Training Your Brain to Be (and Stay) Happy - <AUTHOR> http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-stay-happy.html <comment><USER2> As a practicing yogi, I want to say that gratitude is a great practice! It's supported not just by modern science, but ancient wisdom. Some advanced monks and yogis are able to spontaneously invoke feelings of extreme gratitude or compassion, which are now measurable in brain scans.

Regarding happiness, many yoga traditions would suggest that attachment to outcomes is a major root cause of suffering. Dedicated work without attachment to outcomes is suggested to free oneself from these binds of suffering. In particular, it's stressed that even attachment to positive outcomes will lead to suffering.

This, in additional to renunciation of baser desires, yoga (which I'll define here as exercise and some meditation), and finally surrender to "god" or "love" or the true self.

You are not your mind and you are not your body. Realizing this, and learning to identify with the true self, and to subdue the ego, are the keys to happiness in the yogic tradition. When this happens, your happiness is less and less affected by the outside world; the yogi learns to smile through adversity and keep a level head through triumph.

I imagine in the near future, hackers here and elsewhere will recognize yoga as a method to "hack" ones own tendencies, emotions, health, cognition, etc. I highly recommend it as a gesture towards happiness; I've found it to be both practical and practicable for the most part.

</comment><comment><USER3> This advice appears to boil down to "spend more time recollecting positive things and happy memories".

OK, but what if you don't have anything positive going on in your life right now? What if you don't have close friends, a romantic partner, a good job, or a secure home? What if you don't have a happy memories? Perhaps you had abusive parents, or you were bullied, or you suffered a debilitating illness?

Convincing middle-class college students to be a bit more cheerful by focussing on the myriad things they have to be grateful for isn't the challenge. It's helping people who have had the worst misfortune find some kind of peace.

<comment><USER4> I think chasing happiness will always leave you disappointed. I mean, eventually you die, right? Then what was it all for, if you spent time trying to be happy?

I have to approach this from the perspective of a Christian, because I am one.

Everyone is going to have tips and tricks that they use for improving their mental state. It could be as simple as "think positive" or it could be drugs or therapy. These all work, to an extent. But there's really only one way to deal with the problem once and for all and that's what Jesus did 2000 years ago.

I'll be clear, trying to have faith and trying to turn away from sin is not guaranteed to make you happy. But, as I said up top, that's not the goal. What God offers is peace, which is what I know a lot of people are looking for. An assurance that there's some larger meaning to the world we live in.

<comment><USER5> > I think chasing happiness will always leave you disappointed. I mean, > eventually you die, right?

> What God offers is peace, which is what I know a lot of people are looking > for

Not only do I think you are wrong on the former count, I don't think this is the appropriate forum for the latter - but I'll let the mods decide about that.

On the former, there's nothing to say but "you're wrong". Sure we die, but then we don't care. Happiness is it's own reward. Existing, living, breathing, loving, creating, thinking - these all cohabitate uniquely in humans. To say other things don't matter is to say life itself isn't worth living. If the peace only comes in death, then why not end it now?

> Then what was it all for, if you spent time trying to be happy?

"What was it all for, if you spent all that time waiting for peace in the afterlife?"

<comment><USER4> > I don't think this is the appropriate forum for the latter - but I'll let > the mods decide about that.

I would hope they decide in my favor since there seem to be other people offering their own brand of semi-spiritual advice.

> Happiness is it's own reward.

I don't deny that at all! I love happiness. I try to do things that make me happy every day. What I said is that simply searching for happiness will always leave you disappointed.

> "What was it all for, if you spent all that time waiting for peace in the > afterlife?"

As I said before, that wasn't my point. So many people have terrible things in their lives, as the OP said. It's nearly impossible for some people to find happiness, and if they do, it'll end someday, when they die or when they hit hard times again.

I would suspect that most people, if they've thought about it long enough, have realized that true lasting peace, if it exists, must exist outside of this life. I'm just trying to point out that that's true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Want to be happy? Here's my hot tip:

Don't expect to always be happy. Accept that sometimes life can be really, really hard and seemingly unfair. I think being able to handle times where our own minds/emotions seemingly turn against us is one of the most valuable skills in finding _more_ happiness in life.

It's really hard work, but sometimes it's just ok to feel shitty. Observe this feeling, recognize that it's very normal on the spectrum of human emotion, and remind yourself that it's not permanent, even if it feels that way in the moment.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I am always a little frustrated by the modern American conception that 'happiness' is the end goal in life. "I just want to be happy" or "I just want my kid to be happy" is a common refrain.

Why is happiness everything? If you just want to 'feel good', you could start a heroin habit; you will FEEL great. But is that a satisfying and full life?

I know for me personally, I might have been happier 'in the moment' five years ago, when I lived alone and got to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I played a lot of video games, did fun projects whenever I wanted, and had a lot of spending money from a good job. I know for me, I am never 'happier' in the moment than I am when playing video games.

Even though I can't do that as much anymore, I feel much more satisfied and content with my life now than I did then. Now, I am married with a kid, and my life is way harder, more stressful, and less focused on my own happiness. However, I am way more satisfied in my life, I feel more whole, and I feel a sense of purpose that I didn't have before. Of course, I would also say I am happy, but not in that same way I was when everything I did was what I wanted to do for me.

Happiness is just one part of a full life.

<comment><USER8> >If you just want to 'feel good', you could start a heroin habit; you will FEEL great. But is that a satisfying and full life?

I don't know, but I would facetiously guess that yes, it probably feels like it is. Until you stop being able to afford more heroin, at which point no, it absolutely would not. Kind of like driving fast; it isn't the _speed_ that kills you, it's the sudden stop.

Happiness and meaning probably look like different things to different people, though. Some people find fulfillment in offspring, sure. But I don't see how that's any different from anything else that works to assuage someone's existential malaise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Everything turns into the everyday." \-- @dhh

The key to being happier is to make it part of your daily routine until it becomes habit.

There is a good book called "minihabits" which explores this idea.

It has really helped me.

I wrote a calendar app to track my progress and motivate me not to break the chain. [http://positivehabits.neillyons.io](http://positivehabits.neillyons.io)

One of my daily habits is to "Write down one positive affirmation per day".

I think it actually works. You are strengthening the connections between nerons which see positivity. You start to see more positive things in the world. (I don't know if this science is true. Just my thoughts on the matter)

</comment><comment><USER10> CGP Grey recently posted a great video titled "7 Ways to Maximize Misery". It's worth checking out.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o)

<comment><USER11> i do almost everything on cgpgrey's list, but i don't think i'm unhappy. life is pretty good!

i also do about half of the list in the article. perhaps there are just different preferences...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I spent a significant amount of time in Russia in late 90s. At the time the economic situation was quite bad for most - leaving many to wonder how to provide the most basic essentials for themselves and their families.

