Quebec Cracks Down on Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec-cracks-down-on-airbnb/article12162984/

<comment><USER2> I may be downvoted to oblivion for this but I really don't think my neighbors in Boston would like it if I rented my room out on a nightly basis to people they don't know. There are 20 units in my building so seeing many random people coming and going would trigger great unease and I cannot say that I would blame them for that.

I've used AirBnB and I love it but I think the biggest issue is not the commercial property taxes (the gov't would likely disagree) but the negative impact it could have on those living around you in other apartments. It kind of goes back to the saying, "I don't care what people do in the comfort of their own home," except the entranceway, stairwells and halls of an apartment building are the shared property of all residents. This is not so much an issue when people rent out their houses on AirBnb but my guess is that apartments in major cities are some of their most frequently booked listings.

<comment><USER3> To play devil's advocate to this argument, what's the difference between having new tenants entering the building every week and a resident having random friends over every week?

<comment><USER4> The rent controlled tenants below me pay about $800 for a unit that now rents for $3200 a month. Last year when they bought a home they decided to keep the apartment to use as a pied-à-terre and rent it out on Airbnb.

I found out about this after having three different people in a weeks time knock on my door and ask me where the fuse boxes are. Not a huge deal if my neighbors do it, but these are total strangers. At least when someone moves in to my building they have multiple background checks. And since full time residents live here they have a reason to be polite as they see me daily. They have some connection to the building and its residents.

A few weeks after the start of this I was woken up at three A.M. by my dog barking at the fire escape. There was someone on the fire escape looking into my bedroom window! After calling the police I found out that it was a renter from the unit below who wanted a better view and decided to peek into my unit at the same time. This has happened half a dozen times in the last year.

I work typical business hours. People who stay in the unit as guests are generally on vacation and this can lead to loud parties that last all hours of the night. I have a few neighbors who work strange hours and we work out noise agreements, you can't do that with people who are staying one or two days.

There's also the moral issue. It's hard to find a place in San Francisco, what they are doing is illegal, against the terms of their lease (it's very hard to evict tenants in San Francisco, the owners are trying), and they are denying someone a full time residence so they can make extra cash.

I like the idea of Airbnb but I agree that the people who rent units need to be held to some standards. A permit that neighbors can contest seems reasonable if it's going to affect their standard of living.

<comment><USER5> there are already laws for such disturbances. as for airbnb already being illegal in some places, I wonder why those laws exist in the first place.

<comment><USER6> There are laws, and then there is the matter of getting the laws enforced in a timely fashion -- if at all.

And of not suffering undue material harm during the process. Such as an extended lack of sleep adversely affecting one's employment.

There is also the possibility of escalating retaliation after you file a complaint.

There is the time and cost and confrontation of taking the other party to court, when that's what the law dictates and/or what police insist upon.

I'm significantly inclined to view AirBnB as a parasite upon the well being of long term, "real" tenants.

Both I and my extended group of friends and acquaintances have, en masse, had enough difficulty with neighbors -- before even adding AirBnB to the mix -- for me personally to give this viewpoint considerable weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Considering the outrageous prices charged by _motels_ in every city I've been (up to Chicoutimi) and even by road side motels near nowhere, I'm not surprised :-/

 _> Business groups like Montreal's Bed and Breakfast Association have been pushing for the government to crackdown on home rentals for years._

Yeah. I sure wonder why.

<comment><USER8> There are regulatory mechanisms to make hotels and B+Bs pay their share of externalities. These are things like property tax, room tax, and insurance.

Suppliers of airbnb units avoid a lot of these payments because they're paying taxes at normal residential rates.

If the cost of a room is $100/night, and the cost of that extra stuff is $50/night, then there is no way that hotels can compete on an even playing field with airbnb.

<comment><USER9> Too bad. :)

<comment><USER10> Just wait for the accidents to happen and you shall see how insurance skyrockets...

"My son died at .... because there was a defective socket."

Too bad, indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> AirBnB may be the canary in the coalmine for tech, maybe more than the privacy issues surrounding the majority of the current tech business models.

The industry idolizes "disruption" without taking any responsibility for the negative side-effects. However, in the case of AirBnB, these side-effects don't just affect an incumbent industry, but the private lives of completely innocent ordinary people, who live in the same buildings that are used as makeshift hotels.

Illegal and semi-legal subletting is a big enough nuisance as it is in major tourist destinations (I live in one), and AirBnB is making the problem exponentially worse.

A similar narrative applies to the presence of Uber in places with a decently regulate taxi system.

Not all disruption is good.

<comment><USER12> > Not all disruption is good.

Tor is very disruptive. On one hand it's allowing for political dissidents to speak and access the internet freely. On the other it's used by criminals and child pornographers.

Even if it causes a certain level of harm, as long as there is legitimate benefit, attempting to force everyone to go back to how things were before the technology existed is ultimately futile and unproductive. Just like copyright (bad for record labels) and automated factories (bad for unskilled workers/unions). Or even Walmart (bad for small shops) and drugs (bad for economic productivity).

We should learn to attempt to adapt our laws/policies to the new technology instead of trying to ban it (which is currently the default reaction).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Competitive disruption considered harmful.

If it really was to protect the turism economy and the people of Quebec, they should evaluate how many more people can visit Quebec now that there are options like $25-40/night rooms.

I know AirBnB was a big reason I visited NYC since it made the trip significantly more affordable.

<comment><USER13> Competitive disruption _with substantial negative externalities_ considered harmful.

Yours is a convenient, feel-good, but ultimately incorrect and intellectually insufficient narrative. As is any narrative where one side is the altruistic freedom fighter and the other side might as well have vampire fangs on. The world isn't this simple.

This isn't directed strictly at you - it's a general attitude in the Silicon Valley echo-chamber that I find grating. Have we issued so many press releases extolling our own virtues that we now completely believe it ourselves? Are we so enamored with ourselves that we can't imagine any other reason for people not liking what we do except pure greed and unmitigated corruption?

Hell, I like AirBnb. I use it. But let's not pretend that there are no problems with it, and that there are no legitimate reasons to object to it.

<comment><USER12> I've read the other AirBnB threads on here discussing the externalities. And I still think the cities would be better off with AirBnB than without it.

The opportunities for property owners to profit as well as providing tourism/business visitors with $40 rooms is massive.

It's opening up a huge new bnb industry, provides a large flow of _new_ revenue for tourism businesses in the cities, greatly expands the amount of tourists/business visitors who can afford to visit.

I'm curious which of the externalities you think can't be addressed by property owners? For example, they can have a no-airbnb policy in the rental agreements. Or liability safety waivers. Or security policies to limit flow of non-tenants. Or handled via disputes between property owners or police such as sound violations.

Besides, the incentives mentioned in the article are a) the market incumbents "Montreal's Bed and Breakfast Association" want protection and b) the government wants to protect existing tax revenue/regulation fines.

At this point, it's not about externalities. It's about protecting current revenue streams. While ignoring the potential for far greater tax revenue and social benefit.

<comment><USER13> Sure, and I agree that the benefits of AirBnb ultimately outweigh the negatives. I wouldn't continue supporting them with my business if I didn't.

But there are more than two choices here - there is a third choice besides "let AirBnb continue as is" and "stop everything AirBnb-like". Things like adhering to sanitation standards, paying of hotel taxes, and the rights of residents in AirBnb buildings are all legitimate reasons to oppose AirBnb in its current model.

> _"For example, they can have a no-airbnb policy in the rental agreements."_

This is already the case. This is also already the case in many condo/con-op rules. In fact, in most jurisdictions I've seen stopping AirBnb is as simple as enforcing existing laws and contracts - we don't even have to create new ones. AirBnb owes its existence not to friendly legislation, but to a lack of enforcement - a lack of enforcement that is coming to an end _because_ of these negative externalities (and yes, lobbying by the hotel industry).

> _"Or liability safety waivers. Or security policies to limit flow of non- > tenants. Or handled via disputes between property owners or police such as > sound violations."_

And such is the _definition_ of a negative externality - to offload the costs of these effects onto other tenants and even the city, without any recompense. AirBnb has _created_ this need for additional legal cost and even additional _policing_ yet is paying for none of it. The way your'e describing it, it sounds like AirBnb is laughing to the bank and leaving the cleanup to everyone else.

In any case, my original point is not specific to AirBnb. Your original post is one that I see on HN a lot - whenever a disruptive product is opposed we scream about corruption and the greed of entrenched players, and conveniently ignore the many legitimate reasons why people might find what we do problematic. My response is a more general complaint against our collective holier-than-thou attitude where we can do no wrong, and our intellectually dishonest trend of blaming said opposition squarely on simplistic villains rather than acknowledging that technology and disruption are nuanced. Our refusal to treat our opponents with basic respect, and our propensity to label them with simplistic titles, is aggravating and annoying.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. I agree with most of what you said. AirBnB is relatively new, laws have not yet been efficiently enforced, so some costs are being offset on neighbours/cities.

