Pinker: "News is a misleading way to understand the world" - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/8/16/12486586/2016-worst-year-ever-violence-trump-terrorism <comment><USER2> I've found, for myself, traveling a good portion of the US by bicycle tempers my pessimism about the world.

Bad things happen, to be sure, and it is good (I think) to stay informed of the news, but it is also good to see how kind, generous and caring most people are, and also how people not of your political, religious, or cultural ilk are not exactly the ignorant or immoral monsters you may have thought.

<comment><USER3> I think it's misleading to infer too much from that. Most people are nice to strangers, face to face. Maybe it's that you're suddenly a member of each other's in-group, and forming a basis to exclude the other person (becoming enemies) requires some initial behavioral or ideological incompatibility and enough time for it to germinate into enough of a conflict to sabotage the automatic friendly social interaction. However, just because strangers generally get along when they meet randomly, that doesn't say anything about the major problems that cause people to not get along once they know each other—incompatible ideologies, behavioral patterns that the other person can't tolerate, and so on.

To pivot to another realm, a cop can be the nicest person in the world if you hang out with them at a neighborhood barbecue, and the next week they can be harassing people and ruining lives over drug possession.

<comment><USER2> I agree with you. And yes, in my travels I have met, for instance, racist cops who are quite nice to me. (I am white.)

Still. I see that the people who are the most afraid, the most angry, the most surprised that I would trust strangers not to kill me, are the people that watch the most news. They simply do not trust strangers, at all.

The answer, I think, is somewhere in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

Mark Twain

</comment><comment><USER5> The news is a method of attempting to become informed about the state of the world exclusively through the examination of outliers. It's broken by design.

<comment><USER6> well, IMO news should also cover the issues that affect the masses, yes, an accident in a refinery is an outlier but a vote on carbon taxes in congress is something that affect us all.

The problem with today's mainstream media is that they don't talk a lot about the big issues but those outliers. If we focus on the things that matter well yes we're not in the middle ages but we're not in the best shape possible as a civilization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is good to read the news if you have an understanding of what the media is trying to achieve. There should be a "News 101" class at every university to help students navigating the deluge of information - especially to help them understand what the media conglomerates are and how their business works. Mostly everything that is written follows an agenda that is set by advertisers, political positions of the owners of the particular media group, and national interests. If you don't understand this, reading the news is just like being brainwashed.

<comment><USER8> This analysis is called "deconstruction", i.e. understanding the cultural background and the advocacy of the author. This not only applies to news, but any media- movies, literature, art, etc. Supposedly people should learn how to do this in high school.

<comment><USER9> No it isn't. It's plain old `critical thinking` [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking)

Deconstruction is something else.

<comment><USER10> It could also be called taking a sociological view on the way the media works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Newspapers used to make a healthy profit from tiny ads. Network news used to be run at a loss by the tv networks. The introduction of CNN made news into a huge money maker. Craigslist ate the lunch of most newspapers.

Now, the internet (especially social networks) has made everything a race for attention. Now the New York Times has to compete and worry about Buzzfeed.

All of these trends now just reward attention more than anything. The standards for journalism are eroded when outlets like Buzzfeed allow anyone to write content, get it indexed by Google and then track how popular that piece of content gets and automatically promote it.

In a world like that, we get the loudest, angriest, most emotionally wrenching things; context, nuance and facts be damned.

Whatever you think of his politics, Donald Trump wouldn't be where he is without his savvy use of the media. He has exploited the weakness in our current system all the way to top of one of the two major parties in the most powerful country in the free world. All to the horror, shock and dismay of the vast majority of people who work in the media disagreeing with Trump's politics.

<comment><USER12> You're disregarding the role of subscriptions in supporting newspapers. The internet obviously has made print news delivered to your doorstep obsolete. Even now, subscription-only news outlets are doing okay, such as the Financial Times, and niche papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One way to possibly fix this might be to start a #NoBloodMoney movement that would target advertisers who advertise in news segments about events where people have died.

People's deaths should not be used by the media company to make money, nor should people's deaths be used to try to generate interest in your product.

If enough people targeted the advertisers ("Ever since watching an ad for <your product> during a news segment about <an event in which somebody died> I just associate <your product> with death and sadness"), I think we could get the media companies to stop running an excess of these kinds of stories.

#NoBloodMoney - media companies should not profit off of other's misery.

<comment><USER14> Human misery isn't something most companies want to be associated with. For that reason, many companies don't want their ads to run next to content like that. I've personally had to quickly pull ads off a site because of that fact.

<comment><USER15> I've been occasionally fascinated that newspapers don't have a flag in their CMSs for articles that are crass to plaster with ads.

<comment><USER16> The New York Times seems to do this:

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/an-ad-blocker-for- tragedies...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/an-ad-blocker-for-tragedies- how-news-sites-handle-content-around-sensitive-stories/)

If a story is marked as sensitive, an option is set and ads aren't shown on it.

The Guardian has this too. And I've done this on a few sites I've worked with as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _There has probably been a slight increase in the rate of violent crime in > the US in 2015, and I say probably because the FBI figures are still not out > for that year.

> But even then that wouldn't even be as high as it was in 2012, just three > years ago, and that itself is a huge decrease in the levels of '60s, '70, > and '80s in the US, where violent crime has fallen by more than half. So > there is probably an uptick for 2015 and 2016. But it's just a wiggle in a > curve that's been going down, down, down._

I'm not a member of the NRA and I don't own a gun. Personally, I'm ok with a ton of gun-control laws. All the gun-control laws you wanna pass, I'm ok with. Second amendment rights are not high on my personal priority list.

But, still, I sometimes wonder why there is such a hard push for more gun- control laws every year given this decreasing level of domestic violence.

<comment><USER18> > But, still, I sometimes wonder why there is such a hard push for more gun- > control laws every year given this decreasing level of domestic violence.

Another thing to ponder is why the focus on semiautomatic rifles, when 1, violent crime overwhelmingly uses handguns, and 2, the previous assault weapon ban was deemed ineffective by the DOJ. And what is the basis for proposing expanded background checks in response to, for example, the Orlando mass shooting when the shooter not only passed a background check, but had a security guard license (which itself has a more intensive background check).

<comment><USER19> While I dislike describing these things ("He's a gun nut! He'll kill us! People like him should be locked up!" are common reactions to simple facts) there are multiple reasons rifles are lumped in.

\- Any additional regulation sounds like progress to voters in favor of it. It can be nonsensical, unenforceable, make criminals out of previously law- abiding citizens (CA magazine size laws), be disregarded publicly by police departments, and they will still cheer for it.

\- They are mostly used for target practice, hunting, pest control, and some home defense. People who vote for gun control typically don't do these things. Questions of the form "Why do you need (X number of rounds | optics | calibers | forward grips)?" sound reasonable to them; if you have ever faced a bear / pack of coyotes / intruders it's pretty self explanatory.

\- They are the only real firearms that can present a significant threat to trained teams. Rifles can be aimed precisely, deliver a good sustained rate of fire, and punch through body armor, all from 500 yards.

\- With a good amount of practice and .308-.50 rounds, you can take down opposing vehicles and assets (power stations, fuel tanks, etc), and have enough distance between you and the target to exit the area safely.

For those in favor of gun control (beyond what we have currently) on HN, let me ask: How well do you think you would fair in a large riot / national emergency / civil war armed with only a SAFE Act compliant handgun? These things do and will happen, maybe not in your lifetime, but certainly in the future. The laws we enact should not just be focused on making us feel safe. They should consider those that may have to justly defend themselves against a larger force.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > As long as media will give endless publicity to multiple murderers, they > create a niche for people who want to make a difference for a political > cause or their own ego.

Right on.

</comment><comment><USER21> News is there to Entertain not Educate. IMO, the steady decline in reporting has a more to do with other forms of entertainment showing up and gaining traction than anything else.

<comment><USER22> I think a lot of news is there because it's influential. For example, the newspapers are totally awful money losing businesses, yet they stick around because of their political influence value.

<comment><USER21> Historically newspapers where money printing machines. Compared to say magazine's the industry has done very well over time and some of them are still rather profitable. However, this is a much broader trend even combining TV, Newspapers, Radio, and the internet we are simply employing fewer investigative reporters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The question is, what less misleading alternative is there? Social media?

<comment><USER24> Books, novels, non-fiction.

Low-latency mediums are usually event-based ("Breaking News! You can't guess what _just_ happened!").

High-latency mediums have the time to be understanding-based.

<comment><USER25> I've seen this being used by people arguing that it is why they read the papers rather than get their news online, unaware that the articles are written to the same deadlines, so they are simply getting the same information, but late.

<comment><USER26> Read news magazines that are published weekly (like The Economist) or monthly (like The Atlantic or Foreign Affairs).

