Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks, Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://techiavellian.com/the-map-to-nowhere <comment><USER2> It feels great when I read something that, somehow, I always believed but could not exactly articulate.

I know people that believe that, most of the time, the best way to respond to unreasonable or irrational petitions is to do it by means of answering the actual points made, even if completely unwarranted and time consuming.

For instance, claims of some random paranormal effect should be put to the test with proper scientific investigation, _like that would satisfy the claimant and not take us in a never-ending endeavour_...

Sometimes, the best way to answer the problem is to make use of well tested heuristics that, instead of going into the specific details, just make the elephant in room more evident: some problems are simply not well put, or some answers miss the point (e.g. the paranormal claim is pseudo-scientific therefore will never accept a negative result, whichever it may be; to feed the troll will not satiate the troll, etc).

<comment><USER3> Mm you should spend some time with in a flatearther fb group. Thats when i learnt the true sentence "dont wrestle with pigs, you get dirty and the pig likes it" ><

<comment><USER4> Isn't the Flat Earth movement a 4chan troll?

<comment><USER3> If only ^^. Look at the fb groups and all the videos on yt

<comment><USER4> I pay no attention this stuff so it's all unfamiliar to me, hence my curiosity I guess...

But how do you know that the people you're interacting with on FB aren't trolls having a joke at your expense?

I get that there are some people who take it seriously, but I'm not sure it'd be easy to tell the difference between a believer and a troll in an online forum.

<comment><USER3> I don't know they have normal profile of middle-class americans. Why so many people would they lose time doing so much trolling without clear profit ? Occam razor is my call here.

Also as Einstein said: there really only two things infinite: the universe and people's stupidity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an alternative to a bad map or no map, sometimes alternative solutions get shot down over pure arrogance, as with Musk's clear jealousy of that swim team guy who saved the kids from the cave. Musk wanted to be the hero, that mattered to him more than actually saving anybody, and so he went out of his way to critique and defame. Instead of appreciating the job well done and lives saved, he inserted himself into the situation. Jealousy can be a powerful motive all by itself, and is too often weaponized.

Also, I wonder where the dividing line between epistemic humility and thinking outside of boxes rests. I mean, is it purely circumstantial, or dependent upon personality traits?

</comment><comment><USER6> > Because of an epidemic of suicides and mental health issues, the government > should provide unlimited free candy to every citizen, to make everyone > happier.

I just noticed there are actually full performances on Youtube of Erik Satie's _Vexations_ \-- a piece written in the 1890s in which the player is asked to repeat a dissonant chorale theme 860 times.

That is a common, effective, and ethical rhetorical tactic people use every day in conversation.

It's common because people aren't automatons who must respond to every potential point of debate.

It's effective because it forces the would-be debater to reveal information. Either they roll with the subject change and reveal their utterance as light novelty and disarm, or they attempt to switch the conversation back to their novelty, revealing themselves as a zealot (in this case).

It's ethical because if anyone in the group wants to participate in that zealotry they can continue on the original topic. But everyone else has an easy out through the non-sequitur. And it works just as well if the initial utterance was a truth told to an ignorant crowd. Those who want to know more can break off without the entire group being forced to become students.

Finally, if the interlocutor misjudged the situation, the non-sequitur is ignored and the conversation continues unabated.

In all cases DOS is avoided.

If a medium doesn't support this tactic you might want to question the efficacy of the medium.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I didn't understand your comment. Do you care explaining it a little bit more?

 _" That is a common, effective, and ethical rhetorical tactic people use every day in conversation."_

What is a common, effective, rhetorical tactic? Repeating something dissonant forever? I do not follow

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The map is not the territory" is an idea originating from Alfred Korzybski. He isn't even mentioned in this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have edited my post to rectify this. Thank you for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a funny feeling that this guy is going to push an agenda, particularly with his "free candy" example.

The trouble with the "the revolt of the masses" theme is that institutions are failing us, experts are frequently wrong, and if you want to see fake experts turn on cable news and there you are... Cokie Roberts is always warning democrats to turn the right or otherwise we'll have to have somebody like Pinochet purge the left (she won't tell you her husband was a foreign agent for the Pinochet regime.)

All b.s. All the time was not invented by Facebook, look at how the rush Limbaugh show was reality free before the web was invented.

<comment><USER10> Experts are frequently wrong, because they are frequently either not experts at all, misrepresented or haven't learned not to make wild guesses on the media.

The media doesn't care about anything, they want a face who can act as an expert of the matter at hand, they don't care if the expert has real expertise — they care if the expert can say something experty that simple minds understand.

Everbody who has seen known experts in a field on TV knows that they will tell you afterwards that of that long interview session they just _had_ to take the two sentences were you made the mistake of speculation. A mistake that stops many real experts from speculating on TV or stops them totally from ever doing TV stuff at all.

Of course you will always find real experts who enjoy it to have their voice heard and their face seen, and they will abandon all ideals to get their egos massaged — these will be kept on fast-dial by TV producers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's definitely space for more thinking about epistemic security issues.

</comment><comment><USER12> >Experts wielding their jargon and credentials as devices to shut up non- experts, even if non-experts have credible critiques and ideas to offer

I don't know if I can agree with this: a layperson might make some ridiculous claim about vaccines causing autism, and a medical doctor absolutely has the right to dismiss them based on credentials.

<comment><AUTHOR> At this point, there is no _credible_ evidence I'm aware of that suggests vaccines cause autism. Hence, a doctor dismissing those claims is reasonable and expected. There is no claim here that non-experts necessarily have the same credibility as experts.

My statement was more in reference to e.g. the use by some experts of esoteric and potentially inaccurate models to silence critique by overwhelming non- experts with jargon. "I spent years developing this model, what do you know?"

<comment><USER13> > At this point, there is no _credible_ evidence I'm aware of that suggests > vaccines cause autism.

This is true, but is the data upon which the statistics "proving" no causative relationship _at all_ between vaccines and autism completely comprehensive and absolutely correct? I wonder how many people who consider themselves educated on the matter of vaccines have bothered to actually do any significant reading on the subject.

> Hence, a doctor dismissing those claims is reasonable and expected.

Reasonable and expected sure, but objectively correct is another thing.

Similarly, asserting that vaccines _do_ cause autism is a very different thing than simply asking for evidence that they do not, _ever_ , and wanting to know specific details on the source/methodology behind the evidence.

Related, hat tip to lp2019 in the thread for part 1 of this essay: [https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the- fairway](https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway)

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not consider myself educated on the matter of vaccines and am ill- equipped to defend any position on either side :) To your point, proving a negative such as "vaccines definitively do NOT cause autism, ever" with 100% certainty is nontrivial. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence that they _are_ causally linked to autism, which is usually the claim.

<comment><USER13> > I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence that they are causally linked > to autism, which is usually the claim.

Nor have I, I am referring more so to the general public census (and accompanying confidence level), and a very careful and critical reading of the "facts" as presented by the medical "community".

Just as a fun mental experiment, imagine a purely hypothetical scenario where vaccination reaction data is not _comprehensively_ collected, where the methodology behind the statistical reporting involves an element of _personal judgement_ (and therefore to some degree inconsistent and subject to personal error), and the reporting guidelines are written in a way that there is a relatively high bar before an adverse reaction incident should be reported. In this hypothetical scenario, might it be _possible_ that the statistics necessary to _suggest_ a _possible_ causative relationship _literally do not exist_?

Now, go do some reading on the details of the _actual reality_ of the data and the methodology behind its compilation. Then compare that to what is written _about_ it in literature, or how it is discussed.

<comment><USER14> Mistermann: "...asserting that vaccines do cause autism is a very different thing than simply asking for evidence that they do not, ever..."

Logically, this doesn't seem true—100% causality or 100% non-causality. The very premise doesn't seem "scientific". Are you serious about this claim or laying the groundwork for a different punchline?

I don't know—maybe you should write an article outlining your response? I'll read it ;)

<comment><USER13> > Logically, this doesn't seem true—100% causality or 100% non-causality.

Even _sometimes_ satisfies "do cause autism". "do not, ever" (the popular story), means zero.

We're told vaccines do not cause autism is a fact. Does comprehensive "scientific" data exist to back this up, as we're told?

The punchline I guess is that everyone has a smug, rolling of the eyes demeanor towards anyone who questions the narrative, but these people haven't actually checked "the facts".

<comment><USER14> "...but these people haven't actually checked "the facts"."

It sounds like a hard line, but science is not like that. I don't think science leads to smugness. Science helps us make decisions, now. Ideology, on the otherhand, is quick to judgment, undermines, subverts, misleads, and is a general problem across all of society.

I knew a biologist who, believed their scientific findings, loved animals and nature, but found humans lacking. That general disdain was eveident in scarcastic jokes, and subversive attitudes towards society. They had to delete their Facebook page for all the crap they would say, which people would jump on. That's ideology, a secret belief in the way the world works.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to make Tera to become a popular project in GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/baidu/tera?from=nj <comment><AUTHOR> I found many Chinese projects are hard to attract attention from others, i need some advice?

<comment><USER2> 1\. Translate everything that isn't english to it, and delete all forms of other languages. All communication/docs/code-comments/file-names/whatever need to be in english.

