Why kernel development still uses email - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/702177/e2712c9c41c0c683/ <comment><USER2> Email is an amazing tool. I don't understand the rush to get rid of it.

It is a free standard with many implementations on both the client and server. It is exceptionally easy to manage email. Many servers have great systems for categorizing emails and storing them long-term. Email is fast. Everyone has one.

There is this weird myth that Email magically kills productivity while Slack and GitHub don't. I never understood this - slack and GitHub have a lot more distraction with their social media components.

I see the day coming soon when in order to work with other people I'll need to find and install one of the x tens of IM clients. The day when I can't find anything because it is in a million places and its real hard to search 10 years of conversation when messages don't have basic metadata like a subject. :(

<comment><USER3> > I'll need to find and install one of the x tens of IM clients.

Only one? :)

It got so bad at my company, that at one time we were having conversations on 3 platforms. And, of course, no one emails anything! Because it's all done on Slack or whatever now. So everyone is 100% out of the loop at all times.

I'm up to about 20 Slack channels. I'm constant switching between things to see if I need the information. We have Github integration (and 10 other things) into everything, so it's a constant stream of garbage. And stupid gif animation integration. God forbid you take time off work. Good luck catching up on all that mess.

People like to shit on IRC today. But at least I got to choose the client I wanted, and log to an actual file that I could actually grep on. And timestamp on. And _organize_. And block all the stupid nonsense. First thing on the cutting block would be ignore all Github.

<comment><USER4> It harkens to a yesteryear of decentralised everything and a spirit that wanted to keep it as such: an island for every man...

Now it's more of a huge resort super island filled with lots of other people where everyone perpetually rents everything.

Too cynical?

<comment><USER5> > Too cynical?

No, too romantic. E-mail was never good enough to be decentralized, much less at the "every man" level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's worth adding, in the age of git sending patches by email is easier then ever - it definitely shows that git was developed by Linus with the kernel's development in mind. There is literally a `git format-patch` command which spits out a full formatted email (or emails) of your various commits, which can then be sent to a mail client to be edited and sent out. Or even easier, just use git to send the patches as email direct via `git send- email`.

The harder part is touched on in the article - email clients and email servers. All the patches sent to the mailing-list are plain text, and lots of clients or servers either mess with the plain text before sending or after receiving. And with that they also take some configuring to avoid sending attachments as base64 - which will be rejected by the kernel. Gmail thankfully doesn't mess anything up on the sever side, but the web client wraps your email to 80 characters per line making it unusable. Because of the above issues, using a separate mail client is essentially required, and setting them up can be annoying and there aren't really tons of them to choose from. I personally use `mutt`, but I can definitely understand why some wouldn't want to bother.

<comment><USER7> Outlook loves messing with messages. "Detecting and removing" extra line breaks is one of its features

<comment><USER8> Outlook it probably the worst email client currently on the market and has been for the all of it's existence.

It is my belief of the issue at lot of people have with email stems from Outlook. One example is the weird instance of top posting has made it hard to read many conversations and fostered a mentality of firing of quick response, reducing Outlook/email to a poor mans IM client.

There's a ton of improvements that could be made to Outlook to make it better.

<comment><USER9> Nope, Lotus Notes takes that prize.

<comment><USER8> I forgot about Notes. Yes, Notes is worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article totally missed the mark on Gerrit. I think the heavy user is now OpenStack and not Android...

The article claims that Gerrit is just a small part, but if used fully it really isn't. It can be used to track the entire patch lifecycle. Which LKML doens't do via email.. because it isn't very good at it... it uses 'patchwork'.

OpenStack uses Gerrit to manage 537 git repositories. In the last year, 86,027 changesets were merged in the last year out of 111,292 commits. [0]

The real values are the smart searching capability (with email subscription to that search),integration with CI, inline code reviews.. simple rebasing, acls and easy digestion who reviewed.

Once setup, the workflow is super simple:

      $ git commit
      $ git review
      $ # celebrate success

Further, why all the hate on project managers?

[0] [http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/](http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I find the idea that a technology should be replaced simply because it is old to be very irksome. Those developers out there blindly contributing to the trend of replacing "tried and true" with "new and shiny" really need to take a step back and gain some perspective.

Email works great for the vast, vast majority of users.

<comment><USER12> While I agree, the opposite is also an issue. Developers which either look down upon anything new as "pointless" or in some cases actively try to stop improvements.

Looking at the kernel dev system, it works great, but it has its share of problems. I've never even thought about contributing to the kernel because of the work involved to just submit a patch, that process can be improved.

Making it easier for newcomers, and updating some of the workflow to be more aligned with current tools could really help.

<comment><USER13> I think it's a deliberate barrier to entry: they're basically saying "if you can't be bothered to learn how to do it, we don't want your contributions."

Linus occasionally rants about some of the crap that gets in, and I have a feeling he certainly doesn't want more, which would happen if the barrier was lowered. Here's a somewhat recent example:

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html)

<comment><USER14> Probably you are right, though in the case you linked the barrier was clearly insufficient. And OTOH, I have seen many cases where actually sane one-time contributors had to spend unreasonable time changing trivial patches to match the guidelines.

      [RFC PATCH] cmdline: Hide "debug" from /proc/cmdline

      It has come to our attention that a system running a specific user
      space init program will not boot if you add "debug" to the kernel
      command line.

Lol. I sometimes get disgusted by the kind of crap people merge, but it's nice that at least this one got the ridicule it deserved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Some systems, like Outlook, will uniformly corrupt patches; as a result, companies doing kernel development tend to keep a Linux machine that they can use to send patches in a corner somewhere." Isn't a Linux desktop also convenient for the development itself?

<comment><USER16> I developed a series of patches for the RPi kernel fork. I use the Pi headless, and generally access it from a Windows machine.

I never tried to send those patches upstream - and the Pi fork uses Github for such things - but I'm entirely confident that if I tried to paste those patches into an email client somewhere along the line, I'd get an upstream maintainer pointing out that magical line breaks blew something up somewhere.

<comment><USER17> What I read is "I am entirely confident about what would happen if I tried to do something I've never tried to do", which is useless speculation.

<comment><USER15> What I read is that he develops kernel patches entirely on a Windows desktop, which is a relevant anecdote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I was at Google, gerrit was indeed used internally. Things may have changed in the last 18months, but moving off the old tool to Gerrit was such a huge project that I'd be surprised if they'd moved on to something else.

<comment><USER19> +1. AFAIK Gerrit is still being used for kernel-related projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So I get and agree with what he's saying about how GitHub duplicated email, but as a millennial who uses Vim, I find GitHub much more intuitive and useful than sending patches via email. In general, I disagree with the issues he has with GitHub - most of them are wishy washy disagreements that could easily be solved by adding things to GitHub or using a chrome extension.

IMO the only real, logical reason they need to keep using email is "Email works just as well as GitHub, and we've already been using email, so we might as well continue using it." Which is a good reason on it's own - there's no reason to try and come up with problems with GitHub. (Again, not saying GitHub is perfect, but I don't think the reasons he gave were particularly valid.)

<comment><USER21> I don't really feel that you being a millennial or using vim is relevant.

I have no idea how you would go about getting github to implement whatever functionality is desired and even so would come with the following disadvantages

\-- Requiring a chrome extension limiting people to using chrome + a singular website vs any email client under the sun

\-- wouldn't work offline

\-- Presumably it would be more challenging for sight impaired individuals to use a js heavy website vs their email. They stated they had existing contributors who were so impaired.

\-- Since people still presumably do a lot of discussion via email it would mean using at minimum github AND email some of which would refer back and forth to other discussions.

\-- Relying on github would require tying free software infrastructure to a single non free software tool. Recalling bitkeeper this didn't go well last time.

\-- Hosted github costs additional money.

\-- The primary and perhaps only benefit would be making it easier for people to come in off the street and drop patches with minimal effort but this would actually cost effort to manage and the kind of individual who can't or likely wont figure out how to use existing infrastructure may not be an optimal contributor in any case.

Basically your solution involves not only effort to create tools that don't exist, the cooperation of a third party, but the end result would almost certainly be objectively worse in a number of ways.

I feel like you didn't really address any of the things the actual expert on the matter said and just hand waved his entire argument away.

<comment><USER22> > Requiring a chrome extension limiting people to using chrome

And people who use extensions. Beyond ad blocker on some machines I don't use extensions on principle because of security concerns.

