Atari VCS Lead Architect Quits, Claims Six Months of Design Work Went Unpaid - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/atari-vcs-lead-architect-quits-claims-six-months-unpaid <comment><USER3> There's an 881 page thread of people ripping this "Atari" project to shreds on the AtariAge forums. People could smell the BS even back in 2017: [https://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari- console-t...](https://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari-console-that- ataribox)

At some point in that thread around summer 2019, a photo of their "prototype" hardware was released, and it's just a stock embedded Ryzen dev board - <USER2> custom hardware at all. After 2 years, they had nothing done. It gets even better: They realized their original case design from 2017 was too costly and had to redesign it in Spring 2019: [https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs- structural-improvemen...](https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs-structural- improvements-and-feature-adjustments-ba4ee3af5317)

Even in 2019, all they had were renders of both their old and new case designs, and that blog post really goes to show how unprepared they were. Any moron with CAD experience could have told them their original design would have been a nightmare to manufacture/assemble.

<comment><USER4> > There's an 881 page thread

Holy shit. As someone who loves to find stories on "what went wrong" for startups and especially kickstarters, this is a gold mine. Especially because it 100% independent from Atari's censorship. Here's a comment I just found on page 750:

> I'm not sure what you're adding to the discourse, but I think this thread is > a healthy alternative to:

        Self-serving, highly censored comments on the IndieGoGo project page (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving, highly censored comments in the Facebook discussion thread (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving, highly censored comments in the Instagram feed (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving Twitter threads (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving puff pieces on Fox Business News for audiences from hosts who don't care to audiences who care even less
        More independent, but constrained by relentless positivity, Atari VCS Reddit group (managed by @Historian but infected with Dubs syndrome, and occasionally visited by "Atari," who doesn't have anything to say)

> If "Atari" felt like coming in here to clear the air, they're more than > welcome to do so. There's literally nothing stopping them. What are they > going to do? Swoop in here and say "just wait you guys, we've got lots of > announcements planned for later this summer!" Because that's all they've > done to date. Every time some nimrod falls for the "ooh look, Atari is > back," this highly critical but not-so-serious thread gains a new reason for > existing.

It's mostly just a bunch of guys joking around about it, but it's actually interesting (having looked at maybe 1% of the content).

<comment><USER5> > As someone who loves to find stories on "what went wrong" for startups and > especially kickstarters, this is a gold mine.

Then you will love the Peachy Printer fiasco:

[https://3dprint.com/133842/peachy-printer- embezzlement/](https://3dprint.com/133842/peachy-printer-embezzlement/)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for that! This one might be my favorite:

[https://www.thedrive.com/news/2559/the-weird-wild-saga-of- gi...](https://www.thedrive.com/news/2559/the-weird-wild-saga-of-gizmondo- part-1)

It reads like a Hollywood script that would be rejected for being too unbelievable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the sub linked article on what VCS is:

> Arzt says that Atari is targeting two groups, with one being the folks over > 35-years-old who remember playing the console and playing Atari games in the > arcade. The other group is the younger crowd that Arzt says see Atari as > more of a cool old brand and want modern capabilities like Streaming video > services such as Hulu and Netflix. Arzt says that the Atari VCS is less > expensive than a PC and eliminates the need to connect a laptop to the TV.

Who the hell is going to pay $300 for a glorified emulator slash Chromecast?

Considering the 2nd group likely already has a $30-50 Netflix device and the first group has had plenty of options to emulate old Atari (and every other system's) games for years.

Not a big fan of this Hollywood approach to branding. A retro brand doesn't make your product interesting, at most it's a foot in the door.

<comment><USER7> I could see it selling for the same reason things like the snes classic do. Nostalgia goggles combined with a dislike of, I guess, unofficial emulation, for whatever reasons that don't make much sense to me. Either that or for the slightly more interesting things people do with these things like hacking and modding them. For me though, retroarch seems to have 99% of everything I'd ever want to emulate covered so...meh.

<comment><USER8> The controllers, mostly, for me. Which Just Work and don't decide to become unmapped for no damn reason (admittedly less common on Retroarch/Lakka systems than others, though). I mean those things are _legit_. About as close to the originals as you could hope, and I've side-by-sided them. Only real loss on the NES are the four-score games (Super Spike V'Ball and World Cup Soccer are both _actually_ good and are _actually_ good with four players!) and light gun games, of which I love two but would only really defend one as even sort-of worth a damn (Duck Hunt). Still don't get why that wasn't on the Wii. SNES classic, on the other hand, is damn near perfect. After you hakchi all your other games on, in both cases, obviously.

NES controllers especially are great for kids, for whom even SNES controllers are confusing with their four face buttons plus two shoulders—and I remember, as an NES kid who didn't get another console until I bought myself a PS2 in college, finding anything with more buttons than a 3-button Sega Genesis controller kinda tricky at first, though I _eventually_ managed well enough to hold my own on some N64 games at friends' houses. Only "complicated" controller I've found to be almost as usable for my young kids is the Gamecube controller, so they got that right after all I guess.

Sure you can get knock-offs, but Nintendo doesn't screw around with controller quality, even on cheapish emulator systems.

[EDIT] also I've owned two Wii-connector-to-USB adapters, both from Mayflash, and both were janky and soon stopped working at all, so just buying the controllers (or just using the Wii Classic Pro controller, which is what I actually attempted those times) hasn't given me acceptable reliability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From The Register: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_quits/)

</comment><comment><USER10> If they aren't paying one of lead developers for this amount of time then management is basically stealing from the people doing the actual work.

In my opinion, technical companies should not have managers or executives (who don't simultaneously hold technical roles). They are just parasites without skills who inappropriately have power over the skilled people under them.

This is just one of many examples of that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like I dodged a bullet as I was close to pulling the trigger on backing the Indiegogo campaign. This proves to me that when it comes to semi-expensive hardware, it's best to wait for some version of the product to actually exist before committing any funds. I already made that mistake backing the Airing CPAP which has yet to deliver 5.5 years after the campaign with one excuse after another. Fool me once?

It's probably past time for crowdfunding vaporware to die.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the first I'm hearing of the Atari VCS. As someone that lived through the original Atari era I don't think most of the games would hold up for much replay ability at all. They were fun because they were all we had. They were very crude. Pitfall was one of the best and I can't imagine myself playing that for more than a few minutes. Commodore 64 games on the other hand would still be quite fun today.

<comment><USER13> My wife bought me six carts earlier this week. I play for a few hours at least every other week.

