No Man's Sky One Year Later - <AUTHOR> http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=40413 <comment><USER2> > _No Man's Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu > Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers > something you just can't get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply > flawed and annoying way._

This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to deliver a solid story, or interface, or mechanics, or all of the above.

\- Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator comes to mind; it's a great exploration of cooperative multiplayer design and the possibilities opened up by incomplete information. But it's also clunky and acutely underdeveloped in terms of game modes, balance, and AI. If you want a good game, you'd better dive deep into modding.

\- Tharsis also counts; deeply strategic play in a constrained setting, undermined by strategy-destroying levels of randomness.

\- Even AAA stuff like _Civilization_ does this to me. Why is Civ great? Because nothing else is Civ. Why is Civ terrible? Because the balance is underwhelming and the AI is catastrophically bad.

\- Hell, for years Minecraft was like this. The opening comment about "imagine if Minecraft had been clunky and unintuitive at release" made me laugh, because it _was_. Deep Survival play has been almost dependent on mods for much of the games history, but the underlying insight was too good to pass up.

So... it's an interesting insight, and it also prompts a question. Why don't more of these intriguing flops prompt more polished attempts?

<comment><USER3> This may be off-point, but are there more polished attempts at new ideas out there that are worth checking out? I can't keep up with what's worth playing anymore, and don't have time to play every game hoping that it hits the mark. Anytime I check out the top ranking games, it's new Call of Duty's, Battlefields, Assassin's Creeds, or sports (blegh) and a whole host of games that disappear as fast as they show up. I'd kill for a new game that engages as much Civilization or C&C did.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

Modded Minecraft (try All the Mods 3 on the twitch client, or (formerly my modpack) Resonant Rise)

Challenge Pack Modded Minecraft (Currently Popular: Age of Engineering, Forever Stranded, Sky Factory 3)

Factorio

Dwarf Fortress

Modded Dwarf Fortress Masterwork

Poschengband & Tome4 represent the pinnacle (to me) of classic Roguelike design.

Risk of Rain

Endless Legend

Endless Space 2 (Amplitude releases a consistent and growing world of fantastic games with amazing and long-lived content releases).

(Just give Zachtronics all your money and take all their games, but in a particular order:)

Shenzen I/O

TIS-100

Spacechem

Infinifactory

Cities: Skylines (Paradox Interactive publishes does this and the next few, they're very good)

Europa Universalis 4

Stellaris

Great, thoughtful, engaging games are out there if you want them. Sadly, most people are filthy casuals now.

Zachtronics games in particular stand out as turning real world thinking and skills into fun games.

<comment> fake-name I've never really understood some of the zachtronics games.

Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an _actual_ assembler?

I really, REALLY wish they had done something _really_ clever, like targetted AVR opcodes or something for their vCPU. That'd make it so not only do you get to have fun, but you learn a marketable skill in the process!

That's one of my major complaints about most of the "programming" games I've seen, in that most of the time, if I'm going to spend time writing code, I'd rather just hack on one of my projects then play a game with no real end- product. At least with personal projects, you wind up with an actual app at the end.

I did enjoy Spacechem and Infinifactory, though I didn't finish each before becoming bored.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the huge loss of a learning opportunity to have players learn programming language basics for specific real world code

<comment><USER4> Let me prove your axiom wrong with a counterexample.

I love these games, and I can program (and have shipped to prod) in over a dozen languages including Erlang, Haskell, C++, C, Common Lisp, Java, Clojure, Scala.

What you're saying is nonsense. Practice in programming is practice in programming. If we wanted to, we could make the TIS-100 system real for embedded computing and I bet it'd be popular with some instruction extensions.

I did an annex course at a local middle school with TIS-100 to teach kids that programming is fun. It went over well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I followed the game for years before buying it on launch and being completely and utterly disappointed. Every single time they spoke about the game and showed videos, they promised a fleshed out universe with real consequences for your actions. They promised factions that had goals and would act independent of you. They promised a deep system of crafting. They promised multiplayer. What they didn't mention was that they had scrapped all those ideas a long time before and had turned the game into a grind-fest while they tried to hack things in there. The play-throughs they showed were hand-made areas with automated entities, but they never mentioned that. There was a promise of multiplayer, but it never happened. And probably worst of all, they never mentioned that it wasn't truly open-world, it was all essentially "levels" with little freedom to fly around and explore. They never mentioned that it turned into an almost on-rails flying game when you got close to the surface. You couldn't crash, you couldn't maneuver, you couldn't land on your own. Flying around was made even worse because you run out of fuel every few minutes because of the forced autopilot landings/takeoffs. That's not open world, that's a half-assed game with training wheels permanently glued on.

The whole "Not Evil, Just Bungling" that the author says simply isn't the case. But I'm not saying they're evil. They definitely wanted to make the game they were promising. They had a passion for it. But they knew well ahead of time that it wasn't happening and they kept up the charade.

I'm not disappointed about losing out on my money, I'm disappointed that I lost out on the game they promised.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a former amateur Twitch.tv streamer, I've always been fascinated by the rise and fall of internet personalities, and some of the biggest personalities seem to be game developers that found themselves in the spotlight.

Someone made this very in-depth video about the fall from grace of Phil Fish, the creator of Fez: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW- owa2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w) It seems to me that the combo of high pressure and a guy with a combative personality combined with internet anonymity to create a really messy situation that drove him out of the business.

I've also followed Narscissa (formerly Cosmo) Wright's fallout in the speedrun community after coming out as transgender. Once one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, I'd imagine transitioning is hard enough, but transitioning in front of a studio audience of anonymous gamers would be next level.

And so the same seems to be with Sean Murray and No Man's Sky. Inexperience plus overpromising and really high expectations created the current situation.

I don't think any of these people are malicious and I don't really know how I would have advised them to do things differently. Edmund McMillen, the creator of Super Meat Boy and other indie games once said in a podcast interview that he hates showing people what he's making before it is done for this very reason.

Edit: I know the circumstances of these people are not identical, I'm just calling for more understanding and empathy instead of assuming the worst in everyone.

<comment><USER8> Wait, let's not conflate the cases you describe, where the trolling may have been and probably was malicious, with the case of No Man's Land, where lead director flat out lied about the content of the game, and people who couldn't control their hype fell for it and late raged. In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I've seen—is justified.

<comment><USER9> >In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I've seen—is justified.

Why? The guy obviously wasn't trying to make a bad game. He was just inexperienced, got in over his head, and failed to deliver the product he wanted to build on the timeline he promised. I would have assumed if any community understands that failure isn't an unusual result in the face of ambitious goals it would be the HN crowd. Meanwhile since the game's release he has continued to work on that product to get it closer to everyone's initial expectations. I understand being disappointed by the whole thing, but the vitriol directed his way was somewhat disturbing.

<comment><USER8> Please. He was lying up until the last weeks to release, where no practical development on the game was taking place. I'd see your point if promises were made years before release and the company was unable to deliver. But there was clear malice here.

<comment><USER9> Like the original article suggests, if he was truly malicious in intent then why would he continue to work on this game after release? Hanlon's razor suggests he just failed on the biggest stage he was ever on and he didn't know how to handle that.

To quote the article:

>When people ask you, "Will we be able to do X?" it's easy to say "yes" because you already wanted to have X and you've already thought about how you'd go about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and you don't want to say no. People smile with delight when you say "yes" and when you say "no" they look disappointed and ask annoying technical questions that would – if you took the time to answer them accurately – being incredibly boring and hard to follow. In the short term, saying "yes" is always the path of least resistance.

>I know exactly how that feels and I know I've trapped myself in situations where I needed to crunch in order to meet my promises. Not because I wanted to work overtime, but because saying yes just feels so much better than saying no. I'm really thankful I made those mistakes in private meetings as part of a small company on not in front of international media. If Stephen Colbert had me on his show in March of 2016 and asked with delight if Good Robot was going to have different character classes, it would have been very tempting to say yes. After all, it was something I'd wanted to put in the game and maybe I'd be able to find time to squeeze it in before release. And if that interview happened to me when I was a young man and more easily dazzled by the limelight? Shit. I'm sure I'd make the exact same mistake.

I really can't imagine a developer who has lead a project of any size not relating to that on some level.