But I'm not convinced that a) the costs are currently so bad it requires market restrictions on AirBnB-style units and b) this a problem that the courts, cities and property owners can't handle on their own - by adapting to change.

Whereas the incentives to add restrictions on the basis of protecting existing industry incumbents are very clear.

^ That motivation which so often dictates modern government policy is the basis of my villainization. Once again I see the opportunity for real economic/social benefit via technology and opportunities to address this without restricting technology or markets (such as an evolution in property law and defence).

Instead I see a government rushing to add new policy, without a clear indicator that they are being representative of the best interests of their citizens ... or even themselves.

This same narrative has repeatedly recurred a hundred times in the tech scene (copyright, wiretapping, unlocking phones, etc). As long as the state refuses to even attempt to evolve along with technological change and takes the market incumbents interests first, then you'll keep seeing these posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you're using your house as a commercial establishment (short term rentals) you are paying commercial taxes on it, there is no reason why you should somehow be exempt when others are not.

It's not just a fine, if you using your house as a commercial space when you go to sell your house it will be taxed on sale just like any other commercial entity. I'm surprised other regions are not more adamant about enforcing this.

ps. This is not about Airbnb, they crack down on any listings no matter what the site (tripadvisor, homeaway, vrbo, craigslist, etc).

</comment><comment><USER15> You shouldn't blame the Government for enforcing its laws.

I would like for competition to be more open than it is, but I pay my taxes and would like others to do so too.

<comment><USER16> Amazing that you got downvoted for this. The comments in this thread which are cheerleading "disruption" are completely glossing over the issues of taxes and regulations. Other startups are out there making good faith attempts at following the law and competing fairly. Why does HN seem so eager to collectively give AirBnB a free pass?

<comment><USER17> These new services simply make the regulation and taxation issues more and more obvious. You can't stop technology, you can't stop innovation. Once you acknowledge that, you realize that laws have to adapt to new realities.

<comment><USER18> Um, why exactly can't Airbnb help its hosts abide by the laws?

It's a $250 tax. It does not exactly seem onerous to have them provide a reminder and a simple 1, 2, 3... list of how to make sure that they are legal in the area they are hosting in. Maybe even a way to pay directly as part of signing up.

In this instance, it's really not the law that needs to adapt to reality, it's airbnb.

<comment><USER19> Exactly! Just because you have an idea for changing things doesn't mean that you operate in a vacuum where real-world rules don't apply anymore. This seems like something that's going to involve some negotiating, some real face-to- face time. They're going to have to get out from behind a few monitors to solve this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Disruption is great. Disruption means doing something else is doing, but much better.

AirBNB -- in this context -- isn't being disruptive to the hotel industry. They're doing the same thing, but _worse_. Where legal hotels have consumer protections (like definitely not having lead paint and definitely sufficient fire escapes), AirBNB... doesn't. Where hotels (and B&Bs, etc.) follow zoning rules to make sure they're good neighbors, AirBNB... doesn't.

Now, these rules don't work all the time. They probably can be improved. But don't act like they're merely regulatory capture. That's an aspect, but consumer protections are real. AirBNB isn't doing the same thing better, but doing a different thing worse.

<comment><USER21> Cry me a river. There are _much_ more comprehensive reviews on Airbnb than you'll get for most hotels.

This is regulatory capture under the guise of consumer protection; nothing more.

<comment><USER22> Not really, it's about a company choosing to ignore the law. Craigslist did the same thing for years with respect to advertising for "erotic services".

If the company's strategy for this issue is to declare that "users must be aware of local regulation" while providing thousands of listings in heavily regulated cities like New York City, they're probably going to hit some speedbumps.

<comment><USER17> Do you seriously think it's the responsibility of the service provider to make sure its users don't engage in any potentially illegal activities?

These services are simply glorified communication tools, and limiting what people can communicate with them is limiting free speech.

<comment><USER18> >Do you seriously think it's the responsibility of the service provider to make sure its users don't engage in any potentially illegal activities?

If the illegal activity is "using their system as it was intended" then they have a degree of responsibility, yes.

They should at the very least provide a warning to users in quebec that they need to pay the $250 or they will be in violation of the law by using the airbnb website.

This does not seem like a particularly onerous thing to implement (10 lines of code?), either, and any judge reviewing a case against them would likely bear this in mind.

If they were small and did not have many hosts in quebec I doubt it would be an issue. They are clearly not any more, however.

<comment><USER23> 10 lines of code for every city, county, state, etc? And keeping it up to date will be easy too right?

<comment><USER18> >10 lines of code for every city, county, state, etc? And keeping it up to date will be easy too right?

For every city, country and state that has special rules about renting, yes. If they really don't want to participate in a particular market, they can let their competitors serve it instead.

And no, it's not especially difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a side note, there is no way in hell hotel prices in Quebec reflect their fair market value. Hotels are about the same price in Chicoutimi where land is vastly abundant as they are in Hong Kong, a tiny overcrowded island. My gut guess is that real estate prices are at least 10x higher in Hong Kong too. It's very hard to find an apartment below 1000$/month in Hong Kong whereas in Chicoutimi you can find one for 2-3x the price of a night at the hotel. Makes no sense at all even after considering the cheap imported workers hotels in Hong Kong have access too and other economies of scale associated with a densely populated area... Disclosure: I was born in Quebec and have lived in Hong Kong.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm feeling some hyperbole coming on, but governments rarely seem interested in serving the interests of their constituents.

<comment><USER26> In quebec's case, especially Montreal, renters have all the power. It is fairly trivial to rent a place and never pay rent, and have laws essentially guarantee it take a not insubstantial amount of time to get you removed. So no, in this case, the government ones so much for its citizens that I'm actually surprised thy are siding against airbnb here. Considering everything else they can get away with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Quebec has a rich history of socialist laws (not necessairly a bad thing) and rent seeking laws(bad):

Tuition is one of the lowest in North America

Medical benefits paid by the employer are considered taxable income

Weird laws on lotteries and prize giveaways that excludes Quebec from many said prize giveaways

Tourisme board that tacks on a 'travel agency insurance premium' when purchasing vacation packages

Quebec rental board that is very pro tenants and they can stay without paying rent for many months

<comment><USER17> I'm ashamed of my province. I'm seriously considering moving south of the border if they don't start to get a little more liberal (not talking about the party here).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder what will happen when someone declines to leave the rented space. Do they have any law protecting them? Do the property owners have a law that protects them from this? It would be interesting to see how a magistrate would interpret a property owner renting out the place on airbnb. They are not hotels and are not licensed as such.

<comment><USER29> Quebec laws are very generous to renters, so this is indeed an interesting question to ponder. As much as one can argue that AirBnb renters are "getting away" with not paying certain taxes, they also may be getting lucky that they don't face non-paying tenants, or ones that simply won't leave.

<comment><USER28> I can see the headline now: I rented my apartment in airbnb and now can't evict the renter. It's been a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't know how AirBnB works, but do they charge sales tax and ensure that all relevant tax documentation is provided for renters?

I know Quebec has been cracking down on tax evasion during the last couple of years, enforcing the usage of MEVs (module d'enregistrement des ventes, essentially a sealed sales recorder that prints the bill in a standard format --- an example of the receipt is shown at [1]) for all restaurant sales to prevent the use of "zappers" [2] and educating the public that they should receive such a receipt for all restaurant sales.

[1] [http://www.revenuquebec.ca/en/a-propos/evasion_fiscale/resta...](http://www.revenuquebec.ca/en/a-propos/evasion_fiscale/restauration/fac_mev.aspx)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_sales_suppression_dev...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_sales_suppression_device)

</comment><comment><USER10> There will start to be issues and price hikes when accidents happen and the insurance companies start taking notice of this: your home insurance price gets mutliplied by two if you want it to cover short renting...

I see that as a non-legal positive and useful self-regulation of the market.

And then you will get adverts 'this AirBnB rental is insured', etc.

I do not see this solution as bad at all.

And I guess it is related to the hotel and B&B owners' complaints.</comment>


Project Shield - <AUTHOR> https://jigsaw.google.com/projects/#project-shield <comment><USER3> Kudos to both Krebs and Google for their courage. I have profound admiration for Brian's work and Google's technology.

I didn't know about Project Shield and I think it's an interesting initiative. However, for some reason it leaves me a bit unease (not as much as the idea of being taken down by a 650Gbps DDoS at will!) - not sure what it is, but we might be moving towards an Internet where only the "approved" would have "free" speech.

I really hope ISP naming and shaming takes over, so we can make DDoS a little bit more difficult.

<comment><USER4> > I really hope ISP naming and shaming takes over, so we can make DDoS a > little bit more difficult.

I think naming and shaming would have little impact and whatever impact it did have would be short lived. Consumers tend to have short attention spans and zero long term memory. Take the banking/finance industry for example, were egregious, predatory and at times criminal tactics are par for the course. Banking institutions are named and shamed all the time, yet the Bank of Americas, Wells Fargos and Goldman Sachs of the world still exist.

