Safari Extensions JS - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariextensions <comment><USER2> "Safari Extensions" have been deprecated in favor of "Safari App Extensions". Not sure what the major differences are, but a quick site surf turned this up: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/safari_app_extensions/converting_a_safari_extension_to_a_safari_app_extension)

hmm... "distributed through the app store".

<comment><AUTHOR> Safari App Extensions are less capable in various ways than Safari Extensions, and many currently available and widely used JS extensions cannot be converted to them.

As an example: uBlock Origin is a Safari Extension that simply could not function as an App Extension due to lack of APIs. It is present in the Safari Extensions Gallery, which is deprecated in Safari 12. However, the current version of uBlock Origin is broken. The only fix at this time is to install an older, developer-signed release from the homepage, which is physically impossible in Safari 12.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The title was changed from _" Apple Deprecates Safari Extensions in Safari 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave"_.

Using the original page title buries this news.

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes me sad. It was relatively easy to maintain a cross-browser extension that supported Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. All browsers roughly supported the same WebExtension like format and I could use the same code with relatively few browser specific paths.

I don't understand the move towards requiring xcode instead of going full WebExtension support. I'm scared that I will be unable to support Safari users without a macbook in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> In my opinion, this move makes a lot of sense. The Safari Extensions Gallery was laughably outdated, similar to the Dashboard Widgets Gallery: [https://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/](https://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/)

Switching to App Extensions brings Safari Extensions closer to how they behave on iOS.

</comment><comment><USER5> We've updated the link from [https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/To...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Tools/Conceptual/SafariExtensionGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html) to this, which has more detail.</comment>


Facebook's privacy bait and switch - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/internet/107126/facebooks-privacy-bait-and-switch <comment><USER2> What this article's analogy misses is the hook that keeps (informed) people caught at Facebook. They've captured a de facto sole online social community. Your family and friends (both real and virutal) are on Facebook. Moving means severing many of those connections, and severing the ease of access to them.

In that sense, Facebook's actions approach extortion. Put up with our expanded, self-serving use of your data, or lose your relationships. In the analogy, moving to a different apartment building doesn't mean losing access to your friends.</comment>


Tips and Tricks Learned Releasing an Hybrid App Using Steroids.js - <AUTHOR> http://marcgg.com/blog/2014/04/09/phonegap-steroids-hybrid-native-app-tips/

<comment><USER2> One of the Steroids devs here.

Nice job, Marc. Your thoughts on the subject are much appreciated. Thanks for your kind words on the tutorials!

As for the pain points you had along the way - we feel you and are working toward improving the development experience. Rest assured that the amount of assorted tricks you need to learn to develop a premium application with Steroids will be going down.

The project file structure will be improved to make it easier to tell what parts an app consists of. The focus will be on presenting Angular modules as units of functionality. We find that dealing with preloaded views is cumbersome at the moment, and view handling altogether is ripe for a bit of restructuring.

We also believe that there could be more approachable ways for reacting to eg. the application resume event you mentioned, and for communicating between views. An application that consists of several views each running their own JS environment gets surprisingly tricky to get right, and is not a problem you would prefer to be solving when trying to get your app idea off the ground. For instance, you want to have a bit of data that's persisted to localStorage but that gets rendered to multiple views; in this case you'll want to notify the other views in case any changes occur. Currently, implementing this behaviour must be done essentially manually by our users. Steroids Add-ons implements a few measures to improve the situation behind the curtains, but we don't have something to offer everyone at the moment. For this, and for other use cases where you need to deal with asynchronous and non-local data access, we're brewing solutions right now.

Thanks for the valuable feedback. _b

<comment><AUTHOR> For the record, the overall development experience improved a lot since August, and I'm sure it'll keep improving, so I'm not surprised by your comment :)

Looking forward to what will be made available in the future!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is an awesome list of suggestions for any mobile web app. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great tips, appreciate it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ! Glad it can be of help, I was really annoyed that such an article didn't exist (or at least I didn't find it) when I started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations for the App of The Month award!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good insights Marc!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks !</comment></comment>


Thomas Friedman Wrong? The Innovation Delusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-gomory/the-innovation-delusion_b_480794.html

<comment><USER2> I can't say that I'm a fan of Friedman but it would also seem like Gomory's concerns are overwrought. While I'm far from an impartial observer, it seems that Gomory simply echoes the same concerns and fears that many Americans (and the world) had of Japan. I did a quick search for the 'myth of balanced trade' and came up with this article (written with an ideological perspective but it was written in 1986 but it could have been written today in direct response to Gomory): [http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/protectionism-the- my...](http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/protectionism-the-myths/)

Further this concern that the US manufacturing industry is dying or dead is a myth (and quite handily, type in 'myths of US manufacturing' and you come up with the following article among many) - an excerpt "U.S. workers produce 21% of all factory goods made globally, or about $1.7 trillion worth per year. That's significantly lower than the peak of 28% in 1985 but only slightly below the long-term average of 23% for 1970 through 2006.": [http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/...](http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/the- myth-of-us-industrys-demise.aspx)

What Gomory doesn't seem to address and why innovation factors so importantly (if Friedman, overstates his case, Gomory understates the value of innovation), ideas have far higher margins than their underlying component and fixed goods. A contract manufacturer in China might make 5% or less (that Gomory argues are already subidized by the Chinese government which implies that the Chinese government is losing money in this process) while Apple makes 30+ on the overall products it sells (and these products presumably aren't subsidized by the US government). So for that same dollar of trade that an American consumer is buying from China, more profit is retained in in the US as those same products are sold globally. This is why it's not necessary for there to be "balanced trade" and why countries like the UK had been able to run trade deficits for large periods of modern history.

If history is instructive, it's useful to also consider what's happened to Japan over the past few decades. The ascent of China, who Gomory targets, is very very far from trouble free or certain. Further, he seems to have this assumption if the US aims for balance of trade with China, those same deficits won't simply go to other developing nations. Ultimately it is consumers who bear the costs of imposing protectionist policies.

<comment><USER3> > this concern that the US manufacturing industry is dying or dead is a myth

The counter-meme that US manufacturing is still strong is also something of a myth. The biggest components of the manufacturing sector are things that most people probably don't immediately associate with manufacturing. For example, agricultural products are a huge component. As are primary industries like logging. Processed chemicals represent another big chunk. Most of the factory goods that fit the traditional definition of manufacturing are industrial equipment like earth-movers or electrical transformers. Note that these are all capital-intensive industries that are either protected by tariffs and subsides, or bulky, cost-sensitive goods that aren't as easy to build at a profit overseas.

On the other hand, the mass-market consumer product industries that most people think of as synonymous with manufacturing have been wiped out in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is so right on. I wish I had a billion downvotes for everything Friedman has ever published. He seems to think nothing bad can happen as long as your intentions are good, and his critical thinking faculties and street smarts are about nil.

Buffet and Grove have indirectly criticized his world view, but I wish more like the author (retired SVP of R&D at IBM, among other things) would directly call him out, expose his flawed world view, and replace it with some sense.

<comment><USER5> You'll enjoy the posts below then. Matt Taibbi takes skewering Friedman and raises it to the level of an art form:

\- <http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html>

\- <http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/5950>

\- <http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html>

\- [http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/23/tom-friedman- stri...](http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/23/tom-friedman-strikes- again/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want a far more detailed discussion, especially one that goes into why it can't work, see Eamonn Fingleton's book _Unsustainable_ (or the earlier version _In Praise of Hard Industries_ , there is little difference between them).

And if you want a good story about specifically how innovation grows out of practice, see Bob Johnstone's _We Were Burning_ about the Japanese development of the first blue-light laser diode.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gomory mentions 3 choices for a country that stops making something: (1) import it by selling something else it makes, (2) go without, and (3) import it by promising to pay later. The Buffett article he links to says because America's been doing no.3, the foreigners will use those bonds to buy property in the US before they're inflated away, and that the US won't likely confiscate foreign-owned property.

But neither author mentions what makes the US different to China, Japan, India, and others taking over US manufacturing. Chinese can become Americans, but Americans can't become Chinese. The US (and Australia and Brazil, etc) are founded on immigration. Foreigners buying US land can be given US citizenship as an alternative to having their property confiscated. The children of Chinese (and Koreans,etc) are going to Western countries to be educated, usually hoping to stay. By offshoring manufacturing and ICT, the US, Canada, etc simply get a larger citizenship base, not lose any global competitive advantage.

Despite the rise of China, many of the younger generation of Chinese still want to live in foreign English-speaking and European countries, and that's not likely to stop. And eventually, Americans will eventually vote for the government that lets them in the easiest, because house prices will start rising again when the international students rent them and immigrants buy them.

