Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet? - <AUTHOR> Is there a place on the Internet for general -- including political and economic -- discussion that is filled with civil, insightful commentary?
Outside of specialist corners (such as HN), the Internet often appears to be filled primarily with hateful repetition of populist punchlines, providing little to no insight into the big topics that concern the world at the moment. This is such a shame, as the Internet really should be the enabler of discussion across borders and societies (which of course can become heated but should always be respectful and rooted in trying to understand each other!).
From what I have read, The WELL seems to have been such a place (or still is?) in the "old days", but where do you go today for such an exchange of ideas on a variety of topics?
(Note: It is allowed to cost money.) <comment><USER2> I mostly stay here. The amount of political and economic discussion here is what I personally consider enough in my life; I don't think looking for more sources would improve SNR for me.

I sometimes like to peruse Reddit for some well-defined topics - the trick is to find an appropriate subreddit for it. So, for instance, when I want to follow SpaceX news, I'll tune in to /r/spacex, because quite a lot of people there are aerospace engineers (and some are SpaceX employees), so you can expect detailed, up-to-date and to-the-point news.

My general observation is that the more specialized a community is, and the further it is from ego-involving topics (politics, economy, religion), the more civil the discussions are there. So I'd focus on finding many specialized discussion places instead of one general.

<comment><USER3> The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. Or by an algorithm that systematically buries articles and users (whose accounts accrue ranking penalties) that generate any heated debate by challenging the slant. We're not talking trolls.

Check out the top comment under _SF tech bro: 'I shouldn't have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless'_. It was at least generating some good debate, but HN decided to flag and bury it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896)

See the dominant and buried comments for _272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?_ : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830)

Why was _Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems_ flagged to death? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414)

Hell, even this post has been quickly taken off the front page despite having better numbers (70 votes in the last hour) than many items that are there now.

Politics and economics points of view are heavily filtered here. Rarely if ever does a challenge to the status quo make the front page. If one does it is then killed, ironically, for inspiring debate!

<comment><USER3> Silent downvotes right on schedule!

I think civil and _honest_ discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym.

I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I think it would be solved by requiring a comment with each downvote. The motivations for an upvote are obvious but a downvote should have to explain why, even if it something as simple as "citation needed" or "factually incorrect, here's why."

I often get the sense that anonymous and unexplained downvotes carry a sense of "this post is so obviously wrong it defies the need for explanation," which means that nobody learns anything from the exchange.

EDIT: I got downvoted for this comment and I have no idea why

<comment><USER3> That would result in too many redundant comments. Many people will down-vote for exactly the same reason.

Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

<comment><USER4> > I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or > disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on > false data".

I would like having strong AI driving HN too. Because humans are very bad at distinguishing those two and confuse them all the time. Once we invent the AI that allows people to separate them I'd be all for using it here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, funny thing, but I was just going through dang and sctb's comment histories to get a stronger sense of what makes HN tick. Despite (or because of) limited features, with strong guidance from the top (Guidelines, Paul Graham's "How to Disagree"), and a community that's evolved over the course of about a decade, the discourse here is pretty good. Not perfect, but the curation and commentary are usually informative, occasionally excellent. Topical breadth is limited, and there's no categorisation of posts, but what is covered is pretty good.

I'm contrasting that with Imzy, advertised as a "kinder, gentler Reddit", but which in my experience has been among the more vile, toxic, abrasive, and hateful hellholes on the Internet. I'm not a connoiseur of such spaces -- /b/, 4chan, and the like -- but I've seen what does work.

This set of guidelines from Google+ (unofficial AFAIU) are also useful. Communities with similar tools and principles tend to do better:

[https://plus.google.com/+JohnSkeats/posts/F86Hv3L6kE3](https://plus.google.com/+JohnSkeats/posts/F86Hv3L6kE3)

In a series of investigations trying to assess the size, scope, and vitality of discussion at G+, I hit on the model of searching for names of significant authors or other authorities as a proxy for meaningful discussion. _Foreign Policy_ has a list of "Global 100 Thinkers" published annually which provides a pretty broad-based, multi-ideology, and current basis for finding same, and a set of Google searches (looking at site match totals) along with an arbitrarily selected string to indicate potential conversations _not_ of interest ("Kim Kardashian"), gives an FP:KK index.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/)

As earlier comments have noted, Metafilter has a staggeringly high FP:KK index, though low overall traffic. Reddit is also quite high, and blogs, most particularly Wordpress.com, perform quite well.

This is the sort of tracking I'd like to do over time and across more sites -- it would be particularly useful to have a web search which would simply return the top _n_ domains and hit counts rather than having to parse results and insert search delays (about 45-60s seems to be sufficient) to avoid Captcha prompts.

Conversely, you could find some good search tokens for topics of interest and see where results tend to pop up.

Looking at the detailed results (which I've not posted, the tables simply become too large for convenient presentation), some pretty clear patterns of distribution across both sites and identifiers turn up. Richard Dawkins and Pope Benedict, for example, were both highly popular, though on different sites.

There's a huge amount of public Web activity at several private educational institutions, in particular Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell University, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins. By comparison, the University of California system, which I'd have expected to be more significantly represented, is tiny. European educational institutions are also sadly anaemic, with largely UK schools represented, also Maastricht and Unibo (Italy).

I did a follow-up search through major Libertarian organisations which was pretty disappointing. Having discovered virtually all are part of the Atlas Network might improve my search space a bit, and might make an interesting follow-up.

I've also become fairly convinced that good conversation scales poorly. I'm experimenting with a set of smallish groups, probably ~30 - 300 people, though that remains to be seen via empirical results. These are "knitting societies" in an effort to both be un-cool ("cool" and "good discussion" seem inversely related), and in the sense that these might be societies that knit together, both internally and externally. We're somewhat looking for a good home. (Imzy had been on the candidate list. It's no longer.)

The other option is to seek out the specific people you're interested in discussing things with. I've been taking to simply emailing people directly with either questions or information I'm hoping will be of interest. I got a response yesterday (after a week or two) from a Famous Authority in an Area of Interest who not only appreciated the obscure detain and evidence I'd turned up but invited more. Not bad for a space alien cat / 1950s sci-fi character.

The signal's out there, but you've got to hunt for it, and it is _very_ easily scared off.

</comment><comment><USER6> Let me answer a different question: where do you go for civil, insightful commentary?

I recommend gathering a group of "morning cup of coffee" people with an intellectual bent. This works particularly well among more academic neighborhoods, but can be done elsewhere.

Get 3-10 people you know (or get to know these people) that are generally aware of the world, from different walks of life/professions, and start meeting a few days a week at a local coffee shop. Ensure the shop has a copy of better publications across the political spectrum. Talk shop. Talk the world. Talk whatever.

The internet is good at information. It limps quite a bit when asked to do conversation.

<comment><USER7> You mean he should get out of his house? Isn't it dangerous?

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily. There's a growing trend of finding "mastermind" groups to have group skype chats with once or twice a week. They're great because you're not limited by geography. They're terrible because even the most antisocial introvert needs some human contact. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find this area to be best filled by blogs. The format allows long ideas to be explored in a way no "social" site can. The comments sections are better at being on-topic, because there are less people stumbling in from another corner of a generalist platform. Or comments are disabled, and if you want to participate in a back-and-forth, you need to start your own blog and have something worthwhile to say. Barrier to entry helps with signal to noise ratio. The youtube comments are widely regarded as worthless, but bad video essays on youtube don't make people give up on watching video essays in general.

There is a lot of legwork in finding and following good blogs or aggregators. But if you're seeking out ideas (or "insightful commentary"), you can't avoid doing the legwork. Stopping in one place limits you to the scope of ideas found in that place.

HN and (some) subreddits are certainly good starting points, but the content eventually become predictable, trite and cliche. Even here. (especially here?) The collective conscious of any one community amasses new ideas slower than someone seeking them out can consume them. And that's the best case scenario, it doesn't even account for for topics that have devolved into an echo chamber, or constant flamewars on certain topics. You have to constantly keep moving.

