The End of the Internet Dream - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da61#.csugaho35 <comment><USER2> The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever.

More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before.

Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly).

The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in.

Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are internet oriented.

Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political.

We got this ;) Stay vigilant friends.

<comment><USER3> If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from native to "the web".

But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look at the better performance and usability of apps, they also got real substance behind them.

<comment><USER4> The web has done more to centralise computing and take it out of the hands of ordinary people than any other technology. People don't even control their own data anymore, never mind having control over the software they run.

It's hard to see that as a win.

<comment><USER5> The web has done more to decentralize networked computing than any other technology, because the web is basically decentralized. Only the agreements (IETF and W3C) are somewhat centralized, but even then we are seeing a proliferation of REST APIs to encourage decentralized data management. These usually aren't exactly "RESTful" of course because we are so busy with our own startups we aren't really working towards interop as a priority.

The only inherent reason we have popular centralized services is that there is limited economic incentives of funding or adhering to a decentralized social (or business, or health, ...) network standard - the Web would support it, but we've got to WANT to build the agreements to make it work.

Tl;dr the Read side of the web is decentralized; the Write Side of the Web is currently an oligarchy but not permanently so.

<comment><USER6> The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a- domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live.

Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is _why_ the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third- party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols.

You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other. At that point using HTTP makes no sense either, and users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it. Web technologies are not really useful for users-talking-to-users without server-based mediation.

<comment><USER5> "The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a- domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live."

That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine.

The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly would need applications that automated these details away for a broader purpose.

In fact many stil do run servers in their home in limited contests: their PVR, their backup appliance, their network printer, their Nest thermostat, heck even their Xbox with Twitch. It's all about the software application that warrants having your own server and makes it easy to maintain/run.

"Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. "

Its more than the interactions require software that needs to be written and evolved and maintained. A decentralized social network arguably has many benefits, that would lead to everyone buying something (software to run in their devices, or an appliance for their utility closet) to hook into it.

"You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. "

The web IS all about agreements (protocols), as is the Internet. Decentralized execution of said agreements lead to emergent effects. Sure, if someone writes one piece of software, everyone by definition has agreement.

But the world of the network is about N versions of software written by different people and still achieving their ends.

Today we have cases of agreements enforced by single copies of software (Facebook) on a decentralized network with many many underlying differences in software (web servers, TCP stacks, firewalls, routers, databases). The only reason Facebook exists are the prior agreements made on those lower commodified layers, and economic value moves up the stack.

So why haven't we written the software and agreements to commodify Facebook? Because these things take time for the economic incentives to work. I believe it will happen, just a matter of time. The Web's architecture encourages decentralized sharing and manipulation of information, it's just incomplete.

" The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols."

What's the infeasible part? Where you see infeasibility, I just see "work in progress", or "incompletion".

"You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other."

Okay, there is a good idea for part of an implementation...

"At that point using HTTP makes no sense either,"

... And a bad one.

As an example - BitTorrent actually relies on HTTP and the web to bootstrap discovery to a tracker before moving to a an (optional) DHT. The web is an essential component of the puzzle.

"users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it."

Why on earth would they need to? I can buy an appliance at Best Buy today that runs Wordpress for me. Why can't that evolve into something more sophisticated and compelling , that removes the need for centralized services?

I think you're way too hung up on this concept of a server being a socio- political construct rather than a transient architectural role in an interchange. Clients can be servers and vice versa. End users already run servers today, they just don't know it. The real socio-political construct of the Internet, the nexus of control, is the protocol. That's how you blow up centralized services.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less._

No they can't. They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them.

No they can't. They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?

No they can't. Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?

No they can't. Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract.

No they can't. In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public IP).

Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified. Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on their servers.

<comment><USER5> "They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them."

Or they don't have software that does it for them.

"They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?"

Last I checked, BitTorrent was still a thing. IOW, build a killer app and that will change.

"Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?"

Then you can't run a mail server unless you have a cloud server that isn't blacklisted.

"Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract."

Which is a gray area that will fall apart the moment a killer app exists. ISPs don't block Twitch, they don't block Skype (which is P2P), they don't block BitTorrent, they don't block my NEST thermostat.

"In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public IP)."

This is barbaric and not my experience in North America.

"Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified. Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on their servers."

Sure, that's a common workaround and I don't really consider that "centralized" computing in the manner of a Facebook or Twitter.

My point is that everyone having a server for decentralized internet doesn't have insurmountable barriers, it requires software that people want to consume that will change the way the market works. Uber is doing it for a way more regulated industry (taxis).

<comment> loup-vaillant Well, a usable Freedom Box would indeed solve most problems. Can't wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better.

In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing the users.

And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of _techies_ who went over to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset _and_ skills to pull it off.

<comment><USER8> You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.

I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

<comment><USER9> I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.

Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the internet have turned into a purely free and perfect forum for communication? In an ideal world yes, but not in our flawed world where there are a host of competing contrasting ideas.

To the authors point. Technology is moving too fast for laws, governments and political systems to cope with. The political and legal constructs we use today are not radically different from 200 or 300 years ago. I don't know if there has ever been a time in human history where the rate of technological innovation and change has been moving at such a speed that the legal and political systems cannot stay synced with the change and have no chance of catching up due to the increasing velocity.

<comment><USER7> > _corporations and business models. They 're just driven by demand. It's not > some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone._

Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared wishes and morals of humanity, only if because of coordination problems.

I agree with your other points. And I didn't mean to point out that if Internet stayed non-profit, we'd have a perfect communication platform by now. For instance I think that if it became powerful, it'd still have problems with power and influence being a similar incentive to money. I only wanted to highlight the source of the problems we now have, which are those demand- satisfying, profit-driven actions. And that to make the Internet a better place, we would need to refuse doing things that seem optimal from business point of view but are detrimental to the Internet itself.

