Verizon, AT&T and Sprint to Limit Sales of Cellphone Location Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/verizon-att-cellphone-tracking.html <comment><USER2> In Switzerland there is a concept of the "private sphere" [1] and it basically implies that others do not have the right to pry into nor track that sphere. Each individual and family has their own sense of that sphere and of how large it is. Under this concept I cannot conceive of corporations monitoring and tracking people, then selling that information, as is currently done in the US. For instance, in Switzerland it is illegal to create a database on other people without their knowledge and consent.

It is stronger than the idea of "privacy" \-- its intent is to completely isolate and protect parts of your life from both the political and the public, which includes the commercial. The right to property is part of it. Note that the Wikipedia description of French "vie privée" ("private life") [2] has deeper and more distinct grounding than the one on "privacy" [3] -- the latter claims that this is mainly a US/British legal conceptualization, but the idea of a private life that should be protected has strong historical and a different effective presence in several European legal systems.

[1] [http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F16104.php](http://www.hls-dhs- dss.ch/textes/f/F16104.php)

[2] [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vie_privée](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vie_privée)

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

<comment><USER3> I don't have a whole lot to support my ideas here, other than a collection of my own ideas etc.

When your whole country is about 8.5 million people it must be difficult to ever go anywhere and be a complete stranger.

The USA seems to be such a huge land, both geographically and demographically, that I think it lends itself to a variety of groups exploiting others. I don't think _The USA_ is a _homogeneous whole_.

Or, if there were a scale on which various countries could be placed to describe homogeneity The USA would be at the far end of one extreme of that scale.

I think that's why The USA seems to be such a hodgepodge of poor planning and action.

<comment><USER4> > When your whole country is about 8.5 million people it must be difficult to > ever go anywhere and be a complete stranger.

I know it's not HackerNews material, but: LOL.

In a country with 8.5 million people it's not like you're living in a village with 5000 people where you know everyone. I think that once you have more than about 1 million people it's quite feasible to have perfect anonymity.

More than that, in Switzerland they speak 4 different languages (German, French, Italian and the Romance language Romansch). The communities are quite separate, it's entirely possible for your average French Swiss to not have much to do with his fellow German Swiss countrymen.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the OP was being completely literal, and your point about language barriers is well taken, but in the context of America, Switzerland is the state of Virginia in terms of population (and about 40% of Virginia's land area).

In that context, Swiss national politics is more akin U.S. state level politics, where there tends to be much more cohesion.

<comment><USER6> Actually, as a fiercly federalist country politics are very much comparable to a lesser corrupt US. In fact parts of the US system were implemented with the founding of the Swiss Confederation. Namely the two houses.

The principle of governance is to push as much power as possible as locally as possible. Communities and cities as well as cantons (states) in Switzerland have a lot of leeway in handling their affairs. As long there's no violation of higher principles. For example a violation of the federal constitution.

<comment><USER7> > _parts of the US system were implemented with the founding of the Swiss > Confederation_

Specifically, on the California constitution. (The Swiss system improves on California's referendum process by making the referenda texts non-binding as law, but binding as instructions on the legislature.)

<comment><USER2> You're inventing a past influence of California as a model for other parts of the world.

The Swiss constitution of 1848 is modeled after the US Constitution [1], not after such a thing as a Californian political model -- especially since California was not admitted to the Union until 1850... popular initiatives (not just referenda) were adopted in Zurich before spreading to other Swiss cantons and then being also adopted at the Federal level.

[1] [http://history-switzerland.geschichte- schweiz.ch/switzerland...](http://history-switzerland.geschichte- schweiz.ch/switzerland-federal-constitution-1848.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Verizon has a section of their site to turn off marketing and adjust privacy settings. Notably absent is the ability to turn off location sharing. I emailed the privacy department and they totally dodged my question. I still would like, and think it's important to have, an option to opt out of all location sharing. I don't care if it's for fraud prevention since that is easily abused by companies.

<comment><USER9> For those curious, here is where/how to do this with Verizon:

Login (verizonwireless.com) > My Profile > Privacy Settings

[https://nbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/secure/setPrivacy.a...](https://nbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/secure/setPrivacy.action)

"Customer Proprietary Network Information Settings" was enabled. "Business & Marketing Insights" was disabled. "Relevant Mobile Advertising " was enabled.

Note, I had to disable Customer Proprietary Network Information Settings twice after I found it was still enabled after my first attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know of a way to simply fake location data? I genuinely don't care if it is technically illegal. Data collection has jumped the shark at this point

<comment><USER11> I doubt that there's any way to fake location based on cell towers. That's all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And even if you could mess with it, it's probably very illegal. It's certainly illegal to spoof mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) because that allows theft of service.

It's much easier to disable GPS location capability. But even that's not very reliable, because there are multiple software levels, most of which aren't user controllable.

The best option that I know is turning devices off, and keeping them in Faraday bags, except when in use. So you get to pick which locations get reported. You're less reachable, but that's a necessary tradeoff. For long- term storage in Faraday bags, it's important to remove the battery, because otherwise the device may drain it, trying to ping towers, even though "turned off".

<comment><USER12> > _I doubt that there 's any way to fake location based on cell towers. That's > all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And > even if you could mess with it, it's probably very illegal._

Also, it would probably cause your phone to simply stop working as a phone - cell towers need this location data for their fundamental operations as a cellular system.

<comment><USER11> Yes, good point. So if you care about cell towers, you can just nuke the radio, and use only VoIP via WiFi. But even that's iffy, I think, given difficulty controlling apps. And finally, even if all that works, you don't really have a "phone" anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What about T-Mobile?

<comment><USER14> [https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/1009168217586061313](https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/1009168217586061313) From earlier today.

<comment><USER13> Great, so now I have to count on Mr. Legere's judgment of whether a given middleman is "shady".

Why is it legal for these companies to sell our data to anyone? This is nuts.

<comment><USER15> The FCC in 2016 voted to require that ISPs and mobile providers must get opt- in consent to share or sell customer data.

Then in 2017 Congress voted to overturn those rules and prevent the FCC from implementing them in the future in a party-line vote in the House and Senate.

Adding further insult to injury, the current FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, represented Securus (the company that sparked this revelation) in 2012 as an attorney.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your- pr...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-private- browsing-history/)

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and- att-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-will- stop-selling-your-phones-location-to-data-brokers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> gm-conspiracy It will now be leased.

<comment><USER16> Or bartered, just like Facebook didn't "sell" your data to data brokers, the company just exchanged it for the brokers' own data on you (or others).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was dumb enough to think that anyone would need a warrant to be able to get that information...