2\. Create low-effort/starter issues, and mark them as that for starter people to implement.</comment></comment>


Dangerous Knowledge (vid) - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5122859998068380459

<comment><USER2> And the bowl of petunias said "Oh no. Not again." Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255>

Raised again in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724524> then killed.</comment>


Russia says it can collect encryption keys to decode information from WhatsApp - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/russia-now-collecting-encryption-keys-decode-information-facebook-whatsapp-telegram-1573104 <comment><USER2> I just leave a couple of excerpts for everyone to understand the level of competence up there.

> After signing controversial anti-terrorist legislation earlier today, > President Putin ordered the Federal Security Service (the FSB, the post- > Soviet successor to the KGB) to produce encryption keys to decrypt all data > on the Internet. According to the executive order, the FSB has two weeks to > do it. Responsibility for carrying out Putin's instructions falls on > Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB.

[https://meduza.io/en/news/2016/07/07/putin-gives-federal- sec...](https://meduza.io/en/news/2016/07/07/putin-gives-federal-security- agents-two-weeks-to-produce-encryption-keys-for-the-internet)

> Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday at a media forum in St. > Petersburg that the Internet is a "CIA project" that is "still developing as > such," the Associated Press reports.

[http://time.com/75484/putin-the-internet-is-a-cia- project/](http://time.com/75484/putin-the-internet-is-a-cia-project/)

<comment><USER3> While that makes it sound like the Russian government are planning to crack all the encrypted traffic on the internet in two weeks, that's not what they're saying. They've built a website that enables companies to easily voluntarily hand over their private keys - companies that don't will be fined, and presumably blocked at a state level if they refuse long term.

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/russia-finalizes- procedures-f...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/russia-finalizes-procedures- for-collecting-encryption-keys-506742.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually believe the Russian government can do that.

It's _trivial_ for a messenger app to include code that sends a copy of your private key to the messenger app's company's HQ, if served with a warrant or if obliged by law (and that seems to be precisely what's happening here).

If the messenger app is open-source (like Telegram or Signal), you can satisfy yourself that the messenger app isn't sending your private key behind your back.

But it's a different story if the app is closed-source and its parent company was involved in PRISM (like Whatsapp).

<comment><USER5> > If the messenger app is open-source ... you can satisfy yourself that the > messenger app isn't sending your private key

But only if you are building and installing the app from source, and have audited each release. OS apps installed through app stores suffer the same lack of visibility as a CS app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think we need to wait for someone that understands Russian to chime in and tell us whether this article interpreted this correctly, or if this is just a law giving the state the authority to collect your private keys from your systems (via however they want to accomplish this)

<comment><USER7> I speak russian and I can ensure you this story is ridiculous for every IT- related person in Russia. Russian segment of the internet already produced a lot of memes and jokes about "all keys in 2 weeks" (and teleport in last day, please). It's just level of incompetence of the Russian government.

This law is just reason to ban every messenger who will not send traffic to FSB.

<comment><USER8> Heh. That reminds me about the time when my government (South Africa) wanted to pass a law that all local ISP's must log and store every bit of data that goes through their networks for at least 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many things mentioned in this article are not actually true. The publisher seems biased. Russian officials say different things. I think the most Russia will do in the nearest 5 years is the same as Kazakhstan's officials: force users to install special certificates if they use secured connection. And American and European govs likely have plans to do such things too. They have already copied a lot of laws about surveillance from China, Russia. etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like to me this sort of bluff works on the average users and not the hardcore users who understand what they are doing, so it's entirely fruitless. Unless it's not a bluff, in which case we would wonder why the hell they announced it.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't call it a bluff, but FUD. Of course the carriers can MITM pretty much all traffic, unless the keys were exchanged on a private channel. The internet is not private, SMS 2FA ain't either. It's FUD, because the spin that this announcement is a bluff would lead Terrorists from using it anyhow, revealing sensitive information. Putting on the tin-foil: If even I could figure that out, perhaps it's indeed intended as deterrent, e.g. because AI is not strong or efficient enough to process the amounts of data. That's still less paranoid than thinking AI was indeed strong enough and just keeping people busy with unsubstantial stories.

Of course there's also the theory, that even governments are sometimes just stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The linked article completely misrepresents FSB's announce. It says that FSB has come up with the procedure by which companies can hand them their encryption keys, not that they will be able to decrypt everything themselves.

Is it possible to correct the title? It's actively misleading now.

</comment><comment><USER13> There was a story about some Russian IT company that got huge amounts of money for bogus claims. Maybe this is the case here, however I doubt that the FSB is that incompetent. Or it's an attempt to deter usage of WhatsApp and other clients.

On the other hand there were rumours that Russia can and does manipulate SS7 e.g. to get 2FA tokens via SMS, they also have likely control over the GSM and 3G/4G stations. As this is a black box it's probably not impossible that a network operator could access the keys via the baseband if there is a hole a "feature" e.g. for DMA access from the baseband to the phone, however this is _pure_ speculation from my part.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it OK to flag stories with auto-play video ads?

<comment><USER15> No. That is not an intended use of the flagging feature on Hackernews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apparently they required companies to provide their private keys. Once you have that you can capture traffic and decrypt it.

<comment><USER6> Whatsapp, Signal, and Telegram generate the keys on the clients to provide end-to-end encryption.

The companies themselves do not have keys to provide to anyone.

<comment><USER17> Even if that's true, they are one auto-update away from adding a key exfiltration routine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Governments who do not allow the proper, open operation of the internet, should be banned from using it. Like it or not the Internet was created by Americans, it was nurtured with American ideals of freedom, and countries who refuse to allow those standards should be barred from participating. I think this would have a positive effect in the long run, the way economic sanctions sometimes work.

A few years ago I'd never have proposed this.. but the willingness of second and third world governments to abuse the internet for their obviously crooked purposes has reached a fever pitch in recent months.

slightly unrelated, but interesting, those same countries produce most of the world's spam and viruses.

edit: I wonder if it'd be feasible to ban corrupt governments from the internet while allowing citizens access.

<comment><USER19> > Like it or not the Internet was created by Americans, it was nurtured with > American ideals of freedom, and countries who refuse to allow those > standards should be barred from participating.

And it's been undermined by Americans, and been corrupted into a platform for American surveillance and cultural propaganda, thanks to the NSA and CIA.

The thing is, Putin sounds like a raving loon for saying things like "the internet is a CIA project," but he's not entirely wrong. The US created one of the greatest tools for freedom, communication and expression the world has ever known... and it's been been trying ever since to burn it down and plant the Stars and Stripes in the ashes.

<comment><USER18> Compared to other countries, entirely in my head and not in any scientific way, I think America has a better track record than some of protecting the internet from tyrannical government agents.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Culture is Not About Ping-Pong Tables - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mojotech.com/post/55703401894/startup-culture-is-not-about-ping-pong-tables

<comment><USER2> This is incredibly true.

But I'd add/caveat that I've seen (and, unfortunately, worked for) plenty of startups that write up a "cultural code" \-- typically, a big-ass document that gets posted on a wall somewhere -- and then completely ignore or violate its tenets.

Culture is a living, breathing thing. It's not just a mission statement. It needs to be carried out, and if it's not, then all the mission statements and codes in the world won't force culture into existence. If anything, they'll be revealed for the farce that they are.

And it really does flow from the top down. As the founder, or as a founding exec, you have to eat your own dogfood. You are not above the culture. You are not above the laws of your own land. If you set cultural guidelines and expectations, you are the _first_ person people look to to see if those guidelines are being put into practice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Paraphrase of the "Challenge" paragraph: "We only solve very very hard problems, we turn away the easy problems, and we all agree that's the way to go"

Does anyone really think that way or fall for that? This is incredibly immature. Why would you turn away easy jobs? You're not researchers, you're a business.

I never think of whether the problems I'm solving are "easy" or "hard". They just need to be fixed.

It seems to me that MojoTech's culture is 'look at us, we're superheroes, look at the problems we're solving, they're ultra-difficult.'

You're taking yourselves too seriously. We're all doing the same stuff. There's software, then there are bugs, then we fix them. We're not special. Get over yourselves.

<comment><USER4> > It seems to me that MojoTech's culture is 'look at us, we're superheroes, > look at the problems we're solving, they're ultra-difficult.'

What is wrong with that? If they want to attract people who enjoy finding difficult problems and solving them more power to them. What you see as easy money they might see as grunt work getting in the way of what they enjoy.

The industry needs many different cultures. The practical people who grab easy money when they see it should find a company that does so. People with a lot of pride (you may argue excessive) and think certain tasks are beneath them should a company with simiar views. It might hurt the bottom line but if they are fine with that because it allows them to be more selective I can empathize.

<comment><USER3> They're showing off in a holier-than-thou douchey way. Contrast that with the attitude the folks at freenode#haskell sport, who are _actually_ solving hard problems, and you'll understand why I think MojoTech's blog post is immature.

<comment><USER5> Good news: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell- researchers-...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers- announce-discovery.html)

<comment><USER3> That's cute, but my point is not about Haskell, but about the new grounds computer scientists are breaking using Haskell as a tool. Those are seriously hard problems. Making a phone app is not hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Startup culture isn't about ping-pong tables.