But Americans and Australians don't become Chinese or Vietnamese, nor do they want to. An immigrant-based nation such as the US can outsource its manufacturing to ethnic-based nations such as China and India, and stay rich BECAUSE it's an immigrant-based nation. People from ethnic-based nations will generally prefer to live in the US or Canada BECAUSE they're immigrant-based nations. So the US needn't worry about outsourcing to India.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Warren Buffett opinion piece the author links is a must read too. His ideas around Import Certificates are novel and were ahead of their time in 2003. It seems to be something that both the Democrats and Republicans could support to address the trade deficit.

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/11/10/352872/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article. I specially liked this part:

"At a recent meeting I heard "The only thing that matters is innovative and passionate people." These people do matter, but they are very far from being the only ones. This attitude misses the point that it was all our people, working in many different work settings, that made this country prosper. And all of them will all be needed in any viable future for our country."

</comment><comment><USER10> Producing things is a way. Getting 5% share of any thing produced in the world is another way. Having largest and most innovative and entrepreneurial financial and economical system and largest aircraft carriers would more efficiently be used with the later way.

</comment><comment><USER11> Summary would seem to be: innovation is good and all, but the US' trade balance is really out of whack, and you can't make up for that by just innovating.

Makes some sense. Let's not take this as a discounting of innovation, however. It's necessary, just not sufficient.</comment>


South Korean Cryptocurrency Regulator Found Dead at Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korean-cryptocurrency-regulator-found-dead-at-home-1519093020 <comment><USER2> [https://archive.fo/L5d9z](https://archive.fo/L5d9z)

<comment><USER3> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wonder if this has to do with the fact that cryptocurrency primarily exists for money laundering, gambling and purchasing/selling drugs.

<comment><USER5> nahhhhhh, crypto is for legitimate daily transactions. Just like torrents are for downloading only legal software.

<comment><USER6> The first sentence is correct. For example, most online transactions today make use of SSL/TLS, which is based on crypto.

<comment><USER5> You know exactly what I meant. Stop starting arguments for no reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 52 years old, heart attack. Not so suspicious at first glance.

<comment><USER8> 52 is pretty young to have a heart attack unless you have specific risk factors. E.g. if you smoke or have high blood pressure or you did a lot of cocaine in your 20s then it makes sense, but not if you're otherwise healthy. In the US it would trigger an automatic autopsy and investigation.</comment></comment>


CometCatchr: JS controlled Flash component for Comet streams - <AUTHOR> http://blogrium.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/solving-comet-to-the-browser-with-cometcatchr/

<comment><USER2> Seems kinda related to Juggernaut? (<http://github.com/maccman/juggernaut_plugin/>)</comment>


Mixing Khoisan Knowledge with Drone Technology - tefo-mohapi http://www.iafrikan.com/2015/10/15/what-happens-when-you-mix-ancient-bushmen-knowledge-with-the-latest-in-drone-technology/ <comment><AUTHOR> I find it incredible that, having never seen aerial photography before, after a bit of practice, they can easily recognize and distinguish different animals in 10x10 blobs of pixels.

<comment><USER2> Why is this so surprising? I will be honest, my reaction after reading the article was "Newsflash, the best data analysts are those individuals with the greatest subject matter expertise." They have an incredible amount of knowledge about the landscape and the flora/fauna that inhabit it. Why wouldn't they be the better equipped to analyze images. Is it surprising that "the natives" have discovered that taller objects cast longer shadows? Or is it surprising that they possess the critical thinking skills to take this height/shadow knowledge and apply it to aerial images? I have seen a lot of aerial pictures in my life, but I would be shocked if I was able to look at the aerial photos and identify a handful of the various species of animals pictured.

<comment><USER3> Why so rude?

Like the OP I also pleasantly surprised. Not because I am a racist who thinks the Khoisan are stupid, they are not (I have actually met many of them, they are some of the nicest people in the word).

I would not have thought anyone could do that who had not aerial studied photos of animals could identify them from such low resolution photos... much like submarine operators had to be trained to identify ships at long distances through periscopes. Professional sailors know ships very well, but not so well that they can distinguish between very similar ships at long distances and at random angles (ships look 2D at long distances).

<comment><USER2> I sincerely regret that my message was rude, that was not my intent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


To Save Endangered Species, Should We Bring Them into Our Cities? - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/save-endangered-species-should-we-bring-them-our-cities-180970611/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I've advertised this before: one viable option is to have "sanctuaries", large areas _where humans are strictly forbidden to enter_. The case of Chernobyl shows that wild life recovers from humans pretty quickly once they're gone.

[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl- wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/)

<comment><USER3> But is the "recovery rate" in Chernobyl significantly better than normal conservation sites?

My point is, why "strictly forbidden to enter" if conservation areas are successful enough?

<comment><USER4> > My point is, why "strictly forbidden to enter" if conservation areas are > successful enough?

Why allow humans in at all? We have plenty of room, and no need.

<comment><USER5> One reason may be that for most people to care about conservation they need an opportunity to see or experience what they're conserving. It's the reason most conservation funding in the US comes from hunters.[0][1]

0: (PDF) [https://www.fishwildlife.org/application/files/3615/1853/869...](https://www.fishwildlife.org/application/files/3615/1853/8699/The_State_Conservation_Machine- FINAL.pdf) (page 9)

1: [https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/593001800/decline-in- hunters-...](https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/593001800/decline-in-hunters- threatens-how-u-s-pays-for-conservation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One option is to change our cities to be less hostile to the creatures that used to live there.

<comment><USER7> Why should we save endangered species from going extinct?

<comment><USER8> Multiple reasons, one of which is that once a species is gone there is no way to get it back. Also, consider reasons that people want to save historical structures, or preserve old / rare works of art. Or why someone would pay money to a vet to save their pet.

If you saw a fire spreading and was threatening someone's house, would you call the fire department, or otherwise attempt to stop it? Why or why not? Do you back up the data on your computer? Do you wonder why anyone takes pictures in order to preserve a moment in time, and would be upset if all their family photos got destroyed?

<comment><USER9> Would storing genomes be enough, similar to backing up data until it is needed?

<comment><USER10> > Would storing genomes be enough, similar to backing up data until it is > needed?

I don't think so, because many of the endangered animals are representative of entire ecosystems. Consider orang-utans and the forests they inhabit (many of which are being destroyed to collect palm-oil). If the animals have gone, it is even harder to make people want to preserve their environments in the face of relentless commercial pressure. Some endangered animals also help shape the ecosystems, e.g. when they are apex predators.

Once the animals are gone, recreating their communities is significantly harder. As stated elsewhere, most animals are better raised by their own species rather than humans outside the cage. For primates (e.g. woolly monkeys) individuals that have been raised in isolation in captivity also don't make good parents when they do eventually breed, sometimes abandoning viable young.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> George Carlin on saving the planet

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

<comment><USER12> I agree with the part about people who worry about _everything_. But the bit Carlin misses is that what's troubling is the increase in the rate of extinctions[0]. Of course species go extinct on a regular basis, but when so many are going extinct in such a short space of time, it creates issues like a reduction in biodiversity, which in turn leads to a higher risk of a disease outbreak in a dominant species being catastrophic for an ecosystem. I agree with Carlin about most things, but like Bill Hick's blind spot about smoking, I think he's wrong here.

[0] [https://www.britannica.com/science/conservation- ecology/Calc...](https://www.britannica.com/science/conservation- ecology/Calculating-background-extinction-rates#ref272668)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, the non-city people don't want endangered species. Reintroducing wolf packs has ruined elk hunting, made pets unsafe, made kids unsafe, and caused problems for livestock.

Since city people tend to love wolves, it looks like we have a win-win solution here. I have a feeling though, that city people will have a change of heart upon walking into a subway restroom and suddenly facing a wolf pack.

<comment><USER14> > made kids unsafe,

That's what anti-wolf people say here in Norway even though there isn't a single report of a wolf attack on a human in Europe in centuries and that there are only 30 wolves in the whole of Norway.

So do you have any objective evidence?

<comment><USER15> Not wolves per se and not Europe, but when I lived on a remote military base in California, coyotes were known to kill pets and we were told there had been three attacks on children in the previous 5 years, so don't let kids go outside alone after dark. This was probably in a safety briefing given to my ex who was in the army.

They didn't attack adults who were walking alone at night, but they would attack smaller creatures, such as pets and kids.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack) has a wealth of information on the topic. It seems likely that the attacks are due to animals becoming habituated to being in close proximity with humans and is probably exacerbated by being fed.

<comment><USER17> Yeah a lot of people are clueless about coyotes. I have some land in the desert and one of my neighbors actually feeds the damn things, it's insanity. He Also tried to claim that coyotes don't carry rabies. Needless to say he does not have internet access.

