The trickle of canceled cable TV subscribers last year has turned into a stream - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_CUTTING_CABLE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

<comment><USER3> My household just cancelled our basic satellite service last week because of AppleTV+iTunes+Netflix.

Our reasoning was this: Netflix lets us have the "background noise" programs that we don't really care about for $8/mo and it has a big enough catalog that it's worth it. We can purchase everything else from iTunes and at our rate of "new show consumption", the $60/mo is better spent being put towards iTunes purchases where it's ad-free, on demand, and able to be moved to devices. For TV shows, that's about 15-20 episodes a month _purchased_ without affecting our previous budget. In practice, we don't watch half that many new shows so we'll be saving around $30/month and building a catalog of content that we semi-own where the value increases the longer we use it. Cable/Sat services don't build on themselves like that. Plus, the AppleTV runs at 6 watts where the satellite receiver ran at 10x that, we might even see a lower electric bill.

Households that live for watching TV aren't going to be swayed that easily, but they're easily spending twice as much too.

<comment><USER4> We did this over 2 years ago. Our 2.5yo son is (so far) growing up with very little exposure to television commercials (he almost never sees them unless we are watching something on Hulu), and we consider that a good thing. Not only that, since it's all on-demand, he can choose whatever fits his mood during the time he's allowed to watch stuff. And because the media is "always available", I think he's developing a kind of acceptance that it's okay to stop watching when he's bored because the content availability is not constrained to "now." In other words, it's far easier for him to leave a show midway when it's time for bed or something because he knows he can just pick it up later and continue some other day. This is a decidedly different experience than growing up with scheduled TV pre-DVR where every minute was precious and missing anything was a "big deal."

<comment><USER3> Our 7 month old son also played a part in the decision. I'd rather him develop a habit of filling the majority of his idle time with less mentally and physically passive activities than television. Not that he can't ever watch TV, but I hope that we can find something else more entertaining together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      The weak economy is hitting Americans where they spend a lot of their free time: at the TV set.

While the economy might be the trigger that drives people over the edge to unsubscribe, I actually believe that a large number of them was disenfranchised with TV programming before that. When it comes to entertainment, we have exactly three categories: reality TV, sports events, and series that are designed to be huge blockbusters.

Personally, my biggest beef with this is the series part (I don't watch reality TV or sports at all), because we're only ever seeing the most dumbed- down shit that is designed from the ground up for marketability. Only rarely does that procedure produce a great show, and when it does, it's by pure accident. As a result, we get fiction programming where Warehouse 13 is considered "edgy sci-fi TV", when it fact it is neither edgy nor scifi at all.

<comment><USER6> I could not agree more. I have a FIOS and a huge HDTV, in the living room and I end up watching one TV show reguarlly and a few movies. The last time I spent a significant amount of time in front of the TV was the Olympics whose coverage was so bad I ended up fast forwarding though most of it. The only advantage of cable is they live HDTV programming is less compressed than most streaming options. Yet, for some reason even their Video on Demand option is more compressed than live tv even though they have a full fiber network.

As to programming, I used to watch a fair amount of edutainment like NOVA but even that has been dumbed down to meaningless drivel. I can still get into a good nature show in HDTV, but mostly they are just Steve Erwin style psudo reality TV designed to maximize the number of teeth shown per minute.

PS: If you have not seen it "How It's Made" is still fairly interesting.

<comment><USER7> As for the Olympics, on my basic cable television service (held due to Comcast pricing issues), the one stream of broadcasting that was not utter crap was one of the secondaries that was on... CNBC or something like that. They showed particularly women's curling in pretty much complete broadcasts, except for commercials.

I'm neither a sports fan nor a curling aficionado (or, I wasn't), but I quite enjoyed watching those games and following the Canadian women's team on their way to victory.

People are bailing on cable television (and new television in general) because the programming is utter crap. And then the companies sit on the good, if older, stuff and move it ever further up in the premium levels. I'd actually watch "Star Trek: The Next Generation", but it's been moved to price levels I won't pay for. The channel perennially re-running "West Wing" was recently bumped from my service (despite Comcast's supposed agreement to hold the status quo until 2013).

Now, "The Next Generation" is on Netflix. So, screw you, cable TV.

(Just wish I had a better choice for my Internet connectivity.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If cable networks and MSOs were smart, they'd start developing their own "Netflix" style operation. Build MSO-specific web apps that make it easy to do two things: 1.) Watch live network streams as if I had a box hooked up to my TV and 2.) Give users access to a VOD library (just like Netflix) for each network. There are PLENTY of downsides but unfortunately, these companies need to realize that the old model doesn't work and is only going to continue to die off. Want to keep your subscribers? Move to the web. Now. Worry about the details later.

<comment><USER9> _these companies need to realize that the old model doesn't work_

You give them entirely too much credit, the cable tv industry is joined at the hip to news networks and inextricably to movie producers for broadcast rights.

And what do we know about the news industry and the movie industry? Both are in a state of flux because instead of chasing down a new method of distribution, they held on to increasingly irrelevant business models and now they're paying for it.

<CAVEAT EMPTOR>If Time Warner suddenly comes out with a portable VOD program, instead of locking me down to my living room - and produces one that actually compels me to keep using it, and doesn't expect me to have both home service and VOD as an extra premium, I will _gladly_ eat my words. As it stands, I doubt that will happen, and I doubt it will happen in a cost effective way.

It's a beautiful idea, honestly. If they made a VOD service where you paid one flat fee that isn't a ridiculous cost for online video, I'd reckon the demand would easily make up the difference in costs leasing/selling boxes. </CAVEAT EMPTOR>

edit for clarity: With the news this is more talking to print news.

<comment><USER8> You make a good point about the interconnectivity of the news/film industries to broadcasting, but we've reached a point where people are going to need to let go and embrace what's next. The fear is that of uncertainty and the behavior of consumers but in all actuality, people love television and they'll still pay to watch it. If they have to lower costs, so be it. The upside? You'll probably reach and RETAIN more customers because of the lower costs.

<comment><USER9> _we've reached a point where people are going to need to let go and embrace what's next_

I agree.

But what we'll see if it happens, in my opinion will be an amalgamation of the following when it comes to cable provider VOD ala Netflix:

* Poor/spotty service (I mean look at the VOD that's currently sent through your cable box..) * It will come as a premium add on that requires you to have home cable service * It is not going to be a cheap service for the consumer, but it will probably be a cheap expense for the provider (see: SMS) * Your movie options will be greatly limited in favor of using your cable box

We'll see. These companies need to get with the picture, although that picture is probably going to cost extra just to sell you the frame and nail to hang it with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Work in office during day, and work on personal projects during evenings.

Do not have TV for like.... a lot of years.

Found discount movie theater nearby and go there over weekends sometimes with my wife (she also totally busy during week).

You know what? When you go to movie theater just a few times per month - <USER2> really enjoy the show! And nice restaurant after is a great culmination =) Treat yourself, not bloat!

</comment><comment><USER11> Television content distribution has historically been push model marketing.

One problem was that nobody ever really "knew" with any measurable degree of accuracy how many people were actually watching any given show. Nielsen ratings (and I actually received $5 and the survey in the mail 10 years ago, when I was a televisionless University student), as hyped as they are, were more or less guesstimates totally dependant upon people telling them exactly what they're watching and when. Even the demographics can get somewhat skewed -- educated people would be more likely to return the survey than non.

It makes more sense that this new emerging Internet-based distribution model would be more to the liking of those who are reliant upon an advertising-based revenue model for the simple fact that they can have more accurate numbers showing them how many viewers they have. But instead they whine and complain that they're losing money on a system that was never really optimized for their core purpose.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's still one thing missing from the non-cable services: live sports.

<comment><USER13> If only I could just pay for football Sundays, March Madness, and the NBA playoffs. My TV sits idle the rest of the time.

<comment><USER14> Get an HDTV antenna. Fox and CBS broadcast most of the NFL games and they do so in HD, OTA for free. ABC buys you college football.

March Madness was streamed online this last go. Add CBS from above.

Get an internet provider that grants you ESPN 360 and you get most college football and half the NBA playoffs. I'm sure TNT will come around at some point for the other half. There is always a night out with friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What drove me to cut was this: the content is getting steadily worse, bandwidth is becoming exponentially cheaper for providers, and yet - the price just kept going up.