I learned that in these situations that if basic human needs are not being met, it is very hard for someone to experience "happiness". Two things I observed:

\- Happiness and peace are not the same thing. Many of the good people I talked to would not claim any measure of happiness. But many had hope that tomorrow would be better, and gratitude for what they did have (which most often revolved around their relationships with others). This brought an element of "peace" that perhaps the future would be better than the present in spite of very difficult circumstances.

\- At that time in my life, my own resources were quite limited but I had no worry that I would go hungry or cold. I didn't have a mountain of money, truckloads of food or all the answers. But I could see that my efforts to show sincere concern for people, to be a friend with a soft shoulder, to help with basic necessities as I was able, etc. helped these individuals increase their own hope, gratitude and peace. And that brought _me_ tremendous happiness.

I'm not in a great position to tell someone else what to do to be happy. But I can assert from my own experience that I receive much happiness when I step out of myself and involve myself in things that help lighten the load of others.

I've also tried to distinguish between "pleasure" and "happiness". I think most of us have seen examples of people that have lives full of pleasure but devoid of happiness, and yet we still believe that our own happiness is the sum of self-directed pleasure. It seems to me that pleasure can contribute to happiness, but the foundation of happiness must be something more substantial.

</comment><comment><USER13> For most people, more money does in fact correlate strongly with more happiness. Who is the audience of this piece?

<comment><USER14> Initially, yes, but studies have shown over time you normalise and are just as unhappy as you were before you had more money.

If I think of the people I know who are happy and unhappy, money isn't a great correlation factor, and I know people are borderline homeless through to millionaires - I know happy/unhappy people across capital worth and income spectrum.

A better correlation for happiness is attitude and gratitude and enjoying the small things - the very things the article references.

<comment><USER15> Yep, from personal experience, after a certain amount of salary, my happiness level stayed the same. It would go up a bit maybe for a week or so after getting an increase, but I don't really feel happier than before even though I can travel more, and spend more.

<comment><USER13> that certain amount of salary is well above average.

<comment><USER15> yep absolutely. But it's way below 100k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Read prof. Martin Seligman's Flourish. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Seligman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Seligman)

</comment><comment><USER17> Imagining a better future self can also have harmful effects. Reality often doesn't live up to expectations and projecting what it would feel like to have or be something gives us some of the enjoyment of being that before we actually achieve. Furthermore, when our ideal of what something should doesn't live up to what it is, the gap creates unhappiness.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think one of the keys to happiness is to just look down and see how good you have it.

<comment><USER19> That's not a bad idea provided you have it good. The challenges in finding happiness often occur for the other subset: those who don't have it that good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> May I suggest an alternative approach?

Train your mind in an attitude of equanimity toward all phenomenae.

Much more practical than trying to sustain a specific phenomenon (happiness) in a constantly changing environment.</comment>


The limits of checklists: paradigmatic versus narrative thinking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/pnr-paper/the-limits-of-checklists-paradigmatic-versus-narrative-thinking-a438b9d1de6d <comment><USER2> We've released an app in this aea, Koantify Checklists[0]. It's a voice responsive app (i.e., Siri-like) for creating, maintaining, using, and sharing checklists. You create and maintain checklists within this app (or you can use our web-based editor).

When you perform your task, the app steps you through it by voice or text, and responds to your voice commands (it tries to provide optional "hands-free" operation as much as possible). When you complete your checklist, the app optionally emails you (or a list of people) a detailed record of completion of the checklist, showing steps you completed, skipped, or possibly had to repeat.

For organizations, it's easy to export/import checklists. You can distribute by email, via iCloud, or you can download checklists from web links. Our goal is to provide easy sharing of important checklists for tasks you want to standardize on. For training in your organization, use of a checklist provides important reminders on how things should be done.

Feedback, comments, suggestions are all most welcome.

[0] [https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1158001939?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1158001939?mt=8)</comment>


Mozilla sending political ads via Firefox push notification - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/hx8737/why_did_i_just_receive_an_ad_for_mozillas_blog/ <comment><USER2> Had to click through a few links to get to the campaign page that explains what this is about.

Noticed the '... American values...' in the campaign page title and facepalmed. I got the ad and am European.

They did not think this through to catch that... I doubt they thought about consiquances of politicising the browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the #StopHateForProfit campaign: [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-p...](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum- push-notification&utm_medium=android)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mozilla, please get your shit together. We like you. We want you to succeed. I don't get how you don't get us. I thought you are basically us.

I half-seriously suggest fireing everyone, who was not a developer at some point. If people who's background suggests they truly get your importance actually come up with stuff like this, I have no hope. Everyone grab your kids and run! We were doomed all along!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Cliqz, Mr Robot, Pocket, Fenix having no extensions in the original roadmap, this, there's just a continuous trend of poor judgement from Mozilla. I wish there wasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really care about their political stance or what they support (as many people claiming themselves to be slightly right of center seem to be so offended by) but using push notifications to shove that to my face is one step too far. They should just have stuck to their blog and social media.

Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) and also used undocumented functionality to push ads on people before (the Black Mirror promo fiasco).

<comment> m-p-3 > Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary > service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi > Pocket)

They didn't partner with Pocket, they own Pocket.

<comment><USER5> This came later [0] as originally Mozilla had partened with Pocket while they were still an independent entity as early as 2015 [1]

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla- acquires...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires- pocket-read-it-later)

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ...how does this kind of crap get approved? i use Firefox to avoid advertising and harassment from big companies.

<comment><USER7> Moz://a has joined the moral authority camp for a long time now, consequently "this kind of crap" are considered by Moz://a as a moral obligation hence perfectly normal.

[0]: [https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized- cul...](https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-culture-wars)

<comment> jerome-jh Considering how IT is increasingly used to make people's life miserable (part accidentally, part intentionally) I actually find this is a good thing they take a moral stance.

<comment><USER8> Everyone is free to take a moral stance. Just don't push it in my face. I'll look at it myself if I'm interested.

<comment> jerome-jh Although a user of Firefox on PC and mobile, I have not received that notification. So maybe there was an opt-in/out somewhere to which we answered differently.

As just about every editor of a free (as in beer) product, maybe the Mozilla foundation is also expecting something from you? That would not be your data, but you spreading awareness in your circle.

<comment><USER4> Apparently it's tied to the product tips opt out from the reddit thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The actual title is "Why did I just receive an ad for Mozilla's blog via push notification?"

Edit: The blog post in question is actually about Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a bit ironic, considering a vanilla installation of Firefox has Facebook as one of the default "Top Sites"

<comment><USER11> They tweeted out in May a list of video call apps that they had curated, when everyone was stuck indoors. Usual suspects at the top (Facebook), with trusted apps (Signal) near the bottom. It made me rethink my browser choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Today I learned that Mozilla was pro-censorship, and using their install base to promote this message.

