The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bjcampbell/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical-case-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437 <comment><USER3> I'd like to modify the statistical argument against the author's conclusion -- if we take his yearly probability of violent regime change in the US and take the yearly likelihood as i.i.d., then the probability that it will happen in the remainder of my statistically likely life is significantly reduced by it not having happened in the first 1/3rd. And every year that I procrastinate prepping, I'm more and more incentivized to skip it the next year. That's the math that the average person is unconsciously doing...

To extrapolate to a rural/urban divide, the number of times I've lost power and the average length of that loss is _massively_ lower in the city that I now live in vs. the country farmstead I grew up on, both within 100 miles of one another. Similarly, the number of times I've been unwilling to leave my house because of a major snow event or the like is much lower in the city than it was back home because the speed of road clearing is much much higher here. These sorts of infrastructure things build into the heuristic that produces "trust in the system" in a person, and the likelihood that you'll prep for a week without power or three days snowed in. Once you've prepped for that, prepping a little more is easier because you're already storing extra food and toilet paper, keeping a generator on hand to keep the well running since you're not on municipal water or sewer, etc... It all adds up to different populations feeling very differently about how sane/necessary this activity is.

<comment><USER4> This is the problem with extrapolating a linear trend from nonlinear data. I think few people would argue that the probability of revolution in the US in any given year is as high now as it was in say 1800.

When you take two data points over a period, and use those to establish a linear trend, you get misleading results. I'm nowhere near smart enough to re- crunch the numbers, but I hope someone else on HN will.

Setting aside the scenario of revolution though, there are lots of other scenarios that justify "prepping" even more. Katrina is a great example; those people who chose to stay behind were left without civilized infrastructure in some areas for quite a while. Puerto Rico, too. Here in California, we have the prospect of a devastating earthquake for which we're long overdue, and we're right on the hairy edge of our firefighting resources being overwhelmed each year.

I've taken a different approach to prepping. I'm a search and rescue volunteer and I have basic medical training. In case of major disaster, I hope to be a resource that can be sent into those areas. It's a different mindset from the stereotypical prepper, but we're really both working off of the same assumptions: that there's a significant chance of experiencing first-hand a collapse of civil infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> > I think few people would argue that the probability of revolution in the US > in any given year is as high now as it was in say 1800.

Are you saying it's not? Were they cavemen in 1800, and now we are a thoughtful civilized breed?

The United States has been at war most of my life. My parents lived through a war with a draft. My grandparents experienced World War 2. Seems like war is normal and peace is the aberration.

<comment><USER6> The Indian Wars were fought pretty much constantly from before the creation of the United States until Wounded Knee in 1890. Even for a relatively young nation, it's spent the majority of its existence at war with someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > all he must do to ensure it doesn't hurt anyone is not shoot anyone with it

That assumes his gun will never be stolen, or that an accidental shooting is out of the question. Some stats:

"According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during the four-year period from 2012 to 2015, nearly half a billion dollars worth of guns were stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.2 million guns."

[https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/guns- crime/reports/2...](https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/guns- crime/reports/2017/07/25/436533/stolen-guns-america/)

"From 2006-2016, almost 6,885 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings. In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths."

[https://www.aftermath.com/content/accidental-shooting- deaths...](https://www.aftermath.com/content/accidental-shooting-deaths- statistics)

And those stats only consider deaths. Think about survivable injuries on top of that.

Also, keep in mind that even people who receive some sort of basic firearm safety training typically don't receive training related to how to respond to violent confrontations. The NRA, for instance, offers several Personal Protection courses, but typically you've got to take home firearm safety and shooting courses before you can take a Personal Protection course. The problem is that some people take a firearm safety training course and then think they're fully qualified to act in a violent confrontation. And, unfortunately, that misplaced confidence can put themselves and others in harm's way.

<comment><USER8> "In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths."

In 2015 there were 1250000 incidents of violent crime. No need for further math. I'll keep my guns.

<comment><USER9> Peh. I've been a victim of violent crime five times.

I was punched in the chest on my way to school age 11. I was chased by a gang of kids and punched several times in the back aged 16. I was pelted by eggs while crossing a park twice aged 22 and 23, and was fairly badly mugged aged 25.

Not one of those would have worked out better had I been armed. The first time I was surprised, and the best that would have happened would have been that some guy got shot in the back walking away. Satisfying, but unhelpful. The second might have been stopped if I'd brandished, but then again I might have dropped the gun getting it out and been shot, or overpowered before I fired. I was shit scared and vastly outnumbered. The third and fourth I was both surprised _and_ outnumbered. And anyway, who the fuck pulls a gun in retaliation for an egging? The final and most serious time, I was attacked without warning from the back, and was knocked down to the floor trying to protect my head against my assailants' kicks long before I could have thought to draw a firearm.

Shittons of violent crime is like this: it mostly neither justifies nor provides opportunity for gun use.

Of course, I live in England, so at no point did I have to fear being shot. But I don't think that's in favour of owning firearms just-in-case either, frankly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Campbell is tremendously overestimating how much extreme prepping actually increases your chances of survival. Keeping a week or two of food, water, and energy is smart, but "zombie prepping" is useless:

Revolutionary War: Unless they chose to fight, the "middle class" of independent farmers wasn't much affected (though I'll admit they were already zombie-prepped). The poor did the dying, and the elites got kicked out.

Civil War: Much more calamitous, but little that could be done about it. If you were displaced, your stocks of supplies were reduced to only what you could escape with. If you were killed violently, well, no point buying a gun when you'll be given one before sent charging into artillery fire.

Russia: See Civil War above. And just for fun, remember that having a large private store of grain wasn't exactly smiled upon during collectivization.

France: While farmers were undoubtedly more food-secure than their urban compatriots during occupation, those who cached guns and joined the Resistance weren't exactly making the safe choice.

China/North Korea/Vietnam: See Russia above

Africa: Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences. But if we're talking colonialism, advising people to buy land is a bit out of touch, don't you think?

<comment><USER11> > Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where > to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and > experiences.

Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this in depth is insulting?

You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans. The goal isn't just to be food secure, it is to prevent being victimized while the crisis is ongoing or you escape the crisis.

<comment><USER10> > Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this > in depth is insulting?

Except he doesn't acknowledge ignorance, he plows ahead and puts the entire continent in the same category as Syria and Afganistan. Less than 2% of Africans live in the countries he does deign to mention.

> You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of > these plans.

Good luck singlehandedly fighting off the Venezuelan/Russian/Union/rebel army when they come to appropriate your assets. There's a reason insurgents use hit-and-run tactics, they'd be slaughtered in a pitched battle.

<comment><USER12> I don't think you're discussing the same threat model as the author. You're talking about fighting an army. He's talking about other dangerous, non- military people (e.g. Another gang of survivors, who happen to have guns while you just have food)

To be fair, military presence is certainly a problematic situation, but it seems more likely you'd encounter other, uh, less-than-savory people out there in an apocalyptic scenario, who are more likely to be dangerous to you than military personnel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with this article's defense of firearms for disaster preparedness is that firearms are among the least urgent disaster-preparedness items. If what people were really concerned about was disaster preparedness, the things they would obsess over would be flashlights, water storage and purification, a few weeks of food supplies, backup power sources, medical supplies, portable radios. Some preppers do spend time and energy thinking about this, it's true.

But usually what you typically have is a person who enjoys guns and is trying to think about a situation where it might possibly be useful to own an AR-15. It's a terrible self-defense weapon in an urbanized area (compared to a shotgun or handgun), and they're illegal to hunt with in lots of areas. Owning such a gun requires a major investment of money and time (for practice and training), and encourages this kind of paranoid outlook. So you have interest in guns driving interest in disaster preparedness, rather than interest in disaster preparedness driving interest in guns.

<comment><USER14> I got a whiff of this mindset when I found out about peak oil circa 2005 or so.

There were folks who had transitioned off the grid in a sustainable way. The point of these weapons is to protect their families against roving gangs looking to scavenge resources ala Mad Max. A family of four will not be able to fight off dozens with shotguns, even against a large unarmed group they will be quickly overwhelmed after taking out a few - semi-auto weapons though they have a fighting chance.