A pessimist in me says: this isn't likely to happen, because coordination is hard. So tragedy of commons here, no way to make a bottom-up group opposition there; we're screwed by coordination problems.

<comment><USER10> I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic. You're worrying about coordination problems _on the internet_? That's like, I don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Oh wait... :P

On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)

<comment><USER11> To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Just s/ocean/any big lake/

<comment><USER10> That's why I said "oh wait" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity" ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems even the present day primitive AI would be much smarter and more flexible. The reason of course is not that people are dumb or mean, but that they are driven by incentives and incentives in these positions are never right. Machines on the other hand are not afraid to lose their job and are (potentially) capable of much deeper and broader analysis of any situation than humans while simultaneously being less prone to error.

<comment><USER12> It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either.

With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic". And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace them with less dysfunctional folks.

With complex decision-making machines, it's not even clear whether a subtle bias it exhibits in its decisions is a sign of a bug or intentional design. The machine, of course, is capable of deep and broad analysis, but only of data that some group of engineers decided would be appropriate for it to analyze, using algorithms that were probably hand-tweaked by another group of engineers with their own individual quirks and unconscious biases.

Even the idea that a machine can be "smart" or "flexible" is based on a particular definition of "smart" and "flexible" that other people might strongly disagree with. And yet the machine presents an image of perfect objectivity, and its complexity makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to figure out exactly who or what is responsible for the many assumptions that underlie its design.

Moreover, the possibility of losing one's job is prettty much the only thing that keeps human decision-makers accountable in this world. Take that away, and we've got a benevolent dictator at best and a mechanical tyrant at worst, with the exact same quirks and biases, only hidden better.

<comment><USER13> People do point at Facebooks news filtering algorithm, which is "obtuse and unempathetic". People do complain about Googles algorithms flagging stuff as spam in an "obtuse and unempathetic" way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > • You won't necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your > rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. > Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human > will really be able to understand why.

This isn't a change from the current state of things. For a hundred years, each of these decisions have been made by neural networks which we scarcely understand.

<comment><USER15> At least these are neural networks that we can hold accountable for their actions. Networks that exist in a single physical space easily detained when need be.

Not to mention that they can usually explain their reasoning and behind a decision.

Machine learning algorithms can't do that.

<comment><USER14> 1) Holding someone accountable isn't actually useful unless it changes behavior.

2) They can come up with an explanation, but not usually an accurate one. We are used to giving offhand answers to neurology questions because parents angrily ask them of their children all the time. But the answers we give aren't truth-seeking they are punishment-avoiding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think Snowden's disclosures were a loss of innocence for many technologists, and this reflects that. I can't imagine this would have been written in his absence.

<comment><USER17> For the government surveillance parts of the article perhaps, though lets be honest, people were saying TLA's had been watching everything you've been doing for a while before that.

Another large part of the article is corporate control of the internet and that was a problem long before Snowden. That corporations would control the world and use the internet to create a Shadowrun type world was again something people had been warning about as less of the content on the internet was what people put up and more what was curated for you.

The end of the internet as a place for free expression is being driven in large part by the type of people that frequent this site. They're here to make money, a lot of it. And they're going to do what they can to lock you into their way of presenting things to make it very difficult for you to use another basically identical service. They're going to lock you in with your own data, sell it back to you and package you up to sell to others. The death of the internet began long before Edward Snowden showed the world what the other monster on the wires was doing.

<comment><USER18> The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one. It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's nessicary."

Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards.

* One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As long as you can read ISIS's Dabiq on line [1], censorship isn't working.

As long as you can read Stormfront's White Pride World Wide [2], censorship isn't working.

Facebook is not the Internet, even if Zuckerberg would like it to be.

[1] [http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis- isil-d...](http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-isil-dabiq- magazine-issue-12-just-terror.pdf) [2] [https://www.stormfront.org](https://www.stormfront.org)

<comment><USER7> Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences[0].

"The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website."

As long as media won't talk about the topic, and the main avenues of discovery - Google, Facebook - won't show it to you, censorship works as intended: it removes a topic from the social conversation.

[0] - [http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/)

<comment><USER20> >Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences.

That's because we have won a partial victory. _They_ would very much like a total, fool-proof access limit.

<comment><USER7> _They_ don't care, because there's little marginal gain from improving on the results they already have. Even better, having holes in their wall helps relieve pressure. It's just like the old Sun Tzu adage about the line of retreat - you should leave one for enemy soldiers because if you encircle them completely, they'll realize they have nothing to lose and fight fiercely until they die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You know, one way out of building an internet none of us actually wants just because the people with the money tell us to is to organize as a union.

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of leverage software engineers _already_ have, as evidenced by the wages and benefits that are standard in this industry, that we nevertheless refuse to use to try to exert some control over what we are building.

<comment><USER22> Wouldn't "we" be more likely to unionize if our wages were bad?

And are unions good at this stuff? Here in Sweden, they seem to be mostly aligned with the industrial profit motive. For example, the big metal workers' union supported extending our large arms export deal with Saudi Arabia, since it employs thousands of people.

<comment><USER21> Yes, historically unions don't get organuzed unless conditions are bad to begin with.

But look, what if we just didn't use the word "union"? What if we were talking about a professional organization like the bar association that set standards of what its members can and can't do, what is and is not ethical work? That set certain expectations of providing your otherwise very expensive services for free to people who need it but can't pay?

<comment><USER23> I really like this idea.

Without knowing too much about bar associations I feel like a programmer association with a code of ethics similar to the ABA model rules (perhaps including the Six Fixes[0]) would be a great start to reining in privacy violations.