<comment><USER10> Why wouldn't he work on the game? It's not like after ONE over-promise he's never going to ever in the game dev business. His life a repeated game theory interaction.

Whether he intended to deceive or not, it makes sense to do some damage control for the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found the gameplay at release enjoyable as a chill-out experience, much more my speed than first-person twitch-fests. I didn't mind that it was hyped far beyond what they delivered, its a game after-all. Maybe millennial gamers have more expectations than people who grew up on atari game cartridges?

Haven't played it for months, but my expectations for any game is merely few dozen sessions of play maybe ~100 hours of play total. What more do you want out of a $50 game? People are too harsh.

<comment><USER12> Wut. The company lied about the product. Isn't that fraud? And you say people were too harsh?

<comment><USER8> Damn millennials are too harsh, expecting developers to be honest! It's just a game after all! /s

It's because of such ridiculous attitude and low expectation that the gaming industry is at the state that it is—terrible.

<comment><USER11> Well, it is "just a game"... an innovative, highly creative game with some really interesting features.

I suspect the real creative talent behind the game got used and pressured by product-manager types to ship far before it was ready because of all the money and promises involved.

Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the expectations set by the trailer. Yeah, good luck with that at the multiplex, but also keep in mind that many people got their money back for the game.

And anyways, cautious folks who expect absolute honesty from their game vendors, would do better to wait for the 3rd party reviews before jumping in headfirst with their 50 bucks.

<comment><USER13> > _Throwing a fit because of "honesty" in game pre-marketing is sort of like > asking for your money back because a movie didn't fulfill the expectations > set by the trailer. Yeah, good luck with that at the multiplex, but also > keep in mind that many people got their money back for the game._

These aren't the same though. Trailers can be used to evoke a certain sense about a movie that is disingenuous such as masking a drama as a comedy by splicing together the funny parts. You'll still get those funny parts, but they just weren't what you expected. A director can say that they'll guarantee you'll laugh until you cry, but that's all subjective. What happened with No Man's Sky was just outright lying.

This would be akin to someone saying that some actor gave the performance of a lifetime in the movie, but the actor never had anything to do with the movie. Does that mean I can't enjoy the movie? Nope. I might still love it, but that person still lied to get me to see the movie. That's what they did with No Man's Sky - gave false information about a game's features that was still good for what it was.

For what it's worth, I heard that people who didn't follow the hype-train liked the game. Those accounts of the gameplay all praised it.

<comment><USER14> > For what it's worth, I heard that people who didn't follow the hype-train > liked the game. Those accounts of the gameplay all praised it.

It's unfortunate (but understandable) that critique of No Man's Sky often mix what was promised with what was actually delivered. So much of the commentary focus on Sean Murray's broken promises.

There are a few reviews that cut through all the hype and focus on the gameplay and it's not a pretty picture. It's an AAA-priced game that (at the time of the launch) is at the level of an early access game. I recommend checking out Joseph Anderson's analysis on Youtube.

The people who have had the best time with this game seem to treat it as an overly complicated fidget cube. Something to keep their fingers busy while their mind is focused on something like listening to a podcast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Open world games are notoriously disappointing. "What is this game supposed to be?" is a great question. Are you trying to explore? collect resources and upgrade grind? build things? combat (ground or space)? By being all these things, they became nothing. All encompassing space games (for example EVE) take years to build, usually in the form of updates after release.

As for the UI. It looks like its designed so the PC and consoles have similar UIs. Also they are inspired by context menus, which sacrifice UX for flexibility. (Pretend the inventory is a file system).

<comment><USER16> If you want strong direction, then open world is the wrong end of the spectrum. Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain myself for hundreds of hours. Give me a directed plot and I'll probably stop caring in about 4 hours.

It seems to me there are two very different views of story telling in games. One camp wants games to be strongly directed minimal choice stories with a very specific narrative and it's entirely ok to curtail player agency to tell that story.

Another camp thinks the opposite: player agency always comes first and there is no set narrative but the one that players create for themselves. This comes with the potential that said narrative can be dumb.

I don't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint.

<comment><USER17> _I don 't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint._

This is a false dichotomy.

Skyrim, for example, is absolutely both of these things, offering a strongly directed central narrative and lots of open world exploration opportunities.

<comment><USER16> Skyrim is definitely a gem of a game. I wouldn't however call it "directed" or "central". I've had several playthroughs of it as just a hunter or a spelunker and totally ignored the main story of dragonborn/background war (which is a strength of the game, not a fault).

I would consider Fallout 4 to be much more directed. You _have_ to be the survivor, you _have_ to save the patriots, you _have_ to ultimately destroy one of the three powers. Sure you can ignore the plot for a bit, but you can't advance any storyline. You can't play PI or explore vaults unless you've advanced the story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I found with NMS that I couldn't really see a game in it.

The planets were lovely, the creatures fascinating, but other than grind fuel and occasionally get eaten by something, there wasn't much gameplay.

With the later addition of base-building I was able to ... build a base. W00t.

Lovely tech, pretty planets and stuff... not much compelling to actually do.

<comment><USER19> > Lovely x, y and z... not much compelling to actually do.

This is pokemon go in a nutshell yet it seemed to work for niantic.

<comment><USER20> I think the compelling part of pokemon go is not the game its self, but the social interactions it created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I tried No Mans Sky a year ago and it was so utterly shallow and boring. Lots of breadth and zero depth. I tried the "foundations" update at some point, built a little base and... it felt empty and pointless and still utterly shallow. The game might have been "ok", or at least, I'd have been less harsh, if it didn't have a AAA price tag (and if Hello Games had been honest).

I did not try the next update, and while its added a lot of the originally promised features, from what I've heard and seen on youtube, it still looked shallow and lacking depth and substance. So I've given up hope that these 19 quintillion planets will ever be interesting enough for me to bother playing it again.

Also, regardless of whether they eventually pull of what was promised, it doesn't change the fact that Sean Murray mislead or even outright lied to everybody and that leaves an extremely bitter taste. I for one will never buy anything that Sean Murray touches or has anything to do with. So in many ways, the damage is done.

</comment><comment><USER22> Counter opinion: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16164520/no-mans-sky- one-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16164520/no-mans-sky-one-year- later-ps4-pc)

<comment><USER23> Honestly - I loved the first iteration and have jumped in to play it again this time round. I love it still (again).

It's changed a lot. It's upgraded again there is a tonne of stuff to do, lots to see and explore and plenty of "hooks" to give you the excuse to see them.

NMS gets a lot of hate and I don't think it's deserved but hey if the author doesn't want to play it, then it's no skin off my nose.

They can do what they want.

<comment><USER24> >NMS gets a lot of hate and I don't think it's deserved

Should we just ignore all of the hype and promises _made by the developer /publisher_ which were never delivered on? That's where the hate comes from. They promised something much more than what they delivered.

Yes, they've made improvements, and that's great, but it _still_ doesn't contain some of the biggest features promised while the game was still in dev. The marketing of this game was very deceptive, and they deserve what they got for that.

Besides... most find the game pretty boring.

<comment><USER25> >Should we just ignore all of the hype and promises made by the developer/publisher which were never delivered on? That's where the hate comes from. They promised something much more than what they delivered.

The people who pre-ordered should've waited till the reviews came out and then bought?

I have rarely seen a level of delusion from a fan base than the one around NMS, they collectively hyped themselves to a level of frenzy before the game came out that could only lead to disappointment.

<comment><USER26> >I have rarely seen a level of delusion from a fan base than the one around NMS

Just wait until star citizen crashes down _hard_

<comment><USER8> You assume it will ever be released. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _No Man's Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu > Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers > something you just can't get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply > flawed and annoying way._

X-Com flawed and annoying? Them's fighting words! The game is a masterpiece. It didn't feel frustrating back then; it felt like it belonged in my top 5 most engaging and enjoyable games, and I know this is a widely shared opinion in gamers my age.

edit: well, one of the commenters from TFA agrees with me:

> _The original x-com was "deeply flawed and annoying"? I mean if that's your > opinion, cool, but surely you realize that most people consider it a classic > and using it as an example of a failed game is only going to confuse us._

<comment><USER28> X-Com shipped with a broken difficulty selector, so that all games were played on "Easy" regardless of your setting. The gameplay could be slow and ponderous at the best of times, and at the worst of times (chasing down the one last alien) could be quite maddeningly slow, literally at times 10-30 minutes of nothing. (Then the last alien gets the drop on you and your dude dies.) Some of the mechanics are pretty opaque in the era before "I'll just read a complete disassembly of the game engine on GameFAQs." Some of that is probably a part of the love for the game, but by most modern standards that's a flaw in a game. (Having to discover mechanics is not intrinsically a flaw, but making them somewhat undiscoverable kinda is.)

