adding anything of virtue to the experience.

I wish, instead of horning into the user experience with bullshit, they'd spend their time embracing their core competency: network infrastructure deployment and maintenance. And really do it with gusto – be the best they possibly can be. _This_ would breed loyalty. _This_ would create enthusiasm in consumers for the carriers they pay.

But who am I kidding – it's much easier to license NASCAR and shove that trash into a feature phone.

<comment><USER8> The carriers _SHOULD BE_ dumb pipes, and judged by how how well they perform this task.

Would you stand for it if your water company tried to lock you into it's service by offering to make all your water "minty fresh"? I think not.

I guess this is my minimalist hatred of useless tangential/unrelated features talking.

<comment><USER9> Offering? I think the comparison would have to be they just make all of the water taste like "mint" and talk about how great it is (though it sucks for cooking.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Microsoft, at their retail store(s), enforces the same policy on computers. When you get a computer from there, you get stock Windows 7. (And drivers, I would hope, although 7 seems better about bundling more recent drivers--even Broadcom wireless and Intel graphics!)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm really happy Apple is doing that. I honestly believe that Verizon is the sole reason that America is like 50 years behind in mobile technology. The carrier dominates the market in cell phone service because it gives most of the technology illiterate generation X a _a better deal_ with the monthly plans, but at the same time it gives all of its users crappy cellphones with crappy software. Honestly anything Verizon touches becomes intellectually dull. When's the last time you heard Vcast or Verizon store on TechCrunch? So I am really happy that Apple knows that although Verizon is a good mobile carrier, the company has not innovation at all, and Apple refuse to allow Verizon to touch their gadget.

<comment><USER12> True to a point, but it sounds like they have touched it. No data during a phone call? Will Verizon users be able to use this thing anywhere else? Are Ebay buyers going to have to keep an eye out to make sure it's not a crippled Verizon version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I'm happy to hear this, I don't find it surprising.

Despite having a different chipset and radio, the Verizon iPhone is still just another iPhone and Verizon still just one of several dozen carrier partners around the world. If they didn't allow any other carriers to preload software, why would they let Verizon?

</comment><comment><USER14> One of the best examples of Apple draconian measures benefiting us users.

<comment><USER12> I don't think there are many (if any) "draconian measures" from Apple that don't actually benefit users. Nearly all complaints about Apple's behavior can be split into two groups: Idealogical (e.g. "Everything must be free! Even if that means there are 1,000 app stores to choose from, everyone one of them consisting of almost exclusively malware and viruses, it all has to be open!") and "slippery slope" concerns (e.g. "but if they make it so convenient, what will stop them from controlling the world!?" as if new competition wouldn't instantly spring up to replace them).

<comment><USER15> How does not allowing users to sideload apps benefit users? How does not having apps in the App Store that "duplicate functionality" but offer more choice benefit users?

<comment><USER12> If you don't allow users to load apps you haven't vetted you can do a better job of making sure they never have a bad experience on your device.

Personally I would go for offering some kind of "opt in" that says you know what you're doing and willing to worry about it yourself for people who feel constrained (personally, despite being a developer myself, I would never "opt in". I don't have time to worry about if an app is going to cause trouble or not).

Similar answer with duplicate stores. The thing is, when people have a bad experience because of some stupid app _they_ installed they often aren't technical enough to say "darn that mypic.exe! It screwed my computer". Instead they say "why did my iphone break! What a peace of crap". If you don't believe me, go look up what the _actual_ source for most blue screens were on windows. Who got the bad rap for it? Bill Gates didn't seem to be bothered by it too much but I think being the richest man in the world but having that rep would be the same thing as utter failure to Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a big deal for me, I HATE that carriers can install 5+ crapware apps on my phone that are completely uninstallable without rooting your phone.

I let my nephew play with my phone for about 15 minutes one afternoon and a month later I get a bill for "Need for Speed". Turns out he opened NFS and pressed a single button to play the full version.

Another way to hide the apps it to use Launcher Pro.

</comment><comment><USER17> I personally don't have a big problem with carriers loading apps on the phones as long as they don't interfere with what I do, but it is mind boggling how idiotic the "rest" of the industry is in not identifying this opportunity. It took the PC industry only a decade or so to start offering crapware free computers - first at $50 premium and now free as an option. May be the carriers can do better.

The carriers should really stay out of the software side - less spending for them, clean experience for users and let the manufacturers do what they know best. If the OHA members just stood up for themselves and convince the carriers, I can easily see it happening.

In a way T-Mo has taken the right direction for G2, hopefully each manufacturer offers at least one clean experience phone per carrier.

<comment><USER18> Crapware isn't an expense, it's a source of revenue. Think of it like the ads on Google's result page. Just another conduit for commerce the carrier and manufacturer use improve profitability.

Deciding to kill a source of revenue, whether it's more appealing to the consumer or not, becomes harder to justify when that source of revenue is paying off creditors and funding new development.

<comment><USER17> When I referred to spending I was thinking more about carriers taking responsibility of writing the custom apps, testing and distributing the OS updates etc. If they let the manufacturer do that (like Apple) they would have less stuff to bother about.

As far as crapware goes - yeah it might be ad like revenue but I can't imagine it's a major part of revenue for carriers - they can mitigate it by charging little more for the clean experience models.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes all of the profit is where you'd least expect it. $10 per month for VZNavigator? How much of that is really a cost to Verizon?

See also: extended warranties.

<comment><AUTHOR> And don't forget your Monster Cable accessories

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really glad for this. I use Verizon, but keep buying Samsung SCH-a650's off of Ebay because it was made before Verizon installed their crappy software on every one of its phones.

</comment><comment><USER20> On the wifi access point side, its nice and all that one of the us carriers have infrastructure in place and maybe the other doesn't. What about the rest of the world? My carrier was built from the ground up to use 3G can I share an access point over wifi?

</comment><comment><USER21> This has been coming up again and again, but the question I have to ask: did anybody actually expect apple to let verizon pre-install anything?

</comment><comment><USER22> so only apple will be allowed to install things over the air on my device when I get the verizon iPhone? sadly i find that comforting

</comment><comment><USER18> Great news. Now how about that mobile hotspot?

Will it be free or an extra $20 per month like Verizon's other phones? There seems to be confusion on this point.</comment>


AWS Blockchain Templates - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/get-started-with-blockchain-using-the-new-aws-blockchain-templates/ <comment><USER2> Run your distributed, trustless ledger inside a private network!</comment>


Older brains' increased knowledge slows recall speed - <AUTHOR> https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/01/22/your-older-brains-increased-knowledge-slows-recall-speed/64852.html <comment><USER2> Synaptic pruning is the evolutionary equivalent of the postgres vacuum command.</comment>


Privacy compromised in using the new Gmail for iOS - <AUTHOR> With the latest redesign of the Gmail iOS app, we cannot disable read receipts to the sender as Gmail for iOS loads all the external images and the delivery pixel.
There is no way to disable the same on the iOS app.
Don't understand why has Gmail made such a decision <comment><USER2> Privacy is soooo... 2016</comment>


FCC says broadband isn't telecommunications - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/to-kill-net-neutrality-rules-fcc-says-broadband-isnt-telecommunications/ <comment><USER2> It's a good thing that all the packets are equal, except for the ones that are more equal than others.</comment>


GitHub CSS Search: rbg instead of rgb - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/search?l=CSS&q=rbg&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93 <comment><USER2> _But I can 't run W3's CSS validator while I use my development environment!_

[https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22min- width%3A+n...](https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22min- width%3A+none%22+%22min-width%3Anone%22&type=Code&ref=searchresults)</comment>


Monte Carlo Methods, Stochastic Optimization - <AUTHOR> http://am207.org/ <comment><USER2> I heartily recommend the notebooks published in this course as excellent _applied_ reference material to estimation and optimization.

I love it how code and coursework are intermingled, reminiscing me of Knuth's Literate Programming [1]

My beef with many other courses offered (including Coursera) is that they use Matlab when it's clearly advantageous to use IPython Notebook as a better experimenting environment. For example, Daphne Koeller's PGM course[2] is still in Matlab and no matter what you do the code looks extremely clumsy and hard to read. N.B. I wrote tens of thousands of lines of Matlab code, including GUI programs, but that does not mean it's a good language to use especially in cases like this.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming)

[2] [https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm](https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm)

</comment><comment><USER3> I took this class when I was in graduate school at Harvard. The methods introduced in this course can be used in virtually every domain. I think everyone involved with some sort of data processing should have at least minimal knowledge of Bayesian inference, simulated annealing, data augmentation, sampling, etc...

</comment><comment><USER4> Just covered Monte Carlo and stochastic topics in MIT 6.00.2x on edX. Cool stuff!

</comment><comment><USER5> are there download links for the videos somewhere? I don't have flash installed and need to travel tomorrow ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> I bookmarked this for a later date. I am currently taking a Coursera course and one of the projects touched on Monte Carlo methods, they are super cool, I implemented a rudimentary AI that plays tic-tac-toe(well) in like 70 lines of Python.