What's about ping-pong tables is Silly Valley VC culture, where founders are handed enough money to use $100 bills as fapkins because someone on Sand Hill Road thinks they're as cool and aggressive as Mark Zuckerberg.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article reads as "This is not company culture, this other thing is". But goes into very little detail about why. The only description of what culture generally is, is this:

> It's about values and mindset.

What if your mission statement is "We value a fun work environemnt", or "We value our employees"? Is that /not/ an acceptable culture value? If you don't think it is, then the rest of my post won't be of interest to you, but I'd be interested to know why "we value winning" is, but "we value a fun workplace" isn't.

If it is, then how would you convey it to prospective employees? Do you just tell them that and hope they understand what that means?

I think a much more compelling (dare I say, meaningful?) way to convey those kinds of values is to say how they're implemented. If you say you value constant learning/professional development, people have to take it on faith that you are on the cutting edge, or that you give them freedom. A more meaningful thing to say, I think, would be to give specific examples. The extends to human values, like "we value a fun, casual workplace--we have a video game room, no dress code, and flexible hours".

So, to make an analogy: I think that ping pong tables are to "we value a playful office environment" as "we don't have team leaders" is to OP's inspiration section.

<comment><USER8> > We value a fun work environemnt

If a ping-pong table is on your stuff-to-buy list for the first 3 years or so you've either hit one out of the park or you're as good as dead.

<comment><USER9> Ping pong tables cost about ~$150. That seems pretty cheap for stress relief and entertainment.

I'd be careful not to read too much data into tiny signals like whether a company has a ping pong table.

<comment><USER3> As a ping pong hobbyist and an employee at a company that _does_ have a ping pong table, I can assure you a $150 ping pong table is not good enough for anyone that actually plays ping pong because they think it's fun and they'd like to get better at it over time. It might be good enough for when you have nothing to do and you're just killing time. If you care about the game, then a ping pong table goes for ~$1500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not really about generic "move fast and break things" posturing either, though, is it?

Maybe adding some examples, anecdotes or evidence would help, but if the point of this article is to convince me that mojotech has "real" company culture then just saying that ping pong tables are dumb and bolding the word WINNING isn't going to do it.

I think the HubSpot slide is a great example of actually implementing culture/values, but everything else in the article seems pretty boilerplate.

</comment><comment><USER11> This reads like the exact sort of mission statement that is passed from HR and is defined as the company 'culture.'

Culture is something built from the top down and must be prevalent as an absolute deal breaker in each and every hiring decision.

What I mean by this is if you aren't asking the question 'Is this someone I want to work/have lunch with?' during the interview process then you are going to bring people in who won't be a proper fit. As a byproduct of this, there needs to be a decent amount of time just getting to know the person before hiring them where no interview questions are asked.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading "Endless supply of food" and "pool table" is such a turn off now days.

Mention "work life balance", it speaks volumes more for culture.

</comment><comment><USER13> On hard problems: Just because something is hard does not mean it is valuable. If you are succeeding at the moment I'd say you are doing so in spite of embracing this kind of thinking.

Challenge, Experimentation, Inspiration, Winning? They all sound very generic. If you truly have a culture it shouldn't sound like it could apply to any other company.

</comment><comment><USER14> Such hate for ping pong tables. I can't think of a better way to get a bit of energetic competitive sport in to relax you and break up the day, all without leaving the office.

Sure if you spent $50k on a games room I can see where you are coming from. Ping pong table for a few hundred doesn't seem to be a real sign of startup excess.

</comment><comment><USER15> True. It's about foosball tables.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice marketing.</comment>


Paleo's problem with racism and sexism - <AUTHOR> http://urbanantonio.com/paleo-racism/

<comment><USER2> Genuinely interested in people's opinions:

1\. Is this (a) an ad hominem attack on paleo's scientific legitimacy, or (b) an attempt to save the paleo community from the damaging effects of association with misogyny and racism?

2\. Is the author claiming that a paleo lifestyle is intrinsically bigoted, or that some paleos are bigots?

Separately, I'm not sure I understand the "cultural appropriation" aspect that constitutes the entirety of the racism charge, can anyone clarify this for me?</comment>


OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/politics/openbazaar-is-next-after-silk-road-2-falls/ <comment><USER2> I see several comments questioning the _legitimate_ value of a peer-to-peer marketplace. Some cannot see any use other than illegal commerce (drugs, porn, etc).

It is true that such illicit trades will take advantage of that network but is it really impossible to envision _legal_ business as the major activity? Yes, cars can be used as getaway vehicles from bank robberies and also smash terrorist bombs into government buildings. However, cars also have tons of other legitimate uses.

Consider that ebay has about 200 million users.[1] Their fees have been going up every year and they are now at 10% (which does not include the separate insertion fees.)[2]

If one can sell a _legal_ item such as a $50 book on ebay, why not sell it on a p2p marketplace and avoid paying $5 of that sale to ebay? If not OpenBazaar or similar p2p architecture, what alternatives do folks propose?

Do 200 million ebay users have _lawful_ reasons to avoid paying ebay commission fees?

At this point, I believe low-volume selling is too dependent on proprietary platforms such as ebay or amazonmarketplace. As an analogy using email, I'm glad that SMTP won over closed systems such as CompuServe, AOL, and Western Union's EasyLink. Even though SMTP email has many bad uses such as phishing, malware delivery, and spam, I'm still glad it won. The good uses outweigh the bad.

Can a more open platform for sellers _without the stigma of illegal activity_ be realized?

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=ebay+"200+million+users"](https://www.google.com/search?q=ebay+"200+million+users")

[2][https://www.google.com/search?q=ebay+raises+fees+10%25](https://www.google.com/search?q=ebay+raises+fees+10%25)

<comment><USER3> Why does a distributed marketplace intended for legal trade need to run on Tor? Do you need anonymity if you're selling towels?

<comment><USER4> OpenBazaar developer here. This is the "nothing to hide" argument that we've seen used to much by the NSA and governments.

The answer is that we believe people simply have the right to privacy in trade. Here's a discussion by the OpenBazaar team on the matter:

[https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/issues/189](https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/issues/189)

Do you want your credit card company to know exactly where you've shopped for the past two years? Would you like your employer to know what porn movies you enjoy? Would you want your neighbourhood burglars to know exactly how much money you spent on your brand new Swiss watch this month? Is it OK if your super-market chain only offers discounts to you on the condition that you don't buy anything from other super-market chains?

Should your wife be able to scrutinize what trips you went to and how much you spent on expensive chocolate and alcohol without your permission? Discover before her birthday that you bought her a ring as a present? Would you feel alright if Google used all your shopping history to show you targeted ads? As a seller of rare books, do you want the prices of all purchases to be published to potential candidate sellers instead of being treated as trade secrets? Would you want your annoying jealous nephew to know you've booked snowboarding tickets to Austria without inviting him?

Is it acceptable for these things to be posted on the Internet and commented- on by Redditors?

Please, I invite you to post your credit card records for the past year here. We'll be happy to look over them and leave some comments for you. After all, you've got nothing to hide, yes?

Anonymity is important for people. For some people, it's more important than others. Different people have different needs. Sometimes anonymity is a matter of life and death, sometimes it's just a matter of personal privacy and the right to be left alone. Users can use the anonymity feature as they see fit, but we need to be there to protect them if they require so.

And, yes, some trade can be only marginally legal or completely illegal. Sometimes illegal trade is ethical, and laws vary from country to country. At least at the trade level, we should be free and anonymous. What if your Internet provider disables the Internet in your country by secret warrant request of the government if you live in North Korea, or Turkey in the times of Twitter-censorship, or Egypt in the time of the revolt, or Iran at times of war? Is it OK to leak to your government that you purchased an antenna off of OpenBazaar to access the Internet through mesh networks? Sometimes the penalty can be death.

Not everyone lives in free regimes where privacy is a matter of a warm, cozy feeling and convenience. People need privacy in trade to be free.

That said, freedom comes at a cost, and the price for being free is not low :)

<comment><USER5> > Please, I invite you to post your credit card records for the past year > here. We'll be happy to look over them and leave some comments for you. > After all, you've got nothing to hide, yes?

That's a ridiculous counter argument. If I buy a bunch of towels/etc. from an online merchant, I have every reason to believe they will not use any information they gather to publicly embarrass me or otherwise do me ill will. Their business relies on them not abusing their customers. If they showed any indication that they aren't trustworthy, I wouldn't do business with them.

On the other hand, I don't have any reason to trust someone on the internet requesting my credit card records in exchange for the privilege of being publicly embarrassed when they post it on the internet. The argument is never "I've got nothing to hide", the argument is that I have no reason to hide my Amazon purchases from Amazon.