</comment><comment><USER18> "Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint decide to cut out middlemen and sell directly to location data consumers."

<comment><USER19> Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like quoting someone when you aren't. And could you please not break the site guidelines by posting shallow dismissals? If you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully instead.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER18> That's fair, thanks dang!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't worry, the (federal) government will still have no problems getting their hands on it.

Any progress on privacy is great, but it doesn't buy much as long as underlying issues aren't solved. We still have a legal system that has no issue with nearly unlimited surveillance by the federal government which is set up by what is essentially secret law.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but they have been bypassing due process by using 3rd parties instead of going directly to telecoms. And the friendly folks at Palantir et al are only too happy to share.

<comment><USER20> The due process is basically just a rubber stamped sham anyways — the only downside is that there's a paper trail. But it seems that as a government agency you can just lie to the FISA courts to get your warrants and there won't be any consequences later.</comment></comment></comment>


Native Elements – HTML elements with CSS superpowers - <AUTHOR> https://native-elements.dev <comment><AUTHOR> It is a customizable plug-n-play library for your site which helps you easily styling all the available HTML elements using CSS custom properties, classes, attributes, or whatever you want in less than 7 kB.</comment>


Send a Message from Java to Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://concise-software.blogspot.com/2009/08/concise-howtos-message-from-java-to.html

<comment><USER2> Send a message from your shell to C++:

       $ wget http://google.com/

<comment><USER3> GNU wget is in C; and there wont be any C++ code running in that shell interaction of yours unless it was on Be or Atheos ;-)

<comment><USER2> Google Search is C++. That was my point.</comment></comment></comment>


Deep Probabilistic Programming Languages: A Qualitative Study - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.06458 <comment><USER2> They forgot to mention Zhusuan[0].

[0]: [https://github.com/thu-ml/zhusuan](https://github.com/thu-ml/zhusuan)

<comment><USER3> and Anglican [https://probprog.github.io/anglican/index.html](https://probprog.github.io/anglican/index.html)</comment></comment>


GitHub Language Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://danielvdende.com/gdc2014

<comment><USER2> Assuming this is accurate, what I find especially interesting is that if you hover over each of these languages they all have a significant overlap with JavaScript. I think everyone of these languages widest band goes to JavaScript.</comment>


Ask HN: how do you manage command line snippets? - <AUTHOR>

I find myself working with the command line a lot, and it's a pain to remember passwords, paths and commands I use a lot. How do you manage it? Just a text file? Is there a good tool for this? <comment><USER2> I've created some command aliases in my bash profile. There are also tools to create shortcuts for git commands. Other than that, I have created shell scripts that I copy to projects, and also some Rake commands.

I haven't spent enough time on some sort of centralization of "snippets" per se, since what I listed above covers the stuff I reuse the most.</comment>


Is your website colorblind friendly? - <AUTHOR> http://helloworlddesignco.com/web-design-news-portland-oregon.php?pid=51 <comment><USER2> In addition to color, designers should check to see if their sites break when minimum font size is set in browsers. I like to browse at 18 pt min, and many sites are awful. Mostly because they insist on fixed widths for many sub- elements on the screen.

HN is one site that works quite well at 18 pt min. I don't know about color issues, but HN seems simple enough that it's probably not a problem.

HN also works great w/o JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, the only thing that has ever been a problem to me in terms of usability as a person with strong protanopia is sites that mess with link highlight colors.

Just leave it up to the browser defaults what color links show up in(visited or not) and all should be fine, I've never had any usability problems aside from this. Actually, no, that's not entirely true, this chart [1] that I saw today is a really bad culprit. I have to focus a lot to distinguish between the "Novels" color and the "Short Stories that appear in First Meetings in the Enderverse" color and even then I'm not 100% sure I can tell.

Honestly though, what I've found is by far worse than websites in terms of color-blind friendliness is games. Lots of games, especially casual ones, where you match things based on color are really hard and sometimes impossible for me to play. Though in this area FOSS games almost always include a color- blind mode of some sort, for which I'm glad.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game_(series)#Chronol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game_\(series\)#Chronological_order)

<comment><USER4> Using this bookmarklet, is the graph better or worse?

        javascript:(function()%7B%7Bfunction%20%24(el%2Csel%2Ccb)%7BArray.prototype.forEach.call(el.querySelectorAll(sel)%2Ccb)%3B%7Dfunction%20fix(el%2Cbgcol%2Ctxtcol)%7Bel.style.backgroundColor%3Dbgcol%3Bel.style.color%3Dtxtcol%3B%24(el%2C%22*%22%2Cfunction(el)%7Bel.style.color%3Dtxtcol%3Bif(el.tagName%3D%3D%3D%22A%22)%7Bel.style.textDecoration%3D%22underline%22%3B%7D%7D)%3B%7D%24(document%2C%22.legend-color%2C%20td%22%2Cfunction(el)%7Bswitch(el.style.backgroundColor)%7Bcase%20%22rgb(170%2C%20170%2C%20255)%22%3Afix(el%2C%22black%22%2C%22white%22)%3Bbreak%3Bcase%20%22rgb(255%2C%20204%2C%20187)%22%3Afix(el%2C%22%230055aa%22%2C%22white%22)%3Bbreak%3Bcase%20%22rgb(255%2C%20153%2C%20238)%22%3Afix(el%2C%22%23ff9900%22%2C%22black%22)%3Bbreak%3B%7D%7D)%7D)()

Source:

        javascript:(function(){
        	function $(el,sel,cb) { Array.prototype.forEach.call(el.querySelectorAll(sel),cb); }
        	function fix(el,bgcol,txtcol) {
        		el.style.backgroundColor = bgcol;
        		el.style.color = txtcol;
        		$(el,"*",function (el) {
        			el.style.color = txtcol;
        			if (el.tagName === "A") {
        				el.style.textDecoration = "underline";
        			}
        		});
        	}
        	$(document,".legend-color, td",function (el) {
        		switch(el.style.backgroundColor) {
        		case "rgb(170, 170, 255)":
        			fix(el,"black","white");
        			break;

        		case "rgb(255, 204, 187)":
        			fix(el,"#0055aa","white");
        			break;

        		case "rgb(255, 153, 238)":
        			fix(el,"#ff9900","black");
        			break;
        		}
        	});
        })();

<comment><USER5> Significantly better.

Before the change I can see the two colors on "Ender's Game", since that's the only place they are side by side. All of the blocks which only have one of "Novels" or "Short Stories / Enderverse" I struggle to tell which it is. "Short Stories" is quite distinct from the other two colors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I first learned about HTML, one of its touted features was the ability for people with different disabilities to use custom browsers that interpret the tags differently. For instance, text to speech.