I would expect to pay less YOY instead!

My in-laws subscribe to a cable service in France called "Neuf", that gives them phone, television, and Internet for something like 30 euros a month. I turned green with envy when I discovered that. THAT is a price that I think is reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER16> We used to do cable service plus local video rental, because between spotty reception and the low resolution of broadcast TV, the experience wasn't that great. We would make the pilgrimage to the video store multiple times a week for everything else. We generally watch only the majors (ABC, etc.) and PBS affiliates, so the large channel selection of cable doesn't add much value. We made a decent antenna and now do over-the-air HDTV for our appointment viewing. It's gorgeous and free. We use Netflix DVD/streaming to get the rest of the content we watch. Netflix+Internet+OTA fulfills our needs at a much lower price point and much greater flexibility. The cable model needs improve to compete. It would be compelling for me with things like per-channel a la carte pricing and price parity between HD and SD service. The one thing I find compelling about the cable model today that's been hard for me to do personally is digital recording. For OTA HD recording, one either has to be able to afford TIVO or spend a significant amount of time and some money hand- building a DVR system.

</comment><comment><USER17> And my internet cost has skyrocketed because of it (mostly because there's no competition).

</comment><comment><USER18> www.topchan.tv is developed for people to seek alternative video content. Below are some examples of video not on the traditional TV.

The Game channel <http://www.topchan.tv/show/public1/10> has game play recordings and streaming.

The VLOG channel <http://www.topchan.tv/show/public1/12> has video blogs from people on Youtube.

The TED channel <http://www.topchan.tv/show/public1/264> has the TED presentations.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it too much to hope that Americans are getting outside more?

<comment><USER20> No, we're getting fatter and lazier. If we're getting outside it's only to drive to our local fast food restaurant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cable cutting numbers are so low as to be almost unmeasurable.

So why are Hulu and Netflix hamstrung by content creators as a threat to revenue again?

<comment><USER22> I cut my cable back to the "basic" TV level last year (which is local stations plus a handful of others). I only kept it at all because it is cheaper to get internet + basic TV than it is to have internet alone (Comcast).

I do miss having the ESPNs but nothing else really. We have Netflix and can get ESPN 360 on the Xbox so that's a bit of a consolation.</comment></comment>


Exploring canvas drawing techniques - <AUTHOR> http://perfectionkills.com/exploring-canvas-drawing-techniques/ <comment><USER2> Your circular spray brush has a pretty awful distribution of points. If you hold it in one location for several seconds you can tell that it's heavily biasing points to the bottom left, and you tend to get very visible "lines" as well. I tweaked it a bit to improve it:

[http://codepen.io/anon/pen/EqbnG](http://codepen.io/anon/pen/EqbnG)

My implementation still isn't perfect, as it biases points in the middle over points around the edges. (A consequence of the fact that a bunch of points evenly distributed around a small radius are closer together than a bunch of points evenly distributed around a large radius.) But it's definitely better than the one in the article.

<comment><USER3> more "spraycanny":

[http://codepen.io/anon/pen/utcLx](http://codepen.io/anon/pen/utcLx)

<comment><USER2> Approximating a normal distribution by summing three uniformly distributed random numbers is pretty clever. And it's a nice visual effect as well.

<comment><USER4> A nice illustration of the central limit theorem! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem)

This means there's nothing special about 3 - the more times you add uniforms together, the more normal it becomes. Also it doesn't matter if the uniform isn't uniform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surprised you didn't rediscover using physics on the pen point. You might check out [http://www.graficaobscura.com/dyna/](http://www.graficaobscura.com/dyna/)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Will check it out. Found Javascript adaptation at [http://www.rogerandwendy.com/roger/dynadraw](http://www.rogerandwendy.com/roger/dynadraw)

<comment><USER5> Yep, that's mine. I'm a fan. :^)

<comment><USER7> This is a lot of fun [http://i.imgur.com/seMWVWv.png](http://i.imgur.com/seMWVWv.png)

<comment><USER5> Thanks. All props should go to Paul Haeberli for the original idea.

I should really update it to add controls for mass and friction. Actually I should make a jsfiddle for this. But, I'm in the middle of something else at the moment..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Brush, fur and neighbor points look really cool.

Using Bézier curves, but with variable width, can give nice "handwritten" feel to it - [http://szimek.github.io/signature_pad](http://szimek.github.io/signature_pad) (works best on touch devices).

<comment><USER9> That was super cool to use, and I totally create a digital version of my signature on my iPhone that I'm going to use! Awesome!

<comment><USER10> I had the same impulse, and then it struck me: maybe, just maybe, trying to replicate my hand-written signature on an unknown website that's obviously doing it's best to capture hand-writing is not the absolute best strategy, security-wise.

Not saying the author of that pad is evil or anything, I just questioned my own impulse. And stopped drawing. :)

<comment><USER9> John Hancocks arent particularly secure anyway, and I actually have little use for my digital version, other than using it on documents to be sent to people. Everything else is handled via other ways (or require actual pen on paper!) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A note for those who are thinking about making a "real" paint app out of these techniques - which I started on, got the architecture mostly done to a demonstration stage, and then stalled out on UI:

When you start adding in the flexibility of different tool types, differentiating "stroke" and "material", real-time preview vs. final, and other nuances, the internals start to resemble a dataflow system dealing with point paths and canvas buffers. Often you take raw input and derive a new path from it, or take an existing buffer and combine it with path data.

The basic rendering techniques really are this straightforward, it's just the flexibility requirement that adds complication.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is excellent. We'll probably implement quite a few of these as Literally Canvas[1] brushes.

[1] [http://literallycanvas.com/](http://literallycanvas.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> This gives a strange combination of nostalgia for 80s tech with excitement about the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is the most educating thing I have seen on HN in a while.

I went through the code for each, starting with the simplest and working my way up to the much more interesting and complex.

The only thing missing is a way to edit the JS and see the result. Looks like it's easy to use an embedded jsfiddle[0], but I have not tried it myself.

[0] [http://doc.jsfiddle.net/use/embedding.html](http://doc.jsfiddle.net/use/embedding.html)

<comment><USER15> > The only thing missing is a way to edit the JS and see the result.

If you look on at the right edge of the grey-ish tab bar, you will see an "edit" link. This opens up a link to CodePen which lets you fork the snippet and mark changes to it. Here is one such link: [http://codepen.io/kangax/pen/wDuxl](http://codepen.io/kangax/pen/wDuxl)

<comment><USER14> Wow, somehow I completely missed that. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The examples became more and more complex while the code remained evolutionary and understandable. Amazing work and a huge resource for canvas drawing and those unfamiliar with javascript. Very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a HN JS post I have no problems with! Lots of effort and actually useful - well done!

</comment><comment><USER18> Great variety! Some of these reminded me of [0] Spider-Man Cartoon Maker.

[0] - [http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Adventure-Spider-Man- Cartoon...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Adventure-Spider-Man-Cartoon- Maker/dp/1569971447)

</comment><comment><USER19> What a great interactive post. I never knew canvas was so flexible.

<comment><USER20> Canvas is just a 2D drawing API. Whatever you can do with pixels, you can do in canvas. That includes writing Photoshop if you're so inclined.

Now, that in mind, there are limitations and especially for drawing applications it's a shame that you have to think that hard about how to antialias a stroke (approximating it with shadows – really?). So in a way we dragged 2D graphics to the web, but leaving it with a strange mixture of features which date from a range of 1980–2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They never pay an award - or - reward for that matter -- the police always come up with some excuse not to pay. And if that fails then they say YOU must be part of the crime.

</comment><comment><USER22> Fantastic. This is really an excellent post. I particularly enjoy the code snippets along with each example.

</comment><comment><USER23> this is awesome. the colored pixel brush is my favorite.

this is a nice example of what i like about programming most visualizations in general. it's fun and easy to brainstorm. change variables and logic until you end up with something you like.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is great! The Harmony examples are amazing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Neighbor points give fantastic results.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. Two minutes of screwing around on it made me feel like an artist: [http://i.imgur.com/5e42RRN.png](http://i.imgur.com/5e42RRN.png)</comment></comment>


'360 video camera played with flash - <AUTHOR> http://blog.karagos.com/post/114229575/yellow-bird/ sourced from http://www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com/ <comment><USER2> I like this idea, but honestly, the one thing I've always hated about QT vr and now this is how janky the controls feel.