Most of your examples are either non-issues or not realistic. My credit card company does have a right to see how much and where I'm spending - I'm borrowing their money when I make a purchase. I don't know of any service I use that sends my porn history to my boss (unless I decided to do it at work on computers owned by my employer). I don't know of any supermarket discount program that prevents you from shopping elsewhere - every rewards program I've ever seen is structured to encourage you to shop with them more, not punish you for shopping elsewhere. My wife has every right to scrutinize our bank account - if I didn't trust her I wouldn't have married her. If she finds out what her birthday present was, that's her loss for ruining the surprise, not mine. My annoying jealous nephew can get over himself - if he wants to come on trips with me then he needs to be less annoying.

If I don't want any of these things posted publicly on the internet, I a) won't post them publicly on the internet, and b) won't share the information with anyone that I don't trust to refrain from posting it publicly to the internet. Anonymity is not the same as privacy - privacy comes from keeping personal information to yourself.

So, to reiterate the grandparent poster asked, why does a distributed marketplace intended for legal trade need to run on Tor? Do you need anonymity if you're selling towels?

<comment><USER6> > The argument is never "I've got nothing to hide", the argument is that I > have no reason to hide my Amazon purchases from Amazon.

The argument most definitely is "you've got nothing to hide." This argument is bandied about a lot. With some sort of idea that your entire life should be laid bare before the whims of law enforcement/signals intelligence agencies. The idea always comes with the assumptions that:

\- If you want to hide something from others is means that you must be guilty of some sort of crime, and deserve to be punished.

\- All employees of said law enforcement/signals intelligences agencies are will never abuse their power for any reason, and if they do it's probably for a "good reason" (e.g. see Supreme Court Justice Scala(?) arguing law based on "Jack Bauer" scenarios).

<comment><USER5> I'm going to take a karma hit for this one, I think...

Well, the conversation has apparently gone from asking why someone needs total anonymity when conducting completely legal activity online to protecting oneself from signals intelligence agencies. I have a vested interest in protecting my sensitive information online from identity thieves, scammers, people who would want to rob or injure me and people making arguments like the one I responded to who would likely use my information to embarrass me in an attempt to make a point about having "nothing to hide." When I have a credible reason to add the cops or the NSA to the list, I'll start taking measures to hide my perfectly legal activity from them as well.

The reason I don't fear them isn't because I believe they're infallible, free from abuse, etc. - the reason is that I'm significantly more likely to be assaulted by one of the hundreds of people that walk past me on the way to work than targeted by a rogue NSA agent trying to collect my online activity, and yet I can still walk down the street without being scared of everyone around me.

In the mean time, I know that if the NSA or FBI wants to target me they need a court order, and if I'm going to be arrested and tried in court the cops need evidence of illegal activity to convict me. When I see credible evidence that this is not the case, I'll take steps to protect myself from them. Despite more than a year of Snowden revelations, however, Greenwald and friends have yet to show evidence of a single American being thrown in jail because of the vast, Orwellian surveillance state that has supposedly developed around us.

If it was happening, that would have been the first thing they reported a year ago. The fact that they have yet to come up with anything tells me that in that giant trove of the NSA's deepest secrets, there is nothing to indicate any harassing or incarceration of regular citizens.

<comment><USER7> so, you don't believe that it's a fragile system, before you saw it break?

<comment><USER5> I've followed the reporting that Greenwald, Poitras, Gellman et al. have put out fairly closely, but I've also watched the debates, watched several of the Congressional hearings, read both of the PCLOB reports, quite a few of the declassified documents, etc. The conclusion I've come to is that talking about nuances in surveillance law doesn't bring in advertising dollars, but you can't go wrong by stirring up hysteria talking about all of the things the NSA could technically do without showing evidence of them actually doing it. This is the Ebola scare of the tech community.

So to answer your question, I believe it's an ugly system with a lot of warts, but I have yet to see it break.

<comment><USER6> > you can't go wrong by stirring up hysteria talking about all of the things > the NSA could technically do without showing evidence of them actually doing > it.

A couple of questions:

* Are you a fan of the "benevolent dictator" ideal? (The idea that forming a dictatorship is ok so long as the dictator has the best interests of the people in mind)

* Do you agree with the NSA's redefinition of the word 'collect' to mean that something is only "collected" when a human see it? If not, then why would you trust people that attempt to redefine common terms to mean things that normal people wouldn't expect in the hopes of deceiving them while appearing to be completely honest and up-front?

<comment><USER5> > Are you a fan of the "benevolent dictator" ideal?

I'm not an authoritarian if that's what you're getting at - and this is getting _way_ off topic...

> Do you agree with the NSA's redefinition of the word 'collect' to mean that > something is only "collected" when a human see it?

I'm going to repost part of an older comment I wrote that addresses the issue:

This is the actual legal definition of 'collected' per DoDD 5240.1-R[1]:

 _" C2.2.1. Collection. Information shall be considered as "collected" only when it has been received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component in the course of his official duties. Thus, information volunteered to a DoD intelligence component by a cooperating source would be "collected" under this procedure when an employee of such component officially accepts, in some manner, such information for use within that component. Data acquired by electronic means is "collected" only when it has been processed into intelligible form."_

That would include sent to the NSA, processed by algorithms and stored. The "read by a human definition" as far as I can tell comes from the EFF selectively quoting that definition[2] and drawing their own conclusions from their selective quotation, not the regulation itself. As the regulation itself states, as soon as any DoD intelligence components receives it and processes it, it is considered collected.

The misunderstanding is compounded by Clapper's June 9th 2013 interview with Andrea Mitchell, where he tries to explain that there's a legal difference between collecting content and metadata and fails miserably[3]. Mind you, Clapper is not part of the NSA. That's not an excuse, since as DNI he should know better, but it does explain it somewhat...

[1] [http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/524001r.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/524001r.pdf) (see page 15)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/nsa- spying/wordgames#collect](https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect)

[3] [http://www.nbcuni.com/corporate/newsroom/nbc-news- exclusive-...](http://www.nbcuni.com/corporate/newsroom/nbc-news-exclusive- transcript-of-andrea-mitchells-interview-with-director-of-national- intelligence-james-clapper/)

I hope that answers your questions. (and, btw, I hate it when people downvote because they don't agree with someone. I think it should be reserved for actual abuse, so I voted you back up a point if it matters to you).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey HN, this is Sam Patterson, operations lead on OpenBazaar.

Please note that this open source project is about 6 months old, and not production ready. It has just started integrating Tor, but should not be considered private or secure yet.

We welcome testers, we are about to release 0.3.0 sometime in the next few days. Our Github is here:

[https://github.com/openbazaar/openbazaar](https://github.com/openbazaar/openbazaar)

We've gotten a lot of attention from the recent dark net markets being shut down. As I've said elsewhere, viewing OpenBazaar as SR 3.0 misses the true potential of creating a protocol, network, and client that allows individuals or companies to conduct trade directly with each other online.

We welcome feedback on our project, I'm happy to answer questions, and of course we'd be delighted if you want to join us. Let's make trade free.

<comment><USER9> I think you should reconsider integration of Tor. This is quite likely to end badly for you. If the police reports are true SR2 had 150,000 users: if even a fraction of those decide to migrate to OpenBazaar at some point, any legitimate usage will likely be overwhelmed by illegal usage. That would put you in the unenviable position of being the next DPR, except not anonymous (Silk Road sold books as well as drugs but that didn't matter).

Your best bet is to just not ensure IP addresses are recorded and unobfuscated. That'll help tip the balance towards legal activity.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure it's equivalent. What you're saying is that whoever wrote the stack that SR used should be prosecuted for facilitating the site's creation.

This is simply a project in the same way BitTorrent is a project - it can be used for many things, illegality being just one, and even if that is the main usage pattern (which isn't clear at this point), that's no reason for the creator to be punished.

<comment><USER11> Tell that to the creator of cryptocat

<comment><USER12> TMK, he was never _prosecuted_. Baited, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the interesting thing about these Dark Net markets is how they enable sellers to market their product and maintain their reputation without the need to "get out on the streets" and push their wares. It is fundamentally better for society.

What governments need to get over is the failed "War on drugs". Legalise and tax the lot. Decriminalise possession, release all prisoners on non-violent drug related internments. Provide health care support to help people come off drugs as we do with alcoholics/smokers.

Let's stop being so damn hypocritical about this.

<comment><USER14> I don't think we should push OpenBazar into the illegal drug corner. It is a neutral tech and follows the decentralization vector the internet opened. Amazon, Ebay, alibaba and so on, all could very well get absorbed by an open bazar concept.

This happened imho to bittorrent, which remains in the piracy corner, even though it is brillant tech solution. E.g. BTSync still has this reputation problem (besides missing open sources) which curbs adoption from sys-admins.

<comment><USER3> What need is there for selling non-illegal things in a darknet market? Let's be honest, OpenBazaar will be used to sell drugs, stolen ids, and other illicit things.

<comment><USER15> Therapeutical herbs. Prohibited books.

<comment><USER16> If these are illegal, then you're not really presenting a counter-case that darknets are only useful for illegal trade. If they're not, you don't need a darknet to get them.

<comment><USER17> > If they're not, you don't need a darknet to get them.

False. Some things are restricted by abuse of power, not by law. For example, it's very hard to massprint antiputin agitation in Russia despite there is no law against it.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Keep in mind, a lot of people are hyping OpenBazaar more than it deserves or is helpful. The basic question about OB no one has answered is: assuming they get it up and running and with a good security model, why will the mass of black-market - or legal - users ever use it, when using Amazon or something is easier and more familiar?