Today, it's my perception that web design has gone graphical, to the point where it would seem vastly more difficult to make sense of typical web pages using adaptive technologies.

And as I approach old age, I find myself struggling with web pages, for instance having to use the "find" feature to find simple things on pages such as the login button.

<comment><USER7> I think the "appification of the web", where information is increasingly presented in a custom UI that is supposed to resemble a desktop application, is largely to blame for that, along with the tendency to emphasise form over function (although this is not restricted to the web, it seems to happen whenever people whose only job is to design, and not also create content as well, is present) since there's a general perception that the more "designed" (with graphical elements that are not necessarily useful, distracting animations, multicoloured things whose only purpose is to be attention- getting, etc.) a webpage the better it is. The effect is to emphasise presentation over content, which doesn't please those who are more interested in the latter and certainly isn't any better for accessibility. The overuse of and reliance on Javascript doesn't help matters either. In fact I'd say the web has become _less_ accessible now as compared to e.g. 20 years ago.

<comment><USER8> In Firefox, when I find a page that is beautifully inaccessible:

View/Page Style/No Style

which gives me beautiful, high contrast black on white, and text that flows fully within the borders of the browser without having to scroll sideways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It says 'You can test your site with a color-blindness simulator, such as Colbindor'

But there is no such way to test a site persay, only upload individual images.

<comment><USER10> There are browser plugins such as Spectrum [1] that might be more useful.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegkcmilinpcimpjkfhjfgmhieb?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Design without color isn't just useful for the color blind it helps a designer get a better handle over visual noise. For this reason I operate under grey scale by default on my machine, and only have the option to turn it off for 5 minutes at a time (see [https://github.com/cyphunk/grey](https://github.com/cyphunk/grey))

</comment><comment><USER12> We struggled with this and our designer wrote up a bit about how we solved it. One great example:

> In Illustrator, just go to View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness - > Deuteranopia-type, and immediately see how your design looks in a limited > spectrum.

[http://wistia.com/blog/heatmaps-for- colorblindness](http://wistia.com/blog/heatmaps-for-colorblindness)

</comment><comment><USER13> You should read this article if you're a (mobile) application developer. It's not just webpages that have colour.

</comment><comment><USER14> No. On purpose. Screw those freakin weirdos.</comment>


California bans car hacker George Hotz from its roads. So, he heads to Nevada - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-07-28/tech-reporter-and-boy-genius-skirt-the-law-in-self-driving-car <comment><USER2> Video.</comment>


Standard Chartered Favors Frankfurt as EU Hub After Brexit - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/r-standard-chartered-favors-frankfurt-as-eu-hub-after-brexit-2017-5?IR=T <comment><USER2> Good news. The UK needs to diversify away from financial services.</comment>


Google Reaches 1T in market value - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabet-becomes-fourth-u-s-company-to-ever-reach-1-trillion-market-value-11579208802 <comment><USER2> Current companies by market cap can be viewed here: [https://finviz.com/screener.ashx?o=-marketcap](https://finviz.com/screener.ashx?o=-marketcap)

<comment><USER3> I hear the first trillion is the hardest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So,

> _Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are the first three publicly traded U.S. > companies to hit $1 trillion in market value._

> _Google parent Alphabet Inc. became the fourth U.S. company ever to achieve > a $1 trillion market value Thursday_

This is just a number obviously — E8D4A51000 in hex, 1110 1000 1101 0100 1010 0101 0001 0000 0000 0000 in binary (40 bits), 141981B87854 in the elegant base-12 (duodecimal, or "dozenal" for amateurs).

It's interesting to look at a history of the biggest firms.

\- America's Top 50 Companies 1917-2017 [1]

\- A Century of America's Top 10 Companies, in One Chart [2]

\- Top 15 Largest U.S. Companies by Revenue (1954-2018) [3] (video 5')

(Note: the USA is best documented and as the world's #1 GDP for a century it's a good sample of leading trends).

What we see is a clear shift from primary products to intragrators — makers of final products. It's unclear to me whether "tech" should be seen as either, because software can be very low-level or very high-level, it's pervasive vertically to the whole pre-existing technology stack of civilization. Hence why, perhaps, it's so mesmerizing to us now.

Among the 4 companies cited here, Google is strangely the one that I'm the less confident about in terms of very-long-term prospects. Apple has clearly become a luxury brand, and these last _centuries_ ; Microsoft is as strong as it's ever been with all things enterprise; Amazon is, well, _Amazon_.

Google however, it's an engineer ethos at first (my first tech love), but it seems like corporate drove that away enough to resemble other companies (looking at Facebook, Tesla..). But said corporate management seems aimless, opportunistic more than vision-driven, more about the what/how and not a clear why. The moon projects counter-illustrate that fact but how many of those will actually become Google's main drive to rock the 2030s, 2040s, and beyond?

And yet, as far as the heart goes, Google is the one I'd love to become something more, it's the one I wish I had founded bar none but Musk's. I just don't see it top 10 past 2030, if even that.

[none of this was financial or career advice ;-)]

[1]: [https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas- top-10-co...](https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas- top-10-companies)

[2]: [https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas- top-10-co...](https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas- top-10-companies)

[3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MSQ6n-3YA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MSQ6n-3YA)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's too bad. Out of the other $1T US companies (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) Google seems by far the most user hostile. I would say Microsoft once held this position but lost their edge to be truly damaging. On the other hand Google:

* Sells ads for a living

* Pushes AMP

* Removes features from Chrome that allow you to block ads

* Android littered with spyware

* Kills products randomly

* Kills platforms randomly (leaving developers high and dry)

* Horrible hiring culture cargo-culted by lesser Googles

* Privacy concerns with Google Home product

* Introduces politics into the workplace

* Introduces politics into their products

* Sexual harassing execs get big payouts

* Infantalized workplace culture

* Produces increasingly awful search results

* More...

<comment><USER3> Microsoft, Amazon and Apple also sell ads.

AMP may tie publishers into their standard, but as a user I'd much prefer an AMP page to a dog slow publisher page on mobile.

Despite all the hype and FUD, ad blockers still work just fine in Chrome.

iOS has plenty of hidden spy apps, masque attacks, and iCloud backup attacks.

Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.

Plenty of privacy concerns with Amazon and Microsoft. Remains to be seen if Apple caves on the Pensacola iPhones.

Not sure how workplace politics or culture affects the user experience at all, sounds like you might be confusing your own prejudices with users at large.

Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.

Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.

Apple refuses to interoperate with industry standards, Google does not.