<comment><USER5> From what I hear about the US, many people there don't even have any alternative ISP to change to...

Also changing a service provider often can be a huge inconvenience for one. For instance, if I were to learn today that my ISP makes DDoS very easy and doesn't care about the issue, I'd have a choice between one or two random small providers I don't know, and two big telecom operators that are already on my "do no ISP-related business with" list due to their annoying telemarketing.

<comment><USER6> It's also fairly standard to suffer 1-2 weeks of outages when changing ISP's, which is somewhere between unwelcome and prohibitive for a lot of people. Worse, even places with "competitive" markets often have only one provider giving decent speeds - 1-5 Mbps maximum is not a realistic option for a lot of uses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Post from Brian Krebs about Google using Shield to get Krebs on Security back up and running:

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization- of-c...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization-of- censorship/)

<comment><USER8> I follow your link [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization- of-c...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization-of- censorship/) and I get this:

 _503 Service Temporarily Unavailable_

 _shield_

So it seems to be running shield, but at least part of the attacks are still getting through? :(

Would be very nice to know what kind of attacks Shield doesn't shield against etc.

<comment><USER9> Completely down from here too.

I may need to retract my comments about Akamai. Apparently 680gbps (or whatever it's at now) is the total amount of traffic the busiest site on the internet can be hosed with before the internet itself poops the bed.

So, you know, we did learn something from this whole saga.

<comment><USER10> OVH got hit by a bigger than 1Tbps attack this week

<comment><USER9> Did they?

I saw them report a cannon with 1.5tbps capacity (based on multiple sources), wasn't clear they were getting hit by that load though (it looked like 991gbps from what I could gather, which still I didn't know of and is mind-blowing!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > We've met news organizations around the world who suffer crippling digital > attacks when they publish something controversial.

Good...except Google doesn't protect you from such attacks once the US gov deems it illegal. We need a safe, anonymous protocol not the network of X corporation.

<comment><USER12> So... Tor?

<comment><USER13> A network like Freenet would be more appropriate for a situation like this. Its peer to peer nature is like bittorrent, so the more popular content is, the more it is replicated, and thus becomes easier to access.

It shouldn't be impossible to design a distributed network that has a positive feedback loop that makes a DDOS counterproductive, by actually boosting the targeted materials.

<comment><USER14> > so the more popular content is, the more it is replicated, and thus becomes > easier to access.

Self censorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rather than seeking a technical solution, I wonder if there is a social one.

If Google promised to upweight DDOSed articles in their (news) rankings in perpetuity, that's a strong incentive not to DDOS. It also makes sense that material one person is spending resource trying to suppress is extremely likely to be interesting to others, so it's not necessarily a bad experience for someone using the Google news.

Obviously, in the short term it's also useful if they can link to a cached copy that is still working. A systemic Streisand effect.

<comment><USER16> > If Google promised to upweight DDOSed articles in their (news) rankings in > perpetuity, that's a strong incentive not to DDOS.

That would actually be a strong incentive to DDOS yourself!

<comment><USER15> That's true. Although institutions deal with that kind of moral hazard in insurance all the time, so perhaps similar mechanisms could be applied here.

Perhaps sites uprated for having been DDOSed could be marked as such. We already have to make many decisions about the trustworthiness of news sources, so maybe it's just another factor.

I can also see why Google would just like to make DDOSing very hard and make the whole problem go away, rather than the mechanism I'm proposing.

That said, I think there's something gratifying about using an attacker's willingness and ability to commit resource to removing information as a signal about the value of that information. Judo chop!

<comment><USER5> > _Perhaps sites uprated for having been DDOSed could be marked as such. We > already have to make many decisions about the trustworthiness of news > sources, so maybe it 's just another factor._

Then I'll DDoS your already highly-ranked site just to trigger the "untrustworthy" mark for it in the results.

The problem with going social is the infinite capability of humans to game things like that. I strongly sympathize with the desire to "make the whole problem go away" instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Link to the actual project's page: [https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/](https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/)

</comment><comment><USER17> By nature, a personal (clearnet) domain is a single point of failure, because forever and always attackers know where the site is hosted. This is how DNS works unfortunately and it's very broken. No such problem exists with TOR hidden services, so krebs could have his own .ONION and it would prove very tricky to uncover the servers and boot them offline.

Another mitigation (and there are many DDOS mitigations I'm leaving out here) is duplicating the content at several different locations, which already have their DDOS mitigations in place. So if you really want to be heard, hit Google Plus, Blogger, Twitter, Pastebin, etc. Just copy and paste your message all over the Internet, and it can prove nearly impossible to censor. Bonus points for multiple 'backup TLDs' so you could have:

        krebsonsecurity.org
        krebsonsecurity.net
        krebsonsecurity.io
        krebsonsecurity.biz

You only use these in special circumstances like sharing a blogpost with your friend via email.

More bonus points for mirroring static posts with Varnish cache on multiple sub-domains like

        wwa.krebsonsecurity.org
        wwb.krebsonsecurity.org
        ww3.krebsonsecurity.org

Even more bonus points for putting resources on CoralCDN:

[http://www.coralcdn.org/](http://www.coralcdn.org/)

</comment><comment><USER18> So, does that mean Google (and thus the American State) MitM your website traffic to protect free speech? I am thrilled! I am so happy that at least large corporations that cooperate with the ever-more pervasive surveillance state care about our privacy. /s

That's how you defeat HTTPS.

<comment><USER19> It does mean Google is MitMing you, but this is a service they're providing to organizations that are already at serious risk of DDoS or have been DDoS'd. Like Krebs' site, which was just hit with a 600+ Gbps DDoS.

Plus, I mean, Google Analytics and various Google-owned ads are already present on tons of HTTPS sites. That's enough to nullify HTTPS due to the XSS potential.

How are you getting Google = American State, though?

<comment><USER18> There is barely a company that visits the white house more than Google. I wouldn't be surprised if the American state has direct access right into Google's data center - it wouldn't be the first company whose server building included a government surveillance room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I guess this is where KrebsOnSecurity went to when moving to google cloud? [0]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574428)

</comment><comment><USER21> This isn't going to defend content that threatens the "national security", age of consent, and copyright laws of the States. So isn't it just a declaration that Google wants to be the imperialist content police of the internet, spun under a more benevolent-seeming light?

<comment><USER22> Jigsaw is run by a veteran of the US State Department

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > 'Disrupt online radicalization and propaganda'

> 'End repressive censorship'

These are at odds. One person's (politician's? corporation's?) "propaganda" is another's "Declaration of Independence." How will can you possibly tell the difference?

</comment><comment><USER24> What would be interesting if they handover this project to an organization like the ICIJ to oversee and run while they merely take care of the infrastructure.This sort of setup can work.Provided Google provides a transparent organisation which handles the daily workings. I do not have any issues if a any X corporation provides such opportunities.The kind of attack that Krebs faced, there is absolutely no possible scenario where a non-profit could cater to.

Every organization has a bunch of people who support the open web.This could be their voice from within Google. PS: I am not from google or a fan boy.Just that never judge a book by its cover.Let this unfurl before we pass the judgement.

</comment><comment><USER25> >"I've been toying with the idea of forming a 501(c)3 non-profit organization — 'The Center for the Defense of Internet Journalism', if you will — to assist Internet journalists with obtaining the kind of protection they may need when they become the targets of attacks like the one that hit my site."

Now this is an interesting proposal. A 501(c)3 would need to be unbiased, and also require a large amount of starting capital. On the other hand, a non- profit that strives to protect internet free speech is pretty alluring. I wonder if something like this could be in the next YC fund.

</comment><comment><USER26> Of course I'm not blaming Google or Cloudflare, but it is kind of sad that larger and larger part of the Internet is moving behind their networks. I don't think this kind of centralization is good for the Internet.

<comment><USER27> It's the feudalism age of the internet. Everyone needs a lord for protection.

<comment><USER28> Better than nation states.

<comment><USER29> That's interesting, in the context of a quote from the KerbsOnSecurity piece which prompted this post:

 _John Gilmore, an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.

However, events of the past week have convinced me that one of the fastest- growing censorship threats on the Internet today comes not from nation-states, but from super-empowered individuals who have been quietly building extremely potent cyber weapons with transnational reach._[1]

and also:

 _But as my friend and mentor Roland Dobbins at Arbor Networks eloquently put it, "When it comes to DDoS attacks, nation-states are just another player."_

[1] [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization- of-c...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization-of- censorship/)

<comment><USER28> At the end, if nation states are helpless on preventing this, and only being part of the problem, I say this - our benevolent feodal overlords - is the preferable solution.

<comment><USER30> That's what the "benevolent feudal overlords" want everyone to think. From all the defeatist DDoS comments I'd say they're doing a good job at it.

As Brian Krebs, myself and numerous other people have pointed out, Cloudflare could end almost all of the DDoS-for-hire attacks in an hour if they actually wanted to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577289)

<comment><USER29> Yeah, that's pretty simplistic. There's no evidence at all that somehow removing DDOS protection for the payment part of blackmailers web presence will somehow make them go away.