We're living in an intesting time.

<comment><USER13> Asking platforms to not host and promote violent and racist content is hardly censorship.

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with violence? Do you propose to remove accounts of violent protests from Facebook now?

<comment><USER13> People promoting violence usually means targeted violence. Proposing violence against a specific person or group of people. A protest that happens to have people in that become violent and then those some people posting online is a completely different situation than a bunch of Nazis saying we need to exterminate the Jewish people.

<comment><USER14> Aka let's ban promoting bad violence. Who decides bad or good?

<comment><USER13> Maybe I'm making my point poorly.

Allowing violent people to post online is fine. Allowing them to post _violent_ content is bad. I don't care who the person is. I care what they post. As long as they're not advocating harm to a specific person or group of people it's fine.

I'm okay with people saying racist things from a free speech perspective (it's still despicable). I'm not okay with them saying people should go burn down the synagogue in downtown Seattle.

<comment><USER14> TBH, this point is poor. Violence and therefore promotion of violence are simply necessary in some situations. The former is even ingrained in the U.S. constitution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When they remotely installed add-ons for an ad deal and it blew up in their face, they promised "we've changed". I don't think they have.

I did not receive the notification despite using Firefox on mobile, but a friend did. Maybe because he uses Facebook, and I don't. But that's unthinkable, a Browser claiming to be pro-privacy sniffing around in your web- history to target you for political ads. But then again, you'd also not expect a Browser to send you push notifications for their latest blog post.

</comment><comment><USER16> Previous submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is being anti-violence/hate a political stance now? Fuck.

<comment><USER8> For me the political part isn't the issue - the push notification itself is. I can't stand browser desktop notifications and similar useless distractions and have blocked every kind of ad and popup in Firefox. Now the browser itself circumventing this to push some stupid blog article to me that I never asked for is unacceptable to me. Would you be fine with your image viewer, video player or file browser to push messages and suggest blog articles to you without asking? Then why should a website viewer do it?

I just want web browsers to display content I requested, block ads and otherwise just don't try to do anything clever. Which worked pretty nicely in Firefox so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not a random ad, it's Mozilla's own campaign: [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/)

> Facebook is still a place where it's too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, > antisemitism and calls to violence.

What a fucked-up politics we have this is not a neutral stance, but a polarizing "political view".

<comment><USER19> What you quote is not a stance, merely an observation. One can agree there's lots of socially undesirable speech (call it whatever you want) on Facebook, yet at the same time disagree Facebook ought to take their desired actions [0].

Besides, why my browser should send me a push notification for this particular campaign is beyond me. Even if I agree with the political contents this time, should I expect more push notifications of this kind in the future?

[0] [https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations](https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They've _got_ to stop pulling this kind of crap again and again. They should not use their position to promote their political agenda.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mozilla is using their Firefox browser to support their political censorship message.

What's next? Are we sure in the future that Firefox won't decide that certain sites espouse dangerous opinions and block these sites.

Mozilla's actions go against all their rhetoric about supporting the open web. They have no commitment to free speech nor any qualms about using Firefox to advance their political goals.

</comment><comment><USER22> This pushed me to give Edge a try and I was very pleasantly surprised so I'm going to be sticking with that.

</comment><comment><USER23> Using their privileged position of being able to push any message they want to millions of people to promote a pro-censorship message. Classy.

<comment><USER24> I've lost all respect for Mozilla by now. They're still vital for the web ecosystem as a whole. But they turned into a polititcal party and I don't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Facebook is still a place where it's too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, > antisemitism and calls to violence.

What an odd claim, coming from Mozilla - it's ultimately Firefox that displays all that hate and racism. If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Why leave censorship to Facebook, when clearly Mozilla is the more moral corporation, and knows better which content their users should be allowed to see?

<comment><USER26> It's the platform-vs-publisher distinction.

Firefox the browser doesn't push you towards or away from any particular content, with maybe a few caveats (default search engine, etc.)

Facebook (employees & algorithms) decide what you will see on their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> brought to you by company not willing to implement even optional pull down to refresh for 5+ years

one of the reasons why U don't use their buggy slow browser on Android (use outdated Kiwi Browser, since it's only non shady browser with extensions support)

</comment><comment><USER28> Why hasn't Firefox been forked yet? Not a spin off like Pale Moon or Waterfox but an actual fork of the entire codebase. With only two real browser engines remaining the potential for an independent policitally neutral browser is high. I don't know why people haven't done it yet.

<comment><USER29> People are forking. The project with currently the most traction seems to be LibreWolf: [https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/](https://librewolf- community.gitlab.io/)

However the development of such a program takes a massive amount of work (and money), which is something Mozilla still offers and any fork probably doesn't have.

It generally doesn't make sense to do so even with the resources, because you'd be duplicating a lot of work, so the "spin-off"s prefer to keep merging the original code, just excluding changes they don't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Free means free. It doesn't mean free only to a certain groups of people.

</comment><comment><USER31> I can see that people feel bothered by push messages they didn't ask for, but... "political ads"?

Anyone who feels offended by "stop hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence" needs to urgently figure out where their emotions come from.

<comment><USER32> I preferred when Mozilla made browsers

<comment><USER33> Secure ones, too.</comment></comment></comment>


EventKnower - Know the uknowable the instant it happens (feedback on my idea) - <AUTHOR>

I came up this idea a few nights ago.  I'm hoping you guys would be kind enough to offer me any kind of feedback you can think of.  I'm still not sure how viable it is.
Here goes:
Problem: There are some things I'd like to know when they happen but can't easily get notified right now.
Examples:

    *new Homestarrunner cartoon
    *last season of 24 released on DVD
    *Simpsons movie released on DVD
    *Windows Vista released (old)
    *Nintendo Wii launched (old)
    *updates to small software projects

 Maybe lots of people have things like this they would like to be notified about. Thus the idea is a website where you can request to be notified of something via a myriad of options e.g, RSS, email, sms, etc.
It could work like this. You get say 5 points when you sign up. Each event you sign up to be notified of costs you a point. If you correctly report when one of the other events on the site happened in a timely matter, you earn points.
<comment><USER3> Huh...that actually would be really handy.

Problems:

-How would you deal with people who aren't 'in the know' enough to earn back points?

-How would you prevent them just creating a new account to get more points?

-Chicken and Egg Problem: It's not reasonable to hire enough people to pre-verify that a post is correct in saying 'Event XYZ has just occurred'. The best solution, to my mind, is to allow the receiver ('wants-to-know person') to verify. How do you prevent people from 'griefing' by repeatedly saying a major event has just occurred, thus SMS spamming a bunch of people who want to know, say, when Spore is released? You could wait for multiple people to say something just happened, but then you create a sort of latency, especially for less-heavily-watched items, and you totally blow the chance to get inside scoops.