They're the biggest coyotes I've ever seen and they're not fearful of humans.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: The best HTML5-based mobile websites/services/apps you've come across? - <AUTHOR>

I've always heard of most companies/startups putting out a mobile webkit capable website/service/webapp to circumvent the AppStore restrictions among other reasons.<p>But I never really got to check them out, and can't remember any apart from Amazon Kindle/Cloud Music Player and a few news sites. <comment><USER2> LinkedIn's mobile website</comment>


Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/most-americans-think-social-media-giants-censor-their-views <comment><USER2> When a friend posts on Facebook and it doesn't show up in my feed that's FB making a call as to what to show me.

Why? Because algorithms.

Maybe "censorship" is a strong word in this instance — do we prefer "selective disclosure"?

Regardless, not what I signed up for. Deleted FB.

<comment><USER3> Once in awhile Facebook decides I shouldn't be friends with someone anymore and suppresses all of their posts from my feed. I start to wonder what's happened to them, so I make a point of searching for their page and find that they've been posting daily. Things I would have been interested to see and would have commented on.

<comment><USER4> It's entirely possible that Facebook found that your comments caused less engagement for other people on Facebook, and therefore doesn't want you to comment.

It's also possible that Facebook determined that this person has substantially different politics than you, and has put you in different 'boxes'. You can actually check what groups Facebook thinks you belong in. For instance, Facebook thinks my peer group is 'Starting Adult Life', and my US Political Stance is 'very liberal'.

(Facebook also thinks I work in a production occupation, like mining, or lumber, which couldn't be further from the truth, which explains all the ads for industrial equipment)

I went to high school in a really conservative place, and I'm friends with a lot of people who have wildly different views on religion and politics. A few years ago I stopped seeing their posts, even if I added them to the group of people I see first on Facebook. Meanwhile, I started seeing a ton of posts from people who I barely knew in college, presumably because their 'beliefs' were much closer to mine.

I'm extremely cynical, and I find dogmatic people of similar beliefs as annoying as people whose beliefs I disagree with, and my Facebook feed became a personal hell of dogmatism, especially leading up to the 2016 election. As a result I check Facebook at most once a week. It's entirely possible that leaving the platform improved the experience for some of my more conservative peers from high school, who no longer have to see my posts on the walls of mutual friends.

<comment><USER5> that concept of 'boxes' is pretty interesting -- is there a way for me to check that for myself without handing them a wad of cash? i rarely use facebook aside from messenger (because getting friends and family to use something like telegram/signal/etc is a pain in the ass when fb just works) but i've had it for about 8 years now so it'd be interesting to see how accurate of a profile they've built on me

<comment><USER6> [http://facebook.com/ads/preferences/behaviors](http://facebook.com/ads/preferences/behaviors)

Apparently I'm 'very conservative'... probably because of my friend group, since I've never posted anything political on Facebook.

<comment><USER7> This link gives "Sorry, something went wrong" for me. Anyone know why? It is only available in some countries?

<comment> lloyd-christmas It's not a distinct page for me, but instead an accordion section. I had to go to:

[https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences](https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences)

And then open _Your Information_ > _Your Categories_. I assume this is what they are talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I talked to an ex-twitter employee I met in Ireland at bar. He told me very candidly that twitter employees loathed Milo Yiannopolous and were actively trying to figure out any way to ban him. Not a fan of Milo, but there are clearly agendas which can't be extricated from politics.

<comment><USER9> Well, the shooting he incited in Maryland today should be enough of a reason to ban him.

<comment><USER10> The fake news seems to be jumping on Milo when the shooters motives are currently unknown.

<comment><USER10> For anyone still following this discussion:

We now have evidence the shooting had nothing to do with Milos comments:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5898141/At-four- shot...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5898141/At-four-shot-gunman- Marylands-Capital-Gazette-newspaper-building.html)

Yet at least two people on this thread are acting like there is credible evidence his tweets caused the shooting.

This is the danger of fake news!

<comment><USER9> At least one person on this thread is acting like publicly calling for violence is ok.

<comment><USER10> Who?

You aren't content just to consume fake news - now you are trying to produce your own fake narrative!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that although Republicans are more likely to think that social media platforms are biased against them, they are less likely to think that such platforms should be subject to increased government regulation.

As a cynic, I was expecting that Republicans might want more regulation here (in contravention of their general desire for less regulation) because it would be in their own interests.

Note: I'm not saying I expect Republicans to be more self- interested/hypocritical than Democrats. I would expect it of both parties, based on my experience in the field.

<comment><USER12> As a Republican, and a conservative, freedom of expression is one of the principles I hold most dear. It used to also be a principle embraced by liberals, but they seem to have widely abandoned it, you don't see conservatives going around trying to "no platform" people (which is an insidious euphemism). It is also one of the core principles the Internet was founded on, or at least of the early internet subculture. Sadly, this has also been widely abandoned by the organisations that have the most influence over the internet. I don't see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship.

<comment><USER13> _> you don't see conservatives going around trying to "no platform" people_

This is an extremely odd statement and it took me a while to figure out why you would think that. Because you absolutely do see conservatives shut down speech. Systematically. For a good account of this on college campuses, see [https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free- speech...](https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech- crisis)

Perhaps we "don't see conservatives going around trying to 'no platform' people" in the same way that fish don't see water.

We _expect_ conservatives to fire public school LGBT teachers who mention their partners when told to talk about their personal lives on parent night.

We _expect_ Christian colleges to fire people for being not conservative enough.

We _expect_ those colleges to expel students for supporting gay rights.

We _expect_ obscenity laws. (Aside: conservatives _strongly_ support obscenity laws and _strongly_ oppose bans on hate speech. I can understand the worldview that bans both, and I myself have a worldview that calls for banning neither. But I will be forever perplexed over how anyone who doesn't themselves condone hate speech could come to the conclusion that nakedness/lewdity poses a great threat to society which justifies censorship, but that hate speech does not. If anyone here does have that viewpoint, I'd be interested to hear their reasoning.)

We _expect_ attempts to ban flag burning.

We _expect_ the Red Scare.

And it's true that we never hear about Richard Dawkins being uninvited from Cedarville or Wheaton. But that's only because those students/faculty would be expelled from the institution the moment the invitation was extended.

It's _normal_ for conservatives to be illiberal on speech. So normal that, like fish in water, _we don 't even see it!_

So when people like Cedarville's president bemoan the suppression of speech on college campuses while at same time firing his own faculty for publicly criticizing Mitt Romney, expelling his students for their speech, and routinely monitoring the social media accounts of his students, I think it's fair to say (as [https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free- speech...](https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech- crisis) puts it):

 _There are many who argue, in the pages of this country's most respected periodicals, that this power lies with the intolerant left. But the evidence of real, widespread speech suppression shows it lies elsewhere, on the right. This, in turn, suggests that the ostensible champions of free speech are more interested in criticizing campus identity politics than in protecting speech._

Now, revisiting your quote once more:

 _> you don't see conservatives going around trying to "no platform" people (which is an insidious euphemism)_

Insidious. No-platforming is so thoroughly embedded in American conservativism that _you don 't even see it_ even though it's pervasive. That's practically the definition of insidious.

 _> I don't see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship._

There is one famous example related to the heckler's veto. Rules against heckling/shouting during a speech use censorship to shut down an attempt at censorship. And even that only makes sense in some circumstances; e.g., in a lecture hall but not at a large rally.

<comment><USER12> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble. You might expect those things to happen, but they only do in your imagination. Most Christian colleges are actually pretty accepting of LGBT. You might be able to find a couple examples of some that haven't been, but you barely have to open your eyes to see that conservative voices have pretty much been prohibited from all of the country's other Colleges. Forget how intolerant the user base is, conservative voices are very heavily suppressed on most social media platforms. If your unfortunate enough to voice a conservative opinion in the wrong place at the wrong time, you'll get a Twitter brigade harassing your employer until they fire you. Schedule a conservative speaker to talk at a College, at you won't be at all surprised when a gang of violent, intolerant liberals start a riot.

Your comment is completely disconnected from reality. If you look hard enough, you'd probably be able to find a couple of minor examples to point at, but intolerance and suppression of speech has become mainstream liberal politics.

I've been a liberal for most of my life, I voted for Obama's twice. But it was the grotesque intolerance for all non-confirming views that drove me away from the left. Any form of individual thought is liable to be labeled as hate speech, and possibly the worst element of it is the demand to have your cake and eat it too. To go around literally violently suppressing freedom of expression, and then attempt to claim some level of victimhood as if it was actually your voice that was being suppressed.

<comment><USER13> _> Your comment is completely disconnected from reality. If you look hard enough, you'd probably be able to find a couple of minor examples to point at, but intolerance and suppression of speech has become mainstream liberal politics._

There was a recent CATO study on _exactly_ this question [1].

Nearly 2/3rds of Republican-identifying respondents believe NFL players should be fired if they don't stand for the pledge.

Over half of the Republican-identifying respondents believe that burning flags should be illegal, that an executive should be fired for flag burning, and also that flag burner's citizenship should be revoked.

None of this is particularly surprising! You _expect_ to find that many Republicans oppose flag burning.

