Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot?utm_source=frontpage&utm_medium=mview&utm_campaign=why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot <comment><USER4> I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict.

Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power- structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series)

In one aspect futurism often looks like an extreme expression of contemporary culture when seen in retrospect is in futuristic architecture and design. E.g. [http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/08...](http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/08/60s.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Planet Earth calling: _science fiction is not a predictive medium_.

It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unless they are _really_ hardcore about their futurism.

Upshot: the vast bulk of SF _isn 't_ predictive, and isn't intended to be. As a field we sometimes get something right -- but there's an element of the thousand monkeys eventually emitting a Shakespearean sonnet to this: we also get a whole lot more wrong.

Source: I do this for a living.

<comment><USER6> Ah! I recognize you! I consider "Accelerando" futurist/transhumanist cannon. Thank you for such a wonderful book!

<comment><USER7> Do you maybe mean "canon" as in: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at _500mph_ and the passenger reading a _newspaper_ in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this?

"Radio has no future." \-- Lord Kelvin, physicist, the father of thermodynamics.

Our inability to predict the distant future only says one thing: things that we can imagine are already happening. The gap between an idea and its implementation is narrower compared to hundreds of years ago. With very few exceptions maybe: AI, "eternal" battery cells, easy space travel and a few others. So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.

<comment><USER9> > _A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and > the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong > than this?_

I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet).

What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.

<comment><USER10> It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. Sure, there are prototypes (which are really cool), but there's a big leap between a prototype and the average person owning/hailing a self- driving car.

I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).

<comment><USER9> > _It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there > were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren 't even self- > driving cars now, in 2015._

No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they still got the technology right).

Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars.

> _I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social > /cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far > as to predict it will never happen_

If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15 years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their life, so even easier for them to adopt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few non sequiturs:

1) 'Futurism' is the early twentieth century philosophy created by Marinetti, launched with this enchanting essay: [http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti....](http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti.html)

2) "Instagram began life as a Yelp-style app called Burbn, with photos an afterthought (photos on your phone, is that a thing?)."

Is this somehow implying that Instagram invented phones on your camera, or indeed anything at all? This seems a common sort of confusion, along the same category as believing Apple invented smart phones, Google invented search engines or Facebook invented social networking, rather than popularizing a particular form of a preexisting technology.

<comment><USER12> re 2)

I'd read it as that the makers of Instagram initially didn't believe in people actually using cameras in their phones, so the opposite of your interpretation.

How many people did have camera feature-phones/early smartphones and did really use the camera? Granted, I was still in high-school, but tons of my peers had phones with cameras, but they were only used very seldomly and not in any phone-specific way (take picture with phone if you didn't have a digital camera with you, send to computer, treat as if it came of a crappy digital camera)

<comment><USER11> The innovation that allowed this was really faster wireless networks with internet. My first cell (2005) was a feature phone, had a camera, I used it, but transferring it over the network was slow and painful, so sharing of any kind was impossible. Once it was, it of course required no great leap of imagination to start moving things to the cloud.

<comment><USER13> Also phones with WiFi, and everyone having WiFi in their home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bit of a pet peeve, but futurism already has a meaningful definition - <USER2> refers to an art movement at the start of the 20th century. Just because you like how the word sounds, it's pretty poor form to recycle it to indicate a particular trend you've 'identified'.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, that ship sailed[1] in the early 1980s.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Futurism is this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism) And the article is not related at all, despite the (misleading) title.

<comment><USER17> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_\(disambiguation\))

Futurists (from future studies) refer to the field as futurism, futurology, and future study. See usages [https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&h...](https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#hl=en&q=futurism+science)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The thing about futurology is that there are tons of people engaged in "predicting". Most of them are notoriously bad at it. Most tech journalists, for example, are so bad that they can't even "predict" the present - <USER3> descriptions of cutting-edge technologies used today often have glaring mistakes.

So you have to read the right people. Nearly every time I open a book from Stanislav Lem, I am thinking: "My god, was this really written in the 70s?!". _That_ is predictive power.

</comment><comment><USER19> Dystopian anticipations have been 180 degrees wrong:

      1.Genetic Testing -
         Anticpated: GATTACA
         What we got: A bunch of innocent people freed from jail. Who, today, would want to live in a world without genetic forensics?

      2. Pacifying Narcotics -
          Anticipated: Brave New World
          What we got:War on Drugs, 80's crack epidemic. Huxley foresaw the gov't forcing people to take drugs. The real problem was the gov't trying to stop people from willingly taking drugs.

<comment><USER20> GATTACA is about genetic design rather than genetic testing.

<comment><USER19> The protagonist doesn't wish his brother was born with his same gene for heart failure, he wishes companies would stop using genetic tests to filter out candidates.

Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from imposters. Genetic testing.

<comment><USER21> He wishes it the way modern antivaxxers wish big pharma would stop giving kids autism.

<comment><USER22> What? In the movie he wishes for the companies to stop doing something they are _actually doing_. They are overzealously testing for any possible problem and marking people as unclean.

It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates, but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.

How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.

<comment><USER21> From his perspective it certainly must seem that way. He can probably even point to a paper published by a legitimate researcher to show that it does happen. Even if it was written by someone who was paid to do so and all his coauthors later retracted their support.

<comment><USER22> You're actually arguing that it is a fringe opinion that the companies in Gattaca are discriminating based on genes?

<comment><USER21> They discriminate in the same sense that that real companies today discriminate based on candidates' skills and experience. Selecting the most qualified candidates and filtering out candidates because they trip certain flags are procedurally very different.

<comment><USER22> Sure, when the qualifications have anything to do with the job. When you apply a test to applicants, if it happens to have a bias that touches protected groups you had better have a very good argument that it relates directly to core job requirements or you are leaving yourself open to a massive lawsuit. Which might happen anyway.

Plus all the circumstances where you must make reasonable accommodations even if it has some impact, as long as they can still _do_ the job.

<comment><USER21> Applying real-life ideas about what is protected to a eugenicist utopia really makes sense to you?

<comment><USER22> When we're looking at how its use of genetic testing acts as a prediction of the future? Makes total sense to me.

<comment><USER21> But changing laws when there are radical shifts to society doesn't?

<comment><USER22> Laws do not change the concept of discrimination.

There is a big difference between picking qualified individuals vs. systematically picking certain groups over others.

He's not imagining the tests. The evidence of tests is not one guy lying in a tiny study.

<comment><USER21> Laws are the entirety of the concept of discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Beware: The more you understand about how inaccurate futuristic predictions are, the harder modern sci-fis get to watch.

Especially so if you've seen a lot of older sci-fis about our present time.

<comment><USER8> Or not necessarily about the present time. For example a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away they had very advanced AIs but no computers or mobile communication (in any practical form) :)

<comment><USER24> Another example, the universe of Dune had pretty impressive engineering for a universe without computation. Yeah yeah I read the series, don't correct me about the pre Butlerian Jihad era, etc. Dune was mostly a fantasy not sci fi anyway.

Note there's hard sci fi and soft sci fi, and a soap opera / action flick which happens to be "in the future" like B5 is not really predictive. I'm just saying that very soft sci fi is indistinguishable from copy and paste style fantasy or historical fiction. Hard sci fi like KSRs Mars Trilogy ages much better than "80s soap opera, on a space ship".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the "office of the future" made on- > par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring > omission: The office had no women._

To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.

<comment><USER26> I work in IT, in an office with about 60 people. Two women.

That prediction came true.

<comment><USER27> It's a prediction in the sense that they didn't even consider the fact that women are capable of working in an office. It was a lack of prediction, an unspoken assumption that an aspect of the status quo would never be upended.

But it's ok, feminism won the fight for equality 30 years ago /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items "dumb.""

wow - tough crowd. I would have been interesting just to be there and experience the reaction.

was worth skimming just to learn about the mercury dime : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime)

</comment><comment><USER29> Culture is made up of many abstract ideas ranging from values and customs that combine to make an interdependent complex system, prediction is impossible. And as the norms and values were shaped by situations that were random and or completely different to the situation we currently experience, we get another layer of complexity.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if it's not more that we're ignoring the cultural aspects because many of them didn't turn out as good as the predictions (less working hours, more equality for instance)

</comment><comment><USER31> One problem is what demographics futurists tend to be. White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are, I would imagine. People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world.