-Define 'timely manner'. And do you get points even if you're not the first to say that an event has occurred?

Your idea would be viable in terms of income, though, I would think. Charge software companies to become members, and then create a few never-expiring general-purpose event types for 'exploit found', 'POC posted', 'Code Stolen', etc., while giving them, say, a 3-day advance before anybody else watching those things or similar ones gets notified.

<comment><USER4> If people submit events which other people vote up or down then "x has happened" simply becomes "x has 10 votes".

<comment><AUTHOR> So it's like the probability that x has happened? That's an interesting way to to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this idea as well, especially as a facebook app. Use the Facebook api to scrape together an initial group of events pertinent to an individual user and have them mold it from there.

Problem: Right now when I want to know when something happens (new cd/movie release) i go to a reliable source and I know with some degree of certianty that that event will happen when they say it will. I give them some reasonable leeway since its still a future event with numerous opportunities to miss the date(later ship date, cancellation, etc.). However, when you tell someone an event just happened or is happening now, you better be 90% correct or the tool becomes an annoyance instead of useful.

</comment><comment><USER6> The real gem would be if you could find a way to figure out what they might want to be notified about without them having to specifically request it. For example, say I want to know when 24 is coming to DVD, but I've only used your site once and I don't think to go and add it. Maybe you can use the Facebook API, see that one of my favorite shows is 24, and then any new notifications relating to 24 get directed to me. This is of course just one example.

Just a thought...

<comment><USER7> This is interesting, and sounds a bit semantic web-ish even :) You could maybe use something like Greenspun's Solar Magnitude Forum to find things that are closer to your interests as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is actually quite a good idea - better than truemors certainly. I recently had an idea to notify people when new series of their favourite tv shows hit the screens - I know there are usually many promos but for some reason I still tend to miss them. What you are proposing takes the concept beyond just TV shows and I think it could very likely work. I say go for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that could be the motto: "EventKnower- It's better than Truemors!" :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I take it you already got the domain name?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, no domain name yet. Why do you ask?

<comment><USER9> b/c if you don't grab it now (unless you were thinking to launching with a different name) someone else will grab it (especially if there's a jerk reading your post on yc news - hopefully not)

Being open with ideas is fine, b/c execution of an idea is hard (even with "easy" ideas). Grabbing a domain name or even trademarking a name is a lot easier.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it's a really bad idea to post an unregistered domain name in a public forum. Grab it right now, you can get the .net and .org later.

www.namecheap.com is my registrar of choice, $8.88 a year with free WhoisGuard (anonymizes your whois information in a way that won't allow someone to steal your domain).

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good deal. I'll use that in the future. I'd say there's only say, a 20% chance I'd want to use that name, and then there's only say a 30% chance I'll do this idea, so I'm not sure if I'll buy it just yet.

<comment><USER10> It's worth paying the extra $.89 over GoDaddy just because the checkout process isn't painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you guys have any ideas on how to market / promote something like this?

<comment><USER11> I think a lot of the marketing has to do with the prodct and the interface. I think this is something that you build first and then take it to sources - <USER2> - Paramount Movie Studio. Whenever a movie or TV DVD is released they let your website know.

The marketing: On their 24 page "Want us to remind you as soon as 24 season 3 is on DVD? Get a free reminder with ____.com. As you grow build it out so that any organization can customize for any product or event and then put it on their site.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Google maintain/update the information for the GeoCoding API? - <AUTHOR> Or more specifically, If someone wanted to recreate this for NYC, how would they go about it? <comment><USER2> The good news is that you can do it for NYC using OpenAddresses data. We published two pieces about how to geocode more generally:

[https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/the-basics-of- geocoding](https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/the-basics-of-geocoding) [https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/adventures-in-address- parsing](https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/adventures-in-address-parsing)

It turns out that geocoding has been a much bigger project than we anticipated, but we offer the service very inexpensively. Let me know if you have any questions.</comment>


In India, life under coronavirus brings blue skies and clean air - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-coronavirus-delhi-clean-air-pollution/2020/04/10/ac23dd1e-783e-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html <comment><USER2> similar article on NPR without paywall [https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/04/10/831592401/with-coronavirus-lockdown-indias-cities-see- clear-blue-skies-as-air-pollution-dr)</comment>


Pluggable.js: A tiny plugin architecture for your JavaScript project - <AUTHOR> https://jcbrand.github.io/pluggable.js <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/findhit/findhit- hotplug](https://github.com/findhit/findhit-hotplug)</comment>


Chrome now disables extensions not from the Chrome Web Store by default - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969?p=ui_remove_non_cws_extensions&rd=1 <comment><USER2> Following in Mozilla's footsteps? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061592)</comment>


Show HN: Simple JSON Aggregator for Java - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/caffinc/jaggr <comment><USER2> how exactly does that differ from java streams?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not as feature-rich as Streams, but Streams is Java 8, and this is for systems that want to do simple aggregations on JSON data coming in from data stores that use JSON. I wrote it to bring something akin to MongoDB's aggregations into the JVM. With Java 8, Streams are a much better solution usually.</comment></comment>


High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/high-on-hitler-and-meth-book-says-nazis-were-fueled-by-drugs.html <comment><USER2> There was recently a review critical of this book: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed- drugs-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-in- nazi-germany-by-norman-ohler-review)

</comment><comment><USER3> So were the US armed forces.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575020)

</comment><comment><USER5> As a german that sounds like old news. My understanding is that "Panzerschokolade" is common knowledge.</comment>


Ask HN: What just happened to the internet? - <AUTHOR> According to http://downdetector.com/ and my own experience from Richmond, almost everything just became unavailable for a short amount of time. A few things are still unavailable on and off.<p>I expected to see some chatter on here about it, but nothing. I assume everyone else saw the same thing? <comment><USER2> Comcast is currently having a major outage [https://outage.report/us/comcast](https://outage.report/us/comcast)

I am personally seeing about 80% packet loss between a couple of their routers in Chicago

</comment><comment><USER3> Was on my way to the airport when my support team called me saying the app was down. But Pingdom didn't alert me! Lots of users still having issues.

Trace route indicates a Telia interchange in ATL is causing the issue, at least for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Level 3 seems to be having a major outage

[http://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/](http://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/)

</comment><comment><USER5> My clients are reporting issues in the DC area as well. AWS status page says everything is up. I can get to CNN but Twitter is down.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, lots of stuff seemed down. I saw report of an S3 outage in Virginia

</comment><comment><USER7> It looks like it might be another Comcast issue.

<comment><USER6> I am on Comcast and can get to some stuff, but not other stuff. Twitter is down, but HN and Google are just fine. Clash Royale was down for me as well.