They need to bring in a video game control designer to tweak the mouselook.

<comment><USER3> I think the control would be more intuitive if you can drag the screen like a pdf instead of controlling the camera.

<comment><USER2> There is also too much inertia, you feel as if you are driving on ice.

<comment><USER4> And you can go upside down which feels a bit weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Go 1:03 into the vid and look at the upper right -- on top of the pole.

<comment> matt-kantor "Upper right" being opposite from the DJ stage and out towards the water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The technology here looks awesome, but they need a better algorithm for motion. When you look around here, the video skews in an odd way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just imagine if real estate videos were made with this (with smaller cameras) for looking around a property. The walkthrough video would be impressive.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sourced from [http://www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperi...](http://www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com/)

<comment> matt-kantor I can't believe they chose that domain name over <http://yellowbird.com/>.

<comment><USER8> Umm, I can:

       Record expires on 01-Sep-2011.
       Record created on 02-Sep-1997.
       Database last updated on 28-Jul-2009 15:44:50 EDT.

A domain with no host records is not an open domain.

<comment> matt-kantor Ah, good point. I just checked the WHOIS and stopped there.

Still, <http://yellowbird3d.com> or anything else possibly reachable outside of links or copy/pasting would be nice (though I guess telling people "google yellowbird" works).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the examples here, especially the 'football' one:

<http://www.cornflex.org/?p=1>

</comment><comment><USER10> Very Cool... I want to make a movie with it.</comment>


HackNY Live Demo Stream - <AUTHOR> http://livestre.am/BbRa

<comment><USER2> Always love seeing what the fellows made over the summer. Glad to see first hand that HackNY is continuing to bring in such high quality students and pairing them up with NYCs best startups.

<comment><USER3> +1

Sad I didn't get to meet the Class of 2013 earlier this summer, but the fellows who showed up to my talk last night were all top notch. Hope they enjoy the rest of their hard earned summer break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> List of hacks presented: [https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/hackny- fellowship-20...](https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/hackny- fellowship-2013-demofest/hacks)

</comment><comment><USER5> List of fellows here: [http://hackny.org/a/2013/06/hackny-announces-the-class- of-20...](http://hackny.org/a/2013/06/hackny-announces-the-class- of-2013-hackny-fellows/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I want ice cream! @Dave

<comment><AUTHOR> Download Concierge!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> twerkout.co is awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> soooooo much fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Open the stream to see a tutorial on how to use Github pages... what is this, third grade?

<comment><USER9> [http://www.thinkful.com/learn/a-guide-to-using-github- pages/](http://www.thinkful.com/learn/a-guide-to-using-github-pages/) fyi, pretty slick

<comment><USER8> Wow, that's actually awesome. I take back my previous comment!</comment></comment></comment>


Take a sneak peak at Moonstone's UI and tell us what you think - <AUTHOR> https://marvelapp.com/a31d7h#3555223

<comment><USER2> Looks nice overall.

I have a hard time reading the light green on grey or white background. Not sure if it's possible to improve the contrast without wrecking your color scheme.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not signing up for something where I have no idea what it is for.</comment>


Observables - <AUTHOR> http://cycle.js.org/observables.html <comment><USER2> I've never seen Cycle before, but this looks somewhat similar to Mithril ([http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/index.html](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/index.html)), which is based on a semi-FRP virtual-dom approach.

The thing that I prefer about Mithril though is that at the end of the day, your code looks like regular, vanilla js and is extremely readable. It's a pretty much invisible framework that you can use however you see the best fit - it just takes care of rendering and updating without any magic, and provides you with some helpful tools for managing models.

My immediate grip with Cycle is the api - it just looks messy and more complex than it needs to be.

<comment><USER3> [http://cycle.js.org/documentation.html](http://cycle.js.org/documentation.html)

5 documented functions, and one documented property. This is probably one of the most minimal/clean API's I have seen.

<comment><USER4> I'm really alien to the concept and to the library itself, but still

minimal/clean ≠ not complex

Like monads, this is rather abstract, although simple. As abstractions accumulate in layers, the thing becomes harder to understand.

<comment><USER5> I think working with Rx and these streams in general takes getting used to, but it's such a useful concept to learn for its own sake.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Need something  - <AUTHOR>

I need something and don't know what kind of chat room this is. Am very new at this-1st timer. Can someone please help me and tell me what to do? Is this pro or con here? <comment><USER2> ?? You haven't stated what you actually want at all.

You can see what Hacker News is by looking at the front page and checking out some of the stories and comment threads. If what you want to offer or talk about somewhat matches what you see there, then you're in the right place. If not, you're probably not.</comment>


Amid rising anxiety, colleges tell students it's OK to fail - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/c6bde0dd123a4b81a2388d3c28830a24 <comment> crooked-v I'm hardly surprised. When I was taking courses, some programs had a general X.0 GPA requirement (across all classes taken, not just the department I was actually interested in), which led me to some cynical cash-burning on easy classes to raise my GPA after previously failing some unrelated classes. It could have been a real freak-out moment for someone in my position but without that financial flexibility.</comment>


To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2020/08/15/to-the-future-occupants-of-my-office-at-the-mit-media-lab/ <comment><USER2> It's very MIT.

It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't _do_ much.

Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to maximize comfort at minimum cost, automatically. Will NeXT sell you that? No. It takes too much installation.

You might see that at a well run convention hotel. They have to keep customers happy, yet many of their big rooms are empty much of the time. So they'll have CO, CO2, temperature, humidity, and motion sensors tied to a control system that senses what the room needs for the current people load.

There's real IoT, but it's under commercial building automation.

<comment><USER3> Yup. True home automation is something that changes your life, not gadgets for rich people. I will call true home automation for example when I can throw the trash into a hatch at my same floor in a bag with RFID tag so that it will send it down and sort out it for recycle. I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building. They would leave the bag there and it would drop to a container in the basement that the litter van would retrieve later. Of course it was long before recycling legislation so with new laws it had to be ditched and people would have again to bring their trash bags to the bins, which weren't that close. So why the system can't be repurposed, and introduced where necessary, to be recycle friendly? That's what I would call modern home automation, not stuff like reading a sensor and opening a window, which could have been done 10 years ago with an Arduino, 20 years ago with any uC and X10 already did in the '70s.

<comment><USER4> For some reason this reminds me. My old house, built in the 40s, had a mysterious small hatch in the closet floor across from the bathroom.

One day I opened it and it was just a cutout of the floor, directly over the washing machine in the basement below. I'm not sure if that's lazy or genius, but it doesn't get much easier than that I guess.

<comment><USER5> In typical Russian apartment washing machine is installed in bathroom.

<comment><USER6> I think this is common in Europe, too. Except in the UK and Ireland, where electrical regulations don't allow it, banishing the washing machine to the kitchen.

<comment><USER7> > where electrical regulations don't allow it, banishing the washing machine > to the kitchen.

That explains! I've wondered why people in movies/series would keep washing machines in the kitchen.

Around here in medium size houses like mine the washing machine is typically placed in the same room as one of the toilets and the room is referred to as the washing room (vaskerom).

<comment><USER8> That would actually be allowed AFAIK - it's the bath/shower that makes it a bathroom (both in British English usage and electrical regs!) and banishes the white goods. But WCs tend to be v. small (as if given a little extra space architects say What shall we do, Fred, cupboard or loo?) so can't house them either.

Usually (flats/small houses aside) they'll be in the scullery (adjoining the kitchen) though, not actually in the 'cooking area'.

<comment><USER6> I'd say in the vast majority of house they're in the kitchen; most don't have a scullery/utility room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been thinking about some of these guys a lot lately.

When are we going to collectively unpack the fact the Media Lab/Berkman Center project has been a complete failure?

I worked at these places and mingled on the outskirts, and for a long time really believed all the bullshit they were spouting at the time - that the internet was a positive force, if we just connected enough people, surely their "stories" and "empathy" would "revolutionize" the world, etc., etc..

They were all wrong.

Digital, networked technology seemed exciting for a brief and beautiful moment, but has turned into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams.