<comment><USER17> Catehorically not using extensions, regardless of their permissions system, sounds less like "security concerns" and more like "fear rooted in ignorance." Continuing to use some of them (ad blockers), regardless of said "security concerns", sounds like cognitive dissonance.

<comment><USER21> If any single extension author is compromised you may be yourself but ads are also a malware vector thus the position is consistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like to think that Linux kernel developers master most of the tools they use, especially maintainers who have power to accept patches.

From my own perspective and in different contexts, I can tell that email can be as efficient as it can be inefficient and that depends mostly on its users.

</comment><comment><USER24> The number of systems we have created to try and move collaboration off of email is hilariously large.

Between email and lisp, is there any other system that you can find in any sufficiently large system?

<comment><USER25> > Between email and lisp, is there any other system that you can find in any > sufficiently large system?

Make. How many systems try really really hard to just update the things that need to be changed in an output store from a different input store using a serial number? Nah, just use the date. That's almost like a serial number, isn't it? Except for those handful of things for which we couldn't be bothered to set up the dependencies correctly - those get updated every time. It won't be _that_ expensive to refresh just a handful every run...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Email is great and I can see why they continue to use it, but there is a danger of being blinkered. Saying that GitHub reinvented email because they have comment threads is... almost trolling. Especially when also saying email integrates well with patchwork (presumably written due to the inability of email to handle issue/PR tracking).

Both have strengths and weaknesses.

</comment><comment><USER27> One thing I've always wondered is why email based patch submission and review was never done via a newsgroup over NNTP.

One advantage a newsgroup has over an email list is that you don't have to set up filters in your email client, and that every message posted doesn't have to be specifically CC'd to a certain group of people. Also, it's much easier to browse past posts.

Currently this can be done via the gmane NNTP gateway for the kernel and git mailing lists, but I can't see a good reason why a newsgroup wouldn't be preferred over a mailing list.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is Gerrit really that terrible? I do agree that clicking through each file is a waste, but I love the ability to work on several different reviews and keep track of their different build statuses.

Also, where I use it we have different levels of requirements for different branches (more people usually need to approve reviews on soon-to-be-released point branches). We use it for a large project in MLOCs but relatively few developers (less than a hundred). I can't see it would work for 4000 devs at all, though.

<comment><USER29> Perhaps I don't understand the Gerrit workflow, but last time I read about Gerrit it looked like it had a philosophy of "one commit, one review".

That sounds like an anethema for the kernel, where they want to review a series of tidied up commits, one per email.

<comment><USER30> Gerrit does have "one commit, one review", but - that's not a bad thing. If a change is well written and structured, merging the first in the chain without the second+ is both harmless and is progress towards the end goal.

There's also patch chains in Gerrit, so you can see the X commits that make up the full change, and the second+ cannot be merged before the first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For continued decentralized operations something like [https://github.com/google/git-appraise](https://github.com/google/git- appraise) looks good. It's like Fossil-SCM's distributed tickets but for code review. It can also mirror to Gihtub and Phabricator and has a web interface too. Most importantly it doesn't break the decentralized aspect of git.

</comment><comment><USER32> > "On the other hand, GitHub does not scale to larger projects. He pointed at > the Kubernetes project"

It seems according to this, that Github is fine for a project until it scales to such a size as you need an alternative.

So even this is agreeing that small projects should start with Github.

It would be useful to know the lower bound of users/developers at which point you need to switch to a more flexible system like email.

<comment><USER33> s/should/could/

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> tl;dr: my wish is a code review convention for git-notes and a friendly UI on top.

If only Git would allow storing reviews and issues in the repo proper. Something like Git notes with conventions to refer to files/lines in a file/different revisions etc. Something similar to Fossil.

This would solve half of the problem. The other half would be the UI layer.

Now the reviews live in a database, outside of the repo, and can't be downloaded locally for offline work.

This would allow doing code reviews and managing issues e.g. while commuting in a train. And everything would be pretty fast compared to waiting for a web page to load for every file you want to review and connecting to a server for every comment you write.

<comment><USER35> Something like this [https://github.com/google/git- appraise](https://github.com/google/git-appraise) ?

<comment><USER34> Yes, something like that. I've seen it before and it sparked my interest.

Not sure about using json, though.

Now this project is just the first step, now it needs a code review tool (UI) on top that's good enough to match Gerrit, GitHub, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Email solves [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_prob...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_problem) AND [http://www.beej.us/guide/bgipc/output/html/singlepage/bgipc....](http://www.beej.us/guide/bgipc/output/html/singlepage/bgipc.html#fifopc)

</comment><comment><USER37> Amusingly, the article references Kubernetes and its growing pains a couple times, but fails to mention that it adopted Reviewable (on top of GitHub) for doing more complicated code reviews. I don't know if Reviewable would scale to kernel development -- and it certainly doesn't support offline work, etc. -- but at least Kubernetes seems to be doing all right with it.

(Disclosure: I'm the founder of Reviewable.)

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't have anything against e-mail but I don't get what's wrong with Gerrit either [1]. We used it on several projects and it was pretty transparent to the work flow.

[1]except for some Java gc issues that required the process to be restarted every now and then - pretty annoying though

</comment><comment><USER39> Simple: humans don't like change.

We say we do like it, but the truth is that we don't.

</comment><comment><USER40> For Github organizations, can't you forward notifications to a mailing list? Then everyone on the mailing list can see everyone's comments and respond through email but you still get to keep Github and all of its advantages.

<comment><USER41> Or people can just subscribe to a repo. Github provides pretty decent tools for filtering these via mail filters, too (sadly the on-site github notifications aren't as fine grained). GKHs assertion that you can't follow threads via email is false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Are there any good references online about how to switch from Github-based collaboration to one based on email and patches? I'd like to give it a try and see how it feels.

<comment><USER43> Put mailman/majordomo and cgit/gitweb on a server, and a little front page for the project if you like. Use spamassassin with mailman, restrict allowed mail mime types to plain text and patches. Maybe use one of those tools that pick patches up from your mbox. Quilt is a good patch manager. I'd use emacs org mode for issues and todos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> As always, it's worth pointing out that this is just about the Linux kernel. Different scale, different developer community, different code structure, different testing/CI methodology (i.e. practically none) than just about every other project out there. Email works for them - great. Other things work for other people - also great. Theirs is one interesting data point, but that's all it is.

<comment><USER45> >As always, it's worth pointing out that this is just about the Linux kernel. Different scale, different developer community, different code structure, different testing/CI methodology (i.e. practically none) than just about every other project out there.

Eh? Patches on mailing lists is the "traditional" way for open source projects to operate. Many projects "still" do things this way - indeed I wish more projects did, for the reasons outlined in this article!

<comment><USER44> You're trying to refute a much stronger claim than I actually made. I was pointing out these differences to explain why what's best for the Linux kernel _might_ not be best for another project. I wasn't saying email is bad, that it couldn't be the best for any other project, etc. The space of projects for which email is a good choice might be larger than just the Linux kernel, but it's much _much_ smaller than the whole space of open-source projects as well. Given this community's tendency to cargo-cult whatever the highest-profile projects do without thinking about how different circumstances might affect applicability, I thought it was worth highlighting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Because it ain't broken.)

</comment><comment><USER47> What to use instead? Blockchain?</comment>


Call for ethical debate surrounding use of "killer robots" - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8182003.stm

<comment><USER2> No one should consider themselves informed on the subject of "killer robots" without having read this:

[http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second- amendm...](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendment-in- iraq-combat-robotics-and-the-future-of-human-liberty-820)

<comment><USER3> "What this effort will do, if it is successful, is defang ... all populations, overthrowing the protective effect individual firearms ownership, destroying the intent and effectiveness of the Second Amendment, and unbalancing the Constitution permanently through evolving technology which end-runs around the original intent of the Framers."

Hasn't this already happened? Iraq very clearly demonstrates that a massive force will overrun you no matter how many arms your citizens possess. Citizens usually don't possess missiles, anti-tank weaponry, large-caliber arms, etc.

You don't need significantly advanced technology; you just need slightly better weapons, and slightly more of them.

The flipside, though, is that we could reinterpret software and hardware as arms; if robots are standing on the street corners, the ability to fight back electronically becomes the only option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and "proportionality", determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage."

That is true for autonomous robots, but we are currently not there yet. And if the choice is between the UAV overhead with cameras and sensors on the target firing guided missiles, or the UAV overhead with a camera and someone firing artillery at the target from a few miles away, the UAV is more accurate and less likely to cause collateral damage.