However, you _don 't_ expect to hear that Democrats support rolling back free speech protections. The data support this shift toward illiberalism on the left. And you even point out that this shift happened in your original post!

The rise of illiberalism on the left is concerning, but again, _nowhere_ have I claimed that the American left is a bastion of free speech warriors.

My claim is that we _do_ commonly see conservatives going after people for expressing themselves.

And the empirical data demonstrate it's not just "a small minority" of conservatives who feel that's justified. It's a majority. Sometimes a very large one.

So. If you want to complain about illiberal leftists, I'll nod along all day. And you'll notice that this claim was not the portion of your post I took issue with, because I don't disagree. I took issue with your claim that:

 _> you don't see conservatives going around trying to "no platform" people_

because they do, and the data very clearly indicates that the majority of Republicans believe it's justified.

And, once again, to be _very_ clear, there is no implied assertion anywhere that leftists do not do the same thing.

 _> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble_.

Either I'm not the one in a bubble or else someone should tell CATO their methodology is flawed ;-)

[1] [https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey- reports/...](https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey- reports/pdf/the-state-of-free-speech-and-tolerance.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Please don't do political flamewars on HN. That's just what we don't want here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A bit of both-sides-ism here. The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor _their_ viewpoint, despite the fact that these companies have bent over backwards to accommodate those views and to give them platforms. Meanwhile only a small fraction of Democrats believe this is very likely, and they aren't strongly sure about which side is benefiting from the supposed bias.

<comment><USER16> In fairness they ban gun related content like gun ads and the leaders of the giants have personally come out in favor of liberal ideals.

<comment><USER17> I think there's a pretty clear distinction between advertising and organic speech, and also a pretty clear distinction between wanting to restrict how other people use your platform and simply having views of your own.

<comment><USER18> Somewhat unrelated. Advertisers dont want their to be a clear distinction anymore. Hell pretty soon the most effective marketing strategy wont be shameless plugs but offhanded ones. Ones that sneak in like oh hey yeah I was using x the other day and it helped me with y. Once gun manufactuers catch up it might look something like: popular social media user offhandedly mentions purchase of lgun, posts some pictures firing gun, learning gun safety, talks about how much fun they had. Itll be hard to censor and I wouldnt be shocked.

<comment><USER19> This is already similar to how a lot of gun culture videos on YouTube operate. Go watch Hickhock45. Guy just shoots and chats about guns in a casual, mostly non-political manner. He's really popular and the whole shebang is one big (indirect) advertisment for various firearms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And it's true. Case in point: the gun emoticon.

<comment><USER21> By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined emoticons.

We could have enriched our online culture with a flourishing set of shared emoticons by now!

<comment><USER22> > By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined [emojis].

Emojis should have _only_ been embedded user-defined pngs. I know I'm being cranky and old, but I feel our character sets shouldn't have been used to encode novel cute pictures.

<comment><USER21> Yes. The problem is that it assumes that language is fixed. However, the correct way is to make emojis freely definable, so that the emoji language will continue to develop; of course, the unfortunate side-effect for character set maintainers would be that they have to expand the set in order to incorporate the new parts of the language. But that is their problem; you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.

<comment><USER23> > you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.

It's called an "alphabet".

<comment><USER24> I think the point was "you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols [that can't be used to express an arbitrary idea]".

<comment><USER23> Well, not yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yesterday I tried to post a link on FB to an "Anonymous video maker" that I saw linked in an article shared here. It's just a web based video maker but when I tried to post it I got a message saying "Facebook thinks this is spam" and FB wouldn't let me share it.

Since the page doesn't promote any political view at all we might hesitate to make the leap that they are censoring political views but because the entire purpose of that app is intended for exposing corporate/political/social issues it's a bit difficult to believe FB doesn't have that in mind when they block a link to it from being shared.

I'd love to hear what other reasons they might have because I really cannot think of any that hold up.

Here's the link: [http://anonymous-video.com/index.html](http://anonymous- video.com/index.html)

<comment><USER26> The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous- video.com it returns positive.

You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not.

Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing spam finds signals in common with your link.

<comment><USER27> Can semi-confirm: I worked on Site Integrity (Infrastructure) at FB in 2013–2014, and iirc there were many instances where a benign URL was automatically flagged as spam, and someone had to explicitly go and whitelist it because we were getting complaints. Could be any number of things—I'd guess URLs containing things like "video" and "anonymous" are often sketchy pirate sites that try to install malware; or perhaps that URL was a malicious site in the past but isn't anymore.

The _policies_ are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them _invoke_ machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs, images, comments, &c.)—although I'd imagine an increasing amount of the computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it's so much less resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually errs on the side of "better safe than sorry" when it comes to spam, malware, fake accounts, &c.—hence users' complaints of "getting zucc'd" when someone reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.

<comment><USER25> That site lets you make and download a video but they don't offer to host it. They do host their own content there though.

Here's the link to the article that was shared here where I found the link to the video that led me to the anonymous-video.com site.

[https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret- office-365-foren...](https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret- office-365-forensics-tool/)

I did a Google search on the anonymous-video.com domain name and nothing at all came up about spam or malware or anything nefarious at all, unless you consider the videos hosted there to be "spam", but that's a huge leap to make because they're not selling anything there.

The entire site is blacklisted on FB, not just the video maker. This convinces me even further that this is not a decision based on machine learning models.

I understand FB has the right to do this, and I'm not arguing here they shouldn't. I do, however, think it's important that we know and understand how, why, where, and to whom, when it is done.

And I do think that FB users should be concerned about this specific site being blacklisted. I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have reported multiple facebook posts of friends making death threats against (conservative) politicians and every time it comes back "we reviewed the post and it is not in violation of community guidelines"

<comment><USER29> If it makes you feel any better, female friends have reported multiple Facebook posts from white nationalists sending them death and rape threats only to receive the same message. At least their policy is consistently bad?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This 100% happens. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how- miria...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miriam- careys-u-turn-at-a-white-house-checkpoint-led-to-her-death/?noredirect=on) When this^ woman was murdered, I attempted to post on Facebook: "I bet this woman was not a terrorist." to which I was told the attempt failed. After troubleshooting, such as trying again or posting something else, I felt very deceived.

<comment><USER31> I mean.. that's an anecdote which could have a myriad of technical explanations. I wouldn't immediately jump to the assumption that facebook is blocking select users from sharing links from a respected newspaper because they don't like the content of the article for some reason (why would they even block this article in specific?)

* washingtonpost is behind a GDPR paywall (for me at least), it took a few attempts even for the link preview to load when I tried posting that

* 99.9999% uptime of web APIs is not 100%, fb servers really could have been having trouble reaching washingtonpost

* I was able to share that post fine (once the link preview finally loaded properly), so WFM..?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Case in point is that consumers are more than happy to be given custom- tailored feeds that filter content they agree with (or that the provider's algorithm THINKS they agree with).

If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat.

Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles and echo chambers. I'd argue that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are causing more harm to society at this point than any potential benefit they provide.

<comment><USER33> Consider this: There are other apps that you haven't heard of, with communities completely secluded from the Fb/twit/goog environment, and nobody's complaining that they are bubbleified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Lack of trust is a bullshit argument. It's basically the Conspiracy Fallacy: [https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...](https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory)

Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you? (Note that this greatly expands the use of this fallacy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance))

I think we all have to answer these questions first:

1) Are you comfortable with receiving information that is true, or even mostly true, but that which is distasteful to you personally?

2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?

<comment><USER35> >Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks' publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Twitter openly admits to censorship. They censored legitimate journalism for political reasons.

Source: [https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...](https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony- of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf)

<comment><USER34> Is censorship of argumentum-ad-nauseam bullshit really censorship, though?

<comment><USER35> Where is the "argumentum-ad-nauseam bullshit"? I'm didn't post this to argue about politics or what your political beliefs are, just that they do in fact, censor.

<comment><USER34> The thing about Hillary's emails was COMPLETELY INFLATED by her opposition, since she was not the first person by a long shot to use a private email server. Inflation = distortion = bullshit.

<comment><USER35> Again, I wasn't here to debate your political opinions, I was just simply pointing out that Twitter does censor, and providing a US .gov sourced example.

Try Reddit for your garbage opinions.

<comment><USER14> Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't stand the fact that organizations hide behind "algorithms" as an excuse for every unintended side-effect.

It's no surprise that algorithms create an information bubble for us. I like to use music as an example: the best music recommendations I've ever received have been from friends. I'll describe music I'm listening to and like, and they'll recommend something for me. I'd say 50% of the time I find it unobjectionable, 30% of the time I hate it, and 20% of the time I love it.

Sites have been trying to replicate this functionality using algorithms for a well over a decade. Last.fm used to be a great way for me find music. As far as I could tell, it would just pick music from people who listened to the same artists as you. I'd say I found 30% of the music unobjectionable, 50% of the music terrible, and 20% of the music great. Functionally, this was remarkably similar to my friends recommending me music, because I only care about the music I loved.