<comment><USER25> Both of those are online.

<comment><USER27> I think you are confusing:

"we must get the story online within 5 minutes of it happening"

and

"Story written over a few hours/days/weeks and then published online"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28>
      It's always about events that happened and not about things that didn't happen.

This conversation and the above quote in particular remind me of this article posted here a while back: "Why the world is not falling apart" ([http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.single.html))

      We never see a reporter saying to the camera, "Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out"—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up.

I'm all for the right for free speech, but that doesn't mean that deliberate fear-mongering shouldn't be reprimanded.

<comment> qu4z-2 > deliberate fear-mongering [should] be reprimanded.

By whom?

<comment><USER28> That's a fair question and, not being hugely familiar with the legal system, I'm not sure what that would fall under. I'm thinking something along the lines of intentional deceit or unfair/manipulative representation of facts, but I'll admit to not knowing nearly enough about the law to point to anything in particular.

<comment> qu4z-2 As long as it needs to be intentional, I could _maybe_ see it. I imagine it'd be difficult to prove intent, though.

"Manipulative representation of facts" is tricky, because every representation aside from raw data has been manipulated in some way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes news can be misleading, but I think there's a lot of truth in Rene Girard's idea of escalating mimetic rivalry... and Peter Turchin's fathers- and-sons cycle of violence.

</comment><comment><USER30> I highly recommend Pinker's books. They will give you some rather politically incorrect view of the world. You may feel free to disagree with him but you will find them interesting read with potential to change how you look at the world.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hence why I have a great deal of distrust of any media. They always bend the facts to twist their narrative, it's better to hear from the horses mouth or watch directly what happens around the world

</comment><comment><USER32> Remember when Ezra Klien's Vox wasn't going to be just another left leaning content farm?

I wonder why they don't write about what happened there instead of just interviewing Pinker about the news?

</comment><comment><USER33> I love Steven Pinker!

<comment><USER9> I love him more! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Oh, really? Could it also be that advertisements are misleading way to collect the facts and press releases are misleading way to evaluate performance?

<comment><USER35> Or perhaps it could be people asking leading (biased) questions that have no answers.

<comment><USER36> haha, but if they asked hard questions then their press credentials are revoked.</comment></comment></comment>


Foxconn Buys Belkin, Linksys, and Wemo - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/26/17166272/foxconn-buys-belkin-fit-linksys-wemo <comment><USER2> would change title to "Foxconn Buys Belkin (owner of Linksys and Wemo)" to make it sound less like a buying spree

interesting to attempt another China-US wireless tech acquisition. i dont think the current administration will look too kindly on this.

<comment> eric-hu [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn)

> Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., trading as Foxconn Technology Group, > is a multinational electronics contract manufacturing company headquartered > in Tucheng, New Taipei, Taiwan.

This comment isn't too far from mistaking South Korea for North Korea.

<comment><USER3> That might not be so analogous. Does South Korea actually operate any businesses in North Korea?

(Aside: I'm currently a legal resident of the Republic of Korea.)

<comment> eric-hu Hyundai did until South Korea shut down the joint economic zone in North Korea to protest a rocket launch in 2016:

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

It's not a perfect analogy because China already has nukes. If they didn't, it's plausible Taiwan would do the same in the face of Chinese saber rattling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All the more reason to run dd-wrt on my linksys router.</comment>


Shaq passes GigaOM on Twitter, still behind Obama, Kevin Rose - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/shaq-passes-gigaom-on-twitter-still-way-behind-obama-kevin-rose

<comment><USER2> What incentive does Shaq have to whore himself on Twitter?

He's already accomplished so much in his basketball career, made plenty of money and even got to sample music/movies.

Is he one of those "never enough" guys, or does he simply like to hear/see himself talk?

My money is on the latter given his freestyle antics as of late.

/disclaimer: took Kobe's side in the feud, I think the media is in love with big Shaq and overlook his many warts.

<comment><USER3> Maybe he uses it for the same reason everyone else does? For fun and socializing? From what I've seen, Shaq is a pretty gregarious fellow.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Look at his posts: he's having fun on this thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Researcher: Drug Pump the 'Least Secure IP Device I've Ever Seen' - <AUTHOR> https://securityledger.com/2015/05/researcher-drug-pump-the-least-secure-ip-device-ive-ever-seen/

<comment><USER2> Big discussion on this yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9489237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9489237)

From today's link:

       Like other organizations, hospitals deploy firewalls,
       intrusion detection system software and other
       security products to protect their networks.

I'd like to take the "under" on that. I'd bet that hospitals, like most other large organizations, are really cesspools of virus infected, spam spewing botnets.

I'm only exaggerating a little bit. My intuition is that there are plenty of infected Windows computers in "most" big organizations. Anyone have a link to anything more definitive than my random "intuition"?</comment>


HTML5 differences from HTML4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/#absent- att...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/#absent-attributes)

Look at the things that are depreceted in HTML5: noshade attribute on hr, nowrap attribute on td and th, width attribute on hr, table, td, th, col, colgroup, iframe and pre, etc etc etc because "they are better handled by CSS". What do they mean by "better"?

In other words, things that are used most are deprecated and must be replaced with much more verbose syntax, just because it's _right_. This is so committee-ish. Do they seriously think they can change the way Internet works?

<comment><USER3> You're right! The W3C has never had an effect on the way the Internet works...

(Sorry couldn't resist.)

I generally like the idea of moving stuff into CSS, but I think it goes overboard when you have to define stuff in CSS for a unique occurrence... like defining rules for the one div that wraps my whole page. Why can't that just be defined as attributes to that div? Why do I have to put it in a separate place in CSS-land when it's only used for that specific div element?

I'm still hoping for someone to come along and make the whole html/css thing sane. It seems awfully hacky now.

 _Cue flame war_

<comment><USER4> So put the rules in a style attribute on that one div. That's hardly a reason to clutter HTML up with presentational things.

<comment><USER2> HTML is presentational in nature, so what's the point of separating presentational attributes from presentational tags?

With the current spontaneously emerged HTML standard we have a choice of using or not using separate style declarations, like in imperative programming we may decide to declare and give a name to frequently used constants, macros and functions separately. A library, in other words. Is library obligatory in programming? No. That would be just ridiculous.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Voix.Space – Cathartic Interactive Data Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://voix.space <comment><AUTHOR> Exploring the capabilities and uses of interactive data visualization, this social experiment will let users anonymously post a thought that other users can see and respond to.

voix.space has great potential for sprints, creative idea sharing and general therapeutic catharsis (including suggesting a pub trip).

NOTE: This experiment was developed as part of a 2 day labs event. You may encounter bugs and it currently does not function on mobile or in safari. :(</comment>


Russian Purge: The Horror Story of Publishing Children's Books in Moscow - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/02/17/the-horror-story-of-publishing-childrens-books-in-moscow/ <comment><USER2> I'm not to keen on "Narrative" articles like this...</comment>


Ask HN: How do I get programmers into the college newsroom? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be the sole web developer at my college newspaper (or "media organization" if that suits your fancy) at San Jose State next semester.
We have an existing website, but it has scaling issues and is just kind of sub-par overall. My editors are looking at going to an outsourced solution that we can't contribute any code to, that basically reduces our responsibilities to drag/drop/copy/paste, with no room for innovation.
It's a drag, because YCombinator is looking for news startups, and there's a huge opportunity to do cool stuff with journalism and tech if we can only get CS and CmpE students interested enough to come work on the paper.
What would entice you, as a developer, to come work in a newsroom? What should I say to CmpE/CS students either in person or on a flyer, or something?
And, more to the point, are there any SJSU students here that are interested? The possibilities are wide open, and we could make some seriously amazing stuff alongside some incredibly talented (though technologically lacking) people. <comment><USER2> Treat them like you treat your reporters.

Partner them one on one with a reporter to create one off stories.

Young programmers dream big, find a way to limit them, have them complete something in a week.

Not all people who know how to program work in the CS dept. Cultivate those already on your staff who show an intrest in programming.

</comment><comment><USER3> We used to have this problem at the Minnesota Daily, the U's paper of 40,000 daily print circulation, and found 4 strong sources for hiring. 1) Craigslist 2) Talk to the CS profs and ask to promote your on-site event with free pizza to get feedback on what should be done with the papers site. 3) Talk about the pay, despite objections to keep it hush hush. The recruits need to know they're getting paid a decent amount, like $11/hr (which is still fair for on- campus work with flexible hours) 4) Find alumni to talk about the experience and how that was worth more than the pay.

If you have questions, ping the active staff at the Daily - they're always open to sharing ideas.

<comment><USER4> Why do you think Craigslist was particularly effective, and how did you convince management to pay $11/hour?