Note: When I say blogs, I mean blogs. Not some hackneyed news-blog that will feed your mind poison just to keep you coming back. The Gawker properties were a FOX News for a younger, lefter crowd and it drove me up the wall when people didn't recognize that.

<comment><USER10> I found this leads me into a bubble of internet that only shows me what I agree with. I've found myself going back to reddit just to get both sides of the story. It's useful when say the Trump fans post things that lefties find hard answering, those are the points that I find myself thinking about late at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's funny, because 4chan, especially it's topic-focused sub-boards, isn't nearly as unfit for this as it might seem. Yes, the signal-to-noise ratio will be low and it'd be generous to pretend the conversation will always be _civil_ , but there are some pluses:

\- No downvotes, so opposing viewpoints don't get suppressed

\- (Multi-)Reply support, so you can address your response to a specific post or posts

\- Everyone already expects a low signal-to-noise ratio

\- Everyone comes expecting some amount of personal attacks, offensive content, blatant trolling, and off-topic posts, so seasoned commenters aren't driven off by this behavior

\- Default anonymity means no way to earn or lose reputation, so the only way to judge a post is by its content

4chan has _plenty_ of downsides regardless and it won't appeal to everyone. But compared to Youtube comments or the typical CNN comment section, there is far less majority-moderation, far less intermingling of policy points and personal attacks within the exact same post, and far less propensity for people to respond to comments they deem off-topic or irrelevant.

<comment><USER12> There is a common misconception that all of 4chan is like /b/, but you can find some rather good quality discussions on some of the other boards. 4chan covers a lot of niches, and for some of them it is one of the best places to go to discuss them.

<comment><USER13> /b/ also has some utility as a containment board - it's nowhere near perfect at keeping shitposters away from other boards, but it is a decent magnet for those that want to go crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd say Reddit. There are some heavy moderated subreddits for insightful discussions, like reddit.com/r/truereddit. Because Reddit has a voting system like HN, quality content is being upvoted and shown as first.

If you search you can probably find some more subreddits with less general content. And HN is of course a really great website for such discussions, with a lot of highly intelligent people that post quite lenghty comments. HN is probably my favorite website when it comes to discussions.

<comment><USER15> Reddit's greatest strength (the subreddit architecture) is also its greatest weakness. Subs attract groups of likeminded individuals usually with a particular interest, and as such a default tone and set of opinions are preset within a sub before you arrive.

If you fail to understand what the preset rules of engagement and opinions are you're going to have a bad time. Worse still, if you happen to disagree with the general consensus of a sub your opinion will simply be downvoted and your voice will not be heard. You're very unlikely to be educated by existing sub members as to why your opinion is wrong with any real sense of perspective because the hive mind has kicked in and you're not aligned with it.

The larger the sub, the more this problem is exacerbated as there are more people ready and waiting to hit the downvote button. This means that you're very unlikely to encounter a balanced and sensible (aka civil) discussion on Reddit.

<comment><USER16> Exacerbated.

<comment><USER15> It was a test to see if anybody read to the end. And thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HN - Discussion is generally civil, and snarky or underhanded commends are generally downvoted swiftly. Not much in the way of political and economic commentary, and the discussion tools (e.g., the platform, notification, etc.) are just OK.

Quora - There are pockets of intelligent thought, but _discussion_ is limited to an answer and maybe a couple comments. And there's a ton of noise and not nearly enough moderation. But some of the content is _really_ good and the Quora Weekly Digest remains one of the more interesting emails I get every week.

Newsvine - I haven't been active here for years (since 2008-2009), but it used to be a great community with good discussion and a strong focus on politics and recent news. I think it's gone downhill.

I haven't waded into sub-Reddits yet. I really got out of arguing with random people in the internet. I have better things to do with my time, and (echoing the OP) most comment threads are filled with assholes and comments like: "Wow. You must not have finished elementary school."

<comment><USER18> Oh man, I had thought that Quora was a decent place but quickly found that it's full of the worst of the internet. I had answered some things and made some comments on answers and was quickly attacked for expressing constructive criticism. I think that it wasn't so much that people are negative but that they have come to expect vitriol from everyone on the internet that they were very defensive and in some cases offensive. I found it impossible to have reasoned discussion with people there. I really liked the format and the idea behind it, but unfortunately the internet seems to be broken. I do enjoy the weekly emails from Quora though, I just can't participate.

I also can't do reddit, partially because of it's negative reputation, but also I just don't have the energy to deal with it's terrible UX and having the wade through the crap to find the gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before?

This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy.

Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.

<comment><USER20> > I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system > where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors > they've upvoted before?

Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr.

Only showing downvoted authors would, going by my Reddit voting statistic, expose me to 95% dick jokes and 5% authors that have valid points I disagree with (mostly on such disgustingly controversial topics like "Lenovo makes better Thinkpad laptops than IBM did").

> Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come > up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, > but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.

/. tried it, did it ever work out? (Honestly no idea, I've never been deep enough involved in it.)

<comment><USER19> > Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo > chamber, see also: Tumblr.

Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too.

I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they don't provide new insight. In the system I'm proposing, this incentive is gone because your votes affect what you see more of in the future, not what other people do.

<comment><USER20> I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to.

How'd you get the _initial_ exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.

<comment><USER21> > high-quality content you disagree with

I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it _change_ your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic?

The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time- consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views.

The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://metafilter.com](http://metafilter.com)

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I don't consider moderation censorship. There are plenty of places to go for unmoderated conversations, but they are rarely civil. On Metafilter, abuse and insults aren't tolerated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> From what I've seen, any place that claims to be "civil" also tends to be the most closed minded communities, especially ones that have upvote downvote systems.

Unless you happen to agree with the specific set of ideas that a majority of that community happens to agree with, your contribution is meaningless

<comment><USER25> "Civil" seems to equate with "filtered via down votes". I would prefer seeing just the number of up votes and the number of down votes which gives it a "popularity ranking" of a sort. I can then make a determination for myself if I want to read it or not. Lots of up votes, few down votes? Probably speaks to the majority opinion. Lots of down votes and few up votes? Could either be a shit post or one that goes against the grain. Two seconds of reading will tell me which. Lots of down and up votes? Probably a comment I should read, even if I'm just skimming.

I don't need the community to filter for me, I'd rather just get more information in order to choose what to read. But then I usually read any forum in as raw a format as they allow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Metafilter is great, partly due to the $5 posting account cost. I've lurked there for years and not posted.

CrookedTimber is the last of the oldschool blogs-with-comment-sections that I follow for this purpose, although it has some serious problem posters.

HN isn't really politically or economically focused so you kind of have to slip under the radar.

<comment><USER26> Metafilter is a borderline groupthink echo chamber, so heavy is the moderation. It's best for purely factual stuff. Stray into opinion stuff, and it's really narrow and slanted.

<comment><USER27> I'd call it "toxic", from the one and only discussion I participated in.

Sure, probably an outlier. Bad luck. But I still hate thinking back to that experience, and I survived Usenet flamewars just fine.

<comment><USER28> No, not an outlier. Metafilter used to be great, but it has definitely deteriorated into a toxic echo chamber. Opinions that do not fit in with the groupthink are not tolerated there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some of the Stack Exchanges do well here. It's not 'discussion' in a free-form sense, but in general I've found the focus of each SX and the Q-and-A format to provide a good way to talk about topics without going off the rails.

</comment><comment><USER30> There are insightful comments on almost every site with UGC, even if said comments are a minority. We need a client-side aggregator of whitelisted/upvoted comments, to "follow" pseudonyms and merge comments and context from many sites. Alternately, there could be communities which curate/whitelist comments from multiple sites, then readers could "follow" a feed of curated comments. RSS was a step in this direction.