He also talks about how they are further distancing the soldiers from battle. Not really, if you are a normal pilot you drop the weapons on the target and get the hell out of there, and don't see really any of it except on film later because you are moving so fast. The UAV operators keep the UAV overhead and are watching before, during, and after the attack much more closely than pilots. It turns out it can be more emotionally damaging than manned flight. Especially because of the lack of danger for you, it triggers different emotions.

</comment><comment><USER5> The US better get out in front on this and engage in the debate and get something they can sign. Elsewise the result will be something impractical and both 'good' and 'bad' guys will get a pass.

Don't pretend everyone won't be able to afford this because robots will be cheap enough eventually for both sides to go this automated.

Engagement is the better option.

<comment><USER6> The lower the price of something the higher the volume.

Risking yourself while killing somebody else increases the price on your side. If that risk disappears the 'cost' gets so low that the volume might increase dramatically.

<comment><USER7> On the flip side, the cost of _caution_ also decreases.

Scenario: a person is approaching a checkpoint and does not obey verbal commands. No civilians are present near the checkpoint.

Human soldier: "Oh shit, shoot him, I don't want to get blown up!"

Robot soldier: "Direct extra scrutiny towards target. Do not allow him to approach civilians. Allow him to approach the checkpoint. I only cost $100,000, no reason to kill a human to save my metallic skin."

<comment><USER8> Wrong. The manufacturing cost of the robot may be a mere $100,000. But besides the argument that human lives are often valued at less than that, there's also the security argument: 'we can't allow our technology to be stolen and exploited by the enemy'. I can pretty much guarantee you that one will get trotted out. It's not very logical, but that has never mattered in war.

I mean, let's not be naive here. When the fighting in Iraq was intense a few years ago, the biggest threat to coalition (and especially US) soldiers was 'IEDs' - improvised explosive devices, which in turn was a fancy name for 'homemade mines'. Generally these were triggered by cellphone and there were many comments about how cowardly and evil this was (because it was happening to us). Imagine the reaction if these had been mobile devices - or more accurately, when they are. Because while there are many engineering challenges involved, there's nothing fundamentally difficult about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Professor Sharkey shows a great deal of social and political insight for someone whose academic specialization is in neither of those domains. Let's hope he continues to make these points heard.

</comment><comment><USER10> "While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred…"

That is profoundly disturbing. How can governments justify the continued use of drones with statistics like that? There needs to be an ethical debate, yes, and urgently.

<comment><USER11> It's not the drones, it's what they consider a fair exchange. Guerrilla wars are like that.

<comment><USER6> Ask the families of the 687 civilians if they thought it was a fair exchange...

It's the de-humanizing use of terms like 'fair exchange' and 'collateral damage' that make this kind of atrocities possible in the first place. If we just called it by its name (cold blooded murder by remote control) then it would be looked at quite a bit differently by the general public.

<comment><USER12> I think his point is that the only thing new here is drones. The numbers themselves are old and that is what we should be correctly outraged about. The exact type of weapon used is not relevant. (Except for things like white phosphorus, obviously.)

<comment><USER6> I think drones are a major game changer. They increase the distance between the humans on the receiving end and the humans on the 'giving' end to such an extent that there is now a major disconnect. Regular fighter jocks at least put their own lives on the line as well, drone pilots could literally do their jobs from the other side of the planet while eating donuts.

It doesn't matter much to a victim what weapon they get killed by, dead is dead. That doesn't mean we should not outlaw certain types of weapon (white phosphorous is an excellent sample for that, but drones would qualify as well imo).

My guess is the parties that 'have' the drones would never agree to give them up on the insistence of the 'have nots', it's too much of an advantage. War becomes a simple decision, none of those pesky losses to explain to the homefront. Only some energy and steel lost, there's plenty of that to go around before the homefront will realize there is a cost to war.

<comment><USER12> There is a difference between fighter pilots and drone pilots but not between drone pilots and who's ever job it is to push the launch button on any one of many missile types we'd had much, much longer then we've had drones. So war = bad, drones = red herring.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. Almost always, missiles are targeted against fixed military installations. Of course there are tactical missiles fired between aerial and ground targets, but again these are optimized for and usually deployed against hardened military targets like tanks or gunships.

The problem here is not one of drones firing at columns of tanks, but the fact that they are being deployed as anti-personnel devices targeted at guerrilla leaders. I am OK with targeting such people (and as it happens, I support the _idea_ of fighting and defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, but I'm very disappointed with the _implementation_ ). The kind of drones we use now are basically lightweight planes, and given the physics of fixed-wing flight, that means fly-bys and high-yield single-use weapons.

If your intel is good and you have found an isolated Taliban training camp, then OK. But if it's poor, you're throwing a lot of destructive power at the wrong target. Whereas a sniper team might employ a scope or long-range microphone and observe the presence of many women and children or singing and dancing (conclusion: might be a wedding party), a drone on flyby can identify the _existence_ of a target, but is poorly equipped to identify the _nature_ of the target...which is one reason we've blown up a lot of wedding parties in the last few years.

Realistically, we can get away with it to an extent because the US is a big powerful country that can throw its weight around (and is allied with other relatively big and powerful countries). But a 50:1 kill ratio for civilians:bad guys is piss-poor - even if you assume a degree of dishonesty and propaganda on the other side, a ratio of 25:1 or even 10:1 is still piss- poor and _exactly_ the sort of thing held up as an example of moral failure in history. By depending so heavily on tools which do not allow easy discrimination of military and civilian targets, we weaken our freedom to act effectively and early in other contexts.

I hope it's clear that my argument here is economic rather than political.

<comment><USER6> In fact the 50:1 ratio will probably create 2 new fighters for every one killed. Most people have families and don't like seeing their relatives blown up. Do not put people in a position where you've taken away their every reason to live for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla CEO threatens firing person responsible for anonymous hate speech Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9202067/mozilla-ceo-chris-beard-reddit-hate-speech <comment><USER2> This is from 2015.</comment>


A Critic Uses the DMCA to Avoid Criticism - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/takedowns/critic-uses-dmca-avoid-criticism <comment><USER2> A critic who can't accept criticism? That seems to be a more and more common occurrence nowadays, both with media critics and traditional journalism. Seems a lot of people in those fields can dish out far more than they can take themselves.

But abusing the DMCA for crap like this is definitely going way too far, even by those standards.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of this game company (Campo Santo) using DMCA against PewDiePie [1] because they were offended at something he said while playing an unrelated game. It's another weapon in online fights.

[1] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xxwyg/pewdiepie-...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xxwyg/pewdiepie- is-inexcusable-but-dmca-takedowns-are-not-the-way-to-fight-him)

<comment><USER4> That is an unfair characterization. They did what they did to protect their brand from a Streamer who is making money from other people's content via monetization and to which they wanted no association with.

Many corporations wouldn't allow monetization of their content by someone else so they were quite generous to generally allow it. But that comes at their sole discretion, as is their right.

If somone reads the article you linked, I think this is pretty clear.

<comment><USER5> But is their use of the DMCA valid? PewDiePie's usage of their content was most likely covered by fair use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The full EFF list of these is discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254412) .

</comment><comment><USER7> How many more decades of abuse do we have to endure before we realize the DMCA sucks?</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else have troubles with Facebook's app review process? - <AUTHOR> We've recently submitted an application that uses some basic Facebook APIs for business reviews and some other things and have, in each attempt, provided a user/pass for our system so they can review it. Each time they reject without seeing the accounts somehow.. I get the feeling they are blanket rejecting at the moment. <comment><USER2> I've got a blanket rejection for my page regarding instant articles. Apparently I violated the monetization agreement at some point (though I collected no money at all, and didn't even have ads); and when I go to the page to appeal it, it's so broken it doesn't let me even submit my page to the appeal process. There's no other way I have to contact them at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, strangely you cannot appeal if you haven't yet made it through at least once. At least thats how it appears. We're having the same problem. There is basically no recourse if there is a communication problem and you just need to contact someone to resolve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just submitted my app for review two days ago. Still no reaction. Any experience how long it takes till I get an approval/rejection?