<comment><USER3> Craigslist is effective because the programmers on campus (just like the HR professionals or people in finance) don't think about the college paper as a place where people other than writers are looking. College coders are looking for gigs on Craigslist to fill their free-time, simply because they probably don't know there's an opportunity at your paper.

Regarding talking to management, have them find out what the board members are paying their coders and have them call other college papers in the circuit to find out what the average is (and tell them to compare the rates they hear to the quality of the site). Its one of the beautiful things that I miss about the college paper world - other college papers aren't competitors, they're colleagues and welcome inter-paper exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let them work on more interesting problems. The InfoLab at Northwestern had cooperation between the EECS department and the journalism school and managed to build a system called Stats Monkey which wrote automated stories when given a sports data set. Ends up working so well that it's spun off into a startup.

<http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/>

<http://narrativescience.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd look to the Django community for examples of what hackers are doing in the field--that's been their bread and butter.

LJ World, lots of stuff at Washington Post, Washington Times, EveryBlock (who received a Knight Foundation grant and was acquired by msnbc), "open data/hacking government" by Sunlight Foundation and others, PBS, etc.

I'd think this would interest young developers: lots of things to dig into, your work is seen and has an immediate impact, hone your skills "with deadlines" and it beats working on the intranet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Find a great designer. Great design can convince your editors to keep the solution in house. Great design can attract talented developers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Free pizza. Never fails.</comment>


How To Rewire Your Brains for Positivity and Happiness - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-rewire-your-brains-for-positivity-and-happiness <comment><USER2> Great guest post by Walter Chen, the founder of iDoneThis.

I really like the shout out technique. Seems like a great way to spread the happiness and make others know that you care :)</comment>


To raise or not to raise - <AUTHOR> http://stu.mp/2012/02/to-raise-or-not-to-raise.html <comment><USER2> As a bit of background, Joe was founder of SimpleGeo, which raised $9.81M and was sold for $3.5M (according to TechCrunch). They were doing great stuff, but I kept wondering how they were going to generate enough value to justify a $10M raise quickly enough to satisfy the VCs...

</comment><comment><USER3> One reason not in this post which may influence the decision to raise is how fast the industry you are in is moving. If it's a fast-growing, fast-paced industry with lots of competitors raising big warchests, raising money may be required to give you resources to sell, scale and generally keep up with the Jones'es. If you're industry is not as quick, competitive, etc, fundraising might not be as requisite.

Not the only dimension but an important one.

</comment><comment><USER4> > There are, of course, merits to both camps' arguments, but, as with all > things, reality tends to live somewhere in the middle.

This fallacy is called "argument to moderation".

</comment><comment><USER5> OT, but I clicked that link expecting a discussion of exception handling ..

<comment><USER6> I thought it would be about poker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really timely article for for us. Don't raise means bootstrapping and maybe taking on some consulting work for 3-6 mths before reevaluating. Raising means hiring 2 more people and stepping on the gas. We are definitely at a point where we've validated the concept but the beta isn't available yet. If raising is easy, it would be a great accelerant. If raising is not easy, trying to raise may delay or even prevent us from reaching our goals.

</comment><comment><USER8> "...You've built a successful business, which you have no interest in selling, and would like to extract some liquidity..."

Why would a VC put money into a company in this situation?

<comment><USER9> The company is doing great, has a solid growth strategy and headed for an IPO. Why wouldn't you invest in a company like that?

Not all VCs are early-stage, high-risk investors.

<comment><USER8> "Headed into an IPO" says "interest in selling" to me - it's a relative rarity to IPO a company while still maintaining a personal controlling interest. I guess it's just a difference in semantics.

(updated to clarify that I meant a personal controlling interest)

<comment><USER10> Don't the founders of Google maintain a controlling interest in the company, even now so many years after IPO?

I think a common tactic is to sell preferred non-voting stock during IPO, and retain voting stock for the founders. They get to keep control of the company, in exchange for standing last in line during a possible liquidation.

<comment><USER8> Google maintain a controlling interest, but the founders themselves don't. I believe at IPO the founders controlled about 37.6% of the votes in Google and the board controlled 61.4%. So Google still got to direct Google (rather than their public investors), but the founders personally could be overrun by the board.

Facebook is one of the very few companies I can think of which is IPOing with a personal controlling interest from a founder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The decision to raise capital should be an intuitive one for entrepreneurs. Most founders know if they're going to need funding to ultimately reach a level of success.

That being said, there are still some good points here. It can't hurt to make sure you're examining your needs from both sides.

<comment><USER12> This statement doesn't make a lot of sense to me - even if it's "intuitive", there should still be objective criteria one can use to reason out whether or not raising money is a good idea. In fact, I would hope that most people wouldn't just follow their gut on such an important decision - even if the answer seems obvious, something like fundraising is worth investigating closely and carefully.

Moreover, there are definitely some situations where people will be unsure what to do; and in those cases, knowing that the decisions "should" be intuitive is of no help whatsoever.

<comment><USER6> _In fact, I would hope that most people wouldn't just follow their gut on such an important decision - even if the answer seems obvious, something like fundraising is worth investigating closely and carefully._

False dichotomy. These things are not mutually exclusive. Absolutely, you should investigate closely and carefully; but the final decision will come from your gut. It has to, because it's ultimately a question of what kind of company you _want_ to build.</comment></comment></comment>


Literals in Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.gavilan.edu/csis/languages/literals.html

<comment><USER2> This article is only about primitive literals, not compound ones. I think the list and dict literals in Python are the #1 reason I like it better than C. I think the regexp literals in Perl were one of the main reasons people liked Perl better than C.

<comment><USER3> That line blurs when you have homoiconic syntax, specially one with a programmable reader. Common Lisp uses the # for dispatch macro character, you can define your own literals, in whatever environment you want.

[http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/ansicl/subsec...](http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/ansicl/subsecti/sharpsig.htm)

<comment><USER4> Can't you set any dispatch character you like using make-dispatch-macro- character ?

<comment><USER3> Oh yes, you can set your own dispatch characters, but the # is the dispatch character for the CL _standard syntax_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Booleans are ordinal values and usually false is less than true.

I was surprised to find this is true,

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-values/#3>

<comment><USER6> So in fact you believed it was false before true then ;-)

<comment><USER7> well i believed that they are not ordered. (which they are not in some languages)

<comment><USER5> That's what I thought, but it appears truth values are typically defined with a partial ordering a <= b iff a && b == a, which gives false <= false < true <= true.

You could choose to ignore that partial ordering at your own peril.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Factor has them for many data-structures: [http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-syntax- literals.h...](http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-syntax- literals.html), but they are simple to add in a concatenative language

(they might as well have been added by a user library).

</comment><comment><USER9> To nitpick, -14 isn't a literal in _all_ languages. :)

(In Haskell, it's just sugar for negate 14, while in Standard ML it's spelt ~14. And I assume there are other exceptions too.)

<comment><USER10> Even in C it's not a literal. The consequence is that in a 32-bit implementation, you can't write INT_MIN as -2147483648 (-2^31), because 2147483648 would overflow a signed int. Instead a workaround such as -2147483647-1 must be used.

<comment><USER11> Making the minus part of the literal can lead to parsing ambiguity. For example, "x-3" would parse as 2 tokens "x" and "-3" (instead of 3 tokens "x", "-" and "3") which would be a syntax error in C. The only workaround I can think of is making any expression followed by a negative number parse as a subtraction.

<comment><USER12> > Making the minus part of the literal can lead to parsing ambiguity.

Not really. It's done in java. Usually, minus ("-") is parsed as a token and then unary minus on integer literals are transformed to a negative integer literal.

So, -2147483648 is read as MINUS INT_LITERAL and thus transformed into "-2147483648" as an INT_LITERAL, but -(2147483648) should be read as MINUS L_PAREN INT_LITERAL R_PAREN and should thus _not_ be transformed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside the Paper: Build Systems a La Carte - <AUTHOR> https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2018/07/inside-paper-build-systems-la-carte.html <comment><USER2> I gave some feedback on an earlier draft of this paper and I'm happy to see it on HN, it's a great read!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a brilliant paper. Absolutely brilliant. Seeing Excel as a build system is definitely new for me, and a bit eye opening.</comment>


Twitter's Alex Payne quits, heads onto something new. - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2010/05/17/something-new.html <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but I want my bankers to be grave old men in suits. I also want my bank to have offices all over the world and I want to know that they are handling money many hundreds of times larger than whatever I have.

I don't want a bank started by a guy called al3x, and who just left twitter. It sounds innovative, but it doesn't sound...dependable.

And if there is one feature I want my bank to have, it's dependable.