<comment><USER32> Or perhaps it's the reverse. If you ask "white men" about the liberation status of women/minorities, you're probably going to find them MORE likely to say that equality has already been achieved. So when they write stories, they'll write them as if everyone is equal and living the same utopian dream they are.

On the other hand if someone comes from a background where they feel oppressed, they're going to write that into their work.

That's part of the point of the article. People continue to extrapolate from what they view culture currently is, as if it continues indefinitely into the future. I think based on that "white men" are going to view it as being more pleasant and fair (i.e. their own experience) than minorities.

<comment><USER31> That's true. People from oppressed groups are more pessimistic about the future.

Or, well, pessimistic at all. One of the weird things about the post-war West is most people honestly expect the future to be better.</comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic Swift - <AUTHOR> http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/05/21/dynamic-swift-2/ <comment><USER3> Not sure I see what's going on here (it's just a blog post linking to other blog posts?), but is this arguing that Apple should turn the safety of Swift back into the unsafe mess of Objective-C? Horrifying stuff like swizzling, respondsToSelector tricks, etc.? That's what Swift is trying to get away from!

Some of the classes in Apple's frameworks _need_ to be overridden, some of them cannot be overridden, some of them don't both to call their overridden accessors - it's a mess! You can only discover this stuff by reading the documentation (if it's even there), when it ought to be enforced by a strict compiler.

<comment><USER4> The Objective-C old guard has had a very hard time dealing with Swift. For a couple years now, every 3 months they have another blog post hand-wringing about what they used to do in Objective-C, how they can't in Swift, with the implicit warning this is worrisome and _needs_ to be reimplemented in Swift, or Swift isn't a serious contender long-term.

Most of the of the community seems to have moved on, with the understanding that of course you can't reimplement performSelector/KVO/(insert dynamic, non- type safe feature that usually just bites you in the ass in the long run) from scratch, but we still have Objective-C that _already implemented those features_ , and we will have it for years, if not decades, to come. Maybe Apple doesn't have to open source UIKit to prove their commitment to Swift (a short, albeit slightly unfair, summary of a blog post last week from another member of the old guard)

There seems to be a general lack of imagination, and lack of understanding that Apple would _never_ rewrite UIKit or other large, existing frameworks in Swift. But, once Swift is more stable in a year or two, maybe you start thinking about new frameworks being written in Swift, with Objective-C compatibility, instead of vice versa.

Maybe you can't write Rails in Swift, but by god, why would you _ever_ write Rails again? There's been two heavily up voted stories here in the past two weeks describing how awful it is to have a career dependent on a framework so dependent on dynamic untyped code. That matches exactly with my experience being pressed into service writing Rails code for a couple months - <USER2> development experience felt like the Stone Age compared to Swift, even if I could write a method ~20% faster.

<comment><USER5> So, I'm deeply involved in Swift, in the sense that: I write the odd compiler feature.

From my vantage point it seems to be the opposite of your analysis. While it is true that ObjC's dynamism has all kinds of problems we want to avoid, we're also running into lots of cases where the obvious solution is dynamism, and the other solutions aren't obvious.

One concrete example I can offer you is NSCoding, which is being reimplemented right now in corelibs-Foundation. That API pretty much needs a way to look up classes at runtime, (there's really no other sane way to provide the feature). You could argue that we don't need NSCoding (in fact that was argued), but ultimately, we decided we needed NSCoding more than not. So Swift 3 adds a `_typeByName` API which does dynamic lookups of classes by string. It landed, it exists, the ship has sailed.

Another concrete example that may be interesting is XCTest. The way XCTest works is your unit tests are written as functions on a class, and we "discover" the tests by enumerating the functions at runtime. But oops, Swift has no way to enumerate functions at runtime, so we can't find any of your tests. The solution to this problem is actually pretty interesting: the latest proposal is to do sourcecode analysis from the compiler to enumerate your test functions, dump that somewhere, and then generate a second program that uses the dump to call the enumerated functions.

Now that is very interesting, and certainly less dynamic than ObjC (e.g. no method_exchangeImplementations and other nonsense), and I would argue quite a lot saner for the scope of the XCTest problem. But it follows easily that as soon as we do that we could emit a program that uses that same function enumeration to emit a giant switch statement that does dispatch-by-string. Of course it would be opt-in, so only callers that wanted it would use it, but there's nobody to stop you.

All of that to say, I think what is _actually_ happening inside Swift is we're coming up with more _structured_ kinds of dynamism, rather than a knee-jerk reaction against the ObjC philosophy. ObjC's model certainly has its issues, and we have gotten surprisingly far without really much dynamism at all. On the other hand, Swift constantly hits cases that are "solved" by ObjC's dynamism, those are definitely real (doesn't get more real than the core libraries), and dismissing them out of hand would be stupid. Meanwhile it takes time to come up with solid "structured" approaches to all the various cases people use dynamism in the wild, so it will be a long process of enabling more and more kinds of dynamism over time.

As for the ObjC runtime, we will not actually have it for years. Maybe on Apple platforms. But the decision has been made not to ship it for Linux, and Linux is of course the next big frontier for Swift. All code that wants to run on Linux (or run on both platforms) better not use the ObjC runtime for anything ever. So this places increasing pressure on designers to figure out what our answer to all the dynamic usecases will be, because there is no seatbelt to save you on one of our platforms.

Basically, I would very much not be dismissing these critiques out of hand. They are not (other than a few) arguing for a return to ObjC. But they are raising issues not seriously solved by Swift at present, and we need to be uncovering those and putting in the design effort to generate solutions for them.

<comment><USER4> There's definitely some nuance to this situation – I didn't mean to imply dynamic features aren't needed, or have no place. While writing my comment, there was a nagging voice in my head saying "What about Swift Foundation?"

What I meant to communicate was that there's a histrionical air to most of the commentary that is unfounded. We don't _need_ to be able to reimplement Rails, or KVO, or Core Data – we need to come up with new ways to solve those problems with an approach like you're seeing working in practice, a more structured dynamism. And for what it's worth, all of those problems deserve another try at an answer. They're some of the most tricky parts of the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant reply by Chris Lattner on the Swift Evolution mailing list: [https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of- Mo...](https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of- Mon-20151207/001948.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure how it's relevant: Chris talks about JITs and the performance characteristic of dynamic vs. static dispatch.

What these posts talk about is the _expressiveness_ of a metasystem, and they are generally agnostic about whether this metasystem is static or dynamic, just that it should not be less expressive than the current dynamic one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think ObjC has left us with some dynamic habits we don't actually always need, particularly in all non-UI layers. I appreciate the way using Swift has me questioning just how much dynamism and mutability my programs really need. Overuse of things like setValue:forKey: and performSelector: have a bit of code smell anyway and there's no reason you can't replicate these kinds of behaviors, if you really need to, with Swift Dictionaries.

<comment><USER8> It seems that (a) we need Dynamic features (introspection, dynamic dispatch) and (b) we need to use it sparingly. In short, it's a _cultural_ problem, not a technical one.

I suspect the solution is something as simple as a "DangerouslyCallMethodByName" method.

<comment><USER9> you could do

      if let method = classInstance.methods[methodKey] {
        //Put some ugly method argument checker thing here
        method.execute()
      }

It would be typesafe, not dangerous, and statically typed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Great web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, for example, can't be built without relying on a more dynamic language."

You don't necessarily want dynamism, you want metaprogramming.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, could you provide some examples?

<comment><USER11> A lot of Rails/Ruby magic hides in the dynamic "generation" of code and in the nice DSL-s. However you can typically achieve the same using e.g. macros (which work on compile time) and which can be even statically typed.

The DSL thing is orthogonal: it's more related to the language syntax than to the type system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's stopping Swift from using the C# dynamic keyword scheme as a starting point?