And yet - they persist, despite their ever increasing irrelevance. Spineless hucksters like a Zittrain still get wheeled out occasionally for their take on some hot new trend in Wired magaize, they still get private and government grant money, and, of course, they still keep taking on hapless graduate students.

Just when will we call a spade a spade?

EDIT: This little tirade made me go back and re-read some of the Cluetrain Manifesto - I feel almost ashamed of myself to reread something like "markets are conversations" and remember thinking it was ever good, important, or even valid argument. I now see this as evil thought.

<comment><USER10> > into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, > propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - > forget about your "global library" dreams.

I don't know, if you're basically saying your stylized, hyperbolic, generalizing, imprecise, inaccurate discourse is better than theirs just because it's negative and theirs is positive... I would rather have the positive?

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying very specifically:

The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote.

Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" economics they were promoting - gig economies, crowdfunding, "conversational" marketing - have only resulted in a new form of serfdom, upward movement of capital from the poor to the rich, and a completely collapse of dignity in public life.

In fact, I'll even go a step further and suggest that what we needed was _more_ negativity. Techno-positivity and lack of critical thought is exactly how we got in this mess.

<comment><USER10> The Media Lab's arguably most widely adopted product, the Scratch programming language... is that leading to the "collapse of dignity?"

What about Guitar Hero? Are those guys, Media Lab grad students who spent a decade after graduation until they found hard earned success... did they create a "new serfdom?"

The Berkman Center houses the historic DoJ tech antitrust lawyers. Do you think antitrust won't play a role in reversing "the movement of capital from the poor to the rich?"

Anyway, there are a lot of people who rail on the academy or whatever. I suppose your opinion, however stylized, is as good as anyone else's.

<comment><USER11> GuitarFreaks did not come out of the Media Lab. No disrespect to Egozy and Rigopulos, but HMX's success (even before GH) seems to have come specifically after they dumped Media Lab-inspired plans and started drawing inspiration from the Japanese arcade scene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's something so beautiful about a place so dysfunctional that you can't even replace standard office equipment; I know it was alluded to in the article, but in case anyone forgot, the MIT Media Lab played a part in Jeffery Epstein and he often leveraged it for good PR [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab- je...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-jeffrey- epstein-joichi-ito.html)

<comment><USER13> People do a lot of creative experiments around that building so it's not surprising you would want to ask before disassembling someone's thesis project. To call the place "dysfunctional" because some brilliant grad students constantly try new things is to miss the point (and the spirit of the place) entirely.

<comment><USER14> I think they were referring to the bit where facilities was unable to fix it after the author had removed the original work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Remember when MIT media Lab gave a civil disobedience award to bethann mclaughlin for some nebulous #metoo bs who since disgraced herself by LARPing as a fake Native American academic who died of covid? [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/twitter-account- emba...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/twitter-account-embattled- metoostem-founder-suspended)

Remember when they chased Aaron Swartz to commit suicide and never gave him a civil disobedience award?

Remember their extremely close links to Jeffrey Epstein?

Sorry but MIT media Lab is absolute trash and an embarrassment to the MIT name.

<comment><USER13> You realize the author of the linked article resigned over Epstein and frequently fought to improve things? Why try to link him to some trash that he vehemently opposed?

And Swartz's death was caused by JSTOR not the Media Lab FYI

<comment><USER16> And MIT threw Adam to the wolves.

<comment><USER13> Correct but not the Media Lab specifically and that's a big difference

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whenever I read stuff about this I get a sense of immense jealousy. MIT certainly has its issues but man, I'd love to be at a place where people exhibit so much joy and interest in creation. I've met my share of cool people but it truly does feel like MIT has this unique environment of technical skill and creativity.

<comment><USER18> That the old MIT. For the past 15 years MIT leadership has been dedicated to destroying the creative hacker spirit.

<comment><USER13> Melodrama much? It's still one of the most creative and amazing places to meet hackers (or become one) in the world

<comment><USER19> A lot of MIT "myth" for me, daj when I was trying to get in, was that they would do a lot of things internally and dogfood - for example, project athena, using that as basis for many other things, etc.

Recently I heard from some fresh MIT grads that a lot of that is now pushed to outsourcing and same cookie-cutter approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Paradoxically, publishing this blog post will no doubt result in the window knob being fixed and a new "no unauthorized modifications to HVAC" policy being out in place.

<comment><USER21> I'd be surprised if that is the outcome. MIT facilities tends to be quite tolerant of stuff like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _When sleeping in this office, I found it helpful to cover the blue light on > the box with a post-it note._

Some people point to Richard Stallman having a mattress in his office at MIT as some sort of sinister sign. This, I should think, proves otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER23> Kind of tangential because it also involves the MIT and lots of crazy funny sentimental stories like this one about working and studying there: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightwork:_A_History_of_Hacks_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightwork:_A_History_of_Hacks_and_Pranks_at_MIT)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the same reason I'm never going to be able to move into a nicer/bigger/cuter/better view house. I have my house and the barn behind it all laid out exactly as I see fit, and I know that if I ever sold this place, no amount of impassioned pleas to understand the nuisance and rationale will ever be heard. It's always going to distill into "great, but strip it all out, all of it, paint it white and make it able to store a boat". So much of my ego is programmed into the layout of the building that it would be a denial of self to let someone else have it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Coincidentally I was just watching a talk from one of those two students that ran the breast pump hackathon: [https://vimeo.com/354276137](https://vimeo.com/354276137)

</comment><comment><USER26> > ... needs to be plugged into wifi and power

That first one is going to be a challenge.

</comment><comment><USER27> >If it start beeping, either it's malfunctioning and needs to be rebooted, or there's a significant radiation leak on campus.

With no details on how it beeps I'm now anxious for beeping of a device many miles away

</comment><comment><USER28> Awesome post. Who was the cranky researcher who developed the climate- controlled window system with the Linux box and python scripts? I want to do the same thing.

<comment><USER29> Same, but it seems overkill. I'm in an old office where the only openable window is consumed by a window A/C unit.

I want to put a 120mm fan in a small opening next to it that'll turn on when it's more than 3C cooler outside, and more than 24C inside.

Seems like an Arduino would do it.

<comment><USER28> I believe I found the researcher and thesis that informed the window project here: [https://resenv.media.mit.edu/#Projects#personalized- building...](https://resenv.media.mit.edu/#Projects#personalized-building- comfort-control)

I don't think it's overkill within the context of his full work. Based on my brief skimming, he's coupling the window with a personal device to modulate his environment through reinforcement learning.

<comment><USER30> This "Responsible Environment" website pegs my CPU...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wayback URL: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200815220615/http://www.ethanz...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200815220615/http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2020/08/15/to- the-future-occupants-of-my-office-at-the-mit-media-lab/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Peltier element is just about the worst solution for anything. The angel wings girl wasn't experiencing much "cooling" for sure. Form over function, I suppose - consumer market seems to prefer that, but as an EE I immediately know shit's not going to work, which robs me of appreciation of the "form".

And I'd prefer a mechanized window, myself.

<comment><USER33> It's art

<comment><USER32> Then why bother with Peltier?

<comment><USER33> It's part of the art. Thats like asking why kinetic sculptures move. The whole generating energy from your own inner heat part is kind if part of it. It's not supposed to make enough current to charge your phone, it's art. You're way overthinking it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Actually, there's no such thing as "Vermont Maple". It's Sugar Maple or if you prefer the latin, Acer Saccharum.</comment>


'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' – Jimmy Carter on NSA - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/usa/carter-comment-nsa-snowden-261/ <comment><USER2> The former POTUS's quote "America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time" was covered in few U.S. outlets, and initially reported in the German paper Der Spiegel in the German language.

Perhaps the most visible outlet to include the quote was The Huffington Post, but they can't be bothered to do their own translation. So they cover it via a link to The Inquisitr, which can't bring itself to validate the source, questioning the accuracy of the German newspaper Der Spiegel (which it calls "Die Spiegel").

Note: Carter made this statement in Atlanta, Georgia, not Germany.

Maybe Carter should have also said "America does not have a functioning news media at this point in time."

<comment><USER3> "Few" is and understatement. Searching on Google News for "no functioning democracy" yields only two recognizable US outlets: Huffington Post and The Atlantic Wire.