Over time their algorithm got 'better' and nearly stopped recommending music I disliked, however I found that it mostly just recommended me music that was in the unobjectionable middle ground of 'meh'. I stopped looking for music on Last.fm because it stopped giving me music I loved.

We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. Machine learning lacks the ability to deal with the nuances surrounding controversial or challenging content. It never takes the leap of faith that a person would when recommending you something.

I am really interested to see how this all plays out over the next few years, because I think people are beginning to realize they are addicted to the perpetual stream of 'good enough' content. The network effect will probably protect Facebook for the time being, I assume the first sites affected will be content-driven, like YouTube.

Of course, XKCD addressed the issues I have with algorithms far better than I could ever hope to:

[https://xkcd.com/1831/](https://xkcd.com/1831/)

<comment><USER36> >We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content.

I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make boulder selections with an appropriate data set. I believe what you are seeing is an accommodation for the average person. Most people aren't adventurous, and it makes business sense to get algos working for the middle majority than to cater to tail ends.

It also, IMO, makes content at places like youtube less technical and more clickbaity. But again I believe this is somewhat intentional.

<comment><USER37> >Most people aren't adventurous

I would say most people aren't adventurous in everything except their interests, which they are very adventurous in. The problem is that there will always be more people with a meh feeling toward a random subject than people with a genuine intrest in it, and a brute force ML algorithem trained by just throwing unholy amounts of generic personal data at it before being being relased on the giant mashup of random subjects that make up something like youtube won't catch that nuance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives.

Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.

<comment><USER39> HN is not owned by a social media giant, so this grievance doesn't appear to have much to do with the article.

<comment><USER40> It is owned by a Silicon Valley VC giant, while not directly media it is steered by big money. However I think HN is moderated relatively well, but I can see how some people might think it's being gamed/controlled/censored by self interest (I don't)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm starting to think that the problem is Facebook sets the importance of politics much, much higher than the users of Facebook. It really seems like the folks doing the programming are political animals, and most of us are more concerned with the personal connections we have made. I think they are really bad at understanding our circle of people we deal with and are using a variety of factors that just aren't as important to us.

<comment> wu-ikkyu I recently noticed this with Google News in Chrome. The recommended stories in my feed were creepily relevant to my current location and interests. And yet, the top 2-3 results were not at all -- they were about some ridiculous political rumors/squabbles on CNN/Fox. I never visit those sites and also do my absolute best to be completely ignorant of such political "news". It was blantantly obvious they were forcing irrelevant political nonsense to the top of my queue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just quit Facebook. Your own posts ought to show in your 'Most Recent' News Feed. One particular Share I tried posting over and over again with 'what I had to say about it' never showed up in News Feed. Facebook is Censoring. Anyway it's screwed-up when 'Most Recent' does not have in Chronological order yours and your Friends Post. Lots of Users messed up Facebook by accepting fake profiles from whomever into the thousandths, which no doubt are Foreign Hackers. Could be Facebook couldn't figure out which 'Political Box' to set me in. As I'm Social Conservative, but with the Democrats on economic issues. Populist so to say! I never tried to 'sort' my Friends. I enjoyed seeing the whole spectrum of Opinions, and never wished just to surround myself with those only thinking like me.

</comment><comment><USER43> Most Americans would be right.

There is great confusion on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment in play here.

Secondly, media is drilling down on two toxic ideas:

always two sides to every story

, and

objectivity, claim of no bias.

These things combine to present ordinary Americans with the expectation of objective media and free speech everywhere.

A side effect is a surrender of critical thought in return for unwarranted trust.

The remedy should be to evaluate all of this with a critical eye and help people understand there is always bias, and how they can and shoild be using diverse sources to stay informed.

</comment><comment><USER44> Fantastic. So please stop using them, and maybe things will get a little less crazy!

</comment><comment><USER45> i've seen many cases how twitter silences and bans people speaking out against the democratic party

</comment><comment><USER46> At the end of the day, is anyone really surprised that these platforms censor/filter content in any way?

Where did the assumption of an un-biased platform come from? These companies are in the business of making money, as much as they preach about 'making a difference in the world', they will always default to whatever gains the most public favor and generates the most revenue.

I am actually surprised by the statistics, I had assumed that less people thought they were being censored. Although this presents an opposite problem, if everyone thinks they are being censored then they can claim the real truth is being 'censored'.

Biases will always exist when money is involved.

</comment><comment> wu-ikkyu It seems most every discussion here on HN about political censorship devolves into flamewars, mass downvotes, and mass flagging. That in itself seems quite indicative.

</comment><comment><USER47> Does that include the army of right wing trolls that appear out of nowhere to hurl racist invective or curse words at you every time you post something like "way to go"! on the page of a progressive candidate? I can't be only person who experiences this. A lot of times it's in all caps, and usually the person's Facebook profile features them holding an assault rifle. The insults range from "stupid mother fucker" to "you're a tool of the Jews" to just "retard". Am I to understand that conservatives want to be _more_ free to post that kind of stuff?

</comment><comment><USER48> Ive conditioned my fb feed to be 95% memes. I go there every couple of days for some fresh memes

</comment><comment><USER49> Could do with some examples of said views so we could see whether it's a false equivalence, or whether some of the "views" in fact comprise incitement to violence etc.

Note that there is no "true neutral" in this world; neutrality itself is a political position that helps certain people and hinders others.

<comment> wu-ikkyu How many examples do you require?

Conservative comedian Owen Benjamin being banned from Twitter for life is but one:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24)

<comment><USER49> For being homophobic to one of the mass shooting victims? [http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local- news/201...](http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local- news/2018/04/twitter-blocks-owen-benjamin/)

<comment> wu-ikkyu Like it or not (I don't), he was expressing his political opinions, albeit in a tactless way. Social media is overrun with much worse garbage and people are not banned for such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This isn't opinion, it's provable fact. Twitter and Facebook were on a tear last year, actively shutting down the accounts of conservative pundits, under the guise of rules violations, while turning a blind eye to the same actions from pundits and personalities on the left.

<comment><USER51> Could you point out some of those examples?

<comment><USER50> My favorite is when Sabo the conservative street artist got banned from Facebook right after his "Fuck Zuck 2020" posters appeared all over L.A.

But hidden camera footage of a Twitter engineer openly admitting that they shadowbanned conservatives came out last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I lean conservative, but to be honest, I assign only a small portion of the blame to social media giants. Their office areas and leadership certainly lean left-wing, but I don't think that's the main issue.

I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. As a result, even an entirely neutral algorithm focused on retention / user satisfaction will be more careful about showing right-leaning views to users who aren't obviously right- leaning. To me, it's tough to call that censorship.

As a result, I see the issue more as a symptom of the real problem, but that's a lot tougher to solve.

<comment><USER53> > I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more > likely to be offended by right-leaning views.

More likely to have empathy is another way to phrase that.

<comment><USER54> You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. Besides from a European perspective even someone like Obama or even more obviously Hillary (based on the amount of war mongering she has done alone) is center or ultra right.

<comment><USER55> _> You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist._

At the bottom? Fear of the other; in the United States, fear of the other rooted particularly in racism. Because it's not "nationalism" here--a disease by itself, but a controllable one. It's _white supremacism_ , given nicer clothes by calling it "white nationalism" for some godforsaken reason, peddled by leaders who want the bottom to vote their way. It's not like it's news. Lee Atwater pegged this whole disgraceful thing decades ago. To legitimize and get boots on the ground for economically regressive policies, the right wing of the United States leveraged this racially-motivated insecurity; now the racist tiger has eaten them and they are so very surprised that the racist tiger was racist all along.

At the top? They're the ones doing the peddling. Some is surely true-believer racism. Some is also surely cynicism--because the bottom will eat it up and there's your leash to drag them where you want. It isn't exactly complex.

(And, no, Obama and Clinton are not "ultra right" from a European perspective; that's the sort of mendacious both-sidesing I expect out of _actually far right_ speakers, though. Obama and Clinton would be generically center- to center-right politicians on a Europe-calibrated axis. The modern Republican Party is more like Ukip.)

<comment><USER56> Nationalism and white supremacism are not the same thing at all. Equating them and needlessly injecting race into it is bog standard Russian divisive propaganda.

<comment><USER55> In America, they are. Both are historical and current disasters; the icing on the cake of American white supremacism _fueling_ American nationalism is extra gross, though.

I do want to compliment you for the rhetorical twirl of trying to co-opt reality with the Russian specter, though. It's bold. Projecting...but very bold.

<comment><USER56> Please try to rephrase that by actually saying something. I'm genuinely curious why you think that absurd equality is so obvious it requires no evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Everyone at one point has made a comment that has been downvoted or moderated out of existence. The rejection sticks in your mind. Effectively, that is censorship.