You may say that they'll use it so they don't have to worry about police, except black-market users' revealed preferences are that _they don 't care_: SR2 was doing millions a month _without any escrow at all_ , and multisig usage is uncommon even on the markets which support it (vendors generally estimate <10%). The users seem to simply not care. Why are they going to use OB?

<comment><USER19> The users that don't care are almost always the users buying the smallest (personal) amounts, and they usually don't care because they know if they get scammed or it gets lost they only lost $30. The customers who want larger quantities very much do care, and they're the ones who spend real cash.

Furthermore it's pretty common for a dealer who has a good enough reputation to start requiring early finalization. Most of the reason people still used SR2 is it was the easiest place to find their favorite vendor, and the lack of escrow didn't matter because you trust him and/or he requires FE no matter what the market.

As for why people will use OB (I have no idea if they will), cops aren't the only thing to worry about when buying drugs on the darknet (in fact they're close to the bottom of the list). Several marketplaces (including SR2) have been hacked and had all the users money stolen, and a couple have just disappeared with everyone's money. I suspect the selling point will be more like: "Hackers and corrupt admins won't be able to steal your money! Plus it's never down! Plus it's harder to get arrested!".

<comment><USER18> > The users that don't care are almost always the users buying the smallest > (personal) amounts, and they usually don't care because they know if they > get scammed or it gets lost they only lost $30. The customers who want > larger quantities very much do care, and they're the ones who spend real > cash.

No, you're just wrong. The multisig markets do little business, period. And lots of SR2 sales were for quite large amounts, see Judith Aldridge's paper on this topic - the larger quantities made up most of the revenue.

> I suspect the selling point will be more like: "Hackers and corrupt admins > won't be able to steal your money! Plus it's never down! Plus it's harder to > get arrested!".

And yet, none of that has made PGP or multisig standard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _If authorities acted against OpenBazaar users, they could arrest individuals, but the network would survive._

This sounds exactly like the current physical marketplace for anything illegal. Individual drug dealers are arrested, sometimes even big distributor organizations are taken down, but the trade network always goes on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sensationalist title, just like saying "Bitcoin - an untouchable crypto- currency for drugs".

This has the potential to be used by everyone in the world to sell anything.

</comment><comment><USER22> As someone passionate about decentralized systems, I'm curious how OpenBazaar would deal with, say, a marketplace for assassinations and other things that would clearly be illegal and unethical.

Can any distributed system deal with it? Probably best to leave it in place and expose such people, but who gets to decide which crimes warrant exposing the participants, and how would that even work? I can think about sting operations but that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks like they are also developing a Search API for OpenBazaar [https://search.bizarre.company](https://search.bizarre.company)

</comment><comment><USER24> Untouchable by police? That's a pretty big claim. What would happen if the government were to round up some computers and control 50% or more of the network?

</comment><comment><USER25> untouchable is such a overused word. everything is touchable. the government just has to order some products and track their origin using the mail system, get enough orders, you find the vicinity, spy on the drop off area and the businessman is bound to make mistakes, we are human after all. there are many ways to skin this cat.

</comment><comment><USER25> untouchable is such a overused word. everything is touchable. the government just has to order some products and track their origin using the mail system, get enough orders, you find the vicinity, spy on the drop off area and the businessman is bound to make mistakes, we are human after all.

</comment><comment><USER26> For my business, I order thousands of items on Amazon and Ebay per week. Even with the protections in place, sellers don't ship the items and then never respond/won't refund, I get the wrong items/broken items (and they refuse to let me send it back).

Why would I shop anywhere without these assurances?

<comment><USER8> OpenBazaar uses 2-of-3 multisig, meaning that the buyer doens't send funds directly to the seller but instead sends it to a Bitcoin account that is jointly controlled by three parties; the buyer, the seller, and a trusted third party called a notary. Both parties agree to the notary, and then in order for the funds to be released from the multisig, any two parties must agree on how the funds are released.

In a normal transaction, once the item ships and is received, both the buyer and seller agree to the transaction and funds are released. If there is a problem, then that third party enters the picture, and sends funds from the multisig by agreeing with either buyer or seller.

<comment><USER27> How will they be able to prove anything though? The seller could send an empty box. They'd have a tracking code then "proving" they'd sent the item. The buyer could claim it was an empty box but the 3rd party wouldn't be able to know if it was or not.

A scammer would just have to ensure they cycle 3rd parties so their actions aren't noticed(or cycle accounts). What's to stop that?

<comment><USER28> That (fraud) is a problem for current ecommerce too. It can be addressed in part by reputation systems.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are Consumers Worried Enough to Buy a Personal Computer Server? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/are-consumers-worried-enough-to-buy-a-personal-computer-server?srnd=technology-vp <comment><USER2> > The Helm device costs $499. That includes 128 gigabytes of local storage and > the first year of email, calendar, contacts and a web domain for multiple > users. It's $99 a year after that.

I wouldn't run any such 'personal' hardware if it still depended on a centralized service. What does that $99/year even used for that can't be run on the device itself?

<comment><USER3> Hi there - co-founder and CEO of Helm here. It covers domain registrations, DNS records, the security gateway with a static IP that works around residential ISP limitations and storage for offsite encrypted backups. None of these would be able to run on the device itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What advantage does the Helm hardware have over an old Dell tower left over after an office/school upgrade?

<comment><USER3> Good question - tightly integrated hardware based security. To support secure boot, full disk encryption and ensure keys are well protected, we utilize a security chip in the SoC. This protects your data in the event of theft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The last few years I have suspected this idea would eventually take off...but I'm not sure it's quite there yet (and still requires more transparency than this is offering).

<comment><USER3> Quite a bit more transparency is coming - we will be publishing a series of posts going into more detail of how this works. In addition, we will be open sourcing quite a bit.</comment></comment>


The secret world of cargo ships - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/article/index/252438/the-secret-world-of-cargo-ships <comment><USER2> > "Before containers, transport costs ate up to 25 percent of the value of > whatever was being shipped."

And lost you a portion of the cargo if you were shipping something the dockyard workers had a fancy for (Barrels of whiskey "accidentally broken" during loading was a common one.)

There is a fantastic BBC documentary called "The Box that changed Britain" which charts the rise of containerization and the massive affect it had on maritime trade, the ports and workers.

<comment><USER3> There are also two good books I know of about the topic of containers: "The Box" and "Ninety Percent of Everything".

<comment><USER4> This article is an excerpt of "Ninety Percent of Everything".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a great book about the shipping container:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container- Smaller/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container- Smaller/dp/0691136408)

It is hard to imagine a company like Amazon being successful without the humble shipping container...before its time, a ship could spend as much time loading and unloading as it would to cross the entire Atlantic.

I also think the value of the shipping container is a great analogy for any kind of logistics...such as he importance of structured data when building any kind of web app...non devs have. A hard time grasping how something as simple as a spreadsheet is so vital to collecting and organizing info for an interactive app.

<comment><USER5> It's only mentioned at the end, but this article is an excerpt from a book as well: [http://www.amazon.com/Ninety-Percent-Everything-Shipping- Inv...](http://www.amazon.com/Ninety-Percent-Everything-Shipping- Invisible/dp/0805092633)

<comment><USER6> Great book, too - I've almost finished it. (It's titled "Deep Sea and Foreign Going" here in the UK.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry about the lengthy quote, but this is an incredible collection of non- sequitors and random free-association alarmism:

 _IN 2004, Al QAIDA reportedly recruited a maritime expert. U.S. security sources revealed in 2010 that the organization had been working out how best to blow up oil tankers. Though why bother with intercontinental missiles or explosives, the urban planning academic Stephen Cohen writes, when you can just ship everything you need in parts and assemble it at the required destination? "Containers...are the poor man's missiles: you no longer have to be a big powerful government to create catastrophe." In 2003, ABC News shipped depleted uranium from Jakarta to Los Angeles in an attempt to expose the weaknesses in port barriers. The stunt didn't go down well at the Department of Homeland Security, whose declared mission is to "stop dangerous things and dangerous people from entering the country," even if those dangerous things are sent by people from a national news channel. In fact, shipping uranium is legal, as long as you declare it. ABC didn't, and no one checked._

 _Connecting the sea to terrorism has become popular in security studies. Al Qaida certainly understands ships: not only because it rammed the USS Cole with a boat, but because it is thought to own or charter a small fleet. North Korea has its own flag, a fleet of 242 vessels, and the ability to make maritime mischief. Lloyd 's List reported in 2012 that 120 vessels had reported GPS malfunctions in seas near North Korea, in an article that suspected the work of a North Korean signals jammer._

 _A senior government official was asked in 2002 about the threat of maritime terrorism. "This industry is a shadowy underworld," he said. "After 9/11 we suddenly realized how little we understood about commercial shipping." In 2010, Nigerian security forces discovered 240 tons of rockets, mortar shells, and small arms ammunition in 13 containers that had been shipped on the German-owned, French-operated, Marshall Islands–flagged Everest from Bandar Abbas in Iran, despite U.N. sanctions that prohibit Iran from selling arms. The contraband was hidden behind marble slabs and fiberglass. The manifest showed that the recipient was "to order." In short, according to a report, "the ship's owners, operators, and officers had no knowledge or reason for suspicion regarding the container."_

So... the potential for using containerized freight for terrorism is... what?