<comment><USER7> Do you have the code on GitHub (or elsewhere)? I'd love to read it.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user39_fju5wBozso4CqOw.py](http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user39_fju5wBozso4CqOw.py) I was blown away that the computer is able to play with just 10 trials. Monte Carlo methods are a very powerful concept for sure.</comment></comment></comment>


Mass incarceration: A new theory for why so many Americans are in prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/02/mass_incarceration_a_provocative_new_theory_for_why_so_many_americans_are.single.html <comment><USER4> >> The fact of the matter is in today's state prisons, which hold about 90 percent of all of our prisoners, only 17 percent of the inmates are there primarily for drug charges. And about two-thirds are there for either property or violent crimes.

Hmmm. This is unsatisfying. How many are there for crimes that were committed to feed drug habits? How many for crimes related to but not directly involving drugs (turf wars, drug-money related offences etc)?

Sure, these are crimes and we should definitely still bring people committing these to justice, but I wonder how many just would not have happened without the WoD?

Clearly it's not the whole picture, but it might be a little more complex than the article makes out.

<comment><USER5> >How many are there for crimes that were committed to feed drug habits?

Legalizing drugs will not make them free, and they will still lead to addiction.

<comment><USER4> >> Legalizing drugs will not make them free, and they will still lead to addiction.

Indeed they will. But if addicts have easier access to medically supervised maintenance doses (for instance), without risking jail time, then there may be less crime committed to feed these habits. Stuff I've seen has suggested that (for instance) when heroin users know where their next hit is coming from (the clinic) they are better able to handle their addiction and able to make some progress in the rest of life (hold down a job, etc).

I'm not saying I definitely have all the answers, the picture is complex.

<comment><USER6> Legalizing drugs are one thing (though 80-90% of Americans still oppose legalization for stuff like heroin). Spending non-prison public dollars on peoples' heroin addiction (while potentially a good idea), will never happen in the U.S. before the heat death of the universe.

<comment><USER7> The cost of medical heroin to feed the typical daily consumption of heroin for an addict costs in the $10-$20 range, as far as I remember. We know the costs because because heroin is manufactured and regularly prescribed as a pain killer in a number of countries, e.g. in the UK you sometime get diamorphine (heroin) prescriptions for post-operative pain.

In other words, even if it was not paid for, but just made available on prescription, chances are substantial proportion of users would be able to afford to maintain their addiction without much, if any, crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It always struck me (as a Brit) that the plea bargaining system in the US seemed to encourage prison time. There seems to be a lot of incentive for the DA's to 'get their conviction' and a lot of pressure on those accused to accept a bargain that might see them do 2 years instead of 20 or some arbitrary high number.

Is this an accurate view? Do these plea bargain happen regularly?

I also understand that the prison system was privatised in the US. The combination of aggressive DA's, plea bargains and financial incentives to incarcerate seem, from the outside at least, to have created a perfect storm that's sort of feeding itself.

I'd love to hear from anyone with thought on this!

<comment><USER9> >I also understand that the prison system was privatised in the US.

The prison system was not privatized in the US. Some places do have private prison but it is by no means the norm. As of 2012 less than 8% of the 2.2 million incarcerated persons in the US are in private prisons [1]. This is less than 1% of the population. Although 20% of federal prisoners are in private prisons as of last year [2].

The recidivism rate is even worse. In 2005 almost a half a million inmates were tracked after their release, more than 75% were rearrested within 5 years.[3]

>financial incentives to incarcerate...

Do you have any sources for this?

[1][http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers- the-u.s.s-g...](http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers- the-u.s.s-growing-for-profit-detention-industry)

[2][http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/private-prisons- prof...](http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/private-prisons-profit)

[3][http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/welco...](http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/welcome.aspx)

<comment><USER10> Thanks, very interesting stats!

>> financial incentives to incarcerate...

> Do you have any sources for this?

For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]

Beyond private prisons, there's lobbying from prison guards' unions. For example, the California union appears to have substantial political influence, and in 2008 successfully spent $1.8 million to defeat a ballot initiative that would have reduced the prison population.[3]

Further, in some municipalities, cities use fines as revenue-raising tools, and arrest and jail people who fail to pay. See e.g. the Ferguson DOJ report.[4]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Ame...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_America#Lobbying_efforts)

[2] [http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-management/who- profits...](http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-management/who-profits-from- the-prison-boom/)

[3] [http://criminology.fsu.edu/wp- content/uploads/volume-10-issu...](http://criminology.fsu.edu/wp- content/uploads/volume-10-issue-31.pdf) p. 750 (PDF page 274)

[4] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- nation/wp/2015/03/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- nation/wp/2015/03/04/the-12-key-highlights-from-the-dojs-scathing-ferguson- report/)

<comment><USER11> > _For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly > spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]_

Why lobbying -- buying influence with money -- is legal in the US, I will never understand...

<comment><USER12> Lobbying is, as far as I know, legal in every functional democracy.

I think you are confusing this with campaign contributions, which is a different but related activity.

<comment><USER11> I'm not aware of lobbies, established for a specific purpose, with offices and personel, and getting donations, in any functional democracy I know of.

<comment><USER12> Lobbying in the UK sure sounds like lobbying in the US to me.[1] So does Volkswagen's lobbying of the EU parliament.[2] Do you have an example of a functional democracy that doesn't have lobbying like this?

[1] [http://www.lobbyingtransparency.org/](http://www.lobbyingtransparency.org/)

[2] [https://uk.news.yahoo.com/volkswagen-scandal-puts-eu- lobbyin...](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/volkswagen-scandal-puts-eu-lobbying- under-spotlight-200031351.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Huh, this article has nothing to do with how prisons are run as a for-profit business. The prison boom began in the 1980s when Reagan and Bush privatised them:

[http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the- unit...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united- states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289)

Isn't that our smoking gun? People are being sent to prison because someone is making a pretty penny?

<comment><USER14> Yes, the article says nothing, because some things are just "politically incorrect": prison is a continuation of slavery. The drug war attacks certain cultures. Some make money off cheap labor and government prison funding. A country that ravages people outside the country in war, will ravage people inside the country too. Prison is a tool to maintain a status quo by reducing many people's freedom to resist.

If the article talked about China or Russia, it wouldn't talk about regulating lawyers. It'd talk about the systematic incentives that make everyone (not just lawyers) act so zealously to imprison their populace.

<comment><USER13> Please don't use the political correctness strawman. Nobody is refusing to talk about privatisation of prisons because of it. Many people talk about it, and there's no evidence that the Slate article refused to talk about privatisation from fear of offending anyone.

<comment><USER15> Much agreed that PC is a crappy straw man. I'm glad Slate is talking but I don't think anywhere close to enough of the nation is willing to have this conversation.

<comment><USER16> Many are willing to have the conversation, but the majority want to be _tougher_ on crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash A common refrain you hear from law enforcement is "ignorance of the law is no protection from breaking it."

But what if it was?

As Harvey Silverglate details in his book, "3 Felonies a Day,[1]" it is absurdly easy to accidentally commit a federal crime and serve prison time. The idea behind vindictive punishment is to make it so bad that you won't commit a crime, but if people aren't aware of the liabilities, how can people truly know their risk? Often intent has to be proven, but if it's in the interest of the prosecutor and their career to get a conviction, they'll get a conviction.

I think to reduce the "arrest/convict, ask questions later" approach is to give every officer and prosecutor a publicly available scorecard that shows their record of rightful arrests and convictions versus wrongful ones, as well as excessive punishment sought and applied in wrongful cases.

There is a scene at the end of the hilarious murder trial film, My Cousin Vinny, when the defense's expert witness completely shatters the prosecution's case, and the prosecutor immediately moves to dismiss all charges. I wonder if that would happen today?

1\. [http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp...](http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx)

<comment><USER17> > A common refrain you hear from law enforcement is "ignorance of the law is > no protection from breaking it." > > But what if it was?

It is for police and judges. See what happens if a policeman gives you a bogus ticket. Or a judge makes a decision counter to the law. The onus is on _you_ to prove they're wrong. And there is no punishment or negative feedback on them for breaking the law.

If the police and judges aren't required to know the law, I don't see why anyone else needs to know it, either.

<comment><USER18> This principle was explicitly upheld by the Supreme Court in Heien v. North Carolina. A police officer pulled a car over because it had a broken brake light. During the stop, the police officer became suspicious that the car was carrying drugs, searched the car (with the permission of the driver) and found cocaine.

Now, as it happens it is not illegal under North Carolina state law to have a broken brake light, so the police officer had no basis to pull the man over in the first place. But the Supreme Court ruled that there are so many laws out there that a police officer cannot possibly know them all and because the police officer believed that the defendant was breaking the law in good faith, that was good enough for a traffic stop.

<comment><USER19> Why would it be legal to have non working brake lights? Is car safety equipment just optional in NC?