<comment><USER58> If we end up saying downvotes = censorship, then "censorship" is fine. The natural reaction of "uh oh, censorship is bad, we should be careful about that" only makes sense if we're careful about how we use the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is obviously true.

</comment><comment><USER60> Here's Axios's take on the issue:

[https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social- media...](https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media- censorship-75db1560-4dd7-4d91-961b-5cf2d2b8c799.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> This article seems to be a smoking gun... [https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump- eb7e48c...](https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff)

Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.

<comment><USER62> Are there examples of Democrat-funded attack ads like this with hashtags that Twitter allowed icons for?

EDIT: I ask because this is an example of an attack ad targeted to an individual candidate rather than a general promotion or political concept, which I can see why Twitter wouldn't necessarily want to promote.

<comment><USER63> There is one from Hillary's campaign showed as a picture in the article.

<comment><USER63> I take that back, it's actually still a Republican tweet

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The interesting aspect is that conservatives think that it is very likely that social media sites censor their views at a rate double that of liberals. Even if the social media companies were strictly neutral in the matter, it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter left-wing hostility and censorship from other users of social media sites.

<comment><USER65> > it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter ... censorship from other > users of social media sites

How, exactly? Is Facebook doling out admin privileges to random users? Or are we confusing "receive criticism" with "censorship" here?

<comment><USER66> Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and you'll get a ban. On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech. Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with how Facebook works so I could be way off

<comment><USER65> > Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and > you'll get a ban.

That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be.

> On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting > conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech.

That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you violated Facebook's rules.

<comment><USER66> If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives would think that. The active encouragement of civil disobedience by liberal leaders is probably more than enough confirmation to conservatives of this behavior. I;m not saying this behavior is /is notoccurring, just why some people might think that it does

<comment><USER65> > If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives > would think that.

It's more complicated than that, though. It takes more than just a report to get someone's content deleted.

Take a look at the examples from their moderator training:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech- cens...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship- internal-documents-algorithms)

See, for example, the slide about "female drivers", "black children", and "white men" \- Facebook's policies (via some pretty odd logic, IMO) protect posts about "white men", but not "black children". A liberal bastion, they're not.

> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company's global > hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, > black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate > speech? The correct answer: white men.

> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and > several other types of attacks only when they are directed at "protected > categories"—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, > national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious > disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about > "subsets" of protected categories. White men are considered a group because > both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like > radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is > not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)

<comment><USER67> I don't like Facebook and I rarely use it anymore but this set of examples seems a bit contrived I think.

Would it not be the same the other way around because of the subset rule? Black women would be protected whereas male drivers and white children would not?

<comment><USER68> In practice, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Title is misleading. Most Americans think Facebook and Twitter censor _some_ political views, not necessarily theirs.

</comment><comment><USER70> Is this even up for discussion? Whatever you think of him, Milo Yiannopoulos got banned because HIS FOLLOWERS made derogatory statements about an actress.

(edit: spelling)

<comment><USER68> Actually, Milo was banned because he already had been suspended several times, and then he decided to impersonate another user, which is blatantly against the ToS.

<comment><USER70> That's not what was widely reported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Unfortunately a lot of people conflate censorship with, "We're not shoving your uncle's conspiracy theories in everyone's face."

</comment><comment><USER71> I mean, my views get censored here on HN all the time...

<comment><USER14> We don't "censor views". We do ban accounts that break the site guidelines, and if it's a serial troll, we usually don't bother to say so.</comment></comment>


This is a new (to me) scam - <AUTHOR> A new (to me) scam - this turned up in three of my honeypot addresses:
(reformatted)
<comment>==
Hi, victim.
This is my last warning.
I write yоu beсausе I рut а malwаre оn thе web рage with рorn which yоu hаvе visitеd. My virus grabbеd all yоur рersonаl infо аnd turnеd оn yоur сamerа which cаpturеd thе рrосеss оf your оnanism. Just after that thе soft saved your cоntaсt list. I will dеletе the cоmрrоmising video and infо if yоu pаy mе 300 USD in bitсоin. This is addrеss fоr paymеnt : <redacted>
I give yоu 30 hоurs aftеr you oреn my messаgе for mаking thе trаnsасtion. As sоon аs yоu reаd the mеssagе I'll sее it right awаy. It is not necеssary tо tеll me that you have sent mоnеy tо me. This аddrеss is соnneсted to yоu, my system will dеlete evеrything аutоmаtiсally after transfer сonfirmаtion. If you neеd 48 h just rерly оn this lеtter with +.
Yоu can visit the pоlice stаtiоn but nobody саn help yоu. If you try tо deceive mе , I'll sее it right аway ! I dont live in your соuntry. So thеy саn not trаck my location even for 9 mоnths. Goodbye. Dоnt fоrgеt аbout thе shame and to ignоre, Your life сan be ruinеd.
</comment><comment>==
Interestingly, the messages had different addresses, leading me to wonder if a sufficiently motivated techie could actually trace anything. </comment><comment><USER3> It didn't even come with any kind of proof? Like a leaked password or your full name?

There is a spam attempt threatening with death [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7iymgu/got_an_emai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7iymgu/got_an_email_saying_ill_be_murdered_in_two_days/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope - no proof. Nothing.

I've just realised why the input box marked everything as mis-spelled - <USER2> is a huge number of non-standard characters there. The other two emails are essentially the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Usually I see this one with a previously leaked password associated with your email address, that they're hoping you still use and might be associated with an adult site account. Perhaps your honeypots don't have one so they used a template without it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting - so it's a known scam. It's the first time I've seen it.

And no, no passwords were quoted or suggested. Possibly, as you say, because there are none with the honeypot addresses, although all the addresses have used services, so can have passwords.

<comment><USER4> How long have these accounts been out there though? As an example, I changed email addresses a few years ago, and have yet to get a breach notification at my new address from HIBP, though I somewhat regularly get notifications for my old one(s). This tells me that the majority of breached password data is at least a few years old.

And yeah, it's known, but still relatively recent. I probably first heard about it two or three months ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> These addresses have been out there quite a while - certainly more than 5 years, possibly as much as 10, and maybe even 15 in one case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This also looks like a variation on [https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/993251/porn-blackmail- scam...](https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/993251/porn-blackmail-scam-cyber- criminals-demanding-ransom)

</comment><comment><USER6> I could be grasping at straws but words like "onanism" and "soft" instead of software are quite characteristic of Japanese native speakers of English.

The rest of the English is a little too good though...

<comment><USER7> Probably an attempt to avoid spam-filtering. It is common to see similar "odd" word-choices and euphemisms in spam-mail.

For example a mail I received today was promising some magic pills to make my "my snake grow like an anaconda"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My onanism? I'd pay out just for the vocabulary...</comment>


Wacom Inkling Makes Vector Graphics From Pen & Paper Drawing [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXbBA1DRE84

<comment><USER2> This would be more exciting to me if there were a Linux client, or signs that they were using some open standard (SVG paths/layers?) for storage. :/</comment>


Ask HN: Leave high-salary job for a startup? - <AUTHOR> I've just been offered a new job and I'm not sure if I should take it. I've been at my current company for about five years, where I've had effectively no career growth — I'm still in exactly the same role as I was when I started, and in conversations I've had with various managers there's no clear growth path that's open to me. The new job is a step up in responsibility (from IC software engineer to team lead) but a dramatic step _down_ in compensation ($200k/yr plus equity in a known quantity to ~100k plus equity in a startup).<p>Basically, should I walk away from at least $100k/yr in exchange for something that sounds more interesting? It feels like a wildly irresponsible choice to make… <comment><USER2> If you can take your vested equity with you, and won't see your accounts declining month to month from habituation to a higher income, then sure. Otherwise it sounds like too unfavorable a trade.</comment>


EasyMVP – Android library with annotation processing and bytecode weaving - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/6thsolution/EasyMVP <comment><USER3> Can someone explain what these are? I'm not familiar with Android code.

<comment><USER4> The Android ecosystem is a few decades behind the rest of the development world for design patterns because, to frame it in web technology, every time you resize your window the entire browser restarts and its up to your page to restore its state (Activity/Fragment = Page)

People were so busy fighting that mess in the early days they ended up writing a lot of shitty code.

Then Android has reached where programming was after Smalltalk came out, about a year ago when MVP became "that exciting new way to write less shitty code"

No one really knew what MVP was but they had to have it.

Then someone stumbled upon Uncle Bob and everyone needed to write "Clean code"

Google threw a wrench in things by releasing its data binding library which is MVVM so now there's the holy wars over that on the horizon.

And everyone is doing MVVM bindings the way everyone else figured out was wrong in the mid 2000s (using your bindings to do business logic) so it looks like MVP is pulling ahead before the war even starts.