Most games are very playable because they were designed to be good to play, not to be flashy for Twitch and VC money.

The best part is that the games that you couldn't afford to buy back when they were new are $3 used, or $0 emulated. So you can play anything you want.

<comment><USER12> What games do you like? Are you playing them on an original Atari 2600? That's awesome.

<comment><USER13> I gravitate toward the really old ones for nostalgia's sake. The ones with the text-only labels.

But the ones I play most often are the ones with good gameplay: Dig Dug, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tron, Air Sea Battle, Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt.

I play on real hardware. There's a place in Pittsburgh called DK Oldies that sells refurbed 2600's online with a 90-day warranty.

I have one of those Retron77 machines, too, but it doesn't work with all games. Most notably, paddle games. Which is a shame because I really like Circus Atari.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure the situation here, but I've always wondered why the disconnect is so big between creative work and what people will pay. You ask someone to do a bunch of work, and then people feel justified in only wanting to pay for the bit they are going to use (or not pay at all if they don't want it).

I wonder if this comes from our interactions with large companies. We go in, we see a bunch of products that we are not the customer for, and then we pick one and buy it. We ignore the rest, but for each product, somewhere out there is another customer who will buy it.

But when we hire someone, we want something custom. There is no other market for the options we reject. They are dancing solely for our amusement. Whether we or amused or not, we are taking up their time.

<comment><USER15> Also I don't think most people consider what portion "time" was of the purchase price. You think about buying gas or eating out and it's the price of "gas" or "eating takeout" that costs a lot of money. Everyone is aware there are a lot of people employed by those industries but their time isn't what usually comes to mind. Take this logic to an extreme case like custom creative work and you're bound to have a clash of mentality with reality and that is bound to go far when most don't understand why exactly it takes so much time to end up with the piece you were going to use.

<comment><USER16> "Money is deferred human labor" was something a commentator here posted in a cryptocurrency thread, and it's the best possible explanation I think I've ever heard for what money really "is".

The fact it took a decent portion of my 30-odd years on the earth to hear it, despite taking a number of economics classes, means it's also not a common way it's expressed - which in turn means the above - that "time" is a part of what you're paying for - doesn't really come into most thinking.

<comment><USER17> The reason you did not hear about it in economics classes is because money being human time is an old and rather out modeded understanding of money.

<comment><USER18> Is this a disagreement over semantics?

How do you add value to something? Either through human labour, or raw material inputs, and I would guess many raw materials gain their value entirely from the human labour put in to extracting them.

If you buy an iphone, you are paying someone to mine the raw material, refine it, make it in to chips, make it into a phone, box it, ship it, then paying some marketers to tell you why you need it.

Yes the tiny amounts of gold, and rare earth elements have value, 99% of an iPhones value comes from people's time.

<comment><USER19> A machine running and converting raw material into finished product (say, injection-molded plastic, or a part-picker-placer organizing or soldering on a PCB) rapidly turns less-valuable-stuff into more-valuable-stuff. Value added.

Yes, there is some human labor in assembling and maintaining the machine, but I consider it largely divorced from human labor.

A computer server turns data into more-useful data, either by aggregating it, storing it in a convenient way, or routing it. Once set up, the computer can run for years without human intervention. Very little human labor there after initial setup, but value was added.

<comment><USER18> To return to your computer server example though, these things require so little labour add so little value[1], that they're very nearly / actually are free. A google search is free, posting a message to HN is free.

I agree that as you add layers of machines, you get more divorced from the original labour, I was going to say that labour provides the lower bound, maybe my prior paragraph shows that isn't true, of course there are costs to those 2 activities, they just aren't borne directly by us.

As I put in a sibling comment, it's a model, not suited to everything, but suited to evaluating buying v building an Atari emulator.

[1] I suppose you could argue that computers add lots of value, but competition has reduced the price down to approximately the labour cost. I'm probably not using strictly economics terms here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Original source on the story: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_quits/)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is something like the fourth or fifth unrelated company with the Atari name, but at least the previous ones actually made games. This one just looks like the Infinium Phantom redux.

</comment><comment><USER22> I kind of understand the want for the mini NES/SNES/PSX or any consoles with relatively unique controllers. You can get a rPi and a decent arcade stick for less than $100. What's the appeal of this? I believe archive.org hosts every MAME ROM, it's not like you'd even need to visit a less than reputable site to put this all together.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't lump this in with the recent mini NES or SNES. Nintendo has a loyal fan base and a proven track record. They made something simple and well built for fans of their IP. Atari isn't even a thing anymore. Someone bought the name and attempted to cash in on it. They used crowdfunding and scammed consumers out fo 3M+ dollars.

Basically I can see why people might want something more official than an rPi if it's done well and by original company. But Atari thing is not that.

<comment><USER22> Atari definitely isn't the same caliber as Nintendo/Sony, but I think it's the same market which is why they were able to get $3M in funding. All the other mini remakes sold gangbusters from what I recall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This came up back in 2017 and I was skeptical then... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15348270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15348270)

I blame the journalists covering this stuff. There was so many PR release articles touting this thing based on renders... nobody looked into the people who were responsible on executing it.

These guys have no skills in building a gaming console. They bought a brand and scammed people out of 3M+.

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't six months of unpaid dev work about par for the course for Atari? Fight for Life, the Jaguar itself, and more. And my memory says Infogrames wasn't too swift either. Why did anyone sign onto this expecting that to have changed in 30 years?

On the other hand, the @tGames Atari Flashback 8 is fun to play with, though I do use wired controllers, not the wireless ones!

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it really quitting if you aren't being paid?

</comment><comment><USER26> You gotta admire the dedication to exactly reproducing how consoles were made in the '80s

</comment><comment><USER27> Bad feeling about this console haha</comment>


Ask HN: Are there tech skills that one can learn in a week and get a job? - <AUTHOR> Just wondering, are there skills one can learn in a week or 2 and get a job? Example Microsoft Power Bi platform, Microsoft Dynamic CRM, Salesforce Admin Would you hire anyone who learnt in such a small period and can work well? <comment><USER2> Webflow is becoming hot. It's a web design, development, and hosting platform. It's powerful yet easy to use, IMHO. There are a lot of videos and if you have some experience with web development you should be able to pick up most of it a week. Getting a job using Webflow is dependent on too many things to make a blanket statement. Note: I'm not affiliated with Webflow other than being a customer.</comment>


Filepicker.io (YC S12) launches SDK for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/yc-backed-filepicker-io-goes-mobile-brings-cloud-service-integration-to-ios-and-android-apps/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you guys want to try out sample apps on Android, here are the links to the apks:

An ImageViewer: [https://github.com/Filepicker/filepicker- imageviewer/raw/mas...](https://github.com/Filepicker/filepicker- imageviewer/raw/master/ImageViewer.apk)

An ImageSaver: [https://github.com/Filepicker/filepicker- imagesaver/raw/mast...](https://github.com/Filepicker/filepicker- imagesaver/raw/master/ImageSaver.apk)

</comment><comment><USER2> We've been testing Filepicker.io at Bugly almost from day one, and using it officially for a couple of weeks now, and it's been very solid. It's always a little frightening to rely on an external service for important functionality, but this is a pretty big deal for our users, so in this case we decided to take a chance and become early adopters. No regrets so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's nice to see this on iOS - ironically, the future in iOS app inter- operability might just be in the web (connected with services like Filepicker) instead of waiting for Apple to go native.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great play on Filepicker's part. Having used their service on the web, it's a no brainer to include their service in future mobile apps.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this! I can't wait to integrate this into one of my apps. Does it also have access to the native camera application?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it does. We allow you to pull from both the local gallery and camera on both platforms.

<comment><USER5> And does it use the native accounts on the phone? DB, FB, etc? Or do you pull up a new authorization dialog?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't use the native accounts yet in the interest of development time. We still use the mobile specific auth screen for services that support it though.

We plan to support those in the next release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a similar MIT licensed library on github from DZEN Interaktiv: [https://github.com/DZen- Interaktiv/DZDocumentsPickerControll...](https://github.com/DZen- Interaktiv/DZDocumentsPickerController) It's still a work in progress and only Dropbox and Cloud App are usable.

<comment><USER7> Are there any other alternatives (open source, or otherwise) or competitors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice work guys! Can't wait to use filepicker in my iphone app.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused. How does it make sense to pay per gigabyte for my iOS app users to upload files from their iPhone to their own Dropbox via their own network connection? This makes no sense to me...

</comment><comment><USER10> This is going to be big! Great work guys!</comment>


If It's Not "Cancel Culture," What Kind of Culture Is It? - <AUTHOR> https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind-46a <comment><USER2> It is undoubtedly cancel culture. But some people will deny it because they benefit from it and/or agree with it. It is a trend that must be stopped before we irreparably damage the free movement of ideas that has enabled America and the rest of the world to flourish. If you cannot speak against the orthodoxy without fear of being forced into poverty, then the orthodoxy will grow unchallenged into a monster that eats even the people who helped create it.

<comment><USER3> You can't stop cancel culture without harming the speech of those 'canceling'.

<comment><USER2> Those people are not speaking - they are doxxing and actively harrassing employers in order to get the wrongthinkers fired. I am sure you know the difference between speech and cancel culture.

<comment><USER4> > Those people are not speaking - they are doxxing and actively harrassing > employers in order to get the wrongthinkers fired.

So they are both speaking true facts about people and speaking their desired outcome to people positioned to realize them. How is that not speaking?

<comment><USER5> It's opinion, mob rule and destructive, without trying better approaches first, it's toxic, immature and egotistical.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but it's still pure speech.

<comment><USER5> Mob rule is assembly. Decisions have consequences and are action.

<comment><USER4> Speech always has consequences (that's rather the point of both speech in general, and the entire concept of free speech in particular: if it had no consequences, there'd be no reason to protect it), and is always a subset of action. Assembly is inseparable from speech which is why, lest the flimsy excuse that a thing is one rather than the other be used to justify a ban, it's wrapped up along with all the other speech-equivalent expressive rights in the first amendment.

<comment><USER5> Some speech is not protected, some speech is judged harshly, all along spectrums. Speech doesn't exist in a vacuum and may be criminal, inorderly, trollish, moderated away, unheard, misinterpreted, untruthful, etc. If there are better approaches, people should be steered in better directions. Sometimes a jolt is needed, but continued bullying is usually on the bully. A bully may also be bullied, but the outcome is rarely educational since some people don't bother to care. Besides, bullying works against socializing.

Just action need to follow some due process. Mob rule becomes medieval. Even because modern technology platforms enable despicable behaviour, which speech is part of, does not necessarily protect because of free speech. Freedoms to hurt others need be limited.

When people lose interest in the whole, only to fancy duality, there's no dialogue happening, only escalation.

Speech doesn't imply much consequence beyond enlightenment, when people learn to listen and appreciate diversity.

Speech seems worthless compared to right action. Principles and freedoms mean nothing in isolation.

<comment><USER4> > Some speech is not protected, some speech is judged harshly, all along > spectrum

The claim I was addressing from upthread is not "these people are not engaging in goodspeak" but "these people are not speaking", so as true as that may be it is not relevant to the discussion.

<comment><USER6> Seems like you're making a pointless semantic debate. "Speech" in an ethical philosophical context is "expressing ideas". Threats are not this because the intent is to intimidate or coerce somebody. To your point, there is a definition of the word "speech" that means something like "any communication at all", but of course that's what precisely no one is talking about in a debate about free speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A lot of the 'canceling' is legitimate expressions of speech, even if you disagree with that expression of speech!

Consider a lot of what gets classified as cancel culture is:

1\. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy...

2\. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to?

3\. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not.

I have yet to see a PoV neutral definition of 'cancel culture' that doesn't devolve to litigating whether the issues for the canceling are legit or not.

[1] The Linguistics Society did NOT remove Pinker [https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546](https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546)

<comment><USER7> You are missing the _external_ and _unhinged_ nature of 'cancel culture'.-

What if I decide to buy Goya black beans, and someone takes a picture of me at the grocery store, and brands me as a affiliate of some certain political mindset of Twitter because of it... When in reality, I bought these beans because I just wanted to eat beans?

It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to fire someone for something they said. But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry; the pressure from people who _aren 't_ affiliated with their company at all, _never_ bought any of their products before, etc.

<comment><USER8> >> But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry...

It's interesting to me that this is always put on the outcrier and not the company itself.

<comment><USER7> I personally put blame on all parties involved

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It [the woke revolution] spends most of its time constructing an > impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who > either don't get it or don't like it.

Man, does this resonate. The woke message is just uninspiring and the word play and circular reasoning are just tedious. I've never met a philosophy that depended so strongly on appropriating existing, morally-weighty words.

<comment><USER9> Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him. Mostly because he is good at finding funny sounding insulting but still right below line sentence.

He is good at emotional level, but less good with actual rational arguing.