(Makes sense that it should be insufficient for a car search though.)

<comment><USER18> I might have had it slightly wrong in my original comment. I think that only one of his brake lights was faulty and it's not illegal to have one broken brake light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Finally. I was unfortunately victim to this (not in the US, but in Canada) where objectively, it should have been dropped, but the prosecutor wanted to make an example of me. The case was unbelievably flimsy, but you have no idea the pressure you're under when you're facing opponents who have financial and social incentives to punish you. The morning of my trial (I refused to accept anything before then), the prosecutor was losing her shit because she could lose, screaming and yelling at me. I literally laughed in her face, then accepted the least possible thing that resulted in no conviction or record without a trial. The witnesses had financial incentives to lie and I did not have the resources to go through an appeal.

Things I heard throughout this ordeal:

      1. If you were white, this never would have happened.
      2. I cannot believe how much $witness is lying, yet you can't prove it.

Since this problem, I've seen the same prosecutor try and catch other people in the same bullshit law to the point where it has been in the news. I've countered with my own silent battle, getting politicians to talk to me and I can say that this has directly resulted in some changes, which I'm happy about. One of them told actually told me that he wishes I would have won so that he could use me as an example. Can you believe it?

I gotta tell you, it's frustrating as anything I have ever experienced in my life. But living well is the best revenge and I've got a great life.

      Oh, I posted bail? I'm out this motherfucker?
      I could go? Oh, fuck y'all, aye, fuck the judge
      Fuck the motherfuckin' District Attorney, the prosecutor
      And fuck you motherfuckers in the jury box
      Fuck all y'all 'cause I'm out on motherfuckin' bail
      Y'all ain't never gonna see me in this motherfucker again
      Drop that shit 'em
      Let these old punk ass bitches know how we runnin' this shit
      Niggaz ain't going back to court you stank ass bitches

I understand Tupac better now.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I can definitely say that DAs are the biggest factor in the prison population boom. For example, I was arrested for threatening my dad many years ago. I could've easily gone to prison for some time but the DA was given leeway to drop the charges entirely (with the assumption I wouldn't cause trouble for quite some time).

If a DA's office can drop charges with little consequences then it's obvious they can press on with the silliest of notions of meting out justice for all of them (which they do). I think there needs to be a complete overhaul of how criminal prosecution is done in this country.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do you still have "3 minor crimes" == "prison time"?

Are prisoners still forced to provide cheap "American" goods that would otherwise come from China?

Do "Christian" groups still push for the highest technically possible sentence against the public interest?

An odd thing to say about a slate article, but I think they're overthinking it.

<comment><USER22> > Do "Christian" groups still push for the highest technically possible > sentence against the public interest?

I've never heard that. On the contrary, many churches have jail and prison outreach ministries (here's one I just found on google: [http://www.theriversidechurchny.org/socialjustice/?prison](http://www.theriversidechurchny.org/socialjustice/?prison)). One of them, Prison Fellowship (and its founder Chuck Colson) is quite large and widely respected and supported in the Christian community ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Fellowship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Fellowship)).

Justice Fellowship spun off of Prison Fellowship, which specifically fights to reform the American justice system ([http://www.justicefellowship.org/issues](http://www.justicefellowship.org/issues)).

<comment><USER15> It's easy to find self-described Christians who are extremely right-wing and favor harsh sentences for "lawbreakers" because they see themselves as the good people who will never break a law, and therefore never experience or otherwise have to think about proportionality.

<comment><USER23> Yeah but that's more tied with the "right wing" than the "Christian". Sure there's overlap between those groups, but you won't find more left-wing Christian groups pressing for harsher sentencing, and you _will_ find right- wing non-christian (non-religious) groups pushing for harsher sentencing, so I think referring to them as " Christian is really a misidentification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In summary: The theory is that from the mid 70s to the early 90s the prison population increased due to a real increase in crime, but after that, it increased due to prosecutors doubling the percentage of arrestees that they charge with a felony.

I wonder if the simple explanation is that over decades the size of the prosecutorial bureaucracy increased to deal with an actual increased work load, but after that work load started to go down naturally, that bureaucracy had to find a way to keep itself in business, and that was by charging arrestees who would have been previously released.

A DA's office where people are sitting on their hands is an office that will see budget cuts and staff reductions. We know from both government and the private industry that almost no department will voluntarily take a budget or staff cut, even if it is warranted.

Maybe we should try reducing the DA's budgets in some states/counties and see what happens to crime and incarceration rates.

<comment><USER16> FTFA:

>Well, the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison.

If the article's conclusion was the title it would not even be on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are so many complicated variables in this, but one thing that is crucial to point out is that he keeps referring to state prisons, which is intentionally misleading because many many drug offenders end up in federal prisons, where they make up 48.4% ([https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...](https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp)) of the population. That alone makes a lot of this guy's commentary suspect, and since he didn't even mention race or private prisons as a possible factor it really tanks the smell test on this new theory of his.

<comment><USER26> Federal prisons make up less than 10% of the US prison population. It's almost irrelevant in terms of the total prison population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken > DAs' bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren't serving > the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won't have that big an > effect on prison population either._

So Mr. Pfaff believes that overzealous DAs have caused the prison population to skyrocket, but quickly dismisses the one proposal that could actually help solve the problem.

This seems like a classic case of "My answer, and only my answer, is correct. All other answers are wrong, even if they are compatible with my answer."

> _You can't necessarily go to Washington and say, 'Here's the law that's > going to control what the DAs do,' because they don't have to listen to the > federal government at all. "_

Yes, you can. Getting rid of ridiculously long mandatory sentences will make a DA sound a lot less convincing when he threatens the defendant to accept a plea bargain _or else_. If fewer defendants accept plea bargains, the DA will have to go to trial more often, which costs a lot of time and money. This gives DAs a strong incentive not to charge too many people.

There is no justice in a legal system where one side is free to threaten the other side to waive their Constitutional right to a day in court. I don't think we will ever achieve perfect equality of bargaining power between the state and an individual citizen, but tweaking the incentive structure in this way would be a promising first step toward reducing that gap.

</comment><comment><USER28> One avenue for improvement that I see is the elimination of mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums are, in my ever so humble opinion, a blaten violation of the spirit of the United States Constitution re separation of powers, and the elimination of such sentencing requirements giving way, once again, to true judicial discretion would go a long way toward remedying things.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the line between criminals and civilians has blurred. Too many people live their daily lives while technically committing crimes.

<comment> atom-morgan The only difference between me and many criminals is they were caught in the act. Even Obama is an example of this [1].

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/americas/24iht- dems....](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/americas/24iht- dems.3272493.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Prison industrial complex (private prisons), debtors prison and war on drugs are three things I can come up with off the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER31> The article tentatively points the finger at the fact that prosecutors are elected, and that being a prosecutor is a step towards higher elected office.

The fact that the US elects prosecutors, and judges, is _incredibly strange_. Surely it could only possibly be a terrible, catastrophic idea? You want prosecutors and judges to be professional, impartial, and independent, which is exactly what elected politicians aren't.

Are there any other countries which elect their judges or prosecutors? How did the US get like this? Are Americans aware of how odd this is?

The Economist has some funny stories about it:

[http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21613276-theyre-...](http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21613276-theyre-not-politicians-so-they-shouldnt-act-them-trouble- electing-judges)

</comment><comment><USER32> In the discussions here I keep seeing 8% mentioned as the proportion of prisoners held by private prisons. I wanted a little more context for that number so I found the absolute numbers.

Total US Prison Population[0]: 2,400,000

Private US Prison Population: 200,000

[0] As of 2008, if someone has more recent numbers please comment.

</comment><comment><USER33> TLDR: it wasn't the crime waves, it wasn't longer prison sentences, it wasn't the declared war on drugs - it's that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3

<comment><USER33> Professor John Pfaff prescribes as the solution:

"What makes it very hard is that the person we really need to target now—whose behavior we need to regulate—is the district attorney, and the district attorney is a very politically independent figure. He's directly elected, and he's directly elected at the county level. So there's no big centralized fix. You can't necessarily go to Washington and say, 'Here's the law that's going to control what the DAs do,' because they don't have to listen to the federal government at all."

However, this is not only anti-democratic but anti to the entire American system of decentralized government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was surprised that almost everything that I'd heard about prisons in the US was wrong. (I went digging into source documents to confirm the below.)

\- US prison population is declining in both absolute and relative numbers, even as the population is growing. [1]

\- The prison population skews strongly toward violence. I totaled up the numbers from my own state's prisons[2]:

      51% - HOMICIDE, SEXUAL ASSAULT, ROBBERY, ASSAULT, KIDNAPPING
      21% - BURGLARY, LARCENY, STOLEN VEHICLE, FRAUDULENT ACTIVITY, FORGERY/COUNTERFEITING
      17% - <USER2>
      11% - <USER3>

\- The violent offender percentage is increasing over time, while the drug related charges are decreasing.