I'm not sure I'd defend the "deeply" part of "deeply flawed", because IMHO it still belongs in a different category than some of those other games; it came much closer to doing what it set out to do deliberately, it did not just accidentally back into being a good game despite itself. However, I _will_ defend that X-Com was somewhat flawed. The very fact that they could ship the difficulty selector broken, because nobody noticed, because the difference was not big enough to be noticeable, is a pretty decently sized problem on its own; that affects everything from top to bottom right there.

<comment><USER27> Because X-Com was widely considered a masterpiece _by the standards of its day_ (unfair to compare it to today's games, and anyway that wasn't the point of TFA) it's extremely confusing to list it as an example of a flawed or frustrating game.

You already mentioned the pace: that was one of its strong points, not a weakness. I -- and most of its fans, I'd guess -- liked the game _because of its deliberately slow pace_ , not in spite of it. Why, I remember about 15-20 years ago I debated with someone about real-time vs turn-based games, and why I preferred the latter, _and used X-Com as an example!_.

Like you also mentioned, I don't think most people realized about the "Easy" setting bug back then (I certainly didn't!). "Easy" was difficult enough anyway, so I think this criticism doesn't apply. We're not talking about bugs here (which happen in every game), but about "flawed" gameplay, and how you experienced the game _back when you played it_. Nobody complained about the broken difficulty setting, so this couldn't cause a frustrating experience.

To me, picking X-Com as an example of a flawed game is like picking a movie everyone considers a classic masterpiece and declaring it flawed because there is a scene which is somewhat out of focus: it's an act of snobbery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not a particularly well-researched post. Sony did not publish the game, they provided marketing budget. This means that they were not in creative control.

<comment><USER30> Furthermore, they could be forgiven for making statements saying e.g multiplayer was included a year out since it was an aspirational goal, but they were lying to the bitter end right up to release, either explicitly or by omission.

</comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo Ugh NMS. Didn't get superhyped but bought it at launch, listened to that soundtrack by 65daysofstatic for a few weeks, played the game for about 30 minutes. It was just so boring. They had the tech to make universes but made the core gameplay so boring you didn't care. How is that possible?

The game is now what it could have been, but it makes me uncomfortable even enjoying the game because I remember the dev lying on the day of release about multiplayer. That breaks some kind of contract between producer and consumer. Oh, and the FOV on the PS4 version is horrific, interesting way of extending a consoles lifespan.

I think NMS is a glimpse of the future, but hopefully someone else will take their formula mainstream.

<comment><USER31> I think all games should focus on one platform, the PC platform. Consoles drain developer's time and attention from making the actual game. And don't get me started on knuckle-dragging VR.

<comment><USER32> The consoles are much easier to develop for -- debugging GPU problems across hundreds of GPUs by three manufacturers is so much harder than doing so on a single (or two, if you count the two major consoles) GPU type. They also make a larger share of the revenue than PC games do. They don't drain attention, they put attention where the most revenue for the least work is.

And from a user point of view, PC gaming just got exhausting for me. Driver updates, keeping up with GPU upgrades... or I can plunk down some money on a box that Mostly Just Works. Yes, there's parts of console gaming that annoy me. I dislike having to have a PS4 and an Xbox One, which are like 80-90% of the same damn hardware, to play all the games I want. This goes doubly because the PS4 has marginally better hardware (minus the controller, which is improved from previous generations but not as comfortable as the Xbox controller) and the Xbox has outrageously better software, so I'm missing out on something no matter which console I'm using and I can't crossplay with friends on a different console. But those annoyances are small potatoes given how much time I've sunk into getting PC games to run optimally.

<comment><USER33> I have a PC that's nearly 5 years old, that wasn't top of the line (budget about £800 without screens) when I bought it and took me half a day to put together. It runs every game I've tried on it at least at medium and usually on high. I've spent zero time optimising it, not put a single h/w upgrade in and driver updates get run about every 6 months for a few minutes. PC gaming is way beyond "mostly just works" and has been for some time from my point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This product was really always about trying to push the limits of procedural generation technology. It failed as a game if you ask the gamers, but exceeded expectations if you ask the developers (lucky devils are now millionaires). This 30 second clip pretty much sums up how great their marketing was:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KxRp8jeliQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KxRp8jeliQ)

<comment><USER35> In the lead up, when they were touting 6.84 * 10^23 planets or whatever, my thought was, how is that fun? If it will take all of humanity 10,000 years to see your entire game, what good does that do players now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a game designer this resonated with me: " it's easy to say "yes" because you already wanted to have X and you've already thought about how you'd go about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and you don't want to say no. "

Along the way in my career I heard something that I remind myself to help me with this problem: "Promises are like babies, fun to make but hard to keep. "

</comment><comment><USER37> I love the soundtrack. Many lines of code were written to it

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRI-o9JDfCI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRI-o9JDfCI)

</comment><comment><USER38> Having read this article the only remaining real flaw in this game is - Sony. I'm sorry that I didn't know that it was actually Sony behind the publishing which backfired into the face of Jean Murray, and not _Sony_. Damn.

</comment><comment><USER39> The UI is clunky and impossible to efficiently use.

Compare the galaxy map to the one in Elite Dangerous in which it is far easier to control the camera.

They meant well but they might be better restarting

<comment> m-p-3 Update 1.35 is improving that, you might want to check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looking at this from a totally different angle, I find the fact that we collectively have such a high standard for games to be such a positive signal that life today is moving along swimmingly. The fact that this is what bothers us (rather than a depression or a big war) is wonderful. (Or maybe I've just been reading too many history books recently.)

</comment><comment><USER41> A lot of NMS problems go away if you mod and cheat your way to game balance...

Play it your way.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was just on vacation and played a bunch.

They should have done an early access thing, because it's actually a quite fun game now and it was somewhat oversold at launch.

</comment><comment><USER42> Because they've focused on a different set of priorities from the ones he wants, thus they're incompetent and sadistic?

Ok.

<comment><USER17> Actually, his most basic, underlying thesis is that it's _impossible to determine what their priorities are_. To the author, the game is incoherent. If you cleave to that view, then it's impossible to understand why the developers changed what they changed.

His example of Dark Souls is a perfect one. He acknowledges that, while the game isn't his thing, he can at least intellectually grok why Dark Souls is a good game, and how it has been optimized and refined for the specific play style they aimed at.

The author claims the same can't be said for No Man's Sky.

So, no, it's not that it's a different set of priorities. It's that it appears to be an _incomprehensible_ set of priorities. And that's a real problem, if you believe in the thesis (which, I assume, will be explored in subsequent installments).</comment></comment>


Why Politicized Science is Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html

<comment><USER3> Where to begin? Here, Michael Crichton links "global warming" with "eugenics", and the fate of critics of the former with the fate of critics of the latter. Yes, he's talking about "critics of global warming", not about "critics of the theory that global warming is caused by humans".

To me, the dispute seems not to be to be about whether the globe is warming up, but about whether we have caused this warming-up, about whether we can prevent and/or reverse it, and also about whether the activities of us puny humans can have a significant impact on the system at all. Ok, his might be excused as some "shorthand formulation". but he's making judgments of science and of scientists here, so I'd think that some precision would be in order.

Anyway... eugenics. Crichton describes eugenics as a form of politicized science, which caused people to be discriminated against, sterilized, and even killed in large numbers. It was bad.

About two thirds through his text, he cites another example of politicized science: Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko was a Russian biologist who speculated that aquired characteristics of plants (and presumably other organisms) could be inherited, and that soaking wheat grains in water and burying the wet seed in snow over the winter would improve crop yields. During the time from 1948 to 1964, criticism of Lysenko's theories was formally outlawed in the Soviet Union; academic critics were thrown in jail. As a consequence of such foolish behavior, many people died through famine. It was bad.

In the final quarter, then, he brings on global warming:

"Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt with."