<comment><USER10> The logical fallacies with many modern examples of "cancelling" have already been pointed out far and wide. Not every bit of writing needs to be a statistical analysis (and considering the value of quantitative data is overrated, I'm inclined to agree that a well-written passioned analysis is just as welcome).

Also, lol at the very same circular reasoning the above mentioned whereby agreeing with his ideas is wrong because the people his ideas attract are already wrong.

<comment><USER9> Funny thing, I did not said whether he is wrong or right. I said what literally all his articles are, regardless of whether he is wrong or right.

The only one that I think he really really should not write was one about civility and discourse.

And I am not asking for statistical analysis either. All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.

<comment><USER6> > All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his > whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.

I think this is a fair point. I've noticed this myself as someone who agrees with him. He's clearly a talented writer; I wish he would wed that talent with reasoned critique instead of being a mere cathartic voice. The primacy of catharsis is a distinguishing feature of cancel culture and moderates getting their own cathartic voices risks creating a moderate counter-mob. Moderates' strength is reason and tolerance and we should stick with those virtues even if it demands emotional strength and moral courage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This post from Taibbi is in my opinion also worth a read:

On "White Fragility", A few thoughts on America's smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism

[https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white- fragility](https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility)

<comment><USER12> Taibbi's been on a roll with his writing recently. His breakdown of the current state of the American press is also quite illuminating.

[https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is- destroying-i...](https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying- itself)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only evidence I need to see that what the author refers to is very much a serious concern for everyone is that everytime I refresh this comment section another comment agreeing with the author disappears. I used to defend the folks that participated in the doxxing and very real harassment of people they didn't agree with as misguided, but I've become convinced it's nothing more than malicious at this point. Such a grand scale of people can't lack that much self awareness.

<comment><USER13> Down voting is speech.

<comment><USER10> Unless I'm mistaken about how this site works, downvotes shouldn't completely delete comments, just fade them. Who is stepping in and removing them entirely without a "[deleted]" marker displaying?

<comment><USER14> Are you saying you have "showdead" turned on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >This is an excerpt of a longer article about the Harper's letter

I guess that makes sense then why I felt like I didn't get anything out of it.

>To read the entire post and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.

Oh I see... that's disappointing. At least with the WSJ right up front I know I'm not going to get anything out of it without a subscription.

<comment><USER16> basically. there's no argument here other than some platitudes.

Definitely not worth a post on HN

<comment><USER15> I certainly felt like I got a couple words of meaning at most out of those paragraphs. Lots of volume and platitude as you say... I wasn't getting much beyond that... but then it asked me for $5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The meat of this article is its last paragraph or two, and particularly in the observation that modern "woke" culture is humorless and incapable of parsing sarcasm. I disagree however that this is peculiar to "woke" culture. Literalism and humorlessness are everywhere.

We are living in a profoundly conservative era whose deep conservatism is masked by the triumph of certain select socially liberal causes such as partial drug decriminalization and LGBT rights. IMHO those few specific victories are on the inertia of a previous era.

I am referring to the 60s through the 90s, the era that created modern rock and roll, techno, hip hop, burning man, and rave culture, some of which is now decidedly retro. Very little culture of this sort -- or of _any_ sort really -- is being created today. Ours is an era of sterility.

You can really see this in how the "alt-right" was able to look hip and edgy with nothing more than shitty memes and ideas like "alternate reality gaming" appropriated from old 90s issues of Mondo 2000. Everything else is so damn sterile and dull that the sorts of aesthetically tone deaf CHUDs that hang out on 4chan /pol could sort of look cool. It doesn't take much color to grab attention in a monochromatic world.

I'm not really that pessimistic. This stuff is very cyclic and the pendulum will swing yet again. I'm thinking COVID marks the end of the post-9/11 era and things will start getting interesting again in the mid-2020s. COVID has also crashed the Trump train, which is significant.

<comment><USER18> Dig deeper, there are still excellent music and works being published. Maybe they are hard to find because they are flooded with junk, commercial stuff and misinformation, but they exist and grow faster than in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For the other non U.S. readers:

> The act of canceling, also referred to as cancel culture (a variant on the > term "callout culture"), describes a form of boycott in which an individual > (usually a celebrity) who has acted or spoken in a questionable or > controversial manner is boycotted. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call- outs_and_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call- outs_and_cancellation)

<comment><USER6> Usually I hear this term in context to attempts to doxx or have someone fired, and while the cancellation of celebrities garners more press, it's due to the notoriety of the victim--probably many more non-celebrities are canceled (and usually with worse consequences unless good and decent people intervene). It's the climate of fear, not the criticism, that people take issue with (we're not talking about "criticism culture" after all).

<comment><USER13> Yeah, but the "climate of fear" arises only because powerful people with prominent platforms are afraid of being criticized. And criticism is protected speech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It really does feel like there are bigger problems these days than if there's _too much_ accountability for op-ed writers.

Anyways, this article doesn't even try to say anything other than that Kids These Days are different than they used to be.

<comment><USER21> >It really does feel like there are bigger problems these days

Not even a red herring, but just gesturing at red herrings somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pardon my ignorance but what is the difference between "witch hunt" and "cancel culture?" and do people who are part of "cancel culture" refer to their own actions as such?

<comment><USER23> A witch hunt is usually characterized by

1\. Either no wrongdoing, or minimal wrongdoing.

2\. The ability to grant oneself absolution by implicating others

The implied result is that since there isn't really any wrongful act, the only way to avoid the hunt is to accuse others. And in this way the "investigators" can go after whomever they want.

There's also an implied (3) The investigation is done by someone with traditional authority. The connotation of a witch hunt is therefore a fake investigation for solely political purposes. That is used to implicate more political enemies.

So cancel culture: If I had to, I'd describe this as a movement (or a collection of them) that tries to pressure powerful entities to take acts they deem to be moral by through social and economic pressure. That's really it.

To people who _disagree_ with the moral position, there can be similarities to (1), but (2) certainly isn't present, and the people pressuring for accountability/action/whatever aren't usually traditional authority figures. In fact individual movements may be entirely leaderless and decentralized (so no 3).

Since moral and political lines are correlated, there can also be an appearance of similarity to the politicalized investigation aspect, but beyond the most surface level similarities, there isn't much in common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've noticed that discussions about this issue never lead anywhere, and that seems almost by design (don't know if that's ironic or appropriate).

The reason is that apologists of cancel culture are talking about "influential people/powerful corporations being boycotted/yelled at in twitter". Meanwhile, detractors are talking about "normal people without any kind of power or influence being harassed and/or losing their livelihoods because they cracked their knuckles".