Any site which achieves economic infuence via discussion quality/quantity will eventually attract paid posters of various stripes, ranging from sophisticated misdirection to uncivil discourse. Whitelists can reduce the cost of filtering this noise, but sufficiently good propaganda can best be detected by readers who co-evolve with paid influencers: _"... elite consultants have adopted grassroots advocacy tactics for paying clients. Rather than being dismissed as mere 'astroturf', these consultants' campaigns should be seen as having real effects on political participation and policymaking"_, [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IO0E69E/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IO0E69E/)

      Manually curated Twitter lists, viewed on Flipboard
      Private groups on Facebook
      Niche/subscription blog comments
      Amazon book reviews & comments (niche books)
      HN comments/stories from whitelisted users
      NY Times comments (quality varies by article topic)

</comment><comment><USER31> Almost all of the popular communities online lean left, take your pick.

You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. [http://gab.ai](http://gab.ai) recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.

<comment><USER32> > You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative

IMO, it doesn't matter if the platform leans left as long as it fosters constructive and open discussion. You're correct that a lot of the heavy handed moderation (censorship?) is on popular communities that trend left, but that's just a money related trend imo. Companies want to make their product a "safe" platform for investors

<comment><USER20> Throwing rights under the bus in the pursuit of money is now leftist?

I hope we have Karl Marx' corpse wired up to a generator.

<comment><USER32> > Throwing rights under the bus in the pursuit of money is now leftist?

It's not that it's leftist. It's that the people online tend to lean leftwards, and people investing in online communities want to grab the largest portion of the available population.

I will say, however, that the left in the US (namely the Democratic party) certainly seems to be willing to pursue a lot in the name of money (like taking millions of dollars from corporate and financial lobbying), and a lot of leftists online are totally okay with creating echochambers (though that's certainly not their pursuit alone).

<comment><USER4> I doubt however it goes that deep. I mean, your demographic premise is right, but there is more than ample right (whatever you want to mean by that word, really) online population. And I don't think anybody does a careful calculation of whether we should get this slant or that slant based on how many dollars it will bring us - even if it were possible (which I'm pretty sure it's not) nobody does that in practice.

And, if you look at channels like Fox News, it has huge audience. Granted, online audience is different, but in this time and place, it's not _that_ different. It's not 1990s anymore, using the internet is not for the elite anymore, no more than having a cellphone. Everybody now does that (not literally everybody but demographically pretty much all is covered).

So, why many online communities lean leftwards? I'd say because their organizers/maintainers lean leftwards. Those are usually people that are young, frequently college or early post-college age, frequently with background in liberal arts - that demographics leans left. And those that don't lean the same way don't feel comfortable there (and modern college left made making people disagreeing with them feel unwelcome practically into a competition sport) and leave. That'd happen and does happen with no money consideration involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I use twitter and have a quick and snappy discussion in about a dozen exchanges, many times with known people like journalists, columnists etc. Of course, you must carefully choose who you interact with or follow. I find engaging in discussion of such topics as politics and religion to be futile, and economics is intertwined with politics. I only do it when I see something intolerably incorrect or foolish and I just _have_ to engage with the fellow (as in this [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/)).

On a cynical note (or realistic if you will), I don't think topics like politics and religion can be discussed in a civil manner. If they are, then those discussing are not getting to the meat of the matter because once you get there, you are bound to hit a nerve or two and the civility facade comes right off. Even IRL those who engage in civil debates are more careful about appearing civil than actually debating effectively. The interwebs, with its anonymity and all that, allows one to be much more freer in bringing out their ugly side right of the bat (though sometimes it could be a persona adopted for the kicks).

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm trying to create a private slack community for this actually. It's just a bunch of friends/trusted people who we know are smart, bring a new perspective etc and have good things to contribute. It's been slow going creating a community like that (high achieving, smart people who are usually too busy to participate - So far we're just 20 people with like 10 the most active) but I have hopes that some day it'll become good enough that I can open it up to the public.

Things we usually discuss (and we have at least 1 person who is more knowledgable/an insider so they can teach others and give context) - Tech, Economics, Geopolitics, Culture, Cinema, Photography, BioTech/Energy etc. The goal is _in depth_ discussions, not just water cooler commentary. But since it's friends, it also becomes your usual facebook chat replacement occasionally.

I know it's not the answer you're looking for (since it's actually private/friends and their friends etc for now) but just thought I'd mention this in the context. Trying to create and maintain a community has been an interesting experience so far. :)

<comment><USER35> It is possible for me to join that community?

<comment><USER34> Sorry, it's just I'm trying to keep it among known people or people who are vetted by people we know and trust (that also includes IRL identity etc). Like I said, when I see momentum and people deriving tangible benefit from it, I'll take it public! :-)

<comment><USER36> The second you take it public, it will get destroyed.

It's the classic "I don't want to be in a club that wants me" vs "I want to be in a club that doesn't want me"

<comment><USER37> AKA Eternal September. The quality of an online community is inversely correlated with its popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I spend most of my time in small, private, invite-only forums these days.

As I get older, the problem with most forums is not so much lack of civility, but rather tediousness. Eventually, I have heard all the arguments, and if new comers to the forum hash out the same arguments over-and-over again, then I lose interest. Also I have found that the truth on a variety of issues is extremely politically incorrect, and so you either get a choice between forums that ban nearly all politically incorrect content or forums that are unmoderated and allow any vulgar or spiteful content. Neither are appealing to me.

I have been thinking of the of trying to start a forum for people who are very intellectually curious and not easily triggered by politically incorrect topics. Sign up here if you are interested, and you'll get an email if I decide to go through with it -- [https://countersearch.net/forum](https://countersearch.net/forum)

</comment><comment><USER39> Form your own private, by-invitation, undiscoverable group. Friends and colleagues are the obvious place to start, and not too large.

I've belonged to one for almost 20 years. I think the group has varied between 10 and 20 people, a few have come and gone (and come back).

We use an email list, use whatever you like.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you are asking a place online that equates to in-person discussions, I would say there isn't any.

As I told my kid when I showed him mosaic, the screen is not a human. Humans have kindness and compassion. The screen is to get things. To some it is a way to make a living. The screen can never be generous; that is learned at the home.

Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Ever hear of them? Newspaper columnists who answered readers questions. I always asked, " Why would anybody seek help or advice from a newspaper person? " Plus, you have never met them.

Why would I seek advice or opinion from a person I never met?

Google any ailment and the results are astounding. Ask your mom or dad if it is something to worry about and you are likely to get a trusted answer

<comment><USER41> > As I told my kid when I showed him mosaic, the screen is not a human. Humans > have kindness and compassion. The screen is to get things. To some it is a > way to make a living. The screen can never be generous; that is learned at > the home.

I really like this, thank you for sharing.

As for getting advice on the Internet - there are many quandaries about which one might rather ask the Internet than a person they've met for a variety of reasons.

* They don't know anyone with expertise in $THING

* You want a more objective opinion (who better than someone you don't know?)

* Asking someone they know is likely to create bad consequences (makes them worry! makes them judge you! makes them retaliate! makes them jump to a crazy conclusion and attack someone else! makes them report you to $AGENCY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> One aspect we shouldn't overlook is stratification by intelligence. People of very different IQs have trouble communicating. So, "hateful repetition of populist punchlines" is a natural form of communication for average- intelligence people - to say nothing of below-average.

Now, the loudest, most visible fraction of any political group tends to be the stupid.

So your conversational Utopia needs some kind of poll-test at the entrance.

I think that an educated gentleman of 150 years ago wouldn't be annoyed at the ignorant opinions of a servant, because they were of two different worlds. Today with the spread of literacy and erosion of class distinction, these different levels of discourse are forced together.

</comment><comment><USER43> Something Awful, D&D forum. Maybe not insightful but at least civil. $10 accounts mean being a shithead has consequences.

<comment><USER44> by D&D do you mean dungeons and dragons?

<comment><USER43> debate/discussion

<comment><USER45> They did rename it AD&D: Advanced Debate and Discussion in one of their April Fool's binges a while back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Definitely [https://8ch.net/pol/](https://8ch.net/pol/). I have seen a lot of insightful discussion about politics there.