</comment></comment><comment> java-man somebody is testing offensive tools. expect a false flag operation.

<comment><USER3> I had that thought as well.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Spring Boot microservice with graphql and mongodb - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pgilad/spring-boot-graphql-mongodb <comment><USER2> I recently made a spring boot microservice[0] to query on HN stories in a customized way. It was based on MySQL. How much time/effort do you think it would take someone to migrate to graphql? Also, is what is the speed of a query in graphql? Any pros or cons? Currently I haven't applied any pagination techniques thus it takes much longer to query over 2.2M records. I am trying to get the queries sped up.

hosted application : [http://www.productioncompilers.com/](http://www.productioncompilers.com/)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560413)</comment>


More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked-e9f0e3ed36a6 <comment><USER3> How we express our opinions in a democracy needs to re-engineered. It needs to be secure and it needs to matter. Comments anybody can make and that are easily ignored are relatively useless.

The powers that be aren't going to fix this. If the voters had real, direct power, the lobbyists would not. And you can't put the voters' money directly into your pocket.

So we have to do it. We need to create an open-source, secure and low cost solution that shadows an existing state legislature and does a superior job for the voters.

And California is the perfect state for it. Let the voters decide the issues or let them "elect" anyone in the state to exercise their vote for them. Use proportional representation. Vote any time. Elect any time.

Once this system is proven, voters can decide whether to DUMP the California State Assembly and let the State Senate create and debate all the bills. Then we make it work for all those who can't use or that don't trust the Internet.

Once adopted, the same system can be rolled out in other states and maybe some day it will replace the House of Representatives.

People have to see it work small before they trust it big.

<comment><USER4> I would not say that something applied in California, state with the largest population, is an example of "work small before they trust it big".

Are you proposing a direct democracy system where the regular election cycle for representatives is obsolete, and people directly vote on issues and/or can elect new representatives at any time?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

This breaks down the concentration of power while still enabling people to hand off this task to a trusted delegate. Anybody that is qualified to hold office. Or it could even be a representative from the other house.

And you could change who you delegate to any time. Instead of thinking they have a mandate for 4 years, the amount of power a representative actually has would go up and down over time. He or she could be out of power overnight if the voters lose faith.

Of course, the Senate would still work the old way.

<comment><USER5> This is delegative democracy, and I've been thinking about how to try to get this implemented too.

Rather than trying to push it at the state level, which still seems a pretty high barrier for entry, I'm wondering if it's possible to run as some kind of state or local representative, something like city council, and set up a system so that the rep's constituents are the ones using it to inform their rep of their wishes. They'd use an app or site to vote on things known to be coming up in the chamber, delegates could make public statements about them. The representative could run either on a platform of "I will be bound by how my constituency votes" or "I will not be bound, but I better give you a damn good reason to vote contrary to my constituency if I want to be elected again."

DemocracyOS and other open source tools are starting to appear that should make the implementation of any number of these systems fairly easy, though of course there's still security and ID verification to contend with.

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

<comment><USER3> The ID verification is a challenge. We have vote-by-mail here in California and have dead people still voting.

I would have some annual re-qualification system, like maybe video comparison. You record a video when you register and another each year speaking about a specific current event and the system could compare the two and make sure the current event is correct.

Needless to repeat, but we'd also need methods for handling exceptions. Nobody should be denied use of the system because they cannot figure out how to use it or don't have a computer or smart phone.

<comment><USER5> I was thinking along the lines of in-app ID verification when I wrote that, seems you are too, but it occurs to me that you have to go to a building in order to register to vote as it stands today. That piece could still exist, with alternatives like the one you suggest being made available as they are vetted.

Public libraries, schools, courthouses, post offices could all be access points that would let folks without devices participate. With the right setup, UX for both voting on things and for choosing delegates should be not much more complicated than what a ballot looks like today, and yes, someone should be available to help those who are having trouble with it.

You mentioned that the system is waiting for a good use case, and I agree. That's what makes it very attractive to start at the state level despite the difficulty: people can have a bigger, more tangible impact than what you would get at city scale. I wonder if the best way to get started at that level is by creating a new political party whose candidates are constrained in their votes (but not in any legislation they propose) by how their constituents are responding. Recognizing that elected reps will have their own opinions and should be free to voice them, but bringing in the delegative structure beneath them as a binding principle of the party. It seems like it would help with mindshare/awareness if it was a widespread phenomenon instead of one random city councilman's platform.

<comment><USER3> Great ideas.

A party devoted to reflecting the wishes of all the citizens would be great.

This could be a major plank in a new party, along with many other intelligent goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got a bunch of emails from senators thanking me for contacting them this week... before I had contacted any of them. Who knows what was said in my name.

<comment><USER7> I would report that to them, report that to the Sergeant at Arms for the US Congress (because hey...that seems like a CFAA violation using their computer system), and your state attorney general.

Being angry accomplishes nothing, being noisy accomplishes a little. being FUCKING ANNOYING and ever present accomplishes marginally but meaningfully more.

<comment><USER8> > being noisy accomplishes a little

And a bunch of people being noisy accomplishes a surprising amount, if you can be noisy in the right channels.

<comment><USER9> Also, it's almost always important to be _persistently_ noisy. A single noise event (or even a handful) can be - and often is - ignored.

Silence is insidious because even after a very noisy scandal, silence eventually _normalizes the status quo_. The only way to counter this - and be seen as a real issue that needs to be addressed - is to be noisy in the right channels _every time_ the problem happens, with the noise continuing until the problem is actually fixed.

Protesting, letter writing, and political action in general is not a one time event. It's a force that needs to be continuously applied.

<comment><USER7> This is a much more articulate version of what I posted and should be taken very seriously.

The reason citizen movements so often lose out is because they are able to gather momentum for a one time event, but they are fighting against group with paid staff (not a slight just a reality) who do this full time. They are there on the same message every day.

I have worked with several activist groups that can't get the 'on message' part down and can't figure out how to apply it consistently and clearly. The same ideas about vision->strategy->tactics applies the same to activism as it does to a startup.

It's the different between the grand canyon and a really big rainstorm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just like the election, I wonder if the people behind this care if they get caught as long as they get what they want first. There doesn't seem to be much precedent for overturning laws or elections that were subject to misinformation campaigns.

<comment><USER11> [I am not a lawyer]

Only Congress passes laws (statutes). The FCC is a regulatory body. It has statutory authority (delegated by Congress) to create regulations, not statutes (laws). Proposed FCC regulations have to go through a process defined by statute. Publication and comment are part of that process. Irregularities in the process may form the basis of judicial challenge. Whether what is described here constitutes an irregularity is another matter.

Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. If Congress were to a law to explicitly end net neutrality, the courts would have to assume that the law is the will of the people and a challenge could only be made on Constitutional grounds. An FCC regulation can also be challenged on legal grounds (the regulation violates a statute).