Sure, chase down how they do payment. But ultimately a web front end isn't the thing that makes the payment happen.

<comment><USER30> > But ultimately a web front end isn't the thing that makes the payment > happen.

The "brochure" argument makes 100% sense to me for something like the distributed web, but not for a dynamic web application. Brochures just sit there and look at you. Brochures don't take payments and process callbacks, and send commands to attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Safer from attacks on free speech"

Good. Host a mirror of wikileaks and let's talk.

<comment><USER31> Is this something Wikileaks requested but Google turned them down? I'm wondering if there's some context to your comment or if you're just being dismissive.

<comment><USER16> I am just being dismissive. I just tend to be triggered by comments like "Most of the world lives in countries that censor the internet" that assume that USA does not do that. Wikileaks is the most blatant example, but sci-hub and Pirate Bay are other examples of US influences censoring the net.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >We've met news organizations around the world who suffer crippling digital attacks when they publish something controversial or that questions powerful institutions.

What are some of the recent examples of this?

<comment><USER33> It might not be exactly what you're looking for, but there was the recent attack on Brian Krebs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The navigation column on the left is clipped in Chrome and the monochrome theme is hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is this a competitor to cloudflare?

<comment><USER8> > Project Shield is a free service that uses Google technology to protect news > sites and free expression from DDoS attacks on the web.

So CloudFlare is a service you pay for, and they seem to be hosting every despicable backwater of the internet so presumably they take no stance of the 'goodness' of the site they protect.

Whereas Shield is a free service, but only extended to those who Google deem righteous enough to protect?

I think there's room for both. There could also be room for Google extending it to a paying service, although I'd be surprised if Google would take the brand risk of extending their protection to porn sites etc irregardless of fees.

And of course every time Google stand up and protect sites like KrebsOnSecurity for free, the tech world loves them that little bit more and its a massive PR opportunity miss for CloudFlare.

Of course, every time Google stand up and protect sites like KrebsOnSecurity for free, its a massive PR loss for Akamai who wouldn't/couldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Would Google protects the webapp they created (and gave to Al Jazeera) to support the creation of Islamic State?

<comment><USER37> Considering Jigsaw is also interested in combating extremism, I'd say no.

<comment><USER36> Only Google Search and Youtube are the apps in Alphabet that are allowed to support terrorism?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Off topic - <USER2>

But this site is broken at even modest levels of zoom.

Content hanging off the left of the window and no scroll bar :-(

<comment><USER39> Heck even at 100% on my 1080p monitor it reads 'make people in the afer?' After zooming out to 67% I have a chance. It actual content it is kind of irksome that they have 'End repressive censorship' followed by 3 items that generally are considered censorship at some level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is going to play into the hands of authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. They will simply block Google.

<comment><USER41> Couldn't agree more; no idea who is downvoting you, this is the most insightful comment here. Also, it's fucking hypocritical claiming to support 'net neutrality' while hand-picking sites to receive support of a massive private-fiber global conglomerate with very strong senior management political affiliations. Engineers with ethics at google should start a rebellion.

<comment><USER42> China and Russia don't generally censor via DDOS.

A reverse proxy that connects from the internet to the internet does not need to be neutral. Free hosting does not need to be neutral. Net neutrality is about packets getting between an end user and the core of the internet fairly. This service is in a different area entirely.

<comment><USER41> Straw man about DDoS, nobody asserted that here.

As far as private fiber, global search traffic, cached pages, maps, mail and advertising goes, Google _already is_ the core of the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wonder what the Google Shield team thinks of YouTube heroes.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great, now the political status quo are even more under Google protection. What is the selection criteria? To receive money from some of americans NGOs? Hold yourselves, more Arab Springs are coming.</comment>


Ask HN: Best sites to post startup jobs? - <AUTHOR>

We're gearing up to start hiring, and I'm trying to determine which job listing sites will provide the best bang for the buck – specifically for iOS, Android and Senior Java/C++ engineers.<p>What have you used in the past, and which listing services perform the best for attracting candidates interested in startups? <comment><USER2> Right here</comment>


Obama bans new oil drilling in Arctic Ocean - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38034518 <comment><USER2> Obama banned certain new leases through 2022.

From a related report:

[http://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/18/obama- administration-b...](http://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/18/obama- administration-bans-arctic-oil-drilling-through-2022/)

 _Even if the economics of Arctic drilling improve and a Trump administration wants to reopen the area to exploration, both oil company officials and environmental groups say, Trump would be unable to toss out the five-year plan immediately. To undo the Obama administration's ban, a new administration would have to prepare a supplemental report, which could take as long as two years, depending on whether it needs to prepare a new environmental impact statement.

After that, the federal government would have to organize a lease sale for companies interested in drilling there._

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't put it past the Congress to blow that requirement out of the water.

<comment><USER4> Unlikely to make it past the Senate democrats, who still have filibuster power.

<comment><USER5> Is that a power that could be removed by the Republicans?

Not that this is the issue where they would bother to do so.

But the Democrats may be looking to pick their battles rather than be fully obstinate and force the GOP's hand.

<comment><USER6> Filibuster is one of their favorite tools - doesn't seem like they'd want to get rid of it, in case they need it again in a few more years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, how long will it be before this is overturned? Being from the UK, I don't fully understand the way the US legal system works... I know Trump has said that gay marriage is not under threat because "it's a law", so how is this different? (if, of course, it is different)

<comment><USER8> Gay marriage was determined to be a constitutional right by a conservative Supreme Court (judicial ruling), versus this being an executive order from Obama. Trump has previously said he plans on throwing away all of obamas executive orders, which he can do on his own. That said Obama is now working with trump to transition govt and taking a much more active role in it due to trumps team being under prepared, so who knows. Maybe pieces like this that trump doesn't really care about live on. Hard to say, it's a brave new world in US politics.

<comment><USER9> Roe vs Wade was also a Judicial ruling, and yet that appears under threat.

The power of the supreme court to interpret laws allows them to change, appear and be dismissed as time goes on.

While Trump does not directly attack gay marriage, if he nominates judges who are against the women's right to choose, I am concerned they will also be against things like gay marriage, my argument is most people against that right are very religious and thus also against marriage being equal.

<comment><USER10> Most people don't know this, but Roe v. Wade as a landmark case for two reasons. The first, of course, was that it took the ability to regulate abortions away from the people's representatives, the legislatures. Second, it created a right to privacy in the Constitution. Already, the abortion regulations set up by the Supreme Court are becoming obsolete with new procedures being developed, such as partial-birth abortion, which is why the courts should not legislate.

I most oppose the right to privacy created by the court. I am not against a right to privacy, if someone wants to put one in there. But to find a right to privacy in the Constitution through the "penumbras and emanations" is really just making it up whole cloth, which I oppose.

As for gay marriage, again, it should be up to the states. There is no Constitutional right for gays to marry. First, because marriage is not a right (although procreation is). Second, for the purpose of marriage, gays are not equal: it is impossible for them to procreate, which is the purpose (but not a requirement) of marriage.

My purpose is not to re-litigate these issues, but to say that many feel these cases were badly decided so they should be overturned, not just because we oppose those issues on a religious basis.

<comment><USER4> Procreation is not the purpose of marriage.

Some religious groups might hold that claim, but in this country we do not recognize one religious group over another; i.e. one group's claims about the purpose of marriage have no weight over anyone else's.

<comment><USER10> In western civilization, marriage is the structure of procreation and has been enshrined in the law since the 1200s, notwithstanding any religious beliefs. Procreation encompasses many facets: sexual selection, child rearing, passing property to progeny, recognition of the paternal family line. All of these are governed by the state through marriage laws in order to further the policy of procreation, the natural survival of our species.

<comment><USER11> In the Bible, Paul justifies marriage as a way of controlling the sexual desire so it does not lead to the sin of fornication. But he does not seem to care about procreation.

<comment><USER10> Sexual selection is one of the principles I mention. Sexual context may be a better term. But my argument is secular, not religious. I am referring to American common law, English common law, and its predecessors, not the Bible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like good news to me, hopefully not short lived when the new administration comes in.

<comment> yoz-y Although I would love to see governments taking environmental issues seriously, I just can't fathom this legislation not being discarded by the next administration in the months to come.

<comment><USER13> Well, you can be sure that it will be discarded, because the person most likely to be responsible for energy is either S. Palin or some other oil companies-friendly professional.

Republican administrations tend to be "good for business", which translates to "bad for consumers", so get ready to be shafted.

<comment><USER14> > "good for business", which translates to "bad for consumers"

I know it's trendy to be left leaning so you easily get away with such generalising statements but ask yourself these questions before hating on all businesses:

Would you buy an iPhone or a laptop designed and built by a government agency? A car? How about a pair of shoes or pants. Would you prefer sending your children to private or public schools. Same goes for universities. Would you rather participate in evil Capitalism to earn a living or live under government social security regimentation, possibly even with a job provided or forced on you by government.