<comment><USER4> [https://news.google.com/news?ned=us&q=America%20has%20no%20f...](https://news.google.com/news?ned=us&q=America%20has%20no%20functioning%20democracy&btnG=Search+News)

Sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always liked this quote from Carter on his legacy:

"We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union."

<comment><USER6> With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, and he is a good man at heart, but he appears naive as to what is the true core of the USA. The USA has always been a country of military power. Without military power, the USA would not be what it is today. Even during peace time with the Soviet and others, the underlying military power of the US serves as an important factor to maintain that peace.

<comment><USER7> The military-industrial complex was basically created from scratch in WWII (The U.S's industrial contribution to WWI was a joke). This was never de- mobilized because the Cold War began immediately after, and Europe was in no position to defend itself.

<comment><USER8> > _The military-industrial complex was basically created from scratch in WWII > (The U.S 's industrial contribution to WWI was a joke). This was never de- > mobilized because the Cold War began immediately after, and Europe was in no > position to defend itself._

Actually it was never de-mobilized because the US needed it to play the role of a world hegemonic power -- to control other places with diplomatic and military might, grab resources and such. It was its opportunity to step on to that role, since WWII had destroyed the European colonian empires.

As for Europe, defend itself from what? With the exception of right wing nuts in power, Europeans didn't feel threatened by the USSR. The people of (non Eastern) Europe, were half and half in favor of communism (huge following in Italy, France, Greece, etc. In Western Germany there were lots of sympathizers too, but the communist party was crashed by Hitler (and then the country was divided post war). That would also be the case in Spain and Portugal, if it wasn't for the dictatorships.

<comment><USER9> _> Europeans didn't feel threatened by the USSR._

 _Some_ Europeans certainly didn't, but _many_ of them, in fact, _did_ feel threatened by the USSR: the ruling classes.

Also, opinions on the USSR were quite divided even on the left, with (Moscow- sponsored) hardcore Communist parties being on very different terms with it than traditional Socialist movements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But it totally had a functioning democracy when the President had a team of henchmen breaking into the offices of his political opponents, during an era where the Joint Chiefs had a plan to depose the President if he was unwilling to abide by impeachment.

Certainly, democracy must have flourished during the time where the administration waged an undeclared war in Central America that sponsored death squads and brokered arms deals with the Iranians, in part as an effort to undermine the campaign of the preceding incumbent President.

And democracy was no doubt stronger during the era of the Vietnam Draft.

And it absolutely had a functioning democracy during a time when the House had a committee on "Un-American Activities" that subpoena'd citizens and had them testify under penalty of perjury --- a penalty that actually imprisoned Americans --- for merely sympathizing with the aims of Communism.

And surely we had a functioning democracy during the times where voting was controlled by literacy tests --- "Question 13: Spell Backwards, Forwards" and dogs and firehoses greeted people who dared challenge enforced, legal segregation.

The idea that it's never been worse in American, because some government agency might be reading your Facebook posts, is lunacy; an insult to people who actually stood up to real malignant government power. It's an easy mistake to make: it's the availability heuristic. You understand the implications of worldwide Internet surveillance, but barely remember (if you even knew about in the first place) HUAC.

I don't know what Carter's excuse is, though; he surely knows about Watergate, Iran-Contra, HUAC, Tuskegee, COINTELPRO, and the Hoover FBI. Carter is just being a coot.

<comment><USER11> _But it totally had a functioning democracy when the President had a team of henchmen breaking into the offices of his political opponents, during an era where the Joint Chiefs had a plan to depose the President if he was unwilling to abide by impeachment._

That president was forced to resign after public, televised House hearings showed the country what was going on.

 _Certainly, democracy must have flourished during the time where the administration waged an undeclared war in Central America that sponsored death squads and brokered arms deals with the Iranians, in part as an effort to undermine the campaign of the preceding incumbent President._

The public Iran contra hearings exposed what happened and sent Oliver North to jail.

 _And democracy was no doubt stronger during the era of the Vietnam Draft._

Nightly news programs showing the war and giving the count of US deaths led to protests that ended the war and the draft.

 _And it absolutely had a functioning democracy during a time when the House had a committee on "Un-American Activities" that subpoena'd citizens and had them testify under penalty of perjury --- a penalty that actually imprisoned Americans --- for merely sympathizing with the aims of Communism._

And those public hearings ultimately led to the downfall and disgrace of McCarthy.

 _And surely we had a functioning democracy during the times where voting was controlled by literacy tests --- "Question 13: Spell Backwards, Forwards" and dogs and firehoses greeted people who dared challenge enforced, legal segregation._

Would those tests have ever ended if they were not publicly known?

 _The idea that it 's never been worse in American, because some government agency might be reading your Facebook posts, is lunacy; an insult to people who actually stood up to real malignant government power. It's an easy mistake to make: it's the availability heuristic. You understand the implications of worldwide Internet surveillance, but barely remember (if you even knew about in the first place) HUAC._

You're purposefully trivializing what has been going on. All of the situations you described were ended by public knowledge of what was going on. In the current case not only is there no public knowledge, there is the threat of imprisonment for those who discuss what they know publicly.

 _I don 't know what Carter's excuse is, though; he surely knows about Watergate, Iran-Contra, HUAC, Tuskegee, COINTELPRO, and the Hoover FBI. Carter is just being a coot._

Carter has always listened to a different drummer. He's also been willing to speak for others. In this case he happens to be speaking out for us.

<comment><USER10> You're romanticizing. It's easy to talk about how public information solved these crises in hindsight, but in reality the US government did a far better job of concealing things from the public during the 20th century than it does now. As a concrete example: the entire Vietnam War was predicated on a lie that was only fully uncovered in 2005.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Carter is a nice guy. My dad really likes him. His political views are actually quite consistent with the prevailing attitudes among my liberal friends and a lot of what I read on HN. So it's extremely telling that America dislikes him. The right has an intense hatred for him, and the left is at best ashamed of him. It's also extremely telling that America, on both sides of the aisle, loves Reagan, quite the opposite of Carter, someone who espoused a militarily powerful America that wasn't afraid to get its hands dirty abroad.

Obama seems, to me, to be a democrat for "Reagan's America." Socially liberal, but as willing to blow up random people in the Middle East as anyone who has come before him. When Obama killed Bin Laden and ran with that during the 2008 campaign, I could distinctly perceive democrats thinking: "we found our Reagan." It's no surprise then, that Obama's approval ratings on his handling of the war on terror are still in the black, and are surprisingly good overall for someone whose entire presidency has been mired in a terrible economy.

That doesn't seem to me to be a democracy that isn't functioning. It seems to me to be giving people what they want.

<comment><USER13> I think you are missing the fact that's media and money telling most of the people what they should want. It's sad to say but too many don't people think for themselves... that's why public debates are necessary to help people build an opinion. I'm just glad that Snowden stepped forward and exposed this system of ruthless disinformation. I'm optimistic that now is the time where we have a chance to really make a noise about these problems that we see right now and get people to listen to more sides of the story and drive change.

<comment><USER12> I think that's a phat cop-out. The media can steer the public narrative, but it cannot create predispositions out of whole cloth. I think Americans, especially those raised in the shadow of the cold war, have a predisposition towards wanting a militarily aggressive government. And Carter argued against that, and was reviled for it and seen as weak. I think the media steered that narrative and maybe made Carter less popular than he would otherwise be, but I don't think they created that visceral reaction in people: that his actions showed weakness on the part of America and the gut aversion to showing weakness. I think that was always there and the media just took advantage of it.

<comment><USER13> Alright, I can't much argue against this as I'm not American and only have been living America for a year in 2005.

However, I do believe that it is hard to underestimate the power of the media and propaganda that has been and is going on, not only in the US but almost anywhere in the world. Of course there is some predisposition towards power and everything that comes with it, but it's fueled, driven and used by the media and people who control it. And people can change quickly if they realize that this has gone to far.

Just look at Germany after WWII, it's now one of the least aggressive states there is and I can tell you from personal experience that there is no predisposition towards military aggressiveness whatsoever... And we (as I am German) are still the same kind of people who we have been during Nazi time, just differently educated or indoctrinated, whatever you want to call this.