So this library is for MVP that works around the whole "reopen the browser" issue because your presenters get killed when the browser restarts.

<comment><USER3> Wow, great explanation, thank you. I thought mobile programming was at the cutting edge, given how much code and focus there is on mobile apps. I'm sad to hear it's exactly the opposite.

I would have imagined mobile devs/languages would have nailed asynchronous programming by now, since mobile apps are basically one huge jumble of asynchronous events and processes.

<comment><USER5> I don't believe it is as bad as BoorishBears says.

Yes, configuration changes cause a tear down and recreation of your view/controller layers, but there are several patterns to deal with this cleanly (view controllers whose lifecycle spans multiple instance of a view is one of the more common, with the view instances detaching/attaching as they come and go). If you use a Flux like pattern for handling application data state you don't even necessarily have to do that since your views are just observing data stores whose lifetime outlives the views anyway.

As for asynchronous handling, there are quite a few popular libraries that are very powerful and make it easy to compose multiple asynchronous operations, update views on changes, etc - RxJava for instance has been pretty popular for the last couple of years and is very powerful, but has a steep learning curve. There are others such as Agera (from Google itself), as well as simpler async libraries like Bolts (similar to .Net task futures).

The Android SDK itself does not contain much in the way to help with any of this though (I would avoid pretty much any of the async classes that come with the SDK such as Loaders and AsyncTask) - so you do have to research and learn about third party libraries to get to a state where you can write clean and concise code.

<comment><USER4> Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to imply writing clean apps is impossible but I believe it's a fair assessment of the "state of the Union" for development.

Even your comment kind of alludes to the mess:

Yeah there's RxJava but it doesn't inherently solve the rotation issue because your Observables so you still need to persist the information needed to recreate them. And any long running tasks need a separate solution because tearing down the Observable will reset the operation

Googles app development team made Agera which was widely panned as an inferior NIH RxJava

Having your view's controller persist also requires custom logic because only your application will persist through configuration changes and even then the process can still get killed leaving you with nothing but data stored to disk via Parcelables or your own custom solution.

Android Devs solved asynchronous operations, the problem is keeping those operations going after a configuration change. If the operations reference the view you'll get NPE when the view is destroyed while a job finishes, and if your view references the operation you need to lay down infrastructure to let your asynchronous operations exist completely separate of the view and be able to cache their results for when the view comes back.

It's not impossible, everyone does it somehow, but it's created a lot of divergent theories on how it can be done

<comment><USER5> I also think the Activity handling of configuration changes was a mistake; it should have only ever just been the view that was recreated.

However, I don't think that in the end it's that horrible, once you overcome the learning curve.

If your process is killed and the user returns to the app, you have to be able to restore state from either the Activity's saved instance state or from some other form of persisted state anyway - whether the current approach to configuration changes was in use or not makes no difference here, it's due to the entire approach of the OS to killing and restoring processes as required (and I believe this same approach is used on iOS and for UWP Windows applications).

For handling of async results - once the owner of an async operation is not tied to a single instance of a view and is instead tied to the overall lifetime of that part of the application (e.g. retained Fragment, a Conductor controller, or pretty much any other reasonably modern view composition library), it's pretty trivial to handle. You're guaranteed that nothing else will run on the main thread for the duration of an Activity destroy/recreate cycle, so you don't need to worry about being in some unknown state. If the view was recreated due to a configuration change, rebind your view model/s when it attaches. If you're being torn down because the user left the retained Fragment/Controller/whatever the operation was tied to, you'll receive an indication of that and you can either send a cancellation signal (e.g. unsubscribe), or if that's not possible, have an isDestroyed check where you receive your result to ignore it. If you're on the back stack and still alive but have no view (i.e. view NPE), don't bind your model immediately - <USER2> your view model, and the same code you use to rebind on view reattach will kick in when the user returns and a new view is created and attached.

<comment><USER5> I should add - I do think the learning curve is much worse than it should be, in part due to this.

It would be nice if Google provided some more recommendation and best practices & patterns around this. I have come across and had to work on plenty of code that handles this all very poorly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Smart Is Your State? US States Ranked by Patents per Million People - <AUTHOR> http://www.sharcmedia.com/ip/how-smart-is-your-state-us-states-ranked-by-patents-per-million-people/

<comment><USER2> If you don't really agree with software patents this measure doesn't work well...

<comment><USER3> I doubt software patents contribute much to the totals, or would change the rankings if left out. Same for business method patents.

And you might disagree with patents entirely but still see them as correlated with a certain type of intelligent opportunism.

Pretty sure Idaho owes its ranking to a few key corporate research groups in patent-heavy fields -- HP, Micron, ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think "cashiers who can make change without a cash register" would be a better measure.

<comment><USER5> A lot of things would be a better measure.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those that want to experiment with the KML file you can download it at <http://www.sharcmedia.com/kml/PatentsPerMillion2.kml>

Regarding a finer grained heat map it would be cool, but I couldn't find any finer grained data (eg. by US Postcode) on the USPTO site.

</comment><comment><USER6> It'd be much better if they de-aggregated this information over the surface to create a true 'heat map'. If they did this, you'd probably see true hotspots of patent innovation which I'll bet correspond nicely to startup hubs.

</comment><comment><USER7> This would be a lot better if the colors varied continuously.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the graphic could use some help from <http://www.colorbrewer.org/>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> nice, a patent troll ranking for the US</comment>


The 12 Most Awesomely-Creative Résumés Ever? (Including One She Wears) - <AUTHOR> http://ongig.com/blog/resumes/12-creative-resumes

<comment><USER2> These are all fascinating, but I immediately noticed some dumb typos like "compatable" and "I'm a aspiring ..."

In a way, these typos are almost worse than ones on a boring resume. They ruin something that approaches perfection.</comment>


Static types are great, but I don't use them in practice - <AUTHOR> http://brehaut.net/blog/2013/static_types

<comment><USER2> My experience with modern statically typed languages have been primarily with ML and OCaml.

While they have a lot of advantages over neanderthal languages like C, and it's great that once you've gotten your program to compile, whole classes of bugs will be virtually impossible, I much prefer programming in Scheme.

With ML and OCaml, I really hated spending hours wrestling with the compiler and puzzling over obscure error messages that seem to require taking college level courses in type theory in order to understand.

In comparison, programming in Scheme (and even Common Lisp) is incredibly quick and easy, and a real joy.

True, when I need maximal robustness, I do wind up spending a lot more time writing unit tests in Scheme than I would in ML or OCaml. But for rapid prototyping and programming as I think, Scheme is very hard to beat.

<comment><USER3> I've found the opposite. Granted, Scheme is an exceptionally productive language. However, I recently worked on a project in Racket and then moved over to Haskell. I've found Haskell to be more productive even in the very short term.

Now, admittedly, not all the productivity gain is from types. However, they certainly help me, not just in making the code robust but also in writing it in the first place. And typeclasses actually do make the language concretely more expressive in certain ways.

Admittedly, Haskell is very different from other languages and requires a good investment to learn in the first place. However, I think it's well worth it.

<comment><USER4> > Now, admittedly, not all the productivity gain is from types. However, they > certainly help me, not just in making the code robust but also in writing it > in the first place. And typeclasses actually do make the language concretely > more expressive in certain ways.

You said you started out in Racket. Did you try Typed Racket? You don't necessarily need to move to Haskell to get a type system (though you won't get typeclasses).

<comment><USER3> I looked at it, but never used it. I certainly like the core idea and it would probably have been better for me than just using plain Racket. However, moving over to it--and getting other people to use it--would not have been _that_ much easier than moving to Haskell.

I was missing some specific type features: algebraic data types with pattern matching and custom numeric types (I needed 18-bit unsigned ints, of all things). I don't think Racket supports either of these. The numeric types, I suppose, are just a special case of wanting typeclasses. I really like typeclasses :P.

Additionally, I had several non-type-related reasons to move to Haskell: laziness, purity (my teammates decided that global variables and having IO everywhere are fun) and more functional data structures (vectors in particular).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My number one preference: longer blog entries. That's part of a more general preference, for analyzing information. When I'm reading, I know what kind of thing I expect in a blog post, and I know what I expect to return…

…This is my preference. I believe that it's right, but I also believe that reasonable people can disagree. Just because you don't think the same way that I do doesn't mean that you're an idiot. It's entirely possible for someone to know as much as I do about discourse and have a different opinion. We're talking about preferences.

</comment><comment><USER6> have a look at typed clojure

<https://github.com/frenchy64/typed-clojure>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4697634></comment>


Ask HN: Who are the Feynmans, Sagans and Attenboroughs of our time? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'll nominate Professor Brian Greene as another. He puts space, time, and systems thinking into perspective.

</comment><comment><USER3> Matt o'Dowd of PBS Spacetime on youtube.