So both sides are talking about fundamentally different things, and because of this, discussion on this matter is almost always a lot of people yelling past each other.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm old enough to recall when it was skillfully practiced by the religious right in this country...

It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.

<comment><USER26> I'm old enough to recall when people were "cancelled" by extra-judicial execution. That's even worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this.

Twitter and the social network allowed people to have reach to explain why they're boycotting this or that, share their outrage, sometime about really dumb things, but still with their own reasons.

<comment><USER26> Boycotting has been proposed in previous generations.

In Martin Luther King's last speech before he was cancelled, he suggested boycotting businesses until such time as they were willing to treat all God's children fairly: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101) "All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I generally favor free expression. I'd rather an ugly, obnoxious and pernicious idea be expressed - so I can or others can be free to dismantle it in the arena of ideas. Obviously there are tremendous shades of nuance here. Free Speech does not mean free speech on private platforms. Still, if most or all major platforms constrain what can be expressed, what we end up with is a functional chilling of speech.

Part of what makes the current debate over cancel culture so difficult is that most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention. As much as I believe a University should be a space where intellectual debate is welcomed, I don't think any University should give a platform to, say, a holocaust denier. We all draw the line somewhere. Permuting where that line gets drawn is very, very difficult. Especially because morality evolves, and our convictions about certain things are constantly changing the light of new evidence, new understandings, especially re: traditionally disenfranchised peoples.

The real danger of "cancel culture" is rhetorical, I think. People need to be persuaded of an idea to really accept it. They cannot be hectored into acceptance. You can shove them out of platforms, but they will hold their beliefs, and externalize them at the ballot-box, or elsewhere. Moral development takes time, and it takes suasion.

There's a lot more to unpack here. A part of me wonders if cancel culture is just another expression of a kind of acrimoniousness that has always accompanied political life. Or maybe not. I don't have all the answers. But on balance, I still believe in favoring a space for debate.

<comment><USER29> > most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable > with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for > intellectual contention

I think that's the problem. Any condition beyond being not insulting and not threatening leaves a place to drive in a wedge by those opposed to free speech. They say, if you won't let this Nazi speak, you shouldn't let this person I associate with Nazi-ism speak.

Instead we should let the Nazi speak. And the pedophile, human extinction advocate, anti-vaxxer, etc. We don't have to listen, but neither should we punch them, rhetorically or otherwise, as long as they follow some minimal content neutral standard of decorum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A friendly reminder: the "flag" button is not a super-downvote.

</comment><comment><USER31> there's currently out on the internet a letter that basically says "cancel culture doesn't exist". it's signed by some ~160 people, mostly from left-wing backgrounds (i don't know all of them to say they are all from left-wing backgrounds).

a lot of those signatures are just "Unsigned, <affiliation>". the reasoning, according to the letter, is:

>Many signatories on our list noted their institutional affiliation but not their name, fearful of professional retaliation. It is a sad fact, and in part why we wrote the letter.

if you can't sign something without putting your name on it, because you fear you're going to get persecuted and fired... isn't that cancel culture?

</comment><comment><USER32> I appreciate so many of you are willing to crusade for free speech. But the reality is that platforming isn't free, and the process of deciding who gets platforms is political. The first amendment doesn't govern this process, nor can it—no one can reasonably consume every piece of intellectual content, from every angle, and process it.

My point is, cancel culture definitely exists. There has always been, and always will be, political processes for selecting views we consider acceptable discourse. Arguments against cancel culture that don't grapple with this reality are missing the point. Canceling isn't about using the power of the state to crack down on free speech. It's about deciding who gets access to a scarce resource: their platform.

The way this get decided is unavoidably political, since it's about who wields power.

A good example is this website. While most posts are technical, Hacker News hosts a significant amount of discussion regarding social issues. If you read this site using hckrnews.com, which preserves posts flagged off the front page, it's easy to notice that there are political trends in how moderators and users select what posts get prominence. This post, which espouses a more centrist perspective on cancel culture, was briefly flagged, then restored. Many, many other posts espousing more progressive views are systematically downvoted or flagged (search for DEAD on hckrnews.com), many of which are far longer and more carefully developed than Taibbi's piece. Regardless of how you feel about confederate statues, I think it's hard to consider that this 538 post ([https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate- statues/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/)) isn't comparable to this post in terms of quality, sophistication, and merit to be on the front page of HN.

For those of you who agree with Taibbi... do you think those posts aren't "canceled"?

If you think this example is contrived, because the nature of this cancellation doesn't involve a visible mob, that's because of power differences.

The nature of "cancellation" against minorities looks different. Mob justice isn't necessary when people in power can just fire you. And progressives are fired or otherwise censored for advocating for inclusion, against police violence, for progressive social policy _all the time_. You don't see mob justice in these cases because this kind of canceling is often enforced by institutions. A mob isn't necessary. The _effect_ is the same: people are regularly censored and excluded from mainstream prominence because their views are considered unacceptable.

The reason this latest wave of (attempted) cancellations (nyt editorial, jk rowling, adam rapaport, countless people resulting from #metoo etc) have garnered attention is twofold:

1\. They require popular support. Lots of people support holding rapaport, the founder of crossfit, Tucker Carlson, etc to account. No institution wanted to punish these people, so a popular movement formed.

2\. They cancel views formerly considered to be within acceptable bounds. Anti-trans speech, implicitly discriminatory pay practices, military crackdowns on protestors, even if they weren't popular, are believed by many to be "newspaper publishable". It's shocking to people like Taibbi that people who share their views can get fired and singled out on social media—things that happen to people with progressive views on a regular basis.

3\. Oftentimes, the people making the speech are civil and ostensibly in good faith, even if their views are onerous.

To understand cancel culture, you need to define cancellation as "people whose views are censored", and you need to look at people who espouse progressive views. That "cancel culture" is prominent today means that our definition of acceptability is changing, that powerful people require mobs to be held accountable, and that we increasingly believe that how you present the argument (good intent, good faith etc) is less important than what you present.

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that cancellations are sometimes off the mark. Mob justice is often unfair and harmful. It is often disproportionate (the shor incident is the best example I can think of). Holding people accountable for hate speech or discriminatory practices _should_ be the job of institutions. But they're not _doing_ the job—this is what progressives are protesting.

If you want to stop mob culture, change institutions to fairly enforce the injustices that the mob is necessary to enforce today.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish Freud was alive today. I can't help but think that the hysterics manifested in mainstream or social media are not actually real, that people wouldn't make such illogical steps if they were alone in an island. Instead they seem to be reactions , rooted in something deeper somewhere that's causing mass hysterias and delusions. It does manifest in the shifting ways of life too, the lack of sex, the lack of humor and the limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations.