<comment><USER3> That's why I'll be using it first, and lots of my fellow college students who have a lot less to use and a _lot_ more to gain from using a bank like BankSimple.

Time is in short supply, and fees eat away at my little pool of cash.

I'm willing to take the risk, and willing to put my money in the hands of people who are young, smart and innovative, instead of bureaucratic, slow and set in their ways.

Not only that, but if you'd checked, your cash will be FDIC insured through their partners. I certainly don't have a quarter of a million sitting around.

Finally, the way things are going now, the government is the only reason those "grave old men in suits" still have your money at all.

<comment><USER4> ING Direct (ingdirect.com) is an amazing online-only bank that has virtually no fees. They've got amazing customer service. And they have the best bank web user interface I've ever dealt with. BankSimple will need to differentiate themselves from ING Direct somehow.

edit: Why the downvotes? I use ING Direct as my main bank. I love it. BankSimple will need to differentiate themselves from ING Direct to win me over.

edit #2: I have nothing against BankSimple. I hope they succeed. The market could use another friendly, efficient, tech-savvy bank. Perhaps they will drive innovation in the banking industry.

<comment><USER5> When I first signed up, their savings accounts were yielding 3% interest, which seemed great considering no minimum balance and no withdrawal fees. With the dip in the economy, they're just barely hovering over 1% now. Even still, if you compare that with the two other banks I've dealt with (5/3 and Chase), they don't really have anything that comes close unless you have massive balances or you want to tie up your money.

I'd love to hear if there are other easily accessible savings accounts out there that can tie into your checking account, with no minimum balances or withdrawal fees, that offer comparable interest rates.

My finances aren't stable enough right now to look into anything like CDs, Bonds, etc - it needs to be an interest bearing savings or checking account.

<comment><USER4> HSBC Direct is an online-only bank that offers slightly better rates than ING Direct. In fact, their rates are possibly the best (and ING the 2nd best).

The downside to HSBC, is that their web interface and operations of business are antiquated. While I have an online checking and savings account with them, I really only use the savings account. I just can't bring myself to deal with them because the user experience of ING Direct is so much better. For example, if you want to transfer money from checking to savings (or vice-versa), with ING it's instantaneous; but with HSBC you have to wait a business day! Ridiculous, I say.

HSBC is great if you're traveling/living in east Asia. I traveled through nine countries in Southeast Asia last year and never paid an ATM fee. Their ATMs are all over, and they're also partnered with many other Asian banks.

If you live in the USA (like me) I'd say keep your 6-to-12-month cash reserve in HSBC. And do your day-to-day banking and short-term savings with ING Direct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've wanted to do something very much like this in a future startup. Banking does suck.

Unfortunately, it's debatable how much of banks' suckiness is avoidable. Retail banking is caught in a vice-grip between fierce competition for low margins and government regulations. For example, from what I understand you pretty much have to run mainframes with certain antiquated, government- approved software to process stuff through ACH. KYC rules prevent extremely efficient account openings. Etc, etc.

I'll be curious to see how this goes.

<comment><USER7> Of the value props he describes, the only one that remotely resonates with me is: "A bank that puts your money to work automatically."

He writes that nobody LOVES their bank. But does anybody really HATE their bank? Maybe some vocal folks, but a bank to me is a utility-- a hole in the wall where I stick my money. I've never felt gouged by fees (when I was young and stupid, I've been annoyed by overdraft fees, but they seem justified). I've never been overwhelmingly frustrated by the design decisions of my bank. They decidedly don't treat me like crap. Every time I've needed to interact with my bank(s) it's been a pleasant experience.

Given the switching cost/inconvenience, I think this is going to be a hard sell for most people.

<comment><USER8> Must be Stockholm syndrome.

Have you tried to pay a friend an amount of money that would be inconvenient to do in cash? The best way to do it through your bank is to have them chop down trees into paper checks, physically mail them to you (this takes a few days), have you scribble down a number on the paper, hand (or mail... wait a few more days) the check over to your friend, who feeds it into an ATM, which scans the number you scribbled down, then you wait a few more days and eventually a few bytes in your bank's servers change to reflect your intended payment.

The last time I tried to make that entire process electronic-only, Bank of America said I needed to know my friend's account number and routing number, and even then they wanted me to show up to a bank branch in person to complete the deposit.

Sure, you could use Paypal, but it's an additional layer of complexity and risk, and if you're not careful they'll skim 3% off the top of your transaction.

Let's see... what else? Debit and credit cards. I live within my means. I don't want credit. I pay off my balance in full every month. Other than a hypothetical emergency, I would have no use for a credit card... except consumer protections for credit cards are much stronger than for debit cards. I'd be a fool to use my debit card instead of my credit card. And even though I've paid my credit card balance off in full every month for years, the one time I slipped by 3 days, I got slapped with a $30 late fee on a $200 balance (180% APR!).

Speaking of debit/credit cards... I visit my family in Mexico 3-4 times a year. Every time I go, I have to make sure to call Bank of America twice, to let both their credit card and debit card departments know that I'll be traveling. I'll have to wait on hold an average ~30minutes each time I call. If I forget to do this, and I try to use my credit or debit card while in Mexico, my cards will get frozen due to "suspicious activity", again necessitating a call to Bank of America. I do appreciate that they're looking after my financial safety, but I really do travel to Mexico quite frequently. There's nothing anomalous about my using my cards while I'm there. Once I do call they're incredibly helpful, but it's annoying that I have to call at all.

And don't even get me started on the fees and shitty exchange rates for using your card outside of the US...

Banking in America really is broken. If they're as good as they say they will be, I look forward to giving BankSimple my business.

<comment><USER6> You need to use credit cards for the rewards too. Credit card rewards eat a couple % of the merchants' profits, which they pass along to all customers in the form of higher prices. Therefore people who pay by other methods are effectively subsidizing the frequent flier miles and Red Lobster gift cards of those who use credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Guys guys guys, great idea, I applaud your efforts but...

More than once I'll be typing banksimple and hitting ctrl+enter so I'll go right to a phisher's page ready to empty my bank account as soon as I type my id/pass.

Really, get a dot com.

<comment><USER10> We'll get there. Running lean right now.

<comment><USER11> For the nature of business service you are going to offer, a reliable online presence is not an option - it's a requisite.

<comment><USER12> give em some time, guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We've had the bank discussion here before, and some of it seems to come down to the fact that banks are required to do a lot of regulatory stuff that is not 'simple'.

<comment><USER10> There are regulatory challenges, but the other two BankSimple guys (the real brains) have figured out a ton. I'm confident we can do some cool stuff.

<comment><USER13> Best of luck then, I don't think anyone's not rooting for you here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is going to be interesting. Sucky banking services are largely an American phenomenon.

My bank in Norway has no physical offices and conducts all of its services over the internet, phone or mail. There are (practically) no fees and the interest rates on its savings/checking accounts (there are interchangable, since there are no fees) are within 0.2% p.a. from the best that can be obtained anywhere in the country, regardless of capital amount. All funds are insured from bankruptcy through the national bank security fund. The young crowd almost never uses checks in Norway - all bills are paid online. The only problem with this system is speed and service - if you suddenly lose your credit/debit card, you will have a few days of worry while the bank sends you a new one. Identification can be complicated, since there isn't a person 15 minutes away that can physically talk to you and verify your identity.

All in all, I think this is very promising. Someone needs to pull American banking into the 21st century. This guy will have problems with legislation and bureucracy and huge competitors, though..count on that.

<comment><USER15> What's the name of the bank?

<comment><USER14> Ya bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I for one welcome a bank where I can just message "accept $100".

<comment><USER17> accept benologist $100

<comment><USER16> It'll work.... but not many times unfortunately. Try 'pg'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All of these bad gateways I'm getting from nginx don't give me a whole lot of confidence in this banking website =P I know it's early, but perceptions like that matter.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have worked in the banking industry. Building a better technology stack for a bank is possible. But you need to understand the current technology first, including how it got to where it is today.

You also need to understand the banking industry.

And you need to be focused on reliability. Twitter's reliability history is not adequate for a bank.

So do I think he can do this by himself? Not a flippin' chance. But I do think he could contribute some innovative ideas, if teamed up with people who have deep experience in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER20> oh no...

Don't get me wrong if they pulls this off it will rock.

But we've discussed this before... and it is a _hard_ problem. _Extremely Hard_

<comment><USER21> Not to sound glib, but:

 _it is a hard problem. Extremely Hard_

Isn't that exactly what an ambitious entrepreneur should look for? Especially someone who's had some startup success in the past?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good luck with that.