I immediately see that it would need to be government mandated for it to have any effect, and given that many governments routinely violate these terms I don't know how it could be enforced.

[0] - [http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html](http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is unfortunate how she mixes racism and sexism in this essay, which makes the subject too broad, specially when bringing things like "only 30% of google is female", firstly because such companies are the ones making the "internet dream" die, so you are asking diversity by the "enemy", also when the "internet dream started" it was a lot less diverse than now, the steryotype of lonely male teenager messing with computers is silly but it IS based on real life mostly because men are more likely to be loners who seek refuegee in things like tech, D&D and such "hobbies". And nobody would care for diversity if this particula hobby (tech) weren't the one shaping the world.

<comment><USER24> related: [https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754](https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a lawyer, I don't think Granick appreciates just how the Internet has become a realm of haves and have-nots.

She talks about right to tinker and end-to-end communications. Back in the 90s, I played with HTTP and SMTP services on my Mac. It was just install a program and go. No root permissions for special ports. No configuring port forwarding, because even on dial-up I had a global IP address. And HTTP was a simple text protocol. Network protocols these days are so complex, I don't know how kids learn how they work.

One essential component is IPv6. I perceived that centralized control would be a problem as soon as I heard about how NAT works, but short-term costs have kept IPv6 inaccessible. This is an immense frustration.

<comment><USER5> I grew up through the 80s and 90s too and I'm not sure why you're that concerned:

\- we mainly all still have global IP access on our broadband

\- HTTP and SMTP are still fundamentally text even if you need TLS (just need the key to be able to read it)

\- HTTP/2 has clear semantics that can make it look like text with a simple script

\- NAT is annoying and yet essential ; it will be in an IPv6 world too.

the dream of everything having a public IPv6 address was always unlikely precisely because people want privacy for their devices, a (misplaced?) belief they're one step off the grid.

I suspect the work we are seeing with cloud technology around automated dynamic provisioning of firewall & routing will make its way into consumer edge routers and ISPs some day when the right app is there. Tinkerers always find a way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The best example that the Internet Dream as she sees it is near the end, she published her essay on medium.com instead of using her own system.

</comment><comment><USER27> "At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company's overall workforce, but hold only 17 percent of the company's tech jobs"

Hence what? In France prison population is 96.5% male. Does it prove sexism? That's it, I quit reading women, they can't write without pulling the cover to themselves.

<comment><USER28> You know I read that paragraph expect to cringe at any implied reasons, but there were none. In fact, if you read the previous paragraphs, the author states that the tech community is very inclusive of difference - it's really not an issue.

To me these paragraphs together indicate that it's not a tech problem that there are less women in the industry, but rather a wider societal issue. The tech community is welcoming and inclusive and tolerant of diversity. Any supposed lack in numbers of women in tech does not prove the opposite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The way I see it, there's 2 main hurdles for truly free internet: hardware and encryption.

When normal folks start having personal servers at their home, and have all their traffic and data fully encrypted on their personal server which is in their turf, they will have the freedom to act as they like.

The problem with these two hurdles is infrastructure (being ISP dependent) and regulation (Government can make up rules for personal servers) - if we can get past those, oh my it will be wonderful. But I don't think it will be possible until someone forms a "Digital Country" \- a territory with 'open source' government with some sort of 'digital rights constitution' that would allow the above to really happen.

</comment><comment><USER30> The Internet is not a place apart from society. It exists within society. And society will exert the same amount of control over it as it asserts on other facets of life in order to meet social priorities.

</comment><comment><USER31> Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of Internet Service Providers, and each large (and most medium) one gave access to Usenet discussions.

Then with increased monopoly and commercialization, the ISP's shut down, and Verizon and AT&T gained a duopoly over the majority of the US's wired and wireless last mile. With this accomplished, they shut down their Usenet feeds.

A programmer I know calls it digging ditches with air conditioning. Programmers are wage slaves, just a slightly more exalted position than the people who come in at night to empty the waste baskets.

<comment><USER32> > Programmers are wage slaves

By this definition, anyone with a job is a wage slave unless they work for themselves. Unless you meant something else, because in the US programmers enjoy salaries and flexibility that many other professionals don't have.

<comment><USER33> Even if you work for yourself, you're still working for someone else.

An employee has 1 boss. An entrepreneur has a thousand, a million, whatever the number is.

Working for cash means exchanging value with someone who gives you the cash.

The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real slavery.

<comment><USER7> > _The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real > slavery._

Most of the talk around "wage slavery" is about people who're going to spend the rest of their lives working hard for all their day on stuff that they don't like, for so little money that it barely allows them to stay fed and healthy. It's a different thing that the "real slavery"[0], but there are some important similarities - namely, people using up their whole lives to enrich somewhere else, with no capacity to opt out.

The reason it's being brought up so often now is that in the past, "wage slavery" seemed a necessary component of survival of a society. People simply had to work. But today the necessary work is increasingly being automated, while we compensate with inventing new make-believe jobs living in closed loops that together have no useful output. So it's about time we should start aiming for freeing people from the need to work.

\--

I agree though that saying programmers are wage slaves is... weird. I suspect 'obrero meant something about lack of agency - as a programmer, you're to implement whatever stupid shit your boss envisions, and you have no say about it, even if it damages the environment you're working in. We may be getting paid more than a janitor, but that doesn't mean we have anything more to say about company's business than a janitor does.

\--

[0] - by "real slavery" we mostly think about a particularly brutal and dehumanizing enslavement of plantation workers in the United States; slavery in the past was often not unlike employment today.

<comment><USER34> To be honest, I'm struggling to think of _any_ profession which less resembles the concept of wage slavery than programming, Compared with other jobs it pays relatively high salaries, offers more opportunities for remote and flexible working, more opportunities as self-employed contractors and more opportunities to start companies that don't even rely on contracting for others.