<comment><USER12> > Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of > judicial deference in terms of intent.

Yes, statutory laws must be proven unconstitutional to be struck down, and regulatory laws _can_ be more easily affected by judicial decisions. But for the last 30 years, regulations have been accorded an inappropriate degree of deference by the courts: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2017/03/25/gorsuch-is-right-about-chevron-deference/)

<comment><USER13> If "anti net-neutrality" regulations shall be considered unconstitutional, so shall "pro net-neutrality" ones.

[edit: instead of downvoting me, tell me why left-leaning regulations are automatically Good (and constitutional), and why right-leaning are automatically Evil (and unconstitutional) ?]

<comment><USER14> I'll take the bait and explain why I'm downvoting you.

The parent posts had literally nothing to do with left vs right. It has to do with accepting the results of misinformation campaigns, and post-factum not taking steps to revert malign legislation.

Even in the case that I give you the benefit of the doubt in that you're taking "pro-net-neutrality" to be in some way left-leaning, the bulk of the arguments I've read fall into the "empiricism" bucket rather than "partisanship," either citing precedent of negative outcomes (portugal) or the industry's proven inability to self-regulate (local monopolies ala comcast, fights against municipal broadband, etc).

I'm also somewhat entertained that maintaining a competitive business landscape has somehow become "leftist." To my mind that's very pro-small- business/free market to prohibit large entities from soley dominating a market and legislating protective walls; even Reagan took an aggressive antitrust stance; this not even touching on that internet looks a lot more like a utility necessary for "survival" in a modern world than a good nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The centralization of the web is what worries me. I suppose non-neutral net can contribute to that, but even with a neutral net we've seen extraordinary centralization around a few major sites. Will neutrality really save us?

<comment><USER16> It might not be enough to create exactly the net you want. But yes, net neutrality is strictly better for decentralisation than the alternative.

That is because neutrality creates a (somewhat) level playing field. Without it, Facebook could, theoretically, pay Comcast to slow down a new competitor that is just emerging.

I say "theoretically", because such an action, if taken overtly, would probably still run afoul of competition law. But there will be other, more subtle, ways to achieve similar results. I would expect the result to be worse for data-heavy and latency-sensitive applications, as well as anything using a non-standard protocol (i. e. peer-to-peer networking etc).

It's possible, although not certain, that current service levels might remain accessible for new startups. But any future improvements would be tied to signing contracts with any provider whose customers any new startup would want to reach. Prices will tend to be exactly the value of these customers to the startup, minus one cent–or as close to that as can be measured.

<comment><USER17> They don't need to _slow_ anyone down. They just need to be faster or better connected with the end users with lesser connection drops etc. This __all __the major players already do with their private networks and CDNs and servers at a global PoPs. No startup without serious muscle can compete with that .

In the same vine major players also built and own dedicated DCs , hardware and networking equipment and locate it all over the world, new players can't compete possibly with that anyway.

There has never been any level playing field, New players are nimble and more risk friendly and do not have the baggage of existing users , older players have resource advantage and may need to choose between cannibalizing current users for new areas of growth or avoiding the segment all together.

<comment><USER18> Could you elaborate? It's very easy for a startup, or even a single person to get a CDN distribution up and running with global points of presence, though I don't have much knowledge of the private networks you refer to.

<comment><USER17> The depth and number of pops that Google and Facebook have is way better, commerical cdns give you some foothold but are not in the same league at all.

For example every small isp all over the world will most likely have YouTube caching servers running on their infra likely for free because letting Google do that saves them considerable upstream bandwidth both isp and google benefit, whereas you and I pay .10 to .20 per GB for CDN

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's times like these where an actual - in person protest - might be more effective.

<comment><USER7> I posted this last week and stand by it...

A small counter suggestion. I know we all tend to be introverted but...go visit your reps. Visit them in DC, visit them in their offices in your area. Most will be home this week for thanksgiving and almost all will be home over the holiday break. Email them to schedule a meeting or call. Make them explain this to your face.

I tried this and after five emails have meetings with my rep and both my senators scheduled less than a week out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every social media website is dominated by people supporting net neutrality. I don't even remember seeing an opposing opinion, except from Trump's government. Maybe I'm living in some weird bubble, but it seems to me the argument is really not an argument, but an artificially created nonsense.

<comment><USER21> I'm up for net neutrality, but what do you about one or two pigs hogging the network?

This quotes netflix as having 37% of traffic in N.A. [http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix- boasts-37-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix- boasts-37-share-of-internet-traffic-in-north-america-compared-with-3-for- apples-itunes)

It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.

<comment><USER22> Everyone worries about slippery slopes, but I think that limits should exist. Perhaps if you are consuming more than 10% of Internet's bandwidth, you _should_ have to pay some kind of tax to ISP's, and those funds should then be required to be reinvested in the network to make it more reliable or increase bandwidth. That seems like it would be an all-around win.

<comment><USER23> Bandwidth isn't free. You pay for it, I pay for it, Google pays for it, Netflix pays for it, everyone pays for it.

Bandwidth is what we pay for. Net neutrality does not mean we get bandwidth for free. People who use more bandwidth have to buy more bandwidth already.

<comment><USER22> These services that drive massive _increases_ in bandwidth demand are the services I'm talking about. The demand for Netflix, for example, has required investment on the part of ISPs to support. Most residential cable broadband systems weren't designed with these kinds of constant bandwidth demands in mind. So Netflix gets to grow, while ISPs face massively increased investment, lest their networks will be overrun. Why shouldn't Netflix have to contribute to the increased investment that they are benefitting from?

<comment><USER24> > The demand for Netflix, for example, has required investment on the part of > ISPs to support.

So the ISP were overselling bandwidth?

> Why shouldn't Netflix have to contribute to the increased investment that > they are benefitting from?

They do. Netflix give CDN boxes to ISPs for free. They contribute by saving the ISPs all that external bandwidth (which is what they oversell).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Worse, the FCC has evidence the NY state attorney general needs to investigate and prosecute these fake submissions as identity theft, but the FCC refuses to acknowledge the NY AG at all, let alone assist. At the least it makes the FCC look servile, and at worst complicit.

</comment><comment><USER26> What needs to happen for shit like this not to happen anymore.

<comment><USER27> Get money out of politics. No more superPACs. No more third party bullshit.

My proposal: only contributions from individuals to official campaign organizations. Each person can donate a total of $100, split any way they want.

I'm tired of so many decisions being made at the behest of some campaign funder whispering in a politician's ear. Our democracy is being corroded by all this money.

<comment><USER28> Your solution has a clear result: only the wealthiest would be able to run for office.