There is no such think as a bank that doesn't suck. If there are, they are called credit unions. For profit banks have customers. Non-profit credit unions have members.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is at least the second long time Twitterer to found a new business related to finance or payments (the other was Jack Dorsey's Square). I guess they're in a position to perceive a high level need in that area? Pushing money around gives you a lot more chance for revenue than dealing with mere tweets, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER24> A bank that wants to do things differently and be known for customer service should conspicuously publish their privacy policy and reveal their network of partner banks.

It's not clear what happens with the statistics of your bank usage nor where your money actually is.

Is this version 2 of Mint with banking 'features'?

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if his new company will do everything in Scala. If I were starting a company and writing the corporate stack from scratch, Scala would be a good possible choice. He has written a fair amount about Scala, so I am just wondering...

</comment><comment><USER26> SimpleBank looks interesting - I assume this is a 'virtual' bank and they are just reselling some other bank but putting their interface on it.

Anyone know any details?

<comment><USER27> It's not just a pretty interface to Bank of America or anything like that. But they aren't a normal bank with a charter and millions of dollars put up in bonds to allow them to operate legally. They haven't gone into detail about exactly how everything works, but they have a "network of banks" where the money will be stored (which is how they get it FDIC insured), and they sit on top of that in some way.

<http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/23/status-update/>

> _When we first started thinking about starting a bank we looked into the de > novo banking process. This is the process by which new banks are formed from > scratch. This is both expensive and, more importantly, it takes too long to > launch. It is near impossible to innovate with an imposed three year launch > delay. The best way to serve your needs is to launch quickly and to adapt > our offering to meet your individual needs. Modern technology lets us do > that. To achieve this we are planning to launch with a special corporate > structure. We are bringing together a group of financial institutions to > provide our underlying banking services. Our partner banks hold all deposits > in insured accounts._

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> this already exists: USAA Banking and Investing

<comment><USER29> USAA Banking and Investing isn't accessible to most of the public, and is locked down as to be almost indistinguishable from other credit-unions for their non-veteran, non-military customers.

<comment><USER30> Not true. USAA Banking, Investments and Life Insurance are open to everyone, regardless of prior military service.

[https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=why_ch...](https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=why_choose_usaa_eligibility_main&wa_ref=wcu_main_is_usaa_for_you)

<comment><USER31> The other service credit unions (Tower (NSA), Pentagon Federal, and Navy Federal) are all really good, too, although not as good as USAA.

USAA's insurance is top-notch, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What's up with the .net for their domain?

<comment><USER33> .com was squatted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pretty shocking, especially considering the equity he's presumably walking away from. More power to him.

<comment><USER35> I doubt he's walking away from much equity at all. He's been with Twitter a long time. If he isn't 100% vested, he's got to be pretty close.

<comment><USER34> Yeah but would it be worth anything pre-IPO?

<comment><USER36> Maybe it's worth _more_ pre-IPO!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> they will need someone with actual banking experience on their team - <http://banksimple.net/team/>

</comment><comment><USER18> From their about faq page: _How do I deposit checks? Take a photo of the check with your smart phone and send it to us with our app. Pretty simple, right?_

Is this really secure? I know there are some people doing cardreaders as an attachment to the phone, but pictures of checks?

<comment><USER38> USAA lets you deposit scanned check images. The only requirement is that you have to have a credit card setup as overdraft protection. Decent photos seem like they'd work ok.

<comment><USER18> So do you think we'll move away from paper checks completely and just move around echecks from phone to phone? I've never really understood how checks are secure. They just have a routing number, an account number, and your signature right?

<comment><USER39> Cheques are earth-shatteringly non-secure. The entire system runs on trust. I've had a several-months-post-dated cheque I wrote cashed by a bank and accepted by mine without apparently as much as a look at the date field. (They also dinged me an overdraft fee. Reversed that when I complained, but not the cheque withdrawal itself.) A while back, there was a pretty loud story about an payday-advance business suing the maker of a subsequently cancelled cheque for the money and winning the amount.

The sooner North America weans itself off cheques and external for-profit inter-bank transfer systems (Paypal, grrr), the better off we'll be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I just don't think that the "fee" play is going to cut it as innovative. Others have mentioned ING Direct and Ally.

The _real_ innovation will be cutting out things like the 3 day "clearing" window for funds. Or eliminating the delay for ACH'ing funds (an all electronic transaction).

The problem, banking is too regulated to _really_ innovate, though I applaud the attempt.

 __Edit: If they create an iPhone app for depositing checks (Just like USAA). I am sold. I would also like to think that many tech-savvy people would be sold also. __

</comment><comment><USER41> I currently use Charles Schwab Bank, and don't really see how SimpleBank would be a big improvement. The only feature that SimpleBank has that Charles Schwab Bank doesn't seems to be the ability to take pictures of checks and send those electronically when you want to make a deposit.

Is "al3x" from twitter really up on all the details and security concerns of running an online bank? Will his company do a better job than Charles Schwab? My gut feeling is no.

<comment><USER42> Can you please read about the other founders and the actual company before you think they aren't "up on all the details"

<comment><USER41> I did look at the bank website and at the team before I posted .

As I mentioned, the features of SimpleBank do not appear to be much different from what is available from my current internet bank. As far as the team goes, they may be bright, but none appear to have worked at a bank before, either brick and mortar or digital.

<comment><USER43> Actually that might be an advantage to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Starting a Bank for Fun and Profit" has become more popular topic in recent years (See: <http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/>).

Starting a bank from scratch is not impossible but will certainly be no easy feat. I wish Alex Payne and the team he is going to be working with good luck in cracking existing banking structures.

</comment><comment><USER45> I suspect that not charging overdraft fees will result in adverse selection- people that have no money and therefore can't be used to build a loanable savings asset.

I really hope this works, but due to switching costs, BankSimple will have a very uphill road to climb if they aren't planning to pay very high interest rates or otherwise attract people with some savings.

</comment><comment><USER46> If they wanted to be truly innovative, they could kick-start anonymous internet banking by being the first institution with a public face to do so. _That_ would be revolutionary, and whilst I admire the aim of making a fantastic bank, it still leaves me feeling a bit unexcited :-/

</comment><comment><USER47> It would be cool if bills appeared in an inbox on your online bank account so you could review and pay it in one click. Also, you would have the full details of what you bought in the history of your account.

Also a graph and projection of your bank balance would be neat.

Actually, an API for a bank would be really cool.

<comment><USER48> _It would be cool if bills appeared in an inbox on your online bank account so you could review and pay it in one click_

A lot of banks have some sort of bill pay feature. I have a feature that is exactly like this in my Schwab account including being able to view the bills to see what's on them and pay in one click.

<comment><USER47> What's Schwab? These people: <http://www.schwab.com/> ?

My Banks have sort of a bill pay feature though it's not like I described, it's just a pre-populated list of payees like Electric, Gas, Water etc. companies and it's not even that simple because each company often has several accounts so you have to pick the correct one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sounds pretty cool in theory. But can a new bank like this really make it in today's over-regulated, Wall Street controlled market? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it go somewhere and be available nationwide for people to have a better banking experience. I'm just a bit skeptic.

</comment><comment><USER50> I kind of wondered if this was coming, due to the very specific nature of Twitter's job postings as of a few months back that kind of treaded on al3x's turf.

Best of luck to him. Also, I think I want in. On being a customer, not an employee. I just got my dream job.

</comment><comment><USER51> Imagine, for a moment, a bank that doesn't suck...

A bank that display funny pics when system goes down... The money in your account is eventually consistent... A bank allow users to type command to transfer money, e.g. "accept $1000"...

</comment><comment><USER52> > _A bank that puts your money to work automatically._

This sounds interesting. I don't know how they'll succeed at this while making money, keeping risk low, and beating the rates that something like Ally Bank will give you.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if Twitter is still happy to have crucial pieces of their backend written in Scala. Have they found other Scala hackers to pick up the slack?

<comment><USER54> Yes to both :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> That's a huge leap for him. It's true, it doesn't sound to dependable, but it might be worth the risk in the end.

</comment><comment><USER56> must be easier to make money when your business model requires cash up front as oppose to finding it later.

</comment><comment><USER57> He needs to fix this soon <http://banksimple.net/jobs/>

</comment><comment><USER58> Sounds like ING Direct.</comment>


Is It Time to Tax Harvard's Endowment? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/harvard_yale_stanford_endowments_is_it_time_to_tax_them.html <comment><USER2> It is disturbing that the author so lightly morphs a tax exemption into a taxpayer subsidy. As if the natural state of things is for the government to tax everything and whatever it doesn't is being subsidized.

<comment><USER3> What's the difference between giving you $X that other people don't get, and asking you to pay $X less in taxes that other people have to pay?

<comment><USER4> Because it's an educational institution. That's the whole point! Harvard gets to have people with no money get degrees from their school for free because of this. It's a wonderful thing for society that they have such a big endowment.