I do love Taibbi's writing, even though i think he spends too much time criticising things that soon won't matter

<comment><USER27> Freud was wrong with almost everything he said. He had merit from a philosophical point of view, he coined terms extremely well, but he is definitely not a scientific, was dangerous for his patients and his theories are still dangerous (your child is an autist because you, poor mother, did not pay enough attention to him! and other rubbish about children rape fantasy and other). Lacan, at least, was not as dangerous (but still a pseudoscientific).

Psychoanalysis is still very much a pseudoscience and is based on even less that the new psychological trend with microexpression and all that jazz.

> limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations If this is really a > thing, then the generation prior would have shown more entrepreneurship, is > this the case in the US? It is really to opposite in Europe anyway, so this > should be wrong.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there many Australians well known for their open source work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes, for example [https://ozlabs.org/](https://ozlabs.org/) (I've worked with several of these people, and one prominent example is Andrew Tridgell, original developer of Samba and rsync, among other things).

</comment><comment><USER3> SSLeay, which was forked and became OpenSSL, was developed by Tim Hudson (AU) and Eric Young (NZ).

Also, he's not precisely (primarily?) an open source developer, but Julian Assange is Australian.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a niche area, but Simon Newton of ola (Open Lighting Architecture) - [https://github.com/nomis52](https://github.com/nomis52)</comment>


Why do good ideas come to us when they do? - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Lehrer_Insight_New_Yorker.pdf

<comment><USER2> really interesting article from the psychology perspective, although what id really like to know is what percentage of new ideas (yes i know, different from insights) are developed in the shower...i'm guessing its fairly high</comment>


Flight Delay Insurance by Ethereum - <AUTHOR> https://fdd.etherisc.com/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how hard it would be to game by taking out lots of insurance and then delaying the flight deliberately.

I guess that scam works because the cost of a delay is subjective.

</comment><comment><USER3> The related blog describes it as an experiment. I'm not sure how it would scale because the interface between the reinsurance market and Ethereum contracts seems problematic.</comment>


People will look at art solely through the lens of value - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/this-app-will-change-the-way-you-buy-art/ <comment><USER2> "Value" hides a lot of meanings. The quote seems to imply monetary value, whereas there can also be aesthetic value, emotional value, value due to fame/popularity and more. Seems unlikely that an app would strip out all the rest for merely highlighting the first.</comment>


How To Do Calculus: Basic Derivatives - Hood Style - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/GU6rHi6Qzcs

<comment><USER2> This is actually pretty thorough for a youtube video. In 15 minutes, he did better than most professors explaining how limits actually apply to calculus.</comment>


A place to honor the late software engineers - <AUTHOR> Hello HN. Due to the recent loss of one good colleague and engineer, I was thinking on building a site to honor the achievements of deceased engineers.
We all built things that are meant to last in some way or another and just because you don't update your Github profile anymore it doesn't mean that it should be forgotten.
I am thinking that the site would group their software repositories and possibly Linkedin/Twitter profiles.
Do you think this would be something good to have? Any help/suggestion is much appreciated. <comment><USER2> Would be crazy if when you work on some kind of open source hosted on github that commits from the deceased have some kind of emblem. A bummer to see but maybe some way to give that anonymous code some kind of immortality.</comment>


Es: A shell with higher-order functions (1993) - <AUTHOR> https://wryun.github.io/es-shell/paper.html <comment><USER2> Interesting! I keep getting frustrated with the arcane Bourne syntax and its limitations. I've toyed with a lot of shells. But when it comes down to it, I don't want to switch because the alternative is not ubiquitous.

<comment><USER3> I've switched to using python where possible.. but I guess there are reasons not to do that?

<comment><USER4> I've switched to Perl (and Perl 6) which seem to be better suited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem with first class functions in a shell is that the main duty of a shell is to fork processes. Once the shell is forked, the only communication available are inter process. All of the environment is no longer shared.

For example, in es:

      ; let (i = 0) { fn hello {echo $i; i = <={%sum $i 1}}}
      ; hello
      0
      ; hello
      1

The closure variable i is incremented after every invocation of hello, but if hello in a subprocess, then i doesn't change:

      ; hello | wc -c
      2
      ; hello
      2

This is because hello is a subprocess of the main shell when it is in a pipeline. When it is used without the pipe, then it is executed within the shell environment, not a child.

I have been using a fork of es since Dec, mine has the %sum builtin above, along with some other things: [https://github.com/injinj/desh](https://github.com/injinj/desh)

</comment><comment><USER6> > We applied concepts from modern functional programming languages, such as > Scheme and ML, to shells

Note that ML here refers to a functional programming language[0], not machine learning.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_\(programming_language\))

</comment><comment><USER7> First order functions and the ability to override builtins. Definitely giving this a try.

I've tried out several shells as primary drivers---bash, mksh, zsh, fish. These got me thinking more generally in terms of "userspace tools" instead of just interfaces with coreutils _etc_ , which made me wonder, can we use our favorite REPLs in lieu of a standard shell?

I've tried using Haskell's ghci as a "shell" and, fixable ergonomics aside, it seems doable. We already have interfaces to kernel syscalls, so in principle it's "just" a libraries problem. File I/O is probably the easiest, and with /proc and /sys, that's enough to replace several info-gathering system tools, _e.g._ df, lscpu, mount (just listing).

Really wish I could immerse myself in Haskell for a few years and see if I could learn enough to take this REPLshell idea somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is really cool & sweet.</comment>


Swarm satellites probe weakening of Earth's magnetic field - <AUTHOR> https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Swarm/Swarm_probes_weakening_of_Earth_s_magnetic_field <comment> trail-system "Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly."

The South Atlantic Anomaly is interesting. In past years satellites are being made to shutdown while passing the regions to avoid damage from the lack of protection from harmful particles.

<comment><USER2> Fascinating information, today I learned. Out of curiosity, do you work in the industry?

<comment><USER3> I'm not the commenter you're repling to, but personally I think I originally learned about the SAA from a Scott Manley video.

<comment><USER4> I suspect this one, explaining the various parts of mission control

[https://youtu.be/6zFAme3SQAo](https://youtu.be/6zFAme3SQAo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It has been speculated whether the current weakening of the field is a sign > that Earth is heading for an eminent pole reversal

It's not often mentioned but these pole reversals aren't sudden/instantaneous across the planet. They can take a few thousand years to complete.