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd264741.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd264741.aspx)

C# does an excellent job of bridging dynamism and hard types.

The use of the dynamic keyword ensures that you know you are bridging to an area where the "." is not type checked, and is strictly evaluated at runtime.

There may be too many hooks into the reflection area of C# / .NET, however that can be mitigated in other ways within the confines of Swift.

Could even have an 'if ... let' Swift scheme that attempts to conform an object to a specific dynamic protocol. Example: Define an expected interface as a protocol, then do a 'dynamic if..let cast' which will ensure that all members from the protocol are present on the Swift object.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Leaning on the Objective-C runtime feels like a temporary solution because > it only exists on the Mac and iOS.

That's not entirely true; libobjc2[0] exists, for example, and is fully compatible with objc4.

[0]: [https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2](https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2)

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't want to call someone I don't know a bad developer, but as a general rule if software is moving more towards safety and reliability and you are resisting that change that's a sign there's a problem with your habits and preferences. Not that the decisions being made are bad.

Swift is not a perfect language, there's a lot of low hanging fruit (some of which is being dealt with in Swift 3), but it's lack of support for dynamic behavior is not one of those problems.

<comment><USER15> > if software is moving more towards safety and reliability and you are > resisting that change that's a sign there's a problem with your habits and > preferences

Unless safety and reliability come at the cost of some other metrics that you consider more valuable?

Currently - at least in the HN bubble - it appears that the pendulum is swinging towards static typing and away from dynamic language features. It is surely premature to conclude this is a permanent trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unreal the name "Smalltalk" is never mentioned in this thread...a very old argument folks.

</comment><comment><USER17> The posts in the first linked series ([http://inessential.com/2016/05/](http://inessential.com/2016/05/)) seem to mostly focus on how dynamism can avoid the need for boilerplate. For example, he states that the following code is tedious to write and error-prone:

        if localObject.foo != serverObject.foo {
          localObject.foo = serverObject.foo
          changeDictionary[fooKey] = serverObject.foo
        }
        if localObject.bar != serverObject.bar {
          localObject.foo = serverObject.bar
          changeDictionary[barKey] = serverObject.bar
        }

But there's another language feature that can replace boilerplate, _without_ dynamism and its associated performance and type safety penalties. A feature that's reviled by many, and was omitted from Swift, but serves this purpose perfectly: macros. What if you could write this?

        macro_rules! merge {
            ($localObject:expr, $serverObject:expr, ($($prop:ident),+)) => {
                $(
                    if $localObject.$prop != $serverObject.$prop {
                        $localObject.$prop = $serverObject.$prop;
                        changeDictionary[stringify!($prop)] = $serverObject.$prop;
                    }
                )+
            }
        }
        merge!(localObject, serverObject, (foo, bar, baz));

Actually, this is valid Rust code, as you might have guessed if you know that language. I picked it because it has similar syntax to Swift and a powerful, hygienic macro system. (This case is simple enough that a C macro would also work fine without any ugly arcane stuff - you'd have to have a separate macro invocation for each property, but whatever. But Rust's system scales better to slightly more complicated scenarios.)

Admittedly, not everything you can implement with dynamism is as easy to replace with macros. Many things are essentially impossible with the simple pattern matching language used above. In Rust, there is also the option to write a compiler plugin that can do arbitrary-ish things with ASTs, so almost anything is _possible_ with enough work, including things you can't implement with dynamism, but fiddling with AST transformations is hairy enough that boilerplate looks a lot more attractive, relatively speaking.

Even so, I bet macros would satisfy most of the people advocating for "Dynamic Swift". And for the people who hate them - do you really think doing crazy things at runtime is any safer or easier to understand? It's certainly slower.

(By the way, you can implement dynamism with macros. For example, you could autogenerate functions like 'setProperty(name: String, val: Any)' that switch on the name and do the appropriate casting and such. Though depending on your attitude, you might consider this crucial enough that it should be built into the language.)

<comment><USER18> > It's certainly slower.

That's the least of problems, since nowadays we have smart runtime systems that dynamically optimize running programs. It's not elegant, but it works. A more fundamental problem is that this approach to programming leads to brittle code, and when it breaks, it doesn't warn you until it's too late.

<comment><USER17> Actually, I feel a bit silly and maybe confused, as the 'setProperty' I mentioned at the end of my last post is... just reflection. Which Swift already has, in the form of Mirror. The only reason the Objective-C runtime is needed for that example is that Mirror apparently only allows you to get the values of properties, not set them, but that just sounds like an implementation limitation that could easily be lifted - clearly built-in reflection is considered within the scope of Swift.[1] So it's a bit odd for Brent Simmons to put this in a list of things he's "nervous" won't be possible in the future, and not even mention reflection. Most of the other things in the list seem like they really aren't possible without Objective-C or, in its stead, new Swift features. (They could still be done with macros!)

I guess reflection fits into the general category of dynamism even if it is essentially an existing Swift feature.

In any case, to respond to your point: Objective-C does not have a JIT, and since there are a lot of advantages to a pure ahead-of-time compilation model (see the mailing list post linked elsewhere in this thread), as a language mainly focused on static compilation, Swift is unlikely to get one in the future just to deal with hypothetical dynamic features. Anyway, even in the relatively small set of languages that are both highly dynamic (going beyond simple reflection) and well-optimized - there's JavaScript, and LuaJIT I guess? and maybe some less common ones, there's PyPy but I don't call that well-optimized - if you actually _use_ the dynamic features it's easy to fall off the JIT happy path and make your whole function unoptimizable. See [2]. But that's getting off topic.

[1] In making that thinko I showed my lack of Swift experience: in Rust reflection is done with macros.

[2] [https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization-k...](https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization- killers)

<comment><USER19> A JIT for what? Both Swift and Objective-C are AOT. Objective-C offers runtime dispatch into native code, no different than calling a function pointer in C (just with a more convenient method of looking them up at runtime).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perspective: I both develop in Swift and manage a team of 5 iOS engineers (including me). The majority of our project now is in Swift, including over 8 dynamic modules/frameworks and 10's of thousands of lines of code (all that to say it's not a small project).

I have to agree that there are some pain points with Swift:

\- I developed a persistence layer (not Core Data), and had to rely on a "translation layer" that all clients must implement in order to use it. It ends up being about 100+ lines of glue code for each model we want to persist. Not ideal. \- Retrieving data from API services and converting the data (JSON) into models results in a lot of glue code... A ton it. \- I've frequently had to hack my way around the lack of Generic Protools (using base classes instead). \- Compile times suck. Feels like I've been thrown back a decade in this regard.

Despite these issues, not a single one of us would go back to objective-c. Overall, the velocity of our team has only gone up since we started using Swift:

\- Type safety and Optionals have removed an entire class of bugs in our app, freeing up more time to write features. \- Generics have added a level of clarity to the code base that wasn't even possible before. \- The code base is easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier to modify. \- Oddly, the need to write Unit Tests and use Swift has literally "forced" us into protocol-based programming...a good thing IMO. I'm seeing much better software architecture as devs can't lean on automatic mocks, forced instead to create protocols and keep classes/types separated and injectable. To be clear, it's more difficult to write that kind of code, but the quality of code has gone up since we switched to Swift.

I've noticed that some of the complaints about the lack of dynamism in Swift don't seem as valid. For example: Responder chains. This is easily done using a protocol (something we did for deep linking within the app).

Other issues, like observability, can be solved by things like React, and using Observables. Not only is React more powerful than KVO, but it's obvious where it's being used in the code base (because you're using an Observable).

I can't deny that there are places where having dynamism would certainly remove a lot of glue code. But my experience is that the "old guard" (me included, really) relied too much on the dynamic nature of objective-c to solve problems that could have been better solved in another way.