<comment><USER8> Remember before 9/11 when airport security was sane? The biggest thing they kept drilling in was "don't leave your bags unattended," followed by "don't carry items for persons unknown to you."

Abstraction from consequences allowed for a large number of things to make it aboard planes. With minimal risk of getting caught, you could try once a week to put a bomb on a plane until you managed to succeed.

Shipping containers are effectively the same threat. Due to the globalization and efficiency of trade, I can ship a box full of anything I want anywhere in the world, and the only way anyone will know the contents is if I declare it.

Container cargo is how a ton of bad stuff gets into the country. Not just terrorist stuff, but drugs (and we aren't talking mexican skunk weed here), military grade arms, sex slaves, counterfeit nikes, etc. It is pretty much the wild west.

Something should be done to verify and inspect cargo. A container full of 20 Filipino girls bound for massage parlors should be found and stopped. There is no realistic way of catching more than 1% of illicit shipments without serious investment or impacting the volume of trade that can take place. The best efforts than can be made, unfortunately, are by swinging the terrorism hammer to get dollars.

<comment><USER9> How about you make things that are illegal - legal. Then you don't need to inspect anything. And for those things that are truly horrible - like sex slavery - stop fighting the symptom. Shipping companies are not the root cause of sex slavery. There is a demand for such things. Eliminate the demand and there will be no sex slaves.

<comment><USER10> This is gently baffling. Very few people leave their home country with the intent of becoming a sex slave. They pay some money to leave their country and enter another. When they arrive they're told they still owe $X, and need to pay it off. One way to pay is to become a sex worker. Their legal documents are taken from them. They are told that the police will lock them in prison or deport them if they try to get help.

Domestic sex workers rarely turn to sex work out of free choice. They've made bad decisions, and now they're addicted to drugs, or in deep debt, and sex work is the only way they can get money.

The few people who enjoy sex work are not enough to satiate demand for sex workers, especially if it's legal.

It's nice to think that a bit of sex work is one way that people could chose to put themselves through college and then move on to much better work, but unfortunately that's nothing like the truth of sex work.

<comment><USER11> _Their legal documents are taken from them. They are told that the police will lock them in prison or deport them if they try to get help._

You are down to the very root of the problem here; the logical thing to do would be to make sure these threats are not credible, but it seems you are advocating exactly the opposite.

 _Domestic sex workers rarely turn to sex work out of free choice. They 've made bad decisions, and now they're addicted to drugs, or in deep debt, and sex work is the only way they can get money._

There are many (most?) professions that people choose primarily because that is the best way for them to make money. Why take exception with sex work?

 _The few people who enjoy sex work are not enough to satiate demand for sex workers, especially if it 's legal._

What does this even mean? Normally, demand and supply are made equal through price, and this is exactly how it happens in sex work, just as in any other.

 _It 's nice to think that a bit of sex work is one way that people could chose to put themselves through college and then move on to much better work, but unfortunately that's nothing like the truth of sex work._

s/sex work/any other manual job/, and your statement would still stand true, except it often provides a much higher hourly rate for the worker, compared to most alternatives.

Fundamentally, this is nothing but covert moralizing, implicitly arguing that if other people make choices that you personally consider repugnant, they are somehow objectively wrong and need to be re-educated to see the error of their ways.

<comment><USER10> > the logical thing to do would be to make sure these threats are not > credible, but it seems you are advocating exactly the opposite.

The threats are already not credible. A trafficked sex worker going to police is not going to be arrested; the person controlling a trafficked sex worker is in far more legal trouble.

> Why take exception with sex work?

Because it's not a free choice. An addict cannot freely chose sex work.

> Fundamentally, this is nothing but covert moralizing, implicitly arguing > that if other people make choices that you personally consider repugnant, > they are somehow objectively wrong and need to be re-educated to see the > error of their ways.

You need to speak to sex workers and ex-sex workers and hear the very strong trauma they experience. I've said (although not in this thread) that I have no problem with people selling or buying sex. Someone paying for sex, and someone providing that service is in theory a normal transaction. In practice, very few people want to be paid to provide sex services, and the number of people forced to work in the sex trade is worrying.

Perhaps I've been a bit confusing with terminology. By sex work I tend to mean prostitution, rather than camming etc. (Although the lighter end has some distressing problems too.) And I'm in the UK, where it's legal to pay for sex and to receive money for sex, but we have lots of trafficked people working in the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another little known fact:

Cargo ships also burn a lot of very nasty bunker fuel. The ships going through the panama canal have carbon emissions per year that rival those of all motored vehicles in the US combined (800 metric tons vs 1100 metric tons). Each ship burns 200 to 400 tonnes of fuel per day (worth $40K-$80K)

<comment><USER8> "Bunker" isn't a type of fuel, thats just what it is called when store aboard a ship (the "bunker" is where coal used to be stored). Large ships burn about a dozen different types of fuel oils.

Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods. Better than trucks, trains, and planes.

<comment><USER13> >Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods.

Only due to their scale, there seem to be very little 'carbon reducing' technologies employed in the shipping trade.

I don't know why some sort of modern Sail power hasn't been looked at. If you're sailing with the wind why would you not save "$40 - $80k" a day?

Of wind turbines for that matter, as far as I know, most ships still derive electricity from diesel generators. Why not wind or solar?

<comment><USER14> Ship engines produce a lot of power. Around 75MW.

The size of the sails / solar / wind turbine to replace this would be...? You get the idea.

As for carbon reduction, the engines already run at ~50% efficiency so there is little waste. The amount of carbon produced is the reality of pushing such a huge weight through the water.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why I was down-voted on this.

I should have made it clearer in my post but I wasn't suggesting replacing diesel engines with Sail power, just augmenting it in the same manner as the SkySails (see response from jk4930 and markdown).

I also don't see why covering the deck in solar panels, or installing some form of wind turbine, wouldn't go some way to reducing the demand from diesel power generators.

<comment><USER15> There are a lot of people looking at fuel efficiency as well as carbon/sox/nox emmissions. For the companies running ships, the more efficient the plant is, the more money they save on fuel. About ten years ago we did a rough back of the envelope calculation in one of my engineering classes when I asked a similar question. The extra weight of the solar panels would negate any small benefit they would provide plus the cost of maintaining extra equipment. A lot modern ships run a shaft generator which uses the power from the shaft turning the propellor to turn an alternator to make electricity. When the ship slows down at the end of the trip, they go back to running smaller 'port' generators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I worked for a start-up for quite a while working on this problem. We had a system for CTPAT enrollment of a supply chain, but that proved to go nowhere pretty quickly.

We ended up being part of the Advance Trade Data Initiative (ATDI) where we received a feed of data corresponding to Bills of Lading, Advance Shipment Notices, Stow Plans, Container Updates, etc. We were able to take that feed of data and marry it to other open source intelligence (watch lists for crew, commodities used to cover contraband, historical location data for vessels, historical data on containers, etc) and a rules engine.

The result was a risk score for each shipment, and an aggregate score for each conveyance.

Customs officials then used this data to target their scanning/inspection, instead of trying to do 100% of all cargo.

Not only can this approach be used for security concerns, but also for combating smuggling of legal items by importers trying to circumvent tariffs and taxes.

Hey, here is a screenshot from their website: [http://www.greenlinesystems.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/m...](http://www.greenlinesystems.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/maritime_example.png)

Here is a marketing blurb on the product: [http://www.greenlinesystems.com/cargo-risk- targeting/](http://www.greenlinesystems.com/cargo-risk-targeting/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Might be a good idea to stop doing things which cause people to send you bombs.

<comment><USER18> Doing what violent people want you to do so they stop hurting you is usually not the optimal solution.

<comment><USER19> Where do drones fit into this theory? Using the crudest possible measure - deaths - it's hard not to see the US as the "violent people" you describe. It has become a cycle, how do you suggest breaking it?

<comment><USER20> So is your assumption that drone strikes are deliberately targeting the innocent as a way to inspire terror? If not, isn't it obvious what the difference is?

<comment><USER21> Do you honestly expect anyone under the age of 25 to understand the geopolitics of having their family, friends, etc being killed and to realize that they were actually "bad" people and that the "proper" reaction is to simply accept the "punishment" of a drone strike?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/)

Related article previously submitted on HN, about what happens when one of these containers has radioactive cargo.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this remind anyone of the Guild navigator ships in Dune?

</comment><comment><USER24> The section on arms shipments to Nigeria reminded me strongly of the film "Lord of War," where Nic Cage's character notes that his favorite cover for his arms is the combination of tropical heat and old potatoes.

</comment><comment><USER25> If the Internet should be neutral, why should this peer-to-peer container- switched network be different?

<comment><USER26> Well for one, you can't really email someone a nuclear bomb or chemical weapon. The most you could do over the Internet is detonate an already- existing bomb (either a real bomb or blow something up Stuxnet-style).