\- Federal prisons make up less than 10% of the US prison population, and have a very different composition, and legal pathway for getting there. Any statistic you see that is about only "Federal" prisons or prisoners is next to meaningless in the context of the US prison population.

\- The percentage of US incarcerated that are in privately owned prisons is actual lower than the quoted 8%, and is actually somewhere around 5-6%. (Both TFA and Wikipedia make the mistake of thinking that Federal Prisons + State prisons equals all US prisoners. The are forgetting about local jails, which account for roughly 25% of US prisoners.)

\- Prisons contain far more convicted murderers than you could think possible. People with lesser charges leave soon, and people with murder convictions stay for a long time. 15% of my state's prison population is in with either life or more than 30 years.[3] 50% of my state's prisoners are serving more than a ten year term.[3] But at the same time the intake numbers look entirely different - most people arriving have less than a 2 year term and only 1.3% of arrivals last year had a 30 year or more sentence. [4]

[1] [http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf](http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf)

[2] [http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/InmatePopulationStatsT...](http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/InmatePopulationStatsTrend/ASOFTrendMSOFY11-15.pdf)

[3] [http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/InmatePopulationStatsT...](http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/InmatePopulationStatsTrend/ASOFTrendSentenceLengthDistributionFY11-15.pdf)

[4] [http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/AdmissionsTrend/Admiss...](http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/AdmissionsTrend/AdmissionTrendSentenceLengthDistributionFY11-15.pdf)

<comment><USER34> What makes a convicted murderer doesn't always implies killing anyone, as in the case of the burglars charged and condemned for murder after the death of their accomplice, killed by a homeowner...

Numbers on "murderers" who didn't kill anyone would be interresting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Did anyone else notice the URL of this article?

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/02/mass_incarceration_a_provocative_new_theory_for_why_so_many_americans_are.single.html)

In case you missed it, the HTML file linked to is "A provocative new theory for why so many americans are single"

It may be early morning, but I find that amusing :)

</comment><comment><USER36> "new theory"

<comment><USER16> FTA:

>Well, the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The professor interviewed in this article argues that the rise in prison population can only partly be explained by the common theories (an actual crime wave in the 80s, drug criminalization, and mandatory minimums).

He argues that one of the biggest factors of the prison boom is with the DA having to be 'tough on crime' to further future political ambitions. I don't think anyone can argue with this, as historically being 'tough on crime' has been a vote getter.

A few other factors I think are worthy of considering:

1) The financial incentives of the for profit prison system (which includes for profit prisons, prison guard unions, bail bond industry) which advocates for harsher sentences.

2) The political incentives of having a larger prison population. Many congressmen fight to have a prison in their district for two main reasons. First, it brings jobs to their community. Second, and more importantly, it increases the count of people who they 'represent' even though the felons are not allowed to vote!

3) The criminalization of mental illness- We used to heavily fund mental hospitals. This has been chipped away dramatically starting in the 1980s.

4) Average lifespan of prisoners increasing- I would assume that the average prisoner's lifespan is increasing, hence a bigger prison population. No real evidence to back this up.

5) Drug criminalization leads to more criminals- The professor argues that the population who are in prison for drugs alone is only a small percentage, and that the rest are due violent crimes and property crimes. This is misleading as drug criminalization naturally leads to more criminal activities in other fields. By pushing drugs underground, a group of people will be inevitably become comfortable with the underground. Secondly, drug criminalization leads to higher drug prices, which leads to more property crimes to fuel addiction. Lastly, drug criminalization means people are less likely to get help for their drug problems, increasing the chances they will become socially maladaptive and more likely to develop violent behaviors.

6) The gutting of public defenders- Tied to what the professor argued but surprisingly not really mentioned. Public defenders are extremely underfunded, hence a high likelihood of losing your court case. This in turn leads to a higher prison population.

7) Discrimination against prisoners- As our economy gets more and more competitive, and as background information becomes easier to obtain, it is getting harder and harder for prisoners to get a job. Tied to point #5, a person who would be arrested for drugs could have his future economic career ruined. He has a higher likelihood of reverting back to crime, hence a higher prison population.

8) The removal and policing of public space- One thing I noticed is that public spaces (i.e. parks, stoops, etc) have been routinely removed to make space for private retail. It's way easier to call the cops when you are angering the property owner than if you are on public property. And in those public spaces, you are subject to way more laws (i.e. public intoxication). So it should be no surprise that we have a higher prison population if we're systematically policing more and more areas.

Many of these problems stem back to Reagan in the 1980s with America took a decidedly right-wing turn. Glad to see society is finally changing what it thinks about the over-criminalization of society.

<comment><USER38> >> The political incentives of having a larger prison population. Many congressmen fight to have a prison in their district for two main reasons. First, it brings jobs to their community.

Nobody wants a prison in their community. And nobody wants to work in a prison.

<comment><USER39> I disagree - prisons bring large numbers of jobs to otherwise economically depressed areas. If your options are working at Burger King or working at a prison with benefits, guaranteed overtime, and opportunity for advancement, you'll take the prison gig.

My girlfriend has worked corrections at the state and county level. She hated county but enjoyed the state work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Well, the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison.

<comment><USER40> Except it never answered why the DA's are sending more people to prison. That sort of begs the question, right? The best conclusion the author came up with was:

> Maybe it's that next election they're looking at, that they remain tough on > crime because they want to become attorney general or governor. There's no > clear data on this.

which is a super weak answer. As jordigh said above, it's because prisons are now largely run for profit. Most people who were already aware of the large prison population _already knew_ that for-profit prisons was the reason this phenomenon occurred. Honestly, this article sounds like a propaganda piece to serve as a red herring for the for-profit prison industry to keep chugging along.

<comment><USER16> I know people don't want to hear it but private prisons are only 8%, but keep on believing what you need to.</comment></comment></comment>


"Fetch as Googlebot" tool helps to debug hacked sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fetch-as-googlebot-tool-hacked-sites/ <comment><USER2> I know one approach from over 10 years ago was to have your editable site on a issolated server that would periodicaly copy its content to the hosting site. This meant that any changes to the hosted site would get stamped over by the master copy.

Still nothing is perfect and this is a good read about a issue alot of people are not aware of.

<comment><USER3> What's frustrating to me -- as someone who's getting closer and closer to publicly launching a shared hosting service -- is that this problem _should be solved_ already: we have twice-daily backups for our websites, going back up to a year. It's all automated, and customers can access the backups directly. If your site's been hacked, you can log in to the backup server, view the changes for your site's directory, and download the most recent good copy.

For most sites that store their templates as regular files and their contents in a database, this is plenty good enough. For sites that store their content as regular files too, it only takes a few extra minutes to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff.

This is super easy to implement. Every web host should be doing it.

<comment><USER4> What would be the point? If you got hacked once, after you restore the files you'll just get hacked again.

As a reporting tool it could be interesting though.

<comment><USER2> Content and software are seperate. Were talking about content and not the software. Sure you fix the flaw in the software that allowed the expliot or the weak password or however the site was taken over, but it is a seprate issue.

<comment><USER5> Not in PHP they aren't always, which is what the vast majority of hacks are on...

<comment><USER6> They are separate in the PHP software that gets targeted by "the vast majority of hacks". Those hacks are against popular CMS packages that can be scanned for and exploited in an automated fashion. In a CMS, the software being exploited and the content are separate, in PHP as every other language.

The PHP files where the content and the system are one and the same (hand written pages not using a packaged CMS) aren't part of "the vast majority of hacks" category. Compared to exploiting a WordPress vulnerability in 50+ million installs, someone trying to mess with the black box that is someone's custom written page happens insignificantly rarely. Your retort doesn't hold water.

<comment><USER7> > The PHP files where the content and the system are one and the same (hand > written pages not using a packaged CMS) aren't part of "the vast majority of > hacks" category.

Speaking from experience, this is simply not true. There are automated scanners in the wild which will attempt to detect and exploit common vulnerabilities in simple PHP templating systems and CMSes. One frequently exploited vulnerability is in applications which use URLs of the form:

        index.php?page=foobar

With supporting code along the lines of:

        $page = $_GET["page"]; /* if register_globals isn't set */
        include("pages/$page.html");

Until relatively recently, when PHP started rejecting filenames with embedded null bytes, code like this was vulnerable to input such as:

        index.php?page=../../../../../../proc/self/environ%00

Applications like this are relatively easy to detect in an automated fashion, and were for a time being exploited on a very large scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to learn that there's a communication method one can use to directly speak to a human at google and get a _helpful same-day reply_.

How do I, as someone outside of the music industry, gain access to that communication channel?

<comment><USER9> Become a paying customer

</comment></comment><comment><USER10>
        $ curl -v -A Googlebot example.org
        $ curl -v -e www.google.com example.org

<comment><USER11> I was going to post the same thing. Fetch as Googlebot is nice but really nothing too special.

<comment><USER12> You are wrong. Stop guessing and then acting like your guesses are facts.

<comment><USER11> What I am guessing? Your comment does nothing to clarify any mistake I might have made, which I'll gladly admit to.