Is there even anything where you would prefer the government option over something offered by private businesses?

If you don't want private businesses to offer products and services, and government products and services suck, then who is going to provide this?

<comment><USER13> You missed the point, and I'm not sure you understand what "good for business", as practiced by Republican administrations in the US, means.

It simply means no regulations. So businesses are free to do anything they want, with consumers at the receiving end of the negative consequences of such practices.

Most recently, we saw how that played out under the last Republican (Bush) administration. In an environment in which corporations were going gang- busters, I don't recall that administration ever bringing a single anti-trust case.

That "good for business" environment eventually led to the 2008 financial crises. And the single most important curb that was put in place to prevent such a crisis from happening again is under threat, because the guys set to take office in January (2017) have already said they'll undo the Dodd-Frank Act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Realistically, right now the US has enough sources to produce huge exports without touching the Arctic (or the Pacific Coast, which has enormous untapped resources). Economically, it makes sense (I'm not addressing environmental concerns) to hold off on exploiting this oil. Currently there is so much global supply that adding more would just depress prices while encouraging unnecessary economic growth.

While it would have an enormous environmental impact, there may come a time in the future of America where we are obliged to tap these resources for our economy.

<comment><USER16> > encouraging unnecessary economic growth

economic growth is always a "necessity"

<comment><USER15> nah there are severe consequences to excessive growth especially when subsidized by low oil prices. Please see [https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Energy- Security-Remaking-Modern...](https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Energy-Security- Remaking-Modern/dp/0143121944) for the hard-won lessons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this even matters after the huge shale discovery in Texas.

<comment><USER18> When you hear about news like that, remember that 1) a billion barrels is about 50 days of US consumption and the Us is less than half of global consumption 2) that the announcements are usually about "oil in place" which an estimate of the total size of the deposit, of which 10-40% is usually recoverable.

If you are talking about Alpine High, it's less than 1/2 a year of US consumption of oil and less than 3 years of US consumption of natural gas at current rates (and very likely less depending on the recovery ratio).

<comment><USER16> Wolfcamp shale has 20 billion barrels of oil. According to your numbers, 3 years of US consumption (not counting recoverability).

So...it's a pretty big deal.

<comment><USER19> Three years of consumption is a drop in the bucket, I'm sorry. If you think that's a big deal you need to get your head checked.

Three years is a blink in time.

If it was fifty years or more you would at least have a case.

<comment><USER17> If it is cheaper to extract than the Arctic oil, it's enough to shift investment for a period of years. This action only lasts for 5 years.

<comment><USER19> Pretty much any oil you can think of is cheaper to extract than arctic shale oil. That's an extremely dangerous environment to be operating in, and whatever you extract must be piped out, which incurs significant infrastructure costs as well.

This doesn't even touch on what an environmental time bomb this is.

<comment><USER17> Are we talking about the same thing?

Wolfcamp shale is in west Texas (see my link in this thread). It seems more likely to me over the next few years that west Texas sees a boom than Arctic drilling sees intense interest.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DNSCrypt release for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://blog.opendns.com/2012/02/16/tales-from-the-dnscrypt-linux-rising

<comment><USER3> DNSCrypt / DNSCurve will be great for security of DNS and the internet in general. I hope this helps it reaches wide deployment.

For background, it is the first implementation of DNSCurve designed by DJB (qmail, tinydns, daemontools, etc). See <http://dnscurve.org/> or the excerpt below.

DNSCurve uses high-speed high-security elliptic-curve cryptography to drastically improve every dimension of DNS security:

Confidentiality: DNS requests and responses today are completely unencrypted and are broadcast to any attacker who cares to look. DNSCurve encrypts all DNS packets.

Integrity: DNS today uses "UDP source-port randomization" and "TXID randomization" to create some speed bumps for blind attackers, but patient attackers and sniffing attackers can easily forge DNS records. DNSCurve cryptographically authenticates all DNS responses, eliminating forged DNS packets.

Availability: DNS today has no protection against denial of service. A sniffing attacker can disable all of your DNS lookups by sending just a few forged packets per second. DNSCurve very quickly recognizes and discards forged packets, so attackers have much more trouble preventing DNS data from getting through. Protection is also needed for SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, etc., but protecting DNS is the first step.

Despite its extremely high level of security, DNSCurve is very easy for software authors to implement, and very easy for administrators to deploy.

DNSCurve is part of a larger project to encrypt and authenticate all Internet packets. The techniques used in DNSCurve are easily adapted to other Internet protocols.

<comment><USER4> A summary of the summary is that it encrypts and authenticates all communication with DNS servers that support the protocol, and does so with very little overhead, in a way that can be rolled out incrementally.

<comment><USER5> A comparative clarity enhancing corollary to the summary of the summary:

DNSCurve is like ssh - no central authority, secures and hides the contents of the connection, not the data at rest. Server keys are published as part of the NS record of the domain.

DNSSEC is like PGP with SSL's centralize certificate authorities - <USER2> parties use keys to sign zone files which can be stored on an untrusted server but still authenticated. No encryption on server-client communication.

They're really complimentary techniques with different goals and means of achieving them.

<comment><USER6> Does DNSCurve offer any protection against a MITM attack (e.g. open wifi with dns hijacking)

<comment><USER5> Depends on the client implementation. If your client machine's resolver is set to use DNSCurve enabled recursive servers and has know good copies of their keys and IP addresses, then trying to MITM would require breaking the encryption (ie, impossible/very unlikely).

That said, if you have control at the registrar level or an intermediary or above the recursive nameserver, you could change the NS records to use your keys and MITM it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I deployed CurveDNS a few weeks ago for a few of my domains. It's pretty easy following the instructions here:

<http://curvedns.on2it.net/docs>

I wrapped the CurveDNS binaries with fpm, which made installing it on all the servers very easy. For the DNS server I used the djbdns stack (already in debian experimental, patched with IPv6 support). The big advantage of this is that tinydns's data format is atomic on a line level, so you just cat all the zone files together and build the data.cdb file. I do this with Rake and and push the zone all over SSH to the servers - making an internet facing change is usually as trivial as adding a single line in a text file and running rake.

Glad to see the client side of things is becoming as easy to set up as the server side.

</comment><comment><USER7> _we're searching for a rockstar win32 hacker to build a Windows release_

Cool, just noticed that I haven't seen the term "rockstar hacker" in job ads in a long time. Can't say I miss it.

<comment><USER8> I guess they are looking for an egotistical self absorbed drug addict with a tendency to mistreat women?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It doesn't seem to work for me. I am on a network where all web proxies are blocked. I tried accessing anonymouse.org and I got the default page which is used to inform blocked domains on my network. I can ping to the ip of anonymouse.org. I tested whether I have setup dnscrypt correctly with: "sudo tcpdump udp port dns" it showed very long unreadable lines which I have not seen before using dnscrypt. For anonymouse.org this was the tcp dump output:

12:57:43.523694 IP mypc-ubuntu.local.38481 > resolver2.opendns.com.domain: 28982 updateM [b2&3=0x666e] [27192a] [30295q] [20660n] [52086au][|domain]

12:57:43.801981 IP resolver2.opendns.com.domain > mypc-ubuntu.local.38481: 29238 updateM [b2&3=0x666e] [27192a] [30295q] [414n] [12287au] Type65535 (Class 13704)? [|domain]

There should have been a third line with the encrypted lines, but it doean't show up for anonymouse.org. Where as the third line with encrypted payload gets shown to the domains that are whitelisted in my network.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell So this only works if I route all of my DNS requests through OpenDNS or some other DNSCrypt supporting recursive resolver?

I'm currently running my own recursive resolver. I would like to add DNSCrypt support, but I'm not handing over my DNS queries to somebody else.

<comment><USER10> This is what I was wondering as well. Is there a way to deploy DNSCrypt into our own servers (Bind9, tinydns, MS DNS, etc). Any information would be welcomed if somebody knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain to me how this is working? It seems like the equivlanet stunnel for DNS: I still have to trust my provider's (here: OpenDNS) DNS servers, they have control over the encryption, not the owner of the DNS records?</comment>


INSIDE THE MOVEMENT THAT'S TRYING TO SOLVE SILICON VALLEY'S DIVERSITY PROBLEM - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3037720/innovation-agents/inside-the-movement-thats-trying-to-solve-silicon-valleys-diversity-proble

<comment><USER2> OK. THANK YOU.</comment>


Cops charged after pot shop's hidden cameras show them eating snacks - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/cops-charged-after-pot-shops-hidden-cameras-show-them-eating-snacks/ <comment><USER2> >The cops maintained that the dispensary illegally recorded them because the officers believed they had disabled all the store's cameras and therefore had an expectation of privacy "that their conversations were no longer being recorded," according to their lawsuit.

You can't make this stuff up. The Cops are attempting to sue because they believed they had a reasonable right to privacy; because they thought they had destroyed all of the surveilance system (They smashed 5 cameras and took their tapes) and were not being recorded. Simply so they could commit crimes, break department rules, and get high on the job with complete impunity. Welcome to the Police State America if you're still in denial its time to wake up.