Oh, really? What happens to them? Are they jailed, or killed? Crichton doesn't say. Instead, he says:

"Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions."

What kind of extreme actions are taken? Are those actions comparable with those he cites, like letting peasants starve, sterilizing "feeble-minded" Californians, or killing Jews in concentration camps? He doesn't say. But:

"Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences."

Ah, some people are hurt. So it must be bad. But how are they hurt? Are they starved, jailed, killed? Does he refer to the critics again, or to some other people? Not a word about it...

I don't know whether or not human activities cause/prevent global warming. I believe that the jury's still out on that. But if, as Crichton writes, he really wishes that "knowledge is disinterested and honest", I think he should refrain from drawing the kind of comparisons he draws here. This text reads like scientizied politics. In fact, as a source of knowledge, it's indistinguishable from politicized science to me.

<comment> william-newman I agree that Crichton's analogy to eugenics is really inflammatory and offensive, and even that that's likely part of his reason for choosing it. But in his defense, it might not be the main reason. Consider: How many examples of bogus expert consensus are still remembered today? It seems to me that in order to be remembered, such examples need to be pretty horrific in one way or another. For example, we still remember that doctors bled patients for centuries. If Crichton had tried to draw an analogy between global warming and the long history of bleeding medical patients, wouldn't that've been offensive too?

So what about choosing less-well-known examples, then? E.g., in principle he could have talked about the 1960-era political and academic bogus consensus that the long-run Philips curve allowed governments to reduce unemployment in a usefully stable and predictable way by printing more money. (short form of the last chapter of that story: 1970s stagflation) That analogy would probably've been less offensive than eugenics or bleeding, but it also would've required teaching most people the whole story from scratch. That's a pretty high practical price to pay for being able to use a less offensive example. He might increase his audience by not giving his audience the "he's just being offensive" excuse to ignore him, certainly. But people who disagree with him are unlikely to want to trust him, which makes it hard to tell the story convincingly. With the eugenics story he can keep appealing to things that people already know independently, and so can convey his points about the story even to people who're looking for excuses to ignore him.

<comment><USER4> Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever.

A = "eugenics is wrong"

B = "opponents of eugenics where persecuted"

There simply is no logically correct way to deduce A from B, and drawing an analogy to

C = "global warning is wrong"

D = "opponents of global warning are being persecuted"

doesn't make it any better (you can't infer C from D, that you can't deduce A from B doesn't make D => C any more legitimate).

<comment> william-newman "Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever."

The only point? I think not.

One other point which Crichton makes explicitly is "The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale." Bad science can be very expensive, people mouthing bad science can do extremely nasty things in its name. I think he hammers on this point too much in the essay. It seems to me that most people are already predisposed to believe that policies based in bad science can be really bad: bandwidth is cheap, but why waste it on flogging this dead horse when it could be better used for porn about flogging dead horses? I also think bringing in Lysenkoism is a bad idea because even though it is a valid illustration of bad science being expensive, it comes with the non-parallel of being enforced by world-class murderous repression of dissent, which is too much of a distraction. But whether or not my criticisms are valid, I think it's clearly a point.

Another point which I don't think Crichton makes explicitly, but which seems to motivate various of his examples, is illustrating that a form of argument could be used to justify horrid and stupid eugenic claims and policies. That's both a vivid way of making the point that that form of argument is logically invalid style, and a way of demonstrating that that form of argument dangerous in political practice, and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Look at martythemaniak's post...

"I really don't have the ego to claim I magically know better than thousands of scientists and decades of research, ..." Adjust that for the smaller 1920 scientific population, s/thousands/hundreds/ perhaps, and you have a right- thinking person wisely avoiding being branded as a eugenics denier.

AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to Darwinists and their critics to creationists. Very well, then: why stoop to use arguments which were used to defend Sanger? Think of valid arguments like the ones which worked to defend Darwin but not Sanger, and use them in preference to flaky arguments which can be used to defend any old garbage. Especially, Darwin and his followers found all sorts of extensive patterns of species and population which, to the best of my knowledge, defy explanation any other way. So why not use arguments like that? They can be extremely convincing.

bad example 2: "the fact that CO2 Levels are higher today than anytime in the last 800000 years, or the fact of the 40% increase since the 1800s, my conclusion is pretty obvious." s/CO2/non-Aryan/, s/the last 800000 years/our nation's history/.

Unfortunately, banging on one superficial correlation and declaring victory is a classic pro-Sanger style of argument, not the kind of characteristically pro-Darwin argument that I was referring to. It might seem like good clean fun if you are a true believer and haven't thought about it, but think about it now. Or, if you still don't realize how dysfunctional it is, start by imagining trying to dissuade someone who thinks he has found revealed inconvenient truth in "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

After that, feel free to copy the Darwinists by blasting away with all those independent detailed observed patterns which match AGW. Or pick some other style of argument which worked for Darwin and not for Sanger, and use that.

Or, alternatively, perhaps no such arguments exist, and instead the comparison to Darwinists is self-flattery on such a cosmic scale that AGW does have enormous explanatory power --- in that the gravitational effect of the vast self-flattery cloud explains what the cosmologists call "dark matter". That's roughly my opinion: possibly the Gore/IPCC version of AGW (only very small non-CO2-driven global climate fluctuations, and large positive feedback in climate response to CO2) is correct, but certainly it is not a glaringly obvious truth about the world like Darwin's natural selection. Instead it's like the Philips Curve question I wrote about elsewhere: the answer should become clearer over time, and you can make valid arguments now about what it will turn out to be, but it's not a routine matter to convince an honest skeptic by direct appeals to observation. Darwinists could sample a near- endless supply of independent ecosystems to determine whether a pattern holds or not, and they delighted in charging into the details. AGWists start with a naturally data-poor problem like the Philips Curve arguers, and then many of them make it poorer by retreating from the details, refusing to commit themselves to anything sharper than decadal averages over the entire globe.

<comment><USER4> Sorry I could not follow you completely. Probably it is still too early in the morning for me.

Refuting the theory of a random commentor on HN is just strawman argumentation, though (sorry martythemaniak).

"AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to Darwinists and their critics to creationists."

Um, that is kind of turning it on the head: all this is in reply to an article that tries to defame AGW people as advocates of eugenics. It's as if you say "AGWs are like Creationists", then AGWs reply "no we are not" and you claim victory by saying "see, AGWs think their opponents are creationists".

I myself am simply no expert on climate change. Some knowledge from my area of expertise spills over to climate research, though: the so called "no free lunch theorem". There is no such thing as a free lunch - maybe it has not been universally proven in a mathemacially rigorous sense, but in general it seems to hold.

Hence I personally consider it very likely that human activity influences the climate. There are also countless examples of nature being destroyed for good by human actions.

As for the details of CO2, it would be great if we could just trust expert and politicians to sort it out. Apparently it is not so. I am interested enough to ask for more information. What are good sources to read, that are not opinionated?

<comment> william-newman The creationist comparison shows up other places, too. I've encountered it several times before, and you can Google "denialist creationist" to find more.

Me trying to refute martythemaniak may not impress you, but if when you first read that topmodded post you nodded vaguely, might there be some validity in Crichton's implication that the arguments invoked for AGW could be arguments for eugenics if you filed off the serial numbers? It's an offensive charge, but it's not a goofy one IMHO: it is far more true of the arguments for AGW than of the arguments for actual "settled science" like quantum mechanics or natural selection or antibiotics or the Big Bang.

"What are good sources to read, that are not opinionated?"

One non-opinionated source as background both for my exasperation about the Darwinist analogy, and for my claims about the flabbiness of 10-year-old climate predictions, which also happens to be interesting reading for hackers interested in machine learning: _The Minimum Description Length Principle_. Lots of math to help you think precisely about questions like "by how many bits did this hypothesis reduce the surprisingness of the world compared to alternative hypotheses?"