There are certainly differences between just setting the user agent and running Fetch as Googlebot. (The incoming IP address being an obvious one.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This may help clear up something that has puzzled me about a site I use and often search via Google.

[https://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off...](https://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Ancdd.org+%22for+sale%22&oq=site%3Ancdd.org+%22for+sale%22)

(In this case, I specifically put in "For Sale" to highlight the spammy drug ads, but they come up even without this).

Puzzle: I scan through looking for pages with "XYZ For Sale" in the title and then check out Google's cached version of the page. Sometimes, I see the spam in the cache, but often enough I don't.

So: how is it that the search result is different than google's own cache for that page?

</comment><comment><USER14> For the curious, the site mentioned in the article appears to be either Alanis Morissette or The Doors: <https://www.google.com/search?q=Generic+synthroid+bad+you>

</comment><comment><USER15> The sad thing is, even people who ought not be amateurs, but are, fall for this trick. My mother's company's site was hosted on GoDaddy (I offered to move it and pay for the hosting as it's a non-profit, but she declined). They swore up and down for weeks and weeks that they were not responsible and there was nothing wrong when it was a hosted Wordpress instance.

Most of the time they (hackers, sorry pronoun overload) just naively check the referrer. Going to Google and searching for the site and clicking it is often sufficient

<comment><USER16> Referrer header considered harmful yet? :-)</comment></comment>


Which smart food you recommend? - <AUTHOR> which smart food you recommend? where can i read more about it? <comment><USER2> "Smart food"? what's that? Why do you need it?

<comment><AUTHOR> as the name says, its food that is smart, instead of taking supplements,etc you just take food rich in nutrients that will make you work better,etc

<comment> java-man humans. some are smart, taste great, and on top of that, you are getting rid of the competition. /jk

<comment><AUTHOR> can you please elaborate? i didnt ask for random quotes here..

<comment> java-man A good start would be to define what you mean by 'smart food'.

Is this the kind of food that makes us smarter? Or the kind of food that makes the food manufacturers richer? Or, perhaps, it's not the food that makes us smarter, but education and practice?

Please, er, elaborate.

<comment><AUTHOR> by smart food i mean the type of food that increase your performance..

<comment> java-man this might be a wrong forum to ask. picture a bunch of flabby nerds.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 & went native for its mobile apps - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/17/linkedin-mobile-web-breakup/

<comment><USER2> Was anyone else heavily on the HTML5 crew only to be rudely awakened to all these inconveniences? It seems like there's a constant, persistent migration away from HTML5 for mobile style devices...and while every dev group says something like "performance, debug tools, etc." However, I'd say that the ultimate reason to do so is because of user behavior - opening up safari mobile or chrome is not a "pleasant" experience when compared with a native app.

Is anyone else moving away from html5 to native? What I find odd about this is Paul Graham's whole "web software" is the future - and yet if "Mobile" future and mobile users favor "native software" ............. then it seems that native would be the future.

Of course, one can just say "yes, but native is becoming hybrid with web." And that's definitely true, but it still makes things very dependent upon the client and not as "platform agnostic" as a full web movement would be.

<comment><USER3> It's not about opening up safari or chrome. HTML5 "apps" are simply a browser window and the guts are implemented in HTML/Javascript/CSS. This is how LinkedIn's app used to work and it is the basis for Phonegap (which powers most HTML5 based apps).

The memory management bit Prasad references is a big deal too. Can you imagine not being able to release a feature that you've invested a lot of money into because you've got a performance problem or crashing issue that the tooling is not good enough to let you solve?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What kind of memory problems is html5 prone to that native apps aren't? Prasad didn't give any hints. It seems like a face-saving back-peddle. Native apps are just butterier, and he wasted a lot of money finding that out.</comment>


Car Steered with Driver's Eyes  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/fup/2010/fup_10_106/index.html

<comment><USER2> And in other news, hundreds of good looking German women were the victims of mysterious hit and run accidents this week...</comment>


The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-reaction-to-brexit-is-the-reason-brexit-happened-20160627 <comment><USER2> It seems that the fundamental issues here is direct democracy vs representative democracy. There is an age-old issue of whether each individual citizen should indeed be able to vote on each individual government decision. It hardly seems fair to label someone who doesn't believe in direct democracy (or representative democracy for that matter) as not believing in democracy altogether.

This article seems to do a slight-of-hand where it equates critics of direct democracy as undemocratic.

And it does seem in this case that the populace supported Brexit, but a poll of the representatives would have shown the opposite.

<comment><USER3> I think the point of the article is the elitist attitude and rule by "we know best" is what brexiters hated about the EU. It's now ironic that elitists are calling to invalidate the vote.

I think the question of direct vs. representative doesn't factor. It's the elitist attitude that prevails regardless of style of democracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Excellent article.

FTA: _If you believe there 's such a thing as "too much democracy," you probably don't believe in democracy at all_</comment>


Tears - <AUTHOR> http://www.meltingasphalt.com/tears/ <comment><USER2> Tears aren't excretory or cathartic? Maybe this guy hasn't been through the right kind of situation.

When one of my kids was going through a health crisis I did a heck of a lot of lone crying. Each time internal stress and anxiety would build, my guts would get all churned up, then it would reach the point where I would cry and the "symptoms" would all reduce dramatically before starting to build up again.

I was amazed at the time that crying had such a noticeable effect on physical symptoms. I thought I must be dumping something, adrenalin?, out my tear ducts.

I'm probably wrong, though it's not the kind of set up you can test in a lab.

<comment><USER3> I don't think his point is that it _isn 't_ cathartic; he's pointing out that there is no physiological reason for _crying in particular_ to have evolved to be cathartic. What have leaking eyes or a quavering respiratory system got to do with relieving overwhelming emotions? Nothing. And no other animals experience this.

It's a confusion of cause and effect (or post-hoc fallacy). "I cry because it makes me feel better" supposes that feeling better is the purpose of crying. But really it's the other way around: _Crying is the purpose of feeling better_. Crying is the thing with purpose, because it's an important and useful social signal. Overpowering urges to succumb to it, and feeling better after having done so, are evolution's way of coaxing our minds to do something that's useful to us, just like urges to eat or have sex, and feeling better after having done them.

<comment><USER4> Why do we smile when we're happy? Is it because we're happy (we also expose a similar face when we're scared), or is smiling the purpose of feeling happy?

<comment><USER3> Not sure if you're arguing for or against my point, but I'd say the purpose of feeling happy is to reinforce the behavior that got you where you are. Smiling (and the compulsion to smile, which few other animals have, though they do feel pleasure) is to signal your state of mind to your peers.

I wouldn't say (and wasn't saying) that the purpose of feeling sad is to cry or engender social signaling (parallel to happiness, the purpose of sadness is downregulation of behavior), but the compulsion to cry itself and the relief afterwards _is_ about signaling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The question of why humans cry is always fascinating, since it's such an instinctive behavior we don't seem to realize how bizarre it is. I tried a little to develop a deliberately insane theory to submit to BAHfest (SMBC's festival of bad scientific hypotheses [http://www.bahfest.com](http://www.bahfest.com)) and proposed that crying exists to blind us during periods of great emotional stress, since we'd otherwise be prone to irrational and dangerous behavior. Unfortunately, compared with the real attempts to explain tears, it seemed a little too plausible to be bad! When the state of research has someone proposing "we cry because of the soot flying into our eyes at prehistoric funeral pyres," it's hard to be deliberately weird. (I eventually came up with a much funnier topic, so swing by if you're in the area shameless plug etc)

<comment><USER6> Across species eye contact is a thing for both carnivore/herbivore dynamics and also dominance hierarchies so if you intentionally wanted to create a weird theory I'd suggest mixing those in weird ways.

So if a hunter gets hurt while hunting he could screw up the hunt for everyone by being hurt except for crying messes up his eye to eye stare down so he temporarily falls to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy allowing the overall tribe better luck hunting and more meat for everyone including himself, therefore cry in pain, in the long run equals more delicious meat. Stalking being more a carnivore behavior than herbivore I'd theorize crying is extremely manly and women carried the trait originally rather than directly benefiting by expressing the trait.

The vegan types can be very vociferous when presented with commentary about the biology of the human body appearing to have evolved to support meat eating, so be careful, its very politically incorrect to look into things like cross species carnivore eye contact behaviors or apparently evolutionary evidence of stalking and hunting biological technologies.

<comment><USER5> What's the worst that can happen from a vociferous vegan?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a parent, it seems like a glaring omission that most crying is done by babies. It's right there in the article that humans have the "most dependent babies," and signaling behaviors are often repurposed responses, so it's a good starting point to say that crying (with big inhales and audible sobs) evolved as a "baby in distress" alarm, in which a baby makes a lot of noise because it needs help. We go to that place when we feel small or want the kind of support a parent would give.