In a company of any size, _nobody_ has absolute agency and complete immunity from stupid shit that bosses envision, not even the zillionaire owners of the company who don't have to do performance reviews or attend standup meetings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Back in the 80s on BBSes and 90s on usergroups and finally the Internet a bunch of techies did whatever they wanted and normal people didn't get anything. Now they're getting more than any of us got back then and we're not standing still either, it's just moved on from the web. The Internet dream is alive and is evolving and whilst the original manifesto sounds a bit childish to me nowadays it's still part of what drives us. Wherever the mainstream catches up so do the old hierarchies and we move on.

</comment><comment><USER36> Right now the biggest threat I find is the lack of options in terms of ISP for most people, and somewhat mass surveillance which will likely be used for profit rather than prevention of illegal activity. ISP's that are creating arbitrary data caps, filtering/throttling or modifying content as it comes in, and little is being done by the FCC to stop it, these are the most dangerous trends.

Beyond that encryption, etc has allowed us more freedom.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope.

The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things.

To fight this, we tried federation. We tried building social systems that allowed people to choose their own provider but participate in the same network, but federation hasn't worked since email. If you take a long look at email, you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of evolution that we see in successful social systems. The design-test-iterate loop that design thinkers use to build products people want doesn't work when the rest of the federated providers don't keep up, and they never do.

Where federation failed, I believe decentralization will succeed. There is an honest-to-god renaissance happening right now in decentralized systems, and the tools to continue the internet dream are reaching maturity. Core to this renaissance is our new ability to use blockchains to establish universal cryptographic identities with no intermediary—no federated server to hold back the tide of progress. When you want new features, you don't switch servers, you switch clients. They all speak the same peer-to-peer protocol using the same portable, blockchain-based identities. This has a very useful side- effect: systems that don't rely on servers never shut down as long as people keep using them. Decentralized systems are forces of nature.

This combination makes network effects a public good. Second place companies in network effect industries today have their own private networks that just aren't as useful. It is in their best interest to make their networks as large as possible, and treating the decentralized network as part or all of their network achieves that. It creates a network used by all the competitors who aren't in first place, even as those competitors die off. I think the immortal network used by competitors will over time become as large as the front- runner's. At equal size, the open network is more valuable than the closed one—the open one can be built wholesale into any other product that benefits from it. If you want, you can use a ride-hailing app that uses your social network connections to share rides with friends of friends instead of complete strangers, and anyone can build that app when the ride-hailing and social networks are decentralized.

When our industry gets great at creating decentralized application protocols, it will no longer be feasible to build a business on privately controlled network effects. It's not a defensible business anymore. Users will be able to choose which clients they use instead of being forced to sacrifice their data to a company to benefit from its network.

The internet dream is back, y'all. If you want to help rebuild it, come join the folks using Ethereum, IPFS, and related protocols to build networks we can't control.

<comment><USER38> I'm confused.

What are the most significant distinctions between a federated network and a decentralized network?

Is one of those distinctions that the latter has a distributed filesystem/datastore _shared_ amongst most-to-all of its nodes?

<comment><USER39> Yes, that's it. With federated networks, you still rely on another party — the server you connect to. With decentralized networks, you are a part of the thing everyone else relies on.

<comment><USER38> Two things:

1) In a decentralized network where you are _also_ the client, you _also_ usually rely on another party: the party that contains the resource you wish to access. Not that many decentralized networks give _every_ node a complete copy of all of the data in the network.

2) In a federated network with open federation (Tor, XMPP, email, etc...), you can choose to become a server in that network and be a part of the thing that everyone else relies on.

I'm still having trouble seeing the essential distinction between the two. Is the assertion that "decentralized" networks _force_ you to be a server in the network, whereas federated networks leave the choice up to you?

<comment><USER37> In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server. If you have a domain name, sometimes you can have portable identities that piggyback on DNS. This is a terrible solution for normal people. The cost of switching servers is high.

Decentralized systems have cryptographic identities. If you want to use a different client or a different server that participates in the network while you're offline, just fire up the new one and give it access to your identity via your private key or signing a new key.

Low switching costs are the key to progress on a network. It's why browsers have gotten so good. Similarly, competition will make the clients for decentralized networks improve rapidly, unlike XMPP or email.

<comment><USER38> > In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server.

Untrue.

TextSecure/Signal is a federated system. [0] IDs have always been and are -currently- tied to a user's phone number. [1] If you demand, I'm sure that I can dig up more examples, but that's the first thing that came to mind at $WAY_TOO_FUCKING_EARLY in the morning.

[0] The server software is open source, but only trusted operators are permitted to federate with the official TS servers. However, _anyone_ is 100% free to stand up their own TS network (even if it's a single server) and distribute their own patched TS/Signal clients that use that unofficial TS network.

[1] There is ongoing work (that's probably nearly completed) to move IDs from a phone number to something that makes multi-device-but-a-single-user accounts work. I get the impression that it's coming along rather nicely, but haven't checked out the Github repo in quite a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Yay! More click bait-y doom-and-gloom nonsense from Medium.com. /s

Seriously, what's the deal with these poor quality posts and why do they float so high in the Hacker News rankings?

Aside: The same can be said for posts linking to theguardian lately.

The internet dream is far from dead. Despite numerous setbacks surrounding lack of security/privacy, new standards/practices are being introduced to fix the issues.

The whole personal computer ecosystem that used to be dominated by vendor- monopolized platforms have continually become more open and flexible over time.

The flexibility to share data and services across the web in a standardized manner has never been better. 10 years ago, tools like Zapier that thrive in the ecosystem of openness never would have been possible. There are public APIs and microservices for anything and everything nowadays.