<comment><USER6> While you may be technically right in many of these points, what you say misses or purposefully deflects points from the parent. For example:

> [Google] Sells ads for a living

>> Microsoft, Amazon and Apple also sell ads.

Parent is not stating that the companies do not sell ads, parent is stating that Google primarily makes its money by selling ads. Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple do not.

> [Google] Kills products randomly

> [Google] Kills platforms randomly (leaving developers high and dry)

>> Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.

There is a difference between deprecating and "killing" as the parent puts it, and unlike Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, Google has a website dedicated to its many killed products [1], primarily because Google has a pretty bad reputation for killing a product randomly without much notice.

Beyond those, you're being disingenuous with at least these two points:

> Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.

> Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.

You're technically correct but that's because 1) Google products aren't accessible in China, and 2) Google doesn't really sell physical products like Amazon does (if you don't count some devices like phones). That's like saying, assuming Elmer's Glue isn't in China, that "Microsoft censors their products in China, Elmer's Glue does not."

1: [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

<comment><USER7> MSFT has deprecated 346 products to Google's 194... [https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued- micros...](https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft- products)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android development fragmentation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.audobox.com/android-development-fragmentation/

<comment><USER2> The article doesn't answer an obvious question -- whether an Eclipse-based Android project can be seamlessly imported into Android Studio. That was the first thing I thought of, and in scanning the article I saw it wasn't addressed. IMHO a glaring omission.

EDIT: The Google article about Android Studio covers this -- it's a two-step process in which one exports a project from Eclipse, then imports that into the new environment.

<comment><USER3> I've tried it for a simple project and it worked flawlessly. The new build system is quite well developed at this point, so most developers should be able to get their app building on it. It's not 100% complete or 100% bug-free yet though - for a mature app you might want to wait until it's out of beta.</comment></comment>


Professors can't stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/professors-like-me-cant-stay-silent-about-this-extremist-moment-on-campuses/2017/10/27/fd7aded2-b9b0-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.dbdd2eff7de6 <comment><USER2> I worry about an increasing movement toward radicalization on all ends of the political spectrum. I think Trump represented a shift to the _far_ -right. Now I worry liberals might shift to the _far_ -left. The middle ground seems to be disappearing

<comment><USER3> Having lived in Ohio, the far right is exactly the same as the far left here in San Francisco. What is funny is they do not realize this. So I think its more a personality type selection than actual thought process or belief.

The result of believing the other side is evil, is no one is willing to work together so we all lose.

I think this could be a function of things we've built on the internet such as the ability to "hide" or "block" \- even moderators are bad I, an elected DNC delegate is banned from the DailyKos because I disagreed with the Democrats proxy war policy on Syria.

We are in trouble.

<comment><USER4> > So I think its more a personality type selection than actual thought process > or belief.

Yep, I think that's an important insight. I know a few people who grew up in very evangelical/conservative Christian communities who later dropped that ideology for left-wing ones (e.g. feminism). Their attitudes and behaviors are almost _exactly the same_ , except that the content of their ideas has been swapped out.

<comment><USER5> Why the downvotes? Seems like a relevant anecdote.

<comment><USER6> because the idea that women should get to work and vote isn't a far-left idea

<comment><USER4> That's a pretty disingenuous comment: First, your characterization is probably accurate if restricted to the "first wave" feminism (of a century ago), but, IIRC, I think we're on the "third wave" now. Second, in the American political context, feminism is highly correlated with progressives/left-wing, and the _specific people_ I was talking about are _very left-wing_. Thirdly, my comment wasn't even about feminism at all, but about how people can change beliefs without changing a lot of things one might naively assume would change with them.

<comment><USER6> You brought up the broad concept of 'feminism' as an example and your comment was about people who go to either extreme, so I think I took your comment as being more anti-feminism then you meant it (no ingenuous meant to be dis'ed). I agree with your idea of how some people change beliefs but still keep the same extreme attitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands](http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands)

I'm all for equality, but increasingly, these BLM-emulative student movements aren't egalitarian, but racist in the other direction. See #7 for example. Many of those demands, like #24, aren't even possible let alone reasonable. There are specific laws governing the employment of non-naturalized residents.

<comment><USER8> whats AODs, SES, CSO, HCC, MRC, PMP, CAT, CRES ?

<comment><USER9> These are Reed-specific acronyms that anyone relevant at Reed would understand. I found almost all of them through a search like "PMP site:reed.edu", such as [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=PMP+site%3Areed.edu](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=PMP+site%3Areed.edu) .

AOD = "Alcohol and Other Drugs" violation. They probably want to know if there is a racial bias in who gets cited.

SES = "Socioeconomic Status"; poor people in general have a harder time getting through college.

CSO = "Community Safety Officer", aka, campus police

HCC = Reed Health and Counseling Center

PMP = Peer Mentor Program

CRES = Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies program; think "comparative religion" course but for race and ethnic studies.

CAT = "Each year, one quarter of the faculty is considered for reappointment, tenure, promotion, or an increase in salary. This evaluation is conducted by the faculty Committee on Advancement and Tenure (CAT), which makes recommendations to the president." (This was the hardest to find. It took a couple of minutes.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Put any student that disrupts the activities of the organisation through disciplinary procedures, ultimately expelling them if they can't behave. These disruptions will stop instantly, and they'll learn to behave appropriately in future.

</comment><comment> Tech-Noir This article is about students protesting a humanities course at Reed College in Oregon. Why does it have a huge image depicting protesters against "Nazis in Berkeley"?

<comment><USER11> It's simple: when it becomes acceptable to violate standards of civility when addressing particularly ultra-bad ideas, soon enough, every idea you don't like becomes ultra-bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a good summary of the entire situation without the emotion of an op- ed:

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed- college-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college- course-lectures-canceled-after-student-protesters-interrupt-class)

<comment><USER13> With a link to their supplementary syllabus, I was curious about that:

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bw66lFPav- Gsa3prajMy...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bw66lFPav- Gsa3prajMyTDM2RXM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tim Wu, who coined the term "network neutrality", wrote an excellent op-ed in the N.Y. Times yesterday. He said that now speech,l is a form of control and censorship, whereas 100 years ago limiting speech was a form of control / censorship. Interesting to see how the pendulum shifts...

<comment><USER15> You need to rewrite that whole paragraph. What?

<comment><USER16> Might as well read the op-ed: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first- ame...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first- amendment.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The prof should sue the students for harassment and tortuous interference. The student's are preventing the prof from doing her job and fulfilling her duties to the University.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don't remember hearing about riots at European universities yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don 't remember hearing about riots at European universities yet._

It's actually fairly uncommon; most people are normal and most schools are reasonable: [https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of- pe...](https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-people-are- fine-but-its-that-last-five-percent) . But bad things are happening at a small number of schools, and, unfortunately, many administrators in particular are enabling or tolerating them, so those things make the news.