<comment><USER13> Given the money spent during campaigns, it's already the case. Only the wealthiest are able to run for office. You'll never see a Billy Boy Blow run for president while being a blue collar. That being said, it's important to highlight that most democrat elected in the past were lawyers, while republicans came from business background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How many fake ones were pro-net neutrality? I could see Russia writing fake ones to disrupt things... And then there will be the rise of the bot wars (Ender's Game was prophetic!).

</comment><comment><USER30> The "mail-merge" the article refers to is also known as "spinning". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning)

</comment><comment><USER31> Down with net neutrality. It's just another government program that the very top tech companies love, because it helps squash competition. Open and free markets are always superior.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does the FCC take copy pasted online comments seriously to being with? This seems like the stupidest way to decide legislation.

</comment><comment><USER33> FCC has explicitly said that they have ignored any opinion comments. They have only considered comments which bring new facts or a legal opinion. So the fact that many comments were faked is irrelevant anyway.

<comment><USER34> Which would hopefully bite them in the ass if I had any faith in a Trump- appointed judicial branch. The FCC is required to take public comments into account when making regulations, this should be a fairly straightforward lawsuit.

<comment><USER35> Taking comments into account is different than simply having an opt-in vote which translates to who's e-petition can go the most viral (and let's not even get into fraud). And this is very much a good thing. In this case, even if I might agree with having some issue with net neutrality being repealed - <USER2> think most people have no clue at all what's going on and are voting based on fear mongering and sensationalism.

For instance, what percent of people could explain why Pai thinks repealing net neutrality is a good idea? Most seem to think he's just some Trump appointee selling out the highest bidder. In fact he's been arguing for a path of deregulation for years, even before he was appointed to the FCC by _Obama_ 5 years ago.

I tend to debate against the masses on this issue simply because I think we're acting like a mob instead of a rational collective. And even if we may be getting it right on this issue, mob mentality is something that should never be condoned - even if you side with them on an issue.

<comment><USER36> I agree with gbrown. Pai's statements are so untruthful and nonsensical that I can't figure out why he thinks it could help even after reading many comments by him. His most clear argument is that it will somehow increase investments into ISP infrastructure (citing, I think, what happened in Portugal) while he simultaneously says we have no way to know what effects repealing it will have until we try it. Meanwhile a million people have shared the images of the bucketed plans from Portugal charging $9.99 extra for social networking and things like that.

The man is totally full of BS.

As for your comment that he was an Obama appointee, he was actually selected by Mitch McConnell but I know it's a common trope to blame everything on Obama.

"Though an Obama appointee, Pai does not share Obama's progressive views and is by no means someone Obama would have chosen to lead the commission. Rather, there's a tradition of letting the minority party pick two commissioners, since the majority can only legally hold three seats; in nominating Pai — at the recommendation of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican — Obama was sticking to that tradition."

<comment><USER37> All your reasons for impugning his integrity boil down to you disagree with him. That is narrow minded.

Pai (and many economists) believe a double sided market could increase potential profits which would incentive investment so ISPs could provide a "fast lane." That isn't "somehow." They thought about and have a reason for believing what they believe.

You can disagree but that doesn't make them hitler.

<comment><USER36> No actually very few of my reasons for pointing out his lack of integrity have to do with simple disagreement on policy. I would try not to label people as narrow minded based on one short comment on the Internet. This community normally does a better job of not immediately devolving into personal attacks especially when you didn't even ask what my reasons for disliking him are.

Read a much more in depth analysis in one of my other comments of his transformation of the FCC into a partisan agency, his attacks on poor people through the Lifeline program, as well as his close ties to Verizon which create a direct conflict of interest: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15781535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15781535)

Not to even mention the post that started this thread about how Pai has accepted over a million fake comments on net neutrality from the telecom/ISP industries' astroturfer lobbyists while refusing to provide enough information for NY to look into the matter (or investigating themselves)

There are people playing devil's advocate for Pai's views but how many people actually seem to strongly want these changes? Have you met any who don't work for Comcast, Verizon, etc.? I honestly have not

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Cripes. Ajit Pai must badly be wanting to compete against Martin Shkreli as most despised man in America.

Shkreli ended up in a jump suit (no doubt picking up soap frequently). Is Pai next?

</comment><comment><USER39> There was also a lot of direct copypaste spam on the pro-NN side

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90dO3JA.png)

<comment><USER40> I'm sure a lot of the pro duplicates are from websites that help the person post a comment, but they just use the form comment instead of adding their own stuff.

<comment><USER41> Wouldn't this logic apply to the anti nn side as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> So many in the tech community support Net Neutrality, it's always shocked me that more people don't build bots to submit comments like the opposition do.

Surely the tech community could easily submit a few billion (trillion?) legit- looking comments in support of Net Neutrality that would a) completely cripple the servers or b) produce so much spam that it overwhelms anything useful and all comments are ignored....

why not?

<comment><USER43> Because so many comments would be instantly recognized as spam. The Anti-Net- Neutrality side would then use that as a narrative that all NN arguments are fake and draw even more stupid conclusions like "This is why we're right". They would spin it to play to their narrative.

The best way is to get as many real people as possible to make as much noise as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't believe that botnet activity has been limited to one side, based on how reddit has looked this last week.

Example of suspicious postings:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/7engpr/image_reddi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/7engpr/image_reddit_united_against_net_neutrality/)

<comment><USER45> How are those suspicious? It's an issue redditors care a lot about. A lot of those posts were done by moderators in their respective communities and don't appear to be copied and pasted content. It looks from the screengrab like you upvoted them too...

<comment><USER44> Not my screengrab.

That is a post in frisson where someone is posting a pic that supposedly will generate frisson. There is clearly a campaign to post subreddit themed references to the topic.

The vote counts seem aberrant to me as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm glad that this is being brought up.

However, duplicated comments are not necessarily faked. For instance, there are many times centralized campaigns that people can sign onto for sending messages. The messages from those, while identical, are proper and what the individuals believe.

This happens on both sides of issues. So, please continue to investigate, but be careful you don't interject your own biases into your investigation.

<comment><USER47> The messages the post points out to are not duplicates, though. They have a very similar meaning, but uses entirely different wording so that they won't appear duplicates. In other words, someone went through the trouble of trying to cloak the fact that they're duplicates.

<comment><USER46> > The messages the post points out to are not duplicates, though.

There were two separate categories from the article. This is text from the article, "The vast majority of FCC comments were submitted as exact duplicates or as part of letter-writing/spam campaigns."</comment></comment></comment>


World according to San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://gregosuri.com/world-according-to-san-francisco

<comment><USER2> Put this in poster form... I think a few people would buy it.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Outer Outer Sunset" and "North Beach East" are both a little inspired.