While I would like to see dynamism come to Swift, I would NOT want to see it imported wholesale from objective-c, but instead conservatively placed and annotated in such a way as to say to those of us who use it: "Here be dragons...proceed at your own peril".</comment>


Spy Files 3 - <AUTHOR> http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles3p.html

<comment><USER2> From the gist of the incredible difficult to decipher training manual there are 4 systems. Overview of network topology is here: [http://i.imgur.com/gzw6nAT.png](http://i.imgur.com/gzw6nAT.png)

1) ADMF-Client & Infection GUI

These seem to be HP Compaq computers, running Windows 7 Ultimate, FinFlyISP GUI and a XMPP client(which runs over TLS and is secure). This is a tool for LEA to use which interfaces with the ADMF backend for managing infections, selection of infection methods, realtime status info and management of all components.

2) ADMF - Central Administration Function

This is the backend which all the LEA terminals in 1 connect to. These are HP DL380 G6 Intel Xeon X5550 @ 2.67GHz servers running hardened Debian(by Dreamlab best practices). It is a core component of their infrastructure and communicates in realtime with all their other component systems. It stores the configuration and initiation of infections. Realtime exchange of info and states(target coming online, being infected, etc.) Contains RFC XMPP used for secure encrypted communications.

3) Network Data processing component (iProxy/NDP01/NDP02)

Infections are remotely activated by ADMF in 2 via the GUI. Each NDP is bridged with 10GB/s fiber bypass module. Incase of hardware/logical failures this module switches automatically to by-pass mode. Thus traffic will never be interrupted. ATTENTION this is highly dynamic bridge, do not change any configuration manually. __NDP has been specially configured for his network, any changes are tightly coordinated with Dreamlab.

4) Radius Probe(RP01/RP02)

Realtime monitoring of AAA processes which include:

1\. Targets coming online

2\. Receiving IP Addresses

3\. Changing IP Addresses

4\. Going offline

Recording of RADIUS authentications and accounting dialogues. Being always up to date of target IP RP sends info to ADMF, the ADMF provisions the NDP. Running same hardware/OS as 3. The RPs have bidirectional connection with broadband remote access server(BRAS) [1] which are what connect to the global internet from a ISPs network. BRAS aggregrates user sessions from access network. This is where ISPs can inject policy management and QOS. Aggregrates DSLAM connections from locally dispersed in an ISP area network.

Communications Visualized

The slide explains that communication of all components always is initiated towards the ADMF.

[http://i.imgur.com/qOQfVYd.png](http://i.imgur.com/qOQfVYd.png)

Use Cases

1\. GUI->ADMF [Infect a target]

2\. ADMF->Radius prove [Start monitoring/set a trap on target]

3\. Radius->ADMF->NDP/iProxy [Handover of IP]

4\. iProxy->NDP [iProxy requests NDP to analyse datastream on IP and "interesting" traffic]

5\. NDP->iProxy [Handover traffic matching request]

6\. iProxy [changes traffic and modifies data by adding infection parts]

7\. iProxy->NDP [iProxy sends modified traffic data to NDP]

8\. NDP Reinject [NDP recalculates checksums/resequences TCP/IP packets and reinjects traffic into the stream]

9\. Target infection done [Data successfully sent to target]

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

<comment><USER3> What exactly is an "infection"?

<comment><USER4> FinFisher wikipedia page:

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

It talks about the "infection" and its "use by repressive regimes" among other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad this time it is getting more up-votes than the previous submission [0].

There are many interesting documents here, for example the "Finfisher FINFly ISP 2.0 Infrastructure Product Training" [1] which is a presentation/guide from www.gammagroup.com about how to use their software to "infect" the target and collect information about it.

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329435)

[1] - [https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/GAMMA_2010_FinfFINFISP_e...](https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/GAMMA_2010_FinfFINFISP_en.html)

<comment><USER6> but still going slow.

btw reading some of those files and seeing the presentations remind me of the animated tv show Archer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why you need actual journalists... this is just heap of data that's hard to decipher and hard to make sense of.

<comment><USER8> I find that when dumps of data are released, other journalists go through it and curate it. So, I see WL as making more good journalism possible because there are a lot of curators who do not also have the resources to collect material to curate.

<comment><USER7> I didn't mean it as a criticism of wikileaks! What they are doing is great!

It's just, the data itself are useless if you don't find some narrative, some story in it.

And, frankly, Assange himself admitted it before that just releasing dumps and hoping for people to find something in it is not the best thing to do.

<comment><USER8> I understand. I would like if WL developed the resources to curate as well as release entire data sets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a screenshot at the page 49 of [https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/GAMMA_2010_FinfFINFISP_e...](https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/GAMMA_2010_FinfFINFISP_en.html) (logs of ADMF trojan upload service) which mentions resource "chrome_installer(3)_129271991323222656.exe" was processed.

Doesn't it mean that ADMF of FinFly somehow interferes with browser auto- update in order to upload its trojan to the target computer? I know browser update file must be somehow cryptographically signed, but NSA may have access to private RSA key used for browser updates, which allows such types of attacks. Isn't it?

<comment><USER10> I haven't read the docs, but from the wikileaks page describing it, I assume the malware "wraps" any exe. If it then manages to "unwrap" (on save?) and disappear before crypto checks happen, then they don't need actual need to attack the crypto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have time to read all this but I wish. Please anyone: I need names of organizations and those on the top involved, so I can create my own "no-use list" and avoid those at any cost.

Thank you.

<comment><USER12> * .mil

* .gov

<comment><USER13> __*.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The discussion here so far seems to be talking about something other than the general page that this link points to, as if the other commenter had some context that the current title no longer provides. I see Gamma Group being discussed specifically.

I'm going to guess that the title was edited again, so we don't have the intended context. What was the original title?

</comment><comment><USER15> Making all the text of these docs searchable from a single webpage would be lovely..

<comment><USER16> [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awikileaks.org%2Fspy...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awikileaks.org%2Fspyfiles%2Fdocs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does it say to disable ipv6 along with the likes of no direct root login allowed in the "System and Bios hardening" section? (page 40)

[https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/GAMMA_2010_FinfFINFISP_e...](https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/GAMMA_2010_FinfFINFISP_en.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm moving from US, it just keeps on getting worst. Fuck it.</comment>


The Hash Function Lounge - <AUTHOR> http://www.larc.usp.br/~pbarreto/hflounge.html <comment><USER2> Valerie Aurora has a nicer presentation at [http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html](http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html) with timelines and some humour as to how various groups react.

</comment><comment><USER3> The HTTP response headers suggest that the page was last modified on 2009-09-30. Since then, SHA-3 (Keccak) has been finalized.

Be that as it may, I'm curious about the recommendation to use WHIRLPOOL. If anyone knows why this algorithm is supposed to be better than, let's say, SHA-512, I would appreciate an explanation. Is it because of some intrinsic strengh of the algorithm? Is it because one of the authors is Vincent Rijmen of AES fame? Is it because NESSIE is more trustworthy than NSA/NIST? Or is is simply because no one has found a way to break WHIRLPOOL yet?

</comment><comment><USER4> In case you couldn't tell from the old-school theme, this web page hasn't been updated since late 2008 (2008.11.28).

<comment><USER5> > this web page hasn't been updated since late 2008

Which is here really important since there was a lot of crypto community work on crypto hash functions since. All the really big work from there

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

is missing from the title page. Unless you're interested in the history of crypto hashes, you shouldn't care too much about that page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title should include "cryptographic hash functions".

There are also other types of hash functions like pHash, simhash, etc.

<comment><USER7> Yup, came here to say this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If someone knows the person who owns this, please for the love of (someone's) god get rid of the background image. I mean that with love.

I want to read it, but physically can't... My eyes aren't so good. I eventually just removed it with firefox dev tools but c'mon! That's not right.

<comment><USER9> True 90s style. [http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32](http://www.w3.org/TR/REC- html32)</comment></comment>


Athletics cost colleges, students millions - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athletics-cost-colleges-students-millions/2814455/ <comment><USER3> On some level, college sports programs exist to train students how to be professional sportspeople (which includes things like becoming a professional middle school sports coach). No different, conceptually, than any other major. The fact that supply _far_ outstrips demand just means lots of college sports students end up doing different jobs out of school, just like a creative writing major might end up working in an unrelated field.