There are some genuinely bad trends, but there's also some inflation of the state of reality on the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

I'm not sure who gave these people the idea the heckler's veto is a legitimate tactic on a college campus or why the administration puts up with it. Those students should be summarily expelled.

<comment><USER20> This is not how we did things in the 90s we used to debate these speakers and knock down their ideas with rational discourse it's not that hard to deflate the arguments of the far right they're mostly based on a series of bad assumptions like assuming everyone has a deep fear of anyone who looks different than them. It's better to let them speak and then deflate their arguments to the bone in debate.

<comment><USER20> However when it comes to speakers advocating racism, race is not even real, there is only one human race with ethnic variations we don't allow people to come to medical schools to advocate using voodoo doll to cure cancer why should racists be speaking on college campuses?

<comment><USER21> Perhaps, but then you run into the problem of defining racism. It can be obvious, but you can also have situations like the one in yale where the english curriculum was "Colonized"[1] by the fact it had too many white male writers. Would someone who advocates for teaching the traditionally accepted cannon of english literature be racist. According to some definitions, yes. Further, some are willing to call the fundamentals of math racist[2]. Racism can be subtle as well as obvious, and to define the parameters of acceptable speech based on subjective understanding of that subtlety seems that it would likely lead to abuse.

[1][http://college.usatoday.com/2016/06/10/yale- undergraduates-a...](http://college.usatoday.com/2016/06/10/yale- undergraduates-aim-to-decolonize-the-english-departments-curriculum/)

[2]www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5018223/Professor-says-math-perpetuates- white-privilege.html

<comment><USER22> [1] is fake news. [2] is a single professor from a low-tier university with the article intended to incite outrage and divide through inducing fear in the reader, which is what you felt.

Please be more careful where you are sourcing your brain food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I notice this submission is now flagged. Anybody has any idea as to why or in which way is inappropriate?

<comment><USER24> Likely because discussions on this topic generally generate much more heat than light. That's not to say the issue isn't important or worth discussing; some forums (virtual and otherwise) are better suited for constructive discussions on a given topic than others. HN members often flag such submissions even when they agree with the premise for just this reason.

To be clear, as I understand it, submissions receive a "[flagged]" tag when enough community members have flagged it: it's not a moderator action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >Oh dear, these left wing protestors taking a microphone sure is comparable to fascists actually killing people.

Give me a break.

<comment><USER26> Would you please stop using HN for political/ideological battle? You've done it quite a bit and it's not what this site is for.

Similarly, would you please not post unsubstantive comments here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER25> Every comment in this thread is ideologically driven. It seems that if you don't want people commenting with political opinions, there shouldn't be political submissions.

As far as substance goes, how is my comment less substantive than the top comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704)) on the thread? I said that it was foolish to consider protesting fascism to be worse than fascism, and that commenter said that protesters should be expelled. They're equally substantive comments that express opposing views on the issue in from the article.

<comment><USER26> A certain amount of politics is inevitable, but more than that turns HN into a war zone, which destroys the things the site exists for: intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. So it's a tricky problem. We do two things to address it (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)):

1\. Accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle are obviously not using the site as intended, so we ban them.

2\. Commenters are asked to avoid the inflammatory style of political argument. Comments need to get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Unfortunately it looks like you've been running afoul of both of these. You need to fix that if you want to keep commenting here.

The "what about that other comment" argument, a.k.a. "the other person started it", doesn't really count as a defense because we can't possibly see everything that gets posted here. Not everyone who speeds gets pulled over for a ticket either. I agree with you that that comment was a bad one, but it doesn't mean yours were ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> whole lotta people on this "hacker news" website that love to say authority shouldn't be questioned

<comment><USER11> It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: question an authority when you've learned how that authority works and what motivates it. For god's sake, if you want to be a contrarian, be intelligent about it.

Some freshman with a copy of Derrida and a bullshit social justice grievance does not know enough to question 4,000 years of civilization.

<comment><USER27> Do you? Anyone can question anything. That's how a free and fair society works.

The professor has a lot of detailed knowledge on the topics they cover, but maybe not a radical critique of the underlying assumptions of what they teach.

I'm not super familiar with this case, but glancing over the student's demands, many looked reasonable.

<comment><USER11> Of course we have a right to question anything. But pragmatism demands that we don't spend an arbitrarily large amount of time indulging arbitrarily unlikely scenarios. These protesters are attempting to use brute force to give their horrible ideas more salience than they'd get in a fair intellectual forum, and that's not fair to people who actually want to learn about the far more well- established ideas that we've honed over thousands of years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The author is referring to students protesting the mandatory freshman lecture on Western Civilization, which has a history of being protested at Reed.

There's a list of demands as well. [http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands](http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands)

Students typically have an incredibly small say in shaping the institutions that shape their future.

If protesting wasn't uncomfortable, it wouldn't be effective.

<comment><USER29> Students shouldn't have any say in shaping institutions they attend to gain knowledge. They are not smarter than their professors. Or if they disagree, they should attend another university and vite with their wallet/loan/whatever.

<comment><USER30> This post is poisonous to knowledge. I've politely corrected professors who I respect on multiple occasions. Just because you are informed about a particular subject does not mean that you are never wrong about that subject. I've noticed that STEM professors tend to be more willing to accept that they are wrong about something than in the humanities which I suspect is because it is much easier to prove that someone is incorrect about something in STEM.

<comment><USER4> I think students should definitely be able to offer polite feedback to their professors, like you describe. However, students definitely shouldn't be in a position to dictate the curriculum, which I think is more what the grandparent was talking about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Benoit B. Mandelbrot: How Fractals Can Explain What's Wrong with Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=multifractals-explain-wall-street&print=true <comment><USER2> As Mandelbrot stated :

These techniques do not come closer to forecasting a price drop or rise on a specific day on the basis of past records. But they provide estimates of the probability of what the market might do and allow one to prepare for inevitable sea changes.

In my opinion multifractals can explain the Dow and Nasdaq fluctuations, but it is not enough to predict them. That the market has fractal structure as Mandelbrot noticed is probably very good assumption, but it depends on so many factors that the dimentionality of the fractal will be enormous, and one of the dimencions would be time. Also every stock history, every index, or whatever other value used is just a function of that fractal structure with respect to current and past time. Knowing the values of these functions can give a lot information about the structure of the market to estimate what would be their future values but this is not sure to happen. However some trends could be estimated but their time scale cannot be known for sure ( we have multifractal in which the time can be streched ). So we can say we expect that there will be crisis between 3 and 6 months from now on but we may never the exact that until it hits us.