The developer tools and platforms are evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Data silos are crumbling. Patent/copyright trolls are getting paid their due. Sources of very high quality educational materials are abundant and free. etc...

We live in truly exceptional times.

</comment><comment><USER41> Great talk. I just posted the link to people who follow me on T and G+

As sosuke mentions in another comment, possible alternative mesh networks might regain some freedom and flexibility but we will all be vulnerable to embedded IoT technology that tracks us and because of laws prohibiting looking at embedded code (assuming this happens) it will be difficult for white hat privacy advocates to check the information shared out by these devices. Cars, home appliances, electronic gadgets - a lot of areas that might leak privacy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Are there any solutions? Is it possible to create a new network? How do you champion free speech and then try to control the ugly side?

I'd love to read more I guess.

<comment><USER43> Encrypting everything -- HTTP traffic, email, streaming media -- is a good start.

<comment><USER7> We need to compensate that with having accessible endpoints - otherwise it means that things like[0] won't be possible. Security can be one of the most effective enemies of the Freedom to Tinker.

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165)

<comment><USER44> Accessibility doesn't necessarily have to be the highest priority. BITD folks would jump through ludicrous numbers of hoops just to gain access to the network. Whether or not this limiting factor improved the quality of interactions online is an open question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> [http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt) \- some more technical analysis on what can be done

Another interesting site here is [http://citizenlab.org/](http://citizenlab.org/) and the idea of 'distributed security' they champion.

</comment><comment><USER46> Are any politicians explicitly defending the kind of Internet/technology- related civil liberties mentioned in the article?

The ones that are often written about are Wyden (D), Rand Paul (R), Amash (R), Massie (R), any others?

<comment><USER45> Look up Pirate Party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Sadly, we can't go back.

But we can go a different route. Would love to see mesh technologies get dirt cheep so we could stick nodes everywhere. Develop a new internet such that nobody would be in control.

</comment><comment><USER48> "People are sick and tired of crappy software."

Hallelujah.

<comment><USER49> But they also complain about paying a dollar for an app. They get exactly what they are willing to pay for.

<comment><USER50> What's a, say, 200 USD app or OS that isn't pretty shitty? There aren't many. In fact, I can't mention one on the post.

I know of a few OSes and app that are decent (at least don't try to track you, show ads to your face, do weird stuff in the name of making profits for a company). These all cost 0 and are open-source. Weird uhm.

<comment><USER51> That entirely depends on your definition of "shitty".

Some might care about an occasional ad in an app that they chose not to pay for, or never paying for software on principle, and will always choose open. Some might find the need to manage system-level functionality and installation, or make allowances for miserable UI/UX simply because it is open, too much to bear.

<comment><USER50> So there is none is what you're saying. I agree with that, there's none. F'king exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> During the period being discussed, the constituency of the communities participating in the Internet has completely changed. The percentage of non- paid contributors has drastically declined; the percentage of professional contributors has drastically increased. The percentage of active or contributing participants has greatly declined; the percentage of passive or consumer participants has greatly increased. The norms, laws, and conventions are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats and less and less by community members. The majority of interaction and activity on the Internet is now mediated and tracked by commercial interests. Even if you disagree with one or two of my points, I think you'll grant me the general point.

In a strange twist on things, where in the traditional body-politic one says, "It's the economy stupid", in Internet-politics it's actually the politics. Who participates. What are the power relations. Who makes the laws or enforces the norms. I think this is because, where as in traditional economies money and goods are scarce and so we must have a healthy economy to eat and have shelter, in the information economy scarcity is fast becoming a thing of the past and so a democracy is being replaced by a do-ocracy. Whoever builds it, makes the rules. The law is always two steps behind. So as corporations and governments increasingly hire and direct all the professionals and bureaucrats that produce the Internet, it is created in their likeness or in their interest. So participation, power dynamics, and participant empowerment become foundational.

Unfortunately, the tech industry often superficially dismisses traditional politics. When it does engage it often claims the ideology of libertarian or plays the part of technocrat, seeking purely utilitarian approaches. Libertarianism, you'll please forgive me for phrasing it this way, is rather sophomoric. It's rather like that guy in college that had the Che Guevara t-shirt, but really didn't know what it was all about. Like it or not, we're in a highly coordinated, interconnected, interdependent society, and just as fully realized communism was a very romantic notion but would never get the job done, libertarianism just won't get the job done. We need each other, and we need participation from each other. And this is, in a nutshell, a political issue. Technological, disruptive, efficient "solutions" will not solve this problem. Or worse, the tech industry might engage purely to satisfy its commercial interests. Think about the idea that, a start-up creates a product, and then hires lawyers to "legalize it". Then the start-up claims that it is libertarian or not participating in politics.

We need the equivalent of "The Federalist Papers" for our time. Something contemporary, but grounded in history. Something academic, but pragmatic. Something plain spoken, but inspiring. Instead, we've created the TPP.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _We need each other, and we need participation from each other._

Libertarianism does not dissuade (but quite the contrary, encourages) cooperation provided it is not coerced through means of binary, triangular or other forms of intervention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I don't buy it.

First off, there's always a tendency to overplay the negative aspects of the present while dismissing the positive aspects and to treat the past with excess nostalgia.

Moreover, it's very difficult for most people to grasp the significance and degree of major changes in society, culture, and the economy on short time scales while immersed in it.

I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and while there are certainly many negative developments that have happened along the way there have also been many positive ones. I would not at all characterize the modern internet as heading toward less freedom, not at all. My impression is that far more people are far more aware of issues of injustice and oppression today than was previously the case. It used to be that only a tiny sliver of "radicals" were really clued into those issues, and many of them also adhered to one or another nonsensical conspiracy theory to boot, which weakened their cases when it came to appealing to the modern world. Today I see growing kernels of increasingly less marginalized and increasingly more powerful people who have been educating themselves, participating in the conversation, and speaking out.