Why anyone would get so money hungry as to attack them is beyond me.

<comment><USER5> > Harvard gets to have people with no money get degrees from their school for > free because of this.

As far as I know, enrollment at Harvard and most other elite institutions skews heavily toward wealthy people.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Harvard disproportionately has many wealthy people compared to the population at large, but it also provides free educations to large numbers of people. Last I checked, the cutoff was around 60k (meaning, if your family makes less than 60k, Harvard will foot the entire bill). The challenge of overcoming this skew towards wealthy students has more to do with education in general and recruitment than the price tag when it comes to some of the wealthiest schools.

<comment><USER5> One reason, at least, that they skew toward wealth is that they don't market themselves to others. Recent research has shown that the best poor students often have no idea that Harvard and other elite schools exist (as hard as that is to believe for most people on HN), much less that they might be accepted and afford to attend, and that they never apply. Remember that many of these students come from a world where few go to college, much less where elite schools are discussed or where their graduates and others with those kinds of career are around them.

And the few who make it fail at much higher rates; from what I recall research points to the fact that colleges are geared toward middle/upper-middle class students, mostly white. The cultural adjustment is huge (remember these are 18 year olds leaving their neighborhoods for the first time) and few adults or peers understand their situation. Also, many have poor support from home, financially and socially; rather than receiving encouragement, they get asked why they are wasting time and money on college.

In effect (and assuming Harvard follows those patterns) Harvard offers aid with the knowledge that few will take it, and without orienting their services to serve the new students. They could do much better. From what I understand, Amherst has gone a long way toward solving these problems.

<comment><USER6> Harvard tries to recruit these students, but obviously isn't doing a good enough job of it. As a Harvard alum, this is somewhere that I'd particularly like to see them improve in terms of undergraduate education. When a majority of students are on financial aid, I don't think it's fair to say that "few will take it". Also, Harvard's graduation rates are so high that even if failing and dropping out are much more common among particular demographic groups, the graduation rate is still extremely high across the board (some would claim that it's too high and indicative of the extent of grade inflation.) There's a general philosophy at Harvard that while it may be hard to get in as an undergraduate they'll do everything they can to make sure you graduate.

>Amherst has gone a long way toward solving these problems

They have, but I don't think they have a massive lead over Harvard. If I recall correctly, both have similar aid profiles, are giving aid to a similar percentage of their students, have a similar percentage from low-income families, and have a similar percentage of students of color. I believe the graduation rates are also similar. Amherst has been a real leader in this area, so I'm sure there are areas where they're leading Harvard, and please let me know if my memory (or bias) is deceiving me or my information is out of date.

<comment><USER5> > When a majority of students are on financial aid ...

A bit of a tangent: It also depends on how financial aid is defined. Many schools set an arbitrary price that very few students actually pay, the equivalent of a 'manufacturers suggested retail price'. In one NY Times story on this topic, at the school they looked into around 1% (IIRC) paid the MSRP; everyone else got a 'discount', the same trick salespeople have used forever.

I've had people applying to college happily tell me, 'the school offered me $30K in financial aid'. I try to (gently) tell them that it doesn't matter how much 'discount' the school offers, it matters how much they charge you. They can arbitrarily set their 'MSRP' at $100K and give you $80K in 'aid', or set it at $20K and give you no 'aid'; the result is the same.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely! But many of Harvard's peer institutions have sticker prices just as high without the same level of financial aid. I'd say a fairer metric to use for comparison is what fraction of people have sufficiently large financial aid packages that they pay less than $X where X is some reasonable value (maybe the median cost of in-state tuition at flagship state schools?).

Another thing to watch out for is schools that say "the MSRP is $50k but we gave you $30k in aid so it's really $20k" when that $30k is _loans_ , not _grants_. Harvard doesn't use loans (and very few students take them out), but as you go down a few tiers in financial aid that changes rapidly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> People give these elite colleges and universities a hard time, but I think it is mostly sensational stories with no meat. Do you know how many US schools are need blind and meet full need for all students? 6. [1]

I also have no clue where the story about these schools being for rich kids came from. When my wife went to Princeton a few years back it was one of the cheapest options for her! Schools all base need on the same FASA form, but then these "expensive elite schools" will do things like cover the student portion of the aid with a grant instead of loans [2]. This makes their financial aid package _much_ better than at most schools.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need- blind_admission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission)

[2] [https://admission.princeton.edu/financialaid](https://admission.princeton.edu/financialaid)

<comment><USER7> What would "meat" look like to you?

Suppose you _were_ to start "a hedge fund with a university attached to it", in order to use the university's non-profit status to minimize paying taxes. What would that look like? Would you set up need blind admission, in order to provide better cover to justify the hedge fund?

The article points out that the non-profit status means that "Princeton received $105,000 in tax benefits per student. Rutgers, New Jersey's flagship public university, got just $12,300 per student in public funding." and "Among the 60 schools Schneider and Klor de Alva analyzed, private universities with large endowments averaged $41,000 in tax subsidies, compared with $15,300 in direct funding for public flagships, $6,700 for regional state colleges, and $5,100 for community colleges."

Perhaps the extra $90K/year effective subsidy per Princeton student explains why Princeton was one of the cheapest options?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what your point is. Let's say the above were true, a non profit organization uses its tax subsidies to let students attend for free - how is that not a _good_ thing? And how is that not something that should be encouraged?

<comment><USER7> My point was that the article provided some substance, and gave numbers which explain why a needs blind admission policy does not, on its own, justify the existing tax policy.

The question you asked was addressed in the article, in statements like "In a world where the government only provides limited resources for higher education, we're almost certainly shoveling an outsized share of them to schools that don't need the financial help." and "we seem to have stumbled into a system that disproportionately subsidizes the educations of a tiny few."

The second page tries to address what a more equitable distribution might be. For example, "Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley caused a minor uproar in higher education circles by proposing that colleges should be forced to spend 5 percent of their endowments every year, the same way private charitable foundations are."

However, the author is clear that there is no simple answer, and leaves the topic hanging with "I think we'd all like to spend a little less money sending other people's kids to Harvard."

Personally, I think it should have ended with "we'd all like to spend a little less money sending people to Harvard and more money sending more people to college."

As to your last question, there is a balance of factors that make it difficult to answer. If the monetary policy is such that one person gets to attend Harvard for free or 4 people get to go to a public college for free ... which should we choose, and why? (Based on the numbers in the article, and the cost of tuition for different colleges, the actual number is probably between 1:2 and 1:6.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When public education needs more money, taxing private education to support them doesn't help education in the society as a whole.

High education should not be taxed, period. It's investment towards more tax income in 3-4 years. If you need to tax something to support some providers of education, it's not other providers of eduction.

<comment><USER10> One issue here is using tax policy to incentivize investment in higher education by penalizing institutions for NOT spending huge endowment windfalls on higher ed.

You don't tax Harvard the school like you tax a corporation. You tax Harvard the fund, if and only if it's not existing primarily to support Harvard the school.

Sitting on money doesn't help the economy much.

<comment><USER11> > Sitting on money doesn't help the economy much.

This is a really dangerous misconception. "Sitting" on money isn't really possible, by _definition_. All money is being put to work at some point, it's just a question of where[0].

Broadly speaking, when people store money in banks, that money gets loaned out to people. If you have a mortgage, that's coming from money that someone was sitting on. If you are working at a venture-backed company, your paycheck is paid (through a lot of middlemen) from money that someone was sitting on.

It's impossible for money to be 'sat on' without helping the economy. In fact, our economy _depends_ on people saving money this way.

[0] Again, this is true by definition; savings are investments. Saying that saving money isn't helpful is equivalent to saying that investing money isn't helpful.

<comment><USER12> Banks can only give loans on a portion of their holdings, the rest of the money really does just sit there doing nothing. Arguably, it's a hedge however the FED even manages reserve requirements in terms of monitory policy not as a hedge.

[http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm](http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. If you're going to tax universities, then you need to tax churches too. Good luck.

2\. If you're going to tax non-profits, then why have non-profits?

3\. Do we really want to penalize fiscally responsible organizations when even governments are going bankrupt? What values are we trying to support here?

<comment><USER14> _" If you're going to tax universities, then you need to tax churches too. Good luck."_

Right. There are some very wealthy churches. In the United States alone, the Catholic Church has an operating budget of $170 billion. That's bigger than Apple.