For sources more specific to the AGW controversy, good luck finding someone unopinionated. The controversy long ago became uncivil, and all sides are indignant about various scummy folk who have lined up on other sides. But I can point you to sources that seem (opinionated but) sound. As far as I know, the IPCC reports (see martythemaniak's URL) are a reasonably good presentation of the highbrow case for crisis AGW (high CO2 climate sensitivity, low natural variation): I've never seen an advocate claim that vital parts of the pro- crisis case were overlooked or horribly poorly presented there. And I think McIntyre's critiques of the IPCC reports --- mostly centered on the historical climate record reconstruction I mentioned --- are generally sound. He has a website, Climate Audit; he has also written the Mann critique up as at least one traditional journal paper. Besides his Mann critique, he has also done things like catching a Y2K bug in temperature records. (Of course that's not impressive as virtuoso rocket science, but I think it's pretty convincing evidence that he's a careful guy who does a lot of homework.) It is natural for AGWists to find him irritating, but it is inexcusable to try to dismiss him as a ignorant closedminded crank by analogy with modern disbelievers in natural selection.

And besides the math and technical background, some academic sociology background: McIntyre is not the only opinionated grouchy outsider who has torpedoed a politically correct prestigious academic consensus in the last decade or so, Cramer did too: <http://law.bepress.com/nwwps/lep/art9/> .

<comment><USER4> "The creationist comparison shows up other places, too."

So what point are you trying to make? Do GW people as a rule compare AGW people with creationists? And even if they would, what bearing would it have on the debate?

I have found McIntyre's blog, he seems to be a busy individual. At the moment he is discussing something about prehistoric buckets. That might be too much detail for my entry level... Also, I wonder what he would dig up if he spent the same energy on finding evidence FOR global warming.

Didn't find suitable articles at the Cramer link. Anyway, I will do my own searching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The irony is overpowering here - the horrible politicization by GW opponents is perhaps the second-best example of politicized science being overshadowed only by the disbelief in evolution by creationists.

I really don't have the ego to claim I magically know better than thousands of scientists and decades of research, so when I read something like the IPCC report ([http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment- report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm...](http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment- report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf)), or the fact that CO2 Levels are higher today than anytime in the last 800000 years (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm>) or the fact of the 40% increase since the 1800s ([http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Di...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png)), my conclusion is pretty obvious.

The politicization of GW comes solely from idealogical-opposition - <USER2> don't like what the facts imply (ie, we need a smart energy policy) so they simply ignore the facts using a variety of techniques. For example Inhofe and his ilk are the usual anti-intellectuals - no way they'll let some egg-head ivory-tower geek with his crazy computer models tell them what to do, no siree bob. Meanwhile, Crichton is playing the ever-popular Nazi card - "gee, look at how vaguely similar this situation is things that happened under Nazism and Communism. You're not a Nazi or a Commie, are you?"

</comment><comment><USER6> State of Fear is an interesting read. Chrichton lists the many ways those "in power" have sought to keep the commoners in place. Usually fear is the most effective tactic.

I'm agnostic when it comes to global warming.

<comment><USER7> I'm agnostic when it comes to the moon landings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No idea if global warming is real or not. I don't like that article though - it is purely rhetoric. The historical examples are interesting, but suggesting the analogy is not a honest style of discussion in my opinion - not facts, only emotions. You could probably drop random subjects into that article and make the same point.

<comment><USER8> The article points out the situation with Global Warming science: _"...Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are not longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms."_

I would be very interested to see a comprehensive paper on Climate Research funding and decision making for that funding, but I do remember seeing articles in the past on Scientists being threatened or fired for questioning man-made Global Warming. One of many examples: <http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=21207> . However, I haven't heard about any scientists being threatened/fired for advocating Global Warming.

<comment><USER9> Many old scientists don't accept new theories. Thirty years ago there was a lot less evidence of global worming and computer models where a lot worse. My concern with the "Non Global worming" crowd is they have no single consistent theory. Some say it's getting hotter but people are not involved others say it's not and some even say it's getting colder. If there was a consistent set of facts that disproved global worming there would be consist response that x, y or z is why global worming is wrong but for a significant length of time it's just pick a new pet theory and plaster it around and drop it as soon as it's disprove by evidence.

Find me some 10 year model with 10 year old evidence that is validated and consistently disproves global worming and I would look into it until then your just ranting.

<comment> william-newman It is true that objections to global warming are all over the map, including some embarrassingly silly objections. E.g., it's not just anonymous trolls on internet who claim not to believe the Earth was in a warming trend over the 20th century. Sadly, there were high profile nonanonymous people who held onto that position for much longer than I think was reasonable. It's also true that the anthropogenic global warming crisis camp succeeded in reaching more consensus, converging pretty strongly on its two flagships, Gore and IPCC. But are you really impressed with the consensus? How much do you know about it?

A lot of the CO2 climate technical controversy turn on two subcontroversies, historical climate (how exceptional the 20th century trend was, roughly) and theoretical climate modelling/simulation. I judge the 10-year hindsight score on modelling to be a somewhat vague Gore 0, ranters without consistent disproof of global warming 0. On historical climate , though, it's a much sharper Gore -1, ranters 1.

It seems to me that by your standards of 10-year stability, the modelling controversy is a clear stalemate today. In decades to come, as CO2 levels continue to rise and the model predictions diverge from back-of-the-envelope calculations, the predictions of 1998-era models should be dramatically confirmed or falsified. Today, though, they aren't precise enough to distinguish strongly.

Incidentally, convincing people of controversial stuff by modelling is not easy in any field. If you become sufficiently concerned with CO2 that you decide it's important to support nuclear power, you might find it educational to argue reactor safety models or radwaste disposal geological models with nuclear skeptics. And my Ph. D. work was related to modelling electron transfer reactions, and I'm very glad that cytochromes are not politically controversial.

On the historical climate argument, I think the crisis camp did achieve a medium-term political victory by the way that they achieved and rhapsodized about consensus on the famous Mann "hockey stick" graph, showing stable centuries of natural climate followed by a zoom upward somewhat correlated with global rise in CO2. But because their 2000-era consensus turned out to be technically bogus, I judge their political victory to be a long-term embarrassment for them, in part because it makes it harder to maintain a straight face while solemnly refuting analyses like Crichton's.

"Technically bogus?" I hear some of you say. Chiefly I mean that Mann's statistical methods were screwed up. For the mathematically-minded among you, one noteworthy point is that they were shown to reconstruct the temperature as a hockey stick even when the experimental temperature proxy data were replaced with purely random red noise. For those whose tastes run more to sociology more than math, in the spirit of the Crichton essay, two noteworthy points are first that this analysis reaching a politically convenient but technically surprising conclusion was widely accepted by insiders despite such technical flaws, and second that when it was eventually shot down, it was by a pretty extreme example of "outsider".

(And "technically surprising?" Well, I appreciate the mathematical tractability of nice long uninterrupted time series. And I realize that famous historical extreme data points like the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm period aren't so easy to accommodate in the same formal statistical analysis with uninterrupted time series. But when your formal analysis based on long continuous time series of proxies for temperature gives results that sit uneasily with the grab bag of well-known datapoints on historical extremes of temperature itself, it should be surprising and call for some checks (of the statistical analysis, of the actual temperature dependence of the proxies, on the grotty realities of how the data were collected, on whether the proxies have tracked temperature since then, etc.). It seems that this first occurred to an outsider named McIntyre.:-)

(There are still arguments about whether Mann's general conclusion of stable stable ever-so stable global climate might turn out to be correct after all: there are lots of ways to choose from the available temperature proxy data and lots of ways to analyze them, and with some modern choices people have arrived at conclusions similar to those of the approximately-10-year-old papers. But even if the politically correct conclusion somehow turns out to follow from a more modern technically correct analysis, it'll be a sort of happy accident: not a vindication of the 1999ish published work, but at most a vindication of Mann's unpublished intuition or simple luck.)

"until then your just ranting" Hey, I love you too, but only conditionally. I will love you if you have any 10 year model with 10 year evidence that is validated and consistently proves the crisis variant of anthropogenic global warming. Not just that we've warmed over the past century or more, which is now completely uncontroversial (and about time). Not just that the expected CO2 sensitivity is likely to be about what we'd expect from a back of the envelope calculation, which is not terribly controversial. Instead, the Gore/IPCC version: that we can be pretty confident that the CO2 sensititivity is several times greater than the back of the envelope value, enough to be the main explanation of the warming trend in the 20th century and enough to have more dramatic effects in this century.)

<comment><USER9> I think your confusing the "Global Worming Model" with the symptoms of global worming. Burning fossil fuels > increase in atmospheric CO2 > Increase in average global temperature.