No it's not perfect, and it's not happening absent a lot of the revelation of lots of repugnant behavior. And it's also happening seemingly very, very slowly. But my perception is that the trend is for the most part in the right direction and strong. Giving up is the only sure way to lose at this point.

The bulk of this article seems to be completely out of touch with the way people have been using the internet, especially younger people. It's not becoming more TV-like, it's becoming more interactive and participatory. It's not retaining existing power structures. That only appears to be the case when you look at bullshit measurements based on bogus statistics like paper valuations and user counts. The reality is that the real power is in the people. In the content creators, in the groups, in the social networks themselves. The value layered on top of that or spread in-between to facilitate it is fragile and small by comparison. It's the same as in Silicon Valley. Having a billion dollar valuation doesn't mean your company is powerful or secure any more than having a billion users does. And it doesn't.

I predict that within the next 5 or perhaps 10 years there will be another great shift and "implosion" of one of the current major "internet powers". Perhaps facebook, or youtube, perhaps even google or amazon. I don't think people understand the mobility of the modern technological market. You do not own users or customers, you retain them through superior service. It will probably shock people who vulnerable these mega-corps are to disruption, and once one of these big shifts happens once you are going to see a crapton of bloviation from the chattering classes about how absolutely unpredictable and ground-breaking the whole thing is, but it means nothing more than that they haven't been paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER54> Url changed from [http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet- dre...](http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dream.html), which points to this, which is technically a dupe ([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Interne...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Internet%20Dream&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)) but didn't have much discussion.

</comment><comment><USER55> Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience.

Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business?

We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer some activities over others!

This is ridiculous.

Relevant: [https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s](https://youtu.be/ENL- Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s)

<comment><USER7> I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm _this time_ and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it:

"Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum."

She says there are more people on the autism spectrum in the hacker crowd than expected. Also (I believe is implied) college dropouts, apparently. And it's ok. So if there are more males in the field, why is it not ok? Shouldn't we be fighting against the autism-bias and dropout-bias? Surely neurotypical people and college graduates are underrepresented in tech, by the very definition of "being statistically underrepresented".

<comment><USER56> Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be disproportionately autistic compared to the general population.

I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts are disproportionately autistic?

Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so autistics are disproportionate among security experts when compared to their prevalence in a group drawn from the general population with the same gender statistics as security experts, then a possibility to consider is that whatever it is about males that makes them more likely to be autistic might also be something that makes males more likely to be interested in hacking.

That would fit with Asperger's view that autism was at the extreme end of a spectrum of behaviors normally associated with "maleness".

<comment><USER57> I don't believe she has real numbers on whether security people, in particular, are neurotypical. I'm guessing she's invoking studies of technologists in general (which would make sense in the context of a talk).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Latest Weekend Project Opinions Wanted - <AUTHOR>

Over the weekend I developed a little webapp (http://www.splashactive.com) that allows you to search for and add activities in a given area. The idea being that you could find new things to do in your area, plan a weekend away (Stag/Hen kind of thing) and companies the organise these activities could add them to the site for free.
I'm aiming for sporty kind of activities rather than night clubs/shopping centre kind of stuff. I want something that get people out and active.
The reason I started this is I like to always try different things and am always looking for something new to do of a weekend and something like this would be perfect for me. I did a bit of searching and although there were some pages on activities in a particular town nothing seemed to be putting all locations in one easy to use place.
Its a bit scrappy at the minute with plenty of cross browser issues and css/mapping bugs but I'm keen to get other peoples opinions before I take it too much further.
For those interested its written in ASP.Net MVC 3, SQL 2008 and the mapping stuff uses Bing Maps SDK and the standard Geography type in SQL Server. <comment><USER2> Interesting idea! Definitely could be useful, as others have said, once you get enough listings. Some design/UX feedback to think about if you do decide to take it further:

\- First, biggest problem: I visit the site and I have no idea what it's for. The name doesn't help in this respect. SplashActive makes me think of some sort of aquatic physical therapy for the elderly. Consider changing the name, but even if you don't, have a big, visible, prominent explanation (at least for first-time visitors) that's easy and fast to read and that explains exactly what I can get from the product.

\- The individual listing template is a major weakness. Functionally, the information you've included on the bottom line of each listing is very hard to read because the only thing separating the labels from the values is that the labels are bold. If I were searching for just the phone number, for example, it would be somewhat annoying to find it. Aesthetically, the listings feel extremely bare and boring, and I'm demotivated from continuing to read them. Definitely incorporate photos wherever possible, and make each listing larger. I would group the information currently running along the bottom into a vertical list, with the labels much more clearly differentiated from the content, and the description a smaller, tighter paragraph that doesn't stretch so long.

\- Provide some feedback when I mouseover the title of the listings that reenforces that they are links.

\- I agree with the comment that suggests removing the advertising bar. Not only does an empty advertising bar make you look weak/amateur, you already have a built-in revenue model that doesn't rely on regular advertising. Paid featured listings are more valuable if they are integrated into the site and just made more prominent. If they're set aside in a sidebar that we're trained to ignore, they don't work as well and you can't charge as much for them. They also dilute the experience of the site.

\- More padding in most of your tables. It looks awkward when text is jammed up against the border of a box

\- Maybe it's more popular in the UK, but Bing Maps looks pretty awful. I'd switch to Google Maps.

\- My city shows up as a link on the front page in default blue, directing to what looks like a profile page even though I haven't made an account. Change the link color, and maybe prompt me to register or login if there's no session. Also, fix the spacing on this profile page, and hide the "My Activities" label if there's nothing there.