Today, I believe we HAVE a chance to change. There is blatantly obvious mischief going on and they are struggling to hide it. We have a whistleblower with accurate information (it's funny/telling how not even the Gov is trying to dispute the facts - they are just redirecting the attention), services and platforms to distribute that information and I HAVE to believe that we can use these means to initiate this change. What would be the alternative? Keep on going? I don't want to know how that would turn out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Carter was the first Democratic President after the Church Commission, and his CIA director ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_Central_Intelligenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_Central_Intelligence#Stansfield_Turner_1977.E2.80.931981)) was infamous for his scorn of HUMIT and e.g. firing of 800 in operational positions in a "Halloween Massacre". I've read that today the CIA has 90% of its personal stationed in the US, and their loss of fieldcraft skills is infamous ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack)).

So you might say that his actions in the long term pushed us towards a dependence on what the NSA does, especially in a "War on Terror" where image reconnaissance is of limited utility.

<comment><USER15> Financial necessity pushed us towards what the NSA does -- it's an operational imperative to cut costs, and processing the world's communications definitely cuts costs quite a bit.

Maintaining listening posts and other intelligence infrastructure is a _massive_ economic and political undertaking, and the vacuuming of _everything_ reduces dependence of third-parties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Carter told the truth (probably due to his background as an engineer and an actual family-business size businessman). Many people didn't like that.

Carter wanted to do something about the energy crisis and peak oil. Reagan tore down the solar panels (it's symbolic, OK?). Now we have massive debt and an attempt at empire to capture remaining fossil fuel resources, as well as a blossoming police state to wrap a bow around the package.

</comment><comment><USER17> Fun fact: if you start typing "Edward Sn..." into Google News, it will not auto-complete it. I don't know if there is an innocuous explanation, but it is consistent with a media that is trying to downplay stories like this.

<comment><USER18> I get "Edward Snowden" as the first suggestion after typing as little as "edw".

edit: I'm in the US; My browsers aren't configured to use google for address bar/search box searching. I may have explicitly searched for Snowden via Google at some point, but I don't really use Google for search anymore, so that feels unlikely.

Searching directly from www.google.com, I get the suggestion at "edw".

Though searching from news.google.com, I don't get an auto-suggestion, even if I type out "Edward Snowden" in its entirety.

Amusingly, at "ns" I get "NSA warrantless surveillance controversy" as the first suggestion.

<comment><USER19> Google News search box, or browser search bar? I am finding that the former is behaving like the parent comment said, the latter like you say.

<comment><USER20> I get the correct behaviour in both the search bar and the omnibar (edward snowden girlfriend being the second result).. I should not that I am in Canada but I've tried both google.com and google.ca (although I am logged in at the moment so they know where I'm from regardless)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if Jimmy Carter realized it would come to this when he signed the FISA into law back in 1978.

<comment><USER22> Probably a good candidate for a debate on whether the slippery slope is real or imagined.

<comment><USER23> If you think that FISA in 1978 started a slippery slope to the recent surveillance abuses, you don't understand what FISA did and what the state of affairs with regard to surveillance was _before_ FISA.

<comment><USER22> Long story short: FISA made legal foreign intelligence surveillance on US soil and made domestic warrantless wiretaps illegal. Some people would argue the US Constitution's fourth amendment applies to all men and women, even those that are the subject of foreign intelligence surveillance. Once that was made legal, the definition of 'foreignness' has expanded to effectively include domestic warrantless wiretaps.

<comment><USER23> > FISA made legal foreign intelligence surveillance on US soil

No, it didn't.

Warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance was already legal on US soil; at least, that was the conclusion of the two federal appeals courts which ruled on the issue. And, were it an issue where the Fourth Amendment required a warrant, it would take a Constitutional amendment, not a statute, to change it.

> Some people would argue the US Constitution's fourth amendment applies to > all men and women, even those that are the subject of foreign intelligence > surveillance.

Some people _did_ argue that in the US federal courts before FISA, and they lost, at least insofar as those courts found that however the Fourth Amendment might apply to them, it didn't require warrants for that kind of surveillance. (Note that the Fourth Amendment doesn't require warrants for all searches and seizures, it requires them to be reasonable, and sets a standard for warrants when they are issued; it has been held by the courts that warrants are generally required for reasonableness, but that there are a wide array of circumstances for which reasonableness does not include a warrant requirement.)

<comment><USER22> I am getting my info from here and it is at odds with what you are saying. What are the federal appeals courts rulings on it?

(407 U.S. at 321-22). "We have not addressed, and express no opinion as to, the issues which may be involved with respect to activities of foreign powers or their agents." [1]

[1] [http://blogs.georgetown.edu/?id=12001](http://blogs.georgetown.edu/?id=12001)

<comment><USER23> > I am getting my info from here and it is at odds with what you are saying. > What are the federal appeals courts rulings on it?

 _United States v. Clay_ , 430 F.2nd 165 (5th Cir., 1970), this was reversed on other grounds, but is important because the relevant part of the holding was the basis for the holding regarding foreign intelligence surveillance in the following case, referring to warrantless wiretaps authorized by the Attorney-General on behalf of the President: "No one would seriously doubt in this time of serious international insecurity and peril that there is an imperative necessity for obtaining foreign intelligence information, and we do not believe such gathering is forbidden by the Constitution or by statutory provision"

 _United States v. Brown_ , 484 F.2d. 418 (5th Cir., 1973).

 _United States v. Butenko_ , 494 F.2d 593 (3rd Cir., 1974) explicitly found that the Fourth Amendment did apply, but warrants were not required for reasonableness of foreign intelligence surveillance, as: "Certainly occasions arise when officers, acting under the President's authority, are seeking foreign intelligence information, where exigent circumstances would excuse a warrant. To demand that such officers be so sensitive to the nuances of complex situations that they must interrupt their activites and rush to the nearest available magistrate to seek a warrant would seriously fetter the Executive in the performance of his foreign affairs duties."

<comment><USER22> Thank you kindly, that clears it up. I think then the Supreme Court could define 'reasonableness' in a different manner than currently interpreted, but then I don't know much about how that would come about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Quick! Throw Jimmy Carter in jail! He's a terrorist sympathiser!

<comment><USER7> I often see quotes by Peter T. King in these articles saying things like that, or like - "no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror,", or "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists .... This is an enemy living amongst us."

It's interesting to note that he was an actual terrorist financier:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_I...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_IRA)

<comment><USER25> An hard left ones as well :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Carter ran on a platform of "honesty" and was apparently the only president in American history to actually mean it. See where it got him..."

[http://www.rotten.com/library/history/political- scandal/wate...](http://www.rotten.com/library/history/political- scandal/watergate/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Jimmy Carter just gets more and more awesome.

<comment><USER15> He's the reason we're in the Middle East.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is the stance you must take if you believe Snowden was in the right.

You must believe there is no recourse from within the system for which to correct it if you believe that acting outside of the system is a valid strategy.

I applaud Jimmy Carter for being consistent, at least.

<comment><USER19> I think, as a general principle, this is dead wrong. One could think an injustice so egregious that righting it needs to be pursued both within _and_ outside the system, for instance.

<comment><USER28> You can't believe in a system of government and also act outside of it.

The system is utterly worthless if you don't believe it can correct egregious errors. It's the mundane errors (parking tickets, etc.) which aren't so important, not the other way around.

<comment><USER23> > You can't believe in a system of government and also act outside of it.

People do, so obviously you can.

You may believe you _shouldn 't_, but you haven't really presented a coherent argument as to why that is the case.

<comment><USER28> Belief is the acceptance of a statement (or system) as being either real or true. In this usage, we'll consider "belief in a government" to cover the following, "The acceptance that a system of government is an effective means by which to manage a group of people living together."

So to believe in a system of government, you must therefore accept that this system of government is the most effective way by which to manage a group of people. If you believe this, then you necessarily must believe that to break the rules of this system of government is to introduce a less effective means by which to govern a group of people. It's simply the inverse of the belief.

If you believe the US government is an effective method of governing a body of people, then you must believe that to move outside of the system is to be less effective at governing a body of people. In its strictest sense, this means that you believe in every law and every process by which these laws came into being. In a more realistic sense, you understand that a body of people will want different things amongst different internal groups, and a government's job is to balance those wants and needs against one another.

Edward Snowden broke the rules of the system of government. If you believe the US government is effective, then (because of the argument outlined above) you believe he has introduced inefficiency, and is making the governing of the people of the US more difficult.