This is also the primary reason they tend to move far away from cities - it's not that they don't like people or civilization in general (they may or may not), it's just that it thins out the number of people who could reasonably access their homestead.

I feel the vast majority of folks who have these weapons have them because they're 'cool'. But for the hard-core preppers convinced that the world is going to end they're an essential survival tool in a post-apocalyptic future.

<comment><USER15> Roving gangs won't stick to cities, they will branch out and then that family alone on their homestead won't stand a chance. However if they are in a neighborhood and work together with their neighbors, then they have a fighting chance.

<comment><USER14> That's near term thinking. Longer term thinking had the # of people who were living sustainably OTG to be a vastly small minority of the populace, hence everyone aside from immediate family members were your enemies.

In regards to population density, the further groups had to travel on limited resources the more dispersed and weaker they would be, and in turn the amount of resources available would be more dispersed relative to lack to nearby neighbors, all of which would be reasonably well protected.

Basically, you want to be relatively well fortified slim-pickings that are hard to reach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life _now_ (not only with prep expenses, but also with stress and paranoia) in exchange for surviving a low- probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence.

There's a surprisingly solid mathematical case for living in the present and near future, and accepting the risk of catastrophe that you'd only have a marginal chance of surviving and thriving in. In WWII Austria and Poland, a huge catastrophe, the people who escaped suffering weren't the preppers, they were the people who saw writing on the wall and moved away.

<comment><USER17> "in exchange for surviving a low-probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence."

You're assuming the very worst case there; there's a wide range of outcomes between "everything's great!" and "there's a supermutant banging on my door". Consider France, mentioned as place where many violent events have occurred, but which most people would still consider a nice place to live.

Prepping for 2-4 weeks of independent survival can also assist in the event of a power outage, major snow event, or any number of other mundane events.

It also has social benefits. It's nice if a small burp in food shipments doesn't produce rioting in the streets because there was no slack in the system. Prepping is putting slack in the system. Even if done for what may seem like a dumb reason, it really should still be encouraged to some degree.

<comment><USER18> Or consider a much more common catastrophe such as weather. Clearly there are more places prone to these types of disasters (like hurricane prone areas), but it is not hard to cut off a supply chain for a few days. Even when there are forecasts of heavy snow or something the grocery stores empty real fast. Prepping is for events like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Slightly related to the article: Does anyone else feel like the general public's inability to extract information from statistics is a huge problem?

I think that any sort of "standardized" education should include at least a class worth of teaching on how to interpret statistics.

<comment><USER20> > _I think that any sort of "standardized" education should include at least a > class worth of teaching on how to interpret statistics._

This is sort of a fantasy of mine - having every public school teach a brief course on "not getting tricked".

In my fantasy world, it's a several-week guide to common ways people lie and mislead the public. One section is on interpreting statistics. Another is probably on comparing scientific papers to the news stories they spawn. Another on 'paltering' and all the things a given statement _doesn 't_ say. The 'fun' section covers cold reads, famous hoaxes, and a general sense of how to not end up believing in every silly story you hear. You could use _The Demon Haunted World_ as a readable source textbook for a lot of it.

It's a pipe dream, of course. You'd need teachers who could teach it, which is a tall order to begin with, and then you'd need to find a way to give out examples without offending half the parents in the school when every examples (astrology, crystal healing, and so on) is going to cross _somebody_.

But damn, even if it didn't take completely, wouldn't it be nice to at least have a shared framework to talk about this stuff?

<comment> rm_-rf_slash When I was in middle school, my home economics class had a week on media literacy, and while I only remember one sentence:

"Is a song played on the radio because it is popular, or is it popular because it is played on the radio?"

...it told me everything I needed to know at a young age.

Ten years later I'm introduced to Adam Curtis' "Century of the Self" and that filled in a few gaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Until the same bans are applied to police and military forces operating on US soil, this isn't even a discussion. It's incredible to me that even some gun owners do not realize that the primary purpose for the right to own guns is to keep the police and military at bay. I'm certain that without the huge number of guns, we would be in an even deeper police state than currently. A gun owner has no need to even unpack or assemble a gun in order to have a positive impact on society, namely keeping police somewhat in check through the possibility that they may use their gun should police get out of line. Our police and military are the likeliest enemies these days, but foreign forces invading cannot be completely ruled out, though extremely unlikely. Guns, and the ability to own them, are the only thing keeping us from complete tyranny. In that sense, the thousands of lives lost due to guns, while a tragedy, are not a reason to change our gun laws and never will be.

</comment><comment><USER15> Instead of being an interesting discussion about the mathematics of events worth preparing for, this is turning into a tired discussion about the merits of guns.

I was hoping for the former, because if I wanted the latter, all I have to do is go on Facebook.

<comment><USER22> That's probably because, despite the title of the article, it's almost entirely about guns.

<comment><USER15> Mentioned in opening because I imagine most people associate preppers with gun hoarders.

NOT mentioned in the subsequent sections about Hydrology, Math, Cheating, Horizon, and a brief mention in Disaster Planning. _Then_ in the 6th major section we talk about guns.

"almost entirely about guns" if that's all you want it to be about maybe.

<comment><USER22> Those were all background to talk about guns. Prepping (whether for disasters, revolutions, or zombocalypses) is about far more than just armaments, but there's almost no discussion of how non-gun supplies factor into it.

<comment><USER15> I reread the title and noticed it does have the word "gun" in it, so there is a little merit to your argument, but I stand by my belief it was just included because I think most people associate "prepping" with gun hoarders. The author clearly is more interested in the math than the guns here.

The beginning of the title is "The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case" and the author devotes a lot more space in the article about that than guns. So it's tiring when people jump on the gun bandwagon, than talk about the math of the disasters.

<comment><USER22> A mathematical case would discuss the benefit you get from prepping once disaster strikes. The article talks a lot about the probability of disaster, but takes the benefit of prepping as a foregone conclusion, and essentially equates prepping with stockpiling guns and ammo.

An actual solid mathematical case for gun stockpiling would need to show that 1) disasters are likely enough to prep for 2) the expected benefits of prepping outweigh the costs and 3) stockpiling guns is a better use of your finite resources than e.g. buying more canned beans.

It hits 1 pretty well, then it gives up and just assumes 3. No surprise that the discussion it generates isn't very productive.

<comment><USER11> > An actual solid mathematical case for gun stockpiling would need to show > that 1) disasters are likely enough to prep for 2) the expected benefits of > prepping outweigh the costs and 3) stockpiling guns is a better use of your > finite resources than e.g. buying more canned beans.

He kind of addresses that when he mentions the "raider" survival plan. "For an unethical zombie prepper, firearms may be all they need, if they can find someone else from whom to steal."

Maybe I'm deep enough into gun culture to see something as implicit where it ought to be explicit, but that suggests that it's worth having a minimum amount of deterrent against hostile parties once you have a few weeks food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure I buy this statistical justification for gun ownership, because if you're into statistics then you owe it to yourself to look not only at the odds that you will need a gun at some point in your life (which is what this article argues) but _also_ at the odds on what that gun will be used for while you own it (which this article totally ignores).

Adding a gun to your house increases the odds of successful suicide, of that gun being used against you, and of that gun being involved in an accidental death of a loved one. Gun ownership isn't as simple as "don't shoot anyone with it." Every year that you own a gun, there is a nonzero risk of it being part of a tragedy. You can mitigate and reduce this risk, but it's just as dumb to set it at 0 (because you're responsible) as it is to assume that the odds of a revolution are 0 (because one has not happened in your country in your lifetime).

A more thorough assessment would use the same Bernoulli Process to calculate the lifetime odds that the gun will be involved in a tragedy, and compare it to the odds that it'll save your life in a disaster of some kind.

FiveThirtyEight has a great writeup on gun deaths here, if you haven't seen it. 2/3 of the gun deaths in America are suicides.