Seriously, the time of Physics and the Standard Model is passed. The few people of those generations who are still working on fundamental physics are indiscriminately bad communicators, lost in their thoughts, and slightly bitter because of the fruitlessness of their field in recent decades. There is a general lack of enthusiasm to communicate science with the public due to the lack of wholly interesting new stories to tell, and frankly, reciting how weird quantum physics is for the 10000000th time is no longer exciting. Biology has some interesting stories that i feel are not being told though.

</comment><comment><USER4> That depends on how much _your_ time skews _my_ time away from the originals being those people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. These were the people that made an impression on me as a kid. I guess my question is, who currently has the ability to do the same (and can do so for whatever generation)?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> On TV in the early to mid 80's these were people were able to create a sense of awe in millions of people with their intelligence and eloquence.

Who are the Feynmans, Sagans and Attenboroughs of our time?

I'll nominate Professor Brian Cox to start things off...

</comment><comment><USER5> Jim Al-Khalili

Richard Curtis

Maybe Cox, he is a little prone to dogma.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sean Carroll

Leonard Susskind

Edward Witten

Terence Tao

</comment><comment><USER7> edward witten</comment>


Ask fullstack software engineers - <AUTHOR>

What stack have you specialized in/What stack are you most comfortable in? <comment><USER2> Postgres, Haskell/Scala, React

As far as I can tell the ends are no brainers and the middle is about how much you can get away with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flask, AngularJS, Celery, Postgres with HSTORE via SQLAlchemy, Redis, RabbitMQ.

Not the only one I can use, but I prefer working in Python. You could also count tools like scikit-learn and NLTK as part of my "stack" although they're usually not called in direct response to an HTTP request.

<comment><USER4> Quick question on HStore et al. How is it comparing to Json in 9.3? And how does sqlalchemy handle HSTORe

I am going to make the leap and put some experimental schemea-less designs into pg soon and would appreciate any feedback from the trenches !

<comment><USER3> I haven't actually messed with the Postgres JSON type much. IMO it makes more sense to use straight-up dict() within Python and when stored to the database, then let Flask _jsonify_ the dict() if it needs to leave the server context.

Usage:

You have to tell Postgres to use the HSTORE extension for your database. It's shipped with 9.3 but not active by default.

Then for SQLAlchemy you'd add something like this in your models.py:

        from sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql import HSTORE
        from sqlalchemy.ext.mutable import MutableDict

        class Widget(db.Model):
            id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
            data = db.Column(MutableDict.as_mutable(HSTORE))

You don't technically have to do the MutableDict stuff to use HSTORE, but it's handy. They're mutable on the Python side already, so why not be consistent. With the rest of the model as appropriate (init, repr), and I'm using Flask- SQLAlchemy which makes the contexts line up and such.

It's nice because it's an RDB field so you can do all the usual Postgres love when you're not wanting to store a dict(). Or you can just do a table with id, data, and id can even be a kv-style key if you want some sort of meaning attached to the primkey. Plus it's dicts, and Python is heavy on the dicts, and it's a quick leap from there to JSON.

<comment><USER4> Well that's on my todo list :-)

thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft - .Net, C#/F#, SQL Server, ASP.Net, IIS, Windows Server

It's surprising that I now work in Arc/Racket on FreeBSD.

</comment><comment><USER6> Angular, Go, Nginx, RethinkDB

</comment><comment><USER7> Go and Postgres.

<comment><USER8> Do you write raw SQL for every database interaction? How do you manage abstractions and patterns?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> LEMP.</comment>


Underwater Spider Spins Itself an Aqualung - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/spiders.html?ref=hp

<comment><USER2> Whenever I read something like this I am uncomfortably reminded of how pathetically inadequate my tiny little human brain is for comprehending the vast infinity of the natural world, both on and off our planet.

Just yesterday I was reading an article intended to emphasise us puny humans' puniness by saying, basically, "One AU is 1cm. Now try to imagine ... 30km!!". OK, mind crashed, capacity exceeded, out of range exception. I can kinda sorta hold the first assumption in my brain. I can't hold the second.

Same with this spider and evolution. Hey, evolution, that's like when the roofs on the town buildings turned black with soot, and the white birds were more visible to predators and so darker birds were selected and after a few generations all the birds were black. Hey, I can understand that! Evolution! Yeah!

Now try to imagine ... a spider who - through some utterly incomprehensible series of inputs, forces, mutations, generations, selections, and no doubt thousands upon thousands of years - has managed to somehow end up instinctually constructing a working aqualung, which it then uses to live underwater 24/7. Crash! Stack limit exceeded, out of working space, buy a new computer please.

If only I could ..

<comment><USER3> Powers of Ten is a good way of visualising how large our universe is <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0>

<comment><USER4> Brings a whole new visual (for me) to "As above, so below". Cool find, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Go to 7:08

<http://youtu.be/OWDt-6UIwPo>

</comment><comment><USER5> I saw this newly added Netflix streaming documentary. I wonder if it is the same type of spider?

It is French, called _Microcosmos_.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117040/></comment>


Very simple bot blocking utility in php and iptables - <AUTHOR> http://ww.com/stopbots.tar

<comment><USER2> I use this script for similar purpose - <http://www.inetbase.com/scripts/ddos/install.ddos>

The advantage of this script is that it directly monitors the IPs using netstat so one could stop bots from hammering things other than your webserver, say socket connections.

It is customizable to use APF or iptables and worked quite well when one of my friend's site was hit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat!

Thank you, I'll definitely look in to it. The biggest problem with blocking bots is false positives, identifying and giving a pass to your real users. It's a surprisingly hard problem, bot writers are quite clever when it comes to masquerading as real users.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> in this thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686114> I promised to post this code, I've cleaned it up a little bit.

It's not the most elegant solution and I'm sure the code can be improved upon but it does the job.</comment>


Open Science and climategate: follow CERN's lead - <AUTHOR> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/open_science_climategate_ipcc_cru_needs_take_leaf_out_cerns_book <comment><USER2> As for the "climategate" part of that uhm, rant, I'd say Ars' commentary provided a more balanced, real-world view on matters: [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/uk-hack-puts- cli...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/uk-hack-puts-climate- scientists-personal-e-mails-on-display.ars) \- to me, like to the Ars editor, the CRU emails (sadly) look like your average internal communication.

Of course, the guy is otherwise right: we'd all be better off if research was done completely in the open. The problem that's holding that back is that the research-world still only rewards authorship; there's no mechanism in place to evaluate the "impact" of the linked data someone puts online.

CERN are in a special position: they have little problems protecting their authorship, because few peers would be able to claim that they too have a LHC in their backyards...

<comment><USER3> Rewards for decent behaviour? What's holding 'that back' is an evident paucity of scientists (in this small area anyway) with integrity and a desire to discover the truth, come what may and irrespective of the views of their paymasters, relating to their speciality.

You ask for a mechanism to 'evaluate "impact" of linked data someone puts online'. I'm intrigued. What on earth do you have in mind? How would it work? On the face of it (I trust I've got this about face) it sounds an appalling idea. A load of value judgements delivered by whom?

<comment><USER2> Just to be sure we're talking about the same thing: the article above is advocating that we all publish every detail of our research proceedings online. What I'm saying is, that doing that would jeopardize your position as a researcher: the average labjournal is full of thoughts and ideas for further work. Researchers however don't get rewarded for inspiring peers, they only get rewarded for doing the work.

If we want to encourage people to disclose all their data, we need to get rid of the system where grants, tenured posts, and awards are all based on authorships only.

I'm not sure which idea you think is appalling, as I don't have any idea as to how to do it! One way would be to establish something similar to PageRank: if you publish a database of, say, world-temperature readings, an indicator of its value might be how many online labjournals in the world draw data from it. That's a very raw idea, and obviously not good enough, but calling it appalling before I even came up with it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "What is required is the wholesale adoption of the standards applied in the pharmaceutical industry drug trials: double blind trials (aka peer reviewing)"

I think the gentleman who authored this article neglected to look up the terms in question.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment#Double- blind_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment#Double-blind_trials) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review>

<comment><USER5> Rofl. I gave up on the article after the first paragraph, so I missed that nugget.

Did he explain how you conduct a double blind trial on climate change? That's like asking me (an astrophysicist) to conduct a double blind trial on the Big Bang.

It's not possible to do trials on some systems, either because there is only one or because it's impossible to manipulate it. In those cases, you are unfortunately stuck with collecting data and building (physically reasonable) models where you try to match those data and suggest new data which are predicted by the theory that can be used for testing it.

It _is_ important to do the latter. Just because you can adjust a bunch of parameters in the model to match existing data doesn't give a lot of confidence in your model, because of the feedback loop that causes you to work on the model until it fits the data. What you need to do is then say "given this model, we predict x" and then go and look for x.

From what I know about the climate modeling, it would be nice to see more of the latter. I know there are some things (development of regional patterns of changes) that match the models, but I don't know whether those were pre- or post-dictions.</comment></comment>