<comment><USER47> Insightful maybe, but the ironic (and I'm not sure to what degree) antisemitism, nazi veneration, and apparent lust for the end of the world gets old quick.

I'd kill for a /pol/ that bans low effort posting like that.

</comment></comment><comment> some-guy It definitely leans center-left but I've found /r/PoliticalDiscussion to be a good subreddit for (mostly US-based) political topics.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

</comment><comment><USER49> I frequent several private FB groups that cover a wide range of topics. Like technology, politics, and cars. I find that if you seek out specific groups of enthusiastic people who share your passions (but not neccesarily your perspective) the discussion is usually more insightful and respectful. You basically need to get off of main street and step into a little coffee shop to hear the gossip behind the gossip. Where else would these populist punchlines be coming from if not from passionate groups of people who actually put thought into things and talk about them.

<comment><USER50> Yeah,

On FB, there can be groups that are entirely uncivil and groups that are fairly - it depends on who sets them up and for what purpose, it doesn't necessarily depend on the subject matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> bogleheads.org is a forum for the discussion of conservative investing approaches, but it ends up tying into proactive and insightful discussions about all sorts of lifestyle issues. I enjoy it a lot!

<comment><USER52> Bogleheads is self-contradictory in some ways. The Boglehead philosophy is to buy and hold assets without frequent trading. And yet the discussions are filled with financial noise. For a group of simple buy-and-holders, they like to micromanage (at least with words on the web) minute financial decisions.

A Boglehead thread should be something like this:

9/2/2016 Username said: I began regularly buying XYZ index fund.

9/2/2056 Username said: I began regularly drawing down XYZ index fund.

That's it. Instead they chinwag about tiny personal expenditures. I think a forum is not the best medium for such a community, given that a forum consisting of my model thread would be moribund.

There are some nuggets of financial wisdom, but for a lot of people there being a Boglehead is just a slogan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I have a recommendation, but you first need stairs in your house...

</comment><comment><USER54> I think it's easier to find such kind of comments on specialized communities, i.e. where users have a common ground. For example, looking for insightful comments on politics and economics, I usually like to follow the discussions on the Mises Institute site - since there is a common ideology to most visitors there (libertarianism), they don't spend time hating each other and disagreeing on basic views, and can contribute with constructive arguments instead.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've been using Google+ for that since the beta. If you remove all of the "hot", "recommended for you" and similar torrents of stupid from your circles, you can create a vast circle of people with whom you can discuss politics, science and other things. My "politis" circle is a few hundred people, and a few thousands follow my politics (rabid infrared leftist) collections.

</comment><comment><USER56> One option is setting up a passive Twitter account to follow a handful of very well reputed analysts in the fields you like. No friends, no general media, no noise. Shameless plug as an example: [https://mobile.twitter.com/NuclResearchNet](https://mobile.twitter.com/NuclResearchNet).

</comment><comment><USER57> I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I've partially given up on finding a community. Instead I've decided to try and build it myself. There are some really great ideas around community that I'd like to experiment with.

It's not quite ready yet (www.elyxel.com) but if anyone is interested feel free to reach out.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've been posting on total.fark.com for over a decade at this point for a certain definition of 'civil'.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder if it is possible to automatically assign a "civility" score to internet comment threads using natural language processing techniques.

Even if it works, I think this might reduce the signal along with the noise :-) The most insightful commentary has at least a touch of rhetoric.

</comment><comment><USER60> HN...

<comment><USER61> HN is definitely the only place I've kept returning to long-term. It's uniquely civil, even on topics that include triggers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Besides HN, a friend of mine created a Facebook group of friends where we have those discussions.

</comment><comment><USER63> While gaming oriented, there's a great group of people who discuss pretty much everything over at the Quarter to Three forums. [https://forum.quartertothree.com/](https://forum.quartertothree.com/)

<comment><USER64> Wow, I used to read Tom Chick's writings there a lifetime ago. Some of the best video gaming centric writing I've ever seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> A little bit off-topic, but I've always wondered if there were academic research on how to improve discussion forums. In addition to collective moderation, could we use techniques like machine learning for a better ranking of comments?

</comment><comment><USER10> BBC Radio 4 is enough for me. No need to hear what my friends think about politics.

</comment><comment><USER66> The Guardian's CIF (Comment Is Free) is place I really enjoyed a few years back. Now, the number of users has gone up, I think, and the quality of comments isn't as good as it used to be. theguardian.com

</comment><comment><USER67> I was going to say Reddit. But for some reason(I speculate it is the toxicity), HN is where I have most of my online discussions

</comment><comment><USER68> Back in the days I used to discuss at a few IRC channels with pretty high SNR. Sadly, these communities faded out.

</comment><comment><USER69> The Ars Technica forums are generally quite good. The non-tech forums require being a subscriber, though.

</comment><comment><USER70> for local community elections etc we actually use nextdoor.

I am interested in one topic now that more and more school districts are going pork-free these days but don't know where to discuss that, so yes I'm unsure where to discuss civil topics outside of local issues.

</comment><comment><USER71> every strongly moderated place will do. HN and some subreddits like r/science, r/askscience, etc. are of very good quality. can't stress enough that moderation is the key.

<comment><USER72> Every strongly moderated place turns to the bias of the moderators. Any discussion outside their allowance gets censored.

<comment><USER71> which is often better than no moderation, as evidenced by this site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> when you bring it with you it is anywhere

</comment><comment><USER74> irc.freenode.net ##politics or ##<other subjects of interest>

</comment><comment><USER7> Try 4chan.org/b , the only sane place for civilized people.

<comment><USER75> Yup, that or YouTube comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> bogleheads.org is a forum for conservative investing, but it ends up tying into proactive and insightful discussion about all sorts of lifestyle issues. I enjoy it a lot!

</comment><comment><USER76> Ironically, FB

</comment><comment><USER77> Here...

</comment><comment><USER78> quora FTW!

</comment><comment><USER79> [http://Fark.com](http://Fark.com) has been my favorite.

<comment><USER80> I mainly frequent the Entertainment and Politics sections of Fark.

The Geek topic is generally too non-technical for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> [https://firesofheaven.org](https://firesofheaven.org)

</comment><comment><USER82> A slack channel linked to the community of edge.org would be pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER48> Hurting someone with the truth is better than killing them with a lie.

<comment><USER37> The assertion that civility and honesty are mutually opposed is a common one, but it's neither insightful, nor accurate.

<comment><USER83> The distinction between civil criticism and unholy flame only exists to an uncommonly mature audience. None of the major internet communities, including this one, gracefully host controversial arguments. The end result is almost always censorship.</comment></comment></comment>


Paying For Starbucks With Your Smartphone – Now in 6800+ Locations - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/01/27/paying-for-starbucks-with-your-iphone-or-blackberry-now-in-6800-locations/ <comment><USER2> They were testing this system for a _long_ time. It's nice to see it finally roll out. Coincidentally, it looks like Apple will implement NFC (RFID?) in the next-generation iPhone 5 and iPad 2. It's starting to look like 2011 could really become the year that mobile payments start to take off. It's about time.</comment>


What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/26/loose-ends/ <comment><USER2> I actually did find the "nightmare dilemmas" on the site more interesting.

<http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/22/another-nightmare/>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Today's Dilemma In front of you are two childless married couples. For some reason, it's imperative that you kill two of the four people. Your choices are:

A. Kill one randomly chosen member from each couple. B. Kill both members of a randomly chosen couple.

All four people agree that if they die, they want to be well remembered. Therefore all four ask you, please, to choose A so that anyone who dies will be remembered by a loving spouse.

If you care about the four people in front of you, what should you do?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Argument 1. For goodness's sake, they've told you what to do. If you care about them, of course you should respect their wishes. Choose A.

Argument 2.Once the killings are over, Option A leaves two grieving spouses, whereas Option B leaves one relieved couple. Surely two dead plus two happy is better than two dead plus two sad. Choose B.