<comment><AUTHOR> Turnaround for us has been about a week. Someone looks at the app.. somehow misses the test user we've provided.. and then immediately rejects us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The issue is they are having to re review every app</comment>


A Chrome extension to avoid the Stack Overflow ripoffs - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gledhololmniapejefjfocffkhoamlll# <comment><USER3> Sites like these are, in my opinion, the scourge of the internet. There is a lot of talk nowadays about curated search engines displacing machine-generated search engines but I tend to think this goes too far. A search engine that could reliably determine the authoritative source of duplicated content and only include that source would be killer. Seems within the realm of possible... Anyone working on that?

<comment><USER4> Look up information cascades.

We're doing something along a similar vein for LazyReadr. The idea is to merge news about the same story together, an important step from there will be deciding which is the authoritative source to display. Going from that to effective search isn't a large leap.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip. My search turned up this resource, which looks awesome:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986198>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How can we prevent these sites from ranking well in the first place?

<comment><USER6> Use <http://dukgo.com> instead of its less quality-motivated big brothers. If google, et al. see duckduckgo usage spikes, they will likely implement similar filtration measures. Then they will post blog updates about how awesome they are for adding said measures to their service. And I will read about it after searching with duckduckgo.

<comment><USER7> Sounds a bite like Opera vs the major browsers.

I use duckduckgo as the default search engine with Chrome, and it works really nice. The key to make switching easy: Preface your query with, like `!g my- query' or `"!bing my-query' to search on Google or Bing. Useful, because for me Google is still better on searching stuff in German.

Just using `! my-query' gives you I'm-feeling-lucky semantics.

Have a look at <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html> for an exhaustive list. !hn searches Hacker News via searchyc.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Often times, efreedom ranks higher than StackOverflow, and in some cases SO isn't even on the first page (for some reason the official source 'misses' with my search terms). In those cases, I open up the efreedom link and click through to SO. This seems to be happening more and more.

EDIT: I see that the extension actually redirects to SO. So in a way the presence of those sites when I wouldn't normally see SO results is a good thing. Nice.

<comment><USER9> >> In those cases, I open up the efreedom link and click through to SO. This seems to be happening more and more.

I completely understand why you're doing that, but you should know that's seen by the Goog as a big +1 for efreedom. All they know is you clicked on that result and didn't come back because it didn't answer your question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's sites like these that have made me wish I could downvote or mark-as-spam from the search results. Why can't I tell Google that I never want to see results from certain URLs ever again?

<comment><USER11> I would love to see this feature. Preferably as a way for search results to be "voted-down" by multiple users, with an aggregated score (this would probably be heavily gamed/spammed by black hat SEO people, and become useless anyway).

At the very least if I am logged into my gmail account, I should be able to hide certain site from being returned in my personal results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait, let me see if I understand this right. Stack Overflow doesn't use AdSense. Other sites scrape Stack Overflow and surround the ripped-off content with ads from AdSense. And you're wondering why Google ranks its customers' sites higher than its non-customers'?

<comment><USER13> A correction: these sites don't scrape Stack Overflow's content, they download and use it directly and legitimately. Stack Overflow content is cc-wiki licensed and released in full data dumps every month, as long as the sites link to stackoverflow.com and otherwise comply with the cc-wiki requirements it's legit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google Blacklist can be used to remove any arbitrary site: [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hbodbmhopadphblo...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hbodbmhopadphbloiimamkjmihekaejd)

</comment><comment><USER15> For a little more info on these sites: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/58369/did-anyone- not...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/58369/did-anyone-notice-that- tech-efreedom-com-seem-to-be-scraping-republishing-sos-po)

</comment><comment><USER16> THANK GOD. I was getting really pissed off while trying to meet a pretty hard deadline yet trying to lookup iOS esoterica.

</comment><comment><USER17> DuckDuckGo does filter some of these sorts of sites. Not sure about these in particular, but I did try searching for "NSFetchedResultsController" there and none of these sites were in the results.

<comment><USER18> Actually, I never thought I'd find one, but DuckDuckGo is a search engine that every programmer should use. In fact, I've found that DuckDuckGo can be better than Google in a lot of cases.

<comment><USER19> Google is not currently optimized for technical people - if anything, it's anti-optimized. It shouldn't be hard to beat it for technical queries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Judging by the permissions, it redirects for a whopping three sites. Why not just _not click on the links for those sites?_

<comment><AUTHOR> Because, for reasons known to the engineers toiling at Google, and not me, these sites will show in the search results, and the actual StackOverflow answer _will not be shown at all_.

<comment><USER21> yes, it's very very bizarre and it drives me crazy. We've tried 3 or 4 different things to fix it and nothing seems to take. Note that our attribution terms do require a link back primarily for this reason, and _even the sites who attribute back to us totally legally_ still have this problem. It truly does feel like a Google bug, honestly. See related discussion at [http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/5385/page- appe...](http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/5385/page-appears- indexed-in-google-but-not-findable-for-any-search-terms) . I'm all ears if anyone knows of a way to fix this.

<comment><USER22> Why not just yank the creative commons licence and replace with one that explicitly does not allow scraping?

That would be the fastest way in my book. I've never worked out why SO allows it in the first place. Is it just to appear open and web 2.0-y, or is there a business reason. It's a proper business now, users are loyal, cancel the licence. I can't think of a single person who would say 'oh, but I much preferred to read those spam sites'.

<comment><USER23> Yes, absolutely.

As someone who has contributed a fair amount of content to SO, I would wholeheartedly support modifying the CC license on the content I've contributed. I _much_ prefer the idea of that to the idea of allowing my answers to help build dens 'o spam like eFreedom.

Now that I think of it, my answers going straight-to-spam is a nontrivial detriment to my contributing content to SO.

<comment><USER22> Glad to see I'm not the only one.

But I really posted this comment in reply to say thanks for the blog posts on jquery/asp.net. They really got me going in the right direction - <USER2> stuff.

<comment><USER23> Thank you for the kind words. It's always great to hear that someone's been able to extrapolate a useful approach/direction out of my rambling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> @codinghorror - any update from your conversation with Matt_Cutts? I'm curious on this issue from a justice standpoint, as continuously seeing efreedom results in the Google rankings just doesn't sit well with me.

I looked around eFreedom's site a bit and they are providing some additional add-on value (translations etc.) so that may also be the case. In any case, best of luck in getting SO pages ranked better.

<comment><USER21> the auto-translations are specifically against Google's TOS, just FYI. Beyond that Matt is looking into some specific oddities we found and stuff was forwarded on to the Google search quality team. Not sure what will come of it, but Matt Cutts is awesome!

<comment><USER25> It looks like the robots.txt on those translation sub domains is disallowing all crawlers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really can't get over how a blatantly spammy website (Adsense plastered over pages) just reorganizing SO content can have such a huge traffic velocity - check this alexa chart: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/efreedom.com>

</comment><comment><USER27> Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to do this for any site you didn't want to see in the search results? Is it already possible with Google personalized?</comment>


Student "safety" has become a real threat to free speech on campus - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21654157-student-safety-has-become-real-threat-free-speech-campus-trigger-unhappy <comment><USER2> > Unfortunately for them, something called the American constitution strongly > protects free speech, whether divisive, upsetting or not.

I don't think this author understands the constitution. This _may_ apply on public campuses. However, it most certainly does not apply on private campuses.

Anyone is free to exercise their free speech, but that right does not protect them from being expelled, fired, or censored at a private university.

UI is a public university, but Northwestern is not.

Whether a private university _should_ behave this way is a different proposition. But there seems to be this trend of invoking the constitution like some holy shield against "whatever I disagree with".

<comment><USER3> > Anyone is free to exercise their free speech, but that right does not > protect them from being expelled, fired, or censored at a private > university.

I'm not trying to single you out here, but I see this type of comment all the time whenever free speech issues come up, and I can't help but see it as a middlebrow dismissal. Yes, we all agree that in the USA, the First Amendment only covers government suppression of speech. But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned.

Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers?

Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook?

They're not First Amendment issues, but they are free speech issues.

<comment><USER4> > But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where > the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited > social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned.

There are two things I'd like to ask, in this discussion.

The first is whether the social condemnation of "wrong speech" is the problem here, or the social standard of at-will employment for a living. There are a lot of people who have trouble getting good employment for various reasons beyond their control. To worry about those who are already employed, _especially_ when they make "wrong speech" about those who are not (e.g., an IAC executive talking about AIDS victims in Africa), seems to be misplaced priorities. If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living for _no_ mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with them.