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun- deaths/](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/)

<comment><USER24> The probability of a civil insurrection can be roughly estimated, and is completely external to me. My decisions have no effect on that. The average rate of gun suicides have nothing to do with the probability that I will turn my gun on myself, which is zero. As the author says, if you think you're going to use your rifle for murder or suicide, you should get rid of it.

People are always conflating population averages with individual probabilities, as if the behavior of other people has some magical nonlocal interaction with an individual's behavior.

The rate of alcohol-related sickness and death is probably much higher for people who keep hard liquor in the house. But I can fill my cupboards with whiskey and never take more than one drink a day. Know thyself.

<comment><USER25> So you're completely discounting that you'll ever have suicide ideation just because you've never had it before?

And many people have spouse and kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Another reason is if for some reason we have an oil crisis. Most of what you eat is delivered on trucks. No oil means no food in about two weeks. Hunting used to be par for the course just a few decades ago.

<comment><USER27> From personal experience, from a social circle that spans a wide variety of types of people, the venn diagram of "people who are Into Guns" and "people who can effectively hunt their own food" has no overlap.

My friends who are Into Guns are into feeling tough and powerful, like they've always got an upper hand in any situation. When they go into the great outdoors, it's to drink beer and shoot their guns into the woods. (Yeah, it's stupid and dangerous and shitty. I stopped camping with them some time ago.)

My family members who hunt never talk about their guns, they just hunt with them a couple times a year and fill their chest freezers with deer.

<comment><USER28> What does enthusiasm for guns have to do with this discussion?

<comment><USER13> The linked article is about rationales for possessing rifles such as the AR-15.

<comment><USER28> You can own an AR-15 without being compelled to enthuse about it to everyone (as the grandparent mentioned their poor-hunter friends do).

<comment><USER29> The AR-15 is the key word. Subsistence hunters aren't buying expensive guns. You can get guns for that purpose for 80% less money.

AR-15s are like toy light sabers for adults.

<comment><USER30> > You can get guns for that purpose for 80% less money.

AR-15s are by far the least expensive they've ever been right now, and are substantially less expensive than any reasonable alternative.

You can get a complete AR-15 for <$500, easily. If you're willing to put the parts together yourself, you can do it for ~$350.

You're certainly not going to get a new hunting rifle of similar quality for $70-$100.

> AR-15s are like toy light sabers for adults.

Sure, they can be. It's a fairly common cliche that they're "Barbie dolls for grown men" \- but I fail to see how that's relevant. The article was about preppers, not firearms enthusiasts.

<comment><USER29> That's crazy — I've been out of this world for a log time, basically since graduating college. Back in the 90s, I had friends who spent multiples of that on AR-15 type rifles!

Personally, I'm not someone who will survive long in a combat situation, so I don't spend much time thinking about guns.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, a _lot_ has changed since the 90s. The '94 "Assault Weapons Ban" made them popular; when it expired in '04, production shot through the roof. Various panics have happened since then that kept them relatively expensive, but since Trump's election prices have fallen through the floor.

These days you can easily get a lower receiver (the part that's considered a firearm by the ATF) for <$100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Lots of straw men, poor assumptions, bad analogies and more in this article. He starts with some weird dumb swipe at "the Left" for thinking tyranny is impossible. And ends with a something I've never heard of: a class of people "vehemently demanding the confiscation of rifles". He ticks off countless wars to prove that states of violence is common, but conflicts that reach the state of "war" are going to roll over you and your family and all your prepper gear whether you have one, ten or zero AR-15s.

And the author is extremely naive in his assumptions about the relative risk of having an assault rifle in your home versus the marginal increase in safety said assault rifle would grant you in the case of a massive societal breakdown. If anything, at best it would be a wash: Carrying the rifle openly would just get you targeted by military, militia, gangs, or other preppers who would at such a point have nothing to stop them from employing pre-emptive lethal violence against you. You might be able to protect your home from random lone-wolf raiders, but organized groups could overwhelm you pretty quickly.

As for his two-data-point calculation of the likelihood of violent rebellion based on the history of the United States, the Civil War was a fairly straightforward war between government-equipped armies, not a period of random anarchy. And the Revolutionary War was relatively small-scale given the expanse of the American colonies at that time.

The sadly common European wars up until 1945 were horrific wastes of human life, but again, I'm not sure how having a rifle handy would appreciably change the lives of the folks impacted by the wars. I don't know about earlier wars but I'm pretty sure most every healthy fighting age male in Europe was in their respective military, not holed up in their basement protecting their tins of sardines from the looters across the street.

Point being, the chances of a societal collapse where your AR-15 will make a difference for the safety of your home and your family is miniscule. And the risk of the gun's presence in your home over the decades you wait for the apocolypse which never comes is much, much greater.

</comment><comment><USER32> A few years back I became obsessed with securing a server (a previous one had been hacked). I noticed after a while that what started out reasonable (updating software, closing ports, etc)... had become unreasonable (writing custom code to detect changes to any file on the machine)... and I realized that each step normalized the next step in the sequence. The same thing is in effect with preppers.

You start with the thought "I should have some canned goods and water on hand."... 5 years later you're locked in your bunker in south dakota... each step seemed reasonable, but the destination is unreasonable.

That said, you should have some canned goods and water on hand. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> To me, the problem I have with 'preppers' or the 'gun lobby' is that the over extend their arguments past the point of reasonable-ness.

You may have a very valid reason for owning an AR-15 (even if that very valid reason is 'its rad at the range'). But for basically every valid reason, you can extrapolate a valid reason to own a pickup truck. In fact, there are _more_ valid reasons to own a pickup truck. Pickup trucks, and the materials for making them work, are exposed to all manner of regulation and no-one but the most extreme anarchists make a peep.

Try applying the same sorts of regulations to AR-15s and you get 'slippery sloped' out of existence. So, to me, gun control advocates of the 'left' have not abandoned logical arguments, they've been out lobbied/pr'd by the gun extremists on the 'right'.

This is all coming from someone that does not own any AR-15s, but has fired them enough times to understand how much fun they are at the range.

<comment><USER34> Pickup trucks aren't protected by the constitution. Individual militia arms are.

Our government simply doesn't have the legal power to regulate ar15s like they do trucks.

IANAL but "right to bear arms shall not be infringed" sounds pretty bulletproof to me.

<comment><USER33> Why is it exactly that when people quote the 2nd ammendment they don't quote the whole thing. It's relatively short: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

IANAL either, but the courts have changed their position on it over the years. For instance in United States v. Cruikshank (1875) the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd amendment only applied to the federal government and states could restrict gun rights. Different parts of that decision have come under scrutiny many times.

In any case, its a very modern and specific reading of that amendment that suggests that none of our governments can regulate ar15 ownership. Further Amendment 10 is fairly clear that if it isn't mentioned then the federal doesn't have the right to regulate something, yet here we are with federal regulations on pickup trucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thank you author -- I knew cumulative / long-term probability had a name but did not know it -- Bernoulli Process.

>He could leave [his gun] in his attic with a couple of cans of ammunition, just in case something horrible does transpire where he might actually need it.

Please keep your firearms and ammo out of attics and crawlspaces, unless the alternative is underwater. The key to longevity is climate control, at least within reason.

<comment><USER36> Yep. They also need regular "exercise" and lubrication if you want them to be worth anything in a WROL situation.

<comment><USER26> Back when my uncle was in the army, they stored all their weapons dry so the oils wouldn't trap all the dust. So I guess the attic is ok as long as you store it try, or in a gun case or something.

<comment><USER36> There's enough oxygen floating around in various forms that the _lack_ of an oil layer can allow rust to form. There are other ways to treat it, as your uncle alluded to, but they are probably very sensitive to following the appropriate maintenance schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Cool. I hadn't thought of risk calculation as a Bernoulli process. Hey, I know next to nothing about risk calculations!

However. If we work backwards in time and keep to the same reasoning, the yearly probability of a violent revolution goes up for every year you get _closer_ to the last event (because there are fewer years to sample from). For example, the chance to have a violent revolution in 1866, after the US Civil War, was at its maximum for the period after the Civil War (0.57 by my calculation). That is intuitively wrong. Surely, the probability to have a violent revolution must be _minimal_ right after the end of the last one, when the new status quo is in its most well established, everyone is tired of fighting, etc etc.