Which argument do you buy? And what's wrong with the other one?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

<comment><USER3> That's actually a fairly neat question for sifting different types of Utilitarians. Do you care about other people's happiness, or about their utility as they define it? In B you're really screwing over one of the couples, but they won't be around to be unhappy about it.

<comment><USER4> you are part of the equation, no?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but unless they have a very strong attachment to one or both of the couples our hypothetical utilitarian judge is going to be a very small part of the equation. For the record, I'm not a pure utilitarian myself.

<comment><USER4> the question indicates you do care about them, specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While the story at the end about the bug report is humourous, it's a pretty mean thing to do. Perhaps 3 days lost work was longer than the expected damage, but one would imagine it would waste at least a few hours of someone's time, which is not something I'd feel good about.

On an unrelated note, sometimes using a computer not configured to British English I get spelling corrections for words like "humourous" above, as a sanity check I usually Google the word, it would be really helpful if Google displayed a message that it was the British version of the word, instead of displaying: "Did you mean _humorous_?".

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, while humor/humour is a US/British difference, humorous/humourous is not, the latter is just rare/unusual.

<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour>

<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humourous>

<comment><USER5> Ah I see, thanks, there are certainly better examples though, after a few minutes I found 'unshakeable'* which google tries to correct to the American version, yet is standard British English.

* <https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=unshakeable> (even makes the mistake on the UK Google site).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why I don't like "what comes next in this sequence" questions. Most of the time I can come up with a reason for choosing the answer I do, but that's not necessarily the same reason as the question asker has for their "correct" answer.

<comment><USER8> Precisely. The correct answer to such questions, whenever they don't include additional context/restrictions, is "Anything at all."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given an arbitrarily long or short sequence of numbers, random or otherwise, it is possible to find a polynomial which interpolates them, hence gives a reasonable rule for finding the next number in the sequence.

<comment><USER3> Usually the right next number in a sequence is the one with the lowest entropy, but of course the answer that the post's author says is the "correct" one is far from the simplest way to generate the same sequence of 7 numbers.

<comment><USER10> Entropy is relative to your encoding scheme plus or minus a constant. Usually you can ignore this fact when dealing with large amounts of information, because almost all human-interesting encoding schemes are related by relatively small constants, but when handed a small set of numbers it suddenly dominates as the constant for very reasonable schemes relative to other very reasonable schemes can exceed the size of the bits given to you in the form of the original numbers.

This argument basically collapses back down to, no, there still isn't enough information in a short sequence to identify the next number truly uniquely.

<comment><USER3> Yes, a function's Kolmogorov Complexity[1] does indeed depend on the encoding, but you would certainly have to go out of your way to find an encoding where the official answer can be expressed more easily than "f(n) = pi/2".

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity> I didn't use the term because I didn't think most people would recognize it, but we're getting technical now.

<comment><USER10> First, I was speaking to the general case.

Second, for any given function there exists an encoding for which it is simply the shortest possible string, so no, you don't really have to go "out of your way" to find such an encoding. Trying to create criteria whereby that is somehow "illegal" or "cheating" hits some rocky shores very quickly.

<comment><USER3> By having to go out of your way, I meant that every encoding I could think of, whether English or Python or turing machine would rank these two solutions in the same order. In fact, I would be somewhat surprised if there were any encoding that had been used by more than one person in all of human history that would rank the algorithm offered by The Big Questions as simpler than pi/2.

Using unusual encodings like that isn't cheating in general, but when you play a guessing game with other people like the blog author did then social norms start to enter into the picture, and in this case I think it would be reasonable to say that the author did cheat. Either that or, for the reasons jl6 outlined, it was entirely meaningless.

But this isn't entirely confined to games people play. The only difference between the hypothesis that General Relativity is correct and that General Relativity has always been correct but in 5 seconds the rules of the universe will change" is the complexity of the two statements, and I don't think that the fact that you can specify an encoding where the second is simpler is going to convince them that its a equally valid scientific hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure I like the idea that there's anything special about this. Making an arbitrary sequence that suddenly diverges isn't hard: f(k) = k^(max(0,k-5)). Involving real numbers just adds to the repertoire of hiding techniques.

</comment><comment><USER12> Apparently, "Error establishing database connection.".

</comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of another "surprise" series:

      0, 1, 2, 720!, ...

<comment><USER14> You gave it away with a slight error - the sequence is 0, 1, 2, 720...

For the curious, the sequence follows factorial (!) applied twice, i.e. (0!)!, (1!)! etc. (3!)! is 720, and (4!)! is 6.20448402 × 10^23.

<comment><USER5> In that case the sequence should be 1, 1, 2, 720... as zero factorial equals one _.

_ <https://www.google.com/search?q=0>!

<comment><USER14> Oops, quite right!

<comment><USER4> 0 is correct pragmatacally, and makes the puzzle harder for those not wise that 0!=1 by the definition of factorial. (as opposed to proof.... factorial being a shorthand for math and ths being convenient. if there were a proof it would be a theorem, which its not.)

i knew factorial but i had to read up on 0!, news to me too.

on another note, without context, we could say there is an infinite set of functions that satisfy any such question.

"what could come next and why" or something.

edit: 1 is indeed correct for the sequence, ignore that part... my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What means the "d" in those formulas?

<comment><USER16> delta

<comment><USER17> Actually, it means differential.

<comment><USER18> While delta is technically wrong, it is correct in that dx represents delta x, where delta x tends to 0.

<comment><USER19> Delta x is represented as Δx</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


U.S. Pat. No. 8605152: Method for Filming a Yoga Class - <AUTHOR> http://www.loweringthebar.net/2014/11/us-pat-no-8605152-method-for-filming-a-yoga-class.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this a new technique, specifically sending threatening letter before a patent is granted, warning of owing in arrears?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most painful problem you have day-to-day? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Toddler with a cold

</comment><comment><USER3> reading hn comments</comment>


AOL Increasing Dial-Up Fees - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/data/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208801963 <comment><USER2> What's interesting about this is that people are still using dialup!

Did a quick Google search ... "10 percent of U.S. Internet users on dial-up"</comment>


Wall Street's Naked Swindle - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print

<comment><USER2> "Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class . . . an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas . . ."

I can't take this sort of writing seriously in an article like this. It's fine for an internet rant that is supposed to make me laugh. In an article that is pretending to be an economic analysis, well, I quit reading.

I did see something about naked short selling. Naked short selling sounds fraudulent to me, but I'd like to read a intelligent defense of it from supporters of the practice. Anyone know of one?

<comment><USER3> Not too many people will defend naked short selling, it is an illegal scam.

<comment><USER4> It's not necessarily illegal. Nokia, Nintendo and Tesla all openly do naked short selling of their products. They call this a "preorder" -- you preorder a Wii/N900/whatever and they deliver it on or before a fixed date.

It's only illegal when you do it to manipulate a market or if you intend not to deliver the shares.

<comment><USER5> Nintendo may not yet have the Wii, but they have made some and they are in production.

The difference is that Nintendo can complete your order - if it were a naked short sell then the seller knows they probably can not genuinely get hold of the shares that they sold you, it may be impossible, Some other trade may have had a promise to borrow those shares and may have sold them to some other buyer.

Nintendo may well actually have stockpiled your Wii already awaiting delivery (I think this is the most likely position).

<comment><USER4> Nintendo hopes they can complete your order after they build the wii, and naked short sellers hope they can complete your order after they buy your shares.

In the event Nintendo doesn't build the wii, they refund your money. The naked short seller also needs to pay a large penalty.

Naked short selling is more or less the same as "naked wii selling". That's why it's only illegal when you are attempting to manipulate the market.

<comment><USER5> But the limitations on Nintendo are less than on the NSS (naked short seller), the NSS can know that they are selling someone else's shares that have already been borrowed by someone else, indeed they can sell more shares than exist as they're not actually required to locate the shares before they sell them.

Theoretically Nintendo could sell more than they can ever manufacture, but they at least are able to manufacture the product at the point at which they pre-sell it.