Very similar is the situation with earthquake predictions, but there we have I believe much more knowledge about the underlying fractal structure (the Earth, continents, continental drift, internal Earth energy etc.) We can say there would be big earthquake in Cali every several decades but short term predictions are hard to make.

I will be happy to hear your opinion about fractals and stock market.

<comment><USER3> People seem to be in the habit of mistaking _"description"_ with _"explanation"_ or _predictive power_. I have no doubt that you can _describe_ short term stock market fluctuations in many different ways (fractals and multi-fractals being one of them) that still doesn't get you anywhere close to _explaining or predicting_ those fluctuations. There is good reason for this, of course. Mainly, that short term behavior is mostly psychological. If investors are happy (confident, bull, whatever you want to call it) prices go up, if they are unhappy (scared, bearish, etc) prices go down. To this short time scale behavior you have to add the long time scale component that makes the average market value increase at roughly 10% a year, and the "invisible hand" effect that makes individual stock prices converge (eventually) to the correct value.

IMHO, It's the combination of these three effects that make (short term) stock market fluctuations practically unpredictable.

Here's an hilarious description of this "market sentiment"...

          "You have to remember two things about the markets.
          One is that they are made up of very sharp and
          sophisticated people, these are the greatest brains.
          And the second thing you have to remember, is that
          the financial markets, to use the common phrase, are
          driven by sentiment.

          What does that mean?

          What does that mean? Well, things, lets say, are just
          going along as normal in the market. And then,
          suddenly, out ot the blue, one of these very sharp
          and sophisticated people says "MY GOD, SOMETHING
          AWFUL IS GOING TO HAPPEN! WE LOST EVERYTHING! OH MY
          GOD, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO
          DO?!? SHALL I JUMP OUT OF THE WINDOW? LET'S ALL JUMP
          OUT OF THE WINDOW! SELL, SELL, SELL! Precisely. And
          then, a few days later, this same, sophisticated
          person says 'you know, I think things are going
          rather well' and everybody else says 'I agree with
          you, I think we're rich.' [...] And that's what we
          call market sentiment."

<http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k2rLNuMggOKSJWHSpY>

<comment><USER2> very nice video. Surely, psychology factors play quite a part in the way market works. And also having several variables determined by such factors in chain you can expect to have big fluctuations - exactly the ones that the Gaussian("normal distribution") portfolios fail to explain.

the last part of the video explains an example of such chain- and the effect- the subprime crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem of "fat tails" has been known in finance for a long time, and there are plenty of models in which the distribution of price increments has a higher kurtosis than a Gaussian distribution. Interestingly enough, fractal models are not commonly used at all. Stochastic vol models are a lot more widespread. I'm a trader, not a quant, so I can't comment on why fractals were never in favor -- anyone else know?

</comment><comment><USER5> "Editor's Note: This story was originally published in the February 1999 edition of Scientific American. We are posting it in light of recent news involving Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch."

And Mandlebrot's original research was done in the 1960's before Black, Scholes and Merton were getting prizes and destroying hedge funds in the 1990s. Moreover, Mandlebrot was certainly renowned by the 1970's. You would think people would pay attention to his ideas.

Just goes to show the appeal of research which tells people what they _want_ to hear..

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article. If this was originally written in 1999 then someone must have tried to create a fractal generator on historical market data for the Dow or Nasdaq. I wonder if it helped anyone prepare for the current stock market troubles.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hilarity: when I loaded it, on the page was one of Chrysler's "thanks for your investment" ads.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lost me when he confused the normal distribution with the plain English meaning of normal.

<comment><USER9> From <http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/webtexts/stat06.htm>:

      Normal in statistics generally refers to the gaussian distribution or the "normal" way we would expect errors to be distributed.

When Mandelbrot says: "Granted, the bell curve is often described as normal—or, more precisely, as the normal distribution. But should financial markets then be described as abnormal?", he has reason. But I don't think he even meant it as a very serious remark.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I do believe he was making a pun.</comment></comment></comment>


Retiring Wave - <AUTHOR> https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-wave.git;a=commit;h=e4cb87ffce3b7c65832ffefae22835c64724adbd <comment><USER2> Google Wave was really the spark that inspired me to "build a startup." With that said, it was a mess. It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. It had "everything" in the worst of ways.

It really was a Frankenstein; I distinctly remember threaded conversations that wouldn't collapse, weird and inconsistent results when contributing to the same "wave," and an interface that was honestly pretty awful (not to mention cramped on the screens of yesteryear). There's more: Google wanted to create a _protocol_ but the tech was invite-only (???), it wanted to replace _email_ but no one else adopted it. The whole thing made no sense.

But after watching the Google I/O talk, I was enthralled. I thought to myself "I bet I could build that!" And really, even if Google Wave failed horribly, it did contribute to the "real-time" web we all enjoy today.

<comment><USER3> Google Wave could have been a killer product, but for a key mistake that is a bat light for failure — it was positioned as a replacement for email.

Email is the ultimate killer app and ultimate whipping boy.

<comment><USER4> The "key mistake" was that all of the technical parts were poorly architected and horribly buggy, and then they tried to scale up the user base using a massive amount of marketing hype before their product or infrastructure could handle the load. As a result all the hyped-up customers were confronted by a terrible user experience, felt burned, and left. Without a completely different technical implementation from top to bottom it was bound to fail irrespective of how their marketing team "positioned" it.

The UI was a GWT app written in Java and compiled to JavaScript which suffered from inexplicable UI hangs and all kinds of weird bugs in every corner case (it would e.g. get stuck in states requiring a page reload to fix).

The "communication protocol" was opaque binary blobs of GWT stuff wrapped up in Jabber/XMPP (XML) but without really using most Jabber features. Basically not a designed protocol at all, just the most ad-hoc thing slapped together overnight, with XMPP used as marketing (because that's "open").

The server was some closed source thing only hosted by Google.

The original marketing claim was that this was all "open" and "federated" but it was not possible to run a third-party server, and it was not possible to implement a different front-end since the whole thing was coupled tightly to the GWT front end they had.

The big innovation was supposed to be that some fancy "operational transformation" magic would merge different users' diffs so that everything could be edited collaboratively in real time without conflicts and with minimal bandwidth, but in practice what that meant was they just sent the full content of every message on every keystroke (where "full content" here includes a massive amount of protocol overhead wrapping the messages) – maybe the fancy diff research stuff was intended for some future update that never made it.