I guess you can argue for and against that- but the point is that revolutions cannot be accurately modelled as a Bernoulli process, with a constant probability depending on time, else there is a risk of wildly over- or under- estimating the chance of having another one.

Finally- I think it's very dangerous to assume that just because you can model someone's reasoning as a rational process, that person will actually follow that process and reason rationally. Or in other words- someone else might be able to come up with rational arguments to back up preppers' actions, but that doesn't mean preppers themselves are thinking rationally. You can get to the same behaviour through very different lines of reasoning, not all of which are necessarily consistent.

<comment><USER38> _> That is intuitively wrong. Surely, the probability to have a violent revolution must be minimal right after the end of the last one, when the new status quo is in its most well established, everyone is tired of fighting, etc etc._

Is that intuitively wrong? How many civil wars and revolutions have we seen spiral into madness after the official end to hostilities between the "governments" involved? Iraq, Libya, and South Sudan are among dozens of examples we can pull from recent memory. The defeat of a government or other high level of societal organization does not imply the defeat of the reasons why the war began in the first place. The rise of the Jim Crow laws and the incessant waves of black emigration fron the South after the collapse of the Union state's Reconstruction efforts speaks to the inherent instability of post-war societies. There are more historical examples of "post-conflict" societies which almost immediately descend into further conflict than one can count. Once the seal of peace is broken, it's incredibly hard to recreate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can the author justify the accuracy of estimating revolt using a Bernoulli process? At minimum he should provide sufficient reason to believe that the random variables he is using as components of his Bernoulli process (which are 1 if a revolt or revolution occurs in a given year and 0 otherwise) are independent and identically distributed Bernoulli trials. These assumptions in the situation he is describing seem unlikely, or at best hard to establish. The author is being deceptive by not providing some sort of warning stating that there are good reasons to believe this is a bad model and the probabilities computed are inaccurate (no confidence intervals provided for instance).

<comment><USER8> He's working off a sample of 2, which he clearly stated.

<comment><USER39> Agreed, but then continues to go into larger data sets, of which his analyses suffer from the same erroneous model application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This only makes sense if they are willing to expend a similar, if not greater resources into pro-social, civilization strengthening activity.

Otherwise it's barbaric. Literally a bet against civilization and your fellow human.

<comment><USER30> I believe that a population that is proficient with firearms does in fact strengthen civilization. My experience is that it almost always results in the person seeing the world in a different, more individualist, way.

<comment><USER40> Firearms alone do not a civilization make.

If you are investing some portion of your income/wealth to individualistic self-preservation in the event of societal breakdown, one should, from a purely rational perspective invest in the prevention of such a breakdown, which means the social safety net, democracy, community engagement, etc.

To not do so is, in fact, a bet against civilization, which is, in my humble opinion, literally barbaric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Well of course many people in the US are worried about violence. They see frequent cases of mass shootings on TV, sometimes in places they know or places much like the place they live or work. They see the Police officers getting gunned down, or gunning unarmed people down on an almost daily basis. If I live in a society like that I'd be pretty paranoid too.

But is the solution to this problem mass gun ownership? I think more and more school children in America are beginning to realise that actually no, that's not the right way to think about this.

Is it really sound to compare the USA to Somalia and Afghanistan as though that comparison is just as relevant as a comparison to the UK or Australia or Canada? How many democratic countries have suffered revolutions and mass social breakdown? All of a sudden you end up with a very short list, and usually within a short period of time of coming out of a dictatorship of some kind, before democratic institutions and processes have become established. How many that have been democratic for more that 50 years? I can't think of a single one.

Finally about 30,000 Americans die by the gun every year, many by suicide but that just goes to show the risks of easy access to guns. (If you disagree - people could stab themselves to death instead - compare death rates with other stable affluent democracies. You might be able to explain away some of it but I'm already rounding down to the nearest 10k.) Let's say you have one uprising every 150 years. To pay it's way in blood gun ownership would have to be responsible for saving over 450,000 lives. That's about half the total of the Civil War. I think it's far from clear that this would be the case, and surely isn't having huge numbers of firearms in circulation more likely to make such a tragic breakdown of society even worse?

<comment><USER42> Agreed. The whole point of elections are not to elect perfect people - <USER2> are a revolution, every two years. Trump might not be perfect, but he's a lot better than people in Wisconsin having to rise up against people in California. It's likely that in 2020, the people of {Insert Swing State Here} will not violently murder the president, like they had to during the French Revolution, but will instead vote him out of office.

There's a reason the preponderance of his examples came from countries that were transitioning to democracies, and there are very few examples of violent overthrowing of democratically elected governments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> _Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government._

That's not an accurate characterization of either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.

Immediately availability of small arms is also unlikely to be all that important in similar scenarios (just lie when the local revolt asks if you are against them).

It's an interesting thing to consider how likely things are to fall apart though.

</comment><comment><USER44> > There's the "you can't fight the army with small arms" bucket, which is > increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade and a half war with Afghani > tribal goat herders.

Has either side "won" the "decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders"?

There are certainly no invading forces of "Afghani tribal goat herders" in the U.S.

Sounds like small arms will, at best, hold off the army.

<comment><USER45> Small arms will hold off the army if the army has a supply chain that isn't vulnerable. If the army's supplies originate from the contested territory then it becomes possible for the insurrection to sever that chain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Without even reading the article, I would suggest that people should do whatever makes sense to them to protect themselves and their loved ones. Waiting for real world statistics to back you up is additional risk. I would suggest it would be pragmatic and entirely logical to be proactive and prepare for the worst.

<comment><USER16> How do you know what makes sense if you don't know the statistics? Any action could be more harm than help.

<comment><USER46> Experience has shown that common sense can augment or even replace statistics. Statistics are great for confirming or rejecting what you knew using common sense.

<comment><USER47> Literally the entire point of the field of statistics is to augment our highly fallible "common sense" with objective measures of assessment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This isn't to address the argument, but I just wanted to point out that the guy writing this article chose to describe himself with "I think a lot."

<comment><USER49> I'd take that over "I feel very strongly"

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > There's the "tyranny can never happen here" bucket, which the Left has > mostly abdicated in the wake of Trump winning after they called (and still > call) Trump a tyrant. There's the "you can't fight the army with small arms" > bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade and a half > war with Afghani tribal goat herders. And there's the "what the hell do you > need an AR-15 for anyway?" bucket, which by its very language eschews a > fundamental lack of understanding of what those people are thinking.

Yeah, and where's the bucket for "If you have to bring out a gun to shoot police officers, your nation has failed, _YOU_ have failed at protecting your nation and what it stands for, and I'm not interested in your political fantasy where you become a hero to save the day after abdicating your responsibility while everything collapsed"?

If these guys realistically believed America would turn into another Afghanistan, what they need is an airline ticket. Why prepare for a doomed fight when you can retire in Bahamas? If they realistically believe that America is going down and they need to stop it, what they need is to get involved in politics and fight, NOW, to turn the country around.

But no, they want to believe they can be heroes, while at the same time don't want to believe they can do anything about it now, because then they will be responsible for their inaction. So they keep talking about guns, and how everyone else will feel sorry once civilization collapses.

<comment><USER51> You can organize and vote all you want, but being one person out of 320 million, sometimes things aren't going to go your way. It is not a bad idea to have a backup plan, even for unlikely events. So then what? "Retire to the Bahamas"? Assuming you have enough money laying around to do that, and don't have elderly or less-mobile family/friends, is running away to a foreign country where you have no connections really so preferable to having the option to defend yourself and your family/friends?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Not trying to go all anti-2a..

Many people have guns. I think the numbers are that there's more guns than there are people in the USA.

However for those numbers of guns, there's nowhere near that amount of training to teach proper firearms handling and usage. The hunters probably have the most experience, outside law enforcement and military.