<comment><USER15> I assume you're getting the $170 billion figure from this article: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/08/catholic- chu...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/08/catholic-church- america)

I think it's worth noting that over $147 billion of that number is spent by Catholic hospitals ($98.6 billion) and universities ($48.8 billion). The number more representative of what most people mean when they refer to "churches" would be Parish disbursements ($11 billion). $11 billion is nothing to sneeze at, but when you consider that there are about 17.5k parishes in the US (many of which have schools) it's a less impressive number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't have any objections to the Harvard endowment being so large. What this article doesn't mention, however, is that there is a growing trend of corporations and the wealthy buying questionable research in order to achieve political/business goals, more and more educational institutions are becoming depended on this kind of income. This sort of thing should probably be taxed (if it's legal to begin with). (This is not specific to Harvard, Harvard is probably least guilty of this, actually).

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes

</comment><comment><USER18> This is already subsumed by Betteridge's Law of Headlines anyway, but I'm tempted to propose a new "Internet law" that says "For any question that starts with 'Is it time to tax ...' the answer is always 'No'".

<comment><USER18> It's interesting to see a group of people who self-identify as being part of the hacker community - through their presence here - tacitly endorse violence to achieve their ends. And make no mistake about it, taxation _is_ violence.

Don't believe me? Try not paying "your" taxes sometime, and wait and see how long until the State sends men with guns to arrest you. And then try defending yourself against these men with guns.

We can do better than this. We should be promoting non-violent self- government, not embracing a system which is completely predicated on the use of violent force to ensure compliance.</comment></comment>


We blame the sick for being expensive': the mother whose baby cost AOL $1m - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/04/deanna-fei-aol-distressed-baby-healthcare-privacy <comment><USER2> What a total dick, to single out two babies' cost, especially when compared to his own compensation. One of my children was born premature and even though it was nothing compared to what these people went through it makes me very much aware of the kind of thoughts that go through your head during and afterwards. To have the CEO of the company you work for use you as a scapegoat (and in an easily identifiable context too) for cutting benefits is absolutely un- acceptable.

<comment><USER3> I realize this rant doesn't add much to the conversation, but here's someone who will never in his life have to worry about his OWN access to health care, indeed will never have to worry about any kind of vital personal expense for himself or anyone in his family, whining in public about the cost (that he doesn't personally bear) of one of those commoners. It's really sickening. Sickening that there will be no consequences to him for his comments. Sickening that he will always have his next job waiting for him, no matter what. Sickening that the US system is pretty much set up to keep people like him rich in perpetuity, unless they deliberately do something to destroy themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's just the insanity of having health care coupled with the employer.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. In my mind that is the second biggest problem the system has. The first is the lack of an open market accepting only direct payments.

Oddly, neither one of those was fixed in with the recent reforms.

<comment><USER6> The Republicans (representing the insurance companies, essentially lobbying on their behalf as opposed to merely being lobbied to) were the largest proponents against such changes, as it would cost the Republicans tens or hundreds of millions of dollars out of their private investment accounts.

<comment><USER7> The ACA was passed with zero republican votes - so it's hard to say their love for insurance companies is the reason it is the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just can't get over how shitty a human being Armstrong seems to be. When you offer health benefits to employees by self-insuring, paying for premature babies is just part of the obligation you took on. Complaining about it publicly is not only shameful and illegal, it's an admission that you're an asshole that doesn't want to hold up your end of business dealings.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "This is what we do in the US. We blame the sick people for being expensive, > but the same sick people everywhere else – in the UK – they wouldn't be > causing excess costs to the system," said Peel.

This line bugs me.

Regardless of _who_ pays for medical care, the costs just don't disappear. With a bigger pool, they're spread across more people so the marginal costs might be lower but the total cost remains the same.

<comment><USER10> Not the same - look at the per-person overhead costs of insurance compared to a single-payer system, they're gigantic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't corporations insure themselves against these risks?

<comment><USER12> Many larger companies self-insure. They still pay a traditional insurance company to handle the claims process and negotiate with providers, but they get a discount for taking on the risk themselves.

<comment><USER13> I wonder, is 2 premature babies in one year in a 5,000 person company very unusual? Did their actuaries just do a horrible job? Or is that really a truly extraordinary event for a company their size?

Reminds me of when I balked at my home insurance company trying to bump my rates 20% one year- they said it was because of the 2011 Japan earthquake (I'm in Canada). I laughed and walked right out.

<comment><USER14> You're presuming their decision to self insure was based on an actuarial assessment.

From my experience, it's also plausible that some poor schlep in the accounting department was tasked with looking into self insuring, and created a not-very-robust risk model. At AOL's size one would hope an actuary was involved, but that may not be the case.

As well, even if am actuary was involved, that doesn't stop upper management getting peeved when payouts are towards the upper bound of the model, as all they likely saw was the potential cost savings of the lower bound of the model, not the full risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let's skip the word "blame". Is it a fact that sick people is the cause for being expensive? Our company also had to increase premium because a few extreme cases last year, but the company did not identify them. The employees figured out anyway.

Of course, blame the sick people could be wrong, when the sickness is not caused by the sick people, like the one in the article. However, the implicit message in the title troubles me: it is always wrong to blame the sick -- which is not true.</comment>


Great talks and presentations at 33C3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.metachris.com/2017/01/great-talks-and-presentations-at-33c3/ <comment><USER2> You are missing the "3 Years After Snowden: Is Germany fighting State Surveillance?" talk by netzpolitik. Surprise guest at the end!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, added!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While plugging one's own work may be uncouth, if IoT and embedded topics are of interest I hope you'll consider watching my talk on the LoRa wireless protocol: [https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7945-decoding_the_lora_phy](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7945-decoding_the_lora_phy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Added, thanks!

<comment><USER3> Hopefully because you feel it's worthy, not because I pestered you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's already on the list, but I thought the video on hacking cable/satellite TV was amazing. I've done software reverse engineering, but don't have any experience with hardware RE. It was great to see an overview of the process, and especially, how someone de-caps a ROM chip and reverses the code stored within.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work! Are these sorted in any particular order inside each topic ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And no, no particular order ;)

<comment><USER6> In that case, i.e. without any specific ordering besides the grouping, you could just use the existing list of talks [1]. The conference schedule [2] has a rough grouping into tracks but while you get to the presentation slides from there, there seem to be no links to the recordings.

[1] [https://media.ccc.de/b/congress/2016](https://media.ccc.de/b/congress/2016)

[2] [https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2016/Fahrplan/events...](https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2016/Fahrplan/events.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is just a list of links. I'd expect to read some more substance on which talks were good and why.

</comment><comment><USER8> A really cool talk was the Dash button talk. The presenter exploited a bug in the audio stack, or as I like to think about it, he got the firmware by singing the secret code word.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did video on a few of these. I feel very accomplished now. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> The video links seem to be not loading. HN bombardment? The torrent links do work.

<comment><USER11> You probably got a bad mirror. Sadly we have no more mirrors in th US.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Let me know if I missed any that you think are good!

<comment><USER12> Thanks for curating this list, it's very good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> radare2</comment>


Arizona Looks to Outlaw Internet Trolling - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2012/04/03/arizona-looks-to-outlaw-internet-trolling/

<comment><USER2> _...standard Internet practice of acting like a jerk in the comments section of a blog post_

Haha, yes, that is standard practice for many people in anonymous fora.

Regardless, the philosophy behind bills like this is inane. Hate speech is already illegal, and speech which is deemed harmful to others (such as threats online) is considered hate speech. Legislation targeted at further outlawing behaviors which are already under existing laws will erode our civil liberties.

I doubt this will be written into law, but this is still scary.

<comment><USER3> Hate speech is not illegal. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States>

As long as it's impersonal, you can say whatever horrible things you want about classes of people.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I did not realize that. I guess it's only illegal when directed toward someone as a threat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do our politicians really have so little to do that they feel the need to restrict our first amendment instead of dealing with more pertinent issues?

Also, I think most of the people I know are contradictions to the statement "No one likes a troll".

</comment><comment><USER5> Finally, a state taking on the serious problem of internet trolling! Hopefully now we can move on to less important issues, like the economy, immigration, and healthcare.

<comment><USER6> It's okay, Arizona has already illegalized illegals.

If they'd only thought to illegalize illegal behavior, they'd have solved all problems forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The use of vague words like "offend" or "annoy" isn't the only thing that's disconcerting here. The focus on "intent" should also give us pause.

The thing is, it's pretty damned hard to prove intent in many, if not most, use cases on the internet. And I fear that this law, as written, gives the offended the power to define the "intent" of the alleged offender.

Sure, it's pretty easy to deduce intent if you can find an obvious pattern of repeated attempts to bully or harass someone. But rarely are circumstances so cut-and-dried. And for areas like message boards, comments sections, blog posts, and other open fora, who's to say what someone's intent was? I might write a blog post that's critical of a person or an organization, and that person or organization may get "annoyed" with the post. Does their annoyance, therefore, retroactively define my intent as malicious? Or was I simply exercising my 1st Amendment right to criticize? What a dangerous path we wander when we allow the delicacy of people's sensibilities to define the intent of our words.