But sports are weird and mysterious to me. They seem to integrate so strongly into people's identities that they're willing to overlook any number of rational issues with them. At times it becomes downright bizarre and cultish - Penn State football. I think sports are mildly interesting, but nowhere interesting enough to have the esteemed place of prominence that it has in the educational system.

When I was growing up, I studied in my school's music program, and I remember attending many school board meetings where we had to justify our existence to receive any funding at all. We squeaked by with a combination of reducing budget, bake sales, corporate donations and a teacher going unpaid for a semester. And there were other challenges, ancient equipment, incomplete scores and no money to buy more (outfitting a 100 piece orchestra with music to read off of is very expensive) and on and on. We got very good at fundraising.

Meanwhile the school sports teams got new uniforms for free every season (music kids had to either provide their own instruments or rent them from the school), equipment was mostly new, regular morning announcements let people know about sporting related events, the school newspaper was 40-50% dedicated to the sports teams and students were forced en masse to attend rallies for the sports team in the middle of the academic day. When I was there my 30 year old school got a new state of the art stadium that occupied several acres of school property. They claimed it was to support all of the students, but it was only ever used for sporting events.

Support to the music program? Not once in middle or high school was an upcoming music program event mentioned on the morning announcements, and only one time that I can recall did the school paper mention a music program -- it was to let everybody know that an exchange program hosted by the music program was underway and we were about to have a bunch of foreign students attending classes with us. Students were encouraged to make nice nice with the foreign kids and invite them to sporting events to make them feel welcome.

When my school's orchestra won a prestigious national competition it was never announced and the trophy we won wasn't allowed to mix with the sports trophies in the school's trophy case. So it sat in the music teacher's office, which was a converted janitorial room. Our yearbooks had 30 pages dedicated to action shots for the school's sports teams, the music program (4 orchestras, 3 bands and 2 choirs) had to jam onto one page. Our national win was cut in editing.

Like most high schools the cheerleaders and football players were minor celebrities able to get away with any number of school infractions including physical violence and property destruction against music program kids and their instruments.

I hated school sports teams.

One of the reasons I went to the college I went to was that it had no well known sports team and the President of the college refused to fund a stronger sports program citing research like the OPs that it was a waste of money for the schools. Our sports arena was more likely to be used for circus performances and concerts than basketball or hockey.

I agreed with his stance and secretly enjoyed watching the sports program kids learning how to raise equipment funds and fight for notice like the arts kids had to do.

And then he retired, his replacement poured money into the sports program and in a couple of years one of them made it into a national tournament. The sports program exploded, new teams were added, sports pavilions were added, practice fields were cut out of wooded parts of the campus.

I hated that once again, sports were finding this kind of irrational support.

And then...almost overnight my school went from being a virtually unknown to the largest one in the state with individual schools getting ranked in the top 10 in the country. Money and endowments started flooding in, new performing arts centers, science, tech and R&D buildings started construction. Entire new dormitory blocks sprang up. Two, all new, state of the art sports centers opened up and were opened to the local community. Why? The school president was able to spin the sports teams success into money raising (fund raising, donations, loans) opportunities to invest in every other aspect of the school.

So...I think I learned a powerful lesson. Sure sports look like a parasite on schools, sucking out way more then they appear to immediately return. But used as a tool, the new president was able to benefit the entire school in ways his predecessor could never have dreamed of. So yeah, I feel a sense of school pride, and while it's not _about_ the sports teams, I have to recognize that it's _because_ of the sports teams.

<comment><USER4> It's _because_ the new guy was a competent professional and realized the point of a school is to educate. That's a lucky strike for your school and not a general rule. Most school administrators wouldn't have had that foresight, because they believe the buck stops with the sports - period.

<comment><USER3> That's true, I've heard lots of stories at other schools about cutbacks in other departments while the stadium gets a multi-dozen million dollar refurb.

<comment><USER4> The school my daughter just graduated from is a great example. She had stories similar to yours - she captained the science team to a state win for the first time in a decade and it wasn't even announced. Golf? Sure, that's important.

This year they spent a truly staggering amount of money, given they're a city of 20,000 in the rust belt with a persistent unemployment problem - <USER2> Astroturf for the football field.

To be fair, they have pretty decent facilities for science labs, etc. They have great support for drama. They're not a really bad school at all (we especially liked their AP program). But the preference for rock star treatment of athletes is truly weird to me, and I grew up in that same county.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article starts with "College sports create undeniable campus pride and identity" and leaves this sentence unquestioned, as if it was a positive thing.

Regardless of the money spent (or made, if college sports could be run profitable somehow), there seems to be a huge cost for society by setting the focus on the wrong things.

It seems that being a good student is valued highly by society, but the shortcut - becoming a (sports) star is even better! This leads to a large percentage of young people investing significant resources (time, energy, health) into this dream.

Professional sports is just entertainment, and assuming that the enjoyment comes from a relative comparison between players and teams, or the delta between two rather abstract numbers (this performance, compared to a "record"), then it seems that there are some resources not spent well.

I cannot see how sports and educations should be married the way they are at american colleges. Anyone?

<comment><USER6> I think that at a visceral level we are uncomfortable with education--it is undemocratic, anti-egalitarian, hierarchical--and are happiest when we can turn it into something else: a sports program, a jobs program, daycare.

On the other hand, I suppose it does serve as advertising. Probably a lot more people know of Stanford because of its occasionally excellent football and basketball teams than know of it because of what it has done for computing.

<comment><USER7> Sports are democratic and egalitarian? Tell that to Messi or Lebron James ;)

Anyway, that sports and education are so tangled is purely a national oddity of the US, maybe stemming from its tradition of great, and expensive, private universities. During the 19th century, if I recall correctly, it was a sign of distinction and wealth to practice sports; I conjecture that's what got it started in the universities, and then it spread in the early 20th century, when those colleges started courting new talent, intellectual or otherwise, from the up and coming middle classes, helped by the New Deal and the GI Bill.

That could also be why Oxford and Cambridge are relatively so keen on sports, i.e. rowing, as compared to other European universities. Sports were quite the posh thing back then. But, of course, I'm just guessing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _College sports undeniably have their benefits, creating university pride and an identity that no philosophy or classics program will ever match._

Right there is the failure of the American experiment.

<comment><USER8> Colleges have always changed shape and form, and today they've grown into what Clark Kerr calls the "Multiversity" in _The Uses of the University_ ([http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials- Governm...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials- Government/dp/0674005325)), which is worth reading if you're interested in such issues.

Beyond that, philosophy and classics are interesting citations because the healthy, important parts of philosophy have mostly been shucked into science ([http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html), or William James's _Pragmatism_ ) and classics are interesting but the corpus is static; it is not easy to come up with new and interesting things to say about _The Iliad_

In 1946, I'm sure someone was writing about the decline of theology and Latin and lamenting the failure of the American experiment.

(Despite what I wrote above I am still against the giving of scholarships for sports and think that the pro sports run by big-deal programs should be treated as professions, which they are by any reasonable standard of the word).

<comment><USER4> It's not the reference to philosophy and the classics I meant - it's actually the decline of academics in general in favor of Reality College, and it's not new. I regard the specific mention of philosophy and the classics as a sort of fusty stand-in for all the other academics.

Add to that the "running the university like a business" \- which generally means jacking up CEO pay into the stratosphere while cranking the productivity screws on adjuncts and raising prices for the customers (which in an earlier world were "students") - and you have the recipe for the ruination of the university, just as you have the recipe for the ruination of everything else American corporatism touches.

These programs are sold as _advertising_ \- which is insane. Seriously. If you want to compete for students, then make sure your students have fulfilling and/or lucrative careers (whichever your students are optimizing for) - don't sell them on which college is _fun_. You do that, you're not going to get quality students - and that means low-quality end product, a failing reputation in the job market, and you'll end up having to pay even _more_ for a president who says he can fix it all. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing is, it's mostly the smaller university athletics departments that take the losses. Of the top 40 public university athletic departments (by expenditure), only 5.2% of income is from University subsidies. The top 10 receive only 1.2% of their income from subsidies. The rest is from ticket revenue, direct donations, TV deals, etc (usually with football heavily subsidizing the other sports).