The NSS is more like Nintendo now pre-selling a Star Trek holo-deck - they'd know it's almost certainly not achievable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's preposterous to suggest that naked shorts killed Bear and Lehman, as this article does in some places, despite providing the real reasons in others. The naked shorts may have profited from it unfairly and driven the share price down (via the share inflation concept), but the banks were killed by not having the collateral for their insane leverage (and not getting protection from the government). Just because the stock price of a company drops, it doesn't mean it's going out business. This article confuses the sketchy method used to profit from the collapse with actually causing the collapse in many places, usually by suggesting that the shorts are motivated to cause the collapse, but with scant evidence of any connection.

Seriously, Overstock.Com? They're still losing money. The shorts were right.

For the other side of the shorting story, look at what happened everyone shorting VW in 2008 when Porsche upped their stake to 75%. It briefly became the highest value company in the world, as every short seller had their lunch eaten trying to find the few remaining shares to deliver.

<comment><USER7> The article actually mentions the other reasons for collapse of those banks. But the article makes it clear I think that naked shorts did cause the collapse as it happened, otherwise it would have happened much slower.

Also naked shorts allowed many people to profit unfairly, by doing something that is illegal but it is not properly enforced.

Regarding the VW story, were naked shorts even involved in that? I don't think VW trades in US exchanges and I am not sure whether naked shorts are a factor in Germany. NAked shorting should be differentiated from ordinary legal shorting. Legal shorting is not that problematic because there is a natural limit to it. Theoretically naked shorts can crash any company because they can flood the market with an enormous amount of shares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. This article is very wordy, but it does a tremendous job of explaining how the stock market is basically completely corrupt. Its a wonder that our American economic system hasn't collapsed already.

<comment><USER9> It's not all that bad. Shorting, credit default swaps and all these other ugly tricks are a comparatively small part of the overall system. The vast majority of the trading that happens everyday is completely legitimate old school business. The US economy is also freakishly resilient. We had an almost total collapse of our credit system last year and while we don't know the full long term ramifications yet it does appear we're going to make it through it without too much gloom & doom. It's somewhat of a miracle that we've only seen a doubling of the unemployment rate and very little (if any?) inflation or deflation due to all these external forces at work on the market. The end result for most of us is maybe we couldn't buy that new car we wanted or had to cancel a vacation.

<comment><USER10> the dollar lost a huge amount of purchasing power between 2005-present. prices just havn't caught up yet. expect CPI inflation to continue to suck for the next few years.

<comment><USER11> I'd think so too, but inflation expectations are actually low (e.g. look at TIPS yields).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 One thing I don't get about naked short selling: if I bought shares from a short seller and it turns out these shares don't actually exist, what happens to the money I paid to the short seller?

In other words, does the buyer of the phantom shares have no recourse?

<comment><USER12> The entity victimized here isn't the buyer who is going short it is the company that is "falsely" shorted.

An extremely contrived example:

Say a company has a 1000 shares of stock out in the market.

The broker buys 250 of the shares to sell to the person who wants to short the stock.

So if you were looking at this stock from the outside you'd think: "There are 750 shares where people think the price of the stock is going to go up (or why else would they have bought it) and there are 250 shares where people are betting that the price is going to go down (which is how you make money by going short)".

Note the 750 shares + 250 shorts = 1000 shares

So if someone wanted to short this company on 500 shares, the broker can't find the extra 250 on the open market so they sell the short positions even though they don't have a stock to associate against the last 250 (hence they are "naked").

So you have: 750 shares + 250 actual shorts + 250 naked shorts = 1250 positions in the market on a company that only has issued a 1000 shares.

So now you're an investor and you're trying to guess what the future share price of a company will be and you have:

Company A with legit shots which you can think of as 750 bets the stock will go up vs 250 bets the stock will go down.

and

Company B with naked shorts which you can think of as 750 bets the stock will go up vs 500 bets the stock will go down.

You'd look at the two of these and go: "Gee, there sure are more people in the world that think Company B's price is going to go down. I'm going to sell my Company B shares before they really tumble and buy up some of that good Company A."

So the naked shorts make Company B look less attractive which drives the price down further (making more money for the short positions).

<comment><USER13> > _So the naked shorts make Company B look less attractive which drives the > price down further_

It's not even a matter of _attractiveness_ (although false rumors would definitely fall in that category).

If you have more people trying to buy a stock than those willing to sell (at the current price), the price will rise until more people are willing to sell or fewer people are willing to buy.

Likewise, if more people are looking to sell (at the current price) than to buy, the price will go down until people are either no longer willing to sell, or more people want to buy.

Naked shorting creates excess supply. You suddenly have A LOT more 'shares' being sold, without a corresponding increase in buyers.

As such, the share price declines. Couple this with nasty rumors, and the declining share price doesn't entice any new buyers (which is normally the case when something gets cheap). As the price caves further, and the rumors persist, existing owners start to worry, and decide to get out before it gets worse. Now the downward spiral is in full force. Everyone wants off the sinking ship.

<comment><USER14> > As the price caves further, and the rumors persist, existing owners start to > worry, and decide to get out before it gets worse. Now the downward spiral > is in full force. Everyone wants off the sinking ship.

Can you explain how the company goes out of business as a result of this? Suppose the company is basically sound. Through stock manipulation its share price goes down to 1 cent. But the company continues doing whatever it does (and can purchase its own shares back at a bargain price to boot).

<comment><USER13> Well, if the company were basically sound, it wouldn't go out of business... although it'd be mighty ripe for a hostile takeover.

But Bear, Lehman, and numerous small companies that are usually the victim of this tactic, were leveraged to the gills, and were full of nasty liabilities. The temporary crisis of confidence caused by a falling stock price led creditors to start fleeing as well, preventing Bear from rolling over it's daily debt. As they point out in the article, Bear was highly dependent on overnight lending at that point.

Also, making money via naked shorting doesn't require the company to die. It merely requires the share price to fall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Summary:

1) Hedge fund wants to short Bears Stearns

2) Hedge fund borrows 1M shares and sells them. Deposits its money with a Prime Broker.

3) Stock in Bears Stearns falls in price and hedge fund buys back the 1M shares it shorted (making a profit)

Now, where this gets insane is the shares the hedge fund borrows don't actually exist (it sells stock it does not have, delivering IOUs to the stock buyers and by dumping those non-existent shares it depresses the stock price)

> Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment > executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new > products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry > greed-bubble is being spun at the moment

<comment><USER16> There was a ban on short selling financials for a while to stop this kind of stuff. Maybe they rescinded it too soon.

<http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-211.htm>

<comment><USER17> What this article is getting at is _naked_ shorting. That ban included "normal" shorting (borrowing shares first).

<comment><USER16> Aye, you're right. Apologies, I read it too fast, missed out on that completely, silly me it's in the title even.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is illegal to gamble on the stock price (check some historical articles about gambling halls that took such bets). I am having a very hard time seeing how any of the derivatives are not gambling.

<comment><USER12> You're at the heart of the issue here. Naked Shorts (because they are NOT associated with an actual share someplace) are gambling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What should the layperson read to learn more about the inner-workings of financial systems? Any good books?

<comment><USER20> I normally recommend The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals by Alex Kuznetsov (despite the title you don't have to be a mathmo to read it, anyone with a technical mindset should be fine).

I'd avoid relying upon articles like this one though, from my experience they're frequently wrong.

I've been a developer on the leading equities analytics software, was lead developer on the worlds largest credit derivative trade settlement platform, and now work in currency trading. I don't have a huge in-depth knowledge in these areas, but I know enough that I can tell most of these articles are written by people who are completely clueless.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the book tip. Now, assuming this article is clueless. It is well written, but ok, lest say its factually inaccurate. Where is the article that is accessible and has enough facts right?