The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. There's been a certain scientist in the news recently, who resigned from his job, but has kept his knighthood and Nobel Prize. This does not seem like _unlimited_ consequence and going into hiding and starting a new life. It certainly does not seem like a poor-taste joke made to 50 Twitter followers; the comment in question was given in an invited speech at a conference with a worldwide audience.

I believe there is certainly an incentive for the powerful to weave a story that regular innocent people are losing their lives for an honest mistake, since they want to protect their power (the same reason they _have_ the opinions that people find distasteful: they act in accordance with those opinions, to protect their power). But I think we should be skeptical of this tale.

<comment><USER5> > If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small > mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living > for no mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a > comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with > them.

Surely. But the issue at hand is whether people should lose their living for a small mistake; why do you feel discussing that takes something away from support for people who lose their living for no reason?

<comment><USER4> Because it's tying in two not-intrinsically-related concepts, namely, whether someone should lose their _living_ and whether someone should lose their status, authority, and power. These get tied together a lot in popular parlance.

In the article about the school principal linked elsewhere in the thread, the "fired" principal actually got a desk job elsewhere in the school district. I think that's a remarkably mature position to take (provided that compensation is not wildly lower): it's certainly excessive for that person to be unable to pay rent/mortgage or provide for his family, but not excessive to be unable to supervise children and teachers.

In the story about Brendan Eich, the CTO position was available for him to step back into (and available for him to have kept from the beginning). Even if we allow that he was forced out of the CEO role less than voluntarily, it seems much clearer that he left employment with Mozilla voluntarily, since there were no calls for his resignation while he was CTO. But it still gets reported that he was sacked.

In the story about Sir Tim Hunt, he resigned (possibly voluntarily, but no matter) from an honorary professorship at UCL, while maintaining his day job at Cancer Research UK. But the media spin is that he lost his job as a professor.

I would absolutely agree that people should not lose their living for a small mistake. I would disagree that any of these are examples of that, and I would strongly disagree that an employer should feel compelled to maintain public ties with someone they wish to distance themselves from, just because they feel an ethical responsibility for providing that person's living. _That_ would compromise freedom of speech and association, namely that of everyone else at the company.

<comment><USER5> > I would strongly disagree that an employer should feel compelled to maintain > public ties with someone they wish to distance themselves from

Here's one of the secrets of the world: companies don't really care who they associate with. They don't really care about much of anything, to be honest. They're businesses, they exist to make money, and most of them don't care beyond that. So to say that a company "wishes to distance themselves from [someone]" is a bit disingenuous. It's not like the company decided "yeah, we don't like X anymore". Maybe people inside the company feel that way! But companies don't have much of an opinion about that. What they _do_ care about is, are there people angry with the company about X? If so, they're going to fire X, or demand their resignation (if firing them would make the company look bad), or if they can't get rid of them, shuffle them off into a corner where nobody notices them. But it's definitely not, the company has a crisis of conscience, and doesn't want to be involved with X anymore.

<comment><USER6> What if the company is a nonprofit, such as University College London or the Mozilla foundation?

<comment><USER5> Well, examine the evidence for them—Mozilla, for instance, had no problem with Eich as a CTO, nor had a problem promoting him to CEO. But a sustained negative publicity campaign—from people within the organization, as well as completely unrelated companies like Ok Cupid—and they backed down.

In some cases, they might actually be more aggressive about it, since usually they care about _something_ , and so quick to drop things that interfere with that thing. Take World Vision, for instance. They're a non-profit devoted to supporting orphans. They changed their policy to allow homosexual employees—but a campaign from their primarily evangelical Christian supporters cost them millions of dollars in donations, so they reversed the policy after two days. Did they still feel that allowing homosexual employees was correct? Almost definitely. But they cared more about their work supporting orphans, so anything that got in the way was removed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The debate about whether students are being insufficiently challenged in terms of opinions and beliefs appears to be a growing one, and it ties into the debate on academic freedom on college campuses that has existed since at least the 1800s. It's somewhat distinct though from the more generalized debate about Free Speech in overall society, and I have to wonder in this case if The Economist (and many others) aren't picking the wrong correlation here. While the exact reasoning changes over the decades, "so and so professor should be pressured/fired for saying something I don't like" remains constant and the answer was the tenure system. I think the modern decline of tenure positions is actually much more of the actual, root cause of any problems we're seeing right now. Overall popular opinions are always in flux and new trends come and go, and right now extreme sensitivity towards anything that might make someone uncomfortable seems to enjoy popular support. But just like with previous trends, if a professor had tenure they'd be equally free to argue back as hard as they wished and tell students to either successfully convince the professor, shape up, or suck eggs.

It's true that in many cases economic pressure on some colleges have become heavier over the years as public funding has evaporated, but economic pressure is still economic pressure and has always existed with the same natural result. Money talks. Counteracting that natural trend with mechanisms like tenure is much more important and lastingly useful then trying to apply bandaids to any particular trend of the day. With a strong basic framework ensuring that debate can continue even in the face of popular consensus, there is a much higher chance that the marketplace of ideas will succeed and prevent any permanent fall into a local minima. It's somewhat disappointing that The Economist of all places would fail to explore this, with even the very word "tenure" not showing up at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> What an affront to freedom of expression, that a university had to apologise for an artwork that if left alone, would suggest they condone oppression of blacks? Stupid article. The issue isn't that black students might fear for their very lives because of a statue, but that they may be made to be second- class citizens - if the university condones such outright support of a racist group, where else might they be unfair to blacks?

The point about 'safe' environment is that university is a stressful (and fun) time with a lot going on. By condoning shit like this, you make it harder for a subset of students, who now have to deal with worrying about a political agenda that other students don't.

In any event, the artist shouldn't complain, because _he got exactly what he wanted_ : a dialogue on race. He simply didn't like (expect?) the contents of that dialogue. The cynic in me likes that, that he hid behind a generalised "oh, trying to start a dialogue" motif, and then had problems when he didn't like the specifics.

<comment><USER4> > In any event, the artist shouldn't complain, because _he got exactly what he > wanted_ : a dialogue on race.

This is an excellent point. There was a lot of freedom of speech and expression. Unfortunately, that expression was apparently so traumatic for the artist that he left his job. Nobody forced him to leave. Certainly nobody forced him to leave his entire academic career.

Maybe we should institute "safe spaces" for faculty who don't know how to start conversations on race in a useful way, so they can be shielded from criticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read _Kindly Inquisitors_ by Jonathan Rauch[0] earlier this year which makes a fantastic argument against the limitation of free speech. It was written over twenty years ago. While I wholeheartedly agree with Rauch's position, I can't help but wonder what has changed in the last two decades. The points he made then seem just as relevant today, and the examples he provided of speech being censored do not seem at all old-fashioned. Is this sort of behavior strictly limited to university campuses, or does it eventually seep into the "real world" as well?

Is freedom of speech today significantly more hindered than it was twenty years ago?

[0] I read the book after seeing a recommendation on Hacker News. I enjoyed it a great deal and would strongly recommend it also. [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo1814074...](http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo18140749.html)

<comment><USER10> > I can't help but wonder what has changed in the last two decades.

While certainly not the sole reason, social media giving a voice to disturbed people and resurrecting the "lynch mob" may have played a big part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This whole situation has gotten out of hand in the US. The exercise of speech [even disgusting, offensive, and/or odious speech] is not a safety issue. Words cannot hold guns, knives, or other weapons. Yes, they can be unpleasant. Yes, they can be upsetting. Yes, people who have been abused can be triggered.

However, it is pretty clear the _intent_ of the academic in question was to promote discussion and debate about racism. The fact that is not an idea worth defending because the manner in which it was done offends people is really depressing.

> The reaction among some black students was to fear for their safety, and > that is not surprising. What is more of a puzzle—for anyone outside American > academia, at least—is that students and UI bosses continued denouncing Mr > Tanyolacar for threatening campus safety even after the misunderstanding was > cleared up. In vain did the Turkish-born academic explain that he is a > "social-political artist", using Klan imagery to provoke debate about > racism.

We can't bubble wrap the world for the adults that live in it. We can only provide support groups, make sure they aren't discriminated against in the marketplace, and other measures to help them cope.

<comment><USER12> > Words cannot hold guns, knives, or other weapons. Yes, they can be > unpleasant. Yes, they can be upsetting. Yes, people who have been abused can > be triggered.