The front end really started falling apart horribly (slowing down to the point of being unusable) under any kind of larger group, because it hadn't been architected to keep up with the load. From what I remember it mostly worked with about 2–10 people communicating in a group, and became entirely unusable with 50+ in a group.

Disclaimer: I was never a Wave expert, just some guy who tried to read their docs and play with their technology and ended up laughing and sadly shaking my head all the way through, and it's been a decade now. Some of my recollection could be slightly off.

<comment><USER5> Maybe the tech was bad, but the marketing was worse. I never even tried Wave, so didn't experience the bugs and bad UI, because I could never understand what it was or what family of problems it was trying to address.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. In the modern app world, it's not enough to have great or useful tech, it has to be branded and communicated properly, not exactly Google's strong points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being based in Sydney, I occasionally meet people who worked on Wave.

They should be commended for ushering in a new vision for what the web could do. So much tech in there that is now considered standard.

As a product, it didn't fit a real purpose and was trying to do to much, but it should be remembered for opening our eyes to what was possible.

Tonight I'll raise a drink to all those who committed time to Wave and showed us the way (and I'm in Bondi, if anyone is around and wants to meet-up).

</comment><comment><USER8> For the curious, I think this might be the first submission related to Wave on HN (May 28, 2009; 169 points, 99 comments):

"Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427)

Top comment starts out

> _" This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of > communication."_

</comment><comment><USER9> While the Apache Foundation hosts a lot of great projects, it also looks to me like a place where big projects go to die.

I'm thinking of the whole Apache Open-Office fiasco, among other things. Looking at their list of projects sorted by number of committers[0], event at the top I don't get the idea that most of those have a lot of momentum.

Do I just have a completely wrong impression? I'm curious if there's something to learn from this.

[0]: [https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number](https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, no, your impression is correct. Apache is and always has been a bit of an open source graveyard.

There's counter-examples but even they have me worried. Airflow, originating from AirBNB, is now Apache Airflow: [https://github.com/apache/incubator- airflow](https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow) \-- And I've been super hesitant to throw weight at it because of that, even though it looks actively maintained.

<comment><USER11> Airflow is extremely active — check the mailing list, Gitter chat, or even GitHub contributions. My company, Astronomer, also provides a hosted version of Airflow [1] if SaaS is more you're thing.

[1]: [https://www.astronomer.io/airflow](https://www.astronomer.io/airflow)

<comment><USER11> %s/you're/your

/me _shudders_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People who aren't aware, this was the continuation of Google Wave, the real time collaboration tool that was, for a while, built into gmail, and then taken over by apache. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave)

<comment><USER13> > tool that was, for a while, built into gmail

Do you have a source for this? I don't remember it ever being part of Gmail.

<comment> V-eHGsd_ it wasn't.

when it was release, it was actually introduced (internally) as something like, "what would email look like if were invented today?"

<comment><USER14> Not just internally. I remember the massive hype around this being the "next email." I excitedly got as many of my friends onto there as I could.

I can't really pinpoint any one thing. There really was a mass of mistakes that all lead to this imploding heavily. I seem to recall that the fate of GWT was intertwined heavily with it. Very heavyweight widgets to support the general idea of massive collaboration in real time.

I suspect the killer is that "real time" portion. People love to talk about that. Few actually want it. (Fewer still need it.)

<comment><USER15> Pretty sure the biggest mistake was the same as Google Plus': the invite system that artificially hampers growth.

Since these platforms need to capture an entire network of people at the same time if there is something preventing someone from bringing all their friends/collegues in at the same time then it is doomed to fail.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, this worked fine for Gmail's early years because you can talk to people on other email systems. But Google tried to apply the same system to both Wave and Plus where the exclusivity made them comparatively useless.

I think they've learned the lesson by now at least, since their latest communication systems (Duo and Allo) had open signups. If those two fail it'll be because they were pointless (from a user perspective) entries into a crowded market of established players who already had network effect lock-in working them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've said this before, but while I know for a lot of people Reader is the axed Google product they miss most, for me it will always be Wave. I know a lot of people didn't get it, and I can't blame them, but I was part of a six-person software team using Wave for a brief project and, despite its faults, it was the greatest communication tool any of us had ever used, and remains so to this day. Slack/Discord/Teams/Trello/whatever still don't come close.

(Which makes it all the more appropriately ironic that it had a bunch of Firefly references and easter eggs inside. It's like they knew.)

Anyway, I'm pouring one out for Wave tonight.

<comment><USER18> What made Google wave so great to you? (Even better than slack/Discord/Trello)?

<comment><USER17> It was the complete package, encompassing all of:

\- That communication could be both synchronous (like chat) and asynchronous (like email) and you could use whichever worked best for you at the time. You could even switch in the middle of a thread- maybe it stared out asynchronous, but then both people were online and decided to have a conversation.

\- Threads were a better way of breaking up topics than channels

\- The ability to post a document and then have people comment on it let you basically incorporate Google Docs-style document revision into your chat application, but like the other comment says, the comments were a first-class citizen of the interface, rather than bubbles that are totally out of context

\- I like real-time chats, where you could see the individual characters the other person was typing. This, admittedly, is an aesthetic preference I know not everyone shares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I learned about this from the recent popular article, "How not to replace email":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452)

</comment><comment><USER20> I used Wave along with a group of friends when it first came out often. I also setup WIAB which was almost usable but never was as 'smooth' as the google hosted Wave.

what was smooth you ask? I never had issues, I even played people in some of the games they had to great enjoyment (was never able to get this on my WIAB)

I joined Apache Wave with great excitement when it first was accepted and yet disappointed in my inability to contribute. I am not a software engineer but I tried multiple times with different IDs and the response was (paraphrasing) go check this site and pick something to work on.

as the years went on multiple attempts were made to retire Apache Wave with last minute efforts by multiple people trying to keep it going. I knew this day would come and it is still sad to see.

I am not sure if there was a better 'onboarding' for noobs available if I would have done much but I think many open source projects may fair better if their barrier to entry for them were clearer

</comment><comment><USER21>
      This is the way Wave ends,
      Not with a bang but a whimper.

I remember seeing how incredible Wave was at the time, such a shame to see it end like this.

But that's how the world goes sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER22>
        git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-android.git
        git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-docs.git
        git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave.git

Does it even build?

Wave is one of those things that everyone raves about but has never used.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ)

</comment><comment><USER23> Wave was highly ambitious, but under resourced with a horribly botched rollout. It could have killed Twitter, Facebook, and preempted Slack, or better shifted them to a common open source framework which would have allowed a thousand twitters and fbs to bloom and interact. Real shame that OStatus couldn't get traction.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if Wave and Reader are hanging out in heaven somewhere.