So when you say "people do [believe in a system of government and also act outside of it ]" you are incorrect. The act of moving outside of the system demonstrates, as outlined above, a lack of belief in the system of government which is being acted outside of.

Anyone who breaks laws as a means of enacting change does not believe in the incarnation of the system of government for which they're attempting to change. Martin Luthor King Jr. Oskar Schindler. Timothy Mcveigh. Osama bin Laden. Every one of them attempted to enact change by working outside of the system in which they were attempting to change.

It should be an indication to you that you find such an idea to be negative in the first place when Snowden is brought up. Why exactly do you think it's so negative that I say he doesn't believe in the US system of government? Perhaps because what he's specifically done in terms of actual policy change could have been accomplished without breaking any laws?

<comment><USER23> I think the fundamental problem with your analysis is that it treats "belief" as a binary rather than continuous valued attribute, which is inappropriate even for fairly simple claims where belief can be less than absolute, and it is certainly horrendously inappropriate for complex claims like "that a system of government is an effective means by which to manage a group of people living together."

A secondary problem is that you conflate belief that a system is "an effective means" (your first paragraph) with the belief that it is "the most effective means" (your second paragraph). These are obviously _very_ different beliefs.

> It should be an indication to you that you find such an idea to be negative > in the first place when Snowden is brought up. Why exactly do you think it's > so negative that I say he doesn't believe in the US system of government?

I never said I found it to be negative. Saying that I think the logic of your argument is _invalid_ is not saying I believe the statement it was offered to support is _negative_.

<comment><USER19> This is much of my objection, better expressed than I was able yesterday. Thank you.

A part of it that this comment misses, though, is that there's a difference between "system as described by the text of laws" and "system as it is run on actual humans." It is entirely possible that the optimum system as run on actual humans is produced by a set of laws that doesn't match it exactly. One can still "believe in" that system of laws, in that one believes that it is the system of laws that should be implemented because it produces optimal results, while still understanding that actual human behavior will differ sometimes and that that won't always be a bad thing.

<comment><USER28> There is no difference between what the laws say and do, and what they should say and do. Should (ought)/is happens to be a huge philosophical delineation.[1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem)

<comment><USER19> You have to have misworded something here.

Edited to add:

On reflection, I think you may be confusing morality and legality. It is true that you cannot derive morality without some starting point. However, once you have picked what you value, it does _not_ follow that legality should match it precisely. Legality should be such that it optimally produces the most moral (and best by any other criteria, ideally) outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He should run for President or something.

<comment><USER29> He'll be 91 years old in 2016..

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I might've been serious if I thought he could survive the campaign...

<comment><USER30> I'd like to see him jump into it just to get the TV time. Zero real campaigning, no intention of trying to win (have to raise a billion dollars to do that). He should just declare, do the minimum necessary to stay in it as long as possible, run on a civil liberties platform, and leverage the publicity of it all to push a message against what's going on.

<comment><USER19> That would be pretty amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Who cares? Life in America is great at the moment. It was great yesterday and it'll be great tomorrow. Carter is living a nice comfortable life. So can you.

How is life outside America? It's either the same or not as good. Count your blessings. Americans have it good. Land of milk and honey. Take a deep breath and breathe that glorious American air. Freedom! Love it, live it!

</comment><comment><USER32> I love Jimmy Carter

</comment><comment><USER4> Makes the "USS Jimmy Carter" a rather ironic name for the submarine, given its mission.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29)

</comment><comment><USER33> [http://electoralmap.net/PastElections/past_elections.php?yea...](http://electoralmap.net/PastElections/past_elections.php?year=1980)

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't trust this Castro brother's friend.</comment>


Swept under the rug: the hidden sexism in CS departments - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogher.com/swept-under-rug-hidden-sexism-cs-departments

<comment><USER2> GirlInCS: the guy who tried to retaliate against the offense he took should indeed get some strongly worded advice from someone in authority over him: he needs to deal people he doesn't like with more decorum (talking trash to his peers is just making people uncomfortable and making him look bad), and further, he should contemplate the understandable girls-in-CS tensions he probably wants to avoid aggravating in order to be liked in the community.

Ultimately it's really up to him if he wants to like you and to be fair to women in CS. You're probably right that he has a "bossy-"woman chip on his shoulder. But it doesn't seem proportional to address this as "what should I do as a leader of a WICS organization" (as you allude to with the case of Adria Richards, that's unproductive business). I know it's uncomfortable, but what I'd like to see happen is: when someone is insulted in front of a group of people, the offender is reprimanded appropriately _in front of those people_.

Let's assume that you face more bristling than a man would when you directly exercise authority (safe bet). Let's even say that it's even worse in CS than society in general (I think the contrary, actually). Then it would be great to tell the guy that while it's understandable that he felt disrespected (be charitable!) that when you hear stuff like this, and you hear it more often than a man would in the same situation, the effect is worse than he realizes, that you don't want gender to be an issue, etc. etc.

I don't think the use of the word "bitch" should make much of a difference, although I know it triggers associations of other sexism. It's just too commonplace to read any specific intent other than "I don't like this person".

I don't think the authority figure you escalated to is anything other than a selfish conflict-avoider, like we all are sometimes.</comment>


Developers are not always rich people - <AUTHOR> I really struggled through university, and have been lucky to find employment. But with debts of over $50k and living in a UK city to be close to work is slowly bankrupting me. I am loosing. I am loosing my health, and slowly my will to live. I am now sitting outside a cafe using my phone on free WiFi as I have had my telephone lines disconnected and am building up rent arrears.<p>I wonder how many people are in this situation? And how it makes you feel? Where can I turn to get help?? <comment><USER3> You do whatever it takes to survive. I still remember making $20 last the entire month for food for two early in my career. I remember being rendered destitute. Twice. I remember having the tax man on my ass for a ton of money I didn't have after a particularly catastrophic failure. I've lived in 2 square meters of space while looking for a job. During that time, I wrote [https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi](https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi) to keep myself sane. I've begged family members for a plane ticket just to get me the hell out of a bad situation. Now, 20 years into my career, I _finally_ have some stability. Part of that is my fault, since I'm entrepreneurial at heart, and I'm too stubborn to lie down and die.

When you're not born rich, you have a big challenge ahead of you. You fight, or you die.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please, get in touch with family and/or a mental health professional. It's touch to tell from this brief post, but I wonder if you might be suffering from depression or another illness. This could easily lead to difficulty with getting work done, as well as having the confidence to endure the emotional roller coaster that job-hunting often entails.

More to your question: I'm not sure if you're currently employed or not. Either way, it looks like you need to find a new job, so that's what I'm focusing on.

Almost all of my job prospects have been from people I already know. In fact, my next job (starts in two weeks) came out of a chance encounter at a conference (I happened to sit at the right table for lunch). If you're job- hunting, you should be going to at least one meetup or other tech event per week—ideally more. Also, keep networking even when you're not actively looking—you never know when that might pay off (or you might be able to benefit them) in the future.

Think of anyone that you know that might have a lead—former professors, friends, people you know from church or other social organizations, etc.—and see if you can meet them over coffee. Applying for a job with an inside connection is much more effective than applying blind.

I've been where you are—I had an unconventional resume, and the wrong bullet points on my resume (tons of Java experience in an area where most of the big enterprises are on .NET). It sucks. The feeling of repeated rejection is soul- crushing. The amount of perseverance needed is staggering. But, I can say with a high amount of certainty that you can get through this. Don't be afraid to ask for help—no one should have to go through this alone.

</comment><comment> L-boog I'm a developer. I live in my car. I have a job but I don't make much. On the weekends I escape to libraries and try to find shaded areas before and after hours in parks. This past weekend was especially miserable because it was a 3 day weekend with nothing open. I spent a lot of hours just sitting in my car doing nothing. I find refuge at night at Walmart lots. It's not a good life but I'm managing. It keeps me hungry. I'm pushing myself harder than ever to learn and hopefully get a better job. Keep your head up, and remember this is only a temporary situation, it will pass.

<comment><USER5> for real? oh my...i am curious, what kind of developer and where? Maybe i can refer you to someone..