There is extremely good evidence that global CO2 levels are increasing and so is global temperature is the model seems to be working. However, trying to calculate the changes in weather patterns, sea level, etc from global worming is a separate debate. Finding a refined model that tells us how much of an increase we are going to see and how soon it's going to happen is based on several other assumptions. There are a wide range new ideas and a lot of research into them but there is little evidence the basic Global Warming model is wrong.

PS: The reason for the 10 year old model request is science is based on testing ideas with new data not altering the model to fit the data and assuming it's correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Science is not more dangerous then a stick. It can be used to get a banana or to kill a man.

Correctness of a theory != good-natured usage of that theory.

Example: It does not matter whether one man could or could not be genetically inferior than another one. It is wrong to kill a man in both cases regardless.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's "interesting" that many of the folks pushing AGW "solutions" were pushing those solutions before they heard of AGW.

</comment><comment><USER12> State of Fear is a very interesting read.

Certainly, Crichton is not always fair in his use of statistics or analogies, but an argument for or against global warming is not the point.

He does make some incredibly important points in the process.</comment>


ISIS Influence on Web Prompts Second Thoughts on First Amendment - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/us/isis-influence-on-web-prompts-second-thoughts-on-first-amendment.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> The US survived the Communist Party of the USA. It survived the German- American Bund and Hitler Youth camps on Long Island. It survived Lindbergh endorsing Hitler. ISIS is a nuisance compared to those.

Here's ISIS's magazine.[1] Read what the other side has to say. Their layout, photography, and typesetting are quite good. That's upsetting some people. Most nut groups can't format a newsletter.

[1] [http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis- isil-p...](http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil- propaganda-magazine-dabiq#)

<comment> vezzy-fnord Don't forget the whole eugenics movement. The likes of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant were very popular in their day, but ultimately subsided and in retrospect are derided. The NSDAP did borrow a lot from them, though - Lindbergh was hardly the only one endorsing Hitler, he was an intellectual featherweight relative to many others.

<comment><USER3> If WW2 hadn't occurred we would probably have our own n-tier master race at home by now. Obedient, diligent worker drones powering our own corporate fascist ship.

<comment><USER4> We largely did. The elites just decided it was more profitable to have most of the drones in countries with cheaper labor and looser regulations. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been > able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an > effective way," Mr. Posner wrote. The Islamic State's ability to spread > "ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks," he said, "calls for new > thinking about limits on freedom of speech."

This seems to me like the keystone of the argument, and I'm fairly sure a good bout of research into anarchist and communist terrorism/propaganda around the turn of the 20th century would show it false.

<comment><USER6> If we, as a society, believe it is possible for an _idea_ to be dangerous -- not a person, nor a thing, but an _idea_ -- then we have already lost the purpose of the right that the First Amendment is supposed to protect.

<comment><USER7> I think most people agree that an idea can be dangerous. As I understand it, the first amendment exists because we believe that this danger is outweighed by the dangers of censorship and the benefits of the marketplace of ideas.

<comment><USER8> And ideas are bulletproof.

<comment><USER9> That's exactly it though.

We defend against dangerous ideas by dragging them out into the light of day and examining them.

Sticking them underground does the exactly opposite of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since 2001 more more people have died on US soil from toppling vending machines than from terrorist attacks.. Yet we are constantly told we need to scrap the entire bill of rights to stay safe. It's ridiculous. Who does this serve?

<comment><USER11> Do you have a citation for this? I'd love to share it with a friend of mine who is afraid of being a victim of terrorism in the US.

<comment><USER4> Detailed data is here:

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf)

I'm guessing terrorism is under one of the homicides. On most years, slips in bathtubs and bee stings kill more people than terrorists. Drowning, motor vehicles, chemical poisoning, half the crap in the grocery store, too much drugs/surgery... all sorts of things Americans aren't asking for censorship or intervention for that are what kill them en masse.

Terrorism? That just kills freedom when we pass laws to stop it. Just as it's partly intended to. ;)

<comment><USER12> "Terrorism? That just kills freedom when we pass laws to stop it. Just as it's partly intended to."

So true. I don't think even bin Laden himself could have dreamt of the amount of damage we would do to ourselves here in the US as a result of his attacks. The self-induced aftermath is worse than the actual carnage of the attacks themselves and seemingly has no end in sight. Just as it was intended to, but on a whole other, much larger scale, no doubt.

<comment><USER4> What's bad is that it was predicted, albeit more severely, in a movie about terrorism called The Siege. Starred Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis. Had attacks, the cell model of operation, the cops (Denzel) unable to do stuff, and the military (Bruce) called in to declare martial law. Some of the stuff Denzel said in the movie apply to America today. I highly recommend it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLQOc-B0Ys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLQOc-B0Ys)

Note: Key difference is America became both a surveillance state and a dual state. Dual state is when two governments, public and secret, operate in parallel with one able to bend/break rules to hit certain targets. This model is less likely to cause a revolution given most people never see the other side of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "His proposal would make it illegal to go onto websites that glorify the Islamic State or support its recruitment, or to distribute links to such sites. He would impose graduated penalties, starting with a warning letter, then fines or prison for repeat offenders, to convey that "looking at ISIS- related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden.""

Christ, what an asshole.

<comment><USER14> This is terrifying.

Eric Posner, quoted in the article, isn't some far right nutjob. He's a well respected law professor, son of the famous Judge Richard Posner (7th Cir.), and one of the most cited legal scholars in the country.

I'm not one to sound the alarm, but I'm actually worried about the First Amendment for the first time in my life.

<comment><USER9> And for the former ombudsman of NPR thought that blasphemy should not be constitutionally protected free speech.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2015/02/11/outgoing-npr-ombudsman-seems-to-have-some-words-in- favor-of-restricting-blasphemy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A similar thread ties the San Bernardino shooters, the Paris attacks of a few months ago and the Charlie Hebdo shooters and many others. The attackers weren't known as being particularly devout, but they weren't known for having much of a life outside the Jihadi cause.

By the time an impressionable, disheartened recruit is on the Internet looking for violent hate speech to adopt, many things have already failed socially for them: a real sense of belonging, dignified prospects, hope for a future, a nurturing, generative ethos, a stable family. They are a socially shattered coterie. Jihad gave them a sense of significance they never had but always wanted.

People underestimate a preference to die on one's feet over living on one's knees. Not to mention fighting for a cause larger than oneself, right or wrong.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Because a direct challenge to Constitutionally protected speech is unlikely, I predict the Communications Decency Act from the 1990s -- specifically, Section 230 which protects web services from many liability claims associated with comments posted by users (1) -- could be targeted for repeal or a major rewriting.

1\. [http://technology.findlaw.com/modern-law- practice/understand...](http://technology.findlaw.com/modern-law- practice/understanding-the-legal-issues-for-social-networking-sites-and.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> As if marking a certain brand of speech as forbidden, without being able to do more than a tiny smidgen to actually prevent its dissemination (as must be the case given the unfiltered nature of our Internet - unlike in the past with paper materials, not that censorship worked out so well then either), would reduce its effectiveness on vulnerable young people questioning their worldviews, as opposed to making it seem more attractive!

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that's the biggest problem here. Taking down a lecture from a Muslim extremist isn't going to somehow dissuade a young, easily-influenced person from looking for it. They're going to want to learn what "the government doesn't want you to see!", and will find the video through different means.

Maybe Youtube should instead modify those videos to still show them, but also provide some kind of pop-up or page inject with links to counter-arguments. This is still invasive, but a lot more reasonable, I think. When something has strong potential to turn some people into mass murderers, I think it's okay to be a little invasive.

<comment><USER18> Youtube already shows you related videos, and on the home page suggests videos based on your viewing history. It would not be difficult to modify those algorithms to attempt to suggest videos with the intent of influences the viewers belief (as opposed to maximizing their time on the site). Similarly, Google can do this with their main search engine as well. Of course, when thought about in the abstract, this seems highly distopian, but the time maximizing goal also has political effects (namely, the "search bubble" and radicalization).

<comment><USER17> It does feel a bit dystopian, but it's not trying to prevent supposed societal "ills" like "the gays" or "socialism". Violent terrorism and extremism are real global ills and negatively impact every society.