Babies often don't have tears for the first few months, but I'm not sure that's important. I do think they play a role on the playground, and a lot of the speculation about their effects in social situations sounds right. I don't have any ideas to contribute on why crying is accompanied by tears.

 _In any other species, wearing a signal that advertises, "I recently lost in a dominance challenge," is a strict liability — an invitation for others to pile on, opportunistically, and attack you while you're down (or else to mentally note that you're no longer a good, strong ally). There's no upside, therefore, to using anything other than a quick facial expression or flash of body language, to show your submission only to the aggressor._

That sounds like an overly harsh picture of non-humans to me! I'm pretty sure at least certain apes help their potentially-non-kin in distress. Humans aren't the only social mammals.

</comment><comment><USER8> I found the preamble a tad confusing. It seems to imply that all our evolutionary behaviours aim at solving a problem. I had understood that they are simply the emergent phenomenon of selection - in other words they are the behaviours associated with successful individuals/groups. Is this just a sort of shorthand - assigning a kind of design _intention_ to Nature as a simpler way of expressing this? If so, isn't it anyway the case that not all selected behaviours do actually solve a problem, but are sometimes just a case of "stuff that became associated with success"?

I should say my last encounter with biology was a GCSE some time in the 1990s.

<comment><USER9> > Is this just a sort of shorthand - assigning a kind of design _intention_ to > Nature as a simpler way of expressing this?

Yes, and it's a fairly common, if misleading, shorthand. It's easy to communicate and so gets spread quickly and easily but it always takes careful reading to work out if the author is perpetuating a misconception around intelligent design or merely using an easily digestible metaphor. I suspect the author is doing the latter from a cursory reading, but I might be wrong.

<comment><USER6> You could describe it as bad language. Two physics examples.

A classic momentum problem where a moving railroad car "acts on" a stationary car making the cars couple and move together, slower. There's no ambiguity with language like "acts on". I'm sure a very angry physicist could get very unhappy about the finer details of "acts upon" in that context but mostly people are pretty tolerant of it.

But what, is acting on what, in a classic quantum mechanics double slit experiment? Is one slit acting on the other? I mean, you can't even define the wave/particle as a wave or a particle much less what the whatever it is, is acting on. A physicist sees it where a wave/particle is interacting with a system of slits sounds pretty suspect to a non-STEM person even if it is the weird truth. Or truthier than some other interpretations.

So given the two examples what does "acts on" mean in a physicist sense across all physics problems? Keeping in mind that the intelligent design people say things like "God acts on the earth via miracles" now how does that statement fit in with the two physics thought experiments on the topic of "acts on"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having recently read "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" [1] by the brilliant primatologist Frans de Waal, the whole introductory paragraph reeks of the "humans only" dogma.

Even the link to the Wikipedia article directly contradicts the statement of humans being the only species to bury their dead.

How counter-intuitive it is: so many aspects of evolution we accept as continuum with shared phenotypes (and extended phenotypes) all the way through, yet when it comes to our intelligence and specialness, we forget all of this.

[1] [http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to- Know-...](http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-How- Smart-Animals-Are/)

<comment><USER11> I hear what you are saying. But it is also a mistake to simply assume that there is nothing that is unique to human psychology. In particular, we need to explain why humans have been so remarkably successful, including at dominating other species.

For instance, in all other social mammals, as far as I know, the social group consists of only the group you directly belong to and are in immediate contact with, and this group is in competition with all other social groups of your species.

But in human foraging groups, you band is a member of a larger tribe of many bands that you cooperate with, even though the bands are in no immediate contact most of the time. Now think of all the behaviors and cognitive mechanisms required to make that happen.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but I doubt that any non-anthropocentric measure of biological success puts humans anywhere special:

Biomass: krill dominate

Individual count: bacteria probably soon by a massive landslide

Evolutionary stability: the Goblin shark had been around for millions of years

When people talk about how special H. sapiens is they tend to always say that we're the only species to have some conjunctive list of traits. But for any given species there is some list of traits that single it out as unique and special, so I find those arguments pretty contrived.

However, perhaps humans do win out in the per capita production of waste heat category.

<comment><USER6> Wideness of niche.

Tardigraves and some lichens can live most anywhere it seems. And then life forms get more advanced and their range of terrain generally implodes in size, even migrating birds usually don't cover more than one continent at any given time.

Then suddenly despite being just another big ole thing you'd expect humans to be trapped in a dinky little African savannah by a river, but no, here we are under the ocean and covering the planet pole to pole and under ground and in the air and in space. If its not possible to live there we import stuff and live there anyway like Antarctica or space.

No species has a range as large as us, not even close, other than little microscopic tardigrave critters, and maybe rats. And our internal and external parasites I guess. You don't see alligators in the arctic or polar bears in jungles or whales in space stations or dolphins in grasslands.

There is one interesting bean counter type trait where you do something with the ratio of brain mass to body mass and add a correction factor for total mass, and we kick butt on that one.

Another one is information bandwidth, we can transmit a couple K visually per second via reading and a good fraction of a K per second via speech and no other animals even remotely come close. A human toddler transfers orders of magnitude more data before kindergarten than the entire lifespan of most animals, and as far as humans go toddlers rate as pretty dumb.

I'm sure if ants brains were not so small in an absolute sense and if they could communicate as many bits per second as humans can they'd be teaching us a thing or two about math and physics, but ...

<comment><USER12> Wideness of niche. That's a good one. Once we become trans-planetary, I guess that will also be quite a distinguishing trait. Also, note my optimism :P

Akin to the brain-to-body-mass ratio that you mention, I wonder if this wideness of niche idea can be meaingfully quantified.

Would you be able to point me to some sources? I'd like to level up a little bit on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat summary and contextualization of the topic! Seems simple on the surface, which is why a nice lead through is helpful.

Last week at the zoo I watched the Chimpanzee dynamics for a good half hour or so. Very extreme by comparison to us. Loud. Chasing. Urination.

I suspect that biologically there's some overlap between Tears in Humans - which Chimps don't seem to possess the capacity to produce - and Defecation as a communication mechanism that Humans have spent a lot of time evolving away from. Each can be quite expressive.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there anyone here that's an actual subject matter expert on this topic? I know 1) that I am not a expert on why people cry 2) I don't believe the author has more than a day's worth of googling more background on the subject than me 3) I suspect there are people that have devoted a whole lot more time than the author to the question of why humans cry.

I'm not trying to judge the author, I'm just selfish about and hate wasting my time. This had every hallmark of half-assed pseudo-intellectualism and I don't have a day of time to find out.

<comment><USER15> >I don't believe the author has more than a day's worth of googling more background on the subject than me

There's a certain irony in this accusation considering 30 seconds on his site led me to find out he's writing a book on the subject of social psychology. [http://elephantinthebrain.com](http://elephantinthebrain.com). The fact that he took the time out of his book writing to write this article probably means he's researched and thought a lot about the subject.

He may be a secondary/tertiary source on this matter, but that doesn't mean he has nothing insightful to say about it, or that people who read the article are wasting their time (not to say that the reverse isn't true; maybe he hasn't properly learned the topic, but it's wrong to assume he just wrote this article off the cuff).

<comment><USER16> They also say:

> Incidentally, Why Only Humans Weep by Ad Vingerhoets is the most useful book > I've read about crying.

strongly implying it's not the only reading they've been doing!

<comment><USER14> Ok, well, by way of that example, in less than an hour or so, I was able to read Vingerhoets last 2 years of selected publications (via his personal website, [http://www.advingerhoets.com/journal- articles/](http://www.advingerhoets.com/journal-articles/)) and of particular note one of the most recent ([http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2016.11...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2016.1151402)) was actually rebutting/failing to reproduce the other study cited in this article by the Israeli group ([http://faculty.washington.edu/beecher/Gelstein_et_al_2011.pd...](http://faculty.washington.edu/beecher/Gelstein_et_al_2011.pdf)) on the chemosignal theory.

It's not just about reading the sources. It the quality of the analysis and faithful representation of the sources. Don't you think that this major disagreement between two primary sources would have undermined his thesis (though captured the actual level of nuance/disagreement that exists in the research), or at signaled appropriate levels of uncertainty to the reader?

I still think a days worth of Googling (real, concerted, sustained effort) would leave anyone with a better understanding of the subject matter than reading this article. If someone wants to read an edgy pop-biology econometrical/anthrological opinion piece, that's another story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Humans, unique among all animals, have an instinct to resist aggression even when it's directed toward other members of the group (even non-kin).

I'm not convinced that this is a unique to humans.

<comment><USER18> Can you provide some counterexamples?

<comment><USER19> I've heard tell of ravens attacking humans who had previously attacked other ravens, sometimes quite a while before; at the moment I'm unable to go hunting a cite, but that might be a place to start.

<comment><USER20> I think it's clear from context that the author meant intra-group aggression. A dispute between a human and a group of ravens isn't really a matter of politics in the way a dispute within a group of humans (or chimps for that matter) is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For some reason I just find his articles annoying..his tendency to ascribe a scientific or economic purpose/motive behind everything ..seems too much like positivism and eliminative materialism. Science and economics isn't the answer to everything.