\- While you're still getting started, why not post a message to users who are sufficiently distant from where you are saying that you're currently testing just in this market, and that if they want to request a new area for you to offer your service, they can leave the suggestion and their email to be notified. You can also redirect them to a portal for your town so they can see what the service is and what your offerings are. It's strange, right now, to see a big listing of things 4000 miles away.

\- Put another link to register on the login page.

\- Make the logo a link to the home page.

\- The green color you're using is very subdued and moody for what you're doing. I like the idea of green, but choose a palette that feels active, energetic, and positive. Dark forest green, grey, and white don't say "fun in the sun."

\- Eventually, you'll want to break things up into at least a few categories. Right now, it's not clear what makes something a "Top Activity", and the only other sorting option I have is to see what's recently been added, which doesn't seem that helpful either. Think through what someone using the service to find an activity will be thinking about and using to make their decision. Facilitate their search and make it as fast and easy as possible.

Keep up the good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks for taking the time to give that detailed feedback.

They all seem like good valid points that need to be addressed if I decide to take this further, which I think I am going to do.

Thanks again

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice idea, the problem I always have with sites trying this is that they don't have enough activities in my area (That I know exist).

You need people to submit events in their areas, so how about a gaming mechanic. If you get random people to submit as many events as possible (Don't specifically target the event owner (Only 1 event)) and reward them somehow (Badge, payment, physical prize), it could work.

Make it cool to use SplashActive.

I'd also get rid of the advertising until you are abit more popular, it's just a turn-off that no one will pay for until you have a large user base.

The title in the header could be shortened to "Find activities in your area"

Finally, I hoped you had fun making this, I like it's simplicity.

Good Luck! \- Matt

<comment><USER4> Not to barge in here, but I've built a similar service that I feel like is different enough that this isn't rude.

<http://impromptudo.com>. The aim is basically to be the padmapper of local events. I am targeting the 15 largest cities in the US for now, give it a try if you are in one of those locations. And also even better if you can tell me I am missing something that you know should be there.

<comment><USER3> Love this! Love the map!

I think the maps api allows you to use custom pins, so how about different icons for different types of events.

Also noticed you have an empty meta description.

Also, to both projects, how about implementing machine learning to find events (scan twitter, FB, G+ and sites). Hehe, someone smarter than me would have to figure out how this would work :)

This really is the key to success with sites like these, you needs events, and you need alot.

You don't really want to be entering events manually if you don't have to. The future isn't manpower, its algorithms.

P.S. I've bookmarked this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea, you're going to face a chicken and egg problem though of companies not wanting to post there until you have users and users not wanting to go unless there are activities there.

The best way to grow it IMO would be to start in one town / city and just focus purely on that, then once that has a solid userbase expand. If you try to go global from the beginning it's not going to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Its designed to work global but I intend to only push it in my local town to start with where I can seed the data myself with the hope that it will slowly grow outwards from there.

If you set your location to "Brighton, United Kingdom" you can see some of this seed data that I'm working on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks pretty cool! I like the simplicity of the design. I'm running a very similar startup UpOut.com targeting different cities from you.

I think the difficulty in all these sites as I have found is seeding the initial users. I'd love to talk further as we are also hiring ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice clean design. Didn't work very well on mobile though but I guess that it wouldn't as you made the comment about not being cross browser yet.

Looks good though, I'd use it if it had enough activities in my area. Maybe could also show offer.s

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe you could add a filter function that allows you to target and monitor specific groups: i.e. kids, singles, couples etc... Like the idea too! PS: Would be nice add on to Airbnb.com

</comment><comment><USER9> I really like the idea. It really depends if you can populate it enough to get an initial user base.</comment>


How do you hide a war from your loved one? - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2019/09/12/how-do-you-hide-a-war-from-your-loved-one-lie-about-everything-including-the-bombs.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of my dad, who saw how much his family worried when his older brother was sent to Vietnam and decided not to tell them when it was his turn.

For the rest of her life my grandmother used the Army training my dad for jungle warfare and then stationing him in Alaska as an example of government mismanagement.

</comment><comment><USER3> At least part of this is about a real world example of a family hiding the existence of WWI from their elderly relative until she died at age 100.

Fascinating to think about from a number of angles. We all exist within some set of beliefs that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They no doubt routinely contain inaccuracies on a routine basis, often for benign reasons, but we also get intentionally deceived plenty.

</comment><comment><USER4> however well intentioned, this boils down to people deciding for and controlling others. disrespecting them, treating them less than fully human, less than themselves. that is the underlying evil in all evil actions.

<comment><USER5> No. That's a very cynical interpretation of the events. In fact, it was the human instinct to protect those that need protection (elderly, children) that was the driving force.

American Life had a podcast about a Chinese family that hid their elderly matriarch's terminal diagnosis from her. The story is similar in spirit to this one. Whatever you may think of that decision, it was not an evil act. In another podcast, the adults shielded their girlscout troop from the harsh realities of a POW camp similar to 'Life is Beautiful'.

Sometimes, people will decide to carry a burden on behalf of others, and in general that is a deeply admirable quality.

<comment><USER6> It only really works if you can keep it up, because once the curtain drops you could be looking at a level of deceit or betrayal that becomes incredibly difficult to reconcile as the lie becomes more complicated.

I don't think you can call it a burden in that sense if the other person is totally oblivious to it. That's purely a burden of your own creation, because they had no say in it, and you're basically deciding that you don't like the truth, so they won't either, where in reality it could be quite liberating.

In that sense, I don't feel that's quite as compassionate as giving someone the truth and then supporting them through that if they need it; carrying that burden together if indeed it is a burden to them. It might not be.

<comment><USER5> >It only really works if you can keep it up, because once the curtain drops you could be looking at a level of deceit or betrayal that becomes incredibly difficult to reconcile as the lie becomes more complicated.

Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the situation.

>I don't think you can call it a burden in that sense if the other person is totally oblivious to it. That's purely a burden of your own creation

So we can call it a 'burden' \- why argue semantics if you agree?

>because they had no say in it, and you're basically deciding that you don't like the truth, so they won't either

Another cynical interpretation. No. That's not necessarily the consideration. That's not necessarily the right interpretation.

> where in reality it could be quite liberating.

Maybe. Maybe not.

>I don't feel that's quite as compassionate as giving someone the truth and then supporting them through that if they need it;

Maybe. Maybe not.

<comment><USER6> I've suffered people who think they're mind readers and know what's best for me. Whatever burden they thought I was carrying, they couldn't have got it any more wrong. Those people stopped being a part of my life when I realised what was was going on, because what I felt was betrayed. My own feelings didn't matter, it was their feelings about what they assumed about me that were more important to them.

As such, I would favour open communication instead of being 'protected'. That requires serious trust. And a lot of these games that we play depend on a lack of trust.

There's nothing cynical about this, we've all done things with good intentions in mind only to get bad results. Oftentimes it's because we're acting in our own interest and not the person we're putting it on.

<comment><USER5> It depends. That's all I'm saying here. It is t an absolute answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I already see the creative writing story... when she dies, goes to heaven... and is shocked to find it full of young soldiers...

<comment><USER8> Write it - a brilliant denouement that goes to the heart of the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel the author badly misses the point here. It's not that a person in difficult conditions will necessarily suffer horribly from knowing bad things; they _might_ give up in despair, or they might rise to the occasion and do something startling with the limited options that are available to them.

What's really being protected here are the feelings of the more knowledgeable people; preserving an illusion for the vulnerable serves as a reservoir of hope for those already in despair. This is the 'noble lie' of Plato's _Republic_ (sometimes referred to as a 'pious fiction' in religious terms; likewise the field of law is awash with 'legal fictions' that everyone knows are fictional but which are easier to maintain than addressing the underlying problem). The false picture of a reliable teleology serves to soothe the anxiety that would arise if it was widely appreciated that the people in charge don't know what they're doing a lot of the time and are just making slightly better informed guesses.

While individuals, tribes, and small societies can overcome that anxiety, accept uncertainty and persevere or even thrive, the larger a society becomes the more difficult it is to promulgate ideas and actions within it, and (perhaps more importantly) the greater the incentives for those who benefit most from the fiction to uphold or elaborate it at the expense of others.

Of course, most of us are wired to be protective of children and minimize unnecessary anxiety in favor of harmony. It can be both a kindness and good strategy to shield the vulnerable in hopes that they'll make it through bad times relatively unscathed. But taken to excess, it robs individuals of their agency for the sake of a comforting sentiment, imprisoning them in a gilded cage for the nostalgic pleasure of their jailers who are mourning their own loss of innocence. Should the cage be breached, the unwary inhabitant may fall from a cradle into a horror for which they are utterly unprepared, a far crueler fate than the most pessimistic decline.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not a war, yet still a pretty big happening, a paradigm shift that can be very traumatic too - East Germany from socialism into capitalism and unification. How you hide that? A good and funny movie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin)! :

"The story follows a family in East Germany; the mother (Saß) is dedicated to the socialist cause and falls into a coma in October 1989, shortly before the November revolution. When she awakens eight months later in June 1990, her son (Brühl) attempts to protect her from a fatal shock by concealing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. "

<comment><USER10> It's named and talked about at length in the article.

<comment><USER11> It is a very good film though.</comment></comment></comment>


Finnish logistics giant uses predictive database for intelligent automation - <AUTHOR> https://aito.ai/blog/posti-boosts-their-rpa-with-aito/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

One of the aito.ai founders here! :-)

We feel that the project was transformative, because the ML project was done end-to-end by RPA developers without data science team help. One of the RPA developer comments about Aito was 'that it was easy to use', which is a big thing in the machine learning space and in the context of ML democratization.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to help.

Regards, Antti & Aito</comment>


Ask HN: Which graphical SQL client do you use? - <AUTHOR> I must say development of queries in terminal is so-so. Would love to have something more functional that covers MySQL/PostgresSQL/ODBC etc. Do you guys use anything like that? <comment><USER2> I use DataGrip by Jetbrains. [https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/](https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Usually Squirrel or PGAdmin III.

</comment><comment><USER4> IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate 14

</comment><comment><USER5> psql</comment>


Is chat combined with local jobs the next level for locality? - <AUTHOR> I would love to get feedback for my new app Peerit which connects the job seekers and job owners at local level via chat.
If you are searching an entry level job in town, you don't wanna waste time by visiting each store, restaurant or theatre. What if you can get in touch directly with the job owners around you?!
For more information you can lookup http://peerit.net <comment><USER2> Excellent Idea. I played around with implementing a similar thing with mattermost. I would say go higher up in the food chain. and put listings from remote job sites as well.

If you dont mind me asking, can you go deeper into your thinking about targeting local and entry level vs higher price and remote jobs

<comment><AUTHOR> I talked with Robert Halft Technologies and I searched other big consulting HR companies like monster, indeed, dice etc.. It's impossible to compete against them but they are not in the entry level job area. So I wanna fill this gap with my app idea. Thanks for your comment by the way, wish I could get more comments here.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Search 50M Influencers globally and find out who follows them w/ Modash - <AUTHOR> https://modash.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Heyo hacker news.

Was scrolling about and realized we had never shown our project here before. Thought it might be interesting to see what this community thinks.

We are currently working on API and improving dataset for Twitch streamers.

New to the HN ecosystem so thanks for having us and your feedback + critique! :)</comment>