For all 227 Division I athletic departments of public universities, subsidies provide 30% of the overall budget, other revenue 70%. So when people complain about this issue, it really probably isn't any of the universities that they think it is.

Check it out yourself: [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-14/ncaa- college-athletics-finances-database/54955804/1)

</comment><comment><USER10> And this is without paying the athletes, who should be earning their market value. Students walk around campus wearing their favorite player's jersey and said player gets nothing more than a scholarship out of the deal.

I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities. I remember being told that Kentucky, a famous place for basketball, makes more off of football, and a quick search seems to confirm that:

[http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk- fo...](http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk-football/)

Kentucky made $18 million off of football for 2012-2013, while making only $8 million off of its wildly popular basketball program. All other sports combined lost $11.6 million.

Still a pretty nice little profit. Maybe their math is a bit different.

<comment><USER11> >And this is without paying the athletes, who should be earning their market value.

Wait a minute. I'll agree that student athletes ought to be paid something, the current arrangement is exploitation. But I'm not sure that starting a athlete salary arms-race is the answer.

And what about students who (end up) contributing disproportionately through research & development (patents, and patent licensing)?

>I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities.

Isn't everyone? Someone finally addressed the myth that pouring money into athletics is like buying golden egg laying geese. Good.

<comment><USER10> I should say that I don't think college sports should exist in their current form at all. However, coaches making millions of dollars while players make nothing leaves a bad feeling in my stomach.

If college sports were not about making money, I would have no problem with student athletes not making money. But college sports are all about making money, and they are making it off students who have such a time commitment with their chosen sport that they cannot afford to major in something that will lead to a decent career afterwards. Sure, there are the stars who will go on to the NBA or NFL, but for the rest of the student athletes I'm not convinced that this is a great investment in their future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish I could start a tech focused university without any sports at all. Be interesting to see what happened.

<comment><USER13> This seems to be the norm here in Europe. Our university does have a very diverse offer of sports activities (everything from running, dancing, boxing or paragliding to jazz and waterboarding), but it is more a hobby-thingie and doesn't touch normal study-life at all.

<comment><USER14> True, but there's a pretty good chance that you have a local football club to root for. College athletics is the American equivalent of that.

<comment><USER15> No, really. Our equivalent is much less hyped and attended and players are rarely university or college students. Most don't have any HS degree and are "international" or at least "inter-city player".

<comment><USER16> I think you missed the basis of comparison. In the US, the role of local sports team is largely filled by scholastic sports programs - i.e. small towns in the US turn out on Friday nights to root for the local high school football (American) team in 8000 seat stadiums in part because there are no significant second and third and fourth division professional sports teams.

The public land grant universities tend to fill a similar role at the regional level due to the geographic expanse of the US relative to European countries - e.g. Alabama is about the size of England as a catchment area.

It might be argued that the US minor league baseball system maps onto the European football pyramid model - but it is probably a mistake. Unlike the lower tiers of the footballing pyramid which tend to consist of independent teams which sell players on for profit, minor league baseball consists almost entirely of developmental teams affiliated with major league franchises and have their rosters and lineups and substitution patterns dictated from above rather than in the interest of points on the scoreboard or standings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, have they calculated the secondary markets that athletics generates?

As a CS person I believe that computing/CS is largely irrelevant (like much of science) unless someone, somewhere is making money from its applications. Also keep in mind that non-athletes also end up benefiting. At a coarse level - (in strictly discretionary spending) - people buy tickets, misc gear, subscribe to the internet/cable, purchase large screen TV's to watch games, etc.

Sports is a great common uniting activity for the masses. Geeks/Engineer types get hired to work on shopping websites, ticketing backend systems, payment gateways, wireless HD video chipsets and whatnot.

Even Google who hires all the 'academics' puts them to work so someone somewhere can click a button to buy something while watching a YouTube video (probably sports related :P)

</comment><comment><USER18> _" Nearly every university loses money on sports."_

That overly broad statement was made without citing any evidence. The handful of anecdotes that follow don't support the claim of "nearly every university". If there were any studies that support this claim, the author should have cited them. Otherwise, we just have to assume that they're making it up.

<comment><USER19> If only there were some kind of engines that could power searches for such information. Oh, wait....

"The latest annual update to USA Today's mammoth database on revenue and expenses at institutions in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association notes that just 22 athletic departments are operating in the black. Spending across the 227 public universities for which USA Today could gather data rose by $267 million from a year earlier."

[http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas- to...](http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas-tops-money- making-athletic-departments)

And that's just Division I. Care to make an argument that football teams in either of Divisions II or III are cash cows?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I know how to use Google too, but it should be the author's responsibility to back up his assertion with facts, not the reader's. Making an unsupported claim like this is the sign of lazy journalism.

Division I schools probably have much higher expenses (more and better paid coaches, more spending on stadiums and other infrastructure, more perks for the players, etc.), so it's not immediately obvious whether they're actually more profitable than the other divisions. Economics is full of surprises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think its great that American Universities place such a great emphasis on sports. It's really good for the athletes and it's raised the standards of American collegiate athletics to Olympic standards. For this reason American Universities become aspirational destinations for high school athletes all around the world. Why is this bad?

<comment><USER21> Because colleges are supposed to be about something else - skills, education. Sports has taken a disproportional share of the money and attention.

<comment><USER20> Who is going to produce the worlds best athletes if the colleges stop their supposedly disproportionate spending on athletics? Athletics standards would go down if they did that. I think athletics has an equally significant role to play in life as mind training and memorization. To be a good coach and to learn athletics requires a lot of skill and a lot of discipline both qualities that the education system is trying to inculcate anyways.

<comment><USER21> True but irrelevant to 99% of the students at any given college. Only the best in their sport get the attention and training. The rest of us look on, maybe cheer them on, then go back to our shabby classrooms and underpaid teaching assistants and try to learn something useful.

<comment><USER20> That means standards are really high so you're spending disproportionate amounts of money to train the cream of the crop. Most universities have programs for the casual sportsman. From a practical perspective, even thinking about sports or watching it is useful because it helps balance you out. Having trained as an athlete is like any other training, like a monk meditating or a more academic student going deep into their subject.

<comment><USER21> Those 'intramural' programs for casual sportsmen are great. But little or no money is spent on them; they pale to insignificance compared to the giant corporation that is college athletics. That's another issue entirely and almost completely unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is "and" banned from headline titles?

Does this punctuation make sense for native english speaking people?

"Athletics cost colleges, students millions"

Does it mean that "Athletics cost colleges" and "students cost millions" ?

Or do every english people find this phrase very clear on first read?

<comment><USER23> This sort of abbreviation is commonly found in headlines. "and" isn't banned, it's just that this is acceptable too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Baseball did it right with minor leagues. Football needs to follow. College should not be a minor league football franchise.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure baseball can be held up as a model, given that the minor leagues are "minor" because they are under the boot of the MLB, due to the antitrust exemption [1]. Also, it's noteworthy that college baseball does exist and it goes deep into the summer. Pro basketball has an official minor league, the NBA D-League, but college basketball is still out of control.

[1] [http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the- histor...](http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the-history-of- baseball-s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> And in other news: water is wet. Also, that big, yellow-orange ball in the sky keeps us warm. More at 11.

</comment><comment><USER26> No idea why athletics is bundled with colleges, but I would guess those expenses count as advertising?

</comment><comment><USER27> Athletics are also premium advertisement for a university.

A quick example: I'm from France and I'd never have heard from Gonzaga weren't it for John Stockton. That in itself has tremendous value, for big or small universities. It can put you on the map.

<comment><USER28> Like sports successes (especially of individual players) have anything to do with their education and/or research quality.

<comment><USER27> Of course it doesn't. I'm just saying all the money invested in those sport teams are not 100% money down the drain. They're sometimes a good investment.

<comment><USER25> I have to disagree with you there. It's a zero-sum game. College athletics aren't significantly expanding the national pool of college students. Without them, colleges could use much more mundane, direct (read: far cheaper) forms of advertisement. In most cases, athletics programs are public money and tuition money being poured on something with absolutely minimal academic merit.