<comment><USER7> Containerized freight has never been used in an act of terrorism. For that to be a concern, it would first have to be plausible for terrorists to get a nuclear bomb and have the capability to set it off. Then, using a shipping container would have to come to the top of the list of how to deliver it. Neither is now plausible.</comment></comment></comment>


An Angel Goes Pro: Reid Hoffman Now Officially A Venture Capitalist At Greylock - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/an-angel-goes-pro-reid-hoffman-now-officially-a-venture-capitalist-at-greylock/ <comment><USER2> Congrats to Reid!</comment>


Want a Chance at the Best Startups? Go Beyond the Resume - <AUTHOR> http://jonbishop.co/want-a-chance-at-the-best-startups-go-beyond-the-resume/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you've been visiting HN for a while, you'll probably recognize most of my examples of out-of-the-box resumes. It's been a while for some of them, but they all got a lot of attention here when they were produced.

I just started looking for a job in the Bay Area and decided to go the extra mile to increase my chances of getting the job I want.

The examples I included were part of my inspiration for creating the SaaS growth course I made to help me with the job search.</comment>


On the increasing uselessness of Google - <AUTHOR> http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html <comment> old-gregg So true. It only opens the doors to vertical search opportunities. I have stopped searching Google a few years now, instead I search on Wikipedia for information, on Amazon/Newegg for products to buy and on Yelp for location- based reviews. Wikipedia in particular (not Facebook) has eaten Google's lunch, in my opinion, because when someone says _"..to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.."_ I think of Wikipedia, not Google, despite what <http://www.google.com/corporate> says.

Google is gmail+maps to me, not search.

<comment><USER3> I also search IMDB for movies suggestions and ratings, in addition to Wikipedia and Amazon.

I would still use Google because I don't like thinking about the kind of search I want to do and I don't think having Wikipedia/Amazon/IMDB as the only sources of information is healthy.

But goddammit, Google needs to do something about that spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For what it's worth, I still use Google _all the time_ , for a wide variety of uses, from extremely specific programming questions, to vague "should you take painkillers when you have a fever?" type questions, ranging across pretty much everything, and I have not noticed any decrease in results quality or had any trouble finding what I wanted.

You do need to know how to ask, but if you know how to ask, Google knows how to answer very well indeed.

I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing interest. I know it sounds a bit conspiracy-theory-like, but there have been many articles over the last few months repeating this theme.

<comment><USER5> Maybe so. But I think the more likely explanation is that people are starting to find better results by using Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, IMDB, Blekko, DuckDuckGo, etc. that Google, comparatively, looks worse than it did before.

<comment><USER6> After reading this article, I switched my default search engine to Blekko. But then I had to switch it back, because honestly the results were nowhere near what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mostly use Google to search specific sites these days. It's fantastic for that. Individual site searches suck and I'm certainly as guilty as anyone else doing a quick job on that ... LIKE '%foo%' ... heh.

But when you stray outside of known sites you get all kinds of garbage in the results and unsurprisingly it's _always_ monetized by AdSense. If Google was serious about fighting spam they only have to audit AdSense publishers. Of course that's asking them not only to invest a ton of resources but to do it with the intent of making less.

<comment><USER8> _do it with the intent of making less_

... Initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google's strength has long been tackling the difficult, hairy, algorithmic tasks of data processing, ranking and retrieval. They rose to absurd prominence by coupling a smart approach to search with a virtuous mechanism for targeting ads.

Users won – they found what they were looking for. Advertisers won – they found customers they needed without wasting money. Google won – they became essential for everyone.

Google's strength is emphatically, absolutely _not_ anywhere related to user experience or design. Their early product succeeded because the under-the-hood functionality was superb and they didn't have any taste to design anything beyond the absolute simplest interface that would work. Simplicity and efficacy beat mediocre, complex competition.

When you look at the Google of today, there's zero focus and a pile of products where UX is essential to success. They compete with people who can deliver outstanding user experience _and_ reliable results. Can Google evolve to the point where UX is a strength instead of a liability? Can they succeed with such a scattered approach against focused competition?

Maybe. I give them even chances – they have more money than god. But if their boredom with their original, solely-profitable core product continues to manifest itself in the sloppiness and neglect we see today, I fear they aren't long for this world.

<comment><USER3> Google's weakness is in no way related to UX ... their algorithms have been gamed for a while now, and it shows in the crappy results they return.

The problem Google has is that eliminating the spam is both technically challenging and detrimental to their bottom line: after all, most spam in Google's index is serving Google's Ads.

<comment><USER10> I agree.. I think Danilo doesn't understand what good UX is. UX and visual design are two different concepts, and they are also separate from product value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This makes me really wonder about the saturation of knowledge in SEO, the number of companies in the SEO, and the maturity of the Google "algorithm".

As I understand it, the history of SEO/Google is as such (simplistic view):

1\. Google creates a search algorithm (that is not 100% known to externals) that tries to match your search term with valid, true content.

2\. SEO strategists -- whether by legitimate or deceptive means -- tailor content, HTML, etc to match this algorithm.

3\. Google has constantly improved and tailored this algorithm to prevent spammy type sites.

4\. There is a growing consensus that spam is taking over Google search.

This all leads me to believe that either Google is losing it's touch on it's search algorithm or it's simply matured to a point that it can no longer out- game the gamers (SEOs).

<comment><USER12> If this is the case, the only solution is for competition in search to return - it's much easier to exploit one ranking algorithm than it is to simultaneously exploit multiple algorithms. It's not really a problem in Google so much as a result of Google's popularity.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps Google can facilitate the competition in search by becoming infrastructure for search companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You are not the customer. You are the product. Google works just fine.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but I'll only remain in their inventory insofar as their secondary product, the one I use, remains the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How are these sites spaming PageRank ? I understand that it's fairly easy to create sites with dynamically generated content for common search words but how are they getting enough incoming links to rank highly on Google's search pages ?

<comment><USER17> Actually the trick isn't going for common search words, its going for specific long-tail search phrases. "How do I make tacos with ground beef" instead of "tacos beef howto". Currently google will rank a near-exact long-phrase-string match above a less exact more bunch-of-keywords one with more inbound links.

Tech people, sysadmins in particular, have been living with this in the form of Experts Exchange for a long time. However since they're usually the second or third link among a pile of mailinglists and forums you just learned to skip them. The popular fad in "Q&A" sites (stackoverflow, answers.com, yahoo answers, quora) exists specifically to exploit this revenue/traffic opportunity.

But thats for tech stuff/people. When it comes to general consumer searches the real 800lbs gorilla is Demand Media. If you want to really wrap your brain around how silly this has gotten, read this: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/>

In a way this is all backhandedly from the success of google. We all got so used to it being so good at finding what we wanted, we learned to just "talk" to it, but writing into the search box pretty much exactly what we'd say out loud.

<comment><USER16> I'm not quite seeing how that's causing the problems that people are complaining about. If I was looking for dishwasher reviews I would just type "dishwasher reviews" and you'd think that legitimate review sites would have those keywords as well as lots of incoming links. So they should beat out dynamically generated sites.

<comment><USER18> There are a lot of ways for SEOs to get links. The simplest is to buy them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do your part, it'll improve: [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj)

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a lot of these sorts of "Google not useful" articles going by all of a sudden. Is this a 5th column PR attack by Microsoft et al?

<comment><USER20> There are always clusters of related articles. In this case it is a cross between "me too!" and "king has no clothes". Search in google with a product name or, god forbid, "review" is indeed worthless.

<comment><USER21> The worst is when the link for review is actually "be the first to review this product!". This isn't the review I'm looking for google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> firstname.lastname@example.com: I'll check back and delete this comment once the site is restored_ __

For those trying to get to the page here it is from Bing's cache (Google ironically hasn't cached it yet)...

The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - <USER2> Kedrosky found the same([http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.ht...](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.html)):

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.

And I can't believe Google doesn't know this - nor does Paul:

Google has to know this. The problem is too big and too obvious to miss. But it's hard to know what you can do algorithmically to solve the problem. Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility. For my part it has had a number of side-effects. One, I avoid searching for things that are likely to score high in Google keyword searches. Appliances are an example, but there are many more, most of which I use mechanisms other than broad search. Second, it has made me more willing to pay for things. In this case I ended up paying for a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers -- the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high.

Reading the comment's on Paul's blog post was interesting - you can parse the responses into 3 broad groups:

\- Yes, we agree with you, and here are some tips on how to deal with it \- Yes, but its not poor Google's fault, its those evil spammers (ie Google has no way of changing their systems and is at the mercy of SEO) \- No, there is no problem, this is the best of all possible solutions (complete bollocks IMHO, it was definitely better a few years ago)

(Ignoring the ones trying to pimp their own products or agendas of course, and the end posts comparing the economics of online vs library copies of Consumer Reports.....)

Ignoring these comments, I have found my behaviour is exactly the same as Paul's , i.e. increasingly reaching for paid-for, edited research (Which? in the UK) as Google and some of the "comparison" sights (clearly flooded with Spam, Sock Puppets and Sleazeoids) become less and less credible. (Another aside - I had a gift voucher from Amazon, and searching for a book I wanted I found Page 1 was totally full of results for the book on Kindle, which was very irritating - they need to allow one to select e-book and/or book).