<comment> martin-adams If heaven is in the clouds, then I don't think they are hanging out in the cloud anymore.

<comment><USER25> Since they came from there originally, I doubt they'd end up back at Google Cloud. Maybe AWS? I just hope they don't get sent to, well, the bad place.. Azure..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wave was absolutely the best way to play play-by-post RPGs online.

It was really cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember doing a deep dive on Wave, specifically because I was interested in trying to figure out what I could build on top of the protocol.

Fundamentally, there was no way to persist the data. The open-source version was little more than a demo.

At that point I realized it was mostly hot air, said so at the wave meet up I was going to, and then stopped paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've got different kind of annecdote that I need to share now that the thing got retired.

I missed the entire wave thing. Don't know how or why. But I just missed it. And I never ever miss these kind of things. My job at the time was consulting and advising startups and I just looked silly when "wave" came up in a meeting and I had no idea what it was.

I remember the CEO saying "You didn't see the video of the developers cheering with their laptops above their head?" ... which I did not.

It's one of those things that comes back to haunt me when I can't sleep. You know, one of those awkward social interactions that nobody but yourself remembers.

So good bye Wave. Bane of my existence.

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452)

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember the headlines about Google reinventing email with Wave, the world without emails.. I guess it will never die, long live the emails :p.

<comment><USER31> For the below-25 crowd email is quite dead : they only read it when asked via proper chat or "social" channels, and send one as last resort. For the older gen email is near dead due to spam. In few years it will be new telefax.

<comment><USER32> People have been claiming that email is dying since the mid-90s. And here we are, with the only messaging protocol that's available to everyone on the internet: email.

<comment><USER30> I believe you can take space from email like these messenger apps for the mobile phone but to say that's dead or going to die I think it's a mistake to make this type of statement. Try to enroll in these social media networks without an email, they require you to have an email, try to enrol anywhere they ask you for an email confirmation. Email is not dying it's just changing the purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A single and solemn wave goodbye.

</comment><comment><USER34> Will never forget the launch event: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ)

<comment><USER35> I remember it for the amount of demos that went wrong. It takes courage or desperation to demonstrate a project in that state.

Also, somewhere in there is a quote by the project lead that I still remember today, something like this: "There aren't many companies that can afford to mess up a demo. [pause] We're not one of them." The last part sounded like a panicked attempt to backpedal on what he just said.

</comment></comment><comment> onion-soup Why don't apache update web interface. It's just not fun anymore, I get all retrograde feel to it, but in 2018 it's plain annoyingly ugly and hard to understand what's going on on the page.

</comment><comment><USER36> Google Wave didn't fall, it inspired me and many more for ambitious thinking. Its tech was adopted by other products. It changed something intangible and inherent to tech.

</comment><comment><USER37> Didn't this start out as EtherPad? I remember that being an eye-catching demo of a way to collaborate on documents over the web. How/where did that go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER38> Probably I was not the target audience but I never got the hype with Wave.

</comment><comment><USER39> They made the mistake of thinking the cool demo was the finished product.

</comment><comment><USER40> Can't stop the signal, Mal.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting tech that no one wanted

<comment><USER42> Interesting tech where the roll-out was botched.

My organisation desperately wanted to use this, but since invites were limited and rolled out slowly, we couldn't, since you can't have half of the org using a collaboration tool like this. So the initial buzz about this was killed quickly when no-one could use it for any serious work, then once it was generally available, people had lost interest. Google has a habit of botching roll-outs like this.

Google Docs in its current form has a lot of features that were in Wave, and people seem to like and use that.</comment></comment>


Obama Administration Comes Out Against SOPA, PIPA - <AUTHOR> http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/obama-administration-comes-out-against-sopa-pipa.php <comment><USER2> I disagree wholeheartedly with that statement. From my post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464849> in another thread on this:

It reads to me like a lot of agreeing with SOPA opposition: "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet."

But then tries to jam in:

"That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders"

No! The internet has no borders. American laws and "rights" don't apply outside of the United States. That's why the United States tortures people outside of the US. You can't say that US law applies to copying MP3s, but not torture.

That's why if you read between the lines, the response is not saying "We agree with you.", it's saying "I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time."

<comment><USER3> They interrogate and torture people in other countries because that is where they find them. There wouldn't be any point in sending someone back to the states. The conflict is in the middle east. Therefore the people we need information from are usually in the middle east.

When the U.S. government tortures someone in a different country, it is still illegal. U.S. Government employees are bound by U.S. Law no matter where they are. If you are a member of the military you are actually bound by the UCMJ as well as U.S. law. It has nothing to do with the location.

<comment><USER2> My bit was a little off-topic, but you should look up extraordinary rendition. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States)

It almost always involves abducting someone from a country and taking them to another country. If it didn't have anything to do with location, then why would they do that?

<comment><USER3> I stand corrected. If I am understanding this correctly it seems like they are getting the other countries to torture suspects for them, so they can feign ignorance. If the military or CIA were to personally torture people in these countries they might not get caught, but they would still be in violation of U.S. law.

Thanks for linking the article. Whenever I had heard people complaining about the torture of terrorists I always assumed they were talking solely about the incidents taking place in Iraq/Afghanistan. This was eye-opening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see anywhere in the statement where they say they're "against" the bills. They express some concerns, but they leave themselves a ton of room to support slightly modified versions.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The only thing that I got out of the article was that they are opposed to making themselves look bad. The only politicians and companies that can be trusted when they say that they oppose SOPA are the ones who opposed it from the start. If normal citizens hadn't started the SOPA awareness campaign then SOPA would have been passed already. The rest of these people are just jumping on a bandwagon to save themselves some bad publicity.

People need to realize that every single politician who decided to oppose SOPA only after the public applied pressure is a liar. These people supported SOPA with full knowledge of what it would do to the internet. The Obama administration has a ton of people who got to where they are because of the entertainment industry lobbyists. The next administration will too.</comment></comment>


EFF to Supreme Court: Trademarks Are Not Government Speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/eff-supreme-court-trademarks-are-not-government-speech <comment><USER2> Sometimes a headline makes me go "well, duh" and I wonder why it would need to be said at all.

So, it makes me sad when a well-intentioned organization has to spend its time arguing something so overtly obvious, at least to me, rather than handling the fringe cases that need more attention.</comment>


First Experiences Scaling a Meteor App - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@eliezer/first-experiences-scaling-a-meteor-app-14a48e62a4af <comment><USER2> i can really appreciate how you explain every little detail to the reader here . i remember when I was new to infrastructure and every article i read seemed to assume i had 10 years experience.</comment>