I personally don't have enough time to dedicate to mastery of firearms. Just going and buying a handgun seems like a splendid way to either injure yourself or have it taken from you and used against you. This decision is personal.

However I'm pretty good at: electronics, design, reverse engineering, software, power, chemistry, and many other areas. I may not be a master at firearms, but I know metalsmithing and chemistry to make the bullets gun owners need.

And frankly, if shit goes haywire, they'll be enough guns to go around. Because I could see another country moving in, and guns being passed around like candy to defend us. And barring that, I'll know enough tech and have enough scrap to be needed.

<comment><USER26>
      1. Always assume it's loaded and the safety is off.
      2. Don't point it at anyone, ever, even inadvertantly.
      3. Don't put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
      4. The rest is in the manual.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What causes 'Sorry, that story was previously submitted.'? - <AUTHOR> I sometime make HN submissions. If the URL has already been submitted by another user, I am taken to the existing submission page, and I think the submission might also get an automatic upvote from me.
Today, I tried to submit a story and got a message:
"Sorry, that story was previously submitted."
I couldn't find any previous submission via hn.algolia.com, and it seems a few other folks have asked about this in the past, without any answer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12104077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15445090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404588
I hadn't previously submitted the same URL or any URL from the same domain.
The URL returned after submitting the form included 'deaddupe', which offers a clue, but it would be great to know for sure what causes this. <comment><USER2> To get an answer, it's more relievable to send an email to the mods firstname.lastname@example.com

I think the explanation by kristianp is correct. Someone else summited the same link, it was killed, and killed stories are not visible in algolia.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like it's a duplicate of a dead submission. Dead because it was flagged.

</comment><comment><USER4> Possibly submitted and subsequently deleted.

</comment><comment><USER5> It was submitted and subsequently banned</comment>


Show HN: Dripeesha, a Purple and Pink Golang IDE Theme for vs Code - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GolangHeaux.dripeesha <comment><USER2> But why?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm checking to see how much impact is has on hn vs reddit. That's why.</comment></comment>


Airbnb (YC W09) Freaks Out Over Samwer Clones - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/airbnb/#comments

<comment><AUTHOR> So what's the difference between a clone and a legitimate competitor? I'm not sure I understand...

<comment><USER2> From the article:

        * They falsely claim to be affiliated with Airbnb, or be the "international version" of Airbnb.
        * They claim that they are part of Ebay and/or Groupon. We've confirmed that this is not the case.
        * Their employees pretend to be Airbnb travelers in order to give you a sales pitch in your home.
        * They are duplicating personal profiles, descriptions, and photos of your Airbnb listing without your permission.

<comment><AUTHOR> So competitors need only eliminate the unscrupulous practices to avoid being considered clones? Seems like a dubious distinction at best.</comment></comment></comment>


The Future is Parallel: What's a Programmer to do? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/MITApril2009Steele.pdf

<comment><USER2> A useful read for the aspiring parallel programmer :)

I got interested in the topic at university and spent a lot of time in my final year thesis un-learning all my sequential logic.

One of the biggest traps I fell into was "setup, do work, tear down" philosophy. That's the usual progression of sequential logic into parallism (as in set up your parallel threads with data, fire them off, then hang about waiting to combine the results and tear down any constructs). In my tests I found it was _better_ (both in terms of speed and sanity) to give each parallel segment of a program (be it a thread, a process, a computing node) as much autonomy as you can. The wrapper around all of that, the stuff that splits your logic up has to be damn clever - because portioning code on the fly is complex - but what it actually achieves shouldnt be all that much. Recieve some logic, chunk it, farm it out. Done.

</comment><comment><USER3> Slide 7: "What, not how."

IMO, if you can grasp this you are on your way.

</comment><comment><USER4> A little anecdote. A friend of mine who's working on his Ph.D at CMU sped up his physics group's simulations by an order of magnitude by simply running the same code multiple times on multiple machines. The problem was that the choice of initial random seeds could nontrivially effect the convergence time. There are examples of this in generic programming. Look at quicksort for example. Picking the right pivot can matter a great deal.</comment>


Interview with Rob Pike on Concurrency/Parellelism (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/pike-concurrency

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, sorry, what I thought was a transcript was just links to that section of the video (updated the title to remove "with transcript")

<comment><USER2> You can see the transcript by clicking on "Full Page Transcript"</comment></comment>


Starting Up Cities - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/cities-as-hotels.html

<comment><USER2> It occurs to me that maybe the benefit of constant improvement (from competition) is worth more than the discount you get for doing something at scale.

Otherwise, I'd expect people to buy from/hire the existing companies that can offer lower prices thanks to being established, rather than new companies which have to deal with startup costs.

Or maybe the whole scale thing doesn't actually work like that when improvement is quick enough.</comment>


7 Keys to Unlock an Apple Design Award - <AUTHOR> http://uxmag.com/articles/7-keys-to-unlock-an-apple-design-award

<comment><USER2> This list was originally created by Apple and presented at their first world developer tour after they released the iPhone 1. I still have the exact same list saved on my notes from that presentation. I've seen a few other Apple presentations repeat the same items.

Congrats to the guy for getting the prize, but that's no excuse to just rip apple off and not mention it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone open any of the app descriptions on <http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ada/> ? I tried on FF, Chrome and Safari with no luck - I click but nothing happens. Copying the link seems to go to a page without any styling...</comment>


Node v13.10.0 (Current) - <AUTHOR> https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v13.10.0 <comment><USER2> I really like the change to pipeable. It now allows you to hook into a stream pipeline and consume and update values using an Async Iterator [1].

[1]: [https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v13.x/docs/api/stream.html#st...](https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v13.x/docs/api/stream.html#stream_stream_pipeline_source_transforms_destination_callback)</comment>


Peak Google, Apple and Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/national/2013/06/14/dont-panic-but-weve-passed-peak-apple-and-google-and-facebook/?single_page=true <comment><USER2>
      "Just three companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook
       —generated most of the new ideas (at least the
       mainstream ones) and most of the business momentum.
      (If I had more room and time, I'd work Amazon into
      the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks
      well behind the other three.) "

I find this puzzling. What great new ideas have emerged from Facebook, exactly? It's just one of multiple very similar social networks that prevailed through better execution and marketing.

On the other hand, Amazon has built amazing cloud services - which is impressive, considering that it started as an online book shop. And placing Facebook in the same sentence with Google when mentioning innovation is nothing short of ludicrous.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's really hard to read the rest of the article without questioning every statement after reading that ridiculous paragraph early on. You're telling me Facebook, who's killer app was photo tagging for the first 3 years of its existence and who has, over the last few years, been struggling with transitioning its platform to a mobile audience, somehow ranks ahead, technology-wise, of the biggest e-commerce site on the internet? The technology that goes into Amazon's logistics and distribution platform alone rivals facebook's impressive scale, and Amazon is doing that while, at the same time powering a gigantic and feature rich cloud service and methodically eating the publishing industry's lunch.

<comment><USER4> It's because he's not measuring greatness by technical achievement, he's measuring greatness by how much you have changed the average consumer's behavior. Amazon's big as far as e-commerce goes...but people bought things before, they can buy things from other websites, and they'll continue to buy things even if Amazon didn't exist. Facebook somehow managed to get people to spend 2-3 hours/day throwing sheep at each other and give up all their personal information for targeted ads.

Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are _still_ struggling to play catch-up.

Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he _should_ and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.

<comment><USER5> Building Facebook is one thing, scaling Facebook is an entirely different beast.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in tandem is equally impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went into this article expecting to get mad, but it's actually quite reasonable: just like how incredibly rare it is that Microsoft releases something as capital-i important as Windows, the odds are against companies one-upping the innovations that vaulted them into success. That doesn't mean they're destined to failure or even to obscurity: but innovation favors the young.

(Somewhat ironically, I think Google has consistently shown the highest level of daring and innovation, as seen from things like Project Loon and the things that could totally restructure a first-world society, like self-driving cars or Google Glass -- and yet, they have the highest peak to climb, as I don't think any piece of technology [besides maybe Wikipedia] changed the world quite as much as search.)