Words can't act, but they can compel, coerce, and intimidate. It absolutely _is_ a safety issue. You can argue over the applicability to this particular situation, but to imply that words are harmless is a disservice to rights guaranteed us under the first amendment.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, there is great power in words. That is both why the First Amendment exists and why some seek to curtail speech they find discomfiting.

<comment><USER12> > Indeed, there is great power in words. That is both why the First Amendment > exists and why some seek to curtail speech they find discomfiting.

But their power is also why the first amendment only applies to the government not being able to persecute you. Why should people have the right to speech without consequence of any sort?

<comment><USER13> Of _any_ sort? No. Only certain sorts of consequences are permitted. Turning the forces of government against you in punishment is not to be permitted or tolerated. Other forms of reprisal are permitted and accepted.

Which is why the story about a public university is disturbing. Or the story of a statute for equality being abused in an attempt to silence someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think some lazy college administrators are happy to have another excuse to manage student behavior (in a way that minimizes inconvenience to college administrators).

>Unfortunately for them, something called the American constitution strongly protects free speech, whether divisive, upsetting or not.

That hasn't stopped many from throwing up "free speech zones" and attempting to ban activism in common areas.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised that the Economist didn't include a picture of the effigy. Here's an article with a partial picture:

[http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-of-iowa-pulls- cont...](http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-of-iowa-pulls- controversial-kkk-art-display/)

I think the Economist article is a bit one-sided. Is it really fair to blame students for being scared when an effigy in the style of those displayed by a group that is known for advocating and sometimes conducting violence against a certain racial group, is displayed on campus? As far as I can tell, this particular effigy wasn't clearly distinguished from one that might actually be displayed by the KKK.

Sure, people have the right to display things that make other people uncomfortable, but there must be a line somewhere, and this seems perilously close to it.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems totally appropriate the artwork was taken down. It was an attempt to provoke, and then co-opt the result of that provocation through somewhat surreptitious filming to produce another work of art, all hosted in a public place which could not be expected to be an art venue, using emotionally charged imagery of a scale that could not be avoided. I generally appreciate art that is provocative and performance art, but at least a performance artist confronts the reaction to the work through their presence. If an artist wants to do something that emotionally charged, I think they need more skin in the game than this guy had.

All the article claims happened, as far as I see, is that the art was taken down, and the school apologized they didn't take it down earlier. The language the school used in its apology seems a little hyperbolic, but whatever. Assuming this is the sum reaction against the artist (and maybe there are more repercussions), then I think that's all a reasonable risk that an artist takes and the artist should take his punches and move on.

Creative defacement of the art would have been a more interesting in-kind response, but I suppose that ship has sailed.

<comment><USER17> I think the example in the first paragraphs of the article (the Klan effigy with candid camera) is not the strongest one; it was a weird device for data collection, not really speech. The problem is better illustrated by some of the other articles: leftist students attacking things they disagree with, not by responding to them, but by going to the authorities and claiming to feel "unsafe". They have in many cases abused Title IX, claiming that this book or that lecture creates a "hostile environment" (i.e., lying without shame), because they know it's a way to trap an opponent in a lengthy, biased pseudo- judicial process. In these kinds of attacks, it's not about getting a conviction, because the leftists know their charges are false. Instead, "the process is the punishment". They want to make examples and terrorize others into self-censorship. These attacks are happening all over the country and they are not just good people taking it too far -- they are malicious and intentional.

<comment><USER18> The other examples are pretty terrible too, the guy who was afraid of his "liberal" students was complained about by a right-wing student who demanded he blame a financial collapse on poor, black homeowners, and was mostly frightened because he apparently had no job security.

So on the basis of all the examples the highly respected Economist magazine can scrape together, this appears to be almost entirely invented scandal.

You on the other hand seem to have knowledge of a wide-ranging campaign of terror and intimidation against free speech, maybe you should write up an article about it and we could discuss that instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article strikes me as surprisingly badly argued, much more so than I'd expect from _The Economist_.

> Students should beware of winning too many victories. A perfectly safe > university would not be worth attending.

What? Why? Is there anything in this article that even attempts to be an argument for this point (let alone a good argument)?

And isn't the voluntarily departure of of Mr Tanyolacar a sign that the university is in fact not safe, as the author wants? It seems like he faced some "ideas or imagery that might prove distressing" from students, and chose to leave the academy. Well, good for him, not everyone is cut out for a free- speech environment where students are free to say that they disagree with poorly-done stunts from faculty.

<comment><USER19> If your ideas go unchallenged - are you learning?

If you're "triggered" by history lessons - do we need to _rewrite history_? Is it even considered history at that point?

Who's "safety" should we prioritize? What if two students ideas of safety conflict? How would that be resolved?

Should we focus on teaching or "student safety" from ideas? Which is more important in an academic setting?

<comment><USER4> Those would all be good questions that I would have liked the article to give some attention to.

For instance, do the trigger warnings on historical content imply a way for students to _avoid_ that content and still graduate the class? Or does it merely say what material will be covered, just as a syllabus does, so that students can be mentally prepared?

Have there been conflicting ideas of safety? Concrete examples may be helpful to figure out what we're talking about.

What's a good basis for determining what needs to be taught? I can imagine, for instance, a top-notch CS curriculum that involves no classes about history. (MIT's graduation requirements, for instance, don't require any history classes.)

The article doesn't talk about any of this, and instead spreads FUD about the impending destruction of the academy.

<comment><USER19> _> For instance, do the trigger warnings on historical content imply a way for students to avoid that content and still graduate the class? Or does it merely say what material will be covered, just as a syllabus does, so that students can be mentally prepared?_

Quite literally what a syllabus is for, so I imagine the former rather than the latter. If it were the latter - they already have the syllabus so what's the problem?

 _> Have there been conflicting ideas of safety? Concrete examples may be helpful to figure out what we're talking about._

I feel more safe with security/cops on campus. Certain individuals may feel _less_ safe with security/cops on campus given recent events and media coverage over the past 2-3 years especially.

Just one plausible example. Not to say that issue has come up in any notable cases - but it is one I can imagine playing out given recent events.

 _> The article doesn't talk about any of this, and instead spreads FUD about the impending destruction of the academy._

In my personal opinion, academia is already screwed. Not every field and not every campus - but an increasingly number of them. But my opinions aren't important here.

<comment><USER4> > Quite literally what a syllabus is for, so I imagine the former rather than > the latter. If it were the latter - they already have the syllabus so what's > the problem?

A syllabus covers high-level topics/concepts, not specific types of content students would like warning about, so I can definitely see room for a policy about adding something like "involves discussion of sexual assault" next to "students will read and discuss works of fiction about life in the Southern states during Reconstruction", if you're reading _The Sound and The Fury_. (It's been a while since I read that book, please don't take this as a claim that the book needs a trigger warning.) If there are multiple choices of classes to fulfill a literature requirement, students could just choose to take a class without such a content warning -- they already have that choice of class.

But, you're imagining and I'm imagining. It'd be nice if we had some actual journalism here to answer that question!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel like this specific incident is a really shitty example of the chilling of free speech. And that's a shame, because it's a real issue that deserves better arguments than this one.

I can't see that Tanyolacar was wronged in any way. The article doesn't mention that he was personally disciplined; the university has not attempted to censor his speech. He hung a racist symbol on public property, with no indication that it was intended as art, and it was removed. Is that censorship? If actual Klansmen had set up a burning cross in the middle of campus, should we let it burn because it might have been intended to be art? If someone spraypainted swastikas on the walls, should they be left untouched as free expression of political views?

He made a statement (and if art is speech, than it can clearly be a statement) that was both not his actual belief and deliberately calculated to provoke an entertaining reaction. We call people who do that "trolls." He wanted to offend people, he succeeded, and now he's complaining about it. What did he expect to happen? What does he think should have happened?

<comment><USER17> He was wronged in that students lied about feeling "afraid" and "terrorized" and "unsafe" instead of simply saying that they were offended. They made these claims because they know that these words put into motion an array of employment-related and/or pseudo-legal threats like Title IX suits. They lied about how they felt, to a third party such as the university administration, instead of responding truthfully to the person they disagreed with. The first problem is that there are structures in place that reward this behavior, and the second is that the current breed of leftists feel absolutely no shame in using them.

<comment><USER20> So you don't think there's any possible way that displaying the symbol of a group known for murdering black people and black rights activists, on the site of a protest for black rights, could legitimately be construed as a threat of violence.

Okay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's definitely something going on, although I think this article in particular makes a weak case.