<comment><USER22> Yeah the idea that these things can be explained simply by a purposeful guiding force like evolution is an attractive idea not unlike the belief in a higher power. What seems more likely is that many human traits and behaviors are highly complex evolutionary cruft — things accumulated over millions of years that fall into a few categories:

1) evolved "recently" to create a specific advantage for a human population (the author's favored explanation for crying)

2) provided an advantage for a distant ancestral species and stuck around long past the context in which they were advantageous (the human appendix)

3) random interaction between different traits or behaviors initially evolved from 1&2

4) random evolved trait that happened to be part of an evolutionarily successful population (Epicanthic fold)

5) random interaction between evolved traits or behaviors and a novel environment to produce novel behavior (over-eating and obesity caused by an evolutionary preference for high-caloric foods and their now-widespread availability)

I tend to not like the speculative aspects of evopsych like the ones in this post because they don't really account for the amount of randomness, complex interaction, and vestigial weirdness that seems to result from evolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm toying with the idea that tears are the direct result of excess CSF pressure (i.e. a way to vent that), having observed someone with that condition who tears very easily. Just maybe. This would presumably require that the lacrimal fossa be connected to the inside of the skull, which is certainly possible. Humans, the only upright animal, have unique fluid pressure problems within the skull (except for giraffes - maybe they cry, and nobody's noticed) so crying being unique to humans wouldn't be too surprising. One tiny bit of evidence, a study showing valproic acid ratios (in those taking the drug) are about the same in both CSF fluid and tears: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6799283](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6799283)

Of course, crying being a signaling mechanism is another explanation. Maybe a better one.

The only other connection I can make is that migraines are closely correlated with dry eyes (and emotion can trigger migraines.) So people with migraines are sometimes advised to use eyedrops to reduce migraine incidence these days. Lacrimation is also a migraine symptom. If your brain is very active due to emotion, maybe tears help to reduce the chances that migraines result? (Or returning to the first hypothesis, maybe CSF pressure is elevated during migraines.)

Not a disproof, but chimps are more socially sacrificing than this article indicates, they will find crippled chimps for long periods, as a group; IIRC not just relatives.

<comment><USER14> _" I'm toying with the idea that tears are the direct result of excess CSF pressure (i.e. a way to vent that),"_ Don't, it's not. Why don't you thing 1) high CSF pressure is mood altering/predisposing to tear activity 2) high CSF may be the result of an underlying cause also express in lactrimal gland activity? Those are simpler explanations, and not false, like the lacrimal duct/CSF hypothesis. As for valproic acid, you are letting the tail wag the dog (the point of the article was to suggest diagnostic technique, and the drug was present in all tested fluids... the burden of proof would be on your to say why concentration in tears would not correlate well with serum levels, which also correlated as well with csf levels).

The only things I could find about migraines and dry eyes were positively correlated, but not strong, and not enough to be causative. Can you share more sources? Also, most source indicates IIH can be comorbid with migraines, but is unrelated, curious if you have sources to share on that, too.

<comment><USER23> I do think "high CSF pressure is mood altering/predisposing to tear activity" precisely because the CSF pressure needs to be brought down" (in this hypothesis.) and that high CSF is the result of an underlying cause that also expresses itself in lactrimal gland activity, due to said pressure. I think you'd have to do an arabesque to find an underlying cause with two roots from some underlying cause rather than one (obviously more complex even if you can think up such a thing) (and it wouldn't explain the study I cited.) But knock yourself out, suggest such a causal arrangement/pathway.

The I believe very recent study I saw found a high correlation. I've heard anecdotal reports of eyedrops helping; it's too soon to find studies of (neutral) eyedrops helping, but you can find preliminary studies of migraine treatment beta blocker eyedrops at pubmed dot com.

No tail wagging dog - it's common for studies about one thing to discover something interesting that's consistent with quite another hypothesis (which is the most evidence can be, qua Popper.) That's all I've claimed in this case. There was no such correlation with saliva, so it's clear that disproof was risked - the Popperian litmus test for actual evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How does this theory explain the act of crying in private?

The theory explains why someone would want not to cry in front of people (loss of prestige/dominance), but not why someone would want to cry alone, in private.

<comment><USER25> That's not how evolution works. If evolution builds a mechanism to make you respond to a certain stimulus in a certain way, then it's more work (and more unlikely) to then make that mechanism only act under certain circumstances. We wouldn't _not_ cry in private unless there were additional fitness advantage to it.

<comment><USER26> The appendix seems to be a counterexample to this philosophy of evolution. Useless body parts exist. What are the chances there are no useless behaviors? (By "useless" I mean "no fitness advantage.")

<comment><USER27> Not sure I agree wholly with the GP, but recent theories suggest that the appendix does in fact serve a useful purpose. It can act as a reservoir for gut bacteria that are necessary to our digestive health. It helps repopulate gut flora when they get wiped out by illness (often caused by other bacteria) that causes a bad case of the runs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Our expression of grief is probably a result of a mutation that altered the structure of our amygdala so that fear controls brain chemistry less than our primate ancestor. When an animal is in fear, chemical reactions desensitize and suppress brain activity involved in emotional expression to protect the self from being perceived as weak and dedicate brain energy to motor functions.

Looking at tears and the neurological development from genetics through adulthood would be a great way to understand what makes us human.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871162/#!po=29...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871162/#!po=29.8450)

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems to me that crying often produces a cognitive process. So I feel sad about something and feel I can't do anything about it and cry, and after a while I don't feel so sad and see the situation in a different perspective where I can go on living. Or something distressing happens, and I talk about it and cry some, and after a while I feel better.

This seems to be a different sort of situation than crying to get help with an immediate situation. I wonder if that sort of case evolved first, and then got modified and used for the cognitive processing one.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a two year old son. As you can imagine he cries a lot. Lately we have been applying some EQ lessons we've learned and have tried to teach him to be aware of how he feels when he cries. You'd be surprised he's actually pretty good.

He starts to cry and then says "I'm crying." We acknowledge that he is crying by saying something like "You seem sad." He generally stops crying at that point and we move on. Its like the signal was sent and received. He feels heard.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting article, still a lot of unanswered questions and open areas for discussion...

Most of my life, I was pretty unemotional. I didn't cry watching movies or TV, and even personal matters never brought me to tears. At some point, just shy of 30 years old, everything changed. I was always empathetic, but, that went in to overdrive... Seeing someone else cry or watching a powerful moment on TV can trigger an instant welling of emotion.

</comment><comment><USER31> I recall Scott Alexander (slatestarcodex.com) proposing the tears/bullying hypothesis somewhere, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

<comment><USER25> The subject matter reminded me a lot of his post about guilt, but I don't remember one about tears. Maybe that's what you were thinking of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Could tears be there for some kind of moderating effect on cellular action potentials? Tears are notoriously salty; "salty" has even become synonymous with bitterness, angst, or remorse. I think their production does seem to have a noticeable effect on cognition, but for all I know it's just a coincidence. Certainly they would extract sodium from the body to some degree, I just wonder how much of an effect that would have.

EDIT: here is a vaguely-relevant(?) study from 2014 about an infant presenting with inconsolable crying allegedly because of "an alteration of sodium channels inducing neuropathy in small-caliber fibers" (1)

EDIT 2: As for why this is something that happens from the eyes specifically, I wonder if it is for a particular local effect on ion channels in the frontal lobes.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24468061](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24468061)

<comment><USER14> First: tears are just as "salty" as blood, so they have no net effect (120–170 mmol/l sodium for tears vs 140 mmol/l in plasma). Even if that was not the case, it would have hardly any effect (5 liters of blood v. a few ml tears). Finally, any effect would be dwarfed by the robust homeostatic system regulated by the hypothalamus.

Second: from your study: _" Treatment with analgesics and ice packs was established"_ the infant was crying because the peripheral vascular disease caused them substantial pain.

Edit: I guess your "edit 2" is aimed at me? I mean, maybe? It seems like a huge piece of speculation on your part without a particularly well thought out mechanism, so I'd love to see a bit more work on your part before discussing further. I assume you mean that it would be a change in Na+ concentrations propagated by osmotic difference via the optic nerve, because otherwise I don't know how you'd propose that would work (meninges, blood-brain-barrier, and all). Some kind of quantification of the osmotic difference and the rate that would propagate..

<comment><USER32> I am not clear on what you mean by "no net effect", and not entirely sure how tears are comparable with blood since tears are expelled from the body; blood (and any sodium it carries away from the brain) hopefully remains in the body (not to mention that blood contains a lot more than just NaCl, compared with tears). I am also curious as to how quickly the hypothalamus would respond to a local drop in sodium ions. What you say is plausible; I do tend to agree with you about the study interpretation. Like you, I really want to hear from an expert in this field.

EDIT to reply to your edit: No, my edit 2 above was made before I saw any replies, sorry about that. Yes, it is certainly nothing but speculation.