<comment><USER7> Same. Pretty decent. But it flogs its point a bit too hard. I find 'Peak' a bit of a 2004 buzz-word. I mean, the trinity the author speaks of are megalithic corps now on a downward trajectory. Agree with you that Google is the stayer. Page is streets ahead of Zuckerberg (Gates-lite) and Cook (a caretaker at best). The potency of Apple and FB will dissipate, but Brin and Page will remain fairly vitalic. One only has to look at the relatively Kurzweil hire to see that the Google spirit of old remains somewhat unfettered by the billions in loot.

Personally find the blogger's writing and ideas a bit second-rate, reaching out to the giants (Fukiyama, Moore) yet making no case for a reason not to "panic". As for his call for FB and Google employees to "exodus" and bring about change - seems rather mad and deluded. The shape-shifters are the hungry ones like Karp and Spiegel, not the Apple desk-jockeys and Facebook inner- circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No, it isn't. At least not for Google.

Firstly, Google has Glass, self driving cars, Google Fiber, Loon, and every single one of them has the _potential_ to be the most significant thing of this century - though these are mentioned in the article, their potential is __highly__ underestimated. Its true some of them will (I prefer might) turn out to be duds, but definitely not all of them.

Secondly, all three companies make a conscious effort to be innovative. Sometimes they err on the side of innovation. And the smartest brains are still proud of working there. And until that changes, one can argue that with the recent deluge of startups that it has, they will continue to dominate.

And talking of AI, I guess almost all the leaders in the field are have a strong relationship with Google. Andrew NG, Sebastin Thrun, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil...

<comment><USER9> Yes, and Xerox PARC also had a ton of smart people working on a bunch of exciting futuristic projects at one point as well.

<comment><USER10> ... and completely failing to capitalize on more or less all of them, because they didn't even try.

<comment><USER11> You mean, like, not charging money for anything?

<comment><USER12> Or even release them as products. Or actively shutting them down (or attempting to). The mouse, their DRM language (as mal-conceived as it may have been, was pretty clean), Bob Metcalfe's Ethernet and bit-mapped windowing displays all come to mind. IIRC correctly there were some interesting experiments in object-oriented interpretive languages, their runtimes, dev environments and libraries (think about lessons learned from LISP/Smalltalk before Python/Ruby or Perl or even PHP)

And there were more. Many more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Published the exact day Google announces his Loon Project? I can't say for sure, but if this project is successful, I'd call it a major innovation...

<comment><USER14> "I'd call it a major innovation..."

The company behind the Loon concept has been working on this for over a decade. [http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Space_Data_Awarded_USAF_Cont...](http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Space_Data_Awarded_USAF_Contract_For_Near_Space_Communications_System_999.html) Innovation on an existing idea, no doubt but

<comment><USER15> Sure, but Google has the motivation and money to make it work on a massive scale, which arguably nobody else does. That's what innovative big companies are supposed to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Before the introduction of the Mac, peak Apple would've been in 1977 with the launch of the Apple II. Before the introduction of the iPod, peak Apple would've been in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh. Before the iPhone, peak Apple would've been in 2001 with the launch of the iPod. Before the iPad, peak Apple would've been in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone...

<comment><USER17> Exactly. Look at Apple's patent stream and tell me they have stopped trying to innovate. The author pans iOS 7, when in fact this is a _good_ example of a company taking meaningful risks by throwing out the entire UX of the operating system for one that risks being a disaster in the name of a long term step forward. And for fuck's sake, Google is working on _self driving cars and internet balloons_. And lets not forget Amazon AWS releases insane disruptive technology every quarter and is on track to be the technology provider for all startups of this generation.

Basically we could be at "Peak Facebook", but to claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon's best days are behind them is at odds with reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I disagree with the comment "If I had more room and time, I'd work Amazon into the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks well behind the other three."

IMHO, Amazon is up there as an equal peer with G/A/F.

Edit: I agree with the rest of the article though. I expect (hope for?) more interesting things happening from small players, especially in non-USA markets.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. AWS, Lab126...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not entirely sold on the "Innovator's dilemma" argument that "they can't muster the courage to disrupt their existing revenue streams" in case of Apple - they seem to have been doing plenty of self-cannibalising since Jobs' return - Jobs slashed the numerous product lines to just 4 products when he returned; iPod Mini that cannibalised iPod sales, iPod Nano that cannibalised both of the mentioned, iPhone that cannibalised all iPods. They at least seem to be willing to compete with their own products.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think Apple could still trigger another sea-change in yet another industry: banking.

Put a fingerprint scanner on every iPhone. Let people pay for things (or transfer money) with their phones instead of chip-and-pin bank cards.

They already have bank details linked to every Apple customer account, and they have enough cash to cover all capital requirements and insurance needs and fight lawsuits from protectionist rivals etc. People are wondering what apple are going to do with its money when the answer might be in money itself.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Google is 15 years old and has 39,000 employees (54,000 if you count Motorola), and its last major innovation — AdSense — was way back in 2003."

And AdSense was largely an acquihire of Applied Semantics.

</comment><comment><USER23> But wouldn't any new innovator simply be bought by one of the three as soon as it becomes successful?

<comment><USER24> Tell that to IBM

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Foolishly wrong about Google. Aside from G+, Google continues to do crazy new things--even if one is skeptical of Glass, one can't deny it's interesting.

And something like Facebook, with its artificially inflated value, cannot expand to advertise to everyone; it can only crash when its optimism runs out. He gets it right: it's only a place for sharing photos and links. We don't need Facebook for that, and we'll figure that out pretty soon.

<comment><USER26> Saying Facebook is just a place for sharing photos and links is like saying Google.com is just a place for looking up links.

You can understate it as much as you want but at the end of the day Facebook connects PEOPLE. Technology, whether it be Google, Facebook, or Apple, is about _people_ and it seems to me you haven't figured that out yet.

<comment><USER27> Fb's user experience has waned on a number of fronts... users of the site feel the change and are losing interest.

<comment><USER26> Every single point of hard data and evidence says otherwise.

Facebook, in the past year, has increased every single metric of success; whether it be the amount of money it makes, the number of advertisers on the site, the number of users on the site, or the level of engagement from all age ranges. Every single metric has increased in all countries.

If you're getting your data and information from sensationalist articles which get thousands of hits just for mentioning Facebook, then you should look elsewhere to form a more accurate assessment.

<comment><USER27> Average user engagement (for users who were on the site last year) is higher this year? Really?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Break Microsoft up and divide any MSR ideas among the companies. No that's innovation, but currently MS doesn't want to rock the Win /Office boat.</comment>


Encrypting Gopher - <AUTHOR> https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?gopher://tilde.team:70/0/~rain1/phlog/20190608-encrypting-gopher.txt <comment><USER2> My threat model for encryption is my ISP. If interception happens after that, my default assumption is that I have bigger problems.

For a few years now I've been using my router to forward a selection of ports corresponding to commonly unencrypted protocols such as HTTP (80) and Gopher (70) through a VPN that terminates in a box I own hosted at a colo.

It improves the security of your data from your ISP, but has less of a performance impact than putting your entire internet connection through a VPN, increasingly so as more and more stuff moves to HTTPS/443.

I suppose it's possible that my colo is just as interested in intercepting my data as my ISP is. But my ISP is Comcast, so I doubt it.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious to learn more about your setup! Would you be willing to share more here? Cheers!

<comment><USER2> Nothing fancy. Router runs pfSense. VPN uses OpenVPN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One issue I have with rolling out a new form of encryption to replace the current Gopher protocol is that old clients will become obsolete and less useful.

Even if an encryption algorithm is decided on and widely adopted, clients will need to be updated to use it, meaning compatibility for older clients (which happens to be one of Gopher's core strengths, try surfing the modern web on NCSA Mosaic for a day) will be tarnished.

As it stands, I can use Gopher comfortably on Mac OS 9 with Cyberdog, Windows 95 with WSGopher32, old Java-based phones, and apparently on the Commodore 64, but yet also a high-speed broadband connection on my PC and Android phone. Trying to enforce some security standard on the entirety of Gopherspace will mean the earlier hardware will be more obsolete than they're already considered to be.