</comment><comment><USER4> Vegas in "Jesus Land" gave me a good laugh.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like it how Ireland is bigger than Britain. Norway, however, is not just blondes, but also an Opera browser.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was weak until I saw Outer Outer Sunset... nice

</comment><comment><USER7> "Dalai Lama Int'l Airport" on Nepal gave me a good laugh.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Customer Service" on India gave me a good laugh.</comment>


Hooking Into the AWS Shutdown Flow - <AUTHOR> http://copperegg.com/hooking-into-the-aws-shutdown-flow/ When you are autoscaling lots of spot instances, or kill off systems during a code deploy, you don't care if the system goes away, because that is what you intended to happen. Normally when spots or on-demand instances terminate by either a ec2kill command, price-terminated or killed by the ELB/Auto-Scaler, they receive a poweroff command sent by the hypervisor.  This blog describes how we tell our collector agent to remove the system from the watch list, remove all probing associated with the system (http, ping, etc) and send a blurb through Hipchat saying this system is powering off. <comment><USER2> Nice write-up</comment>


When and how to micromanage - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091201/when-and-how-to-micromanage.html?partner=fogcreek

<comment><USER2> When I hear someone defending micromanagement, it sends a shiver down my spine - I was once a victim of micromanagement. It sucked, and I quit. As did some of my co-workers.

This article, however, is not really a justification of micromanagement. Joel Spolsky suggests that you can't trust technical people who you didn't hire to do their job properly. I wouldn't call this micromanagement.

This strategy is important in any situation in which you are forced to let a technical person from another company do important work for you, and you or someone you know and trust has that expertise. For example, if you are a medical professional, and your mother is sick at the hospital, it is advisable that you carefully monitor her treatment by nurses and doctors, to make sure every little thing that they do it okay. Since you probably did not hire these people, and probably don't work with them, you can't trust them. So watch them like a hawk.

On the other hand, if you hire and train someone at your company but still cannot trust them to do their job, then you should re-examine your hiring process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regarding the wifi issues, if you're running a tech conference and it has to have great wifi, we're recommending Mariette Systems. I know them through Cliff Skolnick, who used to be involved in wiring up community wifi networks (and was a founding member of Apache). I think it's amazing that you could get someone with that much experience to wire up your conference. It's much better than the low-level IT guys that normally show up (or worse, the remote phone IT support).

Here's their website: <http://www.mariette.com/Mariette_Systems.html>

And an article TechCrunch did on them: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had- intern...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had-internet-and- then-some-mariette-systems-ftw/)

You'd think this would be a solved problem by now, but judging by the number of conferences that have bad experiences, it is not.

<comment><USER4> Mariette Systems solved the problem for TechCrunch by using primarily WIRED internet access, not WiFi, and the cost was absolutely breathtaking.

The ServerFault thread that followed that incident about wifi at conferences has become the encyclopedia of how to make it work, so look there if you need a more detailed answer than "spend a lot of money hiring the guy who knows all the secrets." :-)

[http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet- acces...](http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-access-and- wi-fi-always-so-terrible-at-large-tech-conferences)

<comment><USER3> Joel, that's interesting. I've seen them do just wifi and they serve two of our cheaper-seeming customers--so I wasn't under that impression. When you say breathtaking, can you put that into context for me? All conference vendors seem to charge breathtaking amounts (I once paid $220 for electricity in order to plug in a monitor for two hours). Is this breathtakingly-high-for- independent-show-organizers or breathtakingly-high-for-even-major-shows?

Also, what did you use at BoS? I thought the wireless there was good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "At the top of every company, there's at least one person who really cares and really wants the product and the customer experience to be great." In my experience that person is rarely at the top.

And this article seems to be a clear example of this. "Ryan" seems clueless and "Greg" seems to be the go-to guy.

<comment><USER6> I got a similiar impression from watching a few Carsonified vids, off course one has to be careful with judging too fast. I wonder why Joel wrote the articel that way? He s basically saying in public: Ryan screwed it up but I could wing it because I memorised my speech.

<comment><USER4> I hope I didn't create that impression. Carsonified was an equal partner in the event. It was the first time for both of us. We learned a lot. They learned a lot. I made plenty of mistakes, too (at one point I actually forgot my own passport and had to fly across country to pick it up so I could go to Toronto). We're all newbies in this conference business.

<comment><USER5> Carsonified had never done conferences before?

<comment><USER4> Not a series of ten conferences in ten cities, running every other day. Most of the cities on the DevDays tour were new to them.

<comment><USER7> So you basically took a UK company, used to organize large events that span several days a few times a year (and only in UK and a few handpicked US cities), with a lot of preparation time, and let it organize a fast-paced series of events every other day in a number of different US cities they've never been to? Sorry, Joel -- I really respect Ryan and his team (although I can't grieve over Mel Kirk's leaving), but here's your fifth why right there, if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whenever I hear of the 5 Whys method, the first thing that I think of is...

Why 5? (no pun intended considering this thread is about wifi... oh dear).

But seriously, why 5 specifically? What if you need 6 to get to the root of the problem?

<comment><USER9> It's a rule of thumb: you typically need >= 5 whys to get down to a reasonably useful response.

From the article, you could stop at pretty much any point in the whole 'why does our video suck' chain:

"One problem in Austin was that we couldn't switch video fast enough. Why? Because we were using a cheap switch purchased at an office superstore."

At that point you could've said "Ok, let's not buy crappy switches in future", but you would have missed the better solution (don't do things half-assed at the last minute)

<comment><USER7> Actually, the Five Whys isn't about finding a solution, it is about finding the core problem. I don't think that Joel's example is a good one, because after four true layers of problems it abruptly jumps to a solution, with absolutely no reasoning why this particular solution would be the best one, while leaving deeper issues just to keep the number of Whys at five.

The correct Five Whys process would continue past five questions, and end in something like "because the team is not prepared" or even "the team doesn't have enough experience with organizing events"; something that could be solved by, among others, preparing a checklist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't the rule the degree of oversight required is importance-of- task/trustworthiness-of-person?

And if you want to minimise oversight you need to avoid untrusthworty people and/or give them unimportant (but still useful) work.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why can't this just link to the original article?

Which is an ok article, and might be better summed up that when you are dealing with an unknown quantity, you should treat them as an unknown quantity and /not/ trust them to do their job properly. Which is fine and reasonable and possibly common sense.

I just don't understand why this article required two levels of indirection.

<comment><USER4> It looks like somebody already fixed that.

When I link to my own articles on Inc.com, I redirect it through my own site because I want to track how much traffic I'm sending them. Every year when they're considering whether to renew my contract I remind them of this. (For the record, it averages 40,000 direct clickthroughs per month)

<comment><USER12> Ok, I put the partner argument back into the link, so you'll still get credit for the traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author tells how he stepped in using the "5 whys?" method. I recall reading that Jeff Bezos used to do the same thing at some point.</comment>