<comment><USER29> > In most cases, athletics programs are public money and tuition money being > poured on something with absolutely minimal academic merit.

That's not true. In "most" cases, athletics programs do not provide tuition at all, and most student athletes do not receive anything in terms of tuition reimbursement.

In most cases, students are still paying all the tuition and still are required to maintain their academic standings.

Because of this, a good program can attract out of state students, who will generally pay more out of pocket precisely because they are out of state.

Finally, lumping all sports together and claiming they are a waste of money ignores the reality that all sports are not created equal. Sure, adding a football stadium will be expensive, but counting that against the cross- country team is silly.

<comment><USER25> I think you might have missed what I said. I'm not saying that sports provide tuition to many students because you're right, most student-athletes aren't on scholarship. I'm saying that big-time sports are a drain on the tuition money of _all_ students in many cases.

I'm not against athletics at college. I played rugby in grad school, and it was one of the highlights of my experience. I think athletics are a great thing, but that the growth of football and basketball into quasi-professional programs is tremendously wasteful, morally suspect, and unsustainable.

My point is that the pool of college students nation-wide is not being expanded do to sports. If you're at college (anywhere) and were attracted there as a sports fan, you'd probably still be in college elsewhere if not for the sports, and you'd probably be there for more acadmically valid reasons. You are definitely right that athletics attract out-of-state students, who pay more. But I'd argue that this is actually a bad thing systemically given our national student loan debt crisis.

I love athletics. But I also think that big-money athletics is a cancer on higher ed right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hope this article doesn't get passed around very much - it's terrible.

How can you have a discussion on athletic spending without mentioning revenue _at all_!

<comment><USER28> Did you _read_ the article?

"Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers."

Personally, I don't understand this US college sports thing at all.

<comment><USER31> gambling on college sports is a huge secondary black market, with many billions of dollars changing hands every year.

that should clarify the popularity of US college sports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sports also serve to keep alumni connected to the school, and thus increase donations.

You can't justify "student athletes" as having any value to the community other than entertainment, but from a fundraising and marketing perspective they've got some uses.

<comment><USER33> I understand where you're coming from, but you have to remember that student athletes are also people, and members of the community. I could walk you through the argument about physical fitness and the value of exercise, but I'll save you the time. Just step down from that absolute up there.</comment></comment>


Justice Department Sues to Stop California Net Neutrality Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/technology/net-neutrality-california.html <comment><USER2> The interesting part of this to me is that if you read the details the FCC published about the order that was signed, [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-347927A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-347927A1.pdf) it goes into _great_ detail about the court cases about why the FCC has no authority to effectively regulate net neutrality unless the ISP's are classified under Title 2.

(This is true, in fact, and the court cases it cites and the DC circuit have been clear on this point for years)

The order then reclassifies the ISP's outside of Title II.

Outside of the arguments around privacy jurisdiction (which were always dual jurisdiction with the FTC), i don't know what they are thinking.

Given that the courts have already decided the FCC has no authority to regulate in this space (outside of Title II), and Ajit himself has said it numerous times, arguing pre-emption seems like a loser. If they don't have the authority to regulate around it, it's hard to see how they will argue they have the right to pre-empt others: all the court rulings involve determinations about the scope of the statutes involved, which in turn is a valuation of what congress intended to regulate/how far pre-emption goes.

It'll be interesting to read the complaint to see what leg they are trying to stand on.

Besides the existing court cases making super-clear the lack of authority, just the sheer the number of statements and orders from Ajit saying the FCC has no authority here seems like it will be hard for the FCC to overcome.

They would have been much better off saying "we have plenty of authority here and we explicitly choose not to exercise it"

<comment><USER3> Did the order that killed net neutrality move them back to being Title I "information services"?

There have already been court rulings that states cannot regulate Title I information services. There was one just decided a few weeks ago in the 8th Circuit, Charter Advanced Services (MN), LLC v. Lange [1].

Pai immediately praised that decision [2].

That, in this suit coming so soon after that, suggests that is going to be the approach.

[1] [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=162444264794194...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16244426479419445038&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr)

[2] [https://www.fcc.gov/document/court-preempts-state- regulation...](https://www.fcc.gov/document/court-preempts-state-regulation- information-services-pai-statement)

<comment><USER4> Of course, reliance on the Title I status as the basis for arguing that the law is preempted means that both the substantive and procedural propriety of the action by which they were redesignated as Title I services are issues which might be raised against the suit, and would need to be resolved to resolve the suit.

<comment><USER2> Yes. California is definitely going to argue the FCC had no authority to reinterpret things when there is zero changed evidence/etc. It is definitely "arbitrary" (whether it meets the legal definition or not)

At least one trump agency that took a hard right turn has already lost in court on that point in the past few months. The case escapes me, but it was in fact "the evidence has not changed, you can't just decide you don't like what was done before for political reasons".

FWIW: I suspect the real argument here is that _congress_ has preempted California.

IE they _could_ regulate this space, and have chosen explicitly not to do so, through the '96 act, etc.

It's a little bit of a weird argument though, because it's saying "we explicitly didn't give the FCC authority because we didn't want anyone to regulate it", even though the FCC has in fact tried to regulate it in the past because they thought they had authority :)

(IE Congress's intent was not so clear that we didn't have years of regulation, etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like it would be a perfectly American solution to say that utilities only get free access to people's property and city's resources if they are neutral utilities.

And for anything else require they pay the property owner or city/county (as appropriate) at market rates per square foot of usage. Basically if you have a "utility" line on my property I can't use that space, so you better actually bye a utility.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how the business that I conduct with my ISP is "interstate commerce." The wire connecting my house to my ISP begins and ends in my state. As I understand things, it's the speed of data running up and down that wire that net neutrality seeks to protect.

<comment><USER7> Wickard v. Filburn

It is considered interstate commerce to grow wheat on one's own farm to feed one's own animals under the theory that by doing so, he removed himself from the interstate wheat market (where he would otherwise have bought his wheat).

Since the internet plays a major role in interstate markets, one could easily extend this arguement to say that even local internet connections are interstate commerce.

One could actually argue that most anything is interstate commerce. This is one of the main reasons we don't hear courts arguing that federal laws overstep the constitutional authority of the federal government: everything is interstate commerce.

<comment><USER8> Is there a case that considers how this applies to preemption?

For example, could the federal government preempt the states from having public schools, public roads or a police force under the commerce clause because they impact the interstate market for private schools, private roads and private security? It seems like maybe they should only be able to preempt when the thing is _actually_ interstate commerce and not just affecting it. But is there any case deciding that issue one way or the other?

<comment><USER9> It's hyperbole to say everything effects interstate commerce as a legal matter. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez), where the court struck down the Federal Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990.

On the other hand, that's a _really_ low bar for the Federal government to meet. Especially in light of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich), where the court upheld Federal criminal prohibition of homegrown marijuana for personal use, and where everybody stipulated (IIRC) that her marijuana wouldn't enter the stream of commerce. Note that both Kennedy and Scalia upheld Federal powers here, which is why their vehement opposition to Obamacare's individual mandate was so hypocritical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's odd too is that Washington State passed a net neutrality law and I don't see any FCC response to block it. So why only California?

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzkx83/which- stat...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzkx83/which-states-have- net-neutrality-washington)

<comment><USER11> California has been especially committed to challenging some of the administration's various injustices. Trump has made California one of his symbolic, non-white boogeymen in order to manipulate his "base."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/us/politics/trump- califor...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/us/politics/trump-california- lawsuits.html)

<comment><USER12> Republicans have been trashing California since the Vietnam war.

<comment><USER4> Republicans dominated California in federal elections for most of its history until 1992; it was one of the most solid of Republican strongholds.

Republicans have been trashing _Hollywood_ and _San Francisco /Berkeley_ for a long time, though.

<comment><USER13> It's amazing how many "conservatives" I've run into who've never been to San Francisco, but somehow "know" that it's a liberal hellhole that everyone hates.