Calls for violence aren't considered valid free speech and can be directly banned. Calls for things that can eventually lead to violence are a much murkier area. They shouldn't be outright banned, but they should be mitigated.

<comment><USER19> > Violent terrorism and extremism are real global ills and negatively impact > every society.

I strongly disagree, with the inclusion of "extremism" in particular.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, which I think any clear-thinking person would identify as an extreme ideology. Do you wish to silence me? Is my telling people that they should engage in voluntary association and reject the initiation of force a "real global ill"?

To put it another way, in the words of Barry Goldwater: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

<comment><USER17> Maybe extremism wasn't the right word.

In this case, I meant extremist Islamic fundamentalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr The pinnacle of establishment propaganda suggests we should continue to pretend we can trade freedom for safety. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM)

</comment><comment><USER21> Would banning known venues for such communication make it go away? No, it would just make it harder to track. So many officials wanting to appear like they're doing something, but it's all security theater. Now taking it to the point of directly attacking the first Amendment? Scary times.

<comment><USER22> Scarier than you think. Many of these these proposals have already made it in Europe. It may come to the US too in the future given Millennials support for these kinds of measures:

[http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of- millen...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials- ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/)

<comment><USER17> There's still a _huge_ difference between a proposal to ban racist speech, and a proposal to ban videos preaching Islamic extremism. The latter is a lot more likely to lead to physical harm and death.

<comment><USER22> Depends, what's the likelihood of dying from a racist assault compared to a terrorist assault? And how do you measure the effect racist and terrorist speech has on these assaults? And who decides for us what's ok to watch and what's not? And once you decide it's ok to censor, well, we all know where that leads.

<comment><USER17> >Depends, what's the likelihood of dying from a racist assault compared to a terrorist assault?

I think both are incredibly low odds, but globally, the chance of dying in a terrorist assault is probably higher. Most racist media does not advocate violence or death towards minorities; just discrimination and isolation, typically.

For example, probably one of the most popular racist websites out there is [http://www.dailystormer.com](http://www.dailystormer.com), and they have a large disclaimer:

>We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently.

You can find similar disclaimers on websites like Stormfront.

But lectures from people like al-Awlaki? They're both more powerful messages, because they're objective directives ("God DEMANDS you do this"), and directly call for violence towards non-Muslims.

I think both send awful messages, but the latter is worse for society in general.

<comment><USER23> > globally

Sure, globally that's probably true. It's a bit more complicated because some of the terrorist groups are openly racist.

> You can find similar disclaimers on websites like Stormfront.

That's partly because of the years of right wing terrorism happening in the brought considerable attention to sites like Stormfront.

When you have the FBI listing your members on the top-ten list you either put up warnings or go underground.

But even so,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)#Controver...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_\(website\)#Controversies)

> According to a 2014 two-year study by the Southern Poverty Law Center > (SPLC)'s Intelligence Report, registered Stormfront users have been > disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and > mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the five years leading > up to 2014, Stormfront members murdered nearly 100 people.[23][24][25][26] > Of these, 77 were massacred by one Stormfront user, Anders Breivik, a > Norwegian terrorist who perpetrated the 2011 Norway attacks.[27]

It seems the disclaimer doesn't do much.

<comment><USER17> That's fair. Racist attacks are definitely a big problem. But these are racist members of racist websites mostly acting of their own initiative, and not reading violent instructions or declarations from the website. In contrast, Islamic extremist websites do specifically tell people to kill people. That's why censorship of those resources could be a bit more justified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why aren't we teaching our children the responsibilities of freedom instead of attempting to take freedom away?

</comment><comment><USER25> The only thing historically unique about ISIS is the historical overreaction to it. Posner's absurd histrionics are a case in point.

</comment><comment><USER26> The Founders could not have imagined the internet, so I'm not sure how the 1st Amendment even applies to it.

/sarc

<comment><USER19> Sarcasm or not, that's effectively the argument that's being presented here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This article apparently presumes that the US "owns" the Internet and that laws passed here apply to people in other countries...

As much as I despise Daesh, this is not the right way to do things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't bury the ISIS message, we should give them 10 minutes a day on VoA at least. I watched the 700 club as a kid, the crystal cathedral, what is the fucking difference?

<comment><USER28> > what is the fucking difference?

Funny, I can't remember Pat Robertson or Robert Schuller putting people in cages, dousing them with diesel and burning them alive.

<comment><USER29> Our allies in various counter-insurgencies over the years _have_ done such things, and many of those wars have been enthusiastically supported by the religious right.

<comment><USER29> Since this is a technical site, let me point out that if you're down-voting this because you believe that neither we nor our allies have done such things, then you need educate yourself on the modern history and conduct of warfare and counter-insurgency. If this strikes you as an outrageous claim, then your model of the world and of how we wage war is just wrong.

If you're down-voting for other reasons, well, have at it.

<comment><USER3> Jabavu, we are now friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of Gaiman's "Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech" [http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom- of-...](http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky- speech.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Remember, ISIS wouldn't be around if it weren't for the US.

And even as late as 2014, the Saudis prevented the US from attacking ISIS.

So the US helps create ISIS and stands by while it consolidates power ... and _I_ am supposed to pay for it with my First Amendment?!?

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd like to see the constitutional amendment that would get written. If written in general it could probably be used to throw most of the politicians in jail. Wouldn't advocacy for gun laws be generally inciting violence, how about violent video games? Wouldn't calling for going to war be considered generally inciting violence? The bible talks a lot about violence should it be outlawed?

</comment><comment><USER9> Related reading: Mike Hume's Trigger Warning. [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trigger-Warning-Offensive-Killing- Sp...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trigger-Warning-Offensive-Killing-Speech- ebook/dp/B00QPTAUBE)

I'm actually in the middle of reading it now.

</comment><comment><USER33> If ISIS didn't exist, some government agency would have to create it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why are Americans so afraid? You are the most powerful nation in the history of the planet. You routinely bend the rest of the world to your will. Your military kills civilians with relative impunity.

What are you so afraid of? Just chill the fuck out, m'kay?</comment>


HN Feedback: Shortcuts bookmarklets - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I've written these bookmarklets called Shortcuts that give you a way to really quickly look at all of the keyboard shortcuts for your browser without interrupting your work.
You can get them at http://scottjackson.org/software/shortcuts
Shortcuts are currently available for Safari on OS X and Firefox on OS X and Windows. Thought they might be useful to some here, since the HN crowd seems like the kind that would use keyboard shortcuts. Any feedback, leave it here or email me (my email address is included on the Shortcuts page). <comment><USER2> check out KeyCue: <http://www.macility.com/products/keycue/>

Similar idea, but works for _any_ application in OS X.. One of my favorite tools.</comment>


New Jersey slaps MIT Bitcoin hackers with subpoena - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitcoin-hackers-with-subpoena-and-theyre-fighting-back/ <comment><USER2> Follow the lobbyists.

Figure out who was threatened enough by a bitcoin model to want the government to step in.

Because there is no way they have this kind of time on their hands to pursue this and have such in depth technical knowledge to know what to look for, without some corporate lobbyists spoon feeding it to the prosecutor.

Not that I believe tidbit could ever be profitable or useful, but still.

<comment><USER3> No conspiracy necessary. From the article:

 _" With a snippet of embedded code, Tidbit could enable websites to tap into visitors' computers and borrow CPU cycles to mine Bitcoin."_

Ads that take over the screen for a few seconds are bad enouogh. A website that takes over _a computer_ to run computationally expensive tasks? With ads, at least their is the opportunity to run adblockers. With a javascript miner, visitors are left with the choice of disabling javascript, and essentially their access to the modern web, or risking a website abusing their computer.

 _The subpoena and accompanying interrogatories issued to Rubin demonstrate that the people working for New Jersey's division of consumer affairs have made little effort to understand what Tidbit's software actually does._

Based on how Tidbit has described their software, it sounds like New Jersey knows exactly what the software actually does: it runs a BTC miner on a website visitor's computer, potentially without their knowledge. And as the ESEA fiasco demonstrated, this could result in actual, physical damage to people's computers.

Is this overreaching? Maybe. Maybe not. That's what the purpose of the investigation is for.

<comment><USER4> The javascript miner was not deployed anywhere. At no point was anyone in New Jersey knowingly or unknowningly served Tidbit's bitcoin mining code.