(Thank you for pointing me in the direction of further study - I'm afraid this type of thing is a bit beyond my education when it comes to biology)

<comment><USER14> "No net effect" = tears are produced by the lacrimal glad. I am more of an interested hack, compared to someone that actually knows something (medical professional like a neurologist or ophthalmologist), but my educated guess is that cells in the lacrimal gland produce tears entirely from inputs from the circulatory system, and because of the circulatory system structure in your brain v. face, it's actually rather not as local as the physiological proximity suggests. So the change would be indirect, mediated by blood, and since the concentration of sodium is the same in each crying wouldn't effect blood sodium concentration in the first place. You may under-appreciate how rapid blood moves through the body, too, and quickly any local change would move to equilibrium.

ps: you're welcome, happy studying! (it's daunting, keep in mind [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390027), and remember that some of the smartest people out there become doctors, and they spend a dozen+ years training in just single areas of study and indefinite continuing education)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There seems to be a very interesting book in the making by the same author and in a similar vein of this article. The website says it will be finished at the beginning of 2018:

[http://elephantinthebrain.com/outline.html](http://elephantinthebrain.com/outline.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> Curious if anyone knows anything about the similarities/differences between human crying and dog whining?

<comment><USER25> Do dogs whine amongst themselves, or is it a behavior they only use around humans? (like meowing in cats: cats don't meow to other, only to get something from people - it's a trait learned from domestication). I image behaviors learned by domestication behave a little differently: the selection pressure is much greater, and they evolve in response to feedback from a completely different species instead of one's own.

<comment><USER34> That's actually a great question. I'm not sure at all. It's definitely really hard to look at a dog's ability to communicate in a vacuum outside human domestication.

Couldn't find any papers on whether they whine amongst each other on a quick Google myself.

<comment><USER35> In the case of dogs, we should probably look at wolves to see if the whining was a response to domestication. But I don't know if wolves whine, so I'm not much help there.

<comment><USER36> >Idk if wolves whine

They do

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Definitely queues up Terminator 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSotD5M3bsY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSotD5M3bsY)

</comment><comment><USER38> A bit of an odd article. I normally equate crying as grieving, viz a combined physical and psychological reaction to some external distress. Here it seems the author is fundamentally concerned with crying as the purely physical response of 'tearing' which I don't know if it really makes sense to breakdown that way. Nonetheless, an interesting piece and written by a fellow Cal Bear as well.

</comment><comment><USER39> Possibly tangentially related:

[http://robinwe.is/explorations/cry.html](http://robinwe.is/explorations/cry.html)

-> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787083)

</comment><comment><USER40> Most of the things in this list are not specific to humans.

Interesting idea + bad research = fake news

this needs to stop so badly.

</comment><comment><USER41> I hope someday I'll read such detail research on when and how we evolve to lie. It always fascinated me, when this starts and how it propagates from one generation to another. I'm almost sure, it's the most unique human trait.

<comment><USER42> Read "Liars and Outliers" by Bruce Schneier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is he sure that only humans cry? I can perfectly remember my dog (RIP) crying with tears when I lock him up in a cage (sometimes we need to lock him up because he is too friendly to visitors).

<comment><USER44> I don't know about the author, but every vet that I've talked to has seemed pretty certain of it. We have an older dog who has begun to get weepy. We first assumed that it was related to resultant pain from her arthritis, but her vet (and three subsequent vets) all assured me that I was definitely wrong.

[http://www.akc.org/content/dog-care/articles/do-dogs- cry/](http://www.akc.org/content/dog-care/articles/do-dogs-cry/)

Is it possible that there's an allergen in or near your dog's cage?

<comment><USER43> He just doesn't have tears, he cries out loud and make a sound like he is in pain.

<comment><USER44> I believe the howling. Dogs definitely howl, and will happily do so to voice disapproval, sadness, etc., etc. If there are tears alongside that howling, then your dog may be an anomaly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Article is wrong. Crying is cathartic.</comment>


Show HN: Webhook – A lightweight configurable tool written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adnanh/webhook <comment><USER2> Interestingly similar and interestingly different to a project I wrote a while back called Hookah. Mine is specifically targeted at GitHub though.

I actually might not have written mine if this had been around. I intend to play with this as we want to start handling webhooks from other services and I'm not really interested in growing the scope of Hookah.

[https://github.com/donatj/hookah](https://github.com/donatj/hookah)

<comment><USER3> So I am going to reply to this one as its the root one.

Just Curious: Whats the appeal here? Why did you all decide to work on this? What were (if at all) you using before this was made by you?

Regards,

<comment><USER2> We'd played with a PHP script running behind nginx, but I wanted to be able to easily and reliably route requests, with ZERO config, and I wanted to write scripts in bash. The majority of our scripts are written in bash utilizing jq.

Now we can define where things route simply by where they go in the hierarchy and it's wonderfully simple to use.

It was a fairly simple undertaking in Go, and we've been very happy with it overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Configuration for this, especially the hook rules definitions, would be better in some DSL rather than JSON. Trying to structure logic as JSON is very hard to read.

Edit: if you aren't married to configuration in a file, you could even do hosted JS or Lua functions kinda like a serverless environment

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, the biggest pain point I've identified in my tool is the actual configuration. It's okay for simple definitions, but as the number of endpoints grow, it becomes messy. I started work on a CLI tool that would be responsible for managing the hooks.json file, but I haven't had enough time to devote to it. (My wife, my daughter and my daily job currently occupy most of my time...)

<comment><USER4> The only part that made me comment was the rules definitions. I will gladly write key/value type config in JSON or YAML or whatever. But, writing the rules logic in it would be a big pain, because it is not easy to see what deeply nested _and_ and _or_ statements mean.

JSON is definitely nice for the time vs. effort balance; you've effectively got the users writing AST directly. And, building tooling to make it easier to write and manage is good.

I've had a couple of projects recently where I was writing a parser. And, there is a lot of tooling to make it easier: lex/flex, yacc/bison, PEG-style tools like Python's Parsimonious [0]. (I'm sure there are similar libraries in JavaScript) Defining the grammar is a bit arcane, but the only other thing you write is the interpreter, which you already have a version of (just with a different AST format).

In any case, the project/service is really cool!

[0] [https://github.com/erikrose/parsimonious](https://github.com/erikrose/parsimonious)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems cool! Given the example talks about "redeploy," I assume this was built with longer running tasks in mind? Is there a way to see what hooks are processing and get output from them (or send that output somewhere)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The -verbose flag logs pretty much everything you need to the stdout & stderr. I.e. when the hook gets triggered, what arguments and environment are being passed, which command has been executed, what was the output etc...

It is also possible to wait for the command to finish and return the response as part of the HTTP response, or just return 200 Ok and run the script in the background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> CGI?

<comment><USER7> Long time no see [1]

My very first job as a professional programmer, back en 1994, was writing a CGI in plain C. Good old times.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think your JSON keys are verbose.

Command to run should be just called command. And trigger rule can be just trigger no?

Maybe personal preference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I believe that it's better to be verbose rather than obscure. I'm of a belief that it's easier for someone to understand what was the original intention of the "pass-arguments-to-command" rather than "arguments" keyword. The verbosity shouldn't affect performance significantly.

<comment><USER3> "pass-arguments-to-command" vs "commandArguments"

Verbosity is sometimes good but in the context of this.. Where all you are doing is giving commands, giving them arguments... there are not so many things here that can lead to confusion.

If you had multiple arg fields I understand.

Again, preference :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sigh, it's HTTP by default. I get that HTTPS is more setup and it's nice to have something that works out of the box with minimal configuration, but the idea of command execution over an insecure channel makes my eye twitch.

<comment><AUTHOR> It supports HTTPS. You can also put this behind an nginx which is configured to use https.

<comment><USER8> I don't like insecure defaults. I might remember to take the steps to secure this thing, but not everyone will. They might forget, they might not realize, it might be an innocent mistake, but it will happen. It shouldn't be possible to send commands over an insecure channel.

I'm also a bit concerned about the authentication story. You can require the sender to provide a hash signature, but you have to specify the secret in plain text in the webhook config file. That's not best practice. Better would be ldap or Kerberos integration. And again, there should be secure defaults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Might be a good time to plug my writeup of parsing webhooks in Go [https://groob.io/tutorial/go-github-webhook/](https://groob.io/tutorial/go- github-webhook/)

</comment><comment><USER10> One thing this has going for it that others here likely don't: it's in debian repos. The docs say `sid` but it's made it into `stretch` too.

</comment><comment><USER11> So webhook does not handle sending a response? Only requests?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sending responses can be done using curl or wget in your scripts.

Webhook can wait for the script execution and return the stdout & stderr as response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The icon in the readme looks like the heroku logo

<comment><AUTHOR> My brother told me the same thing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome tool!

</comment><comment><USER14> go winner

</comment><comment><USER15> di si hajdare :)

<comment><AUTHOR> ev gura se :)</comment></comment>