The interesting question to me is what happens if this gets worse, as Google risks attacks on 2 fronts:

(i) Other search engines decide to eschew Ads for accuracy and cut down the spamming, to gain market share. There is an article on Techcrunch today about Blekko, which appears to promise this.

(ii) The market for paid-for search and research grows - how much would you pay per month for a neutral search engine? Which? costs about £7 a month, would you pay that for a neutral engine?

Frankly, I don't believe that it is not possible to reduce this sort of spam, I think Google's problem is more that it is trying to navigate a line between income (systemically the more spam there is, the more Ad money it makes) and usefulness (how much spam can you run before the user walks away) and has veered too far to the spamside.

<comment><USER23> Google cache (more readable than your text dump):

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&q=cache:http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On- the-increasing-uselessness-of- Google......html&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1)

<comment><USER24> Irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ironically, I read this article via Google's cache. How useful!

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be nice to be able to create a blacklist of sites that I want to _never_ show up in my search results. If any search engine implements this, I'd switch.

<comment><USER27> Did you see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060994>

<comment><USER26> No I hadn't seen it, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The url isn't loading for me, and I can't seem to find a cache of it. Is the url supposed to look like this?

 _[http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing- useles...](http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness- of-Google......html*)

</comment><comment><USER29> Here's my cache of the page using my side project:

[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://broadstuff.com/archiv...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On- the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html)

</comment><comment><USER30> I know google does try and combat this. For example any adsense account making more than x dollars per day does get investigated and if they're deemed to be too spammy their sites often get penalised in the indexes e.t.c.

But adsense is only one advertiser, there are many more. And the problem is the measures taken to combat this are likely penalise new sites and new (legitimate) content.

It's a difficult line to tread really.

</comment><comment><USER31> Google has technical ability to stay on top of spammers, but may not have enough incentives in the short term for ads revenue or lack of competition. Also, their foray into mobile platforms, social networks, and TVs etc comes with huge opportunity cost - at the end of day, the top guys can only have limited attention.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's interesting—this is a war, with Google on the losing side, and yet there's very little discussion of the winners—the spammers.

Considering how amazing Google's accomplishment has been until recently, the spammers have obviously really, really stepped up their game. But all anyone talks about is Google's "failure."

</comment><comment><USER33> I find productreview.com.au to be the best Australian review site I've found. It's not perfect, but it's fairly comprehensive and has (mostly) well written reviews. Amazon as always is also worth a read

</comment><comment><USER34> Call me stupid and old-fashioned, but to me Google still is the one true search engine which always finds what I'm looking for. I've tried Bing and others, and I've been disappointed.

<comment><USER35> The point is not that google is worse than something else, it's that it's worse than it used to be, and that it shows no sign of improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> any comment from google on this issue recently?

<comment><USER37> The last official comment on anything related to this was a vague mention that resources had been taken away from the search quality team to work on other projects, but that they would be refocusing on search quality in the near future. Not sure if there has been much else in the way of official comment since then, but I can't imagine that they would let the cries (warranted or not) go unanswered for much longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Windows Mobile sucks: that's what my Samsung Omnia taught me as a customer. Never again.

<comment><USER34> Sharing my view: <http://sdsync.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-sucks/></comment></comment>


WTFs by programming language repository on github - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeodor.com/index.cfm/2011/8/11/WTFs-by-programming-language-repository-on-github/3395

<comment><USER2> Let me copy+paste part of one of the comments to clarify high numbers of WTFs in Obj-C from the article, from Sammy Larbi:

For Objective C, I have some light to shed on that situation. If you look at the search results for WTF and Objective C (through github's search), you'll see there are a lot of references to Webkit, which has the Web Template Framework, which gets abbreviated to WTF namespace in the code. ( I learned that from [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/834179/wtf-is-wtf-in- webk...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/834179/wtf-is-wtf-in-webkit-code- base) )

</comment><comment><USER3> WTFs aren't self-documenting. I'd prefer to use a better, more descriptive metric for code-profanity.

Like seeing how many people liberally apply 'that shit' to their comments and shit: [https://github.com/search?type=Everything&language=&...](https://github.com/search?type=Everything&language=&q=that%2Bshit&repo=&langOverride=&x=0&y=0&start_value=1)

</comment><comment><USER4> WTFs per comment would seem to me like a much more interesting measurement. Eg. I'm pretty sure CSS's low rating has more to do with the typical sparsity of comments than the awesome sensibleness and consistency of CSS renderer implementations.

Edit: Also takes no account for the quantity of code in each repository. Languages that are used for large projects are at an automatic disadvantage.

<comment><USER5> I agree, but I have no idea how to get that information out of github, aside from perhaps iterating over every project there.

I think it would be cool if they made some aggregate data like that available though. =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The biggest surprises for me: (copied from my comment on the article):

CSS is also surprisingly low. I would have expected it to dwarf any actual programming language, because IE6 exists, but it's actually lower than most. (Joeboy has a possible explanation: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899418>)

I also find it interesting that functional languages (Haskell, Erlang) are pretty low. These have been thrust into a more mainstream light lately, so I'd imagine they'd be doing worse from programmers who are less experienced in them using them. But they're not like that at all. If anything, Haskell has done pretty good.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps dealing with IE6 incompatibilities results in use of stronger language than 'WTF'

<comment><USER8> Very possible. We have a sheet of paper on the wall where we tally the number of times that IE has been the bane of our existence. I think that piece of paper keeps a number of profanities out of our source code and stylesheets.

<comment><USER7> It's okay cause IE is now all about embracing web standards and we know have access to all of the bleeding edge web technologies...oh wait SVG has been around (in other browsers and plugins) for a decade :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It could be worth clarifying that this is counting instances of the string 'WTF' in code, not code that makes you think WTF, as on <http://thedailywtf.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised C++ isn't in the lead. I've had more WTF moments reading C++ than any other language.

<comment><USER11> That is because most of the C++ monents (at least for me) have resulted in code that cannot even compile and the WTFs have been the pages and pages of template error messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I found interesting is that the 3 lowest ones in his graph aren't programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, I'm both a developer and a WoW player, but I've never done WoW mod development.

That said, I do know that WoW UI mods are written in Lua, and I also know that there's an interface-related folder in the WoW directory structure called WTF. If there are a lot of WoW mods on github, this could be related to Lua's outlier WTF status.

<comment><USER14> Looking at the search results[1] it mostly seems to be the same code being found in different repositories/forks. One of the most forked Lua repositories contains an add-on with a 8 localization keys named SoundWTF for example.

[1] [https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=Lua&q=w...](https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=Lua&q=wtf)</comment></comment>


Real-time Data Provider - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I am looking for a service where I could find quotations in real time or a data provider which provides an API (java preferably) to get the quotations (real-time).
I need to listen real time stock market stream (like NASDAQ, NYSE, S&P)
Do you know a service like this
Thank you for your answers :) <comment><USER2> You are willing to pay for this, right? Try MyTrack?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes i'm ok to pay this service</comment></comment>


Women of Color Working in STEM Fields Are Frequently Mistaken for Janitors - <AUTHOR> http://bitchmagazine.org/post/women-of-color-working-in-stem-fields-are-frequently-mistaken-for-janitors

<comment><USER2> The title is _slightly_ click-baity, since the article itself presents this:

> 48% of Black women and 46.9% of Latinas report having been mistaken for > _administrative_ or custodial staff.

But obviously, the assumption still reflects really poorly! :/

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to be that it's not about racism but rather probability. This concept is described here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity)

</comment><comment><USER4> If I may, I want to comment on the name of this media company. It seems akin to starting another one called _Real N!gg@s_ in order to promote equal rights for blacks. Or something. I don't know.

Some might call it a publicity stunt, but I call it bad taste.

And I don't see this statistic as anything more than insignificant. As an Indian, I've been mistaken as a worker at hardware stores a couple of times.

So what?

This is nothing more than a phony attempt at intensifying race-based bigotry.

That's perhaps even more tasteless than the name of the publication.

<comment><USER5> Heck, I'm a white male, and I've gotten mistaken as en employee at the big box hardware store dozens of times.

I note that the article doesn't compare the experience of women of color versus any other demographic.

As Lord Kelvin said: ""When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science."

<comment><USER6> What about this makes you jump to defend the status quo?

It's obviously a far more hurtful experience when it happens somewhere you actually work, and when you're already a minority in a white male dominated environment. But I don't really think the point of this is to suggest we get better at identifying janitors. It's to point out a symptom that suggests a larger problem.

The report does compare the same figures to white and Asian-American women, which reported the same experience at 32.4% and 22.3% respectively. I'll leave it to you to find figures for men (they may not exist, for a reason).

If you're interested, you should read the full report. It's based on a survey of 500 female scientists. It's not just anecdotal evidence. [http://www.toolsforchangeinstem.org/double-jeopardy- report-v...](http://www.toolsforchangeinstem.org/double-jeopardy-report- viewer/)</comment></comment></comment>