<comment><USER3> The Tidbit team _claims_ that the miner was not deployed anywhere. The purpose of the investigation is presumably to make sure this is the case.

Unfortunately, due to the antics of many other major Bitcoin players, anyone doing something Bitcoin-related is generally deemed untrustworthy unless they prove otherwise. (And from a ideological standpoint, if one believes in the free market, this is how it should be--trust must be earned, not granted.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone with a background in law tell me if or why it wouldn't be legal to turn over bitcoin private keys, complying exactly with a request, while also using your own retained copies of those keys to sign transfer transactions sending all those bitcoins held by the previous (now compromised) keys to your new ones that are not covered by the subpoena?

It seems to me that you'd be complying exactly with their request, as furnishing a copy of data does not obligate you to delete your own.

<comment><USER6> Subverting the intent of a ruling or law is not viewed favorably, and can easily be fixed, if need be, by tighter wording.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's subverting the intent to move the BTC out. The point of subpoenas is to get information, not resources; if you want resources the correct mechanism is a seizure. The court is probably just asking for everything it can just in case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hysteria aside, what happens when a court subpoena demands someone hand over something they don't have? Does the person just say, "I don't have it." and that's that? What if they lie about not having it?

<comment><USER9> Contempt of court faces up to 5yrs in jail.

<comment><USER10> There's no jail limit for contempt of court.

14 years: [http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/07/14/man-jailed-on-civil- cont...](http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/07/14/man-jailed-on-civil-contempt- charges-freed-after-14-years/)

7 years: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Armstrong](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Armstrong)

<comment><USER9> Ah, in Canada it's 5 years. "Punishment can range from the person being imprisoned for a period of less than five years or until the person complies with the order or fine."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If these New Jersey prosecutors fail with this one, I'm sure they can slap some felony computer fraud charges on them for violating X website's ToS agreement.

Prosecutors need to lose their immunity, then we might get some sanity back in the justice system.

<comment><USER12> What prosecutors?

<comment><USER11> New Jersey Attorney General John Hoffman and Deputy Attorney General Glenn Graham... since you asked.

<comment><USER12> Note the caption: Rubin v. New Jersey. Rubin is the plaintiff. The AG is acting in its capacity as the government's lawyer, not in its capacity as a prosecutor. There is no prosecutor, because there is no criminal complaint. What's at issue is a civil subpoena (a request for information and materials) issued by a state consumer protection agency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope they are asking for sanctions in addition to quashing the subpoena. Whoever wrote this subpoena is not only ignorant but has a massive attitude problem, for which some jail time would be therapeutic.

<comment><USER6> No. Let us, instead, wish for justice for all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Umm.... what were they issued the subpoena FOR!? I read the entire article waiting for this to be explained.

Or can you just be subpoena'd without any case?

<comment><USER15> The article explains the case pretty well:

> ...the language in the subpoena reads much like the state's computer fraud > act, which carries some stiff penalties. Last year, New Jersey alleged that > E-Sports Entertainment (ESEA) hijacked their [subscribers'] computing power > to mine Bitcoins... the state believes Tidbit may similarly violate > consumers' rights.

According to the EFF:

> the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs issued a subpoena to Rubin, > requesting he turn over Tidbit's past and current source code, as well as > other documents and agreements with any third parties. It also issued 27 > interrogatories -- formal written questions -- requesting additional > documents and ordering Rubin to turn over information like the names and > identities of all Bitcoin wallet addresses associated with Tidbit, a list of > all websites running Tidbit's code and the name of anybody whose computer > mined for Bitcoins through the use of Tidbit, although Tidbit's code was not > configured to mine for Bitcoins.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/eff-challenges-new- jer...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/eff-challenges-new-jersey- subpoena-issued-mit-student-bitcoin-developers)

<comment><USER16> It reads "much like" the computer fraud act, but that doesn't mean a case was brought forward. Can a subpoena really be issued without a corresponding case?

<comment><USER17> When subpoenas can be issued, by who, and when, varies from state to state (and in the federal world, agency to agency). There are definitely administrative subpoenas, investigatory subpoenas, etc, depending on who and where.

Back in 2000 (best data i can find on short notice), at least 12 states permitted prosecutors to serve investigative subpoenas on targets, witnesses, and record keepers before they charge a person with a crime

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is the first I've heard of Tidbit and I have to say that it is absolutely ingenious!!!

If they do open source the code, I strongly hope that webmasters would actually replace obtrusive ads with the mining protocol and not just add it in addition to ad revenue.

<comment><USER8> CPU bitcoin mining doesn't really do much. The idea is nice, but it would take way too long to be competitive as a form of revenue generation if all it had access to was the CPU.

<comment><USER19> i'm willing to wager it's possible to write a WebGL shader to mine bitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can actually see their point, although yes, they're going about it completely the wrong way.

Bitcoin mining using malicious javascript will cost people a lot of money in power bills if done without permission, and this project has good intentions, but I'd be unsurprised if it has already been forked to run without victims knowing. It's just another form of intrusive advert.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm all for state's rights, but, given what the article says, I cannot understand how NJ has any ability to issue the subpoena. It isn't an active product that has been used in production so no NJ resident has been "harmed". Its like the NJ prosecutor read some tech article and decided to act.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like a wonderful way to waste electricity and kill browser performance at the same time.

<comment><USER23> The concept could be adapted for a more productive proof-of-work currency like PrimeCoin[1]. I wonder why PrimeCoin and others don't get more exposure.

[1] : [http://primecoin.io/](http://primecoin.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Tidbit uses the Stratum protocol, which would enable websites to get paid > based on total work contributed to the mining pool rather than total > Bitcoins mined

No, that's what P2Pool, or really any pool, does. Stratum, as the link states, is just a long-poll protocol to reduce stale shares when a new block is found.

But speaking of pools, it seems like the best bang for their buck would be a scrypt profit-switching multipool, that mines the most profitable scrypt coin and exchanges for btc or dollars or whatever. This would potentially create a huge pool so p2pool is better in that respect, but it's just not profitable to mine BTC like this at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ridiculous prosecution aside, something tells me Tidbit will be used in addition to, not as a replacement of display ads.

(That assumes there will always be a cryptocoin worth mining with a CPU/GPU. Right now it's silly to do so for bitcoin)

</comment><comment><USER26> if you do something that is legally ambiguous and you get penalised for it then it is your own fault.

this is one reason why i am reluctant to buy any bitcoins or cryptocurrency in general - esp given the strong background of money laundering.

its a shame. i do think the future of currency lies in bitcoin or similar... its just not there yet.

sure if everyone ends up using it the legality will need resolving sooner, but to a very good approximation nobody uses it at the moment (!)

i base this on the data that there are a great deal fewer bitcoin addresses in use atm than enough to assign one of them to each out of 0.1% of the world population - given that many people use multiple addresses i don't think its unreasonable to consider it very close to non-existent in that naive sense... penalising all of the people currently involved is not out of the question yet... not by a very long way imo.

(source: [http://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique- addresses?timespan=30...](http://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique- addresses?timespan=30days))

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't stand it anymore! Why are we prosecuting these people instead of Comcast who is on a course to destroy our infrastructure? Of course I know the answer. I just can't deal with it anymore. I will just stop reading any news.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't make heads or tails of this—why is New Jersey, specifically, issuing this subpoena? Do they have jurisdiction? Is the student from New Jersey?</comment>


Cool Y Combinator Kids Muscle in on Cloud Management - <AUTHOR> http://www.undertheradarblog.com/blog/cool-ycombinator-kids-muscle-in-on-cloud-management/

<comment><USER2> Funny they asked about business model. That seems like a startup that will be very easy to monetize if it catches on. Anytime your clientele are people who are paying hundreds or thousands a month for something related to your service, it's not hard to make money.

<comment><USER3> Their company might seem more stable and earn more clients if they were charging something now, however. Data management is definitely a field where the appearance of permanence adds values. Revenue is one such indicator.</comment></comment>


Poor managers 'still rewarded' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32985637

<comment><USER2> The title says "1/3 of underperforming bosses were given bonuses", but the content says "1/3 of those who were given bonuses are underperforming". Somebody is clueless here, rendering the article being trash.</comment>