A couple other articles in a similar vein;

"I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" \- [https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor- afrai...](https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654710))

"My Title IX Inquisition" \- [http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/06/my-title- ix-...](http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/06/my-title-ix-.html) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626970))

<comment><USER4> Vox themselves published some good responses to that first article:

[http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor- identi...](http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identity)

[http://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8753721/college-professor- fear](http://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8753721/college-professor-fear)

The first one points out, in passing, that the only _actual_ complaint the liberal professor received was from a conservative student, who thought the professor was too soft on (perceived) communism. But it makes the more general point that the root problem with academic liberty, insofar as there is a problem, is with the tenure process and the rise of adjunct positions, not with liberal students. It's a very interesting analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the case of Serhat Tanyolacar, an African American lectures a Turkish immigrant: "I don't understand why a non-black person can appropriate black people's pain to teach a lesson about racism." Did she not also thereby "appropriate" the artist's message, another minority? Is she not appropriating the sole victimhood at the hands of the KKK, which has also been racist against other races, anti-Catholic, and homophobic? Her response is basically that Mr. Tanyolacar is too white to have a legitimate voice in this[0] (please don't thoughtlessly retaliate with this link.)

Although it's reasonable for a black person to interpret a KKK message as primarily anti-black, and my opinion would be discounted on the basis of my own race/gender/orientation... it's just sad to see rampant labeling and subdividing of people even among self-professed shared victim classes, assigning out who has legitimate pain and who doesn't, narrow-minded focus on one's own problems while simultaneously professing a motivation to help others, etc. We all have pains, we've all been somebody's victims, we're all aggressors sometimes.

P.S. I find the work in poor taste, and it sounds like it at least should have been labeled better. This is merely a comment on the tactics used to dismiss and discredit the artist.

[0] [https://twitter.com/krw18/status/541105260098371584](https://twitter.com/krw18/status/541105260098371584)

<comment><USER20> The KKK hates everyone who isn't exactly like them, but they were _specifically created_ to suppress (i.e. terrorize and murder) African- Americans trying to exercise equal rights, and that still appears to be their #1 concern. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to see KKK symbols as symbolizing violence and repression specifically against African-Americans and their allies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please remember folks in a time far away US both private and public Colleges got around the US Constitution by shutting down for the summer to put an end to protests during the Vietnam War.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is no right not to be offended. That's just a right that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER4> Is there not the right of freedom of association, and by extension, not to associate with those who offend without purpose?

<comment><USER24> Of course. But my freedom not to associate with someone DOES NOT give me the right to force him to go away.

<comment><USER25> Unless they are on your property, in which case you can ask them to leave.

<comment><USER24> Well sure, but that has more to do with property rights per se than with the implied right of freedom of association.

(Or maybe it doesn't. I dunno, really.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not discussed in the article's introduction is whether Mr. Tanyolacar, and by extension The Economist, might possibly have any learning to do about how race works in America, and whether that learning might be something that he and they are currently experiencing as trauma.

There's a point past which trigger warnings are silly; Klan hoods in the quad aren't past it. That professor's an idiot at best, and The Economist has again chosen a revealing bedfellow.

<comment><USER27> >> Not discussed in the article's introduction is whether Mr. Tanyolacar, and by extension The Economist, might possibly have any learning to do about how race works in America

If you look to the end of the article, it is clear that he had been insensitive at best.

>> The Economist has again chosen a revealing bedfellow

Your choice of language is antagonistic. It seems like you are implying the writer's and the publication's racist tendencies are slipping out. If so, I don't know what is the basis of that assertion.

<comment><USER26> Hey man, I just finished "What is Code," gimme a minute to refill my magazine- article bar.

As for my admittedly prejudicial feelings towards The Economist, it's been a long ride and I couldn't point to anything specific. I've just developed a tendency not to be surprised when they don't regard certain things as important, or certain other things as fallible.

<comment><USER27> Appreciate your conciliatory language. I believe the article is really all about Voltaire's maxim : _I do not agree with what you have to say, but I 'll defend to the death your right to say it._

Such an argument pretty much necessitates an unpleasant exemplar.

Read the obituary of Bob Randall currently on their front page for one instance of the Economist decrying institutional racism in a thoroughly heartfelt manner.

<comment><USER26> As discussed elsewhere in the thread, rights are not at issue; social consequences are. This is about a group of people saying, "not everything you have the right to do is beneficial. When introducing something into a given conversation in a given way, for the mere sake of the performance of your right, has known negative effects on the conversation and the people in it, you're not being a free speech warrior; you're being a jerk."

<comment><USER27> Why must it be either/or? Rights and social consequences are not exclusive. I agree that the artist behaved as a jerk. I just don't think it is desirable to try to prevent him being a jerk by shutting him (and others) down. As the article contends, by bending the definition of "safety" to now include not having to put up with jerks.

At the start of this thread, others had tried to make your voice irrelevant by down-voting your comment. Presumably because they disagreed with you. More recently, I have received down-votes against my first reply to you. In both cases, (and for the same reasons as this discussion) I think it would have been better for those who disagreed to say why they disagreed, not to attempt to shut down dissent. Disagreement is fine, as long as it is in the open. Silencing critics (jerks even) may feel good at the time, but the precedent is insidious.

Did you read that obit yet? [http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21653997-bob- randall-...](http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21653997-bob-randall- aborigine-elder-teacher-and-campaigner-died-may-13th-aged-about-81) Adjusted your view of TE editorial policy on racism after doing so?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Where you read "safety" in this article and other discussions of the issue, it's illuminating to substitute the words "regard as full human beings."

Contexts that don't regard certain classes of people - those with a history of this lack of regard - as full human beings are going to be considered obsolete by today's undergraduates. That's just a given. Repair these contexts and universities would see a lot of these problems go away.

There are, of course, contexts you can't repair - namely, works that have value but were made in, or contain, obsolete contexts. The recontextualization work here can be difficult, it's true, but universities and professors that don't do it are going to be hearing about it.</comment>


Plinky - <AUTHOR> http://www.plinky.com/ <comment><USER2> Since the submitter did not see necessary to add information about "plinky", my hesitant 5-second peek at the unknown URL reveals some type of weird poll/questionnaire site with probably some "social media" scheme.

<comment><USER3> To be fair Hacker News doesn't allow you to submit a link and write a description. Therefore, any description would have to be posted as a comment which in all likelihood would eventually trickle down to the bottom of the comments.

Submitting a url as he did is no different than a ASK HN: Review my startup.

<comment><USER2> Looking at the Submit page, there is a spot for the URL and another one for a title. I may certainly be mistaken as I have never used it, but I would think those two fields are just for the described purpose?

<comment><USER3> True, but the title is not meant to include a long description of the link, rather, just a title.

<comment><USER4> "Pling: a questionnaire site with some social media scheme" would have been fine as a title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I took the plunge and looked around the site. I didnt actually sign up; it sure wasnt anything I wanted. It looks like a way for the creatively challenged to create content for the various social networking sites. The user doesn't even have to come up with a topic; they supply it.

My initial reaction was why not. Web sites are cheap. Throw it out there. See if it works. After all icanhazcheesburger.com became a hit. Then I went into the "about" section. It's run by a suit and it is funded by a couple of VC's and an angel. It has a bunch of employees. No discernible revenue model. I say they have some pretty high barriers to success.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think Skribit ( <http://skribit.com/> ) might lead to better topics for blogs. This site seems good for facebook wall posts or tweets.

</comment><comment><USER7> Plinky is just a smarter version of a meme. Instead of everyone "knowing" a meme, everyone "thinks about" a... Plinky.

</comment><comment><USER8> I answered the questions and nothing happened. Perhaps the site requires javascript?

<comment><USER9> actually clicking any input prompts a registration form (with javascript enabled)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm using Opera and i can't get away from the overlay screens that appear.

</comment><comment><USER11> YAWN - yet another web2.0 network

</comment><comment><USER12> No IE6 support?</comment>


Advice on how to take a screenshot (1985) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/wilson85_screenshot.html <comment><USER2> I used to do this!

An Olympus OM4 with slide film, in a darkened room. The camera's utomatic exposure worked best.

Experimenting with Vista Pro (the original landscape generator!), it was possible to generate stereo images of a scene. And the graphics - for the time - were incredible. With careful lighting and texturing, it was possible to get nearly photorealistic results.