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

The most interesting part to me, from the Wikipedia page is:

> The magnetic field will not vanish completely, but many poles might form > chaotically in different places during reversal, until it stabilizes again.

<comment><USER6> It's seriously discussed to give Mars a "protective" magnetic field like Earth has, by putting a powerful magnet in the L1 Lagrange Point.

We could get something like that for Earth if our field is out for maintenance for a while.

[https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/245369-nasa-proposes- bui...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/245369-nasa-proposes-building- artificial-magnetic-field-restore-mars-atmosphere)

<comment><USER7> we can't coordinate basic health care communication on an emergency. Let's hope someone finds a way to place Advertising on those big magnets in case we came to need them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Geologist here: no. Geomagnetic field reversed thousands of times in the Phanerozoic (last 650 My) without any relation with mass extinction events. Organisms can deal with this kind of events.

<comment><USER9> More info? According to Wikipedia, the Phanerozoic Eon has been lasting for 541 million years (I rechecked because wasn't sure what My meant at first). How would we even detect extinction events from a few million years back? Also, hundreds of millions years divided by thousands of geomagnetic field reversals sounds like very rare (considering the briefness of human existance). Also, ecosystem collapses are probably not all the same: there's gigantic explosions (a la dinosaur killer), there could be ocean acidifaction, etc.

<comment><USER10> There are a lot of good pop science books to read about the history of life on earth.

"The Ends of the World" is probably the best one. "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs" is also a good one, and it doesn't focus purely on the dinosaurs as the title suggests, but about how we know how they evolved and existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Alanna Mitchell's "The Spinning Magnet" is a good popular-level book on the Earth's magnetic field, how it was discovered and investigated, and what's currently known about it: [https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101985168](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101985168)

Space-based X-ray telescopes also need to take the South Atlantic Anomaly into account; data taken while the instrument is in the SAA is disregarded.

</comment><comment><USER12> Am I correct this potentially weaken our shielding against charged particles coming from the Sun?

And if so, is it opening the possibility of having northern lights in the middle of the Atlantic?

<comment> trail-system From NOAA ([https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/aurora](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/aurora))

When space weather activity increases and more frequent and larger storms and substorms occur, the aurora extends equatorward. During large events, the aurora can be observed as far south as the US, Europe, and Asia. During very large events, the aurora can be observed even farther from the poles.

<comment><USER13> That's a very weird and not very precise way to word this. Of course I would expect auroras to be regularly visible in the far northern parts of the USA and Europe:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Kp_Map_North_Ameri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Kp_Map_North_America.gif)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Kp_Map_Eurasia.gif](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Kp_Map_Eurasia.gif)

Now if you start seeing Auroras in Lisbon or Miami please let me know!

<comment><USER4> Auroras were seen in Baltimore and Perth (Australia) during the Carrington event in 1859, around Lisbon's latitude (both north and south)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting project!

Although the name Swarm conjures up a large number of satellites it is actually only 3 that make up the constellation:

[https://space-search.io/?search=swarm](https://space-search.io/?search=swarm)

</comment><comment><USER15> What is that satellite's probe doing to the magnetic field?

<comment><USER16> Haha this is how I first read the title. It should probably read: "Swarm satellites probe the Earth's weakening magnetic field".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Should be possible to estimate how long it would take to hypothetically spread over the whole globe (this probably won't happen). Any idea what time scales we are talking about here? My best guess based on the animation would be ~50 years rather than hundreds of years, but would be nice to have a solid estimate rather than guessing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Could this time of field weakening and events such as cambrian explosion[0] be related?

Does any human activity impact Earth's magnetic field directly or is it irrelevant at this scale? Activity like mining metals out of the planet, large amounts of construction. Movement of metal in ways of air planes and vehicles.

If molten magma is the source of our magnetic field and the earth slowly spews out lava over time, is it causing out magnetic field to weaken over time?

This might be slightly offtopic but what do you make of the concept that magnetic fields and global warming might be associated? [1]

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

[1] [https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AGUFMGP51B..02F/abstra...](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AGUFMGP51B..02F/abstract)

<comment><USER19> > Activity like mining metals out of the planet, large amounts of > construction. Movement of metal in ways of air planes and vehicles.

That is ENTIRELY insignificant, and not even worth mentioning. The deepest hole humans have ever been able to create was about 12km deep. That is less than 0.18% of the earth's radius.

Human activity is limited to the upper parts of earth's crust, which is itself only a fraction of earth. Magnetism happens WAAAAAY deeper.

<comment><USER20> _" The deepest hole humans have ever been able to create was about 12km deep."_

This interesting: We've sent humans 384400 km away from our planet, we've sent an object more than 22E9 km away [1], yet we cannot drill a hole deeper than 12 km into our own planet.

[1] [http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status](http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status)

<comment><USER21> You hit a temperature/pressure threshold pretty quickly once you start going down.

It's hard to engineer materials or machinery that can cope with the kind of pressures and temperatures created when drilling deeper than a few kilometres.

Also pouring government funds into something like this is not as glamourous as manned space flight missions. A good example is that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we know about the ecosystems in the Mariana trench.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >> At surface level, the South Atlantic Anomaly presents no cause for alarm.

I still feel an irrational sense of alarm.

<comment><USER23> Yes, especially during these corona times... "We are not prepared!!!" ;).

<comment><USER24> Wait until the anomaly is combined with a ... Coronal mass ejection!

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interestingly the first person to talk about pole reversals was the American holistic healer Edgar Cayce. On the 11th day of August, 1936: Q What great change or the beginning of what change, if any, is to take place in the earth in the year 2,000 to 2,001 A.D.? (A) When there is a shifting of the poles. Or a new cycle begins. Ref [826-8]

Geologist of the time did not believe a word of it. However, during WW2 the detecting instrumentation for submarine warfare detected on the sea floor alternating bands of magnetic polarization, which is now evidence for the reversal of the magnetic poles. Humans do have non-physical experiences, e.g. dreams, etc. but now most non-physical experience is discounted, ignored, except for thinking.

<comment><USER26> > the first person to talk about pole reversals was the American holistic > healer Edgar Cayce. On the 11th day of August, 1936

Geophysicist Motonori Matuyama talked about geomagnetic reversals in the 1920s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonori_Matuyama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonori_Matuyama)

> When there is a shifting of the poles. Or a new cycle begins.