<comment><USER3> Its ridiculous of course. But protections provided by the courts go to extremes to protect the individual. In the case of officers, there are other issues. But at root their protections start the same as mine and yours. So that's part of the argument here.

<comment><USER2> That is what the Constitution and Rule of law provides in this country and we're all supposed to live under it. At the same time you type this the FBI is attempting to argue in court that no one really has a right to privacy.

If you cannot expect the Police to Uphold and follow the Laws they are sworn to protect you no longer live in a Democracy, you live in a Police State.

If you go and destroy all of the surveilance cameras you see in a bank and then go rob it, see if you're able to request that evidence be thrown out because you thought all of the cameras had been "disabled"

<comment><USER4> If this were an actual police state, the police would not be arguing their position in court, and if they did, the courts would never disagree with them, or charge them with crimes. Police corruption alone isn't evidence of a police state.

<comment><USER2> po·lice state(noun) A totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities.

You are correct that a police state is not simply corruption within the police force. Your self-defined version of what a police state is incorrect though. We're certainly having our activities secretly spied upon.

<comment><USER4> The police don't control the state, though.

<comment><USER2> The State uses the Police to control the Populace, The Police do not Control the State in a Police State.

>The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.

Which part of this is not actively being instituted in the US?

The only reason I can think that so many people have such a limited and incorrect view of what a Police State is they choose to live in denial or they themselves benefit from the Police State.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does Conflict Drive Cooperation? - <AUTHOR> http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2016/KlingTurchin.html#.V8xeTl1enPE.hackernews <comment><USER2> Peter Kropotkin thought so about intraspecies cooperation being driven by conflict with a harsh environment, much of his evidence coming from observing wildlife in Siberia which is quite a harsh place to live. Here is a note about his work by Stephen Jay Gould: [https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.ht...](https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> This can be summarized in the old adage, (roughly) "There is nothing that binds people together like a common enemy". I don't see anything ground breaking here.

External conflict can cause internal unification. Of course, to elicit cooperation, there needs to be a common benefit or good to all parties involved. But external conflict is not the only possible stimulus, though it might be the easiest to trigger.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is a very interesting talk/interview with Peter Turchin here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=q6fx3AN0tlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=q6fx3AN0tlo)

It is about the follow up to the book discussed in the link: 'Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth'

[https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasociety-Years-Humans-Greatest- Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasociety-Years-Humans-Greatest-Cooperators- ebook/dp/B0185P69LU)

Turchin is the founder of Cliohistory - he is trying to formulate mathematical models that can describe history in the sense that it checks if social theory corresponds to the models - similar (but not identical) idea as the fictional psychohistory of Asimov's foundation series.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like the article and what I've read from the free pages of the book on Amazon.

The concept of metaethnicity struck a cord with me immediately. I spend quite some time outside the borders of my own country and took care of foreign students during my university time. Thereby I also developed that feeling that a country is not just one ethnic group, but many. And even a single individual doesn't just belong to one group, but to many. Also I personally never was able to associate myself with a single group alone, always felt e.g. hackers have some interesting concepts I agree with, nerds have some interesting concepts I agree with, scientists, Warhammer 40k players, punk rockers, at the same time communists AND capitalists and so forth. But no group alone - so I felt- could represent what I stand for. And that is a real problem when trying to find a purpose in this society I live in, where people believe you are an individualist because you decide which group you fully associate with. That sounds strange and it is.

But something I don't understand. The book defines Asabiya (as quoted in the blog) as this:

> Asabiya of a group is the ability of its members to stick together, to > cooperate

So it's a measure of cooperation.

But then the essay goes on to talk about it's competitional aspects:

> If asabiya is supposed to predict the winner of an inter-group contest, then > one must be careful to measure it in some way other than by counting > victories in inter-group contests.

Why? Why should a cooperative value be measured in wins against others?

I would say the following are good measures of cooperation, and are indirectly(!) able to predict competitive capability as well as comparison of this capability:

\- 1 divided by the number of tax frauds, equalized over the population could measure the cooperation of a country

\- The total revenue of a company (this is obviously discussable)

\- The mean grade of a class (cooperation between teacher and students)

\- The number of successfully graduating students of a university

\- The average time of a customer in an entertainment park like Legoland or Disneyland

\- The total daily amount of tips of a restaurant

Sure, if you have two restaurants and one is able to generate only slightly more tips, then it's hard to say who would win in a competition for customers. But if the numbers are big enough it's quite clear, e.g. if one restaurant makes $10 and the other makes $765 then it's quite clear the second one must cooperate a lot better (of course considering all other factors equal, as is done in science).

Thus I think if we look at "what are they cooperating on? Which values are depending more on the result of cooperation than on the individuals output?" then we can find a lot of ways to measure cooperation without including competition. And I find this very important since the final, visionary (=not achievable) goal should be to get rid of competition altogether. And you can't really do that if you put it in the formula which you then use to measure your success.</comment>


Amazon Builds First Cargo Airplane - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=67&v=77OUxSW5Lcs <comment><USER2> Color me confused, but this video doesn't show them building an aircraft. It shows people painting an Amazon livery on a Boeing jet. Other sources say that Amazon leased the jets, so this plane weren't even custom ordered.

The video is titled "Introducing Amazon One - Timelapse - With Music". Submitter? Why did you submit this with a confusing and seemingly irrelevant title?</comment>


Microsoft cuts off Windows 10 support early for some PCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-blocks-windows-10-creators-update-on-some-pcs/ <comment><USER3> This hardware uses PowerVR GPUs (e.g. rebranded GMA500), which are no longer supported (driver updates) for Windows by both Intel and Imagination, and even on older versions of Windows (and Linux) had barely-to-non-functional drivers. These drivers already had various bugs, and on newer Windows 10 versions an additional bug is apparently 'text not rendering'.

The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely was usable, that it apparently wasn't deemed worth the engineering effort to work around this type of flawed driver.

Of course, this article completely ignores that information, presumably to cause typical baseless Microsoft hate.

<comment><USER4> I had an Acer Aspire 751 with Atom Z520 and the GMA500 GPU you mentioned. It always had terrible driver support in Windows 7. When I updated to the Windows 10 insider preview before it was released, it was unusable. Huge graphics glitches all over the place, text would disappear entirely in some programs, random scrambled blocks of the screen that changed as you navigated. By the time Windows 10 was officially released it had been improved, but still wasn't great. Not surprising that this piece of hardware isn't a good candidate for support in the future.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever tried running Linux on it?

I wonder how the gma500 driver fares these days.

<comment><USER6> My experience with it under Linux was limited to the vesa driver only, as the GMA500 driver was incomplete and buggy. As such, it wasn't a great platform for media consumption, but if all you needed was a terminal it was fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So in 12 years time when Windows 10 is as old as Windows XP we'll be back to the same security nightmare that Windows 10 was supposed to put an end to?

That's a bit disingenuous of Microsoft - they've been parading the 'as-a- service' model as a security feature so that users get constant patches.

<comment><USER8> Do you think Microsoft is obligated to support all hardware for all time?

A line needs to be drawn somewhere.

<comment><USER7> It does indeed. But remember one of the big sells Microsoft made was that with Windows 10 you would get continual security patches. Microsoft dug that hole for themselves.

And to add, a machine released in 2015 (less than 3 years ago!) that no longer gets security updates is hardly the right place to be drawing the line you speak of.

<comment><USER9> Many of the 32GB Bay Trail Windows 8 tablets that were upgraded to Windows 10 for free were unable to install Windows 10 Anniversary edition. For these devices you had to do a completely fresh install to get from Windows 10 to Windows 10 Anniversary Edition.

Conceivably you've cut your support from 10 years to 2 by upgrading to Windows 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't be so sure until the support _actually_ drops.

1607 is going to receive updates to 2018, and the Acer quote says "Microsoft is working with us to help provide compatible drivers to address this incompatibility", and I can see no official statement from MS saying otherwise.

The "Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC" message, then, could be explained by simple "if (!systemsupported()) { show message }" that does not properly take into account that support could still be added in the future.

</comment><comment><USER11> >If... the manufacturer [of your PC] doesn't officially support it for Windows 10, you're at risk.

In other news, water is wet.

<comment><USER12> Windows upgrades have worked for decades without manufacturer support. I can't remember the last time in the "32 bit and above" era that a whole class of CPU stopped working release to release. You might be bound by RAM or a particular driver but you were generally ok to upgrade. Is Apple's grip on this community so strong that we now accept hardware deprecation for PCs? (Though even apple didn't cut off my 2009 machine until sierra.)

<comment><USER13> > I can't remember the last time in the "32 bit and above" era that a whole > class of CPU stopped working release to release. You might be bound by RAM > or a particular driver but you were generally ok to upgrade.