<comment><USER22> FWIW, I think this author is hitting around the nail, even if not on target, and his emotional style of writing can further bring his credibility into question. However, I wouldn't say the article is clueless or fictional, far from it. I found myself agreeing for the most part with another article from this author about economic bubbles and Goldman Sachs ([http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_grea...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print)) and I'm someone that both predicted and warned of our impending economic trouble as early as Nov '07 (provable screenshots). I recommend watching Money as Debt (5 part series so click at each end): [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIIAvdJvCes&NR=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIIAvdJvCes&NR=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Overstock.com CEO:

"This really isn't about my company," Byrne says. "I mean, I've made my money. My initial concern, of course, was with Overstock. But the more I learned about this, the more my real worry became 'Jesus, what are the implications for the system?' And given what happened to Bear and Lehman last year, I think we ended up seeing what some of those implications are."

<comment><USER11> Byrne tried to deny his company's real problems by blaming naked shorts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news._

</comment><comment><USER25> Not a bad article, but he attributed to some giant evil conspiracy by the banks something that was, in fact, simple economics.

Banks weren't out to swindle people with all those 'new' investment funds, they were reacting to overwhelming demand from the managers of 80-something trillion dollars. That overwhelming demand was driven, in part, by the fed holding the discount window open for so long.

If we remove the author's notion of 'evil' intent on the banks part, for which there is little to no evidence, and chalk it back to 'incompetence' instead, the author's article becomes a rehash basic economics and a lot of empty hyperbole.

For a more dispassionate recap of the debacle, I'd recommend This American Life's article, the Global Pool of Money.

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9032768...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90327686)

</comment><comment><USER26> there have always been haves and have-nots, those are the facts of life. but these guys (read: gs) are laughing their asses off at us. and I'm pretty pissed off about it.

<comment><USER16> The problem is that our whole system is based around rewarding essentially detrimental behaviour.

We'll be forever wondering what the landscape would have looked like if those banks had been allowed to collapse.

I personally think that short term we'd have been _much_ worse off, but longer term quite possibly much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There are too many powerful people who would have had near real-time knowledge of the March 11 meeting, the insight to connect the dots, and the means to cover their tracks. I'm guessing it was a consortium that made the bet on Bear, thus spreading around the protection. We'll never know.

</comment><comment><USER28> He seems to argue both that the fall of Bear Stearns was inevitable, and that it's impossible that a smart outsider could simply have figured that out and bet against them, therefore the naked short must be due to insider trading. You can't have both.

<comment><USER24> From what I understood, he said that insiders instigated the fall of Bear Stearns, and smart outsiders joined in to finish them off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If there really are that many holes in the American economic system, then it's not unlikely that's where terrorists would strike next, since America is physically more robust than its other areas like the economy.

</comment><comment><USER30> "How about bonds? "Naked short-selling of stocks is nothing compared to what goes on in the bond market," says Trimbath, the former DTC staffer. Indeed, the practice of selling bonds without delivering them is so rampant it has even infected the market for U.S. Treasury notes. That's right — Wall Street has actually been brazen enough to counterfeit the debt of the United States government right under the eyes of regulators, in the middle of a historic series of government bailouts! In fact, the amount of failed trades in Treasury bonds — the equivalent of "phantom" stocks — has doubled since 2007. In a single week last July, some $250 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds were sold and not delivered."

That passage is a little alarming. A run on US government debt could be triggered by American financial firms themselves.

</comment><comment><USER31> That dispassionate and nonpartisan authority on our financial system, Rolling Stone Magazine.</comment>


Show HN: Kitify, my first Rails project. And some advice for non-tech founders - <AUTHOR>

http://kitify.com
I'd love to get HN's feedback on Kitify (http://kitify.com), a new service I built. Kitify makes it easy for DIY project writers to document, share and sell kits for their projects. I built Kitify because DIY is fun and a great way to learn, but actually getting the parts together for many projects is a pain; I want to solve that.
This is my first Rails project. I knew how to write simple PHP scripts before this, but I had no exposure to Rails - or MVC or, actually, anything meaningfully involving objects. I had the idea for Kitify months ago, but wasn't able to move it forward with the knowledge I had.
What really helped was finding a great, smart developer and asking him to write just the basic outline of the app and answer questions about it. I don't mean "rails new", I mean a working version with almost no features but with Bootstrap, useful gems, JS utility functions, models/views/controllers in the general direction of what I would eventually need. (Thank you @reedlauber!)
This was affordable and time-efficient, and gave me enough momentum to start learning and building. I highly recommend this approach for non-dev  founders who are intimidated by modern web frameworks but who are having trouble finding a technical cofounder.
My bonus advice for people in b-school is that, if you are working on an idea that may be perceived as "niche", you will probably have to build version 1 yourself, even if you don't know anything about coding. HTML, CSS and basic JS / PHP can be learned quickly, and you definitely have time to do this. Then you should follow the advice I outlined above.
Thanks for reading! I'd love hear any feedback on the idea, where I should go with it, user experience, etc. <comment><USER2> Clickers:

<http://kitify.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it open source? Would love to check out your code!</comment>


A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - <AUTHOR> https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078524)

</comment><comment><USER3> This, indirectly, and after a lot of work and several failed attempts at solutions on the cypherpunks mailing list, resulted in bitcoin.

There was a movement at the time, coalesced by this manifesto, of the geekiest of the nerds, the very few engineers who really cared about encryption, privacy and libertarianism. (OG Libertarians)

For awhile, it was like a window into the world of a William Gibson novel.

Unfortunately, technology marches slowly, and by the time bitcoin was released, the movement was a lot less strong than it was.

Now bitcoin crystalized a second cypherpunk movement around it... but it's success over the past 5 years has attracted a whole lot of momo, traders, players, "investors" and generally non-technical types who can't tell the difference between ripple and bitcoin, except "Ripple has all the banks excited, I'm gonna make bank!"

At some point, though, those eople will be less of an influence as we, as a wider cypherpunk community, recognize, ironically, that identity and the trust that a real identity can accrue, is what is key.

Adam Beck, Luke-Jr, Samson Mow, Matt Blue, and others I don't know as well are accruing the riches of correct predictions, and a half decade of actions with integrity, while the wannabe kings make their plans and push agreements, they will be cast aside as their true intentions become more widely recognized, and their proposals fail in the marketplace (you can't just rip code out of core and call it "bitcoin" and expect it to survive-- the gyrations of BCH's hash rate are a good example of this.)

</comment><comment><USER4> A good elucidation of cypherpunk philosophy:

[https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake- design-p...](https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design- philosophy-506585978d51)

</comment><comment><USER5> re: "If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it?"

This is defeatist. There are ways. Imperfect, but they exist.

There are legal remedies like HIPAA. It seems that we don't actually want the health care system to share everything it knows about us.

Also, Snapchat got where it is by realizing its users want disappearing messages and doing their best to give it to them.

</comment><comment><USER6> It will always be valuable to know things about other people. Technologies that enhance privacy without providing perfect privacy merely increase the cost of technologies that collect data. Even with perfect privacy tech, people sell their privacy for small discounts all the time already. Is the resulting information asymmetry better or worse than sacrificing privacy altogether? I'm not sure.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this really require a monicker? Can't we just call people opposed to the freedom to privacy and encryption... luddites, authoritarians, or assholes?

<comment><USER8> I think I prefer all three actually...Authoritarian Luddite Assholes.

But seriously, I don't think that's necessarily an accurate description of everyone who's against encryption. Some of them just have a poor understanding of the subject and are told total bullshit by other people about it. Often times people who are allegedly "experts".

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it's the overall complete lack of education on any topic that's even remotely cutting edge. Technologies and ideas move faster than the institutions can keep up with. The only subject that should really be taught now is the ability to self-educate as much as possible.

Ignorance to these kinds of things keeps people who would otherwise totally support in the dark, and thus, afraid of it.</comment></comment></comment>


Websites Must Use HSTS in Order to Be Secure - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/websites-hsts <comment><USER2> If you operate a website and want to enable HSTS, you should know about a few caveats:

1\. You can't go back! As soon as a browser sees Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000", it will refuse to load your site over HTTP for the next year.