He actually is not talking about magnetic poles. He clarifies further:

"There will be shifting then of the poles – so that where there has been those of a frigid or the semi-tropical will become the more tropical, and moss and fern will grow. And these will begin in those periods in '58 to '98, when these will be proclaimed as the periods when His light will be seen again in the clouds. As to times, as to seasons, as to places, alone is it given to those who have named the name – and who bear the mark of those of His calling and His election in their bodies. To them it shall be given." \- [https://www.edgarcayce.org/about-us/blog/blog- posts/cayces-p...](https://www.edgarcayce.org/about-us/blog/blog-posts/cayces- pole-shift-prediction-speeds-up/)

> Geologist of the time did not believe a word of it.

I mean, did anybody ask them? Perhaps they would have been familiar with Professor Matuyama's work.

Finally, how many other predictions did he make? Any chance people have cherry-picked a couple of his ideas that seem kind of close to right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd recommmend Sunfall by British physicist Jim Al-Khalili as an entertaining fictional account of the catastrophic effects of an weakening in the Earth's magnetic field, followed by attempts to remotely restart flow activity in the core.

</comment><comment><USER28> NOAA has a map showing historical data of the pole movements -

[https://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/historical_declination/](https://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/historical_declination/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Since Earth's magnetic field derives from the convection currents of magma in the outer core, and since moving magma also drives tectonic activity... is there any potential relationship between this anomaly and earthquakes/volcanos?

<comment><USER30> The magnetic field is generated in the outer core, while surface vulcanism and earthquakes are driven by the upper mantle. These areas are about 2,000 miles different in depth. There's obviously some kind of relationship because it's all one planet, but nothing direct enough to care about in this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Sorry to disappoint the "we're all going to die" crowd, but the South Atlantic Anomaly has been developing at least since 1840, and appears to be an effect of long-term, mysterious flows in Earth's outer core."

[https://twitter.com/coreyspowell/status/1264999851655335936](https://twitter.com/coreyspowell/status/1264999851655335936)

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it dangerous for human ? I'm thinking like the ozone hole we used to have in South America in the past.

</comment><comment><USER33> Speculation : These anamolies somehow related to strange Bermuda Triangle events?

</comment><comment><USER34> Maybe this means it's time for the magnetic pole to flip? Damn, I'd like to see this in my lifetime

<comment><USER35> Does anybody know if flipping, earth being without strong/stable magnetic field for decades/centuries could have been cause of dinosaur extinction?

<comment><USER36> There was a 2013 paper titled "Mass Extinction and the Structure of the Milky Way" that you might find interesting: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4838](https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4838) \- I don't know if there have been any significant follow ups since it published.

Basically our galaxy is a spiral galaxy with four arms, and it's rotating. The center moves slower than the outside, and our sun's orbit is near the inner rim of the Orion arm. We orbit the galaxy roughly every 240 million years and in that time we cross the dense galactic arms every so often (arms aren't symmetrical).

The paper: "A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events."

<comment><USER37> Yeah, and they only had to design an entirely novel and significantly asymmetrical model for the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> [deleted]

Edit: I shouldn't have posted it.

<comment><USER39> All magnets will fail to work so most trains won't run anymore and you'll have to use SSDs or tape storage for your computer.

GPS systems will no longer work and Google Maps will spin around constantly.

Only babies (and crows) will need to live underground for the first 6 months of their lives to ensure they don't develop vertico.

<comment><USER40> > All magnets will fail to work

I'm not sure what you responded to since it was removed, but I assume it was something to do with the subject of the article...

Why would all magnets cease to work if the Earth's magnetic field went funky? Surely neither the magnets on my fridge nor the magnets in a train's electric traction motors do not depend on the earth's magnetic field being oriented any particular direction. I'm not sure, but I think AC train traction motors don't even have permanent magnets in them. Compasses would get messed up though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have this theory that the hydrocarbons (which are just dead trees) are slowly feeding the magma in the earth when the tectonic plates move.

If that's true (although I don't get how that fire burns without oxygen) then our use of coal, oil and gas will eventually have serious effects?

<comment><USER42> I. I just honestly don't understand what you're saying. Or where you would've come up with that. Or what the purpose would be. Or why you even think this exists.

What are you possibly basing this on?

<comment><USER43> Remember, in the 1800s people thought the Sun was burning coal.

<comment><USER44> How dare people try and use existing knowledge to formulate a hypothesis about something that was unknown.

Parent post is just wrong since we know how those processes work

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> By looking at the video it looks like an anomaly in the Amazonas. What is causing this? Deforestation?

If so we need to change economic system to one based on nature. So that eco systems have an economic value. Ie a tree in Amazonas has a value to earth and its inhabitants since it provides oxygen. In current market economic system common resources are not priced fully. It may be profitable to chop down tree and sell the wood. Use previous Amazonas land for example to create more farmland to breed cows.

<comment><USER46> The center is actually more to the south. It seems to be over Paraguay and southern Brazil, thousands of kilometers away from the Amazon rainforest.

"What is causing this?"

Well... that's exactly the point, right? No one knows what's causing it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: weartolook – the UK's largest fashion search engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.weartolook.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

Long time member. Today we've begun pushing weartolook, something we've been working on now for a good couple of years. Its been a crazy journey, we could probably write the book on how _not_ to launch your startup.

We're 2 London based founders that are totally self-taught programmers, we have over 300 of the UK's (and some from the US) best stores on board: Topshop, Urban Outfitters, Harrods, Saks Fifth, Net-a-porter to name a few and today we have >3m products.

Take a look and let us know what you think, we're wide open for feedback.

Geoff (Founder)</comment>


Why the US still doesn't have a contact tracing app for Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.philippcannons.com/2020/04/11/why-the-us-still-doesnt-have-a-contact-tracing-app-for-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> I might be missing something, but I fail to see how contact tracing is useful, due to secondary contacts/infections.

I.e. contact tracing is like a BFS search on a graph.

So, even if you trace the closest contacts, by the time a person takes the test and notify the network, those primary contacts (edge 0) might have infected their own contacts (edge 1) until basically you would need to isolate the whole population.

<comment><USER3> Contact tracking is probably useful at the _beginning_ of a new outbreak when the disease is still isolated to a small number of locations. Isolating a few people might prevent the disease from spreading to other areas.

As you described, once an outbreak has a foothold in most areas, most people will be within one or two hops from someone who is infected. Also, the potential useful period will be shorter when the incubation period is long. Two weeks of incubation provides a _lot_ of opportunity for someone to spread the infection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No app that you can optionally download from the App Store would work. It would require a critical mass for it to be effective, and we don't have the kind of time required for this to happen. This is probably why Apple and Google are working on it together.</comment>