So I had the thought to photograph the monitor image onto slide film, then use a 3D stereo viewer (like this 'Pinsharp Stereo Slider Viewer': [https://www.berezin.com/3d/pinsharp.htm](https://www.berezin.com/3d/pinsharp.htm)).

The views were stunning! A real sense of depth and place, looking past leafy trees, down into valleys and ravines...

<comment><USER3> Vista Pro! Thanks for reminding me of that, spent a good few afternoons playing with it back in the 90s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ha, I remember reading similar advice in an issue of GamePro. They had a section in the back for accolades when someone beat a game or got a high score, and you had to send them a photograph for proof.

(Uphill both ways in the snow, etc. etc.)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's amusing that to many these days, the most straightforward way to take a screenshot they know is to snap a photo of it with their phone camera.

<comment><USER6> I can't really make out the text. Could you follow the instructions below to take a screenshot on your computer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Snagit; saving us from this since 1990.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just be sure to paste it into Word or Excel before sending it off to the IT helpdesk.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple + Shift + 4... remember to hit Space Bar after to capture one window at a time.

Or Skitch, FireShot, Jira Capture, Marker.io...

<comment><USER10> Did you miss the (1985) tag?

<comment><USER9> No... just commenting on how it's a little easier today.

Hooray, my most down-voted comment ever is about screenshots. =P</comment></comment></comment>


Research into the reasons for trepanation (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160826-why-our-ancestors-drilled-holes-in-each-others-skulls <comment> giovan-ni [https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/hole-in-the-head- trepanat...](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/hole-in-the-head-trepanation/)

<comment><USER2> That MIT article is much more informative that the originally linked article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _" Trepanation had been abandoned by most cultures by the end of the Middle Ages, but the practice was still being carried out in a few isolated parts of Africa and Polynesia until the early 1900s."_

Not exactly. As far as I know the latest known trepanations in East Africa (other than those in a modern medical context of course, with electronic tools) have been carried out in the middle of the 20th century.

I can't find the paper anymore so take this with a grain of salt, but if I remember correctly the reports seemed to imply that the practice was merely driven underground by the laws forbidding it, not stopped.

There is a possibility that successful trepanations are still being carried out with simple stone tools today.

One paper by an anthropologist described the process as rather relaxing by the way, once the initial pain of cutting the skin and ripping it apart wears off. The grinding of the stone against the skull supposedly induced a kind of trance in many who experienced it.

</comment><comment><USER4> How do they survive the trepanation? How does one live with a hole in the head for a few years?

<comment><USER5> The scalp is cut in a crescent shape and peeled open for the operation, and then folded back down and sewn back in place, so the hole is covered by the scalp.

<comment><USER6> Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems the researchers have not uncovered the fact that in Australian Aboriginal tribe (which I shall not name) trepanning is part of a warrior's initiation. Initiated warriors have a large section of skull removed which understandably makes them very much aware of those about them who might attack them. Any researchers might easily lose their lives inquiring further into this matter. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Help Launched a startup, banned from Google AdWords - <AUTHOR>

Help! I just help one of my friends launch a startup, and one of our cofounders used multiple credit cards on the account, which apparently violated Google AdWords Terms of Service. A big chunk of our traffic comes from Google.
Anyone in this situation before? Is it remediable?
From: AdWords Support <email@example.com> Date: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 12:49 PM Subject: Re: [#984727456] Contact Us
Hello Deepak,
Thank you for your email.
I did get reply from my specialist team.
After reviewing your account , it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords accounts do not comply with our Terms and Conditions. As a result, your account, and any related accounts you may have created, have been suspended.
As you may recall, the Terms and Conditions to which you agreed to when you signed up for AdWords state that Google reserves the right to review and stop running any ads when deemed necessary. You can review these Terms and Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.
NEXT STEPS
- If you are a prepay customer and have a balance remaining on your account, please visit http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8440 to learn how you can request a refund for the remaining balance. Please note that the activation fee and any service adjustments are non-refundable.
- Please refrain from creating any new accounts, as they will be subject to the same suspension.
- For privacy reasons, AdWords Support is unable to provide any additional information regarding this account.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Sincerely,
Amita. The Google AdWords Team <comment><USER2> This doesn't make sense - it's not against the TOS to have multiple credit cards on the account. EVERYONE has multiple credit cards on their account - that way if one declines, it just rolls over to the other card.

Can you elaborate on what you mean?

And off topic, that email - what little is human written (and not copy/paste) is full of typos and bad/non-standard grammar. That's unfortunate - I'm used to better from Google when I actually do hear from/talk to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Going through Adwords support is like going through a black hole - here's an idea: create a new domain name, and use a credit card with a different name, and see what happens. I think they might even have banned your domain entirely.</comment>


Airbnb (YC W09): The Rise of the One-Room Hotel - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/the-rise-of-the-one-room-hotel/66439/

<comment><USER2> Airbnb does run a risk of pushback by state/local governments. Cities create residential/business zoning for valid reasons. Airbnb disregards this zoning and turns every house into a potential hotel.

Nobody likes living next to a rental property.

That said, still a very ingenious idea and I wish them the best.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully state/local governments will realize the potential increase in tourist spending that Airbnb makes possible. I paid $X for a week of lodging via Airbnb. The equivalent hotel would have cost easily 3X. So now I've saved 2X... and since I'm on vacation I have no problem just spending 1.5X on purely fun stuff (restaurants etc). Also note that having to pay 3X for a traditional hotel would strongly discourage me from going on vacation all together.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dear esteemed HN Editor,

Why add the YC branding to the title? If anything, the branding adds a weird reason to read the article. Without, it's simply an interesting idea in which a YC company is winning. I like the latter much better.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget one of the side functions of hacker news is advertising for YC. There's a reason hacker news is news.ycombinator.com and not it's own separate domain.

<comment><USER5> Actually we originally intended to put the site at startupnews.com (when it was called Startup News), but the guy who controlled the name wouldn't let us have it. That turned out to be very fortunate, because if the site had been at startupnews.com it would have been much harder to change the focus.

<comment><USER6> You've had really good luck with people refusing to give you names.

(Viaweb was originally called Webgen, but another business was already using that name (and had the trademark, I think). They offered the other Webgen something absurd like 5% of the company to let them keep using that name. They said no, so they changed to Viaweb. I think Viaweb is a better name, and it almost certainly wouldn't have made them 5% more successful if they had been called Webgen.)

<comment><USER5> Yes. More generally it's remarkable how often not getting something you wanted turns out to be for the better. Perhaps because improving your situation often also constrains your options, and we undervalue lack of constraint because we underestimate how much things could change in the future (or how mistaken we could be now).

<comment><USER7> I think of it as providing more options. When one doesn't get what they want, they are usually forced to look into other different options, which subsequently provides alternate futures that they possibly never predicted because they were so set on a future dependent on the 'something' that wasn't acquired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really like Airbnb hack for hotel system. I haven't used the service but following comment from the article makes sense. Does Airbnb have any process or protection to avoid this?

 _There's always the danger that something bad will happen to someone who rents a room, touching off a Craiglist-killer-like panic._

<comment><USER9> I'm also curious what protection or approach is taken to avoid bad things happening to single females renting a room through Airbnb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm standing in a beautiful cottage I reserved via Airbnb right now. Using Airbnb has been a great experience and I've recommended it to about a dozen people so far. Keep up the good work!!

</comment><comment><USER10> The hotels lobbying against airbnb and its likes in NYC comes off as cowardly to me.

Yes, there are health and security concerns and yes, they can be addressed by some common sense procedures such as checking ratings before you go and sending a friend the address of where you're staying, and maybe let them check in on you by phone if you're that paranoid.

Furthermore, the "craigslist killer" was also suspected to have been involved in three cases of assault and murder in actual, major hotels: Westin, Mariott and Holiday Inn based on similar criminal characteristics. Prosecution was stopped when he committed suicide. Crime can happen anywhere. Also, have you never heard of bedbug cases in hotels?

Viva creative destruction.

<comment><USER11> If you're talking about the bill that makes something like Airbnb illegal, their founder commented on it during StartUp School. If I remember correctly, he said that the bill was in response to people who would buy apartment buildings and use all the rooms to make them into an unlicensed hotel.

They talked with the sponsor of the bill and he said that they wanted to work with each other, or something to that effect. I haven't looked into it any more than watching his talk, so I could be wrong.

That's not to disagree with you, though. I find it a cowardly move, as well.</comment></comment>