The problem isn't with the actual CPU cores but with the graphics drivers. Unlike all other Intel chips, these Atoms have PowerVR GPUs that have been EOL'd by the manufacturer. The existing GPU drivers won't work with the new Windows 10, and reverse-engineering them without manufacturer support would be too much of a pain (there aren't even good Linux drivers for these GPUs, TBH).

<comment><USER12> If it worked in the last release it's a regression and they can fix it. It sounds to me like a compat bug where the true severity wasn't understood or acted upon until too late.

(Disclosure: I worked for MS from 2008-2011.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yesterday on Ars: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794546)

<comment><USER15> got only 19 votes (probably bad timing), let's keep it and not flag it as dupe - info seems relevant to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Intel's Atom Clover Trail series CPUs

<comment><USER17> Using PowerVR Graphics.

<comment><USER18> Okay, but we already saw Microsoft drop support for Skylake features in Windows 7 and 8.

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft- window...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-windows- support-policy-new-processors-skylake)

We may need at least another data point, but it does look to me that Microsoft has gotten much more aggressive about dropping support for older hardware. It probably a result of Nadella's cut of the Q&A team. If the Q&A team is cut, it makes sense that less hardware would be support, and that you'll also see more bugs in the operating system.

> _Despite being Microsoft's newest and 'most secure' operating system, > Windows 10 was found to have the highest proportion of vulnerabilities of > any OS (395), 46% more than Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 (265 each)._

[https://www.avecto.com/news-and-events/news/94-of- critical-m...](https://www.avecto.com/news-and-events/news/94-of-critical- microsoft-vulnerabilities-mitigated-by-removing-admin-rights)

It sounds to me like all of those anti-exploit mitigations that are supposed to come to Windows 10 will be needed just to make it as "secure" as previous versions.

<comment><USER3> Dropping support? No, said support was announced to not exist before the release of said CPUs, and given that CPUs are a fair bit more complex than appears (for instance Windows XP wouldn't run on Ryzen CPUs until a microcode update in practice due to some old feature being unsupported, or new features would be introduced that old OS task switching code is unaware of) at first glance, it was considered unviable to formally support these CPUs - even if they might work at first appearances, Microsoft gathers sufficient usage/error data that they presumably know of some hard-to-fix issue that makes it impossible to guarantee the OS to work together with this new hardware.

Also, an update to the OS to make it compatible could potentially be sufficiently high-impact that it could break user applications, existing hardware functionality, or other potential concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it's worth noting most Linux distros will continue to support these machines with new features and security patches for the time being.

<comment><USER5> It depends.

The problem here lies within the graphics driver for the PowerVR GPU - <USER2> was never really supported under Linux either.

There is an experimental 2D driver [0] which is unlikely to receive any mayor updates, I don't know how stable it is at this day and age.

You won't get any 3D or video decoding acceleration though unless you use a now as well unsupported release like Ubuntu 11.10 [1]

[0] [https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/Kconfig)

[1] [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PoulsboObsoleteDrivers](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PoulsboObsoleteDrivers)

<comment><USER20> The old Intel driver works under Ubuntu 14.05 LTS. And you can get them working on newer releases also. [1]

The Ubuntu Wiki on this is horribly misinformed and out of date.

The gma500 driver included in Linux also works very well, but lacks the accelerated features.

[1] [https://github.com/EMGD-Community/intel-binaries- linux](https://github.com/EMGD-Community/intel-binaries-linux)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And that's why you use LTSB. 10 years of guaranteed security updates, with no feature updates that break your shit.

<comment><USER22> Only you need a volume license for that, and if you have the dough to spend on that, presumably you'd get a higher-specced CPU.

<comment><USER23> Schools buy hundreds of low end machines for students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Strange way to write Intel.</comment>


THE VERDICT: Google-Motorola Will Be A Colossal Disaster* - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-motorola-disaster-2011-8

<comment><USER2> Motorola has 19,000 employees and can't consistently turn a profit. These two facts seem related in an obvious way, and this implies a way to turn a profit on it.

Cherry pick all the best research and software folks and bring them into Google, abandon MotoBlur and release devices with vanilla Android (thus eliminating the need for said software folks), and streamline operations with massive reductions in headcount. Possibly shutter unprofitable product lines like feature phones entirely, and focus the company on things Google considers strategic for them, i.e. Android phones and set top boxes.

Admittedly, Blodget is right that Google has no experience in performing this kind of maneuver, so there are a lot of risks, but considering that they bought a patent portfolio that happened to come with a company attached, there's no real reason to be afraid of downsizing the company to a point where Motorola can turn a decent profit and start growing again.

Or, as Blodget points out, they could just spin the company off as soon as they can and wash their hands of the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of the points seem to be "Google doesn't know hardware". This is a valid point, but the article mostly reads like this one point repeated over and over.

First, it discounts the fact that Google isn't inheriting a shell company; those former Motorola employees? They're still there.

Second, so what if they don't already have a dedicated hardware factory already? They've got a dedicated team, one that's proven. Danger, Inc.

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/11/andy-rubin-gets- dange...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/11/andy-rubin-gets-danger-back- together-at-google-to-work-on-android-hardware/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Disagree. The companies' cultures are more similar than they might otherwise appear; Motirola has a strong engineering heritage and a good hardware pedigree but their software UI has been badly lacking. Not that the merger will be easy, but a colossal disaster? I think not.

<comment><USER5> You just made me realise it will be a total disaster. Because Google aren't buying the entirety of Motorola, they are buying the cellphone/consumer division of the company.

Hence if the clever ploys are true which John Gruber alluded too, then motorola are smart. And being smart they have already moved the best talent back to the other company "Motorola Solutions" and Google are buying a pile of average to bad.

Plus I doubt Google is ready for the HR mess thats about to hit them. If anyone here has been through a large restructure or merger then you can appreciate just how disruptive and demoralising the process is. Productivity and loyalty will plummet.

If you haven't been through a process like that go watch the movie "Office Space" its a light hearted view of a dark subject, and is way to close to home on many points.

<comment><USER4> Talent issue, no I don't think so. Google's a company where individual talent matters a great deal, they're not oblivious to those issues. There will be a big culture clash and you are right that there will be many HR challenges. I worked as a contracter for Motorola (very briefly and many years ago) and can relate to the problems Google will encounter...but that's well known about Motorola. I don't agree that large mergers are always a failure; Ernst & Young is still together and successful, even though there was a huge clash of cultures there - it was literally a case of ne company being a Mac and one a PC.

<comment><USER5> But if reporting is to be believed Google is struggling to hire and keep talent, and there hiring approach has been heavily criticised for encouraging 'generic' and 'average' employees.

The entire truth behind that I can't comment on myself, but thats what goes through my blogs feeds form time to time.

I know from every restructure I've ever been in the first casualty is the talented staff. They don't hang around to mucked about, they are in demand so they just flow somewhere where those issues don't exist.

But who knows, I guess there was a lot of sleepiness nights at Google before this went ahead, so our conjecture would have already been through more solid risk/benefit analysis than what a chat thread could offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Writer makes good points. I find it hard to disagree.</comment>


The "Shitcoin" Moment in Congress - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Xentagz/status/1151587356425760774 <comment><USER2> The speaker in the video is making the argument that the term "Shitcoin" is used to denote a centralized cryptocurrency (as opposed to decentralized, such as Bitcoin).</comment>


Rural suicides among farmers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/21/health/rural-suicides-among-farmers/index.html <comment><USER2> I'm from rural Eastern Colorado (think Kansas but you can see a mountain far off) and I've know farmers/ranchers who've committed suicide but I don't think any was due to financial stress. It's anecdotal but all were doing quite well. I think the lack of meaning in their lives due to farm subsidies in the form of soil conservation may be the root cause.

Every farmer knows how the game is played. Do whatever it takes to get several years of high yields, then you'll be offered money from the gov to not farm, based on those yields.

But nobody tells them about the depression that sets in when a farmer is paid to not farm - to loose the teleo of one's existence. It's sad to see and since those "soil conservation" contacts can be up to 10 years long, it's a long time to get out of that funk.

Again, anecdotal, but I've never heard of a farmer who had land to work and the ability to work it commit suicide.

<comment><USER3> Interesting theory.

That people want to work (more than for just the money) is one of the reasons I am very skeptical of UBI. I think that people want to work, and we apparently don't structure communities very well for people to just pick up meaningful work (or even volunteering) as a hobby.

<comment><USER4> >That people want to work (more than for just the money) is one of the reasons I am very skeptical of UBI.

This is interesting, can you elaborate? I would expect most people would continue to work if given UBI and it would even encourage people to do work they _like_ to do instead of what makes them the most money, but it sounds like you are predicting the opposite.

<comment><USER3> > it would even encourage people to do work they like to do instead of what > makes them the most money

But clearly this doesn't play out with the farmers in question here! They are not freed from the shackles of work for a year or three, busily following their passion. They are committing suicide. That isn't to say that the majority go in that direction, but its enough to measure, and should be enough to give us pause I think.