<comment><USER5> If you don't mind me asking what kind of content do you consume on gopher? I had no idea it was still in regular use :)

<comment><USER4> As a general rule, if it's a file you can serve it over Gopher. And Gopher's query selector type (`?`) can be used for searching and simple applications.

As an example Floodgap has weather information, feeds, xkcd strips, a Figlet gateway and Gopher link shortener, file archives for classic Macintosh software in particular, among others. And that's just Floodgap's server, elsewhere there are independent phlogs (blogs over Gopher), text adventure games (mozz.us), music, more files..

It may seem obsolete but there's a passionate community behind it. It just looks like that since it doesn't have wide-spread encryption and most clients have tried to treat gopher menus just as basic web pages. Although you can do that, it really limits what clients can do; I could drag mp3 files out of a Gopher menu onto my desktop with Cyberdog, and no client quite like that has come for modern systems (yet), nor can you do that with a webpage. I believe Gopher should be thought of as an improved anonymous FTP rather than a stripped down Web.

<comment><USER5> Thanks a bunch for the detail, I'm pretty familiar with Gopher as a thing, just didn't realize it still had a sort of vintage hobbyist following and that brings me great joy to hear :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Well, to my knowledge there's only really 2 real life instances you need to > worry about (I'd welcome corrections if networking people can tell me about > something I missed):

The author of that post missed BGP hijacking. (There's also NSA-style interception of the backbone links, but that's probably what the author considers "not a real life instance".)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like a lot the idea of using .onion URLs to encrypt plain text protocols that at the very least support proxy and DNS.

<comment><USER8> You can achieve something similar with Zerotier's ipv6 addresses. You only get encryption but no privacy though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _To keep in the spirit of gopher we should figure out a simple encryption > system that a normal programmer can implement in a weekend. This is totally > possible to do with strong security_

I'd be curious about a specific example of this.

<comment><USER10> I assume they mean a system that uses existing crypto algorithms, rather than building everything completely from scratch. For example, if the system involves a key exchange, followed by the derivation of a shared secret, followed by symmetric encryption, all of these steps could use existing solutions with multiple available implementations (DH+AES, or perhaps X25519+ChaCha20). Wiring existing algorithms together to form a secure protocol is certainly doable by a competent programmer in a weekend. And in the Gopher spirit, if you really want to implement ChaCha20 yourself, that's much more tractable than implementing all of TLS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems to me, the gopher thing to do would be to add a new type, eg E, for an encrypted file.

<comment><USER12> Maybe use OpenBSD's signify for validation of content. S is unofficially used for sound files sadly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm struggling not to find this article a bit offensive, if I'm honest. Essentially the author has said, "TLS is hard, and I don't use public networks so is it really a problem?"

Yes. It is really a problem for people who use public networks. It is not like the myriad of wifi mitm attacks went away over the last 5 years. Even if you're not concerned about hiding the content, SOME sort of integrity scheme needs to be in place to prevent folks from replacing your content with theirs.

It seems profoundly irresponsible to wave away these concerns just because TLS is intimidating.

<comment><USER14> While I do agree that this person's attitude towards security is a little too cavalier, I also disagree with your characterization that his problem with TLS is that it is hard.

Gopher is designed as a very simple protocol any programmer is supposed to be able to implement themselves. Including TLS in the protocol will, by its very nature, break this. It will basically rob gopher of its purpose. I understand why that would be a disqualifying property for someone who cares about that purpose.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps what is needed is a simple standard API that wraps OpenSSL, GNU/TLS, mbed TLS, Polar SSL, et al - that covers a small set of standard use cases. _[1]

It's not /hard/ using a library, but it's hard using it _properly _.

And unless you're a cryptographer, you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT roll your own encryption, and even then you're likely to screw things up.

_[1] I know PKCS#11 and friends try to do some of this, but no-one fully implements the entire standard(s), and no-one implements a standard set of features either ... which makes finding a provider and a client with overlapping feature sets somewhat interesting.

I've done some (proprietary) work in this area, and I think that it ought to be the way to go.

<comment><USER14> > And unless you're a cryptographer, you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT roll your own > encryption, and even then you're likely to screw things up.

I agree with this, but given this, how do you build a secure protocol that any programmer can implement themselves? Just saying "don't do it" will lead to posts like these that conclude that security might not be worth sacrificing the self-reliance. But this article also does offer some potential solutions, like tunneling the insecure protocol over a secure channel. I think that would be a better solution for this issue than the library you are proposing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Are Spaces in Science Fiction Not Wheelchair-Accessible? - <AUTHOR> https://io9.gizmodo.com/staircases-in-space-why-are-places-in-science-fiction-1827966642 <comment><USER2> > The Mos Eisley cantina appears as interested in serving disabled patrons as > it is in serving droids […]

I would guess that disabled people wouldn't live long on Tatooine in any case. A bar owner in what is literally a wretched hive of scum and villainy, probably has bigger issues than installing a wheelchair ramp.

But in all seriousness, in a lot of the examples where Ratcliff mentions wheelchair accessibility it just doesn't make any sense from a narrational perspective. In Star Wars the majority of ships are military in nature; it doesn't make tactical nor logistical sense for an army to facilitate wheelchair accessibility on a warship (anyone in a wheelchair would be a liability in emergencies).

The USS Enterprise (NCC 1701 D) was more of a science vessel by design then the pioneering USS Discovery (NCC 1031). The former might have facilitated a visiting scientist in a wheelchair, the latter wouldn't.

There is a point to be made that civilians with disabilities should be seen in civilian settings in a sci-fi universe, but it has to make sense in that setting. In most of the examples Ace Ratcliff provides there are excellent in- universe reasons for not having a wheelchair confined character show up (not least of all because of the presumed medical advances msh mentioned in this topic).

<comment><USER3> Star Trek did have Captain Pike in a wheelchair.

<comment><USER2> Certainly, but not as an active-duty officer of Starfleet. The Enterprise picked the invalid Pike up on a starbase in 'The Menagerie' for that specific story; Pike in a wheelchair suited the narrative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author have some good points but ignores that some or many of the sci-fi universes he mentions have medical technology that seems to make wheelchairs unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER5> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663502)</comment>


Show HN: Control your SlideShare presentations via your mobile - <AUTHOR> http://preso.ly preso.ly is an enhanced presentation clicker. Currently it's only limited to controlling your SlideShare presentations, Google Drive and Dropbox are next. The project is still in beta, you can give it a try at preso.ly
More features to be announced soon... <comment><USER2> Looks nice. Love the flat design. However, I am wondering how much is it still relevant to use QR codes nowadays. Also, what if the user does not have a QR reader?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply piotry, as we speak, I'm coding something that replaces the QR code syncing process basically a 4 digits on the screen instead, we can keep both, what do you think ?

<comment><USER2> Hmmm, I'm more in favor of a 4 digit syncing process!

<comment><AUTHOR> definitely just like iTunes and Remote ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great work Donald! Looking forward for the next opportunity to use it :)

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


Hong Kong security chief warns of growing terrorism backing planned security law - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests/hong-kongs-security-chief-warns-of-growing-terrorism-as-govt-backs-beijings-planned-security-laws-idUSKBN23107F <comment><USER2> As a longtime Hong Kong resident, the worst part about this for me is the abject intellectual dishonesty - we already know that this is the _real_ [1] beginning of the end of Hong Kong's autonomy, so they could at least have the decency to be straight with us.

CY Leung (the previous Chief Executive) said[2] the quiet part out loud yesterday:

> "Former Chief Executive CY Leung acknowledged on Sunday that Hong Kong's > annual June 4 candlelight vigil could be banned, along with the group that > has organised the event for the past three decades, under a new national > security law for the SAR to be drawn up by Beijing."

Putting that kind of censorship on the table is antithetical to the spirit of OC2S and the foundations that make Hong Kong great.

1\. The Causeway Bay booksellers were a foreshock.