<comment><USER14> Stories about NIMBYism on HN don't help.

<comment><USER15> Isn't NIMBYis a very conservative-ish thing? (Though I think this just shows the failure of this mindless political labeling.)

It places the individual's need, which are only incidental due to their current residence above the community's need. Whereas liberal-ish things tend to require something from every member of the community. (Less gun right, mandatory health insurance, more spending on refugees and unlucky folks, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sorry if I get some basic understanding of the law wrong but...

Isn't this the same thing as regulating car emissions? Doesn't 822 only apply to providers in the state itself? Wouldn't it be that the telecoms are welcome to engage in another method of end-customer billing in other states?

What am I missing?

<comment><USER17> > Like California's auto emissions laws that forced automakers to adopt the > standards for all production, the state's new net neutrality rules could > push broadband providers to apply the same rules to other states.

I think you're right, the motives are very similar.

> Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that California's net neutrality law was > illegal because Congress granted the federal government, through the F.C.C., > the sole authority to create rules for broadband internet providers. "States > do not regulate interstate commerce — the federal government does," Mr. > Sessions said in a statement.

I thought Republicans were pro-states rights and limited government? How does their position on this jive with their ideology?

<comment><USER18> The GOP does not have an ideology. Anything you could name as a position of their ideology they will (and did) betray for either "winning" or at the behest of their corporate masters.

<comment><USER19> You left out how both... all political parties cater to special interests but otherwise accurate

<comment><USER20> > all political parties cater to special interests but otherwise accurate

Your statement is so broad as to be effectively meaningless. Sun rises in the east. So what?

The difference is that the GP is beholden completely to its corporate masters and does not hesitate in engaging in lies, false propaganda and bad faith politics to achieve its goals. All of which are corrupt and very anti- democratic.

<comment><USER21> Democrats now get as much money from corporations as Republicans, but no strings attached, eh?

[https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/sectors.php?cycle=2018](https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/sectors.php?cycle=2018)

<comment><USER22> Whataboutism is so tedious.

There are plenty of other contributors, both direct and indirect. PACs, billionaires, unions, earned media, Russians, grandmas, etc.

<comment><USER21> On both sides, yes. I'd say the Democrats are more dishonest. GOP claims to be the pro-business party, so no surprise when they act that way. Democrats take the corporate money, pay lip service to the left, and act pro-business as well. Look at Obamacare - we didn't get single payer, we got government subsidies for insurance companies.

<comment><USER20> Obamacare was a compromise precisely because the Democrats had to make it palatable to Republicans. If it was upto Democrats, they would have passed Single Payer.

<comment><USER23> Obama was under the illusion that he could reach across the aisle and work with the Republicans, and tried very hard to do something that both sides could support. I think he didn't realize yet that making sure your side has wins, and the other side has losses, is how the game is played now at that level.

So after all that, he got no Republican votes. Even thought the plan was, at it's base, a conservative plan. He was naive.

<comment><USER20> Which is really what infuriates me to no end. I'm not saying Obama was perfect, but he was engaging in good-faith dealmaking, hoping to get everyone on board. But the Republicans weren't. And now, everyone seems to think that Mitch McConnell is a super effective Senate leader. But at what cost? Republicans seem to be plagued by a lot of short term thinking... Precisely what the Senate, with its long tenure, was supposed to avoid.

<comment><USER18> They believe they are engaged in long term thinking - seize power so completely, popular support and laws cease to matter. Then do to the country what has been done to Toys R Us. And Democrats are willing to let them do it because they think it's a game.

<comment><USER20> This sounds true but is also really depressing. Do you think the popular wave of democrats seeking office this election season will make any difference? I like the energy in the democratic base, but I trust process over people. I fear after the election, people will again lose interest and we'll fall right back where we started.

<comment><USER22> Belated response (pep talk) to both you and 'wolf550e'.

Yes, the world sucks. But there's great stuff too.

Working towards a better future is my coping mechanism.

I encourage everyone to volunteer somewhere that helps restore your faith in humanity. Finding those people, those groups can be a challenge. (Most do gooders are also tedious to be around.)

I used to volunteer as a tree hugger. Now I'm very politically active. I somehow fell in with great people doing great things. Their friendships and the shared effort is what keeps me going.

Unbelievably, I'm now super optimistic. Yes, the challenges are terrifying, I'm not in denial. But I also believe the opportunities are insurmountable. [ h/t Yogi Bera :) ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So was this lawsuit prepared by a lobbyist's law firm? How on earth would DoJ be ready this quickly?

<comment><USER25> Probably because the bill didn't pop out of nowhere. There was debate over the bill in the legislature, news stories, etc.

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately this doesn't exclude the premise above. I'm sure lobbyists are all over this.

<comment><USER24> Why would DoJ spend time drafting a lawsuit against a law that isn't yet law? Just seems odd. Why is DoJ sending messages on behalf of telecoms? Doesn't DoJ have enough on its plate?

<comment><USER5> That's the point, the DoJ isn't spending time, they're regurgitating material produced by lawyers working for the carriers.

Why is DoJ sending messages on behalf of the carriers? Because the current administration has demonstrated it will do anything they're paid to do.

Doesn't the DoJ have enough on its plate? Like what? The purpose of the DoJ is /ostensibly/ to protect people from abuses by people who have more money/resources than them. Including the police. The GOP/WH has demonstrated that human rights are low priority compared to most other things (especially those that can pay them).

<comment><USER27> Don't forget when the too big to fail banks were given passes without so much a slap on the wrist under Holder's oversight. The whole thing is a joke. Oh and he is now back serving the masters he protected. I can only imagine how much they are paying him for doing their bidding.

<comment><USER15> I agree with the need for more responsibility assignment, but claiming that banks were given a pass as a somehow atrocious thing is just shouting for mob justice.

The way would have been through Congress, SEC, FTC and the other relevant bodies.

The DoJ did pursue investigations against banks, but ... guess what, they were very likely compliant with criminal law, thus there was not much to stand on, and you are right, that it's a joke, because despite this, the DoJ managed to secure billions on Deferred Prosecution Agreements.

Do I weep for poor banks? Fuck no, but I hate the arbitrariness of this "justice".

No, this was no justice - as everyone rightly feels, but the DoJ was not in the position to make things right, Congress was. They could have mandated simpler, safer, cheaper banking for everyone, they could have taxed the irresponsible lenders and borrowers, they could have empowered the SEC to be able to proactively act, but no, they did only regulate a few investment banking things (and created a new consumer protection bureau, that is being gutted by the current administration).

Furthermore, the lack of criminal convictions is of course a problem, but just that would not be enough to disincentivize fraud and other criminal behavior, like money laundering. Both (as in personal responsibility for branch managers and hefty fines for the whole corporation) are needed to keep things in check. And the DoJ does not go after persons, most likely because the enormous interference from the whole war on x, from the ATF, DEA, DoD, etc. at the affected regions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not surprised. Republicans advocate for judicial restraint only as long as it suits them.

<comment><USER29> And Democrats argue states' rights when it suits them.

<comment><USER20> Democrats use state rights to protect scientifically and economically sound policies when there is an obvious bad faith actions on the part of the Federal Government.

<comment><USER30> That's a bad argument to make, only because conservatives believe that their state's rights issues also stem from scientifically and economically sound policy.

<comment><USER20> No they don't. Their arguments are based around different interpretations of the constitution and protection of various ill-defined "freedoms" (freedom from religious persecution, freedom of choice etc.)

They happily do not include science in their political calculus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The article disappears the moment I touch it within the HN app. Who needs paywalls when you can just force the attention onto your site.

</comment><comment><USER32> Intention wise, I am with CA, but we cannot have each state have their own laws when it comes to the internet. We'd have the nightmare of dealing with gazillions of jurisdictions.

<comment><USER4> > I am with CA, but we cannot have each state have their own laws when it > comes to the internet.

We can certainly have each state have their own laws as to the terms on which internet service can be sold to consumers.

> We'd have the nightmare of dealing with gazillions of jurisdictions.

Which is true of consumer sales of many goods and services.</comment></comment>