2\. The includeSubDomains option can cause problems in hard-to-predict ways. For example, Mailgun lets you set a CNAME for unsubscribe links. If a browser tries to load the HTTPS version, they'll get mailgun.com's cert, which is invalid for your domain.

3\. Secure transport doesn't stop XSS, CSRF, etc. There are other headers such as Content-Security-Policy that can ameliorate some of these attacks. Also, sanitize!

4\. HSTS is just one part of ensuring secure transport. It's also important to check your cipher suites. Not all TLS is created equal. SSL Labs is an extremely useful tool for testing your config: [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=floobits.com](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=floobits.com)

If you're curious what the final result of all this paranoia looks like, take a look at the httpd config for floobits.com: [https://gist.github.com/ggreer/9984770](https://gist.github.com/ggreer/9984770)

You'll also notice mod_authn_yubikey. We require multi-factor auth (YubiKey + password) for our admin interface. There's tons of other stuff I could go into, but the real lesson is that security is like raking pine needles: You will never be done.

<comment><USER3> _You can 't go back! As soon as a browser sees Strict-Transport-Security "max- age=31536000", it will refuse to load your site over HTTP for the next year._

This sounds like a powerful way to DOS a site if you can set up a temporary https server on the domain and send this signal.

<comment><USER4> This DoS risk is documented in section 14.5 of the HSTS standard.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797#section-14.5](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797#section-14.5)

It's true that HSTS could be a way for someone who can set up a seemingly valid but nonetheless fake HTTPS listener on a domain to prevent people from later communicating with a genuine HTTP service on that domain.

Three remedies for this, with different degrees of applicability to different sites:

* Put a CAA record for your domain into your DNS (see [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6844](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6844)) to prevent legitimate certificate authorities from issuing the cert to the impostor. (This only provides protection if the attacker doesn't control your DNS zone.)

* Actually switch to HTTPS!

* If this attack happens to you and you don't want to switch to HTTPS, run a legitimate HTTPS listener on your domain that clears the HSTS status and then redirects users back to HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course, it would help if browsers stopped letting sites put an image at the same place they show the locker (like they used to)... But that would require a few more pixels for canvas, and security is a secondary concern (just like usability).

<comment><USER6> Firefox stopped showing favicons in the URL bar. For HTTP you see a globe; for HTTPS, a padlock.

<comment><USER5> That's good, and I didn't notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can't a MITM (as described in the article) strip out any HSTS headers automatically, thus thwarting this quite simply?

As with HTTPS, you need a shared secret _before_ communication begins for anything like this to combat MITM attacks. Unless the browser communicates with a secure server to assess whether the website should be sending HSTS headers... Is that the idea?

<comment><USER6> On the very first connection from the browser to the website, yes. But the browser saves the HSTS setting (for the time specified by the HSTS header's max-age value) so future connections go straight to HTTPS.

Chrome and Firefox also ship with a baked-in HSTS preload list containing sites that should always use HTTPS, without depending on the HSTS header: [http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/tra...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/transport_security_state_static.json)

<comment><USER8> It seems silly that Chromium and Firefox now have separate HSTS lists (though Firefox's was seeded using the Chromium list [1]).

At the moment, these lists appear to be b) tied to specific browsers 2) tied to specific releases of those browsers.

Would it be viable to run some kind of global open registry where any website can be registered for mandatory HSTS? That way, every individual website owner doesn't need to submit a bug to Chromium and Mozilla - the browser just needs to securely connect to the registry and download the latest list. Or maybe DNSSEC can help ...

Maybe work on this is already underway, but I was reading some MLs a few weeks ago and I didn't see any forthcoming solutions ...

1\. [https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading- hsts...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts/)

<comment><USER6> I believe that Firefox is still generating its HSTS preload list from Chromium's - a few months ago I got a site added to Chromium's HSTS list and a few weeks later it showed up in Firefox. I couldn't even figure out how to submit directly to Firefox.

I agree that a global registry would be better, but it should probably be updated using the browser's normal update channel, to avoid re-inventing the wheel. (And DNSSEC has way too many issues.) It's true that ties the list to specific releases, but since browsers have good, and frequent, auto-updating, I think that's OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One interesting thing I've noticed about HSTS (which is probably a good thing in the long run, but kind of painful for now): it breaks wi-fi capture-portal redirects. Try to load [https://news.ycombinator.com/](https://news.ycombinator.com/) on a fresh connection to a wi-fi hotspot, and you just get a connection error.

<comment><USER10> There's no functional difference between craptive portals and a MITM attack, so this definitely seems like a feature...

<comment><USER4> Some people have been thinking about creating a standard to distinguish between the two so that captive portals won't have to do a MITM attack (that browsers currently correctly defend against). One idea might be to have a different protocol through which the captive portal can indicate its presence and declare itself as a captive portal, entirely or almost entirely outside of the HTTP or HTTPS session.

Getting the UI right is pretty challenging, though. It's not even completely clear what getting it right would mean. Even if the user clearly understands that they're interacting with some network operator rather than, say, Gmail or their organizational webmail server, the user still has no way to know whether the portal they're talking to is actually operated by the operator of the network that they think they're connecting to!

<comment><USER11> I've wondered this too. Doesn't DHCP support extensible options? Couldn't you just send an option that said, "hey, crappy portal welcome site at {URL}"? It'd be fixed to a particular webpage (so, you can't use another protocol), but that's the state of things today.

<comment><USER9> It seems like there are only two things captive-portals are "for", though: accepting EULAs, and presenting a login form for the proxy. Both of these could be _better_ if built into browser/OS chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to point out that HSTS is not compatible with private browsing because by saving the information that the particular site must be accessed by HTTPS the browser exposes the fact that the said site was previously accessed. I hope we will eventually come to required secure HTTP by default with the next versions of the protocol.

<comment><USER13> Is it not effectively like someone hand-typing the address with HTTPS? how does it expose anything?

<comment><USER6> Briefly: a page can embed a hidden image with a [http://](http://) URL (with a different hostname, used just for tracking purposes). If that image gets loaded over HTTPS, it means the site has been visited before. If it loads over HTTP, the site hasn't been visited before; it then redirects to the HTTPS version and sends a HSTS header so on the next visit it goes straight to HTTPS.

That stores one bit of information. Repeat 32 times (with 32 different host names) and you can store a unique 32-bit tracking number that persists even when cookies are cleared.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For anyone wondering general best practices for setting up HTTPS on Apache/nginx I found this to be a really great resource

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS)

</comment><comment><USER15> One drastic solution if your web site has lots of IE users: Simply don't answer the phone on port 80.

[Edit] Duh. As agentS points out, this won't work.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's helpful. Perhaps more along the lines of putting a flat redirect on port 80, with no content.

(It sounds like this attack depends on a complete version of the website being available over port 80)

<comment><USER6> > (It sounds like this attack depends on a complete version of the website > being available over port 80)

No, it doesn't. An attacker can always connect to the website over HTTPS and proxy the content to the victim over port 80.

<comment><USER16> Hmm, yes, of course you are correct. I'm not sure why I was thinking that wouldn't be a risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My current client is insisting that all https traffic be served over a separate subdomain.

</comment><comment><USER18> Alternatively, make a plain html website and don't ask users to log in and don't track them with cookies, etc. If you want to collect money from them, make a real product and mail it to them after they sent you a postal money order.

Any attempt to defeat that model will be handled by the US Postal Inspection Service, (see also [https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/aboutus/mission.aspx](https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/aboutus/mission.aspx))

<comment><USER18> Note that if you take their money and don't ship their product as described, the US Postal Inspection Service will come after you. It protects both sides from fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> HTTPS sounds great and s __t but HTTPS won 't help you if you dumb enough to execute shell commands as a root on your server based on unfiltered user form inputs... Unfortunately, I noticed that lots of 'idea guys' trust the dev they hire first even if they have absolutely no skills whatsoever. lOOOl</comment>