2\. [https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1528043-20200524.h...](https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1528043-20200524.htm)

<comment><USER3> Hong Kong resident here as well, I am in no way CY Leung nor Carrie Lam fan. I am pro peaceful demonstration and believe police brutality is real and support independent inquiry.

But this is not exactly his quote when you read further than the first paragraph:

"Asked if slogans like "end one-party rule" – which is often chanted at the June 4 vigil – would be allowed in future, Leung demurred, saying there's no need to get into the nitty gritty of legal definitions at this point, as this could 'affect public feelings' about the coming legislation."

"He also said whether the vigil itself could fall foul of the law could depend on what participants do even after the gathering is over – saying that anything that involves activities that are 'separatist in nature' may well be banned even in other countries."

He evaded the question when asked about the "end one-party rule" slogans, and repeat the line "separatist" will be banned when ask about the vigil.

Do I believe "end one-party rule" slogan will cause problem? I think so, and I do not support arresting people for just yelling the "end one-party rule" slogan. But I would like to see the detail of the law before I draw any conclusion.

<comment><USER4> In my view Hong Kong being a territory of China should be prepared for such laws and so should be it's residents. If people who have passports of other country, they have a choice if they don't agree with this change. This change was kept on back burner for a while until majority of the Chinese could reap the benefits of economic progress. In this case China's legislature has a backing of majority of the Chinese population, so the change will go through. China like Singapore is a meritocracy, not democracy, still for any policy change to be enacted it needs a tacit approval from majority Chinese.

So like in any democracy laws can be passed with majority, its the same for China.

Chinese legislature learned from the mistakes of USSR with perestroika and glasnost that until welfare and progress do not reach its population, it cannot have legitimacy. So they succeeded in it and USA cannot find a clear opening like USSR to break China. So they started firing guns on the shoulders of Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Japan and other countries surrounding China, because the initial attempt did not succeed. In this game these countries will suffer immensely and USA will progress by selling them weapons and prop it's own economy.

Hopefully instead of questioning other country if every country look inward and secure to all its own people JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual, the world will be a better place.

<comment><USER2> This would be a stronger argument if a majority of Hong Kongers had agreed that they _wanted_ to be a Chinese territory in the first place. They didn't get to pick - two governments, neither of which the people chose, made the decision for them.

You can argue that they didn't choose to be a British colony either, but nevertheless they were and many generations have now grown up in that system and internalized those values.

 _> If people who have passports of other country, they have a choice if they don't agree with this change_

What about the millions who don't have second passports or any real option to leave? They have no legal avenue to effect change; are they just supposed to sit quietly and take whatever gets thrown at them?

<comment><USER4> > This would be a stronger argument if a majority of Hong Kongers

Hong Kongers are like Beijinger or Shanghainese so if China legislature wants to enact security law for country, they need to consider whole China not specific city or province like any central government in most democracies (when it comes to national laws). Hong Kong being a territory of China what matters is the majority of Chinese support and in this case overwhelming number support this action. If Chinese National in Hong Kong (i.e. Hong Kongers) are in doubt can do China countrywide survey and understand the national pulse.

> who don't have second passports.

Live the way minority live in most commonwealth democratic countries. Unless these minority go out to fight till end (like Kashmiris are fighting Indian government unilateral actions), which I doubt any is willing to do, my guess is most can look for asylum as option in countries which support their cause, I believe Taiwan already offered (only risk is their founding fathers also consider Taiwan as one China, so may be it might lead to conflict in future).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >"In just a few months, Hong Kong has changed from one of the safest cities in the world to a city shrouded in the shadow of violence," he said, adding national security laws were needed to safeguard the city's prosperity and stability.

Absurd lack of introspection. What change was the catalyst for violence? Maybe start there and work backwards to see who is actually responsible (hint... it's the CCP).

<comment><USER4> Hong Kong is a territory of China and they have a right to enact this law based on perceived threat to national security because this will not be the first time USA used others shoulders to fire gun.

China don't want to make same mistake as USSR of ignoring the outside influence and USA succeeding in its mission to thwart another rising power with a different system like USS dream of Mikhail Gorbachev was broken by similar kind of violent protests.

China learned from mistakes of USSR and worked to let the economic benefits trickle down to general population and their people's life is better than before. I agree they could have treated minorities better and given more rights but looking at conditions of minority in most democratic nation its a worldwide problem.

So do a better introspection and you will notice that answer for this violence and protest is very much linked to geopolitical rivalry especially with USA. There is an uncanny timings that Hong Kong protests flared up quite dramatically right before Taiwan elections, and then suddenly reduced in intensity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The irony being that this so-called terrorism is in reaction to clamping down of freedoms and arbitrarily adding national security laws into the Basic Law.

I want to know who falls for this nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think they know what 'terrorism' means. Civil disobedience because of rights being usurped !== terrorism, it === a probably futile but admirable 'attempt' to fight back at an oppressive regime.

</comment><comment><USER8> > "Terrorism is growing in the city and activities which harm national > security, such as 'Hong Kong independence', become more rampant," Secretary > for Security John Lee said in a statement.

Well, at least the CCP is consistent.

</comment><comment><USER9> CCP is using terror to inflict its policies counter too the wishes of the HK people.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hong Kong is the frontier of the fight for freedom against autocracy. I hope the news continues to cover it

<comment><USER11> HK is a US and UK mission to have a permanent colony in China. We can't really rebrand this exercise with any honest look at history.

</comment></comment><comment> 2019-nCoV What's pushing China from hiding their capacities and biding their time? Why push the world on this now than wait until 2047? Awfully, it looks like Xi thinks China's time has come.

<comment><USER12> He knows China is powerful enough to do this without meaningful consequences. Taiwan not yet, but soon.

<comment><USER13> > He knows China is powerful enough to do this without meaningful > consequences. Taiwan not yet, but soon.

Unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has (thinly veiled) US military Support [1] that would put China in defacto WWIII territory should an attack occur--after this COVID coverup, the CCP and Xi are persona non grata on the international stage. If anything I hope the people of the Mainland realize the dystopia they have created (some do, most are too conditioned) and revolt before that happens as the CCP seems amendment for a suicidal act if they continue with such brazen violence in the area.

They've already pissed off every neighbor in the South China Sea which is essentially opening the doors for more US military bases and interventionism-- which I abhor, but recognize as a reality.

1: [https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/us-military-support-taiwan- what...](https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/us-military-support-taiwan-whats- changed-under-trump)</comment></comment></comment>


Compare Apache/mod_php and nginx/php-fpm - <AUTHOR> http://blog.a2o.si/2009/06/24/apache-mod_php-compared-to-nginx-php-fpm/

<comment><USER2> I spent an entire day last week doing basically the same benchmarks on a new Linode account.

The results were definitely not what I expected. Both servers were able to crunch roughly the same number of requests per second. Nginx won by 20% in some situations, Apache won in a few others, but the margin was never really that significant.

However, it's important to note that there were huge differences in CPU load while running the benchmarks. Running "ab -c50 -n100000" would bring load to 30 with Apache, but only 0.7 with Nginx! Apache also used a lot more ram.

I assume there must be some other bottleneck (disk access?) keeping Nginx from utilizing more of the CPU, hence the fairly close results.

<comment><USER3> Well, Apache would definitely be using more RAM since the Apache process would be actually running/parsing/etc. the PHP. nginx just sends the request along to another process and so nginx shouldn't be using significantly different amounts of RAM from what it would normally use since all the PHP stuff is happening in a different process.</comment></comment>


PG&E Plans to Beam Solar Power From Space Back to Earth - <AUTHOR> http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/04/14/solar-power-captured-in-space-beamed-to-earth/

<comment><USER2> It seems the designers of Sim City were really ahead of the times. And they knew that a misguided energy beam can do a lot of damage.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. I've always wondered about 'wireless' energy, as far as how it could work. I wasn't aware that radio waves carried enough power to make this feasible (and, now that I think about it, safe).

Of course this is all good, but I'm really waiting for the day when my laptop can use something similar to keep itself charged. (<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html>)</comment>