I'm no lawyer, but I would imagine that the letter of this law is pretty indefensible on Constitutional grounds.

<comment><USER8> _Intent_ is a well-established legal idea. E.g. "mens rea" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea> And it strongly favors the defendant, because in US criminal court, the burden of proof is always on the prosecution. There must be evidence presented in court to convince a jury "beyond reasonable doubt" that intent existed.

<comment><USER7> I understand that much, but my point is that in so many internet cases, intent seems pretty much impossible even to _establish_ , let alone sufficiently prove.

So maybe that places an insurmountable burden on would-be prosecutors, then, and we're actually left with a law that's almost impossible to practice in many cases? I'm not sure. Like I said, not a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> (tldr; not being f(cked with is a fundamental human right)

I've been on this planet for a bit over four decades. Much of that time, I've spent in backwaters in the unusual position of being what one might term as an ultra-minority of one type or another. (In ratios of 1 to 1000 or more.)

One thing my unusual perspective has brought me to is this idea: That not being f(cked with is a fundamental human right. Sex between consensual adults can be a great and wonderful thing. Make that less than consensual, and it's not so wonderful any more. Likewise kidding around can be good, innocent fun. Make it non-consensual, and it becomes something negatively sadistic. In other words, the fundamental factor of cruelty in rape is the coercive and non- consensual nature of it, not the involvement of genitalia.

One might respond to this by saying: well, if you don't like it, don't go on the Internet. Unfortunately, the Internet has become something of a public space, in the same way that the sidewalk or a cafe or restaurant is a public space, private ownership notwithstanding.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: are you >imposing< yourself on people in a way incompatible with their expectations? Are you misrepresenting yourself to accomplish this? Do you convince yourself that your targets somehow deserve this treatment? (Even more so if you have an ideology to help justify this.) Do you think the genuine hurt feelings of people who did not consent to your treatment is somehow wonderful and fun?

I'm not against anyone's fun. I'm only against non-consensual activity. If you're not smart enough to find a crowd with compatible expectations, then I posit that you're not smart enough to gamble with social norms through trolling in a way which has any value. If successfully misrepresenting yourself and hurting the feelings of others outside of their expectations is required for your brand of "fun" then you've been fooling yourself about what you're doing.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit It says: _It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person._

People will focus on the "with intent to.. annoy or offend" part but over look the part about "use any obscene...language, or threaten". One could easily spin this into "AZ is going to outlaw being annoying on the internet" but I don't think that is the intent here. I don't think they are trying to ban "being annoying" but rather "the use of obscene language and threats with intent to be annoying". As I read that, you can be as annoying as you want as long as you keep your language clean and don't threaten anyone.

That being said, I'd agree that the bill is too broad and open for misuse. Any time you base things off of subjective terms like "annoy", "offend" or "obscene" it just makes it bad. People are offended by all sorts of stuff that others find humorous. The court has also had a hard time defining what is "obscene" so that makes it particularly problematic.

Edit: TL/DR - Perhaps I should be more clear... I do think this is a ridiculous bill.

<comment><USER3> Sure, you can be as annoying as you want as long as you don't use the word 'fuck'. What kind of ridiculous standard is that? This law is extremely poorly written.

<comment> jack-r-abbit I think we agree here. I just believe their intent is not as ominous as others are making it out to be. But it is still a ridiculous bit of writing.

Edit: also I find your use of the "F" word to be offensive and annoying and it makes me feel threatened. I DO hope you don't live in AZ. LOL

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This might be awesome. Arizona's discrimination laws are offensive and annoying. Their own government are essentially trolls to society.

Governments don't operate by the third law of robotics (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics>) so perhaps it's possible for this law to take effect and for it to instantly outlaw themselves. Sweet!

</comment><comment><USER11> Also, just want to point out, in Arizona, for most misdemeanors, you have no right to a jury trial, I didn't read up enough on this to know whether it would be a felony / misdemeanor, etc (or if it could be either), but its something to also be aware of, I have lived in Arizona and seen their legal system firsthand and its a pathetic joke, it has to be one of the worst in the U.S., certainly for a state that has a major metro area.. if you get charged with a misdemeanor, your options are 1) bench trial in front of some corrupt judge (about 80% chance of conviction) 2) plea deal. Someone needs to stop the nutjobs out there, I am all for the federal government stepping in, in cases like this, where they are essentially trying to massively violate people's civil rights.

The state truly does have a "prison complex", it has a huge law enforcement culture and they are looking for bodies to put in prison as it makes the state money and this may just be another one of their sick attempts to have another way to put people in jail. Seeing something like this is getting me all worked up, I truly hate that place with a passion

</comment><comment><USER12> > _It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, > threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE > and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or > lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or > property of any person._

Most of these are standard clauses in many ISP TOS.

> _It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, > threaten, harass,_

That bit seems okay.

> _annoy or offend,

That bit is too vague.

> _to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or > profane language*

This, in combination with the 'intent' section above is okay.

> _or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm > to the person or property of any person._

I'm gently surprised that this last bit isn't already covered by existing law.

</comment><comment><USER13> Last time I was in Arizona, I was pulled over for being a "potentially undocumented alien". I have red hair and pale skin. Next time I'm visiting my parents, I'll be pulled over and arrested because I made a bad joke online. Arizona, you're pathetic.

<comment><USER14> I live in Arizona and I've been pulled over on immigration check before. I would guess you were stopped because of your pale skin and red hair, the more non-hispanic people they stop the easier it is to claim racial profiling is not part of the sweeps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Legislating should be like coding in that being able to delete lines of code is huge win.

</comment><comment><USER16> Arizona and Florida are out of touch with effective legislation for modern issues. Laws like these (with broadly worded clauses) are either unenforceable, or only enforced through (illegal) targeting of potential suspects.

<comment><USER11> I am extremely glad to have gotten out of Arizona, I made the mistake of moving there for two years and literally put everything I had into being able to move out of there. The only way I can really describe the state is "assbackwards", I'm sorry to anyone who still lives there but there is just something off about the place as far as the way the police, other government officials and elected people there act, they are trying to make their own little fiefdom out in the desert and "to hell" with the rest of the U.S. and its laws, rights, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good luck with that. Up to 25 years in jail for that? Absurd.

</comment><comment><USER18> Let's just legislate _everything_! When you have a group of people whose job it is to legislate and they work a good portion of the year, eventually those people will create a law to govern everything including which finger you're allowed to pick your nose with.

I'm not sure how many days the Arizona house is in session but they should take a page from the US House and take a major portion of the year off. If this is what they choose to spend their time on do we really need them to show up for work? Hell, I'd be happy to have my taxes to toward their vacations if it kept them from coming up with these ludicrous bills.

<comment><USER19> This phenomenon applied to the Internet is especially egregious. The Internet has happily existed for decades with very little fiat law. Facebook hires a good PR firm to spin Eternal September as a good thing, the self-entitled masses show up with no concern for how this world might be different, and every sad-sack politician is suddenly looking to solve non-problems to appear hip and relevant.

Number One rule of the Internet: If what's being said affects you in a negative way, _stop listening_ (this applies from OSI L2 on up). If you cannot handle this responsibility, please leave.

<comment><USER12> > _Number One rule of the Internet: If you don't like what's being said, stop > listening_

That's fine. I agree.

What happens if AA says to BB "I know where you live, and I'm going to fucking kill you"?

And if AA puts BB in a filter, and stops listening, and so BB morphs to BC and keeps writing. And then socks to BD, BE, BF and BG, and finds all relevant social media that AA is on, and posts anti-$MINORITY screeds, with credible threats of violence?

<comment><USER19> I'd say there are many ways to take action and solve this while still using social media (after figuring out where on the vendetta...robot scale they fall) - filters, moderation, ban public comments, inform authorities in case anything actually happens, etc.

Fundamental point being, if you can't solve unwanted communication to your satisfaction using the available tools for social media, including the various web sites' policies and processes that have been developed to deal with such phenomena, _stop using those particular sites_. If a technology fails to provide all the capabilities you'd like, that doesn't give you a right to demand changing the underlying philosophy.

(Sorry, I changed my quote a bit because one can (and should) read things they "don't like", it's when one is looking to forcibly silence others' speech that they become the problem.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought april fools was over...

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, it is about time that someone took a stand against those who would turn the internet into a cesspool of humanity. With the help of Mr. Lamar Smith from Texas and his SOPA legislation we can finally clean up the internet.

<comment><USER21> And here come the down votes. Neither sarcasm nor dissenting opinions nor thinly veiled attempts at humor (trolling) are welcome on HN.</comment></comment>