The majority of men on UBI-like programs seem to watch TV and take drugs, and not follow passions. I've written a fair bit about UBI and contrasting it with basic jobs, here:

[https://medium.com/s/story/after-universal-basic-income- the-...](https://medium.com/s/story/after-universal-basic-income-the- flood-217db9889c07)

Related to this discussion see the section, "The Existential Problem", and if you have the time I suggest you read the two articles (NPR 'unfit for work' and Commentary Mag 'our miserable 21st century') that I link to in that section.

Not in the above article but broadly speaking, the work disincentive for UBI tests so far is about 10%. That is, 10% of the people given something like UBI will drop out of the labor force and not do any kind of (measurable) work. Some % of that 10% will go on to commit suicide, I imagine, like the farmers here. Citations for the ~10% figure can be found here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666307)

Something about being given money and having no work to do, plus no community or purpose, does not cause people to create community or purpose. My fear here is that instead of working towards making sure people can, somehow, create more community and purpose, we're taking the one thing many people find meaning in (work) and pulling the rug out from under them on it, like we are possibly doing to the farmers here.

Sorry, having a hard time being succinct. What I am suggesting is that we have _got_ to solve this "no community or purpose" issue before we solve the "money" issue. It's bigger, and if we don't, we might not like the future very much.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps a difference with UBI would be the ubiquitousness of it. You'd know way before you even entered the job market what the score was.

Thanks for the links in your other post, I will take a look. I admit that I have Star Trek dreams of post-scarcity happiness, but I'm willing to change my mind if there is credible evidence to suggest my hopes are misplaced. I wasn't aware that there were any decent UBI experiments that had been done at scale, lately they all seem to be very limited and aborted early.

Maybe I'll just have to scale back and pin my hopes on Medicare For All. Would be nice to detach medical coverage from employment, IMO.

<comment><USER3> > I admit that I have Star Trek dreams of post-scarcity happiness

I think a lot of us, here on Hacker News, do. I kinda worry that's part of the problem. But you and me and Sam Altman, etc, are not representative of society at large. I was thinking of the HN crowd (myself included) when I wrote this part:

> Just as you can find Silicon Valley techies who think Soylent is the only > sustenance a person will ever need, intellectuals tend to think everyone > could be as content as they would be living life in their heads or inventing > their own destiny. Most people need to be doing something to feel satisfied > and a potential UBI system addresses this need just as inadequately as > disability checks do now. Cue drug epidemics.

I think average people need more direction than that. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I think its a much more serious problem than the average person's relationship with money.

Put another way, the problems of today and the near future are _not_ primarily ones of money. They are ones of community and meaning. By most available data, even the poorest in the USA are doing OK on the money front, though its obviously not ideal! Some cites on that claim can be found here: [https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937200378919055360](https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937200378919055360)

So I worry UBI is solving the wrong problem first, and might make the real problem a little or a lot worse, depending on how the job landscape changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure the person profiled supports the underlying thesis of the article. He was 82 and struggling with numerous health problems, suicide may have been a quasi-rational choice?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Growing up on a Montana wheat farm, while we didn't use the phrase "cowboy up", there was always "is there a bone sticking out" toughen-up message.

And we did have one of those 15 minute hailstorms, and a lot of nervous June months without rain.

<comment><USER7> I grew up in suburban MT, and was one generation removed from rural MT. I never heard "cowboy up," but "is there a bone sticking out" definitely checks out.

The stresses of being in a rural state can be good and bad. Even in suburban MT, it would never have occured to my parents to be helicopter parents. Power tools, dangerous play, and "don't you dare come inside unless you're bleeding" were all par for the course.

But the same stresses that result in kids' freedom can also overwhelm some people. My own grandfather committed suicide, and I have to wonder if (even in a small town where he was well-loved) less isolation and more mental health services might have given him more years.

<comment><USER5> The 'old men committing suicide' seems to be a thing. My own 85 year old father has been ratcheting up the idle talk about being a useless burden to his wife, etc, which makes me _very_ nervous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone wants a sound track to this tragic story, Pearl Jam's "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" is—I'm convinced—influenced by bassist Jeff Ament having grown up in Big Sandy, which is the town discussed in this article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Similar story from 8 months ago. I liked the top comment about farmers creating financial stress just to avoid tax. I have seen this effect myself [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861888)

</comment><comment><USER9> In Syria, ISIS, war against Assad and mass exodus is due entirely to the regime not helping farmers get water during a time drought and famine. No doubt many farmers also killed themselves, but the gamut of hardships fell on deaf Western ears.

</comment><comment><USER10> wouldn't urban suicides among farmers be rare?

</comment><comment><USER11> It says, "two out of three suicides in Montana are by firearm". What do 1/3 of the other people use?

<comment><USER12> Assuming it follows the national trends, then the next most common are suffocation and poisoning.</comment></comment>


The Full, Very Impressive List Of LikeALittle Investors - <AUTHOR> http://tech-news.tk/?p=69444

<comment><USER2> It's really interesting: to me the service seems like a total bullshit, but I'm really curious to find out why am I wrong. I know many people here are sceptical about this website too. But could it be that what HN crowd prefers is supposed to be very different from what non-geeks prefer and all those investors actually realize that? Could it be that you don't have to impress geeks first to get some traction?</comment>


The Commun manifesto. Decentralized communities as the future of the internet - <AUTHOR> https://commun.com/askcommun/@shtefan-daily/1584094884 <comment><USER2> All the other comments in this thread are from accounts less than one hour old

<comment><USER3> Shill - One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

<comment><USER4> I perfectly understand your concern and support the attentiveness to suspicious activities. However, as Nick's colleague (and I'm honest in that), I see nothing bad in supporting his work this way. Even if it seems controversial. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I totally agree with every word. It's so nice to see that the platform has such a solid position and ethics in general. Very good, guys, wish you a great success

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing! Decentralization is good for humans as it brings back to us what belongs us, our rights and freedoms.

</comment><comment><USER6> Look really interesting! I think it's best way for social network future.

</comment><comment> sudo-boy What, a true decentralized sm? Too good to be true, I cannot believe</comment>


The Making of an Expert (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert <comment><USER2> See also Bloom's two-sigma problem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem)

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR:

Experts are always made, not born.

1\. Practice deliberately — considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well.

2\. Take the time you need — ability to attain expert performance is clearly constrained if you have fewer opportunities to engage in deliberate practice, since winning requires a training history comparable with that of other elite performers, nearly all of whom started very early.

3\. Find coaches and mentors — development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful, feedback, to extremely motivated students who seek out such feedback.

Real expertise must pass three tests:

1\. Leads to performance that is consistently superior to that of the expert's peers.

2\. Produces concrete results.

3\. Can be replicated and measured in the lab.</comment>


GlimmerBlocker: http proxy ad blocker for mac os x - <AUTHOR> http://glimmerblocker.org/ <comment><USER2> It's a nice idea, particularly considering that it would apply to any web browser used.

Though on Mac OS X I prefer OmniWeb, which has these filters as well as the ones that GlimmerBlocker says it doesn't have (i.e. control over cookies, JavaScript, etc.).</comment>


18F Handbook - <AUTHOR> https://handbook.18f.gov/ <comment><USER2> yep, it's the federal government, there's a section on how to deal with an "active shooter".

tl;dr: bend over and kiss your ass goodbye

Threatening person with a weapon

        Stay calm and signal a coworker for help.
        Have that person call 911 and then call the Security Command Center.
        Maintain eye contact and stall for time.
        Keep talking but follow the instructions of the person who has the weapon. Never grab for a weapon.
        Watch for a chance to escape to a safe area.

Active Shooter

        Evacuate if possible. Keep your hands up and leave all belongings.
        Hide out if evacuation is not possible. Stay out of view. Lock doors and block entry.
        Take action as a last resort only when your life is in imminent danger.
            Attempt to disrupt and/or incapacitate the shooter by:
            Acting as aggressively as possible.
            Throwing items and improvising weapons.
            Yelling.
            Committing to your actions.</comment>


What is Qualia? (Explanation to Why Magenta Isn't a Color) - <AUTHOR> http://www.biotele.com/qualia.htm

<comment><USER2> As the astute comment in the other thread pointed out, this author doesn't even seem to know what the word "qualia" means. Certainly, the author doesn't even seem to know that the word "qualia" is plural.

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/>

There are so many better articles on color perception on the Web, whether dealing with physics and physiology

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_vision>

or with the philosophy of qualia.

<http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/colorperception.html>

Let's see more quality links submitted to HN.</comment>


A Most Important Discovery (1953) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2015/07/a-most-important-discovery.html

<comment><USER2> TIL that Francis Crick's 12-year-old son Michael, to whom this remarkably clear letter is addressed, started out studying neuroscience at Harvard, but met the computer, ended up writing computer games, and lives in Seattle. ([http://crick.com/gamemaster.html](http://crick.com/gamemaster.html))

The computer is really quite a captivating thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Watson and Crick's letter to _Nature_ ends with the best sentence of the 20th Century:

"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."</comment>