<comment> L-boog I'm a front end developer, but I've been stretching my legs in the backend lately. I'm in the southeast US. I'd rather stay anonymous and not have this situation tied to me. Nobody knows I live like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first job as a programmer in 2011, the boss was paying me US$10 an hour to code in Visual Basic 6. He gave me a $2 raise ($12) after 6 months of proving that I was a good coder. A year later, I ended up having to get a new job because I had debt that I had to pay off and didn't want to take 10 years to do it. Eventually got a job working a web developer for $16-$18/hr.

The advice I have: If you have a college degree or at least 5 years experience in programming, know that you more valuable than you think you are. Also: The reality is, you are replaceable. Keep moving on til you are loving what you do and doing what you love .. and getting paid to do it.

<comment><USER7> it baffles me how devs can work for those rates...

no wonder I still see Ads for C++ contracts in Melbourne for $50/hr for a mid- senior level job... clearly there are people who work at those rates...

the biggest thing holding dev salaries back is cause many devs love what they do..

<comment><USER8> I guess it depends where you're living, and what opportunities you are aware of - or are available to you - and what your next best alternative is.

If you really need the money and don't have another option then working for a very modest quantity of money sure seems like a much better deal than working for none at all.

<comment><USER9> Also the unawareness happens in the other direction too.

I know a bunch of freelancers who get paid a ridiculous amount of money for simple web-dev stuff, just because the companies they work for don't know anything about this and are simply happy to have found a dev.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Move out of London. You don't need to be "close to work" a lot of people commute in every day. And, yes, train tickets are insanely expensive but I bet it is still a saving all things taken into account.

$50k is do-able even in South England, I mean you won't be a movie star, but you'll get by on rent and so on until your salary increases. It is only London where that won't cut it.

<comment><USER11> This. London is a shit-show, filled with people that don't want to talk to you, and without wanting to mention the old rat-race cliché, that's precisely what it is; selfish, greedy, and unhealthy.

I lived in London for five years and it was the most miserable five years of my life, rent was £1,000 a month for a shared house in Camden, and with bills on top the majority of my salary was eaten up by living. I moved from London to Liverpool, my salary actually increased, and my rent halved for my own apartment. Now I have savings, my office is walking distance (8 minutes, to be precise), and the city is friendlier, safer, and being smaller it is made much easier for seeing friends and getting out more.

What London doesn't want you to know is that there's a whole country outside of it, with much better living conditions.

If moving is not an option, you can look at reducing and removing your debt using a charity, they arrange monthly payments straight out of your salary so that you're not building arrears, Martin Lewis normally has good advice on this sort of stuff: [http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/debt-help- plan](http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/debt-help-plan) – the same website will also help you lower your outgoings.

Most importantly, $50k is not a lifetime of struggling, and you should look at getting a payment plan sorted before it becomes usurious. I've seen debt do horrible things to people and families, it's better to fix the roof whilst the sun is shining. Talk to someone.

<comment><USER12> I was about to comment explaining how this isn't everyone's experience, and how I love London, but realised this isn't the thread to do that.

Yes, if you want to save money then don't live in London. I'm currently commuting 1.5 hours and walking some of the journey to shave off as much money as I can from my commute expenses. Trains still aren't cheap and travelling is exhausting but it saves me money. In my experience London salaries are higher on average (£2-4k) but not necessarily.

Maybe try freelancing in the evenings to scrape together more money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You are a skilled university graduate! Keep your hopes high, and don't let your struggles overwhelm you. Whether or not you decide to continue working in software, or choose another path, you will be able to find happiness somehow, believe in that! Perhaps you should find a part time job to supplement your income, or look for a new developing job. Don't give up!

</comment><comment><USER14> Just $50k? I have $200k of debt :( . Thankfully software engineering has been a good profession to me, but it has forced me to be ruthless about salary negotiations and focusing on my career.

Honestly, you could be in a much worse position - I was homeless out of grad school with no prospect of netting a job...for 2 1/2 years. I spent one week eating nothing but oatmeal due to lack of money.

Focus on saving your money and using it judiciously - don't pay your debts until you can safely manage it. Accruing them in the long term is better than making irresponsible payments.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hear that long commutes are a mostly American. I can't truly attest to that, but I'm in the 30+ minutes boat. I would love to move closer, but good housing near my office is prohibitively expensive, and cheap housing is, well - <USER2> definitely get what you (don't) pay for.

I've done the math, and the savings are worth it for me. Instead of idling in traffic like most commuters, I make the sleep sacrifice and show up about 15 minutes early. According to my car's built-in fuel economy monitor, I get about 16-18 MPG on a typical rush hour commute and 26-30 MPG if I'm early. That's huge.

In addition to your commute, see where else you can cut costs. Americans spends nearly $8 daily on lunch. Bringing your own $3 lunch would save you about $100 monthly. You can also look into budget friendly foods that would put you at $1.50 per meal which would increase those savings to $130 per month.

I don't know your overall financial situation, but consider creating a list of all of your monthly expenses. Before you even begin budgeting, start striking out items that are more luxury than necessity. Cut cable in favor of Netflix only. Hell, go rogue and stream everything. Drop your expensive phone plan for something simple. Consider cutting data out of your phone plan altogether. I don't know how connected London is, but I'm almost always in range of an access point.

If all else fails, look to family for some funds. Hope that helped.

</comment><comment><USER16> Move out of London.. There are plenty of other developer roles around the UK which pay a little less but the living costs are much less.

I live in Wales, and my mortgage is £320 a month, taking my bills into account that is roughly around £800/£900 a month.

</comment><comment><USER17> It gets better. I ate rice/pinto beans for 80% of my meals the first year out of college(I graduated in 2010, not a good time even in the Bay Area, Ca), I defaulted on some bills, my first job sucked and paid like crap and wasn't even an actual dev position.

But it eventually worked itself out. 5 years later, I have solid roof over my head, a good job, a wonderful wife and a great life. I think the most important thing for me to realize is that _those things_ , being the stuff that eats us up inside, like bills, money and jobs, are really a small part of life, and you can never let them rule your life.

Whatever you do, don't sell yourself short. Always be looking and open for any opportunities that present themselves to you. Be on your own advocate and make choices that are best for you, not your employer, parents or anything else. In the end, the only truly required attribute, in my humble opinion, that is required to be successful as a software developer(and many other things), is persistence. Persistence to learn the basics, persistence to hone your skills and persistence to look and keep looking until you find a job that fits your needs.

</comment><comment><USER18> As one person told me: "Rich are not who earn a lot, but those who spends wisely". I'm from Lithuania, and I see people migrating to UK for a better living. They mainly do the "dirty work" \- wash dishes, load trucks, but they manage to save money. I already earn more than average lithuanian, even though I haven't event finished University yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> There are no easy answers. First things first, you are better off than most: you have a degree in a good field, a job and live in the UK.

Many of us don't choose to have a landline. Pre-paid mobiles can be an excellent deal in the UK.

Nobody gets rich by spending more than they earn. I am guessing you are being paid reasonably well. More than a recent immigrant, etc. So as painful as it might be, you need to adjust your costs (rent is probably one of the biggest ones) so that you are spending less. As many other HN readers have pointed out, you could move to somewhere with more affordable rents, either commute or find a job closer to home. Do you spend money on eating out? new toys? a car you hardly use? They are all discretionary spends that you could cut back on.

If you are really suffering from burn-out, depression, some illness, then get that attended to urgently.

<comment><USER20> You're really making a lot of wild guesses here ("paid reasonably well", "toys", "car"). The OP might read this kind of answer as somewhat patronizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Look what skill sets are needed by high paying jobs then try to get those skills. There are lot of courses online. You can also do part time freelancing. There are lot of developers they charge $100+ per hour. Giving up is not an option. Only you can do it for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER22> Get out of London ASAP. £32k a year is a respectable wage and you'll find it goes a long way once you move further north (I'm on a very similar wage and live in Leeds)

First thing is you need that roof over your head, if possible clear those arrears as a priority - moving will become more difficult if you leave with debt as no agency or landlord will touch you and it will damage your credit rating for years.

</comment><comment><USER23> Please never loose the will to live!!! Think about how many people, doesnt even get access to clean water. You're fine.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hopefully, if you have favourable laws you should think about some consumer proposal or bankruptcy. You should quickly get out of feeding the interest on your debts. Just think about it.</comment>